Dallas-based developer Hillwood is quietly shopping about 150 acres of entitled industrial land in northeast Austin, stepping back from a planned 1.4 million-square-foot warehouse complex just as a key construction permit is set to lapse. The site development permit for the project's first phase, originally issued in 2021, expires Tuesday, and Hillwood appears to be letting a buyer take on the next steps rather than breaking ground itself.
The property in question is Premier Logistics Park at 2900 ½ Ferguson Lane, where Hillwood had entitled 118 acres for the industrial buildout, according to the The Real Deal, citing reporting from the Austin Business Journal. The masterplan called for six warehouse buildings across three phases: a first phase of three buildings totaling 363,966 square feet, a second phase of two buildings totaling 611,587 square feet, and a third phase pairing a 271,000-square-foot building with a 143,478-square-foot expansion pad. The park was designed as a last-mile distribution node, per the same reporting, with major logistics tenants including Target, Pepsi, the U.S. Postal Service, and United Parcel Service all operating within a mile of the site.
Alex Perry, managing principal of the West Texas-based Dry Water Land Company, is marketing the property for sale and posted marketing material on LinkedIn last week. Perry's listing did not include an asking price, and Hillwood has not indicated any plans for whatever acreage might remain outside the sale. The parcel's entitlement history gives it a head start for whoever buys it: the City of Austin's Zoning and Platting Commission approved a preliminary subdivision plat with conditions for the seven-lot, 148.27-acre site in November 2022, with water and wastewater service designated to come from the city itself.
A County Right-of-Way Deal Sweetens the Package
The land also carries an infrastructure commitment dating back to a 2021 phasing agreement with Travis County Commissioners, which required dedicating right-of-way through the site for a future extension of Rundberg Lane, according to Virtual Builders Exchange filings. That agreement outlined a staged buildout in Precinct 1 designed to manage local transportation impacts as the park came online. Houston-based Powers Brown Architecture designed the original master plan and began filing construction project registrations with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation back in November 2022, per the same filings.
Those entitlements matter because Austin's industrial market has grown far less hospitable to speculative warehouse construction than it was when Hillwood first secured its permit. The metro's industrial vacancy rate climbed to 22.3% in the second quarter of 2026, the highest among major U.S. markets tracked by Cushman & Wakefield. That followed a wave of 8.1 million square feet of industrial completions across the metro throughout 2025, leaving the market saturated just as Hillwood's permit clock ran out.
Shorter Leases Are Making Speculative Warehouses Riskier
Nationally, the calculus for building speculative distribution centers has shifted too. Average lease terms for large industrial space compressed from seven years in 2022 to five years in 2026, as logistics tenants prioritize flexibility over long-term commitments, according to CoStar Group. High vacancy across mid-size and smaller warehouses has made developers more cautious in growth markets like Austin and Phoenix, the firm's research notes, making an already-entitled but unbuilt parcel a less attractive asset to sit on than to sell.
Hillwood, founded by Ross Perot Jr., built its reputation on AllianceTexas, a 27,000-acre logistics and aviation hub in North Texas anchored by Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport and a BNSF intermodal facility that has generated more than $140 billion in regional economic impact since its inception. But the company's more recent capital deployment in the Texas Triangle has leaned heavily toward residential master-planned communities rather than warehouses. Hillwood is developing Landmark, a $10 billion, 3,200-acre project in Denton projected to house 25,000 residents across 1,100 acres of parkland, built on land the Perot family has held since 1987.
Lockhart and Pilot Point Show Where Hillwood's Money Is Going
That residential pivot extends south to Caldwell County, where Hillwood is planning a master-planned community near Lockhart that has grown from roughly 890 acres to more than 1,000 acres, situated between Dry Creek Road and Highway 183 in the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction. Lockhart's population reached 18,591 residents as of January 2025, a 29.3% jump since the 2020 Census, as Central Texas suburban growth surges along the Highway 183 corridor, the Lockhart Post Register reported. Hillwood Communities had requested and received a 90-day extension from the Lockhart City Council in November 2025 for conditional consent to create the municipal utility district tied to the project.
North of Fort Worth, Hillwood also closed on 618 acres near Pilot Point tied to its $1.2 billion Lantern community, set to include 2,000 homes. Denton County commissioners approved a tax increment reinvestment zone in January to support that project. Hoodline previously reported on a $40M Hillwood warehouse groundbreaking south of Dallas the same week the Austin permit was set to lapse, underscoring that the company is not stepping away from industrial development altogether — just from this particular Austin bet.
