An up-and-coming logistics firm headed by a former Amazon executive is taking a big chunk of new office space in Dallas.
San Francisco-based Flexport, led by CEO Dave Clark, will occupy 50,000 square feet across four floors in the Galleria Towers on LBJ Freeway at Noel Road, the Dallas Morning News reported. The renovated offices are expected to be completed later this year. Chicago-based Huntsman Architectural Group is the designer of the $6.7 million project.
The buildings, purchased by Atlanta-based Piedmont Office Realty Trust for $400 million in 2020, also lease to Amazon Web Services.
The Galleria Towers are connected to the sprawling Galleria Dallas shopping center in North Dallas, and about 15 minutes up the Dallas North Tollway from Southern Methodist University.
Founded in 2013, Flexport has grown significantly in the last few years, adding hundreds of workers and topping 3,000 employees by the end of last year. Venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Michael Dell’s MSD Partners have backed the company, which uses a digital platform to service shipping and storage of consumer goods. Another former Amazon executive, Teresa Carlson, joined Flexport earlier this year.
The arrival of big tech companies bodes well for Dallas’ office sector. Like most U.S cities, remote work trends triggered by the pandemic have caused office vacancies to soar in Big-D, and distress is beginning to ripple across the city. Roughly 7.6 million square feet of sublease space is available in Dallas, with the bulk of it concentrated in the downtown area.
—Quinn Donoghue