Daiso is opening yet another Texas store as it expands rapidly across Texas.
The Japanese retailer leased 8,500 square feet at NewQuest Properties’ Stone Hill Town Center. The Pflugerville shop will give Daiso a foothold in one of the Austin metro area’s fastest-growing locations, as workers from the nearby Samsung and Tesla plants, as well as tech workers across the city, move in.
The shopping center is now almost completely occupied, according to NewQuest. In all, it covers 134 acres at the corner of Texas State Highways 130 and 45.
“NewQuest began work on Stone Hill Town Center 15 years ago when Pflugerville was rural and just beginning to grow,” said Josh Friedlander, an executive with NewQuest. “Now, it’s surrounded by 90,000 rooftops,” he added, “and it’s still growing.”
Pflugerville’s population has exploded in recent years. The shopping center’s trade area covers about 257,000 people, up 17 percent in three years, according to NewQuest. The developer has built about 1 million square feet of shops, with two interior sites in the master-planned development under negotiations.
Daiso’s lease will fill space left behind in late January by Kirkland’s Home. The retailer has opened more than 20 stores in Texas, including a 10,000-square-foot location at Edge Realty’s Sunset Valley Marketfair in southwest Austin last month. The firm was repped by Scott Espensen of Venture Commercial Real Estate.
Some 789,000 square feet of retail space is under construction in Austin, according to research from the Texas retail brokerage Weitzman. Existing space is 97 percent occupied, and most construction in recent years has gone to big-box stores like H-E-B, which has been on an expansion tear across the Texas Triangle. Even as construction has significantly outpaced previous years’ totals, vacant spaces tend to fill almost as quickly as they open in the capital city.
NewQuest, based in Houston, has been betting big on the boomtowns outside Austin. In August, it was seeking incentives to build a $204 million mixed-use project in Kyle.