Nine World Cup matches are headed for North Texas next year, when the home of the Cowboys in Arlington will temporarily be renamed Dallas Stadium. Meanwhile, the hotel development market here couldn’t be hotter.
Dallas has the nation’s largest hotel construction pipeline, according to Lodging Econometrics.
The city and its suburbs have 203 projects planned or in development, amounting to more than 24,000 rooms, which is an 11 percent jump from last year. Thirty-one of those projects were under construction at the end of the first quarter; 80 are scheduled to start in the next year; and 92 projects with 12,000 rooms are in the early planning stage.
The World Cup will require about 2,000 hotel rooms for the media alone. It’s estimated that as many as 150,000 rooms will be needed over the course of a month next summer.
Plenty are on the way. Dallas ranked third for hotels under construction in the first quarter, but it led the nation in upcoming work.
Lodging Econometrics expects 46 hotels to be completed in the market next year, when Dallas could top New York in deliveries.
Two of the projects it counted for next year are luxury hotels:
NexPoint Advisors could complete its plans for a 221-key hotel at Cityplace Tower, which was slated as an InterContinental Hotel & Resorts hotel back in 2019. And The Knox Residences Auberge Resorts Collection, which is under construction with 140 hotel rooms and 48 ultra-luxury condo units.
With 821 hotels in Dallas already, clearing the projects in the pipeline will increase supply by almost 25 percent. Lodging Econometrics expects most of the underway projects to open after 2027, forecasting 20 hotel openings this year. By 2027, these hotels are projected to add roughly 4,700 rooms to the supply.
Two of the top five hotel construction markets are in Texas. Austin ranked fifth with 124 projects totaling 14,514 rooms. Atlanta, Nashville and Phoenix took second, third and fourth place, respectively, with Atlanta trailing Dallas by 37 projects.
An increase in hotel occupancy has yielded a revenue per available room of $94.38 this year, up from the $83.20 last year, according to Matthews. The occupancy rate in the Dallas market, including surrounding submarkets, was 64.8 percent last year, and it’s on the upswing. The occupancy rate was 69.7 percent in the first quarter.