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When You're Down to Your Last 100 Acres
By Teasha Cable
What if you sold scarcity, instead of space?
Dallas Snow has spent her entire career on both sides of a commercial real estate deals. For sixteen years, she worked inside Jones Commercial Interiors, running operations on footprints topping a million square feet.
Today she's on the other side of the table, as commercial outreach manager for the City of Grapevine, Texas. Her mission? Convince developers, brokers, and corporations to invest in her city.
That range of experience is rare in economic development, and it shapes how she evaluates every deal that crosses her desk. She can spot potential revenue and sustainability angles in a project that a city team without her background might miss entirely.
Selling Scarcity Instead of Space
Grapevine sits ten minutes from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW), at the intersection of six highways between Dallas and Fort Worth, and pulls in an estimated 52 million visitors a year to a city of roughly 53,000 residents.
Grapevine has a Gaylord Texan resort, a Great Wolf Lodge, Grapevine Mills Mall, a historic downtown, and a lake. A commuter train line even connects DFW Airport directly to Main Street in about ten minutes. That's long term planning that serves everyone.
But the detail that changes Dallas's entire pitch isn't any of that.
It's what Grapevine doesn't have: land. 'We're down to our last hundred acres within the city, and half of those are five acres and under.'
Other North Texas cities can offer hundreds of open acres and long-term lease incentives. Grapevine can't compete on that basis, so it doesn't try.
Instead, Dallas leans on tourism numbers, a strong local economy, and quality of place, and treats every remaining parcel as a decision that will define the city for decades.
That scarcity also reframes how Grapevine works with developers.
City-owned properties are handled relationship-first: the team starts by asking what a developer's vision actually is. Private land deals move faster toward price, but even there, Dallas said the strongest partnerships come from long-standing relationships built well before a deal is on the table.
Growth That Has to Show Up for Residents
Tourism-heavy growth brings real tradeoffs: seasonal swings, service-weighted wages, and pressure on the local workforce.
Dallas said the city pushes hard on a second question beyond tax revenue and visitor counts:
Does this create durable opportunity for residents, or just a spike in visitor dollars?
In practice, that shows up in two ways.
First, in the deal terms. Grapevine has been in conversations with incoming employers about living wages. Dallas pointed to a relocated warehouse operator who is explicitly building its wage structure around long-term employee retention rather than turnover.
Second, in an ongoing program called business retention, or BRE, where the economic development team meets regularly with existing business owners, from small local shops to corporate headquarters, to check in on growth plans, hiring, and how business is actually going.
People are just excited to see us. Someone from the city really caring about them on a personal level.
What Corporate Clients Want in 2026
Dallas's time advising Fortune 500 companies at PDR gives her a read on office demand that most municipal staff don't have.
The dominant trend now: hybrid work is the default, not the exception, and companies are shrinking their office footprints while investing more per square foot in the space they keep.
What corporate clients are prioritizing today is completely different from five years ago.
It's the full experience: amenities, walkability to restaurants, and proximity to housing that lets coworkers build an actual community, not just a workplace.
There's also a generational shift, with younger employees actively seeking in-person community after years of remote-first defaults.
The Takeaway
Dallas's advice to other economic development leaders was simple: get out of the office and build relationships before you need them.
Most of what we're doing is really relationship driven. You never know who you can call to help make an introduction, or who you can pitch a site to.
For a city with almost no land left to sell, relationships may be the only inventory that never runs out.
How would you attract corporate investment if you only had 100 acres left?
Listen to our conversation where ever you get your podcasts.