A few months back I was driving out toward Pflugerville — running errands, half-distracted — when I noticed a stretch of road I’d passed a dozen times looked completely different. Two new subdivisions breaking ground, a hotel flag going up, a chicken-wire fence around what used to be a flat nothing lot. And right behind all of it, visible from the highway access road, one of those enormous gray concrete rectangles with no windows and enough backup generators to power a small city.

Data center. Another one.

I started paying closer attention after that.

What’s Actually Happening Out There

Texas has become a landing pad for data center construction in a way that would have seemed almost unbelievable ten years ago. The reasons are the usual ones: relatively cheap land, a deregulated power grid that companies can negotiate around, and a business-friendly permitting environment. The Dallas-Fort Worth corridor — particularly the areas around Garland, Forney, and out toward Midlothian — has absorbed a significant chunk of this investment. So has the I-35 corridor between Austin and Round Rock, and the stretch from San Antonio toward New Braunfels.

What I’m watching as someone who buys and sells homes is what happens to the residential market in the ring around these facilities. And it’s more complicated than “data center goes up, houses get expensive.”

The Jobs Are Real — and They Cluster

Here’s the thing people miss. Data centers don’t employ thousands of people on-site. A major facility might have a few hundred full-time staff for operations, security, and maintenance. But they pull in a different category of workers: the construction crews who build them, the electrical and HVAC contractors who maintain them, the fiber and networking crews who connect them, and eventually the corporate and tech employees who relocate to manage regional operations.

Those people need somewhere to live. And they tend to have decent wages.

I’ve talked to a few folks in the trades who’ve picked up steady data center maintenance contracts around the Garland and Rowlett area. One of them bought a house in Sachse in 2023 and told me he couldn’t have timed it better — though he’d be quick to say he wasn’t trying to time anything. He just wanted a shorter commute. His neighborhood has seen turnover pick up and prices nudge upward, and he’s noticed more out-of-state plates in the parking lots at the grocery store than he did two years ago.

That kind of localized demand shift is real, even if it doesn’t show up dramatically in county-wide data. AI’s housing impact is strong — but highly localized — and the same logic applies here. These effects don’t spread evenly; they concentrate within a 10–15 minute drive of the facilities.

What Buyers Should Actually Be Watching For

If you’re looking at homes in submarkets where data centers are under construction or recently opened, here’s how I’d think about it:

The upside possibilities:

  • Increased local employment can stabilize a market during broader softening
  • Infrastructure investment (roads, power, fiber) often follows big industrial development
  • Resale demand from incoming workers can be more stable than spec-buyer demand

The genuine concerns:

  • Noise. These facilities run cooling systems and generators 24/7. I’d visit the property on a still night before you make an offer — not just during a busy Sunday open house when ambient noise covers everything else.
  • Electromagnetic interference is mostly a non-issue for residential use, but it’s worth asking your inspector about if the facility is within a few hundred feet.
  • Utility strain. When a massive data center comes online in an area that wasn’t built for that draw, power infrastructure gets stressed. I’ve heard enough complaints from people in fast-growing outer-ring suburbs to take this seriously.
  • Long-term property character. That industrial neighbor isn’t going anywhere, and it may expand.

I wouldn’t buy within literal eyeline of a large facility without walking the property at different times of day and doing a noise test with my own ears. I also wouldn’t skip a full foundation inspection on anything in those outer-ring areas where ground disturbance from construction activity has been heavy. DFW’s next suburban growth wave is forming west of Fort Worth — and a lot of that land has been sitting undeveloped long enough that you want to know exactly what you’re standing on.

What the Numbers Look Like Right Now

I want to be careful here because these figures shift and I’m not pulling from a live database — I’m talking about what I’ve observed and what’s been reported recently.

In some of the Collin and Kaufman County submarkets closest to active data center corridors, median days on market has been running somewhere around 25–35 days for move-in-ready homes in the $300K–$450K range, which is tighter than the broader DFW average has been lately. That’s not solely attributable to data center activity — there are a lot of forces moving the market — but the employment stability in those pockets seems to be a real factor.

Property tax rates in some of these outer-ring municipalities have been running somewhere in the 2.2%–2.6% range, give or take, depending on the specific jurisdiction and any applicable exemptions. Worth verifying with the appraisal district directly before you fall in love with a monthly payment estimate.

New construction has been moving fast in some of these corridors too. In DFW, housing affordability slips even as builders report strength — and that’s very much showing up in the data center-adjacent submarkets, where builders are racing to capture the incoming workforce before those workers start stretching further out.

Before You Make an Offer Near One of These Sites

A few practical things worth doing:

  1. Look up the facility operator and any expansion plans. Most large data center operators file public permits and have announced growth phases. Knowing whether a facility is at Phase 1 of 4 tells you something important about future noise, traffic, and land use nearby.
  2. Check the floodplain status. A lot of these facilities are being built on flat, low-lying land that was previously agricultural. The residential development following them isn’t always going on the best-drained parcels.
  3. Ask about HOA rules and commercial buffer zoning. Some of the newer master-planned communities near these corridors have done a decent job putting green buffers and sound barriers in. Others have not.
  4. Talk to someone who already lives nearby. I know that sounds obvious. But a five-minute conversation with a neighbor — not a sales rep at the model home — will tell you more about what the facility sounds like at 2 a.m. than any brochure will.

The data center boom is real, it’s reshaping specific pockets of Texas, and some of those pockets are genuinely good places to buy right now. But “near a data center” is not a monolith — it matters which side of the facility you’re on, how far away you are, and what the local municipality has or hasn’t planned for what comes next.

Do your homework before you do your offer.