Chris Teesdale

As the Panama Canal celebrates its 100th anniversary this year and its major locks expansion will be completed in 2015, I thought a little background on the canal might be of interest. It's a timely topic, as we're going to be hearing more and more about it.

The North Texas real estate market collapse of the 1980s began in 1987 and lasted five years. The most recent downturn began in 2008, and here we are five years later. If you use the same growth model as the last cycle (i.e., 184 percent), then we can anticipate our industrial market growing to 1.3 billion total square feet over the next 10 to 15 years. Here are some facts that support this.

With the festivities surrounding the opening of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge this past weekend, I found it interesting that no stories profiled or even mentioned the river that the bridge actually crosses and its significance to Dallas. Specifically, if it weren’t for the Trinity River, there would be no Dallas … no Dallas, no new really cool looking bridge.

We’ve been here before. The economy gets out of whack, there’s no confidence in leadership in Washington, yet businesses have to make big decisions, such as: Do we ride out the economy and see what happens? Or do we forward-think our way into being the market-mover in our industry?

In my last RealPoints post, I mentioned a property tour I was giving in the 200-degree heat of the summer of 1980. It was damn hot, as I described. We all wore coats and ties in those days, although some of us figured out that by wearing a vest, we could shed the coat and still look appropriate. Besides the change in apparel expectations since then, another big difference is the reliance we all had on one another for information.