Do Data Centers Hurt North Texas Home Values?
Five years ago, nobody buying a house in North Texas asked about substations. Now it comes up in showings. A client will pull up a news story about an 830-acre campus in Ellis County or a 450-acre land buy in south Fort Worth and ask the obvious question: if one of these lands near my house, what happens to my property value? The honest answer is that it depends almost entirely on distance and screening, and that most of what people fear turns out not to show up in the sales data. But there are real risks, they are concentrated in specific places, and they are worth checking before you buy rather than after. Here is the current picture.
The scale of what is coming
Texas has roughly 387 data centers operating today and is on track to become the largest data center market in the country. That part is not speculative. What makes 2026 different is the size of the pipeline behind it.
The Texas Tribune counted 248 new data centers planned across the state, with 86 of those in North Texas. About half are aimed at unincorporated county land, where local governments have far fewer tools to regulate what gets built.
The power numbers are what get attention. ERCOT told state lawmakers this summer that roughly 90 percent of the 474 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests under review come from data center projects. For context, the all-time peak demand record on the Texas grid is about 85.5 gigawatts. The requests add up to more than five times everything the state has ever pulled at once.
Not all of that gets built. Grid capacity is the bottleneck, and the governor has directed regulators to review projected electricity demand, water use, ownership, and tax incentives for each facility, with the possibility of denying grid access to projects that fail. ERCOT described the effect as a pause on projects moving through interconnection. The pipeline is a wish list, not a construction schedule.
Where in North Texas this is concentrated
The heaviest activity is south and east of Dallas rather than in the northwest corridor where most of our clients buy.
- Ellis County: Leads all 254 Texas counties in requested power. Google in Midlothian, the Red Oak campus, DataBank, Compass, and a 1.8 gigawatt switchyard project.
- South Fort Worth: Black Mountain assembled about 450 acres near Lon Stephenson Road and Forest Hill Drive. Roughly six projects are in the Fort Worth area.
- Denton and the I-35 corridor: A mix of crypto mining and traditional colocation facilities, some of them older sites now expanding.
- Alliance: Existing industrial infrastructure and transmission access make it a natural target for further development.
For Westlake, Southlake, Trophy Club, Colleyville, and Keller buyers, the practical takeaway is that none of these are next door. The relevant question in this part of the metroplex is usually about transmission lines and electricity costs rather than a campus at the end of the street.
What the research actually says about home values
This is where the conversation usually gets emotional and the data gets ignored.
Published research out of George Mason University, studying Northern Virginia’s data center corridor (the most saturated market in the world), found no evidence that data centers systematically lower nearby home values. In several established corridors, homes appreciated faster than the surrounding region, likely because the tax base and job growth arrived with the buildings.
The three things that actually cause complaints
Noise
This is the number one issue neighbors raise, and it comes from cooling. The systems that use the least water lean hardest on fans, so a facility marketed as water-efficient may be the loudest one. Chillers and backup generator testing run on schedules that residents learn to hate. Distance, berms, and tree buffers matter enormously here, and many Texas cities now require buffer zones between data centers and residential areas.
Water
Large facilities can draw several million gallons a day. In a region that has been through repeated drought restrictions, that is a legitimate community concern even when it does not touch your individual home value.
Power, and what it does to your bill
An extremely large facility now needs upward of 100 megawatts. A single megawatt powers roughly 200 Texas homes at peak demand. Grid demand from data centers in Texas is projected to exceed 40 gigawatts by 2028, up from about 8 gigawatts in 2025.
Who pays for the transmission and generation buildout to serve that load is the open policy question, and it is the one most likely to touch your monthly budget. It affects every homeowner in ERCOT territory, not just the ones near a campus. If you are buying at the top of your budget, build in some room for electricity costs to move.
If you are buying in DFW right now
A twenty-minute check before you write an offer covers most of the risk.
- Pull up your target address on a data center tracking map and measure the actual distance to any announced campus, not the city-center distance quoted in news coverage.
- Check whether the surrounding land is inside city limits or unincorporated. Unincorporated county land has weaker zoning protection, which means fewer guarantees about what gets built on the field behind the subdivision.
- Look at what borders the neighborhood. Large parcels with transmission access and no residential entitlement are the ones that change use.
- Read recent planning and zoning agendas for the city. Texas cities generally require public notice for large developments, and proposals show up on agendas long before they show up on the news.
- Ask the seller directly about noise. If a facility is already operating within earshot, visit the property in the evening and again on a weekend.
If a home is genuinely close to an announced site, that is a negotiation point, not automatically a walk-away. Terms in the counties where approvals are still being fought are often better for the surrounding community than in markets where the industry has already won.
If you are selling near an announced project
Do not wait for a buyer to discover it during due diligence. Texas disclosure obligations aside, a buyer who finds a 500-acre land purchase on their own after they are already emotionally invested tends to react by walking or by demanding a large concession.
The better play is to control the narrative. Know the exact distance, know the buffer and screening requirements the city imposed, know the approved building heights, and have that information ready. Most of the fear is about the unknown. A specific answer defuses it. If the project brings measurable tax base and the school district benefits, that is worth saying out loud too.
The part nobody in North Texas is talking about yet
The land repricing is arguably the bigger story for anyone who owns acreage. Nationally, land with realistic power access has been trading at premiums of roughly 1.6 to 2.5 times comparable industrial land. In Texas, that dynamic is spreading well beyond the traditional corridors.
If you own raw land in a growth path in Denton, Ellis, Kaufman, or Johnson County, the value of that parcel may now depend more on transmission proximity than on residential entitlement. That is a genuinely new consideration for North Texas landowners, and one that most local valuations have not caught up with.
Summary
Data centers are not a home value emergency for the vast majority of DFW homeowners. The credible research says proximity alone does not systematically move prices, and the buildout brings tax revenue that funds the school districts people move here for.
What matters is your specific address, your specific distance, and how a specific facility was screened and permitted. That is a question with a concrete answer, and it is worth getting before you sign anything.
