DFW Ranks 13th in "Tech Talent," CBRE Report Says

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Dallas-Fort Worth ranks 13th overall on CBRE’s 2021 Scoring Tech Talent report, as “North American tech-talent employment weathered the pandemic better than most other professions,” the real estate firm said. 

“Corporate relocations have accelerated in recent years as Dallas’s favorable business environment and relatively low cost of living have drawn in talent and companies from high-cost metros,” CBRE said.

“We are currently working with several companies looking at relocating a significant presence to Dallas for the reasons outlined in the report,” Clay Vaughn, senior vice president and senior leader of CBRE’s Tech & Media Practice Group in Dallas, said in the release.

“In fact, among the locations one of our companies is evaluating, Dallas ranks the highest according to studies completed by our Labor Analytics Group,” Vaughn said. “With the market’s significant millennial population growth, availability of very good tech talent, favorable tax structure and relative affordability of real estate on the residential and commercial side, Dallas is proving to be tough to beat.”

“Numerous indicators underscore the resilience of tech talent during COVID-19,” CBRE said. “These occupations registered job growth of 0.8% in 2020 in the U.S., while non-tech occupations declined by 5.5%. Software developers and programmers were the most in demand tech-job category last year, adding 85,000 U.S. jobs for a 4.8% growth rate from a year earlier. Beyond the tech industry itself, those that added tech workers last year include financial activities, professional & business services, and government.”

DFW has the sixth largest tech talent labor pool nationally with 189,200 tech workers, a 16.3% increase from 2015, CBRE said. Additionally, DFW has the 12thlowest apartment rent-to-wage ratio among the top 50 tech talent markets, with the average annual apartment rent amounting to 14.2% of the average tech talent wage.

CBRE’s annual report, now in its ninth year, ranks the top 50 North American markets by analyzing 13 measures of their ability to attract and develop tech talent, including tech graduation rates, tech-job concentration, tech labor pool size, and labor and real estate costs, among others. CBRE also ranks the Next 25 emerging tech markets on a narrower set of criteria. Tech talent is defined as 20 key tech professions -- such as software developers and systems and data managers – across all industries.

DFW stood out in the report in several other key areas, CBRE said:

  • The millennial population aged 23 to 38 increased by 14.7% (230,676 people) since 2014, the ninth largest millennial population growth among large tech talent markets.
  • The metroplex churns out a lot of tech graduates. It ranks ninth among large tech talent markets for number of tech-degree completions at 6,672 in 2019. In fact, DFW’s tech-graduation rate has outpaced its tech-job growth since 2015, resulting in a surplus of 4,130 tech grads that found work in other markets in that timeframe.
  • Overall, DFW ranks in the middle of the pack for expenses of operating a tech company. The average one-year cost for operating a 500-employee tech company occupying 75,000 square feet in DFW amounts to $46.4 million. That ranks 15th most expensive among the top 50 tech talent markets.

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