Mike Berry remembers trying to convince prospective clients that the swath of wheat field before them would someday be a bustling economic hub anchored by an industrial airport.
Sure, there were benefits that came with developing the first speculative project of its kind on a stretch of land north of Fort Worth—for Berry and his boss, Ross Perot Jr. Their vision for what would become Hillwood’s AllianceTexas development allowed them to dream beyond the bounds of what had been done before. But with creativity came the challenges of building a spec project with no committed tenants.
“We didn’t have a user who was already signed up to operate at the airport,” Berry recalls. “That made it even more challenging, because we had to create demand with a project that really no one had ever seen before.”
Fast forward 35 years, and the vision that was once sketched in masterplan documents and in renderings has become 58 million square feet of office, retail, and industrial space. It has resulted in the onboarding of 574 companies and is responsible for 66,198 direct jobs.
In total, Hillwood’s 27,000-acre development has generated an estimated $120 billion in cumulative economic impact, including $9.8 billion last year alone.
Berry and Perot were fraternity brothers at Vanderbilt University. Perot was Sigma Alpha Epsilon president while Berry was the social chairman. “So I often tell people that I was the guy who got the fraternity in trouble, and Ross was the guy who got us out of trouble,” Berry says. They were close in college and then went separate ways afterward.
Berry pursued graduate school, followed by a career with Woodbine Development. Perot co-piloted the first around-the-world helicopter flight, served for eight years in the U.S. Air Force, and then began looking at land with his father, Ross Perot Sr.
The two former frat brothers eventually reconnected, and Perot Jr. began talking with Berry about what AllianceTexas could become. It was a conversation that spanned months but eventually ended with Berry coming on board—and he hasn’t looked back since. “He’s a great salesman, by the way,” Berry says of Perot. “And he still is one of the best salesmen I’ve ever known.”
Since the Fort Worth Alliance Airport—now Perot Field—opened in 1989 as the world’s first industrial airport, AllianceTexas has evolved to host an intermodal facility, to become a data center hub, and to be known for hosting innovative enterprises like commercial drone delivery service Wing and Gatik, which provides autonomous middle mile delivery services.
AllianceTexas has also become a center of innovation for Hillwood itself. “Almost every idea that we have at Hillwood was incubated here at Alliance originally,” Berry says. “It’s a great place to test new ideas.”
D CEO sat down with Berry to look back on AllianceTexas’ 35-year impact and what’s ahead.
NOTE: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
D CEO: Thinking back to when you and Ross were launching Alliance, what were those early days like? What were your initial expectations, and how did theyalign with what Alliance has become?
BERRY: “Everything that we did in the early days we were pioneering. If you think about the structure of the deal itself, being a public-private partnership between the FAA, the City of Fort Worth, and Hillwood, that had not been done in that sort of structure anywhere in the country—certainly for an airport project. The idea of building an industrial airport was also pioneering, because there was no such thing in the FAA handbook as an industrial airport. It didn’t exist as a category. We had to do a lot of education, not just with the FAA, but also with the local community and the local stakeholders as to what it really was.
“And I think that the bigger thing was that it was a speculative project. We weren’t building it for a client. We didn’t have a user who was already signed up to operate at the airport. That made it even more challenging, because we had to create demand with a project that no one had ever seen before.
“Everything was new, which I think at the end of the day was our biggest blessing. Because we really weren’t working off of any benchmarks, it allowed us to sort of think out of the box and be maybe more creative than if you were doing project No. 30 in a long line of projects.
“And we were young, which was also, I think, a huge benefit. We didn’t have a whole lot of experience to fall back on. We also had Ross Perot Sr. around a lot, who would encourage us to think and act that way, basically not to be concerned about making mistakes and to really sort of think about every day as if you’re climbing a new mountain.
“So, that was the environment that we were in, but it was pretty lonely in those early years. We were building a big runway, and we would bring a lot of people out here, and they’d look at it, and they’d look at literally thousands of acres of undeveloped farmland and ranch land around it. And people had a hard time visualizing what the future might look like, even though we had great, beautiful renderings and master plans and site plans, and we had a lot of paper to sell off of, we didn’t have a lot of verticality. But it was fun. We learned a lot, and I think where we are today has a lot to do with the fact that we went through those periods of having to create things from scratch.”
D CEO: What were some of the key elements of Alliance that have been critical to its success?
BERRY: “The infrastructure that we had in place then and have continued to evolve over time has been the backbone of our success, with the airport being the centerpiece of infrastructure. And then you think about building all of the highway improvements that we have over the years, starting with State Highway 170 and how that allowed us to be connected back to DFW airport. And then you think about the development with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railway of the intermodal hub, which really put us on the map as a strategic inland port in the center of North America, and it connected us to Asia through the West Coast ports and allowed all this freight that was flowing from Asia into the U.S. market to come seamlessly into the center of the country and land here at Alliance.
“You start to stack those big pieces of infrastructure together, and it was a unique operating environment for a lot of different businesses, when you could have that sort of transportation and infrastructure integration in one place. On top of that, we put in very robust water, power, fiber systems through the entire development, and continued to even position ourselves as a more complete sort of one-stop shop.
“And then we layered on some unique economic programs. The Foreign Trade Zone allows products to come in from outside the country and remain inside the trade zone duty-free while they’re here. That was an element that helped us attract some people who were doing international commerce and freight movement. We had the Freeport inventory tax exemption, which allowed tax exemption on inventory that moves through the state of Texas in 175 days or less.
“The other thing that made us unique is our land base—the zoning was so flexible. Basically, we put this blanket zoning over 10,000 acres of land that would accommodate the needs of any type of company, from a distribution center to a manufacturing center to a data center to an office need to an aviation and aircraft hangar to an air freight and air cargo…everything in all of those categories we could accommodate without any heavy lifting, without any zoning changes or public entitlement work. So it kind of set the table for anything to happen.
“Additionally, we were very flexible. We were trying to do anything we could to attract the early days of industry and business to Alliance. So we would try to accommodate any sort of deal structure that a company would need. If they needed a building built for them and they wanted to lease it, we would do that. If they wanted to buy their own land and own their own building, we would do that. If they wanted ground lease or some other unique structure, we would do that.
“Lastly, it was room for growth. Ross would always tell clients, and still does, ‘I challenge you to outgrow us.’ It was our goal to be a place where any of our early customers—and even to this day—we would create an environment where they could always know that they could grow and expand here at Alliance.
“All those things put together were things that made us unique and attractive to a lot of different businesses.”
D CEO: As you look back, what are you most proud of when it comes to Alliance and your leadership at Hillwood?
BERRY: “I think the thing that I’m most proud of is the fact that we built something that will last way beyond my lifetime. The assets that are on the ground and the things that are happening inside those buildings, whether they be restaurants or large manufacturing plants, are going to have an impact on the local, the regional, and the larger part of the economy for a long time.
“But within that, if I go out to lunch at Alliance, at one of the restaurants, you walk in and you see people working in the restaurant, you see people there eating, and you think back—maybe three or four or 10 years ago, or maybe even a year ago, that was just a piece of land. Nothing was going on, and all of a sudden there’s this economic activity. People have jobs, people have places to go. People are engaging.
“That, to me, is the most satisfying part of what we do: creating a micro economy out of what was once a piece of raw land and knowing that that will continue to churn for years and years ahead. There’s not a whole lot of careers where that you can have that sort of impact. And we’re not doing it at a small scale—we’re doing it at s giant scale. I mean, 27,000 Acres, 66,000 jobs created, 60 million square feet of space on the ground and a lot more to go. Literally tens of millions of square feet left.
“I don’t step back and sort of look at it that way very often, but when I do, that’s what I’m most proud of, and that’s what is the most fun part of what we do. We’re constantly creating economic activity. We’re creating jobs for people. We’re creating commerce. We’re creating community in an area where it didn’t exist before.”
D CEO: What’s in store, short term and long term, for the future of Alliance?
BERRY: “We’re pretty bullish right now, quite frankly. In terms of immediate things in the pipeline, we just launched another million-square-foot industrial building. We’ve got two more on the design path that we want to have in position to go forward. We’re trying to start two more multifamily projects.
“And another thing that’s really exploding right now is our retail activity. We’ve reached a point of what I would call residential rooftop critical mass, where now all of the retailers—the grocers, the big box retailers, the small shop retailers, all of the service providers, the healthcare, the medical, the doctors—everybody sees the growth, and they want to be in position to serve both today’s market and the future market.
“We’re really overwhelmed with retail demand right now, and we’re trying to expand our team. We just brought in a new leader of retail development, and we’re trying to build a team so we can develop and handle the growth of retail. That’s a huge growth opportunity for us that we hadn’t really seen before.
“Another area that we’re trying to grab onto is this north-south growth that’s occurring between Mexico and the U.S. There’s huge volume of freight movement—more so than we’ve seen in the past—that’s beginning to occur between Mexico and Texas, and on into the U.S. A lot of it is because of this nearshoring and onshoring that’s been occurring, and a lot of the manufacturing expansions happening in Mexico, and that’s creating a need for more goods to be pushed up and down, north and south.
“We participated in the east-west trade global trade market, but really this north-south movement is much bigger than I’ve seen in my whole career, and we’re well positioned to be sort of a giant catcher’s net of a lot of that activity. And we’re really trying to position ourselves to be strategic about that and put in place the next generation of infrastructure to be the center of activity for at least the Texas portion of the north-south trade corridor that’s evolving.
“We’re also seeing a lot of demand in data centers; we’re trying to capture some of that. There’s a lot going on. We’re pretty excited. anytime you’re in a market like DFW, with the growth that we’re experiencing, and more than 300 people a day moving into North Texas, that creates a lot of direct and indirect demand that we want to take advantage of.”
