Fifteen years ago, Frost Bank Tower was the tallest building in Austin at 33 stories. Today, it barely breaks into the top 15 of the tallest structures in the Austin skyline. In fact, when Waterline, a 74-story tower, topped out at 1,025 feet, it became the tallest building in the entire state of Texas. The skyscrapers that line the skyline may be the most visible sign that the city has changed in the last decade and a half, but the growth we’ve experienced since the Hoar Austin office was first established runs much deeper and is more widespread.
Population Boom
You can’t start a conversation about how the city of Austin has changed without the obvious — there are a lot more people here today. In 2010, there were just over 790,000 people living in the city of Austin. By 2025, that number grew to more than 1,054,000. That’s a significant increase, about 33% more people in just 15 years. If you look beyond city limits to the metro area, the population is now over 2.5 million people.
Tech Takeover
What’s behind the population boom in Austin? One of the most notable factors driving people to relocate to Austin is the transformation of the city into a technology and manufacturing hub. One of the city’s homegrown tech giants is Dell Technologies — founded in 1984 in Michael Dell’s dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin and headquartered in Round Rock to this day. In the 90’s, Apple established a campus in Austin and in 2018 began a major $1 billion campus expansion. Then came Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, Samsung, and more. With these tech companies came employee migration, new jobs, manufacturing facilities, and, of course, lots of construction projects to house these expanded operations.
Industry Impact
I won’t keep diving deep into the history behind Austin’s growth and expansion. Instead, I’d like to focus on how that helped fuel the construction industry and our own Austin division. When I first arrived in Austin, the local industry experienced a lot of construction boom and bust cycles — two years of high activity followed by a slower period. Now, tower cranes seem to continuously line the sky.
Local governments have continued to invest in airport facilities, infrastructure, and civic structures, including a massive new convention center. Higher Education institutions that educate the bright minds that these tech giants want to hire have continued to expand, grow, and renovate their own facilities. We’ve seen a significant focus on developing the University of Texas at Austin into a major medical center with improvements and expansions to Dell Seton, the teaching hospital for UT Medical School, and a large-scale project between MD Anderson and UT Health. As the increased population creates increased traffic issues, we’re seeing local government agencies look to improve roadways and infrastructure. The traffic is also driving a focus on urban redevelopment in an attempt to motivate people to stay close within the city. Very rarely do we see a new single-use building. Towers are mixed use, with residential, retail, and office components to promote the walkable, downtown lifestyle.
Our Own Growth
Our own portfolio mirrors the opportunities I just described, created out of booming populations and shifting industries. The very first project we built as a division was a multifamily, high-end luxury development. We’ve built high-rise student residential towers, higher education facilities, sporting arenas, expansions for the city’s largest hospital system, civic and government facilities, mixed-use developments, K-12 campus projects, and more. Each one of these projects tells a different story about the ever-changing population, growth, and needs of the greater Austin metro area and surrounding counties.
One way I think our division set ourselves apart early and found a way to become resilient in this challenging, competitive construction market was to focus on cutting-edge preconstruction processes and lean methodologies. All of the major tech giants that I mentioned that have set up campuses in Austin launched massive development projects, sometimes at the same time. This activity meant skilled trade was, and remains, stretched thin. In order to deliver our clients’ projects on time, within budget, while competing with billion-dollar projects that required massive manpower, our teams looked for every opportunity to leverage modular construction and prefabrication. By building key, critical path components of projects ahead of schedule in offsite, controlled locations, we have been able to accelerate schedules and deliver reliable results project after project.
Measuring Success
This year, we opened a new office to accommodate our growing division. We continue to expand, develop, and achieve new milestones. But whenever I’m asked to quantify that last 15 years in terms of success, it’s not the projects or the wins that come to mind first. It’s the people. The people who started this division alongside me, and the incredibly talented people who have joined our team along the way. Watching them build their own careers, grow their families, and consistently give back to the communities where we live and work makes me more proud than any professional achievement I could name.
I am excited to see what the next 15 years holds for our city and our division. I believe we will continue to grow a strong healthcare presence in Central Texas. Our skillset has proven to be well suited for urban redevelopment, especially the complicated logistics involved in building largescale projects in dense, busy downtown settings. The growing population will continue to drive a need for more K-12 developments, and I am looking forward to our team being able to be a partner on those projects and more.
