Crow Holdings Bet Toyota's 1,000 Employees on a Wood Building Nobody Had Tested at This Scale in North Texas

A Dallas developer broke ground on a seven-story timber tower with no tenant, no regional precedent, and an insurance market that prices the material at multiples of concrete. Toyota called.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Strategy • 2026-06-28

The Offices at Southstone Yards sits on Cirrus Way in Frisco, Texas, directly across the street from Toyota's 100-acre North American headquarters. By October 2024, construction was substantially finished. The building had no tenant. Crow Holdings Development had poured roughly 242,000 square feet of speculative office space into a market still digesting the most brutal post-pandemic office downturn in a generation, and it had done so using southern yellow pine harvested in Alabama instead of the concrete and steel that had defined every other office tower in the Dallas-Fort Worth region for decades. Then, in the fourth quarter of 2024, Toyota Financial Services called.

A Building With No Comparable in the Region

The Offices at Southstone Yards is North Texas's first mass timber office building, a distinction confirmed by Thornton Tomasetti, the structural engineering firm that designed the building's timber system. Floors two through seven are built from southern yellow pine glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels, all sourced from Alabama and manufactured at SmartLam North America's plant in Dothan, a deliberate choice to minimize the carbon cost of shipping. The ground floor podium and the building's core are concrete, with flat plate post-tension slabs and concrete shear walls carrying the lateral load. Structure Tone Southwest, the general contractor, has described it as the nation's largest Southern Yellow Pine mass timber office building.

That hybrid design was not a stylistic flourish. Designed by Duda|Paine Architects as design architect with Gensler serving as architect of record, the building had to clear a structural and regulatory bar that essentially nobody in North Texas had cleared before. Thornton Tomasetti's engineers ran structural and char-layer analyses to confirm the timber would hold a one-hour fire-resistance rating, work that fed into the building's classification as Type III-A construction. The building achieved LEED v4 Gold certification under the Core and Shell rating system in August 2024, with the timber sequestering or offsetting an estimated 2,589 metric tons of carbon, roughly a 34 percent smaller carbon footprint than an equivalent concrete structure would have produced.

None of that solved the more basic problem facing Crow Holdings: nobody had tested whether a Dallas-Fort Worth tenant, let alone a Fortune 500-adjacent one, would actually sign for a sizable office building made of a material they had never worked in before.

The Procurement Problem Nobody Talks About

Getting timber out of an Alabama forest and into a seven-story Frisco office tower turned out to be its own ordeal. Structure Tone Southwest has acknowledged that the project ran into substantial wood procurement and manufacturing challenges during construction, ultimately forcing the contractor to switch to a second regional vendor in Alabama mid-project to keep pace with the building's timeline. The team still hit its budget and schedule, including the precast parking garage that came with the project, but the episode is a reminder that mass timber supply chains in the American South are still thin. Unlike concrete, which any regional supplier can pour on short notice, structural timber depends on a small number of specialized mills, and Southstone Yards needed enough volume, on a tight enough schedule, that a single Alabama supplier could not reliably carry the load alone.

The insurance side carried its own friction. Builder's risk insurance for mass timber typically runs four to ten times higher than for an equivalent concrete project, according to industry estimates compiled by insurance trade publications, because underwriters have decades of concrete and steel claims data and almost none for timber at this scale. Insurers worry most about the construction phase, when sprinklers are not yet operational and the wood has not yet been sealed inside a finished building envelope. Once a mass timber building is topped off, fitted with sprinklers, and enclosed, the structural engineering community broadly agrees its fire performance rivals steel and concrete. The char layer that forms on exposed timber under fire conditions self-insulates the wood beneath it, which is why mass timber buildings are rated for fire resistance in the first place. But getting from groundbreaking to occupancy permit meant carrying that elevated premium on a building with no signed lease.

Why CoStar Called It the Most Significant Lease in Years

Toyota Financial Services signed on November 7, 2024, taking the entire 242,000-square-foot building as its single tenant. Bill Kitchens, CoStar's director of market analytics for the North Texas office market, confirmed it as the biggest new office lease to land in Dallas-Fort Worth in nearly two years, and Steve Triolet, a senior vice president of research and market forecasting at Partners, called it one of the largest leases signed anywhere in Texas in 2025. The significance was not about price. The terms of the lease were never disclosed. It was about the fact that the only available comparable signed at full scale, sight unseen as a category, for a structural system the market had never seen deployed at this size.

"When we began developing The Offices at Southstone Yards, our goal was to build a welcoming, collaborative, sustainable space for a forward-thinking tenant like Toyota Financial Services that wanted to create an elevated workplace for its team," said Cody Armbrister, senior managing director of the office team at Crow Holdings Development, in comments to CoStar News. "We see Southstone Yards as emblematic of the future of what the office can be, specifically a place where people want to spend the majority of their day."

Toyota's familiarity with the site mattered as much as any pitch deck. Because the company's North American headquarters sits directly across the street, Toyota Financial Services employees watched the timber structure rise from the ground over more than a year before signing anything. "I think because they were familiar with the area in general, and they had watched the product come out of the ground, they were confident in the quality and in what we were trying to create at Southstone Yards," Armbrister said. "And that was a key ingredient for accelerating this process and us ultimately signing a lease with them." Crow Holdings had been courting Toyota for years before the deal came together. "We had reached out to them many times over the years, just given their proximity," Armbrister said.

Scott Cooke, president and CEO of Toyota Financial Services, framed the move as additive rather than relocating. "Toyota Financial Services is pleased to add The Offices at Southstone Yards to supplement our workspace at the nearby Toyota North America Headquarters," Cooke said. "This new building provides an appealing environment that will allow our team members to collaborate and provide the best possible service to customers and dealers." JLL represented Toyota in the transaction. CBRE's Trey Smith, Jackie Marshall, and Ben Davis represented Crow Holdings. "I can't think of a better long-term business pairing than Crow Holdings Development and Toyota Financial Services," Smith said.

Toyota Financial Services, the financing and leasing arm of the world's largest automaker, plans to bring approximately 1,000 employees into the building, according to company spokesperson Vinson Bray, with move-in targeted for the back half of 2025 to support employees returning to in-person work. The company is keeping its existing Plano headquarters space and has not yet finalized which internal teams will relocate to Southstone Yards.

The Recruitment Logic Behind the Material

Crow Holdings has been explicit that the bet on timber was never primarily about environmental messaging. Speaking to North Texas real estate executives at an invitation-only event hosted by retail veteran Herb Weitzman, Crow Holdings CEO Michael Levy laid out the commercial logic directly: "A lot of corporate users have told their stakeholders they will be carbon neutral by some date and so we will develop into that theme." For Levy, sustainability credentials are less a virtue signal than a sales argument aimed at large corporate tenants who have already made public carbon commitments and need office space that helps them keep those promises.

The deeper argument is about the war for talent inside the office itself. CoStar's reporting on the deal noted that mass timber construction has already pulled major corporate tenants elsewhere, pointing to Walmart's multibillion-dollar mass timber home office campus in Bentonville, Arkansas, which opened the same month the Toyota deal was finalized, and Google's mass timber buildings in Northern California. Triolet, the Partners analyst, said the logic for Fortune 500 tenants is straightforward: green building techniques look favorable to shareholders and regulators alike, and "it doesn't seem like there's much downside risk to it." Armbrister has previously described the broader dynamic driving the Southstone Yards strategy as a "race for amenitization," in which getting employees back into physical offices voluntarily, rather than under a mandate, has become a design problem that real estate has to solve directly.

There is research behind the bet. A post-occupancy study of two mass timber buildings in Kelowna, British Columbia, funded by Forestry Innovation Investment and conducted by urban research firm Happy Cities, found a positive correlation between employee satisfaction with exposed wood surfaces and more positive at-work experiences, including self-reported gains in mental and physical wellbeing. Separately, the Human Spaces global report, which surveyed more than 7,600 office workers across 16 countries, found that employees in environments with natural elements reported 15 percent higher wellbeing, 6 percent higher productivity, and 15 percent greater creativity than those in conventional office settings. None of that research is timber-specific in isolation, but it is the evidentiary base developers like Crow Holdings point to when they argue exposed wood and biophilic design are recruitment tools, not just sustainability credentials.

A Region That Had Never Built This Before, and the Ones That Came Before It

Crow Holdings was not flying entirely blind. Mass timber office buildings already existed in Texas, just not in Dallas-Fort Worth. The Soto, a six-story, 141,453-square-foot mass timber building in San Antonio completed in 2020, sat at more than 91 percent leased by early 2025, evidence that timber buildings could find tenants in Texas markets given enough time. Hines had also landed several tenants for a three-story mass timber office building that opened in Austin in 2023, and told CoStar News it hoped to replicate the project elsewhere. Houston-based developer Howard Hughes was racing to complete Bridgeland Green, the Houston region's first mass timber office building, around the same time Southstone Yards was searching for its anchor tenant, and had already pre-leased space to an insurance company.

But the category has also produced visible failures, and the contrast is instructive. Hines' T3 West Midtown in Atlanta opened in 2019 with three tenants, including what was then Facebook, occupying only about a third of the building. As of CoStar's February 2025 reporting, roughly 75 percent of T3 West Midtown remained vacant six years after opening, a cautionary data point for any developer betting an entire pro forma on a single structural gamble. Jamestown Properties' 619 Ponce in Atlanta, built from southern yellow pine sourced from Georgia-managed timberland near Columbus, fared better: about 70 percent leased after its first year, and commanding the highest rental rates in the city of Atlanta, according to the project's developer.

Triolet's read on the pattern is that the category is still in its proving stage, building by building, market by market. "All of these buildings were speculative, and it looks like they are landing leases," he told CoStar News. "I think we're going to see more copycat developments in the future." Whether that holds depends heavily on whether buildings like Southstone Yards convert their early anchor tenants into long-term occupancy, the way The Soto eventually did, rather than stalling out the way T3 West Midtown did in Atlanta.

What the Bet Actually Bought Crow Holdings

The Offices at Southstone Yards anchors a much larger wager. The building sits on the first developed parcel of a 45-acre mixed-use project that Crow Holdings has planned to eventually include more than 1,000 residential units, a hotel, retail, and restaurants, with Frisco zoning requiring 22 percent of the overall site to remain green open space. A second, 338,000-square-foot office building is already planned for the same site, and Thornton Tomasetti has confirmed it will also use mass timber construction. Jason Ford, president of the Frisco Economic Development Corporation, has called the project a deliberate tool for recruiting corporate tenants the city could not otherwise attract, telling Crow Holdings that Southstone Yards "is real differentiator in the marketplace and should help us attract top-tier corporate and tech firms to help take Frisco to the next level."

The Toyota lease has already paid a dividend beyond the rent roll. The Offices at Southstone Yards was named Commercial Development of the Year for the Dallas-Fort Worth market at the 2025 CoStar Impact Awards, a credential Crow Holdings can now use to market the second building, and any future timber projects, to corporate tenants who are still uncertain whether an unfamiliar structural material is a risk worth taking. Armbrister has called the Toyota deal "a north star" for how Crow Holdings will approach future office leasing decisions across its portfolio. "When you see these large transactions happen, I think it's good for the market overall, because it's just showing confidence of occupiers to say, this is what we want, and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is," he said.

That confidence was not guaranteed. Crow Holdings built Southstone Yards on spec, absorbed insurance premiums that ran multiples above a conventional concrete project, navigated a regional timber supply chain thin enough that its general contractor had to switch vendors mid-construction, and did all of it in an office market where companies were shedding space, not adding it. The wager paid off because one company across the street watched the building rise for over a year and decided the bet was worth joining. The next mass timber developer in Dallas-Fort Worth will not have that advantage. They will be selling a still largely unproven material to a tenant who has not been watching it get built outside their own front door.