Commercial Construction Company Serving Dallas, TX

Dallas had 1,329,491 residents in the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates, third in Texas behind Houston and San Antonio. Most live in Dallas County. The city limits also take in 54,266 people in Collin County, 29,865 in Denton County, five in Rockwall County, and a slice of Kaufman County where the estimate counts nobody at all.

For a contractor, though, the useful number is age. Dallas has 1880s cotton gin warehouses in Deep Ellum, a 1922 office tower downtown that now runs as a hotel, 1950s showrooms in the Design District, and late 1970s office towers at Preston Center. Much of the commercial space you’d lease here has already had a tenant. So the work starts with a question: what did the last tenant leave behind, and what will the City make you change?

We’re MASACO Construction, a woman- and minority-owned general contractor at 7950 Legacy Drive in Plano, about 30 minutes north of downtown Dallas on the Dallas North Tollway. We lead with commercial work and run a residential practice alongside it. We don’t have a finished project inside Dallas city limits yet, and we won’t pretend we do. Our closest completed work is next door in Irving: Pizza Twist, a 2,000 SF franchise restaurant build-out with a full kitchen installation and utility connections, finished in 6 to 8 weeks while the restaurant stayed open. We phased the work around service hours so the restaurant kept earning through the whole build.

Nearby in Irving: the Pizza Twist dining room, built out while the restaurant kept serving customers.

West End to Love Field: where Dallas tenants build

Dallas doesn’t have one commercial corridor. It has a dozen districts, each with its own building type, and the type decides the job more than the address does.

Downtown, the West End, and Uptown

Downtown is the oldest commercial ground. The West End grew up as a warehouse district after the Houston and Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1872, and the City lists it as a Dallas Landmark District (H/2), so its brick buildings carry design review on the outside. Many of the old warehouses now hold restaurants and shops.

A few blocks away stands the 29-story Magnolia Building, the one with the red Pegasus on the roof. It opened in 1922, was the tallest building in Texas for years, and became a hotel after developers bought it in 1997. Built for one use, refit for another: that’s downtown in a single building.

Uptown runs north from downtown along McKinney Avenue, where the M-Line trolley has carried riders since 1989. Inside it sits the State Thomas Landmark District, which holds the largest collection of Victorian-era homes left in Dallas. Around it, Uptown is mostly mid-rise and high-rise towers with restaurants and shops at street level, the kind of office build-outs where building management sets the rules as firmly as the City does.

Knox-Henderson pairs two streets. Knox Street runs right off the Katy Trail, and Henderson Avenue picks up at US 75 and runs down to Ross Avenue. Both sides are restaurants, bars, and small shops in low buildings, so kitchen exhaust, grease interceptors, and storefront glass come up on almost every job.

Deep Ellum and the Design District

Deep Ellum, just east of downtown, is industrial Dallas in brick. Robert Munger’s Continental Gin Company built its works in warehouses along Elm Street, and the complex is now its own Landmark District (H/30). Henry Ford picked the neighborhood in 1914 for a Model T assembly plant on Canton Street. Today the one- and two-story storefronts hold bars, music venues, restaurants, and offices.

Brick storefronts on Elm Street in Deep Ellum, just east of downtown Dallas.

The Design District was born in the early 1950s as a cheap place to put showrooms and warehouses in the low ground along the Trinity River. The district’s own count is now more than 370 shops and showrooms, with galleries, restaurants, and apartments mixed in. Low single-story warehouses make easy shells to open up. They can also come with long electrical runs, undersized water service, and loading docks that rarely line up with a new floor plan.

The Design District from the observation deck of Reunion Tower: block after block of low warehouses and showrooms.

Preston Center, the medical district, and Love Field

Up north, Preston Center grew up in the 1950s at Preston Road and Northwest Highway around the first suburban Neiman Marcus, then added two 20-story office towers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It now packs more than 3 million square feet of office space and more than 500,000 square feet of retail into 103 acres.

The Southwestern Medical District is a nearly 400-acre complex about 10 minutes north of downtown that takes in UT Southwestern, Children’s Medical Center Dallas, and Parkland Memorial Hospital. If you’re opening a clinic within reach of it, your medical and wellness build-out carries details a dining room never does: plumbing at every exam room, sound control between rooms, and equipment that needs dedicated power.

Dallas Love Field, the city-owned airport about six miles northwest of downtown, opened as an Army training field in 1917 and is now Southwest Airlines’ headquarters and main operating base. Since the 2006 Wright Amendment compromise it has been capped at 20 gates.

Bishop Arts and north Oak Cliff

Across the Trinity, about two miles southwest of downtown, the Bishop Arts District started in the 1920s as warehouses and shops on a streetcar line. In the 1930s its Davis Street trolley stop was the busiest in Dallas. Part of it is on the National Register as the North Bishop Avenue Commercial Historic District, listed in 1994, and the City also has a Bishop/8th conservation district in this part of Oak Cliff. Check which side of that boundary a storefront sits on before anyone draws a new facade.

One-story brick storefronts in the Bishop Arts District in north Oak Cliff.

Old walls, new tenants: Dallas building stock by era

Here’s how we read a Dallas space before we price it.

• Railroad-era brick, 1880s to 1920s. The West End, Deep Ellum, and parts of downtown. Load-bearing masonry, heavy timber or steel framing, few restrooms, and utilities sized for storage, not cooking. Cutting a new opening or hanging a hood starts with an engineer.
• 1920s streetcar storefronts. Bishop Arts and older Oak Cliff and East Dallas strips. Small footprints, shared walls, and a facade that may fall under conservation or landmark rules.
• 1950s and 1960s showrooms and centers. The Design District and Preston Center’s oldest buildings. Wide open floors, aging roofs, and mechanical systems near the end of their life.
• Office towers, 1970s onward. Downtown, Uptown, and Preston Center. Building-standard ceilings and lighting, landlord-approved trades, and after-hours rules for anything loud.

In a city this old, second-generation space is the norm. A prior tenant’s restrooms, ceiling grid, or kitchen hood can save you weeks, but only if they meet the codes the City enforces now. Dallas adopted the 2021 International Building, Residential, Plumbing, Mechanical, Energy, and Fuel Gas codes with local amendments effective May 12, 2023, along with the 2020 National Electrical Code and the 2021 Fire Code with Dallas amendments.

Illustrative: an older brick building opened up for a restaurant tenant, the kind of shell common in Deep Ellum and the West End.

So we walk the space with the lease exhibit in hand. Whose rooftop units are they? Is there a grease interceptor, and is it big enough? What did the landlord promise to deliver? Our tenant improvement work starts from those answers, not from a finish board.

Dallas permits, COs, and plan review in DallasNow

Inside city limits, permits, plan review, and inspections run through the City’s Planning & Development Department, formed in June 2024 when Development Services and Planning & Urban Design merged. Since May 2025, nearly everything moves through DallasNow, the portal that ties permitting, planning, platting, inspections, and engineering into one system. General contractor registration lives there too, and the City issues permits only to registered contractors.

A commercial building permit is required before you construct, alter, or renovate. If your schedule is tight, the Q-Team offers paid expedited review for commercial projects, interior finish-outs included: a $500 intake fee for projects under 10,000 SF plus $1,000 per hour of review. It won’t take a project still waiting on conservation, historic, or floodplain approvals, so those clear first.

One rule changed this year. Since June 1, 2026, plumbing and mechanical rough inspections on commercial, residential, and multifamily projects have to be scheduled together on the same day, and so do the finals. Trades that used to run a day apart now have to be ready at once.

Commercial projects of $50,000 or more also go to the state: the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation requires a full set of construction documents for accessibility review.

Every change of tenant needs a new CO

This is the Dallas rule that surprises people. The City requires a new certificate of occupancy for the first use of a building, a change of use, a change of tenant on an existing CO, and any increase or decrease in floor area. Only a business name change can go through as a $30 record change.

In Dallas, the new lease triggers the CO, not the construction. Take over a space exactly as it is, and you still need one.

You apply in DallasNow with a Land Use Questionnaire. If your use matches the last tenant’s, inspections can be scheduled once the application is approved and paid. If it doesn’t, the application goes to the Building Code and Zoning teams, who may ask for a site plan, a floor plan, and a parking analysis. We file the CO early, alongside the permit, so zoning questions surface while there’s still time to answer them.

Restaurants answer to Consumer Health as well

A food establishment permit comes from the Consumer Health Division of Dallas Code Compliance, and the City sends new construction, remodels, ownership changes, and changes of use to Planning & Development at 320 E. Jefferson Blvd. The Division’s plans and permitting form asks for cut sheets on every piece of food equipment, a kitchen equipment plan, finish schedules, the proposed menu, expected meal counts, and operating hours. It also sets details that shape the drawings: hand sinks covering every food service area within 25 feet with no walls or doors in between, smooth light-colored walls such as FRP in work areas and restrooms, and all equipment drained through an approved grease trap or interceptor.

Our restaurant construction drawings carry those items from the first draft. Pizza Twist closed with a successful final inspection and opened ready on day one, and we plan a Dallas kitchen the same way.

Fire review and the landmark layer

Sprinkler, fire alarm, and suppression permits go to the Fire Protection Engineering and Plan Review Team at the Oak Cliff Municipal Center. For qualifying fire alarm and sprinkler permits, the City’s FASST program offers a same-day initial review by appointment, though a same-day review isn’t a same-day permit.

Then there’s history. Dallas has two kinds of protected neighborhood. Landmark Districts, from Swiss Avenue (H/1) and the West End to Munger Place, Winnetka Heights, State Thomas, and Fair Park, need a Certificate of Appropriateness before any exterior work begins. Staff can approve minor work as routine maintenance. Bigger changes go to the Landmark Commission, which typically meets the first Monday of the month at 1:00 PM, with complete applications due by noon on the fourth Monday.

Conservation districts are zoning, not historic designation. Each one, including Lakewood, the M Streets, Kessler Park, Bishop/8th, Greenway Parks, and Vickery Place, writes its own architectural rules, and a Work Review Form goes to Conservation District staff on top of the building permit review. The City’s conservation district page currently posts an estimated plan review wait of 3 to 5 business days.

Older Dallas houses and the reviews that come with them

Commercial work leads for us in Dallas, but plenty of owners call about houses, and here the city’s age matters even more. A Tudor in the M Streets, a house on Swiss Avenue, or a place in Winnetka Heights comes with a design review before the permit.

The City’s remodel checklist for one- and two-family homes spells it out. Exterior work in a conservation district needs a Work Review Form attached to the permit application. Exterior work in a historic overlay needs a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Landmark Commission first. The same checklist reminds contractors to follow the EPA’s lead-safe Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, which matters in any house this old.

Inside, the work is familiar: kitchens opened to the rooms around them without losing the arches and trim, bathrooms rebuilt down to the subfloor, and whole-house updates that bring wiring, plumbing, and insulation up to the 2021 residential code Dallas enforces.

Illustrative: a kitchen remodel in a 1930s Tudor-style house, the kind of home found in Dallas conservation districts like the M Streets.

One map note. Highland Park and University Park sit inside the Dallas footprint but are separate municipalities, so their permits don’t go through DallasNow at all.

Klyde Warren Park and Fair Park, built for crowds

Klyde Warren Park

Klyde Warren Park is a 5.4-acre deck built over the recessed, eight-lane Woodall Rodgers Freeway, stitching Uptown to the Arts District and downtown. Deck construction began in October 2009, and the park opened in October 2012 as a $112 million public-private project. Its Phase 2.0 expansion, which the park says begins in October 2026, adds nearly two acres to the west, including a glass-and-steel pavilion suspended above the freeway between St. Paul and Akard Streets.

Klyde Warren Park’s lawn and food trucks, on a deck over Woodall Rodgers Freeway between Uptown and downtown.

Fair Park

Fair Park covers 277 acres east of downtown and has hosted the State Fair of Texas since 1886. For the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, architect George Dahl turned it into an Art Deco showcase. In 1986 it was designated a National Historic Landmark as one of the country’s largest surviving groups of exposition buildings, and it’s a City Landmark District (H/33) as well.

The Esplanade at Fair Park, looking toward the Hall of State, in the Art Deco grounds built for the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.

How a Dallas job runs from our Plano office

If you’re comparing construction companies in Dallas, ask each one how the first month goes. Ours runs the same way on every job, and our process page lays it out in full.

First we walk the space with you and read the lease, the work letter, and any district rules that apply. Then you see 3D renderings before we price a thing. The proposal that follows is fixed in scope and organized by trade, with every allowance written down. Once work starts, one project manager runs it and sends you a written update with photos every week. At handover you get the paperwork in one package: as-built drawings, permit and inspection records, the CO, and warranties. After that, we’re still a phone call away.

Sara Bannat, our Founder and CEO, and Mahmoud Abu Saad, our COO, run the company, and MASACO is a Goldman Sachs Preferred Vendor. If you need a commercial contractor in Dallas for a restaurant in Deep Ellum, a clinic near the medical district, or a suite at Preston Center, or a general contractor in Dallas, TX for a house in a conservation district, book a consultation. Bring the lease or the district map. You’ll get renderings to react to and a fixed-scope number to compare.

Building in Dallas: what to know.

Much of the commercial space in Dallas has already had a tenant: railroad-era brick in the West End and Deep Ellum, 1920s storefronts in Bishop Arts, 1950s showrooms in the Design District, and office towers from downtown to Preston Center. Every change of tenant needs a new certificate of occupancy filed in the City's DallasNow portal, and many addresses add a Landmark Commission or conservation district review before the permit. Plan review, permits, and inspections run through the Planning & Development Department at 320 E. Jefferson Blvd in Oak Cliff.

Dallas neighborhoods and districts.

• Downtown Dallas
• West End Historic District
• Uptown
• Deep Ellum
• Design District
• Knox-Henderson
• Preston Center
• Southwestern Medical District
• Love Field area
• Bishop Arts District
• Swiss Avenue Historic District
• M Streets
• Lakewood
• Kessler Park

Dallas on the map.

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