The Premium Is Not for Dirt

🏗 From The Dirt Up

Real Estate Insights. Success Mindset. One Step at a Time.

Issue #72 | October 11, 2026

Data center land buying hit about $6 billion in six months. Texas has its grid connections on pause. And a town east of Austin just approved a 500-megawatt campus anyway. Here is what the buyer is really paying for.

🧠 Market Insights

The Premium Is Not for Dirt

Avison Young just put a number on the land chase. U.S. buyers spent about $6 billion on future data center sites in the first half of 2026. That is up 79 percent from a year earlier.

That is a big number. It is also easy to misread.

The premium is not for dirt. The premium is for power, entitlements, and infrastructure that is already there or can be proven. In Northern Virginia, Avison Young puts entitled land without power at roughly $4 million an acre. Powered land sells for at least $6 million. The difference is power.

A queue position, a transmission path, a gas lateral, a substation pad, or a zoning overlay that already allows the use is what moves the price. A raw parcel next to a cornfield with a “maybe someday” interconnection study does not.

Texas Just Showed Us Why

On August 3, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered ERCOT and the PUC to audit every data center seeking a grid connection. ERCOT paused its large-load review. The queue holds more than 474 gigawatts of requests, over five times the grid’s record peak. In late September, the pause got tighter.

Then on Thursday, the Taylor City Council voted 5-0 to annex 664 acres and approve the Taylor Technology Campus from Big Watt Digital and PowerHouse Data Centers. The plan is 500 megawatts with an option for another 500, powered by on-site gas generation behind the meter. Closed-loop cooling on a one-time fill of reclaimed water. Noise, setback, and lighting standards written into the agreement. $28.2 million in community commitments. No tax abatements.

A Texas data center moved forward while the Texas grid sat on pause.

It brought its own power. That took the grid off the table. The only gate left was local approval, and the city used annexation to gain control it did not have while the site sat in unincorporated Williamson County. The developers had pulled an earlier application after the planning commission tabled it for 90 days. They came back with the conditions in writing.

It was not quiet. An overflow crowd showed up, and many asked the council to vote no or slow down. A lot of that pushback is real. Some of it is undereducated about what is actually being proposed. Behind-the-meter is not a new request on the local grid. A one-time fill is not a continuous draw. When every proposal collapses into the same set of fears, good projects get slowed for the same reasons as bad ones. Closed-door negotiations and NDAs make that worse.

✨ The Alpha Effect

The Story You Tell Yourself

Every landowner carries a number in his head. Most of the time it came from a headline, a neighbor, or a deal that closed three counties over. The number feels like a fact. It is a story.

Stories are comfortable. They ask nothing of you. The longer you hold it, the more it becomes part of who you are. Letting it go starts to feel like losing. That is the trap. Not the market. The attachment.

The best operators I know hold their own beliefs loosely. They would rather be wrong early and in private than have the market tell them in public. They ask the hard question about their own deal first, and they listen to the answer even when it costs them something.

Look at Taylor. The developers pulled their application after the planning commission put them on hold. That was a public setback. Most people get defensive right there. They argue with the critics, or they walk away.

Taylor’s developers went on offense with the facts. They took the concerns on the table, water, noise, setbacks, lighting, community dollars, and answered each one in writing. Then they agreed to annexation, which gave the city the power to enforce every answer. They walked into a packed room that did not want them there and let the agreement do the talking.

You do not win by arguing with what people believe. You win by putting what is true on paper, where anyone can check it. That starts with being honest with yourself.

🚀 One Step at a Time

Action Steps This Week

1. Break your price into parts.

Take one parcel you own or are chasing. List what a buyer would be paying for: acreage, zoning, power path, water, fiber, access. Put a dollar figure next to each one. If most of the number sits on something you cannot document, your price is a hope.

1. Read one approved development agreement.

Pull the council packet for Taylor’s vote or a recent large-load approval near you. Go straight to the conditions: noise, water, setbacks, community dollars. Know what a city asks for before a buyer asks you to sign up for it.

1. Go to one meeting just to listen.

Find the next county commission or planning board meeting where a large project is on the agenda. Do not speak. Sit in the back and write down every concern people raise: power bills, water, noise, traffic, who pays. That list is what any buyer of your land will have to answer. Now you know the questions before the deal ever starts.

Small steps compound. The deals that clear are the ones that answered the hard questions before anyone asked them.

Here’s to building your success, one step at a time...

from the dirt up.

Kris “Dirt Dawg” McGee 🐾

The Dirt Dawg Den