With most of the recent corporate building projects now complete, the number of new office projects in Plano's Legacy business park has dropped.
But just because there are fewer construction cranes in the area doesn't mean that millions more square feet of office space isn't on the way.
A growing number of Legacy's office developments built in the 1980s and 1990s are being tarted up to attract new tenants.
Campuses that previously housed operations for J.C. Penney, Ericsson, Electronic Data Systems and others are either searching for new business occupants or will be soon.
The former EDS headquarters, which recently sold for $125 million to Dallas' Highland Capital, has more than 1 million square feet of office space.
The new owners are studying plans to reboot the old tech company digs.
That's what the owners of the owners of the 1.3 million-square-foot Penney office campus are already doing at Legacy.
Drien Opportunity Partners is spending more than $60 million to revamp the old Penney HQ and has already leased about 250,000 square feet to NTT Data.
Other big office tenants are looking at the property.
With Dr Pepper eyeing a possible move from Legacy to Frisco, that could put another 300,000 square feet of older generation office space up for grabs in the area.
Real estate brokers who represent some of the area's biggest companies scouting the region for office space say much of the second-generation space up for grabs at Legacy will be gobbled up.
But landlords will have to spend some bucks to fill the empty seats.
"The projects where they have added a ton of amenities are going to attract some large tenants," said CBRE vice chairman Jeffrey Ellerman.
Even bargain-priced offices won't land new business without upgrades, Ellerman said.
"No one wants to go in '80s buildings for price," he said. "In the war for talent everybody has today, you can't go into something just because it's less expensive."
Ellerman said the top obstacle for some of the decades-old office campuses in Legacy is that they were built before walkability and mixed-use were musts for corporate employers.
"Fortresses today are not what people want," he said. "They are going to have to tear down all the gates and fences and make it more of a walking destination and feel to it."
Along with price and location, the other factor that can bring tenants to these older buildings is timing, Ellerman said.
"Someone is going to say 'I need a big space now — where can I go?' "
