By Mosaic RE Dallas | Market Update by Janelle Rawlston | Dallas-Fort Worth | Dallas, Collin & Denton Counties | MBA · Certified Senior Advisor · Relocation | Founder, Mosaic RE Group

Inside the $1.3 Billion Deal Bringing One of Wall Street’s Biggest Names — and Thousands of High-Paying Jobs — to McKinney Avenue

A Truluck’s and a shuttered gym don’t usually make real estate history. But that’s exactly the stretch of McKinney Avenue where Morgan Stanley is planning a tower big enough to change how Uptown reads on a map — and if you live anywhere nearby, you’ve probably heard the bank’s name more this year than in the last decade combined.

Here’s the short version: Morgan Stanley has already signed on for temporary office space downtown, and both city and company signals point toward Dallas landing the firm’s larger regional hub in Uptown — though that bigger piece isn’t fully locked in yet. Either way, it’s one of the largest corporate real estate stories to hit the neighborhood in years, and it’s worth sorting what’s confirmed from what’s still in motion.

What Is Morgan Stanley Actually Building in Uptown?

According to reporting from The Real Deal and Bisnow on Dallas City Council documents, Morgan Stanley is planning a two-phase move. Phase one is already underway: the firm has leased space downtown at Fountain Place, the 58-story tower at 1445 Ross Avenue, to use while a permanent home gets built. Phase two, the much bigger piece, is a proposed office tower at 2401 McKinney Avenue in Uptown, near Maple Avenue and Fairmount Street, on a site currently occupied by a Truluck’s restaurant and a defunct gym.

The numbers behind it, per city documents cited by Bisnow, The Real Deal, and KERA News:

• $1.3 billion total estimated value for the Uptown tower project
• Roughly 700,000 square feet of office space across about 27 stories
• Up to 3,800 jobs by the end of 2035, with room to grow toward 4,800 by 2039
• An average annual wage of about $128,000 for those positions
• Construction on the tower is expected to begin around fall 2026

For scale, that’s in the same range as Goldman Sachs’s own new campus a few blocks away in Victory Park — proof that Morgan Stanley isn’t the only Wall Street name betting big on this particular stretch of Dallas.

Is the Uptown Tower a Done Deal Yet?

Not quite, and that distinction matters if you’re weighing how much this should factor into a decision today. The city approved incentives back in June, while Dallas competed against Alpharetta, Georgia for the project. By late August, Morgan Stanley signed its downtown lease and appears to be leaning toward North Texas for the bigger hub, according to KERA News and CoStar — real progress, but still short of a formal answer on the Uptown tower itself.

What This Means for You

If you own a home in Uptown or one of the neighborhoods that ring it — Oak Lawn, Knox-Henderson, Turtle Creek, or along the Katy Trail corridor — a confirmed Morgan Stanley hub would put thousands of well-paid workers within walking or short-driving distance of your street. Employment growth of that scale has historically supported housing demand over time, a pattern we’ve tracked before with AT&T’s headquarters move to Plano’s Legacy District. But the timeline here runs to 2031 and beyond, so treat this as a multi-year tailwind rather than a reason to price a home differently this season.

It’s also part of a bigger pattern. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Scotiabank are all adding a combined multi-billion-dollar footprint to the same stretch of Uptown and Victory Park, while downtown Dallas works through the opposite trend as anchors like AT&T head for the suburbs. Fountain Place itself has sat somewhere between 45% and 55% vacant over the past year, per CoStar data reported by CandysDirt, so even a partial fill from a name like Morgan Stanley is a meaningful signal for downtown, not just a headline.

The Local Reality

Uptown doesn’t do anything halfway this year — new towers, new restaurants, and now a Wall Street bank, all landing within a few blocks of each other. We walked through what the neighborhood’s building boom actually means for buyers a few weeks ago, and spent a full episode of This Is Our Dallas inside the neighborhood itself. The rule that applied there still applies here: separate what’s built and signed from what’s still a rendering or a maybe.

FAQ

Where Would Morgan Stanley’s New Uptown Office Be Located? At 2401 McKinney Avenue, near Maple Avenue and Fairmount Street, on a site currently home to a Truluck’s restaurant and a shuttered gym, according to city documents reviewed by The Real Deal and Bisnow.

Has Morgan Stanley Officially Chosen Dallas Over Alpharetta, Georgia? Not formally, as of this writing. The firm signed a downtown Fountain Place lease in August 2026, which CoStar reported as a sign it’s leaning toward Dallas, but a public commitment to the Uptown tower hadn’t been announced.

When Would Morgan Stanley Actually Move Into Uptown? If the project proceeds, city documents cite an expected occupancy date around 2031 for the McKinney Avenue tower, with hiring continuing through 2035 and potentially into 2039.

If you’re weighing a purchase or a sale near Uptown and want a straight read on how a corporate move like this one actually affects your specific block — not just the headlines — we’d love to talk it through. See what your home could be worth in today’s market, no pressure and no pitch. We’re always in your corner.

Let’s connect. 

Blog Article by Janelle Rawlston | with Mosaic RE Group at Compass, Kaity Gonzalez and Kristi Stacy 

Let Mosaic RE Group guide you through your next move, and make your experience seamless. Call us at 469-360-2161 or email us at mosaicregroup@compass.com.