Southlake doesn't really do new development anymore. That's not a knock — it's the whole point of Southlake. The city is essentially built out, its land is spoken for, and its governing instinct is to protect what's already there rather than add more of it. So when a genuinely new 40-acre project clears its final approval, that's news, even before you get to the part where the anchor tenant is a Whole Foods.
That project is Shivers Farm, and in June 2026 the Southlake City Council unanimously approved its master development agreement — the last major box to check before dirt moves. Groundbreaking is slated for this summer.
What's Actually Happening
Shivers Farm is a $120 million mixed-use development from Trademark Property Company, the Fort Worth firm best known around here for Waterside and, further back, for reinventing what an outdoor shopping district could look like. The plan for the 40 acres: about 111,000 square feet of retail, 38,000 square feet of office, 37 single-family home lots, and a 3-acre pad reserved for a hotel or entertainment use.
And the anchor: Whole Foods Market, now officially signed. For a city that has spent two decades curating Town Square into a destination, landing Whole Foods on a fresh site is the kind of tenant that pulls the rest of a development together.
To make it happen, the city is doing what growth-conscious suburbs do — putting money on the table through a tax increment reinvestment zone (TIRZ) worth up to $18.85 million over 18 years. In exchange, Trademark has to hit real thresholds: a minimum $80 million taxable value, at least $127.9 million in capital investment, and 200 to 265 permanent jobs by mid-2028. Completion is targeted for the end of 2027.
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Take the quizWhy This Matters for Southlake
Here's the thing about a built-out city: every new project is a bet on quality, not quantity. Southlake isn't adding Shivers Farm because it needs the square footage. It's adding it because the alternative to curating new development is letting the tax base and the retail mix slowly ossify.
A Whole Foods–anchored district does two things at once. It captures grocery and retail spending that currently leaks to Grapevine, Colleyville, and Keller, and it adds a second walkable commercial node to a city whose retail gravity has been almost entirely Town Square. For a place with a "fiscal moat" strategy — keep the tax base commercial-heavy so homeowners carry less of it — that's exactly the kind of project the moat is designed to attract.
What This Means for Homebuyers
If you own in Southlake, this is a quiet tailwind. Proximity to a new Whole Foods and a well-designed mixed-use district is the sort of amenity that shows up in listing copy and, eventually, in comps. The 37 home lots inside Shivers Farm will be a limited, premium-priced product — this is Southlake, so assume they price accordingly.
If you're shopping Southlake, watch the neighborhoods within a short drive of the site. The appreciation story here isn't a boom; it's a mature, expensive market getting one more reason to stay expensive. That's the entire Southlake thesis in miniature: scarcity, curated amenities, and a city that treats "we're basically full" as a feature.
What to Watch
- •Summer 2026: Groundbreaking. This is the milestone that turns renderings into a construction fence.
- •Through 2027: Vertical construction and tenant announcements beyond Whole Foods — the co-tenants will tell you what kind of district this becomes.
- •Q4 2027: Targeted completion. Development timelines slip, so treat this as "optimistically late 2027."
The Bottom Line
A single grocery store anchoring a single project wouldn't move the needle in a fast-growing city. In Southlake, where new development is rare by design, it's one of the more meaningful additions in years — a $120M vote of confidence that the city's scarcity-and-quality model still pulls in the tenants it wants. If you're already here, it's a slow tailwind. If you're trying to get in, it's one more reason the door isn't getting any cheaper.