The City of Pflugerville touts its location as “between a rock and a weird place.” That’s a clever way of saying this Central Texas city is in the middle of Round Rock and Austin.

But there’s nothing rocky or weird about its location when it comes to business development. By all accounts, this booming Austin suburb of 75,500 is rapidly becoming one of the premier destinations for corporate site selection in middle Texas.

But don’t just take our word for it. Listen to what the experts have to say about Pflugerville.

“Austin has exploded, and now that explosion is moving into that next ring of communities,” says Tracey Hyatt Bosman, managing director of Biggins Lacy Shapiro & Company in Chicago. “We were just looking at sites in Greater Austin last week. It is an attractive region with an expanding workforce.

There is a lot of momentum in the outlying areas of the Austin region, and Pflugerville is one of those places that has been very welcoming of new business.” Case in point is REE Automotive. The Israel-based electric vehicle technology company recently opened its first North American headquarters in Pflugerville. The firm will produce electric car parts at its new facility in the One Thirty Business Park just off State Highway 130.

The company said it is establishing a long-term home in Texas in order to take advantage of increasing demand for EVs in North America. REE is taking up 120,000 sq. ft. of space in Pflugerville and investing $24.5 million. An 8-year agreement with the Pflugerville Community Development Corp. (PCDC) will provide the firm with up to $8 million in grants.

Big Projects Act Like Talent Magnets

In a region that now has Tesla, Apple, Samsung, Dell and Amazon, Pflugerville stands poised to land its fair share of suppliers, vendors and the vast array of service providers needed to make the ecosystem hum on all cylinders.

Bosman says that site selectors take this into account when scouting a metro area. They want to make sure that the labor will be there when the employer arrives.

“From a labor perspective, we are sensitive to where these mega-projects are going,” says Bosman. “The concern is always around how hard it may be for another project to ramp up in that same metro area. We are always looking at their ramp-up schedules. You also have to look at the availability of construction labor. Can you get anything else built?”

Bosman notes that “in some ways it can be a double-edged sword, but it is more good than bad. There are some side effects to having this many mega-projects in one region, but in Austin, we assume that the talent will keep moving there to fill these jobs.”