Restaurant Feasibility Study in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX Metro Area

Where full-service restaurants sit in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington record

SBA approved 914 full-service restaurant loans across the Dallas-Fort Worth metro in the span FY2017 to FY2026, with $627.7 million gross. That puts the area 4 of 821 among metropolitan and micro areas for this class, while within the area the class itself ranks 1 of 39, ahead of every other kind of business SBA lent to here. The location quotient is 1.15x, meaning restaurants take a somewhat larger slice of this area's loans than they take of the national book. A restaurant study here is therefore not describing a niche: it is describing the most common borrower the area has.

Loan size separates this cell from its parents. A median of $455,000 is 1.65x the class median nationally, and the quartile band stretches $200,000 to $875,000. A Texas restaurant borrower in this area is therefore asking for a noticeably larger sum than the national norm, and the study has to explain why the concept in front of us needs that much capital: build-out, equipment, a second location, or a purchase.

Programs, franchises, counties and lenders

Of the 914 loans, 881 were 7(a) and 33 were 504, so 7(a) lending dominates and real-estate-backed lending is the exception. The franchise share is 17.2%, which tells a reader that most borrowers here are independents. Dallas County leads with 320 loans, followed by Tarrant with 193, Collin with 184 and Denton with 145; Rockwall has 22, Johnson 14, Ellis 12 and Parker 11. A site argument has to say which of those submarkets it relies on.

Bank holders: The Huntington National Bank (83 loans, $39.5 million); Bank of Hope (58 loans, $25.6 million); PCB Bank (47 loans, $33.4 million); Hanmi Bank (47 loans, $28.2 million); Commonwealth Business Bank (45 loans, $38.0 million). Development companies for 504: Capital Certified Development Corporation (11 loans, $14.8 million); Greater East Texas Certified Development Company (11 loans, $12.1 million). SBA lists whoever holds or held each loan, so the Dallas-Fort Worth names above describe books of business, never what any lender demands today.

What the outcomes say, and what a study must test

Walk-aways before funding: 12.5% as a floor, 13.5% as a ceiling once undisbursed loans are tallied as cancelled, both across approvals through FY2024. Charge-off to date reaches 11.2% among FY2017 to FY2021 disbursed loans, 6.2% of them within five years of approval, across 357 loans in the cohort. Each is a floor drawn from SBA files. A lender reviewing a Dallas-Fort Worth restaurant request meets a high-volume, mid-sized market with real loss history; a borrower should expect the study to test sales per seat, occupancy cost against revenue, labor, and debt service coverage at the loan size requested.

A site near the region's edge deserves a county-by-county check before anyone trusts the comparison. Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton restaurant loans appear in this record because the county on each loan was found in the July 2023 delineation; a loan naming a county that cannot be found there belongs to no metro, so 914 is a floor.