To see the past few months' news headlines in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro, you might momentarily forget the woes of the current economy. That's because there are business deals going down left and right in the heart of Texas, largely because of Ross Perot Jr.'s award-winning development firm, Hillwood Properties.

One mid-summer 2002 headline read, "Perot's Hillwood Firm On Track For Its Best Year At Industrial Complex."

The headline was referring to AllianceTexas, the company's flagship industrial park, located 15 miles northwest of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Anchored by the renowned Alliance Airport - the first airport designed solely for industrial use - the 9,600 square foot business development has seen an abundant number of successful lease projects, including one of the biggest in its 12-year history.

It was the Minneapolis-based food company General Mills that inked the most recent in a series of large lease deals in the last year for Hillwood.

The company signed up for a 670,000 square foot facility at Alliance after it acquired Pillsbury last year. General Mills was already leasing a 367,000 square foot facility prior to that expansion.

"In Texas, we are definitely expanding," said General Mills spokesman Tom Forsythe.

Another major project at Alliance over the past year included Motorola's decision to locate its North American distribution center in the Alliance Airport industrial park.

The No. 2 cell phone maker saw numerous advantages in the 400,000 square foot site it would move into.

"We feel that AllianceTexas business park offered many advantages to Motorola, including the foreign trade zone designation," said Amanda Cienkus, Motorola spokeswoman. The company also praised the park's intermodal facilities and excellent utility connections.

The facility is expected to be home to 800 employees when it is up and running in March 2003.

AllianceTexas lies within four cities (Fort Worth, Haslet, Roanoke and Westlake) and two counties (Denton and Tarrant), and consists of the commerce centers of Alliance, the Circle T Ranch corporate campuses and golf courses, and the high-tech residential community of Park Glen.

More than 110 companies, including 34 Fortune 500 firms, call AllianceTexas home.

Additionally, Hillwood is widely known for its development of the $420 million American Airlines Center and the Victory district in downtown Dallas.

For goliath companies Maytag and Best Buy, a Hillwood property in Flower Mound worked out to be the ideal new location.

Maytag set up shop in a 300,100 square foot facility in the Lakeside Trade Center 3 building in Flower Mound in fall 2002. Not long after, Best Buy - one of Maytag's largest customers - said it would close its 150,000 square foot delivery/distribution operations in Dallas and move into the remaining 300,000 square feet of space in the building occupied by Maytag.

Best Buy plans a major electronics repair center in Flower Mound for items returned to 32 of Best Buy's stores in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

"At our current location we are out of space," Joy Harris, spokeswoman for the Minneapolis-based consumer electronics chain told the Dallas Business Journal. "We'll be relocating 10 miles away from the current facility and, with the additional square footage, there's potential for future growth."

Hillwood's ability to expedite the lease deal by two months was part of what drew Best Buy to Flower Mound, but incentives also played a role.

The city of Flower Mound and Denton County offered up an incentive package that includes a 70 percent abatement on city taxes, and a 55 percent abatement on county taxes for five years.