DONNA, Texas - The Rio Grande Valley Partnership held its last Commercialization and Investment Tour event of 2025 at the Victoria Palms inn & Suites in Donna on Friday, December 12.
It was the very last C&I tour the group will hold because in 2026 the program is being revamped. It will be known as RGV Connect.
One of the presenters at the Donna event was Mark Hanna, managing director of SVN Hanna Solutions Commercial Real Estate. He said Donna is going places.
“Donna, the heart of the Valley, is putting together all the ingredients to create a powerhouse of an economy,” Hanna said.
Hanna said that as a commercial real estate professional, he does not like to focus on things that are not based on metrics. As a result, he said, his presentation had the data and analytics to back up his claim about Donna’s incredible potential.
“Donna is strategically located, and they call themselves the Heart of the Valley. And it's not for branding purposes. It's because they are literally the heart of the Valley. They're in the center, and they have things that other areas in the center of the Valley don't have, like an international bridge,” Hanna said.
“Right now you're going to start to see that with this bridge, with the retail data and growth that's coming… the Heart of the Valley… that slogan is no longer going to be just a slogan. People are going to feel it.”
Hanna said he is a “big fan” of a consumer dataset system called Placer.ai. He said it was created in 2017 by commercial real estate professionals.
“Before, if you were going to develop you would check traffic counts from the city level, from the Texas Department of Transportation, and then you would look at the radius of the site, one mile, two mile, five, ten miles. And after that, you would determine if it was a good project. And then you would go to church on Sunday and hope everything worked out after that, right? That was the formula for development.
“But now we have more data and metrics that helps us make more calculated decisions. And so if we look at the Shops at 493, according to Placer.ai… and let me tell you how Placer.ai gets their data. They geofence phones, and it only works for commercial properties.
“So, on the back of your phone right now, on the back end, you have your weather app, maps app, and who knows what other apps you have that are tracking your location, not in a scary way, it's for the economy. Don't go shut off your locations, this is good information. And so in the last 12 months, we can show that there's been 4.8 million visits just to the Shops at 493.”
Here is a video recording of Hanna’s presentation in full:
