CRE Permanent in Oklahoma City

State government, Tinker Air Force Base, and the medical district, in that order. The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber's own major-employers list (last updated October 2025) shows the State of Oklahoma at 32,500 employees and the City of Oklahoma City at 4,500 more, Tinker Air Force Base at about 26,000, and healthcare systems including INTEGRIS, Mercy, SSM, OU Medical Center, and Norman Regional together above 27,000. The medical district itself, the Oklahoma Health Center campus northeast of downtown, carries two line items on that same list, OU Health Sciences Center at 5,000 and OU Medical Center at 3,400, so a building leased to that submarket is leased to a hospital and university payroll of more than 8,000 within a few blocks. Government, military, and healthcare payroll dwarfs oil and gas on that same list, so a permanent quote on office, medical retail, or mixed-use space near those anchors is underwritten against tenants with a public or hospital-system paycheck behind them, not a single employer's earnings cycle.

No, not without an update. Devon Energy announced on 2026-02-02 a merger that moved its corporate headquarters to Houston, and Expand Energy (formerly Chesapeake Energy) announced its own move of executive leadership to Houston about a week later, in early February 2026. Both companies say they're keeping a real presence in Oklahoma City, and Devon Energy Center still anchors the skyline, but the headquarters payroll and decision-making moved. Energy is now the metro's fourth or fifth employment story, behind government, military, healthcare, and higher education, and a page or a pro forma that still leads with "energy town" is describing a metro that no longer exists.

Because it's a stable, federally funded payroll of about 26,000 sitting right where the metro's lowest-cost commercial rents are. Tinker is the Chamber's largest single-site employer on its October 2025 list, and it sits in southeast Oklahoma County, concentrated around Midwest City and Del City, the same submarket carrying the metro's lowest residential rents (Midwest City $1,242 and Del City $1,213 a month, June 2026). Service commercial, retail strips, and small multifamily on that side of the metro are leasing to a tenant base whose income doesn't move with the local market cycle. No submarket-level vacancy or absorption series exists for that side of the metro, so we underwrite it on the lease terms in front of us.

A vacancy rate with a name attached to it, and no cap rate at all. Price Edwards and Company (now Creek Price Edwards), the Oklahoma City firm that surveys this metro building by building, put office vacancy at 25.9% at year-end 2024 on 17.8 million tracked square feet, and retail vacancy at 9.29% at year-end 2025 on a 50.4 million square foot market. That is a brokerage's own self-published survey rather than an audited series, from a firm that brokers into the same market, so use it as a datapoint with an attribution rather than as the market. No cap rate for any Oklahoma City asset class turned up in our research at all, and any cap rate you see quoted for this metro is worth chasing back to its source before you underwrite to it. We underwrite from your rent roll, tenant credit, and lease terms. Bring the executed leases; that's what actually drives the permanent quote.

It changes what an appraisal leans on. Oklahoma doesn't require sale prices to be disclosed as public record, so the Oklahoma County Assessor's own stated method relies on MLS-sourced comparable sales and cost approach rather than a recorded price. That's a real appraisal-gap risk on a rehabbed or repositioned commercial property headed for a permanent refinance, and it's also why you shouldn't trust a Zillow, Redfin, or aggregator "median price" for Oklahoma City as anything more than an estimate. Bring your own comps and be ready to defend value with the appraiser.

Get it leased up first, then refinance into permanent debt once the rent roll proves out. A CRE bridge loan carries a property through lease-up or repositioning; once the asset is stabilized and the leases are signed, we place the permanent structure through agency multifamily channels, insurance funds, or wholesale sources. That two-step path matters more in Oklahoma City than in a disclosure state, because a permanent lender pricing off comps has less recorded price data to lean on than it would in Texas or Florida, so a proven, in-place rent roll carries more weight than it might elsewhere.