About Second Shelters Founder Candy Evans

Dallas Home of George and Laura Bush

Um, that’s me. To tell you the truth, instead of blogging about Candy Evans, I’d much rather be blogging about this great kid I know who is in high school and writes about luxury real estate in North Texas like a pro — in fact he’s guest blogged for me, John Burgdorf. But my SEO experts have asked me to post a little snippet about Candy Evans, why I blog about real estate, kind of a “who is Candy Evans?”.  OK, Candy Evans, here goes.

First of all, despite what you find when you google my name, this Candy Evans is not a porn star. But I am the gal, the Candy Evans, who brought House Porn to the Bible Belt.

This Candy Evans is a journalist who has always been obsessed with homes. Maybe it’s because my ‘rents dragged me to countless “Open Houses” and I was such a weird-a** kid, I liked them. Took my dolls in, played house, yeah. Maybe I should have been a Realtor rather than try and save the world through journalism. But then maybe it was a perfect fit: after all, journalists are supposed to dig up dirt, right? A few years ago I, Candy Evans, invited myself to Inman’s Real Estate Connect to learn more about blogging and this eureka took place. I saw what was happening to real estate: it was all going on line. And I was obsessed with a new blog called The RealEstalker.

In the land of fruit and nuts, Realtors were twittering (I actually got the word confused several times, and called it something that rhymes with “swat”) and they were blogging. My God, I thought, they are all becoming journalists and Inman is giving them a crash course in reporting! Candy Evans came home and asked her publisher if she could start a real estate blog at D Magazine — the infamous DallasDirt. (Yes, I can finally talk about it, taking deep breaths.) At first I just blogged — info on agents, homes for sale, price changes, tear downs, whatever. Then we had a little controversy in the saga of one Eleanor Mowery Sheets and her husband, Nicky, two uber successful agents who made bucket loads of money selling real estate but who also either (a) failed to pay their income taxes and other folks, as the feds claimed, or (b) got some really rotten advice from a tax advisor(s). Anyhow, as is often the case, the feds won and both were sentenced. Eleanor, bless her heart, was sentenced November 5 to one year confined to her home up there in McKinney, Texas. The saga became a top-selling cover story in D Magazine written by the talented Gretel Kovach. (Candy Evans had a cameo role when Eleanor tried to have me kicked out of court.) That ended and I thought we could just settle down to House Porn, pages of beautiful Dallas homes I like to drool over and wish they were mine, all mine. Well, then came the fall of 2008 and the financial world almost collapsed. In fact, some say it did.

I swear, no rest for the wicked.

Then the Bushes moved back to Dallas. Candy Evans became obsessed with finding the home George W. Bush and Laura were going to buy in Dallas. And find it, I did. My post went up at 7:01 pm on December 3rd. I’d been working on it all day.

This is so boring, I swear. Instead of writing about Candy Evans I’d rather be writing about 10141 Daria Place.

About the same time, people started becoming as obsessed with celebrity real estate as I had been. I knew folks like Ann Brenoff at the LA Times and Diedre Woolard at Luxist had been writing about celebrity homes for years — -we have a few in Dallas, not many. But we love them. I just researched and scouted homes and tried to make DallasDirt the best real estate blog in Texas. It was nominated for that distinction once, maybe twice.

And with real estate such a hot topic, the folks at AOL decided to launch a national real estate blog and sought out writers from across the country — folks like me who study trends and spikes and know what short sales are and that REO’s are foreclosures. I even started hanging with the folks at the Urban Land Institute, partially because my darling brother-in-law who is in commercial suggested it. (I could have lived a happy life as a professional student.) In June of this year, I started working on SecondShelters as a blog to cover the explosion in the second home market that has cooled from it’s heyday but is nonetheless alive.  In 2007, second home sales accounted for almost a third of U.S. real estate transactions, and experts predict that was a low figure. More and more folks are interested in investing in real estate now with record-breaking low interest rates and bargain basement prices.

Ye gads: I just saw that prices have been cut on nearly half the homes for sale in the U.S. And experts think we will still be cutting next year. That includes Joel Kotkin, for whom I have also written (and will, more) at  The New Geography. And I recently began contributing to Inman’s Real Estate News FOREM.

There are other places I’ll be writing for, closer to home, and will bring you the news here first soon! Stay tuned. Enough for now about Candy Evans.

But there. That’s all I have to say about Candy Evans. Now can we please go back to more on Robbie Briggs, Sotheby’s and House Porn? And I have got to get on with my post about Mama!

“Now then, we’ve got to git on our horse and ride or we’re going to be late getting on down to one of our favorite daytime eateries in Los Angeles to break bread with another well known property gossip in town visiting.”