Texas
I don’t know how many divorcing couples own vacation homes. But I have a feeling it’s not a small number. After all, the latest numbers from the National Association of Realtors show that buyers purchased 502,000 vacation homes last year, an increase of 7 percent from the year before. And I have a theory, actually,…
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Is this the private Dallas water park that braces built? And would you even consider putting in a water park in a private home? Texas Drills Down on Medicaid Dental Fraud” (sub. rec.) is a headline in today’s Wall Street Journal. What do they mean by that? Possibly the business practices of people like Richard Malouf who is…
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More than 95 percent of Texas is privately owned, and more than 20,000 acres are lost each year to poorly planned development, says the Texas Land Conservancy. Invasive species, overgrowth, and over grazing can turn native prairies into barren wastelands.
With that in mind, you can see why it’s imperative that ranch owners are good stewards of the land. It appears that the owners of Covered S Ranch have taken that duty to heart.
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Happy Fourth of July, 2012. We live the American Dream of real estate here in Texas more than anywhere. Maybe it’s because we learned our lesson back in the 1980’s — R.I.P. Danny Faulkner. Not only did we learn, we RETAINED. When I was in Denver at the National Association of Real Estate Editors Conference last month, Mark Fleming, the dashing economist for CoreLogic, told me over drinks that what saved our butts this time around was our state set limits on HELOCs, or home improvement loans. In Texas, we are limited on what we can borrow against our homesteads. That is what kept many of us from over-borrowing, so when the market fell we were not left with underwater loans*. I walked into our bank yesterday, Comerica, which I LOVE — who else sends you a thank-you note when you pay off a loan? But more than three people asked if they could offer me a home-improvement loan in the course of one hour. You know me, I’d buy a second home in a heartbeat! Our laws in Texas saved us, said Mark, in spite of ourselves.
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Jeff Lamkin says he flew a plane across the Texas Gulf coast a few years ago, and about five minutes after he landed plunked a couple million dollars down on Texas beachfront dirt. Jeff is the developer of Cinnamon Shore on Mustang Island near Port Aransas, a beach front development done “Seaside-style” in the new Urbanism mode that is giving buyers an upscale taste of living on the Texas coast: it’s as good, if not better, than Florida’s panhandle coast. (Certainly, it’s much closer!) And, according to Jeff, Texas is a great buy. Maybe, in fact, the ONLY buy.
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The folks from Cinnamon Shore are coming to Dallas on Monday, January 30. Email me if you’d like to come & learn more! One of my favorite vacation home destinations is Cinnamon Shore on Mustang Island in southern Texas, just about an hour south of Corpus Christi, and maybe five miles west of the charming…
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