The British are coming for Dallas real estate

One if by land, two if by sea: Being landlocked makes us harder to ambush.

Apparently, they've been reading our trade magazines, and they want a piece of us.

The Brits are singing the praises of our real estate market. The Financial Times has singled us out, thanks to the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, which says (and I saw this recently) that Dallas and “nearby” Fort Worth:

…combine to be one of only three US urban areas to have fully recovered from the recession. It says professional and financial services delivered 41 per cent of the growth in economic output in 2011-2012 while commodities, including oil, added 20 per cent. The market research firm Pitney Bowes Software has assessed which surrounding metro areas are set to grow most in the next five years. Dallas was fourth ahead of Washington, DC, Pheonix in Arizona and two other Texas cities, Austin and San Antonio.

Yeah, they misspelled Phoenix. Cute. Oh they also quoted “Mary Foss of the Ebby Halliday realty company and a former acting mayor of Dallas city.”

Do we have a Mary Foss? I think they mean, Poss! They said that “VIP Realty has a 10,500 sq ft house in north Dallas, with a bowling alley and 10 acres of land, for $24.9m.” I had a blonde moment and called VIP Realty, wondering if I was missing something — was there a $24 million house up north with a bowling alley? Agent Matt Anderson texted me that they were talking about Mt. Vernon, Allie Beth Allman’s listing that was on the VIP website.

DUH!

Obviously, they’ve been picking up the numbers from various local articles and posts, info from folks like Ted Wilson, the principal of Residential Strategies. The funniest graph may well be this:

Dallas county, an area of 900 square miles, with Dallas city at its centre, has 820,000 households and 2.45m residents, making it the ninth-largest county population in the US. Yet there are few residents in its downtown business district, forever identified with the assassination of President John F Kennedy half a century ago. Instead, the wealthiest Dallas citizens are found north of downtown in suburbs such as Preston Hollow (former president George W Bush has a home there), Highland Park and University Park, adjacent leafy communities with about 35,000 residents. Further from downtown but still within the Dallas metroplex, other affluent buyers gravitate to Southlake, where 20 years ago minimum house-plot sizes were an acre (they are now a third of an acre), or to the western side of Plano, a settlement of 250,000 residents and near to Southfork Ranch, erstwhile home of the Ewings in CBS’s soap opera Dallas.

Plano is a “settlement?" Hey folks, Dallas is back on TNT, no longer CBS, unless you are watching the reruns! And I think our fabulous Arts District and Klyde Warren Park are steering folks downtown left, right, and center. The Residences at the Ritz-Carlton Dallas sold 26 units last year. We have moved WAY beyond the Kennedy assassination, we even tore down Lee Harvey Oswald’s apartment.

Oh, and Big Tex burned, R.I.P.

We really appreciate the positive strokes, FT, but let’s get it bloody right.