From Houston to Ogden With Love

We arrived back from our yearly winter vacation to Texas.  Every time I travel to Texas, I always find myself being amazed at the the development going on there.  I am particularly fascinated by the quality and quantity of housing construction there.

For instance, my brother purchased a very cute 1400 SQFT home in the Eagle Springs subdivision of Humble, Texas for $127,000 new.  The home is a rambler with 3 beds and 2 bath.  If you do the math, it comes out to about $90/SQFT for a new house.  Wow!

Well, I learned some fascinating things about the Texas real estate market.  First off, I learned how taxes can oppress market prices.  In Texas they don't have income taxes.  However, they do have sales taxes and crazy property taxes.  Due to the forces of affordability, those taxes have had a tendency to suppress house prices.  For instance,  my brother's house payment is $1215/mo.  Principal and interest payment on his mortgage is about $800/mo.  His property taxes are $415/mo.!  (That doesn't include his $75/mo HOA fee or his expensive water bill.)  If you took a Utah scenario where taxes were only about $115 per month the higher principal and interest payment would equate to about $180K.  So, $130,000 homes in this part of Texas are about the equivalent of $180,000 homes in Webery County, Utah...based on affordability. 

Secondly, construction materials, superior ones for that matter, and extremely cheap labor, combine to make for excellent housing designs and subdivisions made for very little cost.  Construction costs there run around $60-$70/SQFT.  You can frequently find 15 year old homes there for $50/SQFT.  Pretty amazing. Timber is abundant.  Many developers clear their wooded building lots, send the trees to the mill, and bring it back as their construction material.  Land is cheap because its taxed heavily and there is so much of it available.  My brother's lot cost him $500.  Even bricks, which cost 75-cents a piece here in Utah, only cost 23-cents a piece there.  The soil in Texas is clay...perfect for brick making.  Hence, almost all of their homes are made with brick.

Here is a brief video on the ground:



One thing I did notice was that the Eagle Springs architecture would fit very will with urban infill ideas currently being implemented in Ogden.  For fun I have put together a map overlay:

This is a map of Ogden showing areas that might be right for infill and reuse.  The big round structure there is Dee Elementary School.

Here is a map of my brother's subdivision in Texas.  Its actually a small portion of a very large 40,000+ community.  I like this community layout because garages and driveways are in the back of the homes.  Unlike Ogden's abutters alley's, these are paved.  Also, there about about 110 homes in this yellow box.  That is dense use of space.  We could probably fit 50 homes of this type in the yellow boxes on the Ogden map.

Anyway, I like traveling and seeing how other people are doing things.  I was impressed by what I saw on this trip. Ogden area developers would do well to initiate some higher quality infill projects.  I will certainly be on the lookout for these types of opportunities.