21Mar
Kevin at Fort Worthology + Fort Worth South Inc. are putting on an Urbanism Presentation today. 1:oo pm at Oleander and Henderson. A certain someone refuses to eat at the Diner that Spirals and isn’t interested in going, so no word on my attendence yet.
Sonja at FWRenaissance is on an interesting path. She wants to know why we don’t go back to more simple ways of house construction. No doubt we will keep getting loans to build homes, but her underlying idea is on target. Those loans should get smaller, so should the houses. It is probably realistic to expect that the future will be a contraction of overextended lifestyles. More time for community and social capital.
21Mar
FWBP notes the extremely high number of foreclosures Tarrant County is seeing. There are currently 1700 homes listed in foreclosure this month, which is only 75 homes off the record set in February of last year. There have only been three months on record with more than 1500 homes in foreclosure.
Default numbers are skyrocketing across the metroplex and even into more rural counties neighboring. For the most part you can assume at least a 20% increase in foreclosure rates in just about any county. Still the most expensive one I have seen is the $2 Million Rivercrest Home, and it doesn’t look like there are many buyers.
20Mar
With all this talk of Chesapeake ownership around the old Black Dog, I became interested to know about how much land Chesapeake actually owns in Tarrant County. Lucky for me the company recently transferred the majority of their properties to a corporation named Chesapeake Land Development Company LLC. Before this transition in late January they were using a multitude of different companies to obtain properties. With names like Fort Worth Land, North Texas Acquisitions, Tarrant FW Properties, and my favorite KHC Land (their stock symbol backwards); the properties had been hard to narrow down in the past.
Unfortunately for me there were a little over 400 properties owned by Chesapeake Land Development Co. It appears that CHK owns around 2000 acres in Tarrant county, with the average property size being just about right for pad sites at 5 acres. There were plenty of mind numbing quarter acre lots, a few residential properties, and the occasional 20-40 acre properties. By these numbers about half of one percent of Tarrant County is owned by the company from north of Red River. Their total property valuations certainly reach well above $100 million, perhaps even twice that.
Some Highlights:
- 45 acres on “Broadcast Hill”
- South Foch St.
- West 7th Street
- 40 acres around the Seminary
- Considerable amounts of land along 360
- Southern Baptist Broadcasting Facility
- Exchange Street north of the Stockyards
There may be some opportunity to acquire land from Chesapeake in the future, but I must admit some properties they have almost indicate a desire to develop. Is Chesapeake going into the real estate business?
19Mar
Dallas news posted an article discussing DFW’s retail real estate market. Apparently we rank fairly low in comparison to other markets like California. They attribute this to relatively high retail vacancies. As a side note they mention that our economy should fair better and that we should have the lowest number of job losses in the nation.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t care if California can keep their big boxes open. Maybe we haven’t built up a debt fueled economy quite like they have. In my opinion the minimal local job losses should be the story. This will surely leave us in better shape all the way around.
If California can’t keep people in jobs, I don’t know what they plan to do with all that retail space.
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