RE: NAREE Wrap-Up

Last week Dallas played host to two major Real Estate conferences, the Urban Land Institute and NAREE. In a way, I was at both. My brother-in-law is in commercial Real Estate and he was in town for Urban. I’m wondering if we will see an uptick in sales after both these conferences. The Real Estate editors from across the country were very, very impressed with the urban development in downtown Dallas. Out west, Hillwood was kind enough to treat many of them to ‘copter rides and photo ops with Longhorn Thursday afternoon! Lucy Billingsley had a beautiful, tasteful reception at One Arts Plaza. Dallas power Realtors explained that we were are not suffering the way most areas of the nation are because we did not have huge run-ups in pricing and a lack of speculators. In fact, one of the best questions a reporter asked at the panel I moderated was this: why not? Why don’t Dallas home prices rise 20% to 30% like they did in Florida, California, Phoenix and Nevada? Ellen Terry said it’s because we have so much land and we can always spread out. A developer completes one home project in say, Flower Mound, sells it out and goes on to start another one because we have no natural barriers like mountans or an ocean. There’s nothing shutting us in!  Allie Beth Allman added that the speculators haven’t preyed on us all that much. However, the close-in areas such as Uptown, Park Cities, Preston Hollow, she says are seeing price appreciation because that dirt is limited. In a way, LBJ is the mountain range or ocean that gives us boundaries and keeps those values up. Bottom line: expect some good press about our Real Estate market in the national press within the next few weeks.  Frankly, we deserve it!