Boom towns...

[8 SNAKE]

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0709/gallery.boom_towns.biz2/index.html

 

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[nomadjanet]

Thanks for the link. 3 of the 10 were in Texas. Out of the three, Houston is a very industrial city, very large sprawling & densely populated, smells like oil. It is an inland port close enough to the gulf to make a day trip a possibility.
Dallas is a high pressure crazy traffic crowded city with tall glass buildings, lots of museums and lots of MONEY, Fort Worth located right next to Dallas is a medium sized city more blue collar in roots than Dallas and infinitely more comfortable to live in. There is a commuter light rail between Fort Worth & Dallas.
Austin is a grown up college town. Downtown is dominated by a huge campus with around 50 thousand students and the state capitol with hundreds of politicians & their staff. The politicians make the college kids look grown up . Austin has lots of green space & beautiful parks & interesting places; it also has worse traffic than Houston or Dallas just on a smaller scale. The problem with Austin's traffic has been building for years as they just don't have enough roads and too many people passing through on the main Hwy 35.
It’s been awhile but we have owned real estate in Fort Worth and Austin. Fort Worth at that time appreciated at a moderate rate about 10% annual, Austin appreciated quickly we doubled our money in less than 3 years. I have never owned or studied the market in Houston but it I know it has certain areas of the city that are very well off.

 

[ChrisS417]

woohoo! st.louis made this list!

 

[NoMoneyDown]

Austin is a grown up college town. Downtown is dominated by a huge campus with around 50 thousand students and the state capitol with hundreds of politicians & their staff. The politicians make the college kids look grown up . Austin has lots of green space & beautiful parks & interesting places; it also has worse traffic than Houston or Dallas just on a smaller scale. The problem with Austin's traffic has been building for years as they just don't have enough roads and too many people passing through on the main Hwy 35.
It’s been awhile but we have owned real estate in Fort Worth and Austin. Fort Worth at that time appreciated at a moderate rate about 10% annual, Austin appreciated quickly we doubled our money in less than 3 years. I have never owned or studied the market in Houston but it I know it has certain areas of the city that are very well off.

Agreed. Although, they built (and are still building) toll roads around Austin to alleviate a lot of the congestion on the arterial byways. I've taken the toll roads many times, and it is a welcome (albeit, costly) relief.

Austin is a "small" city, but the Austin metroplex expands well beyond Travis County now. What this means is that a lot of outlying towns are also seeing tremendous growth. I live in Round Rock, which is just north of Pflugerville, which is just north of Austin, and I can't believe how much it has grown in just the 10 years I've been hear. Farm land has been gobbled up and made into subdivisions and retail centers. And the sprawl has even gone past Round Rock into places like Leander, Georgetown, and even further north. The same is true in ALL directions leading out of Austin - especially to the east and south.

As the article mentions, during the real estate boom preceding last year, Austin's market remained relatively stagnant. It was a metropolis for many of teh dot-coms that went bust, and it never fully recovered from that bust. Just when the market here started to really get going, the subprime fallout happened.

My guess is that several years ago was the prime time to buy in the Austin area, but with the subprime fallout, those with cash can still make out like bandits. In 2-3 years, the real estate market will go through a tremendous growth here, and those who bought cheap will be handsomely rewards - again, JMHO.

 

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