Second Shelters
More than 95 percent of Texas is privately owned, and more than 20,000 acres are lost each year to poorly planned development, says the Texas Land Conservancy. Invasive species, overgrowth, and over grazing can turn native prairies into barren wastelands.
With that in mind, you can see why it’s imperative that ranch owners are good stewards of the land. It appears that the owners of Covered S Ranch have taken that duty to heart.
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There has never been a better time to buy a second home. I am even watching my spending these days, eyeing fractional ownership if it has all the right locations. We are having a guest post soon from a fractional ownership expert to explain the do’s and don’ts. The problem is not buying, as we know,…
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Our Miami correspondent, Andrea Kavanagh, is back and house-hunting for us! Calling all billionaire art aficionados and free-spending, globe-trotting investors! Miami is all a buzz over Ocean Drive’s most infamous residence to hit the sizzling hot real estate market at a whopping $125 million. Casa Casuarina, also known as the Versace mansion, is an iconic…
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El Corazon de Santa Fe Under Fairmont Management: Santa Fe Vacation Home Ownership In the $100,000’s
Faithful readers may recall when I wrote about a beautiful fractional ownership property in the heart, and I do mean the heart, of Santa Fe called El Corazon de Santa Fe. It was fabulous then, and it is even more fabulous now! The property has been renamed “Fairmont Heritage Place, El Corazon de Santa Fe”. El…
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If You’re Lucky Enough to Have a Second Home in France, it Might Get a Lot More Expensive to Keep it
One of the big promises Socialist Party Leader and French President Francois Hollande pledged during his campaign was that he wouldn’t penalize foreign property owners with steep taxes.
And yet, according to a story from The Telegraph, that’s pretty much exactly what he’s proposing to alleviated the country’s budget deficit.
Happy Fourth of July, 2012. We live the American Dream of real estate here in Texas more than anywhere. Maybe it’s because we learned our lesson back in the 1980’s — R.I.P. Danny Faulkner. Not only did we learn, we RETAINED. When I was in Denver at the National Association of Real Estate Editors Conference last month, Mark Fleming, the dashing economist for CoreLogic, told me over drinks that what saved our butts this time around was our state set limits on HELOCs, or home improvement loans. In Texas, we are limited on what we can borrow against our homesteads. That is what kept many of us from over-borrowing, so when the market fell we were not left with underwater loans*. I walked into our bank yesterday, Comerica, which I LOVE — who else sends you a thank-you note when you pay off a loan? But more than three people asked if they could offer me a home-improvement loan in the course of one hour. You know me, I’d buy a second home in a heartbeat! Our laws in Texas saved us, said Mark, in spite of ourselves.
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