@Tracy Perry
Thank you for this information. I'm looking forward to checking the area out. I was surprised to see how expensive real estate was in Amarillo.
If I may ask, what are you paying in utilities in summer and winter?
Right now where I live, we are completely frozen over. Had to call 911 yesterday for a medical emergency in my house and it took them forever to get here because of the ice so that was a major eye opener for us and now a move is more necessary because we cannot of that situation ever happen again.
We have our electric done on an average, and it's around $220 a month and the natural gas (we have both, water heater and central heat run on natural gas) run about $45 in the winter and around $25 in the summer. We normally keep the house at around 73° in the summer and in the winter around 75°. Our neighbors next door moved in from California and one of the things she commented about was that they loved only paying around $250 a month on electric as when they were in California (same size house) they were averaging $700 a month.
Ironically, we are having an ice "storm" right now, but the roadways are still clear. The overpasses may ice, but it typically takes several days of sub-freezing temps before the roads will freeze over.
You'll find that real estate is getting more expensive here in Texas now than it used to be as we are having a LOT of people move in from other areas due to the no state income taxes, the variety of the areas you can chose to live (type of environment), etc. Our neighbor is a real estate agent and she's done a TON of business just around our local community. Land that went for around $1000 an acre 10 years ago is going for upwards of $5000-6000 an acre for 10 acre and smaller plots. The larger plots (100 acre plus) are going for around $3000-4000 an acre now if I remember what she said. 10 years ago my brother bought 178 acres and only paid $785 an acre. He recently bought another 58 acres next door to his property and paid $1800 an acre for it (he was good friends with the owners and had done a lot of work on the land for them over the years).
The smaller cities are not as expensive as places like Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, etc. But the prices in the smaller cities have even gone up. Houses in our locale (in the city limits) only stay on the market for around 3 weeks before they are sold.
From some stats I've seen, the average used home price in Texas is now around $218,000 for an existing home and $285,000 for a new home. Of course, that trends towards "big city" prices. In the more rural communities it is frequently cheaper than that. The median average for my city is around $97,000.
This is a good site to get some average costs from. This link is specific to Palestine but you can do inputs for other areas. It's pretty accurate from my understanding.
Stay warm!
