Two homes can list for the same price in the Rio Grande Valley and still cost very different amounts each month. The difference is usually in the fine print: HOA dues, a PID assessment, or extra lines on the property tax bill.

Buyers ask me about these all …

Three names come up more than any others when buyers tell me what they want in the McAllen area: Tres Lagos, Sharyland Plantation, and the older neighborhoods of Historic North McAllen. They could not be more different. One is a new master-planned community on the north …

Everyone has an opinion about the market right now. I wanted numbers. So I pulled every residential sale that closed in Edinburg, McAllen, Mission, and Alton between April 20 and October 16, 2026. That is 1,163 closed sales, plus the 1,602 homes still for sale and …

Every election year I get the same question from buyers: "Should we wait until after the election?" With the midterms on November 3, 2026 and early voting in Hidalgo County running October 19 to October 30, I am hearing it again.

The short answer is that elections affect …

Drive into Mission and you will see grapefruit everywhere: on the city logo, on signs, on the floats every January when the Texas Citrus Fiesta parade rolls down Conway Avenue. Mission has called itself the "Home of the Grapefruit" for more than a hundred years, and for a lot …

Most "living in" articles about Edinburg read the same way. A paragraph about UTRGV, a paragraph about the county courthouse, a list of restaurants, and a line saying it is a great place to raise a family. None of that tells you what you will actually pay, what you will …

If you follow Texas real estate news, you've seen the headlines. Austin prices falling. Dallas cooling. Inventory piling up across the state's biggest metros. A lot of people in the Valley read those stories and assume the same thing is happening here.

It isn't, exactly. Our market is genuinely …

People move to the Valley and then spend six months figuring out they picked the wrong city. Not a bad city, just the wrong one for how they actually live. The commute is twenty minutes longer than they expected, or the schools aren't what they assumed, or they're paying for …

Every summer I get the same question from buyers, usually somewhere around the third showing: what's this house going to cost me to cool?

It's a fair question, and in the Valley it's a bigger deal than almost anywhere else in the country. Our air conditioners run something like …

There's a particular kind of phone call I hate making. It's the one where I have to tell a buyer that the home they've already mentally moved into isn't going to work out. I've made that call for a low appraisal, for an inspection that turned up more than anyone …