What a hectic past few weeks this has been! At the beginning of March we started looking for a place to live somewhere in the north Dallas area, commonly referred to as the Metroplex. It’s a vast area covering 9,289 square miles with 6.1 million people. To help narrow down the search and get a better feel for the area, we employed the services of a well-established realtor named John Powell, who’s been practicing real estate in the Dallas area for the past 37 years and knows the area as well as anyone. He was recommended to me by a DevelopMentor colleague who lives in the area, and has done an incredible job helping us find a place to call home.

While most of the rest of the country experienced what is now called the housing bubble, home prices in the Dallas area remained somewhat stable over the past several years. The abundance of land here enabled home builders to keep building lots of houses, which helped maintain enough supply to meet demand. And in the past year the collapse of real estate prices in other parts of the country has resulted in lower house prices here as well.

We quickly zoned in on McKinney as the best place for us to look for a home, which just so happens to be where we are now living. It’s one of the few areas left in north Dallas which still has a lot of growing to do before they run out of land. That makes home prices about 10% lower in McKinney than in other parts of the Metroplex. It’s also the site of a master-planned community called Stonebridge Ranch, which has a swimming pool and lake with a beach club for small children.

In spite of my busy traveling schedule, we’ve quickly established ourselves in the area, which has many of the same stores and businesses we’re used to seeing in Southern California. Plugging into a parenting program here also helped us connect with people.