Tony Sneed's Blog

We spent about one month searching for a house to purchase in McKinney, Texas. The first half of that search entailed driving through a few dozen neighborhoods, trying to get more familiar with the city and the kinds of homes that are here. We started by searching realtor.com and getting a list of homes at with at least 4 bedrooms that cost less than $300 K. Then we drove to each house (finding the location with the help of our Verizon GPS service). When we got there, we cruised the neighborhood picking up fliers from other houses for sale. After a couple weeks doing this, we had a much better idea about what we were looking for.

We concluded that we wanted a house in a neighborhood that was somewhat well established, where there was a variety of architectures (no cookie-cutter houses), where lot sizes were larger – with more space between houses and with larger front and back yards. We discovered that over the last several years home builders started skimping on land as it became more expensive, so we wanted a neighborhood where the houses had been built more than 5 years ago.

But at the same time, we also wanted a house that was relatively new, with a floor plan that included a downstairs master bedroom and study and with a kitchen that had granite or Corian countertops and quality custom cabinets. After a friend of mine recommended his realtor, John Powell, to us, we started looking at the insides of houses. One week – and 20 houses – later, we narrowed our search down to a few different houses and neighborhoods.

Our favorite neighborhood included a park, called Falcon Creek, with a playground and jungle gyms, and a lake with a walking path that follows a wooded creek. It also has a highly rated elementary school within walking distance. There were two houses that interested us: one four-bedroom house that had just come on the market, and a five bedroom house had been on the market for quite a while but had come down in price. On Easter Sunday we placed an offer on the newly listed house but found out someone had just beat us to the punch and the house was no longer available. The other house, while a little more expensive, was larger and had an extra bedroom downstairs, which could serve as a nursery for our second child, which we’re expecting to arrive in the Fall.

The second house was also in a slightly more affluent part of the neighborhood, but it was vacant and had fewer bells and whistles, and so was selling for less than the surrounding homes. In addition to five bedrooms (2 downstairs, 3 upstairs), a downstairs study and upstairs game room, there are 4 full bathrooms, and a 2 ½ car attached garage. After a few rounds of negotiations, we settled on a price that’s pretty close to what we wanted to pay for a house. Since then we’ve lined up financing (a 15-year fixed mortgage) and had the house inspected. The sellers also replaced the roof, which had been damaged by a recent hail storm. Here is a link to an online “virtual tour” of the house:

http://www.visualtour.com/shownp.asp?sk=13&t=1369972

Although house prices in north Dallas are about one quarter of those in Southern California – our home would cost over $1 million in Thousand Oaks – there are a couple of down sides to purchasing a home in Texas: 1) property taxes, 2) utilities. Property taxes here are now about 2.3 – 2.5% of the appraised value, versus 1.5% in California. That said, the prices are much lower here and there is no personal income tax in Texas (it’s 9.3% in California). Utilities, however, are dramatically higher here. We’ll probably end up paying somewhere around $400-$500 per month for electricity, gas, sewer, water and trash. That said, we’re planning on improving the energy-efficiency of the house and, on balance, we’ll get a much bigger bang for our buck than areas of the country where the real-estate bubble pushed house prices above the affordability level for most folks.

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.

I can’t believe how much fun it is to have a two-year-old – and the experience of the father-son relationship is especially rewarding. Little Kerrigan wants to do everything I do. I have to elevate my leg because it was injured while moving to Texas, so he puts his leg up too. The picture is worth a thousand words. J

Boy, what a start to the new year! After having spent the last three weeks on the road, I’ve just arrived back at our new home in Dallas, Texas. On Jan 2^nd I flew to New Orleans to take part in a company retreat for instructors at DevelopMentor. It was a lot of fun, and I got to meet others who teach for the same company I do. Then I flew to Los Angeles to load a truck with all our stuff from storage and haul it out to Texas, towing one of our cars while a friend drove the other car. In the course of loading the truck, one of the people helping me move managed to run into my left calf with a large hand dolly. Ever since then, I’ve been hobbling around on crutches and trying to treat my leg with ice, ace bandages, and elevation — which has made the rest of my trip especially challenging.

Moving from Los Angeles to Texas was a real adventure. My leg was severely injured and I was in a lot of pain. I couldn’t carry anything, and getting from one place to another was a chore. I could barely manage to climb into the cab of the truck, and spending 12 hours a day driving for three days put a real strain on it. By the time I got to Texas, my foot was swollen like a balloon and I had to go to the emergency room to have it looked at. My friend Peter Ruffner took his 86 year old father along for the 3 day drive from California to Texas, so it was quite a sight seeing his father and I using walkers to get to the rest room whenever we stopped.

After arriving with the truck and our two cars in Texas, we picked up my wife Zuzana and our son Kerrigan at the airport. They flew up to Dallas from College Station, where they had been staying with a friend. No sooner had we moved into the apartment than I hopped on a plane to fly back to Los Angeles for a teaching engagement. My leg was in bad shape, so I had to teach the class sitting in a chair with my leg packed in ice and propped up on the desk. Each day I had to get a ride to the office from a co-worker, even though the hotel was in walking distance. After that week, I flew back to Texas for the weekend, before having to take off again for another teaching assignment, this time in New York City!

My leg has finally started to feel a little better, but my foot is still swelling up from time to time. I’m hopeful it will heal so that I can get off the crutches and start walking on my own. Today we all went to Wal-Mart to buy household essentials. Thankfully, Wal-Mart has electric carts available for handicapped shoppers. I spent a couple hours tooling around the store, while Kerrigan rode in a special cart for children, which was equipped with a built-in TV monitor with running cartoon shows!

My next teaching assignment isn’t for another three weeks, so I’ve got some time to fully recuperate. I’ll spend most of that time authoring the “What’s New in .Net 3.0+3.5” course for DevelopMentor. Though the travel can be demanding, the nice thing about this job is the time I have in between gigs. I’ll take advantage of the break, because I’ll need to be rested up for the next assignment, which will take place in London. Overall, though, it is good to have work doing what I love, which is teaching developers about emerging technologies. All in all, 2008 is off to a good start. J

In my last blog entry I explained some of my reasons for taking a sabbatical year in Slovakia (roughly from June 2006 through November 2007), the primary reason being an opportunity to move into a new career as an instructor for the developer training company DevelopMentor. Having successfully negotiated the transition, I was left facing the question of where to permanently settle my family. We could have easily remained in Slovakia (I even got a Slovak “green card” through my wife!), but that country is probably decades away from recovering from communism, and better economic and educational opportunities exist in America for our son Kerrigan. Besides, I am American after all, and I’m used to the way things work here, from ordering a book at amazon.com to buying a house with a mortgage. And there’s no language barrier, as there is for me in Slovakia. Lastly, the weakening dollar eliminated the economic incentive for living in Slovakia, where the cost of living has probably doubled since when I lived there in the late nineties.

Having decided to return to America, the question emerged as to where we should live. With the price of housing in Southern California having tripled in the last 5 years, buying a decent medium-size house there would run at least $500K and probably require a dual-income household, depriving our son of the benefits of a stay-at-home mom. Adding in the commute, I would probably be away from home 12 hours a day, getting home just in time to tuck Kerrigan into bed. Not wanting to have to adopt that lifestyle, we started to look at other parts of the country offering lower real estate prices but in proximity to a major metropolitan area with plentiful programming jobs (as a fallback and to supplement by income as a developer instructor). After contemplating areas on the East Coast, such as Atlanta and cities in North and South Carolina, our gaze fell upon Texas and the city of Dallas.

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