BLUE SKY COUNTRYREAL ESTATE
BLUE SKY COUNTRYREAL ESTATE
Navarro County and the counties around it
One listing at a time, start to finish: what the land was, what it took, and what it closed for. Every figure comes from the same closed record as the rest of this site.
1302 FM 55, Blooming Grove · listed March 2023
Ninety-five acres came to me in March 2023, and the sellers wanted to sell it as one thing: the land, the house and the barns, the cattle, the tools and the equipment, in a single transaction to a single buyer. The market wouldn’t carry that number. Not because the place wouldn’t sell — anything sells at a price — but because what one buyer would pay for all of it was below what the sellers were prepared to take. That left two honest routes, and both of them were priced on paper before anything was surveyed: bring the expectation down to what a single buyer will pay, or take the estate apart and sell each piece to the buyer who actually wants that piece. They chose the second. The land closed in four separate sales, $1,497,887, and the equipment and the livestock sold on their own.
What sold, and when
$337,887. Land, a pond and a creek, off the back and fronting County Road 2250 — surveyed out of the parent tract as its own property.
$260,000. Open ground on the highway side, to a buyer who wanted land and no house.
$800,000. The home place — the house, the shop, the barns, the corrals, the ponds and the well — which is the piece the whole layout was drawn to protect.
$100,000. Frontage on FM 55, with road access and utilities available — a small tract laid out to be sold on its own. Acre for acre it brought roughly twice what the big raw tracts did, which is the whole reason it was drawn that way.
How the layout was decided
Every tract line on this place was drawn against the same three questions, and they are the same three on any property: what the place actually is — frontage, access, utilities, water, where the house sits and what the ground will carry; what buyers here are actually looking for, and at what size; and the most the sellers could get within what they were willing to take on. The third one is the one that gets skipped, and it’s the one that decides whether a plan survives contact with the people who have to live through it.
A market analysis in January 2023, a second in March at listing, and a third that December once two pieces had closed and what remained had become a different property. Alongside them, four different subdivide layouts were drawn and costed tract by tract — acreage, frontage, ponds, the building site — so the two routes could be compared as numbers rather than as opinions.
Cattle, tools and equipment went to their own buyers on their own inventory, rather than riding inside a land price that no land buyer was bidding on. A tractor is worth what a tractor is worth; it doesn’t get more valuable by being stapled to a pasture.
Each tract got its own field notes and its own legal description before it went under contract, so nobody was asked to sign for a boundary that didn’t exist yet.
The home place was the most valuable piece, and what could be built beside it decided what it was worth.
Highway frontage, road access and utilities availability are what make a small piece worth more per acre than a large one. Putting all three on a 4.52-acre tract was a decision taken at the layout stage, not a remainder that happened to be there at the end — and it’s why the smallest piece on this list sold for about twice the per-acre price of the raw thirty-acre tracts.
The check that matters. 95.237 acres closed against 95.389 acres listed — a difference of 0.152 acres across four surveys. On a divided estate the arithmetic either closes or something has gone missing.
What it’s evidence of. It’s always a price question. Dividing doesn’t make an unsellable property sellable; it changes who is bidding, and that changes the price that can be got. But price isn’t the only thing being weighed. A plan that earns more and takes two years is the wrong plan for a seller who needs it done this year — and there’s nothing wrong with that seller; plenty of owners should sell whole and should hear exactly that. The job is to find the most a property can bring within what its owner is genuinely willing to take on, and to put both routes on paper first, so it’s the owner deciding and not the calendar.
If a tract has been listed and has not sold, the useful question isn’t what to cut — it’s whether it’s one property or three. Send the survey and the appraisal-district notice and I’ll tell you which, and what each route looks like on paper. Email reaches me fastest, and I answer it myself. If you call and get voicemail, leave a message and I’ll call you back.
Call (903) 695-2978 · Email what you have · Dividing land · The whole record
The survey, the appraisal-district notice, a couple of photos. Whatever is in hand. Email reaches me fastest, and I answer it myself. If you call and get voicemail, leave a message and I’ll call you back.
Call (903) 695-2978 · robert@blueskycountry.com
205 S Fordyce, Blooming Grove, Texas 76626 · by appointment. Robert Phipps, Broker · TREC #0460512.