BLUE SKY COUNTRYREAL ESTATE
BLUE SKY COUNTRYREAL ESTATE
Navarro, Hill, Ellis, Limestone and Freestone counties
A land agent has written, called or knocked, and there’s a number on the table. What to do before you answer — from someone who sells land here for a living.
What is actually happening
Texas had 335 data centers built and more than 248 planned as of June 2026, nearly half of the planned ones in unincorporated county land, and more than 1,900 generation requests in ERCOT’s queue. Around here: the Riot campus at Corsicana, the first one-gigawatt load ERCOT ever approved; the 457-megawatt Tormes solar project southeast of Barry, ground broken May 2026; the 270-megawatt Yellow Cat wind project around Frost; roughly 3,000 acres bought for a data-center campus at Hubbard in Hill County; and 800 Hill County acres contracted in June 2026 at about $100,000 an acre against a $7,100 appraisal. Counties have little say over any of it. The owner of the ground has the only say that matters, and usually meets the question with a letter, a business card and a deadline.
Sources: Texas Tribune, 2 June 2026 · ERCOT interconnection queue as read 5 September 2026 · Riot Platforms, 18 October 2022 · Matrix Renewables, 28 May 2026 · RWE · KXXV, 8 April 2026 · KWTX, 29 June 2026. More on the county page.
Before you answer
Not the offer, not the option, and not the confidentiality agreement until you have read what it stops you doing — usually talking to the neighbors, which is the one thing that tells you what the assemblage is worth.
The county clerk’s records, ERCOT’s queue, the commissioners court agenda and the neighbors. Offers come through land agents under project code names; the owner is usually one of several being approached, and the agent already knows which ones have signed.
The price per acre. The option payment, its term and what an extension costs them. The rollback, and who pays it. The closing timeline, and what happens to you if the project dies — many are never built.
What the tract is worth without the project, from real closings nearby. That’s the number you’re negotiating up from, and it’s the number you keep if they walk away.
The land agent buys tracts for a living. Have someone who sells them for a living read the paper, price the ground both ways, and negotiate for you. How a broker is paid on a sale like this is settled in writing before anything is signed — not at the closing table.
What the first letter never explains
A developer’s price for an assemblage isn’t a comparable for the pasture across the road, and the appraisal district’s number isn’t a ceiling. What a tract is worth now depends on who is buying and why, and that’s the first thing to find out.
Options tie up land for years for small money; leases run for decades; both have to be disclosed when you sell, signed or merely discussed. Sign nothing on the first visit.
Taking land out of agricultural use triggers a rollback of three years of the tax difference at five percent interest (Tax Code 23.55). Who pays it is negotiable, and a contract that is silent on it costs the seller.
A homesite buyer avoids the view of a substation; the next phase of a project pays for it. Which tract you own decides which way your value goes, and it’s worth knowing before you list.
The three outcomes
Each one is a decision, including the last, and each one moves a different set of numbers.
The cleanest outcome and the biggest number, and the one with the most moving parts: the minerals, the rollback, the survey, an assignment clause that lets the buyer hand your contract to someone you have never met, and the tax on a gain at a price the land has never seen. If you mean to buy land with the proceeds, the 1031 clock starts at closing and has to be set up before it.
Thirty years is a long time. Read the rent escalator, the decommissioning bond, who keeps the fences and the roads, what the lease does to the exemption on the footprint, and what it does to a sale — a leased tract sells as a leased tract. An option is smaller money for the right to decide later; it ties the land up while they decide.
Also a decision. The project next door changes the view, the road, the water and the buyer pool for your tract either way. Which way is a question of which tract you own, and it’s worth knowing before the first letter, not after the last one.
Straight answers
No. Most owners who are approached do nothing, and some are right to. What you owe yourself is knowing what the land is worth both ways before you decide.
Read what it stops you doing first. Some are ordinary; some stop you talking to the neighbor whose tract is the other half of the deal. Get it read before you sign it.
Whoever the contract says. Taking land out of agricultural use triggers three years of the tax difference at five percent interest (Tax Code 23.55). A contract that is silent on it costs the seller.
The ground under the panels is no longer in agricultural use and the appraisal district treats it that way; the rest can stay in ag if the use continues. What that costs, and who carries it, belongs in the lease.
More than the appraisal district’s number and usually less than the first letter implies. It depends on where your tract sits in the assemblage — whether they need it or merely want it — and that’s the first thing to find out.
No. A data-center buyer usually wants title to a few hundred contiguous acres near power. A solar developer usually wants a thirty-year lease on a thousand. A wind developer wants easements for pads and roads across many tracts and leaves the rest in use. Each one changes a different number.
Informed, and represented
Every proposed generation project in Texas sits in ERCOT’s monthly interconnection report, by county, years before a turbine or a panel arrives. That’s where the next one shows up first.
Wind, solar and data-center leases and options are usually recorded as memoranda in the county’s real property records. A neighbor’s deal is on file there long before there’s anything to look at.
Tax abatements and road-use agreements are approved on a posted agenda in open session. What a project has promised the county, and what the county has promised back, is a public record.
The developer’s land agent buys tracts for a living. The owner should have someone across from them who sells tracts for a living, and who knows which of the neighbors have already signed.
Send it, with whatever you have on the land — the survey, the exemption notice, the letter itself — and I’ll tell you what it’s worth both ways and what to ask before you answer. No obligation, and
Call (903) 695-2978 · Email what you have · What selling land here involves
If it’s an offer to buy the place outright rather than an option or a lease, that’s read differently.
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.