Magnolia Is Home

I’ve sold real estate in a lot of communities, but Magnolia is different for me. I spent more than 16 years here with my family before I was ever showing anyone else a house in this town. This is where I actually built a life.

I served as president of the Magnolia Community Foundation, and I spent nine years as a school board trustee here. However you want to measure it, Magnolia is where I put down roots, and it’s still the place that feels like home to me, even with everything I do now across Kingwood, Humble, and the rest of Montgomery County.

That kind of history means something practical for anyone I work with in Magnolia, not just something sentimental. Nine years on the school board means I know how these schools actually work, not just what a ratings site says about them. Leading the Community Foundation meant sitting in rooms where decisions about this town’s growth got made, long before most residents ever heard about them. When a client asks me a question about Magnolia ISD, or about how a piece of land near them might get developed next, I’m not guessing. I lived through the planning conversations that shaped it.

And Magnolia has grown. The expansion over the last ten years has brought double-digit growth to Magnolia ISD alone, which tells you how fast families have been moving into this area. New development is really the word that defines Magnolia right now: new neighborhoods, new schools, new everything, built to keep up with a town that’s no longer the sleepy farm-road community it was when I first got here. I’ve watched that growth happen up close, not read about it after the fact.

I work the communities around Magnolia on the same terms, and Conroe is the biggest of them. The county seat sits forty miles north of Houston on I-45, with Lake Conroe to its west and Sam Houston National Forest to its north, and it has filled in quickly as the corridor between The Woodlands and Willis closed up. Housing there runs from downtown bungalows to lakefront homes to new subdivisions along FM 3083 and FM 1314, and the 77302 zip code on the southeast side holds acreage with older homes, carports and outbuildings, where a buyer trades a short commute for land.

Conroe is also where county business gets done, and my two years inside Magnolia city government taught me how that works. When a purchase out there turns on zoning, a septic system or a county permit, I know who to call. A Conroe purchase often involves a sale somewhere else first, and one of the stories below is a couple who owed more on their existing home than it was worth and made the move anyway.