Estate sales in Frisco

Why we are telling you there is less here

A city page that promises deep inventories of mid century estates in Frisco would be making it up. Only 2,362 homes in the entire city predate 1980. The median Frisco structure was built in 2010, sixteen years newer than Plano’s.

That is not a knock on the place. Frisco went from 6,138 residents in 1990 to 200,509 in 2020, one of the fastest expansions in the country, and the city reckons it is about 87 percent built out. But the kind of sale that empties a house somebody has lived in since the Ford administration needs a house from the Ford administration, and Frisco mostly does not have one.

What Frisco has instead

Two different things generate real sales here, and neither depends on old houses.

The first is Frisco Lakes, an age restricted community for buyers over fifty five on the west side. Several thousand single storey homes, all of them occupied by people who moved in already downsizing. A community like that turns over on demographics rather than on the age of its brickwork, which makes it the most reliable ground in the city.

The second is relocation. Frisco has the highest median home value of its neighbours at $735,300, and corporate moves in and out of that price bracket produce full house sales that look like estate sales from the kerb. The contents skew newer, the furniture is larger, and the tools are better than you expect.

The handful of places with any age on them

Historic Downtown Frisco sits on the original townsite auctioned in 1902. The city zones it Original Town Residential and its own design standards describe the housing there as Folk Traditional, Craftsman, Four Square and Folk Victorian, which is direct evidence of pre 1930 building. It is small, and it is the only genuinely old ground in Frisco.

Stonebriar grew around a country club founded in 1988, and the earliest homesites there are now old enough to have original owners aging in place. Outside downtown it is the best prospect in the city.

Plantation Resort, southeast of downtown around the golf course, was built from 1988 into the early 2000s with a mid 1990s core. Starwood, over nine hundred custom homes on 550 acres at the tollway, dates from the mid 1990s.

Newer master planned areas are not worth your Saturday for this purpose. Phillips Creek Ranch broke ground around 2012 and Newman Village runs from roughly 2008.

The rules, or rather the absence of them

Frisco is the permissive one. There is no chapter of the city code covering residential sales of household goods, no permit, no annual cap, no limit on how long a sale may run, and the term estate sale is not defined anywhere in the code. We checked the full chapter list, the business regulation chapter, the offences chapter and the entire sign chapter.

Signs are the part that is regulated. A temporary residential sign may be up to four square feet with no permit, but off premises signs are prohibited, and nothing may go in the public right of way, on a utility pole, on a tree or on a fence.

One caution. Frisco pages all over the internet quote a rule about six square feet and signs only between Friday morning and Sunday evening. That came from a sign ordinance repealed in January 2011. It is not current law.

With more than two hundred homeowner associations in the city, the binding constraint is far more likely to be the association than the city.

Driving it

Frisco is strung between the Dallas North Tollway on the east side of town and FM 423 on the west, with US 380 across the north and the Sam Rayburn Tollway across the south. The five level stack where the tollway meets the Sam Rayburn on the Plano line is the hinge of the whole north metroplex, and it is about eleven tollway miles from there to US 75 in McKinney.

Frisco is not a DART member city, so there is no rail. Everything here is driven.

• All of Dallas-Fort Worth
• Plano
• McKinney
• Denton