Estate sales in Plano

Why Plano is the deep end of the pool

Plano boomed in the 1970s and 1980s. Its population went from 17,872 in 1970 to 72,331 in 1980 to 128,713 in 1990, and the houses built for that wave are still standing with many of the original buyers inside them. The median Plano structure dates to 1994, and 22,818 homes predate 1980 outright.

The city also cannot dilute that. Plano is hemmed in by other municipalities with almost no undeveloped land left, so no amount of new construction shifts the average. What you get is a suburb full of forty and fifty year old houses whose owners have had four decades to fill them.

The demographic half of the story is sharper still. A third of every owner occupied house in Plano has someone over sixty five living in it, and ten thousand Plano residents over sixty five live alone. Those two numbers, more than any listing count, are what drive a steady weekend supply.

Where the older houses actually are

Chase the 1960s and 1970s subdivisions rather than the addresses people recognise from shopping trips.

Dallas North Estates was Plano’s first master planned suburb. Its first unit was platted in September 1960 and all 153 lots sold inside a month. It now covers roughly 2,158 properties across fifteen subdivisions, and it holds The Texas Pool, a 1961 landmark on the National Register.

Briarwood, in east Plano, went up between 1962 and 1981 in Ranch, Contemporary, Mid century Modern and Tudor Revival. Park Forest ran from 1971 and was almost entirely finished by 1988. Los Rios was built out between 1974 and 1980.

Haggard Park is the oldest ground in the city, with houses from the 1890s and a build out largely complete by the late 1920s. Historic Downtown Plano sits beside it, a National Register district listed in 2017 covering thirty two contributing buildings from 1896 to 1967.

A word of warning about Legacy West, which visitors often assume is residential. It opened in 2017 and its thirteen hundred homes are all apartments. There is no single family stock there and there will not be sales in it.

The rules, which are stricter here than next door

Plano requires a permit before a sale can be held, issued by the building inspections department, and it costs nothing. Its ordinance is one of the few in the metroplex that names estate sales in the definition outright, so there is no ambiguity about whether it applies.

A property may hold three permitted sales per calendar year, no sale may run beyond seventy two consecutive hours, and five business days must pass between one sale and the next. Signs may go up on private property on the day of the sale only, at eight square feet or less, and must come down within twelve hours of the close. Nothing goes on a pole, a tree, a fence, a hydrant or in the strip between the curb and the sidewalk, and the building official may impound anything that does.

There is a quirk worth knowing. The city allows three sales a year, but Texas exempts only one or two occasional sales in a twelve month period from sales tax. The third permitted sale is not automatically the third tax free one.

Driving it

Plano is the only city on this list bounded by highways rather than strung along one, with US 75 on the east, the Dallas North Tollway on the west, the President George Bush Turnpike south and the Sam Rayburn Tollway north. It is also the largest city in Texas without an interstate. In practice a Saturday route through Plano means picking an edge and working inward, because crossing the middle is slower than the map suggests.

Plano is the only city in this immediate group inside DART, with rail at Downtown Plano, Parker Road, 12th Street and Shiloh Road. Around downtown sales that matters for parking.

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