Most relocation stories begin with a job offer. In Dallas, some begin with a college acceptance letter.
The city has drawn a steady stream of buyers from New York and California in recent years, many chasing space, lower costs, or a change of pace. But within that flow, family ties to the region’s universities are shaping a quieter set of moves, according to Lisa Marie Perkins, a luxury agent with Christie’s International Real Estate who works across the Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin markets.
“I do get a lot of reloads for universities where grandparents want to be closer to their grandkids that are attending college,” she says.
For these buyers, the decision to relocate is not about a career or a school district. It is about being close to family during the years a grandchild is in college.
That sets these moves apart from the job-driven relocations that usually dominate the conversation about who is coming to Dallas. The reason for the move is a family milestone, and the timing follows the academic calendar rather than a hiring cycle.
Parents are making a related calculation. In a luxury high-rise across from Southern Methodist University, Perkins says, families regularly buy units for their children to live in while they attend school. “You get a lot of parents that need apartments for their daughters or their sons,” she says.
The pattern has a built-in timeline. Families hold the unit for the length of their child’s studies, then sell once the student graduates. Rather than a long-term home, the condo serves one chapter of a family’s life, with the exit planned from the start.
That plan depends on finding the next buyer, and not every unit is equally easy to pass on. Smaller units in the building tend to be the hardest to resell. “The one-bedrooms, those are harder for people to wrap their head around,” Perkins says.
For families buying with graduation in mind, the choice of unit is effectively a choice about how easy the exit will be. A unit that suits one student well may face a narrower pool of buyers when the time comes to sell.
When a unit in the building comes up for sale, the first people to hear about it are sometimes the residents themselves. Perkins, who has sold several units in the building and once lived there, says she contacts residents before a unit goes to the public market, giving them the first chance to buy for themselves or for family.
In a building shaped by families cycling through the college years, that means the next owner may already know the hallways, the neighbors and the campus across the street.
In each of these cases, the purchase is one piece of a larger family story: a grandchild’s education, a parent’s wish to give a student a stable place to live, a grandparent’s choice to be nearby. The property matters, but the reason for buying it starts somewhere else.
About The Expert: Lisa Marie Perkins is a luxury real estate agent with Christie’s International Real Estate, covering the Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin markets.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
Explore similar articles from Our Team of Experts.
In many coastal housing markets, the homes that could ease tight inventory belong to people who bought them decades ago. Their reasons for staying go well beyond today’s mortgage rates. Taxes on long-held gains, a shortage of homes that suit later life, and the weight of a lifetime spent in one place all push in ...
In most housing markets, homes change hands as families grow, relocate, and scale down. In the rolling countryside of Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, some properties come up only once in a generation. When they do, the sale often happens quietly, among people who already know one another. Stephen Gross of the Holly Gross ...
For much of the past decade, demand in many suburban housing markets came from people moving in from somewhere else. That engine has slowed. Higher borrowing costs have made it harder to buy without equity from a previous home, and the remote-work migration that once sent households inland has faded. What remains is a market ...
Most alpine real estate markets in the United States follow the same arc: they start affordable, draw seasonal visitors, get discovered, and then price out the buyers who made them popular. Flagstaff and much of the Colorado high country took that path. Arizona’s eastern White Mountains, around the small high-elevation town of Alpine, have not ...
For most of California’s housing history, homeowners insurance was something buyers arranged in the final days before closing. That has changed. As carriers have pulled back from wildfire-exposed areas across the state, coverage has become something buyers must secure before they can commit, and in some neighborhoods it now determines whether a sale happens at ...
For decades, Houston’s residential growth has followed a familiar map. Master-planned communities and commuter suburbs pushed the metro outward to the north, west, and south, while the east side, home to the refineries and petrochemical plants that anchor the regional economy, stayed comparatively thin on rooftops. That pattern is shifting in the Baytown and Mont ...
