Fort Worth

Fort Worth is the western anchor of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, known for the Fort Worth Stockyards, Sundance Square, and a strong cultural district anchored by the Kimbell Art Museum. It's one of the fastest-growing large cities in the country, with a real estate market that blends historic neighborhoods with rapid new development.

We work Fort Worth directly, and we work it as its own market rather than as the western end of somebody else's. A Texas real estate license is valid statewide, our sponsoring broker Compass RE Texas, LLC is licensed across Texas, and we have closed millions of dollars of business in the Metroplex. We take the listing, we write the offer, and we are at the closing.

Fort Worth started as an actual fort. Major Ripley Arnold put a camp on the bluff above the West and Clear Forks of the Trinity in May 1849 and named it for General William Jenkins Worth, who had died of cholera that same month. The Army left in 1853 and settlers moved into the buildings. What made the city was the Texas and Pacific railroad, which arrived at 11:23 in the morning on July 19, 1876, and only arrived because residents graded the roadbed themselves when the construction crews ran out of money.

Fort Worth buyers tend to arrive here having already been told, by somebody, that Fort Worth is basically Dallas. They know it is not, and they want to work with people who know it is not. The rest are the ordinary cases: a move for work that needs one team on both ends, a second property, a family house that should be handled by someone already trusted rather than whoever answers a portal enquiry first.

The West Side and Camp Bowie. Rivercrest wraps around River Crest Country Club, which opened in 1911 and was the first country club in Texas to build a residential development into its own acreage. That is why the old money settled there. Monticello and Crestwood sit between it and downtown, 1920s and 1930s Spanish Revival and brick bungalows. Crestwood is the way it is because the 1949 Trinity flood nearly finished it, and the levees came after. Arlington Heights runs along Camp Bowie, started as a speculative suburb by a Denver promoter whose hotel burned down in 1894, and holds the Hillcrest historic district on Tremont.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it catches people. Westover Hills is not a Fort Worth neighborhood. It is its own incorporated town, chartered in 1939 and entirely surrounded by Fort Worth. The same is true of River Oaks, Westworth Village, Sansom Park, Edgecliff Village, Forest Hill and Lake Worth. Buying in one of them means buying in a different city with its own government, and that changes several things you will care about.

The Near Southside. Fairmount is the big one: roughly 375 acres, about a hundred square blocks, listed on the National Register in 1990 and a local landmark district the same year. Queen Anne through Craftsman through Tudor, and it went all the way down before it came back. Ryan Place next door has the Elizabeth Boulevard gates, on the National Register since 1979 and Fort Worth's first locally designated historic district a year after that. The city took the gates down in 1955 and the neighborhood started a candlelight home tour in 1983 to pay for putting them back. Mistletoe Heights sits on the bluff above the Trinity, a city historic district since 2002, and its original deed restrictions required brick and a five thousand dollar minimum house. Berkeley Place and Park Hill fill in around them.

TCU and 76109. University Place and Bluebonnet Hills ring the campus, mostly 1920s and 1930s, walkable, smaller houses. TCU moved here in 1910 after its Waco campus burned, which is the same event that brought the streetcar and the paved streets to Mistletoe Heights.

The country club belt. Tanglewood and Colonial, 1950s and 1960s ranch and mid-century modern under a canopy the houses were deliberately built to sit beneath. Worth knowing before you buy here: Historic Fort Worth put Tanglewood on its Most Endangered Places list in 2013, and the scrape-and-build has accelerated since. If the trees are why you want it, ask what is happening on that particular block.

Ridglea. Further west along Camp Bowie around Ridglea Country Club. Late 1930s through the 1960s on large lots and winding streets. A. C. Luther bought the pasture at four hundred dollars an acre and got called the father of the place. Ridglea Country Club Estates is a different thing from Ridglea Hills, which began in 1966 and straddles the Fort Worth and Benbrook city limits.

Near north and east. Oakhurst is on the bluff across the Trinity in Riverside, 1920s bungalows and period revivals, listed on the National Register in 2010, and probably the best value in the city with real historic bona fides. Handley out east began as a railroad town in 1876 and has its own National Register district.

Northeast Tarrant and the SH-114 corridor. Southlake, Colleyville, Keller, Grapevine, Trophy Club and Westlake. Newer, larger, and a genuinely different proposition from everything above. Grapevine is the oldest settlement in Tarrant County, established in 1844, and has the walkable downtown the rest of the corridor does not. Colleyville has kept itself deliberately quiet, with every road in the city posted at thirty or thirty five. Two to get right: Trophy Club and Roanoke are Denton County, whatever the address feels like.

Tell us the neighborhood and we will tell you straight what we know about it, and what we would want to look at before you write an offer.