Greg Mayberry remembers when it was all horses and cattle out here.
“The true country,” he said from the front seat of his GMC truck.
From behind the steering wheel, he pointed.
He pointed toward trees that stretched out to the horizon. He pointed at the backhoes and the dark brown dirt of cleared lots. He pointed at workers and the wooden frames beginning to take their shapes.
It will all be homes.
As Kaufman County booms, Mayberry and his company have ambitious plans in and around the city of Crandall.
Lennar, the nation’s second-largest homebuilder by volume, aims to construct 3,700 homes over the next seven or eight years on 900 acres in one of Dallas-Fort Worth’s newest boomtowns.
The Eastland and the Arbors at Eastland developments — located between downtown Crandall and Interstate 20 — will be one of the company’s largest among its 60 communities in North Texas.
“The future growth is all this way,” said Mayberry, the firm’s Dallas-Fort Worth division president.
Once a shipping point for area cotton farmers using the city’s railroad, Crandall and the surrounding area are poised for explosive growth. And Lennar has noticed.
The builder has a big presence in Heartland, a 2,100-acre planned master community, and eight other developments in the Crandall-Forney area. They recently finished development at Highbridge, a community of 745 homes close to Eastland.
Highbridge allowed Lennar to gauge demand before moving forward with the new Eastland developments.
Construction on Eastland’s first phase has already begun, and Lennar began selling homes here roughly six months ago.
The homes will range from the low $200,000s to the mid $300,000s. Lennar will offer three different home types — cottage, watermill and classic. Each house will have three to four bedrooms and two full bathrooms. Home sizes range from over 1,200 square feet to more than 2,300.
Current plans for amenities include pools, pickleball courts and walking trails among other offerings.
Betting on the boom
Lennar bought the land for the developments several years ago, Mayberry said. The homebuilder was betting on the boom, and it’s come.
Kaufman County was the nation’s fastest-growing county with 20,000 or more residents. From July 2022 to July 2023, its growth rate was 7.6%, according to recently released U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
Crandall sits in western Kaufman County, and the tiny city is growing. It has an estimated population just shy of 5,000, according to the latest 2023 census estimates. Since 2020, Crandall added more than 1,000 residents, an increase of 29.6%.
“Crandall is definitively, probably going to keep [Kaufman County] in that number one spot for the foreseeable future,” said Casey Bingham, the executive director of the Crandall Economic Development Corporation.
In anticipation of that future growth, developers have announced plans for nearly 30,000 homes in Crandall and around the city in unincorporated Kaufman County by the end of the decade, Bingham said.
From April 2023 through March 2024, builders started nearly 1,300 homes and closed on just over 800 houses in the greater Crandall area. Lennar had the area’s largest housing inventory, according to data from Dallas-based Residential Strategies Inc., a market research company focused on Texas’ new home industry.
Several things about Crandall are appealing to Lennar and other homebuilders. The schools are good, and the commute to downtown Dallas is more manageable than the rapidly growing northern suburbs. The homes are more affordable as well, said Ted Wilson, RSI’s principal.
“The Crandall market is kind of an extension of what’s happened in the Forney market. Forney had explosive growth, and it’s gotten a little more expensive. Now, we’ve seen that demand shift down into the Crandall area,” he said. “The houses are smaller square footage and basic construction, but for a lot of people who can’t afford a house that is $400,000 or above, this is a great alternative.”
The median price of a Kaufman County home in April 2024 was $313,499, according to data from the MetroTex Association of Realtors. It remains well below the D-FW area’s $405,000 average.
“We’re targeting the first-time homebuyer,” Mayberry said. “Affordability is a problem everywhere, but it’s definitely a problem in D-FW. We’re trying to solve that. … You go anywhere north, you’re definitely going to be further than 30 minutes [away] in order to be able to get to the price point that we’re offering.”
