Woodcreek in Rockwall/Fate (Garland: transplants, rental homes, HOA)

[steveb334]

How is this area? I am interested in a beautiful home there and was wondering if anyone had any opinions of it. Hows the HOA? It seems this area is being built around a future Rockwall elementary school would this help or hurt resale value.
thanks in advance

[PixieB]

Saw this thread...very interested in this community and wondered if anyone had any opinions about it now???

[MurphyPl1]

Can't tell you about the community, but we have the same property management company. They've had their bouts of being non-cooperative, but I'm actually pretty happy with the company right now. We were having some serious issues and asked for a meeting. We got not only our rep, but the VP and the President. They were very responsive to our concerns and have really come around. Although I think at some point we mentioned that this was, in fact, the neighborhood who caught on to the Dateline sting right off the bat, and organized almost immediately to take their concerns to the PD and the Council.

[PixieB]

Thank you for the feedback. Do you feel that living in a master planned community, and having to "depend" on the HOA to be responsible for maintaining (therefore also affecting your property value and the ammenities that may have led you to choose there in the first place) is worth it, compared to living in a standard "nice" neighborhood where you depend on city parks and building your own pool, etc?

[MurphyPl1]

Well, our neighborhood actually has a city park, and an open playground next to the elementary school. And we don't have a pool. The developers thinking was that our "oversized" lots (1/4-1/2 acre) meant that more people would be building their own pools. Which is actually pretty true.

But having the HOA available to handle the overgrown lawns and maintaining the architectual integrity of the neighborhood is worth it IMO. We've had a lot of investor owned homes that weren't being maintained. And we've had some incredibly random requests for additions to people's homes. We've all got 3 car garages and someone wanted to build a detached garage in their backyard. Huge no! on that one.

But one of the best parts has actually been our social committee. We've started doing something called "Curbside Cocktails" once a month and we usually have 75-80 people. It's like a block party, but the whole neighborhood is invited. One family hosts and blocks off that section of their street (with neighbor permission) and provide snacks. It's been a great way to meet people from streets other than your own.

And we also do an Easter Egg Hunt, a 4th of July Bike Parade, a Fall Fest, and Caroling. And there's a poker group and a Girls Night group. So for a very new neighborhood with a lot of transplants there's a lot of interaction.

And with that Dateline sting, we realized just how much of a real neighborhood we were. People had noticed odd activity at the house and acted on it and let the police and the HOA chairs know. And we realized that our email network and social network was very effective.

We moved from a nice older neighborhood in Garland that was slowly falling apart due to lack of homeowner maintenance. And that caused homeowners to move which invited rental homes that weren't maintained, etc. And there was a development going in that many neighbors were frustrated about but we didn't have a cohesive group to lobby with.

When we moved we looked specifically for an HOA neighborhood to avoid some of those problems.