Looking for house near Alcon

[loves2read]

Schools are always one of the top 2 or 3 factors when deciding where to buy a home--even if YOU don't have children or intend to because you have to consider resale value...
It is very difficult to raise the rating of a school--I would hesitate to suggest you buy in area that has low-rated elementary schools in the anticipation that they will improve--
that rarely happens and it is certainly not something to count on...

look for history of successful TAKS ratings--even in schools with high % of students on free lunch program, you can find schools with good scores...check for tenure/stability of faculty, ratio of apartment children vs SFH (if they will tell you)--those are important aspects to school's success IMO

[osutim]

Originally Posted by Sandhill3

Thanks to everyone for your responses! My wife and I recently began serious house hunting, and we have decided that we would like to live in or near Fort Worth rather than somewhere like Mansfield or Aledo. We love the city of FW, and we want to be very close to my office on Altamesa.

Since we don't have kids yet, we have decided that we do not need the top public schools (and we haven't been able to find anything in Tanglewood), although we would like to find a place where the public schools at least have the potential for improvement in the years to come. Are there any up and coming public elementary schools that anyone can recommend?

As far as neighborhoods, we are intrigued by Fairmount, but some of the houses (and residents) there look a little sketchy. Mistletoe appears out of our price range. Our last house is an old one in a historic district, and we are not sure that we want to go down that road again. I would welcome any thoughts about Fairmount.

On the other hand, we don't want suburbia. So our current plan is to focus on established neighborhoods in FW. We like Overton Park, TCU area and Candleridge. The houses in Candleridge are very reasonably priced, but we have not been able to find much information on Candleridge. Is there something that makes Candleridge undesirable? I understand that Poynter elementary is pretty bad. If anyone has opinions on Candleridge, please let me know.

Any other good neighborhoods (especially with mature trees) with houses under 275K in south FW?

On the whole, we are very pleased with Fort Worth - it is a wonderful city and we are thankful to be here!

Hi There, I came across this thread as i am in a similar situation as you were here. I may possibly be moving from Ohio to this same area and wondering how your search went and what your thoughts are now? What are would you suggest based on the same criteria that you were in when you were looking?

[naterator]

I work very close to where you are and we're in the Lake Arlington part of 76016. We love it here. 15 minutes from my garage to my desk.