It’s hot, flat and folk are fat: real estate agents tell the truth

In the midst of a great migration of Americans from California, estate agents who once made it their business to say nice things about their home states have begun telling the unvarnished truth.

“More guns than family members’: Austin, Texas. Real estate agents are starting to tell the unvarnished truth about living in the state. Picture: iStock

In a recent video about his home state, a Dallas estate agent named Richard Soto offered all those thinking of moving to Texas a few home truths about the place.

“If you like breathtaking views, Texas really isn’t going to offer that,” he declared. “Texas is very flat, the landscape is kind of boring.” There was the Texas hill country, he said, but it was not much to look at.

He added that “everything is bigger in Texas and that includes its people.” The state had “an issue with obesity”. Texas drivers were awfully aggressive, the August heat was almost unbearable and “most people have more guns than they do family members”.

A woman admires weapons at a gun show in Fort Worth, Texas.

This was not a suicide note. In the midst of a great migration of Americans from California and the cities of the eastern seaboard, estate agents in places like Texas, who once made it their business to say nice things about their home states, have begun offering the unvarnished truth.

In a video addressing those who might want to move to Greeley, Colorado, an estate agent named Jamie Eklund, who has lived there for 15 years, warned that “it smells like a farm town”. He added: “If this is something that might bother you, you might want to reconsider.”

“Is there a lot of cultural diversity in Northern Idaho?” an estate agent named Jackson Wilkey asked, rather pointedly, in a video offering ten reasons why viewers might not want to move there. “You have probably read things,” he added, an apparent reference to the days when the area was a base for the white supremacist group Aryan Nations.

“It’s a little bit of a stain on our past,” Conor Hammons, a fellow estate agent, added. “Just look anywhere in the country and you can find ugliness.” Things were improving, he said, but it was not exactly Seattle.

An employee organises produce at the Houston Food Bank facility on February 8, 2022 in Houston, Texas. Picture: Getty

Hammons and Wilkey tackled this sensitive subject in a video titled “Ten reasons NOT to move to Idaho.” Among the other downsides, the dining scene was limited, there was no airport, and though spring was gorgeous “with that comes the pine pollen”, Hammons said. Nor was it actually as cheap as you might think. “We have been discovered,” he added.

The American populace is less mobile than in the 1960s, when about 20 per cent would move in any given year. That figure has fallen steadily since then, to 8.4 per cent last year. But within the past two years, there have been broader movements to the suburbs, to the South, and to places such as Dallas, or Colorado Springs, or Boise, Idaho.

Elon Musk famously moved Tesla’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas as part of the great migration.

Soto, 46, said he now got calls every week. The callers were “overwhelmingly in California,” he said. “The second most are from New York.” In the face of all this interest, it made business sense to speak plainly about Texas. His YouTube video, Don’t Move To Texas, has 114,000 views. “I think the more honest and transparent I am, the better,” he said. “They want to use me as a realtor because they think: ‘This guy’s going to be completely upfront and honest.’ ”

Unusually for a video about moving to Texas, it was mostly shot in Miami, one of the places he escapes to in the summer. “Nobody wants to be around when it’s 105 degrees,” Soto said.

The Times