From crisis to opportunity!
Marsh Family Holdings didn’t begin with a grand plan to build a land company. Like all opportunities, it began with a crisis.
While calling mobile home dealerships to try and build houses, we saw how difficult it was for buyers to find land that which was suitable for low cost manufactured homes. There were plenty of people who wanted to own a home and a piece of land – but finding affordable, manufactured-home-friendly property near the places they lived and worked was much harder than it looked at first blush
This crisis was the opportunity. Marsh Family Holdings, Inc. was created as our land acquisition and development company, responsible for finding larger properties, improving them, dividing them into usable tracts, and most importantly, making them manufactured home-friendly. Buy Dallas Land became our sales arm, focused on connecting those properties directly with the people looking for land.
Our founder Matthew Marsh, had been investing money with a good friend who was already in the subdivision business. Eventually, this friend (generously) invited him out to see the business firsthand and become a strategic partner.
Our first deal taught us some lessons. Our first purchase was a 40-acre property in Van Zandt County, only about five minutes from a Starbucks. There was just one small detail: roughly 80% of the property was in a flood zone…..Needless to say, we learned very quickly what buyers wanted – and what was hurting our acquisitions process.
That first project helped shape the way we look at land today. We became much more focused on location, usability, access, utilities, manufactured-home compatibility, and what actually matters to the person who will eventually own the property.
Then we hit the second crisis…Even when we found good land at an affordable price, many of our buyers were being turned down by traditional banks. Some were self-employed. Some used an ITIN instead of a Social Security number. Others simply didn’t fit neatly into the lending standards used by conventional financial institutions.
So we decided to finance the properties ourselves….Today, we specialize in manufactured-home-friendly land, owner-to-owner financing, ITIN financing, affordable down payments, flexible monthly payments, and a simple buying process. We operate throughout Texas, primarily in areas near major metropolitan markets, growing communities, and major highways where people can still find affordable land without being completely disconnected from jobs, shopping, schools, and everyday life.
We’re also intentionally a small, family-owned organization. We’re not a giant national corporation buying thousands of properties from a distant office. We know our projects. We know our team. We work directly with our buyers, contractors, lenders, title companies, and local partners. As we’ve grown, we’ve worked hard to keep the culture that got us here in the first place.
Our company is built around four core values:
Those values guide how we treat our customers, how we work with our partners, and how we make decisions as a company.
We may have started with 40 acres and a whole lot of flood zone, but that first deal taught us one of the most important lessons in real estate:
Listen to the market, learn quickly, structure a win-win, and give the people people what they want!
