About CandysDirt – Midland-Odessa

Red Star Farms vineyard1

Welcome to CandysDirt.com, Midland-Odessa, an award-winning site for the truly real-estate obsessed in West Texas. We are a sister website to the famous CandysDirt.com of Dallas fame. The National Association of Real Estate Editors named CandysDirt.com the BEST Real Estate Blog in the country in June, 2013. We celebrate real estate here every single day!

One beautiful day in September, 2014, we landed in Midland to visit a very special property on the market  — Red Star Farm. Not only was this a farm with pump jacks going full speed, it was a winery and a home with a wonderful, warm-hearted story. We dined at the Garlic Press, and hooped it up at the Wall Street Bar & Grill with our host, Brian Scarborough.

We fell in love with Midland (& Brian) so much, we almost stayed. That’s when we decided that Midland, Texas needed a little CandysDirt.

CandysDirt.com Midland-Odessa offers readers House Porn (relax, it’s just photos), celebrity real estate, neighborhood profiles, what’s hot, (what’s not), sales insight, Realtor profiles, new developments, the “f” word (um, foreclosures, what were you thinking?), builder talk, real estate news and consumer Q&A’s.  We showcase great listings, help them break away from the noise. We cover those neighborhood HOA meetings that make everyone’s blood pressure rise. Come tax appraisal time, we have The Tax Doctor right here. We even have a real estate attorney on staff for the really tough questions. We do it all from our base in Midland where our reporters love to report the West Texas Dirt.

Unlike 98% of the real estate sites out there, CandysDirt.com is edited by journalists who are not trying to sell you a home; a journalist who went to real estate school to sleep with the enemy and holds a Texas real estate license (this month, it’s with Ebby Halliday) but does NOT sell; a journalist who visits each property and neighborhood and kicks the tires hard in her pointy Louboutins. Or cowboy boots. Make no mistake: Candy Evans and company tell it like it is. Updated daily, reported accurately for the real estate consumer, and always spiced with dish from readers and local experts, CandysDirt.com is a daily fix for anyone who loves real estate in Midland-Odessa.


ABOUT CANDY EVANS

Candy in chair Kent Barker photo

Candy Evans is an internet entrepreneur and one of the nation’s leading real estate bloggers. She is renowned by the industry as a social media futurist. She reports on Dallas real estate for WFAA-TV’s Daybreak with Ron Corning, and is frequently called as a real estate expert by Dallas media. She is also a real-estate editor for CultureMap Dallas, and writes a weekly column for the Katy Trail Weekly. She even has her own web-based Real Estate show called, The Party Line

She is the founder and publisher of an exciting platform of Dallas-based real estate sites including her signature CandysDirt.com, everything you need to know about real estate in North Texas, and SecondShelters.com, devoted to the vacation home market. And of course, MidlandDirt.com for Midland-Odessa. And yes, we are still psyched about the GOLD! In 2013, CandysDirt.com was named Best Blog in the country by the venerable National Association of Real Estate Editors, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious journalism associations, and the only association for journalists covering real estate, home and urban design.

Candy has written for AOL Real Estate, and is a guest blogger for Joel Kotkin’s The New Geography,  Inman Real Estate News plus a host of national sites.  Candy was a longtime editor at Dallas’ D Magazine and sister pubs, and in 2007 founded the wildly successful Dallas real estate blog, DallasDirt. That’s where she broke the news on countless celebrity homes, including where former Midland resident and president George W. Bush and Laura bought their Dallas home in 2008.

ABOUT JOANNA ENGLAND

Jo England Mugshot ColorIf Joanna England could house hunt forever, she’d be a happy woman. Finding unique, luxurious, dreamy (and affordable!) listings for CandysDirt.com turned out to be just as good.

Covering the North Texas real estate market is coming full circle for Joanna. Her first-ever real job was at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, helping to produce the center’s recently launched e-newsletter. From there Joanna landed a sweet job at The Dallas Morning News as an editorial assistant, later selecting the letters to the editor for the editorial page.

It was while she was associate editor at People Newspapers that she met Candy Evans, who introduced her to the wild and crazy world of real estate blogging. After her son, Cooper, was born in 2011, Joanna decided that blogging full time was the perfect way to spend more time with her son while still having a fulfilling career in journalism. Luckily, Candy thought so, too, and hired Joanna as an executive editor for her growing family of websites. She has since written columns for Bubble Life Media and In The Loop Kids, too.

And that brings us to today. When she’s not covering the biggest and best homes, she’s wrangling a 3-year-old, a husband who acts like a 3-year-old, two dogs, two cats, and three chickens in her Casa View Haven home.

READER CONTRIBUTIONS

CandysDirt.com readers create the lifeblood of the site, and anonymity will ALWAYS be assumed and protected. We invite you to comment away, but please be polite. Also, rather than on Facebook, comment on the blog: Mark Zuckerberg has enough moolah! Email and IP addresses are kept confidential and never shared.

WE LOVE TIPS! Mail them to [email protected]. When you email us, the correspondence becomes the property of CandysDirt.com and we reserve the right to print it as content at our discretion unless you specifically tell us to keep mum in an email. You can certainly ask to remain anonymous, and boy do we respect that! So go ahead, speak up! You can also contact Joanna England at [email protected].

PHOTO CONTRIBUTIONS AND USAGE
Candy’sDirt.com loves to get photos from our readers! Send us your favorite House Porn. See something dreadful that’s real-estate related, snap and  send our way! Send us homes you have designed, purchased, or just drooled over! We love any trends in real estate. Of course, when you email us photos, they become the property of CandysDirt.com and we reserve the right to print any and/or all at our discretion unless you specifically tell us otherwise, in an email that we receive. If you are sending us a photo for which you do not own the rights, please indicate as such, and tell us who the heck the content owner is, in your submission. CandysDirt.com photos may be reproduced online only, and we respectfully ask for a hyperlinked photo credit to the site. Oh, and invite us to any parties, too – we prefer champagne, though Prosecco will do. For all offline usage inquiries, please contact Candy Evans at [email protected].

ADVERTISING
Do we accept advertising? Is the sky blue? At CandysDirt.com, advertising on the site does not influence our editorial coverage ONE BIT. We post our advertisers’ listings ONLY when they meet with our approval. In other words, no fugly here, unless we are making a point. (Or fun of them. My bad.) In fact, we have been known to scream about bathtubs that are not deep enough, doorways not wide enough, and wire coat hangers. Unlike our taste in wine, our rates are very reasonable. When it comes to Real Estate, the internet is where it’s at, baby. And our numbers are growing daily: 475,000 plus pageviews/month last time we looked. We can get as many as 10,000 unique visitors in ONE DAY! Yep, we are hot! If you would like to be invited to advertise on CandysDirt.com, please see our advertising page.

PRESS INQUIRIES AND SUBMISSIONS
Are we shy? Um, no. Candy Evans speaks to various consumer and real estate groups on a regular basis. She’s fun, engaging, and really spills the beans, often with photos. Requests for interviews, public appearances and speaking engagements should be directed to [email protected]. Real estate brokers, agents, builders or their press representatives may wish to submit material for editorial consideration, and we welcome you with open arms and a nice glass of bubbly!

DISCLAIMER
CandysDirt.com is a consumer information site but it cannot help publishing gossip and possible rumors, also conjecture, certainly opinions, all sprinkled in with accurately reported factual information. We are a lot of fun, but we are not perfect. (Damn.) The site may contain errors or inaccuracies. We do not guarantee, and no reliance should be placed upon, the correctness or reliability of  CandysDirt.com content. Hey, this is the internet age: links to content and quotation of material from other sites are not the responsibility of  CandysDirt.com. And sometimes when we’ve had too much to drink we mis-spell. Oops! But we really do want to get it right, and will correct all factual inaccuracies if kindly brought to our attention.