At 171.9 million acres, give or take, Texas is second only to Alaska among U.S. states in terms of land mass. Texas is bigger than most countries and includes some of the nation’s largest cities, along with ranch land, national parks, and everything in between.
But most Texans know all that. Here’s something people may not know: Who are the biggest landowners in a state so big?
To answer that question, the Houston Chronicle developed a first-of-its-kind tool using an analysis of property records in each of Texas’ 254 counties.
Marissa Luck, who covers real estate for the Chronicle, said the biggest landowner statewide surprised her.
“Texas has this sort of reputation for being this rugged, independent state, like almost its own identity, right, from the rest of the U.S. But actually the U.S. government, Uncle Sam, is the biggest landowner in our state,” she said. “The federal government has about 2.25 million acres, and that’s like a national park, obviously, and a lot of forest.”
The other top landowners are the University of Texas System, which has 2.1 million acres – a bunch of West Texas lands that generate a lot of revenue for our public universities – and the State of Texas.
“Beyond government entities, there’s also some massive private landowners – ranching families, timber, oil investors – so just a vast and diverse amount of owners that kind of reflect our big state and broad economy,” Luck said.
Several big names stand out among the private landowners, Luck said.
“King Ranch is a big one. They have 825,000 acres, and it’s not just a cattle ranch now. It’s also like a lot of tourism there,” she said. “King Ranch just has a lot of historical significance and kind of shaped early Texas cowboy culture and agriculture.”
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Alexandra Kanik, a data editor at the Chronicle, said the data used in the project came from a company that scrapes information from Texas counties about property ownership.
“We used it to understand who owns what properties, who owns the most properties. But if you kind of imagine looking at a spreadsheet or a list: You got a bunch of names in there, all the names are spelled a little bit differently,” she said. “Take, for example, our first landowner, the United States. They were in the database about 250 times under different names. So you have the National Park Service, Army Corps of Engineers.
“So we had to do a lot of work to kind of join those together, make sure we understood who was the same kind of parent entity.”
The Chronicle did a similar landowner analysis for the 10-county Houston metro area.
“Instead of looking at the biggest landowners by acreage, instead we looked at parcels – so plots of land, who owns the most plots of land,” Kanik said. “We wanted to see a little bit more like who’s controlling the market, basically, in the Houston area.”
Luck said land ownership in Houston does paint a different picture than the situation statewide.
“Instead of these massive ranches or oil-rich areas, there’s a mix of residential developers, Camillo Companies, D.R. Horton and PulteGroup, the controversial Colony Ridge owners,” Luck said. “Then you also have government agencies like the City of Houston that owns a lot of parks and the airport, and then infrastructure operators like Harris County Flood Control.
“So I think that zooming into Houston, it’s less about cattle and oil and more about the residential real estate companies and the entities that are sort of shaping the growth patterns of Houston and helping us prepare for flooding and natural disasters.”
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Luck said one of her takeaways from this project is how hard it is to track land ownership in Texas.
“There’s no centralized debt database. All this information is fragmented over 254 counties, and a lot of companies use aliases and different names,” she said. “So that part of the work that we did was trying to confirm that company LLC was the same as company, you know, X Corp. And that just is, I kind of think it goes back to our history in the state of being super pro business and enabling companies to sort of stay private.”
The presence of so many large developers in the Houston market really underscores the amount of growth the city is experiencing, Luck said.
“Houston is such a magnet for home builders. And at a statewide level, it does sort of reinforce some stereotypes about Texas – well, other than the fact that the U.S. government’s the biggest owner in all these government entities, the private owners on the list really speak to the rich natural resources we have,” she said. “There’s a lot of oil land, timber, cattle ranching land. And so I think it does kind of reinforce the history that we have in Texas.”
