Ray Johnston needed 26 handshakes.
The former Dallas Maverick and current country singer who entered real estate as a side hustle scored some prime land right outside Princeton, Texas, just before it came to be recognized as the fastest-growing city in the country. To sell to a homebuilder and turn a pro-grade profit on the first major deal of his real estate career, all Johnston needed was for neighboring property owners to approve easements for sewer lines.
That meant persuading 26 homeowners, many of whom had moved to Princeton precisely to avoid subdivisions, to let Johnston build.
“If it wasn’t me,” Johnston shrugged, “it’d be somebody else.”
North Texas hay fields have been turning into neighborhoods for decades as Dallas grew north. Princeton, 45 minutes from Dallas in Collin County, is just the latest to benefit, or suffer, depending on who you are. Brokers and developers are mining in a gold rush, local business owners are enjoying a quickening marketplace and North Texans are finding quieter, more affordable neighborhoods with a closer drive to work in Frisco, Plano and Irving. On the other hand are the old guard, the people who’ll say you used to see the Milky Way over Lake Lavon (now sentried by signs that say “No Fishing From Bridge”) and the retirees in double-wides on 2 acres. Unaffected by the city’s restrictions, but also lacking city infrastructure, their neck of the woods is the ripest for development, but it’s work to get the land ready.
Enter Johnston, a former loan officer and NBA athlete whose hard-won victory over leukemia and second life as a country singer have inspired several profiles and a documentary funded by his old boss, Mark Cuban. Johnston’s aw-shucksness can make it seem like he stumbled into the Princeton deal.
True, besides a local’s instinct, neither he nor the partners in his business, No Bad Days LLC, specifically foresaw that Princeton’s population would double to 37,000 in the four years following his 2021 purchase of 138 acres, or that the local government would scramble to slow things down with a temporary moratorium on residential construction inside city limits that will have lasted more than a year when it expires in November.
Though his scope is tiny compared to many of the Metroplex’s projects, Johnston, for both his good timing and his understanding of the moment, carries the story of Princeton and places like it as much as anyone. Everyone knew white-collar Dallasites wanted bigger yards and smaller schools, but not everybody predicted quite how far they’d be willing to stretch for them. Those that saw it are getting a payoff — and a lesson in Texas-sized growing pains.
“I’m all in on DFW growing,” Johnston said. “The only way this loses is if all of a sudden people start leaving Texas. Doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon.”
(To be sure, population growth has slowed, and residential prices in some Dallas suburbs have been correcting, even as homebuilders and investors scoop up more deals.)
Sales prices aren’t available in Texas property records and Johnston won’t disclose how much he paid. But D.R. Horton paid about $70,000 per acre for unentitled land that became the Crossmill subdivision about five miles north of Johnston’s tract, according to a company filing.
Gold medal growth
The population trend line of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area hasn’t taken a dent since the 1970s. The 2020 U.S. Census counted 7.6 million in the Metroplex; that went to 8.3 million in 2024 estimates. Behind the steady rise of the population, each new town it absorbs experiences a spike that, in Princeton’s case, can get steep. Princeton cracked 5,000 residents for the first time between the 2000 and 2010 Census; it surpassed 10,000 by 2017. The Census estimated that Princeton had hit 37,000 people in July 2024.
Construction is everywhere, and rush hour traffic crawls. Straddling FM 3286, the most direct road to Dallas from Johnston’s purchase, is a bait shop-feed store-gas station on one side and on the other, a fresh concrete pad patrolled by Caterpillar machines. (Caterpillar moved its headquarters to Irving in 2022.) Construction crews have pitted all four corners of the intersection of FM 982 and Highway 380, one of the many traffic lights in a town that famously had but two in 2013.
Princeton’s surge has made it a symbol of Texas’ success but local reticence brought the attention of the state legislature.
“If it wasn’t me, it’d be somebody else.”
Its city council voted for the moratorium in September of 2024, to give the city time to pave roads and lay pipe. Infrastructure aside, a feud between local and state government is smoldering. State House and Senate leaders made it a priority to add affordable housing this year, and they aim to find it behind local red tape. Dealing a blow to those who’d expand more gradually, new state laws take effect this year that trim municipal authority over neighborhood density, residential conversions and building moratoriums. Pressing pause now requires notices by mail and newspaper, two public hearings at least 30 days apart and a supermajority vote to pass. Moratoriums automatically expire after 90 days, and the city can only extend them to 180.
At a late June meeting of the Princeton council, with a moratorium extension on the agenda (it passed), resentment of the new regime seeped in.
One councilmember asked Assistant City Attorney Grant Lowry if there was a way to get an exemption to the new rule in case they wanted to extend again.
“That’s not my understanding,” Lowry said, with a certain grimness. “The state is notorious for being developer-friendly and anti-municipality.”
The development lockdown in Princeton’s city limits has made county land all the more desirable. The problem is that it comes without infrastructure. Owners looking to sell to homebuilders must either assume the cost of bringing in roads, water and sewer lines, which means procuring easements from neighbors, or cut their asking price to pass this cost to the buyer. In a community with growing pains, the price of land and easements responds not only to demand but also to who’s buying — a big homebuilding company or a friendly country singer.
Scouting for passive income
As Johnston tells his story over burgers at Park House, a club in Highland Park, it becomes clear that his Princeton play wasn’t dumb luck. Between music gigs at billionaire Ray Hunt’s ranch, chance friendships with the Scovells, hangouts with Cuban and apparently regular hunting trips with a rotating cast of ranch brokers, Johnston has spent years making connections with Dallas’ most eminent players. He’s just now leveraging them.
Johnston lays out maps of his Princeton purchase next to our fries. A Sixpence None the Richer song is playing, and when it gets around to the chorus, Johnston slips into the harmony.
Looking for a passive income source to support his musical career, Johnston acquired the land in 2021, he explained. Initially, he was scouting a good site for a boat storage facility on Lake Lavon after enjoying some success with a similar project near Tyler.
“I just wanted to invest in something that was passive, that could be somewhat recession-proof, because I was touring along with the band and I didn’t have time to be there,” Johnston said.
The land he bought comprises two tracts; a Collin County native named Willis Housewright owned one, and his sister-in-law Flo owned the other. Flo, who lives in Oklahoma, said Ray’s personal touch convinced her and Willis to accept his offer.
“We had been approached several times about selling, but Ray and several others at the same time presented us with different offers, and we decided to go with Ray and his partner at that time. We just had a good feeling about what they presented to us. And certainly financially, we had some demands that they readily accepted. Anyway,” Flo said, “it went very smooth. … He’s an unusual person, business-wise, as well as just being a very kind, giving person.”
Of course, as Johnston remembers, the obvious question eventually occurred to Flo during their three-year correspondence: Why not call up Lennar?
“She asked us, ‘Hey, why don’t we just sell to the end seller?’” Ray recalls. He told her, “‘That makes sense. But if you do that, you’re going to do a lot of work to your land, like get water easements to bring water to your land; get sewer easements to bring sewer to your land. We’re good at that, so that’s why we want to pay you this.’ And it was a lot of work to get easements to that land.”
North Texas hay fields have been turning into neighborhoods for decades as Dallas grew north. Princeton is just the latest to benefit, or suffer, depending on who you are.
That’s an understatement, according to his business partners. Brant Landry and Clint Riley, partners at the Dallas firm Reserve Capital Partners, also have a stake in No Bad Days. Each met Johnston about a decade ago on a different hunting trip. There’s a reason why some homebuilders avoid the entitlement process altogether, preferring to purchase land ready to build, they pointed out.
Clayton Snodgrass, principal at Bluebonnet Partners, and son-in-law of Celina magnate Rex Glendenning, had more of a nose for Princeton’s potential than either Johnson, Landry or Riley. He’s the one who convinced Johnston — the would-be passive investor — that the hustle would be worth it, seeing the potential to get ahead of the major homebuilders and increase the profit when he sold.
“I told him, ‘Look, if you want to move this thing along as far as possible, you’re gonna have to go door to door.’ He did the knocking on doors and kissing babies,” Snodgrass said.
“That’s the most easements that I’ve seen a guy that’s not a professional easement procurer go get,” Riley added.
At each of the 26 houses, Johnston showed up with a gift certificate to a nearby store or restaurant, a business card shaped like a guitar pick, and occasionally his girlfriend.
“If you’re with a girlfriend, it’s a little less sales, more civilized,” he said.
ISO: Water, wastewater and police
Dallas isn’t only swelling north. There’s been healthy development south of the city for some time. Ellis County towns like Midlothian and Waxahachie have attracted the attention of players as big as Jerry Jones, Walton Global, RREAF Holdings and Cawley Partners.
Even so, southern areas are the underdog, with low-performing school districts that belt the city to the south. Meanwhile, the northward expansion keeps going, the Dallas North Tollway reaching toward Oklahoma. Companies that relocate to the Metroplex overwhelmingly prefer the northern neighborhoods, with Toyota, KFC and State Farm in Plano, TIAA and McAfee in Frisco, Charles Schwab in Westlake and Raytheon in McKinney.
It’s less sure which rural spot will become the next Princeton. Plenty of Texas cities have scrambled to offer tax benefits for commercial development in the hopes that employees will follow, even if they also encounter the typical growing pains.
But the issue of local control is a definitive wedge in Texas government, and municipal leaders chafe at statewide guardrails on their authority.
Johnston needed his sewer easements, and as the Princeton moratorium winds toward its final deadline, the city is adjusting to the widening compass of Dallas’ sprawl by making headway on an improved wastewater system and building a 3 million gallon storage tank. The police force is hiring, and new roads should redistribute traffic.
“The city is making some progress,” Lowry, the Princeton attorney, told the council in late June.
The last 60 acres
Johnston kept pursuing the 26 neighbors. After each easement chat, he’d send a personalized gift basket, and eventually, everyone said yes. Growth might have been inevitable, but the landowners just outside Princeton didn’t prefer someone else, it turned out. He got the easements he needed, and he’s now sold two-thirds of the land.
Dollar Tree picked up 1.2 acres and built a store in February at the T-intersection on FM 982. Lennar bought 32 acres last December and 43 this March. Another 16 acres are under contract now with an apartment development company. Johnston won’t say how much he got for it.
Today, the land is graded and plumbed for Lennar’s upcoming subdivision. After a rain, contractors’ bootprints overlapped with deer tracks in the mud. Decorative limestone pillars, the only structures except the new Dollar Tree, mark what will become the entrances to the development. For now, the view toward the lake is lush; it won’t look the same when development starts.
But if it hadn’t been Johnston, it would probably be somebody else — this is his refrain.
“Much like music,” Ray says, “it was just timing.”
He puts the conclusion less lyrically in the biography of his LinkedIn profile, which describes the land — the deals he’s made and what’s left to sell.
“Sewer,” his write-up ends, “arrives Dec ’25.”