Inside the Dynasties of the Texas Real Estate Business

Real estate is a personal business, and there’s no closer relationship than blood.

Texas real estate is dominated by families whose inheritance includes industry legacy, ties and resources. The Real Deal’s Top 100 list features the names of multi-generational clans who’ve shaped city skylines and continue to drive development.

Across the Texas Triangle, these family fortunes have swelled with the growing population of the state. The Butts in San Antonio, the Johnsons in Houston and the Crows in Dallas have all benefited from and helped build the Texas boom, their family enterprises inextricably linked to the cities they came up in and alongside.

Here are some of the top dynasties in Texas real estate, based on TRD research.

City-shapers

The Crows are to the Big D what the Moodys are to Austin. Harlan Crow is the son of the immeasurably influential Trammell Crow and chairman of Crow Holdings, one of the largest apartment developers in America. Harlan Crow was CEO from the 1980s until 2017 when he handed the office to New Yorker Michael Levy in 2017, the first non-Crow to hold the position. Crow also developed Old Parkland, an exclusive office complex whose tenants include George W. Bush and the Texas branch of the New York Stock Exchange.

His sister, Lucy Billingsley, is the only daughter of Trammell Crow. Billingsley founded the commercial real estate firm Billingsley Company with her husband Henry Billingsley in 1978; today, it develops master-planned communities, mixed-use developments, multifamily, industrial and retail properties. Her son George and daughter Sumner work at the company.

The Hunt family, whose fortune began in oil with wildcatter H.L. Hunt, now develops and invests in hotels, offices, apartments and raw land. Ray Hunt, one of H.L. Hunt’s 15 children, is the developer behind Dallas’ iconic Reunion Tower.

One of H.L. Hunt’s granddaughters, Heather Hill Washburne, is married to developer and entrepreneur Ray Washburne, founder of Tex-Mex chain Mi Cocina and owner of the upscale retail center Highland Park Village. Washburne’s real estate interests match the Hunts’; he’s trying to build a 30-story, 1,000-key hotel near Dallas’ convention center, which should coincide nicely with Hunt Realty’s proposed Reunion Tower revamp.

The defining real estate dynasty of Uptown Dallas started in Switzerland. Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, founder of Harwood International, is the son of Swiss art collectors Jean Paul Barbier and Monique Mueller. They founded the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva in 1977. Their son moved to Dallas in 1979 and developed the 19-block Harwood District of condos, office towers and the boutique Hotel Swexan. His sons, Alexis and Oliver Barbier-Mueller, are co-presidents of the company.

In Fort Worth, the Bass family name is a common fixture on public facades, such as the Bass Performance Hall. As the wife of billionaire Ed Bass, Sasha C. Bass is a member of another family enriched by the oil business. The family traces its fortune back to uncle Sid Richardson, who struck oil at Keystone Field in West Texas in the 1930s. Ed’s brothers Sid and Lee Bass started developing Sundance Square, a 35-block mixed-use community in Downtown Fort Worth, in the early 1980s. Sasha and Ed took over ownership in 2019

North of the city sprawls AllianceTexas, an aviation-anchored master-planned community pioneered by Ross Perot Jr., son of the Electronic Data Systems magnate and independent presidential candidate.

In Houston, the Johnsons are behind one of the city’s most notable development companies, MetroNational. Jason Johnson is the CEO of the company founded by his grandfather Joseph Johnson in 1954. MetroNational developed Memorial City, a 300-acre mixed-use community in the wealthiest area in Houston, spanning the Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center, 3.2 million square feet of office space, the Memorial City Mall and the 90,000-square-foot mixed-use Gateway Memorial City.

Titans of sprawl

The generations behind Texas’ sea of suburbs include Perry Homes owner and executive Kathy Britton. The daughter of company founder Bob Perry, Britton has presided over the Houston-based homebuilding company’s massive growth. Perry Homes has developed over 65,000 homes across more than 100 communities.

Headquartered in San Antonio but spanning Texas, the Butt family’s grocery chain H-E-B isn’t a developer. Nonetheless, CEO Charles Butt has grown the brand of the one-room grovery store his grandmother Florence started in 1905 into the sixth-largest privately held company in the country and an asset that developers want to build around. Some of the largest developments underway in the state, including the 7,500-acre Walsh Ranch near Fort Worth, anchor their residential communities with H-E-B stores.

In Dallas, one of the highest-producing residential brokerages by sales volume and the fourth-biggest by agent count is Century 21 Judge Fite, today run by Jim Fite, son of the company’s founder and namesake.

On the luxury side, Jerry Mooty Jr., nephew of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, is CEO of Christie’s International Real Estate @properties Lone Star.

Hines, founded by chairman Jeffrey Hines’ father in 1957, historically developed offices but diversified under Hines’ leadership to develop large-scale master-planned communities as well.

Craig International, founded by Jim Craig and his son David Craig, developed the 2,000-acre, 6,000-home Craig Ranch in McKinney in the 1990s, and it’s participated in DFW’s northward sprawl ever since. Today, Craig International is developing the Preston Harbor community on the Oklahoma border.