For $500,000 In Amarillo, You Can Get A Nice House In A Good Neighborhood, Or A College Football Stadium
By Tully Corcoran
You’re in Amarillo, Texas, and you’ve got $500,000 to spend on real estate. Do you buy …
A) A newer four-bedroom, three-bath, 3,500 square-foot brick house in a nice subdivision
or …
B) A college football stadium?
If you are the Canyon Independent School District, you go for the football stadium. CISD purchased Kimbrough Memorial Stadium from Division II West Texas A&M in Canyon, Texas, just south of Amarillo.
Nicknamed the “Buffalo Bowl,” Kimbrough Memorial Stadium as it sits is in a state of mild dilapidation, and needs almost $6 million in accessibility work to be brought up to code. It was built in 1959 and, among other problems, sits atop a steep incline that some find difficult to climb. The 1950s were a different time.
So what to do? Well, two years ago the student body at West Texas A&M started pushing pretty hard for a new stadium altogether, arguing that not only would the school be better off in the long run with a new stadium, but it would actually cost less to build new than repair Kimbrough.
As you might imagine, some alumni were not thrilled at this proposition. Maybe Kimbrough wasn’t the nicest place around, but it was home, see? You’re gonna tear down memories.
Well, anyway, young beat old this time around, and now the old barn is the school district’s problem.
On the idea it would be “pretty sweet” to have a football stadium for a house, we here at The Big Lead decided to consult Zillow to find out just how good of a deal this is, if you are shopping for residential real estate in or around Amarillo, Texas.
Here is what we found:
Asking price: $449,999
Pluses: Basement, four bathrooms, large living room, wood floors, open floor plan
Minuses: Interior styling a giant cliche
TBL offer? None
Asking price: $558,500
Pluses: A bevy of peaks, five bedrooms, custom built in 2015
Minuses: That’s an awful lot of peaks
TBL offer? $499,999.99 and not a penny more
Asking price: $499,900
Pluses: You could turn it into a football field if you wanted to
Minuses: None
TBL offer: Full asking
Asking price: $580,000
Pluses: Great for those whose aesthetic tastes veer into brutalism.
Minuses: Not brutalist enough
TBL offer? None
Some nice options there.
On the other hand, you could buy an old football stadium sitting on 40+ acres and wake up every morning pretending to be a hardscrabble football coach who sleeps in his office.