Summaries

Swamplot’s January was just too much fun! Here’s a list of some favorite posts from the last month:

• Why The Woodlands’s street names sound so much alike
• How to make your lawn look much greener, the Photoshop way
• House flips and selling your townhouse for full price: Amazing real-estate stories from Joel Osteen
• Shopping for foreclosures in Bear Creek Meadows
• A sneak peek at Uptown’s new Ritz-Carlton Hotel
• Shiny watercolors of a big new development on Westheimer
• The Montagu Hotel collapses
• For the man who has everything, except maybe enough places to pee: Turnberry Tower’s 10-bathroom penthouse.
• Hurricane Katrina: The Sitcom
• More Astrodome redevelopment fun

Swamplot is off tomorrow. Here, at year’s end, are some of our best posts from December:

• An exciting new lifestyle, in beautiful Southwest Houston! The TV work of legendary developer Michael Pollack resurfaces on YouTube
• Fancy designs for a poisoned site in the Fifth Ward
• How to sell a lemon: The Tremont Tower story goes straight to web video
• The Manhattan’s lonely discounted penthouse
• Don’t post new-home listings on a Thursday
• A super strip center for the Heights
• Crown Oaks homebuyers want the lakes they were promised
• Which 3-acre Galleria-area apartment complex is gonna be torn down for a new 3-acre Galleria-area apartment complex?
• The growing Houston real-estate empire of Zaya Younan
• Genuine Houston-landscape-inspired doodads for your home
• Rhea Wheeler’s three new restaurant redos
• Goodbyes: Sites of nighttime moshing, oldtime barbecue, lunchtime liposuction-by-injection
• Sold for land value in River Oaks

Need to catch up on the Houston real-estate scene? Here are a few favorite Swamplot posts from the past month:

• Astrodome redevelopers: Very good at keeping secrets
• New fitness centers headed for The Woodlands and Midtown
• Green-happy communities spread all the way to Alvin
• You loved the book. Now, for only a few million dollars more, you can live in your very own John Staub country house!
• The Titan, Randall Davis’s latest condo project in the Galleria, is ready to take off
• Behind-the-scenes panic at a shelter-magazine photo shoot
• What it’s like to wait for the very last moment to check out from the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Med Center
• Google Maps’ new features
• Greater Houston Builders’ Association: Buy now or else!

Missed out on some of last month’s real-estate fun? Here’s a review of some of Swamplot’s best September posts:

• Difficult home sales of the rich and/or famous: Mattress Mack, Richard Smalley, Dusty Hill
• IRA mortgage investors root for a downturn
• The Galleria’s new ultra-modern mixed-use project will include a giant-size Whole Foods
• The smoggiest part of Houston is . . . where?
• Developers think new “New Orleans style” apartments will be flooded . . . with new tenants
• Live on YouTube: TSU students go bat-crazy!
• Astrodome redevelopment plans get even weirder
• Million-dollar temporary housing in the Museum District
• And of course, the surprise erection: Boulevard Oaks’s new 23-story highrise