Texas Veterans Land Board (TVLB) Program

This post is to help individuals considering using the TVLB for purchasing their rural property. To give a little background our journey started with wanting to buy some property for our primary residence. We were looking at 15+ acres in most cases and finding a company to finance that amount of property is difficult. We have decent credit (750+ FICO without any derogs) and our biggest limitation was a significant down payment since we wanted to pay cash to get everything set up on the property. We have purchased a home before and this was our first rural process but I did enough reading on the front end to get an understanding at a macro level what was necessary to get into a piece of property.

The TVLB website will provide a lot of information to get you started but one area where the website is explaining the post closing process. After some discussions with a manager within the TVLB it became obvious they are there to close the deal on the property, not assist you after closing except in approving easements. This is probably one of those things in life where you can only learn by experiencing however I'm hoping to help people in the future who wish to utilize the TVLB and live on their property.

We finally closed on the property within the 'Chronology of a Land Loan' discussed on their website. One thing to keep in mind if using the TVLB is that it can take a long time for the title company to get the paperwork to the TVLB to process. If you wish to expedite this process you, the landowner, needs to put pressure on the loan company to get it to the TVLB in a timely manner. It is my understanding the chronology page will be updated in the future but again, it is your responsibility to know when and where to put pressure on people in the process.

In conclusion we might use the TVLB again however my wife and I have both agreed that the we would use the TVLB again is if we have 6 months of lead time once we extended an offer or we're just buying the land for investment purposes and not to live on.