What features would make a home safe in a disaster? A FEMA-standard safe room, backup power, stored water and defensible sightlines. The same upgrades protect against the disaster North Texas actually gets, which is weather.
Every October my feed fills up with lists of the best houses to survive the apocalypse and every October I think the same thing. Most of those houses would be miserable to live in for the 364 days a year when nothing is trying to eat you.
So let's do this properly. We will start with the fun version, look at the people who actually built doomsday houses and what happened to them, and finish with the part that is genuinely useful, because the disaster North Texas gets is not undead. It is weather and it has already happened here.
The zombie criteria, seriously applied
If you were grading a house purely on siege performance, here is what would actually matter.
Sightlines. A cul-de-sac with a single approach is defensible. A corner lot with four directions of access is not. Congratulations, you have discovered why cul-de-sac lots command a premium, though for reasons involving traffic rather than the undead.
A second story with a load-bearing staircase. Any defensive plan that involves retreating upstairs requires that upstairs not be accessible through the kitchen window.
Solid-core doors and impact-rated glass. Most interior doors in production homes are hollow. A determined raccoon could get through one.
Water you did not have to go outside for. A water heater is forty to eighty gallons of stored drinking water and most people do not know it.
A food supply that is not in a freezer. Freezers need power. Power is the first thing to go in every scenario, fictional or otherwise.
A fence you cannot see through. Board-on-board beats wrought iron for this specific application, though your HOA may have opinions.
And a well, or at least a plan for water. This is where the fantasy meets reality, because most of us are on city water and city water is a system with pumps, and pumps need electricity.
That last one is the tell. Every serious apocalypse design comes down to water and power, not weapons. Which is exactly what the people who actually built these places figured out.
The people who really built them
These are not hypothetical. All of these exist or existed.
The Survival Condo, Concordia, Kansas. Larry Hall bought a decommissioned Atlas missile silo in 2008 for $300,000 and spent about $20 million turning it into fifteen underground floors holding twelve condo units for up to 75 people. It descends 197 feet. It has a swimming pool, a movie theater, a rock climbing wall, a gym, a sauna, a bar, a shooting range, a jail cell, and a tilapia aquaponics farm, plus three years of stored food and a system for clearing volcanic ash. This is the one that actually got finished and it is genuinely impressive engineering.
The Underground House, Las Vegas. Avon executive Girard Henderson built this between 1974 and 1978 for about a million dollars. It sits 23 feet underground inside a 16,000 square foot space, with a 6,000 square foot home in the middle of it. What makes it wonderful is the commitment to pretending you are not underground: artificial lawn carpet, fake trees, floor-to-ceiling painted scenery, an outdoor fireplace with a fake tree beside it and nearly a thousand fluorescent lights in four colors that could simulate a sunrise. It sold for $1,150,000 in 2014 and has spent years since listed at several million without finding a buyer. Remember that detail. It matters later.
Vivos xPoint, Igloo, South Dakota. More than 500 concrete bunkers on a former Army munitions depot, marketed as the largest survival community on earth. Each is roughly 2,200 square feet. Here is the catch: residents sign 99-year leases and do not own the land. Lease fees have climbed from $25,000 to around $55,000, plus water hookup, monthly common area fees and annual ground rent. Residents have raised significant complaints about unfinished work and promised amenities that never arrived and there have been numerous lawsuits and complaints to the state attorney general.
Trident Lakes, Ector, Texas. And now the local one.
The doomsday resort an hour from here
About an hour northeast of Dallas, in Fannin County, someone tried to build a $400 million luxury doomsday community. Seven hundred acres. Five hundred and thirty-two earth-sheltered condos arranged around three white-sand lagoons and connected by underground tunnels. An 18-hole golf course. A 100,000 square foot equestrian center. Polo fields. Gun ranges. Helipads. A DNA vault. Talk of a private jet runway. More than a thousand people on the waiting list.
What actually got built was a 65-foot marble fountain decorated with mermen and horses at the entrance.
In July 2018, Trident Lakes Property Holdings filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The owner filed personally the same day along with two other companies, with combined debts reported between $12 million and $70 million. The filing came a week after news broke that he faced federal criminal charges for allegedly agreeing to launder millions in Colombian drug money through the development.
I am not telling you this to be mean about it. I am telling you because there is a real lesson in it for anyone buying anything and it is the same lesson from the Rowlett peninsula and every other project sold on renderings. Buy what is built. Do not buy what is promised. The fountain was real. Everything else was a brochure.
PHOTO SUGGESTION: If you can find a licensed image of the Trident Lakes fountain sitting alone in a field, that is the single best photo in this post. A 65-foot marble fountain with nothing behind it tells the whole story without a caption.
What the resale market thinks of all this
Here is the part that is actually about real estate.
The Las Vegas underground house sold for $1.15 million in 2014 and has been trying to sell for several times that ever since, without success. Vivos residents cannot sell what they do not own. Trident Lakes buyers got a fountain.
Extreme, single-purpose housing is very hard to sell. Your buyer pool for a bunker is the set of people who want a bunker, in your city, at your price, this year. That is a small group, and it is the same problem I have written about with age-restricted communities and with anything unusual: the more specific the house, the narrower the exit.
So if the zombies do not come, the person holding a highly specialized property is the one with the problem.
The apocalypse North Texas actually gets
Now the useful part, and I want to be serious for a minute.
On December 26, 2015, an EF4 tornado cut a 13-mile path through Rowlett and Garland. That was not a hypothetical. People in our market lost homes and lost family, and anyone who was here remembers exactly where they were.
We also get hail that totals roofs, ice storms that take down power for days, and the kind of summer we just had. The threat here is real and it is weather.
So here is what actually protects a house, in order of how much good it does.
A safe room built to standard. The specification is FEMA P-361 paired with ICC-500. Those standards require the structure to withstand winds up to 250 mph, survive a 15-pound two-by-four striking it at 100 mph, have a door that opens without power, be reachable within about 30 seconds, and include ventilation and emergency lighting, with minimum wall thickness of roughly four inches of concrete or 3/16 inch steel, properly anchored. Anything sold as a shelter that does not meet those standards is a closet with a heavy door.
If you want the extreme version, the Monolithic Dome Institute is in Italy, Texas, about an hour south of Dallas, building concrete domes they say meet FEMA's near-absolute protection criteria. FEMA does not formally certify them as such, but the domes have a documented history of coming through hurricanes and tornadoes intact. They are also, and there is no kind way to put this, domes. That is a resale conversation.
Backup power. A standby generator or a battery system. Everything else on this list depends on it.
Water storage. Not because of zombies. Because in February 2021 a lot of people in this state learned what happens when the taps stop.
A roof in good condition and current insurance with a deductible you have actually read. I have written about both of those, because hail is the thing here that most reliably costs people real money. If you want that conversation, it is in Hail Damage in North Texas: What Every Homeowner, Buyer, and Seller Needs to Know.
Two weeks of food that does not need a freezer, and a way to cook it.
And the least exciting one, which matters more than any of it: knowing your neighbors. Every serious study of disaster outcomes says the same thing. The people who do best are the ones whose neighbors check on them. No bunker outperforms a street where somebody notices you did not come outside.
Does a safe room add value?
Buyers here do ask about storm shelters, and I do think a properly built one helps a listing, particularly with anyone who was in this area in December 2015. It is not a dollar-for-dollar return in the way a roof or an HVAC replacement is, but it is a real differentiator in a market where every other house has the same finishes.
The important part is that it is built to standard and documented. Keep the paperwork. A certified safe room is a feature. An unlabeled concrete box under the garage is a question mark, and question marks cost money during an option period.
Frequently asked questions
Do storm shelters add value to a home in Texas? A properly built, documented safe room is a genuine differentiator in a North Texas listing, especially with buyers who remember local tornado history. It is not a dollar-for-dollar return like a roof replacement, but it helps a house stand out. Keep the certification paperwork, because an undocumented shelter raises questions rather than answering them.
What standard should a tornado safe room meet? Look for FEMA P-361 paired with ICC-500. Together those require resistance to 250 mph winds, survival of a 15-pound two-by-four impact at 100 mph, a door that opens without power, quick accessibility, ventilation, emergency lighting, and proper anchoring with minimum wall thickness.
Are underground bunker homes a good investment? Generally no, as an investment. Highly specialized properties have very small buyer pools, and the examples bear that out. A Las Vegas underground house that sold for $1.15 million in 2014 has spent years listed for several times that without selling. Build for how you want to live, not for resale, if you go this direction at all.
If you found this useful, read these next
- How to Prepare Your Home for Freezing Rain in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the unglamorous version of everything above, for the emergency we actually get every couple of winters.
- Your Home Has an Expiration Date covers realistic lifespans for the systems you would be relying on when something goes wrong.
Happy Halloween from Jeanie Marten Real Estate. If you want the genuinely useful version of this conversation, ask me about safe rooms the next time we are walking a house. I will tell you which ones are real and which ones are a closet with delusions.
Visit MartenTeam.com or book a consultation.
Jeanie Marten Real Estate 972-414-0719 | MartenTeam.com
Sources referenced
- Survival Condo, Concordia, Kansas
- Texas Monthly: Trident Lakes, a home of last resort
- CBS Texas: North Texas luxury doomsday resort files for bankruptcy
- Underground House, Las Vegas
- South Dakota News Watch: Vivos xPoint residents raise financial and safety concerns
- FEMA storm shelter requirements, P-361 and ICC-500
- Monolithic Dome Institute: surviving hurricanes and tornadoes
