Lake Granbury
Fort Worth's lake — 45 miles southwest on US-377. 8,200 acres of Brazos River reservoir in Hood County, 10 minutes from the historic Granbury Square. One operator (BRA), one county, and a city-tax boundary that splits the same neighborhood into two very different tax bills.
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Submit a Photo →The Lake at a Glance
Lake Granbury is a man-made reservoir on the Brazos River in Hood County, Texas, created by the Brazos River Authority's DeCordova Bend Dam and completed in 1969. The lake was built without public tax dollars — financed entirely through a water supply agreement with TXU Electric Company, which uses the water for cooling at a natural gas plant on the reservoir and at the Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant near Glen Rose. That financial origin is not a trivia footnote: it explains why BRA manages this lake with the posture of a utility-focused operator rather than a recreation-first agency, and why water levels can fluctuate in ways that affect cove-lot buyers significantly.
The lake covers approximately 8,200 acres within Hood County (and a small portion of Parker County on the western arm), with roughly 103 miles of shoreline and a full-pool elevation of 692.7 feet above mean sea level. At roughly 45 miles from downtown Fort Worth via US-377, it is the primary lake market for Fort Worth and the western DFW suburbs — not a Houston commuter lake or a remote retreat, but a suburban-adjacent waterfront community where residents can realistically drive to Fort Worth for the evening.
What Buyers Need to Know First
The most important fact about Lake Granbury that no listing describes: the Granbury city limits boundary runs through what looks like a continuous lake community, and it creates two dramatically different tax outcomes for properties that sit on opposite sides of it. Properties inside Granbury city limits pay a 0.42/100 city tax rate on top of Hood County and school district levies. On a $400,000 home, that city overlay adds roughly $1,680 per year compared to an otherwise identical home just outside city limits. Many Lake Granbury neighborhoods straddle or abut this boundary, and buyers who don't look up the specific parcel's tax entity status before comparing properties are comparing apples to oranges.
The second critical fact: BRA dock permits are issued to individual owners and do not automatically transfer at closing. The BRA's own published guidance and the Hood County News have both stated this clearly — buyers must have the permit transferred or reissued in their name after closing. A dock that is "permitted" in a listing is the seller's permitted dock. It is not yours until BRA has processed the transition.
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