5900 Lilac Place NE

Rio Rancho Estates isn't a neighborhood in the way people usually mean the word. It's the original plat. AMREP bought the old Koontz Ranch in 1961, started with about 55,000 acres, and by the mid-1970s had roughly 92,000 acres drawn into home sites, bigger on paper than the city of Albuquerque. So a search for Rio Rancho Estates homes for sale pulls listings from opposite ends of town, plus raw land out in the county. Understand that before you look at anything else.Agents write it in the MLS the way it reads on the plat. You'll see the bare name, and you'll see unit numbers: Unit #1, Unit 13, on up. Those units are just AMREP's sequence. They don't name a place the way Cabezon or Enchanted Hills does, and two houses sharing a unit number can sit two miles apart. Both Rio Rancho ZIPs, 87124 and 87144, are in play.The houses inside the cityAMREP put up its first homes in 1962 and had only around 500 finished by 1970. Everything since came in slowly, block by block, for sixty years. You...