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As I said, most of his money is in a blind trust, and so we don't know exactly what he has, but his blind trust apparently lost a lot in the stock market crash, and his real estate holdings dropped in value by quite a bit during that crash as well.

Google "Perry net worth", and you'll see that everybody is estimating. I posted one link from this past week that said his net worth was $1.1 million. Do you really need more links?

You are focusing on how much money he made in a real estate deal -- maybe you should focus on how much money he actually has.

Did you know he trained as and became a licensed realtor, although he never worked in that field -- he took a keen interest in real estate. Way back in 1981, he was already appointed to the Bill Clements appointed him to the advisory committee of Texas A&M University's Real Estate Center.

A amart guy with an eye for real estate can make some good investments, especially if he saves his money, which apparently he did when his wife and he both worked for rather average wages.

In the 1990s, he decided he wanted to live in then-rural Travis County, but everytime he found a good deal and bought some land, his wife said it was too far away. In 1991, Perry bought some land at an FDIC liquidation auction for $55,288, and he sold it 3 years later for $125,000. No indication any politicians or contributers were involved. Just a smart investment.

He bought other undeveloped property in 1993. Then it turned out Dell needed it to reach public utilities, so Dell paid him a lot more for it, and he made $342,000. There is no evidence that Perry knew Dell would need the land (pretty odd in fact if Perry would know it before Dell did, which he obviously did or Dell would have bought it when it was on the market). He bought the land on the open market -- a lobbyist friend who became his campaign manager closed the sale for him, but he didn't buy or sell the property, or make any under-the-table deal for it, so the only argument there is guilt-by-association.

THen there was the deal involving a Senator, Perry bought it in 2001, for $315,000. Normally people point to a cheap sale, but this wasn't, or a short turnaround, but again this wasn't. Perry held this land for six full years. Those six years were a great boon in real estate -- everybody doubled and tripled their money, if they sold at the right time.

The right time? We were told that here on Free Republic -- the bubble was going to burst. Perry sold in 2007, right at the peak, and at a little more than 3 times the purchase price; he cleared $780,000 on that deal; but again, nothing improper was found in either the purchase or the sale. Yes, people sometimes make money in real estate, there is NOTHING in that deal that suggests any favors from a legislator OR anything having to do with a contributer.

You are simply saying words "Legislator","COntributer", "Big Gain", and thinking because they are in the same sentence, it means something bad. IN fact, you have to show that there was an actual deal made for which Perry got money that nobody else could have gotten. The land in this case wasn't unique, anybody could have purchased in the same area in 2001, and sold in 2007, and made the same amount of money.

He also wrote two books, just like Sarah Palin. Now, they didn't sell nearly as well as Palin's book, but in fact he made NO MONEY from the sale of either book. The reason: "Perry directed proceeds from one of his books to legal defense for the Boy Scouts of America and proceeds from the other to an Austin-based conservative think tank."

Perry, with a net worth of somewhere just north of $1 million, gave the proceeds of his Boy Scout book to the Boy Scouts, and the proceeds of his Fed Up book to a conservative think tank. Is that the move of a guy who tries to use his public position to make money?

The argument comes down to "Perry made money, so he must have been making crooked real estate deals to clean up on his public job, while he was giving away legitimate book royalties to charity." It makes no sense, it's not supported by any evidence.

IN fact, a lot of the information for the anti-PErry stories on his finances come from the Texas Ethics Commission -- because they investigated ALL of these deals, and found nothing wrong.