Last week, news leaked that President George Bush and Laura Bush had bought a new property in the tony Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow. Early stories made the purchase seem relatively modest. But Newsweek now has this interesting nugget about some other big property transactions that may be in the Bushes’ future:

There is speculation that the Bushes may also be buying an adjacent property. Mary Candace Evans, the real-estate editor of D Home & Garden magazine, who broke the story of the home purchases on her blog Thursday morning, notes that the vacant house next door, a $1.6 million five-bedroom home, is set to close next week to an undisclosed buyer. “I’m speculating on the second house … [but] it’s a very unusual way of titling it,” says Evans, who suggests the adjoining property might be used to house Secret Service agents and create a larger perimeter around the Bush home. Records show that the home belongs to the estate of a deceased woman whose family also had a history of giving to the Republican Party. Family member Peter Northway, a Dallas advertising executive, said he couldn’t comment on the sale.

Both properties back up to the sprawling 25-acre, $50 million estate of close Bush friend Tom Hicks, the Texas billionaire who bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in June 1998 for $250 million. Bush, a part owner of that team, received just under $15 million for his stake. (Coincidentally, Northway’s firm, Core Group Advertising, cites Hicks’s Dallas Stars hockey team as one of its clients.)

Photo by Steve Vance, Flickr Creative Commons.