Songfacts®:

• "...and if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you."
  
  That's an expression said to someone gullible to set them straight. It's based on an actual con by a guy named George C. Parker, who would convince people to buy the Brooklyn Bridge from him. In "Ocean Front Property," George Strait modifies the phrase, telling his girl he's got some ocean front property in Arizona to sell her if she thinks he'll be alright with her leaving him. Arizona, of course, is landlocked, so there's no ocean front property.
• George Strait was on quite a run when he released "Ocean Front Property" as the title track to his seventh album. By this time, he had nine #1 Country hits, and "Ocean Front Property" gave him his 10th. His next single, "All My Ex's Live In Texas," made it 11.
• This song was written by Royce Porter, Dean Dillon and Hank Cochran. Dillon and Cochran had written a song for George Straight called "The Chair" and had worked with Porter on some other songs for Strait. When they got together to write "Ocean Front Property," most of it was written by the time Dillon came to it. He worked on the bridge and the last verse, and made a change to a line Porter had written, taking out the word "bridge" from the line, "If you'll buy that, I'll throw the Golden Gate Bridge in free."
  
  Dillon convinced them that the line sounded better with that word removed, and that listeners would know that the Golden Gate is a bridge.
• This song was released as a single before the album came out, which built lot of anticipation. The Ocean Front Property album ended up debuting at #1 on the Country chart, the first to do so.
• The song's co-writer Dean Dillion worked on a lot of George Strait songs ("Marina del Rey," "Honky Tonk Crazy," "The Breath You Take"...), and he told Songfacts that "Ocean Front Property" is his least favorite.
  
  "I thought it was horrible," he said. "I didn't like to write funny songs. That didn't do anything for me. If anything, I tend to delve in the dark side of life more than I did the funny side of it. Even after we were done with it, I thought, man, this is junk. I thought it was hokey and I didn't know if people'd get it or not. And I think about four months later it came into chart. That whole album came in the charts at #1. Sold a million records the first week it was out, that album did. And that song was one of the fastest selling rising chart records that he ever had. That shows you what I know."