How We Get Our Data

We track 111 San Marcos communities. Three things feed their prices: apartment data we buy, pulled every day; records our team keeps; and our daily property research, which includes reading the rents some communities post on their websites. Specials on the map and the area pages come from that paid data. Where it has no offer for a community, we show an older note from our community lists if one is there. Those notes carry no date and we haven't rechecked them, so ask us before you count on one. On a review page, the special can come from our own read of that community's website instead. When a community hides its prices behind a contact form, we show the last range we read and the day we read it, or no number at all. We never make up a rent. A figure in the data we buy can be an estimate, and one outside our sanity limits stays off the page.

A "1 month free" banner on an expensive unit can be a worse deal than a cheaper unit with no special. So we rank deals by what you would actually pay: a firm special spread over the length of lease it asks for (a year if it doesn't say), then divided by the square feet you get. An "up to" or select homes offer is never taken off, since you might not get it. Communities where rent is set by income limits rather than the market are kept out of market deal rankings on purpose. Comparing them against market rate communities would mislead in both directions.

Every time our price checks run, the numbers are written into a permanent ledger: dated, append only, never edited after the fact. Trend lines and "price dropped" flags come only from that measured record. We do not backfill history we didn’t record ourselves, and a month we missed stays missing rather than being estimated.

We match every community against the City of Austin’s affordable housing inventory. A community where half or more of the units are income restricted is treated as income restricted and stays out of market rate search results until you ask for it. Mixed communities are labeled so you know before you call. Current income limits shown on the site come from the published HUD limits for the San Marcos metro area, with their effective date.

Bus and rail distances come from CapMetro’s published GTFS schedule data (via data.texas.gov): we compute the nearest stop and its routes for every community whose street address we can place on the map. Grocery distances are measured to real store locations (HEB, Central Market, Whole Foods and the other full service chains). Street View imagery links only appear where Google actually has a camera pass near the building, so there are no dead "not available here" links.

Commute times on our employer pages are computed with live-traffic routing for a Tuesday 8:30 AM departure: the honest number, not the 2 AM one. Each page says exactly which departure the number describes. We recompute these periodically; they are estimates of a typical rush hour, not a promise about any given morning.

Every community gets its school district from the Texas Education Agency’s own current boundary file. Campus level zoning (elementary, middle, high) comes from San Marcos ISD’s published attendance boundaries, with the district’s closures and reassignments already applied; other districts show at the district level until we can verify their own boundary layers. Zones change and variances exist, so always confirm with the district before signing a lease.

Sound scores on review pages come from HowLoud’s model of traffic, local activity and aircraft noise. We translate the number into plain language and name the loudest source, and we quote the score as theirs, not ours.