Living in Buda, commuting to Texas State

There is a version of this post that every apartment site in Central Texas writes, and it goes like this: San Marcos rents are up, Buda is cheaper, campus is a short hop down the interstate, come and save money. We drafted that post. Then we checked it against our own two banks, and the premise was backwards.

Buda's one bedroom median currently sits above San Marcos, not below it. The drive to campus is longer than the round number people repeat. And the cheapest apartment in San Marcos starts below the cheapest apartment in Buda. Every figure in the block below is read from the bank at the moment you load this page, so you can see it for yourself rather than take our word for what it said in September.

So the money argument is the wrong argument

If your whole reason for looking at Buda is a cheaper one bedroom, stop here and look at San Marcos. Our San Marcos site tracks a hundred and three communities against the dozen we track here, its median start is lower, and its floor is lower. More inventory at a lower price, walking distance to campus. That is not a close call and we are not going to pretend otherwise to win a lease.

Sending you somewhere we do not get paid is a strange way to run a locating business. It is the only version of this page worth publishing, though. You are going to compare the two markets whatever we write, and the comparison takes about four minutes.

The argument that does hold up

Buda is not the cheap play. It is the split commute play, and that is a genuinely different renter.

Consider someone who is at Texas State two or three days a week and working in south Austin the rest of the time. From Buda, campus is a little over twenty minutes and downtown Austin is a little over forty. From San Marcos, campus is a walk and Austin is most of an hour each way. If the Austin end of your week is real, Buda's position between the two is worth more than the rent gap costs you, and no amount of cheap student housing on the Square fixes an hour in the car.

The same logic covers a graduate student whose partner works in Austin, and a part-time student with a full-time job north of the county line. What those people are buying in Buda is a middle, and a middle is the one thing San Marcos has no way to sell them.

What else Buda actually has going for it

Concessions here run deeper and wider than in San Marcos. The share of Buda communities advertising weeks free, and the average number of weeks on offer, are both in the live block above, and both have been running ahead of San Marcos. That is a function of new supply competing for lease-up occupancy rather than anything charming about the town, and it moves month to month, which is exactly why it is a live reading rather than a sentence.

A concession is worth reading as a monthly number instead of a headline. Eight weeks free on a thirteen month lease is a different deal from eight weeks free on a twelve month one. Our true cost calculator does that arithmetic, and it is the number to compare across markets rather than the advertised rent.

Who Buda is wrong for

• Anyone without a car. There is no bus from Buda to campus and no shuttle. This is not a preference, it is a hard stop.
• Anyone whose week is entirely on campus. Twenty-odd minutes each way, five days a week, is about eighty hours a year. Live near the thing you are at every day.
• Anyone whose budget is the binding constraint. The floor is lower in San Marcos and the inventory is deeper. Go where the floor is.

The part nobody publishes

Several of the cheapest starts in Buda are at income restricted communities, and the live table above marks them. A tax credit property caps what your household can earn, which is why the rent is lower, and a student with little or no income is often inside that cap where a working renter would not be. It is worth asking about rather than scrolling past, and the limits are set per household size, so the office is the place to check.

The catch is the waiting list. These do not always have anything open, and the list can close without notice. That is a reason to ask early rather than a reason not to ask.

How to actually decide

Two questions, in this order. How many days a week are you physically on campus, and is there an Austin end to your week. If the answers are five and no, rent in San Marcos. If the answers are two or three and yes, Buda is doing something for you that San Marcos has no way to, and the rent difference stops being the point.

If you want a hand either way, a licensed locator will work the whole corridor rather than only the town whose site you happened to land on. It costs you nothing and it includes telling you when the answer is the other market.