How We Get Our Data

Our numbers start in three places: apartment data we buy, records our own team collects, and property research we do every day. Any rent or special you see here came from one of the three, and we pull the bought data fresh each day. A special that names an end date comes down the morning after that date. 44 communities in Buda are tracked this way. If a community only shares pricing after you fill out a contact form, you'll see the last range we had and the day we had it, or nothing at all. A number from the subscription can be that company's own estimate, so each rent and special here shows the day we had it.

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 on the rent you'd really pay each month for each square foot. Free weeks get divided across the lease length the offer sets, and across a year when it sets none. We leave out any offer phrased "up to" or tied to select homes, since nobody can promise you'd land one, and rank that community on its sticker rent instead. 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 Buda 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 we can pin to a street address. 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 Buda 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.