How We Get Our Data

Our pricing comes from three places. We buy apartment data from data providers, we collect our own from each community’s official website, and our team researches properties every day. Together that gives us starting rents, floor plan ranges and move-in specials for more than 1,100 communities across the Austin metro. Some figures from outside sources can be estimates, so prices carry the date we last updated them. Rents and specials change fast, so confirm the details with the community before you apply.

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: the special applied across a twelve month lease, divided by the square feet you get. 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. Income limits shown on the site come from the City of Austin’s published table for the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos metro (HUD limits for fiscal year 2026), 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 known street address. Grocery distances are measured to real store locations (H-E-B, 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.

Neighborhood pages show active apartment-related building permits from the City of Austin’s issued construction permits dataset (3syk-w9eu), filtered to residential and multifamily work. When a permit lands at an address we already track, we name the community instead of the raw address. Single unit condo remodels are filtered out. They are not neighborhood news.

Every community gets its school district from the Texas Education Agency’s own current boundary file. Campus level zoning (elementary, middle, high) comes from Austin ISD’s published attendance boundaries, with the district’s closures and reassignments already applied; other districts show at the district level until we have 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.