Texas Home Talk

12/08/2026

Looking for Roofers!

If you’re a roofer, you already know that getting your name out there is job #1.

We’re looking to fill our FREE directory with roofers who serve Central Texas.

Spots are limited per community and will fill up fast!

Free business directory listings for Central Texas and Hill Country service providers — realtors, lenders, insurance agents, and trades. List your business free in minutes.

11/08/2026

Agents — this one's for your buyers under contract right now.

Part 3 of our Central Texas pest series covers the stuff that shows up on an inspection report and blows up a closing: subterranean termites, WDI reports, and why a general inspection doesn't catch what a wood-destroying insect inspection does.

If you've got a client who just found winged bugs on the windowsill and is panicking, or one debating whether the separate WDI report is worth it — send them this episode. It answers both.

Featuring someone worth having in your contacts: Zach Allgeyer at Texas Property Inspections

Link to this episode in the comments below 👇👇👇

04/08/2026

You will probably never feel the bite.

That's what makes this whole group different. A black widow bite can register as a pinprick you barely notice while you're moving a pot or reaching into an irrigation box. An hour later you're in the ER with rigid abdominal cramping and heavy sweating, and because nobody saw a spider, it gets worked up as appendicitis.

The rest of the episode is built on that same gap, just stretched further out.

A kissing bug feeds painlessly on your face while you sleep. The parasite it can leave behind burrows into heart muscle and replicates slowly for decades. Most people never develop complications, but for a minority it eventually shows up as cardiac damage twenty or thirty years after a bite they never felt.

A lone star tick bite you never noticed can rewire your immune system against a sugar found in beef, pork and dairy. The reaction arrives two to six hours after a meal, so people wake up covered in hives at two in the morning and blame the restaurant instead of a tick bite from months earlier.

Chiggers stop feeding and fall off long before the itch even begins. Most suspected brown recluse bites turn out to be bacterial infections, and doctors in states with no recluse population at all still diagnose them regularly.

By the time your body reacts, the thing that caused it is long gone and you have forgotten it ever happened.

Part two of our three part Central Texas pest series. Link in the first comment.

02/08/2026

Everyone treats Leander and Cedar Park like the same town. The data says otherwise — and the biggest differences are the ones neither town advertises.

A few that surprised even us:

Leander is now the larger city (91,132 to 79,032) and grew 53.8% in five years — Cedar Park grew 1.8%.

Cedar Park looks 26% pricier, but only 12% pricier per square foot. Half that "premium" is just a bigger house on a bigger lot.

And the one most comparisons get backwards: Cedar Park has the lower tax rate, even though it costs more to buy in. Leander's affordability is in the price, not the tax bill.

We broke down price, schools, taxes, and commute with sourced numbers so you can decide which town fits.

Full article in the comments below. 👇👇👇

26/07/2026

Nightmare fuel.

This is why the bed shake is not superstition in Texas. It is a habit.

Scorpions are found throughout Texas and they want exactly what your bed has: dark, sheltered, climate controlled.

The reassuring part: Texas Parks and Wildlife reports there are no medically dangerous scorpion species in Texas. It hurts like a wasp sting and fades in a day or two. The dangerous one people picture is the Arizona bark scorpion, and it does not live here.

Full episode in the first comment.

20/07/2026

Two rodeos, same month, an hour apart, and they could not be more different.

Early August: you walk out of 100-degree heat into the air conditioning at the H-E-B Center in Cedar Park. Video boards. Instant replays. Frisbee dogs.

Late August: you drive west to Fredericksburg and stand in the dust at the Gillespie County Fairgrounds, holding a pari-mutuel betting slip at a fair that has been running since 1881.

Both are thriving. That contrast is the whole story of rodeo in Central Texas.

The new episode of The Texas Current maps the full circuit from Georgetown to Converse, west to Fredericksburg, east to Bastrop. What slack actually is and why the winner may never ride under the lights. Why up to half the score in bull riding belongs to the animal. How Bill Pickett invented bulldogging outside Taylor. And the reason the real threat to these outdoor arenas is not attendance, it is land value.

Link in the first comment. 👇👇👇

20/07/2026

The first new Del Webb near Austin in more than thirty years is now selling in Bastrop, and we spent an afternoon at the sales center getting the details.

Del Webb Austin at Lost Pines sits inside The Colony, about thirty minutes from Austin and close to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Twelve floor plans, from $325,990 to $550,990. Twenty families have closed so far out of 513 planned, so buyers right now are getting first pick of lots.

A few things worth knowing before you tour. The amenity center — clubhouse, resort pool, pickleball, golf simulator — is targeted for early 2027, so today's buyers are arriving ahead of it. In the meantime residents have access to The Colony's existing pools and fitness facilities.

Through the end of July 2026, Del Webb is covering the first two years of HOA dues, which works out to a full twenty-four months at the current rate. Dues also include lawn care and gigabit fiber.

One number to factor into your math: homes here sit in a municipal utility district that adds $0.85 per $100 to the tax bill. That's standard for master-planned communities on this side of Austin, but it's worth knowing when you compare against somewhere like Sun City in Georgetown, which doesn't have one.

We put the full breakdown together — all twelve floor plans, HOA, taxes, age rules, and where build-out actually stands. Link in the comments. 👇👇👇

19/07/2026

San Marcos has four private schools, and the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive is wider than in almost any comparable Central Texas town.

Hill Country Christian School charges $6,250 a year — and that's the price for every grade, Pre-K through 12th. Six miles away, San Marcos Academy's international boarding program runs $65,000.

Here's the part most local families never work out: those big San Marcos Academy numbers you see online are boarding tuition. A San Marcos family whose kid sleeps at home pays day tuition. Ninth grade as a day student is $15,000. The same grade as a seven-day boarder is $55,000. A lot of families rule the school out entirely without ever learning that.

We verified every tuition figure, grade range, and accreditation status against each school's own published materials for 2026-27. Not against school-rating sites — those had the Academy's numbers understated across the board and invented a grade band that doesn't exist.

One more thing worth knowing if it applies to you: there is no Catholic school in San Marcos. Neither the Diocese of Austin nor the Archdiocese of San Antonio operates one there. Nearest is Buda.

Full breakdown of all four schools in the comments. 👇👇👇