James DeLoney - Austin Homes for Sale

09/16/2026

Colovore is building a $280 million data center in Hutto. 192,694 square feet at 2401 Innovation Boulevard, 40 megawatts, liquid-cooled. The filing with the state puts construction from December 1 of this year to December 1 of 2028. It sits next to a potential Blue Origin site.

Community Impact reported it last Friday.

Here's the part I'd push back on, and it's the reason I don't get excited about these the way the headline wants me to.

A $280 million number reads like a jobs announcement. It usually isn't one. Data centers are capital-heavy and staff-light by design — the money goes into power, cooling, and hardware, not payroll. The construction window is two years, and that work is real, but construction crews mostly don't move to the county they're building in. The article doesn't list a permanent headcount, and I'd want to see that number before I drew a line from this to housing demand in Hutto.

What it does affect is more indirect and slower. Forty megawatts is a meaningful draw on the grid. Facilities like this come with road, water, and utility work that gets negotiated alongside them, and that infrastructure outlasts the building. Land near the site gets repriced by people betting on what comes next, which is a different thing from the building itself generating demand.

Three weeks ago I wrote about Amazon's robotics plant in East Austin — 300 to 500 jobs on roughly 300 acres. That's a different animal, and lumping them together because both are big industrial numbers is how people end up with the wrong expectation.

If you own in Hutto or you're looking there, the thing to follow isn't the $280 million. It's what the utility and road agreements end up being, and whether a permanent headcount ever gets published.

I'll keep watching it.

09/15/2026

Having trouble keeping track of your monthly payments? You might be damaging your credit score.

A late payment on a credit bill or other debt such as a mortgage can have a significant impact on yo...

09/14/2026

Texas is building big—and this time, it’s the infrastructure behind AI. 🏗️⚡
More than 600 data centers are operating, under construction, or planned across Texas, according to KXAN. This wave of investment is reaching beyond Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio into rural communities across the state.

For those of us who live, own property, and do business here, this is more than a tech story. These projects are creating demand for electricians and construction workers while raising questions about how nearby land will be used and how communities will manage growth.

They’re also prompting questions homeowners care about: Where will the electricity and water come from? Who pays for infrastructure upgrades? And what could these changes mean for utility costs and quality of life?

Texas is still searching for the right balance between economic development and job growth versus strains on resources and environmental considerations.
What are your thoughts?

09/08/2026

Looking to keep your computer files safe? Take this precautionary step.

No matter how complex your computer password is, it isn’t enough to stop a thief from using other me...

09/03/2026

Amazon is putting a robotics manufacturing facility in East Austin, on roughly 300 acres off Hergotz and Dalton lanes, in the newly annexed area people call the Dog's Head. Three hundred to five hundred manufacturing and engineering jobs. Mayor Kirk Watson said Amazon asked for no economic incentives and no public money.

I've watched a lot of these announcements land over twenty years, and the honest read is that the job number rarely changes anything nearby.

Three to five hundred jobs, in a metro that added 14,900 in a single year, is a small share of the demand picture. Families don't reorganize a housing search because a plant opened four miles away.

The part that tends to matter is the sentence nobody clips: the city had already approved a TIF plan funding roads and utilities across the surrounding 2,600-acre district, reimbursing the developer.

Utilities and roads change what a piece of land can become. That's the slow variable, and it moves years ahead of any hiring announcement.

If you own out that way, watch the easements and the road funding rather than the careers page.

09/01/2026

Your October property tax bill is being set right now, and most of the meetings that decide it are still ahead of you.

Austin City Council adopted its rate on August 12: $0.579948 per $100 of valuation. The city puts the impact at about $9.48 a month, roughly $113.76 a year, on what it defines as a typical homestead, a median value of $471,603 after the 20% general homestead exemption.

That's the piece that got covered. It also isn't the biggest line on the bill.

Last adopted rates for the five entities on a typical City of Austin bill, per $100 of valuation:

Austin ISD — $0.9252
City of Austin — $0.579948
Travis County — $0.375845
Central Health — $0.1180
Austin Community College — $0.1034

Only the city figure is for 2026. Austin ISD, Travis County, Central Health, and ACC have not adopted theirs yet, so those four are tax year 2025, the most recent each has set.

Central Health has published its calendar: public hearing September 2, board vote September 9, Commissioners Court September 15. Its options run from no new revenue up to 8% above it, which it estimates at about $44 a year on a median Travis County homestead of $372,638.

Every taxing unit in Texas has until September 29 to adopt a rate. Bills can start mailing October 1. Payment is due January 31.

If you've ever wanted to say something to the people setting your rate, the next four weeks are the window. By the time the bill lands in October, the arguing is over.

09/01/2026

Looking to change the mood of the day? A little creativity can go a long way.

Creative-types can feel stalled if they don’t have a frequent creative release. But with work ...

08/31/2026

There are two Austin medians, and they're $142,000 apart.

City of Austin, July: $577,000, down 1.4% from a year ago.
Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos metro, same month: $435,000, up 1.0%.

One fell. The other rose. Both come out of the same report.

Nearly every headline leads with the metro figure, because that's the number that travels. It blends the city with five surrounding counties, where most of the sales volume actually happens. Fine for a regional story. Not much use if you own a house off South Lamar.

The number I'd pay attention to inside the city limits: closed sales were up 11% year over year in July, 1,005 homes, while the median came off 1.4%. Months of inventory sat at 4.5.

More houses changing hands at a slightly softer price. That reads to me like a market clearing, not a market sliding.

08/31/2026

A stat that stopped me this week: only 1.9% of real estate brokerages report using no AI tools at all in 2026, down from 10.6% just two years ago. Not using AI in this business went from normal to rare in under two years.

It doesn't replace knowing a street, a school zone, or what a seller is actually going through. But the tools that used to separate a good agent from a great one are shifting fast, and most of the shift is invisible to clients — it happens in research, prep, and follow-up, not in what a buyer sees at a showing.

What's something in your own work that changed faster than you expected it to?

08/28/2026

New in Leander: Westlake Dermatology is opening a location in Leander Union, right on Crystal Falls Parkway — basically at the Cedar Park border. It's one of about a dozen business openings logged in the Leander/Cedar Park corridor this month.

If you're weighing where to put down roots along 183A, this kind of steady local business growth is one of the better signals — better than a single new subdivision announcement.