Waco

Waco, the McLennan County seat, sits roughly halfway between Austin and Dallas along I-35. It's home to Baylor University and has seen a wave of national attention and tourism thanks to Magnolia Market at the Silos, drawing new residents and investment to its historic downtown.

We work Waco directly. A Texas real estate license is valid statewide, our sponsoring broker Compass RE Texas, LLC is licensed across Texas, and we have closed millions of dollars of business in this market. Waco listings, Waco purchases, and the acreage outside town are all ours to run, and the drive up I-35 is a normal part of the week rather than a reason to send you somewhere else.

The site was a Wichita farming village on the Brazos before it was a town. George Erath surveyed the streets on March 1, 1849 and lots went for five dollars. The owners wanted to name it Lamartine, after the French poet, and Erath talked them out of it in favor of the name already on the land. Twenty-one years later Waco built the longest suspension bridge in Texas across the Brazos, a 475-foot span strung with Roebling cable, and for a while every cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail paid a toll to use it.

Waco splits into three groups and they want different things. Parents buying near Baylor for four years, who are making an investment decision whether or not they call it one. People moving up from Austin or down from Dallas who have done the arithmetic on what the same money buys here. And land buyers, who need somebody who can read a survey, an easement and an agricultural valuation rather than somebody who can stage a kitchen.

The historic core. Austin Avenue is the spine of old Waco and the street the city's early money built on, running southeast from downtown. Castle Heights and Mountainview sit west of it, both established neighborhoods with mature trees and original housing stock, and both the answer when someone wants character rather than square footage. Downtown Waco itself has been rebuilt around the Brazos over the last fifteen years, and the housing that came with it is mostly conversion and infill rather than anything historic.

Baylor and north. The Baylor area moves on a different clock than the rest of the city, driven by the academic calendar and by parents buying rather than renting for four years. North of downtown, Brookview and the neighborhoods around North Lake Waco sit near the reservoir on the Bosque River, and Villages at Twin Rivers is newer construction on the water side of town. Lake Waco is a Corps of Engineers reservoir on the Bosque, not a natural lake.

Outside the city limits. Woodway is its own incorporated city west of Waco, in Midway ISD, and it is where a lot of Waco's move-up buyers go. China Spring, spelled without an S, is an unincorporated community northwest of town with its own school district and a strong identity for a place that is not a city. Crawford is about twenty miles west, a town of a few hundred people, and it is a genuinely different market: land, acreage and small-town housing rather than anything suburban.

Tell us the neighborhood and we will tell you straight what we know about it, and what we would want to look at before you write an offer.