5 Lies About Leander, TX

If you are considering moving to Austin or the Austin area, you are checking out the suburbs because you’re probably not going to live in Austin proper, and Leander has come up on your radar. We are going to talk about five lies that people are going to tell you about Leander.

Leander Is A Blue Collar Town

Number one, don’t let anyone tell you Leander is a blue-collar town. The Leander zip code ranks 20th out of Austin’s top 50 wealthiest zip codes. I’m talking about the five-county Austin area of Travis, Williamson, Hayes, Bastrop, and Caldwell County. Of the top 50 zip codes, Leander ranked 20th.

Leander is not a blue-collar town, so most adults here have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The median household income is a hundred thousand dollars, whereas Travis County’s median household income is about 80. So, Leander is a white-collar town.

The residents are highly educated and professional, driving many businesses and industries into Leander.

Housing Is Cheap

Number two, housing is cheap in Leander. I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but housing isn’t cheap anywhere in Austin. I talked to folks about what’s going on in Austin, where we’re talking about multiple offers, paying above the list price, the possibility of the house not appraising at the sales price, and what that means regarding your down payment.

Everyone asks me, but I’m looking at Leander or Georgetown; I’m looking at Round Rock. Yes, we are talking about all those places. The Austin area is all-encompassing, and it is all on fire right now.

So, let’s talk about July 2021. The average home sale in Leander was $524,000. That is a 42% increase over July of 2020. That is about $223 per square foot, and homes in Leander sold for, on average, 10% over the asking price in Leander.

Travis County, in general, which is where Austin Proper is somehow. Leander is also in Travis County. There’s a bunch of weird boundaries going on. So, in Travis County, which includes Austin, the average home sale was $706,000 in July, which is only a 30% increase from July 2020. Leander’s increase was 42%, and houses sold for about 6% over the sales price in Travis County.

So yes, it is cheaper than being in Austin proper and Travis County, but it is not cheap. Unfortunately, there are no deals to get in Austin. There are no diamonds in the rough.

It Is A Sleepy Little Town

So lie number three that people will tell you about Leander is that, oh, it’s a cute, sleepy little town. Leander was named the fastest-growing city in the United States – of cities with at least 50,000 residents from 2018 to 2019. They had a 12% population increase between those years, four times faster than the rest of the United States. Usually, populations increase by 0.5% a year. Leander increased by more than 10%.

In 2021, Leander was named the best suburb to move to. This does not sound like a town that’s like, oh, a sleepy little town that’s off the radar. Leander is on everyone’s radar, so it is going down in Leander.

There has been a lot of residential construction and new communities, like many new communities. You’ve got to go through some rural land and some farmland to get to. But once you’re there, you’ll notice that new communities are sprouting left and right. There’s almost always a new construction neighborhood.

Every time you close your eyes, a new neighborhood pops up, and it’s been like that for years. It’s been like the best-kept secret around Austin, but Leander has been growing. It hasn’t been in Austin proper, and if you don’t drive out there, you don’t know about it.

The new neighborhoods have been growing exponentially, but that is nothing compared to the coming development. So we’ve been developing a lot with the new communities for residential development. Now, we are about to explode for commercial development. So, Leander is adding at least four live-work-play developments to the area. If you’ve seen my other blog posts and heard me talk about the Domain, The Domain is like a live work play area. It’s enormous and has shops, restaurants, offices, apartments, hotels, residential, commercial, retail, and all that mix.

They’ve been building the Domain for at least ten years. Leander is getting at least four of these developments. One of them will be 115 acres and will have a train commuter station so you can ride it to downtown and the other areas of Austin.

Our commuter rail is limited, but it will grow over the next few years. And the other development is going to have a lagoon. It’s going to have a lagoon that spans four acres. Leander is also an excellent place for employees because we have a lot of highly educated, high-income employees and employers like that. So this will draw even more industry, businesses, and commerce to Leander as we grow these live-work-play areas and make it an even more desirable place for people to live.

Leander Is A Bedroom Community

The fourth lie that people will tell you about Leander is that all there is right there are houses that it’s a bedroom community. There is a ton of stuff to do in Leander. One of the coolest things to do is the Lake Travis Zipline Adventures. It is the longest zip line in Texas. It’s two and a half hours long.

Leander has a ton of parks. One of them is called Lakewood Park. It has got a modern playground. I like to say I’m not like a regular playground. I’m a cool playground. It’s got foosball tables and pinging pong tables. It’s got a trail where you can walk around the lake.

On the way to this awesome new park, this charming neighborhood has little houses with beautiful front porches where you can put little flower pots on the stairs. The garages are in the back of the house, and that’s where the trash also comes to pick up. So there are no cars, and there are no garages. It’s mainly like a pedestrian area in front of the houses; you can walk out to the park. So, it’s a cool area.

There are lots of skate parks in Leander, which surprised me. There are two major parks, the one I just talked about and another one with two big skate parks. There are also parks with BMX trails, soccer fields, disc golf fields, etc. I guess they’re called disc golf courses.

There are a ton of festivals in Leander. All this stuff is outside. So there’s a Leander Bluegrass Festival. They have a Liberty Fest. They have a Spring Extravaganza Fest, which I imagine is around Easter time. They also have festivals in their old town center. They have one during the summer, just like a cool street festival, and one during Christmas time during the holidays.

So Leander is not just a place where you sleep and you eat and the rest of the time you’re commuting to Austin Lander is where you can have fun. And, like we just talked about, a ton of new construction and development and commercial stuff is coming to Leander over the next few years. It won’t be immediate, but all that fun stuff is coming.

It Is Isolated

Lie number five is that it’s isolated and far from downtown, so it’s too far to get to anything. The cool thing about where Leander is on the map is that it’s close to Texas Hill country.

So if you live closer to Round Rock Cedar Park, you can either go way down south to go through downtown and then go around the city, or you can go up north Northwest and cut through Leander to get to wine country, to get to a bunch of shops and museums and historical sites.

You can go out to Fredericksburg, which has many orchards. You can pick your own fruit. My husband and I went out there for his birthday one year. We had a Mega Hill Country Day. We picked our own peaches that we put into a fantastic beer that we made, and then we went to our winery, Hilmy Winery, a charming spot. We just chilled there.

On the way back, we stopped at a brewery called Jester King, one of the best breweries in Austin, and had a beer there before we came home. So Leander is so close to all that, much closer than if you were in Cedar Park Round Rock. It’s like an hour and a half drive.

You could take an enjoyable day trip out there or have an easy weekend getaway at a sleepy Airbnb, get away from everything, and not drive two and a half or three hours somewhere.

So the next time someone tells you that Leander is just a sleepy little blue-collar town, you’ll know enough to tell them it’s about to explode, that there’s a ton of growth going on there. And if they don’t know what’s happening in their backyard, shame on them.

To find out if Leander is for you, please get in touch with me.