What $1 Million Buys You Near Austin: Top Suburbs Real Estate Tour

Today we are taking a trip beyond Austin city limits to explore what $1 million can buy you in some of the hottest surrounding neighborhoods. From the family-friendly vibes of Cedar Park, the tech-driven energy in Round Rock, to the peaceful charm of Buda in the hill country beauty of Leander. These spots offer everything from sprawling estates to luxurious homes with space to stretch out. So if you're looking for the peace and convenience and suburban comfort, let's hit the virtual road and see what is out there. Boom, boom, boom. Hey guys, I'm Daphne Cray, your Boss Lady REALTOR® here in Austin, Texas. And if you're looking to buy or sell a home in the Austin area, contact me. My contact information is in the description below. You can even set up a direct one-on-one video call with me. Also, if you're watching this video from literally any other part of the Americas, Canada, South America, Mexico, the U.S., and you need to buy or sell a home wherever you are, I have REALTOR® partners literally everywhere that are ready, willing, and able to help you. So if you need to buy or sell a home somewhere else, contact me because I can get you hooked up with a great agent. So with that, let's begin. During the height of the pandemic, home values in Austin skyrocketed. And over the last couple of years, things have leveled out pretty significantly. It used to be that a million-dollar home was oftentimes just a house kind of in a random location that wasn't in particularly good condition. However, that is definitely not the case anymore. A million-dollar home today, especially in popular Austin suburbs, really feel like a million-dollar home. And they offer a lot of really wonderful features. So I made a list of my top five favorite suburbs throughout the Austin area that, one, are growing and have a lot to offer, but also where my clients are buying home. So we're going to start right at the very top in the northwest suburb of Leander. The first home we are going to look at is this really beautiful Texas stone-style home on Lion's Lair. Rawr. This home is really beautiful. It definitely has a very stately Texas style to it. It's spacious at 3,300 square feet with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. It was built in 2012 and it sits on a very spacious lot of 1.16 acres. Let's take a look. The exterior of this home has what we call Texas limestone. Usually it's more of like a white color, but this is kind of a darker cream or a lighter brown tone. Really common to find this throughout literally anywhere in Texas. I'm a huge fan of this curved staircase and the secret room, closet, pantry, whatever, have you. The home was built in 2012, so it looks, I don't want to say dated, because this doesn't look bad. It just doesn't look super modern. But knowing this neighborhood and this style of home, I know that they use high quality finishes that are really going to age gracefully. So you could move into this particular home today, live in it for another 10 or 15 years without doing any updates, and I think it would really hold its grace. This three-car garage is outstanding. I love that they epoxied the floor in there, and the backyard is really cool. Though there is naturally a bit of a slope, they put in some retaining walls, which makes the space a lot flatter and a lot more usable. I think this would be a great place to put in a pool if you really want, or just really build out a bomb deck and patio. We're gonna make our way south just a smidge. We are going to Cedar Park. I love Cedar Park. I feel like it's grown in popularity a lot over the last five to six years or so. When I first started in real estate in 2012, Cedar Park was definitely growing, but it was not as popular as it is today. I think just with all the growth that we've seen in Austin, it's become more of like, I don't want to say it's a central suburb, because it's not. It's north. But it is literally stuck to Austin, and there's a ton of stuff going on there. They have wonderful grocery stores, tons of things to do. They've got lots of movie theaters and parks and gyms and just like a lot of things and basic amenities that I personally think make a neighborhood great. Okay, so let's look at this home on Marquee Lane. This home is a little bit newer. It was built in 2015. It's huge. 3,700 square feet, four bedrooms, four bathrooms. This home also sits on a large piece of land. It sits on an acre. Okay, so let's look at the exterior. You can also see some Texas limestone here. Again, kind of more of a brown tone with brick. Once again, this is a style of home where you can find pretty much anywhere in Texas. I've been to Dallas and Houston quite a bit, and I've driven through neighborhoods that have homes that look exactly like this. I love that it's got high ceilings, and it seems to have plenty of natural light. Also, this home has kind of darker finishes, but again, knowing this neighborhood and the builders in the community at this time, I know that this was kind of a higher-end home when it was built originally. So once again, we have a style of home that's going to age really nicely, and it's not going to look like super dingy and outdated. Another feature that is very much to be expected in Cedar Park, and I would say Leander, and some of these other suburbs, is that it has an oversized patio. Oh, cute, and then they built like an extra little deck out there in the back for stargazing. I assume that's what I would do back there. I don't know. What would you do in that backyard? Another suburb that I wouldn't necessarily say is actually a suburb. It's just another city outside of Austin, but increasing in popularity, it feels like by the minute, is Bastrop. I've done a couple other videos on Bastrop and everything that it has to offer. I recently learned more about Bastrop, and personally, I found it to be super sweet and super charming. It's full of history, and they've really given the entire town a facelift to make it very, very inviting. There's lots of art there. There's lots of food there. There's lots of things to do. There's Lake Bastrop, so if you're into outdoor stuff, there's stuff to do there, too. They have a small national park, so if you like being outdoors, walking, hiking, etc., it's a really good spot for that. I have heard, though, from multiple people that it is kind of a sleepy town, so if you are somebody that likes to be in the middle of the action all the time, Bastrop's probably not going to be your vibe just because it has a slower pace of life, but it is definitely, I would say, the storybook representation of what people think of when they think of small-town Texas. Let's check it out. So, I chose this particular home on Akola, which is located in the Tahitian Village neighborhood in Bastrop, of course. Tahitian Village has so much variety. You can find little tiny houses that are kind of falling apart, and then you can find something more beautiful and new and more modern like this one. I wanted to point out this particular home because, personally, I really like the style, and I think it has a lot to offer. This home was built in 2024, so it is new. 2,600 square feet, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and it sits on just over a third of an acre. Again, I'm a big fan of the Texas limestone. I like how they've got that kind of mixed with the siding to give it more of like a modern traditional feel, which is kind of a contradictory thing to say, but it works. Also, a huge fan of the black framed windows. I think that's a really easy, though expensive, way to update and elevate any style of home. High ceilings, big open space, lots of natural light. Exactly the type of modern style home that I would expect in Tahitian Village. Now, this home is listed at $875, and it's beautiful, but knowing Bastrop and the market there, it feels like it's a little bit overpriced. I have a client that actually just sold a really beautiful home on Acreage on the other side of Bastrop, and that home went for, I would say, almost $100,000 less. So I would be curious just to see what this home ends up going for because I feel like that's Now we're going to make our way back up north, you guys, like way north. We are going to Georgetown. For Georgetown, I chose three homes because I think there's a lot of interesting things happening in Georgetown. We're not necessarily going to look at all three in a lot of detail. I just want to point some stuff out. Okay, so if we look over here on the map on the left side, we can see the three homes that are marked. Two of them are on the east side of 35, and one of them is way on the west side. We're going to look at these two on the east side because they are located more in the historical area of Georgetown. Yeah, these two homes that I chose first are more historical homes that are very close to the downtown or the Georgetown Square. The first home is on South Walnut Street. It was built in 1925. It's really spacious. It's 2,765 square feet, and it sits on a third of an acre. They are asking $945,000 for this particular home. The other home is located on University Avenue, which is just a smidge south of the first one. University Avenue in Georgetown is one of the main roads. This home is really spacious. It's 4,360 square feet with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and it sits on almost half an acre. Three bedrooms in a 4,300 square foot house is crazy. There must be a lot of house space because usually in that big of a home, you would have like five or six bedrooms. Anyway, if we look through these photos, we can see that they have an old-timey Texas vibe. These homes look very livable, 100% ready to go. Of course, you can make adjustments as you go, but generally speaking, these homes seem to be in really good condition. The third home that I wanted to feature is located west in a new community. This home is already under contract, but I wanted to feature the west side as well because there's so much development going on. This home on Plum Tree is a model home, and it's, again, a really good representation of the style of home that you can for the million-dollar-ish price range. This was the Perry model home, and I personally really like Perry. They do very large windows all around, big open spaces, high ceilings, and they have a very elegant look to them. Look at that rounded staircase, beautiful wood floors, open kitchen. I really like the way that they style their bathrooms, and of course, on the second floor, there is bound to be a movie room and a loft as well as extra bedrooms. The home itself is quite large. It's 3,400 square feet. It has four bedrooms, and it has four bathrooms. It sits on a bit of a smaller lot, I think, than compared to some of the other homes that we've seen at 0.18 of an acre, which is still actually really spacious, just maybe not as big as some of the other ones we've seen. Finally, for the final feature home that we're going to look at today, we are going to Round Rock, more specifically, the Forest Creek neighborhood. I've also done a couple videos about Round Rock and Forest Creek, and this is honestly one of my favorite neighborhoods in Round Rock, or I would say just the northern suburbs. Most of the homes in Forest Creek were built, I would say, late 90s to mid-2000s. I don't know, like 1993, 1995, more or less, up till about 2008. There are a couple other newer homes throughout, but generally, the bulk of them were built within that early to mid-90s to mid-2000s, more or less. This home on Hamlet, again, a really great representation of what $1 million can buy you, not just in Round Rock, but in this particular Forest Creek development. Asking price for this home is $924,000. We'll just call it $925,000. Four bedrooms, four bathrooms. It's 3,900 square feet, so almost 4,000 square feet, built in 2001. It also sits on one-third of an acre, and it features a beautiful sparkling pool, which backs up directly to the golf course. I've had plenty of clients that have mixed feelings about backing up to a golf course. Some love it because it's scenic, and some don't because they don't want random golfers in their backyard. Let's take a look. A lot of the homes in the Forest Creek neighborhood do have this brick facade on the exterior. If not brick, it's usually going to be limestone. High ceilings. It has a very stately style all around. We can see there is another curved stairway, which, of course, adds another element of drama and elegance. Here we're in the backyard, which is a big open space. Like I said, you've got the pool there. Though it is absolutely beautiful, I don't know how I would feel about a pool that backs up to the golf course, because I feel like everybody could look in. Not that I'm doing anything. I wouldn't hide necessarily, but it doesn't feel super private. Also, Forest Creek enforces these wrought iron fences throughout the community, so even if you were to get a house like this, you couldn't put like a an opaque fence. So just know that. Other than that, though, the community is actually really lovely. People are super friendly. It's beautifully maintained, and it's really it's in a really great location in Round Rock because it's close to grocery stores and and a bunch of things to do. So those are the homes, and those are the, I guess, cities and parts of town that are very popular. And these homes are excellent representation of the style of home that you can find in these areas for a million bucks. If there's a part of town that I missed that you really like or you're very curious about and want me to do a video about that so we can feature what a million dollar home looks like there, drop a comment. I'd be very interested to hear your feedback, guys. Thank you so, so much for watching. I'm Daphne Quay, your Boss Lady Realtor!