How We Get Our Data

We read pricing from the SparkAPT feeds the communities publish themselves, and for the communities Spark does not carry we read the current starting rents, floor plan ranges and any move-in special straight off that community's own website. 67 communities in New Braunfels are tracked this way. If a community only publishes pricing behind a contact form, we show the last range we could verify with the date we checked it, or no number at all. We never estimate a rent.

A "1 month free" banner on an expensive unit can be a worse deal than a cheaper unit with no special. So we rank deals by what you would actually pay: the special applied across a twelve month lease, divided by the square feet you get. Communities where rent is set by income limits rather than the market are kept out of market deal rankings on purpose. Comparing them against market rate communities would mislead in both directions.

Every time our price checks run, the numbers are written into a permanent ledger: dated, append only, never edited after the fact. Trend lines and "price dropped" flags come only from that measured record. We do not backfill history we didn’t record ourselves, and a month we missed stays missing rather than being estimated.

Bus and rail distances come from CapMetro’s published GTFS schedule data (via data.texas.gov): we compute the nearest stop and its routes for every community we can pin to a verified address. Grocery distances are measured to real store locations (HEB, Central Market, Whole Foods and the other full service chains). Street View imagery links only appear where Google actually has a camera pass near the building, so there are no dead "not available here" links.

Commute times on our employer pages are computed with live-traffic routing for a Tuesday 8:30 AM departure: the honest number, not the 2 AM one. Each page says exactly which departure the number describes. We recompute these periodically; they are estimates of a typical rush hour, not a promise about any given morning.

Every community gets its school district from the Texas Education Agency’s own current boundary file. Campus level zoning (elementary, middle, high) comes from New Braunfels ISD’s published attendance boundaries, with the district’s closures and reassignments already applied; other districts show at the district level until we can verify their own boundary layers. Zones change and variances exist, so always confirm with the district before signing a lease.