If your business grew between 2019 and 2021, some of that wasn't you.
| Residential units authorized | Travis | Williamson | Hays |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 21,417 | 6,668 | 3,474 |
| 2021 peak | 29,052 | 15,036 | 5,439 |
| 2023 | 23,148 | 8,298 | 5,011 |
| 2025 | 15,059 | 4,956 | 4,595 |
Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, series BPPRIV048453, BPPRIV048491, BPPRIV048209.
Travis County is down 48% from its peak. Williamson County is down 67%.
And here's the part that matters: it didn't move to the collar counties. In Dallas the growth relocated — Collin County absorbed what Dallas County lost. In Austin every county fell together. There is no suburb to follow.
So the work changed shape rather than address
Austin didn't stop needing trades. It stopped needing as many rough-ins.
Travis County's median home was built in 1997, with only 13.2% predating 1970 — ACS 2020–2024 estimates. This is a young stock, and young stock generates a different list than Dallas's forty-five-year-old housing: first replacements on late-90s and 2000s systems, capacity upgrades, retrofits, additions, and service on equipment installed during the boom.
Travis County also recorded 17,617 units built in 2020 or later — more than Dallas County managed, despite having barely half the housing stock. Those houses are now three to six years old and entering their first service cycle.
The pitch that worked in 2021 was "we can handle your volume." The pitch that works now is being findable by a homeowner rather than a builder — and that's a website problem, because builder relationships never came through search and homeowner demand always does.
One thing that changed the rules on every residential lot
Austin's HOME amendments. Phase 1, adopted December 2023 and effective February 2024, allows up to three housing units on lots zoned SF-1, SF-2 and SF-3. Phase 2, effective August 2024 and citywide from November 2024, permits single-family development on lots as small as 1,800 square feet, down from a 5,750 square foot minimum. A Site Plan Lite ordinance followed in June 2025.
Every trade that serviced one house on a lot may now service up to three. ADUs, subdivided lots, infill builds — that's a category of work that legally did not exist here two years ago, and searches for it are correspondingly new and correspondingly uncontested.
If you do that work, it needs its own pages. If you don't and you could, it's the clearest growth path in this market.
And a soil fact that splits the city in half
Texas A&M AgriLife Extension's Travis County program describes I-35 as physically separating the Edwards Plateau to the west from the Blackland Prairie to the east — thin soils over exposed limestone on one side, heavy shrink-swell clay on the other, producing "wide cracks and heaving objects like fence posts and patios."
Local garden centers ask customers which side of the freeway they live on. Trenching, drainage, foundation work, irrigation and slab plumbing all behave differently depending on the answer.
That's a genuinely different service conversation east and west, in one city, and we haven't found an Austin company writing pages that acknowledge it.
Where we'd compete
Not the Austin head term. Directories take most of that page before an agency appears.
Service plus sub-market, and the ones worth having are specific: Pflugerville's search results are currently thin enough that Wikipedia articles occupy commercial slots. Round Rock is moderately open. Georgetown grew 58.5% in five years but a Dallas agency already ranks there, so it's a fight rather than a gap.
$500 to start, then no monthly fee until we hit the page-one target we agree on.
- Website Design in Austin, TX
Fast, crawlable sites built to rank and convert.
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Get named when buyers ask an AI assistant who to call.
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Consistent presence that supports search authority.
of pages we build rank on Google's first page
location pages built for a single client across 7 states
page-one placements for one client across 5 cities
growth in monthly search impressions for a Nashville client
Limitless Doors
Commercial automatic doors, five Alberta metros
- 63+ page-one placements across 5 cities
- 85%+ of 74 pages on page one
- 4,483 clicks in 12 months
PM2
MRO inventory and storeroom optimization, Orlando and Tampa
- 589 to 1,300 monthly organic visitors
- 85%+ of pages on page one within 90 days
- First inbound leads in the company's history
Haus of Sovereign
Somatic and spiritual wellness, Nashville
- 132 to 2,900 monthly impressions
- 1,903 organic clicks in 6 months
- 15.6% average click-through rate
We also built and ranked a 208-page location program for a security and surveillance company across 15 metros in 7 states, with 85%+ of pages reaching page one. That client has asked not to be named.
FAQs — Austin
Are permits going to recover?
We don't forecast and won't pretend to. What's verifiable is a four-year decline across all three counties, and that the service work on the 17,617 units built since 2020 doesn't depend on new permits at all.
Is the HOME work actually significant?
It's the newest category in this market and the least competed. Whether it's significant for *you* depends on whether you want small-lot and ADU work. If you do, nobody has built the pages yet.
Does the I-35 split really change the pitch?
It changes what you'd write about drainage, foundations, trenching and irrigation, which is most of the outdoor trades and a good part of the plumbing ones. For an HVAC company it matters much less. We'd scope it to your services.
Should we build for Georgetown or Leander?
Only if you genuinely work there. Both grew more than 50% since 2020, and both already have agencies with page programs — a Cedar Park firm runs about eighteen Central Texas city pages and a Leander firm runs twelve. Pflugerville is the softer opening.
$500 to start. No monthly fees until we hit the page-one target we agree on.
The $500 one-time setup fee covers page research, page development and the website build. Monthly billing only starts once we hit the page-one target we agree on before any work begins. If we never hit it, you never pay a monthly fee — and we keep working.