Who Pays for Texas Home Talk

We take no money from the transactions we write about. We are not a brokerage, we are not a lender, and we do not earn commissions, referral fees, or closing-side compensation on any home purchase or sale discussed on this site.

Our revenue comes from three places:

• Community partner placement. Local real estate agents, home-service businesses, and trades buy a labeled profile slot on a community page. Placement is sold as fixed-term advertising at a published rate — never on commission, never per lead closed.
• Builder and developer features. Sponsored community spotlights, labeled as such wherever they appear.
• Podcast sponsorship. Read as sponsor segments on The Texas Current, disclosed in the episode and on the episode page.

That is the whole list. We run no affiliate links, no pay-per-lead arrangements, and no undisclosed referral relationships.

What Advertising Buys — and What It Doesn't

What a partner gets

• A labeled profile on the community pages they've purchased, with their photo, credentials, service area, and contact route.
• Direct inquiries from readers who choose to contact them.
• Category exclusivity in the trades and home-service categories — one plumber, one inspector, one roofer per community.

What no amount of money buys

• Favorable or unfavorable coverage of any town, neighborhood, school district, builder, or subdivision.
• Removal, softening, or suppression of a fact — including property tax rates, school ratings, flood exposure, water restrictions, or price trends that reflect badly on a market.
• Pre-publication review of any article, community page, or podcast episode.
• A recommendation, endorsement, or "best of" designation. We do not run paid rankings.
• Editorial mention outside the labeled partner slot. A partner does not become a source, a quoted expert, or a featured business by paying us.

How We Label Paid Placement

Every commercial placement on this site is visually distinct from editorial content and carries an explicit label. You should never have to guess whether you are reading reporting or advertising.

Labels are placed above the content they describe, not buried beneath it. We do not use ambiguous framing such as "recommended by our editors" or "trusted local pro" to describe paid placement.

Where Our Numbers Come From

Relocation decisions get made on data. Most of the data circulating about Central Texas towns is scraped, stale, or invented — aggregator sites routinely publish population figures, median prices, and school ratings that are years old or simply wrong. We do not use them.

Every figure we publish is pulled from a primary source and cited:

Market figures are dated on the page. When we can't source a number from a primary record, we don't publish the number.

How Coverage Decisions Get Made

Which communities we cover, and what we write about them, is driven by one question: what does someone actually deciding whether to move here need to know? That includes the unflattering parts — tax burden, water supply, commute reality, growth pressure on schools, and infrastructure that hasn't caught up to the population.

We cover communities where we have no partners at all, and we publish comparisons that conclude one town is a worse fit than another. If our coverage only ever flattered our advertisers' markets, we would be worthless to the reader — and worthless to the reader means worthless to the advertiser.

Corrections

We publish a lot of numbers, and numbers change. When we get something wrong, we correct it in place and note what changed.

• Factual errors are corrected as soon as we can verify the correct figure against a primary source, with a dated correction note on the page.
• Outdated data is refreshed on a rolling schedule; market and tax figures carry the date they were pulled.
• Disputed characterizations get reviewed, but we don't remove accurate, sourced information because a subject dislikes it.

Found something wrong? Email corrections@texashometalk.com with the page and the figure in question. Include a source if you have one and we'll move faster.

Artificial Intelligence and How We Use It

We use AI tools in production — including the synthetic hosts on our podcast, The Texas Current, which are disclosed as such. We do not use AI to generate facts. Every statistic, rate, rating, and dollar figure on this site is verified against a primary source by a human before publication, regardless of how the draft was produced.

Ownership and Material Connections

Questions

• Does Texas Home Talk get paid when someone buys or sells a house?

  No. We earn no commission, referral fee, or transaction-side compensation on any home purchase or sale. Our revenue is advertising only — fixed-term, published-rate placement sold to local businesses. A reader closing a transaction with a partner earns us nothing beyond what the partner already paid for the slot.

• Can an advertiser get a negative fact removed from a community page?

  No. Advertisers have no editorial review rights and no removal rights. If a fact is accurate and sourced, it stays — high property tax rates, declining school ratings, water restrictions, flood exposure, and slow appreciation all appear on our pages in markets where we have paying partners.

• How are featured agents chosen for a community?

  Featured agent slots are advertising, clearly labeled as such. There are three per community, and they are sold — not awarded editorially. Each agent must hold an active Texas Real Estate Commission license in good standing and pass our partner vetting process, but placement is a commercial arrangement, not a recommendation or ranking. We do not publish paid "best agent" lists.

• Where does Texas Home Talk's data come from?

  Primary sources only: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts and the Texas Demographic Center for population, the Texas Education Agency and TXschools.gov for schools, county appraisal district and Truth in Taxation records for property taxes, and live market pulls for housing figures. We do not source data from population, school-rating, or cost-of-living aggregator sites, and we do not publish AI-generated figures.