Flood, Storm & Water Damage Restoration in San Marcos, TX

Seven in Ten San Marcos Homes Are Rentals

That single statistic explains more about property damage in this city than anything else. About 72 percent of occupied housing units in San Marcos are renter-occupied — roughly 19,000 households — against only 28 percent owner-occupied. Nowhere else in our service area looks like that.

The reason is Texas State University. Enrollment reached 40,678 in fall 2024, the first time in the university's 125-year history it passed 40,000, against a city population somewhere around 70,000 to 74,000. The student body is roughly the size of the permanent resident base. And because the university requires freshmen to live on campus and has limited space beyond that, most upperclassmen rent in the private market — occupancy near campus runs around 95 percent, and the university has itself bought downtown apartment complexes to take pressure off.

So when water comes through a ceiling in San Marcos, the person who notices is often a tenant, the person who has to authorize the work is often an out-of-town owner or a property manager, and the clock is often a lease turnover date rather than a family's patience. We work all three of those relationships, and we document to the standard an absentee owner or a commercial carrier needs rather than the standard a homeowner standing next to you will accept.

We are based in Buda, about 17 to 18 miles north on I-35 — usually twenty minutes.

The Student Rental Problem Nobody in This Industry Talks About

Between 2023 and 2024, KVUE, FOX 7, CBS Austin and the University Star all ran investigations into mold and habitability conditions at named San Marcos apartment complexes. One outlet ran a piece on predatory apartment complexes in the city. This is not a story that flared and died — it is a recurring local news beat.

It is also completely absent from the website of every restoration company competing for San Marcos work. Not one addresses landlords, property managers or student-housing operators as an audience, despite rentals being the clear majority of the housing stock here.

The underlying dynamic is not mysterious. High turnover means a unit is empty for a few days between leases and problems get papered over rather than opened up. Deferred maintenance accumulates on a schedule set by budgets rather than buildings. A slow leak behind a shower surround, in a unit occupied nine months a year by someone who has never owned a home, does not get reported until it smells.

If you own or manage rental property here, the useful thing to understand is that remediation done properly means finding and fixing the moisture source, not wiping a surface and repainting before a walkthrough. The second approach costs less this month and considerably more when a tenant photographs it. We will tell you which one a unit actually needs, and we can schedule around turnover dates.

Two Rivers, and What They Have Done

San Marcos sits in Flash Flood Alley at the junction of the San Marcos River, the Blanco River and Purgatory Creek. Thin soil over Balcones Escarpment rock sheds rain rather than absorbing it. Texas generally allows two years from date of loss to bring a property damage claim.

What the City Has Built Since 2015

San Marcos did not simply recover from 2015, it re-engineered around it, and the projects are worth knowing about because they change the risk picture for specific neighborhoods.

A roughly $36 million Blanco River flood mitigation scheme — a berm, a floodwall and a relief channel — was completed in August 2024. A separate $15.2 million drainage project in Blanco Gardens, the neighborhood that took 600 damaged homes in the Memorial Day flood, had its ribbon-cutting in January 2025.

None of that makes a property immune. What it does mean is that if you are buying, insuring or repairing in those corridors, the situation on the ground now is genuinely different from 2015 — and anyone quoting you off a ten-year-old mental model of this city is working from stale information.

Your Flood Map Changed, and Your Lender Noticed Before You Did

FEMA issued preliminary Flood Insurance Rate Maps for Hays County in March 2025. In San Marcos the practical consequence arrived by post: homeowners received notices from mortgage servicers requiring them to buy flood insurance within 45 days, including people who had never considered themselves at risk. Local news covered homeowners being compelled into coverage they disputed needing.

If that happened to you, two things are worth doing. Check your specific parcel through FEMA's own address lookup rather than relying on the letter or on a neighbor's account. And understand that a lender requirement and an actual risk assessment are different things — a lender is protecting its collateral, not advising you.

The underlying insurance point matters more than the paperwork. A standard homeowners policy excludes flood. Water rising out of the Blanco, the San Marcos or Purgatory Creek into a structure needs separate NFIP or private flood coverage, and that coverage carries a waiting period, so it cannot be arranged once rain is forecast. Water entering through a hail-damaged roof is generally covered, because the covered peril is the hail. In a county where the Memorial Day flood alone produced 400 NFIP claims totaling over $45 million, the distinction is not academic. We will tell you honestly which category a loss falls into — including when that means your homeowners carrier will not pay.

What Fails in a San Marcos Property

This city has a wider range of building types than anywhere else we cover — Victorian-era homes, mid-century stock, purpose-built student housing and a large 55-plus community, often within a few miles of each other.

Historic Districts Need More Than a Building Permit

San Marcos has designated historic districts and a historic preservation process, and exterior work on a contributing property generally requires a Certificate of Appropriateness in addition to any building permit. Roofing is exterior work.

The honest caveat is that we have not found the city publishing a clear written definition of what counts as an ordinary repair exempt from that process, and whether a like-for-like shingle replacement clears it is a determination staff make case by case. So we do not guess. On a property in or near a historic district we confirm with Planning and Development Services before scoping, because starting work that needed a certificate is a far more expensive mistake than making a phone call.

Outside the historic districts, the metro-wide picture is worth knowing: permit rules genuinely differ by jurisdiction. Austin generally exempts asphalt-over-asphalt unless the property is in the Wildland-Urban Interface and half or more is being replaced. Georgetown requires a permit for any new roof. Lakeway's trigger is a change to design, material or slope. Buda permits residential re-roofs through its development services department. A contractor working the whole corridor who assumes one rule travels will be wrong somewhere.

On materials, Texas Property Code § 202.011 prevents an HOA from stopping you from installing shingles designed primarily to be wind and hail resistant and rated by a nationally recognized testing laboratory, such as UL 2218 Class 4. Reasonable aesthetic standards still apply, and historic district review is a separate question from HOA review. Texas Insurance Code § 2253.002 requires insurers here to offer a discount for qualifying impact-resistant roofing, with each carrier setting its own amount and documentation.

Our Services in San Marcos

Restoration and construction under one contract, for owner-occupied homes, rental portfolios and commercial property alike.

Neighborhoods We Cover in San Marcos

Blanco Vista, La Cima, Kissing Tree, Cottonwood Creek, Trace, Whisper, Paso Robles, Willow Creek, Rio Vista, Blanco Gardens, Dunbar, Sunset Acres and Hughson Heights — plus the Belvin Street historic district, the downtown square around the 1909 Hays County Courthouse, and the student rental corridors near campus.

That is ZIP code 78666 and the surrounding Hays County area. If you are near Texas State, Spring Lake and the Meadows Center, Rio Vista Park, the outlet centers on I-35 or anywhere along the river corridor, you are inside our area — and we handle rental and commercial property there as readily as houses.

San Marcos Questions We Get Asked