The downtown Austin skyline at dusk, towers lit against a darkening sky with the Capitol dome held clear between them.

78701, where the address is a floor

Downtown, Rainey Street, Seaholm and the Second Street District. Almost everything here is a condominium, which makes the association as much of the purchase as the residence, and the view a thing nobody deeded to you.

Nobody deededyou the view.Ask what canrise in front.

The view

Thirty corridors, none of them yours

The reason downtown Austin looks the way it does from a distance is a 1983 state law. The reason a downtown unit looks the way it does from inside is that the law was never written for you.

The Capitol View Corridors were signed into law on the third of May 1983 and adopted into the City code in 1985. They protect sightlines to the Capitol dome from thirty public vantage points, parks, bridges, road crossings and terraces, by drawing an invisible sloping plane from each one to the dome and forbidding anything to rise through it. That is why the tallest buildings in the state stand where they do and why the dome is still visible from the Congress Avenue bridge. It is also why a tower can be seventy floors on one block and a parking structure on the next.

For a buyer the corridors matter in one specific way. They are the only thing in the city that can stop a building from going up in front of your window, and they were not drawn with your window in mind. A corridor that happens to cross the parcel in front of a unit protects that unit’s view as a side effect, and permanently. A parcel that is not under one is zoned Central Business District, and in 2026 that zoning produced Waterline, seventy-four floors and the tallest building in Texas, on Red River Street where a smaller building had stood. Before paying a premium for a floor, read the corridor map for the parcels between it and what it looks at. That is the whole of the due diligence on a view, and almost nobody does it.

The documents

Ten days, and what arrives in them

In a house the option period is for the inspector. In a condominium it is for the resale certificate, and the certificate has a statutory clock. What it contains is the price of the building, and it is not in the listing.

The clock: Texas Property Code 82.157. Once a unit owner asks in writing, the association has ten days to furnish the resale certificate. If it does not, the seller may give you a sworn affidavit instead, and an affidavit tells you nothing. Ask on day one of the option period, not day five.
Budget: The current operating budget and balance sheet are required contents. Read the line for the reserve contribution against the age of the building. A tower that is fifteen years old with a reserve line that looks like a new one has a bill coming.
Assessments: Any special assessment that has been levied, and any the board has approved, must be disclosed. A buyer who relies on the certificate is not liable for a debt it does not disclose. That protection is exactly as good as the certificate is complete, which is why you read it rather than file it.
Litigation: Pending suits by or against the association. Construction defect claims are common in buildings under fifteen years old and they matter twice: for what the repair will cost, and for whether a lender will lend on a unit in a building that is suing its builder.
Rentals: The declaration and rules govern leasing and short-term rental, and downtown buildings range from prohibiting anything under a year to being built around nightly stays. The listing will not say which. The declaration will, and it binds you the day you close.
Transfer fees: Every fee payable to the association on transfer is a required disclosure. Some downtown associations charge a capital contribution equal to months of dues at closing. It belongs in your cash-to-close figure, and it is not in the listing price.
Insurance: The master policy covers the building. What it does not cover is the line between the building and your unit, which the declaration draws somewhere in the drywall, and your own policy has to start where the master one stops. Read both before the option period ends, not after a leak.

A high-floor living room with floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides, low furniture in pale fabric, and the city far below in evening light.

The water

Two creeks, a tunnel, and the lake at the foot of it

Downtown is bounded by water on three sides: Shoal Creek along the west, Waller Creek through the east, and Lady Bird Lake along the south. The lake is the one everyone prices. The creeks are the ones that decide what could be built. Waller Creek flooded the eastern blocks for a century, and a mile-long tunnel under it, begun in 2011 and finished after years of delay, took more than 28 acres of downtown out of the hundred year floodplain. Waterloo Park reopened over the tunnel inlet in 2021, and The Confluence, the thirteen acres between Fourth Street and the lake, opened on the sixth of June 2026. The buildings going up along Red River and Sabine are going up on land that the tunnel made buildable.

Shoal Creek has no tunnel. Its floodplain runs along the western edge of the ZIP, and the 2018 Atlas 14 rainfall study widened it. A ground-floor unit or a below-grade garage on the west side is a question for the City’s FloodPro map, and so is where a building’s electrical room sits. On the south, the Seaholm plant that generated the city’s power until 1989 sat dark for a decade and a half as a wall between downtown and the lake before it was rebuilt, from 2005 on, into the district that carries its name. The trail along the lake is what most of the west side actually buys.

Until 2033

Three holes in the ground, one finishing year

Every edge of this ZIP is under construction at once, and the projects share a horizon. On the east, the Convention Center was demolished between April and October 2025 and a larger one is scheduled to open on the same blocks in early 2029. Beyond it, the interstate is being lowered from Airport Boulevard to the lake, with the City having funded foundations in May 2025 for three caps between Cesar Chavez and Twelfth, and the roadway scheduled to finish in 2033. Whether parks are built on those foundations is a separate funding decision, and as of the date on this page it has not been made.

Through the middle, light rail is scheduled to begin construction in 2027 and carry its first passengers in 2033, running down Guadalupe, along Third and out Trinity to a new bridge over the lake, with a station on Trinity between Cesar Chavez and Second. And Sixth Street, between the interstate and Congress, is being remade by a single owner of more than thirty of its buildings and by a City plan that reopened it to weekend traffic in 2025 and may rebuild the street itself from 2027.

So a unit here is bought against a specific edge of a specific project, and which window faces which hole matters more than the floor number. An east-facing unit on Red River is buying seven years of a convention center site and then a convention center. A unit over Guadalupe is buying a rail line. The right question for each is not whether the project is good for downtown. It is what that window looks at in 2029, and what it sounds like in 2027.

The Independent seen from the west, its stacked floor plates stepping outward at each shift and a terrace cantilevered from one of the setbacks.

Rainey Street

A street that was a neighborhood

Rainey was platted in 1884 and its two blocks of bungalows went onto the National Register in 1985, twenty-six of the thirty-five houses contributing. In 2004 and 2005 the City rezoned it into the central business district to pull development toward the Convention Center, the bungalows became bars through the 2010s, and the towers followed. The listing on the National Register did not stop any of it, which is the same lesson the 78702 page teaches: a register listing is a recognition, not a rule.

What that history means to a buyer is that Rainey is two different purchases depending on the floor. High in a tower it is a quiet lake view, with The Confluence and the trail at the foot of the street. Low, it is an entertainment district until two in the morning. The same building can hold both, and the declaration, not the listing, says whether the unit below yours can be rented by the night.

Schools

A ZIP that straddles the line

Downtown is not one attendance zone. Most of it is zoned to Mathews Elementary, O. Henry Middle School and Austin High, the same pattern as the west side, and the northern and eastern blocks fall under other zones, including Kealing and McCallum. Austin ISD’s consolidation took effect this school year and redrew boundaries with it. For any address where the school is part of the reason to buy, confirm the current zone with the district before the option period ends, because on this ZIP the line runs between buildings.

Honestly

Who 78701 is wrong for

A buyer who wants land: There is none. A downtown unit is air, a share of a building and a set of documents. The things that make a house in 78703 or 78704 worth what it is, a lot and a tree canopy, do not exist here, and neither do the things they cost: a roof, a foundation, a yard. It is a different asset with a different set of risks, not a smaller version of a house.
Anyone who thinks the view is theirs: It is not deeded, and nothing in your closing protects it. The Capitol View Corridors protect the public's view of the dome from thirty public points, and a corridor that happens to cross the parcel next door is the only view protection a unit will ever have. Read the corridor map before paying for a floor. If the lot in front is not under one, it can rise.
A buyer pricing on the dues in the listing: The dues in the listing are last year's number. The reserves, the special assessments and the transfer fees are in the certificate, and the certificate is the price. A building with low dues and an empty reserve is not the cheaper building.
A light sleeper on a low floor near the bars: Rainey Street and Sixth Street are entertainment districts by zoning and by fact, and a unit on the fourth floor over either one hears it until two in the morning. The 78702 buyer is told to stand on the lot at midnight on a Saturday. Here the instruction is to stand in the unit, with the windows closed, at that hour.

On the market

78701 right now

Residential listings for sale in the ZIP, from Unlock MLS through MLS Grid, as of October 17, 2026 at 4:04 AM CDT. Closed sale prices are not shown and never will be: Texas is a non-disclosure state and the MLS does not permit publishing them, so every figure here is derived from list prices and days since listing.

Active listings: 215
Median list price: $650,000
Median per sq ft: $705
Median days listed: 121; of the active listings, since each was listed

The 12 most recently listed of 218, newest first. All of them, with filters, are on the 78701 market page.

Listed by AustinRealEstate.com; Christies Intl Real Estate Lone Star; Compass RE Texas, LLC; DEN Property Group; Levi Rodgers Real Estate Group; Property Management Of Texas.

Drag to pan, pinch or use the buttons to zoom. Hover a price for a preview and click it for the listing, or tap it on a touchscreen. Every one of these is also in the grid above.

The two figures

The effective property tax rate is 2.0464 percent of appraised value for tax year 2025, across Austin ISD, the City of Austin, Travis County, Central Health and Austin Community College. It is the same rate in every central ZIP.

This ZIP alone carries a second one. Most of downtown sits inside the Austin Downtown Public Improvement District, which assesses 0.0925 dollars per hundred dollars of improvement value above the first five hundred thousand, and is authorized through 2032. Homestead property is exempt, so an owner who lives in the unit does not pay it. A second home or an investment unit does, on top of the tax rate above, and the listing will not mention it. The affordability figures for this ZIP, with the tax rate and a placeholder for dues already in them, are on the buying page. The real dues are in the certificate, which is the point of this page.

Nearby

The other four central ZIPs

MLS GRID logo slot

Listings courtesy of Unlock MLS as distributed by MLS GRID

Based on information submitted to the MLS GRID as of October 17, 2026 at 4:04 AM CDT. All data obtained from various sources and may not have been verified by broker or MLS GRID.

Any use or search of data on the website, other than by a consumer looking to purchase real estate, is prohibited.