Cedar Creek

The feel of Cedar Creek

Cedar Creek isn’t a town in the conventional sense — it’s an unincorporated crossroads community in western Bastrop County, spread along Hwy 71 and FM 535 roughly halfway between Austin’s airport and Bastrop proper. For decades that meant a school, a scatter of churches and feed stores, and ranchland. What it means now is location: Tesla’s Gigafactory is about twenty minutes up the road, Austin-Bergstrom about the same, Circuit of the Americas closer still, and the corridor immediately east has filled with SpaceX’s Starlink manufacturing campus, The Boring Company’s headquarters, and the Bastrop 552 film studio complex (facility names and footprints evolve — verify current). Few places in the metro have gone from “middle of nowhere” to “middle of everything east” this fast.

The landscape is transitional Texas — post oaks and cedar giving way to the Lost Pines as you head toward Bastrop — and the housing follows the same in-between logic: long-held acreage homesteads and manufactured homes on family land, side by side with brand-new starter subdivisions where builders are planting rooftops as fast as roads get paved.

Who it suits: buyers who want land within twenty minutes of an east-side paycheck; first-time buyers chasing the metro’s lowest new-build entry points; and patient buyers betting on where the growth map clearly points. Who it doesn’t: anyone who wants walkability, established retail, or certainty about what the neighboring parcel will look like in five years.

Schools

Cedar Creek is served by Bastrop ISD — Cedar Creek High School anchors the community, with Cedar Creek Elementary, Bluebonnet Elementary, and Cedar Creek Intermediate and Middle feeding it. The honest picture is the same one we give in Bastrop: the district’s accountability ratings have historically trailed the metro’s big suburban districts, and that’s a real consideration for family buyers and for resale. The district is building and investing as the county grows, campus results vary year to year, and career-and-technical programs are expanding alongside the incoming employers. If schools are a primary driver, we’ll look at campus-level data together and verify the exact assignment for any property — zones shift as fast as the subdivisions arrive out here.

The commute

This is Cedar Creek’s headline. Hwy 71 runs straight through the community: Austin-Bergstrom International Airport is about 20 minutes west, Tesla’s Gigafactory about 20 minutes via 71 and SH-130, COTA closer than that, and the SpaceX/Boring Company/studio cluster is 5–15 minutes east depending on where you land. Downtown Austin runs 30–45 minutes — respectable by east-metro standards, though 71’s signalized intersections through Del Valle and its ongoing construction make peak-hour timing inconsistent. SH-130 opens tolled routes north toward Manor and Samsung’s Taylor fab. The caution: 71 is the only real artery, it carries everything from commuters to gravel trucks, and growth is outpacing the roadwork. Off-corridor, county two-lanes are what they are.

Property taxes and MUDs

Unincorporated status is a quiet advantage: most of Cedar Creek pays no city tax, just Bastrop County, Bastrop ISD, and emergency-services districts, landing effective rates around 1.8–2.1% on acreage and older properties. Newer subdivisions typically carry MUDs to fund water and roads, pushing all-in rates toward 2.3–2.5% in early phases — the familiar trade of lower sticker price for higher district taxes, and we run the true monthly cost on every new build. Acreage buyers get a different homework set: many parcels run on private wells and septic (or aerobic systems), so well tests, septic inspections, and — for raw land — utility availability letters belong in the option period. Ag-exempt parcels carry rollback-tax implications worth understanding before you change a property’s use.

What you’ll find

Two markets share one zip code. The first is acreage: one to twenty-plus acres with everything from 1980s ranch houses and manufactured homes to new barndominiums and custom builds, often lightly restricted or unrestricted — which cuts both ways, since your freedom is also your neighbor’s. The second is new subdivisions: starter-home communities along 71 and FM 535 where national builders deliver 1,300–2,200 square-foot homes on suburban lots at some of the lowest new-construction prices in the metro. Between them sits Tahitian Village-adjacent spillover and small ranchette plats from earlier decades.

Per Redfin and Zillow public market data as of mid-2026, newer builds typically run $300K–$450K, while acreage properties range from the $300Ks for modest homes on a few acres to well past $600K for larger or improved tracts — verify current, as this market is thin enough that a handful of sales move the numbers. Buyers weighing the corridor should compare Manor for the more established version of the east-side value play, or Bastrop for town character ten minutes further out.

New construction in Cedar Creek

Volume builders have discovered the corridor: national names including D.R. Horton, Lennar, Century Communities, and Starlight have been active in Bastrop County’s new starter communities along Hwy 71 and FM 535, with entry pricing that undercuts nearly everything closer to Austin — rosters shift quickly out here, so verify who’s building in the specific community you’re considering. Custom and barndominium builders serve the acreage side, where buyers bring their own land and plans.

Fast-growth corridors reward careful contracts: MUD assessments change the real payment, incentive fine print usually ties to affiliated lenders, and on acreage builds the well, septic, and utility questions belong in writing before anything else. We review every addendum, negotiate beyond the advertised package, and put independent inspections at each construction milestone — especially valuable where the county’s building oversight is lighter than a city’s.