Austin is the best US city for renters. Here is the debt behind it: 802 apartment loans in Travis County, who wrote them, and when they come due

Apartment List named Austin the best city in America to rent in on October 14: 9.0% of its apartments are vacant, rents are more than 20% below their 2022 peak, and more than half of its apartments are offered with over a month free. Every one of those discounts is paid out of a building's debt service. Travis County's record holds 802 active multifamily loans of $1 million or more, $24.83B in all. 366 were recorded in the three years that built the glut, and banks wrote more of it than anyone — 34% of the loans, spread across 67 of them. 29 apartment loans state a maturity date in the next twelve months, and they are mostly not the wave: the wave's maturities are, for the most part, not on paper yet.

The ranking is a renter's story, and it has been told well. What it leaves out is who is on the other side of every month of free rent: the lender whose deed of trust is recorded against the building. Texas does not disclose the price of a building, but it does record the loan — the deed of trust states the lender, the borrower, the original principal and, on a little under half of instruments, the maturity date. So we counted the debt behind Austin's renters' market the way we counted New York's maturity wall and ranked Texas's lenders: one row per recorded deed of trust, $1 million and up, from the Travis County Clerk's record since 2015, the property typed by the appraisal district.

Counts are as of October 20, 2026. "Multifamily" means a parcel the Travis Central Appraisal District classifies as apartments — the district's own code, not our guess. "Lender" means the institution that lent the money, with its recorded spellings folded together; trustees, servicers and MERS are left out.

The renters' market, in the landlord's numbers

Apartment List's ranking scored 71 cities on sixteen measures in five groups — housing affordability, housing leverage, cost of living, economic opportunity and lifestyle — and Austin scored 69.4, ahead of Salt Lake City at 68.6 and Charleston at 62.6. It won on leverage: a 9.0% vacancy rate against 6.8% nationally, rents down 2.3% in the year and more than 20% from the 2022 peak, and "over half of all apartments offering more than a month of free rent," in the report's words. It also ranked first for economic opportunity, on 7% job growth and 3.3% unemployment.

Brokers' numbers are harsher, because they count the professionally managed stock where the new supply landed. Matthews put metro vacancy at 12.29% in the second quarter of 2026, down 289 basis points from a 15.78% peak in the third quarter of 2024, with completions down 56.4% year over year and a construction pipeline equal to 4.55% of inventory against 19.67% at the start of 2023. The wave has broken. What it left behind is leased-up buildings at concession-adjusted rents, and loans that were sized to the rents of 2021 and 2022.

Who financed the wave

Multifamily deeds of trust recorded in Travis County peaked in 2021: 167 loans of $1 million or more, $5.04B. Across 2021, 2022 and 2023 together, 366 multifamily loans, $9.95B — 31% of every multifamily loan the county has recorded since 2015, at a median of $16.1M. The count fell to 43 in 2024 and 60 in 2025, and has come back to 128 so far this year — $5.62B, more multifamily dollars than in any full year in the table. The record does not label a deed of trust a refinancing, but the wave's rollover is in that figure.

Deeds of trust of $1M or more recorded against Travis County parcels, originating lenders only, one row per loan, by year recorded. "Multifamily" is the appraisal district's classification. "Untyped" is a loan whose property the record has not yet tied to an appraisal parcel; it has no type and is counted in the first column only. "Still active" means no release, foreclosure or superseding instrument is matched on the record — see the caveats below.

It was big money. 156 of the 366 loans were $25 million or more, and they are 84% of the dollars; 149 were under $10 million. And it was, by count, bank money:

The 366 multifamily loans of $1M or more recorded in 2021–2023, by the type of institution that originated them. "Open on the record" is explained in the next section.

Banks wrote 34% of the loans ($3.39B), agency lenders — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seller-servicers and HUD — 17%, debt funds and private lenders 17%, life companies 7%; 22% are institutions our typing rule does not classify. That is not the Texas pattern. In the six-county ranking multifamily belonged to the agencies, and the first bank came fifth. Austin's wave was financed on bank balance sheets — and on many of them: the 124 bank loans came from 67 banks, the 63 agency loans from 15 seller-servicers.

That spread is why the names at the top of the table are agencies anyway:

Originating lenders of the 366 multifamily loans of $1M or more recorded in Travis County in 2021–2023, by count. Median loan is the median original principal. Lender types are the record's, hand-checked for every name printed.

CBRE Capital Markets wrote the most, 11 — CBRE's two agency desks together wrote 15 — then Wells Fargo Bank (10 loans, $290.7M) and Austin Housing Finance Corporation (10 loans, $130.8M). No bank wrote more than 10. By dollars the order is a bank's: JPMorgan Chase Bank (3 loans, $405.4M), then CBRE Multifamily Capital (4 loans, $390.2M) and Capital One (4 loans, $297.1M). In the last 36 months — the window our Travis County lenders page uses — the most active multifamily lenders have been Builder Circle Finance (15 loans, $32.4M), Berkadia Commercial Mortgage (14 loans, $408.1M) and CBRE Multifamily Capital (5 loans, $458.9M), out of 243 loans.

What happened to the wave

Three to five years on, most of the wave's loans have been dealt with, and the record shows it two ways. A release, where the clerk's index lets us match one. And a later deed of trust on the same parcel, which means the building was refinanced or sold whether or not a release was matched — in a county where releases match poorly (below), that is the better signal.

The 366 multifamily loans recorded in 2021–2023: a release matched on the record; still shown active but with a later deed of trust recorded against the same parcel; and open on the record with nothing recorded since. The last two columns count only the open loans.

201 of the 366 (55%) are released or succeeded by a later lien. 165 are open on the record with nothing recorded since — $4.64B of original principal. 2 of them carry a recorded modification or extension. And only 84 of the 165 (51%) state a maturity date on the instrument; the other 81 were written on paper that leaves the date to the note, which is not recorded. When the open loans come due, as far as the record says:

Open 2021–2023 multifamily loans by maturity year: stated on the recorded instrument, and stated or estimated by our model from the origination date and a typical term for the lender type and loan size (shown ≈ in the product). Only stated dates are used elsewhere in this brief.

On paper, 2026 is the heaviest year, with 12 stated maturities ($307.1M), and it stays the heaviest with the model's estimates added (27 loans, $841.5M). The rows for past years are open loans whose stated date has passed with nothing recorded since — on this county's record, as likely an unmatched release or an extension by letter as anything else, and not read here as anything more. 5 of the open wave loans state a maturity in the next twelve months.

What states a maturity in the next twelve months

Of the 802 active multifamily loans in the county, 360 (45%) carry a maturity date written on the recorded instrument. 29 of those dates fall between Oct 20, 2026 and Oct 19, 2027: $670.7M of original principal, median $22.1M. Another 23 ($353.7M) state a maturity in the following twelve months, and the active book's stated maturities run 17 loans in 2027 and 20 in 2028.

Active multifamily loans of $1M or more in Travis County with a stated maturity between Oct 20, 2026 and Oct 19, 2027, by originating institution.

These are not the wave. 9 of the 29 were recorded in 2017 — ten-year paper from the last cycle — and only 6 in 2021–2023. Life companies wrote 9 of them ($191.4M), agencies 5, banks 5; 8 are lenders our rule does not type. The heaviest month is February 2027, with 5 loans ($115.9M). Multifamily is 9% of the 307 commercial loans of any type that state a maturity in the window in Travis County ($3.33B).

The wave's refinancing is in the record a different way: in the 201 loans already released or succeeded, and in the 81 open ones whose maturity is on a note the county never sees. Counting our model's estimates, 58 multifamily loans come due in the window — a figure to search with, not to publish.

Two things the record does not say about any of these loans. It does not say who holds them: an agency loan is securitized at closing, a bank loan may have been sold, and a sale is rarely recorded, so each row names the originator. And it does not say whether they are current. A stated maturity in the window is a refinancing event in a market where Trepp's multifamily CMBS delinquency rate was 7.69% in August 2026 — not a finding about any one of them.

What the record cannot say in Travis County yet

Every figure above is a floor, and three limits make it a lower one than in Dallas or New York.

• 5,129 active commercial loans (59%) have no property type, because the record has not yet tied their property to an appraisal parcel — Travis's clerk indexes a legal description and no address, and the appraisal district's deed numbers place about 60% of them. Some of those loans are apartments. They are counted as untyped, never guessed.
• Releases match less often here. The clerk's index names one party a side and carries no marginal reference to the instrument being released, so a release is matched by borrower and parcel alone. About 13% of the county's loans since 2015 show a matched release, against 22–25% in Bexar County. That is why this brief reads a later deed of trust on the parcel as the second signal, and why it prints no "matured, no payoff recorded" figure for Travis County — on this record an unmatched release and an open loan look the same.
• Foreclosures are not matched. Travis records a foreclosure conveyance as a plain deed; the notice of substitute trustee sale is the open signal and is being matched. No loan on this page is described as in default, and none should be read that way.

Loans you can check

Every figure above aggregates rows like these. Each traces to a Travis County instrument number, and each parcel was checked for a later deed of trust that would mark an unrecorded refinancing (9 of the 29 had one and are left out here).

The largest active multifamily loans of $1M or more with a stated maturity between Oct 20, 2026 and Oct 19, 2027 and no later deed of trust on the same parcel. Addresses as the appraisal district records them. Property type is the district's.

Methodology

• Source. The Travis County Clerk's official public records (deeds of trust, releases, partial releases, modifications, extensions, assignments, lis pendens), read in full from 2015 and weekly since; the recorded instrument for the amount and the maturity date, read page by page; the Travis Central Appraisal District roll for the parcel, its owner and its state-use classification.
• Unit of count. Loans, counted once each: a deed of trust recorded against several parcels is one loan. A facility perfected by several deeds of trust each stating the full note is counted once, on the widest recording; 1,528 loans in the count are such recordings, and the member recordings they supersede are not counted. Deeds securing corporate credit facilities are excluded.
• Floor and window. Original principal of $1,000,000 or more, read off the instrument; one-to-four family houses excluded. "Recorded in 2021–2023" is by the instrument's recording date. "Next 12 months" is a stated maturity between Oct 20, 2026 and Oct 19, 2027 on a loan with no matched release; modelled maturities are quoted as context and used in no ranking.
• Lender. The institution that originated the loan, as recorded, with spellings and lending vehicles folded into one name; MERS, trustees and servicers are left out. Lender types are assigned by rule and hand-checked for every name printed here. Successor names are footnoted, never merged.
• Property type. The appraisal district's state-use code on the resolved parcel. A loan on a property not yet tied to a parcel has no type and appears only in the all-commercial columns.
• Later deed of trust. A deed of trust of $1M or more recorded against the loan's largest parcel after the loan's own recording date. It marks a refinancing or a sale; it does not say which.
• Verification. Any row can be pulled live through Circlemark or checked against the clerk's record by instrument number. The county's full counters are on the Travis County maturities page, recomputed daily.