The house is the easy part. Why I built Realust

I’ve spent more than ten years as an architect. The first thing that job teaches you is that you don’t design anything until you’ve walked the site. Where the sun comes from. What the street sounds like at five o’clock. What’s about to go up next door. The building comes after.

Then I watched how people buy homes in North Texas, and it’s the exact opposite. Open an app, set a price, sort by newest, fall for a kitchen. The city gets about thirty seconds of thought, usually somewhere between the third showing and the offer.

That’s backwards. So I built Realust.

Listing apps are menus

Zillow, Redfin and realtor.com are very good at what they do. But they exist to move houses, so the house is the product. Swipe, save, schedule a tour. Everything about the place you’ll actually live, the schools, the commute, where the city is headed, gets squeezed into a sidebar or a third-party badge you scroll past.

The MLS is the menu. Nobody was printing the nutrition label.

“Best places to live” lists are worse

The national ranking sites aren’t the fix either. They cover tens of thousands of cities, which sounds impressive until you notice how thin each page is. A couple dozen data points, the same template for a farm town in Iowa and a suburb of Dallas, and a top-ten list that reshuffles whenever someone needs a fresh headline.

I’d rather know one region properly. Realust covers 84 North Texas cities. That’s it. Each one gets 288 data points. If you’re moving to Phoenix, we’re the wrong site, and I’m fine with that.

How it’s actually built

This is where the nerd in me takes over. Most of the data arrives through Python scripts that pull from the U.S. Census Bureau, Walk Score, SchoolDigger and a handful of real estate and safety data providers. It lands in a Supabase database, gets cleaned and scored, and flows into the site, where every number on a city page is pulled live instead of typed in by hand.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Hand-written city guides start going stale the day they’re published. A pipeline doesn’t. When the data changes, the score changes, and so does every table in posts like our Frisco vs. Plano vs. McKinney matchup.

Yes, expensive cities score high. On purpose.

Here’s the part that gets pushback. Plenty of ranking sites punish a city for being expensive. I think that’s backwards. A high price is the market voting with real money: thousands of buyers decided that city was worth the premium. Ignoring that signal doesn’t make a ranking fairer. It makes it less accurate.

So University Park sits near the top of Realust, and homes above $450K earn a small price-tier bonus, capped at 98. It’s disclosed on the homepage because I’d rather explain a choice than bury it.

None of that means expensive is right for you. Affordability is in the score too. Which brings me to the part I care about most.

Don’t trust my weights. Set your own.

Every ranking you’ve ever read bakes in somebody else’s priorities. Ours do too. Prosperity carries 26% of the score, Schools and Safety 18% each, all the way down to 6% for Commute and Growth. Those are my defaults for a typical buyer. You are not a typical buyer.

So the weights aren’t locked. Drop Schools to zero if you don’t have kids. Crank Commute if you’re driving to Legacy West every morning. The list reorders as you go. A ranking you can’t argue with isn’t worth much. Go argue with mine.

What I won’t do

• Publish the exact formula. The sources and the weights are public. The precise math stays in-house so nobody can game it.
• Pretend a number can choose for you. A score tells you where to look, not where to live.
• Trash cities to look clever. Every city on Realust is home to people who love it. The data is there to help you find the one that fits you, not to tell anyone where they went wrong.

Pick the city. Then the house.

Realust is still young, and I’m building it in the open, one city page and one post at a time. If a number looks wrong or you think a weight is off, say so in the comments. I read them.

And whatever you use to search, do it in the right order. Walk the site first.