The transaction
Walton Global sold 1,736 acres in eastern Hays County, Texas, along Highway 21, to Austin-based Wilson Capital and Carlton Capital Investments, in a deal reported on June 25, 2026. The purchase price was not disclosed.
The buyers plan a master-planned community called The Ridge with more than 6,200 homes — 6,218 single-family homes in the master plan as reported. The site is roughly 20 minutes from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and about 30 minutes from downtown Austin.
What the plan contains
Planned lot widths run from 40 to 60 feet. The plan allocates more than 30 acres to amenity centres, roughly 119 acres to parks and open space, and includes a community hall with a fish camp. About 57 acres are reserved for future elementary, middle and high school sites, and about 60 acres are designated for future commercial and multifamily development.
Hays County Commissioners Court separately approved preliminary plans in late June for a sub-phase, The Ridge West at Camino Real, covering roughly 532 acres and about 2,784 homes across 30 phases.
The county the land sits in
Hays County's population has grown from 157,107 at the 2010 Census to 241,067 in 2020 and an estimated 304,390 as of July 2025 — a 26.3 percent increase since the 2020 count, according to Census Bureau estimates. Housing units in the county reached 120,266 as of mid-2025.
That growth has not translated into rising permit volume recently. Census building-permit data compiled by the St. Louis Fed show Hays County authorized 5,439 units in 2021 and 5,528 in 2022, before slipping to 5,011 in 2023, 5,405 in 2024 and 4,595 in 2025. A separate tally of the twelve months through June 2026 puts total permits at 4,672, almost entirely single-family, with the most recent month up 27.7 percent year over year — a sign the slide may be bottoming rather than deepening. A single 6,200-home master plan, phased over many years, would still represent more than a full year of county-wide permitting once construction reaches its peak pace.
Lot width is the affordability lever
The 40-to-60-foot range is the most revealing number in the plan. Lot width determines how many homes a developer can place per acre, and it is the single largest determinant of land cost per home. A 40-foot lot puts roughly a third more homes on the same frontage than a 55-foot lot, which is how greenfield builders reach entry-level price points without reducing house size proportionally.
It also shapes the product: narrow lots produce front-loaded garages, side-yard setbacks measured in feet and alley-loaded variants where the plan allows. This is the standard geometry of Texas entry-level subdivision development, the same geometry Hays County has absorbed through a decade of rapid, if now slowing, permit growth.
Scale and time
6,200 homes is a multi-decade build-out. At even an aggressive 400 to 500 closings a year across several builders, the community would take more than a decade to complete, and that pace assumes demand that recent county-wide permit volumes — under 5,000 units a year across all of Hays County — do not obviously support without a rebound.
The school site reservations are the part that matters most locally. Setting aside 57 acres at the platting stage is how a fast-growing Texas county avoids the pattern where rooftops arrive years before classrooms. Whether the districts build on them is a separate question that this transaction does not answer.
The price was not disclosed in either source reviewed, and the sub-phase approval figures for The Ridge West at Camino Real came from local reporting rather than from county plat records examined directly.