Likes:

Having drinks at manuels with folks while rest of our group was at austonian.

the spring - location is hot, right in middle of everything. incredible views, really cool balconies. North facing units are my favorite. Small units have good layouts and feel big for the square footage.

bridges on the park - just a great development, really nice public areas compared to everywhere else, high ceilings, all concrete and steel construction that is not required for a mid-rise but developer did it anyway (much less noise, both from neighbors and from lamar!), and east facing units have fantastic view of the park that will never be obscured by another development. Great finish out, spacious units.

the shore - whoa, the west facing units have unbelievable view of the lake and downtown. East facing units have really great balconies and view of east austin and the colorado. Nice public entry, convenient access to the hike/bike trail.

Dislikes:

Bus showing up late to pick us all up - we had to hurry to make sunset at the shore.

Not enough hard hats for our entire group to go up on the austonian together.

Layout of some of the large units at the spring, and public entry seemed small/underdone.  Spring staff seemed to have a sense of humor about the unimpressive entry.

Access to the shore is through a neighborhood that is redeveloping and has some construction going on - but such is the life.

An observation:

All of the places we looked at had very few units under $450k left. We've heard that the market for condos is overbuilt, and I think that's plain wrong after having seen how few units (I think 12 of 140 or so at bridges, 8 at shore, for example) are left in some of these complexes. With nothing else big on the horizon, this may be the inventory to work with for at least a little while. I think that the properties that are not right in the middle of downtown are especially good values - bridges seems really well priced, and it just isn't that far from DT. I can see wanting to be just outside DT and to pay less and still have a lot of the amenities of being in the middle of DT.

Thanks Carlos and Todd for putting this together! Let's do it again and look at some of the other developments!