A free, open-source Node.js MCP server that gives any AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, whatever speaks the Model Context Protocol — direct access to Austin’s civic and real estate data. 41 tools, one install command, zero API keys required by the end user.
Ask your AI “Who owns 1513 Lakeway Blvd?” or “Is this property in a flood zone?” and get the answer from official county and city sources in sub-second response times.
Not to be confused with Austin MLS MCP — that’s the hosted, MLS-specific service with sold comps and market stats for serious buyers. This one is free, open-source, keyless, and covers the whole civic-data surface of Austin, with basic active-listing search included.
What it does
41 tools organized across five domains, each backed by a different government or public data source:
Property data — ownership, tax appraisals, deed history, and value trends across Travis, Williamson, and Hays counties. The austin_property_360 composed tool fans out across ownership, tax records, flood zones, permits, code violations, zoning, and active MLS listings for a single address in one call. Three county appraisal districts, each with a different API contract, normalized into one consistent response.
Active MLS listings — search by zip, city, price range, or address. Active and under-contract properties from the Austin-area MLS, served through the VOW public API running on neuhausre.com.
Civic records — building permits, code violations, 311 service requests, zoning designations, restaurant inspection scores, tree permits. All sourced from City of Austin open data portals (Socrata-backed SODA APIs).
Environment — FEMA flood zone lookups via the National Flood Hazard Layer, Lake Travis water levels from LCRA telemetry, NWS weather alerts, and TxDOT roadway construction zones.
Community and relocation — parks, libraries, fire stations, TEA school data, APD crime stats, utility provider lookups (via PUC CCN boundary GIS), special district tax assessments (MUD/PID/ESD), and a composed austin_relocation tool that packages everything a new resident needs in one call.
How it’s built
The server is pure Node.js implementing the MCP protocol specification. Each tool is a self-contained module in tools/ with its own data-fetching logic, input validation, and response formatting. The composed tools (austin_property_360, austin_relocation) orchestrate multiple underlying tools with parallel fan-out for performance.
The hard part of civic data isn’t finding it — it’s normalizing it. Travis County CAD exposes a REST API with one field naming convention. Williamson County uses a completely different ArcGIS-backed system. Hays County has its own pattern. FEMA flood maps use yet another schema. City of Austin departments each publish through Socrata with inconsistent field names for similar concepts. Claude and I built a normalization layer for each source — adapters that translate government API responses into clean, consistent tool output regardless of which county or department the data comes from.
The public API that serves MLS data runs per-IP rate limiting with Cloudflare in front, anti-scraping protections, and a kill-switch for emergency shutoff.
A critical design constraint: this package is installed and run by end users via npx github:mindwear-capitian/local-austin-mcp. That means zero credentials can live in the repo — no API keys, no tokens, no secrets. The VOW public API is the only external dependency, and it requires no authentication. Every government data source is genuinely public and keyless. Contract tests run across Node 20 and 22 with 0 failures and 0 warnings.
Install
One command. No API keys needed.
npx -y github:mindwear-capitian/local-austin-mcp
Works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.
Why I built it
I’ve been in Austin real estate since 2009. For 17 years, I looked up the same data on a dozen different county and city websites every time a client asked a question. “Is this in a flood zone?” — FEMA site. “What are the taxes?” — TCAD site. “Any permits pulled?” — City of Austin portal. “Who owns the lot next door?” — back to TCAD.
I built this so my AI assistant could do those lookups for me. Then I open-sourced it because every agent, investor, and curious Austinite has the same problem. The free distribution drives awareness to Neuhaus Realty Group — the MCP is the top of the funnel, and the brokerage is the business model.
License
PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal and non-commercial use.