Local Austin MCP

Your AI's local guide to Austin. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets Claude (and any MCP client) answer the real questions people ask when they research a property, buy in, or move to the Austin area — "who turns on my water at this address?", "what are the schools and special-district taxes?", "is it in a flood zone?", "what's for sale in this neighborhood?" — by pulling straight from the authoritative City of Austin / Travis-Williamson-Hays County sources, plus active real estate listings and local writers, all provided by Neuhaus Realty Group. No API keys, no logins.

License: Open source under Apache License 2.0 — free to use, modify, and build on, including commercially. Please keep the NOTICE attribution when you redistribute. The Apache license grants no trademark rights: "Neuhaus Realty Group" and the Neuhaus marks stay ours (see TRADEMARK.md). Owner: Ed Neuhaus / Neuhaus Realty Group LLC, Austin, Texas. Source: https://github.com/mindwear-capitian/local-austin-mcp Powered by: Neuhaus Realty Group — https://neuhausre.com (active real estate listings, neighborhood pages, and blog content surfaced by this MCP come from neuhausre.com).

🚧 This is an early project and I'd love help making it better. I'm a broker who built this to give an AI a real, plain-English handle on Austin. It works, but there's a lot more Austin data worth wiring in and a couple of hard problems I haven't cracked. If you build with MCPs or know Austin/Texas civic data, pull requests and ideas are genuinely welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and the good first issues.

🏙️ Building this for your own city? This repo is the reference implementation for the local-{city}-mcp pattern. The spec, a working template, and the full list of cities built so far all live at local-city-mcp-template — start there.

Install

Add to your Claude Desktop config:

// claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "local-austin": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "github:mindwear-capitian/local-austin-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. That's the whole setup. No API keys required for any tool.

Claude Code

claude mcp add local-austin npx -y github:mindwear-capitian/local-austin-mcp

Configuration

Optional environment variables:

Try It

Once installed, ask Claude things like:

• "Show me 3-bedroom homes in 78704 under $700k with a pool."
• "Tell me everything about 9501 San Lucas Dr in Austin — value, taxes, permits, flood zone, schools."
• "What's Lake Travis at right now?"
• "Who's the city council rep for 1100 Congress Ave?"
• "Pull up Austin AFD incidents from the last 24 hours near my address."
• "What did Austin City Council vote on short-term rental ordinances?"
• "Find me condos in Tarrytown — what's the active inventory?"
• "What did Ed Neuhaus write about the Austin market in 2026?"
• "Is there an active flood-zone alert for 78731 right now?"
• "Pull TCAD on 1234 Main St in Round Rock."
• "What library branch is closest to 78704? Hours and amenities?"
• "How many APD use-of-force incidents were reported in the last month?"
• "Where's the nearest fire station to my property?"
• "What's the latest health inspection score for Franklin Barbecue?"
• "Any tree-removal permits ever issued at this address?"
• "What TxDOT projects are scheduled on I-35 in Travis County?"
• "Has Austin Animal Center received any lost calicos near 78704 this month?"
• "What day is trash pickup at 1610 Willow St?"
• "When's the next 801 bus coming through Congress and Oltorf?"

Claude figures out which tool to call, queries the authoritative source live, and returns a source_url so you can verify.

Tools (43 live)

All tools are read-only, idempotent, and hit external providers (readOnlyHint: true, idempotentHint: true, openWorldHint: true in MCP annotations). The composed austin_property_360 is the preferred entry point for any address-centric question.

Real Estate (provided by Neuhaus Realty Group — free, no login)

Property (county appraisal + tax + zoning + permits)

Civic + Public Safety

Transit

Environment

Community

Meta

MCP Resources

In addition to tools, the server publishes static reference documents via the MCP resources/* API:

MCP Prompts

Server-published templates that chain tools. Clients surface them as slash commands or one-click flows:

Sources of Truth

Every tool returns data from an official, authoritative source. No third-party aggregators. No AI-generated summaries presented as fact. Every response includes a source_url field so you can verify the underlying record.

Architecture

• Node.js (ES modules), @modelcontextprotocol/sdk over stdio
• Tool handlers are stateless per call; each hits the authoritative source live. An optional in-memory LRU+TTL cache fronts a few stable lookups (geocoder, FEMA NFHL by lat/lng) for 24h to avoid duplicate calls within a session
• Real-estate tools call a free public endpoint hosted by Neuhaus Realty Group (rate-limited per IP, active + under-contract only)
• No databases, no auth servers, no shared keys baked into the binary
• All upstream API calls are client-side direct HTTPS (Socrata, ArcGIS, NWS, etc.) or a thin pass-through to the public Neuhaus endpoint
• Per-source concurrency caps (lib/semaphore.js) prevent the composed austin_property_360 fan-out from saturating any single provider
• AsyncLocalStorage carries the MCP request's AbortSignal into every upstream fetch so client-side cancellation cancels in-flight calls

Resilience (v0.6.0+)

Every upstream call goes through lib/retry.js, which:

• Adds a per-attempt AbortController timeout (8-25s depending on profile)
• Retries transient failures (5xx, 429, timeout, network) with jittered exponential backoff
• Returns 4xx as-is (those are real query problems, not transient)
• Throws a structured UpstreamError on final failure, naming the source, kind, status, attempts, and last error

When a tool surfaces an UpstreamError to Claude, the message clearly states the MCP is working correctly, names which third-party data provider is having a problem, and suggests what to do next (retry in N seconds, try an alternate tool). Users + LLMs never see a raw stack trace or a confusing "tool errored" message.

Six retry profiles tuned to upstream behavior: fast (NWS, Census), soda (data.austintexas.gov), arcgis (ArcGIS REST, FEMA, county CADs), tcad (Travis CAD via True Prodigy — also has bespoke concurrency cap), rss (per-source graceful degradation across local voices), scraper (Travis Tax HTML).

v0.10.0 additions

• structuredContent + per-tool outputSchema — 23 of 36 tools publish a Zod-based output schema (search-style envelopes) so MCP clients can validate, render, and generate typed SDK code; the remaining composite / single-entity tools return open structured content.
• AbortSignal plumbing — MCP request cancellation propagates via AsyncLocalStorage into every upstream fetch.
• Per-source concurrency caps (lib/semaphore.js) — named buckets prevent the composed austin_property_360 fan-out from hammering any single provider.
• LRU + TTL cache (lib/cache.js) — 24h cache on the Census geocoder + FEMA NFHL point lookups.
• MCP Resources + Prompts — see sections above.
• GitHub Actions CI — Node 20 + 22 matrix, runs unit tests + MCP handshake on every push.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full v0.10.0 release notes, including the BREAKING tool-name rename to the austin_* prefix.

Contact

For partnership, licensing, sponsorship, or press inquiries:

Neuhaus Realty Group LLC Austin, Texas https://neuhausre.com

Built by Ed Neuhaus — more on how this one's built: https://edneuhaus.com/projects/local-austin-mcp/