A Stone's Throw

Pflugerville development wraps up with indoor playground, 3 restaurants

Stone Hill Town Center is entering its last planned phase of expansion.

Rendering courtesy of NewQuest

Pflugerville's popular Stone Hill Town Center expansion is nearing completion, with a few new tenants joining the fray. NewQuest, the developer and real estate brokerage, has announced that Kids Empire indoor playground will become a tenant to open its first Austin-area location, alongside three new restaurants including the previously announced, soon-to-be-completed Hopdoddy Burger Bar.

These details come with a broader announcement that plans for the final phase of development are locked in. The entire development covers a massive area of one million square feet, according to a press release.

Kids Empire will fill out an 8,500-square-foot building next to a nine-screen Cinemark theater. Some restaurant and retail tenants, plus a shaded pocket park, have an additional 12,000 square feet to spread out.

The Los Angeles-based indoor playground chain is drenched in bright colors and combines a variety of play spaces including large climbing structures, a ball pit, building areas full of soft blocks, a mini "soccer arena," dance floors, and even tracks for riding bumper bikes shaped like motorcycles. The chain also hosts birthday parties. The new Stone Hill location is tentatively expected to open in late 2027.

"Young families are the driving force for Stone Hill's trade area, which has a median age of 35," said NewQuest leasing director and senior vice president Josh Friedlander in the press release. "Kids Empire is a good match for the demographic and our strong line up of family-oriented attractions."

Three restaurants are working on opening at the development by the end of the year, the release says: Piada Italian Street Food, Mediterranean bowls concept Cava, and Hopdoddy Burger Bar. The three will share a structure on Limestone Commercial Drive.

All are chains, though Hopdoddy hails from Austin and will be the biggest of the new restaurants, clocking in at 3,375 square feet. Piada's new location will also be the Austin area's first. The chain is known for its wraps, inspired by a street food from Northern Italy.

Although Stone Hill is still undergoing expansion work, the shopping center has been established for nearly 20 years; NewQuest broke ground on it in 2007. According to the new release, 99 percent of the development's class A space is leased, and its restaurants do well.

"We have more than a dozen anchors to help draw traffic. New-to-market tenants, or even to Texas, want to be in Stone Hill," Friedlander said, "but we rarely have vacancies."

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red-hot housing

Austin boasts the 8th hottest real estate market among big U.S. cities

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Austin's housing market is still red-hot.

It doesn't get much hotter than the Austin housing market. A new report has ranked the Capital City the 8th best real estate market among America's big cities right now.

WalletHub's annual study, "Best Real Estate Markets (2026)," compares the real estate markets in 300 U.S. cities based on 17 relevant metrics, such as "housing market attractiveness," home value forecasts, housing affordability, population growth, and many others. Cities were also ranked in groups by size: large cities with more than 300,000 residents; midsize cities with 150,000-300,000 residents; and small cities with fewer than 150,000 residents.

In the overall ranking of the best housing markets in America, regardless of city size, Austin ranks as No. 32 out of all 300 cities.

WalletHub groups its data into two "key dimensions." Based solely on real estate data, Austin ranks as No. 42 nationally, and its surrounding affordability and economic concerns — things like maintenance costs, job growth, and population growth — rank 59th.

This is how WalletHub ranks the "health" of Austin's housing market (where No. 1 is the best and No. 150 is average):

No. 16 – Job Growth Rate
No. 49 – Percentage of Delinquent Mortgage Holders
No. 51 – Foreclosure Rate
No. 71 – Median Home-Price Appreciation
No. 73 – Maintenance Costs as a Percentage of Income

In addition to being declared one of the hottest housing markets, Austin has also soared among the best places for millennials and first-time homebuyers, and the city has one of highest rates of new home construction — a top 10 ranking nationally, according to ConsumerAffairs. Plenty of Austin residents are also turning to popular ZIP codes in nearby suburbs like Leander and Pflugerville, which rank among the hottest places to move to in the U.S.

Other high-performing housing markets in Texas
Two popular North Texas suburbs — Frisco and McKinney — topped WalletHub's overall list of the best real estate markets in the U.S. for 2026 at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, and they locked in the top two spots in the midsize city ranking, too.

Frisco tops the nationwide "affordability and economic environment" category, and ranks No. 2 nationally for its real estate market.

"When you look at home prices as a percentage of income, [Frisco] is the 95th-cheapest among the 300 cities in our study," the report said. "But it’s the 11th-cheapest city for phone service and the 11th-cheapest for maintenance and energy."

Frisco boasts the highest share of houses that were built between 2010 and 2024, at nearly 47 percent, which WalletHub says is "good news for people who want all the benefits of a recently-constructed home," without having to "put in a lot of work" to renovate an older or run down home.

"If you aim to make a profit in the long run with your housing purchase, you’ll need to look beyond tangible factors like square footage and style," the report's author wrote. "Those factors certainly drive up property values. From an investor’s standpoint, though, they hold less significance than historical market trends and the economic health of residents."

Nearby Denton and Allen also made the overall top 10, respectively ranking as the 5th and 8th best real estate markets in the U.S. for 2026. Denton similarly ranked 5th in the midsize city rankings, and Allen topped the list of small cities.

The top 10 best real estate markets in America for 2026 are:

No. 1 – Frisco, Texas
No. 2 – McKinney, Texas
No. 3 – Murfreesboro, Tennessee
No. 4 – Durham, North Carolina
No. 5 – Denton, Texas
No. 6 – Cary, North Carolina
No. 7 – Madison, Wisconsin
No. 8 – Allen, Texas
No. 9 – Charlotte, North Carolina
No. 10 – Irvine, California

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