San Marcos Security for a City Where the Median Resident Is 25

Most rivers start somewhere far away. The San Marcos starts here, from more than two hundred springs that rise out of the Edwards Aquifer into Spring Lake, where glass-bottom boats still float over the vents. San Marcos is also the Hays County seat and home to Texas State University, and the campus shapes the town as much as the water does.

That shows up in the Census figures. The median age is 24.9, which makes San Marcos one of the youngest cities on our service map. The population grew from 67,553 at the 2020 census to an estimated 74,319 in 2024. Median household income runs lower than in most surrounding Hill Country towns, partly because so many households are students. In practice, a very large share of the city’s doors belong to rentals.

If you own a rental near campus, you know the August ritual. One set of tenants leaves, another arrives, and somewhere in between the old keys go missing. Texas law already requires landlords to rekey between tenants, and to provide certain locks and security devices; our summary of the Texas rental security device law lays out the basics.

Smart locks turn rekeying into a few taps. You delete the old codes, issue new ones, and the lock log records every entry from move-in to move-out. Maintenance crews get codes that only work on scheduled days. Disputes about who entered when tend to end quickly when there is a timestamped record.

Multi-family properties face their own version of the problem at scale. Gate codes get shared in group chats. Package rooms fill up and attract thieves. Parking lots see break-ins on weekend nights. Each of those has a practical fix. None of them requires a remodel.

Multi-family security starts with access control that issues each resident a credential you can cancel at move-out, instead of a gate code everyone in town knows. Cameras cover the entrances, the mailroom, and the parking lot with enough resolution to read a plate. Managers can pull footage from a browser instead of driving over to the office.

Not everyone here is 21. Families and longtime residents live in older neighborhoods near downtown and in newer subdivisions on the city’s edges, often a few streets from rental houses with a changing cast of neighbors. Their concerns are ordinary ones: porch packages, an unlocked car in the driveway, a side gate left open.

A video doorbell handles the porch. A monitored alarm with door and motion sensors handles the rest, and a driveway camera keeps an eye on the vehicles that San Marcos thieves seem to favor. For homeowners who travel during university breaks, scheduled lights and alerts make an empty house look occupied.

Downtown San Marcos packs restaurants, bars, and shops around the courthouse square and along the streets toward campus. Many of them close late and open early, with a rotating crew of part-time employees, plenty of them students. Every semester brings new hires, and every new hire is one more person who knows the alarm code.

Individual user codes fix that. Each employee gets their own, the system logs who armed and disarmed it, and a departing employee’s code disappears with one change. Add cameras on the register, the back door, and the alley, and a manager can review an incident from a phone instead of waiting for the morning shift to report it.

We are a San Antonio company, in business since 2010 and licensed by the state as B16898. For a single rental, a walk-through takes less than an hour. For a complex, we review gates, mailrooms, parking, and your current access setup, and we talk with management about how residents actually come and go.

We also work in New Braunfels and Wimberley, just up the road. Start with a free security assessment and get a written plan you can take to your partners or your board. We can schedule installs between leases or during university breaks, when units are empty and nobody has to work around a technician.