By Austin Senior Advisor Care Team · July 3, 2026
A scheduled tour is a sales presentation. Here is what to verify before you arrive, what to watch during the visit, why mealtime tells you more than the brochure, and why the second visit should be unannounced.
Do the licensing homework before you get in the car
Twenty minutes at a laptop will disqualify some communities before you spend a Saturday driving to them. Start with the license. Texas HHSC licenses assisted living as Type A or Type B, and the distinction is not about how much care a resident gets. Under 26 TAC 553.5 it is about evacuation.
A Type A facility serves residents who can evacuate without physical assistance from staff, do not need routine attendance during nighttime sleeping hours, and can follow directions in an emergency. Type B serves residents who may need help evacuating, may need nighttime attendance, and may need help transferring to and from a wheelchair. A Type B resident must not be permanently bedfast.
If your father already needs two people to transfer him, a Type A community is not a candidate no matter how good the tour is. Ask the license type before booking, and verify it yourself rather than taking the answer at face value.
Memory care is not a license type at all. In Texas it requires a separate Alzheimer's certification under 26 TAC 553.27, which requires a Type B license underneath it, is verified by an on-site health and Life Safety Code inspection, and caps the number of residents. A community that markets a memory care neighborhood without that certification is describing decor, not regulation. Our page on Texas memory care certification explains what the certification actually requires.
Where to check, and what you will not find
Two state systems matter. TULIP at tulip.hhs.texas.gov shows current license status. The legacy long-term care search at apps.hhs.texas.gov/ltcsearch carries inspection and deficiency history. Read the history, not just the status. A clean current license tells you nothing about what surveyors found eighteen months ago.
Now the part that surprises almost everyone: there is no federal star rating for Texas assisted living. CMS star ratings and Medicare Care Compare cover nursing facilities only. Assisted living and memory care in Texas are state-regulated, and no federal five-star score exists for them. If a marketing page shows stars for an assisted living community, those are review-site stars, not a regulatory rating.
Write down what you find, including dates. When you sit in the sales office and hear an explanation of a past citation, you want to be comparing it against the actual record rather than against your memory of skimming it. Deficiency reports are dry, but they are the only unfiltered account of the building you will ever get.
Our walkthrough on how to verify a Texas license covers both systems step by step, and Type A versus Type B goes deeper on what each license permits.
Schedule the tour for the wrong time on purpose
Communities prefer mid-morning tours on a weekday. The building is quiet, the night shift is gone, activities are staffed, lunch prep smells good and residents who need the most help are still being assisted in their apartments. It is not a lie. It is just the best hour of the week.
Ask for a tour at 11:30 in the morning so it runs into lunch, or at 4:30 in the afternoon. Late afternoon is when people with dementia are most likely to be agitated, when the day shift is tired and the evening shift is arriving, and when a thin staffing plan shows itself. If the community will not accommodate any time outside the mid-morning window, that is information.
Weekend tours are worth doing at least once. Weekend staffing is almost always leaner than weekday staffing, activity calendars are thinner, and management is usually off site. What happens on a Sunday afternoon is much closer to the daily reality of living there than what happens on a Tuesday at ten.
Bring one other person. Two people notice different things, and one of you can watch the building while the other handles the conversation. Take notes during, not after. By the fourth tour every lobby blends together.
The first ten minutes tell you most of it
Use your nose before your eyes. A strong floral or citrus air freshener smell in a hallway usually means something is being covered. Persistent urine odor means housekeeping or continence care is not keeping up. A building that simply smells like nothing is doing well.
Look at the residents who are not part of the tour. Are people dressed, groomed, and wearing their own clothes? Are men shaved? Are fingernails clean? Is anyone parked in a wheelchair facing a wall or a switched-on television that nobody is watching? A row of residents parked in front of a TV in the middle of the afternoon is a staffing story, not a programming choice.
Notice sound. A well-run building has a low hum of conversation. Total silence in common areas at midday is a warning. So is a call light chiming continuously with nobody moving toward it. Start a mental clock the first time you hear one and see how long it runs.
Look at the details nobody stages: the condition of grab bars, whether hallway handrails are continuous, whether there are trip hazards from cords or thresholds, whether outdoor areas are shaded and actually reachable. In Central Texas, shade and a covered walking path are not amenities. From May through September they determine whether a resident goes outside at all.
Watch the staff, not the tour guide
The person giving your tour is in sales. That is not a criticism, it is a job description, and a good sales director can be genuinely helpful. But the people you should be evaluating are the aides, the med techs and the housekeepers, and the most useful thing you can watch is what happens when they cross paths with your guide.
Does the marketing director know staff names? Do staff make eye contact, or look away and keep moving? Is there any warmth in the exchange, or does the temperature drop when a manager walks by? Tension between departments is visible in about four seconds and it is very hard to fake either direction.
Then watch how staff talk to residents. Does an aide crouch to eye level or talk down at someone in a wheelchair? Does anyone use a resident's first name naturally, without the sing-song voice people use with toddlers? Does a staff member interrupt the tour to answer a resident, or wave them off until later? The wave-off is the tell.
Ask a direct care aide, not the director, how long they have worked there and how many residents they have on a typical shift. Ask what happens when someone calls out sick. Aides usually answer honestly because nobody has coached them to do otherwise. If they get visibly nervous about answering, you have learned something anyway.
Mealtime is the real audit
Stay for a meal. If the community will not let you eat there, cross it off. Dining is the one activity that happens three times a day, involves nearly every resident, and requires coordination between kitchen, care staff and management. Everything that is broken shows up in the dining room.
Watch how long people wait between being seated and being served. Watch whether residents who need help cutting food or being cued to eat actually get it, or whether trays sit untouched. Count how many staff are on the floor relative to how many residents need hands-on assistance. Look at whether people are eating together and talking, or eating alone in silence.
Look at the plate. Is there an actual choice, or one entree and a substitution of a sandwich? Are there fresh vegetables? Is the food hot? Ask a resident at your table what they think of the food, and then ask what they would change. People will tell you.
Ask what happens if a resident sleeps through breakfast or does not want to come to the dining room. The answer reveals the operating philosophy. Some communities will bring a plate. Some will not, as policy. Neither is automatically wrong, but you should know which one you are buying.
The questions that separate operators, and the second visit
Ask these in order, and write the answers down. What is your caregiver turnover rate over the last twelve months? How many residents does one aide cover on the night shift specifically? Who is on site overnight, and is a nurse on site or on call? What triggers a rate increase, how much notice do I get in writing, and how much have your rates gone up in each of the last three years?
Then the ones nobody volunteers. What conditions would require my mother to move out, and who makes that call? Do you accept STAR+PLUS, and what happens if private funds run out? Note that the STAR+PLUS HCBS waiver covers assisted living care services but not room and board, and it is interest-list driven, so ask specifically how they have handled that transition before. What is your policy on hospital transfers and hospice? Can I see the current activity calendar for last month, not a sample?
Ask for the residency agreement to take home. A community that will not hand over the contract before a deposit is telling you something. Read the section on rate increases, the section on discharge, and the section on what happens to the deposit.
Then go back unannounced. Pick a different day and a different time, walk in, sign the visitor log and ask to sit in the common area. You are not sneaking in; families visit constantly. This is the single most valuable hour of the whole process. And in the parking lot, talk to families visiting their own parents. Ask one question: what do you wish you had known before your mother moved in? You will get an honest answer more often than not.
If something is wrong, know who to call
Before you sign anything, save three numbers. The Long-Term Care Ombudsman for the Austin area is at the Capital Area Agency on Aging, 512-916-6054 or 888-622-9111 option 3, at 6800 Burleson Road, Building 310, Suite 165, Austin TX 78744. They cover Travis, Williamson and Hays plus seven more counties. The ombudsman is free, independent, and works for residents, not facilities.
For a complaint about a licensed facility, HHSC Complaint and Incident Intake takes reports at 1-800-458-9858, Monday through Friday, 7am to 7pm Central. That is the line that triggers a regulatory investigation.
The Texas Abuse Hotline at 1-800-252-5400 runs 24/7, but it handles community settings, not licensed facilities. Calling the wrong line costs days. Our pages on the Austin ombudsman and reporting abuse in Texas lay out which line handles which situation.
Finally, be realistic about price. The 2025 CareScout Cost of Care Survey puts the Texas median for assisted living at $5,666 a month, and Austin runs above the state median. There is no published median for memory care in Texas or in Austin, so any specific memory care price you see quoted as a market average is invented. Get the number in writing from the community itself, along with the care-level pricing tiers that sit on top of it.