Tom and Paula Goynes settled into a quiet stretch of the San Marcos River years ago, expecting the kind of privacy that a deed to riverfront land seems to promise. What they got instead was a slow transformation of their backyard into a public thoroughfare. Every summer, tubers drift past their property by the hundreds, sometimes leaving trash and broken coolers behind, and there is very little the Goynes family can do to stop them. Their story, documented by Texas Monthly, is not a cautionary tale about bad luck. It is what Texas water law actually looks like when it meets a popular river.
That distinction matters if you are looking at a listing anywhere along the San Marcos River and picturing a private stretch of water behind the house. The bank might be yours. The water usually is not.
"Navigable" Is a Legal Test, Not a Feeling
Texas draws a hard line between rivers the public can use and rivers a landowner can fully control, and the line runs through a legal concept called navigability. A stream qualifies as navigable in one of two ways. It can be navigable in fact, meaning it has historically served as a route for trade or travel. Or it can be navigable by statute, which under the Texas Natural Resources Code means the streambed averages 30 feet or more in width from the mouth upstream.
The San Marcos River clears that bar without much debate. It supports a year-round outfitting industry, regular kayak and tube traffic, and a fishing culture with enough demand that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department maintains a network of leased fishing-access points along its length. A river that busy is, by definition, a public one under Texas law, regardless of who holds title to the land on either bank.
What Owning the Bank Actually Gets You
Here is the part that surprises buyers who have not dealt with river property before. On a navigable stream, the State of Texas owns the riverbed itself, up to a boundary called the ordinary high water mark. Courts sometimes describe this more precisely as the gradient boundary line, the point midway between the river's low-flow channel and the top of its bank. Below that line, the public has a standing right to walk, wade, fish, and float, no matter whose name is on the deed for the land above it.
Deed language can complicate the picture without changing the underlying law. Older property records in river-adjacent areas sometimes describe ownership running "to the center of the stream," phrasing that predates the modern navigability doctrine and does not survive contact with it. A landowner can hold that language in a title report and still have no legal right to keep a kayaker from passing through the water in front of the house. The rule has been tested in Texas courts more than once, and it consistently comes out the same way: private ownership of the adjacent land does not extend to control over a navigable riverbed.
What you are actually buying, when you buy river-adjacent land in San Marcos, is the bank, the view, and a private easement of enjoyment for your own use of the water. You are not buying the right to exclude the public from the river itself.
Why the Goynes Story Isn't Rare
The friction the Goynes family experienced has been recognized formally, not just anecdotally. A San Marcos River Task Force compiled a long list of proposed fixes for the tension between private landowners and the public floating traffic on the river, ranging from designated tuber stop sites to a Water Oriented Recreation District modeled on the one already operating on the Guadalupe River in Comal County. None of those proposals change the underlying property law. They exist because the law already grants public access, and the practical problems that access creates for adjacent landowners, like litter and crowding on a private stretch of bank, needed some kind of management response.
If you are evaluating a home on the river, this is the honest version of the tradeoff. You get proximity to the water, and depending on the season, you may also get a regular flow of strangers past your property line, especially between May and September when tubing traffic peaks. The City of San Marcos maintains an official FAQ page addressing exactly these questions for residents and visitors, which is worth reading before you assume a "quiet stretch" will stay that way.
What This Means for the Number on the Listing
Here is where the legal reality should change how you read a price tag. Texas is a non-disclosure state, meaning actual closed sale prices are not part of the public record the way they are in many other states. Citywide, tracked closings in San Marcos over the six months ending August 2026 put the median sold price at $309,990, with the middle half of sales closing between $273,999 and $436,450, according to closing data compiled by Resideline. That is a wide spread for one city, and it tells you something useful on its own: San Marcos does not have enough volume in any single micro-market, river-adjacent or otherwise, to support easy assumptions about what a location premium is actually worth.
Apply that same caution to river frontage specifically. A listing that markets itself as riverfront is selling a bundle of the bank, the view, and unrestricted personal access to the water for the owner's own recreation. It is not selling the water itself, and it is not selling privacy from the public during peak floating season. Because Texas keeps actual sold prices out of public record, the only reliable way to find out whether buyers are paying a real premium for that bundle, and how much, is to pull recent closed comps directly, not to rely on an automated home value estimate that has no way to account for a stretch of river's specific access history.
Before writing an offer on a river-adjacent lot, it is worth asking the seller and your agent a short list of direct questions.
- Where exactly does the ordinary high water mark fall relative to any fence, dock, or landscaping shown in listing photos.
- Has the property experienced regular public foot or tube traffic during tubing season, and if so, how the seller has typically handled it.
- Whether the deed contains older language describing ownership "to the center of the stream," and what a current title review says about it.
- What comparable river-adjacent closings in the same stretch actually sold for, pulled from MLS records rather than an online estimate.
A Short FAQ
Can I fence off my section of the river to keep tubers out? No. Texas courts have consistently held that a property owner cannot unreasonably block the public's right to navigate and access a river that qualifies as navigable, even where the owner holds title to the adjacent land or the streambed itself.
Does this apply to every creek near San Marcos, or just the main river? Only waterways that meet the navigability test apply here, either through documented historical use for trade and travel or through the 30-foot average width standard. Smaller, seasonal creeks in the area may not qualify, which is a separate question worth confirming property by property rather than assuming one rule covers every waterway in Hays County.
If you are weighing a home near the San Marcos River, or comparing it against other Hill Country waterfront options in Wimberley or Canyon Lake, the details above are exactly the kind of thing worth working through before you write an offer, not after. Bailey Group has spent years helping buyers separate the marketing language on a listing from what a property actually delivers. Schedule your white-glove consultation and let's look at the specific stretch of river you have in mind together.
