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College Marketplace is the student-only buy and sell app for Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Every account is verified with a @txstate.edu email address, so you're only ever trading with other Bobcats — not strangers from Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.

Anyone who graduated high school within the 12 months before enrolling has to live in university housing, so a full first-year class turns over in the same buildings every August. The community-bath halls are Brogdon Hall, Butler Hall, Jackson Hall, Lantana Hall, Laurel Hall, Mesquite Hall, Retama Hall and Sterry Hall; suite-style rooms sit in Bexar Hall, Falls Hall, San Jacinto Hall, San Marcos Hall, Sayers Hall, Tower Hall and College Inn, and Blanco Hall puts the bathroom inside the room. The newer pod-bathroom buildings — Alamito Hall, Cibolo Hall, Richard A. Castro Hall, First Five Freedom Hall, Gaillardia Hall, Chautauqua Hall and Elena Zamora O'Shea Hall — go first in room selection. After that requirement is cleared, students move to the upper-division apartments: Balcones Apartments, Cypress Apartments and Bobcat Village Apartments. Which means everything you need is already on campus. Texas State students post mini fridges, futons, storage bins, desk lamps, monitors, bikes, and gently used textbooks every semester — usually for a fraction of retail.

Know your room before you buy. Almost every hall comes with an 80-inch XL twin bed, a desk and desk chair and a dresser, with a lockable pedestal in the newer buildings — so XL twin sheets, not standard twin. Sterry Hall is the exception on both counts: 76-inch standard twin beds, and beds that cannot be lofted. Everywhere else beds loft from roughly 29 inches up to 59, bed rails come from your hall's front desk, and at checkout in May everything drops back to the second rung. The apartments run bigger beds — full XL in Balcones and Cypress, full-size at Bobcat Village — and come furnished with a kitchen and in-unit laundry. Housing caps appliances: one 2.5 cu. ft. mini fridge per resident or a shared 4.6 cu. ft. model, and one microwave per room or suite at 0.7 cu. ft. and 700 watts max. Air fryers, toasters, hot plates, blenders, slow cookers, electric grills, hoverboards, candles and personal wireless routers all stay home, so check the packing list before you pay for a secondhand one.

Meeting up is the easy part. Hand something off inside the LBJ Student Center between classes, meet at the front doors of Alkek Library, or trade in the open on the Quad when the walkways are busy. No shipping labels, no delivery fees, no meeting someone off campus.

Popular categories at Texas State: textbooks and course materials · dorm and apartment furniture · mini fridges and microwaves · bikes and scooters · Texas State apparel and game day gear · electronics and monitors · event tickets · lofting kits and bed risers · storage bins and organizers