San Antonio: the Texas metro that skipped the boom

Bexar County, September 2026

Every other big Texas metro is working off a hangover this year. Houston has two sellers for every buyer. Austin's median is a fifth below its 2022 peak. Dallas is holding but soft. San Antonio's median sale price in August was just over $299,000, exactly where it was in August 2025, and sales rose from a year earlier while they fell across the state and the country.

The reason is that San Antonio never had the party. Prices here went up in 2021 and 2022 like everywhere else, but from a lower base and by less, and the money that chased Austin and the Hill Country mostly drove past Bexar County on Interstate 35. So there is less to give back. The county is the fourth largest in the state at about 2.16 million people, the city is the seventh largest in the country, and for most of the last decade it has grown steadily without ever being the story.

This year it has a story. Toyota is spending $3.6 billion to double its plant on the south side and move Tacoma production here from Mexico. The Spurs went to the NBA Finals and the city is fighting over whether to pay for their new arena. And the job base that has always kept the place steady, the military and the hospitals, is doing what it always does while the rest of Texas figures out its labor supply.

Where the county line falls

Most of San Antonio's economy is inside Bexar County, which makes it more like Houston than Dallas in that respect. Joint Base San Antonio is all in the county: Lackland on the west side, Randolph on the northeast, Fort Sam Houston near downtown. The Toyota plant is in the south. Port San Antonio, the old Kelly Air Force Base, is southwest of downtown. The Medical Center, USAA, Valero, H E B, and the Pearl are all inside the line.

The growth that leaves the county goes north and east. New Braunfels and the rest of Comal County have been among the fastest growing in the country for a decade. Boerne and Kendall County pull the executives who work in the north side office parks. Schertz and Cibolo straddle the Guadalupe County line. The pattern is the same as everywhere else in Texas: the county holds the employers and the older housing, the counties next door get the new subdivisions and the families with two incomes.

The military

San Antonio calls itself Military City USA and has the numbers to back it. Joint Base San Antonio is the largest joint base in the Department of Defense, with something on the order of 80,000 military personnel, civilians, and contractors across its three main installations. Lackland is where every Air Force enlistee goes through basic training. Randolph trains the pilots who train the pilots. Fort Sam Houston holds Brooke Army Medical Center, the military's largest hospital and its only Level I trauma center, and the medical training campus that produces most of the enlisted medics in every branch.

The cybersecurity piece is newer and matters more every year. Sixteenth Air Force, the service's information warfare command, is at Lackland. So is a large NSA facility. Port San Antonio has built an aerospace and cyber cluster around that base of talent, with Boeing, StandardAero, and General Dynamics doing aircraft maintenance and a growing set of defense contractors doing the work nobody describes in press releases. Port San Antonio is now one of the largest employment centers in the region and the one the city's economic development people talk about first.

The point for a county reader is that this payroll does not move with oil, rates, or migration. It moves with the federal budget, which cut San Antonio's federal workforce late last year and then stabilized. The metro added 7,000 jobs between November and February, a 2.4 percent annualized pace, led by education and health care. Unemployment sat at 4.1 percent, under the state.

Toyota

On July 6 Toyota announced it will invest $3.6 billion to add a second assembly line at its San Antonio plant for the Tacoma pickup, creating 2,000 jobs and adding 2.5 million square feet, which doubles the plant by 2030. The Tacoma is currently built in Baja California. Production moves to Texas over about four years.

Read that carefully, because it is the reverse of the nearshoring story everyone has been telling. This is not a company moving production from Asia to Mexico to be closer to the American market. It is a company moving production from Mexico to Texas. The plant already builds the Tundra and the Sequoia and has since 2006, with a supplier park on site that employs thousands more. The expansion makes it one of the largest auto assembly operations in the country, and it lands in the part of the county with the most room to build and the least expensive housing in the metro.

Tariffs are the obvious reason and Toyota did not say so. The company said workforce and long term growth. Whatever the reason, 2,000 assembly jobs at a plant that already has a supplier ecosystem is the single largest private investment announcement in the county's history, and it went to the south side, which has never had one.

The listed companies, and the ones that are not

San Antonio's corporate base is smaller than the other three big metros and more concentrated. Two Fortune 500 companies are headquartered here: Valero, one of the largest refiners in the world, and USAA, the insurer and bank for military families, which employs about 19,000 people in the county and is private. Cullen/Frost Bankers, the largest Texas based bank, is here. So are Rackspace and iHeartMedia, both public. NuStar was acquired by Sunoco in 2024 and its headquarters is winding down.

The largest private employer in the county is H E B, which is headquartered downtown, operates 455 stores across Texas and northern Mexico, employs about 175,000 people, and is owned by the Butt family and its employees. This year it proposed a $700 million expansion of its manufacturing and distribution complex on the east side, adding a bakery, a refrigerated warehouse, and 720 jobs by 2028. Whataburger moved here from Corpus Christi in 2009. SWBC, Bill Miller, and a handful of others round it out.

Greater SATX, the regional economic development group, said in January it is going to pursue corporate headquarters harder over the next five years because Austin, Dallas, and Houston are all ahead. That is true and it is also the honest description of the county's position: a very large, stable economy built on institutions rather than public companies. The city's own comprehensive plan says it plainly. Tourism, health care, the military, and education generated 80 percent of new jobs over a twelve year stretch and pay about 20 percent below the county average. San Antonio's problem has never been jobs. It has been wages.

Real estate

Residential is the calmest of the four big metros and it is worth being specific about what calm means. The SABOR area median in August was just above $299,000, flat on the year. Inventory is just under six months. Homes are sitting about 82 days, up from a year ago. Two thirds of sales fall between $200,000 and $499,000. Inside Bexar County the median closing was $281,500 on a thousand transactions, at 97.7 percent of list, which means the typical seller takes about $6,500 off asking. The gap between what standing inventory is asking and what closed homes are getting is about $28,000. Sellers who price to the second number sell. Sellers who price to the first sit.

Two things run against the calm. Redfin has San Antonio's contract cancellation rate at 18.7 percent, third highest in the country behind Jacksonville and Houston. And property taxes in Bexar County run 1.8 to 2.2 percent depending on the district, which on a $290,000 house is $435 to $530 a month before insurance. The house is cheap. Owning it is not as cheap as the sticker suggests.

New construction is concentrated in Converse on the east side, far west Bexar toward Medina County, and New Braunfels outside the county. The northeast corridor around Stone Oak and the Medical Center hold value best. The south and east sides carry the heaviest inventory and the lowest prices, and the Toyota expansion lands in the middle of them.

Office is recovering faster here than in Houston or Austin. CBRE had metro vacancy at 19.6 percent in the first quarter, down from a multiyear high of 22.7 in early 2025, on 179,000 square feet of absorption. There is no new office construction. Industrial vacancy is 11.6 percent, higher than Houston's 6.7, with about 20 million square feet vacant, but absorption was positive in the first quarter and the nearshoring leases, including Nippon Express at 211,000 square feet, are the ones getting signed. The metro's total construction starts are projected at $12.6 billion this year, and the constraint the builders name is skilled labor, not demand.

Project Marvel and the Spurs

The Spurs went to the NBA Finals in June against the Knicks, with Victor Wembanyama the unanimous Defensive Player of the Year and the Western Conference Finals MVP at 22 years old. It was the franchise's first Finals appearance since 2014 and it happened in the middle of the city's biggest civic fight in years.

Project Marvel is a proposed downtown sports and entertainment district anchored by a new Spurs arena, priced at about $1.3 billion for the arena and more for the district around it: a convention center expansion, an Alamodome renovation, and mixed use development on the east side of downtown. The Spurs put in $500 million. Bexar County voters approved $311 million in 2025, and the county will also retrofit the Frost Bank Center into a year round home for the Stock Show and Rodeo. The city's share is $489 million.

The city's share is the fight. Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, citing a $158 million deficit in the coming budget and an affordability crisis, pushed to put the $489 million on the November ballot. On August 17 the council voted 6 to 5 against a public vote, which clears the way for the city to finalize its financing under the framework negotiated last year. Sean Elliott spoke for the Spurs. The mayor's side called it paying twice and voting once. The council majority pointed out that city residents already voted as county residents. The city has spent $30 million on land already.

For a county reader, the arena matters less than the district. The east side of downtown, between the Alamodome and the convention center, has been the part of the core that development skipped. Whether Project Marvel gets built as proposed or in some smaller form, the land the city is assembling is the land that decides whether downtown San Antonio grows east or keeps stopping at the river.

Schools and colleges

The University of Texas at San Antonio is the anchor now. It merged with UT Health San Antonio last year into a single institution with about 40,000 students, a medical school, a health science center, and a research budget that puts it in the conversation with UTD and UH. Trinity University, small and private and consistently ranked among the best in the region, sits north of downtown. St. Mary's, Incarnate Word, Our Lady of the Lake, and Texas A&M San Antonio on the south side fill out a college base that is larger than people expect. The Alamo Colleges are the community college system, and Southwest Research Institute, one of the largest independent research organizations in the country, is on the west side with 1,500 acres of laboratories.

At the district level, Northside ISD is the largest in the region at over 100,000 students and covers most of the growth on the northwest side. North East ISD covers Stone Oak and the northeast corridor and is the district families with options tend to choose. Alamo Heights ISD, three small municipalities inside the loop, is the premium address, the same role Highland Park plays in Dallas and the Memorial Villages play in Houston, and priced accordingly. Boerne and Comal ISDs are where the county's growth goes when it leaves.

Culture

San Antonio is the largest majority Hispanic city in the country, about two thirds, and the only big Texas metro where that has been true for its whole history rather than a recent development. The Alamo is here and is in the middle of a $550 million redevelopment with a new visitor center and museum opening in 2027. The River Walk draws more visitors than any attraction in Texas. The five Spanish missions along the river are the state's only UNESCO World Heritage site. Fiesta in April runs eleven days and draws three and a half million people. The Pearl, the old brewery north of downtown, became the model for adaptive reuse in Texas and is where the city's restaurant scene lives now. The breakfast taco was, depending on who you ask, invented here, and the argument with Austin over that is the most San Antonio thing about San Antonio.

Tourism is one of the four base industries and it pays the way the plan says it does. It is also the reason the downtown fight is a fight: the convention center, the Alamodome, and the arena are all tourism infrastructure, and the city is deciding how much more of it to build.

What we would want to see

San Antonio is the metro in this series with the least to correct and the least to prove. Prices are flat, sales are up, unemployment is under the state, and the two largest employers in the county are the federal government and a grocery chain that has never had a bad year. It is also the metro with the lowest wages, the highest property tax burden relative to home price, and a corporate base that its own development agency says is too thin.

Before committing capital we would want:

• The Toyota expansion breaking ground on schedule and the supplier park growing with it. Two thousand jobs on the south side changes what the south side is worth, and the timeline is four years.
• The contract cancellation rate off 18.7 percent. Flat prices with one in five deals falling through is not a stable market. It is a market where buyers are still nervous about payments.
• Project Marvel's city financing finalized, or formally reduced. Either outcome lets the east side of downtown be underwritten. The current state, approved but contested, does not.
• Office vacancy holding under 20 percent with no new construction. San Antonio is the only big Texas metro where that sentence is currently true, and it should stay true for a while.
• Federal employment stable. The cuts late last year were absorbed. A second round would not be, because there is no other employer in the county that size.

San Antonio does not get written about because nothing dramatic happens here, and that is the case for it. The rest of Texas is finding out this year what a correction feels like. Bexar County is finding out what it feels like to be the place that skipped one.

This is general commentary about a real estate submarket. It is not advice, not a recommendation, and not an offer to buy or sell anything. See the disclosures page.