Question 1

How much does property tax actually change from one Dallas suburb to the next?

Accepted Answer

Enough that the same house is a different deal depending on which side of the metro it sits on. On tax year 2025 rates compiled from the Dallas, Collin, Denton and Tarrant central appraisal districts, per $100 of assessed value: City of Dallas with Dallas ISD totals 2.235030, Dallas with Richardson ISD 2.342995, Mesquite with Mesquite ISD 2.319395, Garland with Garland ISD 2.273741, Arlington with Arlington ISD 2.186180, Irving with Irving ISD 2.138095, McKinney with McKinney ISD 1.747147, Plano with Plano ISD in Collin County 1.707713, and Frisco with Frisco ISD 1.675480 in Collin County or 1.630855 on the Denton County side. That is about 56 basis points a year between the two ends, roughly $2,800 on a $500,000 property, and across ten doors it is real money every year of the hold. The county component alone does a lot of the work: Dallas County totals 0.533095 against Collin County at 0.230563 and Denton County at 0.185938. Give us the parcel list early and we will underwrite each address to its own rate rather than to a metro average. The portfolio loan calculator is a fast way to see what the blend does to coverage.

Question 2

Can I use one tax rate for every door in the same city?

Accepted Answer

No. The rate is set by the city, school district and county combination, not by the city name. A Dallas address can sit in at least seven different school districts, with totals inside Dallas County running from 2.104563 per $100 with Highland Park ISD to 2.362101 with Lancaster ISD on 2025 rates. A Dallas address can also fall in Collin or Denton County, where the county component is less than half of Dallas County's. Plano and Frisco each straddle two counties, so two houses a mile apart in the same city and the same ISD can carry different totals. On top of all of that sit MUDs, PIDs and other special districts, which are not in any of the totals above. The Old Republic guide lists dozens of them across Collin and Denton counties, several levying a full 1.000000 per $100 on their own, which would take a Frisco-area total of 1.675480 to about 2.68 per $100. That is the single most common modeling error we see on out-of-state portfolio files. Pull the actual combination for every parcel before you send the schedule.

Question 3

Do the Texas homestead exemption and the appraisal cap apply to a rental portfolio?

Accepted Answer

No. Those are owner-occupant protections, and investment property is assessed without them. The Texas homestead exemption and the 10% annual appraisal cap attach to an owner-occupied homestead, so every door in your portfolio is valued and taxed without either one. Two consequences on a blanket loan. First, a seller's current tax bill is a poor proxy for yours if the seller lived in the house, and that gap shows up in year two on every property bought that way, not just one. Second, Texas collects no state income tax, so property tax is doing the work an income tax does elsewhere, which makes it the largest carry line you can plan around and the one worth getting right per parcel. We underwrite portfolio debt service on the go-forward assessed bill. Confirm how it lands on your specific properties with your CPA or property tax counsel.

Question 4

My doors are in several cities. Do the short-term rental rules travel with them?

Accepted Answer

No. Two adjacent cities in this metro reached opposite legal outcomes, and the rest are not settled enough to assume anything. Dallas passed two short-term rental ordinances in June 2023, one banning short-term rentals in single-family zoning districts. The Dallas Short-Term Rental Alliance sued, a Dallas County judge enjoined enforcement in December 2023, and the court of appeals sided with the operators three times in 2025. The city petitioned the Texas Supreme Court on October 16, 2025 to lift the block so it could enforce the ban ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and no final ruling has been located, so the ban is unenforceable today and unresolved tomorrow. Arlington is the settled case and it went the other way: the 2019 zoning amendments limiting where short-term rentals may operate survived a 2021 trial ruling, and the Texas Supreme Court denied the operators' petition for review in January 2022, so those restrictions stand. We size a blanket loan on long-term lease income that survives either outcome and treat nightly revenue as upside. Check the current rules city by city with your attorney before you underwrite any door to short-term income.

Question 5

How should I plan the release schedule if I intend to sell doors out of the blanket?

Accepted Answer

Around a real marketing period, not a quick out. DFW resale in July 2026 ran 6,610 closed sales, down 9.1% month over month and 1.3% year over year, against 28,293 active listings, 6.00 months of inventory, 58 days on market and a sold-to-original-list ratio of 94.9%. Six months of inventory is the balanced-to-buyer line, so each release is a quarter or so of carry plus a price concession. New construction is the tighter segment at 4.45 months, which says builder incentives are pulling buyers away from resale rather than that resale is strong. Rent is not covering the gap either: Dallas single-family rents were down 2.2% year over year through the first half of 2026, and DFW closed leases in July 2026 averaged $2.4K, down 0.1% year over year, on lease volume down 12.4%. Those are mid-2026 numbers and they will move. The structure holds regardless: tell us which doors you expect to sell and when, and we will write the release terms around that schedule rather than a metro average.

Question 6

What else moves carry across a Dallas portfolio besides property tax?

Accepted Answer

Insurance, and specifically the deductible structure rather than the premium. Texas hail policies commonly carry a percentage-of-value wind and hail deductible instead of a flat dollar amount, which most out-of-state investors do not price. On one house that is a surprise in a bad year. Across a schedule of ten roofs in the same hail path it is a capital call, because each property carries its own percentage deductible and one storm can touch all of them. We will not quote you a metro premium figure, because the published Dallas-area premium ranges we can find all come from insurance marketing pages with no data source behind them, and the statewide averages in circulation disagree with each other by about 20%. Get real quotes on the actual schedule of locations, read the wind and hail deductible on each policy, and send us the binder terms with the portfolio. Tell us about the portfolio and we will tell you what the file needs.

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