CRE Permanent in San Antonio

Retail, and it is not close. Partners put San Antonio retail vacancy at 4.2% in the first quarter of 2026, and the market has held under 5% since mid-2021. Asking rent was $19.45 per square foot triple net, and trailing-twelve-month sales averaged $211 per square foot at a 7.2% cap rate. For a long-term lender that combination is the point: a vacancy rate that has not broken 5% in almost five years means renewal risk at year five is a smaller assumption than in any other sector here, and a 7.2% trading cap gives an appraiser real comparable sales to work from rather than a survey number. Bring the rent roll, the lease expirations, and the tenant credit. Note the house on every figure in your pro forma, because the brokerage reports in this metro do not agree with each other on any sector, and blending two of them produces a number nobody published.

Start at 6.0% and expect the appraisal to test it, because cap rates here have moved out 50 basis points. Northmarq reported a first quarter 2026 median sale of $132,600 per unit across 12 trades at an average 6.0% cap rate, up from 5.5% in 2024. The operating side is why: San Antonio carries the highest apartment vacancy of any major U.S. market at 15.7% by CoStar's count, with 72% of properties offering a concession, asking rents down four straight quarters to a five-year low, and net absorption of negative 1,700 units in the quarter. The forward offset is real but has not reached rents yet. Deliveries for 2026 are forecast at 2,600 units, down 63% from 2025 and the slowest since 2011, with permitting at a decade low. Twelve trades is a thin sample for a metro this size, so treat the 6.0% as a reference point rather than a valuation. Agency and insurance permanent programs size off proven income, so debt service coverage comes from executed leases and any recovery in occupancy shows up as upside.

It can, but the file has to carry it, and the most telling local fact is what is not being built. Cushman and Wakefield reported no office under construction in San Antonio and nothing delivered in 18 months as of the second quarter of 2026, with asking rent at $27.97 per square foot, up 2.3% year over year. Vacancy depends on who you ask: CBRE published 17.6% and Cushman and Wakefield 15.2%, and part of that gap is inventory removal, since buildings converted to other uses drop out of the tracked base rather than filling up. Pick one house, label it, and keep it there for the whole pro forma. A permanent lender is buying 10 years of that rent roll, so weighted average lease term, tenant credit, and a funded reserve for tenant improvements and leasing commissions do the work. A zero-construction pipeline is genuinely helpful to a stabilized owner: no new competing product is coming for the tenants you already have. If the asset is not stabilized yet, a bridge loan to lease-up with a permanent placement afterward is the honest path.

It is the strongest demand anchor in the metro, and it belongs in the narrative rather than in the net operating income. Toyota announced a $3.6 billion San Antonio expansion on July 6, 2026: 2,000 new jobs, 2.5 million square feet, a second Tacoma line, and a plant that doubles by 2030, on $8.3 billion of cumulative investment since 2003. That is the largest new economic event this metro has had, and it anchors the south side supplier and workforce thesis. The industrial market it lands in is stabilizing rather than booming. CBRE put vacancy at 10.3% and Cushman and Wakefield at 11.1% in the second quarter of 2026, deliveries were down 85.7% year over year, absorption accelerated to roughly 900,000 square feet year to date, and asking rent was $8.52 per square foot triple net by CBRE's count, with five-year rent growth of 44.4%. For permanent debt that means we size on the leases you have signed today. An announced expansion four years from delivery is a reason to like the hold, not a line item.

Enough to change your exit, and it follows the parcel rather than the city name. A City of San Antonio address carried a combined tax year 2025 rate of roughly 2.22% to 2.54% depending on the school district, on a non-school subtotal of 1.285274 per $100 of value. City plus school stacks in the suburbs run lower on paper: 1.7517 in New Braunfels, 1.8645 in Boerne, 1.9191 in Schertz, 1.9267 in Seguin, 1.9299 in Cibolo. Those sums exclude special district overlays, and the overlays are large, with Meyer Ranch MUD at 0.95, Park Place MUD at 1.20, and Kendall WCID 3A at 1.10 per $100, so a suburban MUD parcel can land above the city total. Two Texas rules matter on a long hold. Investment property gets neither the homestead exemption nor the 10% appraisal cap, which are homestead-only under Tax Code section 23.23. And the 20% circuit breaker on non-homestead property under section 23.231 requires a full calendar year of ownership, is stripped on sale, and expires December 31, 2026, so do not build a 2027 or later hold around it. The Bexar Appraisal District protest deadline is May 15 for the 2026 cycle. Pull the full taxing-unit list for the actual parcel before you set stabilized net operating income, and talk to your CPA or property tax counsel about how to model it past year one.

We will not hand you a distress number we cannot source, and Texas closing costs are more predictable than most states. No San Antonio specific commercial mortgage delinquency or loan-maturity distress data was available at a quality we would publish, and national figures do not transfer to this metro, so anyone quoting you a local distress rate is guessing. What we will say plainly is that the labor market is softening: nonfarm employment was 1,193,000 in June 2026, up 7,400 jobs or 0.62% year over year, with unemployment at 4.8%, up 80 basis points. Population growth alone is not an underwriting case. The durable offsets are Joint Base San Antonio at $53.5 billion of economic output and 223,349 total jobs supported, and a data center pipeline with 30 or more built and 23 or more in development in Bexar County. On closing, Texas title insurance rates are promulgated by the Department of Insurance and identical at every company, and the Commissioner ordered a 6.2% rate reduction effective March 1, 2026, the first change since 2019. Texas also levies no real estate transfer tax, and the Legislature is constitutionally barred from enacting one. Hail is the state's leading insured loss peril, but San Antonio is inland and outside TWIA territory, so there is no windstorm pool exposure on the carry line. Bring a bound insurance quote on the subject property before you lock a permanent structure.