DSCR loans for San Marcos rental property, qualified on rent.
Hold your San Marcos rentals with financing that underwrites the asset, not just you. DSCR as low as 0.75, rates from 5.5% interest-only, and 30-year fixed options for single properties or whole portfolios. San Marcos caps a rental at three unrelated adults per house, so the deal has to work at that ceiling, not a per-bedroom pro forma. Business-purpose only, and rates and structure are set in underwriting.
Typical figures, subject to underwriting and market conditions. Not a commitment to lend.
How it works
No tax returns or personal income docs in most cases. We qualify on the property's cash flow, so you can scale your portfolio without the paperwork drag of conventional lending.
Does San Marcos limit how many tenants I can put in a rental house?
Yes: no more than three unrelated adults per dwelling, and you're liable if it's violated. Ordinance 2023-72 raised the cap from two to three unrelated persons on October 17, 2023, and the Development Code makes the property owner and any agent of the owner personally responsible for allowing an over-occupied unit. The city doesn't need to inspect to prove it: over-occupancy is established if three or more vehicles registered to different surnames and addresses are parked overnight on a majority of nights in any 21-day period. A four-bedroom house underwritten at four separate rents does not comply here; model the deal at three tenants' worth of rent, not four. Talk to your attorney about how the ordinance applies to a specific lease structure.
Do I have to register a San Marcos rental with the city before I can lease it?
Yes, for both a long-term lease and a short-term rental, and they're two separate filings. Every residential rental leased for more than 30 days has been required to register under City Code section 34-821 since January 1, 2021, with an exemption only for family-member tenants; the Development Code repeats the same duty at section 5.1.4.1(B). A short-term rental instead needs its own annual, non-transferable permit, and that permit issues only after the property passes a Code Compliance safety inspection and must be renewed every year. Sort the filing, and the inspection if you are going short-term, before you place a tenant rather than after. The city has not published the registration fee, renewal cycle or any inspection requirement on the long-term side, so confirm the current details with Code Compliance directly.
How much of my San Marcos rent does property tax actually take?
Roughly 38% of gross rent on a typical San Marcos rental, before insurance, vacancy or management. At the city's 2.0666 combined rate per $100 of value (Hays County, City of San Marcos and San Marcos CISD, with no ACC line here), tax on a $310,480 mid-tier home runs about $6,417 a year against roughly $16,848 of gross rent at the metro's $1,404 median rent, as of July 2026. Kyle carries a heavier stack at 2.2536 and Wimberley the lightest in the corridor at 1.4098. Check the parcel's own tax stack before you underwrite the ratio on our DSCR calculator, since a MUD or PID assessment can ride on top of these numbers without showing on the county rate sheet. Talk to your CPA about how this lands on your return.
Could my San Marcos rental carry a tax bill bigger than the county rate sheet shows?
Yes, if it sits in one of the city's public improvement districts, and that number won't be on the appraisal district's rate sheet. San Marcos has at least four active PIDs, Trace, River Bridge Ranch, Whisper and Whisper South, created under Local Government Code chapter 372, and their annual assessments are billed on the same Hays County tax statement as the ad valorem tax but administered separately by P3Works. Pull the assessment amount from the title commitment or P3Works's own per-parcel lookup before you close; the CAD rate alone will understate the carry on a PID lot.
Is there real tenant demand for a San Marcos rental right now?
The supply side argues yes: the city permitted zero units in buildings of five or more apartments in 2025, the same year its university posted record enrollment. San Marcos permitted 718 single-family units and no multifamily structures in 2025 (12 of 12 months reported), while Texas State's fall 2025 enrollment reached 44,596, up 9.6% year over year. Most of that growth landed online and at the Round Rock campus rather than in San Marcos itself, so don't convert the enrollment figure into rental demand one for one. Gross yield on the metro's $310,480 mid-tier value and $1,404 median rent runs about 5.43% as of July 2026, below Kyle's 6.28% and Buda's 5.68% but above Wimberley's 3.80%. No primary-source vacancy rate for Hays County was found to confirm the tightness directly, so treat this as a supply signal, not a vacancy claim.
Can I run my San Marcos DSCR property as a short-term rental instead of a long-term lease?
Yes, short-term rentals are permitted citywide with no density cap, but the permit carries real conditions. The ordinance effective April 16, 2024 allows Type 1 and Type 2 short-term rentals with no cap and no ban in single-family zoning, unlike some Texas cities that cap short-term rentals by block face. The city's own Development Code standard limits short-term rental occupancy to no more than two adult guests per bedroom offered, plus two additional adults, and the permit renews annually only after a passed Code Compliance safety inspection. The long-term registration duty under Code section 34-821 is written around leases running more than 30 days, so which filing your property needs follows the length of stay you actually rent; ask the city which applies to your plan. The short-term rental permit fee is not published, so confirm it with the city before you budget it.
Local rules move. Every tax rate, fee, ordinance and market figure here comes from a primary source and carries the date we read it, and we correct them as the rules change. Where a number is mid-change or we could not verify it, we say so rather than guess. Before you commit a budget, confirm anything that drives it with the city or county, and talk to your attorney or CPA on questions of law or tax.
Published by USA Mortgage Funding, LLC, NMLS #152588. Researched from primary sources by our team, drafted with AI assistance, and every figure checked against its source before publishing. Where an answer rests on a public record, that record is linked under it. Figures read on 2026-08-28.
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