For about two years, buying a home in San Antonio felt like a race. Listings drew multiple offers in a weekend, buyers waived inspections to compete, and homes routinely sold for more than their asking price. It was one of the fastest housing markets the city had ever seen, and it reshaped what homes and rents cost here.
Here is what drove it, and what it left behind.
Money had never been cheaper
The single biggest force was the price of borrowing. In response to the pandemic, mortgage rates fell to the lowest levels on record, with the average 30-year fixed rate dipping below 3% in early 2021. At those rates, the monthly payment on a given loan was far lower than buyers had ever seen, and many people who had been renting suddenly found they could afford to buy, or to buy more house than they had planned.
Cheap money did not just bring in first-time buyers. Investors bought too, including large companies buying single-family homes to rent out. And owners who already had a home refinanced at historic lows, which, as it turned out, would matter a great deal later.
People were moving to Texas
At the same time, people were on the move. Remote work freed many from living near an office, and Texas, with no state income tax and housing that was still affordable compared with the coasts, drew a steady flow of new residents. San Antonio, with its lower costs than Austin and its large military and healthcare employers, was a natural landing place for many of them.
More people wanting homes, at a time when borrowing was cheap, would have pushed prices up on its own. What made it a boom was the other side of the equation.
There were not enough homes
The number of homes for sale fell to very low levels. Owners who might have sold stayed put. Builders, hit by supply-chain disruption and rising lumber and labor costs, could not finish homes fast enough to keep up. With few homes available and many buyers chasing them, prices rose quickly, with double-digit annual gains becoming common across the San Antonio area during the peak.
Bidding wars became normal. Buyers learned to make offers on homes they had seen for twenty minutes, to cover appraisal gaps in cash, and to skip contingencies that would have been standard a few years earlier.
Rents followed
The rental market felt it too. With homes harder to buy and more people arriving, demand for rentals rose sharply, and rents climbed with it. Investors who had bought homes to rent added supply, but not fast enough to hold rents down while the boom lasted. The same period saw a wave of "build-to-rent" communities: neighborhoods of new houses built from the start to be rented rather than sold.
What it left behind
The boom ended in 2022, when mortgage rates rose sharply. That story is its own article. But the boom changed the San Antonio market in lasting ways:
- Prices reset higher. Even after the market cooled, the homes that rose in value during the boom largely kept most of those gains. Today the median asking price across the region is around $320,000, by our count of current listings.
- A wave of new suburbs. The rush of building pushed new subdivisions out along the edges of the city and into the towns around it, from Schertz and Cibolo to the far west side and New Braunfels. Many of the new home communities selling today trace back to land that was planned during those years.
- Lots of low-rate mortgages. Owners who bought or refinanced below 3% have been reluctant to sell and give that rate up, which helped keep resale inventory tight long after the boom itself.
- A bigger rental market of houses. More single-family homes are rented today than before the boom, and many of them are newer homes in planned communities.
Understanding the boom explains a lot about the market buyers and owners face now: higher prices than before, more homes for rent than ever, and a lot of homeowners who are in no hurry to move.
*This is a general history. For today's numbers, see our current home price and rental market updates.*