Insights
Market reports, forecast data, industry insights, and more from iEmergent.
San Antonio is a city of many identities. It's known as the birthplace of the cowboy and the site of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. It's also nicknamed "Military City USA," since it's home to one of the largest concentrations of military bases in the United States.
Its housing market has just as many sides, and they don't all tell the same story. Inventory is climbing, which gives buyers more options and could ease prices. Yet affordability is still a stretch for many households, and the market's average loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is the highest among the nation's top 30 metro areas, a sign that buyers are making smaller down payments. What's behind these mixed signals, where is lending growing, and how can lenders use local insights to open the door to homeownership for more buyers? Let's take a closer look.
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The United States is far from a uniform mortgage market. It’s made up of more than 84,400 census tracts, 925 core-based statistical areas (CBSAs), and over 390 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), and because each is unique, we forecast mortgage opportunity at the census-tract level. That allows lenders to use local data to make localized decisions. Since 2010, iEmergent’s forecast has outperformed most models designed to predict U.S. mortgage originations, maintaining an accuracy rate of over 90%.
The San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX, MSA has a population of about 2.6 million people who live in 950,000 households. The overall homeownership rate is 63.5%, which is close to the overall U.S. homeownership rate of about 65%. Median household income is $80,800, and there is a 67.2% minority population, mostly Hispanic.
On paper, San Antonio looks like an affordable market. A large share of the area's existing homes are valued at or below $300,000.
But this chart shows all houses, including those not currently for sale. When we narrow the focus to homes that are for sale or have recently sold, we see signs of affordability challenges:
Together, this data tells us that the homes for sale in the market are not the affordable ones.
Inventory, on the other hand, is moving in buyers' favor. Months' supply, which measures how long it would take to sell every listed home at the current pace of sales, has jumped sharply, and that may bring prices down.
Through 2024 and 2025, inventory hovered around one month's supply. This summer, it climbed past four months.
In the San Antonio MSA, the lender with the most loans in 2025 was Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union (RBFCU), a local depository founded in 1952 to serve personnel at Randolph Air Force Base. Security Service Federal Credit Union, which opened at Kelly Air Force Base in 1956 to serve members of the U.S. Air Force Security Service Command and their families, was also in the top 5 for loan count. Both have since expanded membership well beyond the military, but their roots trace back to Military City USA.
About 8,800 of RBFCU’s loans were home improvement or home equity, which means its average loan size was smaller than other lenders’, but it still cracked the top 5 in dollars:
In San Antonio, our 2026 projections call for 54,148 combined purchase and refinance loans, amounting to $16.4 billion in total volume with an average loan size of $302,912. And now that we're in Q4, we've included our 2027 forecast, too, which calls for 56,370 combined loans amounting to $17.2 billion in total volume with an average loan size of $305,353.
By visualizing our forecast data for 2026 purchase and refinance loans in the San Antonio market by census tract, you can see that more loans are expected to originate in a suburban ring around San Antonio proper, indicated by the red, orange, and yellow tracts:
From 2023 to 2027, total dollar volume for purchase and refinance originations in San Antonio is forecast to grow from $13.1 billion to $17.2 billion, a 31.3% increase:
In San Antonio, 67.2% of the population (and 60.6% of households) are from racial/ethnic minority groups, which makes this a rare majority-minority market. Hispanic residents make up the largest share at 54.3% of the population and 48.5% of households.
The homeownership rate gaps for minority groups are smaller than in many other markets in the United States, but Black households still lag behind. They make up 7.2% of households and have a 46.3% homeownership rate:
The minority population is concentrated within the city limits of San Antonio. Because these households are clustered geographically, lenders can reach many of them by focusing on where they live. That makes a strong case for place-based custom credit programs, which define eligibility by geography, such as specific census tracts, rather than by individual borrower characteristics:
Loan penetration rate helps measure diverse lending in a market. By comparing penetration rate to population, we can see if loans are distributed evenly in a market or if there are disparities.
All things being equal, since Hispanic households make up 48.5% of households in San Antonio, we’d expect that same percent of loans to go to that segment each year. However, that’s not the reality we see. In 2025, Hispanic households accounted for 38.5% of the loan share:
While loan penetration rates have moved closer to matching population share over the last five years, there’s still a gap of about 10 percentage points in each direction: Hispanic households’ loan share trails their household share by 10 points, while white households’ loan share exceeds theirs by 9.5:
In San Antonio, low- and moderate-income (LMI) households exhibit lower rates of mortgage application and origination, higher denial and fallout rates, higher housing cost burdens, and lower homeownership outcomes.
For many renters, the challenge starts before they ever apply for a mortgage. More than half of renter households in San Antonio are housing cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs. Severely burdened households spend more than 50%. That leaves less room to save for down payments, reserves, and closing costs:
Despite San Antonio's high housing cost burdens, LMI borrowers account for about 25% of loan count in the market each year, and in 2027, our forecast calls for $2.5 billion in combined purchase and refinance volume to this segment. Lenders can help more of these households reach homeownership by developing down payment assistance and other lending products that serve LMI borrowers.
Read more about the impact of income on mortgage lending.
VA loans make up about 30% of combined dollars in the market, accounting for $5.1 billion of volume in our 2026 forecast and $5.3 billion in 2027.
Mapping our 2026 VA forecast by census tract shows that VA lending is concentrated outside the urban core, with the highest-dollar tracts (in red, orange, and yellow) on the far west and east sides of the city and to the northeast of downtown, near several of the region's military installations:
For lenders active in these areas, a marketing strategy that highlights the built-in benefits of VA loans can help attract military personnel and veterans.
Housing affordability is a complex issue, and each market in the United States is unique. In San Antonio, home values suggest an affordable market, but sale prices, listings, and loan-to-value ratios show even middle-income households stretching to buy.
In a market as layered as San Antonio, the lenders who come out ahead are the ones who spot opportunity early. iEmergent's census tract-level data and tools show you where growth is headed, so you can build your strategy around it and get there before your competitors do.
With iEmergent, lenders can: