I re-ran my Bexar County screen this week: every active single-family listing between $80,000 and $300,000, 2,121 of them, with the same purchase test on each: after-repair value times the advance rate, less repairs, less closing costs, equals the most you can pay. Run at 70% and 75%.

Seven cleared at the asking price.

What surprised me was not the number, it was the quality. All seven survived a full read of the agent remarks. No short sales, no auctions, no fire damage, no court-controlled sales. Ordinary listings. That almost never happens. In most markets I screen, the biggest spreads on the board are the ones that die when you read the record.

Comp coverage in Bexar was the best of any market I have run this month. Half of everything I carried forward could be valued against three or more matched closed sales inside its own subdivision. For comparison, in the DFW counties that figure was 14%, mostly because the cheap end there is rural and unplatted with nothing to comp against.

Then I ran the same houses as rentals and the answer completely inverted.

None of the seven reached 0.60 debt coverage. Here is a representative file: finished value around $305,000, market rent around $1,500 a month. That is a 5.9% gross yield. After taxes, insurance, management and maintenance you are left with roughly $3,835 of net income against about $19,000 of annual debt service. Sized on the income, that house supports a loan somewhere between $25,000 and $65,000, 13% to 35% of value.

Buying cheaper does not fix it. It reduces how much of your own capital is stuck in the deal, but it does nothing to the debt service side of the ratio.

I also pulled the listings that already have a tenant in place, 124 of them in Bexar. Best coverage I could underwrite on any of them was 0.71. That result has now repeated in five different Texas markets, and I think the explanation is structural rather than local: a house listed with a tenant already paying is being sold as a finished product, so the yield is priced into the ask before you ever see it.

One methodological note in case it is useful. I value strictly inside the subject's own subdivision, within 20% of its square footage and 15 years of its vintage, and I report no value at all below three matched sales rather than reaching for a radius pull. It drops a lot of rows. I would rather drop them than publish a number an appraiser will not reproduce.

The full report, with the method and the rejection notes, is on my website, linked in my profile, and investors can sign up there to get new market reports by email as they come out.

For those of you underwriting San Antonio right now: are you seeing the same rent ceiling, or is there a submarket or a price band where the DSCR math actually works that I am missing?