What this is
The San Antonio Renter’s Report is our aggregated view of how apartment screening and cost actually work in this market. It answers, with numbers rather than adjectives, the four questions renters keep asking: what credit score do properties want, what does the apartment really cost per month, who accepts a guarantee, and how deep are concessions right now.
It exists because that knowledge was sitting in people’s heads and in a CRM. That is operational. It is not authoritative, and it is not much use to a renter who will never call us. Converting it into a dated, versioned dataset made it both. The screening tables published on credit issues come straight out of it.
What is in it
| Output | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Median credit minimum by class | Which property classes are realistic at your band |
| Median credit minimum by submarket | Where the flexible stock actually sits geographically |
| Share at each income multiple | How common 3x vs 3.5x vs 2.5x really is |
| Share accepting guarantees | Whether a guarantor is a viable strategy in your band |
| Average mandatory fee stack, in dollars | What to add to any advertised rent |
| Share considering an eviction with zero balance vs any balance | The single most useful rental-history statistic |
| Concession depth by submarket | Where the deals are, and how deep |
Each carries “n = [count], verified [month/year]”. Where our coverage in a submarket is too thin to publish a median honestly, we say “across the communities we work with” and give a range instead of manufacturing a number.
How the data is collected
Community by community. For each one we record: submarket and class, management company, credit minimum, income multiple, eviction lookback and whether it is balance-dependent, broken-lease policy, property-debt policy, felony and misdemeanor lookback by offense class, which guarantees and deposit alternatives are accepted, the current concession and its expiry, and the full mandatory fee stack, plus the date it was last verified and by whom.
There is nothing sophisticated about the method. It is phone calls and site visits, written down. The discipline is in re-verifying, because a screening number six months old is not a fact, it is a guess with a date attached to it.
We publish aggregates, never the raw file
The aggregates rank, get cited, and help renters who never contact us. The underlying file is why we can answer a question about a specific property in an afternoon. Publishing it would end that advantage and help nobody.
What the July 2026 refresh shows
Three movements worth noting from the current edition.
Credit floors have softened at the margin. With vacancy near 10%, some communities holding a 620 have moved to 580 or added case-by-case review. Not universal, not permanent, floors move back up when occupancy recovers, but real right now, and only visible if somebody asks.
Fee stacks have not softened. Rents came down; the mandatory monthly stack did not. It therefore represents a larger share of your total monthly cost than it did in January, which makes comparing on advertised rent more misleading than usual.
Concession depth widened at the top of the market. Class A rents are down roughly 3.2% year over year and the luxury-to-mid-tier gap has compressed to about $180 a month. Newer lease-ups are competing hardest.
Guarantee acceptance is the other figure worth watching, and it varies by management company far more than by class, see guarantees and deposit alternatives.
What it deliberately does not contain
No invented counts. A number that cannot be produced on request is misrepresentation under TREC advertising rules and actionable under the Texas DTPA and FTC endorsement guidelines. Where we do not have the coverage, we say so.
No named properties. Aggregates only.
No safety or demographic commentary. We compare submarkets on rent, commute and inventory age. Not on who lives there. That is a Fair Housing line, see Fair Housing and how we work.
Cadence and use
The Report publishes each January and refreshes each July. Cite it with attribution and a link. Journalists, relocation offices and university housing teams are welcome to it, and if you need a cut we have not published, ask.
For renters, the more useful version is the same data applied to your own file rather than the market median. That is free, start here.
