San Antonio Texas Rental Property

[Jack Faysash]

Hello BiggerPockets Community,

I'm looking to buy my first investment property in San Antonio, Texas.  My fiancee is Air Force and we will be moving to San Antonio in March of 2021. I've lived in Florida my whole life and have only visited San Antonio once.  I'm looking for advice from people familiar with the area on a good spot to purchase my first investment property.  We'd like the property to be a single family home within a 20 minute radius of Fort Sam Houston Air Force Base.  Our budget is 180k and we would like 2+ bed and bath.  We will be living in the property for a year and renting after, so there can be some small portions of the property we are willing to fix along the way.  We are hoping to find a family friendly area with a low crime rate and good schools nearby.  Can anyone with knowledge on the area give me any pointers?

[Jennifer Gill]

We lived in San Antonio for almost 8 years.  All the "better" school district and areas are on the North side of town.  But even then there are good schools and bad schools within the districts.  NISD, NEISD, Judson, Alamo Heights (expensive area and probably out of your range), Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD, etc tend to be the better districts.  The schools closest to downtown (beside Alamo Heights) tend to be worse and then get better as you move outside loop 410 and then best outside loop 1604 (but not a hard rule).... as with most cities as the money moved out to the suburbs, so did the better schools.  SA traffic is terrible.  Your best bet would probably be to look on the NE side of town (around HWY's 281, 35 or 10) to be within 20 minutes.