Pricing a Bexar County FSBO Without an Agent's CMA

The single biggest reason FSBO sales stall in Bexar County isn't marketing or paperwork — it's mispricing. List $15,000 too high in Stone Oak and you sit through a 45-day appraisal waiver window watching buyers filter past you. List $10,000 too low in Mahncke Park and you leave real money on the table that no negotiation can recover. You can build a defensible list price without paying an agent for a Comparative Market Analysis, but you have to do the work an agent would do, and you have to do it with Bexar County data.

Here is the process I'd run on your house if you called me tomorrow.

Start with BCAD, but know what it actually tells you

The Bexar Appraisal District (BCAD) public search at bcad.org is free and gives you three useful things for any parcel: the legal description and lot size, the year built and living area per the appraiser's records, and the appraised market value history. It does not give you sold prices — Texas is a non-disclosure state, so sale prices are not public record.

What BCAD is good for:

• Confirming the square footage you'll advertise (if you claim 2,450 sq ft and BCAD shows 2,180, a buyer's lender is going to use 2,180 and your pricing math breaks).
• Pulling the same data on neighbors so you can identify which houses on your block are genuinely comparable in size, age, and lot.
• Spotting obvious BCAD errors — wrong bedroom count, missing addition, wrong year of a remodel — that you'll want to protest anyway under § 41.41 but also correct before a buyer's appraiser pulls the same record.

What BCAD is bad for: telling you what anything actually sold for. The "appraised value" is a mass-appraisal number for tax purposes. It lags the market by 12–18 months and is frequently 5–20% below true market in rising submarkets, and occasionally above it in softening ones.

Get real sold comps — three legal ways

You need actual closed sale prices on 4–8 comparable homes sold in the last 90–180 days within roughly a half-mile. Without MLS access you have four options:

1. Ask a lender for an appraisal-style comp pull. Any local mortgage broker you might refinance with has access to public record sales and can send you a list. They'll do it free hoping for future business.
2. Buy a flat-fee MLS listing that includes a pricing consult. Several SABOR-affiliated flat-fee services (covered in our separate article on flat-fee MLS) include a one-time CMA or pricing worksheet for $100–$300. If you were going to list on MLS anyway, this is the cheapest path.
3. Pay for a pre-listing appraisal. A licensed Texas appraiser will run full comps and give you a USPAP-compliant value for $450–$650 in Bexar County. A lender's appraiser will almost certainly respect a recent pre-listing appraisal if the value is supportable.
4. Ask a neighbor who recently sold. Sale prices are not public, but the people involved in the sale know them. Buyers who closed in your subdivision in the last six months are often happy to share what they paid.

Do not rely on public portal "estimates" as your anchor. Those models weight tax records heavily, and in a non-disclosure state they are guessing at the sale leg of their own algorithm.

Define your comp set the way an appraiser would

An appraiser filling out the Uniform Residential Appraisal Report (Form 1004) works to tight rules. You should work to rules almost as tight:

• Distance: 0.5 mile in dense urban areas (Southtown, Alamo Heights, Mahncke Park), up to 1 mile in subdivision areas (Stone Oak, Alamo Ranch, Cibolo's Bentwood Ranch), and stay inside the same ISD boundary. A house on the Alamo Heights ISD side of Broadway prices differently than one 400 feet away in SAISD. Same for the NEISD/NISD boundary along Blanco and the Judson/NEISD line in the northeast.
• Time: sold within 90 days ideally, 180 days maximum. Anything older needs a market-condition adjustment.
• Size: within roughly 10–15% of your gross living area.
• Age: within 10 years if you're in an established neighborhood, within 5 years in a newer master-planned subdivision where builders rotated floor plans.
• Configuration: same story count, similar bed/bath, similar garage. A 4/2 one-story does not comp cleanly to a 4/2.5 two-story even at identical square footage.

Pick 4–6 true comps. Then pull 2–3 active listings and 2–3 pending or recently expired listings in the same filter — those show you the competition and the ceiling.

Make the adjustments explicit

This is where most FSBO pricing falls apart. You cannot just average the six sold prices. You adjust each comp up or down for the ways it differs from your house, then average the adjusted prices.

Rules of thumb that track what Bexar-area appraisers actually use:

• Living area: $50–$90 per square foot of difference, depending on submarket. Higher in 78209, 78212, 78215; lower in 78227, 78242.
• Garage: $5,000–$8,000 per bay of difference.
• Pool: $15,000–$25,000 in most of Bexar County; less south of Loop 410 where pools are harder to resell, more in Stone Oak and the Dominion.
• Lot size: only adjust when the difference is material (>25%) or when one lot has a usability feature the other doesn't (greenbelt, cul-de-sac, flag lot).
• Condition and updates: the hardest adjustment. A renovated kitchen and primary bath in a 1970s Northwood house can add $20,000–$40,000 over an original-condition twin.
• Time: if Bexar County median sale price moved 3% in the six months since a comp closed, adjust accordingly. SABOR publishes monthly market stats that give you the direction.

Keep adjustments under 15% gross and under 10% net per comp. If you have to adjust a comp more than that, it isn't really a comp.

Price to the search grid, not to a round number

Buyers on every portal search in $25,000 bands: $300–325K, $325–350K, $350–375K. If your adjusted value lands at $352,000, listing at $349,900 puts you in front of every buyer searching the $325–350K band and the $350–375K band. Listing at $355,000 cuts your visible audience roughly in half for a $3,000 gain you'll give back in the first counteroffer.

The other grid that matters in Bexar County is the VA loan ceiling and FHA limits. JBSA-Lackland, JBSA-Randolph, and JBSA-Fort Sam Houston generate enormous VA-buyer volume. If your house is priced just above the conforming/FHA limit for Bexar County (check the current year's figure at FHFA and HUD), you've eliminated a big share of your buyer pool for a marginal gain.

What most people get wrong

• Trusting the BCAD appraised value as market value. It isn't. It's a tax number. Use BCAD for property facts, not for price.
• Averaging raw comp prices without adjusting. Six houses that sold for an average of $340,000 tell you very little if three of them had pools and yours doesn't, or two were 400 sq ft larger.
• Comping across school district lines. A house two blocks away in a different ISD — especially Alamo Heights ISD vs. SAISD, or NEISD vs. Judson ISD in Converse — is not a comp at any distance. Stay inside the boundary.
• Pricing to what you "need" to net. Your payoff, your agent-savings math, and your next down payment are irrelevant to the market. A buyer's appraiser will not care and their lender will not fund above appraised value without the buyer bringing cash.
• Ignoring days-on-market on active listings. If three houses like yours have sat 60+ days at the price you're considering, that price is already disproven. Come in below them, not alongside.
• Forgetting seller concessions in the comp. A comp that closed at $360,000 with $10,000 in seller-paid closing costs effectively sold at $350,000. You will almost never see this in public records; you will only catch it by asking the listing party or seeing it on the MLS sheet.

Sanity-check against a buyer's appraisal

Assume your buyer is financing. Their lender will order an appraisal two to three weeks into the option period on a TREC 20-17 contract. If that appraisal comes in below contract price, you renegotiate under the Third Party Financing Addendum or the buyer terminates. The whole deal re-opens, and you've burned 30 days.

The way to avoid this: price so that a competent appraiser, working from the same comp pool you used, can justify your number using three of your six comps. If you can't write the appraisal narrative yourself, the price is too aggressive.

Re-price on data, not emotion

Set a schedule before you list. If you have fewer than 8–12 showings in the first 14 days in an average Bexar County submarket, the price is wrong — not the photos, not the season. Reduce by 2–3% and re-evaluate at day 21. Chasing the market down in $2,000 increments is how FSBOs end up 90 days in, $20,000 below where they should have started.

If you want comps pulled for you, flat-fee MLS options on /resources bundle that with SABOR exposure, or you can list your home on RentInSA at /list-your-home and browse comparable active listings at /homes-for-sale to see what you're pricing against today.