Terrell Hills, TX: A Due-Diligence Guide for Buyers, Sellers, and Investors

Why Terrell Hills Is a Separate City, and Why That Still Matters

On July 26, 1945, San Antonio adopted ordinances annexing Terrell Hills and Olmos Park without holding an election in either city. Terrell Hills sued. The Texas Court of Civil Appeals in San Antonio permanently enjoined the annexation and barred San Antonio from levying any tax on Terrell Hills property, in a case still cited today as City of San Antonio v. State ex rel. Town of Terrell Hills, 195 S.W.2d 421 (Tex. Civ. App., 1946). Terrell Hills adopted a home-rule charter on December 2, 1957, the legal basis for the city running its own police department, fire and EMS service, municipal court, and zoning, instead of contracting those services from San Antonio.

That is not trivia. It is the reason a Terrell Hills address carries its own police response, its own zoning review, and a tax bill built from a different stack of taxing entities than a San Antonio address ten blocks away.

Is Terrell Hills part of San Antonio? No. It is an independent, home-rule incorporated city inside Bexar County, geographically surrounded by San Antonio, with its own police, fire, and zoning authority. It shares a mailing area with San Antonio but not a municipal government.

What Homes Cost, and Why the Median Depends on Which Number You’re Reading

Two credible sources give very different “median home value” figures for Terrell Hills, and the gap is a measurement difference, not an error. The Census Bureau’s 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey puts the median value of owner-occupied housing units at $838,400, built from what long-tenured owners self-report their homes are worth. Ownwell’s parcel-level tax analysis puts the current median assessed home value at $1,641,685, built from actual Bexar Appraisal District assessments, which reset closer to market price at each sale. With 81.3% of homes owner-occupied and many owners holding for years, the ACS figure understates what a buyer will pay today; the current assessed-value figure is the more reliable one for budgeting a purchase.

The current assessed figure is the one to budget against; the ACS figure explains why an older listing or a long-owned neighbor’s home can look far cheaper on paper than what a buyer will actually pay this year.

The Tax Stack, Broken Down

For an AHISD-zoned homestead, that stack totals roughly 2.07% of assessed value, the same effective rate Ownwell computes independently from actual tax bills, producing a median annual bill near $33,973 on the city’s current median assessed value. The Alamo Heights ISD board set that 2025 rate at its August 20 meeting specifically to bring the general-fund portion down from $0.7512 to $0.7122, while the debt-service portion rose slightly. Texas’s homestead exemption removes $100,000 of value from school-district taxation for an owner-occupant, so a homesteaded owner pays school tax on a lower base than the raw rate implies.

How does Terrell Hills’ tax rate compare with San Antonio’s? At roughly 2.07% combined for an AHISD-zoned homestead, Terrell Hills sits close to San Antonio’s own effective rate under Northside ISD, which runs closer to 2.7% combined. The city’s municipal rate is lower than San Antonio’s, but AHISD’s rate runs higher than several neighboring districts, so the two largely offset.

Schools: AHISD, NEISD, and How to Confirm Which One Applies to You

Most Terrell Hills addresses are zoned to Alamo Heights ISD, feeding Woodridge Elementary, Alamo Heights Junior School, and Alamo Heights High School. A smaller part of the city is zoned to North East ISD instead, per the city’s own schools page, which lists both districts as serving Terrell Hills. The exact dividing streets aren’t published anywhere this guide could independently verify; the reliable path is a parcel-level lookup through the Bexar Appraisal District, cross-checked against AHISD’s boundary tool, before writing an offer that assumes AHISD eligibility.

Which school district serves my address, AHISD or NEISD? Confirm it before you offer: search the parcel through the Bexar Appraisal District and cross-check the AHISD boundary map. If the parcel is NEISD-zoned instead, the school tax rate is $0.9822 per $100 rather than AHISD’s $0.9572, a small but real difference in the total bill.

Buying in Terrell Hills: What to Check Before You Offer

Housing stock runs mostly 1920s to 1960s construction alongside renovated and newer custom builds. On an older home specifically, prioritize a foundation inspection (many have had at least one prior intervention over their life) and an electrical review (some unrenovated sections still carry knob-and-tube wiring). Confirm permit history for any addition: the city’s zoning code restricts height, bulk, and setbacks in the A and A-1 Residential Districts to preserve scale and tree canopy, which can limit what you’re able to add later even on a large lot, so an unpermitted addition is both a disclosure risk and a future constraint.

Selling an Older Terrell Hills Home: Disclosure and Positioning

Texas’s standard seller disclosure requires flagging known defects. For 1920s to 1960s Terrell Hills stock, buyers here already expect to ask about foundation history, roof age, and permit status, so the fastest-closing listings are the ones arriving with that paperwork already assembled: prior foundation-repair invoices, a recent roof-replacement receipt, and permitted (not informal) documentation for any addition. A pre-listing inspection that gets ahead of these three questions typically shortens the back-and-forth during option period more than any pricing adjustment does.

Investing in Terrell Hills: Rules, Not Yield, Drive the Decision Here

The single fact that should drive an investor’s decision here is regulatory, not financial: Terrell Hills’ Code of Ordinances prohibits using property in the A or A-1 Residential Districts for short-term rental purposes, which covers effectively all residential land in the city. That removes the short-term-rental model from consideration regardless of any nightly-rate estimate a third-party aggregator publishes for a given address. No verified rental-yield or cap-rate series specific to Terrell Hills’ long-term rental market turned up in this research; that is an open item for further work, not a figure worth estimating here.

Can I run a short-term rental in Terrell Hills? No. City code prohibits short-term rental use of residential property in the A and A-1 Districts, which cover the city’s housing stock; plan around long-term leasing only.

Safety: What the Department’s Own Numbers Show

Terrell Hills Police Department publishes its own monthly and year-end activity statistics rather than relying on a national aggregator’s letter grade. For calendar year 2025, it recorded 155 property crimes citywide (74 vehicle burglaries, 36 thefts, 25 criminal mischief incidents, 4 building burglaries, 3 habitation burglaries, 3 auto thefts) and 1 violent crime, an assault, with zero recorded murders, robberies, or sexual assaults for the year. In a city of roughly 5,200 residents, standard per-100,000 crime rates are statistically unstable; a single additional incident can swing a rate by a visible margin, which is part of why national aggregators sometimes leave Terrell Hills’ crime grade blank instead of computing one.

Geography and Governance in Context

At 1.61 square miles, Terrell Hills sits about five miles northeast of downtown San Antonio, bordered by Alamo Heights, Fort Sam Houston, and San Antonio proper. It belongs to a small cluster of similarly independent cities in the same stretch of Bexar County, each running its own police force and tax authority rather than sitting inside San Antonio’s own.