Search "Terrell Hills home prices" and you'll find a median sale price near $1.1 million on one site, an average value under $920,000 on another, and a listing median under $800,000 on a third, all describing the same three months of 2026. Scroll further and you might land on a page quoting something closer to $275,000, and that page is actually describing a different city two hundred miles away that happens to share half a name.

None of these numbers are lying. They're measuring different things, in a place too small for any single number to hold still.

You might be reading about the wrong city

Terrell Hills is not a neighborhood inside San Antonio. It's its own incorporated city, 1.6 square miles of Bexar County with a population that has held between roughly 5,000 and 5,250 people for the last several years, according to Census figures and the city's own Wikipedia entry. It runs its own police and fire departments, its own public works, and its own zoning, and most of its homes feed into Alamo Heights ISD rather than San Antonio ISD. It successfully fought off an annexation attempt by the City of San Antonio back in 1945 and has stayed a separate municipality ever since.

That independence is exactly what makes the data messy. Two other places share enough of the name to get pulled into the same search results and, sometimes, the same aggregated dataset:

If you're comparing neighborhoods and one source hands you a $275,000 median for "Terrell Hills," you're very likely looking at Terrell, Kaufman County, not the enclave bordering Alamo Heights and Fort Sam Houston. The two places have nothing in common except three syllables.

Even inside the right city, the sample is too small to behave

Strip out the name confusion and the numbers still won't agree, because the real Terrell Hills sells so few homes in any given month that the math behaves more like a coin flip than a market.

Over the three months ending May 2026, a widely used listing-site tracker counted 18 sales in Terrell Hills for that month, up from 12 the year before, with a median sale price around $1.1 million, a jump of roughly 60 percent year over year. Average days on market moved from 38 to 63 over that same window. Meanwhile a separate tracker's average home value for the city sat closer to $916,000, up a modest 3.4 percent year over year. A third source put the median list price at $799,000, down about 30 percent from the year before.

In a city that sells 12 to 18 homes a month, one or two closings at the top or bottom of the range can move the median by hundreds of thousands of dollars. That isn't a data error. It's what a thin market looks like when you measure it monthly.

This is worth sitting with before you compare Terrell Hills to a larger community. A neighborhood that closes a few hundred sales a year will show you a median that moves in inches. Terrell Hills, with its 1.6 square miles and roughly 1,850 households, can show you a median that jumps by six figures depending on whether last month's closings happened to include a brand-new custom build or a dated mid-century house sold as-is.

The disagreement is actually a description of two different products

Here's the part that matters more than any single figure: the spread between "average" and "median," and the spread between what different sites report, tracks a real split in what's actually for sale.

Walk the current inventory and you'll find two distinct categories trading side by side inside the same handful of streets. One is the older housing stock, ranch and mid-century homes from the 1940s through 60s on quarter-acre-and-up lots, several currently listed as candidates for renovation rather than replacement. The other is cleared or replatted land marketed explicitly for new construction, along with homes already built or under construction on those lots. A new build at 817 Garraty is being finished by Haven Design and Construction with a completion target in the works for September 2026. Collier Custom Homes has a lot on the market with a geotechnical soils report from Rock Engineering already in hand, offering to build to the buyer's plan or sell the site outright. A 1025 Garraty Road listing describes a modern farmhouse with board-and-batten siding and a standing seam metal roof, built new in one of the city's established residential pockets. Elsewhere, homes designed by local architect Michael Scholl and finished with black metal roofing turn up as recent, distinct product from the untouched mid-century houses two doors down.

That's why the price-per-square-foot figures cluster in a fairly tight band, generally $283 to $343 depending on the source and month, even while total sale prices swing wildly. Square footage is the stable unit. What varies is whether you're buying finished square footage in a house built last year, or buying a lot with a teardown on it and pricing in what it costs to replace what's there.

For a buyer comparing Terrell Hills to Alamo Heights, Boerne, or another Hill Country community, that distinction changes the question you should be asking. The question isn't "what's the median home price in Terrell Hills." It's "am I buying a finished custom home, or am I buying land with an outdated structure on it that I'll need to renovate or replace." Those are two different budgets, two different timelines, and two different kinds of homework, even though they show up as the same city in every portal's search filter.

What this actually means if you're evaluating the city

A few practical takeaways follow from all of this.

First, ignore any single "median" you find for Terrell Hills without checking the sample size and the date range behind it. A number built on 12 to 18 sales is a snapshot, not a trend, and it will look different again next month.

Second, confirm you're looking at the incorporated city and not Terrell Heights or Terrell, Kaufman County, before you use any price point to anchor a comparison. The zip code and school district (Alamo Heights ISD for most Terrell Hills addresses) are faster confirmation than the city name alone.

Third, separate the renovation-candidate inventory from the new-construction inventory before you compare price per square foot across neighborhoods. A $283-per-square-foot mid-century house and a $343-per-square-foot new build are not competing for the same buyer, even though they'll both show up under "Terrell Hills" in a portal search.

Days on market lengthening from 38 to 63 days over the same recent window suggests buyers are taking more time to work through exactly this kind of comparison rather than bidding on instinct. That's a reasonable instinct to follow.

A few questions worth asking directly

Is Terrell Hills part of San Antonio? No. It's an independently incorporated city fully surrounded by San Antonio, with its own police, fire, and zoning authority, though it sits within the greater San Antonio metro area.

Why do home price websites disagree so much on Terrell Hills? Two reasons layer on top of each other: name overlap with Terrell, Texas in Kaufman County and with the separate Terrell Heights neighborhood, and a genuinely small number of monthly sales, often under 20, which lets a handful of closings swing the reported median significantly.

Should I trust price per square foot over the median sale price? It's a steadier number in a market this size, but it still needs context. A renovated mid-century home and a ground-up custom build can carry similar price-per-square-foot figures while representing very different projects, budgets, and timelines.

If you're weighing a renovation against a ground-up build on a Terrell Hills lot, or trying to figure out what a specific address's numbers actually mean before you make an offer, that's a conversation worth having with someone who builds in this market rather than one who only lists it. BGA Design + Build works across San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country on both remodels and custom homes, and can walk through what a specific property's condition, lot, and budget actually support before you commit to either path.