Duval County

Duval County, Texas sits at the extreme affordable end of the Texas market, with a median home price of $75,098, a population of roughly 9,960, and an affordability index score of 100 out of 100. That price point is striking on its face, but the investment scorecard tells a more complicated story. The cash flow score registers at zero, the appreciation score comes in at 26 out of 100, and the overall score lands at 55, placing Duval in the 36th national percentile and 98th out of 243 Texas counties. Home prices have declined 4.77% year over year, which means you are not buying into momentum. The cap rate and cash-on-cash return fields return zero in the underlying data, which signals that rental income at current market rents is not clearing expenses in a way the model can underwrite positively, even at this purchase price. This is not a cash flow market, and it is not an appreciation market. It is a market that scores well on affordability alone.

That affordability score makes Duval superficially attractive to a buyer hunting for the cheapest entry point in Texas, but the numbers upstream of that score undercut the case. A cash flow investor needs rent coverage above carrying costs, and the model cannot confirm that exists here. An appreciation investor needs population growth, price momentum, or demand catalysts, and a 4.77% year-over-year price decline in a county of under 10,000 people does not offer that. The investor profile most likely to find marginal utility here is someone pursuing deep-value or distressed assets at prices well below the $75,098 median, where a sufficiently wide spread between acquisition cost and rental income could manufacture a return the broader market is not producing. Even then, the population base limits the tenant pool, which increases vacancy risk and makes unit-level income disruption disproportionately painful.

No economic anchor or employer data was provided for Duval County, so the analysis cannot speak to job base depth, sector concentration, or the stability of rental demand from any named driver. That absence is itself informative: in a county of under 10,000 people with no highlighted economic anchors, an investor should independently verify whether there is any institutional employment, energy activity, agricultural processing, or government presence sustaining household formation before committing capital. Thin economic data in a small population county is a flag worth taking seriously during diligence.

On the carry cost side, the state-average effective property tax rate for Texas is 1.80%, which the Tax Foundation classifies as high, and which deserves its own line on any underwrite. At the $75,098 purchase price, that rate produces estimated annual property tax of $1,352, with insurance adding another $375 annually, for a combined monthly tax and insurance burden of $144. In a market where the total mortgage, tax, and insurance stack has to be covered by rental income to produce positive cash flow, $144 per month in tax and insurance alone is material relative to rents achievable in a rural county with a $50,697 median household income. Texas is a no income tax state that funds local government through property taxes, and the 1.80% rate, while a state-average estimate that may differ at the county and township level, is high enough that buyers should request the actual Duval County assessor rate before closing, not after.

The primary risks here are concentration and demographic. A population of 9,960 spread across a rural Texas county means the rental market is thin by definition. Any single employer contraction, outmigration event, or unit vacancy extends longer than in a liquid market. Price declining 4.77% year over year with no offsetting cash flow story and no named demand catalyst means the investor is holding an illiquid asset in a market with limited exit optionality. There is no vacancy or crime data in the provided inputs, so no specific claims can be made on those dimensions, but the population size alone warrants skepticism about resale timeline assumptions.

Against its neighbors, Duval's $75,098 median home price is dramatically lower than Karnes County at $199,873, De Witt County at $212,252, Uvalde County at $192,914, Bosque County at $242,716, and Washington County at $373,954. All five neighbors share an overall score of 54 to 55, essentially identical to Duval's 55. Washington County is the only neighbor with published rent and price-ratio data, showing a median rent of $1,831 and a rent-to-price ratio of 0.0588 on a $373,954 median, which is a considerably more legible cash flow signal than anything visible in Duval's data. An investor should choose Duval over these neighbors only if the acquisition price can be driven far enough below the $75,098 median to manufacture a return the market itself is not generating, or if there is a specific value-add play with an identified tenant and a verified rent level that the county's thin market cannot surface in aggregated data. For a buy-and-hold investor without a specific deal in hand, the neighbors offer higher prices but also higher confidence that a functioning rental market exists.