Right now, 7310 Cresta Bulivar in Cresta Bella is listed at $789,000 on a 0.12-acre lot. A few miles away and a few decades older, 24 Inwood Mnr in Inwood is listed at a similar price on a 0.25-acre lot, more than double the land. Both homes sit inside the same general stretch of San Antonio's North Side, both are zoned to Northside ISD, and both are a short drive from the same shopping at La Cantera and The Rim. A buyer cross-shopping the two neighborhoods on price alone would assume they were looking at roughly the same thing. They are not.
Same Mile, Two Different Decades
Cresta Bella sits at Interstate 10 and Camp Bullis Road, a 242-acre development built out largely since 2010 by builders including Sitterle Homes and Megatel Homes, backed directly onto a 207-acre nature preserve. Inwood sits just inside Loop 1604 off Bitters Road, a gated community built mostly through the 1990s and organized into older sub-sections with names like The Hollow, The Village, The Forest, and The Heights.
The overlap is real. Both are gated. Both fall under Northside ISD. Both put residents within a short drive of Huebner Oaks, La Cantera, and The Rim. That overlap is exactly what makes the comparison useful instead of arbitrary. These are not two unrelated corners of the metro. They are two answers to the same question, roughly twenty years apart.
What the Median Doesn't Tell You
Here is where it gets interesting. For the three months ending March 2026, one market tracker put Cresta Bella's median sale price at $1,062,000, down 29.2 percent from the year before. A separate tracker, pulled around the same point in the year, put the median closer to $935,656, a gap of roughly $126,000 on what is nominally the same neighborhood.
That is not two sources disagreeing about the world. It is what happens when a neighborhood closes only a handful of homes a month. Active Cresta Bella listings currently span from $789,000 on a 0.12-acre lot up to $1,720,000 on a 0.24-acre lot at 7202 Bella Rose, with several custom builds priced between $1.5 million and $1.65 million in between. When a market this small closes even one $1.7 million custom home in a given month, the median lurches. A 29 percent year-over-year swing is not necessarily a market cooling. It can just as easily be one expensive house closing, or not closing, in the sample.
Inwood tells a steadier story. Multiple sources tracking Inwood through 2026, pulling from different feeds and different weeks, land within a tighter band, mostly between $780,000 and $900,000, a spread far narrower than what shows up on the Cresta Bella side. That consistency comes from having more transactions spread across four established sub-sections instead of one continuous new-construction pipeline. When the same style of 1990s home changes hands across The Hollow, The Village, The Forest, and The Heights every month, the number stops swinging on a single sale.
Two Neighborhoods, Two Different Kinds of Waiting
| Cresta Bella | Inwood | |
|---|---|---|
| Built out | Mostly since 2010 | Mostly 1991-1997 |
| Typical lot size (active listings) | 0.12 to 0.37 acres | 0.25 to 0.29 acres |
| Recent median price | $935,000 to $1.06M (Q1 2026, two-source spread) | $780,000 to $900,000 (consistent across multiple sources, 2026) |
| Days on market | 33-34 days broad market; 142 days for homes over $1.5M | 39 days (June 2026, down ~15% year over year) |
| On-site amenities | Gated entry, park, playground | Pool, tennis courts, playground, walking trails, 24-hour guard |
The days-on-market split inside Cresta Bella is its own story. The broad resale tier, the $700,000 to $900,000 range, moves in about a month. The true custom tier, homes over $1.5 million, currently has six listings on the market averaging 142 days. That is not a contradiction. It is two different buyer pools shopping two different products inside the same gate. Inwood doesn't split this way. Its stock is more uniform in age and style, so its 39-day median as of June 2026 describes the whole neighborhood rather than one slice of it.
The Trade Inside the Price Tag
One recent Cresta Bella listing description, a Sitterle-built one-story with rock planters and automatic roll-down shades, promises "expansive views in the front and back of the home." That phrase is doing real work. It is describing what the buyer is actually paying for on a 0.12- to 0.37-acre lot: sightlines, elevation, and new finishes, not acreage. Hill Country and downtown views from a hillside lot are worth something. They are just not the same something as land.
Inwood's premium runs the other direction. A homeowner there is not buying a view corridor. They are buying thirty years of tree growth that no builder can install on day one, a lot roughly double the size of Cresta Bella's smaller parcels, and neighborhood infrastructure, tennis courts, a community pool, walking trails, that has already been paid for and used for three decades. What they are not buying is new plumbing, new electrical, or a builder's warranty. A 1990s-built home carries systems approaching the end of their expected service life, and that reality belongs in any offer a buyer writes on an older Inwood property, the same way a Cresta Bella buyer should ask what year construction wrapped on a specific section before assuming everything nearby is equally new.
What Actually Sits Outside the Front Door
Inwood residents have three decades of walkable neighbors to show for it. Mildfire coffee shop and Luciano's, an Italian restaurant, sit directly across the street from parts of the community. Huebner Oaks shopping center, anchored by Saltgrass Steakhouse, is a short drive away, and Phil Hardberger Park is close enough to reach without getting on a highway. Golf is available nearby at Sonterra and SilverHorn.
Cresta Bella's on-site amenities are simpler by design, a gated entry, a park, a playground, because the real amenity is what backs up to the property line: a 207-acre nature preserve that most other North Side developments simply don't have next door. That is the same trade playing out at the neighborhood level that plays out on any individual lot. Cresta Bella sells proximity to preserved land and a view corridor. Inwood sells decades of built-out, walkable infrastructure that took thirty years to mature.
This comparison isn't about which neighborhood wins. They are answering different questions. A buyer prioritizing new systems, a builder's warranty, and unobstructed Hill Country views is shopping Cresta Bella's actual product. A buyer prioritizing lot depth, mature shade, and a longer track record of resale activity is shopping Inwood's.
One current Inwood listing, on Inwood Knoll, is represented through Phyllis Browning Company, a reminder that this corridor is not a hypothetical for our brokerage. It is where a meaningful share of our own transaction history sits.
A Few Common Questions
Is Cresta Bella more expensive than Inwood? On a straight median basis, yes, though two separate market trackers pulled around the same point in 2026 landed roughly $126,000 apart, which says as much about the neighborhood's low transaction volume as it does about actual value. Inwood's median has been more consistent across sources this year, landing in the $780,000 to $900,000 range.
Why do the days-on-market numbers swing so much in Cresta Bella? Because the neighborhood is really two markets in one. Resale homes in the $700,000 to $900,000 range have been moving in roughly a month, while the six custom homes currently listed above $1.5 million are averaging 142 days. Blend those together and any single days-on-market figure you read for Cresta Bella is describing an average of two very different buyer pools.
Are the schools different between the two communities? No. Both Cresta Bella and Inwood are zoned to Northside ISD.
Does a smaller lot in Cresta Bella mean a smaller house? Not necessarily. Several active Cresta Bella listings pair modest lot sizes, under a quarter acre, with homes well over 3,500 square feet built vertically or with more square footage under roof relative to yard space, a different design approach than Inwood's more horizontal, lot-forward layouts from the 1990s.
If you are weighing new construction on a view lot against an established canopy and a longer resale track record, that is exactly the kind of decision worth working through with someone who tracks both corridors closely. Jennifer Santrock can walk you through current inventory in both Cresta Bella and Inwood and help you figure out which trade actually fits how you plan to live. Request your free relocation kit to get started.
