Texas Seller Disclosure in 2026: What Trips Up FSBO Sellers

In Texas, if you hand a buyer a signed contract without giving them a seller’s disclosure notice first, they can walk away from that deal for any reason within seven days of finally getting it. Any reason at all. That is written straight into Section 5.008 of the Texas Property Code, and it is the single most common thing I watch trip up people who sell their own home.

So lets talk about the disclosure, because for sale by owner sellers tend to treat it like a formality (it is not), or they figure selling as-is gets them out of it (it does not). I have been selling homes in Austin since 2007, and the disclosure form is where I see good, honest sellers hand a buyer a reason to sue them, without ever meaning to. Not because they lied. Because they left the wrong thing blank, or didn’t know a fixed problem still counts.

None of this is that hard once you know where the traps are, right. Lets walk through the ones that actually bite.

What the seller’s disclosure notice actually is

The seller’s disclosure notice is a form the seller fills out describing the condition of the property, and under Section 5.008 the seller of a single dwelling unit has to give it to the buyer. That is the key phrase, single dwelling unit. A regular house resale. A duplex you’re selling as a whole is a different animal, and so is raw land, and so is commercial.

The statute even prints a minimum version of the form right in the law. The Texas Real Estate Commission publishes that statutory version as form TREC OP-H. But here is where FSBO sellers get a little confused. Most agents in Texas don’t use OP-H. We use the Texas REALTORS version, the TXR-1406, which asks everything the statute requires plus a bunch more (added items like previous flooding, prior insurance claims, and a longer defect checklist). Both are legal. The TXR form just protects the seller better because it forces you to think about more stuff up front.

If you’re going it alone, you can absolutely use OP-H. Just know you’re using the bare minimum, and the bare minimum is not always where you want to live when it comes to liability. For the full breakdown of the form and every line on it, we put together a complete guide to seller disclosures in Texas, and if you’re selling without an agent our FSBO guide walks through the rest of the paperwork too.

The exemptions people get wrong

Section 5.008(e) lists the sales that don’t require a disclosure notice, and people love to assume they’re on the list when they’re not. So here is the actual list. You’re exempt if the transfer is:

• Under a court order or a foreclosure sale
• By a trustee in bankruptcy
• To a lender (mortgagee) by the borrower, or by a lender that got the property back through foreclosure or a deed in lieu
• By a fiduciary administering an estate, guardianship, conservatorship, or trust
• From one co-owner to one or more other co-owners
• To a spouse or to a person in the direct line of family (parent to child, that kind of thing)
• Between spouses because of a divorce decree or a property settlement
• To or from a governmental entity
• Of a brand new home that has never been lived in
• Where the dwelling’s value is five percent or less of the total property value (think a big tract of land with a small structure)

Now watch the ones people misread. Estate sales are exempt only when a fiduciary (an executor, a trustee) is the one signing, doing their job administering the estate. If you personally inherited the house and now you’re just selling it as the owner, you are not automatically off the hook. Same with a divorce. The exemption is for the transfer between the two spouses under the decree, not for when the two of you turn around and sell the house to a stranger. And new construction only counts if nobody ever occupied it. Your builder spec home that was a model unit for a year? Somebody lived that lifestyle in there, so tread carefully. We get into the inherited-property version of this in our guide to selling your home in Austin.

One more thing, and this is the part that actually matters. Being exempt from the form does not give you a license to hide a known problem. The exemption waives the paperwork. It does not waive honesty. If you know the foundation moves and you actively conceal it, exempt or not, you have a problem.

“As-is means I don’t have to disclose”

This is the big one, so I want to be blunt. As-is has nothing to do with disclosure. As-is means the buyer takes the house in its current condition and you’re not agreeing to make repairs. It is a statement about who pays to fix things. It says nothing about your duty to tell the truth about what you know.

You can sell as-is and still owe a full, honest disclosure. In fact selling as-is makes the disclosure more important, not less, because as-is is a real magnet for buyers claiming later that you dumped a problem on them and hid it. I have seen the “well I sold it as-is” defense fall apart in about four seconds, because as-is was never the shield the seller thought it was.

Blank lines and the word “unknown”

Here is a subtle one that FSBO sellers do without thinking. They hit a question they’re not sure about, so they leave it blank. Don’t do that. A blank line is not an answer, it is a question mark that a buyer’s attorney gets to interpret later.

Daniel Kahneman’s whole thing in Thinking Fast and Slow is that what you see is all there is, your brain builds a whole story out of the little bit in front of it. That is exactly how a buyer reads a blank on your disclosure. They fill it in themselves, and they almost never fill it in with the generous version. If you genuinely don’t know something, the form gives you a way to say so. Mark it unknown. “Unknown” is a real, defensible answer. Blank is not. There’s a big difference between “I told you I didn’t know” and “you didn’t say anything,” and that difference is the whole ballgame if it ever gets to a lawyer.

Past repairs still count, even the ones you fixed

This trips up the most honest sellers, which is what makes it sad. You had a roof leak in 2019. You fixed it, did it right, no issues since. So it’s handled, nothing to report, right?

Wrong. The form asks about previous conditions and previous repairs, not just current broken stuff. A repaired roof leak is a previous condition and a previous repair. Both get disclosed. Same with foundation work, which in Central Texas soil is basically a rite of passage. If you had piers put in, that is disclosed, even though the fix is what a buyer actually wants to hear about. A documented, repaired foundation is often less scary to a buyer than a foundation you stayed suspiciously quiet about (we cover what buyers actually worry about in our guide to foundation issues in Texas). Keep your receipts, your engineer’s letter, your warranty, and disclose the whole story. The repair is your friend here. The silence is what gets you sued.

The flood questions everybody rushes through

Back in 2019 the Legislature passed Senate Bill 339 and beefed up the flood section of the disclosure, effective September 1, 2019. Before that, sellers basically had to say whether the home sat in a 100-year floodplain and that was about it. Now the form asks a whole set of flood questions, including whether the home is in a 100-year or 500-year floodplain, whether it’s in a flood pool or reservoir, whether it’s ever flooded, and whether you’ve filed a flood insurance claim.

FSBO sellers blow through these because they think “I’ve never flooded, next.” But some of these questions are not about whether water actually came in your door. They’re about where the property sits on a map. You can answer “no” to ever having flooded and still need to answer “yes” to being partly in a 500-year floodplain. Those are different questions. Read each one on its own. If you’re not sure where your property sits, that is worth ten minutes with a floodplain map before you check a box you can’t take back.

Deaths on the property, and what you actually have to say

People get weird and nervous about this one, and the law is actually calmer than you’d think. Under Section 5.008(c), a seller has no duty to disclose whether a death by natural causes, by suicide, or by an accident unrelated to the condition of the property happened on the property. So if your uncle passed away peacefully in the back bedroom, you are not required to put that on a form. Same with a suicide. Same with, say, a car accident in the driveway.

The “unrelated to the condition of the property” part is the hinge, though. A death that came from something about the house itself, a faulty balcony railing, a bad gas line, is a different conversation, because now you’re back to disclosing a known defect. The death protection is narrow and specific. It is not a blanket “you never have to mention anyone died here.” Don’t stretch it into one.

What it actually costs you if you get this wrong

Now I am a broker, not a lawyer (and despite what my YouTube channel might suggest, I don’t play one either), so a real dispute means you go talk to an actual attorney. But here is the plain version of why this matters beyond a lost week from that termination window. A disclosure you filled out carelessly is the seed of a lawsuit. If a buyer can show you knew about a defect and misrepresented it or hid it, you’re looking at potential claims for fraud and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and the DTPA is not a gentle statute. Depending on what a court finds, buyers can go after their actual damages and, in the ugly cases, more on top.

And “I didn’t know” only works when it is actually true. If you genuinely had no idea, honest ignorance is a real defense. But if you knew and you played dumb on the form, a jury gets to decide how believable your memory is, and that is not a spot you want to be in over a roof leak you could have just written down. This is the whole reason I tell FSBO sellers that the disclosure is not the boring part of the deal. It is the part that follows you home.

A quick checklist to get it right

• Use the fuller Texas REALTORS form (TXR-1406) instead of the bare statutory minimum if you can get your hands on it.
• Fill in every single line. If you don’t know, write “unknown,” never leave it blank.
• Disclose previous conditions and repairs, not just what’s currently broken. Fixed still counts.
• Read every flood question separately, and check a map if you’re not certain where you sit.
• Deliver the disclosure to the buyer on or before the day they sign, not after.
• Keep copies of your receipts, engineer letters, and warranties, and hand the whole story over.
• When in doubt, disclose. Nobody ever got sued for telling a buyer too much.

If you want a second set of eyes before you sign anything, that is genuinely the easiest part of my job. I have walked a lot of Austin sellers through this exact form, and most of the time it takes one conversation to turn a stressful blank page into something you feel good about. You can also see how the whole thing fits into what changed recently in the newer Texas disclosure requirements.

Selling your own home? Lets get the disclosure right the first time

The disclosure is the one piece of a FSBO sale I’d never wing, and it’s also the easiest one to get right with a little help. If you’re selling in the Austin area and want someone to look over your form before it becomes a problem, reach out to me, Ed Neuhaus. I have been doing this here since 2007, and at Neuhaus Realty Group this is exactly the kind of thing we handle so you can sell with your eyes open. No pressure. Lets just make sure the paperwork protects you instead of setting a trap.