Texas HOA Resale Certificate: A Buyer's Checklist

In Texas, Section 207.003 of the Property Code defines the items a subdivision homeowners' association resale certificate must disclose to a buyer. The list is broad — covering assessments, the budget, reserves, litigation, and insurance — but execution varies widely from association to association, and the document leaves significant gaps a careful buyer has to fill from other records. Here is how to read one critically before you close.

What Section 207.003 requires the certificate to contain

Chapter 207 of the Texas Property Code is titled "Disclosure of Information by Property Owners' Associations," and Section 207.003 is the operative provision: it obligates a subdivision HOA to deliver "subdivision information" — which includes the resale certificate, the recorded restrictions, the bylaws and rules, and the association's fee schedule — on written request. The resale certificate itself must include, among other items:

• Restraints on transfer. Any right of first refusal or other restriction in the dedicatory instruments that limits the owner's right to sell or transfer the property.
• Regular assessments. The frequency and amount of any regular assessment levied on the lot.
• Special assessments. The amount and purpose of any special assessment that has been approved and is due after the certificate is delivered.
• Unpaid amounts. The total of all amounts currently due to the association from the owner, including assessments, fines, and other charges.
• Approved capital expenditures. Capital expenditures approved by the association for the current and the upcoming fiscal year.
• Reserves. The amount of reserves the association maintains for capital expenditures, if any.
• Budget and balance sheet. The association's current operating budget and balance sheet.
• Judgments and lawsuits. The total of any unsatisfied judgments against the association, and the style and cause number of any pending lawsuit to which the association is a party (other than routine delinquency-collection suits).
• Insurance. A certificate of insurance showing the association's property and liability coverage.
• Known violations. Any alteration or improvement on the lot that the board has actual knowledge violates the dedicatory instruments, and any notice of a governmental health or housing-code violation affecting the lot or common areas.
• Transfer and administrative fees. A description of every fee associated with the transfer of ownership, plus the managing agent's name, address, and phone number, and a statement of the association's lien-foreclosure rights for unpaid assessments.

Read against this list, a certificate that arrives missing the budget, the reserve figure, or the insurance certificate is not merely thin — it is non-compliant with the statute.

HOA (Chapter 207/209) versus condo (Chapter 82): which regime governs

The title of this article says "HOA," and that word matters in Texas, because the resale-disclosure rules differ depending on the form of ownership.

A subdivision property owners' association — the kind that governs single-family and townhome communities — operates under Chapter 209 (the Residential Property Owners Protection Act) for governance, and its resale disclosure flows from Chapter 207, principally Section 207.003. Chapter 209 expressly does not apply to condominiums.

A condominium unit owners' association operates under Chapter 82, the Texas Uniform Condominium Act, and its resale certificate is governed by Section 82.157 rather than 207.003. The §82.157 condo certificate covers substantially the same ground — periodic assessments, unpaid amounts, capital expenditures approved for the next 12 months, reserves, unsatisfied judgments, the nature of pending suits, and insurance — but the two regimes diverge in one consequential way. Under Section 82.156, a condo buyer who did not receive the resale certificate before signing the contract may cancel before the sixth day after receiving it. The subdivision-HOA regime under Chapters 207 and 209 carries no equivalent statutory rescission right. If you are buying a condominium, you have a cancellation window the typical Texas HOA buyer does not.

Some Texas communities layer both structures — a master subdivision association under Chapter 209 over a sub-association condominium under Chapter 82. In a layered community, confirm which association is producing which certificate, and under which statute, before assuming any particular protection applies. Our master-planned community due diligence guide covers the layered-association problem in depth.

What the certificate legally omits — the gaps you must fill

The Section 207.003 certificate is a point-in-time summary, and several of the most important risk questions in a Texas transaction fall outside what it is required to disclose:

• Reserve adequacy. The certificate discloses the reserve balance — a number — but Texas imposes no reserve-study or reserve-funding mandate, so there is no required context for whether that balance is sufficient. A $250,000 reserve in a community facing roof, road, and amenity replacement may be far short, and the certificate will not say so. Request any reserve study the association has voluntarily commissioned; if none exists, that absence is itself a signal.
• Audited financials and history. The certificate includes the current budget and balance sheet, but not audited or reviewed financial statements, and not budget-to-actual trends over prior years. Request two to three years of financials separately.
• Meeting minutes. Minutes are not part of the statutory packet. They are the single most useful unstructured record for surfacing assessments and projects that are being discussed but have not yet been formally approved — and therefore do not yet appear on the certificate. Request 18 to 24 months of board and member minutes.
• Pending-but-unapproved special assessments. Section 207.003 requires disclosure only of special assessments already approved and due after delivery. A major assessment that the board is actively debating but has not yet voted to levy will not appear on the certificate. It will appear in the minutes.
• Insurance claims history and deductible exposure. The certificate includes a certificate of insurance, not the full master-policy declarations page, the wind/hail deductible structure, or the claims history. In coastal and hail-exposed Texas markets, that deductible structure is where the real exposure lives, so request the declarations page directly.
• Litigation detail. The certificate gives the style and cause number of pending suits, but not the substance, the exposure, or the association's reserve against it.

The pattern is consistent: the certificate tells you the facts the statute compels, and the underlying documents tell you what those facts mean.

Fees and the statutory cap

Section 207.003(c) caps what an association — or the management company acting for it — may charge: $375 for a resale certificate and $75 for an update. That cap was set by SB 1588 in 2021 and took effect September 1, 2021. The association may require payment before it begins assembling the certificate, but it may not process that payment until the certificate is ready for delivery, and it may not charge any fee at all if it misses the statutory delivery deadline. (On the condominium side, SB 711 in 2025 reinforced transparency and fee discipline under Chapter 82; the $375/$75 figures buyers encounter on the subdivision-HOA side trace to the earlier SB 1588 amendment to Section 207.003.) If you are quoted "rush fees," "compilation fees," or other surcharges that push the total above the cap, that is a statutory violation worth flagging to your agent or attorney.

The delivery timeline

The clock is statutory. After the association receives a written request for subdivision information, it must deliver the certificate no later than the tenth business day. An updated certificate — which a buyer can request within 180 days of the original to refresh figures that have aged — is due by the seventh business day. Build that timing into the contract: order the certificate as early in the option period as possible so that any follow-up records request, and any renegotiation the certificate prompts, can be completed before the option period expires. A certificate delivered late is itself a finding — both because it suggests an under-resourced or disorganized association and because it forfeits the association's right to charge the fee.

Transfer, foundation, and architectural items to check

Three certificate line items deserve specific attention in Texas:

• Transfer fees. Section 207.003 requires "a statement of all fees associated with the transfer of ownership, including a description of each fee." Texas communities sometimes layer transfer fees, capital-contribution fees, working-capital fees, and resale-package fees, and these can total hundreds or even thousands of dollars at closing. Confirm each one, who collects it, and whether it is a one-time charge or a recurring obligation.
• Foundation and structural conditions. Texas's expansive-clay soils make foundation movement a real and common issue, particularly in older subdivisions and in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston regions. The certificate will not disclose foundation history; the known-violation line covers only documented violations of the dedicatory instruments, not engineering conditions. Pair the certificate review with an independent inspection and, where common-area structures are involved, request any engineering reports the association holds.
• Architectural approvals. The certificate discloses alterations the board knows to violate the governing documents. It does not confirm that prior owner improvements — a pool, an addition, a fence — were properly approved by the architectural review authority. An unapproved improvement can become the new owner's problem. Cross-reference the certificate's known-violation line against the architectural approval file for the specific lot.

What to cross-reference

The certificate is a starting point. We verify each disclosed item against the source documents:

• Assessment amount against the latest budget — the figures should match. A mismatch usually means the certificate is stale or the budget changed mid-cycle.
• Reserve balance against any reserve study and against a realistic estimate of the community's ten-to-fifteen-year capital needs.
• Special assessments against recent meeting minutes — minutes routinely reveal pending votes months before they reach the certificate.
• Restrictions against the recorded CC&Rs and any recorded amendments — the certificate summarizes, but the original recorded documents control, and amendments are sometimes adopted faster than certificates are updated.
• Litigation (style and cause number) against the county and district court dockets the buyer or attorney can search independently.
• Insurance certificate against the master-policy declarations page, focusing on wind/hail deductible structure and any unusual exclusions.

Red flags

• A certificate more than 90 days old at delivery, with no update offered.
• A reserve balance disclosed with no reserve study and no capital plan behind it.
• Approved capital expenditures with insufficient reserves — typically a precursor to a special assessment.
• Assessment amounts on the certificate that do not match the operating budget.
• Restrictions summarized without referencing the recorded amendment number.
• Transfer-fee totals or "package" charges that push the certificate cost above the $375 / $75 statutory cap.
• A pending lawsuit disclosed by style and cause number with no further explanation in the packet.
• Known violations or governmental code notices that the buyer's own inspection corroborates.

A worked buyer example

A buyer is under contract on a townhome in a 140-lot Texas subdivision association. The resale certificate arrives eight business days after the written request — inside the ten-day window — and discloses a $310 monthly regular assessment, no approved special assessment, a reserve balance of $180,000, the current budget and balance sheet, no unsatisfied judgments, one pending lawsuit identified by style and cause number, a certificate of property and liability insurance, and a $295 transfer fee. On its face, the certificate looks clean.

The cross-reference tells a different story. The buyer requests 24 months of minutes and finds that, three meetings ago, the board received a $640,000 engineering estimate to repair failing private roads and an aging pool deck, and voted to "study funding options" — but has not yet approved a special assessment, so nothing appears on the certificate. The $180,000 reserve is far short of the disclosed capital need, and there is no reserve study at all. A docket search on the disclosed cause number reveals a construction-defect suit against the association's prior contractor that, win or lose, will generate legal expense funded from operating dues. The insurance certificate confirms coverage exists but not the hail deductible; the declarations page, requested separately, shows a 2% wind/hail deductible that, on the community's insured value, exposes the association to roughly $240,000 before the policy pays.

None of this was hidden — the certificate complied with Section 207.003 — but the risk lived in the documents the certificate is not required to summarize. With that picture, the buyer renegotiates a price concession and a seller credit before the option period expires, instead of inheriting a likely special assessment after closing.

Why this isn't legal advice

CondoSignal surfaces what the resale certificate and the underlying documents say, and flags the gaps between them. The interpretation of any specific disclosure — whether a pending suit, a transfer restraint, or a known violation changes your contractual position — is a question for a Texas real estate attorney. This article describes the statutory framework as of mid-2026; it is not legal advice, and it does not replace counsel licensed in Texas.

Review your Texas HOA and condo documents with CondoSignal before you close. We read the Section 207.003 certificate against the budget, the reserves, the minutes, and the master policy, and flag the items the certificate alone leaves out.

Sources

• Texas Property Code Chapter 207 — Disclosure of Information by Property Owners' Associations
• Texas Property Code §207.003 — Delivery of Subdivision Information to Owner (resale certificate contents, $375/$75 fee cap, 10-day / 7-day delivery)
• Texas Property Code Chapter 82 — Uniform Condominium Act
• Texas Property Code §82.157 — Resale of Unit (condominium resale certificate contents)
• Texas Property Code §82.156 — Resale (condominium buyer's six-day right to cancel)
• Texas Property Code Chapter 209 — Residential Property Owners Protection Act
• Texas SB 1588 (87th Legislature, 2021) — amended §207.003(c) to cap resale-certificate fees, effective September 1, 2021
• Texas SB 711 (89th Legislature, 2025) — property owners' associations, including condominium unit owners' associations