Selling a Flooded House in Texas: What the Law Requires You to Disclose

After Harvey put a fifth of Houston underwater, the Texas Legislature rewrote what home sellers must say about flooding — and most of what circulates about those rules is secondhand and partly wrong. This guide is checked against the statutes themselves. If you're selling a house that has flooded, ten minutes here will save you from the two big mistakes: disclosing less than the law requires, or being scared out of a sale the law fully permits.

The baseline: the seller's disclosure notice

Texas Property Code § 5.008 requires sellers of a single-dwelling residential property to give buyers a written disclosure notice on or before the contract's effective date. Serve it late and the buyer gets seven days to walk for any reason (§ 5.008(f)). The duty is honesty, not investigation: you answer to the best of your knowledge, and marking an item "unknown" is compliance if that's the truth (§ 5.008(d)).

What the 2019 flood rewrite actually asks

Since September 2019, flooding has its own dedicated section of the notice, and its questions are specific:

• Whether you're aware of previous flooding from a natural flood event — water into a structure, not just the yard;
• Whether you're aware of flooding caused by a reservoir failure, breach, or a controlled or emergency release — the question written for houses behind dams;
• Whether the property sits wholly or partly in a 100-year floodplain, 500-year floodplain, floodway, flood pool or reservoir — definitions keyed to FEMA's maps, which you can search by address, free, at the FEMA Flood Map Service Center;
• Whether you have ever filed a flood claim with any insurer including the National Flood Insurance Program — lifetime, not the "last five years" many websites claim; that five-year lookback exists only in the separate landlord-tenant statute;
• Whether you've ever received FEMA or SBA assistance for flood damage to the property.

One reason your honest answer matters so much: a prospective buyer generally cannot pull a property's NFIP claim history — federal privacy rules reserve that to the current owner. On claims history, your disclosure is often the only window a buyer has.

Who's exempt — and the exemption myth that hurts people

Section 5.008(e) lists exactly eleven exempt transfer types — foreclosure and trustee sales, transfers to or from lenders, court-ordered transfers, transfers between co-owners, spouses and lineal relatives, never-occupied new construction, and — most relevant here — a transfer by a fiduciary administering a decedent's estate. Read that one precisely: an executor or administrator selling in that official capacity is exempt; an heir who has inherited and sells in their own name is not on the list.

And the myth: there is no exemption for as-is sales, cash sales, or sales to investors. None. Selling a flooded house cheaply, as-is, to a company like ours does not remove the notice requirement — and any buyer who suggests skipping it is telling you who they are. We ask for the disclosure on every purchase, precisely because we're pricing the flood in, not hoping to miss it.

What hiding a flood actually risks

Texas gives a wronged buyer real weapons: the Deceptive Trade Practices Act treats failing to disclose known information to induce a sale as deceptive conduct, with up to treble damages for knowing violations — and its big-transaction exemptions specifically do not apply to someone's residence. A separate statute, Business & Commerce Code § 27.01, creates statutory fraud in real estate deals. And the Texas Supreme Court has held that an "as-is" clause won't protect a seller who fraudulently concealed a known condition. The pattern in all of it: the law does not punish selling a flooded house — it punishes lying about one.

The other notices Houston sellers forget

Two flood-adjacent notices ride alongside the main one in this region. If the property sits in a municipal utility district — and an enormous share of the Houston suburbs do — the Water Code requires a separate MUD notice before contract. And if the property adjoins a large water impoundment, a water-level-fluctuation notice applies (Property Code § 5.019). Landlords have their own flood-notice statute for leases (§ 92.0135, updated again in 2025) — a reminder that a flooded house you rent out carries disclosure duties too. A title company or attorney will confirm which notices your specific sale needs.

Selling a flooded house without fear

Here is the practical takeaway. Disclose everything, in writing, and then sell to whoever prices the house honestly with the history on the table. A retail sale after full disclosure is lawful and sometimes right; so is an as-is sale to a buyer who assumed the worst before walking in. We buy flooded Houston houses at every stage of repair — with the disclosure done properly, because it protects you as much as anyone — and our as-is page explains why honesty costs a seller nothing with us: the flood is already in the price.