Dropping a termination notice in the mail is still enough to get a Texas home buyer out of a contract — and the lawyers and brokers who write those contracts said Oct. 9 they would rather it were not.
Nothing was decided. The Broker-Lawyer Committee drafts the standard forms that Texas real estate agents are required to use; it is the nine-member Texas Real Estate Commission that adopts them, by rule, after publishing them for comment. What the committee did Oct. 9 in Austin was tell its own working group which way to write. Asked to state a preference, the committee landed on striking U.S. mail from the paragraph that governs notices. “I think that we’re talking that may be the majority,” one member said, and the chair noted the committee could revisit it: “we’re talking about just general principles today”.
The problem they were circling is that a postmark no longer proves anything. Under the current contract a notice is effective the moment it is mailed, hand-delivered, sent by courier or transmitted electronically — all acts of the sender. That works only if the date of mailing can be established. “The default rule when you say sent by mail is when it’s deposited as evidenced by the postmark stamp, but the postmark stamp doesn’t match when you deposit it anymore,” one member said. Texas REALTORS told its own members the same thing in March, warning that mail left in a collection box or handed to a carrier “may receive a postmark dated later than the actual day the item was deposited”, and that members’ “requests at post offices for manual postmarks have been denied”. The association was advising agents how to mail safely; it has taken no position on changing the contract.
What hangs on it is the option period — the negotiated stretch of days, written into a blank in the contract, during which a buyer can walk away for any reason at all. The buyer pays a fee for that right and forfeits it on termination, but gets back the earnest money, usually the larger sum. The catch is the clock: notice must be given by 5 p.m. on the last day. A buyer who mails it that afternoon is protected as the contract now stands, even if the seller reads it a week later. A buyer who mails it under a receipt rule, or under no mail option at all, is not.
Striking mail would land on an identifiable group: people who do not use email. One member described two of them from a single week’s work — a Dallas client who insists on paper, “He only uses mail. He’s about 76 years old”, and a man in his 60s who wanted a listing for 160 acres mailed to him. Asked when they had last used mail in a transaction, the brokers in the room answered flatly: “It’s not common.” But a member pressed the point — “you cut some people out” — and another agreed: “you run into people who absolutely don’t use email at all”.
The committee weighed a middle course before settling on its preference. One proposal was to keep mail but blunt it: “You can send it by mail, but it will be deemed effective on the third day following the deposit”. A member thought even that generous — “I think three days is optimistic these days really for five would be more realistic”. Another floated letting buyers and sellers pick their own accepted methods from a menu in the contract. The objection that carried was that none of it is simple enough for someone who will never see the form again.
“It’s a legally binding transaction, one that maybe a consumer does once or twice in a lifetime and their rights need to be protected”
That cuts both ways, and a member said so: “these forms also get used by the consumer”, not only by agents who all use email. The same worry runs through the rest of the working group’s project, which is less about mail than about words. The contract uses give, provide, notify, deliver, furnish and receive more or less interchangeably, some of them lifted from statutes that are not consistent either, and nobody can say which triggers what. Nor does the form say whether a text message counts; its catch-all is “electronic transmission”, which it never defines. One member pushed that to its edge, asking about a deal discussed over a video game: “if you send it by that gaming platform that’s electronic transmission”.
The working group now takes the committee’s preferences away and writes actual language. Its next scheduled meeting is Jan. 15, 2027, and anything it produces must still clear the full commission and a comment period before it reaches a single contract.
Solar panels. A member told the committee it is “getting a lot of pressure to create a solar panel addendum” because leased and financed panels keep complicating sales, and that the existing fixtures addendum does not reach the issues they raise. A five-hour sitting. The meeting ran 5 hours 24 minutes and also worked through whether a missed closing date kills a contract or merely opens remedies, what a seller must disclose about ponds and water wells, and option-fee and earnest-money mechanics. What this desk did not read. Only the notice discussion, the first 40 minutes, was read verbatim; the rest was sampled to confirm nothing larger was missed. Nothing above beyond the notice item should be treated as a finding without returning to the video and to the posted minutes.