Landlord-Tenant & Ownership
Security deposits, repair obligations, and eviction procedure under the Texas Property Code.
Landlord-tenant law is one of the more heavily codified areas of Texas real estate practice — the Texas Property Code sets specific rules, timelines, and dollar-figure obligations that the exam expects you to know precisely.
Security deposits
Texas law generally requires a landlord to return a tenant's security deposit — or provide an itemized list of deductions — within a specific statutory timeframe after the tenant moves out and provides a forwarding address. Failing to do so in bad faith can expose the landlord to liability well beyond just the deposit amount.
The landlord's repair duty
Texas law places specific procedural requirements on both sides of a repair dispute: the tenant generally must give proper written notice of the needed repair, and the landlord then has a specific window to act. A tenant who skips the required notice procedure can lose some of their available remedies, even for a genuine repair problem.
A tenant generally can't simply withhold rent as a self-help remedy for an unrepaired condition without first following the Property Code's specific notice procedure — skipping that step can undermine an otherwise legitimate complaint.
Eviction is a court process
A landlord generally cannot physically remove a tenant or the tenant's belongings from the unit without going through the formal eviction process — that always requires proper notice to vacate, followed by a court suit if the tenant doesn't leave.
Changing the locks is a distinct, genuinely Texas-specific exception. Under Property Code §92.0081, a landlord may generally lock out a tenant who is delinquent on rent without going to court first — but only if the lease itself allows it, and only by following the statute's strict requirements: advance written notice, and giving the tenant a new key any time of day or night on request, whether or not the rent has been paid yet.
Property left behind after eviction
Texas law specifically governs how a landlord must handle a tenant's personal property left behind after an eviction — there's a defined statutory procedure for this, separate from the general eviction rules themselves, and getting the citation right (not just the general concept) is worth knowing precisely for the exam.
Across almost every landlord-tenant question, the theme repeats: Texas law cares as much about the procedure — proper notice, specific timeframes — as it does about who's ultimately right on the underlying dispute.
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