Budget for ONE Conference, April 27-29, in San Antonio! 
The 2025 legislative session was one of the best for rental housing providers in years. With the passage of Senate Bill 38, the Legislature and the Governor gave property owners a clearer, more predictable process for removing squatters and other unlawful occupants under Chapter 24 of the Texas Property Code. That predictability matters more than it might seem. Every delay, every inconsistent ruling, and every extra filing has a cost, and that cost eventually shows up in what it takes to provide housing in Texas. Protecting SB 38 is our first legislative priority in 2027 — not because it hands owners a new power, but because a straightforward, uniform, and consistent process is what keeps housing affordable to operate and, in turn, affordable to rent.
We expect efforts this session to chip away at that consistency in ways that may look small but matter a great deal in practice. We are watching closely how the law treats hotel squatters, what different types of notices must contain, the ongoing dispute over the 30-day notice provision, how writs are processed and how judgments are enforced once an owner has won one. Inconsistency at any one of these points doesn’t just frustrate owners — it reintroduces the very unpredictability the Legislature set out to fix, and unpredictability is expensive. Our job is to make sure the reforms function the way they were written to function, uniformly, across every court in Texas.
We also expect a new round of tenant-side legislation this session that would affect how we run our properties: proposals to limit how owners screen applicants and use rental records, to encourage taxpayer funds for representation of tenants in eviction proceedings, and to seal or expunge eviction records. We anticipate another push for a source-of-income mandate, along with a range of measures framed as tenant protections. Some may be well-intentioned. But nearly all of them add a layer of cost or risk to providing housing, and that cost does not disappear — it moves downstream to the resident paying rent. Part of our work in 2027 is helping policymakers see that connection clearly: every new duty or obligation placed on a housing provider is, functionally, a line item in the cost of housing.
That is really the throughline across all of our priorities this session: Texas has built something remarkable in its rental housing market, part of what people call the Texas Miracle, and it did not happen by accident. It happened because Texas has kept the cost of building and operating housing lower than most of the country. Preserving that requires understanding, and helping policymakers understand, everything that feeds into that cost — insurance, land, construction, and above all, property taxes.
Property taxes are one of the biggest and most unpredictable costs most owners face, and 2027 is shaping up to be another major property tax session. State leadership has laid out different strategies: the Governor is focused on structural reform, the Lieutenant Governor wants to expand the homestead exemption, and the Speaker is working through a path forward in the House. Whatever direction the session takes, we will be making the case that apartment owners must be part of any relief, not left off the homestead-only list. Tax reform and relief that excludes rental housing negatively impacts housing affordability.
Fee transparency is our third priority, and it is really the same cost conversation from a different angle. The City of Austin has already passed a fee transparency ordinance. The FTC has a rulemaking pending that could reshape the rules nationally. We expect statewide legislation on this in 2027. Our preference is a single clear statewide standard rather than a patchwork of city-by-city rules that make compliance more complicated — and more costly — than it needs to be. We are monitoring the FTC, preparing an Austin ordinance fee form for members, and reviewing how any new requirements interact with our lease forms, so implementation is workable rather than another hidden cost.
A broader set of issues is also on our radar: foreign ownership and citizenship verification, security deposits, application fraud, and apartment security, alongside a quieter list — management licensing, local preemption, emotional-support-animal policy, credit reporting, and credit-card swipe fees — that shape how we screen residents, write leases, and manage risk day to day. Increasingly, these preemption and local-authority questions are converging with a bigger debate playing out in cities and counties across the state: how much control local governments should have to set their own rules, on everything from data centers to zoning to housing itself. That debate over local control is likely to be front and center this session, and its outcome will shape what cities and counties can and cannot do on housing going forward. We intend to be part of that conversation, not caught off guard by it.
Taken together, our priorities are less about defending any single right and more about defending a principle: that every regulatory decision has a cost, and that cost lands on the affordability of housing in Texas. We will protect the consistency we won in 2025, push to keep taxes and fees from driving up the cost of providing housing, and stay ahead of the local-control and preemption questions shaping the next fight. The most persuasive voice at the Capitol is not a talking point — it is an apartment owner describing, in plain terms, what a specific rule actually costs to comply with and what that means for the rent their residents pay.
Texas has long been one of the best places in the country to build and operate rental housing. Keeping it that way means showing policymakers the full cost of every decision they make, not just the intent behind it. In 2025, we showed what we can accomplish when we speak with one voice. In 2027, affordability will be the frame the electorate is watching most closely — and we need to speak with that same united voice again.
Learn more about TAA’s 2027 Legislative Priorities at taa.org/legislative-priorities.