A seller in Graystone Hills fixed a foundation crack five years ago. Piers went in, the invoice got filed somewhere, and the floors have been level ever since. As far as that seller is concerned, the story ended in 2021.
It didn't. Sitting down to list this fall means filling out a Seller's Disclosure Notice that looks nothing like the one used at closing five years ago, and the new version asks a question the old one never did: has this property ever had trouble getting insured. In Conroe, where clay soil moves under nearly every slab in town and where insurance carriers have grown more selective about roofs and prior claims, that single question turns an old, closed-out repair back into something a buyer's agent will circle.
The Form Changed While Almost No One Was Watching
Texas Property Code Section 5.008 requires sellers of previously occupied homes to complete a written disclosure before closing, and the Texas Real Estate Commission publishes the standard form nearly every transaction uses. The version most Conroe sellers are used to has been in place since contracts signed on or after September 1, 2023.
That changed this year. The Texas Real Estate Commission's periodic Sunset review flagged gaps in what sellers had to disclose around insurance, water rights, and a handful of environmental items. TREC proposed the fix on February 9, 2026, adopted it on May 4, 2026, and made the updated Seller's Disclosure Notice mandatory for contracts signed on or after July 1, 2026. A brand new standalone form arrived alongside it: the Water Notice, which covers groundwater and surface water rights and applies to any seller who knows about a well or sits inside a Groundwater Conservation District.
The headline change is insurance. The updated form asks three things a Conroe seller never had to answer before: whether the home is currently covered by insurance, whether that coverage includes windstorm, and whether the seller has ever been unable to get coverage for any reason. Sellers also now disclose above-ground storage tanks over 500 gallons, private road maintenance agreements, conservation easements, and permanently installed generators.
If you closed on your Conroe home before this summer, you have never seen this form. If you're listing it now, you have to fill it out.
Why the Insurance Question Lands Differently Here
Every neighborhood in Montgomery County sits on the same reactive clay that swells when it rains and pulls away when it dries. A Conroe home inspector who has worked the area since 2006 and covers everything from the downtown historic district to Stewart's Forest, Graystone Hills, Wedgewood Falls, Grand Central Park, and the Lake Conroe shoreline treats foundation movement as a baseline condition of the market, not an anomaly to flag once and forget. That movement produces the door-and-window misalignment, the stair-step brick cracks, and the interior wall fractures that show up on almost every inspection report in town.
Layer in storm history. Hurricane Harvey in 2017, Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019, and the 2024 derecho all left roof, fascia, and exterior envelope damage across the area that is often invisible from ground level and only surfaces once someone climbs up to look or files a claim.
Put those two things together and you get exactly the kind of property the new insurance question was built for: older roof, documented foundation history, maybe a prior claim from one of those storms. None of that makes a Conroe home unsellable. It does mean the new form is asking a question this market has more reason than most to answer honestly.
Old Repairs Don't Get to Retire
Texas courts have been consistent on one point for years: a defect that a reasonable homeowner would have noticed cannot be marked "unknown" just because it feels resolved.
If you lived in the home while a foundation was repaired, and the piers, the invoice, and the engineer's letter are sitting in a drawer somewhere, that history is disclosed knowledge. Marking "no known defects" because it's currently stable does not satisfy the requirement.
That standard predates the new form, but the new form gives it a second angle. A seller who checks "no" on foundation issues and then checks "yes" on having been dropped or non-renewed for insurance has created a contradiction sitting on the same page, and that kind of mismatch is exactly what invites a buyer's agent to ask harder questions during the option period.
The "as is" box on the purchase contract doesn't change this either. Texas courts have held that an as-is clause can be voided if a seller actively concealed a known defect, and a blank line on the disclosure form isn't treated as an answer at all. It's read as an incomplete document, and an incomplete disclosure gives a buyer grounds to challenge the whole thing rather than just the section that got skipped.
The Competition Sellers Are Actually Up Against
Conroe isn't just changing its paperwork this year. It's also building at a pace that gives buyers real alternatives to an older resale home with a documented repair history. The city's broader construction activity, tracked through Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation project filings, showed 145 projects registered over the trailing 12 months as of August 2026, worth a combined $243.2 million, ranging from College Park Plaza to a Chick-fil-A at Marketplace Conroe to the black box theater remodel at Lone Star College-Montgomery. That figure spans commercial and institutional work as much as housing, but it says something simple: this is a city investing in itself on every front right now.
On the residential side specifically, local inspectors already describe Conroe as one of the fastest-growing new-construction markets in Texas, with enough volume that even reputable builders occasionally ship homes with flashing, insulation, or drainage issues that a walkthrough misses. That volume matters for resale sellers because it means buyers comparing your listing against a builder's spec home aren't just comparing price per square foot. They're comparing a home with a documented repair history against one that has none yet, built to current code, with a one-year warranty attached.
A clean, complete, well-documented disclosure is one of the few things a resale seller controls in that comparison. A messy one hands the advantage straight to the new-construction option down the street.
A Pre-Listing Sequence Built for the New Form
Before you sign a listing agreement this fall, work through this in order:
- Pull every foundation repair record you have, including the engineer's report, the contractor's invoice, and the date work was completed, and write the fact down exactly as it happened rather than summarizing it as "fixed."
- Call your insurance carrier and ask directly whether you've ever been non-renewed, dropped, or denied coverage on this address, even if you switched carriers years ago and forgot why.
- Check whether you're on well water or sit inside a Groundwater Conservation District. If either is true, you'll need the new Water Notice form in addition to the standard disclosure.
- Note any above-ground storage tank over 500 gallons, private road maintenance agreement, conservation easement, or permanently installed generator on the property, since all four are new disclosure categories this year.
- Walk every "unknown" answer through the reasonable homeowner test before you sign: if you've lived there long enough to have noticed a pattern, unknown probably isn't the honest answer.
- Consider a pre-listing inspection so your disclosure and the buyer's future inspection report tell the same story, rather than surfacing a conflict during the option period.
What to Ask Before You Sign
Do I need the new Water Notice if I'm on city water? If you have no well and you're not in a Groundwater Conservation District, the form is typically straightforward to complete and won't add much to your listing timeline.
Does a foundation repair under warranty still need to be disclosed? Yes. The disclosure is about your knowledge of past and current conditions, not about who paid for the fix or whether a warranty is still active.
What if I genuinely don't know whether I've ever had an insurance claim tied to this property? "Unknown" is a legitimate answer when it reflects real uncertainty. It stops being legitimate the moment you can find the answer with one phone call to your carrier and choose not to make it.
None of this is legal advice, and a real estate attorney is the right call if your situation involves a contested repair, a denied claim, or language on the form you're not sure how to answer. What it is, is the paperwork reality every Conroe seller is walking into this fall, whether their foundation story ended in 2021 or is still being written.
If you're weighing a listing in Conroe and want a straight read on how the new disclosure requirements apply to your specific address, Kim Kindred is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule your free consultation and get the paperwork right before it becomes a problem at the option period.
