Nobody plans to own an empty house. It happens by accumulation — a parent passes and probate takes a year, a job moves you to Houston before the place sells, a tenant leaves and the turn costs more than you expected, a divorce stalls and neither party will authorize repairs.
The house sits. And the assumption underneath the sitting is that an empty house is basically neutral: nothing’s happening to it, so nothing’s costing you much beyond taxes.
That assumption is wrong in Texas, specifically and expensively. A vacant house doesn’t hold steady — it moves against you along seven separate lines at once, and several of them are cliffs rather than slopes. The insurance cliff arrives at roughly day 60. The tax cliff arrives on a January 1. By the time most owners run the numbers, they’ve already gone over both.
I run underwriting at Diamond, which means I price vacant houses for a living and see what’s actually behind the front door after twelve or eighteen months. This is what the meter is really running at, and what your options look like once you know.
Cost 1: The insurance cliff at day 60
This is the one that turns a manageable problem into a catastrophic one, because it converts every other risk on this list from “expensive” into “uninsured.”
Standard homeowners policies contain a vacancy provision. The Texas Homeowners forms prescribed by the Texas Department of Insurance have long limited or removed dwelling coverage once a house has been vacant beyond roughly 60 consecutive days. Carriers vary — some use 30 days, some 60, some distinguish “vacant” (empty of people and contents) from “unoccupied” (furnished but nobody home) — but the structure is consistent.
Here is the part Texas owners consistently get wrong: the vacancy does not have to have caused the loss.
In Greene v. Farmers Insurance Exchange, 446 S.W.3d 761 (Tex. 2014), LaWayne Greene owned a house in Irving insured under a Texas Homeowners policy form. She moved into a retirement community on June 30, 2007, and notified Farmers on July 5 that she intended to sell and gave them her new address. On November 14, fire spread from a neighboring house and damaged hers.
Farmers denied the claim because the house had been vacant more than sixty days. The Texas Supreme Court affirmed, reasoning that the vacancy clause defines the scope of dwelling coverage rather than operating as a condition the owner breached — so the anti-technicality statute and its prejudice requirement didn’t rescue the claim.
She did nothing wrong. She told her carrier. Her neighbor’s house caught fire. She had no coverage.
What to do about it: read the vacancy language in your actual policy today, and call your agent before day 30. Options are a vacant dwelling policy, a builder’s risk policy if the house is genuinely under renovation, or a landlord policy if you’re placing a tenant.
What it costs: vacant dwelling coverage in 2026 runs roughly 25% to 60% above a comparable standard homeowners premium, higher on harder-to-place risks. Coverage is frequently narrower — often named-perils, often with vandalism and theft excluded or sublimited, which is exactly backwards from what a vacant house needs. Many carriers also require documented property checks every 7 to 14 days as a condition of coverage.
You pay more, you get less, and you take on an inspection obligation on a house you don’t live in.
Cost 2: The property tax cliff
The second cliff is quieter and usually larger.
Texas gives owner-occupants two distinct benefits, and a vacant house eventually loses both.
The exemption. Tax Code Section 11.13(b) requires school districts to provide a residence homestead exemption, which Texas voters raised to $140,000 when Proposition 13 passed on November 4, 2025 — retroactive to the 2025 tax year. Section 11.13(c) adds another $60,000 for owners 65 or older or disabled, following Proposition 11.
The cap. Tax Code Section 23.23 limits how much your appraised value can rise to 10% per year while the property qualifies as a homestead. On a house held for years in a rising market, the gap between capped value and market value can be very large — that gap is exactly what the cap has been protecting you from paying tax on.
Section 11.13(l) gives you room for a genuine temporary absence: the homestead does not lose its character if the absence is less than two years, you don’t establish another principal residence, and you intend to return. Military service and residency in a health or aging facility have their own protections.
Outside that, the exemption goes and the cap goes with it. The limitation expires on January 1 of the tax year following the year you no longer qualify. Which means the taxable value doesn’t drift upward at 10% — it can reset to full market value in one step.
For an inherited house this hits immediately and catches families off guard. The decedent’s homestead exemption does not simply flow to the heirs, and an over-65 exemption doesn’t survive its owner. A house that carried a modest tax bill for a decade under an elderly parent’s exemption and cap can come back the following year at full market value with no exemption at all — while the estate is still trying to decide what to do with it. If you’re in that position, our guide to selling an inherited house in Texas covers the rest of the estate mechanics, and how much probate costs in Texas covers the timeline you’re waiting on.
Talk to your county appraisal district about your specific situation before assuming either way — the rules around heir property and continued occupancy have real nuance.
Cost 3: Theft and stripping
Vacant houses get stripped because nobody is watching and because the damage massively exceeds the value of what’s taken.
- Copper plumbing cut out of walls and slab. If the water is still on, the house floods and nobody knows for days. The plumbing repair is the small part; see our slab leak repair cost guide for the water-damage side.
- HVAC condensers stripped for the coil or taken whole. The copper in a residential unit is worth tens of dollars as scrap. Replacement is a different order of magnitude, and if a compatible coil is no longer manufactured, the whole outdoor unit goes. Our HVAC replacement cost guide has current DFW pricing.
- Wiring pulled from panels and junction boxes, which turns into a rewiring job plus a panel. See our electrical panel replacement cost guide.
- Appliances, fixtures, water heaters, and cabinetry — anything that unbolts.
The pattern to understand is that theft damage is never the cost of the stolen item. It’s the cost of the destruction required to get it out, plus everything downstream of the hole they left.
Cost 4: Weather, with nobody home
Texas is hard on empty houses in both directions.
Summer. Owners turn off the AC to save money on a house nobody’s in. In a humid Texas summer, a sealed house with no conditioning becomes a mold environment. What you saved in electricity you spend several times over on remediation — our mold remediation cost guide for Dallas–Fort Worth covers the numbers.
Winter. Texas has taken repeated hard freezes in recent years. An unheated house with water in the lines is a burst-pipe event waiting to happen, and in an occupied house someone hears it and closes the valve within minutes. In a vacant house the water runs until a neighbor notices — which can be days.
Check your policy before you decide: some vacant-dwelling coverage is expressly conditioned on maintaining heat, and a carrier can deny a freeze claim if you let the house go cold.
The practical middle ground most owners land on: leave power on for climate control, shut the water off at the meter, and know where your main shutoff is.
Cost 5: The city
Cities notice empty houses, because empty houses look empty.
Under Texas Health & Safety Code Chapter 342, a municipality can abate a nuisance on private property — overgrown weeds, accumulated debris, an unsecured structure — bill the owner, and file a lien with the county clerk if the bill goes unpaid. Section 342.007 is the mechanism.
These compound quietly. A mowing cycle in Dallas commonly runs a few hundred dollars plus administrative fees, and it repeats through the growing season. Board-up orders for an unsecured structure cost more. If deterioration goes far enough, Local Government Code Chapter 214 governs substandard buildings and can produce a repair-or-demolish order, with a demolition lien typically in the $8,000 to $25,000 range.
Every one of those liens has to be cleared before a title company will insure a buyer’s title — so they come out of your proceeds at closing regardless. Our guide to selling a Texas house with code violations walks the whole enforcement track.
Cost 6: Occupants
A house that reads as empty from the street eventually attracts someone, and Texas rewrote the law on this in 2025.
SB 1333 created Property Code Chapter 24B, a sheriff-driven removal process effective September 1, 2025, and SB 38 compressed the eviction timeline for filings on or after January 1, 2026. Both help. Neither is free, and neither is instant if the facts are complicated. The full mechanics, the sworn-complaint requirements, and the 2026 court costs are in our companion guide on removing squatters from a Texas house.
The relevant point for a vacant-house owner is preventive: the removal process exists because the problem is common, and the cheapest version of this problem is the one where the house doesn’t sit long enough to attract it.
Cost 7: The carrying costs that never stop
The unglamorous baseline, running the whole time:
- Property taxes — at the higher post-exemption number
- Insurance — at the higher vacant-dwelling premium
- Utilities — which you should be paying, per above
- Mortgage principal and interest, if there’s a note
- HOA dues, which keep accruing and get settled at closing (see our Texas HOA dues guide)
- Lawn service, so the city doesn’t do it for you at a markup
- Periodic property checks, which your policy may require anyway
None of these are dramatic on their own. Over eighteen months they’re a substantial number, and they buy you nothing — the house is not appreciating faster than it’s deteriorating once theft and weather enter the picture.
Five ways out
1. Move back in or put family in it. Restores the homestead exemption and cap, ends the vacancy problem, ends the insurance problem. Rarely available, but it’s the cleanest answer when it is.
2. Rent it. Income against carrying costs, no vacancy exclusion, house stays maintained. The trade: you become a landlord under Property Code Chapter 92, the house has to be in rentable condition first, and a bad tenancy puts you in eviction court. Good answer for a sound house in a decent rental submarket.
3. Repair and list it retail. Highest gross price. Requires funding the repairs on a property that’s already been draining you, plus months of market time during which every cost above keeps running. Works when the house is fundamentally sound, you have the capital, and there’s no deadline pressing on you.
4. Secure it and wait. Sometimes forced — probate isn’t finished, heirs can’t agree, litigation is pending. If you’re here, at minimum: get proper vacant coverage, keep the power on, shut the water at the meter, hire lawn service, and have someone physically check the property on your carrier’s required schedule. Waiting is a decision with a price; make it deliberately.
5. Sell it as-is for cash. Ends every line item on this page on a date you pick. You take a lower price than a repaired retail sale and you stop paying to own a problem.
What we’d actually pay
Diamond Acquisitions buys as a principal — for our own account. We are not licensed real estate agents and we don’t represent you in a fiduciary capacity. Closing goes through a Texas-licensed title company, which handles title work and pays off any liens, back taxes, HOA balances, and mortgage payoff out of proceeds.
Our math is ARV × 75–80% minus repairs. On a long-vacant house the repair line is where the vacancy shows up, because we’re pricing what deterioration, theft, and weather have already done — not what the house looked like when someone last lived there.
A representative example:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| After-repair value (ARV) | $240,000 |
| ARV × 75–80% | $180,000 – $192,000 |
| Estimated repairs (freeze damage, stripped HVAC and copper, mold, roof) | −$38,000 |
| Indicative offer range | $142,000 – $154,000 |
Liens, delinquent taxes, and payoffs come out of your proceeds at closing rather than out of your pocket beforehand — which for a lot of vacant-house owners is the entire reason this path works. Our breakdown of how a cash offer is calculated shows the full underwriting, and cash offer vs. listing: the real math compares it honestly against a retail sale including the carrying costs you’d absorb while it’s on the market.
The one thing worth doing this week
Pull your homeowners policy and find the vacancy provision. Not next month — this week.
Everything else on this list is a slope you can still correct. The insurance cliff is the one that has already happened to some readers of this page without their knowing, and it’s the one that turns every other item here from an expense into a loss. Greene is a real Texas case about a woman who did the responsible thing, told her insurer, and still had no coverage when her neighbor’s fire reached her house.
Once you know where you actually stand on coverage, the rest is arithmetic — carrying costs and repair exposure against what the house is worth to you empty.
If selling is on the table, tell us about the property and we’ll give you a number to compare against. We buy vacant and inherited houses across Dallas–Fort Worth and the wider Texas market, in whatever condition eighteen months of sitting has left them in.