What Happens to Your Austin Lease When the Building Sells to a New Owner
Your lease, your deposit, and your eviction risk — grounded in the Texas Property Code, not Reddit.
Your lease, your deposit, and your eviction risk — grounded in the Texas Property Code, not Reddit.
Somewhere in the last week, a tenant in an East Riverside complex got a form letter. Or they heard through a neighbor. The building sold. New ownership. New LLC name at the top of the notice — usually a string of initials followed by “Holdings” or “Acquisitions” and a Phoenix or Dallas address. The letter was friendly but vague: “We’re excited to be your new management team.” No mention of the security deposit. No explanation of what changes. No phone number that actually reaches a human.
This has played out across Austin’s rental corridors — East Riverside, Rundberg, North Loop, South Lamar — hundreds of times since 2021, when outside capital started buying multifamily properties here at volume. Individual building trades have continued since. What hasn’t changed is the information vacuum tenants land in: they get the letter, then they go to Reddit, where the top threads are three years old and cite laws from other states.
This piece is the answer that Reddit thread isn’t. Everything below is grounded in the Texas Property Code, with Travis County specifics where they apply. If you just found out your building sold, or you’re not sure who’s holding your deposit, start here.
Your Lease Is Still Valid. Here Is the Legal Reason.
Your lease survives the sale. Fully. Every term.
The legal mechanism is a principle of Texas common law called a covenant that runs with the land. When a buyer purchases a multifamily property, they take title subject to all existing leases. The new owner is bound by the same rent amount, the same end date, the same pet policy, the same parking terms. They didn’t buy a vacant building. They bought a building with tenants who have contracts, and those contracts transferred with the deed.
What you’ll sometimes hear from new management — particularly from out-of-state operators who acquired Austin properties during the 2021–2023 surge without existing Texas property management infrastructure — is something like “we’re new management, things are changing” or “we need you to sign a new lease.” Neither is a legal requirement during an active lease term. A new management company is a vendor the owner hired. It does not void your existing agreement.
Texas has no residential exception that carves out a right for new owners to dissolve active leases at sale. The covenant runs with the land. Period.
What the New Owner Can and Cannot Do While Your Lease Runs
During an active lease term, the new owner cannot raise your rent, cannot unilaterally change material lease terms, and cannot terminate your tenancy without cause. That’s a binding contractual obligation they assumed the moment the deed transferred.
What they can do is narrower than most new owners imply. They can switch property management companies and issue new contact and payment information — and they’re required to notify you of that in writing. They can start thinking about what happens when your lease ends: declining to renew, repricing the unit, repositioning the property.
That last point is the cliff. If your lease is ending soon, your protections thin out fast. Austin has no just-cause eviction ordinance and no rent control. Both are preempted by state law, and City Council hasn’t enacted either. A new owner can decline to renew for any reason — or no reason — and can price the renewal at whatever the market will bear. Your protection during the lease term is real. Your protection at lease expiration is limited to whatever your lease says about non-renewal notice.
If your lease runs several months out, you have real insulation. The new owner cannot touch your terms until expiration, regardless of what they say informally. So if they tell you otherwise — and some do — you’re not obligated to take that at face value.
Check your lease’s non-renewal notice clause now. Many Austin leases require 60 days’ advance notice of non-renewal. If the new owner missed that window before your expiration date, you may have a holdover month-to-month tenancy that buys you additional time. Don’t assume — get it confirmed by the Austin Tenants Council or a local attorney before acting on it. For a broader look at what Austin renters should know before they reach this point, our moving and real estate coverage addresses the full arc of the local rental market.
The Security Deposit — Who Owes You What, and When
Texas Property Code §92.105 governs what happens to your deposit when a building sells. The statute sets up a two-step requirement at closing. The seller must transfer the deposit to the buyer, and the seller must provide you with written notice that the transfer occurred. Both steps are required.
If the seller skips either step, the seller remains personally liable for your deposit — regardless of who currently owns the building. Once the seller properly transfers and notifies you in writing, liability shifts entirely to the new owner. From that point forward, they hold your deposit and must return it under the same rules any landlord faces.
The return clock is in §92.103: 30 days from the date you vacate, minus any lawfully documented deductions. Thirty days from your move-out date — not the sale date, not the date the new owner took possession. That distinction matters more than most tenants realize. Document your move-out date with something verifiable: a text to new management confirming your last day, a timestamped photo of the empty unit, a returned key receipt.
If the deposit is withheld without legitimate cause — no written itemized statement, or deductions that don’t hold up — §92.109 gives you a meaningful remedy. A landlord who withholds in bad faith is liable for three times the deposit amount plus attorney’s fees. That provision requires proving bad faith, not just a disagreement about whether the carpet needed replacing. The way you build that record is with a demand letter sent before you file anything in court.
Call the Austin Tenants Council first: 512-474-1961, at 1640 E. 2nd St. They offer free tenant counseling and can help you draft a demand letter in a form that actually establishes the paper trail the three-times provision requires. They’ve seen enough Austin building-sale deposit disputes to know what documentation matters and what gaps get exploited.
The Written Notice Your New Owner Is Required to Give You
Texas Property Code §92.3515 requires a landlord — including a new owner who just acquired the building — to disclose in writing the name and address of the person or entity authorized to manage the property, and the name and address of an owner or agent for service of process.
Without a verified current address for your landlord, you cannot send legally effective written notice for anything. Repair requests. Move-out notices. Deposit demand letters. A missing address is the kind of technical problem that feels minor until you’re standing in JP court with a hole in your paper trail.
The pattern in Austin’s post-sale environment has been consistent — and it’s genuinely maddening. On East Riverside alone, several large properties changed hands between 2021 and 2023 and got absorbed into out-of-state management portfolios. Tenants routinely went 60 or more days post-sale with no written notice of the new ownership structure. No address of record. Sometimes no management company name at all. Payment portal logins stopped working, replaced by new ones, with a form email as the only bridge.
If you haven’t received written notice of your new owner’s identity and address, pull the current deed record from the Travis Central Appraisal District at traviscad.org. The ownership history will show the new entity’s name. Send a certified letter to that address of record, stating that you’re a current tenant and requesting written confirmation that your security deposit was transferred from the seller per §92.105. Keep the receipt. This protects you even when the new owner hasn’t gotten their operation together yet.
If Your Building Was Foreclosed, the Rules Are Different
A building can change hands two ways: a standard sale or a foreclosure. The rules diverge sharply at that fork.
The Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act — reinstated by Congress in 2018 and currently active — requires a successor owner in a foreclosure to honor existing leases through their end date. For month-to-month tenants, or tenants in the final months of a lease, the PTFA requires a minimum 90-day notice before the new owner can require you to vacate. That’s substantially more runway than Texas’s standard non-renewal framework provides, and it’s meaningful protection if you’re month-to-month and worried about quick displacement.
To find out whether your building changed hands through a foreclosure or a regular sale, pull the Travis County deed records through TCAD’s ownership history or the Travis County Clerk’s online records portal. Foreclosure-related deed language will appear in the ownership history if that’s what happened. It takes about ten minutes, and deed records don’t lie.
Your Day-One Documentation Checklist
The moment you learn your building has sold — from a letter, a neighbor, a new name on the payment portal — start this list. Most of these tasks take under 30 minutes and cost nothing.
Pull the deed record on TCAD. Go to traviscad.org, search your address, and click through to the ownership history. Confirm the new entity’s name, their listed address, and the recorded sale date. Screenshot or PDF it. This is your first evidence that the sale occurred and who the legal owner is.
Preserve your full lease. Photograph every page of a physical copy, or download the PDF from the signing platform now. Don’t assume you can retrieve it later if the old management’s portal goes dark — it happens.
Find your move-in inspection report. This document establishes the unit’s baseline condition at the start of your tenancy and is your primary defense against deductions for pre-existing damage. Can’t find it? Send a written request to the old management’s last known email and address asking for a copy.
Document your security deposit amount. Find the original receipt, confirmation email, or the clause in your lease stating the deposit amount and terms. If you paid a non-refundable fee — common in Austin — note that separately. It is not a security deposit and is not subject to the return provisions under §92.103.
Send a certified letter to the new owner’s address of record. State that you’re a current tenant, include your unit number and lease end date, and request written confirmation that your deposit was transferred from the seller at closing per §92.105. Keep the certified mail receipt. You’ve now created a timestamped record that you asked — and they either answered or didn’t.
Write down your move-out date. The 30-day deposit return clock under §92.103 runs from the day you vacate. If you’re uncertain about that date, confirm it in writing with the new owner at least two weeks before you leave.
Resubmit any outstanding repair requests in writing. Verbal acknowledgments from old management don’t bind new ownership. If you had an unresolved maintenance issue — broken HVAC, plumbing problem, anything you notified the old landlord about — send a new written request to the new owner’s address of record. This matters both for getting the repair done and for establishing your notice compliance if you later need to exercise remedies under the Property Code’s repair-and-remedy provisions.
Save every communication from new ownership with timestamps. Emails, texts, portal messages, letters. All of it, organized by date. That’s your exhibit file if this ends up in court.
How to File a Deposit Dispute in Travis County
If the demand letter goes unanswered and your deposit is withheld without legitimate cause, Travis County Justice of the Peace court is where you file. This is a small claims proceeding. You don’t need an attorney, though one helps if the amount is significant or the facts are messy.
Travis County has five JP precincts. Central Austin tenants most commonly fall under Precinct 5, but your specific precinct depends on your address. Use the precinct lookup tool at traviscountytx.gov. The current small claims ceiling in Texas JP courts is $20,000. Filing fees in Travis County currently run approximately $46 to $80 depending on claim amount and precinct — confirm the current schedule at traviscountytx.gov before you go.
Send the demand letter first. Give the landlord a clear deadline. If they ignore it or respond inadequately, file your petition. Bring your lease, move-in inspection report, deposit receipt, the certified mail documentation, and all communications with both old and new ownership. The bad-faith damages provision under §92.109 — three times the deposit plus attorney’s fees — is available in this proceeding if your record supports it.
For income-qualifying tenants who want representation, contact Lone Star Legal Aid (lonestarlegalaid.org) or Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (trla.org). Both have Austin offices and provide free civil legal services to qualifying renters, including deposit disputes and eviction defense. If your situation involves a lease you’re trying to exit rather than defend, how to break a lease in Austin without paying more than you have to covers the options renters actually have under Texas law.
Sidebar: How to Look Up Your Building’s Ownership History on TCAD
Go to traviscad.org. Use the property search bar to enter your street address and select your property from the results. For multifamily buildings, it’ll typically appear as the full parcel rather than an individual unit.
On the property detail page, find the section showing the current listed owner and their mailing address. That’s the address to use for certified mail if you haven’t received written notice from the new owner.
The ownership history section shows the chain of prior owners and the dates of recorded transactions. The most recent recorded deed transfer gives you the sale date and the new owner’s entity name.
One thing to know: TCAD reflects filings with the Travis County Appraisal District, and there can be a lag of several weeks between a deed recording at the County Clerk’s office and the update appearing on TCAD. If TCAD still shows the old owner but you’ve received a letter from new management, cross-check with the Travis County Clerk’s Official Public Records portal at traviscountytx.gov under the County Clerk section. That database is more current for recently recorded deeds.
Print or PDF what you find. It’s free, it’s public, and it’s the foundation of everything else.
The Austin Tenants Council offers free tenant counseling by phone at 512-474-1961. Their offices are at 1640 E. 2nd St., Austin, TX 78702. Lone Star Legal Aid’s Austin intake is at lonestarlegalaid.org. For Travis County JP court information and precinct lookup, visit traviscountytx.gov.
