If you're searching for this because a real estate deal went wrong and you want your money back, start here: filing a complaint with the Texas Real Estate Commission does not get your money back. TREC's own Complaint Overview Manual is explicit about this. Complaints over matters outside the Commission's jurisdiction are closed without an investigation, and TREC names the example directly — "any private dispute between the parties to a contract" is exactly the kind of complaint that gets closed, unopened. A commission dispute between an agent and their broker, or a tenant complaint against an unlicensed landlord, gets the same treatment. TREC's Enforcement Division investigates whether a license holder violated licensing law — reprimand, suspension, revocation, an administrative penalty payable to the state. None of that puts a dollar back in your pocket.
The Real Estate Recovery Trust Account is a genuinely different thing: a narrow, last-resort reimbursement fund, not a shortcut around a lawsuit. It exists to pay consumers back when a license holder caused real damages and can't or won't pay a judgment. But the price of admission is steep — you have to win a civil case first. TREC doesn't investigate your dispute, take your side, or determine fault. A court does that. TREC's only job is deciding whether your already-won judgment qualifies for payment from the account, and if so, how much.
What the Trust Account is (and isn't)
Established in the mid-1970s to replace surety-bond requirements for license holders, the Trust Account reimburses consumers for actual damages caused by a broker, sales agent, or easement/right-of-way agent — or their unlicensed employee — while that person held an active license. Texas Occupations Code §1101.602 ties eligibility to conduct that independently counts as a statutory ground for suspending or revoking a license: fraud, misrepresentation, gross negligence, mismanagement of trust money, and similar violations. A judgment for, say, a builder's construction defects doesn't qualify just because the builder happens to also hold a real estate license — the damages have to trace back to licensed real estate brokerage activity.
It's also explicitly a fund of last resort. It's only available once you've been unable to collect from the license holder directly, from another responsible party, or through insurance. And it runs on a completely separate track from a TREC complaint — you can file both, but neither one feeds the other. A complaint doesn't get you in line for Trust Account money, and a Trust Account claim doesn't require a complaint at all.
The caps: $125,000 per transaction, $250,000 per license holder
Senate Bill 1577 raised these caps for the first time since 2003, effective January 1, 2024. Current limits under Texas Occupations Code §1101.610:
- $125,000 per transaction — total payments for all claims arising from a single transaction, including attorney's fees, interest, and court costs, regardless of how many claimants are involved. Before 2024, this cap was $50,000.
- $250,000 per license holder — the cumulative ceiling on what the Trust Account will pay out against judgments against any one broker, agent, or business entity, until that person repays what's already been paid out. Before 2024, this cap was $100,000.
If total claims against one license holder would exceed the $250,000 ceiling, the court proportionately reduces what each claimant receives. A business entity and its designated broker count as a single license holder for this purpose — you can't work around the cap by suing the brokerage and the broker separately.
The deadlines — miss any one of these and you're done
Three separate clocks run on a Trust Account claim, and they're unforgiving:
- 2 years to file suit. Texas Occupations Code §1101.605(a): the underlying civil action has to be filed within two years of the date the cause of action accrues — the act or omission that caused your damages. This runs regardless of any longer limitations period that might otherwise apply to your specific claim.
- 2 years to file the TREC claim after judgment. Once you have a final judgment, you have two years from the date of that judgment to bring your claim to TREC (per TREC's own published guidance — this specific deadline isn't set out in a separate numbered statute section the way the caps and suit deadline are).
- 1 year to schedule a hearing, or recovery is waived. Texas Occupations Code §1101.606(b) is blunt about this one: "If the aggrieved person does not schedule a hearing before the first anniversary of the date the application was filed, recovery is waived." File your application and then let it sit for a year without scheduling a hearing, and the claim is gone — not delayed, waived.
In practice, most claims settle without a court hearing, but the one-year clock still runs from the day the application is filed, whether or not a hearing ever turns out to be necessary.
The claims process — what actually has to happen, in order
This is not a form you fill out after a bad experience. Every step below has to happen, in this order, before TREC will even look at your claim:
- Win a final civil judgment against the license holder, for damages tied to real estate brokerage activity that falls under a statutory ground for license suspension or revocation. If you're settling with an agreed judgment, it has to be submitted to TREC for review before the judge signs it — submit it after, and it won't qualify.
- File an Abstract of Judgment in the real property records of the county where the judgment was entered. Requirements vary by county clerk's office.
- Obtain a Writ of Execution returned "nulla bona." The court orders the sheriff or constable to locate the judgment debtor and their assets. If nothing turns up — no assets, debtor can't be found — the writ comes back marked nulla bona (Latin for "no goods"). That's the proof TREC needs that the license holder genuinely can't pay.
- File the Application for Order Directing Payment from the Real Estate Recovery Trust Account, in the same court and under the same case number as the original judgment. Submit a file-stamped copy to TREC along with the Final Judgment, Abstract of Judgment, and returned Writ of Execution.
- TREC reviews and recommends payment to the Commission at its next scheduled meeting. Commissioners discuss specifics in executive session, but the vote to approve payment happens in open session.
- The Attorney General's office signs off and sends you the Order Directing Payment and an Assignment of Judgment to sign and file. Once that paperwork is back with TREC, payment typically processes within two to three weeks.
If your case involved multiple defendants who are jointly and severally liable, you generally can't file your Trust Account claim until you've gotten judgment against — and either collected from or gotten a nulla bona return on — every one of them, not just the license holder.
What happens to the license holder afterward
Getting paid from the Trust Account doesn't let the license holder off the hook. TREC is legally subrogated to your rights as the judgment creditor once it pays your claim, and it has priority on any future recovery. If the license holder doesn't repay TREC in full within 31 days of notice, TREC is required by statute to revoke their license — and they can't get a new one until the amount, plus accrued interest, is repaid. Some license holders mistakenly assume TREC will step in and defend them once a consumer files a Trust Account claim, sometimes to the point of not defending themselves in the underlying civil suit. That's backwards — TREC's role starts after the judgment exists, and TREC cannot change what the civil court decided.
How much has TREC actually paid out
As of TREC's most recently published cumulative figures (a May 2023 staff report, reproduced by the Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center — TREC hasn't published a newer public rollup since), the Trust Account had paid 830 claims totaling $16,945,970.10 since its inception in the mid-1970s, an average payment of $20,417 per claim. The account's available balance at that time was just over $3.4 million. Under the pre-2024 rule, anything above $3.5 million at fiscal year-end reverted to the state's general fund; SB 1577 repealed that reversion requirement along with raising the caps, effective January 1, 2024. For scale: that's fewer than 15 payments a year, on average, across the entire state's real estate industry — evidence of just how narrow the eligibility bar actually is in practice.
One related change worth knowing: the separate Real Estate Inspection Recovery Fund, which covered claims against home inspectors, was eliminated effective January 1, 2024 by House Bill 1363. Lawmakers cited the fact that inspectors are already required to carry liability insurance, and that fund had paid only three claims in ten years. If your dispute is with a home inspector rather than an agent or broker, the Trust Account described here does not apply — insurance is the applicable remedy instead.