Your mailing address says San Antonio, TX 78213. Your property tax bill routes to Bexar County. Your water is SAWS and your power is CPS. If you ran a pre-listing check on the San Antonio Development Services portal and saw no red flags, you would be forgiven for thinking the file is clean.
It isn't. Your permit history lives somewhere else, and the buyer's inspector is going to find that out before you do.
The building department that isn't in San Antonio
Castle Hills is a separately incorporated municipality. Its own City Hall sits at 209 Lemonwood Drive, and its own permit office issues every building, electrical, plumbing, mechanical, and roofing permit inside the city limits. Trade contractors working in the 78213 blocks that fall inside Castle Hills pull paperwork through Castle Hills, not through San Antonio's Development Services.
The governing code is Chapter 8 of the Castle Hills Code of Ordinances, rewritten in full under Ordinance 2021-04-13. That chapter adopts the International Residential Code, the International Plumbing Code, the National Electrical Code, and the rest of the ICC suite, and it sets out inspection procedure under Sec. 8-5. Two operational details from that section change how you plan a pre-listing repair:
- Inspections must be called in by 2 p.m. for a next-business-day slot, which means an urgent re-inspection can cost you a full day of closing calendar.
- Under the city's fee schedule, any work performed without a permit is billed at double the standard fee when the permit is finally pulled, and no new permit issues at all if the property carries a debt to the city, including stormwater fees, delinquent taxes, or unpaid re-inspection charges.
That second rule matters most for estates, inherited properties, and long-tenure owners who added a covered patio, converted a garage, or replaced a water heater with a handyman two decades ago. The city can freeze permit activity on the property until the ledger clears.
What the disclosure form is really asking
Under Texas Property Code §5.008, a seller of a single-family home must deliver a written Seller's Disclosure Notice on or before the contract's effective date. TREC's statutory minimum is Form OP-H, adopted by reference at 22 TAC §537.62 as TREC No. 55-0. SABOR listings almost universally use the longer Texas Realtors version, TXR-1406, which asks the same questions plus flood claims, FEMA assistance, and a broader set of environmental items.
Read the form once as a seller and again as if you were the buyer's attorney. It asks the seller to disclose, among other things:
- Any room additions, structural modifications, or other alterations, and whether permits were obtained
- Any known building code violations or unresolved notices from a municipality
- The presence of an on-site sewage facility, including aerobic septic
- Whether the property is currently insurable and any coverage the seller has been unable to obtain
- Private roads or shared drives with maintenance obligations
TREC recently expanded the form on directives from the Sunset Advisory Commission to add questions on insurability, private-road maintenance responsibility, aboveground storage tanks over 500 gallons, and conservation easements. If you last sold a home in Texas five years ago, the disclosure you signed then is not the disclosure you will sign now.
The teeth are in Property Code §5.008 and the DTPA. A buyer who receives the notice late can terminate within seven days of receiving it. A buyer who discovers concealment after closing can sue for misrepresentation, and damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act can be trebled where the concealment was knowing. Answering "unknown" on an item you actually know about is itself a misrepresentation, not a safe harbor.
The three paths when the permit file has a gap
Most Castle Hills sellers I work with discover the gap the same way: a neighbor mentions the previous owner's addition, or a tape measure across the primary suite doesn't match the county's recorded square footage. Once you know, you have three options, and the arithmetic on each is different.
Retroactive permit. Apply for an after-the-fact permit and let the city inspect the work as built. The fee doubles under the Castle Hills schedule, and you may be asked to open finished walls so the inspector can verify structural, electrical, and plumbing details behind the drywall. This is the cleanest path if the work was done to code by a competent contractor. It is the most expensive and the slowest if it wasn't.
Remove the improvement. A pergola, an uncovered deck, or a small storage building can sometimes be demolished cheaper than it can be permitted retroactively. You lose the square footage, but you also lose the disclosure line item and the appraiser's exclusion problem.
Sell as-is with full disclosure. Legal, but expensive at the closing table. Conventional, FHA, and VA underwriting all treat unpermitted livable space skeptically. An appraiser typically excludes unpermitted square footage from the gross living area calculation, which drops the appraised value, which then caps the loan amount. In a 61-day median-days-on-market environment, a re-appraisal after a financing fall-through is not a small setback.
The pricing implication is worth stating plainly. In a fast market, buyers absorb permit gaps because competing offers give them no room to negotiate. In the current Castle Hills market, where a home can sit for two months before it prices correctly, the buyer's inspector and the buyer's lender both have time to build a case for a price reduction. Fixing the file before you list keeps that leverage on your side of the table.
Two 78213 wrinkles that catch sellers off guard
Aerobic septic on larger lots. Not every parcel inside Castle Hills is on SAWS sewer. Larger interior lots, particularly the acre-plus properties along the older cul-de-sacs, run aerobic on-site sewage facilities. Those systems require an active maintenance contract with a TCEQ-licensed provider, and the maintenance records are part of what a diligent buyer's agent will request. If your maintenance contract lapsed during a period of vacancy, that is a disclosure item and a repair item, not a paperwork item.
Aging sewer laterals. Much of the housing stock in Castle Hills dates to the 1950s through the 1970s, sitting on heavy clay soils over shallow limestone bedrock. Cast iron and clay lateral pipes in that soil profile fail from root intrusion and joint separation on a predictable timeline. A pre-listing camera scope of the lateral is inexpensive relative to the surprise you avoid at option period. If the scope reveals a bellied or root-invaded line, you have time to price the repair into your list price rather than negotiate against a buyer's inflated plumbing bid.
A pre-listing sequence that actually works
The sequence below is what I run with sellers before a Castle Hills listing goes live. It is designed to surface every issue that could turn into a price reduction later.
- Request the property's permit history from the City of Castle Hills permit office at 209 Lemonwood. Do this before you order photos. Compare what the file shows against the current floor plan, the tax records, and your own memory of what previous owners did.
- Confirm the city ledger is clean. Under the fee ordinance, an outstanding debt to the city, including stormwater fees, will block any new permit until it is cleared. Better to find that on a Tuesday in month one than the Friday before closing.
- Scope the sewer lateral. A camera inspection costs a few hundred dollars and gives you either a clean report to hand a buyer or a scoped bid to price against.
- Pull your aerobic maintenance file if the property is on OSSF. Confirm the contract is current and the last inspection report is on hand.
- Complete the TXR-1406 with your file open, not from memory. Attach permit numbers where you have them. Where the previous owner did the work and you do not know, say so in writing on the form. Honest "did not know at time of purchase" language is defensible. Vague "unknown" answers to questions you could have answered are not.
- Decide on the three-path question early. If you have unpermitted work, choose retroactive permit, removal, or as-is disclosure before you set the list price, not after the buyer's inspection.
Sellers who run this sequence tend to close on their first executed contract. Sellers who skip it tend to renegotiate.
FAQ
Does an "as-is" sale exempt me from disclosure? No. "As-is" language in the contract addresses repair obligations, not disclosure obligations. The Seller's Disclosure Notice is still required under §5.008, and DTPA exposure survives an as-is clause where concealment is proven.
My contractor pulled permits with the City of San Antonio ten years ago. Am I covered? Not automatically. If the property sits inside Castle Hills city limits, permits should have been issued by Castle Hills. A permit filed with the wrong jurisdiction is worth raising with a real estate attorney before you sign the disclosure, because the answer to "were permits obtained" is not a simple yes.
Can I close before the retroactive permit is finalized? Sometimes, with lender and buyer consent, and typically with funds escrowed. It is a negotiated outcome, not a default, and it depends on how far the file is from a certificate of completion.
Let's Connect
Selling a Castle Hills home is a document problem before it is a marketing problem. If you would like a candid read on your permit file, your disclosure exposure, and what the current market will actually pay for your home once those two are squared away, reach out to Aden Stiles. I bring a CPA's eye to the paperwork and a listing agent's discipline to the pricing, and I would rather find the hard questions in month one than in the option period.
