My property manager is not responding. What can I do in Texas?

Three Kinds of Silence

Not every unreturned call is the same problem, and treating them the same wastes your leverage. Service silence is unreturned calls about a repair, a showing, or a question; it is frustrating, and it is governed by your contract and your patience. Money silence is a missing owner disbursement, a statement that has not arrived, or a deposit balance nobody will confirm; that is regulated. Document silence is a lease, ledger, or inspection record you asked for and did not get; that is regulated too. The License Act lists failing to account for or remit another person's money within a reasonable time and refusing to surrender a document the owner requests as grounds for discipline (Sec. 1101.652(b)(9) and (b)(5)). Name which one you have before you write the first email, because the words you use next depend on it.

Your Money Has a Clock

Rent and deposits a manager collects are held in trust, and the broker is accountable for that account even when a staff member does the day-to-day handling (TREC Rules 535.2(c), 535.146(c)(7)). Commingling it with company money is its own listed violation (Sec. 1101.652(b)(10)). The statute uses reasonable time rather than a fixed number of days, so the fact pattern matters: a disbursement that is a week late with an explanation reads differently from two months of statements that never came. Keep the paper trail simple and dated. Which statements arrived, when, and what they showed.

Put It in Writing, and Make the Writing Count

A written demand does two things a phone call cannot: it starts a record, and it forces a specific answer. Send it the way the agreement's notice clause specifies, and ask for specific items rather than a general update: the current owner statement, the ledger for the property, the deposit balance held, the open work order list with dates, and any document you are missing. Give a date. Keep the tone plain; the point is the list and the date, not the anger. If the reply arrives and is complete, you have a service problem and a decision to make. If it does not, you have a record that says so.

TREC: What a Complaint Can and Cannot Do

The Texas Real Estate Commission licenses the broker and takes complaints from consumers against license holders. A complaint can lead to discipline up to suspension or revocation, and in limited cases an order to refund what you paid for the regulated service. It cannot award damages; money you are owed beyond that is a civil matter, and TREC says so plainly on its complaint page. Where actual damages came from conduct listed in Sec. 1101.652(b), the Real Estate Recovery Trust Account exists to reimburse aggrieved persons (Sec. 1101.601-.602). File with the paper trail from the section above; a complaint with dated requests and dated non-answers is a different document from a complaint that says nobody calls me back.

When Silence Is the Answer: The Termination Clause

At some point the non-answer is the answer. Read the termination clause for the notice period, any early-termination fee, and the notice method, and decide whether the cost of leaving is lower than the cost of another quarter like the last one. Our companion answer on canceling a property management agreement in Texas walks through what has to come back to you and how the tenant handoff works. Two things to protect on the way out: the deposit accounting and the tenant's written notice of where to pay next.

What Responsiveness Looks Like When It Is Built In

Responsiveness is not a personality trait, it is a system: one named person who owns your property, an owner statement that arrives the same time every month whether or not you asked, a work order log you can see rather than request, and a rule about how fast a message gets answered that the company holds itself to. That is the standard we run to and the one we would tell any owner to write into the next agreement they sign. If the company you are with cannot describe its own system in a sentence, that is the answer to why the calls are not coming back.