Company Newsletter for July 2025
Legal Updates
In addition to keeping you up to date on local market trends and maintenance trends, we also keep an eye on the legal landscape potentially impacting your investment properties. Besides monitoring news resources, our local chapter of NARPM is a great resource for helping us stay up to day on the industry and legal updates. Recently there have been some changes at the local level, and state level that have garnered our attention.
SB 38 and SB 1333 – Squatters and Evictions
These two bills have been passed that have a focus on squatters and evictions. While the primary goal of the State Legislature was to improve processing time and the legal process surrounding squatters, most of the original language meant evictions for regular residents would be wildly expedited. This language was cleaned up and now the primary impact for evictions from SB 38 for us will be:
- Allows for electronic delivery of the Notice to Vacate (form that starts the eviction process).
- Allows for expedited processing of evictions by allowing courts to delegate them to other Precincts that have lower case loads. This should, in theory, help ensure more time appropriate legal processing.
- Expedited processing in Writ of Possessions at the constable level.
SB 1333 is focused on squatters and improving the legal process around their removal. The changes here are summarized as:
- Changes allowing for expedited evictions of unauthorized occupants.
- Changes allowing "immediate" removal of illegal occupants from private property.
While none of these things have been tested in actual legal environments, we’ll be keeping an eye on the real-world impact once this goes into effect on January 1st, 2026. It’s also worth keeping in mind that so far in 2025 we’ve had zero evictions. In 2024 we had a single eviction and in 2023 we had zero. So while these changes will have a minimal impact on our operations, we will still be keeping a close eye on them.
You can read more about SB 38 here or here for an article by the Austin American Statesman. You can read more about SB 1333 here.
City of Austin HVAC Ordinance
This newly passed ordinance requires that the indoor temperature of all rental properties have functional HVAC systems that ensure the interior of the home does not exceed 85 degrees, and cools 15 degrees more than the outside temperature. A landlord that fails to comply can face fines. Enforcement and the tenant required notice process follows the usual outline of property code for proper notices. Time to remedy is normally seven days but is dropped to five days if the issue arises from a failure to maintain a good working system.
How Could This Impact You?
We don’t expect this will impact operations much due to our innate, quality driven approach to maintenance. We work closely with our HVAC vendors to ensure our properties receive priority scheduling and care. That, combined with quick approvals from you, our clients, mean we’re able to give quick service, allowing us to avoid issues like this. Plus, we’re able to give excellent service and keep people cool.
To stay compliant, it will be critical to keep these deadlines in mind when your property manager reaches out to you regarding HVAC repair or replacement approvals.
Market Statement – July 2025
Local market trends are holding true to their seasonal shifts, as we start to slowly trend out of the summer season. Days on market has jumped up from 20/21 to 28 days recently, and we expect that to continue to increase. We’re also seeing an increase in homes that are renting below asking price, which indicates that Landlords are more willing to negotiate rental rates down, to get homes to move. This trend is mimicking the sales market, which has shifted into a buyers market.
How can you ensure your investment property is positioned to perform the best? By making sure the home is in A-Grade Condition, priced competitively, and being flexible with negotiation requests. We’re hearing requests from residents including adding refrigerators, or other similar things. Our advice is “you can’t write off lost rent, but you can write off expenses.” Getting the home rented is often well worth the price of a new appliance!
You can view the Rental Report from the Austin Board of Realtors by clicking here. We pull our information from the first four pages, Austin MSA.
Estate Planning
As one of your financial advisors, it's important to us that you are in a position to best protect your investments, as well as what happens to them in the event of your passing. More importantly, how those left behind should handle your assets, and be successful. So, we're working on putting together information regarding estate planning and will be incorporating it into our monthly statement cover letters. The information we'll be providing will be broad strokes, but it will hopefully be a place to help you get started on the process or at least thinking about it or reaching out to an estate planning attorney.
Thank you for your continued trust and business! It is genuinely appreciated.
Christopher M. Francis
Owner / Director of Operations
Rollingwood Management, Inc.