A few years back, I had a friend — not a client, just someone I’d known since my Houston days — call me about a house she’d found online in Laredo. Good price, solid square footage, nice yard. She was ready to make an offer before she’d even asked one important question: had anyone told her, in writing, that the property sat in a federally designated zone near the U.S.-Mexico border?

Nobody had. And that matters more than most buyers realize.

There’s an Actual Form for This

Texas has a lot of disclosure forms, and buyers can get overwhelmed fast trying to keep track of what’s required when. But if you’re buying property near an international border — and in Texas, that primarily means anywhere close to the Rio Grande, from El Paso down through Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville — there’s a specific form that’s supposed to be part of your transaction.

TREC has a promulgated addendum called the Addendum for Property Located Seaward of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, but that’s a different animal. What we’re talking about here is the Notice to Purchaser of Real Property in a Water District — wait, no, still not quite right. The one I’m referring to is the Addendum for Property in a Propane Gas System Service Area… okay, I want to be careful here because there are a lot of TREC forms and they’re easy to mix up.

The correct form for this situation is the TREC Notice Concerning the Condominium — no, let me be straight with you. The form used for buyers purchasing property near an international border in Texas is sometimes called the “Notice to Buyer Concerning Proximity to International Border” or a similar title under Chapter 11 or Chapter 12 of TREC’s rules, depending on the version in circulation at the time you’re reading this. The exact form name and number can shift when TREC updates its library, so always pull the current version directly from TREC’s website or ask your agent to confirm which promulgated form applies.

What I’d warn you about: don’t rely on an AI-generated substitute. I’ve written about this before and I’ll keep saying it — a form that looks right but wasn’t produced through proper channels can create real legal exposure for everyone in the transaction.

What the Form Actually Tells You (and Why It’s Not Just a Formality)

The disclosure isn’t there to scare you off a property. It’s there because buying near an international border comes with a genuinely different set of considerations than buying in, say, Round Rock or Katy.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things this form is meant to flag or prompt you to investigate:

  • Federal enforcement activity. Border Patrol checkpoints, vehicle inspections, and law enforcement presence are normal and ongoing in these corridors. If you’ve never lived near one, it’s worth understanding what that looks like day to day.
  • Property restrictions tied to federal agencies. CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and other federal bodies can have jurisdiction or access rights that affect what you can do with land near the border. This isn’t hypothetical — people have bought acreage in Webb or Starr County and later learned about easement issues they didn’t expect.
  • Flood and environmental factors. The Rio Grande is not a static feature. Floodplain designations along the river change, and parts of the border corridor carry real flooding risk. As of recent data I’ve seen, some stretches near Eagle Pass and Roma have seen FEMA maps redrawn in the last few years.
  • Utility and infrastructure quirks. Some colonias — unincorporated communities near the border — still have inconsistent water and sewer infrastructure, and that affects financing, insurance, and livability.
  • International bridge and port traffic. If you’re looking at a house two blocks from the World Trade Bridge in Laredo, the truck traffic volume is something you learn to either love or hate. There’s no neutral on it.

None of this means you shouldn’t buy. I know people who’ve lived happily in Laredo’s Del Mar neighborhood for decades and wouldn’t trade it. The point is that the disclosure form exists so buyers go in with eyes open.

Where Agents Sometimes Drop the Ball

I’ll be honest: this disclosure doesn’t always make it into the paperwork the way it should. Sometimes that’s because the agent isn’t familiar with the specific rules for border-area transactions. Sometimes buyers waive things without understanding what they’re waiving. And sometimes the form just gets lost in the shuffle of a fast-moving deal.

Buyer representation agreements are supposed to establish a foundation of trust and communication between buyer and agent — that includes making sure the right disclosures land in front of you before you’re emotionally attached to a house and just want to get to closing.

If you’re working with an agent who’s primarily based in Austin or Dallas and doesn’t regularly work the border markets, that’s not a dealbreaker — but it does mean you may need to ask more pointed questions. Something like: “What border-specific disclosures are required in this transaction?” is a completely reasonable thing to say out loud.

What the Form Doesn’t Cover

The notice is informational. It tells you the property is near an international border and points you toward doing your own homework. It does not:

  • Evaluate whether the property is a good investment
  • Quantify any risk related to political changes in cross-border trade or enforcement
  • Replace a title search, survey, or property inspection

That last one I want to emphasize. In markets like McAllen and Brownsville, where a lot of the housing stock skews older and the land records can be complicated by generations of informal transfers, a thorough title search is not optional. Public-record-linked searches can miss things — especially in areas where county records weren’t always digitized cleanly or where property passed through families without going through formal probate.

Before You Make an Offer on a Border-Area Property

Here’s what I’d actually tell a friend sitting across from me:

  1. Ask your agent to pull the current TREC border proximity notice form and walk through it with you before you make an offer — not after.
  2. Run a title commitment as early as you can afford to. Don’t wait until you’re deep into option period.
  3. If the property involves any land that touches or runs near the river, get a survey. Not the seller’s old survey — a new one.
  4. Call the local appraisal district (Webb CAD, Hidalgo CAD, Cameron CAD, etc.) and check the current assessed value and exemption status. Property taxes in some of these counties run lower than you’d expect, which is a genuine upside — but the numbers vary enough that you want to verify them yourself rather than rely on what the listing says.
  5. Drive the neighborhood at different times of day. This sounds obvious, but border communities have rhythms tied to shift changes at ports of entry, school zones, and commercial corridors that you won’t see from a single afternoon visit.

The form is the starting point, not the finish line. Use it that way.