All,

I purchased another house in the middle of 2016 in Oklahoma and did not properly relinquish homestead in Dallas. I still own the house and have been renting it out. I need to write the Dallas Appraisal District to let them know that I owe them money and write them a check.

- Do I need to get an attorney involved?
- Can I just call the Appraisal district and ask instructions?
- I don't see a form on the website for relinquishing homestead exemption.

Thank you in advance.

Most areas have services/attorneys that specialize in that sort of thing. Call your title company that you closed with and they should point you in the right direction.

Thank you. My rental manager says I could also look into giving up my homestead in Oklahoma since the value of the house is higher in Texas and the tax rate is higher as well.

If your not living in the Texas home I'd just play it straight and remove the HS

Dallas CAD is pretty hard to deal with on the homestead stuff. Where do you have your drivers license?

We have a lake house in East TX & our homesteaded property in Dallas. We retired & are spending more time at the lake because things are just easier - can get a DL in 15 minutes as opposed to HOURS, etc. - so we both changed our DL addresses and started forwarding important mail. We still have the property, still go to get mail & do Dallas stuff, it still has our furniture, all utilities on, etc. It is not a rental & we are not trying to "pull" anything. They have tried the last 2 years to deny our homestead. Husband had to change his DL back to Dallas. We'll see what happens next year, but I expect we will get the same letter again trying to revoke it. Makes no sense to me since we only have one homesteaded. I think changing the DL was the thing that started the process.

that's Texas state law so not too surprising.

Yeah, I found that out. I didn't think/know it mattered which address we used as long as only one was homesteaded.

I'd probably sell the house rather than deal with the CAD

F them

I just got off the phone with my Oklahoma Title company, they said from Oklahoma's point of view you can have one homestead per state.

I wonder if this is true in Texas.

In Texas, you can keep your homestead exemption on property you dont occupy only if you do not establish another principal residence and meet one of the following conditions

1)You intend to return to the property and the absence is a maximum of two years from when you left
2)You're not using the property because of military service, or
3)Reside in a facility to due to age, health or infirmity