Research · Forty Years, No Measurement (5 of 6)
Texas Has Never Introduced the Bill at All
Other states debated manager licensure and declined it. Texas — among the largest common interest community markets in the country — has never been asked the question. Not once, in twenty-five years of legislative record.
Proving a Negative
Most findings in this research required reading documents. This one required establishing that documents do not exist, which is a different and more laborious exercise.
The sweep covered:
- the Legislative Reference Library's subject indexes — 460 association-subject bills from 2001 through 2023, every caption read;
- eleven full-corpus caption searches across the same period;
- a 12,787-bill sweep of the 2025 regular and special sessions.
The result: no bill has ever been introduced in Texas to license, register, or mandate education for community association managers.
Not a bill that failed. Not a bill that died in committee. Not a bill that passed one chamber and stalled. No bill.
The Nearest Miss, and Why It Is Instructive
The closest the record comes is SB 1500 from 1993, which would have licensed property management under the Real Estate License Act — and which expressly exempted property owners association management from its scope.
So the one time the Texas Legislature considered licensing the adjacent occupation, it wrote community association management out of the bill on purpose. And the bill died in committee anyway.
That is a small detail with a large implication. The exemption suggests the question was at least visible to the drafters in 1993 — they knew this work existed and made a decision about it. What has never happened since is anyone proposing the affirmative version.
What the Regulator Says
The Texas Real Estate Commission describes the resulting landscape on its own website, and the sentences are worth reproducing because they are unusually direct for a regulatory agency:
"TREC does not have jurisdiction over Homeowner Associations or Association Management Companies."
"There are no state agencies that regulate HOAs in Texas."
That second sentence should open any policy discussion of this subject in this state. It is not a criticism of TREC, which is describing its jurisdiction accurately. It is a description of the field a Texas owner actually lives in.
What This Does and Does Not Mean
It would be easy to read this finding as an indictment, and it is not one.
Texas has a considered regulatory philosophy about occupational licensing generally, and reasonable people hold that additional licensure imposes costs on practitioners and consumers that frequently exceed its benefits. That position is not obviously wrong, and this research does not claim it is. Nothing in the evidence base would support telling Texas that licensing managers would improve outcomes, because — as the rest of this series establishes — nobody anywhere has demonstrated that.
What can be said is narrower and, I think, more interesting: Texas has not declined this proposal. Texas has never received it.
A state that examines a question and says no has exercised judgment. A state that has never been asked has exercised nothing. And an industry that has spent forty years asking legislatures for licensure, while never once filing the bill in one of its largest markets, has made a strategic choice it has not explained.
Why This Matters to a Texas Board
Here is where the legislative history stops being abstract.
In Texas, the competence of the person managing an association is a matter entirely between the association and the manager. There is no licensing body to check, no examination anyone must pass, no continuing education anyone must complete, no state complaint process specific to the occupation, and no regulator holding a disciplinary record you could look up.
Every filter that exists in a Texas association is a filter the board itself builds into its selection process and its contract.
That is not an argument for panic, and it is emphatically not an argument that Texas managers are less capable — there is no evidence for that proposition and this series will not manufacture any. It is an argument about where the responsibility sits. In a state with no external check, the board is the check.
Practically, that means the questions a Texas board asks during selection are doing work that in another state would be partly done by a regulator: what credentials does this person hold and are they current; what does the firm's insurance actually cover and does it extend to the people touching our money; what outcomes can they show across the communities they already serve; and what happens to our records and our funds if the relationship ends.
CICSC's cash-controls standard and its competence measurement standard exist to specify those questions, and they are written to be useful precisely in the states where nobody else is asking them.
The Broader Pattern
Texas is the extreme case of a pattern this series has traced through every jurisdiction.
Where the question was asked and the field had no evidence, the answer was no — California, on the merits. Where the question got close and the field had no evidence, it died without explanation — New Jersey. Where the question was actually tried, nobody instrumented it — Colorado. Where the question was never asked, the field never asked it — Texas.
Four different failure modes. One common ingredient.
And when the question finally got answered somewhere, it was answered by a legislature working from a catastrophe rather than from the field's own record. That is Part 6.
Related CIC-SC Resources
- Governance Standard EDU-001 — Manager Competence Measurement
- Governance Standard FIN-003 — Cash Controls and Independent Verification of Association Bank Records
- California Chose to Regulate a Word (Part 4)
- Florida Mandated the Education — and Nobody Is Measuring It (Part 6)
A Note on Sources
The legislative sweep, the SB 1500 (1993) exemption, and the quoted TREC statements are drawn from the Texas Legislative Reference Library's subject indexes and full-corpus caption searches, the bill text of SB 1500, and TREC's published guidance, as retrieved and cited in the working paper Forty Years, No Measurement. Readers relying on any statute or agency guidance for any purpose should consult the current text directly and take its application from counsel licensed in Texas.
CICSC provides educational resources and governance standards. CICSC does not provide legal, accounting, tax, engineering, insurance, or reserve study services. Boards should consult qualified professionals for matters requiring professional judgment.