The Texas Buyer Representation Agreement: Which of the Three Forms You’ll Actually Sign

If you want to see a house in Texas this weekend, you’re signing something first. That’s been true for REALTORS® since August 2024, and since January 1, 2026 it’s been state law for every licensed real estate agent in Texas. But there isn’t one form — there are three, and only two of them are a Texas buyer representation agreement. The third looks similar, takes thirty seconds to sign, and quietly strips out everything a real estate agent would otherwise owe you. Knowing which one is in front of you is the whole game.

The short version: Texas law now requires a written agreement before a real estate agent shows you a residential property. Two of the three forms make you a client — the long form (TXR-1501) and the short form (TXR-1507). The third, the Unrepresented Customer Showing Form (TXR-1508), states in plain type that you get no representation, no advice, and no opinions. It is not a lighter version of representation. It is the absence of it.

Why you’re signing anything at all

Two separate rules landed on top of each other, about sixteen months apart, which is why this feels newer to some buyers than others.

The first came from the National Association of REALTORS® settlement. Since August 17, 2024, a real estate agent who is a REALTOR® and works through the MLS has needed a written agreement with a buyer before touring a home. If you bought a house in 2025, you signed one.

The second is Texas law. The 89th Legislature passed Senate Bill 1968, which amended the Real Estate License Act and took effect January 1, 2026. Under Texas Occupations Code §1101.563, a license holder has to enter into a written agreement with a buyer before showing residential real property — or, if no property gets shown, before making an offer on that buyer’s behalf. A real estate agent who skips it faces discipline under §1101.652, up to suspension or revocation of their license. TREC’s summary of the change is worth two minutes, and Texas REALTORS® published a plain-English explainer of SB 1968 that spells out what every written agreement now has to contain.

The practical difference between the two: the NAR rule binds REALTORS®. The Texas statute binds every license holder in the state, member or not. There’s no real estate agent left who can hand you a key without paperwork.

Three boundaries worth knowing, because they come up constantly:

• Residential only. The requirement covers single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, and condominium units. Raw land and commercial property are outside it.
• Not when the real estate agent already represents the seller. A real estate listing agent showing you their own listing isn’t in this rule — they have a client, and it isn’t you. But note the flip side: a real estate agent hosting an open house for a home that isn’t listed with their brokerage does now need a written agreement with everyone who walks through. That’s why you may get handed a clipboard at an open house you’d have breezed into two years ago.
• It’s about showing, not buying. The trigger is the tour. You can sign a form, look at four houses in Bridgeland, and buy nothing.

One more document will land in your inbox around the same time, and it isn’t an agreement at all. The Information About Brokerage Services notice — the IABS — is a disclosure every Texas license holder must give you before a showing. It explains the difference between representing a buyer, a seller, and acting as an intermediary. You don’t negotiate it and you don’t really sign it in the contractual sense. It’s context. Read it once and you’ll understand the vocabulary in everything below.

The three forms, side by side

Here’s all three on one screen. They’re Texas REALTORS® forms, and each carries a 2026 revision date.

	TXR-1501 Long Form	TXR-1507 Short Form	TXR-1508 Showing Form
Are you represented?	Yes	Yes	No
Length	6 pages	2 pages	1 page
Exclusive?	Yes	Yes, in the market area	No
How long	A term you negotiate	A term you negotiate	Ends at the showing; 14 days max
Advice and opinions	Yes	Yes	Expressly none
Protection period	Yes, if filled in	None	None
Retainer option	Yes, optional	None	None

The long form: a full Texas buyer representation agreement

TXR-1501 is the complete version, and it’s what I use with most buyers. Six pages sounds like a lot until you realize most of them are protections that run in your direction — confidentiality, an intermediary election, a mediation clause, and a fair-housing notice printed right on the form.

The paragraphs that decide how it actually feels to work under it:

• Market Area (¶3). The form itself says this section should not be left blank, in capital letters. It defines the geography where your exclusive applies — an address, a subdivision, a city, a county, a ZIP code. If you’re torn between Cypress and Katy, this is where that conversation belongs.
• Term (¶4). A start date and an end date you agree on. There’s no standard length. A number gets typed in because two people agreed to it.
• Your obligations (¶6). Work through your real estate agent in that market area, and tell other real estate agents and sellers you’re represented.
• Compensation (¶7). The longest paragraph, and the one worth the most money. More on it below.
• Intermediary (¶9). Whether your real estate agent may represent both sides if you want to buy one of their own listings. If you decline, you simply won’t be shown those listings.
• Competing clients (¶10). Your real estate agent may work with other buyers chasing the same house. That’s normal, and the confidentiality paragraph is what keeps it fair.

The short form: same relationship, fewer moving parts

TXR-1507 makes you a client too. It’s two pages instead of six, and it drops the protection period, the retainer option, the mediation clause, and most of the notices. You still get a market area, a term, an exclusive working relationship, and a stated fee.

It also carries a checkbox most buyers never notice. Under Broker Obligations, a real estate agent picks either Full Services — best efforts to help you acquire a property — or Showing Services, where paragraphs 6 through 8 fall away, the real estate agent simply gives you access to properties, and you pay a flat fee at signing. That second box is a genuine middle path, and almost nobody talks about it.

If you’re nervous about commitment, the short form is the honest de-escalation. Not the third form.

The showing form: read what it takes away

TXR-1508 is titled the Unrepresented Customer Showing Form, and to its credit it doesn’t hide the ball. Four bolded conditions sit on the front of the page:

• No Representation. The broker does not represent you as your real estate agent.
• No Compensation. No fee is charged to you for the showing.
• No Advice or Opinions. The broker will not give you any advice or opinions about the property or the transaction. They may confirm facts — size, price, terms — and that’s the ceiling.
• No Other Brokerage Services. Access to the property, and nothing else.

It’s non-exclusive by law, it dies when the showing ends, and it cannot run past fourteen calendar days. There’s also a checkbox where you confirm whether you already have a representation agreement with another broker — leave it unchecked and you’re stating you don’t.

Here’s the part that tells you what this form really is. If you sign a showing-only agreement and then ask that real estate agent to do anything else — write an offer, advise you on price, negotiate a repair — they can’t simply carry on. The law requires a separate representation agreement first. The showing form doesn’t upgrade. It stops.

All of which is fine, for exactly one situation: you want to see one specific house, you have no real estate agent, and you understand that nobody in the room is on your side. What it is not is a trial run at representation. When you walk a house with no advice and no opinions, you are touring alone with a person who has keys.

Going unrepresented usually doesn’t save you money

This is the part that surprises people, so I’d rather you hear it early.

The residential listing agreement Texas sellers sign — TXR-1101 — changed in 2026 too. Broker-to-broker compensation came out of Paragraph 5 entirely. And a new option went in: additional compensation to the seller’s broker when the buyer is unrepresented.

Read that twice. If you tour and buy without your own real estate agent, the money doesn’t necessarily stay in your pocket. Depending on what the seller and their broker agreed to, it may simply move to the other side of the table — the side negotiating against you. You saved nothing and gave up your advocate.

I’m not telling you that to sell you on hiring me. I’m telling you because “I’ll just go direct and save the commission” is the single most expensive assumption I hear, and the 2026 forms made it less true than it already was.

What Paragraph 7 says about who pays

Compensation is where a Texas buyer representation agreement earns its keep, and where the post-2024 rules changed the most. Here’s what the form actually commits to.

Every version carries the same conspicuous language: compensation is not set by law, not fixed or suggested by any association or MLS, and is fully negotiable. Each broker sets their own fees. That sentence is on the page because it’s true, and because you’re meant to act on it.

Then three mechanics:

• The fee itself (¶7A). A percentage of the sales price or a flat dollar amount, written in before you sign. Blank is not an option.
• Source of compensation (¶7C). You can ask the seller to cover your real estate agent’s fee, and I’ll negotiate for it. In many Houston transactions the seller does contribute, and on new construction the builder usually does. But the form is direct about who carries the balance: you remain responsible for the fee, reduced only by whatever the seller actually contributes. Now the part that takes the pressure off, because it’s what worries buyers most. We find out what a seller is willing to contribute before you write an offer — so you’re never surprised at the closing table. If a seller won’t cover your real estate agent’s fee, and paying it yourself isn’t something you want to do or can afford to do, we go look at other houses. There is no shortage of homes across Cypress, Katy, and Greater Houston where the seller is prepared to contribute. You are never cornered into paying it out of pocket on a house you happened to like; that stays your call, house by house, with the actual number in front of you. It’s still not something I’d call free — but for most of my buyers, it never comes out of their pocket.
• The cap. Total compensation your broker receives from all sources may not exceed the amount stated in your agreement. If the seller’s contribution comes in higher than your agreed fee, your broker doesn’t pocket the difference.

If the mechanics of who pays whom are what you’re really chasing, I wrote a fuller piece on how real estate buyer’s agent compensation works in Texas.

The blanks I’d read twice before signing

Everything above is printed. These are typed in, which means they were decided by somebody — and can be decided differently.

• Market area. Narrow it if you’re undecided. “Harris County” and “Coles Crossing” are very different commitments.
• Term. Ask for a length that matches your actual timeline. A first outing doesn’t need a year.
• The fee and how it’s stated. Percentage or flat, and what happens if the seller contributes more or less than expected.
• Protection period (¶7F, long form). The number of days after the agreement ends during which you’d still owe a fee on a home your real estate agent showed you. It survives termination, and the broker has ten days after the end date to send you the list of properties it covers. There’s an escape hatch: it doesn’t apply if you’re under agreement with another Texas REALTORS® broker who gets paid on that deal.
• Retainer (¶7B, long form). Optional, non-refundable, fully earned when paid, and a checkbox decides whether it credits against your final fee. Ask which box is checked.
• The intermediary election. Yes or no, and understand what each means for the listings you’ll see.

What signing does not do

Most of the fear I hear is about things the agreement doesn’t actually do.

It doesn’t commit you to buying a house. It doesn’t lock you in forever — the term is a date you agreed to. And it doesn’t mean you can never look at a home on your own: the 2026 forms clarified that attending an open house or a showing where no advice, opinions, negotiations, or substantive brokerage services are provided doesn’t violate your obligations. Just tell whoever’s hosting that you’re already represented.

One real exception, and it costs people money every year in Cypress and Katy: tell your real estate agent before you walk into a builder’s model home. Most builders require your real estate agent to register with you on that first visit. Walk in alone, hand over your name, and you can find you’ve lost representation on the largest purchase of your life. If new construction is on your list, read why you still want your own real estate agent at the model home before you tour Bridgeland or Cinco Ranch.

How this works when you call me

I’ll send the agreement before we meet, not at the curb with the engine running. You’ll have read it before you sign it, and if you want the short form for a first outing, that’s a conversation, not a fight.

Two other things I ask for before we tour, and I want to be upfront about why. If you’re financing, I’ll want a pre-approval rather than a pre-qualification — not to screen you, but because I’ve watched buyers fall in love with a house forty thousand dollars past what they’d be approved for, and there is no good version of that conversation. If you’re paying cash, proof of funds. Most sellers ask for one or the other before they’ll accept an offer anyway, so we’re doing it now instead of in a bidding war.

The Texas buyer representation agreement isn’t a trap and it isn’t a formality. It’s the document where a stranger becomes your advocate and the terms get written down. Read it, change what needs changing, and then go look at houses. More questions before you sign anything? The buyer’s FAQ covers a lot of them, and the full home-buying process lays out what comes next.

Last updated: July 2026 · Form paragraph references are to the 2026 revisions of TXR-1501, TXR-1507, and TXR-1508; forms are revised periodically, so confirm against the version in front of you. This is general educational information, not legal advice — if you don’t understand the effect of an agreement, consult your attorney before signing.