Texas contract forms and federal home-sale tax rules
Selling and Buying at the Same Time When One Home Is a Unit at The Royalton
Updated October 2026
How do I sell one home and buy the next when one of them is a unit at The Royalton?
In October 2026, the Royalton side of a two-home move runs on TREC's condominium resale contract, since the standard one to four family form excludes condominium transactions.
Paige Martin, Houston Properties Team, The Royalton
Source: Texas Real Estate Commission, One to Four Family Residential Contract (Resale) form page and licensing FAQs, October 2026.
Which contract does each side of the move use when one home is at The Royalton?
The Texas Real Estate Commission's standard resale contract covers the resale of a single family home, a duplex, a tri-plex or a four-plex. TREC states that form is not for use for condominium transactions, new homes being sold by a builder, or farm and ranch properties.
So the Royalton unit runs on TREC's Residential Condominium Contract (Resale), whether you are selling it or buying it. A house on the other side of the move uses that standard form. You end up with two contracts whose deadlines count from different starting points.
Read the two side by side before you sign the second one. The condominium form carries provisions that relate solely to condominium transactions, including delivery deadlines for the association documents.
Can a Royalton unit be your main home for the federal gain exclusion?
IRS Publication 523 (2025) names a single-family home, a condominium, a cooperative apartment, a mobile home, and a houseboat. Each of those may be a main home and therefore qualify for the exclusion. A Royalton unit is a condominium, so it sits on that list.
The same publication gives each person one main home at a time. Close on the next home before the unit sells, or the reverse, and you hold two homes for a while with still only one main home.
Which of the two counts during that overlap depends on how you used each one. Take the dates you lived in each home to a tax professional before you set either closing.
An individual has only one main home at a time.
What does The Royalton's association add to the calendar on the unit side?
Before a contract is executed, the selling owner of a Royalton unit furnishes the declaration, the bylaws, any association rules and a current resale certificate. The association has ten days from the owner's written request to produce the certificate.
The certificate a buyer receives must have been prepared no earlier than three months before delivery. If you are selling the unit, request it close enough to listing that it stays current. If you are buying the unit, your own termination windows open when the seller's packages arrive.
Under TREC's condominium resale contract, a buyer who lacked the documents at signing may terminate within 7 days after receiving the declaration, bylaws and rules. A separate 7 days runs from receipt of the certificate. Where the declaration shows a right of first refusal, the contract amends the Effective Date, and the option period moves with it.
Those dates decide how close together your two closings can sit. A late certificate can push a buyer's walk-away right on the unit past the date you planned to close on the other home.
Plan for the unit's monthly assessment through any stretch when you own both homes. It follows the unit's allocated interest in the recorded declaration rather than its square footage. The median fee on homes sold here has risen in most years of the last decade.
Buyers here also ask for the board minutes and engineering reports covering the 2022 repair, the insurance history and the current reserve study. Gather them early on whichever side of the move the unit sits.
How does supply inside The Royalton bear on which side goes first?
12 homes sold at The Royalton in the trailing twelve months out of 253, about 5.0 months of inventory, as of October 2026. The median home went under contract after 40 days and closed at about 95.2 percent of asking.
Those sales come from 27 floor plans, and two or three listings at once is a full inventory here. If the unit is the home you are buying, the first question is whether your plan and exposure are listed now. That answer can set the order of the whole move.
If the unit is the home you are selling, its price comes from sold homes of the same plan, on a similar floor and facing the same way. That set is usually short enough to name unit by unit, which helps when a list date has to fit a purchase.
Selling first means moving out before the next home is ready. Buying first means carrying two homes. What carrying both would cost on a loan is a question for your lender.
The Texas Real Estate Research Center reports that typical homeownership tenure in recent years is less than eight years in Texas. The Texas Real Estate Research Center links that to owners who move up, downsize, relocate, or experience life events that necessitate a move.
What should you send before setting either date?
Send the Royalton unit number with its plan, floor and exposure, plus the address or plan of the other home. Paige Martin of Real Broker, LLC has 43 closings at The Royalton since 2004, most recently July 2026.
You get back a comparable set for each side, the association documents to request and when, and the date each contract counts from. Tax questions about the overlap go to a tax professional, and loan questions go to your lender.
Questions & answers
The Royalton questions, answered
If I sell my house and then my Royalton unit within two years, can I exclude the gain on both?
Not on both. IRS Publication 523 (2025) says you may take the exclusion only once during a 2-year period. When two sales fall inside that window, at most one of them gets the full exclusion. The publication also allows a partial exclusion in some cases, such as a workplace change. Which sale to claim it on, and whether a partial exclusion fits, is work for a tax professional with your dates and figures.
Publication 523's look-back test asks whether you sold another home during the 2-year period before the date of sale. If you did, and took no exclusion on that earlier sale, the later sale can still meet the look-back requirement. The ownership and residence tests apply as well. Each asks for 24 months within the 5 years before the sale, and the residence months need not be consecutive. The order of your two sales is therefore a tax decision as much as a scheduling one. Settle it with a tax professional before either listing goes live.
Which date counts as the sale date for tax purposes when my two closings fall on different days?
IRS Publication 523 (2025) gives a rule for a seller who did not receive Form 1099-S. The date of sale is the earlier of two dates: the date title transferred, or the date the economic burdens and benefits of ownership shifted to the buyer. Each of your two sales gets its own date under that rule, and the exclusion's 2-year and 5-year windows are measured from it.
Where those two dates differ on one sale, the publication takes the earlier one. Keep the closing documents for both homes, and any Form 1099-S you receive, together in one tax file. A tax professional can then confirm which date applies to each sale and how the windows line up.
I have used my Royalton unit part time. Can it count as my primary residence when I sell it?
It can, on one condition. The Texas Real Estate Research Center says owners may designate a second home or part-time residence property as their primary residence, provided they have lived in it for a cumulative two years within the five years preceding the sale. The two years need not run as one block. They do have to fall inside that five-year window.
Keep a record of the stretches you lived at the unit: travel dates, utility usage and mail at that address all help show where you were. IRS Publication 523 still gives each person one main home at a time, so the unit and your other home cannot both carry that role for the same months. A tax professional can line up the days against the five-year window before you set a list date.
Can I weigh more than one offer on my Royalton unit while I am under contract on my next home?
Yes. The Texas Real Estate Commission says a seller may receive, review and negotiate several offers simultaneously. An offer that depends on its buyer selling another home can sit beside offers that do not. You then compare the price, the terms and the closing dates against the purchase you already have scheduled.
Compare the dates first. A clean offer that closes after your purchase leaves a stretch when you own both homes. An offer tied to another sale adds that sale's calendar to yours, and its timing is outside your control. Ask each buyer's agent when they expect the resale certificate in hand, and plan the dates around that answer. Ask how the buyer is paying as well, because a lender's project review of the building can add its own steps.
What if the home I am buying next is also a condominium resale in another Texas tower?
Then neither side of the move uses the Texas Real Estate Commission's standard resale contract for a single family home, a duplex, a tri-plex or a four-plex, because the commission excludes condominium transactions from it. Both sides run on the condominium resale contract. Each association produces its own documents on its own clock, so you track two sets of delivery deadlines and two sets of termination windows.
Request both packages early. For each building, that means the declaration, the bylaws, the rules and a current resale certificate. Then set the two certificates side by side: the assessment, approved capital spending for the next twelve months, the reserves and any pending suits. Two monthly assessments may overlap for a while, and each follows its own building's recorded allocation. Ask each association's managing agent how long its document requests usually take. Then write that into your dates.
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