That Harris County tax bill is around $443 a month
On a typical Houston home, property taxes run about $443 every month, on top of your mortgage. Texas has no income tax, so this is how everything gets paid for, and Harris County runs one of the most serious delinquent-tax operations in the country. Go past due and your account gets handed to an outside law firm, and their fees pile onto the penalties and interest that were already growing. Let it sit a couple years and a single tax bill can turn into $13,000 or more that has to be paid at closing no matter how you sell. It does not shrink while you think about it.
You might only have two months
Here's the part most people find out too late. Texas foreclosures don't go through a courtroom. Your lender sends a 20-day notice, then a 21-day notice of sale, and your house goes to auction the first Tuesday of the next month at the Harris County courthouse. Start to finish, that can be two months. And there's no redemption in Texas, once it sells, you can't get it back, period. So if you're 30 or 60 days behind right now, listing it and hoping is a real gamble. Especially once a buyer's inspector gets inside a Houston house.
What inspectors find in Houston houses
Houston sits on clay soil that swells when it rains and shrinks when it bakes, so foundations here move. Constantly. The older homes in Fifth Ward, Third Ward, Sunnyside, and Acres Homes have been riding that soil for fifty-plus years, and it shows up in every inspection. Then there's the water. Harvey flooded a huge chunk of this city, and plenty of houses got patched up but never properly dried out, so inspectors still find mold. Add a flood-zone flag and the insurance that comes with it, and a financed buyer usually just walks. That combination is what puts a financed Houston deal at risk late in the process.
The Houston average doesn't apply to your street
Houston covers 665 square miles, and the citywide price means nothing on most of it. In Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens, almost every buyer is an investor, retail buyers with bank loans barely show up there. Sunnyside and Acres Homes are the same story: thin demand, long waits. Magnolia Park and Eastwood sit near the Ship Channel, which makes lenders nervous, and Greenspoint has been losing value for years. If you price off the Houston average and wait for a financed buyer in one of those neighborhoods, you're not really selling. You're running out the clock.
What each way out actually costs you
Sell the traditional way and the math gets ugly fast. Commission, closing costs, the repairs an older Houston house needs before a lender will touch it, plus carrying the place for the couple months a listing takes, honestly, you're looking at somewhere around $50,000 to $70,000 in costs before you see a dime. And that path needs time you may not have. The other way is a cash offer: as-is, no inspection repairs, closed in about ten days. Neither one is automatically right. But the earlier you pick, the more both of them are still on the table.