Texas's New Water Disclosure Form Is Blank Space for Most Sellers. In Springtown, It's a Full Page.

Drive west out of town on Highway 199 and you'll pass a small office with a windmill out front, easy to miss unless someone's told you what it is. That's the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District, headquartered right here in Springtown, and until this year most homeowners never had a reason to think about it. Its job is registering water wells and tracking aquifer levels across Parker, Wise, Hood, and Montague counties. It's the kind of agency that exists quietly in the background of rural life.

As of July 1, 2026, it stopped being background. Texas sellers now have to name their groundwater conservation district, by name, on a mandatory state form before they can close a sale.

The Texas Real Estate Commission adopted two changes to the seller disclosure process this spring: an expanded Seller's Disclosure Notice and a brand new standalone form, TREC No. 61-0, the Water Notice: Seller's Disclosure about Groundwater and Surface Water Rights. Both became mandatory on July 1. For a seller in most of Texas, this is a five-minute exercise in checking boxes marked "none" or "not applicable." For a seller in Springtown, it is closer to an inventory.

What the form actually asks

TREC Form 61-0 asks sellers to disclose what they know about a short list of things: whether the property sits inside a groundwater conservation district and which one, whether there are water wells on the property and how many are currently in use, whether any wells have been capped, plugged, or abandoned, and whether groundwater rights have ever been severed from the surface estate. The updated Seller's Disclosure Notice adds a few more items around the edges: insurability, private roads, large storage tanks, conservation easements.

None of this is new information sellers are required to go dig up. The form is built around what you already know, not what you're obligated to investigate. But "what you already know" is doing a lot of work in a town where knowing your well is part of daily maintenance rather than a fact you half-remember from the closing packet.

Why this form is a formality almost everywhere and a checklist here

Most Texas sellers will fill out Form 61-0 in about the time it takes to sign it. City water, city sewer, no well, nothing to sever. The form exists to catch the exceptions.

Springtown is the exception. Growth pressure from the DFW metro has reached into northern Parker County, but the town still runs on wells and septic systems for the majority of its homes, a pattern that shows up in listing after listing for acreage tracts around town, from ten-acre parcels off county roads to newer subdivisions like The Ranches at Valley View, which are built explicitly around co-op water and required septic rather than a city sewer connection. Heritage Oaks, Westwood, The Reserve at Taylor Ranch: different price points, same underlying infrastructure question.

The Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District wasn't created because Parker County has an unusual number of wells for decoration. Its own data on new well drilling found that in a recent year, more new water wells were reported in Parker County than in any other county in Texas, out of over 250. That's not a rounding error. It's the reason the district's four founding counties, worried about being folded into a larger district run out of Tarrant or Dallas, pushed the legislature to let them form their own in 2007.

So when the new form asks "is this property inside a groundwater conservation district," a Springtown seller isn't answering an abstract compliance question. They're naming the agency down the road that already has a file on their well, or should.

The well you forgot about is the one the form wants to know about

Here's the part that catches people off guard. The disclosure doesn't just ask about the well you're using. It asks about wells you know exist, even ones sitting capped and forgotten because the property switched to co-op or city water at some point in the last few decades.

Plenty of Springtown-area properties have exactly this history: a homestead that drilled a well in the 1970s or 80s, later tied into a rural water co-op line, with the original well left in the ground rather than properly plugged. If you know it's there, the new form asks you to say so. Texas doesn't require you to go looking for a well you have no knowledge of, but "I forgot about the one behind the barn" isn't the same as "I didn't know."

For sellers who've owned a property for twenty or thirty years, this is worth a walk of the fence line before the listing photos go up.

The septic half nobody puts on the form but everyone finds out about

The water form covers wells and groundwater rights. It doesn't ask about your septic system directly, but on well-and-septic acreage the two are never really separate conversations, and Parker County's septic rules are their own source of transaction friction that has nothing to do with the new TREC paperwork.

Springtown sits right where the Cross Timbers woodland gives way to open prairie, and the soil underneath reflects that transition: sandy loam on the surface, heavy clay a foot or two down, formed from weathered Cretaceous sandstone and shale. Clay that dense slows percolation to a crawl, which is why so many rural lots here end up with aerobic septic systems instead of a conventional gravity drain field. Aerobic systems come with obligations a conventional system doesn't: Parker County requires inspections roughly every four months and a minimum two-year service contract with a licensed maintenance provider, along with a notarized affidavit filed with the County Clerk's office. Septic permits in the county run around $400, and a standard pumping job for a typical tank runs a few hundred dollars depending on size and access.

None of that shows up as a line item on the new water form. All of it shows up during inspection, and a buyer who's never owned rural property before is often hearing about aerobic maintenance contracts for the first time at the exact moment they're trying to close. Sellers who can hand over a current maintenance contract and inspection history save everyone a round of confused phone calls.

What to gather before you list

If you're selling a well-and-septic property in or around Springtown this fall, a short list of documents turns the new disclosure from a source of stress into a formality of your own:

• The well's completion report, if you have it, showing depth and driller information
• Confirmation of your groundwater conservation district status through the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District, whose office and maps are available directly through their site
• Any record of a second, older well on the property, even one that's been out of use for years
• Your current septic permit and, if you're on an aerobic system, your maintenance contract and most recent inspection
• Any documentation on whether groundwater rights were ever severed from the property in a prior deed

None of this requires hiring a hydrologist. It requires the kind of walk-through a seller who's lived on the land for years can usually do from memory, with a phone call or two to confirm what memory gets fuzzy on.

A few common questions

Do I have to test my well before I sell? No. The new form asks what you know, not what you're required to test. If you haven't tested recently, buyers often ask for it anyway, and having a recent result on hand tends to move things faster.

What if I genuinely don't know whether there's an old well on the property? Texas law doesn't require you to investigate a well you have no knowledge of. Disclose what you know. If a prior owner mentioned one and you're not sure where it is, that's still worth a note.

Does this form apply to properties on city water? Yes, technically, though most sellers on full city water and sewer will complete it with straightforward "none" or "not applicable" answers across the board.

Paperwork like this tends to arrive quietly and then matter a great deal at exactly the wrong moment, usually somewhere between the inspection period and closing. If you're weighing a sale of acreage, a homestead, or anything running on well and septic in Parker, Tarrant, or Wise County, the team at Lori Mayo Real Estate Group has spent years walking these properties before they ever reach the market. Start your home or land journey and talk with our local Springtown team today.