The letter arrived in Jennifer Reed's mailbox on a Tuesday in October. It was certified mail from the Texas Department of Transportation — a stack of documents, perhaps forty pages, that she had to sign for.
Jennifer and her husband had lived in their Craig Ranch home in McKinney for fourteen years. They had watched the neighborhood grow around them, watched US-380 to the north transform from a two-lane road into something that, according to TxDOT's expanding project map, was about to get wider still. She had seen the orange survey stakes appear along the edge of her property two months earlier. She had asked a neighbor about them. "They're just surveying," the neighbor said. "Don't worry about it."
The letter confirmed what the stakes had suggested. TxDOT needed a 28-foot strip across the front of her lot — part of the right-of-way expansion for the US-380 widening project running through Collin County. The offer was $47,000. There was a signature line. There was a deadline.
Jennifer's husband asked a few people what they thought. The consensus was something like: it's TxDOT. You can't fight the government. Take the money and move on.
They signed.
Two weeks later, their neighbor three houses down received a nearly identical letter. Same project. Similar-sized strip. He did not sign. He called a real estate attorney in Southlake. Fourteen months after that, he settled for $134,000.
Jennifer and her husband were not unique in what happened to them. In North Texas, where highway expansion projects have been reshaping Collin, Denton, Tarrant, and Dallas counties for two decades, thousands of property owners have signed condemnation offers without knowing that the number on the first page was never meant to be the final number. What the law gives them — and what most of them never claim — is the subject of this article.
What "Just Compensation" Actually Means in Texas
The Texas Constitution doesn't say the government owes you what it offers. It says — in Article I, Section 17 — that no person's property shall be taken for public use without "adequate compensation." Texas law calls this "just compensation." And the government and the landowner rarely agree on what that number is.
Texas eminent domain law is codified in Chapter 21 of the Texas Property Code. That chapter establishes a formal process — with multiple stages, legal rights at each stage, and real consequences if the condemning authority fails to follow it. Most property owners who receive a condemnation offer have never read a word of it. The government is counting on that.
Just compensation under Texas law is not simply the market value of the strip that's being taken. It is the difference between the value of the entire property before the taking and the value of the property that remains after it. That distinction matters enormously in residential cases.
When TxDOT widens a road and takes a strip across a homeowner's front yard, several things often happen simultaneously: the setback between the house and the road shrinks; the expanded road becomes noisier and more visually intrusive; the remaining lot may no longer meet the original survey dimensions; and in some cases, landscaping, fencing, or improvements that were located in the taken strip are destroyed without separate compensation. All of that damage to the remainder — not just the value of the strip itself — is legally part of "just compensation."
Jennifer Reed's $47,000 offer reflected only the appraised value of the land in the strip. It did not include any amount for the damage to her remaining property. Her neighbor's attorney demonstrated that the expansion would reduce the value of the remaining lot and home by an additional $61,000 — and that was the primary source of the $87,000 difference between the two settlements.
The Landowner's Bill of Rights: The Document Most People Throw Away
Texas law requires every condemning authority — TxDOT, a city, a county, a utility — to provide a Landowner's Bill of Rights to any property owner before making a written offer. This requirement comes from Tex. Prop. Code § 21.0112, and the document itself is prepared by the Texas Attorney General's office.
The Landowner's Bill of Rights is a plain-language summary of what you're entitled to in a condemnation proceeding. It tells you that you have the right to:
- Receive a copy of the appraisal the condemning authority used to establish its offer
- Hire your own appraiser to assess the value of your property
- Hire an attorney to negotiate on your behalf
- Request a meeting with the condemning authority before accepting or rejecting an offer
- Reject the initial offer and receive a formal hearing before special commissioners
- Appeal the commissioners' award to district court
- Recover attorney fees and costs in certain circumstances
It also tells you something that surprises almost everyone who reads it: the condemnor must make a bona fide written offer — a good-faith attempt at just compensation — before it can file a condemnation petition. Under Tex. Prop. Code § 21.0114, if TxDOT or any other condemning authority files a condemnation petition without having made this required offer, the property owner can challenge the petition itself. That procedural protection exists specifically to prevent the government from bypassing negotiation and taking property without giving the landowner a meaningful opportunity to respond.
Most property owners receive this document in the same envelope as the offer letter. Most of them file it with the other papers, sign the offer, and return the paperwork by the deadline. The Landowner's Bill of Rights was designed to prevent exactly that — but it only works if someone actually reads it.
The Special Commissioners Hearing: The Stage Nobody Reaches
If a property owner rejects the initial offer and the parties cannot reach agreement, the condemning authority must file a condemnation petition in county court. Under Tex. Prop. Code § 21.021, the judge then appoints three special commissioners — disinterested local landowners, not attorneys or judges — to assess the value of the property being taken and issue an award.
The special commissioners hearing is not a courtroom proceeding. It is a relatively informal valuation conference at which both sides can present appraisal evidence. The commissioners hear from the condemning authority's appraiser and from the landowner's appraiser (if the landowner has one), and then issue their award of just compensation.
Either party can object to the commissioners' award — within the deadline set by Tex. Prop. Code § 21.049 — and if they do, the case proceeds to a full bench or jury trial in district court. The key fact: if the condemning authority makes a written offer that is lower than the commissioners' award, the landowner may be entitled to recover attorney fees and costs under Tex. Prop. Code § 21.0195.
That fee-shifting provision is part of why many condemnation attorneys are willing to take these cases on a contingency basis — their fee comes from the difference between the initial offer and the final award. The landowner often pays nothing out of pocket to pursue a higher number, yet the government's offer on the first page of that certified letter is still what most people accept without question.
The Right to Buy Your Property Back
Questions about real estate? A WG Law attorney can walk you through your options.
There is one aspect of Texas eminent domain law that almost no property owner knows about, even those who hire attorneys: the right of repurchase.
Under Tex. Prop. Code § 21.0193, if a condemning entity acquires property for a public use but fails to use it for that purpose within ten years, the original owner — or their heirs — has the right to repurchase the property at the original condemnation price. This provision was added to Texas law as a specific protection against the government condemning property in anticipation of a project and then abandoning or repurposing the project.
It is not an obscure or rarely-triggered right. Highway and infrastructure projects in Texas are routinely delayed, rerouted, scaled back, or cancelled. Collin County has seen this dynamic repeatedly as major thoroughfare expansions have shifted timelines by years or been reconfigured entirely. When that happens, the original landowner has a claim — but only if they preserved the right through proper legal documentation at the time of the original taking.
What a Condemnation Attorney Actually Does
The role of a real estate litigation attorney in an eminent domain case is not to "fight the government." Texas law gives condemning authorities the right to take private property for public use — that is a bedrock constitutional principle that no attorney can undo. The question is never whether the taking happens. The question is what the government pays for it.
A condemnation attorney does several things that most property owners cannot do effectively on their own:
First, they commission an independent appraisal. The condemning authority has its own appraiser, who approaches the valuation in the manner most favorable to the government. An independent appraisal considers the same property using the same methodology but from the landowner's perspective — and frequently arrives at a significantly different number, particularly when remainder damages are properly quantified.
Second, they review the condemnation proceedings for procedural compliance. If TxDOT or a city failed to provide the Landowner's Bill of Rights, made an inadequate bona fide offer, or violated any of the procedural requirements in Chapter 21, those failures have consequences — up to and including dismissal of the condemnation petition and having to start over.
Third, they negotiate. The vast majority of condemnation cases in Texas settle without a full trial. A property owner represented by counsel, with an independent appraisal in hand and a clear understanding of what the special commissioners' hearing might produce, is in a fundamentally different negotiating position than an unrepresented landowner who has been given a deadline and a stack of paperwork.
For a real-world sense of the scale at which these dynamics play out in North Texas: TxDOT's active project list for the Dallas-Fort Worth region includes dozens of right-of-way expansions currently in active acquisition phases, stretching from the US-380 corridor in Collin County to the SH-121 interchange south of Fort Worth to the Interstate 30 and Interstate 635 network projects in Dallas and Tarrant counties. In each of these corridors, property owners are receiving certified-mail offers that may or may not reflect the full value of what they're giving up.
Common Mistakes That Cost Property Owners Money
In condemnation cases, the most expensive mistakes are the ones made at the beginning of the process:
- Signing before getting an independent appraisal. Once you accept an offer and transfer title, negotiation is over. There is no going back. The time to evaluate whether the number is fair is before you sign — not after.
- Assuming the deadline is absolute. The government's offers typically include a deadline for acceptance. Those deadlines are often negotiable, particularly if you contact the condemning authority and indicate you are in the process of getting your own appraisal. An attorney can help you manage that timeline.
- Focusing only on the strip being taken. Most property owners mentally calculate what their land is worth per square foot and multiply by the square footage being taken. That calculation misses remainder damages entirely — often the largest component of just compensation in residential cases.
- Believing you cannot afford an attorney. Many condemnation attorneys work on contingency or on fee arrangements that tie their compensation to the increase in award they obtain. If there is no increase, there may be no fee. Calling an attorney to understand the fee structure costs nothing.
Jennifer Reed's Postscript
Jennifer found out about her neighbor's $134,000 settlement through a conversation at the neighborhood community pool, about sixteen months after she and her husband had signed TxDOT's offer. She called the attorney her neighbor had used. The attorney explained that once she had signed and transferred title, the option to negotiate had closed.
There was no lawsuit to bring, no process to trigger, no remedy available. The $47,000 was what she had been paid. The additional $87,000 — the amount the neighbor's attorney had demonstrated she was likely owed — was gone.
"What I didn't know," she said later, "was that there was a process. I didn't know it had steps. I thought it was just a letter."
Texas law built a process — with multiple formal steps, independent appraisal rights, and a fee-shifting mechanism designed to level the playing field between individual property owners and government agencies with staff appraisers and legal departments. But that process only works for property owners who know it exists before they sign on the deadline date.
Serving McKinney, Frisco, Allen, Plano, and the DFW Metroplex
If you have received a condemnation offer from TxDOT, a city, a county, a utility district, or any other condemning authority, the most important thing you can do is contact a real estate attorney before you accept or reject the offer.
At WG Law, Stephan D. Hwang brings real estate litigation experience dating to 2007, title experience since 2003, and federal court admission to the U.S. District Courts for the Northern and Eastern Districts of Texas. He has argued before the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Dallas and handles real estate disputes — including eminent domain and condemnation matters — for clients throughout the DFW metroplex. For broader context on Texas property rights disputes, see our overviews of Texas easement disputes and Texas property boundary and encroachment disputes. Our Texas real estate law practice covers the full range of property matters our clients face.
WG Law serves clients in McKinney, Southlake, Frisco, Plano, Allen, Prosper, Fort Worth, Arlington, and throughout Collin County and the DFW area. Call 214-250-4407 or contact us for a confidential consultation. Do not sign a condemnation offer before you understand what you may be giving up.
This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Texas eminent domain and condemnation law involves fact-specific analysis under the Texas Property Code and Texas Constitution. The scenario described is illustrative; individual condemnation cases vary significantly in their facts, applicable procedures, and outcomes. For guidance on your specific situation, consult a licensed Texas attorney.