A family member has lived in the house for years. Maybe a parent deeded it to someone else along the way. Maybe there was a handshake, or even a signed agreement, about buying it someday. Then the person whose name is on the deed wants the house back, and the family member refuses to go. That fight happens constantly in Texas, and it usually lands in an eviction court rather than a probate court.
The question in that courtroom is narrower than most people expect. It is not who owns the house. It is who has the superior right to immediate possession right now. Occupants who hold a lease-to-purchase agreement often assume the paperwork gives them an ownership stake that blocks an eviction. That assumption is usually wrong, and the reason why is worth understanding before an executor, an heir, or a family member ends up on the wrong side of a writ of possession.
A recent case makes the point. In Gonzalez v. Garza, No. 09-25-00459-CV (Tex. App.—Beaumont June 11, 2026, no pet. h.) (mem. op.), the occupant had a signed Lease to Purchase Option Agreement on the family home. She had never paid the option money the agreement required. The court had to decide whether that agreement created a title dispute big enough to shut down the eviction case, and whether the owner had done enough to win possession.
Facts & Procedural History
The property is a home at 29702 E. Hawthorne Dr. in Spring, Texas, in Montgomery County. It had been in Lori Gonzalez’s family since 2002. On May 25, 2022, Pedro Trinidad Suarez, her father, signed a general warranty deed conveying the property to Ramiro Garza. That deed was filed in the Montgomery County real property records.
Gonzalez and Garza were not strangers. She had been his accountant, and he had relied on her for business and personal dealings for close to a decade. The day before the deed, on May 24, 2022, the two of them signed a Lease to Purchase Option Agreement covering the same house. Gonzalez signed as “Buyer/Tenant.” Garza signed as “Seller/Landlord.”
Section 4 of that agreement is the one that decided this case. It said the Buyer/Tenant “shall remit option consideration in the sum of $216,000 to Seller/Landlord upon execution of this Option to Purchase Agreement, which amount is non-refundable.” If she exercised the option and closed, the $216,000 would be credited toward the purchase price. Section 7 gave Garza the right to terminate the agreement by written notice if she defaulted, and said the option would then pass to her brothers before the house went on the open market. Section 14 said the agreement was not to be recorded in the property records without Garza’s express written permission.
Gonzalez never paid the $216,000. She never made rent payments either. Garza put his bank statements from that period into evidence to show it. She did record the Lease to Purchase Option Agreement in the Montgomery County property records, which Garza testified he never authorized.
Garza fired her in February 2025. On February 20, 2025, his attorney sent her a “Demand for Possession” letter with a “Notice to Vacate” attached. The demand said her tenancy was terminated under Section 91.001 of the Texas Property Code and gave her thirty days to get out. She stayed. On April 15, 2025, Garza filed a forcible detainer suit in the Justice Court of Montgomery County, Precinct Three. Then, on May 9, 2025, after the eviction suit was already on file, his attorney sent a separate Notice of Default and Notice of Termination of the Lease to Purchase Option Agreement.
Gonzalez answered and raised three defenses: the court had no subject matter jurisdiction because the case involved title, Garza had not complied with the notice requirements or given her a chance to cure, and the eviction was retaliation for her firing. She also had a separate suit pending against Garza in the 284th Judicial District Court in Montgomery County.
The justice court ruled for Garza. Gonzalez appealed to the County Court at Law for a new trial from scratch. Her lawyer withdrew with her consent, and she tried the case herself. On cross-examination she argued that because there was no separate written lease, she owed Garza nothing and could not be evicted. She also testified that she read Section 7 to mean that if she did not pay the $216,000, the property “should have been passed on to [her] brothers.”
The county court awarded Garza possession, found that Gonzalez was a tenant whose right to occupy had been terminated, found that written demand was made and received, and found her guilty of forcible detainer. Gonzalez hired a new lawyer, filed a Motion for New Trial and Plea to the Jurisdiction, lost, and appealed.
How Texas Eviction Suits Work, and Who Counts as a Tenant
To see why Gonzalez lost, you first have to understand how small the question in an eviction case really is.
Justice courts have original jurisdiction over forcible entry and detainer and forcible detainer suits. Tex. Gov’t Code Ann. § 27.031(a)(2); Tex. Prop. Code Ann. § 24.004(a). If a party loses there, the case goes to the county court at law for a trial de novo, meaning the county court tries it over again rather than reviewing the record. These suits exist to give people “a speedy, simple, and inexpensive means for resolving the question of the right to possession of premises.” Rice v. Pinney, 51 S.W.3d 705, 709 (Tex. App.—Dallas 2001, no pet.). The sole issue is who has the right to immediate possession. A plaintiff does not have to prove title. He only has to show enough evidence of ownership to demonstrate a superior right to immediate possession.
That limit cuts both ways, and it is where most probate-related possession fights go sideways. Real ownership disputes belong in district court. Justice courts and county courts at law cannot decide who owns a house. But the existence of a title dispute does not automatically strip them of jurisdiction over possession either. Hossain v. Fed. Nat’l Mortg. Ass’n, No. 14-14-00273-CV, 2015 Tex. App. LEXIS 6041, at *4 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] June 16, 2015, pet. dism’d w.o.j.) (mem. op.). The eviction court loses jurisdiction only when the title question and the possession question are so intertwined that the court has to resolve ownership first. Yarbrough v. Household Fin. Corp. III, 455 S.W.3d 277, 280 (Tex. App.—Houston [14th Dist.] 2015, no pet.). When there is an independent basis for deciding possession, such as a landlord-tenant relationship, the eviction court keeps the case and the title fight goes forward separately in district court.
So the next question is what makes someone a tenant. It is a lower bar than people think. A written lease is not required. Under the Property Code, a “landlord” is the owner, lessor, or sublessor of a dwelling. Tex. Prop. Code Ann. § 92.001(2). A person who refuses to surrender possession on demand commits a forcible detainer if she is a holdover tenant, a tenant at will, or a tenant by sufferance. Tex. Prop. Code Ann. § 24.002(a). To win possession, the landlord has to prove four things: that he owned the property, that the occupant was a tenant at will, a tenant at sufferance, or a holdover, that he gave proper notice to vacate, and that the occupant refused to leave. Shields Ltd. P’ship v. Bradberry, 526 S.W.3d 471, 478 (Tex. 2017).
A tenant at will is someone who “holds possession with the landlord’s consent but without fixed terms (as to duration or rent).” Coinmach Corp. v. Aspenwood Apartment Corp., 417 S.W.3d 909, 915 (Tex. 2013) (quoting Black’s Law Dictionary 1604 (9th ed. 2009)). The possession is lawful, but it runs for no fixed term, so the owner can end it whenever he wants. That is exactly the status of most family members living in a house they do not own, including the adult child who has lived rent-free in a parent’s home for a decade and the relative who stayed on after the owner died. The moment the owner or the personal representative demands possession, they are tenants at will facing an eviction.
For a tenant at will, the notice requirement is three days’ written notice to vacate before the suit is filed, unless the parties contracted for a different period. Tex. Prop. Code Ann. § 24.005(b). One caution for anyone handling this today: the delivery rules in Section 24.005 were rewritten by S.B. 38, effective January 1, 2026. The old subsections spelling out in-person delivery and the certified-mail-plus-regular-mail option were repealed. Under the current statute, notice must be delivered by mail (first class, registered, certified, or a delivery service), by delivery to the inside of the premises in a conspicuous place, by hand delivery to any tenant sixteen or older, or by electronic communication if the parties agreed to that in writing. Tex. Prop. Code Ann. § 24.005(f-3). Those delivery requirements do not apply if the tenant actually receives the notice. Id. § 24.005(f-4). The notices in Gonzalez went out in early 2025, under the prior version, but anyone sending one now needs the new rules.
The Court’s Analysis: An Option Nobody Funded
Gonzalez made two arguments on appeal. Both failed for the same underlying reason.
Her first argument was jurisdictional. She said a lease-to-purchase agreement necessarily brings equitable ownership rights and title questions into the case, and that her pending district court suit for declaratory relief and equitable title put the whole dispute outside an eviction court’s reach.
The court said she had the burden on that point and produced nothing to carry it. She never showed that possession could not be decided without first deciding ownership. Her district court petition was not even in the appellate record, and under Rule 34.1 of the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure the court could not consider evidence outside the record. Meanwhile Garza put in a general warranty deed showing he owned the house, and there was no dispute that Gonzalez never paid the $216,000 the option required. The trial court had also looked at her district court petition and stated on the record that what she filed was a contract case, not a suit to quiet title. On that record, there was no title dispute intertwined with possession, and the county court had jurisdiction.
That distinction is the one to remember. A claim that you were promised the house, or that you have a right to buy it later, is a contract claim. It is not a present claim of title. As the court noted, until a buyer fully performs a real estate purchase agreement, he has only an equitable right to acquire title in the future by carrying out the agreement, and that kind of claim does not create a genuine title dispute or deprive a county court of jurisdiction to render a judgment of immediate possession. Salazar v. HPA Tex. Sub 2016-1 LLC, No. 01-19-00330-CV, 2020 Tex. App. LEXIS 10279, at **14–15 (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] Dec. 29, 2020, pet. denied) (mem. op.).
Her second argument was about the evidence and the notice. She said she was not a tenant at will, that the Lease to Purchase Option Agreement governed her tenancy, and that Garza had to terminate that agreement before he could evict her. Since the Notice of Default and Notice of Termination did not go out until May 9, 2025, and the eviction suit was filed on April 15, 2025, she argued Garza had no present right to possession when he filed.
The court did not need to sort out that sequencing, because the agreement never gave her anything to terminate. She produced no evidence that she ever exercised the option by paying Garza the $216,000 that Section 4 required upon execution. Once she failed to do that, she had no further rights under the agreement and she was nothing more than a tenant at will. The court leaned on its own prior decision in Dorta v. Rave, No. 09-12-00376-CV, 2014 Tex. App. LEXIS 210, at *15 (Tex. App.—Beaumont Jan. 9, 2014, no pet.) (mem. op.), where tenants with a purchase option had never made the required down payment. No down payment meant no title dispute and a superior right to possession in the lessor. Same result here.
With Gonzalez a tenant at will, the notice question got simple. Garza needed three days’ written notice to vacate before filing. Tex. Prop. Code Ann. § 24.005(b). Gonzalez did not dispute that she got the Notice to Vacate attached to the February 20, 2025 letter, and Garza filed suit on April 15, 2025, nearly two months later. Reviewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the ruling, and remembering that anything more than a scintilla of evidence supports a finding, the court held the evidence was legally sufficient on both notice and superior right to possession. City of Keller v. Wilson, 168 S.W.3d 802, 807 (Tex. 2005); Formosa Plastics Corp. USA v. Presidio Eng’rs & Contractors, Inc., 960 S.W.2d 41, 48 (Tex. 1998). The judgment was affirmed.
One detail worth noting for anyone reading the opinion closely: the court also observed that Gonzalez never argued the agreement was an executory contract governed by Subchapter D of Chapter 5 of the Property Code, never argued she performed by paying the option fee, and never claimed she paid monthly rent. Arguments not made in the trial court and not briefed on appeal do not get decided.
The Takeaway
A signed agreement is not the same as a funded one. If an option requires money up front and the money never changes hands, the occupant is usually left with nothing but a tenancy at will, and a tenancy at will can be ended at any time with three days’ notice. That is true whether the paperwork was signed with a stranger or across the kitchen table with family.
For executors, administrators, and heirs trying to get possession of a house someone refuses to leave, the practical lesson is that this is often more straightforward than it looks. Bring the deed. Send a proper written notice to vacate under the current version of Section 24.005 and keep proof of how and when it went out. Wait out the notice period before filing. Build a record that no purchase option was ever exercised and no rent was ever paid. Do that and the possession case can be decided in an eviction court without ever litigating title.
For the occupant, the lesson is the mirror image. Filing a district court suit does not freeze an eviction, and calling your claim a title dispute does not make it one. If the agreement required a payment, pay it or be ready to prove why you did not have to. And raise your arguments in the trial court, because the court of appeals will not consider a theory you never presented or a document you never got into the record.
Our San Antonio Probate Attorneys provide a full range of probate services to our clients, including helping with recovering possession of estate property from occupants who refuse to leave. Probate is what we do. Affordable rates, fixed fees, and payment plans are available. We provide step-by-step instructions, guidance, checklists, and more for completing the probate process. We have years of combined experience we can use to support and guide you with probate and estate matters. Call us today for a FREE attorney consultation.
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The content of this website is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The information presented may not apply to your situation and should not be acted upon without consulting a qualified probate attorney. We encourage you to seek the advice of a competent attorney with any legal questions you may have.
