Last updated September 21, 2026 · Written by Meredith Sherwood, TREC License No. 0832882
Your listing agreement reached its end date and nothing happened — no ceremony, no phone call, possibly no notice at all. Here is what that actually changed, what it did not, and what you can and cannot do next.
This page describes how the standard Texas forms and North Texas MLS conventions generally work. It is not legal advice, your own agreement may have been amended, and specifics vary. Read your signed listing agreement, and consult an attorney about your own situation.
What “expired” means, precisely
A Texas listing agreement runs from a start date to an end date, both written into the form as blanks. There is no statutory listing length in Texas and the standard form supplies no default — six months is market custom, not a rule. When that end date arrives, the agreement ends by its own terms. Nobody has to sign anything or send anything.
So the answer to “am I still under contract?” is usually no, if the date has genuinely passed. But there are two things that survive expiration and one status that looks like expiration and is not.
The thing that survives: the protection period
The standard form contains a protection period that begins the day after the listing ends. Its length is a blank on the form — there is no standard duration, and any article quoting you a typical number is quoting something that is not in the document. Broadly, it means that if you sell during that window to a specific person whose attention was called to the property during the listing, and whom the broker named in a written notice sent within ten days of expiration, the fee is still owed.
It is buyer-specific rather than property-wide, and the notice is optional — the form says the broker may send it. There is also an exception aimed at exactly your circumstances: broadly, where the property is relisted exclusively with another Texas REALTORS® member brokerage that you owe a fee to, the old protection period generally does not apply. The mechanics are covered properly here, including what to look for in your own paperwork.
The status that looks like expiration and is not: withdrawn
This one traps sellers. According to MetroTex’s MLS status definitions, a Withdrawn listing means marketing stopped but the listing agreement is still alive, with conditions attached, and the property cannot be relisted by any broker until the original expiration date passes. A Cancelled listing means no conditions were attached and you are free to list with another broker now.
If someone told you “we took it off the market” or “we cancelled it,” those words do not tell you which of the two happened. It is worth finding out before you start interviewing agents, because in one case you can hire someone tomorrow and in the other you cannot.
Can I just relist it right away?
Legally, once the agreement has genuinely ended and no conditions bind you, yes. Strategically, it is usually the wrong move, for two separate reasons.
Reason one: nothing has changed yet
An expired listing relaunched unchanged is the same house, at a similar price, with the same photographs, going back in front of largely the same buyer pool. Those buyers already saw it and already passed. Putting it back with no new argument gives them no reason to reconsider — and it tells their agents that the seller has not learned anything, which is precisely the impression you cannot afford.
There is also no momentum to preserve. That is what expired means. The urgency sellers feel to get back on market immediately is real, and it is almost always working against them.
Reason two: your listing history follows you
Relisting does not wipe the slate. MetroTex’s documentation describes expired and cancelled listings remaining visible to MLS participants for up to three years, and a cumulative days-on-market figure that carries a prior listing’s days forward unless the property was off market for a substantial break — documented there as 31 days or more. MLS conventions do get revised, so ask your agent to confirm how it applies to your listing specifically.
What that means in practice: a competent buyer’s agent pulling history on your relisted house will see the prior list dates, the prior prices, and how long it sat. You cannot hide that. What you can do is control the story it tells — which is a stronger position than it sounds, because “we took it off, fixed the three things that were wrong, and came back properly” is a perfectly good story. “It has been on and off for a year” is not.
Be sceptical of any agent who tells you a relist erases the history. It does not, and they will be contradicted by the first buyer’s agent who looks.
The days-on-market figure your agent sees in the North Texas MLS is not the number shown on the big consumer portals — MetroTex’s documentation notes NTREIS does not share its DOM and cumulative DOM with those sites, which compute their own. So “days on Zillow” and the MLS figure are different numbers measuring different things, and neither one is the whole picture.
What to do in the gap instead
The weeks after expiration are the most useful ones you will get, precisely because there is no listing running and no pressure to respond to anything. Four things worth doing with them.
- Work out which of the six reasons actually applied. Price, photography, competing inventory, condition, effort, or timing — they have different fixes and the wrong fix is expensive. The diagnostic is here, written so you can run it yourself.
- Read your own listing agreement. Specifically the term dates, the protection period blank, and anything in the special provisions. You want to know your position before you talk to a new agent, not after.
- Find out your actual MLS status. Expired, withdrawn, or cancelled. It determines what you can do right now.
- Get a current valuation. Not what it was worth when you listed — what closed while you were sitting there. Those sales are the houses buyers chose instead of yours, and the gap between them and your listing is most of the diagnosis. Meredith will do this at no charge.
If the timing was against you
Worth naming, because a lot of listings expire in the autumn and winter and their owners conclude the house is unsellable. It might just have been the calendar. In Denton County, homes going under contract in late spring have historically spent the fewest days on market, and those contracting in December and January the most — a difference of roughly four weeks on the median. The month-by-month picture is here, along with why today’s timelines are normal rather than broken.
That does not mean you should always wait for spring. It means a listing that ran September to January was fighting the season, and that is a genuine, checkable reason rather than a story about your house.
If your house is in Flower Mound, there is a version of this written around that town: what to do when your Flower Mound listing expires, including the local reasons listings stall there.
Where to start
If you want somebody to read the listing history and tell you plainly what happened, that is the re-evaluation, it is free, and it does not require signing anything. Or call 806-781-7464 with the address and Meredith will pull it up while you are on the phone.