Ask a Central Texas listing agent what’s changed in the last two years, and pools come up fast. Not because buyers stopped wanting them. Because a growing share of them are quietly falling apart from the inside, and now that failure has a paper trail.
The defect is alkali-silica reaction, ASR for short, “concrete cancer” if you’re the homeowner standing over a crack wondering what it’s going to cost you. John McIntyre, a licensed engineer who has spent the last couple of years testing pools for it, puts the number affected across the region at roughly 30,000 — most of them built between 2017 and 2023, back when demand for backyard pools outran the concrete industry’s fly ash supply. There’s no repair for it once it sets in. Rip it out, pour a new one, and hope the mix is right this time. Bills run $150,000 to $500,000.
That’s the contractor’s version of the story. The real estate version starts at the seller’s disclosure form.
The paperwork caught up
As of June 15, the TXR 1406 — the disclosure form most Texas home sales run through — has a section that names concrete cancer specifically. Texas is one of the first states to spell it out that plainly on a standard form, which tells you something about how common this has gotten.
Sellers are on the hook under Texas Property Code §5.008 to disclose known defects, pools included, and that obligation doesn’t evaporate just because a listing says “as-is.” Agents don’t have to go digging for problems nobody’s told them about — TREC has said as much — but once there’s a test result, a builder’s admission, a repair quote sitting in someone’s inbox, that’s not optional information anymore.
Here’s where it gets messy, though. ASR doesn’t always look like ASR early on. A hairline crack that reads as cosmetic settling can be the first visible sign of a chemical reaction that’s already well underway underneath. Homeowners who patched a crack two summers ago, not knowing what caused it, may now be sitting on a disclosure problem they created without meaning to.
Deals aren’t dying — they’re getting slower
and pricier
Agents working Round Rock, Cedar Park, Dripping Springs, Lakeway and Bee Cave say confirmed ASR rarely kills a sale outright. It does change the shape of one. Buyers want an engineer’s report. They want demolition and rebuild estimates in writing. “Some cracking near the deep end” doesn’t cut it anymore as disclosure language — attorneys and agents alike are pushing for specifics: what was found, when, by whom, and what it’s expected to cost.
Sellers who already tore out and rebuilt an affected pool are being told to spell that out too — year of replacement, confirmation the new pour used ASR-resistant materials, warranty paperwork attached. Skip that documentation and the listing tends to sit longer, or the price gets negotiated down by whatever the demo-and-rebuild number happens to be, or a buyer just walks once they realize the home falls inside that 2017–2023 window.
It’s not only sellers feeling it. Homeowners with no plans to move are running into ASR questions during refinances, at insurance renewal time, in HOA budget meetings — any of which leaves a record that a future sale will eventually have to answer for.
Who pays is still being fought out in court
The financial picture keeps getting worse for owners waiting on somebody else to make this right. Several pool builders and the concrete subcontractors behind them have gone under, which narrows the list of who’s left to sue. Insurers haven’t made it easier — in one federal case, Cody Pools’ own insurer sued to argue its policies don’t cover ASR damage at all. A multidistrict lawsuit against concrete supplier Easy Mix is the one most attorneys are watching, since a ruling there could shape how a lot of the smaller cases get resolved.
Some HOAs managing shared pools have stopped waiting on litigation and started taking out loans to cover reconstruction, spreading the cost across every household in the neighborhood — sometimes years before anyone knows if a lawsuit will recover a dime of it.
None of that shows up on a listing sheet. But agents say it’s increasingly part of the conversation before one gets written — because at this point, in this market, ASR isn’t a rare complication. It’s close to a routine one.
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