Find Texas Apartments That Accept Felons

Felon Friendly Apartments is a TREC-licensed locating service (License #679806) that places renters with felony convictions into apartments across Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth. A felony conviction locks renters out of roughly 60 to 70 percent of the Texas apartment market. The properties that will review vary by management company, by offense type, and by how old the conviction is. We know which properties auto-decline, which use blanket lookback windows, and which run genuine individualized review, and we pre-screen your specific record before you spend a dollar on an application.

We are honest about hard stops. Sex offender registry status, active warrants, and pending violent felony charges are near-universal declines at nearly every apartment community in Texas as of 2026. If your situation is one of those, we say so up front rather than collecting a fee.

What Determines If a Texas Apartment Will Review Your Felony

Every Texas apartment applies its own criminal-background policy, but the policies cluster around a small set of variables:

• Management company. Some management companies apply a blanket ban across every property in their portfolio. Others delegate to the property level. A property owned by one management company may auto-decline where a comparable property across the street reviews. Which management company matters more than which property.
• Conviction age. Common lookback windows are 5, 7, and 10 years. Many properties weight conviction age within the window instead of applying a hard cutoff. A Class A high-rise may lookback 10 years for any felony; a Class B garden-style community may only care about the last 5. See how conviction age affects apartment approval.
• Offense type. Nonviolent felonies clear more properties than violent ones. Property-crime felonies draw extra scrutiny because they touch the landlord-tenant relationship. Drug-possession felonies clear more properties than distribution felonies.
• Disposition. A conviction reports differently than a deferred adjudication or a dismissed charge. If your case ended in a way that is not technically a conviction - deferred, pretrial diversion completion, dismissal - screening platforms like RealPage or TransUnion SmartMove may still surface it, but the correct disposition matters.
• Sentence completion. Fully completed sentences, including any probation or parole, read better than active supervision.

How Pre-Screening Beats Applying Blind

Listing sites (Apartments.com, Zillow, Apartment Finder) do not filter by criminal-background policy. A renter with a 12-year-old nonviolent felony searching for a garden-style apartment or a mid-rise in Houston sees the same search results as someone with a clean record. Every application is a blind $50-$150 gamble.

We do three things instead:

1. Track property-level policies. We work with management companies across Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth. When a property changes its screening posture - a new blanket ban, a new lookback window, a management-company transition - we hear about it.
2. Pre-screen your specific record. We ask about offense type, conviction date, disposition, and sentence completion. Then we check that against property policies before you apply.
3. Send a shortlist you can actually work. You get a small number of properties - typically three to six - that we have specific reason to believe will review your record. Not a scraped list of “felon-friendly apartments” that everyone else already got denied at.

How We Compare

Feature	Typical Listing Site	Felon Friendly Apartments
Criminal background policy filter	No	Yes - property-level policies tracked
Pre-screening before you apply	No	Record matched against management-company policies
Application fee rebate	No	Rebated on approval and lease signing
Licensed real estate agents	Varies	TREC License #679806
Hard stop disclosure	No	Disclosed before you spend money

Situations That Are Near-Universal Declines

The Felon Friendly Apartments team does not sell false hope. Certain situations are near-universal declines at Texas apartment communities:

• Sex offender registry status. Almost every apartment community declines. Some counties have residency restrictions layered on top.
• Active warrants. Almost every apartment community declines while the warrant is active.
• Pending violent felony charges. Almost every apartment community declines while charges are pending.

If your situation is a hard stop, we tell you the day we hear it. You keep your application fee and we point you to the appropriate legal-aid contact.

How the Application Fee Rebate Works

When you get approved at a property we sent you to and sign the lease, we rebate your application fee. The community pays us a referral fee from their marketing budget; part of that pays back your out-of-pocket application cost. You never write us a check for anything.

Related Criminal Record Types

• Misdemeanor history - how strict-policy properties handle minor records.
• Deferred adjudication - why it still shows on screening reports and what to do about it.
• Multiple convictions - how stacking changes screening.
• Renters on parole - meeting the approved-residence deadline.

Get Your Pre-Screened Apartment List

The intake takes about seven minutes. You tell us the record and the metro; we send you a pre-screened shortlist typically within 24-48 hours. Free service, TREC-licensed team, application fee rebated on approval.