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What Should You Do After Buying a Home in El Paso?

What to do in the first thirty days

Rekey the locks. You have no idea who has a key to your house. Contractors, the previous owner's family, a dog walker from four years ago. This is the first thing, not the tenth.

Set up your utilities if you have not already. In El Paso that generally means El Paso Electric, El Paso Water, and Texas Gas Service for natural gas. Get them in your name before closing day if you can, because a transfer that lapses is a weekend without power.

File your homestead exemption. This gets its own section below because it is worth more than everything else on this list combined.

Save your closing documents somewhere you will find them in ten years. Your settlement statement, your survey, the title policy, the seller's disclosure, the inspection report. You will need these when you sell, and possibly at tax time. Scan them. Paper disappears.

Change your address properly. USPS forwarding is the start, not the end. Driver's license, voter registration, insurance, banks, your employer, anything that sends you a statement.

Register your builder warranty if you bought new construction. It is not automatic for everything and the window to register can be short. Find out exactly what your warranty covers and for how long, because the structural coverage and the cosmetic coverage are usually very different lengths. More on that in the complete guide to buying new construction.

Change the HVAC filter and write the size on the wall by the unit. You will not remember it in three months and you will stand in the aisle at the hardware store guessing.

Get a pest control assessment. Scorpions, roaches and termites are all part of life here. Starting a service before you have a problem is cheaper than starting one after.

Do not renovate anything for six months. Live in the house first. The things you are certain you will change on day one are frequently not the things that actually bother you, and the money you spend in month one is money you do not have when the water heater goes out in month seven.

File your homestead exemption

If you take one thing from this page, take this one.

A homestead exemption reduces the taxable value of your primary residence, which directly reduces your property tax bill. It also limits how much your assessed value can increase year over year, which protects you from appreciation you did not ask for.

It costs nothing. It is a form.

And an enormous number of new homeowners either file it late or never file it at all, because closing is exhausting and nobody reminds them.

How to do it. You file with the El Paso Central Appraisal District at epcad.org. You will need your Texas driver's license, and the address on that license has to match the property you are claiming. There are filing windows and deadlines, and in some situations late filing is allowed, so if you think you missed it, go check rather than assuming.

There are additional exemptions beyond the general homestead one, including for homeowners over 65, homeowners with disabilities, and disabled veterans. The disabled veteran exemption in particular is substantial, and we cover what it is worth in the complete guide to PCSing to El Paso.

Rules and amounts change, so confirm the current requirements with the appraisal district directly rather than relying on any website, this one included.

Why your mortgage payment may go up next year

This one surprises people and it is not a mistake, so it helps to know it is coming.

Your lender collects property taxes and insurance monthly and holds them in an escrow account, then pays the bills when they come due. When you bought, your lender estimated that amount using the tax information available at the time.

Here is the problem. The property may have been assessed based on what the previous owner had, including their exemptions and any caps that had built up over years of ownership. After a sale, the property gets reassessed, and the new number can be meaningfully higher than what your lender estimated.

So the taxes come due, your escrow account comes up short, and your lender does two things at once: spreads the shortage over the next twelve months and raises your monthly collection going forward. A payment that was comfortable becomes noticeably less comfortable.

Three things to do about it.

File your homestead exemption immediately, because it is the main lever you have on this number.

Ask your lender directly how they estimated your escrow and whether the number reflects a reassessment. They can tell you before it happens.

And check what the actual rate is for your specific address at elpaso.countytaxrates.com/tax, because rates in this county vary enormously depending on which taxing entities you landed in. Two homes a few minutes apart can differ by three quarters of a percentage point. We wrote that out in detail in the Horizon and 79928 guide and the West Side guide.

This does not mean something went wrong. It means year one and year two are different, and budgeting for year two is the adult move.

Find these five things before you need them

Do this on a Saturday afternoon, not at two in the morning with water coming through a ceiling.

The main water shutoff. Know where it is and make sure it actually turns. Old valves seize.

The individual shutoffs under every sink and behind every toilet.

The gas shutoff and what tool it takes.

The electrical panel, with the breakers actually labeled. Spend an hour with somebody flipping breakers while you walk the house. The labels the previous owner left are usually wrong.

The water heater, how old it is, and how to shut it off.

A house gives you about ninety seconds to stop a plumbing problem from becoming a floor replacement. You do not get to spend those ninety seconds looking for a valve.

Your El Paso maintenance calendar

Most home maintenance checklists are written for places with humidity, snow loads and gutters full of leaves. Almost none of that applies here. This is the desert version.

Spring, March through May

This is wind season, and it is harder on a house than people realize.

• Service your air conditioning now, not in July. Every tech in the city is booked solid the first week it hits 100, and you will wait days. Spring service is the single easiest way to avoid a bad week.
• If you have an evaporative cooler, this is startup. New pads, check the pump, check the water line, look for leaks before you need it.
• Walk the roof or have somebody walk it. Winter and wind do damage you cannot see from the driveway, especially on a flat roof.
• Check the stucco for new cracks and seal them. Wind-driven rain finds every opening.
• Check fascia, gates, and fence posts after wind season.
• Replace filters, and replace them more often than the box says. Blowing dust means your filters load up faster here than the manufacturer assumed.
• Test your irrigation or drip system before the heat arrives, not after plants start dying.

Summer, June through September

Heat, then monsoon.

• Check your drainage before the rain comes. Where does water go when it comes off your roof and your lot? If you are near an arroyo or at the bottom of a slope, this is not a theoretical question.
• Flat roofs: look for ponding. Standing water is what kills a flat roof. If water sits more than a day or two after a storm, that is a problem to solve now.
• Change filters monthly while the AC runs constantly.
• Check current watering rules with El Paso Water at epwater.org, because schedules and restrictions change and the fines are real.
• Watch for sun damage on exterior paint, window seals, weather stripping and the garage door. The UV here ages materials faster than almost anywhere in the country.

Fall, October through November

The changeover month, and the one people forget.

• Shut down and winterize the evaporative cooler. Drain it completely and cover it. A swamp cooler left full going into a hard freeze is a repair bill waiting for you.
• Service the heater before the first cold night, for the same reason as spring AC service.
• Check the fireplace and chimney if you have one.
• Seal gaps around doors, windows and pipe penetrations.

Winter, December through February

El Paso freezes, and people who moved here from warmer places get caught.

• Cover exterior faucets and insulate exposed pipes. Southwestern construction often has more plumbing on exterior walls and in unconditioned space than people expect.
• Know your main shutoff before the first hard freeze, not during it.
• Drip faucets on hard freeze nights and open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls.
• Shut down and drain the irrigation system.
• Protect pool equipment if you have a pool.

Three things that are different about owning a home in the desert

These are the ones that catch people who moved here from somewhere else, and plenty of people who grew up here.

Your water is hard, and it is quietly destroying things.

El Paso water carries a lot of mineral content. That builds up as scale in your water heater, your fixtures, your dishwasher and your washing machine, and it shortens the life of all of them.

Flush your water heater annually. It is a straightforward job and it is the difference between a water heater that lasts its full life and one that fails years early with sediment baked into the bottom of the tank. If you are seeing white crust on fixtures and spots on every glass, a softener is worth pricing out.

Your foundation wants consistent moisture, not none.

This is the one almost nobody knows. Expansive clay soil is common here, and it swells when wet and shrinks when dry. What damages a foundation is not moisture. It is the swing between soaked and bone dry.

During long dry stretches, watering the soil around your foundation perimeter keeps that movement from happening. A soaker hose a foot or two out from the slab, run occasionally and evenly on all sides, is cheap insurance. Uneven is worse than none, so do the whole perimeter or do not bother.

If you have an older home, a hillside lot, or you are already seeing doors that stick and cracks that open and close with the seasons, get a professional opinion rather than guessing. We cover what that looks like on the West Side guide.

If your home has cast iron plumbing, start a clock.

A lot of older El Paso homes, particularly on the West Side, have cast iron sewer lines. Cast iron does not last forever and the failure is expensive and disruptive.

If you did not get a sewer scope during your inspection, get one now while nothing is wrong, so you know what you are working with and roughly how much runway you have. Hire a plumbing contractor rather than an inspector for it, so the quote and the camera come from the same visit.

Exemption rules, filing deadlines, utility providers and water restrictions all change. Confirm anything on this page with the El Paso Central Appraisal District, El Paso Water, or your lender before relying on it. This is not legal, tax, or lending advice, and nothing here replaces a professional opinion on your specific home.