Most Texas agents track contract deadlines with a calendar and the form itself. That works, it is free, and for a straightforward deal it is often enough. This page is an honest account of where a computed answer helps and where it does not.
Where each one wins
| Calendar + the blank form | REcontract | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free. TREC publishes every promulgated form at no charge, and so do we. | Free to read a contract and compute its deadlines. |
| Works in every state | Yes. A calendar does not care which state you are in. | Auto-fill and deadline computation are Texas only. Elsewhere the reader still works, but the forms are not ours to distribute. |
| No software to trust | Yes. Nothing to be wrong, nothing to go down. | You are trusting our reading of Paragraph 5. That is why the rules are written out and the calculator is public. |
| Signature and delivery | Whatever you already use. | Not included. We produce the document; sending and signing happen in your existing tools. |
| Transaction management, CRM, commissions | Your brokerage platform. | None of it. Deliberately out of scope. |
| Reads a contract somebody else wrote | You re-key it. | Yes — including a flattened e-signature export. |
| The 5A(2) / 5B asymmetry | You have to remember which one extends. | Computed. Both dates, with the reason. |
| Which days are Legal Holidays | You look it up, and the answer is not the state holiday list. | Computed from the statute the contract cites. |
When you should not use this
If your deal is outside Texas, the deadline engine does not apply — it implements the TREC form's paragraphs, not a general rule. If your brokerage requires a specific forms platform, use it; a contract written somewhere your broker cannot see it is a problem no software solves. And if you need e-signature, transaction management or commission tracking, this is not that product and is not trying to be.
What REcontract cannot do
It cannot give legal advice, and it contains no language model — the deadlines come from ordinary code reading the form's own paragraphs, which is why the same contract always produces the same dates. It does not file anything, does not send anything, and does not talk to your MLS. It will not tell you whether a term is a good idea; it tells you what the document you already have actually says.
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