§ 34.022.Recovery of Property Value After Sale

The money remedy where the property cannot be returned.

A person is entitled to recover from the judgment creditor the market value of the person’s property that has been seized through execution if the judgment is reversed or set aside but the property has been sold at execution.

The claim runs against the judgment creditor — not the officer, and not the purchaser.

That allocation is the right one. The creditor set the execution in motion and received the proceeds; the officer was carrying out a valid writ, and the purchaser bought at a sale the chapter protects.

The measure is market value at the time of sale, not the sale price.

The difference is the point of subsection (b). Execution sales are notoriously poor markets — limited notice, cash terms, no opportunity to inspect — and property frequently sells for a fraction of its worth. Measuring by the price would leave the owner with that discount.

Fixing the moment at the sale date is equally deliberate. It excludes both later appreciation and later decline, and it measures what the owner lost when they lost it.

The creditor’s exposure can therefore exceed what the creditor received. A creditor who collected the sale price may owe the full market value, and the gap is the cost of having executed on a judgment that did not survive.

That is a real risk in enforcing a judgment under appeal, and it is why a creditor may prefer to wait, or to take security, rather than sell.