Florida real estate, one question at a time

Buying

• A condominium as a first home, after the 2022 reformsA condo is often the cheapest way into a Florida address, and since 2022 it is also the purchase where the building’s finances matter more than the unit. Two documents decide it, and both are obtainable before you offer.
• Buyer’s market or seller’s market? Not in Florida — in your areaAcross the 166 Florida areas we measure, 55 are firmly a buyer’s market and 18 are firmly a seller’s. The state-level headline is useless. Here is the number that answers it for your area.
• Buying a house with a friend, a sibling or a parentCo-buying is rising in the United States for an obvious reason: two incomes reach a price that one does not. It works. What decides whether it works is a document signed before the offer, not the friendship.
• How long does it take to buy a house in Florida?Six to ten weeks from accepted offer to keys, if nothing goes wrong. Here is where the weeks actually go, which of them are fixed by your contract, and the three points where a Florida purchase stalls.
• Inspection or appraisal? They are not the same thing, and the difference costs moneyOne protects you, the other protects the bank. Buyers who assume the appraisal will catch a bad roof find out at the walkthrough, when the contingency has already expired.
• New construction or resale: where each one actually winsThe 712 Florida new-construction communities we track start at a median of $332,245. The median existing single-family value across the areas we measure is $531,471. That gap is real, and it is also not the whole comparison.
• New construction: the person in the sales office is not your agentThey are pleasant, they know the floor plans, and they are paid by the builder. Bringing your own representation costs you nothing and changes what you can ask for.
• The builder rate buy-down: who pays for it, and what it costs youA builder advertising 4.99% when the market is at 6.75% is not lending you money more cheaply. They are spending part of the price to make the payment look smaller, and whether that is a good trade depends on how long you keep the loan.
• The five contingencies that decide who keeps your depositA contingency is the clause that lets you leave with your money. In Florida they run on short clocks written into the contract, and missing one by a day turns a refundable deposit into the seller’s.
• What a builder incentive is actually worth“Up to $60,000 in incentives” is a real offer and a bad unit of measurement. Four kinds of incentive get quoted as one number, and they are worth very different amounts to you.

Financing

• Adjustable rate: when it makes sense, and when it does notThe ARM has a bad name it earned in 2006 and a structure that is now heavily regulated. At a fixed rate near 6.75% it is worth understanding rather than dismissing — but only if you can answer one question honestly.
• Down payment assistance in Florida, and why so few people claim itThere is state money and county money, and most of it goes unclaimed every year. Not because people do not qualify — because they find out after they are under contract, when it is too late to apply.
• How to buy in Florida before you sell where you live nowThe relocator’s problem: your deposit is locked in a house eleven hundred miles away, and the Florida seller wants a clean offer. There are four ways out and a bridge loan is only one of them.
• Paying cash or taking a mortgage in FloridaCash wins offers and costs flexibility. At today’s rates the arithmetic is closer than it was three years ago — and for a foreign buyer there is a consequence at the sale that nobody mentions at the purchase.
• The VA loan benefit most veterans never useZero down, no mortgage insurance, and it can be used more than once — including while you still owe on a previous VA loan. Florida has one of the largest veteran populations in the country and the entitlement is routinely left on the table.
• What credit score do you actually need to buy in Florida?The minimums are lower than most people think. What changes with the score is not whether you are approved — it is what the money costs, and over thirty years that difference is not small.
• What not to do after you apply for a mortgageApprovals are re-verified days before closing. The car, the credit card and the helpful transfer from a relative are the three things that undo them, and all three feel harmless at the time.
• You do not need perfect credit, and four myths that keep people rentingSurveys keep finding that would-be buyers overestimate what they need by a wide margin — on the score, on the down payment, and on both at once. Here is what is actually required.

Investing

• A South Miami rehab, line by lineMost articles about renovating for profit are theory. This is one operation with its numbers: what it cost, what went wrong, what it sold for, and what was actually left after the costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet.
• Buying in your own name or through an LLCThe LLC is sold as protection and treated as a default. For a first Florida rental it often costs more than it returns — and for your own home it can cost you the homestead exemption entirely.
• How an investor actually reduces tax on a Florida rentalFlorida charges no state income tax, so everything here is federal. Six mechanisms do most of the work, and the one that surprises people is that the largest deduction is not a cash expense at all.
• Is a short-term rental a property business or a hotel business?It is a hotel business that happens to own real estate, and that distinction decides whether you should own one — especially if you do not live in Florida.
• Running a Florida rental from another stateYou can own a Florida rental from anywhere. What you cannot do from anywhere is be there when the air conditioning fails in August — and in Florida that is the call that decides whether a tenant renews.
• Short-term rentals in Miami: what the listing numbers leave outA nightly rate times 365 is not revenue, and revenue is not return. Here are the seven lines that come out between the headline and what reaches your account — plus the two that can stop the business entirely.
• Six mistakes that ruin a Florida investmentNone of them is picking the wrong area. All six are arithmetic or paperwork, and all six are avoidable in the ten days before you are committed.

Owning

• An ADU to help pay the mortgage: what it costs and what it earnsA garage conversion or a small detached unit can cover a meaningful share of a Florida mortgage payment. Whether you are allowed to build one is decided by your city, not by the state — and that is the first thing to check, not the last.
• If you cannot pay the mortgage in Florida, what actually helpsFlorida is a judicial foreclosure state, which means the process goes through a court and takes time. That time is the only asset you have, and it is worth more the earlier you use it.
• The deductions a Florida homeowner can actually takeWith no state income tax, the federal deductions work differently here — and for most Florida owners the honest answer is that the standard deduction beats itemising. Here is how to tell which side you are on.
• The same house, $3,000 apart: property tax across Florida countiesWhich county you buy in can move your annual tax bill by nearly $4,800 on the same $400,000 house. The cheapest county is not Miami-Dade, not Sarasota, and not anywhere most people guess.
• What actually happens to home values in a recessionHousing fell in one of the last six US recessions. In the other five it held or rose. 2008 is the exception everyone remembers, and treating it as the rule has kept a lot of people renting.
• What an underwater property is, and what to do if it is yoursYou owe more than it is worth. It is happening again in specific Florida pockets — condominium buildings hit by assessments, and areas that peaked in 2022 — and there are four ways out, none of them painless.
• Where home insurance eats the most of your house valueThe dollar premium grabs headlines, but the percentage of home value is what decides whether a purchase pencils out. Florida’s worst county hits 3.00% of value per year — higher than any county in New Jersey, New York, or Illinois.