Selling a Miami condo

A house sale turns on the house. A condo sale turns on the building — and since Florida rewrote its condominium law after Surfside, a buyer's lender, attorney and inspector all look at your association before they look at your kitchen. That is the part most sellers discover late, usually during someone else's cancellation window. This page is the sequence in the order it actually bites: what a buyer will find out about your building, how to price against sales that genuinely closed rather than prices somebody once asked, and what leaves the closing table before you do.

Published September 5, 2026

Almost every page written for Miami sellers is about presentation — staging, photography, "maximizing curb appeal" on the eleventh floor. None of it is wrong, and none of it is what moves a condominium sale in 2026. Three things do: what your association's paperwork says, whether your price is anchored to a real transaction, and whether the money side is set up before you sign rather than after.

1. Your building is inspected before your unit is

A buyer making a serious offer on a Miami condominium now asks for the association's documents, and a buyer using a mortgage has a lender asking the same questions independently. What comes back decides whether the offer survives the inspection period.

Three findings kill more Miami condo deals than any defect inside a unit:

• An assessment that has been discussed but not levied. It is in the minutes before it is on a bill, and a buyer who reads the minutes finds it. Whether it attaches to you or to them is a contract question, and it is far cheaper to answer it in your listing than in a renegotiation.
• A reserve study that has not been completed, or reserves that are not being funded. For budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024, owners can no longer vote to waive reserves for the components a structural integrity reserve study covers. A building still catching up is a building where the buyer can see a bill coming.
• A milestone inspection due, overdue, or completed with findings. Where a building sits on its clock is a matter of record, and where the report exists, the buyer will read it.

None of these are reasons not to sell. They are reasons to know the answer first, because the alternative is learning it in week three of an escrow while the buyer's attorney drafts the objection.

• What is in your board minutes — read them the way your buyer will
• The reserve study, and how to read one
• Milestone inspections and Miami-Dade recertification
• Selling with an assessment in play — who pays, and when it attaches
• What changed in Florida condo law, and what it costs

2. Price against what closed, not against what was asked

The number on a competing listing is an opinion. The number on a recorded deed is a fact, and the two are routinely far apart in the same building in the same quarter.

There is a second trap underneath that one. Not every recorded sale is a comparable. The Miami-Dade roll contains foreclosures, transfers between related entities, deed corrections recorded for a nominal sum, and bulk developer closings — and Florida's Department of Revenue flags them. Only arm's-length transfers belong in your pricing. A median that includes the rest is wrong in a way nobody reading it could detect, which is precisely how a unit ends up listed for six months at a number no buyer was ever going to pay.

Every building page on this site is built that way: what traded, filtered to arm's-length sales, with the excluded transfers shown and the reason stated.

• Your building's page — the recorded sales, filtered, with the county assessment beside them
• How the method works, on one market
• How buildings are compared here, and what the score does not claim
• Selling a waterfront house rather than a unit — the seawall standard, the elevation certificate and the dock permits a buyer will ask about
• What the island houses have sold for — the recorded arm’s-length figures, and how many transfers were excluded to get them
• What buyers actually paid across eleven markets — recorded sales by price band, with the square footage behind each

3. What leaves the closing table

Sellers price on the offer and plan on the offer. The gap between the offer and the wire is usually wider than expected, and every line in it is knowable in advance.

Documentary stamps on the deed are fixed by statute rather than negotiated. In Miami-Dade the rate is $0.60 per $100 of consideration, and the county's additional $0.45 per $100 surtax applies to property other than a single-family residence — which, on a condominium, means it generally applies. In Florida the seller customarily pays the stamps on the deed; the buyer pays those on any new mortgage. Customary, not statutory: the contract can move it.

Then the brokerage fee, the estoppel fee, prorated property tax and association dues to the day of closing, any recording and lien-release costs, and the payoff itself.

• Seller net proceeds calculator — every rate visible and editable, nothing assumed behind the scenes
• What your association charges, and why it moved

4. If you are not a US person for tax

FIRPTA withholding is deducted at closing on a sale by a foreign person, and it is withheld from the gross price rather than from the gain. On a property that has not appreciated much, the withholding can exceed the tax actually owed — and getting it back means waiting for a return to be processed, unless the reduction is applied for before closing.

That application has to be filed in the right order relative to the closing date. It is the single most common expensive surprise for an overseas seller in Florida, and it is entirely avoidable with notice.

• FIRPTA — how the withholding works and how to reduce it before closing
• Holding structure and estate exposure
• La même chose en français — the cross-border material for Canadian and European owners, including form 8288-B and the T1135 declaration
• Selling as a Canadian — withheld on the price rather than the gain, the 10% and 0% tiers, and the certificate that only works before closing

• The board's approval of your buyer — whether it has the power at all, what it may charge, and the calendar it costs you
• The estoppel certificate — $299 not the $250 in the statute, ten business days, and free to you if the association is late

What this page does not yet cover

One thing a seller should weigh is not written up on this site yet, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.

Capital gains and the primary-residence exclusion. How the federal exclusion applies to a condominium that has been let for part of its ownership is a tax question with a real answer, and it belongs on a sourced page carrying a tax disclaimer rather than in a paragraph here.

It is being researched. Until it is published, treat the calculator above as covering completion costs only, not your tax position.

The association's approval of your buyer is now written up — and the headline is that no Florida association has an automatic right to approve anything: the power exists only where the declaration creates it, and the fee is capped at $150 per applicant.