What Florida Law Does to the House in a Divorce

Most married Florida couples hold the marital home as tenants by the entireties — a form of ownership available only to spouses, in which neither owns a divisible share and the survivor takes the whole. It is why creditors of one spouse generally cannot reach the house, and why neither of you can sell or mortgage it alone.

Dissolution ends that automatically. Florida law converts an estate by the entireties into a tenancy in common the moment the marriage is dissolved, without anyone signing anything. The practical consequences arrive immediately: the right of survivorship is gone, so if your former spouse dies the following week their half passes to their heirs rather than to you. Each of you now holds a distinct, transferable half interest — which either of you can sell, or ask a court to divide by partition.

This is why the timing question ('do we sell now or after the final judgment?') is really a question about which set of rules you want governing the sale. Selling while you are still married means one closing, one deed, both signatures, and proceeds divided under an agreement you negotiated. Selling afterward means two co-tenants with separate interests, separate advisors, and a partition action available to whichever one loses patience. Most Florida couples who sell at all sell during the case.

Keeping the marital home feels like the stable choice, and in Florida it is frequently the expensive one — for reasons that have nothing to do with the mortgage.

The first is the assessment cap. Florida's Save Our Homes limitation holds the annual increase in a homestead's assessed value to a small percentage, so a house owned for fifteen years is often taxed on a fraction of what it would sell for. That accumulated benefit attaches to the homestead and the exemption, not to the person, and a change in ownership and residency can reset it. A spouse who agrees to keep the house on the strength of last year's tax bill can find the following year's bill computed from a much larger number.

The second is portability, and it cuts the other way — in your favor, if you know to ask. Florida lets a homeowner carry the accumulated assessment difference to a new homestead, and the statute contemplates exactly the divorce case: when co-owners abandon a jointly titled homestead, each one establishing a new homestead may take a share of the benefit. It is not automatic. It is claimed through your county property appraiser, and it is worth real money to both of you — which makes it something to divide deliberately in the settlement rather than discover afterward.

The third is insurance. Florida homeowners' premiums are the highest in the country, and a policy underwritten years ago on a two-income household is a different proposition for one person. Any honest comparison of 'keep it' against 'sell it and split' has to price taxes and insurance as they will be after the judgment, not as they appear on the current statement.

Florida's equitable distribution statute instructs the court to begin from the premise that marital assets should be divided equally, and in a contested case to make specific written findings valuing each significant asset. That framework needs a number for the house. It does not supply a method for producing one.

So the parties produce methods of their own, and the gap between them is the case. An appraisal is one professional's opinion built from selected comparable sales; change the selection and the opinion moves. In Florida markets where a flood zone, a roof age, an assessment on a condo, or an insurance quote can reprice an otherwise identical property, two competent appraisers reach two honest and very different conclusions. Nobody is lying, and nobody can prove the other wrong, which is precisely why these disputes run for months.

Written purchase offers do something an appraisal structurally cannot: they commit money. A buyer who names a price and a closing date is making a falsifiable claim about the property in its current condition, with its current roof and its current insurance profile. Several such offers, gathered at the same time, produce a documented range rather than a contested opinion — and a range is something a mediator can move two people toward. Most Florida family cases resolve at mediation, not trial, which makes evidence that shortens mediation worth more than evidence that wins an argument at a hearing that may never happen.