Selling an Inherited Condo or House in the City of Miami

Start with the building's paperwork, because that is what the buyer will start with. Florida requires a milestone structural inspection for condominium and cooperative buildings of three or more habitable stories once they reach 30 years, repeated every 10 years, and the local building official can pull that forward to 25 years where conditions such as proximity to salt water justify it. Most of Miami's inherited-unit inventory sits in exactly those buildings. The association has to send every unit owner a summary of the inspection report within 45 days of receiving it, so the estate usually already has it in the decedent's mail or the association portal.

On resale, the seller must hand a prospective buyer the declaration, the articles and bylaws, the annual budget and financial statement, the milestone inspection report summary if one exists, and either the association's structural integrity reserve study or a statement that none has been completed. The buyer then has seven days, excluding weekends and legal holidays, to cancel after signing and receiving that package, and the right ends at closing. A cash buyer who has never seen the documents has not really made an offer, because the number can still move inside that window.

This is why matched buyers in Miami ask for the inspection status first and the unit second. A building with a completed phase-one inspection, no phase-two required, and a funded reserve study draws the broadest pool. A building with a phase-two under way and a pending special assessment draws specialists who price the assessment as a line item. Either way the estate gets a defensible figure. What it should not do is price the unit from a comparable sale that closed before the report came back.

If the person who owned the Miami unit was not a Florida resident when they died, the estate here is an ancillary administration rather than a primary one. Florida's statute covers a nonresident who dies leaving assets in the state, and it sets an order of priority for who serves: the person the will names to handle Florida property, then the foreign personal representative if they can qualify here, then an alternate named in the will, and otherwise a representative chosen by those holding a majority interest in the Florida property. Anyone other than the domiciliary personal representative who seeks ancillary letters has to give that representative prior notice.

The physical-filing rule matters more in this scenario than in any other. The Eleventh Circuit routes filings through the statewide portal, but authenticated or exemplified copies from another jurisdiction, original death certificates, and original wills have to be filed in person at the probate counter in the Soto Justice Center. When those documents come from a court in another country, the translation and authentication steps happen before the Miami file can move, and the buyer's contract has to be written to wait for them. Florida's short-form route for admitting a nonresident's will applies only where the Florida property is worth $50,000 or less, which rules out nearly any condo inside the city.

The clerk's fee schedule treats formal and ancillary administration identically at $401, and the county's disposition-without-administration route is closed to any estate that includes real property, so there is no shortcut around a court file. Practically, an heir in São Paulo or Madrid does not need to fly in to sell: the ancillary personal representative, once appointed, signs the contract and the deed, and the closing agent arranges remote signing. What the heir does need is a buyer who will hold a price through the authentication wait, which is the thing the matching process is built to find.

A buyer can sign with the estate before the court has ruled, but the closing happens on one of three tracks and the contract should name which. The first is the sale-of-real-property petition under the circuit's CC-09 checklist, available only when the property was titled to the decedent and is an asset of the estate, no order determining homestead status has been entered, and the case is not a summary administration. The petition has to describe the sale as an arm's-length transaction at fair market value, attach the contract, include notarized consents from the beneficiaries entitled to the property or proof of formal notice, and carry a broker's comparable-sales letter or, above $600,000, an appraisal. The order directs the decedent's share of the proceeds into the estate's restricted depository.

The second track is protected homestead. The personal representative's control over the decedent's property does not extend to protected homestead, so when the decedent lived in the Miami unit or house the court first determines homestead status and the property passes to the heirs outside the estate. After that order it is the heirs who sign the deed, not the personal representative, and a contract the PR signed alone may not be the contract that closes. The third track is summary administration, where the order itself assigns the property to the people entitled to it and a bona fide purchaser for value from those people takes it free of the decedent's creditors' claims.

None of this is legal advice, and the estate's attorney decides the track. What a seller can control is getting the buyer's written offer to reflect it: a closing contingency tied to the order that actually applies, a price that holds through the wait, and a buyer who has closed on that track in this courthouse before.