Selling a House During an Eviction In Miami-Dade? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

A violation from the day they bought it, at two hundred dollars a day

Miami Gardens

A single family house in Miami Gardens that had been in violation from the day the seller bought it, and nobody had told them.

The property needed a re-occupancy before it could lawfully be lived in. They did not know that. It is not an unreasonable thing not to know — it is a municipal step that does not announce itself at a closing table, and plenty of people buy a house without ever hearing the phrase. It was never done, so the violation existed from the beginning.

They owned it around two years and rented it out. Then the tenant stopped paying.

So now there is no income arriving. And the violation that had been sitting quietly started being served — and a violation that goes unanswered becomes a lien, and the lien carries fines that accrue. This one was running at about two hundred dollars a day.

Two hundred a day, on a house producing nothing, against an owner who did not know the meter was running. That is the part that does the real damage. A fine you know about is a bill. A fine you do not know about is a number getting quietly larger while you get on with your life, and by the time it has your attention it is into the tens of thousands.

Getting out of it took two separate legal processes, not one. An attorney to run the eviction, because a tenant who has stopped paying does not leave because they were asked. And a second attorney to work on mitigating the fines, which is its own specialist exercise with the county and not something the first attorney does. Neither is quick, and both cost money — money that was meant to be coming from a rent nobody was paying.

We bought it and took all of it on. The fines were dealt with. The re-occupancy was completed properly, which is the thing that should have happened at the very start. The tenancy was ended through the court, which is the only way it can be done and have it stay done.

And then the actual work began — the updates, the repairs, bringing the house back. Which is worth noticing, because it is what people underestimate about a property in this position. Every one of those steps happens before a single useful thing gets done to the building. The renovation is the straightforward part, and it is last in the queue.

The eviction that ended in the rain

Liberty City

The owners were an elderly couple. Their tenant of fifteen years was a good man who was retiring to Georgia to be near his family, and there was never any argument with him at all.

At some point he had let his grandson move into the property, and the grandson's behaviour towards the owners had become threatening. Two people in their eighties, frightened of their own tenant, and no longer able to deal with a property they had owned for decades.

We bought it, and we offered the grandson cash for keys — money and time to arrange somewhere else to go. He refused, and turned the same behaviour on us.

So it went through the courts, because that is the only route left when somebody will not take an agreement.

On the day the sheriff came, it rained. He had not packed. He had not arranged a truck. He had not, as far as we could tell, accepted that any of it was going to happen. We had men there to carry his things out, and they ended up on the front lawn in the rain.

That is not a good day for anybody, and it is not a day we enjoy. We had offered him a better version of it more than once.

This is why cash for keys exists, and why we lead with it every time. We would far rather pay somebody to leave with their dignity and their belongings dry. But when that is refused, the legal process is what remains — and an owner in their eighties should not be the person standing in the rain watching it happen.