Selling a House With Liens or Code Violations In Miami-Dade? We Can Buy Your House For Cash.

Stuck between a hard money lender and the city

Hialeah

This one was a re-occupancy problem, and Hialeah's re-occupancy process is not a forgiving one. The owner had open permits, work the city wanted to see done, and no clear route to the end of it.

They were also on a hard money loan. Those are short-term by design — the plan is always to refinance out of them into ordinary financing. But you cannot refinance a property carrying open violations, because a conventional lender will not lend against it until the record is clean.

Which is a trap with no way out from the inside. The city would not clear the permits without the work being done. The work needed money. The money was supposed to come from a refinance that the open permits made impossible. Every month cost them more, and nothing about it was moving.

We bought the house, and brought in a general contractor we work with who knows the Hialeah building department well. Between us we cured every violation after closing.

That last part is worth being honest about, because it is not paperwork. It is engineering plans, inspections booked and rebooked, and somebody physically standing at a counter until it is done. It takes a full-time contractor who knows that particular department and how it works.

It is also why we bring one in rather than pretending we can do all of it ourselves — and it is exactly why an owner without those relationships can be genuinely, expensively stuck.

Fixing the small violation meant showing them the big one

Brownsville

A frame duplex in Brownsville, tenanted front and back, with a list of problems that looked survivable right up until you followed it through.

There was a violation for a central air unit installed without a permit. There was a front porch that was sagging. And the exterior walls were bulging.

Taken separately those are three repairs. Taken together they are a trap, and it works like this. To clear the air conditioning violation you pull a permit, and a permit brings an inspector to the property. The inspector does not look only at the air conditioning. He is standing in front of a frame house with bulging exterior walls, and bulging walls on a frame structure are not a cosmetic finding. They are a structural one.

At which point the original violation is the least of it. Curing what has now been seen means full engineering plans for the structure, and where those are not produced, the city’s remedy is a demolition order.

So the owner is standing somewhere genuinely difficult: the correct and responsible thing to do — pull the permit, fix the violation — is the thing that starts the larger process. And doing nothing is not safe either, because walls do not stop moving on account of nobody having filed anything. That is what people mean when they call a property like this a falling knife.

The tenancies in both units were their own problem, and not a separate one. Work of this kind happens around people living in the building, or it does not happen at all.

We bought it to take it down. Not for want of imagination about the existing house — as the honest read on it. Once a frame structure needs full engineering plans in order to keep standing, the money is going into rescuing a building rather than into having one, and past a certain point that stops adding up.

So it comes down, and a new construction duplex goes up in its place. Two units again, built properly and permitted from the ground. That is a real answer for a property in this condition, and it is not the one most buyers want to give, because giving it means saying out loud that the house is not worth saving.

Two eight-plexes bought for a son who was never going to be a contractor

Florida City

Two eight unit multifamily buildings in Florida City, side by side. Sixteen units in total, and about four of them producing rent.

The owner was an investor with properties across Florida, and he had not bought these for himself. He bought them for his son — the idea being that the son would repair them and have the rental income. It is a generous thing to do and it is a hard thing to hand somebody, because what is actually being handed over is not an income. It is a construction project in two buildings, and the income only exists on the far side of it.

There were several contractors, and none of them finished. That on its own is the whole story of a lot of stalled buildings. Every failed contractor costs money that is gone, time that cannot be recovered, and a little more of whatever confidence the owner had that the next one will be different.

So the buildings sat. Two units rented in each, wood over the windows on others, and several units not functional at all. Squatters had moved into a few. The grass got long enough that the city wrote citations for it.

And there was an air conditioning permit that had never been closed out, which had turned into a violation of its own. That one is worth separating from the rest, because it is the trap people least expect. The work was permitted. Somebody did the right thing at the start and pulled it. But a permit is not finished when the work is finished — it is finished when it is inspected and closed, and an open permit sitting there long enough stops being paperwork and becomes a violation with the building’s name on it.

None of it was one big failure. It was a building not getting the attention it needed, for long enough that the neglect started generating its own paperwork — and a vacant unit in a building nobody is watching does not stay vacant.

We bought both buildings together, which is the only sensible way to take two like that: the same crews, the same permits, the same inspectors, twice over.

A new roof, laid straight on top of the old one

North Miami

The contractor they hired laid the new roof directly on top of the old one instead of tearing the old one off. He did the same thing with the patio. No permit was pulled for any of it.

They paid for that roof. They believed it had been done properly. And they now hold a violation for unpermitted work they commissioned in good faith and had no way of knowing was wrong.

What happens next is worth following carefully, because it is the same chain for a great many Florida owners and almost nobody lays it out:

The roof leaks, because it was never really a new roof. The insurer finds out and starts writing letters asking for proof the work is being put right. Putting it right means permits, an engineer, and doing the roof properly this time — real money, which they did not have between them. While that stalls, mold starts growing inside the house. The property taxes come due. And if the insurer drops them, which was exactly where this was heading, the mortgage itself is in trouble, because a lender requires the house to be insured.

On top of all of it, the couple were going through a divorce.

Any one of those things is manageable. All of them at once, with no money and no agreement between the two of you, is not. It is not a failure of character. It is a chain reaction that started with one contractor cutting one corner.

We bought the house. They got their money and thirty days to leave, and we started pulling permits to correct the roof.

Not only so that we can sell it. So that it can be insured at all — and so the next family who buys it can actually be approved for a mortgage. A house in that condition cannot be financed by anybody, which is precisely why the chain is so hard to break from the inside.

If any of that sounds familiar, the moment to deal with it is before the insurance company makes the decision for you.

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.

Twenty-four units, and violations for work he says he never did

Liberty City

A twenty-four unit multifamily building on the Liberty City side of the Brownsville line, inherited, and three years behind on taxes. The taxes alone run thirty thousand dollars a year, so three years of them is not a small number. There was no insurance on the building at all.

It was largely abandoned and in bad condition. People were in the empty units who were not tenants — using them for drugs and for sex work — and there were dogs loose in the building. It was a dangerous place. Dangerous for anybody going near it, and dangerous for the people inside it, which is the half that usually gets left out.

The owner was living in one of the units. He was also doing the repairs himself, and that is where the real trouble started, because he was not a contractor. The work was mismatched and none of it was done well.

Then the citations began. This is the part worth reading twice: he told us the city was citing him for work he had not done, and he could not prove it either way. That is what unpermitted work actually costs, and it is not the fine. When work goes in without permits there is no record of what you did or when you did it — which means there is no record of what you did not do either. Every defect in the building becomes arguably yours, and you have nothing to point at.

Meanwhile: thirty thousand a year in taxes with three years outstanding, no insurance, twenty-four units mostly producing nothing, and a citation file getting longer. There is no version of that a man works his way out of from inside one of the units.

He sold it to us. We are still rebuilding it, which is the honest answer on this one. A twenty-four unit building in that condition does not finish quickly, and it would be a lie to write it up as though it already had.

Four units, unpermitted work, and a tenant who called the city

Allapattah

A fourplex in Allapattah — a quadplex, the way most people around here say it — that needed every repair there is. That part was simple enough. The complicated part was what had already been done to it.

The owner had carried out a number of repairs without pulling permits. People do that for a reason that is easy to understand — permits cost money and take time, and the work in front of you is real and needs doing now. It is also the decision that turns a maintenance problem into a records problem, and the records problem is the expensive one.

Then one of the tenants fell out with him and called code enforcement. It is worth being fair about that. A tenant who reports unpermitted electrical and plumbing work in the building he lives in is not doing anything unreasonable. But it meant the city was looking now, and the violations were open.

Which put the owner in a corner. Curing it was not a few weekends. It meant engineering plans drawn up first, then permits pulled for electrical, plumbing and the rest, then inspections, then whatever the inspections turned up. Tens of thousands of dollars, and several months at the optimistic end — realistically closer to a year. He had neither the money nor the time, and the building stayed full of people the whole time none of it was happening.

So he sold it to us. We took on the record, and we took on the tenants — including the one who had made the call.

That is the honest description of a purchase like this. It is not a discount on a building. It is somebody taking on a process with a firm start date and no reliable end date, on a property that stays occupied the whole way through. The owner was out from under it in a matter of weeks. Getting out from under it properly took a great deal longer than that, and it was ours to do.

He owned the house outright, and was still going to lose it

Buena Vista

A single family house in Buena Vista, owned outright. No mortgage on it at all. And three years of unpaid property taxes, with code violations alongside them.

People assume a house with no loan against it is safe, and it is not. There was no lender in this picture and no monthly payment anybody had missed. Just taxes that had gone unpaid for three years running. Owning something free and clear does not protect it from what is owed on it, and that is the part which catches people out — they are not behind on anything they signed for, so it does not feel like the kind of trouble that takes a house.

We paid the back taxes. That was part of the purchase rather than a favour — arrears come off at closing, because that is the only way a sale leaves clean title behind it. The practical effect for him was that the thing threatening the house stopped threatening it.

Then the part he actually needed, which was time. He was not ready to walk out of the house. There were belongings to go through and things to get in order before he would be comfortable leaving, and that is not a weekend.

So he set the closing date. Not us. And after closing he had thirty days or so still in the house, with the money from the sale already in hand.

That order matters more than it sounds. Most people move on the proceeds of the move, which forces the whole thing into the wrong sequence — find somewhere, commit to it, then hope the money lands in time. He had the money first and the deadline last, which is the only version of this that lets somebody choose where they are going instead of taking whatever is available.