How to read a Miami condo before you buy

When a buyer sends us a listing and asks whether the price is fair, the honest answer is that the price of the apartment is the easy part. The expensive part, the part that decides whether this purchase goes well, sits in the building's paperwork.

We ask for four documents before we will give a view on any Florida condominium. If the seller does not have them, or is slow to produce them, that is already information.

1. The reserve study

After the Surfside collapse in 2021, Florida stopped letting condominium associations postpone saving for structural repairs indefinitely. Buildings of three storeys or more must commission a structural integrity study and fund reserves for the items it identifies: roof, structure, waterproofing, windows, plumbing, electrical.

A building with underfunded reserves is not a cheap building. It is a building that will send you the bill, and in a condominium that bill arrives as a special assessment: a one-off charge that can run to five or six figures and is not negotiable. Read the study, look at the gap between what is required and what is held, and divide it by the number of units.

2. The association minutes

Twelve months of minutes cost nothing and say more than any brochure. They carry the live litigation, the arguments about insurance, the works that were approved and the works that were deferred, and the tone in which the board talks to itself.

3. The master policy and its deductible

Insurance in Florida repriced hard over recent years, and the building's master policy is a shared cost that comes out of your monthly dues. What matters is not only the premium but the wind and hurricane deductible, usually expressed as a percentage of insured value. A 5% deductible on a large building is a special assessment waiting for a storm.

4. The rental rules

If the property is for income, the condominium's own rules decide whether your plan works. Many buildings impose a minimum lease term, a waiting period after purchase before you may let at all, a cap on the share of units that may be rented, or board approval of the tenant. Any one of those four can turn a short-let plan into an impossibility.

We read all four before you book a flight, and we tell you which of them makes the deal not worth doing. Ruling a building out on a call is cheaper than discovering it at the first assessment.