Selling your home in S Florida: What You Need To Know
Channel: Roy Oppenheim
Date: 2024-03-19

To sell a home in Broward County or South Florida, Roy Oppenheim advises potential sellers to first determine their destination, addressing the current "locked-in effect" where individuals feel bound to their homes due to low mortgages and high prices; the process involves listing the property, possibly through a realtor or by owner, careful negotiation of offers, disclosure of property issues, legal considerations with an attorney, and finalizing the sale with the title company, emphasizing the importance of knowing where to go before initiating the selling process

Oppenheim Law 
2500 Weston Rd Suite 209
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33331 
954-384-6114
https://www.oppenheimlaw.com  

Full Transcript:

Hi, Roy Oppenheim "From the Trenches." Sometimes people ask me, what is the process for actually selling a home in Broward County or really for all of South Florida for that matter? And the first thing you gotta do is if you're gonna be selling your home, you gotta make sure you know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you know you need to think twice about whether or not you're gonna sell your home.

Right now we have this thing called the locked-in effect, which I've been talking and blogging about in the past. And that is where people feel locked into their homes as sellers because they can't go somewhere. They have a low mortgage, they can't take that mortgage with them, and prices are still very high and they have nowhere to go. So you may end up renting, you may decide moving closer to the kids, moving in with the kids. Maybe you're going into some sort of a complex you know, for a 55 and over of some type. But you need to know where to go.

So assuming you know where you're going and you wanna sell your home, the first thing you're gonna do is you're going to list your property. And typically you're gonna list your property through the multiple listing service, although you don't have to do that. But that's typically the case. And in order to do that, you'll usually use a realtor. In some instances, people don't use realtors, they don't use the MLS, they just put a sign on their lawn, and they maybe just even will put it through Zillow. I think Zillow still takes by owner, but maybe they stopped doing that. And you then will sell the property by owner.

And if you do that, you need to make sure that you have a good attorney waiting to review any contracts that you get in because the buyer's gonna submit an offer to you once they see that the property is for sale. And you then need to review it and decide whether or not you're going to sign it or if you're gonna counter that offer. And if you're gonna counter that offer, you need to make sure that when you do the counter, that you're not going to lose your buyer. Because if your counter's unreasonable, you're going to lose a buyer. And the buyer's no longer gonna be on that fishing hook.

So once you reel that buyer in and you have a contract, you of course will then need to disclose, or you don't really have to, but most people do disclose any issues concerning leaks and other problems with the house. In some cases, people choose not to disclose and just use an as is contract and say, "You know, I'm not disclosing anything." And legally they can, in fact, do that. And in some circumstances, we advise that there's no need to disclose. So you should have an attorney to decide with you what you should disclose and not disclose.

We've had litigation many times where people do disclose something and it's not fully disclosed and they don't disclose it properly. And so you need to be very careful on your disclosures when you're selling a home. Once that is done the title company's gonna start preparing title. They'll get the payoffs, get the established from the homeowner association or the condo association. And at that point, you better make sure you know where you're going because you have to start putting your stuff in boxes and get ready to move.

And then on closing day, if all goes well, you sign the deed, you get a check, your mortgage company's paid off, and you have a great rest of your life. Roy Oppenheim "From the Trenches." Thank you.