This is a well travelled route. Thousands of foreign buyers complete it every year, and the parts that feel opaque from the outside are routine from the inside.
This page describes the shape of the process. What your bank and your country require specifically is a conversation to have early, and one the desk is happy to have with you. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
Money moves from your bank abroad, through the international payment system, into an escrow account held by a Florida escrow agent, usually a title company or an attorney’s trust account, and is released at closing under the terms of the contract.
Four parties are involved: your bank, any correspondent bank in between, the receiving bank in the United States, and the escrow agent. Each of them has a compliance obligation, and each of them is looking at the same thing, which is whether the funds are what they appear to be and are coming from where they appear to come from.
The single most useful thing to understand is that this is a documentation exercise, not a negotiation. Funds that arrive with a clear, consistent story go through. Funds that arrive without one get questions.
Once you see it that way, the process stops being mysterious and becomes a checklist, and checklists are solvable.
Open the conversation with your own bank first. Before anything else, tell your bank what you intend to do and ask what they will need. Banks are considerably more helpful in advance than they are mid transfer, and this single step prevents most of the friction people encounter.
Establish the receiving instructions from the escrow agent. These come from the title company or attorney holding the escrow, in writing, and they should be confirmed directly rather than relied upon from an email you received passively. Confirming wire instructions by voice with a known contact is standard practice and it exists for good reason.
Assemble the source of funds documentation. This has its own note. In outline it is the evidence trail showing where the money came from, and it is easier to assemble before you need it than under time pressure.
Send, and expect the transfer to be reviewed. International transfers of size are examined. That is the system working rather than failing.
Confirm receipt with the escrow agent directly. Not with anybody else.
Keep the whole record. Every confirmation, statement and letter. You will want it at closing and possibly at sale.
The wire is usually the fastest part. What takes time is everything upstream of it: satisfying your own bank, converting currency if you are converting, meeting any local requirement to register or report an outbound transfer, and assembling documentation.
Buyers consistently underestimate the first of those and overestimate the last. Your own bank in your own country is frequently the longest step, particularly if the relationship is new or the amount is unusual for the account.
The practical instruction is simple: start with your bank the week you start looking seriously, not the week the deposit is due. Everything downstream is easier when that conversation has already happened.
If your funds are not in dollars, somebody converts them. Where that happens, at what rate and with what spread is a decision, and leaving it to happen automatically at the receiving end is a decision too.
Institutions differ considerably in what they charge for this, and the difference on a large sum is not trivial. It is worth asking your bank directly what rate and spread apply, and worth knowing that specialist providers exist.
We do not advise on currency, we do not forecast rates, and we will not tell you when to convert. What we will do is make sure the question is on the table early enough to be decided rather than absorbed.
United States financial institutions operate under anti money laundering obligations, and real estate transactions have their own reporting requirements. The escrow agent, the title company and the banks all have duties here, and they take them seriously.
That is a good thing for a legitimate buyer. It is the reason a foreign buyer can move a substantial sum into a jurisdiction they have never lived in and have it held safely by a third party until the conditions of a contract are met. The diligence is what makes the escrow trustworthy.
The requirement is that the money is clean and that its origin can be evidenced. If it is, the process is administrative. Every case we have seen where a transfer became genuinely difficult involved documentation that had not been assembled, not a rule that could not be met.
Situations vary enormously. Funds held across multiple countries, proceeds from a business sale, an inheritance, an account in a jurisdiction with its own outbound requirements, a buyer with no United States banking relationship. We have seen all of these complete.
What they had in common is that somebody sequenced the steps, engaged the right institutions early and documented properly. None of them required anything clever.
If your situation looks complicated to you, it is worth describing it to the desk before you assume it is a problem. Most of the time it is a sequence question rather than an obstacle.
The step buyers leave until last is almost always the one that takes longest, and it is the one entirely within your control to start early. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will map the sequence for your situation and tell you which step needs to begin first, and connect you with the institutions and advisers who do this routinely.
We hold no listings and we are not the developer. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through the current position on any building we cover, including the parts a sales gallery would rather skip. Where a question is legal, tax or structuring, we introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.