A move to Miami goes wrong in two ways: the paperwork that decides your taxes is done late or not at all, and the housing decision is made in the first week from a hotel room. Both are avoidable, and both are avoided by doing things in order.
This page is the order. Ninety days is not a rule; it is roughly how long the decisions take when they are made properly, and long enough to be living here before you buy. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
If you are leaving a state with an income tax, the move only counts when your domicile changes, and the state you are leaving decides whether it did. The steps are known: the Florida driver licence, the voter registration, the declaration of domicile filed with the county clerk, the address on every account and return, and the near and dear things actually moved. None decides it alone. Together, with the days spent here, they are the case. This is done with a tax adviser in the state you are leaving, and it is done before anything is bought.
The pages on this site for New York, California, Chicago and Michigan set out what each state looks at. The short version for all of them: the apartment is the easy part.
Almost every buyer who regrets a Miami purchase bought in the first month. Rent for a season in the zone you think you want, and find out whether you actually walk to dinner, whether the causeway matters, whether the school run is twenty minutes or forty. The zone pages on this site are for narrowing; the season is for confirming.
While renting, look properly. The desk covers the new buildings across the city and will put the ones that fit the brief in front of you with the current position on each, so that by the end of the season you are choosing between three residences rather than starting the search.
With the zone confirmed, the purchase is the process set out on the how to buy a condo page: the brief, the building, the contract, the documents read by a Florida attorney inside the cancellation window, the deposits or the closing. If the building is new, the deposits are staged through construction and the closing is years away, which means you may rent for longer than a season, and that is normal here.
The order is rent, domicile, look, buy. The common mistake is buy, then discover the rest.
Florida car insurance is its own market and the car is registered here within ten days of establishing residence. Homeowners and condo insurance are the hardest lines in a Miami budget and are quoted before a contract is signed, not after. The homestead exemption, which caps the annual rise in your property tax, is filed by the first of March for the year after you own and occupy the home as your permanent residence. The hurricane season runs June to November and a new building is built to the current code; an older one may not be.
And the people. Miami is easy to arrive in and slow to settle in, and the people who settle fastest chose a zone they could walk in and joined something in the first month. That is not the desk’s department, but it is the truth.
The desk at Miami Dossier handles the property side of a move: the zones that fit, the new buildings in them, the current position on each, the documents. For the rest it makes introductions, to the tax adviser who handles residency, the attorney who reads the contract, the school adviser, the lender, and it takes no fee for any of them.
This is the desk at Miami Dossier, a real estate desk covering the Miami market. It reads the developer’s documents, keeps the current position on every new building it covers, and puts the buildings that fit a brief in front of you the same day.
A private report on the Miami market, sent when there is something worth knowing. No noise, no listings, no pressure.
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Nothing on this page is legal, tax or investment advice, and the timelines are the general Florida position, not your position. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through the buildings that fit, the current position on each and what the next step actually is. Where a question is legal, tax or immigration, we introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.
