Florida sellers must disclose known unpermitted work under the Johnson v. Davis duty on latent defects. The three real paths are a retroactive permit, a disclosed as-is listing at a discount, or a cash sale where the buyer prices the risk and takes it.
By Ty Stevenson, Founder of InTym Properties
Broward County's older housing stock runs on unpermitted work: garage conversions, enclosed porches, added bathrooms, and kitchen remodels done over decades by owners who never pulled a permit. Under the Florida Building Code, Chapter 553, permits are required for most structural, electrical, plumbing, and mechanical work, and § 553.79 sets the application and inspection framework. Work done without one is not rare or disqualifying; it is a known problem with three workable exits.
This post is about the seller's side of unpermitted work: the disclosure duty, the financing filter, and the choice between retro-permitting, pricing around it, and selling as-is. For the enforcement side, open permits that became citations, fines, or code liens, the code violations post covers the Broward machinery, and the code violations situation page covers the statute-level fines.
Florida's rule comes from Johnson v. Davis, 480 So. 2d 625 (Fla. 1985): a seller who knows of facts materially affecting the property's value that are not readily observable, and that the buyer could not discover, must disclose them. Unpermitted work you know about sits squarely in that category, and an "as-is" clause does not remove the duty.
Practically, disclosure protects the deal as much as the buyer. A buyer who learns about the unpermitted addition from a permit search three days before closing walks. A buyer who read it in the disclosure and still wrote the offer is the buyer who closes.
The permit search. Standard Broward practice is a municipal lien and permit search before closing. It pulls open and expired permits and flags work in the property's record that never was permitted or inspected. The buyer's side almost always finds it; the only question is whether they found it from you or from the search.
The appraisal and the lender. Appraisers note obvious unpermitted additions, and underwriters routinely require permits closed before they fund. This is the mechanism that quietly removes financed buyers from the pool: not a rule against the house, but a loan file that cannot clear.
Insurance. Carriers can decline coverage on unpermitted work at binding, and the nastier version is a denied claim later on damage traced to the unpermitted work. Either way it feeds back into the financing filter, since no loan closes without insurance.
Code enforcement. If the building department opens a case, unpermitted work becomes a recorded problem: fines under Chapter 162 run up to $250 a day for a first violation and $500 a day for repeats, and cities over 50,000, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pompano Beach, Coral Springs among them, can set higher ceilings by ordinance. At that point it is the code-violations lane, not this one.
Every Broward building department has an after-the-fact permit process. The realistic version: hire a contractor or engineer, open the work for inspection where required, produce drawings for anything structural, pay the permit fees plus penalties, and pass the inspections. Work that cannot be brought to code may have to come out.
This is the highest-cost path and sometimes the highest-net one: on a house where the unpermitted addition is the difference between a three-bedroom comp set and a two-bedroom one, closing the permits can move the retail price more than the work costs. The trade is weeks to months and real money up front, plus the risk that the inspector wants more opened than you planned.
The middle path is a straight retail listing with the unpermitted work disclosed up front and the price set for it. It works, with two known frictions. Retail buyers discount disclosed problems harder than their actual cost, because the discount prices the unknown, not just the permit fee. And the financed-buyer filter still applies: even a buyer willing to accept the work may lose their loan when the appraisal or the insurance flags it. The listing that keeps going under contract and falling out is usually this path discovering its own buyer pool.
A cash buyer treats unpermitted work the way they treat the roof or the cleanout: a cost line in the offer, not a reason to decline. No lender to satisfy, no appraisal contingency, no insurance binding problem, and the disclosure lives inside a transaction where the buyer already knows what they are pricing. The written offer arrives with the unpermitted work's remediation cost inside it, the seller signs, and the permit question becomes the buyer's project after closing.
The honest version of the trade: the cash number will be below a theoretical retail price, and on a house where the retro-permit is cheap and the comp set rewards it, doing the work first is the better net. Where the as-is sale wins is the common case, the house where the unpermitted work is one of several problems, the seller does not want to fund months of permits and contractors, and certainty plus a two-week close beats a higher number that needs a lender to survive.
For the broader version of that choice, the as-is versus fix-up post runs the same math on repairs generally, and the how we calculate your offer post shows what pricing a problem into an offer actually looks like line by line.
Selling a Broward County house with unpermitted work and no appetite for retro-permits? Email hello@intymproperties.com or schedule a call with Sean. InTym Properties buys as-is, prices the permit problem into the written offer, and closes usually within two weeks.
Yes. Nothing in Florida law bars the sale; what the law requires is disclosure. Known unpermitted work falls under the Johnson v. Davis duty to disclose material latent defects, so the seller's options are to retro-permit the work, disclose it and price around it, or sell as-is to a buyer, usually an investor, who prices the risk into the offer.
If you know about it, yes. Johnson v. Davis, 480 So. 2d 625 (Fla. 1985), requires sellers to disclose facts materially affecting the property's value that are not readily observable and that the buyer could not discover. An as-is clause does not erase that duty. Work you genuinely did not know about is a different question, but an unpermitted addition visible in the house is hard to call unknown.
No. Title searches find recorded liens and ownership issues; unpermitted work lives in the building department's permit records, which buyers, agents, and title companies check through a municipal lien and permit search. That is also where open permits surface, and an open permit that turned into a code enforcement case becomes a recorded lien a title search will find.
Yes, most Florida building departments offer an after-the-fact or retroactive permit. Expect the job to be opened for inspection, walls or ceilings exposed where needed, engineered drawings for structural work, penalty fees on top of permit costs, and possible demolition if the work cannot be brought to code. It is the most expensive path in dollars but can produce the best retail sale price.
Often no. Appraisers flag obvious unpermitted additions and conversions, and when the appraiser notes it, underwriters commonly require the permits closed before funding. Insurance is the second filter: carriers can decline or later deny claims tied to unpermitted work. A listed house with known unpermitted work that only attracts financed buyers is a listing that keeps falling out of contract.
The Davis line of cases gives the buyer claims for nondisclosure of known latent defects, which can mean damages or rescission. Beyond litigation risk, if the unpermitted work later surfaces in a permit search or an insurance claim denial, the nondisclosure becomes the fact pattern the lawsuit is built around. Disclosure is cheap; the alternative is not.
Related, not identical. Unpermitted work is work that was done without ever pulling a permit. A code violation is an enforcement action, a citation, fine, or lien, which may or may not involve unpermitted work. One becomes the other when the building department opens a case; until then, unpermitted work is a disclosure and financing problem rather than a lien problem.
Written offer usually within 48 hours, signed by InTym Properties, every number shown. No repairs, no fees, no obligation.
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