Florida has laws that protect the buyer and the seller of property. These rules ensure that buyers and sellers get the fair price for the home in question. This means that you need to give full disclosure of the property when you are selling your home, or the buyer can come after you after the fact. This disclosure is called “A Seller’s Disclosure.”
Inside this information packet the buyer needs to include everything seen and unseen that’s known about the property by the seller. It guides the value and price of a property being sold. The information included must be honest, disclosing all information potential buyers will want and need to know about the property’s history of problems, if any exist.
However, the wording of disclosures can be misleading, and a property owner may think they’ve done their due diligence when in fact they needed to do more digging. The following are the common disclosures that property owners must be aware of: Sellers Real Property Disclosure, Condominium and HOA Disclosure, and Lead Based Paint Disclosure.
Sellers might even need to have certain inspections completed on their home in order to comply with a disclosure requirements. The most common inspections are: Home Inspection, Radon Inspection, Mold Inspection, and Termite Inspection. Once an inspection has been completed the home owner must make the findings available to the interested parties.
The 6 most important things to include in your disclosure are: Repairs, Termites, Water/Mold Damage, Lead, Natural Damage, and Infamous Past. If you fail to disclose any of these items in your report the buyer can come after you with a law suit. However, you are not responsible for property defects of which you have no knowledge of.
In order to successfully prosecute you for failure to disclose information about your house, the prosecution must be able to prove that you knew about the property defect, the defect has a substantial impact on the value of the property, the buyer did not, upon purchase, know about the defect, the defect would not have been easy for the buyer to detect, and that you did not tell the buyer about the defect.
Even if you’re selling your house “As Is”, you still need to disclose the above mentioned information, failure to do so can result in a law suit, even if you assume that the buyer knows that they’re buying a real “fixer upper.” Not all buyers go after the seller after the sale has been completed, but you need to be honest and forthcoming with the property’s history so the price is fair and the buyer knows exactly what they are purchasing.
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