For Homestead owners

Renting out your house, and whether you should

I am a REALTOR in south Miami-Dade and I sell homes here, which makes this an odd page for me to write: some of the owners who ask me about renting would do better to sell, and that is a thing worth hearing from the person who would otherwise be writing the lease. So this page does both. First, what that decision actually turns on. Then, if you decide to hold it, exactly what has to happen: the rent set off what has really leased, a tenant screened against a written standard, a lease that holds, and a deposit handled the way Florida requires.

Updated 2026-10-04

First decide whether you are holding it at all

Most owners arrive here having already made that decision and come looking for the mechanics. Make the decision properly first. It is the expensive one, and it is only easy to reverse in one direction.

What it sells for today against what it nets as a rental, both as real figures rather than one price set against one hope. Those are two separate analyses and you want them side by side, on paper, before anybody advertises anything.

The tax clock, which expires quietly. If the house has been your primary residence, federal rules allow a significant amount of gain to be excluded when you sell, but the exclusion turns on having lived in it for enough of the years immediately before the sale. Rent it out for long enough and that window closes, and the tax on the gain can be larger than the rent you collected while it was open. This is the single most expensive thing owners do by accident. Work out when the window closes before you sign a lease, and work it out with a tax professional rather than from a website.

Who your buyer would have been. The buyer who pays the most for a house in Homestead is usually an owner-occupant, often a first-time buyer with an approval in hand and a reason to be in this city specifically. That buyer needs possession. Once a tenant is in place with months left on the term, the lease ordinarily survives a sale, and your market narrows toward investors, who buy on what a property produces rather than on how the kitchen feels. So holding does not simply postpone the sale. It changes who is available to buy it, and at what price.

And the option nobody offers you: hold it for one defined term and revisit. A twelve-month lease is not a permanent decision, and it buys information you cannot get any other way: what the house really rents for, what it really costs to run, and whether you mind being a landlord. The caveat is the tax clock above. A defined term is close to a free option while you are inside that window, and an expensive one after it.

If you hold it, these are the numbers that decide it

Start from a rent you can defend. That means what comparable houses have actually leased for, not what they are asking, because asking prices are opinions and signed leases are facts. The MLS records both the rent a property agreed and how many days it took to get there, and that is the input worth working from.

Then subtract everything that runs whether or not a tenant is in place: the mortgage, the taxes at the rate the property will actually be assessed at, insurance, the association fee, and a real allowance for maintenance rather than a token one.

Then subtract a vacancy allowance, because no house is occupied every month forever. That is arithmetic rather than pessimism. Divide the monthly rent by thirty and that is what one empty day costs you while everything in the paragraph above carries on. Then subtract turnover: paint, cleaning, repairs and a fee to find the next tenant, every time one leaves.

What is left is the real number, and it is frequently much smaller than the rent figure people open with. Occasionally it is negative. Discovering that on paper costs you nothing. Discovering it in year two costs you a year.

The same figure has a second use, on the sale side. Investors are part of the buyer pool in this city, and an investor's ceiling is set by what the property produces. So a rent you can defend also tells you roughly where an investor's offer would land, which is worth knowing whichever way you end up going.

Two different jobs, and which one you are actually asking for

Owners tend to open with a question about property management when what they need this year is a qualified tenant on a sound lease. The two pieces of work overlap at the start and then separate completely.

Getting a tenant in has an end point. Set the rent, photograph it, list it, show it, screen the applicants against a written standard, prepare the lease, collect the first month and the deposit, document the condition, hand over the keys. Then it is finished, and the property is yours to run.

Running it is the years afterwards. Rent collection and the statements that go with it, repairs and the vendors who do them, the call at nine in the evening, the renewal decision, the deposit held correctly and accounted for the whole time, and the statutory notices when something goes wrong.

Where I sit, stated plainly, because you should hear it from me rather than work it out later. I am a REALTOR and I sell homes in south Miami-Dade, mostly in and around Homestead, and I work with buyers, first-time buyers included. For an owner, what I do is the analysis above and then the finite piece of work: finding and screening a tenant for you, and getting the lease and the deposit right. On ongoing management I have one property, so if what you want is a company with a maintenance department fielding calls across a portfolio, that is a different product, and I would rather say so than imply I run one.

Set the rent off closed leases, and market it like a listing

Overpricing is the more expensive of the two mistakes available here. A rent set slightly low corrects itself at renewal. A month with nobody in it does not come back, and none of the carrying costs in the section above pause while you hold out for a number.

Then market it as a property rather than as a classified advertisement. Plenty of rentals get a handful of dark phone photographs, no floor plan and a description that lists the bedroom count, and the house then loses to better-presented competition on presentation rather than on merit. Photographs with the lights on, the blinds up and the clutter gone. The MLS, which is what puts the house in front of every agent in Miami-Dade with a client who needs one, and which is where the tenant usually comes from. I have been on both sides of this transaction in this city, so that is observation rather than theory. Syndication out to the rental portals follows from the MLS rather than replacing it.

Access. Every restriction on when the house can be seen removes applicants who cannot make that window, and applicants with steady jobs are looking outside their own working hours. Decide your showing policy before the first enquiry arrives rather than after you have turned three away.

Condition at showing. A vacant house that smells closed-up reads as neglected. If a tenant is still in there while you market it, section 83.53 of the Florida Statutes covers entry. Showing the unit to a prospective tenant is one of the purposes for which the tenant may not unreasonably withhold consent, and the statute's own definitions of reasonable notice, at least 24 hours, and reasonable time, between 7:30 in the morning and 8 in the evening, are written for entry to make repairs. That is the standard most leases and most practice apply to showings as well, and your lease controls wherever it is stricter. An outgoing tenant who has lost interest shows a house badly, and that costs real money at application time.

Decide your screening standard before you advertise

Write your criteria down before the first enquiry arrives: the income multiple you require, how far back you look at rental history, what you do about credit, how you treat a prior eviction. Then apply them to every applicant identically, in the order applications arrive.

This produces better tenants, because you are measuring rather than reacting. It is also your defence if a declined applicant ever claims discrimination. A written standard applied uniformly is a far stronger position than a recollection of why somebody did not feel right.

Federal fair housing law protects race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status and disability. Familial status means households with children, so turning a family away because it has children is unlawful, and so is advertising that signals the preference. Miami-Dade's own ordinance protects more categories than the federal list does, so check the current county rule rather than assuming the federal one is the whole picture. An assistance animal is not a pet: a no-pets policy does not by itself defeat a request for one, and pet fees and pet deposits do not apply to it.

What you can verify: income against your written multiple, employment with the employer rather than from a document alone, and rental history. Call the previous landlord as well as the current one, because the current one may want a difficult tenant gone. Credit and public records through a proper screening service, with written consent. And identity, so the person signing is the person you screened.

The lease, and the part of Florida law that catches owners out

The lease is where a tenancy is either sound or already in trouble. Get the term, the rent and due date, the late fee, who pays which utility, the pet terms, the maintenance responsibilities and the association rules in writing, and set the end date deliberately so the next turnover lands in a month you would choose.

Then the deposit. Florida Statute 83.49 does not leave this to preference. A landlord holding a security deposit or advance rent must do one of three things: hold it in a separate non-interest-bearing account in a Florida banking institution, hold it in a separate interest-bearing account and share the interest with the tenant on the terms the statute sets, or post a surety bond. In either account case the money is held for the tenant's benefit and may not be mixed with your own funds. A personal or operating account is not one of the options, and that only surfaces in a dispute, which is the worst moment to discover it.

The same section also calls for written notice to the tenant, either in the lease itself or within 30 days of receiving the money, stating where it is held and on what terms. Read that subsection before you rely on it in either direction, because it does not apply to a landlord who rents fewer than five individual dwelling units, which is most owners of a single house. The three holding options above carry no such exception. Giving the notice anyway costs nothing and removes an argument later.

At the end of the tenancy the clock runs from the day the tenant vacates. If you are making no claim against the deposit you have 15 days to return it. If you are making a claim, you have 30 days to send written notice by certified mail to the tenant's last known mailing address, in the form the statute sets out, stating the amount and the reason, and the tenant then has 15 days to object in writing. Miss that 30-day window and you lose the right to impose a claim on the deposit or to set anything off against it. The damage can be real, documented and photographed, and you still return the whole deposit and have to pursue the damage as a separate claim afterwards. It is the most expensive piece of administration available to a Florida landlord, and avoiding it is a diary entry.

The handover, and what you own from then on

Document the condition before the keys change hands. Photograph every room, dated, including the things nobody photographs: inside the cabinets, the water heater, the air handler, the walls behind where furniture will sit. Have the tenant sign a condition report agreeing to it, and repeat the exercise at move-out from the same angles. A deposit dispute is an argument about what changed, and dated before-and-after documentation settles it regardless of who remembers what.

Hand over more than keys. Where the water shut-off is, where the breaker panel is, which filter size the air handler takes, the association rules and any parking decal, how the utilities get transferred into their name, where rent goes and on what date, and who they call when something breaks at the weekend.

Then the diary. If you are running it yourself from here, three dates belong in a calendar: the deposit notice if you are giving one, the renewal decision far enough ahead to act on it, and the lease end date. It is also worth knowing that section 83.56 sets the notices if rent goes unpaid or the lease is breached: three days, not counting Saturday, Sunday and legal holidays, to pay rent or deliver possession, and seven days for other noncompliance, either to cure it or, for the violations the statute treats as non-curable, to terminate. Those notices have a prescribed form, and a defective one restarts the process rather than shortening it.

One addition to that diary. When you set the renewal decision, re-run the sell-or-hold arithmetic at the same time, with current figures. A lease coming to an end is the cheapest opportunity you will ever get to sell the house empty, and it only exists for a few weeks. None of the rest of this is complicated. All of it is the kind of thing that costs money when it is done late.

Common questions

Related

• Rent it out, or sell it?
• Selling a rental with tenants in it
• The deposit rules most landlords get wrong
• Screening a tenant without breaking the law
• What property management actually costs here
• Selling and buying in Homestead

General information for Florida property owners, not legal, tax or financial advice. Sections 83.49, 83.53 and 83.56 of the Florida Statutes set specific requirements, notice forms, deadlines and exemptions, and they are amended from time to time, so confirm the current text or consult a Florida attorney before acting on any particular tenancy. Tax outcomes, including the exclusion of gain on the sale of a primary residence, depend on individual circumstances and on current federal rules; consult a qualified tax professional before deciding on that basis. Fair housing obligations are federal, state and local, and Miami-Dade's protections are broader than the federal list. Equal Housing Opportunity.