The permit record is the building's medical history

What the record actually is

A buyer closed on an eight-unit building in Little Havana, well under what the seller first wanted. The title came back clean. The survey matched. The rear units were renting above the rent roll.

Four months later a contractor pulled the permit history to price a kitchen scope. A 2016 permit for an interior alteration had never been finaled. Two bathrooms in the back building had no permit at all. The building had not changed. That record had simply never been opened.

Nothing about that shows up in a title report. Title records who owns the land and what is filed against it. It does not record what was built, or whether the City ever agreed to it. That is a second record, and most deals meet it late.

Every permitted job in the City of Miami leaves a trail: the application, the approved plans, the inspections, and the final. The City publishes it, searchable by address through its permit search and the iBuild portal, and Miami-Dade County publishes plans, permits, Certificates of Occupancy and Use, and code compliance records through its public records service.

Read in sequence, that trail is a medical history. It shows when the building was opened up, what was done to it, who signed off, and, most usefully, where a job stopped.

The three states a permit can be in

They are not equally consequential.

1. Closed. Permitted, inspected, finaled. The boring outcome, and the one worth having.
2. Open or expired. A permit exists and the job never reached a final.
3. Never existed. The work is there and the record is not.

The middle one has mechanics worth knowing. Under the Florida Building Code, a permit becomes invalid if work is not commenced within six months of issuance, or if work is suspended or abandoned for six months after it starts. Work counts as being in active progress when the permit has received an approved inspection at least every 180 days. Miss that rhythm and the permit goes null and void.

That is not the end of it. Under the same section, if a new permit is not obtained within 180 days of the date the original went void, the building official is authorized to require that work already commenced or completed be removed from the site. The alternative is a new permit, and here is the part that decides money: the work in place has to meet the regulations in effect when the initial permit expired, plus any that became effective between then and the new issuance.

What the tail looks like

Two mechanisms do the damage, and they are separate.

Code enforcement. Florida Statute 162.09(2)(a) allows an enforcement board to impose a fine of up to $250 per day for a first violation, up to $500 per day for a repeat violation, and up to $5,000 for a violation the board finds irreparable or irreversible. Section 162.09(2)(d) allows a county or municipality with a population of 50,000 or more to adopt an ordinance raising those ceilings to $1,000 per day, $5,000 per day, and $15,000. Whether a given jurisdiction has adopted the higher schedule is a question for its own code, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.

Then 162.09(3): a certified copy of an order imposing a fine may be recorded in the public records, and once recorded it constitutes a lien against the land on which the violation exists. Against the land. Not against the person who did the work, and not against the owner who set the notice aside. The next owner inherits it, which is why this belongs in diligence rather than in the punch list.

Licensure. Florida Statute 489.128 makes contracts entered into by an unlicensed contractor on or after October 1, 1990 unenforceable in law or in equity by that contractor. Owners tend to hear that as protection, and in a narrow sense it is. What it also means is that when unpermitted work turns out to be defective, the person who built it is frequently judgment-proof, unbonded, and long gone. There is no warranty to call on. The repair belongs to whoever owns the building by then.

Three chairs, three readings of the same file

Here is where a permit history stops being a fact and starts being an argument.

The seller reads it as settled history. The work has stood for eleven years, the tenants are housed, nobody has complained, and no inspector has knocked. From that chair the permit record is a technicality being used as a price lever, and the honest version of that position is stronger than buyers like to admit: an unfinished record is not the same as unsafe construction, and a discount priced as though it were is a discount the seller pays twice.

The seller also carries a duty. Under Johnson v. Davis, 480 So. 2d 625 (Fla. 1985), a seller who knows of facts materially affecting the value of the property that are not readily observable and not known to the buyer has a duty to disclose them. An owner who knows the back units were never permitted knows something a walkthrough will not reveal.

The buyer reads it as inherited liability. From that chair the question is not whether the work is sound, it is what the government can require, and the answer is that the code in force when the file is reopened is the code that applies. What the buyer’s chair has trouble seeing is the mirror image of the seller’s: the repair has a number, so it gets priced, and the process does not, so it often does not. The exposure is rarely the drywall. It is the months, the plan review, and the possibility that a small correction pulls a larger system up to current standard.

The developer reads it as almost nothing. If the plan is to take the structure down or gut it to the frame, an unfinished 2016 alteration permit is noise. What the developer cares about is whether an open case, a recorded lien, or an unresolved violation sits in the way of the next permit, because the thing that has value on that site is the ability to file and get approvals. A developer will often pay through a permit problem that gives a buy-and-hold purchaser pause, and pay less for a clean building that cannot be changed.

Where they collide

The disagreement is almost never about whether the condition exists. It is about who owns the uncertainty.

Sellers want it priced as a repair, because a repair has a number. Buyers want it priced as an unknown, because unknowns are cheap to raise and expensive to refuse. Both are arguing their own exposure, and both are usually arguing without the one thing that would settle it, which is the file.

There is also a version of this that nobody plans for and that we see anyway. An owner is asked whether the back units were permitted and genuinely does not know. Not evasion. The work was done in 2009, by a guy, and the owner remembers the price and the color of the tile and nothing else. In theory the seller holds the information and the buyer is in the dark. In practice both sides are working from memory, and the permit record is the only party in the room with a complete one.

Our read

The permit record should be pulled before the offer, not after the inspection.

That single change in sequence moves the entire negotiation. Read early, the record is information and it prices itself into the offer. Read late, it becomes a re-trade, and a re-trade costs a seller trust, costs a buyer credibility, and costs both of them the two weeks nobody budgeted.

The fair reading of an imperfect permit history is that it is neither a scandal nor a technicality. It is an open position, and open positions get closed one of three ways: the seller closes it before market, the price closes it, or the contract closes it by putting the obligation and the deadline in writing. All three are legitimate. Choosing none of them is the only bad option.

Nobody prices the file, and there is nothing careless in that. A rent roll takes ten minutes and a permit file takes a morning, and the calendar wins most weeks. It just means the reading is still available to anyone willing to spend the morning.

An owner reading this about their own building has a cheaper version of the same move. The record is public and the owner can pull it. Ninety days before a listing, an open permit is a task. Ninety days after a contract is signed, it is a discount.

Who to ask

The record itself belongs to the City of Miami Building Department. Permit history is searchable by address through the City’s permit search and the iBuild portal, and Miami-Dade County publishes plans, permits, Certificates of Occupancy and Use, and code compliance records through its public records service. The counter is at Miami Riverside Center, 444 SW 2nd Avenue. Online is usually enough to find out whether a problem exists. When the question is what a specific job actually was, pulling the file in person tends to be faster than clicking.

If something does turn up, three doors, in this order.

A licensed general contractor reads a permit history faster than anyone and can say what that 2016 alteration probably involved and what closing it out would take.

A real estate attorney reads what an open case does to a contract, a closing date, and the exposure behind both. That is a legal question and it deserves a lawyer, not a broker’s opinion.

The title company is worth one direct question that is easy to forget. A title search and a municipal lien search are two different products, and open code violations tend to surface in the second one. Which one is running, and what it covers, is a fair thing to ask. The specifics come at closing anyway, and knowing the difference beforehand makes that a better conversation.

What we do is read the record and say what we think it means. The Building Department is the office that decides what it is. We last checked these sources on August 4, 2026, and code editions and fine schedules move on their own cycles, so anything acted on today is worth confirming against the version in force that day.