This platform is designed to provide brief, periodic news from the legal world that will hopefully be relevant to your work or personal life.
In this edition: two real estate updates in Florida law. One affects commercial property, and the other affects residential property. Both took effect on October 1, 2025.
1. Tax is no longer owed on commercial rent. This is good news for any business owner who rents commercial property for his or her business.
2. New flood disclosures are required of sellers, landlords, and some developers of residential property. This is good news for buyers and renters.
1. Commercial Rent Tax Repealed
First, the simpler update: no more commercial rent tax. For many years, there was a sales tax imposed on rent or license fees paid for commercial rentals in Florida. Effective October 1, 2025, that tax has been repealed and is no longer imposed. Click here to read more about the change and about certain storage spaces that were unaffected and are still subject to rent tax.
This is good news for business owners who rent commercial space because the tax previously imposed on rent was a significant addition to the cost of doing business.
2. Residential Flood Disclosures
The other update concerns residential property – specifically, disclosures about past flooding on residential property. This is part of a buyer-protective trend that has been slow to develop in Florida.
Up until 1985, the rule in residential sales in Florida was effectively “buyer beware.” Essentially, if there was a problem with the property, the buyer had better discover and address it before closing, or else the seller would not likely be responsible for it. And without destructive inspections and testing, how was a buyer to discover what the seller might already know about problematic conditions underground, behind walls, etc.?
In 1985, in the seminal case of Johnson v. Davis, the Florida Supreme Court changed things and held that “where the seller of a home knows of facts materially affecting the value of the property which are not readily observable and are not known to the buyer, the seller is under a duty to disclose them to the buyer.” That new duty imposed on sellers was a big change in the law and a welcome relief for buyers. Still, many years later, unpleasant (and costly) surprises are experienced by many buyers, and there has been much litigation about the seller’s duty to disclose that was announced in Johnson v. Davis. The issue of undisclosed flooding, specifically – and damage from prior flooding – has been a common source of those disputes. Did the seller know of the flood-prone nature of the property or the flood damage? Were those things readily observable to the buyer such that he or she could/should have known about them?
Last year, the Florida legislature took another step to address these issues and imposed a requirement for sellers of residential property to make certain flood-related disclosures to buyers. And this year, effective October 1, 2025, the legislature made another change to require more (and more meaningful) flood-related disclosures. Now, the “flood disclosure” form that must be used in residential sales includes a line where the seller must check a box to indicate whether or not the seller has knowledge of any flooding that damaged the property during his or her ownership of the property. Click here to see the text of that amended statute, 689.302.
This is good news for buyers. Time will tell whether these new requirements will cut down on the numbers of post-closing disputes and disappointed buyers in Florida.
But that’s not all. The new law that took effect on October 1, 2025, also requires residential landlords, including mobile home park owners, and many developers of residential condominiums to make disclosures about past flooding on their property before renting or selling their units. A new statute, 83.512, was added to Florida’s residential landlord-tenant chapter to lay out the landlord’s disclosure obligations and the tenant’s remedies. And two existing statutes were amended to beef up developers’ disclosure obligations: 718.503 and 719.503.
This is an especially big change for residential landlords in Florida, who need to become familiar with their new disclosure obligations.
