If you are a Canadian buying a home in Florida, or planning on doing so, the process has a number of complications that might be unexpected and might trip you up. If you are considering buying your Snowbird Home instead of renting, here is the process we went through.
Why bother buying a home in Florida?
Why be a Canadian buying a home in Florida, or in Texas, or Arizona, and so forth?
Some many years ago we decided that we would never buy a home in Florida. Being forced, through property ownership, of having to travel to and make the same old place our every-year Snowbird destination did not appeal to us at all. We still wanted to be a bit footloose, able to decide on a whim that next year we might go to… where? Exactly!
We could travel anywhere by not being tied down to a specific location because we were Canadians owning a home in Florida.
And then reality hit.
During the next years when still travelling to Florida each season (we’ll get into why later) we have lost our annual Snowbird rental location three times. The circumstances were always beyond our control. The landlord sold our rental was one reason. Then another landlord decided they were going to be selling our rental, a very common occurrence – because health concerns of the landlord made them decide that for the foreseeable future they were not going to rent at all. To us, or anyone.
Each Snowbird season we became very tired of having to spend enormous amounts of time during this trip looking for a satisfactory rental for the next year. The economy in the U.S. had heated up. Rentals were becoming more and more expensive, and finding one that suited us was getting harder to do.
We realized we liked Florida!
It also dawned on us that were coming back to the same area of Florida each year because we liked it! We realized too that despite the dream of jetting off to some exotic location for the winter that we were not ever going to spend three months in the South of France or the Costa del Sol.
Nope, we liked Florida. We liked it a lot, and the thought of coming back to this same location every year for the foreseeable future had now become just fine by us.
So we decided to look into buying a property in Florida.
And we thought you might be interested in the decision making, and buying process. So here is a list of pages that have to do with being a Canadian buying a home in Florida. Click on those that interest you for complete information, if you wish.
- Where to buy a home in Florida?
- What type of Florida Home?
- Converting Canadian to U.S. funds to buy that home
We would also like to know about your Snowbird experiences and invite you to leave a comment below.