How a Foreign Buyer Should Hold South Florida Real Estate

By the time most buyers ask me how to hold a Miami property, they have already chosen it. The apartment in Brickell, the house in Coral Gables, the unit in Sunny Isles. The money is ready, often in cash, and the closing is weeks away. The question of ownership feels like a formality to handle at the title company. It is not a formality. It is the decision that determines what the property costs you for the rest of your life, and what it costs your family after it.

Two out of every three foreign buyers in South Florida pay cash. That means the bank is not in the room asking hard questions, and the structure that would normally get examined never does. The buyer signs in his own name, or inside a quick single-member LLC a friend recommended, and feels protected. He has solved the wrong problem.

The name on the deed is not the point

Holding the property in your personal name exposes it on every front at once. It sits in the public record. It is reachable by a lawsuit, and the United States is the most litigious place your money will ever live. And on the day you die, it enters the US estate.

That last point is where foreign owners are most exposed and least warned. A non-resident is not treated like a US citizen for estate tax. The exemption is roughly sixty thousand dollars, and above it the tax climbs toward forty percent of the property's value. A family can inherit a two million dollar condominium and owe several hundred thousand dollars in tax on it, on an asset they believed was simply theirs.

A single-member LLC feels like the answer. It takes your name off the deed, which solves privacy. It does almost nothing for the estate, because that kind of company is invisible to the tax authority. It looks straight through the LLC to the property, and the property is still yours. Privacy and protection are two different problems, and the cheap structure only touches one of them.

The questions that actually decide the structure

There is no single correct way to hold US real estate. There is a correct way for your situation, and it comes from a few honest questions.

Is this one property or the first of several? A single home is held differently from a portfolio, where each property belongs in its own protected entity beneath a holding company, so a problem at one address cannot reach the others.

Do you intend to rent it? Rental income to a foreign owner is taxed at thirty percent of the gross by default, with no deductions, until you make a specific election that lets you be taxed on the net instead. Most owners never hear about the election and quietly overpay for years.

What happens when you sell? A foreign seller has fifteen percent of the gross sale price withheld at closing, recoverable later, but a real drag on liquidity if no one planned for it. You want the exit modeled before the entry.

And who inherits, in which country? Whether an estate-tax treaty exists between the United States and your home country changes the exposure enormously. Spain has none. Most of Latin America has none. That single fact often decides whether a corporate layer belongs above the property, converting what your heirs receive from US real estate into foreign shares the US estate cannot reach.

Why it has to be settled before you sign

Every one of these questions is cheaper to answer before the purchase than after. Once the property is bought in the wrong structure, fixing it means transferring an asset that already exists, which can trigger tax and cost that a clean setup would have avoided entirely. The families who hold South Florida real estate well are not smarter than everyone else. They simply had the conversation first.

This is the work I do before a client buys. I look at the property, the countries you are taxed in, whether you will rent it, how long you intend to hold it, and who it passes to, and I build the ownership so the asset is protected while you own it and clean when it passes on. A title company will not ask you these questions. A formation website cannot. It takes someone who has sat on the banking side of these transactions and knows where the exposure hides.

If you are close to buying in Miami-Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach, the hour it takes to answer these questions before you sign is the difference between owning a property and being owned by it. The exact rates, exemptions, and treaty positions shift with the law and with your country, so they should always be confirmed for your specific situation. The principle does not shift. How you hold it matters more than what you pay for it.