Please note: This article describes common Florida customs and typical contract terms for general information. Customs vary by county, everything is negotiable, and your signed contract controls your transaction.

Closing costs are a stack, not a bill

Every closing settles a pile of separate charges: government recording fees and transfer taxes, title insurance, the closing agent's fee, lien searches, and — if there's a mortgage — the lender's charges. Buyer and seller each pay their own portion, and the settlement statement shows every line before anyone signs. Knowing which lines usually land on which side is how you compare two offers honestly.

What Florida sellers typically pay

  • Documentary stamp tax on the deed — $0.70 per $100 of the sale price in most Florida counties. Miami-Dade is the exception at $0.60 per $100, plus a surtax on most non-single-family properties. On a $450,000 deed, the standard rate is $3,150.
  • The owner's title insurance policy — in Broward and Miami-Dade (and much of South Florida), custom puts this on the seller, who also typically chooses the title company. In some other Florida counties the custom flips to the buyer. This is the single biggest county-by-county difference.
  • Municipal lien search and estoppel fees — the searches that surface open permits, code liens, and HOA balances so they can be settled at closing.
  • Commission, if an agent is involved — technically separate from "closing costs," but very much part of what a seller pays. We break it down in realtor fees in Florida.

What Florida buyers typically pay

  • Their loan costs — origination, appraisal, credit and underwriting fees, if they're financing. Cash buyers skip this entire stack, which is one reason cash closings are cheaper overall.
  • Documentary stamps on the mortgage note ($0.35 per $100 borrowed) and the intangible tax (2 mills) — these attach to the loan, so they only exist when there is one.
  • The lender's title policy, prepaid insurance and tax escrows, and recording fees for the mortgage.

The three rules that actually govern your deal

First, the contract beats the custom. A buyer can offer to cover the owner's policy; a seller can credit a buyer toward their costs. It happens in negotiations every day. Second, some costs follow the property's problems — existing liens, unpaid HOA balances, and open-permit fines are the seller's, settled from proceeds, because they're the seller's debts. Third, compare offers net: a higher price with the seller paying everything can be worth less than a lower price with the buyer covering costs. The only honest comparison is the bottom line of the settlement statement — the same exercise we do in our agent vs. cash buyer breakdown.

What this looks like on a cash sale with us

Simple, by design: we cover the seller's standard closing costs — title, doc stamps, closing fees — and there are no commissions. Your existing obligations (mortgage payoff, liens, HOA balances) are settled from the proceeds as they would be in any sale, and every line appears on the settlement statement for your review before closing. The offer number we give you is the number the statement starts from, not a number that shrinks at the table.

So how much, in total? A realistic range

Put the seller's stack together on a typical South Florida sale — deed stamps, owner's title policy, lien search, closing fee — and sellers commonly land around 1.5–3% of the price before commission. On a $450,000 sale, think roughly $7,000–$12,000. Buyers with a mortgage usually pay more in total (loan charges dominate), while a cash buyer's costs are lean: mainly their own title and recording items, sometimes under 1%. These are planning ranges, not quotes — property value, county, title insurer, and the contract's negotiated splits all move the real number.

Seller concessions: when the seller pays the buyer's costs

In negotiations, you'll hear about seller concessions — the seller crediting the buyer toward the buyer's closing costs, often to help a buyer whose cash is going to the down payment. Concessions are just price by another route: a $450,000 sale with a $9,000 concession is economically a $441,000 sale. There's nothing wrong with them when the market calls for it, but evaluate them as net, always. It's the same discipline as comparing a cash offer to a listing: the only number that matters is what reaches your account after every line on the statement — which is exactly the comparison our closing approach guarantees by covering the seller's costs ourselves.

The takeaway for your own sale

Before you compare any two offers — a listing estimate, a platform's number, or ours — ask each side the same closing-cost questions and compare the answers in writing: who pays the doc stamps, who pays for the owner's title policy, and who absorbs the lien search and closing fees. Five minutes of asking turns a confusing stack of customs into a single honest number, and it's the number your decision deserves to rest on.