The law that lands October 1

Hi again. On October 1 a new Florida law takes effect — and the piece that actually touches your paperwork is not the one that made the news.

On October 1, CS/HB 1293 becomes law. It was signed in June as Chapter 2026-143, and it does two separate things. It creates a new criminal offense — fraudulent entry of a residential dwelling — for someone who enters and takes possession of a home under false pretenses. And it makes fraudulent entry an act of noncompliance for which a landlord may terminate the rental agreement.

That second piece is the one to care about, because it's a tool and not a headline. Florida already had routes for this, and they were slow and awkward. What's new is a defined path that runs through the lease.

Here's what I'd actually do with the six weeks. Pull your current lease and read the noncompliance and termination section — the one you almost certainly haven't looked at since you signed it. You're checking whether it's written broadly enough to reach a new statutory ground, or whether it enumerates a closed list of specific breaches. A closed list is the common problem in older forms and in the free templates, and it's the kind of thing that turns a clean legal remedy into an argument. If yours is narrow, your next renewal's the moment to fix it, and that's a conversation with whoever drafts your lease, not a task for October.

One caution, because this law will get oversold. It isn't a general-purpose eviction shortcut, and it doesn't change how you remove a tenant who simply stopped paying. It addresses a specific fact pattern — someone who obtained possession fraudulently. If you're dealing with ordinary nonpayment, the ordinary process still governs, and treating this as a faster lane would be an expensive mistake.

And even with this cleaner ground, you still can't remove anyone yourself — change the locks or cut the utilities to force someone out and you become the one who owes damages (actual and consequential, or three months' rent, whichever is greater) under Florida's self-help statute, §83.67. The new law gives you a better reason to terminate; it doesn't let you skip the process. We wrote up how the fraudulent-entry law works and where its limits are when it passed, if you want the detail before you call anyone.

Which brings me to something that outlives any one law.

Every one of these situations — fraudulent entry, a deposit dispute, a damage claim, a disagreement about who left what behind — comes down to the same thing: whether you can prove the condition of the unit on a specific date. Most owners are casual about this until the one time it matters, and then it's too late to fix.

The habit is boring and takes twenty minutes. At every turnover, photograph every room, every appliance, and every existing scuff, with the date visible in the file metadata. Not a walkthrough video you'll never find again — individual, labeled photos, stored somewhere that isn't only your phone.

Do the same on move-in with the tenant present, and have them sign the condition report. Neither of those has to be you personally. The single most common reason a landlord loses a deposit dispute in Florida isn't that they were wrong about the damage. It's that they couldn't prove the unit didn't look like that already. Our move-out inspection checklist is the version we use.

One number surprised us. We pulled eleven years of Tampa rent data to settle the question of whether it's worth timing your lease to the summer peak. It is — barely. The entire seasonal swing between Tampa's strongest and weakest months is under 1% of rent, about twenty dollars a month. One vacant month costs roughly eight and a half times what perfect timing earns you across a whole year.

If you've been holding a unit off the market waiting for a better month, that math isn't on your side. The full analysis is here, including the one part of the pattern that's genuinely reliable.

Two more worth your time. If you own a Florida condo, the financing rules that changed on August 3 affect who can qualify to buy your unit — and the reserve rule inside them matters more than the deadline everyone wrote about. And the August Orlando numbers are out: rents held or rose in thirteen of fifteen ZIPs while values fell in fourteen of fifteen, which is an unusual split and an opening if you're shopping.

Twenty minutes reading your own lease, and twenty minutes with a camera at the next turnover. That's the whole list this week.

— The True North Team