Triple Rent for the Wrong Call

Florida gives you a fast way to get a stranger out of your rental, and almost nobody writes about what it costs when you point it at the wrong person.

The path is s. 82.036 — the sheriff removes an unauthorized occupant on a sworn complaint, without an eviction case. It is genuinely fast and it exists for a real problem. But you swear, on that form, that the person unlawfully entered. Get that wrong and they can be put back in the property and recover triple the fair market rent, plus their actual damages, costs and lawyer. On a $2,000-a-month house that is $6,000 before anything else, and the court is required to move the case up the docket.

Here is the sorting rule I would use, and it takes about a minute. The sheriff form is for the stranger you never let in and never took paper from. If the person in your house has keys and a lease from someone who claimed to be your agent, that is a different animal — they may have answered a cloned listing and paid a deposit to a scammer. They are still in your house without your authority, but they did not break in, and their entry is exactly the thing you would be swearing to. Ask who they paid before you sign anything. That one is a phone call to a lawyer, not a form.

This matters more if you cannot see the house. If a neighbour reports someone inside a property you own from another state, the question to answer first is not how do I get them out — it is how did they get in.

While you are thinking about who gets into your properties: write your screening standards down, date them, and write your exceptions into the same document. No Florida statute requires it. The reason to do it anyway is that once the standards exist, the question a rejected applicant can raise stops being what did you intend and becomes did you follow your own paper. An exception you planned for is consistency. The same exception improvised at nine at night is a deviation, and it is sitting in your file with your name on it. Worth doing once, especially if you only screen a tenant every couple of years and will not remember what you did last time. Our screening and fair housing guide covers where the lines are.

Nine days after this lands, on October 1, Florida's fraudulent-entry law takes effect. We covered the law itself when it passed, so this is the countdown, not the explainer: what it changes and what to do before the 1st. The one thing worth doing this week is checking where your applicant documents come from. If a screening service or a leasing agent handles that for you, ask them the same question — where the document came from, not whether they collected one. A PDF that arrived by email is a picture of a document, not a document.

Three numbers worth having. Mortgage rates: the 30-year averaged 6.95%, against 6.26% a year ago — and on September 16 the Fed raised its target range a quarter point, its first increase since 2023. Hillsborough County adopted a vacation-rental registry on September 2 — $200 a year, effective January 1, unincorporated county only, roughly 3,000 properties. (Correction, Sept. 26, 2026: we could not trace the 3,000 figure to a county source; treat it as unverified.) And the flood deadline everyone was watching moved: H.R. 6500, enacted in early September, runs the National Flood Insurance Program to December 11. A fall closing that needs a new flood policy is fine. Put the next cliff in your calendar instead — and remember a new NFIP policy generally takes 30 days to take effect, so December 11 is really an early-November decision.

If you missed them: what a Florida landlord can and can't do when rent shows up short, and the September Tampa market update.

If you own one property in Orlando or Tampa and this is the third thing this year you have had to keep track of, that is most of what we do for owners — and we manage single properties, not just portfolios. Reply and tell me how you verify an applicant's income today. I will tell you straight whether it is enough, and whether you need us.

— The True North Team