Commercial & New Construction
Development and commercial projects require decisions early that are expensive to revisit later.
What the work covers
- Commercial acquisitions, sales, and leasing
- Development and new construction support
- Contracts, financing, and permits
- Construction liens and payment disputes
- Attorney review before you sign
- Document review at closing
Contracts bind you
Before signatureA construction or development contract allocates risk that will surface months later. The clauses that matter are rarely the ones that get read.
- Payment terms, and what triggers them
- Change order procedure, and what happens when work is done without one
- Delay, and who bears the cost of it
- Retainage
- Termination
- Dispute resolution, and whether you have agreed to arbitrate somewhere inconvenient
- Indemnity, and how far it reaches
Review before signature prevents the disputes that stop projects. Review afterwards is called litigation.
Construction liens in Florida
Chapter 713Florida's construction lien law is one of the more punishing statutory schemes in the state, and it punishes owners and contractors in different ways.
You can pay twice
A lien can be recorded against your property by a party you have never met and never paid directly.
Subcontractors and suppliers who served a notice to owner have lien rights even where you have already paid the general contractor in full. Paying twice for the same work is a real outcome, and it happens to owners who did not know what to ask for.
The deadlines are absolute
The rights exist but they are conditional on strict compliance.
The notice to owner has a deadline. The claim of lien has a deadline. The action to enforce has a deadline. Miss any of them and the right is gone regardless of whether the money is owed.
It surfaces at closing
On a new construction purchase, this affects the buyer at closing.
Where a project has open liens or unreleased work, the title cannot be cleared until they are dealt with, and the discovery usually happens late.
The protections are procedural
They operate before and during the work, and almost none of them can be applied retroactively.
New construction purchases
Pre-constructionBuying pre-construction in Miami is a different transaction from buying a resale, and the differences run against the buyer. The developer's contract is drafted by the developer.
On new construction the documentary stamp tax on the deed is customarily paid by the buyer rather than the seller, which adds around one percent to the buyer's costs. Across the rest of the market the position is the other way round.
None of this is hidden. It is in the documents, which run to several hundred pages and are presented with a signing deadline.
Where we act
ScopeCommercial and development transactions across Miami-Dade and Broward, for owners, developers, contractors and purchasers.
Tell us what you're closing.
Give us the property, the parties, and the date you need to close. We will tell you what the transaction requires and what it will cost.