The Landlord Lens - DeSantis Ends Squatter's Rights in Florida

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Governor Ron DeSantis has signed SB 322 and SB 606 into law, cracking down on squatters and protecting commercial property owners, Airbnb hosts, and vacation rental operators across Florida.If someone breaks into your storefront, Airbnb, or short-term rental and refuses to leave, you no longer have to waste time with the eviction process. This new law gives you the power to act fast and take your property back.#DeSantis #FloridaRealEstate #SquatterLaw #CommercialLandlord #AirbnbHost #VacationRental #SB322 #SB606 #SquattersRights #LandlordNews____

Bill's SB 322 that's helping it make it easier for squatters to be evicted from commercial and short-term rentals. Now, instead of going through days of a squad occupying the property, deputies can remove the unauthorized occupant within hours, you know, maybe the next day. Hello, everybody. I'm Alex, senior content producer with TurboTenet. I'm here with John Martin, director of product marketing. How's it going, John? Pretty freaking good, Alex. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. Got some big news coming out of the Sunshine State, some new anti-squatter laws. Let's take a look. Squatting is a growing problem nationwide, including here in Florida.

A state law passed last year aimed to protect homeowners from squatters. And today, the governor put pen to paper signing two bills that strengthened Florida's crackdown. As Fox 13's Kimberly Cuisan reports, the new measures give more rights to commercial property owners, as well as owners of hotels, motels, and restaurants. Governor Ron DeSantis signed two bills into law. Senate Bill 32, expediting the process for law enforcement to remove unauthorized occupants from commercial properties and Senate Bill 606, which strengthens the rights of hotels and food establishments while preventing hotel guests from claiming residency. You're there. You're either paying or you're not, and if you're not, it shouldn't devolve into some major landlord-tenant dispute.

the person should just be escorted off the property and leave. So I think this is going to be something that's going to be really good for our economy. Property rights are really important. So that's some pretty big news. Bill's SB 322 that's helping it make it easier for squatters to be evicted from commercial and short-term rentals. What do you think, John? Happy about it. Yeah, I think it's a good step.

Florida keeps pushing these anti-squatter bills through their legislature. I think it's a good thing. It's getting rid of laws that have been around for 300 years from a different time. I mean, it's pre-industrial stuff. And so I think it's a super positive thing. Florida's kind of been at the forefront of these anti-squadding legislation laws. Last year, they had written a similar law for residential. This one's based around commercial and short term. Talk a little bit more about what was in that last bill last year and what led up to the recent legislation. So a lot of the provisions that are in this law, in this 2025 law, were applied to residential, long-term residential properties before, and now they're mapping it over. And so some of these provisions are things like a simplicity of the sheriff affidavit for a squatter. It's basically a one-page affidavit now for these properties. Much easier than before where you'd have to go through an entire large legal case, similar to generate an affidavit for the sheriff to execute on.

And so now, instead of going through days of a squad occupying the property, deputies can remove the unauthorized document within hours, you know, maybe the next day, which just makes that process a lot easier and makes it much harder for these squatters to maintain their residency in the property. That already existed for long-term rentals there since 2024. And then there's also, this one's kind of interesting and will be fun to watch. there's new criminal penalties for fraudulent leases, right? So leases that are created by the tenant and, you know, they fake the signature or whatever and say, no, I actually have occupancy rights, which would then kick off a whole like court case, right, to decide whether that lease that they made up is real, during which time they get to live in the property.

And so that'll be kind of interesting to figure out how they decide whether it's a real or fake lease without courts, right? And then this one's the fun one. online how to squat content now has criminal penalties. Wow. Yeah. So if you're somebody who's like, here's how you make a fake lease or here's your playbook to squat in the abandoned storefront on the main street of your town,

there's criminal penalties now in Florida, which is going to just be, I hope that makes the news because that'll be a fun thing to watch. So it seems like they're just expediting, getting rid of these squatters that are controlling these properties and making it hard for people to get their property back. You know, everybody hears these nightmare stories about residences being occupied by squatters, but this bill targets commercial and short-term. What do you think has made them target for squatters in the past few years? What's interesting about the expansion to these two other types of properties is it fits in the COVID experience a little bit, right?

Yes. In a lot of places, storefronts became empty or unused due to, you know, shelter in place. and the heritage of that and challenges filling a, like if you have a space designed for restaurants in a town today, it's likely harder for you to find reliable tenants for that space, so that space is likely emptier more often. And so you have these kind of soft targets

for people to go in and take up residence, right? And so expansion to commercial property makes sense in that light. And then all of the hotels in short-term lodging, I mean, you know, they say hotels first, the real ambiguity is introduced when you're doing like an Airbnb or a VRBO, because that's a house, right? And that ambiguity gets cleared up a little bit with these bills. So I'd think of that first residential one as capturing most of the cases that we care about, right? And also that

our landlords care about. And these commercial properties and hotel short-term laws kind of clean up the rest of the pieces that they weren't able to cover with the first bill. And, you know, this is spearheaded by Florida, but we've got a lot of other legislation this session coming from other states. We've got SB 38 from Texas. We've got Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, all trying to get faster removal of squatter to become the norm. So courts can unclog the eviction dockets and get these people out of these properties. Why do you think this matters for small landlords? Well, for small landlords, it's twofold. The first thing is I think it gives an added sense

of security to your rental property. We always talk about screenings. your tenants and making sure they're good tenants and that's the best way to avoid situations like this. But it's always good to know that the laws on your side if something goes haywire. And that's the first thing that there will be laws that support you in evicting a squatter in the case that there is a squatter on your property. And we'll talk a little later about how to avoid that. Yep. The same people that hear these cases for squatters are the same people that hear eviction cases, right? And it's, they use the same term, right? But, but, but,

If there's a bunch of squatters in a state and those are contributing some portion of the caseload associated with the judge that's going to hear your actual eviction case of nonpayment of rent, right, where that's not a squatter. But that squatters getting the hearing before your event. Basically, the clearer the docket is for the housing court, the better it is for small landlords and for tenants that are going to try to get good outcomes on their end because you get decisions faster, right? And so anybody that wants fast decisions on things like evictions or nonpayment of rent should be cheering this kind of legislation because it clears the way for those courts that we rely on. You know, in this legislation, this is being passed for, you know, once the damage has already happened, once the squatters are occupying the property, I think the best case would be to have preventative measures, right? So this never happens. So you don't have squatters occupy your property. what are some measures that landlords can take to prevent this from happening to their property?

Yes, and this is the sort of stuff that larger corporate landlords do to mitigate risks that smaller landlords sometimes don't do because their risk of this happening, at least they perceive, is much lower, right? And in a way it is, you only have one unit, three units, five units, versus the corporate landlord that bills policies and procedures for 200, 500, 1,000 units. but still it's actually really easy to do these things it's very easy first document everything phone calls are not your best friend when it comes to the leasing process they're not and and you should make sure all conversation is documented um to the extent possible whether that's through a

messaging solution like turbottenants um even uh text and SMS if you're able to make sure make sure there's clear ties to that number and that tenant um and then emails obviously like all of these things ought to be documented as well as your lease agreement. That lease agreement should be clearly published, right, available to you and your tenant in any, in any fashion, whether that's you giving them a hard copy, which they might lose and whatever. As long as you keep it, it's most important. Or you put it in a, you know, digital space you both have access to TurboTenet lets you host leases and all this documentation. And then screen relentlessly. I mean, this, uh, this is very important for landlords. I, you know, I'm consistently surprised at the amount of landlords that come to us for the first time and say,

oh, you know, I've been managing 10 years or so. I never wanted to go through the leasing process because there was some money changing hands and I needed to know a social security number and that seems wild. Well, you don't anymore. You don't need to do that anymore. There are providers that let you just send a link and they handle the whole thing for you and provide you all the information. TurboTenance is one of them. There's tons of them. Use them, you know?

and then take the extra energy you just gained from just sending a link to get the application and screening report back. Call their boss. Call the last landlord, right? Ask for those references and follow up because that's how you're going to make sure that the tenant you're getting into your property is low risk for these kinds of outcomes. I'll also call out there are some having a vacancy is bad. We all know that, right?

You probably have a mortgage. And every day that your property is vacant is you paying. that mortgage in full. You're getting no help from rent. And today, a lot of, especially newer landlords, are not running cash flow positive businesses. And so it hurts even worse, right? There's no way that a vacancy doesn't hurt. But there's still things you should be doing during a property. If a property is vacant and you haven't filled it with the previous renter in there, what you've got to do is you need, you need to make sure you have eyes on that property, whether that's a neighbor with a really good relationship

or a remote camera or some smart sensors in the house to detect people in there. You can act really fast on somebody, regardless of your state. There's a way, if you find out next day that there's somebody that just unrolled a sleeping bag in your living room in that house, you can get them out.

That's trespassing. Squatting happens after time passes. So you've got to be on top of, of what's going on in your property, even when it's vacant. So the big differentiator is how much time they've been on the property. If you're concerned about the vacancy period creating squatters for you, it's all about length of time. Yeah.

And you'll probably have documentation of the move out of the last tenant. So you have a date established when it was previously occupied. And then any way you're able to create sensors, cameras, a text message from a neighbor calling something out, right? Then you have a timeline where they could have been in. and they can claim all the way up to that first one, right? And so that's why the eyeballs are so important on the property and filling the vacancy really fast, right, which I think we're all incentivized to do. So we're going to document everything, mitigate vacancy, and tenant screening.

Following these pillars should be able to prevent squatters from occupying your property. That's exactly right. You can avoid the problem that way. Well, I want to applaud Florida for the new bill. I think it's a great step forward for landlords and property owners. Thank you for join us today. If you want to smash that subscribe button, we'll see you soon. TurboTenant is the all-in-one platform for landlords to manage their rental properties. From vacancy to tenancy, we have you covered with industry-leading tools and expert advice.

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