What a winning bid does not wipe out.

The auction platform's own FAQ puts it more bluntly than any brokerage would dare to. Asked whether the sale erases the other liens on a property, it answers: no. There may still be other encumbrances — judgments, priority mortgages, taxes or liens — that survive the sale. The winning bidder takes title subject to all defects, liens, encumbrances and matters of which they have or could obtain knowledge. And then: the Clerk's Office does not guarantee a clear title.

Read the middle of that carefully. "Could obtain knowledge" is the whole game. The public record is open, the case file is open, the tax roll is open. Nothing here is hidden from you — it is simply not handed to you, and the auction does not pause while you look.

Before anything else: which lien is being foreclosed? A foreclosure sale disposes of the interests that sat behind the lien that brought the case. It does not touch what sat in front of it.

So if the plaintiff is the first mortgage holder, most of what was recorded against the property is behind the sale. If the plaintiff is a second mortgage, a homeowners' or condominium association, or any other junior lienholder, then the first mortgage is still there when you win — and you have just bought a house with somebody else's mortgage on it, at auction prices that assumed you had not. The Clerk's own answer names "priority mortgages" as exactly the kind of encumbrance that survives.

This is knowable in advance and it is free. The case number is published on the auction calendar; the docket tells you who sued and on what instrument; the final judgment names the lien. An auction listing that looks impossibly cheap for the street it is on is, more often than not, a junior lienholder foreclosing.

Property taxes attach to the property, not to the person who failed to pay them. The Clerk lists taxes among the encumbrances that survive, and a buyer who ignores them has simply moved the bill, not cleared it.

It matters more than the arithmetic suggests, because unpaid taxes are also the start of an entirely different auction. A delinquent bill becomes a tax certificate, and after two years the certificate holder can apply for a tax deed sale — a separate process, run by a different office in Broward, on a different platform, with different deadlines. A property can be moving toward both sales at once.

This is where third-party buyers in Miami-Dade and Broward get hurt most often, because the rule that circulates is not the rule that applies to them. The cap people repeat — the "safe harbour" that limits how much unpaid assessment a new owner can be made to pay — was written for the lender that forecloses and takes title, or its assignee. A stranger who buys the unit at the sale is not obviously in that category.

We are not going to publish a number here. Whether any limit applies to you, what it applies to, and how it interacts with the association's own documents are questions with expensive wrong answers, and they differ between a condominium and a homeowners' association.

What you can do before you bid is concrete: ask the association for an estoppel figure on the unit, read the declaration, and have a lawyer tell you what a buyer at a judicial sale actually owes on that specific property. In a county where a large share of the auction inventory is condominium stock, this is not optional diligence.

Code enforcement liens and open permits are the quiet ones. They do not show up in a listing photograph, and they can stop you renting, selling or insuring the property until they are resolved — which usually means doing the work the previous owner did not, then paying to close the case.

Work the jurisdiction out before you start looking. In Broward almost everybody lives in a municipality, so the city is the authority. In Miami-Dade, 43.5% of the county — 1,233,658 people — lives in unincorporated territory, where there is no city hall to call and the county is the code authority. Search the wrong one and the file comes back clean.

Unpermitted work is the version of this that costs the most. A converted garage, an enclosed patio or a re-roof with no permit behind it becomes your problem at the moment title passes, and in the High Velocity Hurricane Zone — which is Miami-Dade and Broward and nowhere else in Florida — bringing windows, doors and roofing up to code means products carrying a Miami-Dade or Broward Notice of Acceptance. A statewide Florida product approval is not enough here. An auction repair budget built from generic Florida pricing is wrong by tens of thousands.

If the title work turns up an Internal Revenue Service lien, stop and get a lawyer before you bid. Where the United States holds a lien on a property sold at a judicial sale, federal law can give the government a period after the sale in which it may redeem the property from the buyer — a window commonly described as 120 days.

We have not verified that figure against the federal statute for this page, and we are not going to repeat it as if we had. What we will say is that this is the one category where the downside is not a number on a spreadsheet but the property itself, and the cost of an hour of a lawyer's time is trivial against it.

If the property is at a tax deed sale rather than a mortgage foreclosure sale, almost everything on this page changes shape. Broward's tax deed material says plainly that the deed does not clear other liens. And unlike a foreclosure, there is a redemption right: under Fla. Stat. § 197.472(1) the delinquent owner can redeem until the tax deed is actually issued.

The two sales get conflated constantly, including by people who have bought at one of them. Check which sale a property is in before you do anything else — in Broward they are run by two different offices on two different websites with two different deposit rules, and in Miami-Dade by one office across both.

None of this requires you to be a lawyer. It requires you to look, in a fixed order, and to stop when something does not resolve.