Occupy the home, or hold it for family use.
Keeping the house you inherited is a real option, not a fallback. But two things change on the tax bill the moment the property changes hands, and both of them are worth checking before you commit to staying.
Talk it through with AmandaKeeping the house is often the option that feels the most natural — nobody has to sell anything, nothing has to be listed, the family home stays the family home. It's also the option most likely to be chosen by default, before anyone has looked at what it actually costs to hold onto.
That's the gap this page fills. Two protections that may have kept the tax bill low for years — the Save Our Homes assessment cap and the homestead exemption — both come off when the property changes hands. Neither of those facts means keeping the house is the wrong call. They just mean the decision should be made with the real numbers in front of you, not the numbers your family has been used to.
If you haven't looked at all three doors yet, the Keep, Rent, or Sell overview walks through how the doors compare. This page goes deep on what keeping the house specifically involves.
Two things change on the tax bill the moment the property changes hands. Both are checkable now, before you decide anything.
If your family held this home for a long time, the property taxes you grew up hearing about are not the taxes you'll pay if you keep it. Florida's Save Our Homes cap limits how fast a homesteaded property's assessed value can rise — so after decades, the assessed value sits far below what the home is actually worth, and the tax bill reflects the lower number.
When the property changes hands, that protection comes off. The assessed value resets toward market value, and the tax bill follows it up. For a long-held Palm Beach County home, the increase can be dramatic — and because keeping the house means living with that bill every year going forward, this is the single factor most likely to change the math on Door 1.
This is the single most common surprise in an inherited home, and it is the fastest one to check. Amanda pulls the current assessed value, market value, and exemption status from the county record and lays the current bill next to a reset-basis estimate — in writing, before you decide — so it is not a surprise at the first November tax bill.
Before you decide to keep it, you should know
Florida's homestead exemption belongs to the owner who occupies the home as a permanent residence. If you inherit a house and don't move into it, you don't have the exemption. This lands in the same tax cycle as the Save Our Homes reset — which is why the first bill after an inheritance is so often the moment the plan changes. Two protections come off at once.
There's one more piece worth understanding, and it's the point most people get wrong: if you do move in, you may be able to establish your own homestead going forward — but you don't inherit the decades of capped assessment your family built up. Portability is not inherited. Whatever cap the property carried before belongs to the prior owner's tax history, not to you.
Amanda checks the exemption status on the county record before you plan around it, and flags in writing what moving in does and does not restore.
Worth answering before you move in
These affect all three doors, not just keeping — but they're worth having answered before you plan around staying in the house.
Florida carriers scrutinize roof age closely, and an aging roof can mean coverage that's expensive, conditional, or hard to get at all. No insurance generally means no financing — which turns keeping the house into a cash proposition. Amanda establishes roof age and condition at the first walkthrough and connects you with an insurance agent for a real quote.
More on the full seven factors →Florida's post-Surfside inspection and reserve requirements have moved through several rounds of legislation, and some associations have levied or scheduled significant special assessments. Amanda requests the inspection status, reserve study, budget, and recent meeting minutes as a standard step — because on a condo, that packet can decide the question before anything else does.
More on the full seven factors →Keeping the house is easy to agree on when one heir wants it and everyone else doesn't care. It gets harder when one heir wants to keep it and the others want to sell. A neutral value opinion, supplied to every heir at once, is usually what unsticks a buyout conversation — before positions harden into something an attorney has to untangle.
The same starting point regardless of which door you're leaning toward: get the facts on the table, in writing, before anyone commits.
Amanda coordinates the work — she walks the property, prioritizes what actually returns value, lines up vendors, sequences the trades, and runs the punch list. She's paid by you, not by them. No contractor pays her anything, and she'll tell you which vendors she's worked with before so you can judge that for yourself.
Amanda is an active Florida Registered Paralegal. That means she reads the documents fluently and knows what your attorney and CPA need. It does not mean she gives legal or tax advice, and she won't. What she'll do is make sure you walk into those conversations knowing which questions matter.
Legal fluency, not legal advice.
All three are legitimate. Here's where to look next.
Before anything else here, check whether the community even allows it — many Palm Beach County communities restrict leasing.
The tax reset and exemption loss factor into net proceeds too — worth understanding even if selling is the likely path.
No pressure toward listing it and no assumption that keeping it is the easy choice. A conversation about the real numbers, what to check first, and whether staying still makes sense once you see them.
Book a ConsultationOr call (561) 406-4557 · amandasweetz@kw.com