Do You Have to Disclose a Death in a House in Florida?

Updated August 2026 · Reviewed by Adams, Cameron & Co.

This comes up more often than people expect, usually because a buyer asks directly, or because an agent taking a listing learns something about the property's history and does not know what to do with it.

Florida has legislated on it, which is unusual and helpful. What follows is general information rather than legal advice, and anything genuinely contested belongs with an attorney and your broker.

What the statute says

There is a section of Florida law headed, in essence, failure to disclose homicide, suicide, deaths, or diagnosis of HIV or AIDS infection in an occupant of real property. It identifies two things as not material facts that must be disclosed:

• That an occupant of the property is infected or has been infected with HIV, or diagnosed with AIDS.
• That the property was, or was at any time suspected to have been, the site of a homicide, suicide, or death.

It then adds the protection that gives the section its practical force: a cause of action shall not arise against an owner of real property, his or her agent, an agent of a transferee of real property, or a person licensed under chapter 475 for the failure to disclose those matters.

Two details in that wording are worth pausing on. It covers a death generally, not only a violent one, so an elderly owner dying peacefully at home is inside it. And it covers a property suspected to have been the site of one, which matters because rumour and local history often outrun documented fact.

What the protection does not cover

This is the part to get right, because the statute is narrower than the relief it produces suggests.

It protects silence, not falsehood. Not being obliged to volunteer something is different from being permitted to deny it. If a buyer asks a direct question and receives an answer that is untrue, that is a misrepresentation problem rather than a disclosure one, and this section does not address it. If you are asked directly and do not want to answer, the honest route is to say it is not something you are able to comment on and let them do their own research, not to say no.

It does not touch physical defects. Florida has a real and separate duty around known defects materially affecting value that are not readily observable. A roof, a leak, a sinkhole, a history of flooding: none of that is inside this statute, and the general obligation is covered in Florida's seller property disclosure requirements. Do not let a memory of this rule bleed into thinking disclosure is generally optional, because it is not.

It is about disclosure, not about everything else. Where a death has led to a condition that is a physical problem, such as damage requiring remediation, you are back in defect territory rather than in this section.

How to actually handle it

If you are listing the property. You are not required to advertise it. Talk to the seller about what they want to do, and take the question to your broker rather than deciding alone, particularly where the event is locally known. Some sellers prefer to be upfront, on the reasonable view that a buyer who finds out later feels deceived even where nothing was owed to them.

If a buyer asks you directly. Do not guess and do not deny. Saying that it is not a matter you are able to speak to, and that public records and their own research are available to them, is accurate and does not create a misrepresentation risk. This is the same discipline as the other questions covered in what to say when a client asks something you do not know.

If a buyer says it matters to them. Take it seriously as a preference rather than dismissing it. Some buyers care a great deal for religious or personal reasons. The right response is to help them investigate rather than to reassure them, because reassurance is exactly where an agent creates exposure.

The HIV and AIDS provision, and why it exists

The same section addresses an occupant's HIV or AIDS status, and its inclusion is a product of when it was written.

It is worth being clear that this is not merely a technical protection. Treating a person's health status as a defect in a house is precisely the kind of thing fair housing law exists to prevent, and disclosing it would risk a great deal more than a disclosure complaint. Discrimination on the basis of disability is a fair housing matter, which is the same body of rules that makes characterizing neighborhoods dangerous, described in what you actually do at your first showing.

The practical instruction is simple: this is not information to pass on, and volunteering it would be the error rather than the diligence.

Where new agents go wrong on this

Two ways, in opposite directions.

The first is over-disclosing out of anxiety, on the theory that telling everyone everything is always safest. It is not neutral here, because it can harm a seller who was owed no such disclosure and, in the health status case, can create a serious problem of its own.

The second is treating the statute as broader than it is, and reasoning that if a homicide need not be disclosed, then surely a leaking roof is a grey area. It is not remotely. Physical defects affecting value sit under a different and much more demanding rule.

The honest bottom line

Florida law says a death at a property, however it occurred, is not a material fact requiring disclosure, and licensees are protected from a cause of action for not disclosing it. The same is true of an occupant's HIV or AIDS status.

Do not extend it further than it goes. It protects you for not volunteering, not for saying something untrue, and it has nothing to say about the physical condition of the house.