FLORIDA – Florida construction law is changing, cutting the amount of time homeowners have to file construction defect claims by 30%.

Beginning Monday, July 1, the time frame to report construction defects in the state of Florida will shift from 10 years to seven years.

The change in the law affects anyone who owns a home that was recently built, but it especially impacts homeowners in that 7-to-10-year time frame.

The News4JAX I-TEAM receives complaints regularly about construction defects in newer-built homes. Most recently, we heard from a Middleburg homeowner dealing with mold, humidity, and improper ventilation issues.

“It’s a brand-new house. It’s unacceptable,” homeowner Erin LePage said last year. “If we could have been here for our walkthrough, it would have been different.”

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Brian Crevasse, a board-certified construction attorney, said this change will impact hundreds of thousands of people in Florida — if not more.

Senate Bill 360 was signed into law last summer changing the time limit from 10 years to seven years.

Crevasse said this is a real concern because he deals with clients who are often past the seven-year threshold when reporting construction defects.

“Oftentimes, these defects are actually concealed. And you wouldn’t be able to necessarily see that you have water intrusion, just by taking a walk around the building and looking at it, you would have to actually remove some of the exterior facade to look for the types of issues that we typically see,” Crevasse said.

The new law also changes when the countdown starts for filing claims. Previously, the time frame started when you got possession of your home or when construction was finished.

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“If you are a homeowner or association that was built, you know, seven to 10 years ago, you know, you’re going to want to run out and get counsel as soon as possible to see if there’s a way to file by Monday. And then, for everybody else that may have homes that are four or five, six years old, you know, you’re just going to want to be extremely diligent about pursuing any potential issues that you might see with your home going forward so that you don’t run out of time at that seven years,” Crevasse said.

The new law starts the countdown from the earliest of the following events:

• When the building gets a temporary or permanent certificate of occupancy

• At the completion of the building

• At the abandonment of construction, even without completion