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The latest from Domuncula — practical articles on buying, maintaining, and understanding homeownership in Central Florida, published regularly.

  • Termite Inspections in Florida: WDO Reports, Bonds, and What Actually Matters

    Termite Inspections in Florida: WDO Reports, Bonds, and What Actually Matters Florida’s climate that makes year-round outdoor living possible is the same climate that lets termites stay active twelve months a year, no winter die-off, no slow season. FDACS puts it bluntly: termites cause more damage to Florida structures than fire, floods, and storms combined.…

  • Buying a Condo in Florida: What’s Different From a Single-Family Home

    With a single-family home, the building’s condition is mostly the seller’s problem until it’s yours. With a Florida condo, the building’s condition, and just as importantly its finances, are already partly yours the moment you close, shared with every other owner in the association. Post-Surfside reforms have made that reality unavoidable to ignore. Everything in…

  • Buying a House in Florida: The Complete Process, Step by Step

    The mechanics of buying a house aren’t universal. Florida handles the contract, the closing, and a few cost categories differently enough from a lot of other states that following generic national advice can leave real gaps. This is the roadmap in order, with the Florida-specific parts covered directly and the deeper dives linked at each…

  • Mortgage and Financing Basics for Buying in Central Florida

    Most of the buying process gets figured out after you’ve found a house. Financing is the one piece worth sorting out before you start looking, since it determines your actual budget, not the number a listing search filter lets you dream about. Short version: Get pre-approved, not just pre-qualified, before house hunting seriously. Conventional loans…

  • Flood Insurance in Florida: What It Covers, and the Trick Most Buyers Miss

    Standard homeowners insurance, in Florida or anywhere else, doesn’t cover flood damage. Not partially, not under some conditions, not at all. It’s always a separate policy, and understanding how that separate policy actually works, and the one real move that can save a buyer real money, matters more here than in almost any other state.…

  • Florida Homeowners Insurance in 2026: What Changed, and How to Pay Less

    If your picture of Florida homeowners insurance is still “insurers fleeing, premiums doubling every year,” it’s worth updating. That was an accurate description of 2020 through 2023. It’s not quite the story in 2026. Short version: Florida’s insurance market is genuinely stabilizing, not fixed, but stabilizing. Citizens Property Insurance, the state’s insurer of last resort,…

  • Solar Panels in Florida: What Changed for 2026, and What’s Still Worth It | Domuncula

    If you started researching solar a couple of years ago and are just now getting back to it, the math has changed more than the panels have. The number most people still have in their head, a 30% federal tax credit, no longer applies to a system you buy or finance yourself in 2026. Short…

  • Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, and What Actually Differs Between Them

    Every house hunter ends up with two or three real estate apps open at once, and it’s worth knowing upfront that they’re not independent sources competing on accuracy. In Central Florida, most of them are drawing from the exact same underlying data. Short version: Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, and Redfin all pull the bulk of their…

  • How Zoning Actually Works in Florida (and How to Check a Specific Parcel)

    Anyone shopping for land in Florida eventually runs into a zoning designation on a listing, something like A-1 or RSF-2, and assumes there’s a statewide key somewhere that decodes it. There isn’t. Florida zoning is written and enforced entirely by individual counties and cities, which means the same letters can mean different things two counties…

  • What Florida HOAs Can (and Can’t) Control

    Homeowners association authority in Florida comes from the association’s own governing documents, but state law sets hard limits on what those documents are allowed to say, and several of those limits surprise people who assume the HOA has the final word on everything. Short version: Florida law overrides HOA rules on several specific points, including…