Close the file, then the sale.

Most Fort Lauderdale permit problems are inherited. The seller finaled nothing, the contractor vanished, and twenty years later it is your closing date on the line. It shows up as a title search flagging an open addition permit on a Victoria Park cottage, an appraiser questioning the enclosed Florida room on a Coral Ridge ranch that appears in no city record, or a lender pausing a refinance on Seven Isles because a boat lift and a whole-house generator were installed and never inspected. The house is fine. The file is not.

Work here is filed digitally on LauderBuild and reviewed by the City of Fort Lauderdale Development Services Department, where Building Services handles plan review, permit issuance and inspections. Broward then adds a second layer above the city: the county's Board of Rules and Appeals publishes the Broward amendments to the Florida Building Code, certifies the plans examiners and inspectors who will look at your job, hears appeals of their decisions and issues formal interpretations. Broward sits inside the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, so windows, doors and roofing need approved products with the anchor details attached. Exterior work in the Sailboat Bend historic district needs a Certificate of Appropriateness first.

PGX Builders Group has twenty-plus years in South Florida and more than 150 permitted, inspected remodels and additions behind it, which mostly adds up to having read a great many bad files. We pull the history before we price anything, open up whatever has to be seen, and coordinate the engineer, architect or surveyor the record requires instead of claiming to be one. On the finger isles we check the flood side early, because crossing the substantial improvement threshold changes the whole project. The inspections get booked by the person who ran the work, not by a coordinator who has never seen it. We do not sell shortcuts.