Mission
CanadaFlorida exists to be the most trustworthy single source of information for Canadians whose life intersects with Florida. The audience is the 1.5 million Canadians who own property, spend winters as snowbirds, work, study, or move permanently to Florida, plus the much larger group considering one of those moves.
The manual is organized as 11 chapters covering acquisition, possession, renting out, sale, succession, immigration, health, banking, currency, cities, and living in Florida. Every chapter is published in both English and French because Canadian readers search for the same topics in different vocabularies.
Written by Canadians who made the move
The editorial team behind this manual is not a group of journalists compiling cross-border real estate research from the outside. It is a Canadian couple, one with a background in engineering and active in real estate investing, the other with a long background in technology and infrastructure, who have personally lived a large portion of what this manual documents. The site exists because, over years of doing the transactions themselves, they kept running into questions the existing English and French resources answered partially, contradictorily, or not at all. The manual is the reference they wish had existed when they started.
Their first cross-border real estate experience pre-dates Florida. While residents of Montreal, they acquired land in Vermont through a Canada-US trust structure, built a house on it, and later sold it. Setting up that structure, managing it across two tax regimes, and unwinding it cleanly required learning the operational reality of cross-border ownership well before the Florida chapters were a question. That early foundation informs the way this manual treats trusts, title structures, and the interaction between Canadian and US tax filings.
The Florida chapters draw on the rest. The team has personally walked through the move from Montreal to Florida, the immigration step and the visa, renting a home on arrival, purchasing a Florida property financed through a Canadian bank with a US presence, the closing itself, opening the utilities, importing a vehicle from Canada to Florida and registering it at the DHSMV, obtaining a Social Security Number, and obtaining the Florida driver licence. In parallel, the team holds a multifamily real estate portfolio on both sides of the border, including the sale of a US commercial building, which sits behind the chapters that touch landlord obligations, depreciation, and disposition.
This is the source of the manual's credibility, but it is not a blank cheque. Some chapters cover situations the editors have not lived in the first person. Succession and probate are the clearest example. For those chapters, the same standard applies: every figure and every rule is verified against a primary source, and the page states plainly when it is reporting the law rather than recounting experience. The distinction matters. Claiming experience that is not real would be a false signal to readers and to the search engines that evaluate this site. Telling the reader where the line sits is what trust is built on.
What this site is
A reference manual. Long-form guides, comparison tables, calculators, and primary-source citations. The closest analogues are how a Government of Canada guide is written, or how a tax law commentary is written: precise, neutral, and verifiable, with the cross-border specifics named explicitly at every step.
Every figure, rate, threshold, and deadline is drawn from a verifiable primary source: IRS publications, Cornell LII for the United States Code and Code of Federal Regulations, Canada.ca for federal Canadian rules, the official statutes and Department of Revenue pages for Florida, and provincial sources for provincial Canadian rules. Direct links to the primary sources appear at the bottom of each article.
What this site is not
This site is not legal, tax, immigration, real estate, or medical advice. It does not establish a professional relationship with the reader. It does not replace the analysis of a cross-border tax attorney, a Florida-licensed real estate broker, an immigration attorney, or a financial advisor. Every concrete decision should be made with a licensed professional who has the reader’s full file in front of them.
The site is not a transaction platform, a brokerage, or a referral network. No property listings, no commission, no paid placements. The editorial position is independent.
How the site is maintained
Every guide carries a visible publication date and a separate last reviewed date. When a primary source changes, when a court ruling shifts the interpretation, or when a regulatory threshold is updated, the affected guides are revised and the last reviewed date is bumped. Anyone can report a factual error.
The full editorial method is documented on the Editorial method page. The complete list of official sources used is on the Official sources page.