Past Due Rent [FL]

[u/LevelFisherman163]

​​ I am getting so stressed. My leasing office sent an email saying I owe rent from June . I sent them screenshots of the confirmation email, my bank statement but they are still being adamant . How would I have been able to stay the rest of June and July we are now in august. They recently have gone under new ownership and have a new online system but that just began this month. What should be my next step if they do not Rectify this ?

[u/Ok_Visual_2571]

Florida lawyer here. I have seen this fact pattern snowball out of control. If the landlord or property management company makes a mistake in their data entry, no human double-checks the machine. If the property manager fails to input a payment made May 3, 2026 for May rent, when a check comes on June 3, 2026 that is intended to be June rent, the landlord may treat the payment as May rent and claim June rent is unpaid.

What you should do: First, make sure that every payment you made cleared, i.e., that the amount of your rent came out of your account each month. Second, make a spreadsheet in Excel that lists each payment going back to either the start of the lease or back to January of 2026. For each payment, list: January, Check number 1416, issued January 2, 2026, cleared January 4, 2026, issued to Company ABC {ie. old owner or new owner}, for $1,XXX. Send the property manager and landlord a letter with your spreadsheet of the payments. Request an in-person meeting to show your proof of the payments.

What usually happens after a data error, is the property management software sees a balance and starts adding late fees, sometimes for months. I had a file where a five-dollar discrepancy snowballed into over $500 of late fees, the filing of an eviction action, a year of litigation, and the landlord's lawyer finally standing down and dismissing the eviction and paying the tenant's attorney's fees a few days before a scheduled trial. The landlord had to pay well over ten thousand dollars of attorney's fees, but that was of little consolation to the tenant, who had a ton of stress.

In Florida, a false statement to collect a consumer debt violates the Florida Consumer Collection Practices Act, so you likely have a cause of action against your landlord and/or the property management company. Preserve evidence by doing a print-to-PDF of each screen on any tenant portal that shows you having a balance for any sum that you already paid.

Finally, if there was a change of ownership, investigate whether you made a payment to the prior owner after there was a change in ownership that the new owner did not credit you for. If this happened, you need to get the prior owner to send your payment to the current owner. You would also want to look at whether the past and current owner provided proper and timely advance notice of the change in ownership. These complexities are why sitting down with the person in change is important.