Most homeowners assume that once a contractor finishes the work, the permit is finished too. It’s a fair assumption. It’s also wrong often enough that it’s the single most common property problem we encounter — and the reason our sister company, Permit Solutions Services, exists.

An open permit is a permit that was pulled and started but never closed. The work happened. The inspection didn’t — or it failed and was never corrected. Either way, the permit sits on the property record, open. And it stays open until somebody actively closes it.

That “until somebody actively closes it” is where the problem starts.

What an open permit actually does to a property

An open fence permit doesn’t make a fence fall down. The fence works fine. The problem is that the property record now has a flag on it that follows the address forever — until it’s resolved.

That flag shows up in three places:

Title searches. When the property is sold, the title company runs a search against the parcel. Open permits surface. The title insurer either won’t issue clean title, or will require the open permit to be resolved before closing. Most of the time the closing date gets pushed and somebody is scrambling.

Four-point inspections. When a homeowner renews insurance — especially after the property changes hands — the insurer typically requires a four-point inspection. Some carriers flag open permits as a condition that affects the policy. A few will decline coverage outright until the file is closed.

Refinance underwriting. Lenders don’t fund properties with open permits. If you try to refinance a property with an open fence permit, the underwriter pulls the property record, sees the open file, and the funding pauses until the permit is closed. The clock for rate locks, appraisal windows, and conditional approval all keeps ticking while you sort it out.

So the fence stands. The property is unsellable, harder to insure, and harder to refinance.

How a permit ends up open

There are really only four patterns:

  1. The contractor finished the work but never scheduled the final inspection. Common when the contractor is operating below their volume capacity and inspections fall off the radar. The fence got built; the file just got abandoned.
  2. The inspector failed the final and the corrections were never made. A picket spacing off, a gate latch installed below the code height, a post depth that wasn’t right. The inspector wrote it up. The contractor never came back to fix it. The re-inspection was never scheduled.
  3. The contractor went out of business mid-project. The deposit got cashed, the work might have started, and then the company disappeared. The permit sits open under a contractor license that’s no longer pulling permits.
  4. The original homeowner never knew the permit existed. This is the after-the-fact pattern — the prior owner had a fence installed, the permit was pulled (sometimes by the contractor, sometimes by the homeowner themselves), but nobody followed through. The current owner inherited the file along with the property.

In all four cases, the open permit is a paperwork problem, not a fence problem. The work has either already been done or doesn’t need to be done.

How an open fence permit gets closed

The path to closure depends on which of the four patterns above applies, and on which municipality the property sits in. But the broad strokes are consistent:

Pull the property record. Before doing anything else, we pull the full record — every permit, every inspection note, every code violation — so we know exactly what’s open and what the inspector wrote up.

Walk the fence. We confirm what’s actually built versus what was permitted. Sometimes the install matches the plans exactly and the only issue is the missing inspection. Sometimes the install drifted and field corrections are needed before the final will pass.

Resolve the inspection. If the original failure was a real code issue — picket spacing, post depth, gate hardware — we make the fix. If the inspector’s notes are out of date or no longer apply, we file the documentation that resolves the comment.

Schedule the final inspection. With the file caught up, we book the inspection through the municipality, walk the inspector through the property, and close the permit against the record.

Hand off the closed-permit confirmation. In writing. So when a title search runs in two years, the record is clean and the parcel is sellable.

For the Allday Fence side, this is the work we already do on every install — we just close the permit before we leave. For the after-the-fact resolution side, where the open permit was opened by somebody else under a different contractor license, our sister company Permit Solutions Services handles the resolution permit and code-enforcement side directly.

How to know if you have an open permit before it becomes a problem

If you haven’t pulled the property record on your home in the last few years, it’s worth doing. Most Miami-Dade County municipalities have searchable online permit portals; Miami-Dade County’s own portal aggregates permit history across the county. The free MyHausFax™ report — the one we pull on every Allday Fence install — surfaces this in one place, no portal-by-portal hunting.

The cost of finding out you have an open permit before you try to sell or refinance is essentially zero. The cost of finding out during a closing is a delayed sale, a worried buyer, and a lender clock running out.

A fence is the property line. Keep it closed against the record.

Got an open fence permit on a property? Send us the address and the permit number — we’ll pull the record and lay out the resolution path.