Here's a bad assumption we run into a lot: an owner gets their Fort Lauderdale paperwork sorted, buys a second unit fifteen minutes down A1A in Hollywood, and figures the same certificate carries over. It doesn't. Not even close. Broward County is stitched together from cities that each write their own short-term-rental rules, and they don't check with each other before doing it.
If you run a portfolio across the beach, this is the thing that quietly gets you fined.
What a Fort Lauderdale certificate actually covers
Inside city limits, short-term rentals run under Ordinance No. C-16-25. Rent a home or condo for 30 days or less and you need a Certificate of Compliance. You apply through the LauderBuild portal, but only after you already hold a Florida DBPR license and a Broward County registration — the city won't touch your application until those two exist. Figure about five business days of processing, then a life-safety inspection under Article X, Chapter 15 of the City Code, and the certificate lands within three business days of passing. Combined registration and business-tax fee runs somewhere around $460.
A few rules worth memorizing because they follow the property, not you:
- Responsible party, on-site in one hour. Reachable 24/7, and physically at the door inside sixty minutes. That's a real constraint on where your key-holder and cleaner live.
- Noise-detection device that keeps data for 180 days. Not optional.
- Occupancy of two people per legal bedroom, plus up to four kids under 13 who don't count.
- Noise standard: nothing plainly audible for a full minute at 25 feet after 10pm, or 50 feet during the day.
All of that stops at the city line. Every bit of it.
Hollywood plays by its own book
Cross into Hollywood and you're starting over. Separate city Vacation Rental License. Its own owner-response rule — 60 minutes, worded their way, not Fort Lauderdale's. Its own noise-monitoring device requirement. Your Fort Lauderdale certificate is a piece of paper Hollywood code enforcement does not care about.
So picture the same cleaner working both a Las Olas condo and a bungalow off Hollywood Beach. Same person, same van, two completely different compliance regimes. The key box, the emergency contact on file, the noise gear — all of it has to be set up twice, per city, per unit.
And it's not just those two
Hallandale Beach, Dania Beach, Davie, Cooper City and Miramar each register and tax on their own terms too. Davie skews single-family and horse-property; Dania Beach is its own small city pressed right up against the airport. None of them inherit Fort Lauderdale's rules. If you've got units scattered across the service area, you've got a stack of separate registrations, and the turnover logistics shift with each one.
The taxes at least look similar city to city — guests pay roughly 13% in lodging tax across the county: 6% Florida transient/sales tax, 1% Broward discretionary surtax, and the 6% Broward County Tourist Development Tax remitted through TouristExpress. Airbnb collects some of that for you automatically. Vrbo and your direct bookings usually don't, which means you're the one filing. That part's countywide. The registration and the on-site-response rules are where the cities go their own directions.
Why this lands on the cleaning side
People think of this as a permitting headache and stop there. But the response-time rules are really staffing rules. A one-hour on-site requirement in Fort Lauderdale and a 60-minute owner rule in Hollywood both mean somebody has to be close enough, keyed in, and reachable — for each property, under each city's version of the rule. When you run turnovers across three or four municipalities, key handling and who-shows-up-in-an-emergency stops being one plan and becomes several.
It's the kind of thing that's easy to get wrong from a spreadsheet and obvious once you're the one driving I-95 between jobs at 11am on a back-to-back Saturday during spring break. Which, by the way, is exactly when this matters most — the December-through-April stretch when snowbirds and spring-break bookings pile same-day turnovers on top of each other, across cities that each want their own paperwork in order.
We clean across these lines every week, so we already know which box is Hollywood's and which is Fort Lauderdale's, and we don't mix them up. If you're expanding past one city and want a straight answer on what changes, tell us where the units are and we'll walk it property by property. Or start at the overview if you're just sizing this up. One registration almost never covers the portfolio. Plan for that before you close on the second unit.