Florida Title Insurance
Blog & Resources
Welcome to the Florida title insurance blog from Verified Title: guides, explainers, and how-tos for buyers, sellers, agents, and lenders working through a closing. The blog covers owner's title insurance costs, title commitments, 1031 exchange deadlines, and remote online notarization, all specific to Florida law and practice.
How to use this Florida title insurance blog
The articles here answer the questions our coordinators actually field on the phone. So the fastest way through is to start with your role in the transaction rather than with a topic.
If you are buying, begin with whether you need an owner's policy at all, then read the piece on the title commitment. Those two cover most of what a buyer has to decide. If you are selling, start with what a title company does for sellers, because the surprises on that side almost always come from liens nobody remembered.
Agents and lenders tend to want the referral mechanics and the fee breakdown. Investors usually want the 1031 exchange timing rules, since those deadlines are the ones that cannot be extended for any reason.
Why so much of this is Florida-specific
Title practice is state law, and Florida differs from most of the country in ways that matter. We are not an attorney-closing state, so a licensed title agent runs the transaction rather than a lawyer. The premium is promulgated, which means the state sets it and no agent can discount it.
Florida also has an unusually broad mechanic's lien statute, a homestead provision that constrains how married owners convey, and a documentary stamp tax that changes in exactly one county. Because of all that, generic national advice about title insurance is often wrong here in small but expensive ways.
Where an article states a rule, it cites the statute or the agency behind it. You can check the premium schedule and licensing rules for yourself at the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, and we would encourage it.
What we do not publish
We do not write legal advice, and nothing here substitutes for an attorney on a contested matter. If your file involves litigation, a quiet title action, or a disputed estate, you want counsel rather than a blog post.
We also avoid writing about anything we do not close ourselves. Every article on this page describes work that runs through our own files in Florida, which is the only reason we can be specific about timelines.
Finally, we correct rather than quietly delete. Florida statutes change, premium schedules get amended, and recording practice shifts county by county. When something on this page goes stale, we update the article and say what changed, because an out-of-date closing timeline is worse than no timeline at all.
If you spot something here that no longer matches your experience on a Florida file, tell us. Our coordinators close these transactions every week, so a mismatch usually means either the practice shifted or we wrote it badly. Either way we would rather know, and corrections tend to make the next reader's file go smoother.
One last note on how to read any of this. Every article here describes the general rule, and your file is specific. A homestead question turns on who is on the deed and who lives there. A lien question turns on when the work began. So treat these pages as a map rather than an answer, and call us with the address when you need the answer itself.
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