Florida Quiet Title Lawyer

What Counts as a Cloud on Title

A cloud is anything in the public record that makes ownership look uncertain. It does not have to be a genuine competing claim. It only has to be enough that a title underwriter will not insure over it, which in practice is a low bar.

The versions that come through the door most often are these. A mortgage that was paid off years ago and never released of record. A lien or judgment satisfied but never cleared. A deed missing witnesses or carrying a defective acknowledgment. A wild deed recorded by somebody with no connection to the chain. An old easement or restriction nobody can locate the origin of. And most commonly in our practice, a death in the chain of title that nobody ever probated.

Florida gives circuit courts jurisdiction over actions by a person claiming legal or equitable title, to determine an adverse estate, interest or claim and to quiet or remove clouds from the title. The court can enter judgment quieting title, award possession to whoever is entitled to it, and where the circumstances need it, enter injunctions or appoint a receiver.

You Do Not Have to Live There

People assume they need to be in possession to bring this, and often they are not. An heir in another state, an investor holding a tax deed, a company that bought a parcel it has never occupied. The statute deals with that directly.

An action to remove a cloud may be brought by a person or corporation whether in actual possession or not, claiming legal or equitable title, against a person or corporation not in actual possession who has, appears to have, or claims an adverse interest.

Florida then removes three objections a defendant might raise. It is no bar to relief that the title has never been litigated at law. It is no bar that there is only one litigant on each side of the controversy. And it is no bar that the adverse claim is void on its face, or, though not void on its face, requires extrinsic evidence to establish its validity. That last one matters, because it forecloses the argument that a plainly worthless claim is too trivial to bother a court with. A worthless claim still stops a closing.

One more point worth knowing. The action can be maintained in the name of the current owner or of any prior owner who warranted the title, and where several parcels share a common defect they can be dealt with in a single action.

The Grounds the Statute Actually Lists

Florida sets out when this remedy is available, and the list is more specific than most people expect.

• Somebody holds a claim that clouds your title. A person not the rightful owner has a conveyance or other evidence of title, asserts a claim, or pretends to a right, which may cast a cloud on the real owner's title.
• The deed failed on execution. You are the true and equitable owner but record title is not in your name because a deed or mortgage was defectively executed, specifically through omission of a seal, lack of witnesses, or a defect or omission in the wording of the acknowledgment, where the instrument was apparently made and delivered to convey and was actually recorded in the county.
• Possession has ripened into title. Possession has been held adversely to the record owner or their heirs and assigns until it has ripened into good title under Florida law.

Read the second ground again, because it is the one people do not know exists. A missing witness or a botched acknowledgment does not simply create an argument. It is a named statutory basis for asking a court to put the record right, and it is why homemade and hurried deeds keep producing these cases twenty years later.

When the Deed Was Forged or Signed Under Pressure

Florida draws a line between two kinds of bad deed, and the side of that line your deed falls on decides who you sue.

A forged deed is void. The Third District said it in one sentence. “A forged deed is absolutely void and wholly ineffectual to pass title.” Recording it changes nothing, and every deed after it in the chain is void too. A buyer who paid full price without knowing anything was wrong is not protected. The twenty-year curative statute (the law that fixes technical defects in an old recorded deed) does not reach a forgery either. The one thing that can is thirty years of record title under the Marketable Record Title Act described below, which is why the age of the forged deed matters more than anything else about it.

A deed the owner actually signed, but signed because of a lie or under pressure from a relative, is only voidable. Legal title passes the day it is signed and stays passed until a court cancels it. An innocent buyer who paid value before a lis pendens went on record keeps the land, and the owner's remedy is against the person who did the pressuring. So the owner whose name was forged has to prove one thing, that the signature is not theirs, and can name everyone in the chain. The owner who signed under pressure has to prove the buyer knew, and usually cannot, so the fight is for money rather than for the land.

The first kind looks like this. An aunt mortgaged her own home to raise $90,000 and paid off the foreclosure on her niece's house. The niece signed the house over to her aunt by quitclaim deed, stayed living in it, and promised to make the aunt's new mortgage payment directly to the lender, with the right to buy the house back. The payments stopped. The niece forged a quitclaim deed from her aunt back to herself and sold the house to a couple. The aunt learned of it when she discovered the payments had stopped and strangers were living in the house. The aunt sued to quiet title, the niece admitted in her own court papers that she had deeded the house to her aunt in good faith and then moved to Georgia, and the trial judge gave the house to the buyers anyway. The appellate court reversed and ordered judgment for the aunt, because a forged deed passes nothing and neither does any deed that comes after it. Practice pointer. A family rescue secured by a deed instead of a mortgage leaves the record in the borrower's hands. If you take the deed, take possession too, or record a notice that the person living there is not the owner.

The age of the forgery does not save it. In a Pinellas County case decided by the Florida Supreme Court in 1940, a will probated in 1910 left land to a woman for life, with the remainder to named relatives. In 1912 a deed was recorded that purported to be signed by those relatives and to give her the land outright. One of them, Eleanor Jenkins, first saw that deed in April 1939, and testified that she had never signed it and had never met the notary. Suit was filed in October 1939, twenty-seven years after the deed went on record, and the people holding under it could not produce the original. The trial court dismissed the case under the twenty-year statute. The Supreme Court reversed, because the recording statutes apply only to genuine instruments and a curative statute cannot be the means by which a forged deed is made good after twenty years. The court left the burden on the family to prove the forgery clearly. Practice pointer. Twenty years on the record is no defense to a forged deed, and thirty years under the Marketable Record Title Act can be. The date of the forged deed is the first thing I check, because it decides whether the thirty-year rule has already run.

Where the forger has no money and the buyer was innocent, the notary who acknowledged the forged signature is often the only defendant able to pay. In a Broward County case decided in 2022, a jury awarded an estate $247,000 against the notary on a deed the owner never signed, and the appellate court reinstated that verdict after the trial judge had set it aside on the theory that a void deed causes no harm.

The Seven-Year Requirement Most People Miss

This is the part that determines what a quiet title action actually costs, and it happens before anything gets filed.

Florida requires the plaintiff to deraign title from the original source, or for a period of at least seven years before filing the complaint unless the court directs otherwise, setting forth the book and page of the records where each instrument affecting the title is recorded. The exception is where you claim from a common source with the defendant.

Deraigning means tracing the chain and pleading it. So the first real work in one of these matters is a title search and an abstract, and the complaint gets drafted from what that turns up. The order is not optional and it is also useful, because the search regularly finds a second problem nobody knew about, and it is far cheaper to learn that before a case is filed than after. Our guide on what a Florida quiet title complaint has to contain covers the deraignment paragraph and the rest of the pleading.

What the Judgment Does

Where the plaintiff has legal title, or is the equitable owner on one of the statutory grounds, the court enters judgment removing the alleged cloud and forever quieting title in the plaintiff and those claiming under them, adjudging the plaintiff to hold good fee simple title to the land or to the interest cleared.

Two features of that are worth drawing out.

A default resolves it without a trial. Where a default is entered against a defendant, the statute says in terms that no evidence need be taken. A great many of these cases end exactly there, because the person clouding the title is an unlocatable heir, a dissolved company, or a lender that disappeared into three mergers.

The recorded judgment behaves like a deed. Final judgments may be recorded in the county or counties where the land is situated and operate to vest title in like manner as though a conveyance had been executed by a special magistrate or commissioner. That recorded judgment is the document the closing agent and the underwriter will actually rely on, so recording is part of the job rather than an afterthought. The statute also states that this remedy is cumulative to other existing remedies, meaning it does not displace ejectment or the other tools where those fit better.

Between the filing of the complaint and the recording of the judgment, the property is still in the defendant's name, and a lis pendens (a recorded notice that the land is the subject of a lawsuit) is what stops a sale to a new buyer in the middle of the case. A quiet title suit that attacks how a deed was signed, rather than what a recorded instrument says, does not hold its lis pendens as of right, and one that is not founded on a recorded instrument expires after one year unless the court extends it. Our guide on the Florida lis pendens covers when it holds for the whole case, when a bond can be required, and what happens to a buyer who ignores it.

Tax Deeds Have Their Own Rule

Where the action is based on a tax deed, Florida narrows the fight dramatically. The grantee under a tax deed, or a purchaser from the state or a political subdivision of land acquired through a tax foreclosure, or their successor in title, may bring an action to quiet title against the record title holder and anyone claiming an interest or lien predating the deed.

Then comes the provision that decides these cases. No defense to the action or attack upon the tax deed may be made except the defense that the taxes assessed against the property had been paid by the former owner before the tax deed issued. The statute allows one defense and nothing else. The one attack that survives that clause is a former owner's claim that the clerk never mailed the notice the tax deed statute requires before the sale, and our deeper guide on quiet title after a tax deed in Florida covers that fight and the four-year limit on bringing it.

There is a related relief on the abstracting side. Where the action is based on a tax deed, the complaint need not deraign title beyond the issuance of the tax deed, which removes most of the seven-year work described above. Investors bring these routinely, because a tax deed on its own is frequently uninsurable, and the quiet title judgment is what turns it into a title a buyer's lender will accept.

The Thirty-Year Rule That Clears Old Defects

Sometimes the cloud has already been extinguished by statute and nobody realized it. Florida's Marketable Record Title Act provides that a person vested with an estate in land of record for thirty years or more, alone or together with predecessors in title, has a marketable record title free and clear of all claims except the statutory exceptions.

The exceptions are where the analysis actually happens, and they include:

• Estates, easements and use restrictions disclosed by, and defects inherent in, the muniments of title beginning with the root of title, subject to the identification rules the statute sets out.
• Anything preserved by filing a proper notice under the act.
• The rights of any person in possession of the land, for as long as that possession continues.
• Anything arising out of a title transaction recorded after the effective date of the root of title.
• Recorded or unrecorded easements and rights of way in use, including those of a utility or a governmental agency.
• Rights of a person in whose name the land is assessed on the county tax rolls, preserved for three years after the land is last assessed in that name.
• State title to lands beneath navigable waters held by sovereignty, and interests held by the Board of Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund, a water management district, or the United States.

So a thirty-year root of title can dispose of an ancient claim without litigation, and somebody actually living on the land is not disposed of by anything. Whether the act has already solved your problem is a question the title search answers, and it is worth asking before paying for a lawsuit.

Homestead Changes What a Quiet Title Judgment Can Do

A Florida homestead (the home a person owns and actually lives in) follows rules of its own, and two of them change what a quiet title action can do.

The first rule is that a married owner cannot sell, mortgage or give away the homestead without the spouse joining in the deed. A deed that tries is void rather than voidable, so no innocent buyer is protected, and the same is true of a deed that would defeat the rights of a surviving spouse or minor child unless it carries the waiver sentence Florida law prescribes. Our guide on Florida homestead law covers the protection itself, and our guide on what a surviving spouse inherits in a Florida homestead covers the life estate and the remainder that pass when a homestead is not validly left in a will.

A 2025 decision from Miami shows what that rule costs a buyer. A Miami Gardens couple owned their home together, and the wife had a court-appointed guardian. On December 2, 2021 the husband signed a quitclaim deed for both of them, using a power of attorney he said his wife had given him, keeping the home for his own life and giving the remainder to a man who said he paid $100,000 and a $50,000 note for it. The man moved in and later paid off the mortgage to stop a foreclosure. The husband died six weeks later. The wife's guardian sued to quiet title, and because the deed carried none of the waiver language Florida requires, the court held it void from the day it was signed and the home passed to the wife. The buyer had never pleaded that he was an innocent purchaser, so that defense was gone, and his $150,000 became a claim against the husband's estate rather than an interest in the house. Practice pointer. A deed of a married person's homestead that does not carry the waiver sentence is void as to the other spouse's rights, however much was paid. Read the deed for that sentence before any money changes hands, and if you are sued over one, plead the innocent-purchaser defense in the answer or lose it.

The second rule runs the other way. A judgment against the owner personally never attaches to the homestead, and a lien that never attached is not a cloud on title. Two Volusia County homeowners learned that after the county recorded a code-enforcement fine order against them and treated it as a lien on their home. The homeowners sued to quiet title and remove the order as a cloud on their homestead. The trial court dismissed the case with prejudice and wrote that the lien remained valid against the home and against anyone who bought it. The appellate court threw that order out. Under the Florida Constitution no such lien exists against a homestead at all, so the recorded order was never a cloud, and for that same reason the court held that a quiet title suit “will not lie” against it. The right filing, if any was needed, was a declaratory judgment that the property is homestead. Practice pointer. A judgment or fine recorded against the owner personally is not a cloud on homestead, and a quiet title complaint aimed at it gets dismissed. The fix at a closing is an affidavit that the property is homestead, and if the buyer's title underwriter still will not insure, a declaratory action rather than quiet title.

Boundary Lines, Fences and Easements

Not every dispute about land is a quiet title case, and choosing the wrong remedy wastes a year.

Where the argument is about who owns a parcel, or about a recorded instrument clouding your title to a strip of ground, quiet title is the right tool. Where the argument is about where the line physically runs, the survey usually settles it, and the remedies run through ejectment, boundary by acquiescence, trespass, or an injunction directed at a fence or an encroaching structure. Adverse possession and prescriptive easement claims sit alongside these with their own elements and time periods.

The first step is identical whichever way it goes. Get a current survey and pull every recorded instrument affecting both parcels before anyone writes a letter. A surprising share of boundary disputes end at that point, because one side is simply wrong about the plat and had never looked.

Delay is the defense that beats a good deed in these cases. In a Key West case decided in 2012, a family had used its lot as a commercial parking lot since 1938, and a fence built before that year stood about four feet onto the neighboring lot. The neighbors bought that lot in December 1986 and got a survey two days later showing the encroachment. The new owners said nothing. Over the following years they planted about twenty palm trees along their side of the fence, laid brick pavers and lighting beside them, and after a storm knocked part of the fence down they rebuilt it in the same place. The neighbors' lawyer wrote one letter in December 2001 asking that the fence be moved, and then nothing happened until they sued for ejectment in December 2007. Twenty-one years after the survey, the court held the claim barred by laches (the rule that a person who knows of a wrong and waits too long to act loses the right to complain) and declared the fence the boundary, because the witnesses who knew how the fence got there had died during the wait. Where a fence has stood that long, the neighbor may also claim the strip outright, and our guide on adverse possession in Florida explains what that claim requires. Practice pointer. A survey that shows an encroachment is a demand letter waiting to be sent. Send it, and if the neighbor does nothing, sue while the witnesses who know how the line got there are alive.

When the Cloud Is a Missing Heir

This is the most common version we see, and it usually arrives attached to a family rather than to an investor.

Somebody died owning the property, or owning part of it, and no estate was ever opened. The family kept paying the taxes and insurance and living there, and years later they try to sell and discover the record still shows a dead owner. Sometimes the death was two generations back and the heirs now number eleven people across four states.

Quiet title does not fix that by itself, because it resolves competing claims rather than moving a decedent's interest to their heirs. The gap in the chain is closed through probate, and our guide on whether probate is required covers when that step is needed and which form of administration applies. Quiet title then handles what the record still will not support, such as a defective old deed, unidentified prior heirs, or decades of accumulated confusion.

The closed estate is the version that catches families who wait. In a Miami-Dade case decided in 2023, a relative asked the probate court to reopen an estate that had been fully administered and closed in 1960, more than sixty years earlier, so the court could rule on who now owned a property. The probate court refused to reopen the estate and then ruled on the ownership anyway. The appellate court upheld the refusal, since nobody had alleged fraud or any irregularity in the old administration, and vacated the ownership ruling, because a probate court with no basis to reopen an estate has no jurisdiction to decide who owns the land. The same opinion pointed the heirs to the door that was open, a quiet title action in the civil division, which the two-year probate limitation does not bar. Practice pointer. A closed estate is the wrong door, and a sixty-year-old discharge does not shut the right one. Our guide on how to file a quiet title action in Florida walks through the title search, the complaint and the publication step that follows.

Where the heirs are identified and simply cannot agree what to do with the property, that is a different remedy again. Partition divides or sells co-owned land, and since 2020 Florida gives the family members who want to keep inherited property the first chance to buy out the one forcing a sale.

What a Quiet Title Action Costs

These are quoted after the title search, because the search decides the shape of the case. An uncontested action against unlocatable heirs that resolves on default is a modest matter. A contested case with a live opponent, a competing chain and a survey fight is not.

Two things drive the number more than anything else. How far back the deraignment has to go, which is at least seven years and sometimes to the original source. And how many defendants have to be located and served, since heirs scattered across several states and dissolved corporations both take work to serve properly. Where service by publication is needed, the diligent search that has to precede it is real work and it gets done properly, because a judgment entered on defective service is worth nothing to a future buyer. The 30-minute consult is free, and bringing the title commitment with its exceptions schedule makes it far more useful.

Two of our guides go deeper. What a Florida quiet title action costs sets out the court filing fee (it starts at $395 and rises with the value of the claim), the publication charge and the title work. How long a quiet title action takes in Florida sets out the floors the statutes fix, including four consecutive weeks of publication and a return day 28 to 60 days after the first notice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The mortgage that was paid in 1998. A family tries to sell the house their mother owned and the title commitment lists a mortgage satisfied decades ago by a lender that has since been absorbed twice. Nobody remains to sign a release. A quiet title action naming the successor entity resolves on default, the judgment is recorded, and the closing proceeds.

The deed with one witness. A property was conveyed between relatives years ago using a form deed signed in a kitchen with a single witness present. Everyone treated it as valid and the current owner has paid the taxes ever since. The defective execution is a named statutory ground, and the action puts record title where the parties always intended it.

Related Guides

• Florida partition actions, where co-owners cannot agree what to do with inherited property.
• Do I need probate in Florida, the first question when a dead owner sits in the chain of title.
• Florida homestead law, which changes who can inherit a home and how it can be devised.
• Florida lady bird deed, the planning tool that keeps the next generation out of both problems.
• Florida summary administration, the shorter probate route that often precedes clearing title.
• What a Florida quiet title action costs, the filing fee, the publication charge and the title work, with the numbers the statutes fix.
• How long a quiet title action takes in Florida, the statutory floors from filing to a recorded judgment.
• How to file a quiet title action in Florida, the steps from the title search to service by publication.
• The Florida quiet title complaint, what the pleading has to contain, including the deraignment paragraph.
• Quiet title after a tax deed in Florida, the one-defense rule and the notice attack that survives it.
• Florida adverse possession, when long possession ripens into a title a court will quiet.
• The Florida lis pendens, the recorded notice that stops a sale while the case is pending.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §65.011 (jurisdiction over actions by a person claiming to own land against those occupying or claiming adversely; judgment quieting title and awarding possession; injunctions, receivers and costs orders); §65.021 (removing clouds: available whether the plaintiff is in actual possession or not, against a person not in actual possession; no bar that the title has not been litigated at law, that there is only one litigant on each side, or that the adverse claim is void on its face or requires extrinsic evidence); §65.031 (action may be maintained in the name of the owner or of any prior owner who warranted the title; lands subject to a common defect may be joined in one action). (verified 2026-08-21)
• Fla. Stat. §65.061 (additional remedy. (1) jury trial available in ejectment where a defendant is in actual possession of part of the land; (2) GROUNDS, including a person not the rightful owner holding a conveyance or asserting a claim which may cast a cloud, a true and equitable owner whose record title fails because of defective execution through omission of a seal, lack of witnesses, or a defect or omission in the wording of the acknowledgment where the instrument was apparently made and delivered to convey and was recorded, and possession held adversely until ripened into good title; (3) DERAIGNMENT of title from the original source or for at least 7 years before filing, with the book and page of each recorded instrument, unless claiming from a common source with the defendant; (4) JUDGMENT, including on default where no evidence need be taken; (5) recorded final judgments operate to vest title as though a conveyance were executed by a special magistrate or commissioner; (6) cumulative to other remedies). (verified 2026-08-21)
• Fla. Stat. §65.081 (tax titles. (2) the complaint need not deraign title beyond the issuance of the tax deed; (3) no defense to the action or attack upon the tax deed may be made except that the taxes assessed against the property had been paid by the former owner before issuance of the tax deed). (verified 2026-08-21)
• Fla. Stat. §712.02 (Marketable Record Title Act: an estate of record for 30 years or more, alone or with predecessors in title, is marketable record title free and clear of all claims except the §712.03 exceptions); §712.03 (exceptions, including defects inherent in the muniments of title from the root of title, interests preserved by proper notice, the rights of any person in possession while that possession continues, matters arising from a title transaction recorded after the root of title, easements and rights of way in use, rights of a person in whose name the land is assessed preserved for 3 years after last assessment, and sovereign and agency interests). ⚠ Section 6, ch. 2022-171 required a §712.06 notice by July 1, 2023 to preserve interests not already extinguished before July 1, 2022, and by July 1, 2025 for counties as defined in §125.011(1). (verified 2026-08-21)
• Forged and voidable deeds. Fla. Stat. §695.01 (the bona fide purchaser rule, as applied in Hardemon v. United Companies Lending Corp., 746 So. 2d 1231 (Fla. 3d DCA 1999), where a genuine signature made the deed at most voidable and the lender that relied on the record kept its lien); §695.03 (a deed must be acknowledged to be recorded, as applied in Scheible); §117.05 and §117.107 (the notary must have satisfactory evidence of the signer's identity and the signer must be in the notary's presence, as quoted in Scheible); §95.231 (the curative statute for old recorded deeds; its curative effect extends only to technical defects in an otherwise valid deed executed by the owner, per Davis v. Hinson, 67 So. 3d 1107 (Fla. 1st DCA 2011), and its predecessor was held inapplicable to a forged deed in Wright v. Blocker); §712.02 (the thirty-year limit on the forged-deed rule). Cases read in full. Knowles v. Edwards, 967 So. 2d 255 (Fla. 3d DCA 2007) (a forged quitclaim after a $90,000 family rescue; a forged deed is absolutely void and every later conveyance is void; judgment directed for the aunt); Wright v. Blocker, 144 Fla. 428, 198 So. 88 (Fla. 1940) (a forged 1912 deed, suit in 1939; the recording statutes apply only to genuine instruments and the twenty-year statute cannot be the vehicle for a forged deed; the burden of proving the forgery stays on the plaintiffs); Scheible v. Brown, No. 4D20-1899 (Fla. 4th DCA Feb. 9, 2022) (slip; the $247,000 jury verdict against the notary on a forged deed reinstated, because the notarization is what let the deed be recorded and the house be sold); McCoy v. Love, 382 So. 2d 647 (Fla. 1979) (a deed the owner knew she was signing is voidable rather than void, and later buyers keep the land if they prove good faith); Schlossberg v. Estate of Kaporovsky, 303 So. 3d 982 (Fla. 4th DCA 2020) (even a deed voidable for undue influence gives way to a bona fide purchaser; the court's own list of void deeds is forgeries and homestead violations); H & F Land, Inc. v. Panama City-Bay County Airport & Industrial District, 736 So. 2d 1167 (Fla. 1999) (restating Marshall v. Hollywood, Inc., 236 So. 2d 114 (Fla. 1970), that a recorded chain rooted in a forged deed becomes marketable under the Marketable Record Title Act once its recording requirements are met). (opinions read 2026-09-15)
• Homestead. Fla. Const. Art. X, §4 (§4(a), no judgment lien attaches to homestead, as applied in Demura; §4(c), the owner's spouse must join to alienate homestead, as quoted in Rogers). Fla. Stat. §732.7025 (the sentence a deed must carry, or substantially similar language, for a spouse to waive the homestead devise restrictions, as quoted in Rogers); §732.401 (when homestead is not validly devised, the surviving spouse takes a life estate and the descendants a vested remainder, as quoted in Rogers); §162.09 (a code-enforcement lien may not be foreclosed on homestead, as read in Demura). Cases read in full. Rogers v. Guardianship Program of Dade County, Inc., 408 So. 3d 846 (Fla. 3d DCA 2025) (No. 3D24-1405, Mar. 12, 2025; a quitclaim of an entireties homestead signed by one spouse under a power of attorney, without the statutory waiver language, void ab initio; the bona fide purchaser defense waived by not pleading it; the $150,000 a claim against the husband's estate); Demura v. County of Volusia, 618 So. 2d 754 (Fla. 5th DCA 1993) (a recorded code-enforcement fine order is not a cloud on homestead because no such lien exists against it, so a quiet title suit will not lie and a declaratory judgment that the property is homestead is the proper filing). (opinions read 2026-09-15)
• Closed estates and heirs. Williams v. Williams, No. 3D21-2013 (Fla. 3d DCA Jan. 18, 2023) (slip; a probate court with no basis to reopen an estate discharged in 1960 has no jurisdiction to decide who owns the property; the court's citation to Egger v. Egger, 506 So. 2d 1168 (Fla. 3d DCA 1987), describes the two-year limitation in Fla. Stat. §95.22 as not barring a quiet title action by the decedent's heirs). (opinion read 2026-09-15)
• Boundaries and delay. Trevett v. Walker, 89 So. 3d 998 (Fla. 3d DCA 2012) (ejectment over a fence about four feet over the deed line and built before 1938; the deed holders had a survey two days after buying in 1986 and sued in 2007; barred by laches under the Van Meter v. Kelsey, 91 So. 2d 327 (Fla. 1956), elements, and the fence declared the boundary). (opinion read 2026-09-15)
• Lis pendens. Fla. Stat. §48.23 (a lis pendens must be recorded to bind anyone; one not founded on a duly recorded instrument expires one year after the action begins unless extended for good cause, and the court controls it as it would an injunction). Rodriguez v. Villavicencio Guerra, 254 So. 3d 521 (Fla. 3d DCA 2018) (a suit to rescind a deed and quiet title that attacks how the deed came to be signed rather than its terms has no lis pendens as of right; the court applies the injunction standard and may require a bond). (opinion read 2026-09-15)
• Tax deeds, the attack that survives. Dawson v. Saada, 608 So. 2d 806 (Fla. 1992) (the clerk's mailed notice under §197.522(1) is mandatory and a due process attack on it survives §65.081(3); the sheriff's notice under §197.522(2) is directory only); Fla. Stat. §95.192 (four years to challenge a tax deed, with the exception in subsection (3) for a legal owner who stays in possession for a year). (opinion read 2026-09-15)

What I See When a Title Fails

The people who call me about a cloud on title have usually just learned that the public record disagrees with a story the whole family has told for years. A grandfather's estate was never opened and three generations have paid the taxes on a house the record says a dead man owns, or a buyer paid for a home and finds out that the person who sold it never owned it. In 14 years of law practice, I litigate probate, trust and deed disputes in court, and a title that fails is where many of them start. After reading the cases retold above in full, I have a few take-home points.

The first is the difference between void and voidable. A forged signature passes nothing, and the aunt who mortgaged her own home for $90,000 got her house back from buyers who had paid for it, because in the eyes of the law the deed they bought under never existed. A signature the owner actually wrote, under pressure or on a lie, passes title until a court cancels it, and a buyer who paid without knowing keeps the land. The difference decides who I sue and how fast I have to record a lis pendens. When an owner tells me a deed is not theirs, the first question I ask is whether they signed anything at all that day, because the answer sorts the case before I read another document.

The second is the day the record changed. In the Key West case, the survey showing the fence four feet over the line was in the new owners' hands two days after they bought, and the court counted their twenty-one years of delay from that day. A title search that shows your name missing, or a survey that shows a fence on your side of the line, starts a clock whatever the deed says, and I have read more than one Florida opinion in which the owner with the better deed lost to the neighbor with the older fence. Avoid a survey or a title report that goes into a drawer, because in these cases the defense that beats a good deed is delay, and the witnesses who could explain how the fence or the deed got there do not wait.

The third is homestead. A deed of a married couple's home signed by one spouse is void whatever the buyer paid, and in the 2025 Miami case the buyer's $150,000 became a claim in a probate rather than a share of the house. Before anyone I represent pays for a life estate or a remainder interest in someone's home, I read the deed for the waiver sentence Florida requires and I check the marital status of every signer against the record, because the deed form does not ask and the notary does not either.

The honest limit is that every forgery case is a trial about a signature. The aunt won because her niece admitted the sale in her own court papers and then left the state. Where the notary remembers the signing, a court can decide the signature is real, and Florida courts have, in one case after four years of litigation. I cannot tell you from an opinion how a judge or a jury will read the signature in your case, and I cannot promise that a judgment entered on a default will hold if the search behind the publication was thin. What I can tell you is that the title search comes first, because it answers more of these questions than the lawsuit does.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. The cases described above are published decisions of Florida courts rather than matters handled by this firm. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Updated on September 15, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. General information about Florida law, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Title problems turn on the specific records and outcomes depend on the facts; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Do not send confidential information until we have agreed to represent you.