How Do You File a Quiet Title Action in Florida?

Step 1: Order the Title Search and Build the Chain

A Florida quiet title action starts at the clerk's records, and the lawsuit is drafted from what the search turns up. Florida requires the complaint to deraign the plaintiff's title (deraign means to trace it, link by link) from the original source or for at least 7 years before filing, with the book and page of every recorded instrument that affects the title. The court can relax that on request, and a plaintiff who claims from the same source as the defendant can skip it, but the ordinary case starts with an abstract. Our Florida quiet title guide covers what counts as a cloud and what the judgment does. The steps on this page are how the case is actually run, and what the complaint must contain takes each pleading element in turn.

The search does two jobs. The first is to produce the chain the complaint has to plead. The second is to find the problem nobody called about. A search ordered to clear an unreleased 1998 mortgage regularly finds a deed with one witness, a co-owner who died without a probate, or a legal description copied wrong in 1987, and each of those is a separate defendant and sometimes a separate claim. Finding it before filing costs a week. Finding it after filing costs an amended complaint, new service and months.

A 2011 case from the First District shows why the court reads the plaintiff's chain first. In July 1983 a couple quitclaimed about 74 acres to their seven children and several of the children's spouses, all as co-owners. In September 1989 the co-owners signed a deed giving one daughter and her husband 11 acres for their own exclusive use, with no legal description saying which 11. One of the co-owners had died by then, and her child, too young to sign, never did. The daughter and her husband recorded the deed in August 1990 with a survey stapled to it and treated the 11 acres as theirs. They had earlier sold two adjoining acres to a neighbor, and when he built a shed across the line and spread his belongings over it, they sued him to quiet title and to eject him, and they won in the trial court. The appellate court reversed and sent them home without a judgment, and the reason had nothing to do with the neighbor. Their own 1989 deed was missing one co-owner's signature and had no description when it was signed, and the 20-year curative statute, which fixes technical defects in a deed the true owners signed, cannot supply an owner who never signed. In the court's words, a plaintiff “may recover only upon the strength of his own title, not the weaknesses of the defendant’s title.”

Practice pointer. Before the complaint names anyone, confirm that every deed in your own chain was signed by everyone who owned the land at the time and describes land a surveyor can find. The court will look at your title before it looks at the defendant's.

Step 2: Confirm You Are Someone Who Can File

Florida lets four kinds of people bring the action. The owner of record can file whether or not the owner lives on the property or has ever set foot on it, so an heir in Ohio and an investor holding a deed to a lot in Lehigh Acres both qualify. A prior owner who conveyed by warranty deed can file to clear a cloud on the title that owner warranted, which is how a seller ends up cleaning up a problem after closing. Two or more owners troubled by the same cloud can join in one action even when they own separate parcels. And where the owner has died, the personal representative of the estate can bring an action to determine title to estate property, with a caution about protected homestead, which passes to the heirs at the moment of death and sits outside what the personal representative takes possession of, so that title action usually belongs to the heir.

Being able to file is a different question from being able to win. The plaintiff has to hold a title the court can quiet, which is why Step 1 comes first. A person whose only claim is that a relative promised them the house, or that they have paid the taxes for years, is not yet an owner, and the remedy for that situation is usually probate or an adverse possession claim, each with its own rules, before any quiet title action.

Practice pointer. When the person in the chain who died is your own parent, the estate has to be opened and the interest passed to you before you can quiet title in your own name. Filing first and probating later produces a complaint the defendant can dismiss.

Step 3: File in Circuit Court, Never County Court or the Probate File

The circuit court has exclusive jurisdiction over every action involving the title and boundaries of real property, over ejectment, and over cases in equity, and a quiet title action is all three. The complaint is filed in the circuit court for the county where the land sits (any county where part of the land lies will do), in the civil division, and it pays the graduated real property filing fee, which is $395 where the value of the claim is $50,000 or less, $900 up to $250,000, and $1,900 at $250,000 or more, plus a $4 court education fee and $10 for each summons. What a quiet title action costs walks through those numbers.

Two wrong doors come up often enough to name.

The first is county court. Landlord and tenant cases, evictions and unlawful detainer actions live there, and a family member trying to remove a relative from a house sometimes files there because it is faster and cheaper. In a 2022 case from the Third District, the trustee of a family trust filed an unlawful detainer action in county court to remove two relatives from a house the trust held. The two answered that one of them was a beneficiary of the trust with an ownership interest and had paid for improvements to the house. The county court held a trial and ruled for the trustee anyway. The appellate court vacated the judgment as void, because the moment a defendant claims an ownership or equitable interest the case is one for ejectment, and only the circuit court can hear it. The trustee's win was worth nothing, and the case went back to start over in the right court. (The two relatives argued the appeal themselves, and the point they won on was jurisdiction.)

The second wrong door is the probate file. A closed estate does not reopen so that the probate judge can decide who owns a house. In a 2023 case from the same court, a family member asked the probate court to reopen an estate that had been fully administered and discharged in 1960 and to rule on who owned a property. The probate court refused to reopen the estate and then ruled on the ownership question anyway. The appellate court affirmed the refusal, since nothing suggested fraud or a procedural irregularity, and vacated the ownership ruling, because a probate court with no basis to reopen the estate has no jurisdiction to decide title. The court wrote that “no precedent exists to reopen an estate that was fully administered and discharged over 60 years ago.” The heirs' path was a quiet title action in the civil division, which the same opinion noted is not barred by the 2-year probate limitations statute.

Practice pointer. If anyone in the dispute can claim to own a share of the property, or to have an equitable interest from money they put into it, the case belongs in circuit court from the first filing. A judgment from the wrong court does not clear title and does not bind the person who was not properly before it.

Step 4: Name Every Defendant and Search for the Missing Ones

A Florida quiet title judgment binds only the people who were parties to the case. Anyone left out keeps whatever interest they had, and the title commitment on the next sale will list them again. So the defendant list is built from the title search, and it names every person and entity whose recorded claim clouds the title, whether the claim is a mortgage, a judgment lien, a deed in a competing chain, or the interest of a person who died owning part of the land.

Missing and unknown people are reached by description. Florida allows a plaintiff to name the unknown spouse, heirs, devisees, grantees, creditors and other parties claiming by, through, under or against a named person who is known to be dead or not known to be dead or alive, and to name the unknown successors of a corporation that has dissolved. The notice of action then describes them as all parties claiming interests by, through, under or against that named person. What the law does not allow is a lawsuit against the world.

The Florida Supreme Court settled that in 1948. A man had held Leon County land under color of title for more than the 7 years needed for adverse possession, and nobody had ever claimed against him. He wanted a judgment he could sell on, so he filed a quiet title bill against all persons claiming any interest in the property and published a summons for four weeks that named no one, under a statute passed the year before that required no names, no search and no affidavit. A guardian ad litem appointed in the case moved to dismiss. The trial judge quashed the service, and the Supreme Court agreed, because suing unknown people about unknown claims, with no inquiry into who they might be, does not satisfy due process, and a complaint that names no adverse claim presents nothing for a court to decide. The statute he used is long gone, and the modern rule is the same in substance. Unknown heirs of a named dead owner can be reached because the cloud is known and only the names are not. A judgment against the world is not available.

Practice pointer. For each defendant, the complaint should say what that person's claim is and where it is recorded. A defendant named only in a caption, with no cloud described, is a defendant the judgment will not bind.

Step 5: Serve in Person, or by Publication After a Diligent Search

A named defendant with a known address is served personally, by a process server or the sheriff, and Florida's civil rules require that service within 120 days of filing or the case can be dismissed without prejudice. A served defendant then has 20 days to serve a written answer.

Publication is for the defendant who cannot be found, and the statute allows it in quiet title actions. The paperwork is where these cases are lost. Before the clerk will issue a notice of action, the plaintiff or the plaintiff's attorney files a sworn statement showing that diligent search and inquiry have been made to discover the defendant's name and residence, stating whether the defendant is over or under 18 if that is known, and stating that the residence is unknown, or is in another state or country, or that the defendant has been absent from Florida for more than 60 days or is hiding from service. A dissolved or unlocatable corporation has its own version of the statement. The clerk then issues the notice within 60 days, the notice is published once a week for 4 consecutive weeks in a newspaper in the county, and the notice sets a return day not less than 28 nor more than 60 days after the first publication by which the defendant must file written defenses. Where the sworn statement gives an address more specific than a state, the clerk also mails a copy of the notice within 10 days.

The words diligent search carry the case. A search that stops at one returned envelope, or that ignores the address on the tax collector's receipt or the name of the defendant's lawyer sitting in the plaintiff's own file, is not diligent, and a default judgment entered on a search that was not actually diligent is void, which means the heir who never received notice can set it aside years later, after the property has been sold to somebody who relied on it. The affidavit should say what was searched (the property appraiser and tax collector records, the probate index, the Sunbiz records for an entity, the last known addresses, the people who would know), so that the search is on the record if it is ever questioned. Florida does say that after final judgment no sworn statement is defective for omitting a fact that appears elsewhere in the record, which protects a judgment against a technical omission and does not rescue a search that was never made.

Practice pointer. Publish only after the search is written up and exhausted, and keep the file that shows it. A judgment that clears title against an heir is only as good as the search that preceded the affidavit, because the buyer's title underwriter will ask to see it.

Step 6: Record a Lis Pendens the Day You File

A notice of lis pendens (Latin for a pending suit) is a short recorded document that tells anyone searching the title that this lawsuit exists. Florida gives a lawsuit no effect on the property against outsiders until the notice is recorded, so a buyer or lender who deals with the property before the notice goes on record can take free of whatever the judgment later says. Recorded, the notice does two things. It puts every later buyer and lender on notice of the case, and it bars unrecorded interests and liens (other than someone in possession or an easement in use) unless their holders move to intervene within 30 days of the recording.

The notice states the names of the parties, the case number or filing date, the court, a description of the property, and the relief sought as to the property. Whether the plaintiff can keep it on record for the life of the case depends on what the case attacks. Where the suit is founded on the terms of a recorded instrument, the notice holds as of right. Where the suit asks the court to cancel a recorded instrument, or attacks how a deed came to be signed, which describes most quiet title actions, the court controls the notice as it would an injunction, the notice expires 1 year from the start of the case unless the court extends it, and the defendant can move to discharge it or to require a bond. Our guide to the Florida lis pendens covers the bond fight and the one-year clock.

Practice pointer. Record the notice the same day the complaint is filed, in every county where the land lies. The cases where a property was sold out from under a title claim are almost always cases where the notice went on record months after the sale.

Step 7: Take the Default or Try the Case

Many Florida quiet title actions end without a hearing on the merits, because the defendant is a lender absorbed in three mergers, a corporation dissolved in 1994, or the unknown heirs of a person who died in another state, and nobody answers. When a defendant fails to respond by the deadline, the plaintiff moves for a default and then for a final judgment on it, and Florida's statute says in terms that where a default is entered no evidence need be taken. The judge signs on the pleadings and the affidavits in the file, which is why the complaint has to be complete. A default cures nothing that the complaint left out.

When a defendant does answer, the case becomes an ordinary civil action with a title fight in the middle of it. Each side produces its chain, the disputed instrument is examined, and the questions become factual, whether a signature is genuine or where a described line actually runs. Where a defendant is in actual possession of any part of the land, any party can demand a jury on the possession question, and the court frames an ejectment issue for the jury while it decides the title question itself. A contested case runs on the ordinary civil schedule, and there is no verified figure for how long that takes; how long a quiet title action takes in Florida sets out the floors the statutes fix and where the time actually goes.

Practice pointer. A defendant who has any real claim answers, so the honest forecast of the case is made at Step 1 from the title search, when you can see who the defendants are and whether any of them is alive, findable and motivated.

Step 8: Get the Judgment and Record It

Where the plaintiff proves legal title, or is the equitable owner on one of the grounds the statute lists, or where the defendant has defaulted, the court enters a final judgment removing the cloud and forever quieting the title in the plaintiff and those claiming under the plaintiff since the case began, and adjudging the plaintiff to hold good fee simple title to the land or to the interest cleared. The judgment describes the land the same way the complaint did, which is why the description had to close.

The judgment is then recorded in the official records of the county, or of each county, where the land sits. Florida provides that a recorded final judgment vests title in like manner as though a conveyance had been executed by a special magistrate or commissioner. The recorded judgment is the document the closing agent and the title underwriter will read, and an unrecorded one clears nothing at a closing. The judgment binds the parties named and served, and reaches the claims that were pleaded. An interest that was never described in the complaint is not touched by the judgment, however broad its language, and what the complaint must contain tells the case that made that limit.

Practice pointer. Order a certified copy of the recorded judgment and keep it with the deed. Ten years from now the sale will be handled by people who have never heard of the case, and the recorded judgment is what they will need.

If You Were Served With a Quiet Title Complaint

If a process server handed you a summons and a quiet title complaint, you have 20 days from the day you were served to serve a written answer, and the date is on the summons. If you learned of the case from a notice in a newspaper, or from a notice the clerk mailed to you, the notice itself states the date by which written defenses must be filed with the clerk, which by statute is between 28 and 60 days after the first publication. Either way the deadline is short, the consequence of missing it is a default, and in a quiet title action a default means judgment against you with no evidence taken.

The people who most often ignore these papers are heirs. A notice arrives addressed to the unknown heirs of a grandmother who died in 1988, and the grandchild who sees it assumes it is about someone else, or assumes that the family's years of paying the taxes settle the matter. Neither assumption holds. If the grandmother owned the property, or a share of it, her death passed that interest to her heirs at the moment she died, whether or not anyone opened an estate, and the quiet title action is the plaintiff's attempt to cut that interest off. An heir who answers and states the interest turns a default into a contested case, and in that case the plaintiff has to prove a title good against the heir. An heir who does nothing loses the interest when the deadline passes and a default is entered.

The answer itself is a short document. It admits or denies each numbered paragraph of the complaint, states the interest you claim and how you came by it, and raises any defense, including that you were never properly served. A defendant with a real claim to the property usually files a counterclaim as well, asking the court to quiet title in the defendant or, where the parties are co-owners, to partition it. Do not send confidential details of your claim to any law office, including this one, until that office has agreed to represent you. Bring the papers you were served to the consult and we will tell you what the deadline is and what an answer would need to say.

Is There a Statute of Limitations on a Quiet Title Action?

No single clock runs against an owner's quiet title claim as such. Florida's general limitations statute is titled, in its own words, limitations other than for the recovery of real property, and the periods in it are written for contracts, fraud and other claims. No opinion read for this guide applied one of those periods to an owner's action to clear a cloud on land the owner holds. The clocks that decide these cases are attached to the particular cloud, and they run in both directions.

• A tax deed. The former owner has 4 years from the issuance of the deed to attack it, with an exception for a legal owner who stays in actual possession for a year after the deed. Quiet title after a Florida tax deed covers the sale and the one defense the statute allows.
• Possession by somebody else. Seven years of actual, open possession, with the tax and filing steps Florida requires, can ripen into title in the possessor, and ripened adverse possession is itself a ground for quiet title. The record owner who waits past that point is the defendant rather than the plaintiff.
• Heirs of a dead owner. The 2-year limitation that cuts off claims against an estate does not bar a quiet title action by the decedent's heirs, which the Third District held in 1987 and repeated in 2023 in the case of the estate closed in 1960.
• A bad judgment. A judgment entered on publication without a diligent search is void, and a void judgment can be attacked at any time, so a plaintiff who cut corners on service has no clock running in that plaintiff's favor.

Two honest limits belong here. A court sitting in equity can still refuse an owner who knew about a problem for decades and did nothing while the people who could explain it died, under the doctrine called laches. And the answer for any particular property depends on which cloud is being cleared, which is what the title search tells us.

Can You File a Quiet Title Action Yourself?

Florida lets a person file a lawsuit without a lawyer, and the clerk will accept a quiet title complaint from anyone who pays the filing fee. A corporation or a limited liability company cannot, because an entity appears in circuit court only through a licensed attorney. For an individual owner, the question is whether the judgment at the end will hold, and self-filed cases regularly fail in two places.

The first is the deraignment. The complaint has to plead the chain of title by book and page for at least 7 years, and a chain with a void link in it (a deed one co-owner never signed, a description that does not close) cannot be pleaded around, however carefully the form is filled in. The couple with the 11 acres in Step 1 had a recorded deed, a survey and years of undisturbed use, and they lost because of what the chain showed when a court read it.

The second is service. A judgment against a defendant who was never properly served is void, and a default taken on a publication affidavit that recites diligent search without a search behind it can be undone by the heir who surfaces after the property is sold. The self-filer usually does not learn this from the judge, who signs the default on the paperwork presented. The self-filer learns it from a title underwriter at the next closing, who reads the file, finds the affidavit thin, and declines to insure over the judgment. At that point the money spent on the first case buys a second one.

What a person can do alone is the preparation. Pull the last deed and the title commitment, list every name that appears in the exceptions, and write down what is known about each of them. The preparation shortens the consult, and every case starts there anyway.

What Filing a Quiet Title Action Costs

The court's share is fixed. The filing fee is $395, $900 or $1,900 depending on the value of the claim, plus $4 and $10 for each summons, and a newspaper charges for the notice of action at a statutory rate of 70 cents per square inch for the first insertion and 40 cents for each of the next three, or its minimum commercial rate if higher. The title search and the attorney's work are the variable, and they depend on how far back the chain has to run and how many defendants have to be found and served. Litigation is quoted per matter after the title search. The consult is free and takes 30 minutes, and it is more useful if you bring the title commitment or the papers you were served.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The heir in Denver who almost defaulted. A woman in Denver learns from a cousin about a notice in a Polk County newspaper addressed to the unknown heirs of her grandmother, who died in 1991. The notice gives a date 35 days out. Her grandmother had owned a one-third share of a lot the family has not visited in decades, and a company that bought the other two-thirds from her cousins has sued to quiet title against the grandmother's unknown heirs. An answer filed before the return day states her one-third interest and turns a default into a case in which the company has to prove a title good against her, and the conversation becomes a buyout or a partition.

The self-filed case that stalled at the closing table. A retired teacher in Ocala filed her own quiet title action to clear a mortgage her late husband paid off in 2003, using a complaint she found online. Nobody answered and she obtained a default judgment. Two years later a buyer's title underwriter read the court file, found that the lender named in the complaint had merged twice before the suit and that the affidavit of diligent search recited the statute and nothing else, and declined to insure over the judgment. A second action, naming the successor bank and supported by a documented search, was needed before the sale could close.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §65.011 (jurisdiction; judgment quieting title and awarding possession); §65.021 (removing clouds; plaintiff whether in actual possession or not); §65.031 (the owner or any prior owner who warranted the title may sue); §65.041 (no person not a party is bound by the judgment); §65.051 (joinder of plaintiffs against the same clouds, though their interests relate to separate lands); §65.061 ((1) jury trial in ejectment where a defendant is in actual possession; (2) grounds and venue in any county where part of the land lies; (3) deraignment from the original source or for at least 7 years, with book and page, unless the court otherwise directs or plaintiff claims from a common source with defendant; (4) judgment, including on default where no evidence need be taken; (5) recorded final judgments vest title as though a conveyance were executed by a special magistrate or commissioner; (6) cumulative to other remedies). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. Stat. §26.012(2) ((c) exclusive original jurisdiction in equity; (f) ejectment; (g) all actions involving the title and boundaries of real property). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. Stat. §28.241(1)(a)2. (graduated filing fee for a civil action in circuit court relating to real property: $395 where the value of the claim is $50,000 or less, $900 where more than $50,000 and less than $250,000, $1,900 at $250,000 or more, each with not more than five defendants and up to $2.50 for each defendant in excess of five; the party estimates the value in writing and the clerk adjusts at final disposition; a $4 court education fee); §28.241(1)(d) ($10 for each summons issued). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. Stat. §49.011(2) (service by publication allowed in actions to quiet title); §49.021 (upon whom, including the unknown spouse, heirs, devisees, grantees, creditors or other parties claiming by, through, under or against a known or unknown person known to be dead or not known to be dead or alive, and dissolved corporations and their unknown successors); §49.031 (sworn statement as condition precedent; may be in a verified pleading or affidavit; (3) after final judgment no sworn statement is defective for omitting a fact that otherwise appears from the record); §49.041 (contents against a natural person: diligent search and inquiry, age over or under 18 if known, residence unknown, out of state, absent more than 60 days, or concealed); §49.051 (contents against a corporation); §49.08 (notice of action issued not later than 60 days after the sworn statement; unknown defendants described as all parties claiming interests by, through, under or against the named party); §49.09 (return day not less than 28 nor more than 60 days after first publication); §49.10(1)(a) (published once during each week for 4 consecutive weeks); §49.11 (posting where no newspaper is published in the county); §49.12 (clerk mails the notice within 10 days where the residence is stated with more particularity than the state). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. Stat. §48.23 ((1)(a) an action operates as a lis pendens only if a notice is recorded; (1)(b) an action not based on a duly recorded instrument has no effect on third parties without one; (1)(c) contents; (1)(d) unrecorded interests and liens, other than persons in possession and easements of use, barred unless the holder intervenes within 30 days; (2) expires 1 year from commencement unless founded on a duly recorded instrument, extendable for good cause; (3) otherwise controlled and discharged as the court would grant and dissolve injunctions). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. Stat. §50.061(2), (3) (legal notice rates: 70 cents per square inch for the first insertion and 40 cents for each subsequent insertion, or the newspaper's minimum commercial rate if higher). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. Stat. §95.192 ((1) 4 years from issuance of a tax deed to attack it; (3) the exception for a legal owner remaining in actual possession); §95.11 (title: limitations other than for the recovery of real property); §95.18 (adverse possession without color of title, 7 years with the tax and return requirements); §732.101(2) (the decedent's death vests the heirs' right to intestate property); §733.607(1) (the personal representative takes possession of the decedent's property except protected homestead and may maintain an action to determine the title to it). (retrieved September 15, 2026)
• Fla. R. Civ. P. 1.140(a)(1) (a defendant must serve an answer within 20 days after service of original process and the initial pleading, or not later than the date fixed in a notice by publication) (rule text verified September 15, 2026); Fla. R. Civ. P. 1.070(j) (service within 120 days of filing or dismissal without prejudice absent good cause), as applied in Paredes Cornejo v. Garcia Reyes, No. 4D2024-2515 (Fla. 4th DCA June 11, 2025) (slip) (a quiet title and partition suit against a defendant in Mexico).
• Davis v. Hinson, 67 So. 3d 1107 (Fla. 1st DCA 2011) (a plaintiff in quiet title or ejectment recovers on the strength of his own title; a deed signed by fewer than all cotenants, with no description at signing, conferred no standing; the curative statute reaches technical defects only). Thompson v. Thompson, Nos. 3D21-0165 & 3D21-2335 (Fla. 3d DCA July 6, 2022) (slip) (county court judgment in unlawful detainer void once the defendants claimed an equitable ownership interest; exclusive circuit court jurisdiction over ejectment). Key v. All Persons Claiming Any Estate, Right, Title or Interest, 160 Fla. 723, 36 So. 2d 366 (Fla. 1948) (constructive service against unknown claimants of unknown claims, with no search, fails due process; a bill naming no adverse claim presents nothing to decide; the 1947 statute construed is not current ch. 49 or ch. 65). Williams v. Williams, No. 3D21-2013 (Fla. 3d DCA Jan. 18, 2023) (slip) (no basis to reopen an estate discharged in 1960; the probate court had no jurisdiction to decide title; citing Egger v. Egger, 506 So. 2d 1168 (Fla. 3d DCA 1987), for the rule that §95.22 does not bar a quiet title action by the decedent's heirs). Opinion texts on file, read September 15, 2026. Other parties' cases, not matters handled by this firm.

Where a Quiet Title Case Is Won Before It Is Filed

I see cases where the complaint was drafted before anyone pulled the deeds, and the case then spends a year discovering what a title search would have shown in a week. 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. The four decisions above are the ones I hand to a client who asks why the search comes first, because each one is a person who did the sensible thing and lost on a fact in the record. I have a few take-home points.

The first is the chain. The couple with the 11 acres had a recorded deed, a stapled survey and years of undisturbed use, and none of it mattered because the deed had been signed by everyone except a child who was too young to sign. I read a client's own chain before I read the defendant's, for the same reason the court does. Avoid filing on a deed in your own chain that you have not checked against the list of people who owned the land on the day it was signed, because that is the deed the other side will read to the judge.

The second is the court. The trustee in the 2022 case won a trial and left with a void judgment, and the relative in the 2023 case took a sixty-year-old estate to a probate judge who had no power to decide the question. Both filings were reasonable guesses about where a property dispute goes. The circuit court's civil division is the only place a Florida title gets decided, and I would rather explain that at a consult than on an appeal.

The third is the search behind the affidavit. The 1948 decision is old and the statute it construed is gone, and I still keep it in the file because the principle has not moved. A court will cut off the unknown heirs of a named dead owner when the search for them has been made and written down. A court will not cut off the world. When I sign a diligent search affidavit, the search is in the affidavit, because the buyer's underwriter at the next closing is the person who will actually read it.

The honest limit is that none of these opinions tells you how the case would have ended with the mistake corrected. The couple might have obtained a proper deed from every co-owner and won the shed dispute, and the trustee might have prevailed in circuit court. What the opinions settle is the order of operations, and an owner who follows it spends the money once.

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.