Brickell Title Company

Brickell is a market where the buyer or the seller is often in from another country, title is taken through an LLC or a trust, deposits sit in escrow against a developer's contract, and the wires arrive from several banks on the same morning. What a deal like that needs is a title company that picks up the phone, holds the date, and keeps a real estate attorney in the same office for the moment something has to be solved. That is what we are: a boutique, counsel-led title and escrow firm that has closed Florida real estate since 1985. We close in Brickell regularly, for buyers, for sellers, and for the agents and lenders who send their files our way.

Brickell keeps reaching higher, and we close across the whole range. Swire's Brickell City Centre reset the core about a decade ago; today the 80-story Cipriani Residences and the solar-powered Residences at 1428 Brickell are rising on the condo side, and Citadel is building its new Miami headquarters in the neighborhood, a tower rising at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive. The tallest of these reach about 1,049 feet and no further, the ceiling the FAA holds them to this close to Miami International, which is about the only limit Brickell has agreed to respect. We handle preconstruction units in the newest towers, resales in the buildings that started the boom, refinances, and the occasional commercial deal in between.

The people behind those purchases are as international as the address. A large share of Brickell's buyers and sellers come from across Latin America and beyond, families and professionals putting down roots, often through an entity or from abroad. We close in English and Spanish, so the most important paperwork of the year reads clearly to the person signing it, and we confirm entity and trust authority so the signature at the table actually binds. When the seller is a foreign national, the FIRPTA withholding that rides along with a Brickell sale is something we manage as a matter of routine, start to finish, so it moves through the closing instead of stalling it.

Because Brickell is mostly condominiums, most of what we close runs through the condominium act, and the building sets the pace. A new tower brings developer documents, escrowed deposits, and association approvals that all have to line up so the date holds; a resale runs the same machinery with the pieces already in place. Either way, most of our work is getting those pieces to converge: ordering the estoppel and the recorded association documents, confirming that assessments, approvals, and any liens are accounted for, and putting the association's budget, inspection reports, and reserve studies in the buyer's hands in time to read them, with their own advisers, before committing. Then we keep buyer, seller, lender, association, and, on a new building, the developer all pointed at a single closing date. That coordination is most of the job.

Underneath all of it sits the simplest question of the deal: do you own what you are paying for, free of anyone else's claim. A title search reaches back through the public record for the things a listing never shows, an unreleased mortgage, a gap in the chain, an old lien, an heir nobody mentioned, a survey line that does not sit right, and the owner's policy stands behind the result for as long as you hold the property. Florida sets the premium for that policy by law, so the rate is identical at every agency in the state, and our closing-cost calculator shows exact figures for any deal. What you are really choosing is who does the searching, the reading, and the solving. We write owner's and lender's policies through two of the country's largest underwriters, Commonwealth Land Title and First American, so the coverage is national even when the hands on the file are local. And when a file turns out to hold more than the contract let on, the answer is down the hall, at the affiliated Law Offices of Thomas G. Sherman, P.A. The people who answer the phone are the people working your file, and the attorney is in the same office. That has been the idea since 1985, and from our Coral Gables base we close in Brickell and in every county in Florida, on everything from a first condo to a nine-figure development.