About a mile off the southern tip of Key Biscayne, a cluster of pastel houses stands on pilings in the open water of Biscayne Bay. They are what remains of Stiltsville, a community that began in the 1930s with a bait shack and grew, through the Prohibition and postwar years, into a raffish colony of private clubs reachable only by boat. At its height it held some twenty-seven structures; storms and time have left only a handful, now preserved as public landmarks reachable by permit. The reason Stiltsville belongs on a title company's page is what sits beneath it: nobody ever owned the ground. The bay bottom is sovereign land held by the State of Florida, and the residents had leases and permits, not title, which is exactly why the houses could be ordered cleared and why the survivors answer to the Park Service today. Title work is the discipline of answering that same question on dry land. What does a buyer actually own, and what merely comes with permission?

Key Biscayne is a small, tightly regulated island village, set between Crandon Park to the north and Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park to the south and reachable by a single causeway. Its housing stock leans toward condominiums and high-end single-family homes, and we handle both. The volume here is select rather than high, which suits a boutique firm well: a small firm on a small island can keep every file close at hand rather than at arm's length.

Condominium closings on Key Biscayne run through Florida's condominium act: association estoppel certificates, approval requirements, and the post-Surfside disclosure package that every Florida condo buyer now reviews before committing. We do not inspect buildings, and we do not opine on structural condition. What we do is track the disclosure materials and the estoppel the association is required to make available, confirm any special assessment or unpaid balance the estoppel reports against the unit, work to the association's statutory response windows, hold the deposit in escrow, and keep the closing on schedule, so that the buyer, the buyer's lender, and the seller are all reading the same package the association already has in hand.

Island and coastal property brings considerations the mainland does not, and several of them rhyme with Stiltsville. Bayfront parcels raise riparian rights, dock permits, and seawall consents, because the land usually stops at the water and the bottom beyond it belongs to the state. Oceanfront parcels can carry coastal-construction permitting and a statutory coastal disclosure. Beach-access rights depend on what the recorded instruments actually say. And flood coverage, here as everywhere in Florida, is separate from a standard homeowner policy and carries its own required disclosure. We identify these items early and make sure they land where they belong, on the survey and in the title commitment, rather than surfacing in the final days before the table.

Because so much of a Key Biscayne closing depends on documents someone else controls, the association's manager and engineer, a coastal surveyor, the county, we set the closing calendar around those timelines from the very start. It is a small thing on paper, and it is the reason a date set early in the file tends to hold by closing day.

Florida sets title insurance premiums by law, so the rate is the same at every agency in the state; we issue owner's and lender's policies through two national underwriters, Commonwealth Land Title and First American. From our Coral Gables office, a short drive across the causeway, we close Key Biscayne transactions for buyers, sellers, and lenders with the counsel-led care that has defined the firm since 1985, and with in-house attorney support through the affiliated Law Offices of Thomas G. Sherman, P.A. for anything complex. From this one office we close in every county in Florida, from a first home to a nine-figure development, and a Key Biscayne file gets the same attention as the largest deal we handle.

Key Biscayne Title Company