Miami Title Company

Miami is the rare American city whose origin is, at its core, a real estate transaction. In 1891 a Cleveland widow named Julia Tuttle bought several hundred acres on the north bank of the Miami River, and within a few years she had persuaded the railroad magnate Henry Flagler to extend his line south to meet her land. The deed came first, the railroad followed, and the city followed the railroad. Tuttle remains the only woman to have founded a major American city, and when the place she willed into being was incorporated in 1896, the story goes that its voters wanted to name it after Flagler. He declined. They took the name of the river instead.

That history is worth keeping in mind, because the things that make Miami thrilling to buy and sell in are the same things that make it demanding to close in. The Magic City earned its nickname by growing faster than anyone could quite track, and it has never really slowed down. What you get today is one of the most active and most international real estate markets in the country: a downtown packed with condominium towers, historic single-family pockets in Coconut Grove and the Roads, waterfront along Biscayne Bay, and a steady stream of buyers and sellers from across Latin America, Europe, and well beyond.

A property that has traded hands many times across more than a century carries a long paper trail, and a long paper trail is where trouble likes to hide. An old mortgage that was paid but never formally released, a gap in the recorded chain, a lien left behind by a prior owner, a question about exactly what the survey shows along a seawall: these are ordinary facts of Miami real estate, and they are precisely what a careful title search brings to the surface before you reach the closing table rather than after. Anything that turns up gets raised as an exception in the title commitment and cleared, so that the owner's and lender's policies we issue through our underwriters, Commonwealth Land Title and First American, stand behind a clean result.

Condominiums add a layer of their own. Buying into a Miami association means buying into its records, its finances, and everything it is required to disclose, and reading all of it closely is what keeps you from inheriting someone else's problem. The association's estoppel certificate confirms, to the dollar, what is owed at closing, and reconciling those figures is part of delivering clean title. The international and all-cash deals that are so common here carry their own paperwork, and they tend to go smoothest when the escrow is run by people who have handled a great many of them. Moving the closing funds securely, and confirming wiring instructions by voice rather than by email alone, is part of that same protection.

This is where a boutique firm earns its keep. Union Title Services has been closing Florida transactions since 1985, and we are counsel-led through the affiliated Law Offices of Thomas G. Sherman, P.A. When you call our Coral Gables office, you reach the people actually working your file, and an attorney is part of that work rather than a referral you have to chase. On a deal of real size or real complexity, that access is the difference between an answer in minutes and a question that sits for days.

We close throughout Florida, and we treat a Brickell high-rise contract, a bayfront estate, and a straightforward residential resale with the same respect for the record. If you have a Miami closing taking shape, talk to us early, before the contract is signed if you can. You can reach us at (305) 444-4508.