South Miami Title Company

South Miami has the most irregular boundaries of any city in Miami-Dade County, and there is a real story behind that jagged outline. In the city's early decades, after it incorporated in the 1920s, a run of boundary changes and lawsuits by residents who wanted out carved its map into the patchwork you still see today. There is even a tale that South Miami was once saved from dissolution by a fire engine, when a court ordered the young city to keep operating long enough to pay off its debts, one of the largest of which was owed for that very engine.

It is a good story, and it makes a serious point. In a place where one side of a street can sit inside the city and the other side outside it, knowing exactly which jurisdiction a property falls under is not trivia. It governs which municipality's liens, permits, and code enforcement attach to the parcel, and confirming that with precision is part of what a careful closing is for. The leafy, walkable community that calls itself the City of Pleasant Living is a lovely place to live; it simply rewards close attention to where, exactly, the lines fall.

South Miami is mostly a single-family town, its tree-lined streets giving way to a compact downtown near the Metrorail and the Shops at Sunset Place. Many of its houses have changed hands several times across the decades, which means an established chain of title to walk through with care: an old mortgage that should have been released, a prior lien, the ordinary questions a thorough search exists to answer. Anything it surfaces is raised as an exception in the title commitment and resolved before you sign, and we walk through that commitment with you so each exception is something you understand in advance rather than meet for the first time in the file. On an older home, the search also looks for unpaid municipal charges and open or expired permits from past work, so they are resolved before closing rather than inherited by the next owner. The older structures around downtown can carry considerations of their own, and any parcel near the city's unusual edges deserves a clear look at boundary and survey detail.

Done properly, before closing rather than after, that work is what keeps a pleasant transaction pleasant, and it is the part most buyers never have to think about because someone else thought about it for them.

That someone, in our case, is a small team you can actually reach. Union Title Services is a boutique, family-owned firm that has closed Florida transactions since 1985, counsel-led through the affiliated Law Offices of Thomas G. Sherman, P.A., and issuing owner's and lender's policies through Commonwealth Land Title and First American. The advantage is simple, and worth being plain about. Florida sets title insurance premiums by law, so the rate itself is the same at every agency in the state; what actually differs is who handles your file and whether you can reach them. In our Coral Gables office, the person who answers the phone is the person handling your file, and an attorney is part of the work rather than a referral down the road. When a question comes up about a lien, a boundary, or which jurisdiction a parcel actually sits in, you hear back from someone who knows your deal, not a ticket number.

We are a short drive from South Miami and we close throughout Florida. Whether you are buying a first home near the downtown, selling the house where you raised a family, or financing along one of the city's offbeat boundaries, we will make sure the record is clean and the closing stays calm. Call us at (305) 444-4508 whenever you would like to start.