Miami Property Report vs. a national title service,
section by section

A standard national title or owner search is built around the recorded instruments — deeds, mortgages, judgments, recorded liens. That work is real, and they do it well. But on a Miami-Dade property, a lot of what actually costs you lives outside that standard search, where a national service either sells it as a separate product or skips it. What we fold into the one report:

• Open code-enforcement cases — not just the liens they become. A title search flags a code problem once it has hardened into a recorded lien. We pull the open case with its current balance while it’s still accruing, before it gets there — which is exactly when you’d want to know.
• DERM environmental cases. Environmental isn’t part of a standard title search; it’s a separate request. Miami-Dade DERM enforcement is in our base report.
• Sewer-connection mandates. The forced five-figure infrastructure costs that attach to a property and never appear on a title search.
• County and City of Miami building permits. In the base report, where a national search treats permits as a separate municipal product. (Coverage in the smaller incorporated cities varies — and the report tells you where it’s thin rather than pretending otherwise.)
• The recorded chain past two owners. A “Two Owner” search stops at the current owner and the one before. We follow the recorded chain further back — more on that below.

The headline national price can look competitive — until you add what a real Miami-Dade search needs. The municipal lien search, the prior-owner product, the rush fee: each is its own line item, and a finished Dade report routinely lands between $150 and $275. Ours is $59 with everything already in it — no tiers, no “and for another $40 we’ll also check…”

A national service like ProTitleUSA quotes roughly 24 to 48 business hours for a standard search, and a rush fee still only gets you to about four business hours — not minutes, and “business hours” means a Friday order can land mid-next-week. They compile by hand, so a person has to sit down and do it.

Our pipeline is automated end to end. You enter an address, it runs, and the PDF is in your inbox in minutes — same on a Sunday night as a Tuesday morning.

A national “Two Owner” search does what the name says: the current owner, and the one before. We don’t stop at two. We follow the recorded chain back through each prior sale — as far as the records run — until the trail reaches a foreclosure or tax deed, the events that legally extinguish whatever came before them. Florida law treats those earlier claims as wiped out, so there’s no reason to keep digging past that point. What you get is the real recorded chain of ownership, not a fixed two-owner window.

Because the search is automated, it runs the same way every time. The moment you enter an address it queries every county, court, and municipal source we cover, matches the results to your folio, and dedupes across feeds that overlap — then renders the PDF in minutes. A human abstractor is skilled and fast, but they’re also working a queue by hand and deciding, case by case, which records to pull. Software doesn’t build a backlog on a Friday, doesn’t skip a source because it’s slammed, and shows you the property as it stands today — not a file pulled last week.

A national search hands you records. Accurate records — but you’re on your own to read them and work out which lines actually matter. Every report we generate ends with a clear summary that calls out anything worth a second look, written for a normal human, not a title examiner.

To be clear about the boundary: we’re not a certified, insured title product, and we’re not trying to be. We don’t write title insurance, and for a closing you’ll still want a title commitment from a title company. That’s a different job for a different moment.

But if the question you’re actually asking is the due-diligence one — “before I commit, is there anything wrong with this property?” — that’s exactly what this is built to answer: fast, clearly written, for $59. For that job, we’ll put our report up against a national search any day.

Use us first, on any Miami-Dade property — as the triage step before you spend real money or sign anything. Use a national service (or a local title company) when you’re buying across multiple states, or when you’ve cleared the first look and need the certified, insurable product to actually close.

They’re not really competitors so much as different steps. We’re the one that should come first — and the one that costs $59.