Everything that can be wrong with a property — on paper.

A lien is a debt tied to the property instead of the person. That’s the part that catches people out: when the title changes hands, plenty of these come along for the ride. Buy the place, inherit the bill.

They come from everywhere — an unpaid contractor, a court judgment, association dues, the county’s own code fines, old tax debt. Some are trivial. Some are bigger than the equity in the house. We check what’s recorded against the property and, just as important, whether anything that looks settled really was: a mortgage or lien that was paid off but never formally released still reads as open until someone clears the paperwork, so we flag the ones worth a second look before you treat them as closed.

Property tax is its own kind of debt, and in Florida it bites. When a property falls behind, the county can sell a tax certificate on it — meaning an outside investor already holds a financial claim against a place that’s delinquent. We pull the current tax status and what’s owed, so you know whether you’re walking into a clean account or a years-deep hole.

Cities and the county inspect properties and write violations when something’s off — an illegal addition, an unsafe structure, an overgrown lot, work done without a permit. The catch is that many of these carry fines that accrue every single day until the problem is fixed.

By the time a property changes hands, a forgotten case can be sitting on thousands of dollars in stacked-up penalties. We check the open code cases across the county and the city departments we cover, and tell you what’s still live.

Here’s the part a standard title search misses: it sees a code problem only once it has hardened into a recorded lien. An open case that hasn’t become a lien yet is invisible to it — and that’s often the one you most want to catch early, while it’s still small and still negotiable. We surface the open cases with their current balances, not just the liens they eventually turn into.

Almost any real work on a property — an addition, a re-roof, the electrical, a pool — is supposed to be permitted and inspected. Two things go wrong. Either the work was done with no permit at all, or a permit was pulled and never closed out with a final inspection.

Both become your problem the day you own it. Unpermitted work can sink an insurance claim, stall a resale, or have to be torn out and redone to code. We pull the permit history so you can see what was done on the books — and what wasn’t.

One honest caveat: permits don’t live in one place. The county runs its own system and many cities run their own, so how much we see depends on the address. We pull county and City of Miami permits today, and where we don’t yet reach a particular city’s system the report says so — we’d rather show you the gap than imply we checked somewhere we didn’t.

This is the bucket most quick searches skip. Miami-Dade’s environmental department (DERM) opens cases on things like contamination and improper fill. The county issues sewer-connection mandates that can run into the tens of thousands. And a property’s flood-zone designation shapes what you’ll pay to insure it for as long as you own it.

We surface the environmental flags on the property, so a five-figure surprise isn’t sitting in the mail after closing.

Sounds obvious — but ownership is where a surprising number of deals quietly come apart. Whoever is selling has to actually hold clean title to sell it. An estate that was never properly probated, a name still on the deed from an old divorce, an LLC that doesn’t quite line up with who’s signing — any of it can cloud the title and tie your purchase up in court.

We map the current owner and walk the chain of title — the trail of recorded sales behind them — so you can see how the property reached today’s owner, and whether there’s a gap that needs explaining.

If a property is mid-fight — a foreclosure, a lawsuit, a lis pendens (a recorded notice that litigation is pending against the title) — that’s something you want to know before you’re committed, not after. We check for the court filings that signal a property is in the middle of something.

Raw records are their own language. The reason a title company can charge $300 and take two days is that a human has to read all of this and work out what actually matters. We do that part too: every report ends with a clear summary of anything we’d flag for a closer look, written so you don’t need a real-estate license to follow it.

The moment you enter an address, we query the public record live and match everything to that property’s folio — the county’s unique ID for the parcel. Nothing is cached from last month; you see the property as it stands the day you order. Where we don’t yet cover a particular city department, we say so up front and don’t charge you for what we can’t deliver.