Sell your extra platted lot and keep your house

Often yes. A great many Miami-Dade homes sit on ground that the original plat drew as two separate lots. The county bills them under one folio number and you mow them as one yard, so it rarely comes up. On the recorded plat there are still two.

If the house sits entirely on one of them, the other one can be sold on its own. You stay put. What changes hands is the empty ground beside it, and you get cash for land you have been paying taxes on for years.

When Miami-Dade was subdivided, mostly through the land booms of the 1920s and again after the war, a surveyor drew a plan of a whole block, cut it into numbered lots, and recorded that drawing with the county. That recorded drawing is the plat. Every lot on it has a number, a block, and dimensions that have not moved since, and your deed still refers to it today.

• The plat is paper, filed in the Clerk's plat books. Your legal description names the book and the page, written like PB 34-57.
• A lot on a recorded plat is a legal parcel of land whether or not anybody ever built on it.
• One folio number can cover several platted lots. The folio is how the county bills you. It is not a count of what you own.
• Because the lots already exist on the plat, selling one is a conveyance rather than a new subdivision.

Usually because somebody bought the pair. In the older platted neighborhoods the lots were narrow, often 25 or 50 feet wide, and buyers regularly took two side by side so the house had a proper yard. The house went on one and the other stayed grass. Three owners later, nobody remembers the second lot is a lot.

• Two narrow original lots bought together and built on as one homesite.
• A neighboring lot bought years later to keep it empty, then absorbed into the yard.
• An inherited property where the deed names two lots and nobody read past the street address.
• A corner property where the side lot fronts a different street entirely.

It concentrates in the areas platted earliest. Allapattah, parts of Hialeah, Little River, and the older grids around Homestead turn up far more of these than the subdivisions built later in Cutler Bay and the southwest, which were platted one house to one lot.

Owning two lots is not the same as being able to sell one. The real question is whether a clean, empty lot exists on the ground. We measured this against Miami-Dade parcel geometry and the county's building footprints, and the answer is sobering: on most double-lot parcels, something crosses the line. A room addition, a garage, a carport, a pool deck.

• The house has to sit fully on one lot. If any part of the structure crosses the recorded division, there is no separate lot to sell.
• A setback has to clear as well. Unincorporated Miami-Dade RU-1 zoning uses a side setback commonly set at 7.5 feet. A house that stops exactly at the line still fails.
• Driveways, sheds, and pools count. They are structures on the ground, and they have to be dealt with, moved, or priced in.
• Easements and utilities matter. A septic drainfield or a utility easement running through the empty lot changes what can be built there.

The honest answer is that it depends on whether somebody can build on it, and we do not put a price on it before the survey tells us where the line falls. Anyone who quotes your lot over the phone has not seen the plat. Here is what actually moves the number.

• Size. Unincorporated Miami-Dade RU-1 generally looks for at least 5,000 square feet for a buildable single-family lot. Some smaller lots recorded long ago are treated as lots of record and can still be buildable, which is worth asking the county about by folio rather than assuming either way.
• Which government you are under. RU-1 and RU-2 are unincorporated county zoning. Inside Hialeah, Miami, or Homestead, that city's own code applies, and the answer can change across a single street.
• Frontage and access. A lot with its own street frontage is worth far more than a landlocked strip behind a house.
• Utilities and flood zone. Water, sewer or septic, and the flood map all feed into what it costs to build, which feeds into what the land is worth.
• Sold vacant land nearby. Sold in the last year, on comparable lots. Asking prices tell you nothing.

1. 1
   You send the address

   That is all we need to start. We pull the folio ourselves, then the plat and the legal description that goes with it.

2. 2
   We read the plat and the legal description

   We count the lots named in the legal and check for the words that mean you hold a piece of a lot rather than a whole one. If it does not qualify, we tell you then, and that costs you nothing.

3. 3
   We order the survey

   A licensed surveyor stakes the recorded lot line and shows what sits on which side of it. We pay for this. You are under no obligation once it comes back.

4. 4
   You get an offer with the arithmetic on it

   Land comps, what the lot can carry, and the figure that reaches you at closing. Itemised on paper, so you can hold it against anything else you are shown.

5. 5
   Title work, then the split

   The deed conveys the platted lot by its own legal description. The title company clears title and records it, and the Property Appraiser splits the folio afterwards so you are taxed on your house and your lot only.

6. 6
   You close and stay put

   You pick the day. Nothing about how you live changes except a fence line and a deposit.

Extra lots attract middlemen, because the pitch is easy and the seller usually has no idea what the land is worth. The difference is who signs the check.

• We are the buyer. Our own funds close it. There is no assignment clause and no third party who has to be found first.
• We pay for the survey. A middleman will not spend real money on a deal they do not own yet, which is why they ask you to pay for it or skip it.
• No commission and no fees to you. You are not listing anything and there is nothing to pay on your side.
• No price before the facts. A number quoted before the plat is read is an anchor. Treat it that way.
• Miami-Dade only. These are the plat books and the survey firms we already work with every week.
• If you want the full checklist for vetting any cash buyer, read is We Buy Houses a scam.

1. 1
   Pull your legal description

   It is free and it takes about two minutes. Our guide on how to check if your property is two platted lots walks the exact clicks.

2. 2
   Count the lot numbers

   LOTS 10 & 11 BLK 20 is two lots. LOT 5 BLK 1 is one. Watch for the words LESS, PT OF, and UNDIV, which change the answer.

3. 3
   Walk outside and look

   Is there a clear stretch of open ground beside the house, wide enough that a house could sit on it, with its own frontage on the street?

4. 4
   Look for the old markers

   Iron pipes at the corners, an old fence line running oddly through the yard, or a utility pole set on what looks like nothing. They are frequently sitting on the platted line.

5. 5
   Ask for the survey

   That is the step that turns a maybe into a number. Our extra lots page is where to start it.