How to check if your property is two platted lots

Not on the tax bill, and not on any mapping app. It is in your legal description, the paragraph of shorthand that describes your property in the county's records and on your deed. It reads like a code because it is one, and once you can read it the question answers itself in about a minute.

This matters for one reason. If your parcel covers two platted lots and the house sits on only one, the empty one can often be sold on its own while you stay in the house.

1. 1
   Open the Property Appraiser's property search

   Go to apps.miamidadepa.gov/PropertySearch. It is free and it does not ask you to register.

2. 2
   Search by street address

   You can also search by folio number or by owner name if the address is not matching, which happens on vacant land and on older Homestead and Hialeah addresses.

3. 3
   Open your property's record

   The folio is the 13 digit number the county bills you under. Note it down. Everything else in this guide is faster with the folio in hand.

4. 4
   Find the full legal description

   It sits with the property information on the record, and it is also printed on the property record card you can generate from the same page. Copy it exactly, punctuation and all.

Only the numbers that follow the word LOT or LOTS, and that come before the next BLK or PB, are lot numbers. Everything else in there is something other than a lot.

The trap is the numbers that are not lot numbers, and a legal description is full of them. Section, township and range shows up as three bare numbers like 21 56 38. Plat book and page is written PB 34-57. Recording references look like OR 12345-678 or COC, and dimensions like N100FT or E1608.5FT. None of those are lots. Counting them is how owners talk themselves into an extra lot that is not there.

This is the part nobody tells you. A legal can name two lots and still describe something you cannot split, because a piece was carved off, or because you only hold a share of it. These are the specific words to look for.

PB 34-57 means plat book 34, page 57. That is a real document you can look at, and it is the drawing your lots were cut from.

1. 1
   Note the plat book and page

   Take them straight off your legal description. Some legals name two plat books, which happens when a block was replatted later. The later book is the one that controls your lot lines.

2. 2
   Open the Clerk's Official Records

   Go to onlineservices.miamidadeclerk.gov/officialrecords and choose the search by recording book and page.

3. 3
   Set the book type to plat

   Choose the PLT plat book type, then enter your book and page. The wrong book type returns nothing, which is the usual reason people give up here.

4. 4
   Read the drawing

   You get the recorded plat: the block, the numbered lots, their dimensions, the streets, and any easements. Your lots are on it, drawn to size, with the subdivision name across the top.

5. 5
   Note the recording date

   Every plat carries the date it was recorded with the county. Write it down. It matters more than most owners expect.

Miami-Dade sets a minimum size for a buildable single-family lot, generally 5,000 square feet in unincorporated RU-1. A lot of the county's older plats drew lots narrower than that, because 25 and 50 foot widths were normal in the 1920s. Whether an undersized old lot still counts as a buildable lot of record depends on the rule that applies to your zoning and on how old the plat is, so ask the county about your specific folio instead of assuming it either way.

One practical warning. The plat books are roughly sequential but not strictly chronological, so you cannot date a plat by its book number. We have pulled recorded dates in these books running from 1924 through the late 1940s, and books in the low to mid thirties scatter across the early and middle 1930s. The only date you can rely on is the one printed on your own plat.

Say you get to the end and the legal names two clean whole lots. There is still one question left, and it is the one that decides everything: is there actually an empty lot standing there, or is the house sitting on top of the line?

• Look at your own yard first. Is there open ground beside the house wide enough that a house could sit on it, with its own frontage on the street?
• Additions are the usual culprit. A back bedroom, a Florida room, or an enclosed carport added decades ago often reaches across the platted division.
• Detached structures count. A garage, a shed, a pool deck, or a driveway sitting on the empty lot is an encroachment that has to be handled.
• Setbacks eat into it. Unincorporated RU-1 uses a side setback commonly set at 7.5 feet, so the house has to clear the line by a margin rather than just miss it.
• No online map settles this. The recorded lot line has not been digitised. Aerials and county maps give you a strong maybe, and only a survey gives you the answer.

1. 1
   If it names one lot

   You have your answer and it took two minutes. There is nothing here to split off.

2. 2
   If it names two or more clean lots

   Read how selling the extra lot works, which covers what it is worth and how the closing runs.

3. 3
   If it names two lots with LESS or PT OF in it

   Worth a second look rather than a dead end. Sometimes the carved strip is a few feet of road widening and the rest still stands as a lot. That is a survey question.

4. 4
   If you cannot make sense of it

   Send us the address and we will read it for you and tell you plainly which of the three you are. Start on our extra lots page.