What a property roll shows about ownership
The roll is a tax record. Its owner field is a copy, fed daily from the recorder's office, kept for the purpose of sending an assessment to somebody. Treating it as a determination of title is the most common mistake made with the easiest data to get.
One session, published twice. The written version below follows the recording as it plays. Click any line to jump the film to it.
0:36Two records, one of them derived from the other
One register holds instruments. A roll holds parcels, values, and a name to bill.
Fla. Stat. 695.22 wires them together, and it says exactly how. County recorders must keep and furnish to the county property appraiser a daily schedule of the deeds and conveyances filed for recordation. Setting out the grantor. The names and addresses of each grantee. And a description of the land as specified in each instrument.
Hear what that makes the roll. The owner name on it is downstream of a deed. Downstream, by however many days the schedule takes. So where the two disagree, the question is how many days apart they are.
1:18Which one the law cares about
Now, which one does the law care about.
Fla. Stat. 695.01, subsection 1, puts the authority in the register, and it does it in one sentence.
No conveyance, transfer or mortgage of real property, nor any lease for a term of 1 year or longer, is good and effectual in law or equity against creditors or subsequent purchasers for value and without notice, unless it's recorded as the chapter directs.
Unless it's recorded. That's a rule about recording, and appearing on a tax roll does nothing to satisfy it.
1:51What the roll is genuinely good for
Okay. So what is the roll genuinely good for? Because it is good for things, and I don't want to talk you out of using it.
Three
A value, produced by an assessor on a published schedule. That's the only routine estimate of what a parcel is worth that costs you nothing to get. An address and a parcel identifier, which is how a name search and a lot search get joined. And a set of exemption flags, which in Florida is how a homestead claim first becomes visible to you.
None of those is a statement about who owns the parcel. All three are worth having anyway.
Now here's the part to hold on to. There are four ways the roll and the title come apart. Each one is ordinary, and none of them is anybody's error.
Lag, first. A deed recorded on Tuesday reaches the appraiser on a daily schedule, and reaches the published roll whenever the roll is next published. Which isn't daily.
Then entities. A parcel held by a company carries the company's name, and the person behind it appears nowhere on the roll.
Then unrecorded deeds. A conveyance that was never recorded is ineffective against creditors under 101 point oh one, subsection 1. But it still happened, between the parties. And the roll knows nothing about it either way.
And possession, with no deed at all. Fla. Stat. 95.18 makes 7 years of actual continued possession, under a claim of title not founded on a written instrument, into a route to ownership. No instrument exists, so nothing feeds any daily schedule.
3:38Four ways the roll and the title come apart
Four ways, and not one of them is a mistake anybody made.
3:42How to use it without overreading it
So how do you use it without overreading it.
A roll answers where to look. The register answers what's there.
Start from a name on the roll and treat it as a lead to a parcel identifier. Take the identifier into the land records and read the chain of instruments against that lot. And if the last recorded deed names somebody other than the roll does, the deed is the later fact about title. The roll is the older copy.
A roll is a good place to start a search, and a bad place to end one.
4:12What this does not cover
Now let me tell you what this doesn't cover.
How stale any particular roll is. That's a question with 67 different answers in Florida alone.
Publication schedules, correction practice, how quickly a daily schedule gets worked into the file: all of it varies by county, and none of it is published in a form anybody can compare. So the direction is knowable and the size is not. A roll is never ahead of the register. Never ahead. By how much, nobody can tell you.
And nobody writing this is a lawyer, and none of it is advice. Whether a particular person owns a particular parcel is a title question, and title questions get answered by people who are paid to answer them and who carry insurance when they do.
What I can tell you is narrower. The owner line on a roll arrived there from a deed. And the deed is still the thing worth reading.
So use the roll to find the lot, and then go and read the deed. The piece on Florida homestead is where the roll's exemption flags get their own reading, and they mislead in both directions.