Hialeah Lady Bird Deed Attorney

Written and reviewed by Yanitza Schoonover, Florida probate and estate planning attorney The Schoonover Law Firm, P.A. · Updated August 2026

Hialeah Lady Bird Deed Attorney

A Hialeah Lady Bird Deed, known formally as a Florida enhanced life estate deed, lets your house pass directly to the children or family members you name when you die, with no Miami-Dade probate case. Nothing changes while you are alive. You stay on title, you keep your homestead exemption, and you can live in the house, rent part of it, refinance it, sell it, or change your mind completely.

Hialeah is its own kind of estate planning conversation, and two census figures explain why. 74.5% of residents are foreign-born and 92.6% speak a language other than English at home, both the highest of any city on this site. At the same time the median household income is $55,594 against a median home value of $392,000. Put those together and you get the defining Hialeah fact: the house is not part of the estate, the house is the estate, and it usually belongs to a family that has held it for decades.

What Is a Hialeah Lady Bird Deed?

A Hialeah Lady Bird Deed is the common name for a Florida enhanced life estate deed recorded on property in Miami-Dade County. It names the beneficiaries, called remaindermen, who receive the property automatically at your death, while reserving to you an enhanced life estate that leaves you in complete control while you are alive.

The difference between this and simply putting your children on the deed is the difference between a plan and a problem. If you add a child as a co-owner today, that child owns part of your house today. You cannot sell or refinance without their signature. If they are sued, divorce, or file bankruptcy, your house is exposed. And you cannot undo it without their cooperation.

A Lady Bird Deed reserves the power to sell, convey, mortgage, lease and revoke without the beneficiaries’ consent. They receive nothing until you die. Until then the house is yours, completely, and you can change your mind for any reason or no reason.

For a broader comparison, see our guide to Lady Bird Deeds versus wills, trusts and quitclaim deeds.

Hialeah Estate Planning Snapshot

Hialeah has one of the most distinctive demographic profiles in the United States, and every number below points toward the same planning conclusion.

• 20.3% of Hialeah residents are age 65+

• 46.6% of housing units are owner-occupied

• $392,000 median value of owner-occupied housing

• $55,594 median household income

• 74.5% of Hialeah residents are foreign-born

• 92.6% speak a language other than English at home

A $392,000 house against a $55,594 household income is a ratio of roughly seven to one. For most Hialeah families the home represents years of work and essentially the whole of what will be passed down. When probate costs are driven by the size of the estate, and the estate is one house, the family feels every dollar of it.

One in five residents is over 65, and 74.5% were born outside the United States. That combination describes a large population of older homeowners who bought decades ago, raised families in these houses, and now want a simple answer to a simple question: how does this go to my children without a court case?

The 92.6% figure is not a footnote. It means the overwhelming majority of Hialeah households conduct their daily lives in Spanish, while every deed, every court filing and every title document is in English. That gap is where mistakes live.

Demographic figures: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Hialeah city, Florida (most recent American Community Survey five-year estimates available at publication).

Before Anything Else: Who Is Actually on the Deed?

This is the first thing we check on a Hialeah property, and it stops a meaningful number of families in their tracks.

The pattern is familiar. A couple bought the house in 1978. The husband died in 2001. Nobody opened a probate case, because the widow simply kept living there and paying the taxes, and the tax bill kept arriving in a name everyone recognized. She died in 2021. The adult children have been maintaining the property ever since and now want to put a Lady Bird Deed on it so their own children are protected.

They cannot. The record owner is still the father who died in 2001. No one signing today holds title, so nothing they sign conveys anything. Living in a house for forty years and paying every tax bill is not ownership under Florida law.

It is fixable. A Florida summary administration, often paired with a petition to determine homestead status of real property, produces a court order establishing who owns the home and confirming its homestead character, the order title companies will accept. When more than two years have passed since the death, summary administration is available regardless of the estate’s value, which makes many of these cases far more manageable than families expect.

Once title is clean, the Lady Bird Deed is exactly the right next step. It is what stops the cycle from repeating.

Duplexes, Efficiencies and Partial Homestead

Hialeah has an unusually large stock of duplexes, and an even larger number of single-family homes with a converted efficiency, garage apartment or rented back unit. Often that rent is what made the mortgage affordable in the first place. It also creates a wrinkle almost no generic estate planning article addresses.

Florida’s homestead protections (both the property tax exemption and the constitutional protection in Article X, Section 4) generally attach to the portion of the property you actually occupy as your residence. The half you rent to a tenant is not your residence. The Miami-Dade Property Appraiser may already be assessing your property with a partial homestead exemption for exactly this reason.

If part of the property is rented, tell us. It takes one sentence in the consultation and it changes what we look at.

Signing a Legal Document in a Language You Actually Understand

With 92.6% of Hialeah households speaking a language other than English at home, this deserves to be said plainly rather than buried.

The deed must be recorded in English. That is not negotiable. It is the language of the Miami-Dade Official Records, of Florida real property law, and of every title examiner who will ever look at your chain of title. A Spanish-language deed is not what gets recorded.

But the conversation is a different thing entirely. Before you sign, you should understand exactly what the document does: what you are keeping, what you are giving up, who receives the property, what happens if you change your mind, and what your children will have to do when you are gone. That explanation should happen in the language you think in, not the language the form is printed in.

This matters more than it sounds. A deed signed by someone who did not fully understand it is vulnerable in ways that surface at the worst possible moment, when the signer is no longer available to explain what they intended. Families who assumed they had a plan discover instead that they have a lawsuit.

Se habla español. Podemos explicarle el documento en español antes de que usted firme. If you would rather have the conversation in Spanish, say so when you schedule a consultation and that is how we will do it.

Mortgages, Liens and Unpermitted Work

A Lady Bird Deed transfers the property as it is. It does not clean anything up on the way through, and Hialeah properties often carry more history than the owner realizes.

If there is still a mortgage

A Lady Bird Deed works on a mortgaged home. Because you keep full control and possession during your lifetime, it generally does not trigger a due-on-sale clause the way a transfer to your children today would. Your beneficiaries receive the house and the mortgage. If the plan is for them to keep it, they need to be able to make the payment or refinance, and that is worth discussing with them before you die rather than after.

Unpermitted additions and open permits

Converted garages, added bedrooms and enclosed carports are common in older Hialeah housing stock, and a fair number were built without permits or with permits that were never closed out. The deed still works. The problem arrives later, when your beneficiaries try to sell, refinance or insure the property and an open permit or a code enforcement lien surfaces in the title search.

Code enforcement liens recorded against the property follow it to whoever inherits it. If you know about unpermitted work, resolving it while you are alive is far cheaper than leaving your children to discover it during a closing.

Association and utility liens

Any recorded lien (association assessments, municipal utility liens, contractor claims of lien) travels with the property. A Lady Bird Deed does not extinguish them.

Homestead Exemption, Save Our Homes and Spousal Rights

The tax homestead

The homestead exemption reduces your taxable value, and Save Our Homes caps annual increases in assessed value at 3% or the change in the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower. For a Hialeah owner who bought decades ago and never moved, that cap has quietly become one of the most valuable things they own. A properly drafted Lady Bird Deed should not disturb the exemption or the cap during your lifetime, because you retain the enhanced life estate, you remain in possession, and the Property Appraiser continues to treat you as the owner of record.

The cap does not pass to your children. It resets on the change of ownership at death, the same as it would through probate or a trust. Anyone telling you otherwise is describing something Florida law does not provide.

The constitutional homestead

Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution restricts what an owner can do with homestead property. A married owner cannot convey homestead without the spouse joining in the deed, and homestead cannot be devised away from a surviving spouse or a minor child. These restrictions are tested at death rather than at signing, which is why a defective deed can sit quietly for years before it fails.

A married Hialeah couple normally signs the Lady Bird Deed together, naming the beneficiaries who take after the second death. Where there is a minor child, a deed naming anyone else is a real problem requiring a different plan.

Medicaid and Estate Recovery

With one in five Hialeah residents over 65, long-term care is a live question for a lot of these families. Florida’s Medicaid program is required by federal law to seek reimbursement from the estates of recipients aged 55 and over who received long-term care benefits, and the word doing all the work is estate.

Florida defines it narrowly: recovery reaches assets passing through the probate estate. Florida has not adopted the expanded definition some states use to reach jointly held property and trust assets. Property that never enters probate is generally beyond a recovery claim, and Florida’s constitutional homestead protection points the same direction when the homestead passes to heirs.

That is the mechanism. The home passes to your named beneficiaries outside probate, so it is not part of the estate the state can look to.

Our full write-up is on the Florida Lady Bird Deed and Medicaid page.

Sources: 42 U.S.C. § 1396p (federal estate recovery mandate); Fla. Stat. §§ 409.910 and 409.9101; Art. X, § 4, Fla. Const.

Recording a Hialeah Lady Bird Deed

Hialeah property records in the Miami-Dade County Official Records, maintained by the Clerk of the Court and Comptroller. The recording counter is at Courthouse East, 22 NW First Street, first floor, Miami, and deeds may also be submitted by mail or through an approved e-recording provider.

Execution requirements

Florida requires a deed conveying an interest in real property to be signed in the presence of two subscribing witnesses and acknowledged before a notary public (Fla. Stat. §§ 689.01 and 695.03). Both witnesses must actually be present and must sign. Deeds prepared informally by relatives, or signed at a hospital or nursing facility without proper witnessing, fail this test regularly.

Recording fees and documentary stamp tax

Recording charges are $10.00 for the first page, $8.50 for each additional page, and $1.00 per name indexed beyond four names.

Miami-Dade is the only Florida county with its own documentary stamp rate: $0.60 per $100 of consideration rather than the $0.70 used statewide, plus a $0.45 per $100 surtax on transfers of property other than a single-family residence. For a duplex that surtax question is worth confirming with the Clerk before recording.

As to whether the tax applies to this deed at all: in Technical Assistance Advisement 20B4-004 (October 16, 2020) the Florida Department of Revenue concluded that an enhanced life estate deed is not subject to documentary stamp tax, because no present beneficial interest transfers when the deed is signed. A Technical Assistance Advisement binds the Department only as to the taxpayer and facts presented, so a deed on a mortgaged property still deserves review beforehand.

Sources: Miami-Dade County Clerk of the Court and Comptroller, Official Records; Florida Department of Revenue Technical Assistance Advisement 20B4-004 (Oct. 16, 2020); Fla. Stat. ch. 201; Fla. Stat. § 28.24(13) (statutory service charges); Fla. Stat. §§ 689.01, 695.03.

After a Death: What Your Family Actually Does

Remarkably little, which is the entire point.

1. Order certified death certificates

   Several copies. Institutions want originals, not photocopies.

2. Record one against the property

   Recorded in the Miami-Dade Official Records, this publicly establishes that the life estate has ended and the named beneficiaries now hold title.

3. Provide an affidavit if a title company asks

   On a later sale or refinance, a title underwriter commonly wants an affidavit confirming identity, continuous marital status, and that the deed was never revoked.

4. Update the insurance and, if there is one, the mortgage servicer

   The property insurer needs to know who owns and occupies the home. Skipping this is how coverage lapses at the worst time.

5. Apply for their own homestead exemption

   If a beneficiary makes the house their permanent residence, they apply to the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser in their own name. Your exemption and Save Our Homes cap do not carry over.

What is not on that list: opening a probate case, appointing a personal representative, publishing notice to creditors, waiting out a claim period, or paying probate costs out of the value of the house. That absence is what you are buying.

What a Lady Bird Deed Does Not Do

How a Hialeah Lady Bird Deed Compares to the Alternatives

Most families arrive having already been told one of these five things by a relative or a neighbor.

The second row deserves emphasis, because in Hialeah it is far and away the most common piece of advice families receive from someone who means well. Adding a child to the deed feels like the simple answer and is usually the expensive one. Our detailed breakdown is on the Florida Lady Bird Deed comparison page.

How to Get a Hialeah Lady Bird Deed

1. Confirm who is actually on the deed

   We pull the last recorded deed from the Miami-Dade Official Records. If a parent or late spouse is still the record owner, that gets resolved first.

2. Tell us if any part of the property is rented

   Duplex, efficiency, garage apartment. It changes the homestead analysis and we would rather know at the start.

3. Confirm the legal description and folio

   The exact legal description from the last recorded deed, plus the folio number from the Property Appraiser.

4. Draft the enhanced life estate reservation

   The deed must reserve your power to sell, convey, mortgage, lease and revoke without the beneficiaries’ consent.

5. Sign with two witnesses and a notary, after you understand it

   Both witnesses present and signing, notary block complete, and the document explained in the language you are comfortable in before you sign.

6. Record in the Miami-Dade Official Records

   At Courthouse East, by mail, or by e-recording, for $10.00 for the first page and $8.50 per additional page.

Plain-English Glossary

Hialeah Neighborhoods and Communities We Serve

We prepare Lady Bird Deeds for property throughout Hialeah and Miami-Dade County, including:

• West Hialeah
• East Hialeah
• Hialeah Gardens
• Palm Springs
• Palm Springs North
• Miami Lakes
• Country Club
• Westland
• Hialeah Acres
• Lake Michelle
• Bucky Dent Park area
• Amelia Earhart Park area
• Milander Park area
• West Little River
• Brownsville
• Medley
• Opa-locka
• Virginia Gardens
• Doral border communities
• Okeechobee Road corridor

We also assist families in nearby Miami-Dade markets including Miami, Doral, Miami Beach, Kendall, Homestead, and Miramar. Browse every market on our areas we serve page.