Estate Planning Attorney for Lakeland, Florida

A Florida trust that leaves your home or savings to someone at your death has to be signed the way a will is signed, with two witnesses who watch you sign and a notary. Florida law voids the parts of a trust that pass property at death when they are signed without those formalities, and Florida courts have thrown out trust amendments that carried one witness instead of two. We run the signing with our own witnesses and notary, by video or in person. If you would rather sign locally, these are the places nearby.

A Florida deed needs two witnesses and a notary, and the Polk County Property Appraiser says the same thing on its own help page. We set up the signing for you by video, so you can sign at your own kitchen table in Lakeland with nobody driving anywhere.

Polk’s Clerk does not publish a separate deed checklist, so the formal requirements are Florida’s, including each witness’s printed name and post office address under the signature. When we draft and record the deed, those details are handled.

Putting your home into the trust means recording a new deed, from you to yourself as trustee, in Polk County’s official records. The trust deed is recorded at the same office, and in the same way, as any other deed.

In Polk County, deeds are recorded by Stacy M. Butterfield, the Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller, who also serves as County Recorder. The Clerk records official records at three offices, and one of them is in Lakeland, at the Lakeland Government Center, 930 East Parker Street, with Room 240 as the mailing address there. The other two are the Polk County Courthouse in Bartow, 255 North Broadway Avenue, and the Northeast Government Center in Lake Alfred. The Clerk’s offices are open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and the main line is 863-534-4000.

You will not need to go in. We record your deed electronically through Simplifile, which is on the Polk Clerk’s own list of eRecording partners, so the original never leaves our hands and nothing travels by mail. The Clerk posts the recording fee as $10 for the first page and $8.50 for each page after that, so a two-page deed costs $18.50 to record, plus $1 for each name after the fourth.

A home held in your revocable trust keeps its homestead exemption when the trust gives you a lifetime interest in the home, which is how we draft it. The Property Appraiser still asks for proof of the trust, and each county asks for something slightly different, so here is what this one wants.

Homestead is handled by Neil Combee, the Polk County Property Appraiser. The Property Appraiser has a Lakeland office in the same Lakeland Government Center, 930 East Parker Street, Suite 272, open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at 863-802-6150. The main office is at 255 North Wilson Avenue in Bartow, where the Property Appraiser’s site says counter service is paused during a renovation while the Lakeland and Lake Alfred offices stay open. The exemptions line is 863-534-4777, and the email is [email protected].

You can file online at exemptions.polkflpa.gov, which the Property Appraiser says takes most homeowners less than 15 minutes, or in person, by mail or by email. Bring your Florida driver license and Social Security number, plus a Florida voter or vehicle registration or another proof of residency showing the home’s address. The statutory deadline is March 1 each year. Applications for 2027 are being taken now, and once an exemption is approved it renews automatically.

The Property Appraiser answers the question that matters for a lady bird deed on its own FAQ page. To keep the homestead exemption, the person claiming it must have equitable title, a life estate, or a beneficial interest for life, and a lady bird deed keeps a life estate for you. If the home is held in a trust, the Property Appraiser may ask for a copy of the trust agreement after you apply.

Expect a lag after recording. The Property Appraiser’s deed department typically takes four to six weeks after a deed records before the new ownership shows on its website, and longer when volume is high, so the old owner line on the parcel page for a few weeks is normal.

After your death your successor trustee steps in without a court. Within 60 days the trustee must tell the beneficiaries the trust exists, and Florida law requires a notice of trust to be filed with the court in Polk County. To sell or transfer the house, the trustee signs a deed as trustee and gives the title company a certification of trust instead of the whole trust.

After you die, the house is already your family’s. To show that in the record, they record a certified copy of your death certificate and an affidavit, and then a title company can insure a sale. The Florida Department of Health in Polk County issues death certificates in Lakeland at its location at 3241 Lakeland Hills Boulevard and at its Office of Vital Statistics on Government Center Boulevard in Lake Alfred, open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The fee is $10 a certificate, the vital statistics line is 863-519-8446, and the county offices cover Florida deaths from 2009 on. We prepare and record the rest.

We send you the recorded deed as soon as the Clerk returns it. The deed also appears in the Clerk’s free official records search, which covers 1957 to the present, and you can print an uncertified copy at home at no charge. Polk also keeps older deeds online, back to 1861, in a separate historical deed search.

If a bank or title company asks for a certified copy, the Clerk offers electronic certification for official records, a tamper evident PDF you can download within minutes and print as often as you need. A mailed certified copy can be requested online as well. At the counter, the Clerk charges $1 a page for a copy and $2 to certify.

Then take two minutes to sign up for the Clerk’s free Property Alert. You register with an email address and then choose your name, your parcel ID number, or both. Whenever a document is recorded in Polk County that matches, the Clerk emails you with instructions for finding it. If a deed you never signed shows up, the Clerk’s advice is to report it to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office at 863-298-6200 or your local police.

The Lakeland Government Center sits on East Parker Street, northeast of downtown, so the places below are a short drive or a 20 to 28 minute walk away. For coffee, Mitchell’s Coffee House at 235 North Kentucky Avenue opened in 1998 as the first coffee shop in downtown Lakeland and is open Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the kitchen closing at 2 p.m. The walk is about 20 minutes. Black & Brew, a Lakeland coffee house and bistro, has its downtown cafe at 205 East Main Street, about 24 minutes on foot.

To print, the Lakeland Public Library at 100 Lake Morton Drive charges 10 cents a page for black and white and 50 cents for color, and you can send the file from your phone ahead of time through the library’s mobile printing and pick it up at the desk. The print stations take bills and coins only. The library is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 1:30 to 5 p.m., about 28 minutes on foot, and Black & Brew runs a second cafe inside it.

The library is worth the stop for its own sake. The Lakeland Public Library opened on the shore of Lake Morton in January 1927, before which the Woman’s Club, organized in 1912, kept the library residents used, and the present building opened in April 1966.

The errands are close together downtown. Citizens Bank & Trust, a Polk County community bank, has its downtown office at 402 South Kentucky Avenue, Suite 100, at 863-686-1430, about 28 minutes on foot, which helps if you bank there. The Downtown Lakeland post office at 210 North Missouri Avenue is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., about 26 minutes away, for anything that has to go out by certified mail.

If you drive downtown, the city’s Main Street Garage at 314 East Main Street has metered parking at $1 an hour or $6 a day, enforced from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays. At the Heritage Garage, 227 South Kentucky Avenue, the first two levels are free after 5 p.m. on weekdays and all day on weekends.

A disabled veteran may qualify for more than the basic homestead exemption, and the proof is a letter from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The Polk County Property Appraiser lists a $5,000 exemption for an honorably discharged veteran with a service connected disability of 10 percent or more, a full exemption on the homestead for a veteran with a service connected total and permanent disability, and a separate exemption for a veteran 65 or older with a combat related disability. Some of these carry over to a surviving spouse.

Polk County Veteran Services helps with the paperwork, and in Lakeland its officers work without appointments at the VA clinic, 2080 Meadowland Park Boulevard, office 2049 on the second floor. A county Veterans Service Officer is there Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the Florida Department of Veterans’ Affairs staffs the office on Tuesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The county’s line for appointments at its other offices is 863-534-5220.

Marriage or divorce often leaves a home titled in a name you no longer use. We write the new deed with both names, the name on your old deed and your name today, so the record connects them and a future title search does not stall on the difference.

Your driver license should match too, because the Property Appraiser asks for it when you file for homestead. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles requires every name change on a license to be made in person, and only after the Social Security Administration has updated your name, allowing 24 to 48 hours after that. In Polk County, driver licenses are issued by the Tax Collector, and the Lakeland Service Center is at 916 North Massachusetts Avenue, open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with driver license service by appointment and a 4 p.m. cutoff.