What Is a Lis Pendens in Florida?

Something came in the mail with Latin on it and now you're reading this at an hour you'd rather be asleep. So let's start with what it actually is, because most of what's written about this online is either a law firm ad or wrong.

A lis pendens is not the lawsuit. It's a notice about the lawsuit, recorded in the public records of the county where your property sits.

Florida Statute 48.23(1)(a) is blunt about it. A court action only operates as a lis pendens on your property if a notice of lis pendens is recorded in that county's official records, and only for as long as that notice hasn't expired, been withdrawn, or been discharged. No recorded notice, no lis pendens. The lawsuit can exist without one.

What It Actually Does

It tells the world the property is tied up in a court case.

The practical weight of that is in 48.23(1)(b). If somebody buys the property, or takes a lien on it, while a case is pending and no notice was recorded, they take it free of the claims in that case. They're treated as if they never had notice at all. Flip that around and you have what a recorded lis pendens does: anyone who takes an interest in the property after it's recorded takes that interest subject to whatever the court eventually decides.

That's the whole mechanism. It doesn't freeze your house. It doesn't stop you signing anything. It attaches the outcome of the lawsuit to the property so a buyer can't step around it.

The Part That Costs Junior Lienholders Their Money

This one is in 48.23(1)(d) and almost nobody writes about it.

Recording the notice bars enforcement against that property of every interest and lien that was unrecorded at the time the notice went on record, and the statute specifically includes federal tax liens and levies in that. The only way out is to move to intervene in the case within 30 days of the notice being recorded, and have the court grant it.

If the holder of an unrecorded interest doesn't intervene, and the case runs through to a judicial sale, the statute says the property is forever discharged from those interests and liens.

Thirty days, from recording. Not from when somebody got around to telling you.

What Has to Be in the Notice

Under 48.23(1)(c), a notice of lis pendens has to contain:

• The names of the parties
• The date the action started, or the clerk's electronic receipt date, or the case number
• The name of the court where it's pending
• A description of the property
• A statement of the relief being sought as to the property

Worth reading yours against that list. A notice that names the wrong parcel or the wrong parties is a different conversation than one that's in order, and that conversation belongs with an attorney.

The One Year Thing Everybody Gets Wrong

Search this topic and you'll be told a lis pendens expires after a year. That comes from 48.23(2), and the sentence has an exception in it that changes the answer for most people reading this page.

The statute says a notice is not effectual beyond one year from the commencement of the action and expires at that point, unless the relief sought is founded on a duly recorded instrument, or on a construction lien under part I of chapter 713, or unless the court extends it for good cause.

A mortgage foreclosure is founded on a recorded mortgage. That's a duly recorded instrument. So in an ordinary Florida mortgage foreclosure the one year clock generally isn't doing what the internet says it does.

If your situation involves something other than a recorded mortgage, that exception may not cover it, and that's a question for a lawyer looking at your actual pleading rather than a page like this one.

One more wrinkle from 48.23(4): where the one year period does apply, it doesn't count time the case spends in an appellate court.

When a Court Will Take It Off

48.23(3) says that when the pleading doesn't show the action is founded on a recorded instrument or a chapter 713 lien, or when the action no longer affects the property, the court shall control and discharge the notice the same way it would dissolve an injunction.

So it isn't permanent and it isn't automatic in either direction. It comes off when the case stops touching the property, or when a court says so.

Can You Still Sell the House?

Nothing in 48.23 prohibits a sale. What it does is put the buyer on notice, which under 48.23(1)(b) means they take the property subject to the outcome of the case rather than clear of it.

In practice that's the problem. A buyer's title company sees the recorded notice, and a lender financing that buyer sees it too. Most transactions need the case resolved, or the notice discharged, or the payoff handled at closing before anyone will insure or lend against the title.

That's also exactly why a short sale exists as an option here. The point of the negotiation is to get the lender to accept a payoff that's less than the balance and release the lien, which is what clears the path to closing. Whether that's the right answer for you depends on numbers I can't see from a web page.

Where This Sits in the Timeline

The recorded notice usually shows up at or near the start of the foreclosure case, which means by the time you're holding one, the lawsuit exists. It also means the case has a docket, a schedule, and a set of deadlines that haven't all passed yet.

I made a video walking through where the lis pendens falls in the Florida foreclosure timeline and what's still on the table when one lands. It covers the timing side. This page covers what the statute itself says. Different jobs, same subject.