Miami-Dade Has the Biggest Numbers in Florida. How Many Can You Actually Call?

“Miami-Dade has tons of foreclosures” is the least useful true statement in Florida investing. Tons is not a number you can build a calling week around. Here is the measured version — how many lis pendens filings the county actually produced in the last 30 and 90 days, what share of them carry enough information to work, and the one number in this dataset we are deliberately not publishing because it would mislead you.

The volume

350 filings in 30 days is roughly 16 per business day. That is the highest raw lis pendens volume of any county we collect, and it is the reason Miami-Dade is on every Florida investor's list.

It is also why it is the most competitive county in the state. Volume and competition are the same fact viewed from two directions. If you are deciding between Miami-Dade and a mid-size county, the honest trade is more filings against more people calling each one.

How much of it is workable

Filing count is the number everyone quotes. It is not the number that matters. A lis pendens identifies property by legal description — not by an owner you can call or an address you can mail. Somebody has to resolve that, and the resolution never succeeds on every row.

On Miami-Dade the large majority of filings resolve, and the failure mode is all-or-nothing: a filing either comes through complete, with the owner, the property address and the mailing address together, or it does not come through at all. That is worth knowing, because it means you are not sifting partially complete records.

At the 30-day pace above, Miami-Dade produces over 300 workable pre-foreclosure leads a month. That is the number to plan a calling week around.

Why we are not charting the monthly trend

Our own Miami-Dade monthly series climbs steeply from spring into August. Presented as a chart, that is a dramatic story about a market accelerating.

We are not going to present it, because we do not believe it is about the market. It is about us.

A collection that starts partway through a window and settles over several months produces exactly this shape — a low, jumpy early series that climbs as coverage settles. The recent months hold up when we check them, so the recent volume is real. The earlier months do not support the same confidence.

This is the most common way foreclosure “trend” content is wrong, and it is worth learning to spot regardless of whose data you are reading. When any vendor shows you a rising filing trend, ask when they started collecting that county. If the trend begins near their start date, you are looking at their onboarding curve.

Where we can compare honestly — a fixed 14-county panel with continuous coverage across the whole window — Florida lis pendens filings rose from 673 in June 2026 to 931 in July, a 38% increase. That comparison holds because the county set does not change inside it. The full method is in our county-by-county breakdown.

What else Miami-Dade produces

Lis pendens is one lane. The county records several kinds of distress, and the other lanes behave completely differently.

Two things to read carefully there. Tax-delinquent shows 1 June because Florida's certificate cycle is annual under Fla. Stat. Ch. 197 — that list refreshes once a year and is not stale when it does not move. And code violation is far larger than the rest, which reflects both genuine volume and the fact that a code lien is a much lower-intensity signal than a foreclosure filing. A code violation means somebody has an overgrown lot. A lis pendens means a court has a case number.

How to size any county yourself

None of this requires our data. The method works on free clerk records for any Florida county, and you should run it before committing a marketing budget to a market.

1. Open the county clerk's official records search and filter by document type — “LIS PENDENS” or “NOTICE OF LIS PENDENS,” the wording varies.
2. Set the date range to the last 30 days and count the results. That is your raw monthly volume.
3. Take a sample of 20 and try to resolve each to an owner and mailing address through the property appraiser. The share that succeeds is your workable rate.
4. Multiply. Raw volume × workable rate = leads you can actually contact per month.
5. Divide by your realistic contact rate and your conversion rate. That tells you whether the county can support your deal target at all.

Do this for two or three counties before you pick. A mid-size county at 90% resolution frequently beats a large one at 60%, and nobody discovers that from a marketing page.

Frequently asked

All figures measured from Lispend's own collection of Miami-Dade County clerk records on 25 August 2026. See also: what a lis pendens actually is, the county-by-county breakdown and the 2026 Florida wholesaling guide.