A judgment is a piece of paper. Collecting on it is a second lawsuit against a defendant who has had eighteen months of advance warning to get ready.
That’s the argument for hiring an asset search investigator in Miami before you file rather than after you win. A pre-litigation asset check answers the one question a complaint can’t: if you prevail, is there anything left to take?
Florida Is the Best State in America to Be a Judgment Debtor
Florida’s constitutional homestead exemption has no dollar cap. Tenancy by the entireties shields jointly held property from the creditors of one spouse. Statutes 222.14 and 222.21 protect annuities, life insurance cash value, and retirement accounts. A defendant sitting on twelve million dollars can be functionally uncollectible, and plenty of them moved here for exactly that reason.
Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution caps homestead by area, not value. Half an acre inside a municipality, 160 acres outside one. There’s a federal cap in bankruptcy under 11 U.S.C. 522(p) for homes acquired within 1,215 days of filing, but a state court judgment creditor gets no benefit from it. A defendant can hold an eleven million dollar house in Pinecrest against your judgment indefinitely.
Entireties property is the second wall. Under Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Associates, 780 So. 2d 45 (Fla. 2001), Florida presumes that a bank account held by a married couple is entireties property, which puts it beyond the reach of a creditor of only one spouse. Rebutting that presumption is possible and it is not cheap.
Wages are the third. Statute 222.11 exempts the wages of a head of family netting $750 a week or less from garnishment entirely, and exempts higher earnings unless the debtor agreed in writing to garnishment. Add the retirement account exemption under 222.21 and the personal property exemptions under 222.25, and you can end up with a paper win over someone whose entire visible life is exempt.
Winning a seven-figure verdict against a defendant whose house, boat, and brokerage accounts all sit inside exemptions built before your demand letter went out is a very expensive way to learn this.
What an Asset Search Investigator in Miami Can Legally Find
A lawful pre-suit search covers public records and licensed-access databases: real property, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, UCC filings, corporate affiliations, judgment and lien history, bankruptcy filings, and professional licenses. It does not cover bank balances, and anyone offering those is describing a federal crime.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, 15 U.S.C. 6821, makes it a federal offense to obtain customer information from a financial institution by false pretenses. Investigators have been prosecuted for it. What we can do is show your lawyer where the accounts probably are, which turns into a subpoena in post-judgment discovery and gets you the same information in a form a court will honor.
The rest of the file is deeper than most litigators expect:
- Real property across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach and statewide, including property titled to entities the subject controls
- Recorded mortgages and their balances, because ownership without equity is not an asset
- UCC-1 filings at the Florida Secured Transaction Registry, showing what a bank already has a lien on
- Vessels through Coast Guard documentation and Florida DHSMV registration, plus slip leases at Dinner Key, Miami Beach Marina, and Haulover
- Aircraft in the FAA registry
- Sunbiz officer, manager, and registered agent history, including dissolved, administratively dissolved, and reinstated entities
- Litigation and judgment history through the Eleventh Judicial Circuit clerk, the statewide portal, and the Southern District of Florida docket
- Employment, professional licensing, and lifestyle indicators that reveal income the tax return doesn’t
Recorded mortgage balances are the part people skip. A defendant with four properties and four fresh mortgages is not a collection target. A defendant with one property he bought in 2013 and never encumbered is.
Shell LLCs and What Sunbiz Won’t Show You
A Florida LLC filing names its managers and registered agent. It does not name its members. Someone can hold a six million dollar Coconut Grove property through an entity whose only listed human works at a downtown firm and has never seen the building.
Connecting shell LLCs to a person takes records outside the corporate registry. Registered agent overlap across a cluster of entities. The same suite number on eight filings. Entities formed on the same afternoon by the same filer. Mortgage documents, which name a signing member because no lender will close without one. The notary and witnesses on a warranty deed, who tend to be the same two people at the firm that closed every deal the subject ever did. Building permits through Miami-Dade Regulatory and Economic Resources, where the owner-applicant on a large renovation is a human being with a signature.
FinCEN’s beneficial ownership registry briefly promised to make this easy. The March 2025 interim final rule removed U.S. domestic companies from the reporting requirement, leaving only foreign entities registered here. Check the current status before relying on it, because this area has moved repeatedly.
Fraudulent Transfers and the Four-Year Window
Chapter 726 of the Florida Statutes lets a creditor unwind a transfer made to hinder, delay, or defraud. The outside limit is generally four years from the transfer, or one year after it reasonably could have been discovered. Finding the transfer before you file is what makes that claim usable rather than theoretical.
Statute 726.105 lists the badges of fraud a court weighs: transfer to an insider, the debtor retaining possession or control, concealment, transfer of substantially all assets, timing relative to a substantial debt, and inadequate consideration. A recorded quitclaim deed transferring the defendant’s Weston house to his mother for $10, dated eleven days after your demand letter, is worth more than any deposition you will take in that case.
Post-judgment, Statute 56.29 proceedings supplementary let you implead the third parties who received the assets and litigate the transfer inside the original case. That works far better when the transfer was documented before anyone knew you were looking.
Worth knowing on the lien side: recording a certified copy of a Florida judgment in a county’s official records creates a lien on the debtor’s real property in that county for ten years, renewable once. A separate judgment lien certificate filed with the Department of State reaches personal property for five years, renewable once. Those clocks are the reason collectibility should be a pre-suit question, not a post-verdict discovery.
When an Asset Search Investigator in Miami Tells You Not to Sue
The most valuable outcome of a pre-suit search is often the one that stops a lawsuit. A target with a homesteaded house carrying no equity, a leased car, an administratively dissolved LLC, and a wage history under the garnishment threshold is not worth suing on the merits alone.
I’d rather bill for a search and tell a client to walk than watch them spend a year earning a verdict they can never enforce. The commercial litigators we work with regularly use the report to settle rather than to sue. A defendant who learns you already have the Weston rental, the boat at Haulover, and the entity chart tends to become more reasonable about a number.
Two other outcomes come up often enough to mention. Sometimes the real defendant is an insurance policy, and a general liability, E&O, or D&O tower changes the entire analysis regardless of what the individual owns. And sometimes the search finds a collectible party nobody had considered, which is the argument for scoping the corporate due diligence side of the file at the same time.
A pre-suit search costs less than the first round of written discovery on the case you’re deciding whether to bring.
Get the Answer Before You Commit the Budget
We’ve provided asset and background intelligence and litigation support to South Florida law firms since 1985, from our office in Coral Gables and across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach.
Send us the name and the entities you already know about and call (305) 278-8700. We’ll tell you what a search is likely to surface before you retain us for one.
Travis Wasser is a licensed Florida investigator and the owner of Wasser Investigations Inc., Florida Agency #A3200002. He is a summa cum laude criminal justice graduate of Florida International University, a member of the Florida Association of Licensed Investigators, and the second generation to run the agency his father founded in 1985. Nothing here is legal advice.