Guide · Florida sales
Comps for Florida houses and land from recorded sales
Start from sales the appraiser coded as qualified, one parcel to a deed, of the same kind of property, close by and recent: a mile and a year where sales are frequent, wider where they are not. Compare houses on price per heated square foot and land on price per acre, check that each comp was vacant or built when it sold, and adjust for what still differs.
Step 1: keep only qualified, single-parcel sales
Every Florida transfer gets a qualification code from the appraiser. The Department of Revenue counts codes 01 and 02 as qualified, arm's-length sales; 03 to 06 are arm's length but set aside for its checks. Drop the rest, drop any deed that sold several parcels at one price, and drop token prices. How to read a sale's codes. In the twelve months from May 2025 to April 2026, the state's file holds 1,207,100 transfers, and 475,028 of them pass that test with codes 01 and 02.
Step 2: same kind of property, as it was when it sold
Compare a house with houses and a lot with lots, using the state use code: 001 single family, 000 vacant residential, and so on. But the use code is the parcel's use on the roll today, not on the day it sold. A lot bought and then built on is a house on the roll now; a lot coded vacant now may have sold with a new house on it. The sales file has its own flag for that, vacant or improved at the time of sale. In Polk, of 2,336 qualified sales of parcels coded vacant residential on the 2026 roll, 1,534 were improved when they sold, at a median of $310,000 against $40,000 for the 802 sold as land. Read the flag before you call a sale a land comp.
Step 3: set the radius and the months by the county
How far and how far back you look depends on how many sales there are. Qualified single-parcel sales, May 2025 to April 2026:
| County | Qualified sales in 12 months |
|---|---|
| Miami-Dade | 30,807 |
| Lee | 28,642 |
| Palm Beach | 28,498 |
| Broward | 28,361 |
| Hillsborough | 22,072 |
| Polk | 19,561 |
| Duval | 17,100 |
| Marion | 15,634 |
| Levy | 1,727 |
| Franklin | 672 |
| Glades | 224 |
| Liberty | 73 |
Broward's 28,361 come to about 2,360 a month across the county, so a mile and six months is often enough there. Liberty's 73 come to about six a month for the whole county: there, look five or ten miles out and two or three years back, and adjust the older sales for how the market has moved since.
Step 4: compare on a unit, then adjust
Divide price by heated square feet for houses and by acres for land, and work from the middle of the comps, not the extremes. Single-family homes, qualified sales over the same twelve months:
| County | Sales with heated area | Median price | Median heated sq ft | Middle half, $ per heated sq ft | Median $ per heated sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miami-Dade | 11,822 | $665,000 | 1,795 | $320 to $521 | $397 |
| Lee | 11,357 | $395,000 | 1,798 | $187 to $296 | $227 |
| Hillsborough | 17,644 | $404,350 | 1,842 | $185 to $283 | $225 |
| Duval | 13,932 | $310,000 | 1,648 | $154 to $227 | $184 |
| Polk | 14,316 | $310,600 | 1,785 | $154 to $202 | $177 |
| Marion | 10,014 | $285,000 | 1,670 | $153 to $195 | $173 |
The spread inside one county is wide: in Miami-Dade the middle half runs from $320 to $521, so a county median is a check on your comps, never a substitute. Then adjust for what the unit misses: a pool, the year built, a garage, water frontage, a larger lot.
Land needs the same care with size. Small lots sell high per acre: lots sold vacant in Charlotte had a median of $20,000 on 0.23 acres, about $78,000 an acre, a rate no five-acre tract nearby would fetch. Compare lots with lots of a similar size. For a parcel's assessed value against its sales, see how much is my Florida land worth.
Where it stops
- Sales arrive late. Our copy of the state's file is complete through April 2026; some counties' own files run later.
- Area means different things. Some rolls' living area includes more than heated space. Across Lee's single-family homes the median living area is 2,944 square feet against 1,770 heated; in Marion the two agree.
- The house may have changed. The roll shows the building today. A comp renovated or enlarged after it sold carries today's area against the old price.
On Map Views
Open a parcel's report and press Find comps. Pick a radius of 0.5 to 10 miles and 6 to 60 months; Same use keeps the parcel's broad group, so a house's comps can include condos and lots unless you narrow them. Two bands help: Size like this one keeps parcels of half to one and a half times its acreage, and Price near its value does the same around its just value. The list holds up to 200 sales with month, price, distance, acres, price per acre and per square foot, with the medians above it and the whole ring's market beside it, pinned on the map. Qualified there means codes 01 to 06, one parcel, over $1,000, from every sales source we hold. The per-square-foot figure uses the county's living area where it has one, so check it in Lee or Polk. Open any comp to see its sales and whether it was vacant when sold, and export the list as CSV.
Recorded deeds at the county clerk are the authority on a sale, and the property appraiser on its code and the building's area. These figures are a starting point for a value, not an appraisal.