Nearly half of recorded commercial property sales are not arm’s-length.

Question 01

What share of recorded commercial property sales are not arm’s-length?

In the two counties counted so far, between 44.5% and 46.1% of recorded commercial and industrial sales were not qualified as arm’s-length by the assessing authority.

“Recorded sale” and “market transaction” are not the same thing, and the gap is not small. A Florida county appraiser assigns every recorded deed a Department of Revenue qualification code. Codes 0 and 01 through 07 mean the sale is treated as usable evidence of market value. Everything else — corrective deeds, transfers between affiliated companies, partial interests, sales never exposed to the open market — is excluded from the assessor’s own sales analysis.

We counted those codes directly. In Sarasota County, 1,314 of 2,368 commercial sales since 2024 were qualified and 1,054 were not. In Miami-Dade, 2,485 of 4,614 commercial sales from 2025 onward were qualified and 2,129 were not. Sarasota’s disqualified count includes 57 sales (2.4%) where the appraiser had simply not decided yet — qualification code 99, pending — so the settled disqualification rate there is marginally lower than 44.5% and will move when those are resolved.

Sources: Sarasota CSV rows commercial_sales_since_2024, commercial_sales_qualified, commercial_sales_disqualified, qualcode_99_pending · Miami-Dade CSV rows commercial_sales_2025_onward, commercial_sales_not_qualified. Klebl, C., Sterling Digital Partners, 19–20 September 2026.

Question 02

How many recorded commercial sales have a price of $100 or less?

About a third: 30.6% in Sarasota County and 33.1% in Miami-Dade.

This is the single most practical number on the page, because it is the one a reader can check in ten minutes. A $10 or $100 sale price is the conventional placeholder used when a deed transfers property for no real consideration — into a trust, between two entities with the same owner, as a correction to an earlier deed. The price is a legal formality, not a valuation.

Roughly one in three recorded commercial sales in these two counties carries such a price. Any tool that averages recorded sale prices without filtering on the qualification code is averaging those in. The two rates are close enough across very different counties — a county of 304,544 live parcels and one of 938,308 — to be worth watching, but two counties is two counties, and we would not put a national figure on it.

Sources: Sarasota CSV and Miami-Dade CSV, row commercial_sales_price_100_or_less in each.

Question 03

Why are recorded sales disqualified, and how many reasons are there?

The largest single reason in both counties is the corrective, quit-claim or tax deed with no consideration — 31.0% of Sarasota’s commercial sales and 29.0% of Miami-Dade’s — and Sarasota’s commercial sales carry 19 distinct qualification codes in all.

A sale is not simply qualified or unqualified. Sarasota’s 2,368 commercial sales since 2024 carry nineteen different codes between them, and the distribution matters more than the headline split, because the codes describe different failure modes. Note that a parcel can appear under both a qualified and a disqualified code across different sales, so these shares are shares of all recorded sales, not slices of one pie.

Sarasota County commercial sales by qualification code, since 2024

Code and meaning	Sales	Share of 2,368
01 — Qualified as a result of deed examination	934	39.4%
11 — Corrective, quit claim or tax deed, no consideration	735	31.0%
05 — Qualified, multiple parcels	295	12.5%
30 — Transactions involving affiliated parties	91	3.8%
16 — Deeds conveying partial interest	58	2.4%
99 — Qualification decision pending	57	2.4%
02 — Qualified as a result of evidence	55	2.3%
37 — Not exposed to open market, or parties not informed	35	1.5%
11 further codes (30 qualified, 78 not qualified)	108	4.6%

Source: Sarasota CSV, rows qualcode_01_deed_examination through qualcode_distinct_codes_present. Counted 19 September 2026.

The three largest Miami-Dade codes, 2025 onward

Code and meaning	Sales	Share of 4,614
01 — Qualified as a result of deed examination	1,433	31.1%
11 — Corrective, quit claim or tax deed, no consideration	1,338	29.0%
05 — Qualified, multiple parcels	1,046	22.7%

Source: Miami-Dade CSV, rows qualcode_01_deed_examination, qualcode_11_corrective_quitclaim_taxdeed, qualcode_05_multiple_parcels. Counted 20 September 2026. The Miami-Dade study published these three codes only; a full code distribution for Miami-Dade has not been counted.

Question 04

Does the city in a property address tell you which municipality governs the property?

No — 77.4% of Miami-Dade addresses that mail as “Miami” are not in the City of Miami, and 66.8% of Sarasota County commercial parcels with a “Sarasota” address are in unincorporated county.

The postal city on an address is a mail-routing label. The municipality is the government that sets the zoning, issues the permits and levies the local millage. They are different fields and they disagree constantly.

In Miami-Dade, 328,540 of 613,901 address points in the county address layer (53.5%) have a mailing city of Miami. Only 77,311 — 12.6% of all address points — are actually in the City of Miami. The 254,328 in between are the trap.

In Sarasota County, 129,734 live parcels (42.6% of 304,544) carry a situs city of Sarasota. Of those, 101,809 — 78.5% — are governed by Sarasota County, not the City of Sarasota. Narrowed to commercial and industrial parcels the effect softens but does not go away: 6,442 commercial parcels have a Sarasota situs city, of which 4,301 (66.8%) are unincorporated and 2,141 (33.2%) are in the city.

On the roll side rather than the address side, Miami-Dade’s own physical-city field reads “Unincorporated County” for 395,369 parcels — 42.1% of the county — and for 16,530 commercial parcels, 29.0% of the commercial stock.

Sources: Miami-Dade CSV rows address_points_mailing_as_miami, address_points_mailing_miami_not_city_of_miami, address_points_actually_city_of_miami, jurisdiction_unincorporated_roll, jurisdiction_unincorporated_commercial · Sarasota CSV rows sarasota_situs_live, sarasota_situs_unincorporated, sarasota_situs_commercial, sarasota_situs_commercial_unincorporated, sarasota_situs_commercial_city.

Question 05

How far below market value are commercial properties assessed?

The median commercial parcel is assessed at 97.0% of just value in Sarasota County and 91.8% in Miami-Dade, but the median hides a long tail: 20.7% and 30.3% of commercial parcels respectively are assessed below three-quarters of just value.

Florida separates just value (the appraiser’s estimate of market value), assessed value (just value after statutory caps) and taxable value (assessed value after exemptions). The distance between the first two is the accumulated effect of assessment caps, and it grows the longer a property is held.

Commercial parcels assessed below a share of just value

Assessed below…	Sarasota (of 10,933)	Miami-Dade (of 56,907)
99% of just value	5,740 · 52.5%	34,709 · 61.0%
95% of just value	5,174 · 47.3%	31,209 · 54.8%
90% of just value	4,458 · 40.8%	27,160 · 47.7%
75% of just value	2,265 · 20.7%	17,245 · 30.3%
50% of just value	480 · 4.4%	4,661 · 8.2%

Sources: Sarasota CSV and Miami-Dade CSV, rows assessed_below_99pct_of_just through assessed_below_50pct_of_just. Sarasota’s denominator is the 10,933 of 10,934 commercial parcels carrying a just value above zero; Miami-Dade’s is all 56,907 commercial parcels.

The two counties are not measuring quite the same thing and should not be placed side by side without saying so. Sarasota’s median of 97.0% is a single assessed-over-just ratio, with the median taxable-over-just ratio at 96.0%. Miami-Dade’s 91.8% is specifically the non-school assessed ratio, because Florida applies a different basis for school millage. Across Miami-Dade’s commercial stock the school assessed value is 99.7% of just value while the non-school assessed value is 86.8%.

Sources: Sarasota rows median_assessed_over_just, median_taxable_over_just, commercial_valued · Miami-Dade rows median_nonschool_assessed_over_just, school_assessed_share_of_just, nonschool_assessed_share_of_just.

Question 06

How much commercial value sits in the gap between just and assessed value?

$19.49bn in Miami-Dade County — 13.2% of its commercial just value — and $1.58bn in Sarasota County, 9.1% of its commercial just value.

Miami-Dade’s commercial and industrial stock carries $147,842,566,502 in just value against $128,350,516,135 in non-school assessed value. Sarasota’s carries $17,271,381,200 against $15,691,613,636.

In Miami-Dade there is a second, sharper figure inside the first. Because the school-tax basis is not capped, $19,120,443,450 of commercial value is exposed to school millage and not to county millage — and 56,705 of 56,907 commercial parcels (99.6%) have a school assessed value exactly equal to just value. A buyer who reads only the assessed value on the record is reading the county figure, not the one the school district will bill against.

Sources: Miami-Dade CSV rows total_just_value_commercial, total_nonschool_assessed_commercial, aggregate_assessed_below_just, value_exposed_to_school_millage_only, parcels_school_assessed_equals_just · Sarasota CSV rows total_just_value_commercial, total_assessed_value_commercial, aggregate_assessed_below_just.

Question 07

How often do two parcels share an address that differs only by a directional prefix?

Rarely — 0.3% of parcels in both counties — and this is the number in the series that argues against a popular worry.

Address collisions — two distinct parcels at 100 Main St N and 100 Main St S — are the kind of error people expect to be everywhere. We looked for them and they are not. In Sarasota County, 337 of 230,059 distinct address keys (0.1%) carry two or more non-blank directional values, drawing in 950 parcels. In Miami-Dade, 1,280 of 886,549 distinct address keys (0.1%) do, drawing in 2,566 parcels.

For commercial property specifically the effect is smaller still: in Miami-Dade just 20 collision keys touch 40 commercial parcels, 0.1% of the commercial stock. We publish this because it is what the count found. If you are worried about property-record quality, the directional prefix is not where the risk is; the sales qualification code is.

Sources: Sarasota CSV rows address_keys_distinct, address_keys_multiple_direction_values, address_keys_multiple_nonblank_directions, parcels_in_direction_collisions · Miami-Dade CSV rows address_keys_distinct, address_keys_multiple_nonblank_directions, parcels_in_direction_collisions, commercial_direction_collision_keys, commercial_parcels_in_direction_collisions. The two counties build their address key differently — Sarasota on house number, street and situs city; Miami-Dade on house number, street with the directional prefix removed, and 5-digit ZIP — so the key counts are not directly comparable.

Question 08

Can these figures be cited as national statistics?

No. Every number on this page is a count of two named Florida counties on stated dates, and nothing here has been weighted, modelled or projected to any larger population.

What the two counties do jointly support is narrower and still useful: in both of the US county records examined in detail, close to half of recorded commercial sales were excluded by the assessor from market-value analysis, and about a third carried a nominal price. That is a real finding about how recorded-sale data behaves, and it is a reason to check the qualification code in any county before treating a recorded price as a valuation.

The series is planned for ten markets. The third, in a non-Florida state, will be the first real test of whether any of this generalises past the Florida statute. Until it lands, the honest scope of this page is two counties.

Question 09

Where can I download the underlying data?

All 69 metrics are published as a single JSON file under CC BY 4.0, free to reuse commercially with attribution.

Every row carries the market, the metric name, the value, the denominator, the share, the counting note, the source file, the date the source file was published and the date we counted it. The file was generated mechanically from the two study CSVs rather than typed, so a row here and the row in the study CSV are the same row.

Reuse is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. You may republish, chart, transform and sell work built on these figures. The one condition is attribution: name Chris Klebl and Sterling Digital Partners and link back to this page.

A third market is being counted now and will be added to this file as an additional block of rows, with the same schema and its own market, source and date. Nothing already in the file will change when it lands, except the metrics and markets_covered counts and the version date.