Pinellas County Deed & Recording Guide

The world's first scheduled airline was not launched with a crowded jet and a maze of boarding groups. It began in St. Petersburg on January 1, 1914, when a Benoist flying boat carried one passenger across Tampa Bay. The trip to Tampa took about 23 minutes, far faster than the long rail journey around the water. The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line lasted only three months, but the Smithsonian still credits it as the world's first scheduled airline. Pinellas County has been comfortable with reinvention ever since.

St. Petersburg is the county's largest city, known for a downtown waterfront, museums, universities and neighborhoods that range from historic bungalows to new condominium towers. Clearwater is the county seat and home of the main courthouse and recording office. Largo is the third major population center. Along the Gulf are beach municipalities such as Treasure Island, Madeira Beach, Indian Rocks Beach and Belleair Beach. Dunedin has a walkable downtown and a Scottish accent to its civic traditions, while Tarpon Springs is famous for its Greek community and sponge-diving history. Safety Harbor, Gulfport and Seminole each add a recognizable local character.

Pinellas is a peninsula and Florida's most densely settled county. With little vacant land left, change often happens through redevelopment, renovation and replacement rather than endless outward expansion. That produces deeds for condominiums, townhomes, single-family lots, waterfront property and commercial parcels. A beach mailing address can conceal a separate small municipality, and a St. Petersburg address may require careful attention to the parcel rather than assumptions about city boundaries.

The Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller serves as County Recorder. Recording Services is at 315 Court Street, Room 150, Clearwater, Florida 33756. A St. Petersburg branch at 545 First Avenue North also provides full recording service. Documents may be submitted in person, mailed or transmitted through an approved eRecording vendor. The clerk maintains a separate Official Records counter in Room 163 for research and copies.

Standard recording costs $10 for the first page and $8.50 for each additional page, with $1 charged for each indexed name after four. Deed documentary stamp tax is generally 70 cents per $100, or fraction, of taxable consideration. The fee calculator helps with page, name and tax calculations. Before preparing a deed, the Pinellas County Property Appraiser's search can confirm the parcel number and current tax-roll listing, while the clerk's Official Records search provides the recorded instruments themselves.

A deed in Pinellas may describe ground where aviation history began, a Gulf-front condominium six stories up, or a bungalow shaded by live oaks. It cannot rely on the view from the window. The legal description identifies the property, the execution makes the document recordable and filing with the Pinellas recorder places it in the public chain of title. The first airline needed only one passenger. A good deed also succeeds by carrying exactly what it is supposed to carry.