Defects come in three shapes, and only one of them is what people picture. The first is recorded and entirely real: an unreleased mortgage from a loan that was actually paid off years ago, a judgment lien, unpaid property taxes, a recorded easement nobody mentioned. The second is recorded and apparently invalid, and it is the interesting category, because a bad claim clouds a title just as effectively as a good one. Florida's statute is explicit about this: in an action to remove a cloud, "[i]t is no bar to relief that the title has not been litigated at law or that there is only one litigant to each side of the controversy or that the adverse claim, estate, or interest is void upon its face, or though not void on its face, requires extrinsic evidence to establish its validity". A claim that would lose in court still has to be dealt with, because a buyer's lender will not fund against a record that raises the question. The third shape is not recorded at all, and it is the class a records search is structurally unable to reach: an instrument that was signed but never filed, a person with a claim who never appeared in the records, or a boundary the documents describe differently from the way the ground is actually occupied. Finding nothing is not the same as there being nothing.
Cleared, cured, and merely excepted are three different outcomes. Most problems a search turns up are cleared at closing with money: the seller's mortgage is paid from the proceeds, the tax arrears are settled, the contractor is paid and records a release. Some are cured by an instrument rather than a payment, such as a corrective deed, a release from the person holding the stale claim, or a quitclaim from someone with a possible but unclear interest. And some are neither: the title company declines to insure over the problem and writes it into the policy as an exception, which means the buyer takes the property with the problem attached and without coverage for it. Reading the exceptions in a title commitment is how a buyer finds out which of the three has happened.
Some defects the legislature has cured wholesale. Florida created a curative procedure for a single scrivener's error in a deed's legal description, so that a transposed lot number conveys the property intended rather than requiring a suit. Its definition of an eligible instrument is "any deed, other than a quitclaim deed, which contains a scrivener's error", and its conditions include that record title was held by the grantor when the erroneous deed was executed. That is the shape of a curative statute generally: a narrowly defined mistake, fixed by operation of law, with the hard cases left to the courts.
The quiet-title action is the last resort, and it is a lawsuit. Where a claim cannot be released, bought out or insured over, the owner sues to have a court declare the state of the title and bind the claimant to that declaration. Florida's chapter on the subject gives chancery courts jurisdiction to "determine the title of plaintiff as against defendants and enter judgment quieting the title of, and awarding possession to, the plaintiff entitled thereto", and allows the action to be brought "in the name of the owner or of any prior owner who warranted the title". That second clause is a useful reminder that a seller who gave covenants of title has a continuing interest in the outcome. The procedure, the wait and the cost are all matters of state law, and none of them is quick.
