Collier County published 24 probate filings in August 2026.
That is the number we counted, and you can count it too — the rest of this page is how.

Where they are published

Florida law requires it. Under section 733.2121 of the Florida Statutes, the personal representative of an estate must publish a Notice to Creditors once a week for two consecutive weeks, in a newspaper published in the county where the estate is being administered. So they are in the legal notices of a Collier County newspaper, every week, in public, before anybody has decided what to do with the house.

The case file itself sits with the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Collier County, in the probate division, under the file number the notice gives you.

What the notice tells you

The statute says what has to be in it, so every one of them carries:

• the name of the person who died;
• the file number of the estate;
• the court where the case is pending, and its address;
• the name and address of the personal representative — the person handling the estate;
• the name and address of that representative’s attorney;
• and the date of first publication.

That date matters more than it looks. Creditors have three months from it to file a claim, which is why the notice appears early — it is close to the first public sign that an estate exists at all.

What the notice does not tell you, and this is the whole job

It never names the property. Nothing in a notice to creditors says which house, what it is worth, how big it is, or whether anybody lives in it. The statute does not ask for any of that, so it is not there.

To get from a notice to a house you take the names and addresses it does give you — the person who died, the representative — and go looking for a matching parcel on the county property appraiser’s roll. Sometimes that is obvious. Often it is a judgement call between two people with the same surname, and sometimes the answer is wrong. That matching is the work, and it is the reason a list of notices is not yet a list of houses.

Doing it yourself, for one county

It is entirely possible, and for one county it is reasonable: read the legal notices each week, note the file numbers, and look up the names on the appraiser’s site. What it costs is the same hour every week, forever, and the errors you cannot see — the estate whose notice ran in a paper you do not read, the match you made to the wrong parcel.

What we do with them

We read the notices for 54 Florida counties, match each one to that state’s own parcel roll, and post the result three times a day. In August 2026 that was 24 filings here, and you can see the count for every court we publish and check any of them against your own county’s notices.

Matches are probabilistic and some of them are wrong. A row can name the wrong parcel, the wrong owner, or a person not connected to the filing at all. These records concern deaths, and acting on a wrong match means contacting the wrong family about one. We publish the confidence with every row and we say when we do not know.

What each row holds · Every court we publish · What it costs