Does My House Have Terrazzo? Reading Your Hillsborough County Property Record

The quickest way to know whether a Tampa house is likely to have terrazzo is its public record. Look up the parcel on the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser’s site and check three things: the year built, the Class (you want Concrete Block), and the Interior Flooring line. A concrete block house built between the mid-1950s and 1970 is a good candidate whatever the flooring line says, because that line only shows what is on file, and most buried terrazzo is filed as carpet or tile.

We know this because we pulled the records. On October 8, 2026 we ran 26 street searches across Tampa and Hillsborough County through the property appraiser’s public search and kept every building on the single-family parcels it returned, 1,103 buildings in all. (A few parcels carry a second building, such as a cottage, and each building has its own record.) Here is what came back.

What 1,103 county records say

Every house that listed terrazzo was built between 1954 and 1970. Not one house built in 1973 or later did, in any part of the county we searched. The pre-1950 houses, the bungalows and early frame houses, did not either.

The other 359 mid-century houses are the interesting part. Their flooring reads Carpet (124 houses), Tile (104), Wood (85) or Vinyl (44). Some of those really are wood or tile on the slab. Some are likely terrazzo with something on top of it, because carpet and tile over terrazzo was a common remodel and the record shows the finish the appraiser has on file, not what is under it. The record cannot say how many. That is why the flooring line is a clue and not an answer.

Street by street

Some of the subdivision results from the pull, counting only houses built between 1950 and 1972:

And some that came back empty, which matters just as much:

• Sweetwater Creek off Comanche Avenue, 11 houses from 1957 to 1971: none.
• Carrollwood Unit 27, six houses all built in 1972: none.
• Temple Terrace Golfview and Temple Terrace Hills, ten houses from 1966 to 1972: none.
• Northdale Section J on Ashwood Drive, 45 houses from the 1980s: none.
• Del Webb Boulevard in Sun City Center, 58 houses, 53 of them from the 1990s: none.

The tail end of the window is visible in that list. By 1971 and 1972 some builders in the same towns had stopped pouring terrazzo even while their neighbors a few years earlier had it. The University of Florida’s survey of postwar Florida housing describes the same shift statewide: concrete block was the preferred material for Florida houses from the 1940s into the 1970s, and by the 1970s it was being replaced with wood.

How to read your own record

1. Go to the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser’s property search and enter your street address.
2. Open the parcel and scroll to the building information.
3. Note the year built. 1954 to 1970 is the strongest window; the early 1970s are possible; after 1972 is unlikely.
4. Note the Class and Exterior Wall. Concrete Block with stucco or painted block is what you want. A Wood Frame house from the same years is much less likely.
5. Read the Interior Flooring value. If it says Terrazzo, you are nearly done. If it says Carpet, Tile, Vinyl or Wood, keep going.
6. Check the floor. Fold back the carpet in a closet corner, or look at a floor register, a door threshold, or the edge of tile where it meets a closet. A speckled surface of stone chips with a thin brass or zinc line is terrazzo.

If you are buying, the record is the part you can do from your couch. The floor check needs the seller’s permission, and do not expect a home inspector to do it for you: the InterNACHI Standards of Practice say inspectors are not required to inspect floor coverings or to move carpets or rugs to see the floor beneath them.

What the record cannot tell you

It cannot tell you condition. A terrazzo listing does not mean the floor is clean; it may be under thirty years of wax, or cracked where the slab moved. It cannot tell you about tile bonded straight onto the terrazzo, which is common in kitchens and baths and is the most expensive covering to remove. See pits after tile removal. And it cannot tell you whether a later owner took out a wall and left a strip of bare slab, which our wall gap page covers.

It also cannot tell you about flood history. If the house is in a low coastal neighborhood that took water in Helene in September 2024, the carpet and pad may already be gone and the terrazzo bare. The flood-damaged terrazzo page covers what to do next, including Hillsborough County’s Substantial Damage Packet for homes in a Special Flood Hazard Area.

A note on the method

This was not a random sample of the county. We chose street names that run through each of our service areas and kept every single-family building the search returned, including the new houses on those streets, so the comparison between eras is fair. The percentages describe those 26 searches, not Hillsborough as a whole. The raw rows, with the subdivision, year built, wall type and flooring for each house, are kept with our sources.

What to do with the answer

If the record and the closet corner both say terrazzo, send us a photo of that corner, a shot of the worst spot with a coin beside it, and the square footage. We will tell you what we see and where it falls in the published prices. If you want a number first, the floor cost estimator gives you a typical range in a minute.