Can I Keep My Name Off My California Property?

Some of it. You can make yourself harder to find, and a few of the ways are cheap and legal and nobody sells them because there’s no money in it. You can’t make yourself impossible to find, and the structure most often sold for that will cost you the right to file an eviction.

This question almost never comes from someone hiding anything. It usually comes from an owner who found out how little effort it takes for a stranger to pull up every property in their name. That’s the complaint. Somebody with a phone can inventory what you own.

Why your name is findable

Two public records do it, and they work together.

The county recorder keeps a grantor and grantee index. Every deed that ever transferred your property sits in it, in order, permanently. Title companies run on that index and it’s open to anyone who walks in.

The Secretary of State keeps your LLC’s statement of information. It has to list the name and address of every manager, or of every member if there’s no manager. (Corp. Code, § 17702.09, subd. (a)(5).) It’s searchable by name on bizfileOnline, free, no account needed.

So the search that finds you runs either direction. Type the name, get the entity, get the properties. Or start at the property, get the entity, get the manager.

The chain of title is the part nobody can fix

A lawyer asks when you bought the property before answering your question.

If you bought the house in your own name and later deeded it to your LLC, both deeds are in the index. Anyone reading it sees the property go from you to the company, which tells them the company is you. Recording a new deed doesn’t remove the old one. Nothing removes the old one.

Privacy structures work going forward. They do almost nothing backward. If your name has ever been on title, the most any structure buys is that a casual search stops at the entity and a careful one doesn’t.

That’s still worth having. Most searches are casual.

What works

A trust as the manager of your LLC. Trusts aren’t recorded and there’s no public registry of them. If your LLC’s manager of record is the 1247 Trust instead of your name, the Secretary of State search dead-ends there. It’s legal, it’s cheap, and it’s the most useful item on this list.

It doesn’t touch your chain of title, and it doesn’t stop anyone who reads the recorder’s index back far enough.

Getting yourself out of the data brokers. Most people asking me about privacy want this one, and it isn’t a legal answer at all.

The sites that return “all his properties” in one search are aggregators. They scrape public records and resell them. They all have opt-out processes, and there are services that run those opt-outs across a few hundred sites and keep re-running them, because the data comes back.

This works better than people expect. It will not make you unfindable, and it never will, but it takes the one-search inventory off the table for most of the sites that offer one.

An address that isn’t your house. The statement of information takes a business address for a manager, and an agent for service of process can be a commercial registered agent rather than you at your kitchen table. (Corp. Code, § 17702.09, subd. (a)(2), (a)(5).) That separates what you own from where you sleep, which is usually the part that worries people.

Buying in the entity from the start. The only clean version. No prior deed in your name means no chain of title pointing back at you.

You can’t hide from your own tenants

California requires the rental agreement to disclose the name, telephone number, and street address for personal service of whoever is authorized to manage the property, and of an owner or someone authorized to accept service of process for the owner. (Civ. Code, § 1962, subd. (a)(1).)

You can name a manager or an agent instead of yourself, so this doesn’t mean your home address goes in the lease. Somebody real has to be named, servable, and kept current. A successor owner who doesn’t comply can’t evict for nonpayment of rent that accrued during the period of noncompliance. (Civ. Code, § 1962, subd. (c).)

The people most likely to sue a landlord are the people this statute guarantees can find him.

What the Wyoming LLC costs you

The pitch is that Wyoming doesn’t publish member names, so form there and you disappear. Wyoming’s rules are what they say they are. They stop mattering the moment the LLC owns California property and collects California rent.

An LLC formed elsewhere that does business here has to register as a foreign LLC. That leaves two doors, and both of them are bad.

Register, and the privacy evaporates. A registered foreign LLC files the same California statement of information as a domestic one, naming its managers or members. (Corp. Code, § 17702.09, subd. (a).) You paid a Wyoming filing fee and a registered agent to end up in the same public database, plus the $800 minimum California franchise tax you were going to owe anyway.

Don’t register, and you can’t sue. “A foreign limited liability company transacting intrastate business in this state shall not maintain an action or proceeding in this state unless it has a certificate of registration to transact intrastate business in this state.” (Corp. Code, § 17708.07, subd. (a).)

An unlawful detainer is an action or proceeding. So is your suit for unpaid rent, and your quiet title action. Filing cases is most of what a landlord’s legal position consists of, and this is the structure that takes away the courthouse.

And service gets easier. An unregistered foreign LLC doing business here “shall be deemed to have appointed the Secretary of State as its agent for service of process for rights of action arising out of the transaction of intrastate business in this state.” (Corp. Code, § 17708.07, subd. (d).) Nobody has to find you. The state is your mailbox.

One correction to something you’ll hear repeated, including by people arguing against Wyoming LLCs: failing to register does not cost you the right to defend. The statute says so. (Corp. Code, § 17708.07, subd. (b).)

Losing your defense takes one more step, and it’s a step people in this posture take all the time. Miss the $800 minimum franchise tax or the biennial filings long enough and the entity gets suspended, which for an out-of-state LLC means forfeiture of its rights here. (Rev. & Tax. Code, § 23301; Corp. Code, § 17713.11, subd. (a).) A suspended entity can’t prosecute or defend anything, can still be served like a healthy one, and can be defaulted. (Grell v. Laci Le Beau Corp. (1999) 73 Cal.App.4th 1300.)

That’s the sequence that ends in a judgment nobody appeared to defend and a lien on the property. The Wyoming filing didn’t get you there by itself. The compliance nobody mentioned at the point of sale did.

The offshore version is the same trade at ten times the price

The Cook Islands or Belize structure is sold on the promise that when a court orders you to bring the money home, the trust’s own terms make compliance impossible, and impossibility is a defense to contempt.

The Ninth Circuit has already heard that argument. In FTC v. Affordable Media, LLC (9th Cir. 1999) 179 F.3d 1228, a couple with a Cook Islands trust raised it. The court quoted the asset protection industry’s own published advice describing that exact design goal, held the burden of proving impossibility is especially high here because of the likelihood that attempted compliance “will be merely a charade rather than a good faith effort to comply,” found the couple still controlled the trust, and affirmed the contempt finding. They were taken into custody in June 1998 and released the following December, still in contempt.

More on why these structures fail in California: why out-of-state LLCs will not save you in California

Where to start

If the goal is that a curious person can’t inventory you in four minutes:

A trust as manager of the LLC, so the Secretary of State search dead-ends.
Data broker removal, on a subscription, because they repopulate.
A business address, not your home, on anything recorded or filed.
Any new property bought in the entity from day one.

None of that requires forming anything in Wyoming.

If the goal is instead that a creditor holding a judgment can’t reach the property, that’s a different question with a mostly different answer, and the order is insurance, then exemptions, then structures, all of it before there’s a claim. California asset protection: what actually works

If you already own California property through an out-of-state LLC, check whether it’s registered here and current with the Franchise Tax Board before you do anything else. That’s a ten minute look, and it’s the difference between a structure that’s merely useless and one that’s actively costing you.

Want a straight read on where you stand?

Talk to Eric. A free 30-minute call, no pitch. He’ll tell you where you’re exposed, what it would cost to fix, and what you can skip.

Talk to Eric