4 ms·

There are actually plenty of good (and legitimate) reasons to buy property in such a way the keeps the owner relatively private. 1. Keep your asset from appear

There are actually plenty of good (and legitimate) reasons to buy property in such a way the keeps the owner relatively private. 1. Keep your asset from appearing in a quick asset search. 2. Keep John Q. Public from finding your address via Spokeo, or similar data aggregators. 3. ..? Same applies to a lease, be it commercial or residential. Most of the cheap background checks used by property managers are cheap because the company (say Experian, etc) receive your information for their product in return. The way around that, is to rent the property through a shell, or to a trust.

patio11 11y ago
LLCs in particular are a very convenient minimal-fuss-required way to get "an entity the system knows how to interface with" spun up abroad. The US economy welcomes investment by foreigners and foreign corporations. The simplest way to do so is to establish an LLC. These LLCs are often established by lawyers. Breathless reports to the contrary, this is actually very common and not in itself indicative of money laundering. This gives you an entity which can trivially (trivially -- fill out a form online, get emailed it in a minute) get a US tax ID issued and be used to fill in any boxes required by a bank, secretary of state, county office, etc etc etc.
- ellius 11y ago
  Most articles go out of the way to have some boilerplate agreeing with what you just said ("of course there are perfectly legitimate uses" etc), but the fact remains that property bought in this fashion has caused enormous money laundering issues. I wouldn't call the recent articles on this hysterical at all. Furthermore this is requiring confidential reporting to the US financial intelligence unit, not public reporting.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    This is a little bit like saying that money has caused enormous money laundering issues.
rdtsc 11y ago
Heck the tech company I worked for was buying houses and appartments as way to stash value and invest. So besides selling software they jumped in on the post 2008 crash and started sweeping up real estate. In retrospect it was a good investment I suspect. The value didn't double but probably went up by 30-40% since then.
tomcam 11y ago
3 would be to avoid stalkers

patio11 11y ago

LLCs in particular are a very convenient minimal-fuss-required way to get "an entity the system knows how to interface with" spun up abroad. The US economy welcomes investment by foreigners and foreign corporations. The simplest way to do so is to establish an LLC. These LLCs are often established by lawyers. Breathless reports to the contrary, this is actually very common and not in itself indicative of money laundering. This gives you an entity which can trivially (trivially -- fill out a form online, get emailed it in a minute) get a US tax ID issued and be used to fill in any boxes required by a bank, secretary of state, county office, etc etc etc.

ellius 11y ago
Most articles go out of the way to have some boilerplate agreeing with what you just said ("of course there are perfectly legitimate uses" etc), but the fact remains that property bought in this fashion has caused enormous money laundering issues. I wouldn't call the recent articles on this hysterical at all. Furthermore this is requiring confidential reporting to the US financial intelligence unit, not public reporting.
- tptacek 11y ago
  This is a little bit like saying that money has caused enormous money laundering issues.

rdtsc 11y ago

Heck the tech company I worked for was buying houses and appartments as way to stash value and invest. So besides selling software they jumped in on the post 2008 crash and started sweeping up real estate. In retrospect it was a good investment I suspect. The value didn't double but probably went up by 30-40% since then.

tomcam 11y ago

3 would be to avoid stalkers