Privacy Starts Before the Deed Is Recorded
Anyone can look up who owns a home in Florida. Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County all run free, searchable property appraiser databases, and a name typed into any of them returns a home address, a purchase price, and a mailing address in seconds. For most buyers that is a non-issue. For a business owner selling a company, a public figure, a physician worried about litigation exposure, or a family that simply does not want a $9 million closing price attached to their name in a Google search, it is a real problem, and it is one that has to be solved before closing, not after.
Florida gives buyers two well-established tools for separating a name from a deed: the land trust and the limited liability company. Both are legal, both are common in South Florida luxury transactions, and both work differently than most buyers assume. At MJI Realty Group, structuring a purchase for discretion is part of the closing process for clients who ask for it, not an afterthought bolted on at the end. Getting the structure right also now means accounting for a federal reporting rule that changed the privacy math for entity-held real estate in 2026.
How a Florida Land Trust Works
Florida is one of the few states with a statute built specifically around land trusts. Under the Florida Land Trust Act, Section 689.071 of the Florida Statutes, a property owner can appoint a trustee to hold legal title while the owner keeps every beneficial right through a private trust agreement that never gets recorded anywhere. The deed that goes into the public record names only the trustee, usually an attorney, a title company affiliate, or a trust company. The beneficiary, the person who actually controls the property, decides when to sell, and receives the proceeds, appears nowhere in the courthouse records.
The trustee has almost no independent authority. Florida law restricts the trustee to acting only on the written direction of the beneficiary or whoever holds the power of direction under the trust agreement. The trustee cannot sell, lease, or mortgage the property without instructions. In practice, the beneficiary runs the property exactly as a sole owner would; the trustee is a name on paper required by statute to keep that name public instead.
What Stays Private and What Doesn’t
A land trust keeps the beneficiary’s identity out of the recorded deed and, in most cases, out of the property appraiser’s public ownership field. It does not make the transaction invisible. The sale price still appears in the recorded deed and in county sales records, because Florida deeds must state consideration or reference the documentary stamp tax paid, which allows the price to be reverse-calculated. Utility accounts, permit filings for renovations, and homeowners association records may still tie back to an individual depending on how those accounts are set up. A land trust also does not shield the beneficiary from a subpoena, a divorce proceeding, or a properly noticed lawsuit; courts can compel disclosure of beneficial ownership when there is a legitimate legal reason to ask.
Land trusts also solve a practical problem beyond privacy: the beneficial interest is classified as personal property rather than real property under the statute, which means it can change hands by simple assignment rather than a new recorded deed. For an owner who wants to sell a fractional interest, restructure between family members, or transfer the property into a different holding vehicle later, that flexibility avoids a second round of documentary stamp tax in many situations.
Using an LLC to Hold Florida Real Estate
A limited liability company solves a different problem. Where a land trust is built for privacy and simple transferability, an LLC is built for liability protection, and it delivers privacy as a byproduct. When an LLC buys a Florida property, the deed names the LLC, not the individual member. Florida’s Division of Corporations does require an LLC’s registered agent and managers to be listed on Sunbiz.org, the state’s business entity search, so an LLC is not airtight privacy on its own. Many buyers pair the two tools: an LLC formed in Florida, Delaware, or Wyoming holds the beneficial interest in a Florida land trust, which holds the property. The deed shows a trustee. Sunbiz shows a holding company. Neither shows the individual buyer.
The liability case for an LLC is often the stronger reason to use one, particularly for investment property, a rental home, or anything with public foot traffic like a commercial building. If a tenant, a guest, or a contractor is injured on the property and sues, a properly maintained LLC generally limits the owner’s exposure to the assets inside that LLC rather than the owner’s entire personal net worth. For an investor holding several properties, separate LLCs for each asset keep a lawsuit tied to one property from reaching the others.
An LLC is not free. Florida charges an annual report fee to keep an LLC active, lenders often price commercial or non-owner-occupied financing differently when the borrower is an entity, and an LLC-owned property gives up Florida’s homestead exemption entirely, which is significant enough to warrant its own section below. An LLC also has to be run like a real business, with its own bank account and books kept separate from personal finances, or a court can disregard the entity in a lawsuit and reach the owner’s personal assets anyway, a result attorneys call piercing the corporate veil.
The New Federal Reporting Rule Changes the Calculus
Structuring for privacy used to mean worrying only about Florida law. That changed with a federal rule from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Treasury bureau known as FinCEN. In March 2025, FinCEN exempted domestic companies, including ordinary Florida LLCs, from the Corporate Transparency Act’s beneficial ownership reporting to the federal government, which had briefly required nearly every small LLC in the country to disclose its true owners to FinCEN directly. That exemption held.
A separate, narrower rule did not go away. FinCEN’s Residential Real Estate Rule took effect March 1, 2026, and requires certain non-financed transfers of residential property, meaning purchases made in cash or financed by a private lender rather than a bank, to a legal entity or trust to be reported to FinCEN when closed. The report identifies the beneficial owners of the entity or trust taking title, the property, and the transaction details. Title companies and settlement agents are typically the ones filing it, not the buyer directly. The report is not made public and is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, so it does not undo the privacy an LLC or land trust provides against a Google search or a competitor’s due diligence. It does mean the federal government, specifically law enforcement and financial regulators investigating money laundering, now has visibility into who actually stands behind an entity-held cash purchase of a home, in a way that did not exist before.
What This Means for Buyers Structuring Ownership Today
The regulatory picture kept moving after the rule took effect. On March 19, 2026, a federal court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated the Residential Real Estate Rule, finding that FinCEN had exceeded its statutory authority in issuing it. As of this writing, reporting persons are not required to file Real Estate Reports and are not subject to penalties for not filing, while the government appeals that ruling. That status can change again before an appeal is resolved. Any buyer using an LLC or trust for a non-financed Florida purchase should confirm the current filing requirement with a closing attorney at the time of contract, not rely on what was true a few months earlier, since litigation over the rule is ongoing.
Homestead Exemption: The Tradeoff Privacy Buyers Must Weigh
Florida’s homestead exemption reduces the taxable value of a primary residence and, more importantly for high-net-worth buyers, provides near-total protection from most creditors under Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution. That protection has one hard requirement: the owner must be a natural person. Florida courts have consistently held that a home titled to an LLC does not qualify, even when the individual is the sole member and lives there full time, because the LLC, not the person, is the legal owner of record.
A revocable living trust works differently and is generally the better vehicle when the property is a primary residence rather than an investment. Because the buyer keeps a beneficial interest for life under the trust document, Florida law under Section 196.041 allows the homestead exemption to carry through to a properly drafted revocable trust. A land trust under Chapter 689 can raise the same question depending on how the trust agreement is drafted, so the beneficiary designation and the powers reserved in the trust instrument need to be reviewed by a Florida real estate attorney before closing, not assumed to work the same way a standard revocable trust does. Irrevocable trusts are the most restrictive of the three and generally do not preserve the homestead exemption unless a beneficiary holds a specific, qualifying right to occupy the home for life.
The practical rule of thumb: for a primary residence where creditor protection and property tax savings matter as much as privacy, a properly structured revocable trust is usually the right tool. For a second home, a rental property, or a commercial asset where homestead protection was never available anyway, an LLC or a land trust, or both together, does more work.
Documentary Stamp Tax and the Cost of Structuring Ownership
Every deed recorded in Florida triggers documentary stamp tax under rules published by the Florida Department of Revenue, at $0.70 per $100 of consideration in most counties and $0.60 per $100 in Miami-Dade County, which also adds a surtax on non-single-family transfers. Structuring ownership through a trust or LLC does not automatically avoid this tax, and the details matter.
- Transferring a property into a revocable living trust where the buyer remains the sole beneficiary is not a taxable event, with or without a mortgage.
- Transferring a mortgaged property into a wholly-owned LLC generally does trigger documentary stamp tax, because Florida treats the outstanding mortgage balance as consideration even when no cash changes hands.
- Transferring an unencumbered, mortgage-free property into a wholly-owned LLC is typically free of documentary stamp tax, since there is no consideration and no change in beneficial ownership.
- Selling an interest in the LLC that holds the property within three years of the property’s transfer into that LLC can itself trigger documentary stamp tax on the underlying real estate, a rule Florida added specifically to prevent LLCs from being used to sidestep the tax entirely.
None of this is a reason to avoid a trust or LLC structure. It is a reason to have a closing attorney or CPA model the documentary stamp tax exposure before choosing whether to buy directly into the entity at closing or to buy personally and transfer later, since the two paths can produce very different tax bills depending on financing.
Commercial Property and Investor Ownership Structures
Privacy is only part of the reason investors use entities to hold Florida real estate. For a commercial building, a multifamily property, or a portfolio of single-family rentals, an LLC is standard practice for the liability protection alone, and Florida’s charging order protection for multi-member LLCs adds a second layer: a creditor of an individual member generally cannot seize the LLC’s underlying property, only a charging order against future distributions, which makes a well-drafted multi-member LLC meaningfully harder to attack than sole ownership.
Investors building a portfolio across several properties should plan the entity structure before the first closing, not after the third one. A common approach uses a separate LLC per property, or per small cluster of properties, held under a single parent holding company, so that a lawsuit tied to one asset cannot reach the others and the investor still files one consolidated set of books at the top. This matters even more when a 1031 exchange is part of the plan, since the entity that sells the relinquished property generally has to be the same entity that buys the replacement property to preserve the exchange, which means the ownership structure has to be set correctly well before a sale closes, not adjusted afterward.
Building a Privacy Structure That Actually Holds Up
The buyers who get the most out of a land trust or an LLC are the ones who set it up correctly before the contract is signed, not after a title search is already underway. That means choosing the trustee, forming the entity, and confirming the current federal reporting posture with a Florida real estate attorney early enough that the structure is ready to take title at closing, rather than retrofitted afterward at a second cost in documentary stamp tax.
MJI Realty Group works with buyers and investors across South Florida who value discretion as much as price and timeline, and coordinates that closing process with the attorneys and title companies who handle the structuring itself. Typical Florida brokers do not have to offer their clients real estate confidentiality, and most do not build a process around it. We do it anyway, because for a meaningful share of luxury buyers, the structure of the deal matters as much as the deal itself.
Real estate ownership decisions depend on individual circumstances, including financing, residency status, and long-term estate planning goals, and the federal reporting rule described above is still being litigated as of this writing. This article is general information, not legal, tax, or investment advice for your specific situation; a Florida real estate attorney and a CPA should review any land trust, LLC, or homestead structure before closing.
