Joe Seagle
Joe Seagle has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Protecting Your Wealth and Assets with Land Trusts with Joe Seagle
Attorney Joe Seagle of My Land Trustee explains how land trusts keep an owner's name off public property records and why that anonymity discourages lawsuits before they start. He walks through the differences between land trusts, revocable living trusts, LLCs and series LLCs, how lenders and taxes treat each, and the situations where putting a property into a trust can backfire. Mike DeHaan and Dan Austin push him on partnerships, refinancing, cost and what investors outside Florida should do instead.
Key takeaways
- Plaintiffs' attorneys look first at insurance coverage, then at property records; if a search turns up nothing collectible, many cases never get filed. Keeping your name off public records is the point of a land trust.
- Use one land trust per property, like eggs in separate baskets, so a code enforcement violation or a lawsuit on one house doesn't block a refinance or expose the rest of the portfolio.
- Land trusts are disregarded entities for tax purposes: the beneficiary (often a buy-and-hold LLC or a flip LLC) reports the income, so you avoid a separate return for every property.
- In Florida a land trust runs roughly $275 to $600 and can be created in under an hour; an LLC averages about $700 to $750 plus a month's wait and annual filing fees.