How do you find out who owns a building when the owner is an LLC?

The property record names the LLC, not a person, and New York publishes nothing about who owns that LLC. The name of a person normally comes from a third record: the city housing registry. Of the 59,151 New York City buildings held by an LLC whose HPD registration runs to September 1, 2026 or later, 59,127 name a person.

What the property record actually tells you

A deed names the grantee of record, and an LLC can take title in its own name. Nothing in US property law requires a natural person to appear. FinCEN wrote its residential real estate reporting rule in 2024 for exactly this reason: non-financed transfers to legal entities leave no beneficial owner anywhere on the public record.

The entity name you get is often less informative than it looks. New York City's tax-lot file, PLUTO, records the owner of 1134 Madison Avenue as 1134 MADISON AVENUE, dropping even the "LLC". The registered name is 1134 MADISON AVENUE LLC, and it appears on exactly one building registration in the city: the building it is named after.

The one-building entity is the norm here, and it is measurable rather than a guess from the name. Of the 48,055 distinct LLC names on these registrations, 43,772 hold exactly one registered building, and those entities cover 43,771 of the 59,151 LLC-held buildings, or 74.00%. The two counts differ by one because a single building is registered to two such LLCs. The naming convention follows the structure, with 23,567 buildings, 39.84%, held by an entity carrying the building's own house number in its name. A large portfolio is therefore a long list of LLCs with nothing in common on their face. The exceptions run the other way: the largest single LLC name on these registrations covers 248 buildings.

Why the state's corporate registry usually stops short

New York does not ask an LLC who owns it. LLC Law section 203(e) sets out what the articles of organization "shall set forth", in seven items: the name, the county of the office, an optional dissolution date, the designation of the Secretary of State as agent for service of process, an optional registered agent, an optional statement that named members are personally liable for the company's debts, and any other internal-affairs provisions "the members elect to include". Two of the seven mention members, and both are permissive: one is about liability and the other about limits on authority to bind the company. Nothing in the list requires the LLC to say who its members are. The biennial statement under section 301 adds one thing, the post office address to which the state should mail any process it accepts.

New York does ask the ownership question elsewhere in the same article. Section 215 requires a reporting company filing its articles of organization to file a beneficial ownership disclosure naming each beneficial owner, with a date of birth and an identifying number. What section 215 does not do is make any of that public, which the end of this section comes back to.

The published data matches the statute. New York's active corporations file carries 4,284,739 entities in eleven columns: dos_id, current_entity_name, initial_dos_filing_date, county, jurisdiction, entity_type, and five dos_process_* fields. There is no owner column, no member column, and no manager column, so no query against it can produce one.

Looking up the example entity returns what the statute promises and nothing more:

curl -sG 'https://data.ny.gov/resource/n9v6-gdp6.json' \
  --data-urlencode "\$where=current_entity_name='1134 MADISON AVENUE LLC'"

[{"dos_id":"2723756",
  "current_entity_name":"1134 MADISON AVENUE LLC",
  "initial_dos_filing_date":"2002-01-25T00:00:00.000",
  "county":"New York",
  "jurisdiction":"New York",
  "entity_type":"DOMESTIC LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY",
  "dos_process_name":"C/O SOLIL MANAGEMENT LLC",
  "dos_process_address_1":"1185 SIXTH AVE FL 10",
  "dos_process_city":"NEW YORK","dos_process_state":"NY","dos_process_zip":"10036"}]

That is a useful lead and not an answer. The LLC has existed since January 2002 and forwards its legal mail to another company, Solil Management LLC, at a Sixth Avenue address. A management company is not an owner, and the record does not claim it is.

Two fallbacks that readers often expect are closed. New York's LLC Transparency Act does collect beneficial ownership, but section 1107 makes the database confidential outside consent, a court order, or a government request. At the federal level, FinCEN finalized a rule on August 11, 2026 exempting US companies from beneficial ownership reporting altogether. There is no public federal registry of company owners to fall back on.

Where a person's name actually appears

Housing law asks the question corporate law does not. New York City requires the owner of any building with three or more units, and of any one or two family house the owner does not live in, to register with HPD every year between May 21 and September 1. HPD's own guidance says a corporate owner must give the names and addresses of anyone whose share of the corporation exceeds 25%, and a partnership must do the same for its limited partners. It does not state that rule for an LLC. What it does require of every registrant is a managing agent who is a natural person, and a signature from the owner or a corporate officer as well as from the agent.

The filings are published as open data, so the effect is measurable. Across the 154,249 buildings whose registration runs to September 1, 2026 or later:

Of the 107,359 held by a company, 59,151 are held by an entity whose name is an LLC. And of those 59,151, 59,127 name a natural person as head officer. That is 99.96%. Counting any named person in an owner or officer role rather than the head officer alone moves it to 59,147, or 99.99%.

Methodology: HPD registrations expire on September 1 each year, so on a day three weeks after that date most buildings sit between one cycle's expiry and the next one's filing. Taking only unexpired registrations would therefore have counted 23,560 buildings rather than 154,249. The denominator used throughout is every registration whose registrationenddate falls on or after 2026-09-01, counted once per buildingid: 130,689 buildings whose registration ran to September 1, 2026 and 23,560 already renewed through September 1, 2027. Pulled 2026-09-22.

The three hops, on one building

All of it starts from a street address. The tax lot gives the entity, the state file gives the entity's history and its process contact, and the registration gives the people.

# 1. The tax lot: who is on the property record
curl -sG 'https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/64uk-42ks.json' \
  --data-urlencode "\$where=borough='MN' AND address='1134 MADISON AVENUE'" \
  --data-urlencode '$select=address,ownername,block,lot,unitsres' \
  --data-urlencode '$order=:id' --data-urlencode '$limit=50'
# -> ownername "1134 MADISON AVENUE", block 1496, lot 17, 6 residential units

# 2. The building's HPD registration, by address
curl -sG 'https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/tesw-yqqr.json' \
  --data-urlencode "\$where=boro='MANHATTAN' AND housenumber='1134' AND streetname='MADISON AVENUE'" \
  --data-urlencode '$order=:id' --data-urlencode '$limit=50'
# -> registrationid 106034, block 1496, lot 17

# 3. Everyone named on that registration
curl -sG 'https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/feu5-w2e2.json' \
  --data-urlencode '$where=registrationid=106034' \
  --data-urlencode '$order=:id' --data-urlencode '$limit=50'

The registration carries the same block and lot as the tax lot, which is what ties the two records together. Six residential units also puts the building over the three-unit threshold that makes registration compulsory.

The third call returns five rows. CorporateOwner is 1134 MADISON AVENUE LLC, the same entity the tax-lot record named. HeadOfficer is JANE GOLDMAN, title SECRETARY, at 1185 Sixth Avenue, which is the address the state file gave for Solil Management. An Officer, an Agent and a SiteManager are listed too, and none of those is an owner: HPD's agent is the managing agent responsible for running the building, a different role from the registered agent who accepts legal process for the company.

Note what this did and did not establish. It produced a person who signs for the building and shares an address with the management company the state file already pointed at. It did not produce a deed, a share register, or any statement that she owns it. Her title on this filing is secretary.

What the named person actually is

The registry records a role, and the role is worth reading before the name is used for anything. These are the eight most common titles across the 58,523 distinct head-officer records filed on those LLC-owned registrations, covering 85.3% of them:

The unit there is the filed contact record, not the building. A single registration can cover several buildings, and counting its head officer once per building would weight large portfolios by their size: done that way the same data gives 100,276 rows and inflates "partner" alone from 2.25% to 11.28%.

Read as records, the finding is that the name is far more reliable than the role. A title of any kind appears on 33,201 records, 56.73%, and the largest single category is no title at all, at 43.27%. Titles that point at ownership, meaning member, managing member, owner or partner, account for 17,362 records, or 29.67%. So fewer than a third of these filings assert that the person named has any stake in the company. The owner files its own registration, which also makes every one of these names self-reported.

One name reaches the rest of the portfolio

The reason the head officer is worth having is that the name is the same across filings while the entity name is not. JANE GOLDMAN is head officer on 134 of these LLC-owned buildings, filed under 98 different LLC names once punctuation is normalized, or 103 as the strings are typed. All 134 give a business address at 1185 Sixth Avenue, with the street itself typed four different ways across the filings, which is why matching on the address string alone fails.

The pattern holds well beyond one landlord. Of 20,496 distinct head-officer names on LLC-owned buildings, 7,608 appear on more than one, and those names reach 46,242 buildings, 78.18% of the LLC-owned set. Two people can share a name, so treat that as a ceiling. Requiring a match on the business address as well as the name gives a floor of 38,934 buildings, 65.82%. The true figure sits between them.

Does this work outside New York City?

It depends entirely on whether the city publishes a rental register that carries an owner name, and plenty do not. Four that publish something, measured the same day:

The counts are not comparable, because New York registers buildings while Philadelphia and Minneapolis license rentals. The shares are only loosely comparable either, because each city is answering the question with a different field: New York has a dedicated head-officer role, Philadelphia has two structured name columns, and Minneapolis has an applicant name. What they have in common is narrow and still worth knowing: whether a human's name appears anywhere on the filing.

Philadelphia's figure is a floor, and deliberately so. Its license records carry structured legalfirstname and legallastname fields, populated on those 5,678, plus a free-text ownercontact1name populated on 12,427 more. That free-text field often does name a person, but it also holds company names such as Chatham Holdings Services LLC and single-character junk, so it cannot be counted as a person field. Excluding the values that look like companies puts the combined figure around 16,864, or 64%, and that number is an estimate rather than a count.

Seattle is the instructive failure. Its registration file has a propertycontactname and gives you a human, but it has no column for the owning entity at all, so nothing connects that person to the LLC on the deed. When you check your own city, that is the column to look for first: a register that names a person is only useful here if it also names the company.

Taking the name to the rest of the country

A name from a housing registry is local. The companies that person is named on are not, and once you have the name the question becomes which registries publish it. GovFiles normalizes officer, director, member, agent and shareholder records from the state registries that publish them into one schema, searchable by name across all of them:

curl -s -X POST 'https://api.govfiles.dev/v2/officers/search' \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"q":"\"jane goldman\"","jurisdictions":"us_ny"}'

That query returns 27 matches in New York: 21 recorded as Chief Executive Officer, six as registered agent, and 24 of the 27 attached to corporations rather than LLCs. That split is the section 203(e) gap seen from the other end. New York asks a corporation to name a chief executive officer on its biennial statement and asks an LLC for nobody, so the officer records that exist in New York are mostly corporate ones.

It also shows why a name is a starting point and not an identity. Sixteen of the 27 give the same 1185 Sixth Avenue address that appears on the building registration. Five more give a second Manhattan address, 640 Fifth Avenue, one of which spells it out as "C/O SOLIL MANAGEMENT". The remaining six sit at unrelated addresses. Nothing in the record settles whether they are the same person, which is the point: the address does the disambiguating, not the name.

Frequently asked

How do you find out who owns a building when the owner is an LLC? Work through three records, not one. The property record names the LLC. The state's business registry confirms the LLC exists, and in New York what it publishes is a service-of-process contact and nothing about the members: the articles of organization never have to name them, and the separate beneficial-ownership filing the state does collect is confidential. The name of a person normally comes from a third source, a city rental or housing registry. Of the 59,151 New York City residential buildings registered to an LLC whose HPD registration runs to September 1, 2026 or later, 59,127, or 99.96%, name a natural person as head officer.

Why doesn't the deed name a person? Because a deed names whoever took title, and an LLC can take title in its own name. No US jurisdiction requires a natural person on a deed or an assessor roll. FinCEN wrote its 2024 residential real estate rule specifically because all-cash transfers to legal entities leave no beneficial owner on the public record.

Does the Secretary of State record show who owns an LLC? It depends on the state, and in New York it does not. LLC Law section 203(e) lists seven items the articles of organization must set forth. Two of them mention members, and both are optional: whether named members are personally liable for the company's debts, and whether there are limits on the authority of members or managers to bind it. Nothing on the list requires the LLC to identify its members. The biennial statement under section 301 adds only a mailing address for service of process, and New York's published file of active entities has eleven columns, none of which records an owner, member or manager. Which people a state does publish varies a great deal from one registry to the next, and several states do ask for managers or members.

Is the person named in a rental registry the owner of the building? Not necessarily, and the record usually will not say. Across the 58,523 distinct head-officer records filed on LLC-owned New York City registrations running to September 1, 2026 or later, 43.27% carry no title at all, and only 29.67% carry a title that indicates ownership, such as member, managing member, owner or partner. The remaining 27.06% carry some other title, most commonly manager, officer or president. The names are supplied by the owner on its own registration, so they are self-reported.

Do other cities publish the person behind a rental property? Some do. Philadelphia records a structured owner first and last name on 5,678 of the 26,316 active rental licenses held by an LLC, 21.58%, and a free-text owner contact on 12,427 more that mixes people with company names. Minneapolis names an applicant on all 1,495 of its active rental licenses held by an LLC. Seattle's rental registrations name a property contact but record no owning entity, so nothing links the person to the company.

What is the difference between a managing agent and a registered agent? A managing agent runs the building and is the person a city housing registry wants on file. A registered agent accepts legal process on behalf of a company and is filed with the state, and in New York an LLC does not have to appoint one at all: section 203(e)(5) makes it optional, on top of the mandatory designation of the Secretary of State for service of process. Neither role establishes ownership. The same caution applies to an address: companies sharing one address are frequently sharing an agent rather than an owner.