Real Estate Branding Mastery: LLC and a DBA for Dual Business Identities

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0:00 - Intro
0:58 - What is a “DBA”
1:42 - Two Brand Names
2:17 - A Note on Legal Contracts
3:40 - Considerations When Picking a Business Name
4:34 - Using Chatbots for Name Ideas
5:00 - Checking for Domain Name Availability
6:30 - Checking Domain Availability on NameCheap
6:45 - The Benefits of a Generic Name
8:19 - Checking Name Availability In Your State
10:19 - Two Places to Register Your LLC and DBA

If you're in the business of “flipping” real estate (i.e., buying undervalued properties and selling them at a significant markup), one issue you'll eventually have to address is how to brand yourself as a buyer and how to brand yourself as a seller.

In a very real way, you'll be wearing two separate hats in this business. On the one hand – you'll be running an acquisition company that buys undervalued assets from highly motivated sellers. On the other hand – you'll also be running a real estate selling platform where you need to showcase these assets in their best light and sell them for much more than you paid.

It's like operating two separate machines that perform completely different duties. Given their inherent differences, it often makes sense to establish two separate brand names for your business in order to perform these roles without confusing your customers.

Disclaimer: Before we go any further, please be aware that I am not an attorney, and this article should not be interpreted as legal advice. Every business and situation contains different attributes that may affect the validity of this approach, so be sure to review this strategy with your legal counsel before proceeding.

When I started flipping vacant land properties, I found out pretty quickly that using one SINGLE name as an umbrella for all of my buying and selling activity (sharing the same website, phone number, logo, etc.) left the door open to a lot of unnecessary problems. It was an open invitation for buyers and sellers to see how they got the wrong end of the deal.

For obvious reasons, when I bought a property for $5,000, I didn't want that same seller to check back the next day only to see that I was listing it for $50,000. When you use the same platform to communicate with EVERYONE, you're asking for this kind of trouble.

Of course, there's nothing technically wrong with buying low and selling high, regardless of who sees it… but I'm not here to discuss the ethics behind the business model. I'm here to talk about how a real estate investor can avoid these awkward confrontations by simply structuring their company names so that the buying arm of the business looks like an entirely different company than the selling arm of the same business.