Why put your Real Estate in a Land Trust – What are the Benefits?

What are the Benefits of buying in a Land Trust?Show more

1. Privacy -- it is best not to have your name anywhere. Why allow the snoops to know everything about you and especially the lenders? The really wealthy people do it this way because they don't want their name showing up anywhere. The less you can show up on any type of County Documents, the better.

2. When we deed a Land Trust it doesn't say the land trust name is John Smith or Jane Smith. It is usually just the property address. If you have a house on 814 E 9 in Lexington, Kentucky then the trust name is going to be 814 E 9 Lexington Kentucky Land Trust.

3. Flexibility -- it is easy to change a beneficiary. The beneficiary is who's benefiting from the trust. Trustees are also easy to change. 1982 - The Garn-St Germain Act -- if a family deeds a property into a trust. for estate planning purposes, a lender cannot call a loan due. They can look at who the beneficiary of that trust is and if it's not that persons name and it's your LLC could they still call the loan due? Yes, they can. Hypothetically, let's say this happens and the bank pulls it up and says "hey John, we pulled up the paperwork and it shows that this property is deeded to this land trust, we need to see the beneficiary paperwork or trust papers." Well, this is not recorded with the county, so they don't see it anywhere. But let's say they request it for some reason. You could add or subtract any names to the trust fairly easy.

4. You can also direct the proceeds of that to any LLC that you want to. and it still remains out of your name.

Ron Legrand is the master of this. Ron is the legend on how to set these up the right way.

They should not be deeded to an LLC, they should be deeded to a trust. When a lender sees you are in LLC, that could cause an issue, but when they see it is deeded to a Land Trust, or a trust name, they usually back off it.

Here is what you could do to throw them off -- You could put the trust name under the previous owner's name. If the previous owner was Don Trump, you could put Don Trump Land Trust. This doesn't mean that Don is the beneficiary or the trustee, it is just the name of the trust. You can name it whatever you want and all it is a handful of papers. It is not some big, long drawn-out thing that is very expensive.

It should only cost $200 to $300 as it literally is just a handful of papers. If someone is charging you much more, find another attorney.