Real Estate Question for you ladies or lawyers....

queenybride

I need to help someone put a condo she just purchased into a trust.

The objective is to get it out of her name in the sense if someone tries searching for where she may be living or if she owns a house they could not do a property search and find her name.

She needs protected somehow and I thought that setting the property up into a trust may help a little.

Does anyone know how to get started?

Thanks

BuksFan

Hi there. Even if your friend put her condo into a trust, the title to the property would read, "Jane Doe, as trustee for the "your friend" living revocable trust" - so her name would still appear on the deed. Not to mention it costs at least $1,000 to set up a trust. A better suggestion may be to form an LLC to hold title to the property with a name indistinguishable from her own.

However, that being said, regardless of what your friend does with title to the condo at this point, her name will still appear in the county records as being the owner at some point in time. So if whomever is searching for her is clever enough, they could figure out that she owns that property, or at least that she did own it at some point in time.

I may be able to help if I had more specifics - please feel free to email me at Michelle at yourohiolawyer dot com.

BuksFan

It also just occurred to me that she could do a blind trust. That might give her a little more protection, although it doesn't cure the problem with the county records.