Need Some Legal Structure Advice

[Michael Vazquez]

My wife and I recently took over a rental property in "da Bronx."  It's a major fixer upper that she bought a long time ago with her ex-husband and he allowed it to fall into major disrepair after their divorce many years ago.  Anyway, that's an entirely different discussion.

My question has to do with the setup of our LLC(s). We created a LLC for the Bronx property and plan on creating an individual one for every other property we purchase down the road. However, we would like to publicly represent ourselves under one name with all of our real estate dealings. Should we create a "top level" LLC with the name we want to use or would a simple DBA suffice? Also, do we place any or all of our properties under any type of legal exposure if we use the top level public name in our dealings with businesses and tenants?

Hope this all makes sense.  Thanks for any input and advice you can offer.