Owner or landlord on lease??? For protection & amonimity

[Brennan Utt]

Hired a broker agent to find tenant and do the lease on a rental property. We agreed I will manage tenants after that. I will and have used and alias when contacting the tenants. Broker just found tenant and are moving in Aug 1st. He sent me lease to sign and put my real name on behalf of "my LLC" The issue I have is the broker who is doing the lease put my real name and address on behalf of my LLC. I told him to put my alias. He said he doesn't want to do that since he is not a real person and risk losing his license. I have business partner and a registered agent can I just use one of them? Don't want to make a big deal of it. But want to protect.myself.

i will be contacting future ten9 moving forward using alias just to remove myself a bit but don't want my real information on lease. Thoughts? 

[Tim Little]

@Brennan Utt, I certainly understand the desire to protect yourself, but as others have eluded to, you are likely putting yourself in a more dangerous legal position by using the alias on legal documents. I would say that if your business partner is part of your LLC and have authorities to conduct business on behalf of the LLC, you should be fine with having them sign (I'm not a lawyer).

I self-manage my triplex now and while I tried to play it off as if I was only the property manager, my tenants remembered me from when I did the inspection and put 2 and 2 together. My concern was that if they knew I was the owner, I could open my self up to frivolous lawsuits. Luckily, I have good tenants and I can't really see that being an issue. But I have also taken steps to mitigate some risks. 

So my personal address doesn't show up in legal paperwork, I have a UPS box that provides me with a real street address. That is the address associated with my LLC. I also recently purchased an umbrella insurance policy with coverage up to about $1 million. This should be more than enough to settle most issues, even frivolous lawsuits. It's also not as expensive as you might think since it's supplementary (only kicks in once the other insurances are exceeded). Hopefully, this give you a few ideas of what you can do to mitigate your risk.

- Tim