Shade, utility savings, privacy?

The court stated that an owner has a constitutional right to privacy in their property, including their rental property, and therefore has a right to refuse to allow the City to conduct an inspection and to demand a warrant.The court also found that the City of Bedford has been unjustly enriched by charging a fee for these inspections and therefore shall not be permitted to retain the fees that were unlawfully collected.

I've been here since 2010 and haven't seen one yet.As for privacy, your tenants will quickly figure out you are the owner so it doesn't really matter that the property is owned under a different name.Don't create an LLC just because someone said you should or you see it thrown around the forums a lot.

However, I understand that in some areas you may not feel as comfortable providing this info to your tenants, but in our specific situation it worked out and we have good lines of communication with out tenant overall.I don't know where the line would be drawn for what could be considered an invasion of privacy and it may be state dependent, but I would just make sure that everything is clear with any prospective tenant so that there is never any confusion.

It covered setting up a holding company in WY (privacy protection laws) and child LLCs for the state you plan to operate in. 

Due to privacy laws here, the only way we could be certain of collecting the required data was to retain the utilities in our own name.   

If this is used in a residential unit, does the tenant have any rights of privacy which would be compromised by the monitoring?

It's practically an invasion of privacy!

Texas is pretty good about privacy so I don't know if you will be able to find out, but most counties allow you to search for new Warrant Deeds by last name.

Besides the benefits of privacy this structure could make life very difficult for a potential plaintiff and their attorney – so much so the attorney likely will look for another case!