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A practical look at the Florida land trust – the privacy it actually delivers, what gets recorded, how it interacts with homestead and financing, and whether the trustee’s fee is worth paying

Key Takeaways

  • A Florida land trust puts both legal and equitable title in a trustee and converts the beneficiary’s interest into personal property. It is a title-holding and privacy device. It is not asset protection.
  • The privacy works best on acquisition, not on conversion. Deeding a home you already own into a land trust leaves your name in the chain of title.
  • Florida law preserves the homestead property-tax exemption for a qualifying individual beneficiary, but no such statute expressly extends the constitutional protection of homestead from creditors.
  • You do not record a certification of trust for a land trust. The deed itself has to carry the statutory powers language, and getting that right is critical.
  • In order to maintain privacy, the trustee should be someone other than the beneficial owner and their immediate family, and third-party trustees generally expect to be paid every year. For most homeowners, that recurring cost buys very little.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is a Florida Land Trust?

Florida is one of a small handful of states with a land trust statute. Under Fla. Stat. § 689.071, a recorded instrument that transfers real property to a trustee and confers on that trustee the power and authority prescribed in Fla. Stat. § 689.073(1) vests in the trustee both legal and equitable title. The beneficiary’s interest, if the documents say so, is personal property rather than an interest in land, and the trustee acts at the direction of the beneficiaries or of whoever holds the power of direction.

That inversion is the whole engine. In an ordinary trust the trustee holds legal title and the beneficiary holds the equitable interest in the land itself. In a Florida land trust the trustee holds both, and what the beneficiary owns is an interest in the trust. Because the beneficial interest is personal property, it can be transferred by assignment rather than by deed, pledged without recording a mortgage, held by several people without creating a partition risk against the land, and passed at death without an ancillary probate of Florida real estate.

Florida also legislated away the two doctrines that defeat this arrangement in other states. Section 689.071(4) shuts off the statute of uses, so a land trust is not collapsed into the beneficiary’s hands even though the trustee has no real duties and the trust is otherwise passive. Section 689.071(5) does the same for the doctrine of merger, which does not extinguish a land trust even where the trustee is its sole beneficiary. Those two provisions are why the device works here and does not work in several states that lack an equivalent statute.

Everything people like about land trusts follows from all of this. So does most of what goes wrong with them.

Why This Works in Florida and Often Does Not Elsewhere

I am licensed to practice law in Florida, Louisiana, New York and Texas, and the comparison is worth drawing, because clients who move to Florida from elsewhere frequently arrive carrying assumptions formed under very different law.

New York collapses passive trusts by statute. Under N.Y. EPTL § 7-1.2, every disposition of property must be made directly to the person in whom the right to possession and income is intended to vest, and where it is instead made to a person in trust for another, no estate, legal or equitable, vests in the trustee. A conveyance to a trustee who holds bare title and takes direction from the beneficiary is the paradigm case of what that section is aimed at, and New York has no land trust statute to switch the rule off, so in effect a land trust ceases to exist the moment it is set up in New York. That is why the device is not used there the way it is used here.

Texas arrives at much the same place by a shorter route. Tex. Prop. Code § 112.032 provides that title to real property held in trust vests directly in the beneficiary if the trustee has neither a power nor a duty related to the administration of the trust, and that a trust survives only where it is not merely nominal. As a Texas practitioner, I can still build a workable arrangement by giving the trustee genuine powers, but no Texas statute confirms and protects the structure the way Fla. Stat. § 689.071 does here, and a Texas homestead carries its own separate requirements under Tex. Prop. Code § 41.0021.

Louisiana does not have land trusts at all. It is a civil law jurisdiction, and trusts exist there only by virtue of the Louisiana Trust Code, La. R.S. 9:1721 et seq., which contemplates a fiduciary administering property for the benefit of a beneficiary and leaves no room for the Illinois-style title-holding arrangement. Estate planning lawyers in Louisiana, including me, can go no further than what the Louisiana Trust Code provides. Clients who want something like the effect in Louisiana generally use a limited liability company instead.

Florida is the outlier. Fla. Stat. Sections 689.071(4) and (5) exist precisely to stop the statute of uses and the doctrine of merger from doing in Florida what EPTL § 7-1.2 does in New York. If you own property in more than one state, do not assume that a structure that works on one side of a state line works on the other.

Why Florida’s Property Records Are So Easy to Search

Clients who have owned property in other states are often startled by how information about their Florida real estate is easily discoverable online, for free. Florida is an extreme outlier in this regard. Four things account for it.

First, access to public records in Florida is a constitutional right, not a legislative grace. Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution, adopted in 1992, guarantees the right to inspect and copy the records of every branch of government and every political subdivision, and it is self-executing. The statutory Public Records Act in Chapter 119 dates to 1909 and is among the oldest in the country. Florida did not drift into transparency. It chose it, twice, and wrote it into the constitution the second time.

Second, the Florida Legislature has required the records be made available online. Under Fla. Stat. § 28.2221, every county recorder must maintain a current index of recorded documents, reaching back to at least January 1, 1990, on a publicly available internet website, with a requisition point for obtaining the images and the capability of feeding that index to a statewide search site. The statute opens by declaring that putting public records on the internet serves a proper and legitimate state purpose. Most states leave this to county budgets and vendor contracts. Florida made it a duty.

Third, Florida taxes the deed. Documentary stamp tax under Chapter 201 is measured by the consideration, so the consideration appears on the face of the instrument and the sale price becomes a public fact. Roughly a dozen states are non-disclosure states where the price is nobody’s business, Texas among them. Florida’s revenue system depends on the number being written down.

Fourth, the ad valorem tax system generates a parcel-level public database as a byproduct. Every property appraiser must value every parcel every year, maintain the tax roll as a public record, and administer homestead exemptions and Save Our Homes portability, which requires data sharing across all Florida counties. The resulting search tools are good because the underlying legal obligation is demanding.

There are a few narrow exceptions to the free public accessibility of all Floridians’ property records. Fla. Stat. § 119.071(4)(d) exempts the home addresses of specified people, including law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors, and certain of their family members from publication online, and § 28.2221 gives a person entitled to a statutory exemption a free, notarized process for having that information removed from the recorder’s public website. If you qualify under one of those categories, use it. It is more effective at hiding ownership than a land trust and it costs you nothing.

The Privacy Is Real, but Narrower Than Advertised

If you browse the online property appraiser’s records for the expensive neighborhoods in the Sunshine State, you will find a great many entries along the lines of “John Q. Lawyer, Esquire, Trustee of the XYZ Land Trust.” In a land trust arrangement, the deed names the trustee and nobody else. Paparazzi, reporters, process servers, contractors with a grievance and stalkers, all hit the same wall.

However, that wall is about waist high.

A land trust defeats casual curiosity. It does not defeat a litigant with a subpoena, a plaintiff taking the trustee’s deposition, a creditor conducting proceedings, or the IRS. Naming a lawyer as trustee raises the wall a bit higher (which is why the palm-lined avenues of Palm Beach contain so many esquires as trustees), and Florida is unusually protective on this point. The First District held that a client’s identity and the payment of a fee fall within the statutory privilege and are not among its enumerated exceptions. See Corry v. Meggs, 498 So. 2d 508 (Fla. 1st DCA 1986), 511; and Tumelaire v. Naples Estates Homeowners Association, Inc., 137 So. 3d 596 (Fla. 2d DCA 2014). The limit is capacity rather than subject matter. The privilege protects the rendition of legal services, and a lawyer who holds title as trustee is performing a fiduciary function rather than giving legal advice, so no client should assume the privilege travels with the trusteeship. A land trust makes it harder, slower and more expensive to learn who lives in the house. It does not make it impossible, and no lawyer should advise a client otherwise.

Why Transferring a Home You Already Own Does Not Make It Private

Suppose you own your home in your own name, and you decide you want to hide the fact that you own it by creating a land trust, with your lawyer (who cannot easily be compelled to identify you) as trustee. You create the ABC Land Trust with your attorney as trustee, and you quitclaim your home to the trustee. The current owner field now reads “Joe Schmoe, Esq., as Trustee.” But the chain of title reads you to the trustee, and it will read that way permanently. Anyone who looks one deed back learns who put the house into the trust and draws the obvious conclusion. The property appraiser’s sales history shows the same transfer. You have not become invisible. You have added a step.

There is a second point usually raised at about this stage, and on examination it cuts the other way. To claim the homestead tax exemption as beneficiary you file Form DR-501 with the property appraiser, and that form names you. But the form is confidential. The Attorney General concluded in AGO 2005-04 that DR-501 is a “return” within the meaning of Fla. Stat. § 193.074 and therefore exempt from public inspection, and the social security number on it is separately protected by § 193.114(5).

What is public is the assessment roll, and Fla. Stat. § 193.114(2) says exactly what the roll must show: the owner or fiduciary responsible for paying the taxes, that person’s address, an indication of any fiduciary capacity such as trustee, and a categorization of any exemption on the parcel. For a land trust that means the roll names the trustee, identifies them as a trustee, and shows that homestead has been claimed. It does not name the beneficiary. A searcher learns that someone lives there as a permanent resident and that a fiduciary holds the title, which is a good deal less than most people assume and does not identify the client.

The exception is the one that runs through this entire subject. Section 193.074 makes the return confidential except upon court order or the order of an administrative body with quasi-judicial powers in ad valorem tax matters. A litigant who wants the application can go and get it. So can the value adjustment board process: if an exemption is denied and the taxpayer submits the return as evidence in the dispute, it becomes a public record. The application is protected from the curious. It is not protected from the determined.

So the privacy case for a land trust is best made at acquisition, and it holds only when three things are true:

  1. The seller is a stranger. The deed runs from the seller directly to the trustee. Your name never enters the chain at all.
  2. The purchase is cash, or the lender will take the trustee as mortgagor. A recorded mortgage naming you as borrower undoes everything, and most residential lenders will not close to a land trust.
  3. The property is not your homestead, or you accept the tradeoff. And watch the federal reporting rule discussed below, which is vacated but on appeal.

None of this means a conversion deed is pointless. Moving a home you already own into a land trust still buys real things: less public clarity about its beneficial ownership, probate avoidance on the beneficial interest, a workable structure where several people own one parcel, and, for a non-resident owner of Florida property, no ancillary administration here at death. Those are transactional benefits and they are worth paying for when a client wants them. They are simply not complete privacy.

The 2026 FinCEN Rule: What It Was, and What It Is Now

For eighteen days in 2026 there was a federal answer to the privacy question, and what became of it matters more than the rule itself. FinCEN’s Residential Real Estate Rule, codified at 31 C.F.R. § 1031.320, began imposing reporting obligations on March 1, 2026. On March 19, 2026, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated it nationwide in Flowers Title Companies, LLC v. Bessent, No. 6:25-cv-127 (E.D. Tex.), holding that FinCEN had exceeded its authority under the Bank Secrecy Act.

As matters stand, no report is required. FinCEN’s own guidance states that reporting persons are not currently required to file real estate reports and are not subject to liability for failing to do so while the order remains in force. FinCEN and the Department of Justice filed a notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit on May 11, 2026, and that appeal is pending.

Do not treat the question as settled. A judge in the Middle District of Florida had reached the opposite conclusion a month earlier in Fidelity National Financial, Inc. v. Bessent, and parallel challenges have been litigated elsewhere. If the Fifth Circuit reinstates the rule, reporting obligations could return on short notice.

There is a further wrinkle, and it matters most to cash buyers in the Florida markets that federal regulators have historically watched. Since 2016 FinCEN had run Geographic Targeting Orders requiring title insurers to identify the natural persons behind entities buying residential property without financing in covered counties across thirteen states, Florida among them, at a threshold of $300,000. The last renewal was deliberately written to expire on February 28, 2026, because the nationwide rule was to take over the following day. It did, for eighteen days. Unless and until FinCEN reissues a Geographic Targeting Order, which it can do on 180-day cycles and without notice-and-comment, neither program is in force.

What the rule asked for is why it belongs in an article about land trusts. It reached non-financed transfers of residential real property where the transferee was a legal entity or a trust, with no minimum price and no geographic limit, and it required identifying information about the trust and about the individuals who control it or hold significant beneficial interests in it. A cash purchase in the name of a land trust is the paradigm transaction it was written to capture. Reports, if the obligation returns, are not public records, and the privacy interest most clients actually have is privacy from neighbors, marketers, litigants and strangers rather than from the Treasury Department. But a client buying for cash should be told that the rule exists, that it is currently unenforceable, and that it is on appeal.

Homestead: The Tax Exemption Is Statutory, the Creditor Protection Is Not

Florida homestead has two primary benefits: reduced property taxes and protection from creditors.

The property tax benefits of land trusts are settled by statute. Under Fla. Stat. § 689.071(8)(h), the principal residence of a beneficiary is entitled to the homestead tax exemption even though the home is held by a trustee in a land trust, provided the beneficiary otherwise qualifies under Chapter 196. The Legislature addressed this in 1963 and it has not been a live question since.

The protection from creditors side is not addressed by that statute. Article X, Section 4 protects all Florida homesteads from forced sale. The question is whether the resident beneficiary of a land trust holds a genuine present interest in the home sufficient to claim it. Title sitting in a trustee is not by itself fatal, but what the cases have actually protected is a genuine present right of occupancy that looks like a life estate or a lease for life. See Southern Walls, Inc. v. Stilwell Corp., 810 So. 2d 566 (Fla. 5th DCA 2002), a cooperative apartment held under a lease for life, and Cutler v. Cutler, 994 So. 2d 341 (Fla. 3d DCA 2008), where the residence was held in a land trust and the resident beneficiary had reserved a life estate.

The safe practice follows directly from those cases: Give the resident beneficiary an express, continuous lifetime right to use, occupy and possess the home, written into the trust agreement. Every Florida decision protecting a home held for someone else has involved more than bare occupancy. The occupant in Southern Walls held a lease for life in his cooperative. The beneficiary in Cutler had reserved a life estate. Engelke v. Estate of Engelke, 921 So. 2d 693 (Fla. 4th DCA 2006), turned on a retained power to revoke. No reported Florida decision has tested a land trust beneficiary who has occupancy and nothing more, and I would rather none of my clients be the case that settles it.

Three related traps:

Assigning the beneficial interest to an LLC or a corporation forfeits both the exemption and the constitutional protection, because homestead belongs only to natural persons. An entity holding a beneficial interest in a land trust is in the same position as an entity holding the deed outright.

And while moving property between legal and equitable title does not ordinarily reset the Save Our Homes cap where the same person remains entitled to the exemption, a genuine change in beneficial ownership can. See Fla. Stat. § 193.155(3). The deed, the trust agreement, the beneficial ownership and the homestead application all have to tell the same story.

And the trap that catches married clients more than any other: Article X, Section 4(c) restricts the devise of homestead where the owner is survived by a spouse or a minor child, and those restrictions apply whatever the title arrangement says. Where there is a minor child the homestead cannot be devised at all. Where there is a surviving spouse and no minor child it can be devised only to the spouse. A land trust creates no way around either rule, and a client who sets one up expecting to direct the home elsewhere at death should learn that at the drafting table rather than from their family afterwards.

I cover the broader homestead picture, including co-owners, Lady Bird deeds and trusts generally, in the companion article on Florida homestead as asset protection.

What Actually Gets Recorded

When I fund an ordinary revocable trust, I record a certification of trust under Fla. Stat. § 736.1017, which proves the trust exists and identifies the trustee and the succession without exposing the trust’s dispositive terms. A land trust does not work that way, and the reason is structural: Under § 689.071(12), except as that section itself provides, Chapter 736 does not apply to a land trust at all.

What you record is the deed alone, so that deed has to do the whole job.

The powers language is mandatory. A trust is a land trust only if a recorded instrument confers on the trustee the authority prescribed in Fla. Stat. § 689.073(1): the power “to protect, to conserve, to sell, to lease, to encumber, or otherwise to manage and dispose of” the property. That grant, on the face of the deed, is what vests both legal and equitable title in the trustee and what tells the world the trustee can convey. Leave it out and you do not have a land trust.

Name and date the trust on the deed. Both § 689.071(15) and § 689.073(4) exclude instruments governed by Fla. Stat. § 689.07, which provides that a deed to a grantee “as trustee” that names no beneficiaries, states no purposes, and identifies no trust by title or date conveys an absolute fee simple to that grantee, with full power to deal with both the legal and the beneficial interest. That is the opposite of what anyone intends, and the cure is one line of drafting.

Declare the beneficial interest personal property. Under § 689.071(6), the recorded instrument or the trust agreement must contain a provision declaring the beneficiaries’ interests to be personal property only. If neither does, those interests are real property by default, and the assignability and probate advantages go with them. This is the single most commonly missed provision in land trust drafting.

The trust agreement stays unrecorded, and the statute protects that. Section 689.071(8)(e) and § 689.073(2) both provide that anyone dealing with the trustee is not obliged to inquire into the terms of the unrecorded agreement. A title underwriter will usually want to see it, or a trustee’s affidavit in its place, but that goes to the underwriter, not to the clerk.

Succession is where the certification-of-trust instinct reappears, and it matters. Section 689.071(9) gives three paths. If the recorded instrument itself provides for appointing a successor trustee and a successor is appointed accordingly, nothing further is ever recorded. If the recorded instrument is silent but the unrecorded agreement provides for succession, the successor records a declaration of appointment signed by the former and successor trustees, containing the legal description and both addresses and acknowledged in the manner of a deed; where the former trustee has died or become incapacitated, a death certificate or statement of incapacity is attached in place of that signature. And if both documents are silent, the holder of the power of direction appoints, and the declaration must be signed by a beneficiary.

That last path puts a beneficiary’s name and signature into the official records, which is precisely what the arrangement was built to avoid. If privacy is the client’s objective, put the succession mechanism in the recorded deed at the outset and never need a declaration.

The clause that does it need be no longer than this, sitting in the deed alongside the powers language:

Upon the death, resignation, incapacity or refusal to act of the Trustee, [Name] shall become Successor Trustee and shall succeed to all of the title, powers and authority conferred on the Trustee by this instrument, upon the recording in the Public Records of [County] County, Florida of an acceptance of appointment executed by the Successor Trustee.

Four Things a Land Trust Does Not Do

It provides no additional creditor protection. A land trust holds title for the beneficiary’s benefit. A creditor who learns that the beneficiary is the real owner can reach the beneficial interest like any other personal property owned by the beneficiary. Concealment is not exemption.

It is not a liability shield. If the worry is a slip-and-fall at a rental property, the answer is an LLC to own the property, adequate insurance, or (ideally) both. A trust has no members, no charging-order protection and no wall between the property and the owner. This is why I rarely recommend a land trust as the sole structure for investment real estate.

It saves no income tax. In the ordinary directed structure with one beneficiary, a land trust is a grantor trust and is disregarded for federal income tax purposes. The beneficiary reports the income and takes the deductions exactly as before.

It does not automatically avoid probate. It can, if the trust agreement names successor beneficiaries and the interest is drafted to pass outside the estate. If it does not, the beneficial interest is simply personal property that passes under the will. And where the property is homestead, the constitutional restrictions on devise described in the homestead section above apply whatever the title arrangement says.

Where a Land Trust Earns Its Fee

There are a few situations where I recommend land trusts without hesitation:

  • A client whose address genuinely needs to be hard to find: a celebrity or public figure, a person who has been threatened or stalked, or a survivor of domestic violence.
  • A developer or investor assembling adjacent parcels with anonymity, where the seller of the fourth lot must not learn that the buyer of the first three is back.
  • Several unrelated people buying one property together, where the ability to transfer a beneficial interest by assignment, and the absence of a partition remedy against the land, is a specific requirement.
  • A non-resident owner of a single Florida property, where converting the interest to personal property sidesteps an ancillary administration in Florida at death.

What those have in common is a specific, articulable objective that the structure actually accomplishes. Absent one, I tell clients what I will repeat here: Paying a lawyer every year to keep your own name off the deed to your own house is an expensive answer to a question nobody was asking.

The Trustee Is an Annual Expense, Not a One-Time One

Name yourself or your spouse (or parent or child) as trustee and you have saved the fee and destroyed the privacy, because the deed now discloses whose house it is or at least whose family members live there. Name a friend or more distant relative and you have handed legal title to your home to a person whose divorce, bankruptcy, incapacity or death is now your problem; and that person has no privilege to assert if they are asked to identify the home’s occupant. Name a lawyer or a corporate trustee and you have a workable arrangement with a recurring cost: Tax bills, insurance notices, code enforcement letters and hurricane assessments all arrive at the trustee’s office, and someone has to be paid to open them and forward them.

Clients should price the arrangement over 10-20 years, not at signing. In my experience the recurring trustee cost, not the drafting fee, is what determines whether a land trust was a good idea.

le, and Transfer Tax

Three practical items that surface late if nobody raises them early.

Lenders. Many residential lenders will not close in the name of a land trust, and moving an already-mortgaged property into one can trigger a due-on-sale clause. The Garn-St Germain Act protects certain transfers into an inter vivos trust where the borrower remains a beneficiary and no rights of occupancy change hands, but whether a particular land trust fits that exception depends on its terms. Read the note before recording the deed, not after.

Title insurance. Underwriters will generally insure a land trust, but they will want to see the trust agreement, or at least a trustee’s affidavit, and they will require that the trustee’s power to convey is stated plainly on the face of the deed.

Documentary stamp tax. A deed conveying unencumbered property into a land trust for no consideration ordinarily attracts only the minimum tax. However, deeds without consideration that convey encumbered property can be taxed on the outstanding mortgage balance, which usually is not a trivial number. Price the transfer tax before recording the deed, or you may be getting a hefty tax bill for the doc stamps on the mortgage balance months later. The issue of documentary stamps based on your unpaid mortgage balance is not limited to land trusts. It is an issue I warn clients about whenever they are moving real estate into any type of trust or “adding” someone to their deed.

Practical Guardrails

  • Start with the objective, not the instrument. If you cannot state in one sentence what the land trust is supposed to prevent, you do not need one.
  • Understand that privacy is bought at purchase, not afterward. Deeding a home you already own into a trust leaves your name one click back in the chain of title.
  • If privacy is the goal, do not name yourself trustee. If cost is a serious concern, do not use a land trust.
  • Make sure the trust agreement gives the resident an express lifetime right to occupy the home. That sentence is what carries the homestead protection.
  • Make sure the deed carries the statutory powers language, names and dates the trust, and sets out the successor trustee mechanism.
  • Never assign the beneficial interest in your residence to an LLC.
  • Budget for the trustee annually, and decide now what happens if that trustee retires, dies, or you simply stop paying them.
  • If you are buying for cash, watch the FinCEN reporting rule. It is vacated and on appeal, and could return on short notice.

Frequently Asked Questions

I already own my home. If I deed it to a land trust, does that make my ownership private?

Deeding a home you already own into a land trust does not make your ownership private. The current owner will show as the trustee, but the chain of title permanently records the transfer from you, and the appraiser’s sales history shows it too. Anyone who looks one deed back finds you giving the home to the land trust while no money changed hands. A land trust conceals ownership effectively only when the property is acquired in the trust’s name from an unrelated seller.

Does a land trust protect my home from creditors?

A land trust does not, by itself, protect a Florida home from creditors. As with all Florida homesteads, protection from forced sale comes from Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution and depends on the interest you hold in the home, not on the label on the title. A land trust that gives the resident a genuine lifetime right of occupancy can preserve that protection. One that does not may put it in doubt.

Will I keep my homestead tax exemption and my Save Our Homes cap?

The homestead tax exemption is expressly preserved by statute for a qualifying individual beneficiary of a Florida land trust. The Save Our Homes cap survives a transfer between legal and equitable title where the same person remains entitled to the exemption, but a real change in beneficial ownership can reset it. Claiming the exemption does not put your name in the public record: the homestead application is confidential as a “return” under Fla. Stat. § 193.074, and the tax assessment roll shows the trustee, not the beneficiary.

Do I record the land trust agreement?

No. The land trust agreement is not recorded. What you record is the deed, which must confer the statutory powers on the trustee, and Florida law expressly relieves anyone dealing with the trustee of any duty to inquire into the unrecorded agreement. Unlike an ordinary revocable trust, a land trust does not use a certification of trust, because the Florida Trust Code does not apply to it.

Can my LLC be the beneficiary?

An LLC can hold the beneficial interest in a land trust, but the property is then not homestead for any purpose. Homestead is available only to natural persons, not corporate entities.

Is a land trust the same thing as a revocable living trust?

No. A land trust and a revocable living trust do different jobs. A revocable living trust is an estate planning instrument that holds many kinds of assets and directs their disposition at death. A land trust holds title to one parcel, concealing the beneficial owner, and does very little else. Some plans use both, with the revocable trust named as beneficiary of the land trust, which keeps the client’s own name out of the documents where a beneficiary must be identified and carries the beneficial interest into the estate plan without probate.

I own property in another state. Can I use a land trust there?

Whether a land trust is available for out-of-state property depends entirely on the state, and the differences are not small. Only a handful of states have land trust statutes, and Florida’s is among the most developed. New York law refuses to vest any estate in a trustee who merely holds title for a beneficiary, so the arrangement generally fails there. Texas has no land trust act and requires a trustee to hold more than nominal title. Louisiana, a civil law state, does not recognize the device at all. Property outside Florida has to be analyzed by an attorney licensed in the state where it sits before anything is signed.

Does a land trust make me anonymous?

A land trust keeps your name off the current ownership record. It does not make you anonymous to a court, a litigant with subpoena power, a taxing authority, or anyone willing to read the chain of title. Nor would it have shielded a non-financed purchase from the federal reporting rule described above, if that rule is reinstated on appeal.

Can I put a property I already own and still owe on into a land trust?

Sometimes, but a mortgaged property raises two questions first. Check the mortgage for a due-on-sale clause, and calculate the documentary stamp tax on the outstanding balance. Those two questions have ended more land trust conversations in my office than any other.

Is a Land Trust Right for Me?

A Florida land trust is a statutorily recognized and genuinely useful instrument under limited circumstances. It is not asset protection, it is not a liability shield, it saves no tax, and the privacy it provides is narrower than advertised, and narrower still if you already own the house. What it costs is not only the drafting fee but also the trustee’s fee, paid every year for as long as the property is held.

If you are weighing one, the useful conversation is not about land trusts. Tell your lawyer what you are trying to prevent and what you are trying to achieve, and also whether this is the best instrument to achieve your goals.

To review how your property is titled and whether a land trust fits your circumstances, contact Verras Law, P.A. to schedule a consultation.