
If youβre the oligarch buyer of a mega-apartment in New York, thereβs a good chance β unless youβre a Trump or a Rybolovlev β that you donβt want to broadcast your purchase to the world. What you do, then, is set up a limited-liability corporation, or LLC, to anonymize the purchase. The deed is held by the company, you or your partying daughter lives there, and the developer gets its multimillion-dollar sale. Until January 1, when β as Gothamist notes today β Congress, over a presidential veto, passed a law requiring that the Treasury department keep track of LLC ownersβ names.
Obviously, this has big ramifications for developers and extreme-high-end buyers. (Itβs a little like the moment, a decade or so back, when co-op shareholders were finally required to show themselves in public property-transfer records.) As my colleague Andrew Rice wrote several years ago, an apartment on 57th Street has become the new Swiss bank account, a place where Russian or Chinese billionaires can stash cash in a nation with a relatively stable economy and (somewhat) less government intrusion. Unfortunately, the ownersβ names wonβt be a matter of public record β Treasuryβs database will not be accessible to all β so donβt get your hopes up if you plan to snoop through the records of apartment purchases in years to come.