Most buyers pick a structure to solve one problem and discover the other two later. The three problems are rarely the same problem.
This page frames the decision. The structure itself is for your counsel. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
Estate exposure. A non-resident owner of US real property faces US estate tax on that asset above a threshold that is very low, and it is not the same threshold a US citizen gets. This is the problem most foreign buyers do not know they have.
Privacy. Florida property records are public and searchable. Your name on a deed is a published fact.
Liability and reporting. Separating the asset from you personally, against the ongoing filing burden that separation creates.
A structure that solves one of these often does nothing for the other two, and may make one of them worse. That is the part that gets sold as a single answer.
Personal name. Simplest, cheapest, no annual filings beyond the ordinary. Full estate exposure if you are non-resident, no privacy, and the asset sits directly in your name for every purpose.
A Florida LLC. Gives you liability separation and a layer of privacy in the property record. On its own it does not solve non-resident estate exposure, because a single-member LLC is commonly disregarded for that purpose. This is the single most common misunderstanding we encounter.
A trust. Can address estate exposure and succession properly, which the LLC alone does not. It costs more to establish, more to maintain, and it needs to be the right kind of trust drafted by someone who does this for a living.
Layered structures exist, a foreign holding company over a US entity being the classic. They can work well. They also carry real annual cost and reporting, and they are worth it above a certain value and wasteful below it.
Filing burden. Entities carry annual obligations. Missing them is inexpensive to fix early and expensive to fix late.
Financing. Some lenders price entity-held property differently or decline it. If you may refinance, ask before you form, not after.
Exit friction. Selling an entity-held property, or selling the entity itself, is a different transaction with different tax treatment. Decide at purchase how you expect to exit.
Undoing it. Transferring a property into or out of a structure after closing can trigger documentary stamp tax and other costs. The cheap moment to decide is before you sign.
Preconstruction contracts commonly give you a short rescission window, often fifteen days. That is enough time to read a contract. It is not enough time to design an ownership structure, take tax advice in two countries and form an entity.
So the sequence has to run the other way. Decide the structure before you reserve, not after, or accept that you are signing personally and will pay to change it later.
We are not lawyers or tax advisers and we do not set these up. What we will do is tell you which of the three problems you actually have, so the conversation you pay for starts in the right place.
Fifteen days is enough to read a contract and not enough to design a structure. Ask the desk at Miami Dossier early and we will tell you which questions are yours.
We hold no inventory of our own and we are not the developer. Ask the desk at Miami Dossier and we will tell you what applies to your situation, what does not, and where we would not proceed. Here that starts with which of the three problems is actually yours. Where the question is legal, tax or immigration, we will introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.