When coming up with a name for your rental business, I am assuming, even though you do not need a business license, you would still need to make sure that nobody else is using this name?

How do you make sure that the name you use for your rental business is not already being used by anyone?

I have noticed that some people use their last name, as in "Anyone Properties" used by Ralph Anyone. Is this okay?

Thank you for your time.

In Texas, I use my state's taxable entry search when I'm coming up with names for my single-member LLC. Texas, when registering business names, wants to avoid confusion, but they also don't go overboard in avoiding confusion.

Once upon a time, for example, I wanted to use a particular Latin word. X, LLC. No one else was registered for that single word--- it was all X Healthcare, or X Transport, or X Biotechnologies, or whatever. As it turned out, there was a major medical biller that had a somewhat-similar name. So to avoid confusion, I wasn't allowed to register my first choice. I had to modify it enough to make the State of Texas happy that no one was going to confuse a small-town landlady with a major medical biller.

Recently, I opened a different entity to own a single commercial building. I let my husband name that one. The name he ended up picking was also coincidentally the name of a defunct foreign bank from decades past. I was afraid Texas was going to say, "No, we don't want you to be confused with a defunct foreign bank from decades past", but that one sailed through without a hitch.

In a nearby city, I went to their tax sales a few times, when I was thinking about expanding. Everything worth having was being snapped up by one particular guy. He probably picked up five out of seven properties that day, without blinking or flinching. I caught his name, and went home all ready to use the full powers of my librarian-fu to find out about his biz and see what his situation was. As it turns out, he'd named his company after himself, and had 200+ addresses all in the same biz bucket. (He was in the RTO biz.) It was really weird that he had that amount of his business all in full view, no detective work necessary. Whether from a privacy perspective or a liability perspective-- it didn't seem ideal.

6man,

Short, easy to spell, does not accidentally sound like body parts. (I used to work for American School Supply AS_. They changed the name!)

Start your search on GoDaddy. Use .com because that’s what people expect.

Not your real name and make it sound like housing.

Zillow will now show every property in your name when someone taps that button.

A city inspector made a list of the props I owned in my name and started inspecting each one. He did not know of the props not titled in my name.

You can name each property in a trust using the address as the name. In Indiana trusts are super easy and private. They don’t have to be under your business name.

Your BUSINESS is a management company, not the props.

Be more concerned about naming your trust and less about your business.

One piece of advice I heard from a land trust guru (which can hold true for an LLC as well): make it sound like you're big. "Global Capital Partners" or "Pacific Holdings". A contingency lawyer might be less likely to tackly a large corporate entity and its lawyers than "Phoebe Smink LLC."

One piece of advice I heard from a land trust guru (which can hold true for an LLC as well): make it sound like you're big. "Global Capital Partners" or "Pacific Holdings". A contingency lawyer might be less likely to tackly a large corporate entity and its lawyers than "Phoebe Smink LLC."

6x6 good for you, taking your business to the next level of professionalism!

Here are some idea starters for the name of your LLC.

Name of Your Town Property Management Group, LLC

Name of Your Town Property Management Associates, LLC

Name of Your Town Hills Property Management Associates, LLC

Name of Your Town Summit Property Management Associates, LLC

Name of a tree/flower/bird that is very abundant in your area

Oak Property Management Group, LLC

Raven Property Management Associates, LLC

Name of random thing that sounds good

Hill Top Property Management Group, LLC

Whitestone Property Management Associates, LLC

Summit Property Management Group, LLC

Before you settle on a name, make sure that name is available as a dot com so you can someday build a website.

Go Daddy can search for you and you can buy the domain name SummitPropertyManagementGroup.com or whatever for a very nominal sum and then when you are ready, you will have your website.

When you have a website, you can also have e-mail addresses at your website , info@SummitPropertyManagementGroup.com, that comes across much more professional than SummitPropertyManagementGroup@yahoo.com. We are also working on this.

As others have mentioned, best practice is your properties should not be titled in your personal name or the name of your property management LLC. We are working on this right now as we purchased properties before we knew what best practices were.

To your continued success!