How to find the owner of a commercial property in Texas, even behind an LLC (2026)

Texas publishes what New York hides. Three free public records name a person behind a commercial property held in an LLC: the county appraisal district's owner of record with the mailing address the tax bill goes to, the Texas Comptroller's franchise-tax search, which lists the officers and managers every LLC must report each year, and the signature page of the deed of trust recorded with the county clerk. One search costs $1; the rest cost nothing.

A Dallas broker working maturities hits the same wall as a New York one: the loan is real, the deed of trust is real, and the grantor is "LBJ FREEWAY OWNER LLC". The difference is what happens next. In New York, the state will not tell you who is behind an LLC, and the person has to be assembled from four city records. In Texas the state tells you, every year, in a public filing the entity signs itself. The order below runs from the record that names the most people to the one that names the person who decides.

1. The appraisal district: the owner of record and where the bill goes

Every parcel in Texas sits on a county appraisal roll, and every appraisal district publishes it: Dallas CAD, Tarrant Appraisal District, Collin CAD and Denton CAD for Dallas–Fort Worth, Harris Central Appraisal District for Houston, Travis CAD for Austin, Bexar Appraisal District for San Antonio. Search by address or by owner name, no account, no fee. The account shows the owner of record as the district carries it and the mailing address for the tax bill.

For a building held in a person's name that is the whole answer, and the mailing address is the best one you will get: where the owner wants the county to reach them. For an LLC the name is only the entity, but the mailing address still says something. A single-asset LLC rarely has an office of its own, so the bill goes to the principal's firm, their accountant or their home. An address that is a house is a skip-trace key (section 5). An address that is a suite in an office tower is the firm, and the firm is what the next two records put a name to.

Two cautions. The roll names the owner as of January 1 and catches up with deeds over the following months, so a building that traded this spring may still show last year's owner; the county clerk's deed index is current. And Tax Code §25.025 lets certain people — judges, peace officers, prosecutors and others on a statutory list — have their home address withheld from the roll, so a blank mailing address is a legal shield, not a missing field.

The same roll holds the second clue to who runs a building: the business personal property accounts at the address. Every business renders its equipment to the district under its own name, so the tenants and the operator of a property are listed beside it. For a warehouse or a strip center that is how we estimate a property type where the district publishes none; for a broker it is a list of who to call at the building.

2. The Comptroller: the officers an LLC must report

This is the record New York does not have. Every corporation, limited liability company, limited partnership, professional association and financial institution that is organized in Texas or does business there must file a Public Information Report, Form 05-102, with its annual franchise-tax report, due May 15. The form asks for the name, title and mailing address of each officer, director, member or manager, it must be signed by one of them, and Tax Code §171.203 says in terms that the information "will be available for public inspection". The Comptroller publishes the result: search the entity in the Taxable Entity Search and the account page lists the officers and directors from the most recent report the Secretary of State has processed, with their titles and addresses, free, without an account.

Read it with three things in mind.

• The names are a year old at most and a filing cycle behind. The report is due in May and reaches the search once the Secretary of State has processed it, so a change of management in the autumn shows the following summer. For a stable ownership entity that is fine; for a building that just traded, check the deed first.
• A manager can be another entity. Institutional borrowers register a management LLC as the manager of the property LLC, and the report names the manager, not its people. Search the manager's own name in the same tool; the chain usually ends at a natural person within two hops, because somebody has to sign.
• The confidential report is the other one. Partnerships, trusts and other entities that are not corporations, LLCs or limited partnerships file an Ownership Information Report instead, and the Comptroller does not publish it. A limited partner in a fund is on neither list. What Texas makes public is who runs an entity, not who owns its units.

One more property of the Comptroller's list that matters for matching: an entity name is unique within Texas, because the Secretary of State refuses a duplicate, so the "1101 HOLDINGS LLC" the Comptroller shows is the one borrowing in Dallas, Houston, Austin or San Antonio — and not the 1101 Holdings LLC that borrows in Brooklyn, which is chartered in New York. Match an entity to a loan within the state and never across one.

Texas asks one further question on the franchise-tax account that the record uses later: the entity's line of business. A borrower that registered as a home builder or a developer carries that type on every loan it signs, which is how a broker can find the construction loans in a county without reading each deed of trust.

3. The Secretary of State: the people who formed it

The Comptroller's list is the current officers; the Secretary of State holds the entity's birth. The certificate of formation (Form 205 for an LLC) names the initial governing persons — the managers, or the members of a member-managed LLC — with addresses, plus the registered agent and the organizer. SOSDirect charges $1 per search, waived when you order a copy, and the filed image costs a few dollars more. For an entity formed to buy one building, the organizer is often the sponsor's lawyer and the governing person is the sponsor; for an older entity the formation names people who may have left, which is what the Comptroller's annual report corrects.

The same search returns assumed-name certificates, which tie a trade name ("Oak Lawn Apartments") to the entity behind it, and the registered agent, who is almost always a service company and almost never worth calling.

4. The deed of trust: who signed for the borrower

A Texas commercial loan is secured by a deed of trust recorded with the county clerk, and like every recorded instrument it ends with a signature block and a notary's acknowledgment: "LBJ FREEWAY OWNER LLC, by: ___, its Manager", and under it the notary's statement of who appeared and in what capacity. That person committed the entity to the debt. It is the closest thing the public record has to a decision-maker, and it is in the borrower's own filing, dated the day of the loan.

The page is not indexed. The clerk's search indexes the parties, the instrument number and the recording date, so you open the image and page to the end of the body, before the exhibits. Texas instruments are shorter than New York consolidations, so the block is usually within the last third. Page one, meanwhile, carries two things worth copying: the principal, which the Texas index does not publish and we read from every deed of trust, and the grantor's notice address, which is where the lender agreed to send default notices — a better address for the borrower than the LLC's registered agent, and often the same suite the Comptroller's officers list. How to read the rest of the instrument — the maturity clause, the rate, the release — is its own guide.

5. Rank the names, then find a phone

Four records can produce four different people for one building, and the word "owner" gets attached to all of them. Rank by how close each stands to a refinance decision:

1. The signer of the deed of trust — committed the entity to this loan.
2. The officers and managers on the Public Information Report — the entity's own filing of who runs it. A manager that is another entity is one hop from its people.
3. The owner of record when it is a person — the small-landlord case, with the best mailing address of all.
4. The governing persons on the certificate of formation — right at formation, possibly stale.
5. The operator from the business accounts at the address — who answers the phone at the building, and not who decides on its debt.

A name alone reaches nobody, and the two routes to a number need different keys. A skip trace is keyed on a home address and returns the household's mobiles, landlines and personal mailboxes with Do-Not-Call and litigator flags; keyed on an office, it returns the office's other tenants. A business-contact lookup is keyed on a person at a firm, and the public record almost never names the firm — the Comptroller lists the officer at the property LLC, which no database treats as anyone's employer. The step the records cannot do is establishing the operating company the officer actually runs, from the name, the title and the office address, and only then asking for a work email. In our September 2026 test on 33 owners and officers, the home route returned a mobile for 3 of 3 owners registered at a residence and for none registered at an office, and the firm route returned a mobile for 5 of 10 office-registered principals. The ratios are from New York; the mechanics are the same in Texas, with the one difference that the officer's title and address come from the state rather than assembled from the city.

When the record names nobody

The limits of the method first. Some Texas loans reach the public domain without a borrower. A mortgage sold to Freddie Mac or packaged into a CMBS trust is disclosed to investors property by property, with the borrower line blank or "N/A", because the borrower is a single-purpose entity formed for the building; and the largest institutional multifamily complexes are exactly the ones held this way. A 440-unit complex in southwest Fort Worth is a fair example: three agency disclosure rows, no appraisal-district owner beyond the entity, and a borrower of "N/A". The owner was two minutes away in the trade press — the July 2019 sale was reported by two outlets, and the leasing site named the operator — but that is evidence of a sale on a date, not a record of title, and the operator on the leasing page is who runs the building, not who signs for its debt. Keep the two labelled separately.

The count is worth knowing before you buy a contact list for Texas. On September 24, 2026, of the 140,374 Dallas–Fort Worth properties with an active loan in our index, the public record named at least one person for at least 57% by the routes above, before the signature pages were read; the rest skew to institutional multifamily and to entities whose managers are entities. That is the population where the signature page and the trade press earn their keep.

How Circlemark does it

Every Texas loan on Circlemark carries the people the public record ties to it — the Comptroller's officers and managers, the appraisal district's owner of record, and the deed of trust's signer where we have read it — and shows, before any click, who is there by role and source: "Manager · Comptroller PIR", "signed the recorded deed of trust". One credit unlocks the names, titles and addresses for that property, with each source next to the name, and looks for a work email, the decision-maker's first. Where the Comptroller names a manager that is another entity, the chain is followed; where the record names nobody, the owning or operating firm is identified from a page that names both the building and the firm, linked and dated, and shown as being at the owner firm rather than on the record. A direct phone is an add-on per person, charged only when a number is found and labelled mobile, home line or via the firm; a Do-Not-Call number is shown greyed and unlinked. Nothing charged when the record names nobody. Where the people panel sits on the record page, and how to reach a record from a market-wide search, is in the search tutorial.

The owner is on every loan in the Dallas County, Tarrant County, Bexar County and Travis County lists, and the free lookup shows the loans on any one address first.