The first decision in a South Florida sales gallery has nothing to do with the view. It is whose name goes on the deed, because Florida will publish the answer. Every conveyance is recorded in the official records of the county where the property sits, and every county property appraiser in the state runs a search that returns a parcel from an owner’s name. Eric McNeil, who connects recognised athletes and entertainers with select developments along the Miami to Palm Beach corridor, understands that questions around privacy and ownership structure can matter just as much as floor plans for high-profile buyers.
Described from outside, the work looks like introductions. Underneath it is closer to a brief. A person who is stopped in airports needs a residence that answers a set of requirements no rendering addresses, and most of those requirements are settled long before handover. Several of them are settled before the contract is signed.
What the public record gives away
Price is the easiest thing to recover. Florida charges documentary stamp tax on the consideration paid for real property at 70 cents per $100 in every county except Miami-Dade, where the rate is 60 cents per $100 on a single family residence with a surtax of 45 cents per $100 on other property. The tax is collected when the deed is recorded. Anyone who can read the stamps can run the arithmetic backwards and arrive at what was paid, whether or not the instrument states a figure.
Names are the harder problem, and Florida is deliberate about them. The general public records exemption at section 119.071(4)(d) does shield home addresses, but it shields them for sworn law enforcement and correctional officers, firefighters, paramedics, judges, state attorneys, public defenders, guardians ad litem, child protective investigators and a long list of other public roles. A private citizen with a recognisable face appears nowhere on that list. Fame confers no statutory privacy in Florida. Anyone who wants privacy has to build it, and what they build carries a cost.
Two structures, and the tax each one carries
The two structures in common use answer different halves of the question. A Florida limited liability company files articles of organisation and an annual report that name at least one manager or managing member together with an address, though the state does not require members to be listed, which is why an out of state entity is so often installed as the manager. A land trust under section 689.071 goes further. The recorded deed vests legal and equitable title in the trustee, the trust agreement itself is never recorded, and a party dealing with the trustee is not required to inquire into its terms.
Both come with a bill attached. Florida’s homestead exemption is constitutional and it runs to natural persons, so a residence held in a limited liability company does not qualify, and losing homestead also loses the assessment cap that travels with it: three percent a year, or the change in the consumer price index if that is lower. Non-homestead residential property is capped at ten percent a year under section 193.1554, a cap that does not reach school district levies and that resets when the property changes hands. A carefully drafted revocable trust giving the settlor the right to occupy for life can preserve homestead. A limited liability company cannot. Across a long hold on an expensive parcel the gap between those two caps compounds into a real number. For high-profile buyers, those tradeoffs make it important to work with qualified legal and tax advisers on ownership structure well before closing rather than addressing the implications after the purchase.
The federal layer moves faster than the building does
The rules sitting above a Florida buyer have been unsettled for two years. FinCEN issued a final rule in 2024 that would have required a report on non-financed residential transfers to a legal entity or a trust, identifying the beneficial owners behind the transferee, with the filing duty falling on whichever real estate professional sat highest in a cascade of closing functions. Applicability was postponed from December 2025 to 1 March 2026. In March 2026 a federal district court in the Eastern District of Texas vacated the rule nationwide, and FinCEN’s published guidance states that reporting persons are not currently required to file while it appeals, a sequence widely covered in law firm reporting at the time.
The detail worth keeping is that those reports were never going to be public. They were to sit in a FinCEN database exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, which is a different animal from a county record any member of the public can search from a phone. Confusing the two costs buyers money, because a structure chosen to satisfy a federal filing rule is not the same structure as one chosen to keep a name out of a searchable state database. A purchase that takes two years to deliver will close under rules that were not final when it was signed, whichever way the appeal goes.
What the sales gallery has to be able to do
Confidentiality inside a gallery is a matter of practice rather than law. For high-profile buyers, confidentiality inside a sales gallery can depend heavily on the developer’s practices. Depending on the project and the buyer’s needs, that may include private appointments, carefully managed communications, limits on photography and coordination with a buyer’s representatives. None of it is exotic, and all of it is the difference between a sales operation that has done this before and one that has not.
The statutory timetable helps. A purchase contract with a developer stays voidable by the buyer until 15 days after the buyer signs it and receives the required condominium documents, which hands counsel a fixed window to examine the entity, the title structure and the disclosures rather than conducting that work in an afternoon. Buyers who use the window end up with better structures. Buyers who treat the reservation as the decision tend to fix the entity afterwards, which means a second conveyance and a second set of stamps.
What a security detail asks a building for
The requirements that actually decide whether a building works are duller than anything in the brochure. Can a resident move from a vehicle to a private elevator without crossing a public lobby, and is that elevator dedicated or shared? How many residences open onto the same lift lobby, and how does the building handle a floor where two of them do? Is there a service route a delivery, a physiotherapist or a driver can use without arriving through the front door? Does the garage have controlled entry with a record of it, and can the porte cochere be closed to the street?
Some of it is structural rather than procedural. Recovery equipment is heavy and it is wet. A plunge tub full of water and a lifting platform impose floor loading and drainage requirements that no interior designer allows for by default, and a residence being fitted out after handover is a far worse place to discover that than a residence still on the drawing board. Terraces raise a separate problem. A building cannot stop an aircraft flying over it, so privacy on an upper floor is a question of screening, planting and orientation against the towers already approved nearby, resolved at design stage or not resolved at all.
The narrow version of the job
The obvious way to work this market would be volume. Build a list of names, send every launch to all of them, let the numbers do the rest. McNeil’s approach runs the other way, because much of the value sits in understanding which developments are equipped to meet the specific privacy, security and lifestyle needs of the person considering them. That makes selectivity, and familiarity with both the buyer and the development, more important than simply sending every new launch to every name in the network.
This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and it is not investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Real estate and private market investments carry risk, including loss of principal, and nothing described here is a prediction of future results. Readers should consult their own licensed advisers before making any financial decision.