Beneficial owner (UBO)
The natural person who ultimately owns or controls an asset held through one or more legal entities.
“Who really owns this building” is the question the whole terminal exists to answer, and the reason it is hard is structural, not technical: the answer is deliberately not filed. Registry-based vendors cannot reach it at all in the US. Behavioral inference can (deeds, addresses, agents, co-borrowers, timing), but only honestly if every hop shows its evidence and its confidence, and stops where the evidence stops.
What the record actually contains
- What is filed
- Entity existence, registered agents and process addresses with Secretaries of State. Deeds and mortgages with counties. The person connecting them is filed nowhere.
- What must be inferred
- The control chain: entity to entity to person, from behavior that surfaces in filings.
- What honest inference carries
- Evidence and a confidence score per hop, because inference presented as fact is the industry’s core dishonesty.
Jurisdiction notes
The decisive fact: in the United States there is no public register of beneficial owners. FinCEN’s 2025 interim rule exempted domestic companies from Corporate Transparency Act reporting, and New York’s LLC Transparency Act routes disclosures to a confidential database. What other countries publish in a registry, the US leaves to inference.
The ownership chain resolves deed-holding companies to controllers where behavioral evidence supports it, across New York and Florida today, hops scored and cited, dead ends stated as dead ends. Strictly counted, hops ≥ 1 only.
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