LLC Structuring and Compliance for Real Estate Investors in 2026 with Tzvi Weiser

Steven Weinstock: 0:01 Hi everyone, and welcome to the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock. I've been investing in real estate for more than 20 years and everything from single family homes to multi-family properties to launching my own real estate investment fund. This show is sponsored by the WE Capital Mortgage Fund, where we invest in bridge loans. That have already been vetted. Every borrower, every property, every deal has gone through a full underwriting, including appraisal review, credit checks, verification of past performance, and a complete analysis of the real estate that secures the loan. Our goal is to give investors access to safe, consistent returns backed by strong collateral. There we have a guest who brings a valuable mix of real estate experience, tax knowledge, corporate structure expertise and a deep understanding of the business structure. Tzvi Weiser has more than 20 years of experience. 20 years, okay. Across real estate software, e-commerce, tourism. Am I seeing this correct? And publishing. Okay. I'll ask you about that. He is known for making complex tax and structure topics clear and simple for investors. We'll ask him about that. And we'll ask him about the latest and greatest of what's happening in his field since it seems it's always ever changing. Sometimes with the stroke of a pen by some of the people we elect and maybe sometimes even from the people we don't elect. Thank you for joining me. Tzvi Weiser: 1:37 Thank you for having me. A pleasure to be here today. Steven Weinstock: 1:39 I've seen you on LinkedIn. I feel like I know you. I've seen pictures. I even know which part of the world you live in. But for people meeting you for the first time, let's start like this. How do you describe the work that you do simply? Tzvi Weiser: 1:55 Sure. We start in the beginning. In the beginning there has to be a company, an LLC, that's where we come in. And like every beginning when you're in the embryo, every slight move is very critical or else you come out some way you don't want to. So we try to get people off on the right foot, shape their ecosystem that they'll live in and make sure it stays secure throughout the lifetime of the business that they will transact. Steven Weinstock: 2:22 How'd you get into the business? Tzvi Weiser: 2:23 Oh, I got into the business. I was doing 1031s and I was always really fascinated by the structures because we would get some very complex 1031 deals and I was really interested in how structures work. So I really took a deep dive into that. And next thing I knew I was working for an LLC filings company. Steven Weinstock: 2:42 So you started off in this industry in the 1031 business. Yes, I did. Yeah. What was your role? Were you trying to find investors that needed your service? Were you dealing with the actual paperwork and what's allowed, what's not allowed? Tzvi Weiser: 3:01 So I have a law degree and a legal background, and my role was the back office. We were in charge of processing, creating the documents for the 1031 deal. And we had a team of about seven guys working for me that we were in the heyday, we were doing about 25, 30 deals a day. Steven Weinstock: 3:20 What around what timeframe is this? What year? Tzvi Weiser: 3:23 2020. 2021. Got it. Yeah, definitely a busy time. Steven Weinstock: 3:26 Busy, fun time, especially for everybody who services real estate transactions. It was probably a great time. Yeah, we were busy. Yeah, we should definitely get back there. Things work in cycles and you do it long enough, you get to hit it twice, sometimes three times. When you're dealing with investors, when they ask you questions, are they knowledgeable when it comes to 1031s? Tzvi Weiser: 3:52 Not at all. I think today, probably more so than then. We would do so many deals at the closing table where the investor had no idea what a 1031 was, and maybe the lawyer would say, how about a 1031? And somebody would bring it up and they'd say, what's that? And they'd get the one minute version and they'd say, hey, that sounds good, because we're planning to do another deal very soon, so let's do it. And we would literally process documents in one hour. I remember when I first came to the company, they were always under pressure. They would tell me, we got, this is a rush, we gotta do it in an hour. I'm like, come on. This was prepared for about two weeks or three weeks, or sometimes months beforehand. And when I was in our main office in New Jersey, I was sitting waiting to talk to the CEO and I was looking through some of the pamphlets and I saw the 1031 pamphlet. I see it specifically said we turn around documents in an hour. So I realized that when these people wanted an hour, they meant it because that's what we promised. Steven Weinstock: 4:46 You ever feel that investors just assume 1031 is as simple as I take the money, I can't touch it, I have a certain timeframe? It does start to get a little more complicated when you have to start figuring out what the debt amount was on the original property. What the equity's going to be, are you taking any of it out? There's even something called a cashless 1031 where there's no proceeds, but I guess there's already profits factored in. Are you constantly explaining and teaching when it comes to investors who are like me? I'm talking from experience these questions because I've done quite a few 1031s and there's always something new I'm learning. Whether I can't do it, I have to do it this way, I thought I could do this, but it has to be done this way. Can you talk a little about that? Tzvi Weiser: 5:38 Sure. My role is not client facing, so I didn't do it firsthand, but I know what went on. And there's always, no 1031 is the same. There are no two 1031s that are the same. And like you said, the amount of the investor understanding and knowledge, it's really hand holding, teaching and explaining. And some of the rules aren't intuitive. People get upset like, why, this doesn't make sense. But they're giving you a tax break and this is the way they want it and this is the way it is. This is something that really followed me from 1031 to LLCs because again, it's the same thing. The government gives you a gift called an LLC, and you gotta follow the rules whether you like the rules or not, or you could say, you don't really like the rules? No problem. Just don't have an LLC or just don't do a 1031 and then stand on your own two feet and figure it out. Steven Weinstock: 6:24 Okay. You mentioned LLC three or four times in the last 30 seconds. So I know you transitioned from 1031s into, I guess it's called LLC filings. Explain, tell me how you made the transition and what exactly are you doing today other than strictly just filing an LLC. There's obviously more to it. Give us a little breakdown. Tzvi Weiser: 6:48 So now I'm actually doing the opposite of what I did back then. I was hired to build out, to help them build out the LLC business. We started out as Riverside Filings, which was part of Riverside Abstract. When you have a title company, the clients often need to form LLCs and they started doing it as a service. Once they hit a certain amount of business, they realized, okay, let's have this as a standalone business. And they created Riverside Filings. Riverside Filings basically did all the back office and just like you said, strictly the filings and the compliance. And we were very in our box. We didn't do anything else. Somebody wanted an entity, just call us. We didn't advise. What we've been doing since then, and especially since we moved to NewCo, since we broke off and became an independent company, my role is really to educate the people, to help them understand what all this stuff means, and to help them strategize and make sure that they do things right. Steven Weinstock: 7:43 There's obviously different types of LLCs. There's S-corps. Tell us a little, give me a little history lesson of what we should use, what most people are using, what's the cheapest version? Tzvi Weiser: 7:56 So the first thing I want to say about the LLC is that people should know, really the cost is so minuscule. That should never be a factor in how you have your LLC strategy and what you do. We're talking about a few hundred bucks either way, and nobody ever died. Nobody ever went bankrupt from having too many LLCs, but lots of people went bankrupt from having too few. So that's rule number one. Cost is not an issue. Just to give you an idea, a filing could cost you $150. So we're not talking about major investment over here. We're talking about small change. To some people $150 is a lot of money too, so that doesn't work for them. But that's narrowmindedness, shortsightedness on their part. What were we talking about? Steven Weinstock: 8:38 The difference between the LLC types. Tzvi Weiser: 8:43 Yes. Okay. We deal, because of our background, I would say 95% or 90% with real estate people. So everybody talks about S-corp and everybody's neighbor knows about S-corp, and everybody's friend told them they should have an S-corp. When it comes to real estate, nobody should have an S-corp. That's a big no-no. S-corps are fantastic, but they're the exact wrong tool for real estate investors. For example, S-corp, what S-corp really essentially is made to do is when you have an LLC, you have to pay self-employment tax. It's all considered salary, so you're paying 50% self-employment tax to the full max. When you have an S-corp, you can give yourself a salary and then the rest becomes passive income and therefore you don't pay self-employment taxes. But in LLCs, it's all self-employment taxes, so there's no reason for an S-corp. More than that, when we talk about real estate, we talk about depreciation. If you have an S-corp, you are gonna hurt a lot of the depreciation strategies. You're also not gonna be able to have a capital stack because all shares are the same. So you won't be able to have preferred equity. You won't be able to have uneven allocations of loss and gain. And another big problem is moving properties in and out of an S-corp. That becomes a taxable event. When you have a regular LLC, it's not a taxable event. So what real estate investors have to know is that the S-corp is not for them. They should just drop it until they get into an additional line of business. Steven Weinstock: 10:12 So for real estate professionals, LLC seems to be the most simple, the most recommended. And like you said, it costs a few hundred bucks. You ever see real estate investors for any reason wanting a different structure, and for them, is it because they know what they're talking about or they just don't know what they're talking about? Tzvi Weiser: 10:36 So there's two different things that we can break this down to. If we're talking about LLCs versus C-Corp or something like that, there are times that you would want a C-Corp in real estate because you don't want to pay taxes on the, if you're gonna continue to reinvest and you're building something, you'd rather keep the taxes inside the company and pay 20% annually in order that your money could compound faster. That's not usually the case, and that's only for certain cases. The main question really, and the main strategy that we talk about in real estate for LLCs is how to structure your entities. We're not talking about just getting an LLC and starting to buy real estate. We're talking about how to set up LLCs for what different parts of your business. We're talking about stacking LLCs and having holding structures. We're talking about single purpose entities for every deal that you get into. That's what we mean by entity structuring, generally, when we talk about real estate. Steven Weinstock: 11:27 Saw you post something on LinkedIn, something that affects New York real estate investors. Let's talk about that. Tzvi Weiser: 11:35 So we had the Corporate Transparency Act, which was in the news for the better part of last year, where the government said that every LLC has to disclose all their beneficial owners, which means anybody that owns 25%. And that came under a lot of scrutiny and a lot of challenges. And there were court cases saying it is constitutional, it's not constitutional, both ways, until Trump came in and just pretty much ditched the whole thing for American investors, and they kept it really just for foreign investors. But what the states did was the states were pretty upset because the government was not going to share this information with the state. Now commerce usually belongs under the state domain, not under federal domain, but they were able to somehow pass this law based on national security rather than commerce. The states were upset. This is really a commerce issue and you're not gonna give us the information. So the aggressive states, as always, and you could probably tell me them right off the top of your head, New York, California, Massachusetts, went ahead and they said, okay, we're gonna have our own beneficial ownership interest laws, our own transparency laws. And not only that, New York, for example, said that ours is gonna be part of a public database. It's not even gonna be hidden information. So they passed this law about two years ago. The problem was that it was all built upon the federal law of corporate transparency, and basically they didn't bother writing anything. They just said as says in the Corporate Transparency Act. So when the Corporate Transparency Act was gutted, their law became a worthless shell because it kept referring to things that didn't exist. So in New York, for example, they went ahead and they passed an amendment. The problem is they never brought it to the governor, and the question is why? And it's still sitting there, has not been brought to the governor yet. Now, officially, the law goes into effect on January 1st, 2026, which is why you'll hear people rumbling and talking about what's gonna be, why is our filings company, why are lawyers, accountants, why are they not telling us about the transparency Act? In the meantime, there is no law. They can't go back to the old law because that's worthless. The new law has not been brought to the governor for whatever reason, and even if they come up with a law and they pass it, they now have to build the infrastructure, the computer infrastructure, the database to handle this, the filing of this. It took the federal government about two years to do this. And they do it a lot faster than states do. They were federally funded and they can move fast. I think New York understands that they're probably not gonna build this, especially now that they're standing out there by themselves. They gotta come up with a law. They gotta come up with an infrastructure. I think we're not talking about any transparency on the ground until 2030, in my opinion, but we'll see where this goes. Steven Weinstock: 14:19 We spoke offline. You told me you're born and raised New Yorker. We're both in the same borough, both from Brooklyn. But you're working an American business, but you're living elsewhere. Where? Tzvi Weiser: 14:35 I'm in Jerusalem, Israel. Steven Weinstock: 14:38 Oh, wow. What a shock. Okay. Out of all the countries in the world, that's where you ended up. I wouldn't have guessed. Tzvi Weiser: 14:41 We had a short list of about seven or eight when we decided Israel at the end. Steven Weinstock: 14:48 Yeah. Okay. There's always Mexico, there's always Venezuela. I'm sure there's a minion somewhere over there. So you've been there, you're working East Coast hours, New York City hours, which means you get to have a whole day almost. And then at three or four o'clock, you gotta be busy for what, till 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, maybe sometimes even later. But you have to do a lot of work throughout the day if you have to. But it's pretty peaceful. I was there visiting and the time difference makes vacation a lot more fun because you're not busy till three, four o'clock. Do you travel to the States for work ever? Or is it just personal stuff? Tzvi Weiser: 15:27 I generally don't travel too much today. We're in 2026. We can do a lot of stuff from right here. Steven Weinstock: 15:34 You're living there for a while, so I dunno. Take us back, I dunno, 15 years. Were you still working an American business, American job? Tzvi Weiser: 15:43 So there was a time in my life where I basically flew every Saturday night to the West Coast, and then I spent the rest of the week flying the red eye from West Coast to the East Coast, from the East Coast to London and from London back to New York to Israel. Steven Weinstock: 16:02 Now this is not the 1031 business? Tzvi Weiser: 16:04 No. That was a software company. Steven Weinstock: 16:07 Got it. Okay. Wow. How long did you do that for? Tzvi Weiser: 16:10 About three years. Steven Weinstock: 16:12 Okay. So you racked up the frequent flyer miles. That's pretty nice. All right. Good. All the people at the airport know who you were. So now you're living over there, having a great time, enjoying the first half of the day, working the second half of the day. That's pretty cool. Tzvi Weiser: 16:30 Yeah. I bumped into a lot of people who I assume they're in my backyard and they're thousands of miles away and it's so seamless. It's easy. I'm almost jealous. That's why I'm harping on this point. Steven Weinstock: 16:39 For me it's the opposite. I'll get on a Zoom with a client and I'll look out the window and say, where are you? And I'll find out it was one guy, he was literally around the corner from me. Steven Weinstock: 16:50 Exactly. I've seen you on LinkedIn a lot. You are definitely active. Has LinkedIn helped your business? Tzvi Weiser: 17:00 LinkedIn is my business. What does that mean? I would say that most of my clients come to me via LinkedIn. Steven Weinstock: 17:07 That means what? You're emailing everybody proposals all day long? Tzvi Weiser: 17:14 No, I'm getting inbound. Inbound from LinkedIn. We'll do some outreach every now and then, but it's a lot of inbound. Steven Weinstock: 17:21 Yeah, you're active but not in an annoying way. And you try to add value, right? Tzvi Weiser: 17:26 Yeah. You're adding value. And every time I see your name, I see what you do. That's definitely a way to get leads and like I said, you're very active on LinkedIn. I'm enjoying it. Steven Weinstock: 17:40 What kind of content are you writing or commenting on that connects with your audience that's given you success with LinkedIn? Tzvi Weiser: 17:48 That's a loaded question because I see LinkedIn in a different way than some other people see LinkedIn. LinkedIn to me is a big billboard. It's a poster, so you get to advertise free and the people, generally the people that you interact with and you engage with, it's quid pro quo, so it's not really any value to either side other than you are helping them boost their audience and they're helping you boost yours. So I would say the engagement that you see on my posts is not really what I'm aiming for. It's great and I need that. And you know you need the following because that gives you the credibility that you are the LLC guy. And when your posts are highly engaging, then people say, wow, this guy must know what he's talking about. Whether he actually does or not is a different story. But in general, given that I can write anything on my LinkedIn and probably get the same amount of comments and people don't even read it and don't even know what they're commenting and that's all good by them. So I really try to connect with the people that you don't see commenting on my posts. And that's why I try to make it educational, to teach them things where they'll reach out and say, wow, I saw you write about this and therefore I called you up because it's very relevant to me. So that's, I use my content in one way and then the engagement in a second way. But believe it or not, a lot of the people that actually engage with me every day are all clients. Steven Weinstock: 19:11 What are some mistakes that investors make when it comes to LLCs? Give me like one or two mistakes. Tzvi Weiser: 19:19 The first one is compliance. Just to give you an idea, we have a client from LinkedIn who has a fund. He has about 80 LLCs. He called us up, we did an audit for him. 20 of them were dissolved. They didn't exist. Now he's running, I don't know, a billion dollar fund. He has people's money. He's invested in all these deals, and the LLCs were dissolved. It doesn't get worse than that, right? We put them back together again, and now we manage all his LLCs for him, which is just like typical what happens with what we do. We give a free audit and it's free until we find all the problems and then they ask us to fix it up and then they become a client. So it's a pretty straight path from free audit to loyal client. Steven Weinstock: 20:03 For someone who's overwhelmed with some of the compliance issues, what's the simplest starting point? Tzvi Weiser: 20:12 There's no easy answer because the answer is that this is really critical, but it's really tedious and really easy to mess up, and most people give it to their administrative assistant who doesn't appreciate the importance of it, and tries their best to keep up, but doesn't always keep up. Like I said, most people that know us and have multiple LLCs just say they give it to us. We have a portal, we manage it for them. They get, we can do it seamlessly without them even knowing. We could do it where we just tell them everything that happens and then they could decide what they wanna do. If they want us to file, if they wanna file and just keep them in the loop. And people get all kinds of spam emails and we get emails from clients on a daily basis saying, I got this. Is this real? Didn't I just pay you last week? And we tell them yes, it's spam, ignore it. And people get used to that. But the people that don't understand that, they just throw up their arms and they just don't even bother with compliance anymore because it just seems to be, they're overwhelmed like you said. Steven Weinstock: 21:12 Okay. So I'm gonna give a different answer. The simplest starting point is probably just to reach out to you and have you deal with it. And tell everybody here how they could reach out to you. Give us your LinkedIn profile, your phone number, email, whatever you wanna share. I'll also put it in the notes. If you're active on TikTok or MySpace, or if you still have a Hotmail email address, whatever you want to share with us. Go for it. Tzvi Weiser: 21:39 Okay. The easiest place to reach out to me is on LinkedIn. And that would be Tzvi, T-Z-V-I-L-L-C, Weiser, W-E-I-S-E-R. You could reach me by email at T-W-E-I-S-E-R at NewCo Filings, N-U-C-O-F-I-L-I-N-G-S dot com. And you can call me by phone. That would be 516-690-6106. Steven Weinstock: 22:03 Now, LLC is not your legal middle name, correct? Tzvi Weiser: 22:07 Actually Tzvi is not my legal name either. Steven Weinstock: 22:10 Okay. We got a nickname. That's fine. Tzvi Weiser: 22:14 My mother preferred a different name to the one that my grandfather was named. So my legal name is actually Daniel. Steven Weinstock: 22:22 Yeah, just in case you're elected president, you gotta have a secular English name. Exactly. I've been there. I'm living practice of that. Tzvi, it was great to have you on the episode. Thank you. Tzvi Weiser: 22:34 Thanks for having me. Steven Weinstock: 22:34 Thank you for zooming all the way in from Jerusalem, Israel. I love it. I love going there. I was there last week from the time of this recording. I did not go to Chevron, but I was still in Israel for that week, which is very nice. Tzvi Weiser: 22:47 I got two more beds over here. One on the left, one on the right. If you ever decide you wanna come here, I can reserve one for you. Steven Weinstock: 22:53 No, I actually went to Rabbi Eli Stefansky to do his Daf when I was there. That's why I went to Ramat Beit Shemesh over there. And that's always a highlight of my trip to Israel as someone who does the Daf. Daf Yomi, learning one page of Babylonian Talmud every day. For anybody out there who doesn't know what I'm talking about, it's a worldwide program. We do one page a day, seven and a half year cycle, and really keeps me structured. I really love it. And that's some of those wonderful colorful books that he has behind him. You would think since he has a legal degree that those are law books. But no, they're law books of a different kind. It was great to have you on. Thank you very much. Tzvi Weiser: 23:25 Thank you. Steven Weinstock: 23:26 Thank you everyone for listening to the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock. We will see you on the next episode.