The Expert Podcast

So how can you find the assets for a company or for a corporation or even any kind of business enterprise? First of all, check out our website activeintel.com - it'll give you good information about doing asset searches where the records come from. Also put some notes in the comments below about why you might need an asset search for a corporation.
Corporations hold assets just like individuals do. They can own real estate, you can have bank accounts, you can have vehicles, you can have equipment. Some businesses also have inventory or materials that they use to manufacture products - those are all assets. Businesses also have other types of assets which are intangible or intellectual property like patents, trademarks, websites, customer lists, what they call goodwill or bluesky for that business. You want to know about all those.
If you're looking to find assets for companies for a reason, it's because you either have a judgment against them, you want to sue them, you're getting into litigation, or you have some type of recovery you want to make and you want to find out where your money's coming from. So running an asset search on that business is important.
So how do you find all this? Well, each type of asset has a different place to look. For example, real estate - you can look in the county recorder's office, not the tax assessor, don't make that mistake, but in the county recorder it'll show all real estate owned by that corporation. Vehicles can be searched with the licensing division department of motor vehicles. It'll show what vehicles are owned by that corporation and you have to file a certain release form with the DMV to have that information given to you.
One good thing about commercial records as opposed to individual records - many states require that a corporation also lists their insurance on their vehicle record because they want to make sure that companies have proper liability insurance. So you can get the name of the insurance company and the insurance agent which may come in handy later.
What about bank accounts? Well, you can do a bank account search for a corporation the same way you do it for a private party for a civilian consumer. Now instead of having their social security number, you will need the tax ID number, the EIN number for that business. You may have to search for that first before you run the bank account search. You also need to have the exact corporate name as it's filed in the records. Sometimes companies go by a shortened version of their name or like a trade name or product name. You want to get the actual legal entity name from the secretary of state or whoever hands out corporations in your jurisdiction. That in the tax ID number and you can run a bank account search.
What about inventory materials? How do you search for those items? Well, many times those items are scheduled - they're listed on a balance sheet. Now that balance sheet, if you have an adversary relationship with the company, they're not just going to hand it to you. However, there are three or four third parties who also have that balance sheet or the inventory list. It may be the insurance agent that we talked about earlier. It may be a vendor or supplier that has their inventory as listed sold to that client. It may be an accountant. It may also be a lender.
Many lenders require that a company post their assets as collateral for loans. If this loan is done as a UCC filing - Universal Commercial Code filed on a UCC-1 - many times those are posted in public records and it'll list the inventory or what the pledged assets are. Sometimes it'll even give you other locations that you didn't know about. So find those UCC filings to look for inventory.
The next type of asset is an intangible asset or intellectual property, and certainly patents, trademarks fall under that category. But you can search for USPTO - the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - federal government has an online version of that. Some companies have patents and trademarks, but beyond that, the most valuable things that are, I should say most common, are normal everyday things like the website for that company, the trade name for that company. They may have a DBA doing business as name filed. Even their phone number is an asset.
If they have a phone number they've used for 10 years and everybody knows that number to call in to make orders, they probably don't want to lose that phone number. So if you sue them - and make sure you get good legal advice from an attorney before you do any of these steps, and even asset searches you want to get legal advice from an attorney - the phone number might not be that valuable to you, but it's incredibly valuable to the debtor. So if it's at risk of being seized, even though you can't really use it to make a lot of money, the debtor probably doesn't want to lose it.
We had cases where a client had a claim against a debtor, ran an asset search, there wasn't a whole lot of assets, but they did have a phone number and a website they got a lot of traffic, a lot of phone calls. And the debtor stood their ground and said "I'm not paying you, too bad, you're out the money." Well, our client the creditor filed a motion with the court to have those two things seized and transferred to them. And what they did was they set up a lead collecting line for that business and they collected leads and sold the leads to a competitor. Well, after about two weeks of that, the debtor found a way to come up with the money and buy them back because the last thing you want is all your clients going to a competitor.
So that's a reason why intellectual property is a good thing to look at even if you don't think it's worth a whole lot of money. Obviously as a creditor, you just want to find a big fat bank account where you can just scoop out cash - that's great, maybe you'll find that in a bank account search. But these other searches many times find information that's just as valuable, sometimes more valuable.
The other thing that can happen is if you seize a website, you also have access to emails. And once you have those emails, you can go back through the history and maybe you'll find the balance sheet, maybe you'll find prior financial statements that were sent or received, attached files, PDF files. So seizing the email sometimes will get you the information in another way if you can't - you might have to go to court to get a court order.
What other types of assets? Well, there's also an asset called blue sky, meaning that some companies have a company valuation bigger than the book value. So if you take up all their tangible assets and inventory and real estate and cash in the bank, subtract their debts, and let's say it leaves a million dollars, there's many companies that have an imputed value higher than that because of sales they could be capitalized or amortized. And that book value or that blue sky value, you may not be able to cash it out, but the debtor doesn't want to lose it either.
So you can look at in that industry what is the standard rate of multiplier of revenue to come up with a company value, because that's cash flow, it's like an annuity. If you have questions about running an asset search on a corporation, check out our website or leave your comments below and we'd be glad to be of assistance.