It’s often difficult to follow the relationships between larger property management companies or development groups, let alone try to untangle the web of landlords in a community. Properties may operate under different LLC names but be connected to the same parent company, for instance, or a single management company might represent the interests of several distinct companies.

It’s often difficult to follow the relationships between larger property management companies or development groups, let alone try to untangle the web of landlords in a community. Properties may operate under different LLC names but be connected to the same parent company, for instance, or a single management company might represent the interests of several distinct companies.

Knowing who makes decisions at a property is vital information for tenants and communities. For one, harmful actions such as frequent eviction filings or housing code violations at two seemingly unconnected properties may in fact stem from the bad actions of a single decision maker. And knowing who owns a property is necessary to hold a landlord to account, and maintain effective communication between tenants and landlords.

In our quarterly reports, we report the most frequent evictors in Dane County to give a sense of the properties and communities where tenants are most at risk of eviction. For this report, we collected public property and business records and combined it with our internal data on evictions to give better insight into the landlords and property owners filing for eviction in Dane County.

Our data combines eviction records from the state’s Consolidated Court Automation Programs (CCAP), property data from Access Dane and business records from the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI).

Every eviction filing on CCAP has a plaintiff name and address attached to it. TRC staff manually enter every filing into an internal system in order to provide rental assistance and other services, and we standardize plaintiff names to avoid data inconsistencies, such as misspellings or any other slight differences in naming. This tells us the properties where evictions are most commonly filed.

To draw connections between properties, we take plaintiff addresses listed on CCAP and pull property records from Access Dane, which maintains property information for most properties we analyzed. Access Dane lists the property’s owner name, as well as its billing address. Future reports will analyze these billing addresses.

Finally, we take the owner’s name listed on CCAP and collect business information from the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Financial Institutions, namely where the registered agent and principal offices are located.

Other Takeaways:

• 86% of evictions since the start of 2023 were filed by landlords identified as LLCs/Corporations. The remaining evictions were filed by smaller, individual landlords (8%) or by separate property management companies (7%).
• While most evictions were filed by landlords based in Wisconsin, roughly 28% of evictions were filed by landlords with an owner's address outside of the state. Of landlords with owner's addresses in Wisconsin, 51% were based in Madison, 25% outside of Madison but in Dane County, and 23% outside of Dane County.
• The top evictor since 2023 is Prima Management, LLC, with 122 evictions across 30 unique addresses.
• When taking into consideration properties with the same owner or property manager, the top evictor since 2023 is HQ Tradewinds LLC. In all, 13 landlords listed this owner on public records, and these landlords filed 164 evictions across 27 unique addresses.
• A quarter of evictions were filed by LLCs and property management companies that did not have an owner name listed on the public records we analyzed.

Our analysis has limitations. The records we relied on do not guarantee a connection (or lack thereof) between properties as landlords routinely list P.O. boxes and suites in commercial buildings as owner’s addresses. We are unable to draw connections between ownership at these properties using the methods described above. Also, two properties that share the same owner’s address may not necessarily be owned by the same entity or person; however, we believe the same owner’s address ensures some level of connection between properties.

Without a landlord registry or some other method of discerning ownership structures, it will prove difficult to provide clarity on the landlords providing housing in Wisconsin. However, examining these trends continues to grow in importance as more and more properties continue to change ownership on a more frequent basis. In many cases, these ownership changes can result in wide-ranging impacts for tenants and the community as a whole.