Holdings, Ventures and a Lot of Street Addresses: The 1,674 Shells and Property LLCs in October 2026's Pulse

On Oct. 12, 2026, a company called Phantom Capital 41 LLC filed with the New York Department of State, listing Nassau County. Two days later, Phantom Capital 42 LLC filed in the same county.

The names don't say what either one does. The state records don't either, so from the outside there's no sign of a product, a crew or a storefront to insure.

Names like these belong to a much bigger crowd. In our October 2026 New Business Pulse, 1,674 of 19,733 new businesses (8.5%) were tagged either as holding and investment shells (511) or as real-estate and property holding entities (1,163). That's about 1 in 12. Not one of the 1,674 scored 70 or higher on our insurance-need score (1 to 100), in any of the five states. That even includes Connecticut, whose October scores still carried a business-email bonus we removed on Oct. 19, 2026. The bonus could only push scores up, and its shells and property entities still came in under 70.

That 1,674 is what was left after filtering. The Pulse counts only filings that got past our filters for holding companies, registered-agent mail drops and shared virtual-office addresses. These are the shells that slipped through, plus the property entities we keep on purpose.

Where they filed

Each state's window is a different length, so don't compare raw counts across states.

Texas barely shows up for a reason. We count new sales-tax permits there, not new companies, and a Texas sales-tax permit is for businesses that sell or lease tangible personal property (goods), or sell taxable services, in Texas. A company formed only to own a building or hold investments usually has no reason to apply. Connecticut's tiny shell count may come down to the state's industry codes, which we'll come back to.

The naming playbook

A few words come up again and again in these names. We searched the raw Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut state files for the same filing-date windows (before any of our filters, so these counts won't match the Pulse):

• 362 names included "Holding" or "Holdings"
• 320 included "Property" or "Properties"
• 147 included "Venture" or "Ventures" and 112 included "Capital"
• Roughly 320 started with a street address, like 2 Elm St., LLC (Colorado, Oct. 14), 60 Market St LLC (Pennsylvania, Sept. 21) and 1314 3rd Ave LLC (New York, Oct. 12)

Some owners had fun with it anyway. Our favorites:

We tidied the capitalization. What these companies actually do is our guess from the name. The state records don't say.

Connecticut just tells you

Connecticut asks new businesses to report an industry (NAICS) code, and in this window the answer was blunt. (Our Connecticut feed covers only Connecticut-formed companies, so these counts do too.) The single most common code in the state's new Connecticut-formed registrations from Oct. 10 to 18, 2026 was 531110, "Lessors of Residential Buildings and Dwellings," with 58 filings. In other words: landlords. 52 State St LLC, registered in Danbury on Oct. 15, is one of them.

That may be why Connecticut had only 4 shells in the Pulse but 106 real-estate entities. When a filer picks a real-estate code, we can tag it as property instead of guessing from the name.

The codes cut both ways, though. Powder Day Holdings LLC (Stamford, Oct. 16) sounds like a classic holding company, but it reported NAICS 541611, management consulting.

Not every "Capital" is a shell

Some of those keyword names are operating businesses. Apex Capital Construction LLC (Denver, Oct. 12) is, by its name, a construction company. Capital Corporate Events LLC (New York, Oct. 11) sounds like an events business. And more than 60 of the 320 "Property" names were property management, maintenance or service companies, like PeakWorks Property Maintenance LLC (Colorado Springs, Oct. 10). Those names describe a service, not a holding.

That's why our filters don't throw out every name with "Capital" or "Holdings" in it. We only remove them when the business is also tagged as a holding, property or unclassified entity, as section 3 of our methodology explains.

Why they score so low

The insurance-need score starts from an industry base. Holding and investment shells start at 8, the lowest base of any group, and real-estate holding entities start at 25. Only nonprofits (20) sit in between. The small bonuses for an industry code (+5), a physical address (+5) or a corporation (+3) can't get them anywhere near 70.

Real-estate entities stay in the data anyway, because some agents write landlord policies. A 25 doesn't mean "worthless." It means our score ranks them below operating businesses.

What it means for agents

• Expect the noise. About 1 in 12 new businesses in the October Pulse window was a shell or property entity, even after our filters ran.
• If you write landlord or habitational business, look again. The 1,163 real-estate entities are the closest thing to a prospect in this pile, and in Connecticut the state's own code tells you which ones are rentals.
• Watch for numbered series. Near-identical numbered names filed days apart, like Phantom Capital 41 and 42, may come from the same owner. Check before you count them as two prospects.
• Read the whole name before you toss it. "Capital Construction" and "Property Maintenance" are trades, not shells.

For the step-by-step version of separating shells from real prospects, see our guide to using Secretary of State filings for prospecting. For the exact rules our pipeline uses, see the methodology.

About these numbers

Shell and real-estate counts, totals and state windows come from the October 2026 New Business Pulse and its October 2026 CSV, published Oct. 19, 2026 (data snapshot Oct. 19, 2026). None of the shell or real-estate rows, in any state, had a business scoring 70+. Base scores come from our methodology, section 4. Source: UncoveredList, New Business Pulse (October 2026): https://uncoveredlist.com/pulse

Business names, filing dates, Connecticut's NAICS codes and the name counts come from each state's official open data, checked Oct. 24, 2026, for the same filing-date windows: the Colorado Secretary of State's Business Entities dataset, the New York Department of State's corporation filings (articles of organization and certificates of incorporation), Pennsylvania's registered businesses (domestic registrations) and the Connecticut Business Registry. The name counts are from the raw state files before our filters, so they won't match Pulse totals. Keyword counts are whole-word matches; the street-address and property-service counts are approximate, because they depend on how a name is parsed. We left out Texas names because many sales-tax permits are held by individuals. We use business names only, never owner or officer names.

new business pulseholding companiesproperty llcsnew business filings