Find out who owns a building in SF

For my 400 Divisadero series and to help track down some stolen property from my girlfriend I needed to figure out who owned a given building in SF. Here's the process I followed, using 740 Valencia Street as a random example (because it's the address for Dandelion Chocolate and I like their stuff).

1. Get the block/lot from PIM

First in the SF Property Information Map portal type in the address. Selecting "Property" in the left list gives us the parcel number as Block/Lot, in this case 3588/006.

2. Find the owner from SF's Assessor-Recorder deeds

From here we'll go over to the Public Index Search for SF's Assessor-Recorder, https://recorder.sfgov.org/#!/simple. ¹ The search UI leaves a lot to be desired. I'd recommend swapping to 100/page, but you'll need to search again because it will silently clear your filters. Here we can search for all documents by the Block and Lot we found from the previous step. This requires an account, but it's free to create.

We're looking for something that relates to DEED. In this case the last transfer was from the "Ronald J Mallia Revocable Trust" to "740 Valencia Street, LLC" in 2010.

As a sanity check, the 740 Valencia Street LLC is still referenced in 2022 documents:

3. Get the LLC owner from CA Business Search

From here, because the LLC is incorporated in California we can look it up with Business Search at https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business (you'll again need a free account). ² I used this for one of my previous brief hyperfixations tracking down the creator of the US poster for Possession (1981). You can click into the LLC from search, and "View History" will show you all the files. In this case we can already see that the Agent Name is the same, Ronald J Mallia, but we can verify that from the initial filing.

The full filing confirms that it's also created by Ronald J. Mallia back in 2006 (though there could be other people involved). And that's our owner!