An investigation by Truth & Transparency into the landholdings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—commonly referred to as the Mormon Church or LDS Church—has shed light on how expansive and diverse their real estate portfolio is. While the church has never been listed among the largest private landowners in the US, this newly compiled data places them in the top five in terms of acreage and likely number one in terms of market value.

Truth & Transparency’s investigation reveals that, in July 2020, the LDS Church owned 1,754,633 acres across the country with a minimum market value of $15.7 billion. 15,963 parcels across the country have been linked to the Church through public records. Roughly 50 percent of the parcels consist of agricultural zoning. The other half is primarily made up of commercial or religious zoning.

While initially looking into a handful of properties known to be owned by the Utah-based church, a common data point was discovered: a single address that was associated with each property, regardless of the legal entity that owned it. Working under the hypothesis that this single address could be the key to mapping all—or at least a large portion—of the church’s landholdings, Truth & Transparency tapped into a database compiled by Reonomy. A New York City-based technology company, Reonomy is considered a “leading provider of [commercial real estate] insights, empowering top brokerages, financial institutions, and commercial services providers with actionable data and solutions”. Using this common data point, Truth & Transparency uncovered the parcels mentioned above through Reonomy.

In order to obtain the highest level of confidence in the integrity of the data, Truth & Transparency manually verified every property with a market value of at least $20 million and another 1,000 randomly selected samples from the remaining population.

Reonomy’s records do not include properties zoned for single family residences nor do they claim the data is completely comprehensive. For example, the Chicago LDS temple in Glenview, IL does not show up in the query. It is unclear what would preclude properties that share the same common data point to not be included in the query. Furthermore, it is possible that there are other properties in the US that are owned by the church that are not associated with the common address. Thus, the properties found should be considered the Mormon Church’s minimum landholdings in July 2020.

Over the years, there has been some reporting on large portions of the Church’s landholdings. For example, in 2013 Reuters reported that the Mormon Church was set to become the largest private landowner in Florida. In 2017 the Dallas Morning News reported on a commercial property that the Church purchased for $100 million. However, Truth & Transparency is unaware of any attempt to compile all LDS real estate assets across the US before now.

When the data is populated into an interactive map, the largess of the church’s real estate empire can be jarring.

The interactive map and its accompanying data—publicly searchable here— will prove to be  useful tools to those looking to further our reporting. Additionally, the information adds to the growing library of investigative reports that have shed light and knowledge on the church’s assets, something they have tried to keep as quiet as possible over the years according to The Wall Street Journal.

A representative from the LDS Church did not respond to our request for comment before the publication of this article.

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A few caveats to remember when reviewing the map and data:

• This data is based on county records as of July 21, 2020. There are properties purchased in early 2020 and after this date that are not present in the data. For absent properties purchased prior to July 21, 2020, it is likely due to the county records not yet reflecting the change in ownership. An example of this would be the 15,000 acre Texas ranch the Church purchased in early 2020.
• Any properties owned by the LDS Church with “Single Family Residence” zoning designation would be in addition to the properties in this dataset. There are a few properties on the list that would fit the traditional description of “Single Family Residence'', but they are not zoned as such.
• The "Asset Category" designation reflects what the official county records show. Not all counties are perfect in keeping those designations up to date. Some properties may have asset designations that do not accurately reflect their intended or actual use.
• Reonomy cannot guarantee that it captures every property. This means that there are properties (other than single family residences) owned by the LDS Church that don’t show up in the dataset. An example of this would be the Chicago temple. We were unable to determine what caused some properties to not show up in our query results.
• The numbers labeled “Total Assessed Value” and “Total Market Value” are reported by each county. Counties across the country use different methods when calculating these numbers. Furthermore, 2,291 properties have no value assigned to them by their county. These values should be considered a baseline when trying to evaluate the total value of these properties.
• These properties were able to be aggregated due to the common address we discovered that they all share. It is possible that there are properties owned by the LDS church that do not share this address.

Update, April 5, 2022 1:30 pm PST: The original data included an office building in Provo, Utah with a market value of $76 million. This building is next to the church’s City Center temple. When building the temple, the owner of this building, Nu Skin, donated a small portion of the property—0.2 acres—to the church in the form of an easement in order to accommodate construction. For unknown reasons, this caused the entire property to show up in the Reonomy query as being owned by the LDS church. We discovered this discrepancy early on in our investigation, but the property was inadvertently included in the final database and interactive map we published. It has been removed.

This morning, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, reported a total of $38.7 billion of holdings in the U.S. stock market.

Truth & Transparency first reported on this topic in May 2018 by uncovering $32 billion traded by 13 shell companies connected to the Church, and again last month when revealing the increased value of those shell companies as well as venture capital investments made by another shell company connected to the Church.

Last month, in another unprecedented move, the Church gave an exclusive interview to the Wall Street Journal discussing the portfolio, admitting to having intentionally obfuscated the paper trail with the shell companies discovered by Truth & Transparency. They feared that members would reduce their tithing donations to the Church.

Today’s story from the Tribune implies that this $38 billion is in addition to the money already reported by Truth & Transparency saying that Ensign Peak’s portfolio is “more diversified than any of those smaller funds.” However, closer analysis of the data suggests otherwise.

While it is true that Ensign Peak filed a report with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, none of the other 13 shell companies did, a fact the Tribune originally failed to report. This suggests that the shares were moved under the known corporate umbrella of the Church, another unprecedented and surprising move.

This hypothesis is supported by comparing the data from Ensign Peak’s most recent filing and the previous quarter’s filings from the shell companies. The number of entities the Church had invested only grew from 1,646 to 1,650 and the amount of shares traded between the two quarters is largely negligible.

Additionally, the difference in shares between the two reports could be a result of consolidating other shell companies than the ones currently known. An entity only has to file these public reports if over $100 million is held at the end of the quarter. It is completely possible that the Church has other entities under its corporate umbrella that were not trading at that threshold.

Such may be the case with Clifton Park Capital Management, an LLC known to be owned by the Church, yet one that hasn’t filed a report with the SEC since the final quarter of 2015. That does not necessarily mean that they are not still actively trading, simply that they may be doing so below $100 million.

The Church has also previously engaged in venture capital endeavors, investing in private companies before they are publicly traded. One of those companies Truth & Transparency reported on last month was the tech company Fastly. When comparing the data, the church had not reported any public shares held in Fastly until this most recent quarter in Ensign Peak’s filing. There are likely several other instances of similar activity.

This money is obviously a fraction of the $100 billion known to be controlled by the Church, as originally reported by the Washington Post, and simply the only amount discovered through public records.

While it’s likely that only a small portion of the $38 billion reported by the Salt Lake Tribune wasn’t already known, the Church is obviously making strides in becoming more financially transparent. Time will tell if the behavior is the new norm or a one-time attempt to silence critics.

The code used to perform the data analysis for this article can be found here.

In the coming days, Truth & Transparency will be publishing interactive graphs illustrating the known worth of the Mormon Church’s portfolio over time. This is a tremendous effort with many features planned. If you want to support this work, please consider making a donation today.

In May 2018, Truth & Transparency compiled public information connecting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as the Mormon Church, to 13 LLCs holding assets in the U.S. stock market worth over $32 billion. The public filings for the third quarter of 2019 for 12 of these LLCs show they are now worth a combined total of $34.9 billion. New filings for the final quarter of 2019 are expected to be made public in the coming weeks.

In addition to these companies, Truth & Transparency has connected two other LLCs to the Church: Morgan Hills Group and Marshfield Advisers. Of the two, Marshfield Advisers, was listed in 3 separate filings publicly available via the United States Security and Exchange Commission. However, unlike the reports regarding the previous 13 discovered in 2018, these reports did not deal with trading in the U.S. stock markets, but rather as a venture capital investor.

When transitioning from being privately held to publicly traded in the U.S., companies may or may not be required to publicly file documents with the SEC outlining voter and investor rights for all parties who hold financial stake in the organization. If filed, these documents are  approved and signed by a representative from each stakeholder. Marshfield Advisers is identified in such filings for Gossamer Bio, aTyr Pharma, and Fastly.

The amount Marshfield Advisers holds in each organization, the price paid for their shares, as well as the point in time the investments were made are not disclosed in the reports and, therefore, publicly unknown. All three documents were signed by the same representative of the Church whose employment Truth & Transparency was able to independently verify.

Gossamer Bio, a San Diego-based biopharmaceutical company, announced its first round of private fundraising in January 2018 and filed for their initial public offering in July of the same year. Since going public, the company has enjoyed spikes in its stock price, but has ultimately decreased approximately 28% from opening price at the time of publication.

aTyr Pharma’s website states its mission is “to translate newly discovered biological pathways to develop innovative therapeutics with improved outcomes for patients.” According to Crunchbase, a website dedicated to tracking venture capitalist investments in a crowdfunding fashion, aTyr began fundraising as far back as 2007. The company went public in 2015 and its stock price has since dropped 97% in value.

Fastly specializes in web content delivery, providing their customers with fast hosting solutions. It was founded in 2011 and went public in 2019. It has since risen in public value approximately 42%.

Marshfield Advisers and Morgan Hills Group were discovered as part of a deeper investigation into the original 13 LLCs discovered in 2018. Those organizations’ ties to the Mormon Church were uncovered by observing that the Church was listed publicly as the owner of their internet domain names, such as elkforkpartners.com. The ownership of the domains was corroborated by the fact that the Church controlled the IP addresses of those  domains.

The control of all domain names is done via the internet's domain name system or DNS. The function of DNS is perhaps easiest to understand when compared to a phone book. When a user enters a domain, such as truthandtransparency.org, into an internet browser, the computer queries the DNS to receive the IP address where the website is hosted, such as 198.185.159.145. This is similar to looking up a phone number in a phone book. Upon Truth & Transparency’s reporting in 2018, the Mormon Church’s DNS servers were hosting the authoritative records to the domains for all 13 of the LLCs.

However, in April 2019 the control of those records was relinquished to a third party known as Brand Shelter, a company that helps protect organizations trademarks online. The Church, owning thousands of domain names, appeared to only have moved the 13 LLCs' domains to the third party.

In an attempt to find any additional domains moved from the Church’s control to Brand Shelter’s, Truth & Transparency leveraged a database of historical domain ownership and DNS records maintained by Security Trails. By checking the tens of thousands of domains with records hosted with Brand Shelter, only 17 were once hosted by the Mormon Church. 15 were already known domains, the others belonged to Morgan Hills Group and Marshfield Advisers.

The code used to conduct this investigation can be found here.

At this time, the function of Morgan Hills Group is unclear. Business licenses were found in both Delaware and California for the company.

In December 2019, the Washington Post reported on a complaint filed by a whistleblower to the United States Internal Revenue Service. The whistleblower, a former employee of Ensign Peak Advisers, the subsidiary of the Church that oversees all investments, claimed the Church manages more than $100 billion for the Mormon Church.

It is believed that the LLCs discovered by Truth & Transparency in May 2018, and the additional two reported here, are part of that sum. However, this cannot be confirmed. Ensign Peak redirected comment to the Church who did not respond before the publication of this article.

This investigation cost Truth & Transparency over $1000, a significant amount of our budget, and dozens of hours of work. If you found it valuable, please consider making a recurring or one time donation here. Thank you for your generosity.

The following lists the LLCs originally reported on in May 2018 and links to their most recent SEC filings:

• Ashmore Wealth Management
• Argyll Research
• Cortland Advisers
• Elkfork Partners
• Flinton Capital Management
• Glen Harbor Capital Management
• Green Valley Investors
• Meadow Creek Investment Management
• Neuburgh Advisers
• Riverhead Capital Management
• Tiverton Asset Management
• Tyers Asset Management