How To Research Someone's Net Worth When They Have Almost No Digital Footprint
I've spent more time than I care to admit tracking down financial information on individuals who actively avoid having any of it public. It's not glamorous work. Most of it is just sitting in databases, cross-referencing property records, and waiting for some obscure municipal site to actually load instead of timing out. When you're looking at someone like Juan Borrero Martinez, you're immediately hit with a specific problem: there isn't a lot of searchable, reliable data on him. He doesn't appear to be a publicly traded company executive, he's not a celebrity, and he hasn't published any autobiographies or given financial interviews. That means the standard net worth estimation approach — aggregating public filings, stock holdings, and real estate records — hits a wall pretty fast. Here's what actually works in practice. You start with the properties. In most jurisdictions, property ownership records are public. You search county assessor databases, but you quickly run into the issue that many people hold real estate through LLCs or shell companies rather than their own name. I've seen this constantly with people who are wealthier than they appear. You end up digging through corporate registration records to find the person behind the LLC, which is tedious and sometimes impossible depending on state law.
For Juan Borrero Martinez specifically, the available data is thin. I found a handful of references to property associations and some old court filings that mentioned his name in what appeared to be civil matters, but nothing conclusive about asset holdings. The property search I ran through multiple counties turned up zero direct matches under his full legal name. That either means he doesn't own real estate in those jurisdictions, or the assets are held through entities that require a more aggressive investigation to uncover. One thing people don't always consider is that "net worth" for someone this obscure is essentially a guess wrapped in whatever fragments of data you can piece together. There's no single correct number. The best you can do is establish a floor and a ceiling. The floor is what you can verify — if you find even one property or business interest, you know he has at least that much. The ceiling is based on lifestyle indicators, but those are unreliable. I've seen people driving ten-year-old Honda Civics who owned multiple rental properties, and I've seen people with flash social media presence who were deeply in debt. Appearance is not a reliable proxy for financial position. The business registration angle is another path. Secretary of state websites let you search for entities by owner or officer name. I ran searches for "Borrero" across several states and found a small number of business formations, but none clearly tied to Juan Borrero Martinez as a principal owner with significant equity. This is where the research gets time-consuming because you have to read through formation documents, check for name variations, and sometimes physically visit county clerks' offices if the digital records are incomplete.
Here's an edge case I ran into recently that might save you some frustration. Sometimes the person you're researching uses a middle initial or a nickname in public records but is listed with their full middle name in other documents. I was tracking down a subject last month who showed up as "Robert J. Smith" in property records but "Robert Jameson Smith" in business filings. Took me three weeks to connect the dots. For someone with a name like Borrero Martinez, which has a clear structure, this is less of an issue, but variations like "Juan B. Martinez" or dropping the middle name entirely can still create mismatches in database searches. Court records are another public resource that frequently gets overlooked. Civil litigation, probate filings, and lien records can reveal asset information. But accessing these requires knowing which jurisdiction to search, and many courts only maintain digitized records going back a certain number of years. Older records sit in physical storage and accessing them requires a formal request, which often involves mailing forms and waiting weeks. Some counties won't even provide copies unless you have a legitimate investigative purpose, though technically these records are public in most places. The uncomfortable truth is that for a private individual with low public visibility, the net worth research process is as much about documenting what you can't find as what you can. Any final number you land on should come with clear caveats about its limitations. I usually present findings as a range with a confidence level attached to each component. Property holdings might be confident at 70% because the records were clear. Business interests might be 30% confident because I only found corroborating mentions, not direct ownership documentation.
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If you're actually doing this kind of research for professional purposes — due diligence, legal proceedings, journalism — you'll want to factor in the cost of commercial database subscriptions. LexisNexis, Accurint, and similar services aggregate records across jurisdictions but cost thousands per year. For one-off research, it's often more economical to search county and state websites directly, even though it takes longer. The trade-off is time versus money, and your choice depends on how many people you're researching simultaneously. I should also mention the human element. When you're digging this deep into someone's financial life, you occasionally encounter information that's personal and private — medical liens, family disputes, bankruptcy filings. These are legally public, but there's a difference between being allowed to access something and considering it appropriate to use. I tend to stick to asset-related records and avoid the more intrusive categories unless there's a direct relevance to the research question. It's a judgment call, but one that matters if you want to maintain credibility in this work. The final output of any net worth investigation should be a transparent document that shows your methodology, lists every source consulted, and clearly marks where you hit dead ends. Anyone reading it should be able to reproduce your process and arrive at the same conclusions or identify where you might have gone wrong. That's the only way this kind of research holds up to scrutiny, whether it's for a news article, a legal case, or personal curiosity.
