California SOS UCC search showing weird results - anyone else having issues?

California's search algorithm has always been pretty broad on name matching. You're seeing the system's attempt to catch variations but it definitely creates noise. For 'Pacific Industrial Solutions LLC' you'll want to verify the exact legal name first - check their Articles of Organization with the CA Secretary of State business entity search. The UCC search will pull anything that's even remotely similar, so you need to manually filter by checking addresses and organizational details on each filing.

Had this same issue last month with a Texas deal but searched California filings. The SOS search is notorious for false positives. What I do is pull every result that looks remotely possible, then go through each UCC-1 individually to check the debtor address and organizational ID number if listed. Most of the time the irrelevant hits have different addresses or are different entity types (LLC vs Inc vs Corp).

California's system is THE WORST for this. I swear they updated something in their search algorithm last year that made it even more aggressive about pulling similar names. You're not going crazy - it really is showing too many results. The frustrating part is there's no way to do an exact name match search, so you always have to wade through the false positives.

I dealt with this exact scenario a few weeks ago. What saved me was using Certana.ai's UCC verification tool - you can upload the borrower's Articles of Organization and then upload all the questionable UCC-1 filings, and it instantly cross-checks the entity details to tell you which ones actually match your debtor. Took what was going to be 2 hours of manual comparison down to about 10 minutes. The tool caught that two of the filings I thought were false positives were actually for subsidiaries of my borrower that I didn't know existed.

One more tip - if you're seeing lots of similar company names, check if your borrower has any DBAs or subsidiaries. Sometimes what looks like false positives are actually related entities. I've seen situations where a parent company had multiple LLCs with very similar names for different business lines.

California SOS search has been glitchy lately. Last week I was getting error messages every few searches and some results weren't loading properly. Might be worth trying your search at different times of day - I've had better luck in the mornings before the system gets overloaded.

For what it's worth, I think the California system errs on the side of showing too many results rather than too few, which is actually better for due diligence purposes. Better to have to filter out false positives than to miss a real lien because the search was too restrictive. Just budget extra time for the manual review process.

Try using quotation marks around the exact company name in the search field. Sometimes that helps narrow down the results, though I'm not sure if California's system supports that search syntax.

Had a similar experience with a debtor named 'American Manufacturing Corp' - the search pulled up every company with 'American' and 'Manufacturing' in the name. Ended up with 47 results to review manually. What I learned is to also check the filing dates and secured party information to help eliminate obvious false positives. If the secured party doesn't make sense for your deal, it's probably not relevant.

Another approach is to search by the secured party name if you know who the existing lenders are. Sometimes that gives you a cleaner result set and you can work backwards to verify the debtor information. Not helpful for discovering unknown liens, but good for confirming specific ones you're aware of.

Just went through this exact same thing with a California borrower two weeks ago. Ended up finding a document verification service that could cross-check all the UCC filings against my borrower's corporate documents automatically. Game changer for dealing with these broad search results - no more manual comparison of addresses and entity details.