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PostHeaderIcon Rental Real Estate Taxation Basics

While I continue to fret over my “about me” page, one of the things people ask me is, “What is your specialty?”  Over the course of my 18+ year career in tax, to a certain extent, I’ve done it all.  I’ve worked on billion dollar bank and insurance companies and large multinational manufacturing companies all the way to the businesses that bring their receipts in a shoe box.  Still, for most of the past ten years I’ve been immersed in real estate.  They’re not the only clients I work on but it’s become a niche I’ve embraced.  This includes big real estate (I spent over five years in the tax department of a publicly traded REIT) to local real estate working with investors mostly in the Detroit-metro area.  You’ll also find that a lot of the content on this site is real estate related.

One of the things I haven’t touched on in a post is the taxation basics of rental real estate.  If done right, rental real estate can be a great investment but when you take into consideration some of the favorable tax rules that surround it, it can definitely be something you want to look at to add to your portfolio of investments.

First off is the disclaimer. I’m going to making a lot of general statements but as always, everyone’s tax situation is unique so be sure to consult with a professional before you put any of this advice in place.

The first question I usually get asked is about entities.  I’m going to focus on just the tax implications and leave the entity protection discussion for your attorney.  If you want to buy and hold real estate, most of the time you’re going to hold it in a non-corporate entity.  If you want to read about why you probably don’t want to hold real estate in a corporation, I discussed that specific issue in a separate post.  Most of the time you’ll be dealing with a limited liability company (LLC).  If it’s a single member LLC, you’ll be reporting your rental real estate activity on Schedule E of your 1040.  If its a multi-member LLC, then the default tax form is the Partnership Return, which is Form 1065 with the specific rental activity being reported on Form 8825.

The next question I’m usually asked is “What can I deduct?”  The IRS’s general rule is an expense has to be ordinary and necessary expense in carrying on the  trade or business.    As usual they like to keep things vague but the first bucket of expenses are what I call the Big Three.  This is your interest, insurance and taxes.  Rental real estate will almost always have insurance and taxes and if there is leverage involved, you will have interest as well.  In dollar terms, those three expenses usually make up the bulk of you cash outflows.  If you hire a property manager, that is also a deductible expense.  Repairs (not to be confused with capital improvements) can also be deducted as can utilities if that’s a cost you incur on behalf of your tenants.  Costs to advertise the property are also deductible and you can also deduct your mileage if you’re making trips out to the property (within reason). You can also deduct legal and other professional fees (accounting and tax as an example) as well.

I mentioned repairs and you have to distinguish between a deductible repair and a capitalized capital improvement.  Lets use a roof as an example.  If you have someone come and patch up your roof, it’s probably something you can deduct. If you’re replacing the entire roof, that would probably fall more into the improvement category and you should capitalize it and depreciate it over its useful life.

Which leads me into depreciation.  When you buy a piece of real estate, you buy several different things.  You get a building, you get land and unless the house is gutted, you also get a lot of fixtures, pipes and wires.  You have a couple of choices when it comes to depreciating your property.  One option, although it’s usually not cost effective for single family homes, is a cost segregation study.  When you do a cost seg. study, you really break down the cost of what you’re buying and the end result is, you usually get property that you can depreciate over a shorter useful life (i.e. more depreciation expense now) versus property you can depreciate over a longer life (less depreciation expense now).  The other option is to just go with an estimate like an 80/20 split between property and land with the 80% being depreciated over 27.5 years.  You don’t get to take advantage of the quicker depreciation tables but you also have to spend less administrative time and money to break everything down.

When you prepare your taxes, the calculation isn’t that challenging but you have to make sure you fill out the form completely and accurately.  You take your rental income and subtract your cash expenses and your depreciation to come up with a net number.  If it’s a positive number, it’s either reported on your 1040 or it will flow through from your Form 1065 via a Schedule K-1.  If it’s a loss, then it gets a little trickier because the passive activity loss rules can get complicated.  I will save how and when you can take these losses for a post of its own.

Hopefully this is enough to get you started or if your already renting property, it validates what you’re doing. There are some other strategies I’d like to talk about, including ways to set things up if you own multiple properties, but this is getting a bit long and I will save those as well for a future piece.  As always, if you have questions, you can find a few different ways to contact me on my contact page or if you have a comment, feel free to leave one here.

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