Ep. 82 | How Rental Properties are Taxed
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Intro:where the goal is to empower and educate you to legally and ethically minimize taxes paid over your lifetime. Welcome back to the teaching tax flow podcast, everybody. Episode 82, we are jumping into how rental properties are taxed and maybe other non taxed. We'll see how it goes. But before that, let's take a brief moment as always and thank our episode sponsor.
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John Tripolsky:Welcome back everybody. Today, as mentioned in the intro, we are gonna look at rental properties and how they're taxed. So a lot of people have this idea, right, of, oh, I wanna own all these properties, these houses. I wanna be a landlord. You hear a lot.
John Tripolsky:Right? But how familiar are you and others with how that actually relates to your tax situation? So as I always like to poke fun at, but nothing's rolling off the tongue today, so we just bring them back on here anyways. Chris Pacquero, the man with the answers, the tax guy. What's happening?
Chris Picciurro:How are you today, Johnny t? Oh, I'm feeling taxi.
John Tripolsky:Feeling very taxi today.
Chris Picciurro:Lord, have mercy.
John Tripolsky:Here we go. But
Chris Picciurro:I'm not feeling so taxi. I feel I feel good. I feel, excited to talk about how rental properties are taxed. Obviously, there's some there's some wrinkles, so we're gonna be talking about the 99% situations. And you're right.
John Tripolsky:Some a lot of people become landlords, property owners. Landlord's kinda one of those terms that, it's not too PC anymore, but investors or what have you. It it
John Tripolsky:felt weird saying it. Honestly, like, it didn't feel right. I said landlord. I thought, well, you know, like, I kinda nestled down in my chair a little bit when I
Chris Picciurro:saw that. That's okay. And some people become property owners, rental property owners. Purposely, sometimes we have an accidental landlord or meaning, hey. You lived in a primary residence.
Chris Picciurro:You had an unexpected job change. You you don't wanna sell the property, you think you'll be back, or maybe you're in the military and you overseas for a while, so you rent your property out when you're out of town or living
John Tripolsky:somewhere. Hey, well, that's how Chris, you know that, you know, this story a little bit more. That's how I, got into the Airbnb game about 13 years ago. Right? I didn't even have any pictures on that listing.
John Tripolsky:It's like, what in the world did I just do? I had no idea what I was doing, but figured it out. So thank god for people like you. You can, you know, make sense of the muddy waters when sometimes people don't know. But then also what we're gonna talk about here too, Chris, are we gonna look at anything between long term and short term rentals, or are we just kinda kinda putting them all together?
John Tripolsky:We're gonna put them all together. I'm willing to say this. There is something and we had another episode on the short term rental loophole. There is a 1 to 2% situation where you are providing substantial services, according to the IRS, for your short term rental property. That is extremely rare.
John Tripolsky:If that's the case, what we're gonna talk about today does not pertain to you. We're gonna be talking about the 99.9%
Chris Picciurro:of all rental property situation, how rental properties are taxed and how you report them on your tax return. We talk, John, a lot about tax agencies being your involuntary business partner. In teaching tax law, we talk about that tax laws are written to encourage and discourage certain behavior. We also have an episode that not all income is taxed to the same, shameless plug. I
John Tripolsky:think it
Chris Picciurro:was, like, one of the first 10. I don't know.
John Tripolsky:Yeah. Go, yeah, go back and listen to those. That's when our auto audio quality was subpar. We were just so excited to talk about those things. But
Chris Picciurro:Well, when you when you launch a podcast on a pizza abused pizza box, what do you expect?
John Tripolsky:Disclaimer but not a disclaimer. Yes. That really did happen. And that yeah. Go back and listen to some other episodes, and maybe you can maybe There There you go.
John Tripolsky:Yeah. We'll send you a gift card for Domino's.
Chris Picciurro:So why being a property owner, a rental property owner is attractive? Is that the first thing I wanna talk about when you're reporting how how this income is reported is that you are paying tax on your net income. Now there are a lot of rules, what are called passive activity loss rules, and there are situations where on paper, you can have a loss from a rental property that actually offsets other types of income. But the the thing you have to remember is you're paying tax on your net income and not your gross income when it comes to owning rental property. So you report your rents collected, and you get to deduct all of the ordinary and necessary business expenses for a rental property owner.
Chris Picciurro:Those are gonna be your mortgage interest, association dues, property taxes, potentially property management fees, repairs, maintenance, all of those common type of expenditures.
John Tripolsky:Not your dog food if you're a freelance graphic designer?
Chris Picciurro:No. No. Not in your crate, John.
John Tripolsky:Because I'm looking at a birthday card here from my daughter from a couple weeks ago that literally says happy birthday, dad, and it has a giant donkey on it. So I don't know if she's calling me a jackass already or what the deal is, but animals. Actually, there's a lot on lot on that topic too when we talked about, 10 90 nines and dogs. So Absolutely.
Chris Picciurro:I mean, there are rare cases where I you could deduct the dog food. If, if you own, like, a junkyard or a scrapyard and in a area that's, let's just say, not the best area and you have pit bulls that live there and they're and they are used for security purposes only, they're not personal pets, they actually live outside, then that could be a deduction potentially. But we're talking about rental real estate today. The other deduction you get is depreciation. Now we talked a little bit about depreciation when we had our did our cost segregation study, podcast, but what depreciation is is it can be a confusing term for taxpayers.
Chris Picciurro:Because when you buy a property, why are you buying a property? So it appreciates. So it goes up in value. So depreciation is just a condensed term, that we use to describe the cost recovery of that property. So, for instance, John, if you bought a rental property that is worth for $200,000, let's assume $40,000 of that property is allocated to land.
Chris Picciurro:You wanna look at those property tax records to determine that. And $160,000 of that property is allocated to the building portion. You depreciate the building portion, meaning you get to deduct that. And on residential property, that's over a 27 and a half year period. Commercial property, 39 years.
Chris Picciurro:The point is, even though the property is going up in value, if you have a mortgage or don't have a mortgage, you still get the depreciation deduction, and that deduction can offset your rental income. So the first thing to remember when you're reporting rental property, your takeaway from this piece, I get to pay tax on my net income, not my gross income. So that's a win. Now most people own rental property in individually or in a single member LLC. Shameless plug for episode 2, actually don't listen to it because you would probably cringe.
John Tripolsky:Although that's one of our most popular ones, it still holds the number one spot for the most popular, I think, for two reasons. Right? One of them, I think, is I purposely tried to get you all fired up on it because you as a tax pro. Right? Like and we'll get into this, I'm sure, is maybe some of the, we'll call it a disillusion maybe with, LLCs.
John Tripolsky:But then also, yeah, that would I mean, this is a great topic. And, again, looking at our roster here for the upcoming month, month and a half, we're actually gonna revisit that one. So shameless plug to subscribe to the podcast. Yes. Please do.
John Tripolsky:But if you own the property individually or if you own it in
Chris Picciurro:a single member LLC or what's called a qualified joint venture with a spouse, that property is reported on what's called a Schedule E. Schedule e is just attached to, in this case, your personal tax return. And the schedule e just really breaks down many things about the property. Now many most people are focused on am I reporting the proper amount of income, am I reporting the proper amount of deductions, but there are other things the IRS is very, very interested in. And not only is the IRS interested in when we're talking about rental property reporting for that individual or single member LLC that that is a that's reporting on schedule e, Lenders are very, very interested in what's on this.
Chris Picciurro:Underwriters. In fact, our friend of the show, Brenna Carls from The Mortgage Shop, talks a lot about understanding there are things on your Schedule E that play a role in your lendability that you're not even thinking of. So let me explain that, John. On schedule e, you have to identify each property separately. So every if you own 10 properties, you have 10 different entries on schedule e.
Chris Picciurro:Each schedule e, you could put up to 3 properties on. You want the the physical address of the property has to go on the form. But also property type. So you have to tell the IRS, is this a single family home? Is it a multifamily home?
Chris Picciurro:Is it commercial? Is it a self rental? Is it a short term or vacation rental? That's very, very important. Or is it just land?
Chris Picciurro:Because if you have land and you're getting taking a depreciation deduction, shameless plug to our to our previous podcast. We're gonna do a lot of shameless plugs today on the IRS data book. Your your examination percentage is probably a lot higher than we just talked about last episode. So that's a factor because if you're going through underwriting and you're trying to add your portfolio, the type of property plays a role. Also, you have to report fair rental days versus personal use days.
Chris Picciurro:So we see this sometimes where someone is is lazy or some a tax professional is lazy or the software just defaults, where you may have bought a property. Let me give you an example. You bought a property in October. You placed it in the service, you report the rental income. On your tax form, you write and you put down that you owned it.
Chris Picciurro:There was 365 for your rental days. What's the problem? An underwriter is gonna say, well, if this property produced $15,000 worth of revenue in all year, that's not very good when our debt service is a lot higher. But if the underwriter or bank says, oh, okay. You only owned it for 90 days and it produced $15,000, then they can surmise that it might produce $60,000 a year.
Chris Picciurro:So my point is when you're reporting on schedule e, we talked about those technical parts about about it previously. Make sure that you properly report the fair market rental days, the personal use days in the property type. And here's a here's a dumb guy question, you know, from me as I always try to
John Tripolsky:have one of them or I try not to have them, but I do. So I'm actually looking at a Schedule e here in front of me. Right? And and the lines, you know, where it comes to, you know, listing each of the physical addresses for each property, so up to 3. You have those columns, fair rental or, fair rental days, personal use days.
John Tripolsky:And then there's a little column with some checkbox. It looks like it's QJV. What what exactly is QJV? There are
Chris Picciurro:a couple checkboxes that you have to be keenly aware of. QJV is qualified joint venture. So if you live in a community property state and you and your spouse form a limited liability company or an LLC, and you put the property in the LLC or a partnership, let's say, in general, you would have to file a partnership tax return, and those returns on average are start at $2,000 a year to have those prepared. And then you issue k ones, we're gonna talk about that in a moment, but your let's just put it this way. Then your tax compliance is a lot a lot more arduous.
Chris Picciurro:So instead of having to go through the process of filing a partnership return, if you qualify, then you report to the IRS, hey. This is a qualified joint venture owned by both spouses on this tax return. That's why IRS I'm not filing a partnership return for this property. The other box is oh, great great. John, I'm so proud of you
John Tripolsky:for looking at the schedule e. Hey. You know, every are
Chris Picciurro:you are you gonna go to the eye doctor, like, crazy?
John Tripolsky:In a while. Have eyes bleeding. You know, it's yeah. I kinda I closed one eye and kinda looked at it, like, see what what this thing is right here. You know, I hear schedule, and it reminds me of, you know, high school and college days where I didn't like it.
John Tripolsky:You know? Because kind of it
Chris Picciurro:yeah. I know you're a loose cannon, John. You don't like you're you're you're you don't like having a having a a schedule. Although you you really don't like when people are late, and I love that about you. That's one of your big pet peeves.
John Tripolsky:Drives me nuts. I won't mention you know, let's not get off topic, but now you got me all flustered up. It's kinda like when everybody, says that I'm a was it a 10.99 employee? It's kinda what you said about that. So I know I know that gets you fired up.
John Tripolsky:10. It's a yeah. Good segue, though, because
Chris Picciurro:the last question that is on the form is did you make payments that you should issue a 10.99 on? So if you're a rental property owner, the IRS now says, hey. Should you have issued 10.90 nines? It's a really funny question, and you either say yes or no, and then they ask you, if yes, wait, did you make any payments that would require you to file a 10.99? Yes or no?
Chris Picciurro:Let's say I say yes. Hey. If you said yes, did you file them? I'd rather see a taxider where someone said, yeah. I did I did make payments for the 10.99, but, yes, screw you.
Chris Picciurro:I'm not filing 1.
John Tripolsky:What you know, one day, Chris, we're we're gonna put the call out there. If somebody has so much money that they don't know any don't know any better way you know, thing to spend it on except pay fines to the IRS, We should try to, you know, find that person and just try to, you know, muck with the IRS as much as we can by contradicting answers and, you know, timing how long it takes to get an audit. So if anybody wants to
Chris Picciurro:do that, I'm sure we can blush. Well, let's move on to the second popular fact pattern when you own property.
John Tripolsky:Assume the property I like how you completely, like, kick my my BS comment to the side. You're like, no. I don't wanna work with that person. No. I want nothing to do with
Chris Picciurro:No. Heck no. And and the people in teaching tax law community appreciate that, the other tax professionals. The motherfucking Oh, anyways.
John Tripolsky:Well, you know, back to a regularly scheduled program.
Chris Picciurro:I didn't even acknowledge pivot redirect. I just pivoted and redirected on that one. So that was that's just the way it goes. So while time let's assume let's talk about reporting for someone that has either a multi member LLC taxed as a partnership or is a partnership or, oh, gosh, is an s corporation, which is gonna make our our tax professional friends cringe when you have rental property in the s corp, but we're not gonna get upset. But let's assume you own rental property in one of those three types of entities.
Chris Picciurro:The multi member LLC and the partnership, that is reported on a form 1065, an s corp reported on an 11 an 1120. Yes. There are episodes in the podcast about these forms. Regardless of if you're an s corp or taxed as a partnership, the rental activity, other than being on the balance sheet, is reported on a form 8825. I wonder I wanna be the person at the IRS that gets to number these forms.
Chris Picciurro:Like, wow. Very into, like, ah, we don't have we need a new one in the 800. I'm sure there's a method to their madness, but, like, 88 you know, shoot. We we've got a gap. Let's just call it form 422 or something.
Chris Picciurro:Right.
John Tripolsky:Yeah. Because I highly doubt they have, you know, 9 1,000 forms.
Chris Picciurro:It feels like it sometimes, but I really mean. So the 8825, it really sets up similarly to the schedule e. But this is so, you know, you have to report the fair market days, the personal use days, what type of property, the physical address of the property, gross rent, and then your rental real estate expenses including depreciation. Each Form 8825 has the has the capacity for 4 rental properties to be reported on it, whereas schedule e only has 3. So if you have 12 properties, not a big deal.
Chris Picciurro:I mean, we can shoot on our private CEP practice, we've got clients with over 200 properties, and we have, you know, 50 form 8825s attached to the partnership return or per so that that happens. But, so the 8825, again, make sure you take your depreciation deduction. The difference on the partnership and s corp return is that you have to you have to report the balance sheet, which would mean your any mortgage amount, any, asset amount, for the, for the entity. So so, yeah, very similar. And the takeaway here is, remember, each property should be reported separately.
Chris Picciurro:Now there are some exceptions to that. An exception might be, like, an apartment complex or an apartment building that has 20 units in it. You're not gonna put each unit separately. That apartment is its own, you know, physical address. Or if you have a duplex, you know, duplex with multiple addresses, like, it could be 110 dash 112 Main Street could go on one line.
Chris Picciurro:So make sure, you know, because because it gets really muddy and the IRS doesn't like this and nor do banks. And I've seen it, unfortunately, where I see some I see someone that has 8 rental properties and they put it all on one line of their Schedule E and they just slap in their rental property portfolio. That's that's not a good look, John. Nope. It's not not a good look.
John Tripolsky:So I can and I can see exactly why.
Chris Picciurro:For that. Like, that go beyond this podcast with passive activity losses and rental grouping elections and that sort of stuff.
John Tripolsky:Absolutely. Absolutely. So I know in the you know, early on, one of the first kind of supporting documents I know we made with teaching tax flow, and this was probably going back about a year, a year and a half. You know, we laid out all of the well, I think we call it guidance chart. Right?
John Tripolsky:So we laid that out as far as for a really kind of a cheat sheet on entity types or I should say ownership types, whatever, for rental properties. So do we wanna walk through all these, kinda one one at a time? And some of them I know are very simple. But then also too, and I know this is probably gonna come up again. I know we talked about a little bit too is I'll let you do the answer for it.
John Tripolsky:But somebody that might be looking to getting their 1st rental property or maybe reassessing their situation. Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. So l an LLC.
John Tripolsky:So LLC is with properties, though. I'll let you explain what it really is and why the IRS does or doesn't care about an LLC?
Chris Picciurro:I mean, a a single member LLC is a disregarded entity. So remember, you if you have a rental property, it's gonna fall into 3 buckets. The first bucket's gonna be you own it personally or you own it in a single member LLC or you own it in a qualified joint venture. I would say that's gonna be the vast majority of rental properties. Then it goes on schedule e, part of your personal tax return.
Chris Picciurro:Bucket 2 is gonna be that multi member LLC, your partnership return, or s corp. Cringe every time I think about rental properties in an s corp. That goes then those properties are reported on form 8825 and go on your partnership return. I know we're getting really in the weeds in technical, so what I want people to remember is work with your tax professional to make sure that you're getting the depreciation deduction and make sure that each property is not only identified as the correct type, but the correct rental days, and each property has its own line on those forms. And then finally, if you own a rental property in a c corporation, very rare, then it's there's no separate schedule or form.
Chris Picciurro:You just put the rental income on line 6 of the c corp and list any deductions as normal on the c corporation tax return. That's a form 11 20. I would say I mean, at least in my 20 years, if I think about all the properties, one out of every 1,000 properties are on a c corporation tax return.
Chris Picciurro:Very, very rare. Excellent. So, yeah, there's, obviously, there's complexities with certain situations and certain setups, we should call it. But, hopefully, this, you know, gives everybody a little bit of a little bit of a background just in the separation. Right, Chris?
John Tripolsky:Yes.
Chris Picciurro:And I would say if you are listening to this podcast and you're newer to our podcast, definitely go back, and I know we kid around about the the, you know, the shameless plugging. Listen to the podcast on step up basis. So if you are listening to this and and you're a tax pro or you're a taxpayer
John Tripolsky:and you and you're working, in rental properties and you realize the property was inherited by someone, definitely think about the step up in basis and and make sure that that's accounted for within that depreciation deduction. Chris always says you're kinda pardon the shameless plug. Not me. Nope. I will give the shameless plugs, and they are completely shameless.
John Tripolsky:So, yes, that episode, Chris, that that's actually a really good one to mention too. If if somebody's not familiar what step up in basis is, myself included, honestly, even going into that podcast, listen to that. I won't say anything about it, but listen to it, but you will be absolutely floored on the opportunities and benefits with that. So, and then also to looking at our podcast recording roster, directly tied into rental properties. Again, if this something that you're kind of interested in, maybe you haven't acquired your first property yet.
John Tripolsky:You're thinking about it, kind of kicking the can a little bit. I believe it's the end of June. We have a, an excellent topic on why real estate is so popular when it comes to taxes with a fantastic guest who if you've done any research online about real estate investing, his name has definitely come up. Won't tell you who it is because I like dangling carrots. So hang out for it.
John Tripolsky:Subscribe to the podcast. Check us out online. We are happy to obviously craft some content to help you in your real estate investing journey. So as always, we will see you back here next week, same time, different topic on the Teaching Tax Flow podcast. Everyone, thanks for hanging out with us again here on the podcast.
John Tripolsky:It's hard to believe that we've done this 82 times. That's 82 weeks. If you've listened to all of them, we commend you. You've obviously been along for the podcast journey that Chris and myself have gone on. Yes.
John Tripolsky:We started this on a pizza box, which we're not ashamed of. Lavalier mic and iPhone in a pizza box. We said, hey, today's the day we're gonna launch a podcast sitting at a dining room or a living room table, sitting on a sofa in Panama City Beach, Florida. So if we can do that, you as a taxpayer can take advantage of some of the benefits and opportunities that are out there. So I know I sound like a used car salesman, but nothing against car sales.
John Tripolsky:But check it out. I mean, as we mentioned in this podcast, often, very often, you, the tax payer, really are in control of your tax situation, your tax bill per se. But it's, again, it comes with responsibility. It's up to you. You're in control of it.
John Tripolsky:But that being said, you need to be educated, be working with the right team in place. We did a great episode earlier on. Yes. Another podcast plug about building your board of directors, personal board of directors. So check that one out.
John Tripolsky:Check out any of the topics we have on here. If there's anything you haven't heard yet, it's either already on the schedule or we don't know that you're interested in it. So drop us a line. If you have any ideas for shows, you would love to hear. We'd love to hear them as well.
Disclaimer:So thank you as always everybody and we will see you back here very soon. The content provided is for educational purposes only. We encourage you to seek personalized investment advice from your financial professional. For all tax and legal advice, please consult your CPA or attorney. Investment advisory services are offered through Cabin Advisors, a registered investment adviser.
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