7 Real Estate Tax Benefits to Supercharge Your Rental Returns in 2027

We’re always talking about cash flow, appreciation, and loan paydown, but tax benefits are some of the most understated and overlooked advantages of real estate investing. Do you want to pay less in taxes and keep more of your hard-earned money from the IRS? Dave’s bringing you seven of the best tax strategies that could help you save thousands each year! Today, Dave’s breaking down an example property and putting each of these tax strategies to the test. We’ll look at how much money they could save you and how they fit into your overall investing strategy. From depreciation deductions that reduce your taxable rental income (on paper) to 1031 exchanges that help defer capital gains tax, there are options for every investor. When used properly, these real estate tax deductions are completely legal and relatively easy to implement. But it’s up to you to actually use them! Whether you own a single rental property or a large real estate portfolio, put these tax strategies to work and allow your investments to compound even faster! In This Episode We Cover Seven real estate tax strategies that could put thousands back in your pocket Two ways to defer capital gains taxes when you sell a rental property How to offset your active income with real estate professional status (REPS) How to accelerate depreciation deductions with a cost segregation study Everyday operating expenses that often qualify as tax write-offs And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠h⁠⁠t⁠t⁠ps://www⁠.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1338. Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  Do you want to pay less tax and keep more of your hard-earned money? If you were to get a raise at work, let's call it $2,500 a year. After a 22% federal income tax, 7.6% payroll tax, and 5% for state tax, your take-home pay would be just $1,640 instead of $2,500. But if you earn that same $2,500 in real estate rental income, you'd probably pay almost zero tax and keep most of that $2,500. That's cold, hard cash in your pocket that you can use to keep growing your portfolio. This is a hidden, but absolutely huge benefit to real estate investing.

• 0:42Dave Meyer?

  The IRS just treats real estate differently from almost everything else. And almost anyone can use the US tax code to save on taxes and keep more for yourself. So today on the show, we're breaking down the many, many ways real estate gets special treatment from the IRS, and how you can use this to your advantage. I'm going to pull out the whiteboard and show you real examples and real numbers so you can start planning your next move.

• 1:14Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. Some benefits of real estate investing are obvious. Things like cash flow, and appreciation, and value-add investing. But some are a little more subtle. And today's show is about the biggest one of all of these subtle advantages: taxes. So today on the show, I'm going to break this thing down in detail. We're going to walk through several concrete examples with real numbers and show the different strategies you can use right now to optimize your tax situation. It's going to be fun. I think it's going to be eye-opening, and it'll lower your tax bill. So let's do it. But before I get started, I'm going to use one single example,

• 1:56Dave Meyer?

  one deal for the entirety of this episode, just so you can follow the potential tax savings on a single deal. And then, of course, you can extrapolate that and how powerful this can be for an entire portfolio. So I just kind of want to write out what my sample deal is to get things started. So for our deal, we're going to look at a property that we're going to purchase for $300,000. So it's a little bit below the national average, but as investors, this is the type of sweet spot I actually look for. I like to look for properties that are $125 to $150 a unit. So let's just assume that this is a duplex that we're going to be buying. Then, we're going to put down payment. We're going to put 20%.

• 2:41Dave Meyer?

  We're going to get a mortgage at 7%. That's about where they're sitting today. For this property, our rent is going to be $2,800. And our operating expenses are going to be just under $12,000 a year. I actually ran the math, and I figured it would be about $11,600. So as we're going through this entire episode, remember that this is the deal that we're looking at. And if you actually calculate this out, I'm just going to get to this now. Our cash flow for this deal would be about $2,840. And that comes out to a cash-on-cash return of 5%.

• 3:23Dave Meyer?

  So a solid deal in today's market, not a home run, not a bad deal. If you can get 5% cash-on-cash return in most markets, you are doing very, very well. So let's just say that you find a great deal, as we talk about how to do all the time on the podcast. And now you want to figure out how you can make this deal even better by optimizing your taxes. So the first tax strategy that you should be using, and this is probably the most common one, is known as depreciation. Depreciation is basically part of the tax code that allows you to deduct the gradual decline or deterioration of your property over time. In the IRS's eyes, everything out there, every physical object, has a useful life.

• 4:08Dave Meyer?

  And for residential real estate, the government has decided the useful life for a house, or a duplex, or a three-unit is 27.5 years. It's very specific, but they say that every 27 and 1/2 years, you're going to need to essentially replace your property. And that decay over 27 and 1/2 years is seen as a business expense that you can deduct in a given year. And this deduction counts against your rental income and lets you keep more cash flow. So let me just show you how this works. So remember that our income for this year, right? Our profit or cash flow was $2,840.

• 4:51Dave Meyer?

  And if you were to pay your normal income on that, right? Like, if this was just regular income you got from your job, you might pay up to about 40% in taxes, in which case you'd get $1,704 after tax. That's still cash flow, right? Like, that would still be money in your pocket, but it definitely lowers the return. Like, you're no longer getting a 5% cash-on-cash return. It's probably something like a 3% or 3.5% cash-on-cash return. But luckily, in our example, we're talking about rental income. And so what you do is subtract the depreciation. So you can take, again, that decay and subtract it from your income,

• 5:35Dave Meyer?

  and that's how much you pay in taxes. So let's figure out what the depreciation would be for our property. Now, an important distinction when you're figuring this out is that you do not get to depreciate the entire property. When your taxes are assessed, the tax assessment will have a land value, and it will also have a building value. And so you need to know what this is. Usually, it's like 80/20 building to land, right? So I'm just going to use that because this is just an example. So our land value here would be about $60,000. And our building value would be the remainder of our purchase price. So that would be $240,000.

• 6:20Dave Meyer?

  So all we got to do now is take $240,000 and divide that by the oddly specific 27.5 years. And that gives us $8,727. This is the amount, $8,727, is the amount that we can deduct from our rental income. So you take your $2,840, you subtract this $8,727, and that equals a negative $5,887. This is now, in the eyes of the IRS, that's your taxable income on your rental property.

• 7:04Dave Meyer?

  So instead of paying taxes on $2,840, you are paying taxes on negative $5,887, which is to say you are paying zero tax on your rental income. It's amazing, right? So like, basically, you're paying no tax on your rental income. Now, there are a few things I need to explain, a few caveats here. So first, you'll notice we are not using our total depreciation, right? We're only using a piece of it. We could deduct more than $8,000, but we only deducted $2,840. But we're going to get back to that. Remember that this was negative because we're going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. Second thing, just keep remembering that you depreciate the building value and not the land. So you can go, this is public data.

• 7:48Dave Meyer?

  You can go up and look at the land value versus the building value, and only do this calculation on the building value. Third thing to remember is this is just residential property. If you're using a commercial property, like large multifamily, you absolutely can still use depreciation, but commercial is depreciated over, again, an oddly specific 39 years, not 27 and 1/2. And then there's the big one. This is really, really important, and it's something I think a lot of people forget about and miss, is that eventually, you do have to pay this tax. There is something, when you go to sell your property, called depreciation recapture, which is basically you paying this back eventually. And so if you're wondering, what does it matter?

• 8:32Dave Meyer?

  Why even do this if I am just going to repay it when you sell? Well, first and foremost, if you look at the time value of money, it says, I'm not going to totally get into this, but basically, time value of money tells us that the current value of cash is more value than money in the future. So a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 10 years. Why? Because you can invest that dollar today. And if you invested that, and it compounds, in 10 years, that dollar is probably going to be worth $2 or $2.5 or $3. And so having money now allows you to invest that over time. And so if you think about a rental property that you might own for 20 years,

• 9:14Dave Meyer?

  you just saved $2,840 that now you can compound for 20 years. And then, when you go and sell your rental property 20 years from now, the depreciation recapture is probably going to be a drop in the bucket compared to all the appreciation you've had, or the money that you've made compounding your savings on taxes. So this is absolutely still worth it with depreciation recapture. But if you're only holding on to a property for a few years, and you're not going to get a lot of appreciation, it's something to really remember that you're going to have to pay for. But depreciation is awesome. It's amazing advantage that you can use on any sort of rental property. All right, so let's move on to tax strategy number two.

• 9:58Dave Meyer?

  And I'm actually going to just lump two together because they are related. We're going to talk about bonus depreciation, so even better than the depreciation I just talked about, and cost segregation, which I'm just going to call cost seg, just for short. So as we talked about, standard depreciation treats the whole $240,000 building as one asset, right? The whole thing, one building is one thing we depreciated over 27 and 1/2 years. Doing something called a cost segregation study, which is, you can do yourself, but you usually go out and pay someone to do this for you. This is a process that allows you to look at that building and say, that's not one thing. A building is actually made up of dozens or hundreds of different components,

• 10:42Dave Meyer?

  right? There are appliances, there are floors, there are water heaters, there are hot water boilers, all of those things. And you shouldn't depreciate all of those things on the same 27 and a half year schedule. Instead, you should depreciate some of them faster because some of them have shorter useful lives. Just think about a fridge or a hot water heater, right? Like they last seven to 10 years, something like that, not 27 and a half. And so, anything that has through this useful life of 20 years or less qualifies for bonus depreciation. And bonus depreciation has been around for a couple of years. It came about during the 2017 jobs bill, but then it was phased out as part of that bill. But in the

• 11:25Dave Meyer?

  one big, beautiful bill act, that actually has brought it back. Bonus depreciation is back to 100% and it is permanent for properties acquired after January 19th, 2025. Before that bill, it was scheduled to sort of like phase out over time, but it is back. So this is really important. And so, the way that this would work is if you want to do depreciation, someone would come in and help you. I mean, you could do it yourself, but I recommend having someone come do this for you, is you're basically going to break all of the components of your home into different buckets. So certain things are five years. So like if for five

• 12:04Dave Meyer?

  years, we have carpet, we have fixtures, stuff like this, we have some appliances, that would be depreciated over five years. And as you'll notice, like the good thing about that is that would mean you get a higher percentage of the depreciation upfront. Instead of dividing the cost of a carpet by 27 and a half and depreciating it, you're dividing it by five and depreciating it, right? There are seven year things, right? We have things like a driveway, fencing, landscaping, stuff like that. And then we move on to 15 years, right? And we have stuff like a roof and so on and so forth. I think you all get the point, right? And so, it just basically allows you to break down your depreciation

• 12:48Dave Meyer?

  faster. So this is really useful if you have a ton of rental income, right? Like if your rental income on this hypothetical property that we're talking about was $15,000 or $20,000 of cash flow, remember our depreciation for that year was just about 8,700 bucks. And so you would get a big tax benefit just from regular depreciation, but you're not going to pay zero tax. If you do bonus depreciation, I'm not going to do the whole math here because again, usually like a professional goes out and does this, but let's just say your bonus depreciation came out to $30,000 in year one, then you would be able to depreciate all of your rental income and get that tax bill and your rental income back down to zero.

• 13:32Dave Meyer?

  And just do want to call out that cost segregation studies, having someone go out and do this for you costs money. You know, you can do it on the cheaper end, I think like 1,000, 1,500 bucks, but they can go up to 5,000 bucks. It sort of like depends on how professional it is, if you're doing it online, how big your property is, how complicated it is. So like if it's only going to save you a couple hundred bucks a year, it is not worth doing a cost segregation. But if it's going to save you potentially thousands of dollars, if you have high rental income and you want to depreciate against it, then it's definitely worth it. So definitely think through that before you go out and do this. Now again, you're probably wondering about that negative depreciation, right? Our negative income.

• 14:15Dave Meyer?

  Because even on our first example, we had negative, I think it was about $5,000 that we weren't using in depreciation that we could have, right? It was negative $5,887 that we could have been using. So what do you do with that? Can you actually use that in some productive way for your tax bill? You can, and I'll explain exactly how. And I do think this is an unbelievable tax unlock, but we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Imagine if real estate investing was easy. All the benefits of owning properties without all the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise flagship fund. Now,

• 14:56Dave Meyer?

  you can invest in the $1.1 billion real estate portfolio, starting with as little as $10. Visit fundrise.com/biggerpockets to explore the portfolio, see historical returns and more. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise flagship fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the funds prospectus at fundrise.com/flagship. This is a paid advertisement.

• 15:27Henry Washington?

  Here's a strategy that most W2 employees have never heard of. Normally, if you want to write off a rental property against your regular income, you need real estate professional status. That means tracking hundreds of hours a year. Rent to Retirement just launched a program that skips all of that. It's called the STR loophole tenant placement program. Here's how it works. You buy one of Rent to Retirement's Class A new construction investment properties, you set up an Airbnb listing and self-manage it for the remainder of the year. Rent to Retirement then rents the home as a short-term rental to establish it as an STR for the year, no furnishing required, making this the easy button to save five or six figures in taxes this year. And because you're the sole manager, there's no hourly

• 16:12Henry Washington?

  minimum to meet. That lets you use a cost segregation study to accelerate the depreciation and potentially write off over $100,000 against your income, even on your first rental. Add in cash back up to 13% of the home price, which exceeds $60,000 on some properties. With this massive cash back incentives, investors are seeing total returns up to 126%. New construction, A-class properties, and inventory is limited. Learn more at biggerpockets.com/retirement or text REI to 33777. Again, text REI to 33777.

• 16:51Dave Meyer?

  Summer bookings sound great until someone slips by the pool, gets hurt on your dock, or damages your property during a long holiday weekend. A lot of short-term rental investors don't realize their standard policy may leave gaps when it comes to short-term rental activity. That's why investors use Steadily. They offer landlord insurance built for real estate investors, including short-term rentals. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, you'll also get 5% off your landlord insurance premiums. Visit biggerpockets.com/landlordinsurance to learn more.

• 17:23Henry Washington?

  Quick word about a new pro perk you'll want to know about. Aven. If you're a homeowner, there's a good chance you're sitting on equity that you're not using. The problem is tapping into that usually means a cash out refi, a traditional second mortgage, or weeks of paperwork just to get approved. Aven built something different. It's a credit card, but it's backed by your home equity. So you get a lot of the rate benefits of a HELOC with the flexibility of a card you can use anywhere. Rates are typically well below a standard credit card, approval is fast and mostly online, and you can use it for anything. A renovation, paying down high interest debt, or just have more breathing room in your budget. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, there's an extra reason to check it out. Get approved for the Aven card and you'll get a $400 statement credit after

• 18:06Henry Washington?

  spending $400 on your Aven card. Enough to cover your entire annual Pro membership. Head over to aven.com/biggerpockets to see if you qualify. Aven Financial, NMLS number 2042345. Cards issued per 2020 license from Visa USA Inc. by Coastal Community Bank, NMLS number 462289. Member FDIC, equal housing lender, subject to approval, terms apply. Visit aven.com for details.

• 18:28Speaker 02

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• 19:00Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. Today, we're talking about how real estate can save you money on your taxes. Just as a reminder, we're walking through an example of a deal that is $300,000, down payment of 20%, mortgage rate of 7%, our rent's 2,800 bucks. Our cash flow on this property is about 2,840 for cash on cash return of 5%. And as we've shown, depreciation, both regular depreciation and bonus depreciation, can save you a ton of money on your taxes today so that you can reinvest that over time. But as we've shown in our examples so far, there are times, it's quite common, where you can depreciate more, you can take a bigger deduction than your income. And

• 19:41Dave Meyer?

  so your taxable income on paper becomes negative. And the question then becomes, is there something that you can do about this? And that brings us to our third tax strategy, which is called real estate professional status. A real estate professional for tax purposes is a specific IRS classification. It allows qualifying people to treat their rental income, their rental activities as non-passive. The IRS splits your income, if you're a real estate investor. Anything like my job, my W2 job at BiggerPockets, that is my active income. My money that I make from my rental properties in the eyes of the IRS is quote unquote passive income.

• 20:25Dave Meyer?

  I cannot take the losses I take on my passive income. So any of that depreciation, I cannot take that and say, I want to take that negative $40,000 I earned from my rental property cost seg bonus depreciation and apply it to my salary at BiggerPockets. That is not allowed. So when I get, Dave Meyer, when I have negative depreciation, I can't do anything about it. And it's frustrating, but that's the way it is. But if you qualify for this thing called the real estate tax professional status, you can take hypothetically, all of the rental, the losses, the depreciation from your passive investments like rental properties and apply it to your active income.

• 21:10Dave Meyer?

  And that is incredible because you can actually get your entire tax bill closer to zero. So rather than, for me, like, I rarely pay tax on my rental income because of depreciation, or I defer it, I should say, until I sell the properties. But I still pay full taxes on my income. If you're a real estate professional, you get to carry it over. So it's unbelievable for tax purposes if you're investing in real estate. But again, the qualifications are very strict and it's not something you can fudge, right? Like, you will get audited, you will get in trouble. Don't do that. You need to actually qualify for real estate professional status. So here's what the IRS says is real estate professional. There's a bunch of different criteria.

• 21:53Dave Meyer?

  The first is the 750-hour test. You must perform more than 750 hours of services, services during the tax year in real estate property trades or businesses in which you materially participate. So this is really important. First of all, you have to be in real property or trade. So these are things like being a real estate agent, being a property manager. I think even maintenance or contract work would count for this. Those are just usually some of the more common examples of this stuff. But you also have to materially participate in the property that you're using the depreciation for. So you couldn't be a real estate agent, do 750 hours of services and then take depreciation

• 22:37Dave Meyer?

  from a syndication that you're not involved in and apply it to your income as an agent. But if you own a rental property yourself, let's just say you did a cost seg, you got $40,000 negative from your rental income. You can then take that and apply that against the income you make as an agent. So let's just say for our bonus depreciation, we had negative 40K. Then, as an agent, you made in commissions, let's call it $100,000, right? So you subtract, you now take your 100K and subtract the 40K. And so now your taxable income,

• 23:19Dave Meyer?

  not just on your rental property, but on your other income is going down. So now when you go and pay your ordinary income tax, the IRS is only looking at $60,000. You were deducting $40,000. And if you're paying, let's say, 33% tax, right? If you're paying 33% on your tax, this would come out to, 1/3 of 40,000 is roughly $13,333. So you just saved another $13,000 on your ordinary income. That's absolutely unbelievable, right? So if you can do this, it's great. I should mention the other parts of the test, right? Again, you have to do 750 hours, you have to materially participate in these properties.

• 24:05Dave Meyer?

  And then there's also something called the 50% test. And this is that more than 50% of the services you perform have to be in real trades or businesses. So basically what this is saying is it has to be your main job. You can't have a corporate job working 40 hours a week and be an agent on the side and do this. Even if you're an agent for 750 hours, you cannot do that. It has to be the majority of the hours that you work in a year. But if you are an agent, if you are a property manager, if you are a contractor, this is magic. You get to count your rental losses against active income. I'm so jealous of this. I wish I can absolutely do it.

• 24:48Dave Meyer?

  I think it's probably the greatest tax advantage for real estate investors over the lifetime of your portfolio building. It will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, over the lifetime of your investing. If you can qualify, you should look into this. All right, so that is another great tax benefit. But we have more, we have a lot more. One of the most popular ones that real estate investors use, I love this and use it myself quite frequently, is the 1031 exchange. So the 1031 exchange allows you, when you go and sell your property, to take the profit that you have earned owning and operating that business

• 25:31Dave Meyer?

  and pay zero capital gains tax on it if you go and invest it in a new property, like, it's called like-for-like, invest it into a new investment property in a specific period of time. So there are a bunch of rules about it, but the big picture here is you do not pay capital gains tax on your property sale if you reinvest it. And hopefully you can see why this is so beneficial. It's similar to what we talked about with depreciation. It's not that you never pay those taxes. Eventually you might, unless you die, frankly, that is the way you get out of it, if you die owning these properties. But you get to defer your taxes indefinitely. You could keep 1031, 1031, 1031 for your whole life

• 26:16Dave Meyer?

  and never pay the capital gains tax. So that allows you to reinvest and compound your income over time. So let's go back to our example. Remember, we bought this property for 300K. And let's just say we held it for 10 years and it appreciated at 3%. And that, you know, of compounding, over 10 years, our property would be, I'm just going to round here, it's going to be worth $403,000, right? So that's the value of our property. We need to account for 7% sales costs. That's commissions and just getting the house ready and all that kind of stuff. So that would give you about $375,000, right? So that's where we would be.

• 26:58Dave Meyer?

  But then we need to account for the depreciation. Remember, that still you do have to pay when you go and sell this property. Let's just say the depreciation recapture is $40,000, right? So I'm just making this up as an example, right? But we have 375 minus 40K. So now our real, what we're walking away with is 335K, right? So with 335K, then we have to pay off our mortgage, right? It was originally a $240,000 mortgage. I'm going to keep the number simple here and just say we paid off $40,000 of our mortgage. So we then have to subtract $200,000, right? And we have to subtract our down payment because that's equity that we put in, that was 60K.

• 27:41Dave Meyer?

  So if we subtract 260K from 335, that gives us $75,000 in profit, roughly. I'm rounding, just so you know, but $75,000 in profit. Now, if you were not to do a 1031 exchange, you would pay capital gains tax on this at 20%, meaning you would pay $15,000 in taxes on this, right? So if you didn't do a 1031, you would pay capital gains, you'd pay $15,000. And at the end of the day, you would walk with 60 grand. Still awesome, right? You owned a cash flowing rental property for 10 years. You made money that way, now you're walking away with 60 grand.

• 28:25Dave Meyer?

  That's 100% return on your 60% equity in 10 years. Pretty good, right? But if you do a 1031, you don't pay this $15,000. So instead, you get to reinvest $75,000 instead of $60,000. Just think about what you can do with that. Obviously, it's $15,000 more dollars. But if you were to go out and put 25% down on your next investment property, if you paid the capital gains tax, what you would be able to afford is $240,000, right? Because you're putting 25% down on 60,000, you divide 60,000 by 25%, that's $240,000.

• 29:09Dave Meyer?

  But if you do the 1031 exchange, you can afford something worth $300,000. So just by doing this 1031 exchange, you can afford a bigger property. And this is how real estate investors scale up, right? Because you do this enough times, maybe this is the difference between buying a two unit and a three unit. But you do it again, maybe that's the difference between buying a four unit and an eight unit, an eight unit and a 10 unit, a 10 unit and a 15 unit. And this is probably the most common way people really start to scale up is they do something like a BRRRR. They hold on to these properties, they build that equity. And then when they go to trade up, they get to keep all the equity.

• 29:53Dave Meyer?

  They don't pay the 20% in tax. They get to keep rolling it into future properties. So the 1031, again, it costs money, but it's not that much. It's a couple thousand dollars. It's really, really worthwhile. The thing that is stressful about it is the rules about how quickly you have to buy a property. And there's this whole process where you have to quote unquote, identify properties within 45 days. So once you go and sell your property, you have 45 days to pick the properties that you're going to 1031 into. You don't actually have to close on them for 180 days. So you have six months, but that part's easy. You have to find the properties that you want. And so in certain kinds of markets, that can be hard. If you're in a really strong seller's market, like during COVID,

• 30:36Dave Meyer?

  it was hard to do a 1031 because you would have to find properties to buy in 45 days when deals were scarce and you didn't have a lot of negotiating leverage, right? So you might bid on a lot of properties and not get them. Now, it's a lot easier to do a 1031 because your ability to get things under contract is a lot better, in my opinion. So you have a better predictability when it comes to 1031. But just remember those rules. There's also some rules about how much debt you have to put on the property. You should look into all of this, but it's all very specific. Usually you hire someone called the 1031 intermediary who can help walk you through all of these things. But if you're an investor, you're selling a property, absolutely look into a 1031 exchange. It is a very powerful tax tool.

• 31:22Dave Meyer?

  All right. So that's the very powerful, popular 1031 exchange, but we have three more tax advantages that you can use that we're going to get to right after this break. You know, when I first started sharing my real estate journeys online, I didn't have a website. I had a spreadsheet, an Instagram account, and no idea how they'd ever connect. I remember thinking a real website was going to cost me thousands of dollars and take a developer weeks to build. So I kept putting it off. Then I found Hostinger. I typed in what I wanted, a site to show off my deals, share my story and capture leads. And their AI builder had a working version live in minutes. No code, no designer, no developer

• 32:04Dave Meyer?

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• 33:45Dave Meyer?

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• 34:27Dave Meyer?

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• 36:25Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. Today, we're talking about taxes and how you can save tons of money as a real estate investor. So far, we've talked about depreciation, bonus depreciation, real estate professional status, and the all-popular 1031 exchange. I've got three more strategies to go through for you, and the first two here are things that people just overlook. They're pretty simple. They're not complicated, but they're things that you should remember that you benefit from as a real estate investor. So tax strategy number five is mortgage interest deductions. This is something that a lot of people just forget about, but you are able to deduct the interest you pay on

• 37:08Dave Meyer?

  your mortgage from your expenses, from your tax bill. This is kind of similar to how you can do it on your primary residence. The rules are a little bit different. There's no like state and local tax cap, but luckily it doesn't require you to itemize. So there's actually, it's actually pretty easy to use. But just remember, when you're calculating in your head, when you're underwriting deals, remember that this is money that you get back at the end of the year. A big portion of your payments on your mortgage, especially in the beginning, are interest. The way that a mortgage works is your payment stays the same every month, but at the beginning of your mortgage, most of it is interest, and that percentage that goes to interest versus principal changes over time. In the beginning,

• 37:51Dave Meyer?

  it's very heavily interest. So you can get pretty substantial tax deductions from mortgage interest. And so this is something to just remember as a way that makes your deals a little bit better. Make sure you're accounting for this in your underwriting, because it really can go from taking a deal from okay to a good deal. So remember that tax advantage, too. Number six, I'll just go through these ones quickly, is operating expenses. When you're running a business, all of your expenses are tax deductible. So these are things like, if you're going out and buying equipment to do maintenance on your property, if you are paying for things like property management software, or bank fees, or home office, right?

• 38:36Dave Meyer?

  You can deduct using a home office. You can deduct the mileage on your car if you're driving to and from projects that you're doing. You can even deduct things like BiggerPockets Pro or BPCom, because that's professional development or software tools that you use for your business. And so remember to deduct all the stuff that you need for your business from your operating expenses. These are things that really help. Now, just remember the way this works. If you go out and spend $1,000 on tools for your rental property to do DIY stuff, you don't save $1,000. You deduct $1,000 from your taxable income, and if your tax rate is 33%, you would save $333. You save 33% of that $1,000. So remember

• 39:21Dave Meyer?

  that. People get confused about that. That is important to remember, but this is meaningful, right? It makes it cheaper, especially in the beginning, at least when I was starting. It was really nice, because I did my own property management for 10 years. You need a lot of stuff. I needed to buy and invest in tools. I needed to invest in banking and property management software, and I had to build a home office so I could run it. Like, I could deduct all of that, and that was really powerful and popular. The last tax strategy I'm going to go through today, we don't talk about it a lot on BiggerPockets, because it's been up and down. It's sort of like subject to political whims, but they are coming back, and that's something called opportunity zones. It's really cool. It's

• 40:05Dave Meyer?

  similar to a 1031 exchange, where when you go and sell an asset, instead of paying your capital gains, you can reinvest it into real estate and defer the capital gains tax in different ways. The 1031 exchange is great. I really like it, but you have to do sort of like-for-like real estate in a tight clock. Opportunity zones accept capital gains from any source. So if you went and sold stock and had a taxable then capital gains, right? You could put it into, instead of paying taxes on that stock, you can put it into an opportunity zone. If you sold the business, if you sold crypto, right? Like, all those things can work. Or, for example, if you don't find a property for your 1031 exchange

• 40:50Dave Meyer?

  within that 45-day window, that is a tight clock, right? So if you can't do that, you can look into opportunity zones. The way it works is they're basically areas that are designated by the government for economic development. They want investors to invest in these neighborhoods, to revitalize them. And so there's literal physical boundaries. You can go Google the boundaries and areas that are opportunity zones in your state, and you can find, if you can find, properties. So you can invest in individual properties, or a lot of people, what they do is invest in opportunity zone funds. And there's no right or wrong way to do it. I recommend you look into this, but it can really be beneficial. The thing about opportunity zones is you kind of have to hold on to the

• 41:32Dave Meyer?

  property for a long time. There's basically three different benefits, and they have three different timelines. So like, if you invest in an opportunity zone, you can basically defer your taxes for five years if you hold on to your new property for five years. Again, allows you to compound your principal. Five years, that's beneficial. Number two, you get a 10% step-up in basis. A step-up in basis basically reduces your overall tax, because in the eyes of the IRS, you paid more for your property essentially. And so when they calculate what your profit is, it lowers your profit, that lowers your taxes. That's great. Or the big one, I mean, this is kind of why I think people do it, is if you hold something for 10 years, the appreciation on the investment that you make is permanently

• 42:15Dave Meyer?

  excluded from capital gains. That's unbelievable, right? So it's really, really nice. Permanent untaxed appreciation is totally different category than deferral. Deferrals are good, but this is really great. Look into these things. But like, the one big beautiful bill act did make these permanent, but it restructured it. So like, you got to go and make sure you understand all of this. There are a lot of experts out there. Go to BiggerPockets, biggerpockets.com. Talk about it on the forums. People are always talking about it there. So look into opportunity zones, get some advice, but it can really be beneficial for people who are looking to buy and hold things long-term. So that's it. Those are the seven benefits to real estate. There are more for tax benefits, but these are the seven that

• 42:58Dave Meyer?

  I recommend investors take a look at. It's depreciation, regular depreciation, then bonus depreciation and cost seg, real estate professional status, the 1031 exchange, mortgage interest deduction, operating expense exclusions, and opportunity zones. And as you can see, all of this is written into the tax code. It is perfectly legal. It is encouraged. It is encouraging investment. So if you're a real estate investor, I really encourage you to take some time and think through how this can benefit you, because so many people get into the game looking at buying as many properties as possible, scaling as quickly as possible, and they overlook one of the easiest optimization hacks out there, which

• 43:40Dave Meyer?

  is just keeping more of the rental income that you already have. There are tons of tools and ways that you can do it, so don't ignore them. That's our show for today. Thank you all so much for watching and listening to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer, and I'll see you all next time.

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