Multifamily Tax Advantage – K-1 Losses

Hey there. I want to talk real briefly about tax advantages in multifamily real estate investing, and there are a couple, but I just met with my CPA yesterday. We filed our personal tax return for 2017. We always extend our corporate taxes and our personal taxes so that we get a little more time to put all the books together, but we’re going back over last year, and there were some K1 losses that came through to me personally from some projects, multifamily projects that I’m invested in. Of course, I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not a CPA, and this is not accounting advice, specifically. I’m just sharing some of my personal experiences with. One of the projects that I’m an investor in had an $87,000 K1 loss on it. What that means is I take my income for the year, and then I have this $87,000 loss to reduce my taxable income, which is good news, for sure, especially if, in the same year, if I have other things that are selling and I’m having to pay capital gains on. This could be further enhanced through the use of what’s called a cost segregation study. What I do on our multifamily projects that we buy, if we’re planning on holding it for a couple of years, we’ll go in and, right after the purchase, we’ll hire an engineer to come in break the property down into its component parts. They’re going to break it down into land and the building and then the building’s going to be broken down further into carpet, fencing, and all these component parts. The takeaway there is that you can accelerate depreciation. Rather than a standard 27-1/2-year schedule of depreciation, a lot of these components, you can break down shorter. Of course, there’s some new things in the tax code, which I will not elaborate on because it’s outside of my realm of expertise, but something that I’m working my CPA on is to take a lot of the depreciation in that first year. What that encourages businesses to do is to invest more capital, to buy buildings, etc., etc., but I just wanted to talk about that one specific $87,000 paper loss on one of my investments, and that was just one of them, and there were several in that year that really add up to a lot of losses. I’ve got a friend that says, “If you’re in real estate investing and you’re paying taxes, you’re doing it wrong.” Now, I’m not saying to do anything outside the scope of what’s in the tax code, but the tax code is written to specifically incentivize entrepreneurs and business owners to make these capital investments into our city and our country. The tax code is written specifically to take advantage of that. The people that, unfortunately, don’t typically take advantage of this are strictly W2 employees, and specifically I’m talking about high-end [inaudible], dentists, doctors, that type of thing, where you have a high W2 income and no other vehicles to reduce your taxable income. That’s really who I’m speaking to in this message is your high-income W2 earners that don’t have any paper losses to show for the year and are paying in that high tax bracket. I would encourage you to look at multifamily investments as a vehicle to lower your taxable income during the year, and that’s one of many strategies you want to discuss with your CPA as an overall investment strategy, but a tax reduction strategy, too, because we all know it’s not what you earn every year that matters. It’s what you get to keep and take home that really matters, and there are probably some simple tweaks you can make if you haven’t spent a lot of time and attention on it that will greatly reduce your taxable income, and, thus, improve that take-home pay, which is, at the end of the day, all that matters. Doesn’t matter if you made 500K in a year if you’re giving away a giant portion of it in taxes, and there’s something simple you can do to change that. Just a little bit about my experiences with that, one of the many reasons we love multifamily real estate investing. Have a great day.