Tax help for real estate professionals, investors and landlords

If you sell real estate for a living

Commission income arrives unevenly, nothing is withheld from it, and the bill lands all at once. The work is mostly about getting ahead of that:

• Quarterly estimates set from what you are actually earning, not last year’s guess
• Vehicle, mileage and home-office deductions documented properly rather than reconstructed in April
• Whether an S-corp election is worth it yet — and when it is not (see business owners)
• Brokerage 1099s reconciled against what you were actually paid
• Retirement options that do more for a good year than a last-minute deduction hunt

If you own rentals

Rental returns go wrong in predictable places, and most of them are fixable in advance:

• Depreciation set up correctly at the start, including improvements versus repairs
• Passive activity loss rules — what you can use this year and what carries forward
• Basis tracking across years, so a sale years from now is not an archaeology project
• Short-term rentals, which are taxed differently from long-term ones depending on how they are run
• Out-of-state property, which usually means another state return — we file multi-state routinely

Before you sell or exchange

This is the conversation worth having early. Holding periods, the home-sale exclusion, depreciation recapture and the strict timing rules of a 1031 exchange all turn on dates that cannot be changed afterwards. A client who called us two months before closing instead of two months after would have kept roughly $42,000 — that story is on the tax planning page.

Why clients in this industry stay

Jeff has been a licensed REALTOR since 2004 and has run property management alongside the tax practice, so rental, commission and closing-statement questions do not need translating first. Several of the reviews on our homepage come from agents and investors for exactly that reason.