It’s that lovely time of year again… tax season.
Whether you’re a business owner, employee, solopreneur or anywhere in between, tax season is something we all have to navigate and everyone’s situation looks different.
Your marital status, charitable donations, business expenses and many other factors can qualify you for legal tax write offs and benefits.
But did you know that investing in multifamily real estate can be one of those factors?
Many times when people think about investing, the primary reason they want to do it is so that they see a much greater return on their investment.
And while yes you want to see a steady cash flow for your investments, there are a few other benefits to consider that shouldn’t be overlooked.
When you invest in multifamily properties, you can usually take advantage of a few tax benefits that you’ll thank yourself for come tax season.
4 Major Tax Benefits for Multifamily Investing
- Depreciation
One of the first and major tax benefits you can take advantage of when investing in multifamily real estate are depreciated tax losses against the gains of the property.
Depreciation is the term used in real estate to describe the degrading condition of the property overtime.
Over the years, things will break, go out of date or simply need repaired which means the value of the property can decrease. This is completely normal and expected for any property!
The good news is that the IRS doesn’t hold that against you and instead allows you to use that depreciation amount as a tax deduction year after year for 27.5 years.
Why 27.5 years? This is the amount of time that the government rules a multifamily property to be profitable.
This means that as long as your money is invested into a property of this sort, you can reap this benefit for almost 30 years and that’s hard to find anywhere else!
- Cost Segregation
Another option that investors can take advantage of when it comes to taxes is utilizing cost segregation which goes hand in hand with depreciation.
Essentially what this does is accelerate the depreciation of certain aspects of the property, such as appliances, cabinets, etc. inside of the units so that you qualify for a greater depreciation deduction in a single year.
The only caveat with utilizing a cost segregation study is that it only benefits you during your ownership period.
Because of this, when you decide to sell or pull your investment from the property, you can be faced with a higher tax bill… but don’t let that scare you away!
There’s another benefit for investors to contrast this and it’s called the 1031 Exchange.
- 1031 Exchange
A 1031 exchange is an investing tool that allows you to defer your capital gains taxes by reinvesting the funds you pull out of a property and put them into another investment property of like kind.
This means that the new property must be of the same nature as the previous.
For example, if you pull your investment from an apartment complex, you can reinvest those funds into a different apartment complex and utilize the 1031 Exchange benefit in order to avoid that higher tax bill.
This will ensure that you continue to reap the Depreciation and Cost Segregation benefits year after year!
- Passive Income Tax Benefits
Lastly, one of the greatest tax benefits that investors can take advantage of involves passive income.
As an investor of a multifamily property, you receive what is known as passive income. The IRS sometimes refers to this type of income as unearned income.
For a multifamily investor, your earnings come from your investments in rental properties.
Just like active income, which is money received from your job or business in which you are actively involved, passive income is also taxable, but it’s treated much differently.
To qualify for passive income tax benefits, you have to spend less than 500 hours on the business. As an investor, this is usually the case which is good news for you during tax season!
Instead of being involved in the day-to-day operations, you simply invest your money with a trusted group of professionals and they take care of the hands-on work.
This allows you to qualify for huge tax breaks that you typically wouldn’t receive through traditional investing.
It’s for this reason alone that many people choose to work with investment groups like XSITE Capital so that they can trust they will see an ROI, while also benefiting in other ways without having to do a lot of extra work.
If you’re looking to increase your tax benefits for 2023, investing in multifamily real estate could be an option for you! To learn more about the process of getting involved, click here to connect.
– The XSITE Capital Team