Real estate tax deduction guides
Free resources for rental property owners who want to understand REPS qualification, hour tracking requirements, and IRS activity categories.
What Is Real Estate Professional Status?
The 750-hour rule, material participation tests, qualifying activities, and common mistakes. Everything you need to know about REPS.
Read guideHow to Track Property Management Hours
What the IRS expects in your records, three tracking methods compared, and best practices for defensible documentation.
Read guideIRS Activity Categories for Rental Properties
Complete reference of 10 IRS-recognized activity categories with examples and typical time ranges for each.
Read guideREPS for Married Couples
How qualification works when filing jointly — one spouse qualifies, aggregation elections, and common traps.
Read guideSchedule E for Rental Properties
How rental income and expenses are reported, line-by-line walkthrough, and common filing mistakes.
Read guideWhy Your Profitable Rental Has a Tax Loss
How depreciation creates paper losses on cash-flow positive rentals, why that matters for REPS and STR deductions, and what most landlords get wrong.
Read guideCost Segregation Studies for Landlords
Accelerating depreciation to maximize deductions. When it makes sense, what it costs, and why REPS matters.
Read guideSTR Tax Deductions
What short-term rental owners can write off — cleaning, platform fees, the 14-day rule, and more.
Read guideSTR Bookkeeping Basics
Practical bookkeeping for Airbnb hosts — tracking income, separating expenses, and staying organized.
Read guideSTR vs LTR: Tax Differences
Side-by-side comparison of how short-term and long-term rentals are taxed differently.
Read guideIs Your CPA Overcharging You?
Where your tax prep bill actually goes, and how better documentation cuts the cost.
Read guideWhy the IRS Rejects Most REPS Hour Logs
Tax Court consistently throws out reconstructed hour logs. Here's what 'contemporaneous' actually requires — and why your spreadsheet probably doesn't cut it.
Read guideWhat REPS Tracking Apps Actually Capture on Manual Entries
We compared the top tracking tools on one question: what metadata do they record when you log hours by hand? Most log nothing.
Read guideReady to start tracking?
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