A Blog About Tax Savings for Building Owners
Industrial developer SunCap Property Group has announced that it has delivered its 251,000 square foot industrial building for a Fortune 50 transporation company. The industrial building is located Ferncliff Park in Henderson County, NC. That’s western North Carolina – west of Asheville, NC.
A sign that business continues to keep chugging along here in the Upstate of South Carolina, Lee & Associates Greenville / Spartanburg, announced that their brokers signed 13 industrial and land deals during the month of December 2022. While business might be slowing, there is still a decent amount of activity that is continuing. Lee & Associates Greenville / Spartanburg
The Upstate of South Carolina continues to attract investment from all across the country and more and more people come to realize that the cost of living as well as land and building costs are less here than in most places across the country. The proximity to Charlotte, NC as well as Atlanta, GA are a big help. I-85 runs through Greenville and provides great transportation access to the south as well as cities further up on the east coast. The Inland Port Greer is also a massive business driver helping companies with their supply chains as it has direct access to the Port of Charleston.
Sometimes I will occassionally get a question from a building owner and/or investor as to whether or not cost segregation is a legitimate tax strategy. I will let them know it’s been law for well over 20 years now and in fact the IRS publishes a guide for its auditors to evaluate cost segregation. The IRS just published a new cost segregation audit technique guide. It had been many years since the last one was published. It’s 268 pages in case you’re interested in reading it :).
From the IRS document…
This Audit Techniques Guide (ATG) has been developed to assist Internal Revenue Service (Service) examiners in the review and examination of cost segregation studies. The primary goals are to provide examiners with an understanding of:
• Why cost segregation studies are performed for Federal income tax purposes;
• How cost segregation studies are prepared;
• What to look for in the review and examination of these studies; and,
• When certain issues identified in the cost segregation study need further
examination.
The ATG was originally developed by a cross-functional team of Service Engineers and Revenue Agents. It was updated by members of the DCE PN and is not intended as an official IRS pronouncement. Accordingly, it may not be cited as authority.
So if you wonder if you should hire a reputable and trusted firm for cost segregation for your building / investments, just realize the IRS has published a 268 page guide for its auditors to examine the accuracy of your cost segregation study.
If you’d like to talk to a firm with a long history of successfully completing these studies for building owners and investors, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, John Murphy, CSSI at 864-276-1448.
There is a movement afoot in the U.S. for some cities and now even states eliminating parking lot minimums when it comes to new development or redevelopment projects. California has now officially banned parking minimums.
Given the high cost of development and land, this makes sense to allow the developers to put more toward the building itself rather than allocate additional space for parking to meet an arbitary requirement by a city or county council. That said, America hasn’t given up cars yet and people still need parking. It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.
I can imagine that some developments will scale back too much and word will get out that those developments are hard to get in and out of and may deter customers from showing up. I guess we’ll see how this goes. My guess is we won’t have a good read on this for at least 10 years.
Mulit-Housing News is out with their annual list of the top development firms building multi-family housing across the U.S. in 2022. There were some massive numbers put up by the top firms in 2022.
Top 10 firms are:
Despite the constant state of negative business news in general, multi-family continues to plough ahead with consistent development. From Mulit-Housing News, “Despite rising construction costs in recent years, multifamily development has maintained a strong pace. A recent supply update from Yardi Matrix predicts deliveries will exceed 420,000 units by the end of the year and expects multifamily completions to hit north of 430,000 in 2023 and more than 450,000 in 2024.”
There has been lots of doom and gloom about real estate ever since the Fed started to raise interest rates. And it may well be warranted. I suspect these deep pocked firms will be just fine and will weather whatever choppy market we face in the coming year or two.
Cost segregation is a terrific strategy for any commercial building owner. New retail development tends to do quite well we are finding especially in part because of the land improvements to develop the property. New retail buildings for Starbucks for example are excellent for cost segregation.
With a new Starbucks not only do you tend to see great numbers from the 15 year class life category but also in the 5 year as well as the stores tend to be finished nicely.
If you’re interested in getting a no-obligation free estimate on your building, please don’t hesitate to reach out at 864-276-1448. I work all over the U.S.
Two sizable commercial real estate firms have officially merged together. According to the Columbia Business Report, the two companies have been working toward this for four years. NAI Earle Furman and NAI Columbia have joined forces.
“We are excited that NAI Columbia is officially rolling into our business family,” Jon Good, CEO of NAI Earle Furman said in a news release. “This collaboration will mutually benefit both of our firms with more manpower, added support and additional resources. Together we will be able to better serve our clients throughout South Carolina and beyond.”
This sure seems to make a lot of sense especially in the world of commercial real estate where there are some very big players with large networks who serve the Upstate and Midlands area.
Last week Congress released Donald Trump’s tax returns in hopes to find something that they can either shame him with or perhaps file criminal charges. But remember, Trump was and is a real estate developer and owner before becoming President of the United States. I remember hearing people clammoring to see his taxes but my thoughts were it’s likely we’ll see little to nothing because he probably maximizes his real estate depreciation to minimize or eliminate his tax liability. It turns out that clearly is one of the strategies he utlizes. The best ways to maximize depreciation on your buildings is by doing cost segregation.
According to the article in BisNow, Trump used a number of different strategies including loss carryforwards to eliminate his tax liability. Don’t think this can be used by the small to midsized investor? Think again. These kinds of strategies are available to all U.S. taxpayers. You just have to have a tax professional who can help you think strategically about these things as well as have a trusted source for cost segregation.
If you own an investment property or commercial building that has a depreciable basis of at least $200,000 and you have not done cost segregation yet on your building, please reach out and I will be happy to discuss this with you. We’ll run a no obligation estimate that will show you what we expect to achieve with increased accumulated depreciation and what it will cost. You can then discuss it with your tax professional and decide yea or nea. It’s that easy. We’ll collect a few documents from you as well as send someone out to photograph your property and then we’ll get started on the study. It’s pretty painless to you as the owner. It takes us six weeks to complete our engineering-based cost segregation study.
Just a reminder for building owners and their tax professionals out there…we are the outsourced provider for hundreds of tax professionals and firms who need to get cost segregation done for their clients. We can help with partial asset dispositions on large ($100k+) renovations as well as capitalization to expense reversals. If you have clients who have buildings and if they haven’t done a cost seg study, reach out and let’s talk. We can usually make it work for a client down to about $200,000 in depreciable building cost / basis. We are still 5-6 weeks away from our deadlines to hit tax deadlines of 3/15 and 4/18/23…that time will go fast. Let’s get them scheduled.
Many REALTORS® own investment property and some own commercial property. If they do real estate full time, generally they can use depreciation from their real estate investments to offset tax liability from their real estate sales activity. As always, please consult with your own tax advisor to make sure you qualify for this and that your involvement with your investments is such that you can utlize the depreciation to lower your income taxes.
But let’s say you do qualify and you have the following scenario…
REALTOR® Commissions for 2022 net after expenses: $150,000. Let’s say you own a single family rental home that you purchased this year for $325,000 and the land is worth $50,000 leaving you with a building cost / basis of $275,000. When you evaluate your P&L on your rental home after deducting your expenses, debt service and standard depreciation, you end up making $2,000 net profit this year. That certainly isn’t going to create much of a tax burden for you so you wouldn’t do a cost segregation study just to save $700-$800 taxes for the year. But this isn’t the entire picture. In this situation, a cost segregation study may help you save about $15-$20k in income taxes. Let’s take a look.
If this building was put into service right away Jan. 1, 2022, your depreciation for the year would be $10,000 which is the straight line depreciation amount you can take each year for the life of your ownership or until you’ve fully depreciated the building after 27.5 years. A cost segregation study might generate a depreciation expense of about 20-25% of the cost basis which was $275,000. A study would generate a depreciation expense of about $55,000 – $68,000 which means this REALTOR could likely lower their taxable income from $150,000 to $95,000 or lower. That might be a 30% tax savings for this agent which would be about $15-$20,000. The cost to do a study like this might be $2,250 – $2,500 – net cost would be about $1,500. Pay $1,500 and save $15,000 on your taxes. This is a 10:1 ROI or a 1,000% return on your money. Not bad.
REALTORS® especially should consider cost segregation as a tax minimizing strategy if they own rental investment properties or commercial properties. As always, please consult with you tax advisor. If you have questions or would like to get a quote, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at john.murphy@costsegregationservices.com or 864-276-1448. I work all over the country in all 50 states.
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