Can you write off a loss on an investment property?
If you sold your investment property for less than your cost base, you have a deductible loss that you can claim when you file your taxes for the year. Losses from the sale of a personal residence are not deductible. Generally, you can only claim tax losses for the sale of properties that are used for business or investment purposes. You can usually deduct your losses from other income you have, such as income from a job or other investments.
If you sell a rental property with locked PALs, you may be able to deduct them from sale in addition to deducting any Section 1231 losses. You may see a loss if you need to sell a rental property in a declining market or simply need to invest more money in a property than it’s worth. Deductions from rental income (especially large losses) are often subject to special scrutiny by the tax authorities. So it’s important that you make sure you’re doing it right. In principle, you can only deduct passive losses to the extent that you can cancel profits from passive activities.
However, to do this, you need to understand how investment real estate portfolios are primarily taxed. If you’re an active participant in your rental properties, you may be able to deduct more rental losses from your taxes than a passive investor. In this case, you may be wondering whether you can use your lost rental property to reduce your taxable income for the year. On the other hand, if you simply bought the properties to house your home or second home there one day, you wouldn’t have bought the properties for investment purposes and probably wouldn’t be able to suffer a loss from your federal income tax returns.
If you are not a real estate professional or an active investor (more on that in the next two sections), investing in rental properties is classified as a passive business activity. The above article is intended to provide general financial information that serves to educate a large part of the public. It does not offer personalized tax, investment, legal or other business and professional advice. In other words, if you’re selling your property at a loss and you’ve valued shares that you can sell in the same year, you can use the loss of your property to offset the profit from your shares. In fact, IRS statistics show that more than half of the schedule e-forms submitted that report rental income and expenses each year
are defined as those who own rental properties but do not play an active role in their day-to-day operations. When you collect your taxes, it’s not uncommon for your rentals to show a loss for tax reasons in your schedule E, even if they actually made a significant profit. The deduction only applies to non-real estate professionals who own at least 10% of a rental property that they actively manage and that is operated at a loss in a given tax year.
