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Physician Series Part 2: Real Estate Tax Strategies to Offset Physician Income
Physicians with multiple income streams have a unique opportunity to save significantly on taxes, especially when real estate is involved. In this episode of the Hidden Money Podcast, CPAs Mike Pine and Kevin Schneider dive deep into real estate tax strategies tailored for doctors. Whether you're investing in short-term rentals, buying commercial property, or trying to offset income from a surgery center, this episode breaks down exactly how to structure your investments for maximum tax efficiency.
Guest
What We Cover
Physicians often find themselves in a high-income bracket, burdened by both income tax and limited time freedom. However, one of the most underutilized yet powerful tax-saving tools available to doctors is real estate. Whether you're investing in long-term rentals, short-term vacation homes, or owning the building you practice out of, strategic real estate planning can significantly reduce your tax liability.
1. Depreciation: The “Magic Deduction”
Unlike most assets, real estate tends to appreciate over time. Yet the IRS allows property owners to depreciate those assets—meaning you get to deduct a portion of the property’s cost each year, even as its market value increases. This creates a unique opportunity for physicians to reduce their taxable income while growing long-term wealth.
2. Long-Term Rentals and Real Estate Professional Status (REP)
Long-term rental properties can offset active income—but only if you or your spouse qualify as a Real Estate Professional (REP). This requires:
- At least 750 hours/year of real estate-related activities
- Over 50% of your working time dedicated to real estate
For physicians, meeting these requirements personally is often impossible due to demanding hours. But if you have a stay-at-home spouse, they can qualify as the REP—unlocking significant deductions that offset your medical income.
3. Short-Term Rentals: A Game-Changing Loophole
Short-term rentals (STRs)—properties rented on average for fewer than 7 days—offer a powerful workaround. If you or your spouse materially participate (often by putting in 100–500+ hours per year), you can deduct losses from STRs without needing REP status.
This is ideal for dual-physician households or those who can’t commit to full-time real estate involvement. STRs often produce higher returns but require more active management due to frequent guest turnover.
4. Offsetting Passive Medical Income
Many physicians receive K-1 income from surgery centers or medical investments. These are typically passive investments—but so is rental real estate. By investing in rental properties, you can use passive losses (via depreciation) to offset passive income.
Additionally, if you own the building your practice operates out of, self-rental strategies—such as paying rent to your own property-holding LLC—can create even more opportunities for deductions.
5. Start Small, Think Big
The beauty of these strategies is scalability. Many physician clients begin by acquiring one or two properties per year. As rental income builds and equity compounds, they slowly reclaim control over their schedule and finances. Some even achieve financial independence within a decade—no longer forced to trade time for money.
Tax Strategy with Revo Tax
For high-earning physicians with multiple income streams, real estate offers a strategic path to both tax savings and long-term wealth. Whether you're leveraging REP status, the short-term rental exemption, or self-rental strategies, the key is to treat real estate like a business—and partner with professionals who understand the tax code inside and out.
EP 24 Transcript
00:00:18:01 - 00:00:50:48
Mike
Welcome to our second episode of our physician series for the 2025 Hidden Money podcast. Kevin, I excited. Hopefully you've watched our first episode, but if you haven't, if you watch this and go back and check that one out, this one. We're excited to talk about how physicians can save money in taxes, kind of like all of our episodes, but this one we're going to focus mainly on physicians with with multiple income streams and one of our favorites, how physicians can use real estate to save taxes.
00:00:51:01 - 00:01:17:42
Mike
I love real estate for so many reasons. One main reason is you're not really creating anymore. It's it's a finite resource. And unless it's some place like Detroit, Michigan, it's always going up in value. But depreciation, it's a magical deduction. And depreciation can allow you to seriously reduce your taxes. And you get to depreciate an asset that's going up in value.
00:01:17:47 - 00:01:36:22
Mike
When you go buy a vehicle, you get to depreciate it. You get expenses for it if it's used in business, but it's going to go down in value the second you drive it off the lot. When you buy real estate, not only is it often option for a potential for an income stream in the future, it's fair market value is going to go up and you get to take depreciation.
00:01:36:22 - 00:01:39:53
Mike
So thanks for joining us. We're going to talk about that in this episode. Yeah.
00:01:39:56 - 00:01:40:20
Speaker 3
And
00:01:40:20 - 00:01:42:29
Kevin
there's so many ways to structure real estate and
00:01:42:32 - 00:02:01:27
Kevin
handle real estate when it comes to taxation. So this is going to be just blanket advice. We recommend that you talk to either us or a CPA who knows what they're doing to actually enact this. So what we see a lot now is in our last episode, we talked about the self-employed physician who we maximize our tax savings at the entity level of their practice level.
00:02:01:36 - 00:02:07:50
Kevin
And now the tax liability has now passed through down to them personally. And so now we have to actually pay our tax.
00:02:07:50 - 00:02:08:45
Speaker 3
So
00:02:08:45 - 00:02:34:27
Kevin
what can we do now on our 1040 tax return to reduce this income that I have as a physician I and let's say there's multiple strategies. One, if you're married, in your spouse in this we see this a lot where typically you have a high income earning doctor, and then you have a stay at home spouse, and that stay at home spouse is kind of managing the house, managing the schedules, managing, you know, this life.
00:02:34:32 - 00:02:40:45
Kevin
And that spouse can actually be utilized for tax purposes when it comes to real
00:02:40:45 - 00:02:41:02
Speaker 3
estate.
00:02:41:02 - 00:02:46:53
Mike
Be careful how that sounds. You're not using your spouse. You're partnering with your spouse.
00:02:46:53 - 00:02:51:09
Speaker 3
Yes, partnering with your spouse, utilizing their time. Yes.
00:02:51:09 - 00:03:08:13
Kevin
utilizing kind of their, they're ability to use this tax, this section of the the Internal Revenue Code to reduce the physician's income, the high income earning income, and the way that's done. So you have you have two types of real estate. When when we're when we're talking real estate for tax purposes.
00:03:08:13 - 00:03:10:52
Kevin
Now in reality there's more than just two types of real estate.
00:03:10:52 - 00:03:11:44
Speaker 3
hunters. You
00:03:11:44 - 00:03:16:55
Kevin
have short term, mid term, long term. You have all sorts of different categories in real
00:03:17:13 - 00:03:19:42
Mike
Residential, commercial, yada yada.
00:03:19:55 - 00:03:22:32
Speaker 3
Yeah. But when we're talking taxes, it's two. You got
00:03:22:32 - 00:03:28:02
Kevin
short term real estate your Airbnbs in your Vrbo. Those are average lease time at seven days or less.
00:03:28:02 - 00:03:55:32
Kevin
That's short term then. If it's not short term it defaults to long term. So long term as you're going to be your your single family multifamily properties could be, storage facilities, anything that has lease time or lease agreements that are longer than seven days on average throughout the year. Those are long term rentals. Those two have different tax rules, sets of how to eliminate W-2 income for the position, or 1099 income or business income from the position.
00:03:55:56 - 00:03:57:51
Mike
Or heck, any other kind of income.
00:03:58:01 - 00:03:58:22
Kevin
Yes,
00:03:58:22 - 00:03:59:03
Mike
yes.
00:03:59:03 - 00:04:20:05
Kevin
this or any other income, this, you know, any sort of W-2 income. But depending on where you go, if you go, the short term rental route or the long term rental route will drastically change how we structure how we tax plan. Now, the overall tax plan, the tax deductions are roughly going to be the same in either, the depreciation.
00:04:20:05 - 00:04:28:45
Kevin
What we can deduct that doesn't change. What changes is how do I utilize that targeted, segment of real estate to reduce my active income?
00:04:28:59 - 00:04:53:35
Mike
Absolutely. I do want to just throw out. We're always speaking in generalities. You have to in tax speak, generally speaking. That's why we say that a lot. At least I say that a lot. There are ways that a 30 day or less property can be treated as a short term rental, bed and breakfast type places. There's a lot of caveats, but we're speaking about 99% of the tax rules here with real estate.
00:04:53:39 - 00:05:10:33
Mike
It's a it's a big get. How about I'll talk about the short term real estate and you talk about the long term one. So, actually no. Let's go to real estate professional first because without knowing that you don't understand the amazing beauty of the short term rental loophole. Right.
00:05:10:33 - 00:05:20:12
Mike
So unless you understand the rules of real estate professional with long term or commercial real estate, you don't really understand the huge advantage of short term rental real estate.
00:05:20:17 - 00:05:40:12
Mike
Like I said, they both have similar tax tax deductions and availability. But long term, the only way you or your spouse are able to deduct actual or active income from real estate is if you all qualify, one or both of you qualify as a real estate professional. What's it take to be a real estate professional?
00:05:40:17 - 00:06:10:18
Kevin
A real estate professional is going to be 750 hours a year, and any qualified real estate activities such as brokering, buying, selling, real estate, fixing it up, repairing it, being a general contractor, if you're if you're working and with your hands and real estate roofers qualify as reps, I can even get a plumber. If you're improving real estate, that is qualified real estate activity time and you have 750 hours of that and over half your working time has to be in real estate
00:06:10:18 - 00:06:12:10
Mike
That's where it gets most people.
00:06:12:14 - 00:06:13:29
Speaker 3
That's why the doctor
00:06:13:29 - 00:06:15:04
Kevin
is never going to qualify as a rep.
00:06:15:04 - 00:06:32:13
Kevin
You may let's say you're a hustler of a doctor. You're superhuman. You're able to work 3000 hours a year and your job as a as a physician, and you got 750 hours of real estate management. You're just killing it. I don't know how that's even possible. You don't sleep, but let's say you do that. You're still not a rat.
00:06:32:20 - 00:06:50:24
Kevin
Even though you hit the 750 hours, because over half your working time was not in real estate. That's why you're never going to hit rep status. But if you're married and your spouse stays at home, they have no other job that they will. They have a job, but no other job for the IRS purposes where they're earning income.
00:06:50:39 - 00:06:51:32
Kevin
That goes to that
00:06:51:32 - 00:06:52:11
Speaker 3
yes.
00:06:52:16 - 00:07:01:18
Mike
Even though my wife works, stays at home raising our kids and doing homeschooling. She works more than I do. The IRS does not consider that a job. That's
00:07:01:18 - 00:07:02:13
Kevin
It's not a it's not a
00:07:02:13 - 00:07:03:53
Speaker 3
job or profession. So
00:07:03:53 - 00:07:24:26
Kevin
she your spouse could get 750 hours managing the real estate you're buying with the positions. Income could get 750 hours. Maybe getting a realtor's license and buying and selling real estate on behalf of clients. Whatever gets you to that 750 hurdle and over half their working time is going to be in real estate.
00:07:24:31 - 00:07:27:26
Kevin
So now there are real estate professional in that.
00:07:27:28 - 00:07:35:20
Mike
750 hours. If you do the math, it's just under 14 or just under 15 hours a week. It's doable.
00:07:35:24 - 00:07:35:52
Speaker 3
Yeah. And
00:07:35:52 - 00:08:03:09
Kevin
let's think about this. Let's say you're making $1 million as a physician. Your spouse stays at home and your buy, let's say $1 million long term rental property. The amount of tax savings on $1 million rental property against that million dollar physician income, you're probably going to be saving probably 150 and tax. I would say, bottom line, if you bought $1 million rental, maybe a little less, maybe a little more, depending on the circumstance.
00:08:03:09 - 00:08:06:25
Kevin
But let's say for this example, it's $150,000 of tax
00:08:06:25 - 00:08:07:43
Speaker 3
saved. That's
00:08:07:43 - 00:08:11:23
Kevin
$150,000 job for 15 hours a
00:08:11:23 - 00:08:13:46
Speaker 3
week. Yeah. Think about that.
00:08:13:46 - 00:08:27:45
Kevin
you're you're the benefit of them pouring 15 hours a week for the year to get rep status and utilize rep status and their material participation in the real estate we're buying with that physician's income is $150,000.
00:08:27:47 - 00:08:29:01
Kevin
Job
00:08:29:01 - 00:08:29:29
Speaker 3
Yeah
00:08:29:29 - 00:08:30:56
Kevin
15 hours a week. I would do that.
00:08:31:14 - 00:08:55:20
Mike
One of our favorite clients, he's also one of my physicians in the specialty areas. She is an amazing doctor. Her husband does a lot of stuff, but he wanted to kind of back down a little bit. There was a discussion they had, and she said, if you can help save me this, save us this amount of money in tax by qualified as a real estate professional, you can keep some of it.
00:08:55:25 - 00:09:18:10
Mike
He was happy to do it. I think it's been a couple of years since then. And now they're not so happy because it is it. Running real estate is a long it's a intense job doing a lot of work. And they wanted to hire full service management companies. But it can be done. And it works for y'all in Kevin's example, let's say you save the $150,000 on $1 million property, you might have only had to pay 15% down.
00:09:18:15 - 00:09:34:17
Mike
Generally speaking, if it's a commercial real estate, you're buying it as a as a rental property, you generally gonna have to come up with 20 to 25% down. However, there are rules about buying a second home. And I just want to get into this for a second. We're not finance experts, but we work with a lot of good ones.
00:09:34:24 - 00:09:54:02
Mike
Financing. You can buy second homes and eventually turn them into a rental property. We see it all the time in the short term rental market, but also in long term. There's some rules, like you have to be more. The home has to be more than 50 miles away from where your house is. If you buy a second home, you can qualify for 10% down.
00:09:54:02 - 00:10:18:10
Mike
And we've seen a lot of physicians do this. They buy 100, they put $100,000 down, save 130 to 170,000 in taxes, meaning the IRS completely subsidized their down payment. They got some cash to boot. And you own the equity in that property. The bank is financing most of it, but you get 100% of the fair market value increase in it.
00:10:18:15 - 00:10:43:22
Mike
Now, physicians, you guys work hard. And the way the world's changing and private equity is changing, you are seriously stuck. Trading your time for money. And time is a very finite resource. But consider this if you can start to grow a portfolio that can make you money, it can be passive in the future. To be real estate professional, you gotta have some active material participation, but it can be passive in the future.
00:10:43:22 - 00:11:03:02
Mike
You can turn it into once you get ten properties, higher management company handle all of them. You can replace a significant portion of your salary and then only work when you want to work. If you want to work, just imagine the freedom to say no, I am not taking those weekend shifts. No, I'm not going to be on call.
00:11:03:03 - 00:11:11:39
Mike
But once a year you could have that freedom without hurting your financial freedom if you do something like this. Yeah.
00:11:11:39 - 00:11:16:09
Kevin
And that that's an amazing kind of weight off
00:11:16:09 - 00:11:17:53
Speaker 3
your shoulders. If
00:11:17:53 - 00:11:36:57
Kevin
you if you can get out of the hamster wheel for a little bit and slowly buying 2 or 3 rental properties a year, and if your spouse can manage those, we're saving taxes. We're doing we're, we're, we're, we're exponentially driving our net worth up to where you're going to be feeling in your pocketbook,
00:11:36:59 - 00:11:39:03
Speaker 3
The difference.
00:11:39:03 - 00:11:40:28
Kevin
what you're doing with your cash.
00:11:40:28 - 00:11:43:19
Kevin
And you can have that freedom. I'm saying to say no. The
00:11:43:19 - 00:11:44:19
Speaker 3
yes. No,
00:11:44:19 - 00:11:52:24
Kevin
I'm not working anymore. This weekends, on weekends, I'm gonna spend time with my kids. No, I am not going to be working, when I should be on vacation. No,
00:11:52:24 - 00:11:53:33
Speaker 3
yeah I am,
00:11:53:33 - 00:11:59:54
Kevin
I am secure enough with my financial future, with the investments we've made with the tax plan that I can say no.
00:12:00:25 - 00:12:22:35
Mike
If you were a younger physician with family, I'm just going to go back to my father, the physician. He's retired now, live in a pretty decent a really good life, actually. He his biggest regret in life is not that he didn't put in more time at the clinic, or he didn't win more teaching awards. His biggest regret is not spending more time with myself and my sister growing up.
00:12:22:40 - 00:12:44:49
Mike
You have a chance to change that, but it's going to take doing things differently. Don't be. Don't follow Einstein's definition of insanity and continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. Change it up now. Change it up while you still have time. Don't miss out on your kids ball games. Don't miss out on their graduation parties.
00:12:44:54 - 00:13:08:39
Mike
You can change that, but you gotta learn to change your facts. And honestly, this is what our podcast is all about. It hidden money. Change the way you consider tax. It is not something to hurt you. It shouldn't be considered a painful burden every year. It should be considered an amazing power that you can leverage, a tool that you can leverage to grow in your financial freedom.
00:13:08:43 - 00:13:16:13
Mike
If you don't have kids and you want to keep working 3000 hours a year, go for it. But continue to grow your financial freedom by leveraging off the tax code.
00:13:16:13 - 00:13:32:16
Kevin
Yeah. Then the last detail, I think on the long term, there's well, there's two major things I want to hit on real quick. One, let's say your stay at home spouse gets a real estate license and then brokers and buy sell some real estate on behalf of clients. They get some income off that. Yeah we need a tax plan off
00:13:32:16 - 00:13:32:59
Speaker 3
that.
00:13:33:04 - 00:13:33:25
Speaker 3
But
00:13:33:25 - 00:13:53:19
Kevin
just becoming a real estate professional does not allow the investments you make with the position, income or wherever the income the to buy these rental properties, just because you have maybe a couple long term rental properties and your spouse is a realtor, does not still make those rental properties. You have the tax deductible against the doctor's income.
00:13:53:19 - 00:13:55:05
Kevin
There's still more steps. That's the material
00:13:55:05 - 00:13:56:44
Speaker 3
participation. That
00:13:56:44 - 00:14:08:16
Kevin
estate professional has to manage those rental properties in order to tax plan with it. So you can't be passive in the real estate as well. On top of rap, you have to do both. You have to be a rep and be and materially
00:14:08:44 - 00:14:30:04
Mike
But you don't have to materially participate in every property. You got to at least materially participate in one. And there's one more beautiful thing here. So let's say you try this. Your spouse's doing it after two years. They're managing your two properties. And and they're just tired and they're like, I don't want to buy more properties because it's just adding to my to to my time requirements.
00:14:30:04 - 00:14:58:59
Mike
It's not right. I don't want to keep doing this. Once you're a real estate professional, once you materially participate in one property, not only do you get the deductions from your individually owned properties, now you can invest in like an apartment complex syndication and utilize that rep status. If your tax preparer knows what they're doing to group it correctly, the material participation grouping for real estate professionals, and get the depreciation from those investments that you are 100% passive in.
00:14:59:14 - 00:15:25:40
Mike
This is completely legit, completely illegal. Get those investments to spin off depreciation to offset your active income. And you can do that over and over again. And just consider the power of compounding. You might only be able to buy one property or maybe one property every two years when you start off. But as they start making more money and they got cash flow, you can get to where you buy one a year, then two year, then three a year, and before ten years is past.
00:15:25:40 - 00:15:51:14
Mike
You've got 20, 25 properties or syndications that are all spinning out. Hopefully not. Hopefully most of them, if not all of them, are all spinning off cash flow to you. And once you've gotten that snowball compounding effect, man, you are off to the races. And we've seen physicians do this. One of our good friends and some we've worked with for a long time, I even helped work on a book, read the Tax Cure, check it out on Amazon.com.
00:15:51:19 - 00:16:06:34
Mike
Doctor black, he did this in about seven years, got off of that hamster wheel, and now only works where he wants to work. How much he wants to work. And he's increased his quality of life a lot and got to spend time with his kids before they all went off to college.
00:16:06:34 - 00:16:12:24
Kevin
And that's Mike. I love that picture you painted. It's very rosy. But
00:16:12:24 - 00:16:12:34
Speaker 3
I.
00:16:12:34 - 00:16:13:48
Mike
Think it takes hard work.
00:16:13:49 - 00:16:17:02
Speaker 3
It takes a lot of hard work. And there's market risks. Yes. That
00:16:17:02 - 00:16:26:25
Kevin
level, you have a team and it's expensive. You got a team of an accountants attorneys, you got other people involved. When you're at that level, you have your professional fees are going to go up.
00:16:26:25 - 00:16:28:57
Kevin
But also you got to watch your overhead, make sure you're cash
00:16:28:57 - 00:16:30:16
Speaker 3
00:16:30:16 - 00:16:43:44
Kevin
risk, market risk, interest rate risk. You might want to refi pull some cash out. That's tax free by the way. But can you still cover the debt the, the the debt on the property on a monthly basis. So we want to make sure we're cash flow
00:16:43:44 - 00:16:44:39
Speaker 3
Yes.
00:16:44:52 - 00:16:57:35
Kevin
But hopefully you're you're also diversifying your properties. You're not all in one neighborhood. And then a storm comes in wipes your whole portfolio out. Hopefully you're kind of spread out, amongst different, geo geography,
00:16:57:49 - 00:16:58:29
Speaker 3
Yeah.
00:16:58:29 - 00:16:59:42
Kevin
of the country and all this stuff.
00:16:59:42 - 00:17:20:24
Mike
great point to bring up. I mean, we've seen this happen. We had a lot of physicians getting into apartment complexes in the late, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. They're doing pretty good. And interest rates went up and insurance rates went up. And suddenly more than half of these apartment complex syndications were negative cash flow. And that was bad.
00:17:20:24 - 00:17:38:05
Mike
So it isn't all rosy. You got to be careful. And we say constantly over and over again, don't let your tax tail wag your business dog or your investment dog. Make sure you're underwriting well, make sure you're doing your due diligence, but it can happen. We've seen it happen and it's a beautiful thing when it happens.
00:17:38:05 - 00:17:59:44
Kevin
Yeah. So now that we've hit on the long term rental, how to utilize a spouse to offset your your physician income, how to utilize long term rental properties to offset your physician income. And there's there's that was just scratching the surface. There's so many details how to document it, how to defend it, how to do, how to actually get the deductions that you're owed.
00:17:59:49 - 00:18:00:27
Kevin
There's so
00:18:00:27 - 00:18:02:14
Speaker 3
many things. Yes, here.
00:18:02:14 - 00:18:16:20
Kevin
but now let's transition to vacation rentals, because now you can see the work involved to get the long term real estate against physician income. Now let's kind of come with a little softer, easier mandate to get short term
00:18:16:20 - 00:18:17:32
Speaker 3
real estate right.
00:18:17:32 - 00:18:19:13
Kevin
to offset the physician income.
00:18:19:13 - 00:18:26:40
Mike
Let's say both spouses are working I mean we know a lot of multi we're both spouses are physicians. They don't have time to become a real estate professional.
00:18:26:40 - 00:18:28:42
Kevin
hitched, and now they're both working. And
00:18:28:52 - 00:18:52:56
Mike
Yeah. My my stepmom was a doctor as well as my dad. And and I feel sorry for their kids because the conversations we had at the dinner table, man was so over my head. They're talking about different drugs and different cancers. And my dad found it. But anyways, in those cases, or let's say you're similar to me, where my spouse, she works way too hard already taking care of the kids, and doing home schooling.
00:18:53:08 - 00:19:17:28
Mike
She doesn't have the time or any interest in being a real estate professional. There's still an option in real estate. It's the short term rental. It's become known as a short term rental loophole. I hate the term loophole. It's an incentive, man. It's an incentive purposely put into the tax code so that people will be incentivized to buy property and make it available to improve affordable housing.
00:19:17:28 - 00:19:42:50
Mike
We have a housing housing shortage. That's an incentive. But I understand it's normally generally called now the short term rental loophole. No one has to be a real estate professional, not one less hour requirements you need. One person needs to do 750 hours in to become a real estate professional. If you want to hit the gold standard, the guarantee that the IRS cannot cannot question whether you can take this deduction.
00:19:43:00 - 00:20:06:01
Mike
You only got to hit 500 and spouses can combine their time 250 each. And if you're working on the same thing together for an hour, that's an hour for you, an hour for your spouse. You can get that 500 hours. You don't have to have the 500 hours. There's if you look up and Google IRS material participation, they list seven different ways to do it.
00:20:06:01 - 00:20:32:37
Mike
Any one of those count? The second one is you do substantially all the work at once. Nebulous. I have not enjoyed having to defend clients in an audit with that one, because there's too many question marks. And what's substantially all. I disagree with the IRS agents on that multiple times. The third one's my second favorite. I called the bronze standard, and that is 100 hours, at least 100 hours and more than anyone else.
00:20:32:42 - 00:20:53:39
Mike
So spouse can put in 50 hours husband. The other spouse can put in 51 hours. You got 101 hours. As long as no individual working on that business out works you. If you have a management company and they're spending 200 hours a year, or if you're self managing and your cleaners are spending 200 hours a year, you and your spouse better have 201.
00:20:53:39 - 00:21:14:51
Mike
And in all honesty, the way it works in an IRS audit, there's a chance IRS is going to disallow some of your time. So give it a lot more padding than just one hour if you can. But then your material participant not real estate professional. Again, it has the property you're renting has to average seven days or less during the year in the lease length.
00:21:14:55 - 00:21:41:37
Mike
There's a lot of different details can go into that. A lot of questions we could answer, but we don't have time in this episode. If you do that, if you don't use it for personal use, according to what the IRS considers personal use, generally it's 14 days are more than 14 days, actually, for personal leisure use, where you or you're sending your family or your friends for free to this property for more than 14 days, that would be considered personal use.
00:21:41:41 - 00:22:04:02
Mike
And then you have a mixed use property. Can't take a net loss if you are at that property and you go for a month to work on that property to do market research out for that property. And you're spending the majority of your day at that property each of those days. That's not personal use. You have those two roles, and there's a lot of other caveats and rules, that it's too detailed, I think, for this podcast.
00:22:04:06 - 00:22:12:57
Mike
But if you do that, you buy $1 million property, so you get the same benefit as a real estate professional would with $1 million, a long term property. So it's beautiful.
00:22:13:02 - 00:22:13:28
Speaker 3
You can save
00:22:13:28 - 00:22:37:37
Kevin
that. Still that for example, a little earlier the the million dollar physician buying $1 million long term rental, the spouse getting the stay at home spouse getting wrap and saving $150,000, that's that spouse's quote unquote job is 150 grand a year. That's a great job. You could do the same strategy, the million dollar doc buying $1 million vacation rental average less time seven days or less.
00:22:37:42 - 00:22:48:11
Kevin
Both of you don't need to wrap both the y'all work together to the same goal to hit those our requirements. My kind of sped out with the material participation. You save the same
00:22:48:11 - 00:22:50:57
Speaker 3
$150,000 here tax
00:22:50:57 - 00:23:03:22
Kevin
benefit, just a different classification of real estate, which means different classification of tax law. Generally speaking. Also, I've just noticed vacation rentals tend to be more profitable more, but they're also
00:23:03:38 - 00:23:04:44
Mike
More work.
00:23:04:44 - 00:23:06:30
Kevin
because you got tenants coming in and out.
00:23:06:30 - 00:23:15:02
Kevin
Member. Your average lease time is seven days or less. So you got tenants staying two days, three days. What am I doing about the wear and tear on the property? What am I doing about security
00:23:15:02 - 00:23:16:31
Speaker 3
A
00:23:16:31 - 00:23:24:19
Kevin
lot of people coming in there, so you got to make sure you're okay with the amount of work it it is to actually get that threshold.
00:23:24:24 - 00:23:24:50
Kevin
Met.
00:23:24:50 - 00:23:42:55
Mike
But you only have to material participate in the year that you're taking the deduction. The IRS says clearly, material participation is a year by year test. So you can materially participate that first year, get the deduction and say I want to do this again on a second property, but I don't have the time to keep self-managing this first property.
00:23:42:55 - 00:24:05:53
Mike
Fine. Turn it over to a full service management company and just go spend less than two weeks the next year. And actually, you could probably spend more, again, that to get detailed, go do it again on another property. We had a physician that did this for for properties, for years. And by the time they were done and it started in 2017, by 2021, they were receiving enough income.
00:24:05:53 - 00:24:24:22
Mike
It replaced 40% of his salary just in four years. Again, it's not normally like that, but it worked well. And now they don't manage the properties at all. I want to kill one more myth that I've heard a lot. People say, if you have a if you have a property manager on your vacation rental, you can't qualify as a material participant.
00:24:24:35 - 00:24:46:17
Mike
There's a lot of well known podcasters out here that have said that that is not technically true. It's not. We have had people under audit who had a management company run on their property. As long as they qualified as a material participant, if you had 500 hours, they qualified. If they had more than 100 hours, they better be outworking that management company.
00:24:46:17 - 00:25:03:56
Mike
But you can do it. There's a lot of other myths. We should do another episode. This and short term rental, in real estate. But one thing I do we need to cover in this episode more, we've talked about real estate physicians that have multiple income streams. I'm just going to go into one of them, but it's pretty applicable for a lot of things.
00:25:04:01 - 00:25:32:11
Mike
We have a lot of physicians that invest in the surgery centers that they work at. Right. Or that they're affiliated with. Generally in those they're passive in those surgery center. Someone else is running the property, running the facilities. They get a K-1 from them. I see this over and over again from other tax preparers. They claim those properties or those K-1 that you're receiving, that cash flow you're getting from the surgery center is not eligible for the qualified business income deduction.
00:25:32:11 - 00:26:00:03
Mike
The Cubii deduction. Beau honky if if you're if you're a CPA or tax preparer tells you that, they're wrong. They're absolutely wrong. Unless you're materially participating in that business and even in a lot of cases, if you are materially participate in the surgery center, you're still eligible for it. And then it's also generally a passive activity. Passive income can be offset by other passive losses.
00:26:00:07 - 00:26:16:04
Mike
So just to get back full circle with the real estate, let's say you have a surgery center. It's spinning off 500,000 a year, an income to you. No one in the family wants to become a real estate professional. You don't want to go the short term rent around, go buy a long term rental. It's a passive activity.
00:26:16:04 - 00:26:23:44
Mike
Get the depreciation from it and eliminate your surgery center income for one year. Mitigate mitigated. Anyways, there's so many things you can do, Kevin, but
00:26:23:44 - 00:26:39:22
Kevin
Let's say you own your own practice and you own the building. You operate out of, that building that you operate out of as a doctor. Your family built the family practice building, your surgery center that maybe you directly own, but you generate income in that building that you own.
00:26:39:22 - 00:27:03:46
Kevin
Those are probably likely two different LLCs. Hopefully for liability purposes, you might have a property company and an operating company. There's ways to make sure that we can segregate, accelerate depreciation in the practice building that you operate out of, because it's necessary, as an owner occupied building for you to generate income over here. There may be ways to not get this as passive, and we could utilize the losses in the rent.
00:27:03:57 - 00:27:07:57
Kevin
Not the rental but the self rental to offset your income as a
00:27:07:57 - 00:27:08:46
Speaker 3
physician too.
00:27:08:46 - 00:27:30:50
Mike
So sorry, another unit that I have to just add one more and you can also make sure you're not paying more than market rent, but pay market rent if it's passive to you in your building, you're taking money out of one pocket, putting in the other. But that passive activity that's passive to you if you're not a real estate professional, the cost segregation, the depreciation can eliminate some of that income, the same income.
00:27:30:50 - 00:27:54:11
Mike
If you didn't pay that rent, you'd be paying full tax on. There's so many cool things here. I do want to add one more thing. Kevin and I are not licensed attorneys. We are not licensed attorneys. We're not we're not legally allowed to more much less competent to offer you legal advice whenever you're considering liability issues like do you need LLCs for multiple properties, please consult your attorney.
00:27:54:15 - 00:27:55:30
Mike
And how shall we wrap this up?
00:27:55:33 - 00:27:55:44
Speaker 3
I
00:27:55:44 - 00:28:02:19
Kevin
think, that was very I don't know if you've seen the Pringles, the Pringles commercials, where it's like a bet you just can't eat one. It's like, I feel like we're
00:28:02:19 - 00:28:05:30
Mike
it's hard. There's so many cool things.
00:28:05:39 - 00:28:06:35
Speaker 3
One more thing. No, I'm just
00:28:06:35 - 00:28:08:21
Kevin
kidding. One more thing. Thanks for watching.
00:28:08:21 - 00:28:22:28
Kevin
Thanks for listening. Thanks. We just give us a like comment, subscribe. We got one more episode coming next week in our physician series, so stay tuned. And, we'll see you all next week
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