Seller Tax Return Filing for the property in Due Diligence?

[Brandon Yuan]

In commercial deals (apartment/storage, etc), Do you require Seller to provide tax return filing for the property as part of your due diligence document? And how realistic is it for Seller to be willing to provide it?

In my smaller commercial deals yes I did get the tax return schedule E (bank typically request it too), but on larger deals Sellers declined to provide it and broker said that's fairly common. 

Is it true? what's your experience? Yes I understand that at end of day it'll still need to rely on buyer due dilligence to verify and it's a risk management decision, but tax return filing does carry more weight than seller's income/expense statement in my mind.