Real Estate Attorney and CPA consultation: best practices

[Leta Eydelberg]

Hello,

We are looking for Real Estate Attorney and/or CPA to consult about best practices for buying and managing investment properties. 

A little of our background.

We are located in North California. We owned one investment property which we just sold and are in the process of doing 1031 exchange for multiple properties. We have tons of questions. For example:

Our old property was in our name, and we'd prefer to have LLC instead but were told that we cannot change ownership status during 1031. Is that correct? What should we do?

How to set up LLC and transfer ownership of the investments? How to process payments and what accounts to use? Basically, what are the best practices to do to protect us and from the tax standpoint?

We would really like to urgently find a knowledgeable attorney and CPA to work with.

Thank you for any advice and recommendation!