Tax Question With Big Impact

[Mark Tanner]

How can we apply real estate losses from prior years to offset current year non-real estate income? I assume we need "real estate professional" status, but 90% of CPAs I have talked to (all with real estate clients) say that even with real estate professional status you can never take advantage of those past losses until you actually sell the properties. We have accumulated about 115k in real estate paper losses from 2016-2019 mostly due to renovations and depreciation and we never plan to never sell the properties. We would love to be able to apply those losses to my non-real estate earnings, but we haven't gotten a clear answer on how to do that. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Thanks!