Filing a 1065 Partnership return Husband/Wife vs Schedule E

[Tony C.]

We (husband and wife filing jointly) are looking for a CPA. While interviewing CPAs to file our 2012 taxes we are trying to determine if we should file a partnership return or listed all of our properties on our schedule E.

Currently we have titled our 16 properties in 4 LLCs and we have a 5th LLC where we manage our properties. One CPA is telling us that we need to file a partnership return for all LLCs and the other CPA is telling us that we can place all properties on our Schedule E and use Schedule C for our property management activities

We like the Schedule E and C approach because it's cheaper.

What approach is correct? Or is both approaches okay?