All Forum Posts by: Sean Graham

Does anyone have any firms they would recommend for cost segregation on my STR? Property is in St Louis, MO but I understand there may be remote options as well.

Father-in-law has recommended CostSegAuthority.com but open to shopping this around. 

Thank you! 

I have a couple rentals near Milwaukee, I'm looking to do a cost segregation study to accelerate depreciation and recapture some bonus depreciation from the last few years. Im going to be claiming REP status for my 2025 tax return, and am hoping to deduct everything I can against my W-2 income for a nice tax refund.

Any recommendations on who can perform the study and what it would cost to have done on a duplex? Is it a niche trade? I'm a novice with regards to these, looking for a good place to start.

thanks!!!

@William C.

I personally would not be concerned about this structure's permit status for tax purposes. Our tax code tries to be blind to legal compliance outside of taxation. To give you an example, you're supposed to report your business income for tax purposes even if the source of income is illegal.

The most serous concern for me would be the one raised by @Chris Seveney: insurance. And with STRs, the risk of an insurance claim is higher.

I was consulting with cost segregation company. This is what she told my CPA

'if you do not fit the qualifications to be considered a real estate professional, then passive income limitations would not allow you to access the deductions'

I have never heard or read anything as such. I remeber hearing if you make too much on your W2 then it might not benefit you from cost segregation. 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

@Matthew Samson, so I think you probably need to be buying something that's more than $1,000,000 to get close to $200K of first year depreciation. (Bonus depreciation in 2025 is 40% right?)

FYI, you want to look at short-term rentals as another alternative. That would let you keep your job and then get the giant deductions with relatively few hours. (With short-term rentals, you just need to average rental intervals of 7 days or less and then usually either carefully time the investment for late in the year or spend more than 100 hours to get material participation.)

Two other comments:

1. I'd connect with @Sean Graham to see his calculator. I know we've got those at our blog (JavaScript written by ChatGPT interestingly!). So it is absolutely possible to get actionable planning insights from a calculator.
2. My rough estimate above is based on the sorts of study results @Julio Gonzalez 's team has repeatedly done for our clients. (We've worked with his crew a lot over the recent past.)

Hi @Alexandra Isenhour, good to meet you. We help clients with Detailed Engineering Cost Segregation Studies. We are based in MI but help clients in FL too. We provide on-site visits nationwide. Happy to provide you with a free estimate done by our in-house engineers if you like? 

Hi all - Dave Matthews here. I've got two properties now, townhome and single family, both rented. This will be my first year where I will be reporting ALL the rental income (some 60k or so). My question to you all is how in the world do folks deduct deduct deduct so that their tax burden on rental income is zero or close to it? I am worried that I will owe big in 2026...