You could roll up a entity, and write off the office supplies or whatever you want to catalog it as, but the write off value on them books will likely be worth less than the cost to form the entity, documents, and tax filing cost.Once you have a working business, you can absolutely write off software, books, seminars, guru program, etc..

Thank you Hi Mary this is a different topic thread but Fannie used to count all properties in entities as "financed properties," as long as you owned more than 25% in that entity as documented by your annual K1 form which your LP/LLC/Scorp/flow through entity will show your ownership percentage.This meant that even if the mortgage note was in the LLC's name and the title was in the LLC's name you'd still be hit with these properties as financed properties as long as you owned more than 25% of the company/entity.Fannie has evolved their language on how they count financed properties in late 2017.Now their emphasis is on you being "personally obligated," on the note or basically if you're personally obligated on the note/mortgage/paper instrument.A real life experience or example is that most local credit unions or community banks that use the same loan origination software  will make you sign make you sign the mortgage note as a manager of your LLC however the personal guarantee (PG) is a separate document.

Also is there anyone who uses bill paying software to allow their tenants to pay the rent online?

I managed the rentals myself up until early this year when I hired a property management firm in order to get some free time back, have some backup so I can go on vacations again,  and in response to the hostile political environment towards landlords in seattle.My long term plan with REI is to get to a large enough door count such that with sufficient equity the net cash flow is enough to live on comfortably  (which I would define as matching my current gross software engineer's salary).    

Please if anyone has built out something like this or has software company info would helpTHanks 

The safe harbor applies to amounts paid during the tax year to acquire or produce what the regs call a “unit of property” (UOP), you must meet these requirements: (1) at the beginning of the tax year, the taxpayer has written accounting procedures treating as an expense for non-tax purposes amounts paid for property costing less than a specified dollar amount (which will be 2500 for you), or with an economic useful life of 12 months or less;.(2) the taxpayer treats the amount paid for the property as an expense on its books and records in accordance with its accounting procedures. ( do this on your bookkeeping software or whatever you utilize)(3) the amount paid for the UOP doesn't exceed $2,500. as substantiated by invoice.Note: The cost for the Unit of Property includes additional costs (for example, delivery fees, installation services, or similar costs) if these additional costs are included on the same invoice with the tangible property.Eg:A purchases 100 printers at $500 each for a total cost of $500,000 as indicated by the invoice.

As mentioned above, QuickBooks online is the go-to software for expense tracking.

LLC works well with my real estate software company and my investment company.

Here is a bay area software company laying off 1150 people http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Autode...Brick and mortar retail looks to be suffering too as more people shop online. 

is it a software program?