Hello BiggerPockets community,I am new to real estate investing and we now have 3 properties and accelerating. 

Leverage Equity WiselyTapping your home equity via a HELOC or cash-out refinance can accelerate your multi-family investments, but you must factor in the debt service to ensure it doesn't kill your cash flow.

High efficiency appliances were utilized including HVAC, light fixtures and water heater.The use of the accelerated depreciation strategy helps real estate investors to reduce the tax liability immediately which therefore increases their bottom line due to the offsetting of income.

Here are some quick end-of-year tax strategies to offset rental income:Cost Segregation: Buy a short-term rental (STR), put it into service, and use cost segregation to accelerate depreciation.Prepay Expenses: Pay for repairs and insurance now to deduct this year.Defer Income: Delay rent until next year to lower this year’s taxable income.Maximize Deductions: Deduct property taxes, mortgage interest, and insurance.Charitable Donations: Donate before year-end to reduce taxable income.These won’t offset W-2 income but will help reduce rental taxes.

This could allow you to take advantage of bonus depreciation, which can significantly accelerate the depreciation deductions in the year you place the property into service

Those so (relatively) new to either syndication or REI or both that they had no institutional memory of market downturns, interest rate acceleration, frozen capital access, and other risks, sometimes all at the same time.

Bonus depreciation is just a special part of the US tax code.It allows you to take accelerated depreciation on portions of your property depending on when an asset is put into service.At the time of this writing, you can write off a huge portion (60% in 2024) of many qualified components that have a useful lifespan of 15 years or less.That means a certain percentage of things like landscaping, sidewalks, latches, appliances, fences, certain flooring, etc is depreciable in year 1.The bonus depreciation rate percentage changes yearly depending on the administration and the tax code.For years 2015 through 2017 first-year depreciation for all the items on a 15-year schedule or less was set to 50%.It was scheduled to go down to 40% in 2018 and 30% in 2019 and then 0% in 2020.But then Trump got elected, and he enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.That moved the bonus depreciation percentage to 100% from 2017 to 2022.In 2023 it went down to 80% and it’s currently at 60%.Depending on who gets elected again, 100% may be back on the table.Only time will tell.We know that the US government wants to incentivize more development and ownership of RE.They want Americans to continue to build and maintain our physical world.That’s why real estate is one of the most tax-advantaged assets in the US.Depreciation and bonus depreciation for RE are very positive and will likely continue in the years ahead.

It could help accelerate depreciation deductions, especially with your mix of single-family homes and duplexes.

I've had a conundrum the last few years since I bought my first primary residence, I was lucky to get a good interest rate <5% When I purchased this property I was very green and new to real estate but I had heard or seen somewhere on some financial blog or podcast that if you pay an extra $100/mo toward your mortgage in many cases you can accelerate your payoff date 5+ years.

The expectations are that any reduction in interest rates of even .25% will accelerate buyer and investor activity and competition.