Qualified Real Estate Professional Status for taxes

Greetings! Does anyone have experience with “Real Estate Professional Status” for the purpose of taxes as a land investor? Assuming that someone qualifies for this status under the IRS Code, how are you using this as part of your tax strategy? Interested in hearing how others are using this status in their land business. Most info I’m seeing online is geared more to rental property and not vacant land.

@chris-m are you talking about the NAICS code you assign to your real estate business entity (telling the IRS what kind of real estate investing business you’re operating)? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question.

As far as I know, Real Estate Professional status only helps you when you have rental properties or something similar that generates passive losses. Without that status, there is a limit on how much loss you can claim to offset income each year. The losses don’t go away if you can’t use them that year; they just get pushed forward to the future until you can eventually claim them. REP status allows you to claim unlimited passive losses in a tax year, ie you can use any that you have right away instead of having a cap on them and pushing the rest forward. REP status does not help you save on taxes owed due to land flipping activities as that is active income.

2 Likes