354: Short Term Rentals=Hidden Tax Gems

I’ve never spent much time on the concept of short-term rentals (Vacation Rentals) before because it didn’t sound particularly appealing to me. But after interviewing Tim Hubbard for this week’s podcast, I may have changed my mind.

Here’s the deal. Unless you are a limited partner in a syndication, there is no such thing as truly passive income in real estate. If you want your asset to succeed, you are going to have to do some work for it. And for me, making $300 per month for anything that takes more than 10 minutes per month is not really acceptable.

But short-term rentals provide a sexier take on active ownership of real estate for busy professionals. Make no mistake, there will be some work involved. But now you may be making 5X the monthly income that you would with a traditional long-term rental.

Maybe the rental income is still not that compelling. But what if you started buying properties in places you might actually like to visit yourself on occasion? At any point in the future, you could theoretically flip the switch and make it all your own.

In the meantime, short-term rentals have extremely advantageous tax benefits—and not just to the real estate professional status types like me. If done properly, you could have a short-term rental, do a cost segregation analysis and apply that depreciation to other active income.

Let me reiterate that I am not a tax professional but my understanding here is that through material participation in short-term rentals, depreciation losses can be ACTIVATED and used against your W2 income.

If you can pull this off, the tax savings alone would be worth doing it in my humble opinion. With conservation easements pretty much DOA (victims of the IRS) and with oil and gas being full of crooks and fraudsters, short-term rentals could possibly be the best thing out there if you are trying to mitigate taxes.

If this sounds intriguing, I highly encourage you to listen to this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast. At the very least, it’s an option you ought to know about.

Tim is originally from Sacramento, CA and started his career in real estate as an investment broker selling multi-family and commercial properties in Northern California. He worked with a small team of five who completed cumulatively over $2 billion in transactions. He has been personally investing in real estate for the last 11 years and has since acquired a multi-million dollar portfolio comprised primarily of small multi-family properties in multiple markets.
He has traveled extensively throughout the world in over 70 countries and stayed in hundreds of different short-term rental accommodations. About 7 years ago he realized the high returns that could be made from converting properties in to furnished short-term rentals and renting them by the night. Through trial and error he has figured out how to set up operations so that the business could be passive and has since successfully accommodated over 15,000 guests with excellent reviews from all over the world.

He continues to expand with the help of his teams and manages everything remotely from his home in Medellin, Colombia. He also teaches others to do the same and shows them how they can successfully increase their income 3,4, or even 8x by implementing the right strategies to convert existing long term rentals in to nightly rentals.

He holds a degree in International business and an MBA from the University of California, Davis.

He’s a co-author in the Amazon best-selling book “Resilience” and the host of the popular “Short Term Rental Riches” podcast.