Articles

Several months ago you stumbled upon a
property sorely neglected by its previous owners. Your practiced eye told you that there was a lot of money to be made if you bought the property, fixed the deferred maintenance items and did some basic cosmetic work.
Now you find out that you were right—you’ve received an offer that will return you a substantial profit. But here’s the problem—tax will eat a chunk of your profit—maybe as much as half!

The good news: your buddy tells you about a 1031 exchange and how you can roll the gain from this property to your next one. The bad news? You may not qualify for a 1031 exchange unless you structure the transaction correctly.

A 1031 exchange rolls the gain from the sale of your old property into your new one. Both properties have to have been held for investment, or used in a trade or business, and you only have 180 days from the sale of your old property to get your new property purchased.

One of the requirements of a 1031 exchange is that the entity that sells the Old Property must be the same entity that acquires the New Property. Where the property is owned by a partnership or a limited liability corporation (LLC) with multiple partners, that entity is viewed as the exchanging entity.

A common question posed to our firm involves situations where the property is being sold, but one or more of the partners wishes to take their share of the cash and pay the tax, while the rest of the partners want to stay in real estate and desire to do a 1031 exchange. Let's use the FGH Partnership as an example where F, G, and H each own an equal one-third interest in the partnership. The partnership has entered into a Purchase and Sale contract to sell the Old Property. F and G wish to stay in real estate and have decided they want to do a 1031 exchange. H, however, has decided that it's time to cash out and wants his share of the cash.

Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code allows you to roll the gain from the sale of your Old Property to the purchase of your New Property -- and not pay any capital gains taxes! To do this, you have to jump through certain hoops. We've talked in the past about how your property has to be held for investment or business use, and that it can not be held for resale (like a developer or fix-&-flips). We've also talked about your requirement to identify and list potential replacement properties for your exchange within 45 days of the closing of your sale of the Old Property.

The IRS Recently Issued a ruling that is bound to impact Arizona real estate and 1031 exchanges. Revenue Procedure 2002-69 says that a husband and wife, who own all of the shares of a limited liability company (usually called an "LLC") in a community property state (ie: Arizona), will be able to disregard the separate nature of the LLC and report all of the income and expenses in their personal return.

Until now, the IRS has refused to rule on whether a husband and wife who own all of the shares of an LLC constitute a "single member" for purposes of the "disregarded entity" rules for filing a return. If an LLC has only one member, the disregarded entity rules state that the LLC does not have to file a tax return, but may instead report all of its income and expenses in the tax return of the sole member.