Special Problems in Real Estate Taxation

Course Description:

This course is designed to survey selected “hot” topics having a direct impact on the property owner and investor. The emphasis is on problem areas where the unwary beginner and expert alike can be trapped. You will learn to identify dangers involving installment sales, imputed interest, exchanging, equity participation, condemnation, passive loss rules, and transactions with foreign investors.

Learning Objectives:

Upon successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Determine what constitutes building an estate, preserving wealth and distributing assets in the context of financial fundamentals and tax planning elements.
• Identify how the contingent payment sales have changed due to the Installment Sales Revision Act of 1980, specify other contingent payment rules, and determine circumstances when dispositions of installment obligations occur.
• Identify mortgage financing specifying advantages and disadvantages and determine how to amortize mortgage costs.
• Recognize the refulations for related party exchanges, foreign real property exchanges, and multiple property exchanges, and specify the former codification systems and how they related to exchanged depreciable tangible properties.
• Specify variables of a condemnation award including their effect on income and the cost of newly aquired property.
• Recognize the suspension of disallowed lossses and how it relates to passive losses, and specify the special rules for types of transfers that are not deemed to be fully taxable dispositions.
• Identify interests in foreign corporations that can be used to avoid taxes on their disposition, and improve reporting of U.S. real property interests by foreign investors.
• Cite reasons for establishing a REIT that generate annual income that is tax-sheltered and is apt to grow over time, specify advantages that REITs have over limited partnerships and their effect on investments and shareholders, and recognize the development of the self-liquidating REIT.