Shiv Kothari, tax manager at Gumbiner Savett Inc. recently wrote an interesting piece about like kind exchanges and how they can assist in deferring taxes on gains. The entire article appears in Commercial Property Executive. A like-kind exchange is any exchange of property held for investment or for productive use in your trade or business [...]
Energy Efficient Tax Breaks Significant tax savings are available to the owners and lessees (and some designers) of commercial property. This underused tax break, known as Section 179D, relates to the installation of certain energy-improvement systems. What is Section 179D? It’s a tax deduction that rewards the inclusion of certain energy-efficient systems in [...]
US President Obama has signed into law the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 . These cuts provide tax incentives that allow businesses to immediately write off much of the cost of investments immediately, instead of having to depreciate them over time. [...]
Transforming an existing structure or creating a “green” building is a movement that transforms the established practices in the design, construction and operations of built environments. The objective of “going green” is to mitigate the harmful environmental impacts of traditionally constructed and operated buildings, while creating a healthy and economically successful place for people to [...]
Throughout most of 2010, the real estate market’s slow recovery continued to negatively impact the construction industry. The available sources of bank financing are scarce and the lack of meaningful job growth and high unemployment are adding to the depressed state of the market. Construction employment increased in 71 metro areas, fell in 217 and [...]
Legislation that Threatens the Real Estate Industry On June 24, 2010, the Senate failed to pass the House-approved American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act (H.R. 4213), which was the legislation that, in part, proposed to change the way carried interest is taxed. Whether some version of the carried interest legislation will be [...]
The slow recovery of residential real estate Although residential real estate has been showing signs of improvement in some markets, it has been experiencing a slow recovery overall. According to the National Association of Realtors, home sale contracts signed in June 2010 were down 18.6 percent from June 2009, but up 10.4 percent [...]
Dealing with Distressed Assets in Real Estate Tax Planning With the continued downturn in the real estate markets, the one topic that many will wrestle with at this time of year is their year-end tax strategy: What do we do with these distressed assets? There are a number of options when it comes [...]
Operating Lease or Capital Lease? Standardized accounting treatments have become a topic of hot debate. Fueled by the Enron debacle and the myriad of corporate bankruptcies, off balance sheet accounting methods are raising eyebrows. Currently, treatments differ between the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). As [...]
