For some reason, determining "material participation" leaves me with many questions. Hopefully, I can get some opinions to help me. It never used to matter because my income was low enough that I could deduct my losses under the passive loss rules. Now however I am hitting the limitation.
I'll try to be as brief as possible and make my questions yes/no type questions to make it easy on anyone who wants to respond.
Facts:
a) My wife is a full time real estate professional doing sales and rentals of mostly residential RE, a little commercial as well
b) We own 4 multi-family buildings, which she manages - finding tenants, advertising, handling the money, bookkeeping, dealing with repair people, etc. Hard to say how much time she spends - when we have no vacancies or problems, it is probably 5-10 hours/month or so combined for all properties.
c) We purchased a building in 2007 that needed substantial repair, much of which we did ourselves (probably 150-200 hours for myself, 50 hours for my wife, 100 hours for my 16 year old). We hired various people to do plumbing and more complicated carpentry, however none worked more than the 150 hours I put in.
d) We generally find our own tenants, however we will occasionally accept a tenant found by an agency and pay them a commission, however we make to decision to take them based on our own income/credit/ reference standards. We make all decisions on rents, repairs, improvements, etc.
Questions:
1) Does the fact that my wife is a full time RE professional automatically make all of our rentals meet test 1 "The taxpayer works 500 hours or more during the year in the activity."? It's not clear what "activity" covers in this context.2) Do I have to "group" all the rentals or do I figure out material participation for each one separately? Or can I choose?
3) Test 2 says "The taxpayer does substantially all the work in the activity." Tthis is true for all of our rentals, since no one does more more work than my wife and I. However, "substantial" is not defined and there are no specific hour requirements. Do I meet this test?4) Test 3 says "The taxpayer works more than 100 hours in the activity during the year and no one else works more than the taxpayer." We certainly meet this for our latest property since my time gets included in the 100 hours, and no one else worked more. So for at least the latest property, we pass the test. Agree?
5) Test 7 seems to be a more restrictive version of test 3. If you meet test 3, wouldn't you automatically meet test 7?6) Test 5 states "The taxpayer materially participated in the activity in any 5 of the prior 10 years." Does this have the effect that if you materially participate for 5 years in a row, you will pass this test forever? It would seem in year 6 you pass, in year 7 you pass because of years 2-5 and the passing of test 5 in year 6, etc.
Thanks!