Hello everyone. I bought a property in the country in 2018 and the house is in bad shape. There are other buildings (barn,garage,and shed) on the property. I am wondering if there is any way for me to count this on my taxes this year?

"...for this year?" Yes, if you are referring to 2019 for rental purposes and if you start advertising this for rent this year/put it into service by renting the barn, garage, and/or shed.

What are you planning on doing with the house?

What's your estimate to repair the house if you're not going to tear it down?

What's your estimate on value of the house before and after repairs?

What value did you assign on the house itself for depreciation purposes when you bought it? I

Value of barn, shed, garage? Are you avoiding them separately or all buildings together? You might gain some advantage using component depreciation if you value them separately from the house.

Thank you for your responses.

I originally wanted to repair the house and move there. I started looking into the house and gutting it but the house is not really worth saving. I repaired the garage and small storage shed and then the neighbors son stole my power tools. The barn needs lots of repair but is repairable. There is 9 acres of land with the property but havn't made up my mind what I want to do with it at this point.

I did not know if there was any way I could count it for 2018.

I do have some equipment stored there to work on the land.

I have done a lot of clearing and clean up on the property as nothing was maintained for over 15 years and let go back to nature except for some small parts of land.

I am thinking about putting a small trailer on it and renting it but again I did not know if I could count it for 2018 for any reason as I have not rented it just done lots of work and stored things there.

Not a bad idea JB about renting the other buildings but I don't know that I would be able to make enough money off of it and I would loose my storage and would end up buying a trailer to transport my equipment to maintain the land I have worked so hard on to clean up.

Richard, I bought the property for land value for 100k.

I think it would be just as cheep to build a new house and the old house sit very close to the ground and I believe is a plank house. It is built almost like a barn but looks like a craftsman house on the outside.

What is component depreciation?

6er,

In Indiana my property taxes would go up x3 if I declare it a rental so I could take deductions.

For rental purposes I see no way you could pass any IRS scrutiny for trying to use this as a rental property deduction for 2018...just going to be an audit magnet and not legitimate.

Residential property taxes in TN are not affected by being a rental or not. I don't know the answer on commercial, but as you described your property, it is residential.

Anything you spent on repairing the property plus depreciation is deductible IF the property was available for rental.

Your property was available for rental the day you took possession. Got it?

Sounds to me like you were using the property to store inventory for your business. That's a deductible business expense. So you could at least deduct the property taxes, utility costs, etc.

Thank you all for your responses.

I will probably wait as I have not made up my mind yet as to what to do with it and can not rent the house.