How many Real Estate Agents are filing as S-Corp?

[Harry McNamara]

My wife and I are a team of agents, and with the new year beginning, I'm looking into creating an S-Corp for our finances. I'm aware of the pass-through structure and how it might work, but I'm curious: How many of you other BP realtors are using this tax structure, and at what level of income would you consider it to be advantageous? We are in NY, and will probably make 80-100k in commissions this year if that helps

I'd like to make one of our cars the dedicated "work" car, and be able to itemize more deductions. Anyone else have thoughts on leveraging this tax status?

[Irene Nash]

We switched to being treated as an S-Corp for tax purposes around 5 years ago (later than we should have) and it was a really good choice, self-employment tax was trouncing us before that. Our current accountant says she thinks the bridge point income-wise is around $50K, which sounds low but I trust her more than our previous accountant who gave us a MUCH higher number as the threshold, we should have made the switch long before we did and waiting cost us tens of thousands of dollars. If you figure out how to do payroll for yourself you'll save accounting fees, I've never done it but I don't think it's hard. And I believe it only needs to be done once a year, you just need to pay estimated taxes in quarterly. (I *think*, please verify, accounting is not my strong point.)