Dear tax gurus, CPAs, etc,

My understanding is that you can't count rental losses against your W2 income, unless you qualify as a real estate professional (which is very difficult if your W2 is unrelated to real estate). But I've heard that short term/vacation rentals are an exception to this rule, allowing otherwise passive losses (e.g. depreciation) to count against active W2 income. But to qualify for this you have to have materially participated in your STR, which means 100 hours minimum, and more than any other individual.

That's my understanding... please correct anything I've got wrong so far.

My question is: if I own one STR, it's pretty clear I can write off losses from that property against my W2 income. But if I owned 10x STRs, do I have to materially participate 100 hours on each property to write off all 10x? Or can I leverage systems as I scale so that I'm still spending little more than 100 hours total on my STR business per year, but write off losses from all 10 properties?

Really looking forward to the community's wisdom here! Thanks in advance.