Non Resident Tax Returns - Recommendations

[Chris Battle]

Hello all

My wife and I jointly own 2 properties, 1 in Florida and 1 in South Carolina and are looking for a recommendations for an accountant to file federal and state tax returns for each of us.

would appreciate any recommendations and also an idea of what you would expect to pay.

Thanks

Chris

[Sebastien Hitier]

Hi Chris,

I have been through the same situation as you, I took some notes concerning the tax situation for non US resident non US person investing in rental real estate in the US. 

Here they are: http://www.usa-nra-tax.com/

That gives you a non professional opinion of what is involved in the simple case where you have nothing to do with the US other than receiving that rental income. 

I have seen accountants charge anything between 500$ for up to 3 units to $1000-$1500 in the case of LLC. I asked a friend who does pay the accountant to compare his filing to mine. Ultimately, the same computations were done as on my return, but the 8 or so page filing was padded with 35 pages of badly formatted spreadsheets whereas the extra computation could have held on 1 or 2 pages.

So I can't recommend one yet.

Some other investors told me they would pay the first year, and then file themselves on the next years. The truth of the matter is you already have to do much of the work of retrieving the relevant accounting data for filing.