All Forum Posts by: John Smith

I appreciate the feedback. I didn't think the $900 fee unreasonable, but at the same time I see a lot of tax preparers quote flat fees in the $1,500 area, which seems sort of strange given that the complexity of an LLC can vary wildly. In my case, it's a checking account that cut 3 checks over the course of the year; pretty much as dead simple as it gets.

I figured that since lots of people own RE through LLCs (often fairly modest properties), paying $1,000/LLC/year could represent a meaningful drag on returns, and therefore they'd have a better way of tackling taxes.

What's the most cost-effective way to prepare taxes for a basic partnership? I started an LLC with 6 partners with the purpose of constructing a home and selling it in NY State. The LLC has incurred only expenses thus far. Basically, I need to prepare K-1s for all partners.

I had an accountant prepare the return last year for ~$900, though he has since retired, so I'm looking for other (hopefully more affordable) options.

I'd prefer that someone prepare a return for me, but I'm open to doing it myself if it's super straightforward.

Any advice is much appreciated!

I should mention that I'm potentially getting a look at this before it hits the market, so I don't even have an offer price as a guide.

I'm looking at a personal investment in a 17 unit residential property (~150k NOI) in a medium sized town on the east coast (population ~11k) about 2 hours outside of a major city. Call is Class B-ish. What's the right way to go about generating the appropriate cap rate for something like that? It seems like most published cap-rate data is for bigger metropolitan areas and is all over the map (2.5% for class A in NYC vs like 16% for class C in Memphis). The most natural thing to do would be to put together a comp sheet on competing opportunities in the area, but the number of competing opportunities is small and highly variable both in terms of characteristics and cap rate (an inn/bar/restaurant with some residential units attached, a mobile home park, a couple run-down 4 unit multi-families, etc.). I had a friend do a REIS search for historical transactions which was also not particularly illuminating. I asked a couple local real estate agents who also didn't have a great idea.

I understand that there will be a lot of case-by-case variation based on things like deferred maintenance, tenant quality, rental trends, financibility, etc. But if you had to make an offer on a property like this "in a vacuum" what's the best way to establish a starting point? Should I just compute an average class-b cap rate across the US and then make adjustments for perceived features of deficiencies of this property in particular vs "the average". Price tends to be very location dependent, but if the location lacks much data, how do I establish guide-posts?

I appreciate the advice!