Business Advisory Services
Everything you need to help you launch your new business entity from business entity selection to multiple-entity business structures.
Everything you need to help you launch your new business entity from business entity selection to multiple-entity business structures.
Designed for rental property owners where WCG CPAs & Advisors supports you as your real estate CPA.
Everything you need from tax return preparation for your small business to your rental to your corporation is here.
WCG’s primary objective is to help you to feel comfortable about engaging with us
Table Of Contents
By Jason Watson, CPA
Posted Sunday, May 25, 2025
Passives activity losses can only be offset by passive activity income. Generally, material participation changes the color of money, and the activity is no longer passive. However, rental activities remain passive even if you materially participate. You must materially participate as a real estate professional. Read that again.
If you cannot leverage real estate professional status or the short-term rental loophole, there is an exception allowing $25,000 of passive activity losses created by rental losses to be deducted against other non-passive income. But you must actively participate.
Active participation is a less stringent standard than material participation. For example, you may be treated as actively participating if you make management decisions in a significant and bona fide sense. Management decisions that count as active participation include approving new tenants, deciding on rental terms, approving expenditures, and similar decisions.
Sidebar: California does not conform to the IRS allowance for real estate professionals. You can read more in our state problems with your rental property section on page 119 for more information.
This KB article is an excerpt from our 420+ page book (some picture pages, but no scatch and sniff) which was updated May 25, 2025, and is available in paperback from Amazon, as an eBook for Kindle and as a PDF from ClickBank. We used to publish with iTunes and Nook, but keeping up with two different formats was brutal. You can cruise through these KB articles online, click on the fancy buttons below or visit our webpage which provides more information.
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Please use the form below to tell us a little about yourself, and what you have going on with your investments and wealth-building objectives. WCG CPAs & Advisors are real estate CPAs, tax strategists and rental property consultants, and we look forward to talking to you!
The tax advisors and business consultants at WCG are not salespeople; we are not putting lipstick on a pig expecting you to love it. Our job remains being professionally detached, giving you information and letting you decide within our ethical guidelines and your risk profiles.
We see far too many crazy schemes and half-baked ideas from attorneys and wealth managers. In some cases, they are good ideas. In most cases, all the entities, layering and mixed ownership is only the illusion of precision. As Chris Rock says, just because you can drive your car with your feet doesn’t make it a good idea. In other words, let’s not automatically convert “you can” into “you must.” Yes, it is fun to brag about how complicated your world is at cocktail parties, but let’s not unnecessarily complicate it for the bragging rights.
Let’s chat so you can be smart about it.
We typically schedule a 20-minute complimentary quick chat with one of our Partners or Senior Tax Professionals to determine if we are a good fit for each other, and how an engagement with our team looks. Tax returns only? Business advisory? Tax prep, and more importantly tax strategy and planning?
Should we need to schedule an additional consultation, our fee is $250 for 40 minutes. Fun! If we decide to press forward with a Business Advisory or Tax Patrol Services engagement, we will credit the consultation fee towards those services.
Taxes are complicated. We make them simple. Get in touch with a pro here at WCG!
Everything you need to help you launch your new business entity from business entity selection to multiple-entity business structures.
Designed for rental property owners where WCG CPAs & Advisors supports you as your real estate CPA.
Everything you need from tax return preparation for your small business to your rental to your corporation is here.
WCG’s primary objective is to help you to feel comfortable about engaging with us