Cost Segregation Summary

By Jason Watson, CPA
Posted Sunday, July 12, 2026

A cost segregation study, or “cost seg” as your bartender advises, can be extremely beneficial. But there are problems to navigate through, and like Robert Plant used to sing, (not) all that glitters is gold and sometimes words have two meanings.

Another consideration- should you benefit from a cost segregation study and the related big tax deduction, then perhaps pairing this with a Roth conversion on your traditional IRA makes sense as well. Tax planning is a must!

At the risk of repeating ourselves, whether this accelerated rental property depreciation yields a tax deduction / tax benefit and therefore increased cash flow (an improved IRR) is contingent on three general things-

• Short-term rental loophole (7 days average guest stay + material participation), or

• Real Estate Professional designation (REP status), or

• Net rental income (profit) that can be reduced

Go forth and cost seg!

WCG Cost Segregation Referrals

Many real estate investors ask us for referrals. While WCG philosophically avoids revenue sharing and other arrangements, we have three referral options-

CostSegEZ.com (do it yourself, about $1,000ish)

https://costsegez.com/

Maven Cost Seg (fully-engineered, about $2,500 to $3,000ish)

https://www.mavencostseg.com/

CSAP Partners (fully-engineered, about $3,000ish)

https://csap.com/about-us/

We do not recommend RentalWriteOff.com. They use AI and images to generate your components list, which is cool and all, but a human does not review it. We recently had a cost segregation report from them where the same grill was counted twice- once at $3,000 and another time at $800. Granted, the listing photographer moved the grill to two locations for the photo shoot, but this is the kind of stuff that will really get you into trouble.

Maven Cost Seg prepares some of the best reports. Founded by a CPA who understands tax return preparation and asset setup, their reports reconcile to the penny. And No, they are not old man Harold staring over his readers while being stodgy and conservative. They understand the objectives, and produce a report that tax professionals can magically follow.

If you want to at least obtain a free, no obligation, no muss no fuss benefits analysis on your rental property from CSAP, please use this link to complete a simple intake form and our team will forward a detailed analysis in a couple of days-

Benefits Analysis