Real estate legal question?

Question on tax deduction on real estate expense?

• With my intention to make money, I started attending different real estate seminars, seeing properties, deals and so on from January 2007. This had some expense involved such as car mileage and education cost. I also bought my first investment rental property in August 2007. However, most of the expense such as car mileage and education cost were misc expense for real estate business and not directly related to this rental property. My question is how can I show my expenses which are not directly related to this investment rental property but they are misc/general real estate business? 1- Should I show all the miscellaneous/general real estate business expenses against this investment rental property in schedule E? 2- or should I have another column saying "Miscellaneous real estate expense" in schedule E and show miscellaneous expenses there, but this will have zero income as rental income is only from rental property? 3- or is there another way to show misc real estate expense?

• Answer:

  If you went to a typical infomercial event, then you've got a problem. The seminars are not education. The seminars are not an investment expense. (That is, you can't deduct them.)