Real Estate Tax Strategies for 2026: Bonus Depreciation, Cost Segregation and More

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
You will not believe how many times I see. I just I had a client the other day hand me some depreciation schedules. I was reviewing his tax return to be a potential client. He has six rental properties, right? The land allocation on these six rental properties was fifty percent of the total cost of the properties. And to make it even funnier, they were all condos. So there should have been no rental, there should have been no land allocation because he didn’t own any land. They’re condominiums.

Joseph Crooms
Hey everyone, welcome to Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Joseph Crooms, and today I’m joined by someone who’s I’ve been looking forward to chatting with. His name is Ted. And Ted is going to tell you his last name. He’s going to tell you about his business, and he’s been making some serious moves in the real estate, but also he has a book out, he’s a CPA. I think he’s going to really have some things to say to us. I think you’re gonna be excited. So hey, Ted, say hello to everybody.

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Hey Joseph, thanks for having me on. I’m Ted Lanzaro. I am a real estate CPA, the founder of Landmark CPA Group in Shelton, Connecticut. We’re a national tax strategy firm for real estate investors. We work with investors all around the country. Everybody from private equity firms buying big apartment buildings around the country to the mom and pop investor buying three families here locally in Connecticut.

Joseph Crooms
Good. So first of all, for people who are not familiar with you, Ted, Ted, give us the short version, what your main focus these days are. What’s your what’s the market you’re operating in?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Yeah, so we’re we work exclusively with real estate investors. And I my book, Year Round Tax Planning, is basically the program that we run for investors. So it’s a very proactive platform. It starts with helping the client get organized and have great books. It sets up tracking for things like real estate professional status or short-term rental material participation, make sure their bookkeeping is good. It helps them build the foundation. And once we have the foundation built for them, then we can move into our year-round tax planning. Like for example, in 2026, right now, we’ve already been having tax planning conversations with our clients since January, right? Because we know, like I’ll give you an example. I have a I have a client who buys short-term rentals. He’s a high income W-2 and he buy short-term rentals as a tax strategy and an investment and wealth building strategy, also. That’s the really key part of it, right? So we’ve already been talking about so last year he tried to jam one in and like December, right? You know, to get one up and running so you get the tax benefits. So this year I’m telling him, Listen, start now, right? That way you’ve got all year to do the renovations. Get you know, instead of trying to jam, you know, some some some rentals in at the very end, you know, you’ve got the whole year to run this thing. You’ve got the whole year to get your hours in, right? That kind of thing. Same thing. So it’s it’s the same thing with all of the various strategies that we help clients implement. It starts with a it’s it starts with great books, a foundation, and then we’re looking at every single client and doing a custom assessment of their situation and a custom tax plan because everybody’s different. So there is no one size fits all tax strategies. It’s like a great suit, it’s tailored to your specific situation.

Joseph Crooms
Ted on on a fundamental level, what is some of the basic information that you sit down and share with each and every one of your customers or potential clients?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
I think the biggest one is I want my clients to be proactive with me and I want them to let me know before they buy, before they sell, before they renovate a rental property. And I also want them to share with me any big tax events that are happening as they happen or before they they happen. So like i you know, if somebody’s doing if somebody’s buying a property, there’s a whole conversation that we’re going to have a pre-acquisition tax planning conference where we discuss, you know, things like, are going to do a renovation? If so, what does the scope of work look like? I’m an old rehabber, so I, you know, scopes of work are are are second nature to me. You know, we can even optimize, you know, we talk about optimizing the scope of work so that you get a better cost segregation study when you’re ready to do that, right? How to do that, right? How to how to document the things that you are getting rid of if you’re doing a renovation in a house. So that’s just one example, kind of the pre-acquisition strategy call where we talk about everything to do with what I want you to do immediately when you close so that we have the proper documentation to be able to work on the strategies for

Joseph Crooms
Thank you, Teddy. When you talked about the big, beautiful bill, can you tie that into what you just said? Hey, I need these documents at the end of the close. Can you describe those?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Yeah, well, like typically what I’m doing, right, is so the big beautiful bill brought back 100% bonus depreciation. That was the big one for real estate investors, right? So now think about this. You’re you’re you’re about to close on a property, right? And you say to me, hey Ted, I’m buying a million dollar apartment building, right? So Joseph, I’m gonna sit down with you and I’m gonna say, okay, listen, when you’re when you close, I want to see the closing statement. Right, because the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna use that a closing statement to evaluate what the basis is, and we’re immediately gonna do a land building allocation, right? You will not believe how many times I see. I just I had a client the other day hand me some depreciation schedules. I was reviewing his tax return to be a potential client. He has six rental properties, right? The land allocation on these six rental properties was fifty percent of the total cost of the properties. And to make it even funnier, they were all condos. So there should have been no rental, there should have been no land allocation because he didn’t own any land. They’re condominiums. So so that was something that we immediately had to look at and go, ho holy cow, how do we fix this? You know, because before you can do a cost segregation study on this and get the hundred percent bonus depreciation from the one big beautiful bill, you gotta have the proper building land valuation. In this case, it it was totally screwed up. So it’s something we had to fix, right? So so I think there’s a huge amount of benefits from the one big beautiful bill. The bonus depreciation is the biggest one. Going into next year we’ll start talking with people about opportunity zones again because there’ll be a new twenty twenty seven opportunity zone strategy that can be used. And it’s just but it we we we tie it all together into a framework that makes sense. It optimizes taxes, we do you know, minimizes and optimizes how much you pay, and then also helps you create wealth because my big thing is I want you to take the tax savings and reinvest it in your in your business and buy more properties, right? I think that’s the big opportunity. That’s the whole idea of why you want to to be really proactive with your taxes and get them down as low as possible because it gives you capital to buy more properties, right? And we see that a lot with our with our clients.

Joseph Crooms
You talk about the big the opportunity zone, what are some things that you find missing in their portfolio that you may have to identify? Like when you found out about the the the the land what would what do you call it again? The land

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
land land basis allocation.

Joseph Crooms
And then you found out that they were basically condos, so it didn’t qualify. So what what are some of the things that you look for and and that you say say to your clients?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with like what do you really have in place? What are your portfolios? The first thing we look at, like if I’m looking at somebody’s tax return, the first thing I’m looking at is their depreciation schedules. I’m looking at how many rental properties they have and and what their depreciation schedules look like. I’m looking at how much income they have, right? I’m looking at an opp whether or not there’s an opportunity to qualify them as a real estate professional, right? Do they have a non-working spouse that we might be able to get involved in their portfolio and and make it more deductible by getting them REPS status, right? That’s a that’s a strategy that we do a lot of consulting on, right? And it has to be documented well. And it’s part of part of the framework, part of the documentation framework that we put together for clients is, you know, listen, if you’re gonna, if you want to use the real estate professional status, then let us teach you how to document this stuff well. So those are the kind of things that we look for when we go through tax returns. And then it’s and then it’s all about like just listening to clients. Like what are their goals, right? What are they trying to accomplish? What is their unique situation? Because that’s really what it’s all about, right? Everybody has a unique situation. So now we’ve got to you take that situation and design the strategies around the situation, not one size fits all or here, just do a cost segregation study, right? That’s that’s not how it works. You have to it has to be in the client’s best interest when you implement that strategy.

Joseph Crooms
Let me ask you a question. So that that’s not easy, especially in this climate. What’s been keeping your machine running smoothly?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Yeah. I’d love to tell you it runs really smoothly, right? You know? I mean, I I think part of it is that, you know, I kinda keep it running smoothly. Listen, I have a standard for what we do. We’re certainly not perfect, you know, but we try to be I try to be as good as I possibly could be. And so adding some very, very good CPAs to my team recently has definitely been a way that we’re we’re improving our client experience, right? And also the ability to do the planning really comes down to having a system. So I have an operations director that keeps everything moving in my office, right? Keeps contact with the clients or whatever, so that I can really focus on what I do well, which is tax consulting and tax strategy and like I literally spend four to five hours a day on client calls doing strategy with clients, right? And that’s because I don’t have to worry about sending Joe one of my clients his extension. My op my ops person is doing that. I don’t have to worry about what information is coming in, right? Because my ops person is taking care of that, right? And then she’s moving it over to a team member when it looks complete and all of those kind of things. So we have a pretty good system and we I’m always striving to make it better.

Joseph Crooms
Now every operator, Ted, has has a moment when things just get real. So and you sort of solved it a little bit by getting an operation system have out an operation manager. But maybe there’s a deal that that went sideways or a time that had to pivot fast. Would you mind looking back in your mind and sharing one of those moments with us?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Sure, it happened, it happened right before this tax season. I a lot of my staffing was coming from a larger CPA firm that I share office space with. I had been mentoring a team of 13 CPAs for the last two years. And that CPA firm, owned by a friend of mine, purchased two new CPA firms, one in Massachusetts and one in Florida. And they came to me on December fifteenth and they said to me, Ted, we’re so sorry. We’re gonna have to pull your team back. We’re not gonna be able to help you with all of the work that we’re doing because we need them to help us with these new acquisitions we just made. Now, this is December fifteenth, and now it’s just me and my ops person, and I don’t have any help. And now I’ve got to pull together kind of a ragtag team of merry CPAs to you know to be able to get through this tax season. And that’s exactly what I did. I started picking up the phone and literally calling, you know, everybody who’s ever helped me, you know, in the past and saying, hey, you know, you know, I I would you know, do you want to work with me again? I’m really in a bind and, you know, we’ve got to get and and so I ended up putting together a team of five people to help me this tax season. Two of them actually fell out very early in the season because their their work just wasn’t up to the standard. So I couldn’t allow them to continue. And then the the the remaining three of us plus the ops person literally, you know, went well beyond what I felt like I really wanted to do as far as working hours, right? To get everything done. And we got through it, right? And nobody, you know, nobody got hurt. No clients were left behind. Nobody complained, right? Work got done well. But that was all on our our backs. I worked way harder than I really wanted.

Joseph Crooms
Ted, that’s the kind of stuff that people don’t talk about enough. And honestly, it’s what separates the folks who are just dabbling from the ones who stay in the game long term? Let me ask you this. What are you focused on solving or scaling next? You seem to really honed in on some concerns operating you maybe want to expand that. Can you share what’s your your your your what are you scaling next? What’s your next real goal?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Yeah, so the the the scaling now that we’ve got so what ended up happening is we I came across a a strategy of of bringing in higher level people. There’s a lot of young CPAs out there going out on their own. And I’ve got five what I call fulfillment partners working with my firm, all high level CPAs that I’m mentoring now, and they’re gonna allow us to scale the firm and so I’m expanding the book Year-Round Tax Planning for Real Estate Investors for the one big beautiful bill but I’m also expanding it out and and building out new sections for real estate professional status, short term rentals, working with passive investors, wealth, you know, advanced wealth strategies, right? All of the things that my clients have been asking for, right? Because these days a lot of clients are on AI, so they’re getting all of these, you know, strategies off of AI. So we’re we’re trying to you we’re trying to keep up with their demands and we are. And so now this is the really big opportunity is to expand and what we’re building out is what I call the Landmark Wealth Framework. And it’s what I’ve been describing. It’s you know, step one, getting all of the foundational stuff in, the good record keeping, the book good bookkeeping, tracking REPS, tracking material participation, moving on to the tax planning, then moving on to putting implementing the planning and and getting the things like the cost segregation studies done and that sort of thing. Moves on through kind of some higher some higher wealth planning kind of stuff like charitable planning and and retirement planning and that sort of thing. And then ultimately shifts at towards the end into the like re retirement, estate planning and legacy planning and how to, you know, kind of, you know, what are you gonna leave for your kids? Because I find with real estate investors, that’s one of the things everyone talks about all the time is I’m leaving a legacy. Legacy plan, right? This is why I’m doing this. Right. So I I love that and I wanted to be able to provide the kind of services that make that easier to do and kind of bulletproofs it, you know, so you’re not, you know, getting audited by the IRS for for whatever strategy.

Joseph Crooms
Well, that sounds exciting. That’s big, especially when you’ve already got your book and we’re gonna talk about your book and and ’cause you talked about expanding in place, but the next move can either compound things or create chaos depending on how you play it. So for your people that are listening to me, I know a lot of people listening are are either early in their journey or looking to level up. I think they’ll benefit from hearing this when it comes to building relationships, growing your network, such as your book, how you got authors to contribute. What’s made the biggest difference from you, Ted?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Yeah, I mean look, I I’m the kind of person who likes to get out there and share what I know, right? I’m I’m really in the big picture, I’m just I’m just a guy who knows a lot about a little, right? But I love to share it, right? So what we’re doing i in building out and developing our network is literally just sharing as much information for free as we possibly can. I wanna be and already pretty close to being, but I want to be the premier tax strategy educator for real estate investors. So we just keep expanding our content, building our network, getting to know people. And that, you know, for me, that’s getting, you know, and doing podcasts like like this one, speaking at events. I speak at events all over the country and just expanding that. Doing webinars, we do a lot of webinars for our clients, help them educate. Like for our syndication operator clients, we do a lot of passive investor education for them. So I’m typically on at least one passive investor education call a a month or so, you know, for my clients. So all of that stuff is how we kind of build out our network and build credibility within the real estate.

Joseph Crooms
Ted, thank you so much for sharing it. So, yeah, you just can’t fake that the the relationships, especially when you tell me your book and how you’re expanding. I know that’s been very key. Thank you for sharing it to our listening audience. Right? All right. Before we wrap up, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, maybe collaborate or learn more what you’re doing, what’s the best way to reach out to you?

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
That sounds great. And thank you. You know, so my email is the best way to get in touch with me. It’s [email protected]. You can also go on our website, which is www.landmarkcpagroup.com. And there’s a page there that you can fill out a little form and request an appointment to talk to us. I literally talk to anybody who wants to talk to me can reach out and and I’ll have a conversation with you and I’ll see how I can help, right? You know, and we want, you know, our our thing is that we want to wow people, right? I want people after they’re done talking with me to be like, wow, that that was amazing. That was worth the time I just spent. So yeah, I mean, please, please feel reach out and we we help a lot of

Joseph Crooms
Rerun, one more time, Ted. Give it to him.

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
[email protected] is my email. www.landmarkcpagroup.com is the website.

Joseph Crooms
Perfect. Well listen, I appreciate your time. I love your story. I love your philosophy of giving things away that that is key and I know the return from the universe comes back to you. We need more people in the space of doing right doing it right way and thanks again for being here. For those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you subscribe. We got more conversations coming from operators like Ted. And I and he just gave us a unique perspective. And also go to his website. Who are out there building real businesses. So we’ll see you at the next episode. Ted say goodbye to everybody.

Theodore Lanzaro Jr.
Joseph, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. But thank you everybody. I hope you enjoyed my perspective and I look forward to talking with you.