Thanks. Section 678 seems to say that if a person has a "power exercisable solely by himself to vest the corpus or the income therefrom in himself," that person can be treated as the owner of the trust. I believe my brother, as beneficiary and trustee of his trust, can do that. So he can count the time his trust owned the house towards the ownership requirement for a residency exclusion. So I'm back to my thinking to transfer the ownership of the house from his trust to my brother as an individual to sell the house (which incidentally also supports that he has the power to call himself the owner of the trust because he would have unilaterally just transferred some of the corpus to himself). He gets the 1099-S issued to his SSN and handles it as if he owned the house since it was first transferred to his trust when my parents died. It seems reasonable with the quoted tax provisions. Again, thanks. I'll let you know if this is correct if we go to a lawyer or a CPA.
