My mother is in a memory care center and my brother and I are renting out her house to help pay for her care center rent. My brother took several trips to my mother's house (about a 4 hour drive) to clean out her personal belongings and prepare the house for renting. My mother paid my brother for the cost of his gas and food for those trips. I consider those costs to be part of the rental expenses but I'm not sure how to categorize them on my mother's taxes. I don't think I can claim a travel mileage and food deduction because it wasn't my mother who did the travelling and it wasn't her vehicle. Can I just include those costs as part of the cost of getting the house ready for rental, maybe cleaning costs? My mother didn't pay my brother as an employee--he got no wages--she only paid for his travel expenses. So how do I categorize
those costs?
