My wife and I bought a rental properly in another city in 2017. We traveled there to shop for it in October, closed escrow in November, and signed with a property management company a few days later. While the house was on the rental market in December, we drove there with our kids and stayed for four nights. We did maintenance for half of the time we were there and vacationed the rest of the time. No one rented the house until 2018. I know we can't deduct any expenses from our 2017 income, but we want to account for the passive losses to carry them over this year. One problem is that TurboTax doesn't want to count this as a rental because it was rented zero days in 2017. It just tells me to delete the property and then loops back to ask for details of the same property. Another question is how we account for our part vacation/part maintenance trip when counting personal days of use, since it was on the market the whole time. (The people who eventually rented it toured the house during our stay.) Finally, can we count our trip to shop for the house (which was all business, no vacation) as part of our expenses?
