Investors & landlords

For starters, if you change the amount already entered in the COST and/or the COST OF LAND box, you are guaranteed to screw things up royally. That will throw off all the prior year's depreciation taken, as well as the current year's depreciation. So under no circumstances do you ever change the originally entered cost basis on a rental asset. Not ever.

As you're probably aware, when you first start renting property the amount used for depreciation is the "lesser" amount of what you paid for it, or it's FMV on the date placed in service. For property purchased prior to 2008 and placed in service as rental property between the end of 2008 and 2016, it's perfectly possible that the "lesser" value was the FMV of the property at the time you placed it in service. So that would be the correct amount to enter in the COST and COST OF LAND box in the tax year you initially placed the property in service and started depreciating it.

Now if you sold the property at a loss, then you will use those values in the rental section to report the sale. This actually reduces the amount of loss you can claim. But that's the law weather we agree with it or not.

If you sold the property at a gain, then you use the higher value - which is what you actually paid for the property. This actually benefits you, because it reduces your taxable gain.

So in your case you can not report the sale in the SCH E section. Instead, you have to report it in the "Sale of Business Property" section. This is the only way possible with TurboTax, to use the correct values for correctly reporting the sale. Here's the procedure.

First, start working through the rental property and in the Property Profile Section indicate that you sold the property. YOu will also select the option that you converted the property to personal use. (When asked later, your conversion to personal use date will be the date you closed on the sale.)

After working through the rental income and expenses section and entering all pertinent data there, the next section is "Sale of Assets/Depreciation". You have to work through each individual asset listed one at a time. you are going to do several things as you work through each asset, as you need to gather information that you will need later in the "sale of business property" section.

As you work through each asset, you will indicate that you "stopped using this asset in 2019". Then on the "Special Handling Required?" screen, you will select YES.  If you select "NO" then you will be FORCED to enter sales information. You don't want to do that in this section. So select NO.

As you work through each asset you will need to write down the amounts on each asset for "Prior year's depreciation already taken" and "current year's depreciation" that will be taken. You must also include in that any and all Special depreciation allowance you may have taken on an asset, as well as any SEC179 deduction (which is rare for residential property) that you may have taken in the past.

You must do the above for each individual asset listed. When done, add up all the depreciation numbers you wrote down. You will need this total for when you report this sale in the "sale of business property" section.

Now if you claimed any vehicle use for this rental at any time during your ownership of it, you also have to show disposition of the vehicle. So you'll work through the "Vehicle Expenses" section.

Since I seriously doubt you sold the vehicle as part of the rental property sale, simply indicate that you removed the vehicle for personal use and you can make the date for that the same as your closing date on the sale, or any date before the closing date.

Once all the above is done, and done correctly, 2019 will be the last year you will report anything concerning this rental on SCH E. Now you're ready to move on to the "sale of business property" section to report the sale. This section is fairly easy and self-explanatory. So at this point I don't see a need to go through any step-by-step details. The improtant thing is, you have all the information from the SCH E, that you will need to report this sale in the "sale of business property" section.