Thanks for your response Patricia. I'm not sure how to understand "existing real estate business". I currently own several rental properties as an individual and I report income from each of them on schedule E. The failed real estate transaction aimed to acquire another rental property, but there's no real-estate business "entity" associated with that transaction (or with any of my other rental properties, which are all in Europe).
So my current understanding of the law aligns with John's description above (these legal fees are business expenses related to rental properties, not personal expenses) though I'm not sure how/where to report them in TurboTax (since I was never able to acquire the specific rental property those fees are associated with, which is also the very reason I'm incurring those fees in the first place).
Does this make sense?
