Rental Property Depreciation Removed.

[wilder84]

My mother rented her house in Feb 2017 when she moved to an independent living facility. When I entered all of her expense and income information into TT Premier, it calculated a depreciation. But, when I went back to recheck everything, the depreciation was removed. This occurred under the Rental Info section when I moved from the page asking if the house was in a specific "Designated Area" to the page "Tell Us About the Property." I did not make any new entries. (I have repeated this several times.)  Now no depreciation is listed on the relevant forms. Why was depreciation removed?  I understand the IRS will count the depreciation when we sell the house even if we didn't get the deduction during the rental years. Thanks for any help.

[AmandaR1 · Accepted solution]

To take depreciation you'll need to add the house as asset. This isn't done under the Property Info/Basic Profile section. It sounds like you have it set up properly and you just need to add the asset for depreciation. 

To do so: Edit the Rental > Answer questions till you arrive at Summary of your XYZ Rental > Scroll down and click Start/Edit next to Assets/Depreciation > Answer the questions to add the house as an asset. 

Please let me know if this resolves your issue or if you still have questions. 

[wilder84]

I'm still having problems.  I think the house is entered correctly.  I have spent hours reading and checking all of the numbers manually and got the same result as TT Premier.  Basis $136,854, Land $31,322, Percent Use for this First Year = 87.5%, Depreciation $3358 per year (lower in first year).  

However, I left off $2315 in Improvements before it was rented.  When I try to add them, Premier deletes the previous numbers and recalculates the Depreciation to only $300 per year.  It appears that it has something to do with the "Allocation between Land and Improvements" on the New Rental Worksheet.  The Depreciation Worksheet now recalculates Cost as $9419 and Land as $127,435 and Depreciation Basis as $9419.  I can manually change the numbers, but it doesn't give me much confidence.  I am frustrated that there are no help links that explain the allocations and why the numbers changed.  Can you give me some help?