I have a rental property where ordinarily I am very passive, with occasional visits to the property to do repairs or to visit my tenants. However, last summer, my tenants left, and I decided to remodel the property as the property went through 10+ years of continuous rental. With regard to the property, I spent almost all summer, 11 weeks, mostly on weekends, on location. Quite a few weekdays as well, as I was not working in the month of July. I was at the property either supervising others with remodeling, doing grunt work myself, showing the house, and dealing with the finances. Roughly 30 full days at the property, but in reality more, since I did a lot of arrangement work with various suppliers such as Home Depot, answering phone calls, etc. A number of questions:
1) how is the 250 hour work minimum calculated? If I'm at the property the whole day and actually stay overnight, is it based on 8 hours per day? Or 10+ hour days? If I was there overnight, I easily did 12+ hours a day of work.
1a) I'll assume that phone calls and other things I may have been doing while at home also counts towards the 250. Also, what does the documentation entail, i.e. what type of logging is required by the IRS? Would having Google Calendar entries show enough "proof"?
2) I've also noticed that if I take this option, if I incrementally add expenses for this property, anything, such as repairs or depreciation or management fees, my taxes actually goes up, which makes no sense. I could see my taxes staying the same, but not to go up?! Maybe this has nothing to do with the Safe Harbor QBI? I do have 2 other properties, both which have paper losses due to large depreciation expenses (plus for the past 2 years rent control issues, people skipping out on rent using Covid as an excuse, etc).
3) I've read other threads where I would have to manually send in the tax forms, rather than electronically filing. Has this been fixed in TurboTax? I'm not sure if it's worth the small amount of savings on the Safe Harbor QBI if I have to deal with this hassle.
