Tax & Structure
Selling: timing, costs and the tax bill
The exit is where a large share of the return is realised, and where the costs are most often underestimated.
Nikhil Varma
20 articles by Varma
Markets & Cycles
Demographics and the next twenty years of housing demand
The slowest-moving variable in real estate is also the most predictable, which makes it unusually useful and easy to overrate.
Tax & Structure
Passive activity losses and why the tax benefit may not apply to you
The rule that determines whether your rental losses reduce this year’s tax bill or sit unused for a decade.
Markets & Cycles
Is now a good time to buy?
The most frequently asked question in real estate, and the one where the honest answer is least satisfying.
Markets & Cycles
Office, retail and industrial: what happened and what it means
Three commercial sectors that moved in completely different directions over the same period, for reasons worth understanding even if you never buy one.
Strategies
REITs and the case for not owning buildings
Public real estate offers the exposure without the operations, and the comparison with direct ownership is more even than either side admits.
Tax & Structure
Appealing your property tax assessment
One of the few operating expenses you can reduce by argument alone, on a deadline most owners miss.
Markets & Cycles
Single-family versus small multifamily
Two entry points with genuinely different economics, risk profiles and exit markets, frequently compared on cash flow alone.
Underwriting
Portfolio-level underwriting: the risks you cannot see one deal at a time
Every property can pass its own stress test while the portfolio fails, because the same shock hits all of them at once.
Tax & Structure
Repairs versus improvements, and why the line matters
One is deducted this year, the other over decades, and the classification is made at the moment you write the check whether you realise it or not.
Markets & Cycles
Rent regulation: what exists and where it is heading
A politically charged subject with a real evidence base, and a regulatory trend that belongs in market selection whatever you think of it.
Markets & Cycles
Insurance costs are now a market variable
Premiums used to be a rounding error in underwriting. In several regions they have become a determinant of whether property is viable at all.
Tax & Structure
1031 exchanges: the rules that actually bind
A powerful deferral mechanism with unforgiving deadlines and a set of requirements that fail deals when they are discovered late.
Markets & Cycles
Class A, B and C, and why the letters matter
The classification is informal and imprecise, and it predicts more about your experience as an owner than almost any other single descriptor.
Markets & Cycles
Migration data and what it does not tell you
People moving to a metro is a demand signal. It is not the same as people who can pay your rent.
Markets & Cycles
Interest rates and property prices: the actual relationship
Rates matter enormously and the mechanism is more specific, and slower, than the headlines suggest.
Markets & Cycles
What actually happens when a market turns
Downturns in property do not look like downturns in stocks. They are slower, quieter, and the volume moves before the price does.
Tax & Structure
Depreciation, explained without the mysticism
The most significant tax feature of real estate is also the one most frequently described inaccurately by people selling something.
Markets & Cycles
Reading a market without believing the brochure
Every market has a story, most stories are true at some scale, and the scale is usually wrong.
Markets & Cycles
Supply, not demand, is what usually moves a market
Population growth gets the headlines, and permit data tells you more about where rents are going.