Everything we'd send a client — plus the people we'd send them to.
Free downloads, calculators, and reference material built from the same engineering and tax-rule frameworks behind every Cost Seg Smart study. Then, when the question is bigger than depreciation, the firms and sources we trust.
Start with your property type.
Short-term rental
Average stays under seven days, material participation under §469, and an FF&E-heavy 5-year bucket.
Single-family, condo & ADU
One door at a time — houses, condos and accessory units, including new builds and renovations.
Multifamily
Duplex through 5+ unit buildings, where per-unit finishes and appliances repeat at scale.
Commercial
Office, retail, restaurant, industrial, medical and mixed-use — a 39-year shell, and specialty MEP that moves the result.
Specialty & operating
Self-storage, dealerships, car washes, gyms, vet clinics, day care centers, houses of worship, farms, senior living, funeral homes and data centers.
Free tools you can hand to your CPA.
The STR investor's tax guide
How the STR loophole works under IRC §469, the material participation tests, stacking cost segregation on top, and Form 3115 lookback for properties you already own.
STR material participation time log template
An IRS-ready format for contemporaneous entries that holds up for the 100-hour and 500-hour tests. Fill it in as you go, not the week before filing.
CPA cost segregation review checklist
What to verify before you file a client's study: MACRS classification spot-checks, basis reconciliation, and the audit-defense documentation that should be attached.
Should you do a cost segregation study?
Five questions that settle it in about a minute: what the property is worth, how long you're holding, whether it earns income, your bracket, and whether it has been studied before.
See a real, anonymized study before you order one.
Calculators and tools.
Look it up.
Our published research, definitions, and rule citations — all open, all free to link.
Resources we'd actually send you to.
We do one thing: engineering-based cost segregation. Everything below is outside our shop — the two firms we refer clients to, and the primary sources we check our own work against.
Taxstra
A proactive tax-planning CPA firm for high-income professionals, business owners, and real estate investors. They're the ones we call when a client's question is bigger than depreciation — REPS qualification, S-corp elections, entity structure, or a return that needs a plan rather than a filing.
Sponsored: we have a working referral relationship with this firm and may receive a referral fee.
- They have a study but no one to plan around it
- Their CPA says "just file it" about REPS
- W-2 income is high and passive losses are trapped
- They need multi-state or entity work alongside the rental
Marketics
Done-for-you revenue management for short-term rentals — positioning, listing copy and photos, distribution, search ranking and dynamic pricing, run as a specialist alongside whoever handles the guests. They're the ones we send an owner to when the study is done and the question becomes what the property should actually earn.
Sponsored: we have a working referral relationship with this firm and may receive a referral fee.
- The study is done and the property is under-earning its market
- They self-manage or use a PM but nobody owns pricing
- A new STR needs positioning before its first season
- They want revenue work without handing over operations
How this directory works: Taxstra and Marketics are firms we have working referral relationships with and may receive referral fees from; their cards are marked Sponsored. CPA and tax-professional listings come from our partner program and are free to the firm — we pay no one for a listing and no one pays us for one. The tools and vendors are uncompensated — we list them because clients ask and they're what people actually use. A listing or a link is not an endorsement of any specific product, price, or professional's advice. Cost Seg Smart is not a CPA firm and does not provide tax advice.
Straight from the IRS.
Nothing on this site outranks these. Read them yourself — or hand them to a CPA who says cost segregation is aggressive.