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The have seen the real estate market in a free fall in recent years. We have seen record foreclosures litter the balance sheets of our nation’s banks and these rundown properties litter our neighborhoods and towns. We need investors to reenter the residential and commercial real estate markets.
By accelerating depreciation, we can help investors earn profits sooner.
Currently if you purchase real estate, you are allowed to write off the cost of systematic depreciation over a period of several years. By reducing the amount of years for this deduction while keeping the total amount of the depreciation the same over time, we allow investors to write off more money in a shorter period of time. In other words, investors will get to keep more of their money—sooner.
Reducing the terms for depreciation incentivizes the investor to sell the property sooner as well. After they have realized all the tax benefits, many investors will be ready to sell the property. This churns more jobs for contractors, architects, realtors, banks and mortgage facilitators. In many cases, this churn will improve property rates, which will improve neighborhoods and towns by the increase in property taxes.
I am proposing the change of the write off of the real property as follows:
| Years Now | Proposed | |
| Residential | 27.5 | 19 |
| Commercial | 39.5 | 29 |