Tax
Federal and Florida returns, cost-seg on acquisitions, depreciation elections against year-end income, and 1031 exchange support.
Learn MoreIndustries
Real Estate & Construction accounting for owners, developers, and GCs.
Job costing, WIP schedules, and depreciation elections that hold up to a bonding company or a lender. Consulting work on 1031 timing, cost segregation, and the entity structure across the operating company and the properties.
What We See
The specific mechanics that come up every year.
WIP schedules and percentage-of-completion accounting sit at the center of a contractor’s tax and financial picture. Get the estimated cost-to-complete wrong and you overstate income in one period and understate it in the next; get it consistently right and your bonding capacity, lender confidence, and tax bill all line up.
Real-estate owners face a different set of mechanics: cost segregation on new acquisitions, 1031 exchanges when it’s time to trade up, and the choice of one LLC per property versus a single holding structure. Each choice has consequences years out; each is usually made once and lived with for a decade.
Entity structuring is where owners and GCs overlap. The operating company sits in one wrapper, the real estate in another, and the intellectual property (blueprints, brand, systems) in a third. Getting that architecture right protects the assets and simplifies the tax return; getting it wrong is expensive to unwind later.
Services for Real Estate & Construction
Three practices, one team.
Accounting & Assurance
Job costing, WIP schedules, percentage-of-completion journal entries, and financials your bonding company and lender both accept.
Learn MoreConsulting
Entity structuring across the operating company and real-estate holdings, 1031 timing, and succession work when a builder hands the shop to the next generation.
Learn MoreCommon Questions
Questions owners and builders bring us most.
For contracts longer than a year, PCM is the default under IRC section 460 unless you qualify as a small contractor (three-year average gross receipts under the current threshold) or the job is a home-construction contract. Even when completed-contract is available, PCM usually gives a cleaner picture for lenders and bonding companies — and the tax deferral of completed-contract is smaller than it looks once you factor in the alternative minimum tax adjustment.
Strictly speaking, 1031 always defers rather than eliminates. The savings show up in three places: cash-flow (deferred tax funds the next acquisition), stepped-up basis at death (heirs receive fair-market basis, wiping out the deferred gain), and rate arbitrage (deferring ordinary depreciation-recapture income into a future year when you might be in a lower bracket). The math works best when you plan to keep buying up.
Typical warehouse cost-seg studies reclassify 15 to 25 percent of the depreciable basis from 39-year commercial property into 5-, 7-, and 15-year categories. On a $5M warehouse, that’s $750K to $1.25M shifted into shorter lives, which with bonus depreciation can produce a first-year deduction well into six figures. We only recommend a study when the numbers actually justify the study cost, which is usually true above roughly $1M in depreciable basis.
One LLC per property is the standard for liability protection: a slip-and-fall lawsuit at property A can’t reach the equity in property B. The trade-off is administrative cost (annual filings, separate books, separate bank accounts) — usually worth it above roughly $500K of equity per property, less so below. A parent holding LLC that owns each property LLC as a wholly-owned subsidiary gives you consolidated reporting without breaking the liability wall.
The Vocabulary
What we mean when we say we know the sector.
Real estate & construction carries its own accounting vocabulary. These are the items that come up on live engagements, not a glossary.
WIP schedules
Work-in-process schedules reconciling costs incurred, billings, and estimated cost to complete — the schedule your surety and your lender read first.
Retainage
Amounts held back on progress billings, tracked separately on both receivable and payable sides, with the revenue-recognition and cash-flow consequences that follow.
ASC 606
Revenue recognition over time using an input or output method, performance-obligation identification, and contract modifications on change orders.
Job costing
Direct cost, labour burden, and allocated overhead by job, so gross margin is known per contract rather than at year-end in aggregate.
Contract schedules
Completed-contract and contracts-in-progress schedules in the format a bonding company expects, tied to the general ledger.
Bonding & surety
Working capital and equity calculations that drive single-job and aggregate limits, and the reporting cadence a surety requires.
Percentage-of-completion
Cost-to-cost measurement for long-term contracts, plus the small-contractor exceptions under IRC §460 and when they are worth taking.
Cost segregation
Reclassifying acquisition or construction basis into shorter recovery classes — and modelling recapture and passive-loss limits before commissioning a study.
1031 considerations
Identification and replacement periods, qualified intermediary coordination, and the boot and debt-replacement mechanics that determine whether gain is fully deferred.