Thomas Castelli, an entrepreneurial spirit with a passion for business. Armed with a Bachelor’s in Business Management and Accounting, they ventured into real estate investing, transitioning from passive to active involvement. Now a Tax Strategist at Hall CPA, they merge their expertise in real estate and accounting to navigate the financial landscape with precision and insight.
Episode Highlights Here:
Thomas You want to work with real estate clients, because they’re going to present you with problems. And through solving those problems, you’re going to gain a lot of expertise. And secondly, reading the available research and, and books and blogs and articles written by professionals out there who are in the real estate space will also help you kind of get a good idea. Brett Thomas, what would you say is the number one secret to becoming real estate focused? CPA? Thomas Yeah, so if you want to become a real estate focus, CPA, you definitely want to work with real estate investors, that’s probably the best way. Because you’re gonna, there’s a lot of hands-on learning. And as you kind of come into the problems that your clients are facing, you’re going to be forced to do the research, you’re gonna be forced to find the solutions to their problems. Now, having said that, reading, reading is a big one as well. So for me, when I first started kind of my journey of advising, I wouldn’t just find books on the topic of real estate tax, the no lo series has been phenomenal, a great way to educate yourself on what strategies are available to you as an investor. But then also diving into tax court cases into the actual tax law itself, has been a tremendous help. So I guess, to summarize, you want to work with real estate clients, because they’re going to present you with problems. And through solving those problems, you’re going to gain a lot of expertise. And secondly, reading the available research and, and books and blogs and articles written by professionals out there who are in the real estate space, we’ll also help you kind of get a good idea of how you can do what’s available and how you can help your clients. Brett Absolutely, I think of it like sometimes people ask, but what I do and how we figured it out, it’s like, well, I spent the 10,000 hours with the brain surgeon who was helping other people do all the things and watching all the surgeries basically and all the all the deals in different nuances and different different angles. And it’s full immersion, it’s like how do you learn how to swim, what you need to get into the waters are swimming, right. And so it sounds like the focus is on that niche client, which is the real estate investors spending a ton of time with them solving the problems. And that helps you to see the patterns, right and create opportunities for you probably to think in a way that most people wouldn’t have, because you’ve been solving so many of those problems. And then you probably do little slight adjustments, talk about how you’ve evolved with your problem and your analytical skills over time, as you spent so much time with real estate investors that most CPAs just wouldn’t do because they’re, let’s face it, more of a generalist. Thomas Yeah, right. So a generalist would typically go very surface level. So they’ll maybe read the IRS guidance or publications, and they’ll like to go along like the surface. As I kind of moved along in my career as a tax advisor for real estate investors, you start to see this lot of nuanced problems that you have to find solutions for finding answers to and just looking at the plain old tax code or looking at the guidance from the IRS isn’t always going to paint the whole picture. So diving into tax court cases has really been huge, because where there’s a lack of guidance from the regulations or from the IRS, or the tax code itself, you can often find people who went to tax court and had a similar problem, maybe not the same exact problem, but similar. And it’s the tax court that has determined the answer and has already figured that out. And it has like drawn a conclusion to its position on it rather, and going to tax court cases and finding those facts, finding those the solutions for people of similar fact patterns has been huge. I’d say that’s probably a primary differentiator. And also, one of the things has been interesting is there’s this one strategy for short term rental investors where I believe that the court, the tax court misinterpreted the regulations. And we have the tax court’s opinion rather, okay, that’s the best way to put it was dated and the regulation system has been updated. And rather than taking the regulator taking the tax court’s opinion at face value, if you dive back into the updated regulations, you see that might no longer be the case. So we’ve written an article on that and published it in professional publication. So going that extra mile and diving deep into tax court cases. And also, once you have that intimate understanding, like you said, that 10,000 hours or the 10,000 reps, you start to see that you start to see things differently, you start to see where the nuances are and start to see where there might be flaws and some arguments. So if that kind of makes sense. That’s kind of where I’m at, I guess you could say it absolutely does. Brett And by the way, you can learn more about Thomas Castilian by going to the real estate cpa.com
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About Thomas Castelli
Ever since Thomas was a child I had the entrepreneurial bug and a passion for business. This led to earning a Bachelors in Business Management with a concentration in Accounting, and landing a role with a national accounting firm. Shortly before graduating, real estate investing caught my attention. He attended networking events, seminars, listened to podcasts, and read every book he could find on the topic. Armed with this knowledge, Thomas invested in several properties as a passive investor before actively participating in the syndication of an 82-unit apartment community as a member of the sponsorship team. By this point, he was more than convinced that real estate was not only one of the best investments he could make, but it was the industry where he wanted to focus my business career. Today he combine my passion for real estate and accounting background into my role as a Tax Strategist with Hall CPA.
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