Using airbnb causes loss of primary residence status for property tax purposes

Are you shore? That is the first thing that I did, talk to the IRS, and if one of you is 62 years young, that may be the issue, but if you are of full retirement age $20,000 should be O.K.

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I wasn’t encouraging them to be dishonest, I was just pointing out that there was no reward or consideration for a simple mistake, especially due to crazy tax rules that change yearly. But everyone has undisclosed income. If you ever had a garage sale or collected cash for anything and did not itemize that transaction on your taxes (in the USA) you are not “disclosing income”. Whoever says they have disclosed ALL income is fooling themselves.

My opinion is that if you are making money from your property then you should pay the full amount of taxes that you are supposed to pay, and you shouldn’t be on the tax freeze. When people go on a senior tax freeze, the rest of the tax payers taxes are increased to pay the difference in lost taxes from people being on these freezes. It doesn’t seem ethical for someone on a freeze to be profiting from their neighbors higher taxes. If I found out someone in my town was on Airbnb and also receiving a tax freeze you better believe I would notify the tax assessor and town council immediately.

And in my area, the determination has been made that senior citizens have a perfect right to the tax exemption [about a 10% reduction] and can rent out a room in their home since it is more likely that they can stay in that home and not use senior housing. This reduction is based on age and ability, not income from any source.

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If a tax reduction is based on age, not income, what difference would it make if they have an airbnb rental in their home? Now buying a property an an investment and then trying to claim it is a primary residence is a different matter.

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So just property taxes then?

Do you remit your state’s sales taxes when you buy online out of state? Do you collect and remit bed taxes for your area? If you don’t pay these taxes and they are owed you should turn yourself in.

If you don’t pay sales tax for your online taxes, you are dishonest and should be turned in like those seniors you mentioned

Thank you SO much for this information.

There are a number of issues here. I am not familiar with Arizona law on senior property freeze. In Michigan we have PRE (principal residence exemption) that provides the lowest property tax. So if you have a 2nd vacation house that is taxed at 2X. We had a year long fight which we won recently on loss of PRE due to the local tax assessor saying our house was a rental property due to Airbnb. We too rented out only a portion of our house. We finally won in the Michigan Tax tribunal. I suggest you go on line and find out how to appeal and there is probably a time limit so get going. It sounds like your local county taxing authority has misinterpreted a state law. You should absolutely fight this. Let us know how it is going.

The 2nd issue is taxes. Again you should consult with an attorney friend on state and federal laws. Your income may NOT be considered rental income at all based on your living there and also for how many days. For example federally (and please verify this ) I believe you can rent your house out for 14 days or less and not have it count as rental income.

Good luck and fight back.
Curt