Daily Real Estate News  |  March 31, 2008

Disney Proposes Luxury Development
If you’d like to live in a luxury house next door to Mickey Mouse, Florida’s Disney World is about to make your dream come true.

The proposed property will be built on the banks of Walt Disney World canals. The project could encompass as many as 373 single-family homes, 200 multifamily homes, and 60 time-share units.

A Four-Seasons Hotel is expected to anchor the resort. Marilyn Waters, spokeswoman for Walt Disney Imagineering, the Disney office that handles real-estate development, compared this proposed resort to the Four Seasons-anchored Aviara community in San Diego, a high-end vacation community for people rich enough to have multimillion-dollar second or third homes.

“This is in essence the coming together of the Disney brand and the Four Seasons brand,” she says.

Disney won’t discuss the issue, but speculation is that given the current state of the U.S. real estate market, the luxury homes will be snapped up by wealthy foreign buyers.

Source: Orlando Sentinel, Scott Powers (03/28/08)

Daily Real Estate News  |  March 10, 2008

IRS Releases Vacation Home Ruling
The Internal Revenue Service recently issued a Revenue Procedure ruling that spells out how vacation properties can qualify for 1031 exchanges, which involve the exchange of investment properties.

The guidance aims to clear up the debate about whether vacation homes are investment or personal use properties. The ruling states that the property must be held by the taxpayer for 24 months. The holding period is broken into 12-month blocks, and during each the property must be rented at the fair market rate for no less than 14 days.

Additionally, the owner can use the property for 14 days or 10 percent of the days rented, whichever is greater, plus a "reasonable" number of days devoted to maintenance tasks. Because it is a safe harbor ruling, experts say failing to comply with all the rules does not mean the exchange will be denied or an audit will automatically occur.

However, they underscore the importance of keeping good records of the property's rental history and the dates the property was occupied by the owner for maintenance.

Source: Realty Times, Gary Gorman (03/06/08)

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