Tommy DobczykOpportunity Zone Advisor, OZ Wizard · Director of Development | Certified Opportunity Zone Advisor

Airbnb is COMMERCIAL Property? IRS Tax Secrets REVEALED! #shorts

20 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this short explanatory segment, the speaker outlines how the IRS classifies short‑term Airbnb rentals (seven days or less) as commercial/hotel property rather than long‑term residential rentals. Because of this classification, the property must be depreciated using the commercial straight‑line schedule of 39 years. The speaker then describes a practical cost‑segregation approach: using the purchase price (often based on an appraisal) to allocate the total basis into individual building components such as carpet, luxury vinyl plank (LVP), plumbing, and HVAC. By breaking the $1 million purchase price into these component values, owners can accelerate depreciation on the shorter‑life assets while the remainder follows the 39‑year schedule. The overall message is a concise, actionable method for Airbnb owners to maximize tax benefits through proper asset classification and component‑level depreciation.

Chapters

If we're talking about Airbnb, that's considered commercial because the rental is 7 days or less. So the IRS says that's more like a hotel than a long-term rental. So we're going to treat it as a commercial asset. So if you were to straight-line depreciate it, it would be over 39 years of the basis, right? Right. But what we do to break it down even more simple is when you bought that property, you probably got an appraisal on it if you got financing. And so you got an appraisal and the appraiser says it's worth $1 million. Cool. What we go in is not so dissimilar as an appraiser, although we're not appraisers, we're engineers, is we go in and say, great, it's $1 million and you paid $1 million for it. Let's, let's break down each component and say that $1 million equals, you know, $25,000 of carpet, $10,000 of LVP, $50,000 of plumbing, $100,000 of HVAC. I'm making numbers up. But at the end of the day, we, we take that, that $1 million and break it out into the individual components that make the property.