Real Estate Trust Lawyers in Chicago

You want your home or other real estate property to be properly taken care of once you are no longer able to manage it. At the same time, you want to be sure this is done in a way that is tax efficient and fully advantageous to yourself, your children, and other beneficiaries of your estate.

One way to do this is by placing your real estate into a living trust. As part of a well-structured estate plan, a real estate trust can afford you a great deal of security, as well as certain tax benefits — but only if it is structured properly. Hart David Carson offers the legal acumen necessary to make this possible.

Benefits of Real Estate Trusts

Often, real estate is placed into a living trust, alongside other assets. Placing your property into a living trust grants a number of advantages. 

On top of the flexibility inherent in a living trust, setting up a real estate trust provides you with the following benefits, including:

• Avoiding the time and cost of probate
• Ensuring property will be properly managed, particularly if you become incapacitated
• Reduction of estate taxes
• Security, especially when determining to whom the property should go after you pass on

To provide these benefits, the trust must be structured correctly. In addition, it needs to be effectively incorporated into a well-organized estate plan. If placing your house or other property into a trust is not done with a full, efficiently structured estate plan in mind, the benefits will be minimal or nonexistent. Therefore, contacting an attorney will help you to get the most out of a real estate trust.

REIT

When you hear the term “real estate trust,” the term REIT may come to mind. A real estate investment trust (REIT) is, simply put, a company that invests in real estate. Often, it deals in trading shares of stock on the properties it owns, allowing investors to gain ownership of real estate assets when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

REITs make a great addition to an investment portfolio, and their share-based trading can be a great benefit to investors who might normally encounter significant barriers to investing in real estate. Selling your property to an REIT can help with estate planning by deferring capital gains taxes and providing secure income.

Hart David Carson can help you structure a deal with an REIT that will yield much-needed benefits to you and your family while avoiding exorbitant taxes both from the transaction and later on.

Placing Real Estate in a Trust

Placing property into a living trust may seem simple enough, but the trust needs to be structured properly in order to yield all the benefits of doing so. Also, it is somewhat more complex to place real estate into a trust than other assets. In particular, you must retitle the property to the trust, essentially giving the trustee control of it.

Making sure the terms for this are set up in a way that works to your benefit is absolutely key, and that requires thorough legal knowledge of real estate, asset transfers, and trust structuring. This is where our lawyers come in.

To learn more about how we can help you with real estate trusts, REITs, and other instruments for use in estate planning, contact Hart David Carson today.