As a non-resident American, I know there are a lot of other people living in the U.S like me who want to buy real estate property. The main idea is that United States is a transparent market, pricing is very transparent, plenty of rental agents to handle the property, and just a full suite of services which a lot of foreigner investors like but today I am going to give you three main factors to consider if you’re a foreigner investing in the U.S Market.
1. Litigation risk:
So the first thing you should be ready to face or should already be careful about is getting sued for literally anything. People in the US, not in the west or most of the world but mainly in the US, love to sue each other (sarcastically).
So if you want to purchase a property in the US market, you have to make sure that you have lots of insurance and you have to make sure that you have an asset protection strategy, use limited liability companies to hold your property and make sure you have an attorney to structure things properly for you.
2. File a Tax Return:
In the US you must have to file a tax return at any cost, yes sometimes owners gets lazy and don’t do it because they think that their property is on rent and they don’t have to this and also in a lot of other countries it is not really compulsory to file a tax return but in US it is very important. As a non-resident American you have to make sure that you are not screwing with the IRS.
So always have a good tax preparer so you are not missing out on anything which may cause trouble for you in the future.
3. Limited Liability Companies:
So in the US you are not just required to give the tax return but an informational return called form 5472 which all the non US person needs to complete and file this informational return for any LLC that has transaction within the year and the penalty for not filing has increased to $25,000.
