Liz Weston

Dear Liz: My husband and I bought a single-family home as a rental property in 1988. We paid $135,000. The tenants moved out in February and we are doing major upgrades now. If we moved into the property and sold it after two years, would the first $500,000 of gain be excluded from income tax? The property is under our family trust and our two daughters are successor co-trustees.

Answer: Generally speaking, a former rental property can qualify for the home sale exclusion as long as the owners claim it as their primary residence for at least two of the five years before the sale.

The home could still be subject to depreciation recapture, however, says Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. You probably deducted depreciation on the rental over the years — basically reflecting the wear and tear on the property. The IRS typically requires that tax break to be paid back when the property is sold. You won’t be able to exclude the part of the gain that’s equal to any depreciation deduction allowed or taken after May 6, 1997, Luscombe says.

If your trust is a revocable living trust, which is designed to avoid probate, your ability to take the home sale exclusion won’t be affected. Other types of revocable trusts may require the home to be taken out of the trust before it’s sold, Luscombe says. If it’s an irrevocable trust, the sale of the home generally would not qualify for the home sale exclusion, he says.

You should discuss this with a tax expert before proceeding, and consider reviewing other options for reducing taxes. For example, if you kept this home until death and bequeathed it to your heirs, there probably wouldn’t be any tax on the appreciation that occurred during your lifetimes.