Nirav Desai

Why this site exists

Over the years, a pattern kept repeating in our practice. Someone would call about their investment portfolio, and somewhere in the conversation they would mention a rental property they had owned for decades and were thinking of selling.

Almost none of them knew what the sale would cost. They knew about capital gains tax in the abstract. They had never heard of depreciation recapture. They had no idea that the combined federal and California bill on a property they bought in 1990 could run past a third of the sale price. And several of them had already signed something.

The information exists. It is scattered across intermediary websites, sponsor marketing, and dense IRS publications, most of it written either to sell something or to satisfy a lawyer. Very little of it is written for a seventy-year-old who just wants to know whether they can stop being a landlord without losing a third of their life's work.

This site is our attempt at that. It is free, it does not require an email address, and it says plainly when a 1031 exchange is the wrong answer.

Background

• Founder of Qubera Wealth Management, Inc., a fee-only registered investment adviser based in Pasadena, California, serving clients nationally.
• Master of Science, University of Southern California.
• MBA, UCLA Anderson School of Management.
• Personally owned and operated more than twenty investment properties, including long-term rentals and short-term vacation rentals.
• Practice concentrated on complex, tax-heavy financial events: concentrated stock positions, liquidity events from acquisitions and public offerings, and real estate dispositions.

What being fee-only actually means

The distinction matters more in this field than in most, because the 1031 exchange industry is full of people who are paid a commission on the product you select. Their advice may still be good. But you should know how the person across from you is compensated, and you should notice when the answer is vague.

Fee-only means our compensation comes from our clients and nowhere else. We do not receive a commission if you exchange, and we do not receive one if you do not. That is what makes it possible for us to say, on a first call, that we do not think you need us. We say that regularly.

Having been the landlord

There is a version of this work that treats a rental property as a line item on a balance sheet. That version misses what is actually happening in the room.

The house you bought in 1990 is not a line item. It was a stretch at the time. You did the plumbing yourself for the first ten years. Your kids helped paint it one summer. You kept the rent low for the family who lived there because they were decent people who paid on time and you did not need the extra two hundred dollars a month badly enough to disrupt their lives.

Deciding to sell it is not purely a financial decision, and pretending otherwise is a good way to give bad advice. Having owned, leased, repaired, and sold rental property myself, I understand why the decision is hard, and I understand that the tax question is often the smaller half of it.

How we work with 1031 clients

Most of the work happens before the sale closes, which is why the timing of the first conversation matters so much. We coordinate with your CPA, your attorney, your real estate agent, escrow, and the qualified intermediary so the pieces line up. We review Delaware Statutory Trust offerings against your specific proceeds and debt replacement needs, read the offering documents with you rather than summarizing them at you, and build a mix across sponsors and markets.

Most clients stay on afterward for ongoing management, though that is a separate decision and not a condition of the exchange work.

See exactly what the process looks like, step by step →