REPS Compliance Software

Most trackers count to 750 and stop. That is only half the law. IRC Section 469(c)(7)(B) has two conjunctive prongs: more than 750 hours in real property trades or businesses, and more than half of all your personal service hours in those same businesses.

The second prong is what actually disqualifies people. If you work a 2,000-hour job, your real target is not 750 — it is 2,001. REP Status asks for your non-real-estate hours during setup and shows you the number you actually have to beat, rather than a 750-hour progress ring that quietly lies to you.

Qualifying as a real estate professional does not by itself make your losses non-passive. You also have to materially participate. REP Status evaluates all seven tests in Treas. Reg. Section 1.469-5T(a) against your log, including the ones most tools skip:

• More than 500 hours in the activity
• Substantially all of the participation in the activity
• More than 100 hours, and not less than any other individual — including your property manager
• Significant participation activities totalling more than 500 hours
• Material participation in five of the last ten years
• A personal service activity you participated in for any three prior years
• Regular, continuous and substantial involvement on the facts

Thresholds are tested as "more than," the way the regulation is written, and against unrounded hours. Rounding minutes up before comparing creates a band where the software says you passed and the regulation says you did not.

A property with an average guest stay of seven days or less is not a rental activity under Treas. Reg. Section 1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii)(A). That means the automatic passive rule does not apply and you do not need Real Estate Professional Status at all — you need material participation in the property.

Tell REP Status that short-term rentals are your strategy and the dashboard changes: it leads with per-property progress toward the 100-hour test rather than the 750-hour ring, and it flags the trap in that test — if anyone else, a manager or a cleaning crew, logs more hours on that property than you do, you fail it.

Spouse hours and managing-partner hours are not the same thing and the software does not treat them as such. Under IRC Section 469(h)(5) a spouse's participation counts as yours for material participation. A managing partner is a separate individual — their hours never pool with yours, and they count against you on the 100-hour test.

Logging hours is the easy part. Surviving the review is not. Courts have consistently rejected reconstructed estimates while accepting contemporaneous records backed by independent evidence.

• Timer or manual entry, with the date, property, duration and nature of each activity
• Categories that map to qualifying activity types rather than free text
• Bulk import from an existing spreadsheet, with property matching and duplicate detection
• A generated IRS Defense Package: qualification summary, per-property material participation analysis, and the full time log
• Separate tax years, each with their own log, properties and verdict

REP Status is documentation software, not a tax advisor. It does not file your return, make the grouping election for you, or tell you whether to claim REPS. It shows you where you stand against the tests and gives your CPA something defensible to work from. Nothing here is tax advice.