New SOI Looks at REIT Subsidiaries

For the first time, the Internal Revenue Service's Statistics of Income Bulletin takes a detailed look at taxable real estate investment trust subsidiaries. The REIT Modernization Act of 1999 provided for the creation of taxable REIT subsidiaries, corporations that could be 100 percent owned by REITs. The just-released Spring 2005 issue of the SOI Bulletin shows that in 2001, the first year of TRS tax returns, 480 firms elected to be TRSs. Of these, a total of 404 filed corporate income tax returns, reporting total gross income of $8.1 billion and total assets of $19.4 billion, and remitting $85.4 million in total taxes. Although TRSs tend to be highly leveraged, with 31 percent of those that reported Schedule L data showing negative book equity, loans from shareholders, including parent REITs, account for only 3.3 percent of total TRS debt. In other bulletin news, 3.2 million S corporation returns were filed for tax year 2002, an increase of 5.6 percent from tax year 2001. S corporations continue to be the most popular corporate entity choice, representing 59.8 percent of all corporate entities. Women-owned sole proprietorships grew faster than those owned by men in terms of numbers and net income from 1985 to 2000, according to the bulletin. However, male-owned businesses were larger and more disparate in terms of business earnings.