Founder/Attorney For Donate For A Cause
Our goal is to keep them all and rent them. We deed all of them into our charity within 12 weeks. If they rent successfully we keep renting them year after year. If we have trouble renting them we try to sell them quick hoping to get someone who can use it and therefore pay the maintenance fees. But this could take a year. Remember with the fee they pay us we have a year cushion to test the rental market. The problem for the donor is that they can't wait until we decide if we will keep it or sell it before they have to file their taxes. They need an evaluation before a year away. They typically need it within a couple of months.
This whole issue gets more complicated when you start factoring in the affect on FMV when we do this. Should the donor be punished, or better yet, is it a fair value if we try to rent it for a year and when we realize we can't we take whatever steps we can to dump it within a couple of weeks? Couldn't the donor argue that if we spent that marketing time, money and energy which we invested in testing the rental market, in trying to sell the property that we would have realized a higher sales price? If I ran an ad in a major newspaper and offered free airfare and lodging at the timeshare and then had a good salesperson meet them at the end of their vacation (like the developer did) I might have been able to get a much higher price then if I placed it on a website for a week.
Like I said before, if you weren't able to show your house but rather had to sell it on the web with only pictures and it sold for $100,000 but your neighbor invested a bunch of money in marketing, hired a professional sales person and thereby sold an identical house for $200,000 which is the FMV? Should the donor be punished because the charity is in a hurry or bad at marketing?
These are complicated questions and that is why we don't decide the FMV. That is why we leave it to experts. If someone doesn't want an appraisal we don't force them to get one. But then its up to them to figure it out. The appraiser creates a report and shows how they came up with their figure. You attach that to IRS Form 8283 and give it to the IRS. Out of the 5000 donations that we have handled over the last 6 years I have never had a donor come back to us and say the IRS is challenging their appraiser's FMV conclusion.
) issue at my end or what, but can you summarize the gist of Clark Howard no longer recommeding DFAC, reportedly after having viewed DFAC more positively for the preceding 8 years? 