I was talking to some people who owned investment properties last week and I was astonished that even though they knew about depreciation they didn’t know they could actually buy a depreciation schedule. Most people know about claiming depreciation for investment properties, but obviously not everybody knows that you can pay a qualified valuers to get an Australia Tax Office (ATO) approved depreciation schedule which you can used in your tax return. So this post is dedicated to closing this gap!

I have used several companies to purchase depreciation schedule for my properties, this is just the ones I have personally used and this is definitely not the definitive list. Feel free to Google one or ask your friends or even go look through the yellow pages

• Deppro (full service - a valuer will come to your property and calculate the depreciation for your property)
• Tax Shield (budget service, desktop estimates are done, I don’t think an actual real life valuer actually comes on site to see your property. This is better for those older type properties with not much depreciation left, ie. no new renovations or improvement done to the property for decades)
• Local Valuers (full service - a valuer will come to your property and calculate the depreciation for your property. Its usually cheaper than Deppro and those bigger companies, you can find them in the yellow pages or Google)

So if you have an investment property, do yourself a favour and order a depreciation schedule especially if you don’t already have one. You are literally throwing good money away if you don’t have a depreciation schedule.

PS: You can actually negotiate on the price with Deppro (for that matter, with anybody), I told my colleague about deppro and he was smart enough to ASK for a better price. I think he got $100 off simply because he asked! So the question is, are you brave enough to ask?