House Expands FIRPTA, Limits Real Estate Spin-offs

WASHINGTON, DC—At 2,009-pages, [PDF]  there is a lot to digest in the House of Representatives’ $1.1 trillion appropriations bill. House negotiators rolled it out for review around midnight on Tuesday night, giving the full House, as well as the rest of the US, some 36 hours give or take, to analyze it before part 1 goes to the House floor for a vote. To get the measure out the door before the Continuing Resolution expires — and hopefully to avoid political clashes — the House is breaking it into two parts. On Thursday, it will vote on the tax package and on Friday it will vote on the spending measures.

For the commercial real estate industry, there was quite a bit of good news in the measure. As we reported yesterday, Congress, astonishingly, left the EB-5 program untouched, passing it for another year.