I spent most of the last three weeks at two advisor conferences, and the thing that moved a conversation fastest was never a feature. It was data.

I think that's how most of planning became planning. Tax planning and estate planning weren't always a standard part of the advice conversation. As the evidence built up on what they were worth to clients, more advisors took them on, and today they're standard. In Kitces Research's 2022 study of how planners build plans, 90% include tax planning and 81% include estate planning.

Real estate hasn't had that moment yet. But the numbers are starting to show up, and once you line them up, it's hard to look at a client's rental the same way.

Start with who owns it. On 2023 tax returns with adjusted gross income between $200,000 and $500,000, 17% reported rental income or a rental loss, according to the IRS. Between $500,000 and $1 million it was 26.5%. In every bracket above $1 million it was close to a third. Across all returns it's under 6%, so the wealthier the household, the more likely there's a rental. Advisors tell us about one in five of their clients owns one. For a wealthy book, that's probably the low end.

Portfolios tell the same story. Capgemini's 2026 World Wealth Report puts directly owned property outside the home at 19% of wealthy investors' holdings worldwide. Fixed income is 20%. Nobody would build a plan that left out the bonds.

Then look at what the property means to the person who owns it. In a 2021 study of small-property owners by UC Berkeley's Terner Center, 46% of small rental properties were held as part of the owner's retirement plans. The client is counting on it. And the ownership skews older: taxpayers 65 and over filed 38% of the returns reporting rental activity in 2023, and took 54% of all the net rental income.

Then there's what's sitting on the returns themselves. In July I wrote about a client who had more than $148,000 of rental losses piled up that he couldn't deduct. His income was too high, so the losses were suspended and carried forward, year after year, waiting for passive income to absorb them or a fully taxable sale to release them. He isn't unusual. Across the country, 1.84 million returns brought $98.7 billion of unused rental losses into 2023, up 20% since 2015. Whether that money ever does anything for the client depends on a decision about the property.

So why isn't every advisor already on this? Because the measures the profession uses on itself haven't caught up. That same Kitces study tracked 20 components of a plan. Student loans made the list, and so did career and salary benchmarking. Real estate didn't. Vanguard, Morningstar and Russell Investments have each put a number on what advice is worth, anywhere from about 1.5% to nearly 5% a year, and none of them puts a value on a decision about property a client owns directly. In that 2023 survey, only 39% of advisors said they actively advise clients on real estate. Jay Boekeloo, CFP®, of High Note Financial put it plainly: "For my investments, I have Altruist. For tax, I have Holistiplan. But real estate? I don't have a specific anything."

That's what early looks like. The data is there if you go looking for it, but I haven't seen anyone pull it together into the kind of study the profession already has for taxes and retirement income. Until someone does, a lot of advisors will keep treating the rental as a line on the balance sheet. The ones reading the numbers now will see it first: a large group of clients, many of them nearing or in retirement, holding an asset that's carrying part of their plan with nobody measuring it. Whatever an advisor adds there is the real estate alpha, and nobody has measured it yet.

Market Implications Right Now

More data is close. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances runs every three years, and the 2025 results are expected late this year. It's one of the most detailed pictures anyone has of what American households own, including real estate beyond the primary home. The last edition, from 2022, found that 43.8% of families in the top tenth by net worth held residential property beyond their home, a figure that includes second homes. Watch for the new number.

Just as telling is what nobody has measured. I couldn't find a single survey asking clients whether they want their advisor's help with real estate, or how they'd rate the help they get. The Census Bureau's survey of rental owners doesn't ask owners their age or their plans, so nobody knows how many intend to sell, hold, or pass the property on. And I couldn't find any study of whether advisors who cover real estate keep clients longer or grow faster. Those are the questions that would settle it, and for now they're open.

The tax data, meanwhile, keeps building. Depreciation claimed on rentals reached $113.9 billion on 2023 returns, up from $77.2 billion in 2015. Every dollar of it lowers the client's basis, and on a taxable sale it comes back as recapture. That exposure grows quietly every year a client holds, whether or not anyone has put a number on it.

Put it together and you have a profession about to get more data on an asset it has mostly left out of the plan. When the next study lands, the advisors who already have numbers on their clients' properties won't be catching up. They'll already be having the conversation.

Leveridge models exactly this for every investment property in a client's portfolio: hold, sell, or exchange.