How Cost Segregation Guys built a business around tax depreciation
Cost segregation is technical, unglamorous, and easy to misunderstand.That is precisely why Cost Segregation Guys saw room to build a national service brand around speed, education, and defensible engineering.Most founders go looking for a new technology or a fashionable market.
Nathan Resnick found an opportunity in something older and less glamorous: the gap between what a building looks like and how the tax code treats the assets inside it.To an investor, an apartment building, warehouse or hotel may feel like one asset.For depreciation purposes, it can contain many.
Lighting, millwork, floor finishes, specialty wiring, furniture, fencing, paving and landscaping do not necessarily share the same useful life as the structure around them.A cost segregation study identifies and documents those differences so eligible components can be assigned to shorter recovery periods.That technical exercise became the foundation for Cost Segregation Guys, where Resnick is a partner.
The important entrepreneurial question is not simply how large that number is.It is how a service built on tax classifications, engineering detail, and professional judgment can be made understandable – and scalable.Resnick had already built in another complicated category.
He founded Sourcify, a Y Combinator-backed sourcing platform, and later moved to a board and advisory role.Manufacturing and tax depreciation are very different businesses, but the founder’s instinct is similar: when customers face a costly decision inside a confusing system, a company that provides a clear process may be better positioned to build customer trust.Depreciation is fundamentally a timing system.
The IRS generally allows an owner to recover the cost of income-producing property over a prescribed period.Under the general depreciation system, residential rental buildings are typically recovered over 27.5 years and nonresidential real property over 39 years.
The structure remains on that long schedule, but qual...