A fair tax code fails if the largest fortunes can route around it. The Accord closes the conversion games that turn labor into capital gains, income into unrealized appreciation, inheritance into tax-free basis step-up, philanthropy into donor-controlled tax avoidance, and gifts into estate-tax escape.
Real-estate gains defer indefinitely through Section 1031 like-kind exchanges. An investor sells a building, rolls the proceeds into a new building of equal or greater value, and the gain is deferred — not taxed. Repeat across decades and the gain compounds tax-free. At death, basis steps up, erasing the lifetime accumulation. The same buy-borrow-die logic that applies to securities applies to real estate, with the like-kind exchange providing the indefinite-deferral mechanic.
Section 1031 was originally justified for genuine in-kind business succession (a farmer trading a plot for a similar plot of equal value). The modern use is far broader — large real-estate investors execute serial exchanges across portfolios in the hundreds of millions of dollars, deferring gains that would otherwise be a substantial revenue source. JCT estimates put the lost revenue in the tens of billions per year.
Cumulative like-kind exchange deferrals above a published per-filer threshold realize the deferred gain. The cumulative tracking is across the filer's lifetime — a $50M cumulative-deferral threshold (specification pending v10.2) caps the total deferred gain across all 1031 exchanges; deferrals above that level produce realization at the time of crossing the threshold.
Owner-occupied housing and small-investor exchanges below the cumulative threshold remain available. The architectural intent is to preserve the original Section 1031 case — genuine business-property succession, ordinary investor portfolio rebalancing — without preserving the indefinite-deferral mechanic for the largest real-estate operators.
Real-estate investors making large cumulative like-kind exchanges above the threshold. Practically: the largest real-estate operators (Trump-style portfolios, REITs operating outside REIT-tax structure, family real-estate partnerships at scale).
Owner-occupied housing exchanges. Genuine small-investor portfolio rebalancing. Family-business real-estate succession below the threshold. The threshold is set high enough that ordinary commercial real-estate investing is unaffected.
Pending canonical scoring.
Like-kind closure is one of several real-estate-side closures that together address the indefinite-deferral pattern. Combined with basis-step-up elimination (death = realization regardless of 1031 status) and the capital-gains convergence framework, the architecture closes the loop on real-estate appreciation that today never enters any tax base.
See tax ladder · fiscal scoring
- Serial exchange chains
- Cumulative tracking across the filer's lifetime stops the indefinite-rollover pattern. Each exchange counts against the cumulative cap regardless of timing.
- Cross-entity exchanges
- Aggregation across all entities the filer beneficially owns. Splitting a portfolio across LLCs / partnerships / family trusts does not create multiple cumulative caps.
- Death-step-up combination
- Basis-step-up elimination forces realization at transfer. Even if the filer hasn't crossed the cumulative-deferral threshold during life, accumulated deferred gain realizes at transfer.
- Buy-borrow-die
- Companion: 1031 is the real-estate-specific version of the indefinite-hold pattern. Closing both sides closes the real-estate buy-borrow-die loop.
- Capital-gains convergence
- Realized gains above the $10M lifetime CGAL converge to ordinary marginal.
- Estate-tax prepayment
- Held real-estate appreciation above the estate-prepayment threshold pays the annual prepayment. The prepayment plus the realization-at-threshold rule together remove the indefinite-hold-without-realizing escape.
Section 1031 supports legitimate real-estate market activity. Capping it will reduce transaction volume, harm liquidity, and disrupt commercial-real-estate financing structures.
The threshold is set high enough that ordinary commercial real-estate investing is unaffected. Below the threshold, 1031 continues. Above the threshold — at the largest-operator scale — the architecture's view is that indefinite deferral is the failure mode, not the policy benefit. Transaction volume at the affected scale may decline; at smaller scales, market activity continues unchanged.
Honesty about gaps. The Accord's credibility comes partly from explicit acknowledgment of what is not yet specified. The items below are flagged for v10.2 specification or for outside expert review.
- Cumulative-deferral threshold dollar amount and aggregation period: pending v10.2 specification.