Personal Real Estate Web Form

Parent/Mother/Father

This document is listed as required because either you indicated on your HLS Main Online Institutional Application that your parent/mother/father household had ownership in a personal real estate OR when we reviewed your parent/mother/father Federal Form 1040 we saw personal real estate listed on their schedule E. If you feel this document is listed in error, please contact our office.  

If you are applying for HLS need-based grant assistance and your parents own or have a percentage of ownership in personal real estate, then you are required to submit all corresponding Federal tax documentation to HLS Student Financial Services. HLS requires detailed financial data about all personal real estate holdings (other than the primary residence) owned fully or partially by the parents of any student applying for need-based grant assistance. This includes, but is not limited to, all of the following: investment properties, rental properties, vacation homes, time shares and land. Data about the primary home is not required since we receive this information from the Parent Supplemental Data Web Form. 

Understanding the financial circumstances of the personal real estate is a critical component of our ability to make accurate, complete and fair determinations of need-based aid eligibility to our students. We recognize that we require a lot of detailed information from families who are involved in personal real estate. It is often an involved process for us to build a fair and complete picture of your personal real estate activity. This process usually requires a lot of back and forth between our staff and parents as we review data and need to ask frequent follow up questions to make sure we are processing the information we are reviewing correctly. Past experience has shown us that no two real estate holdings are the same and there are few universals that can be applied to all businesses uniformly. Our primary goals through this process are twofold:

1. We want to get an in-depth understanding of the recent and current cash flow within all real estate in which your parents are involved, and;
2. We want to arrive at an appropriate and fair net worth in today's dollars for all real estate in which your parents are involved. We appreciate your help and patience as we work hard to try and get the data we need to offer you the best and fairest aid package possible.

Student

Although generally not automatically required, should a student be selected to participate in either the Federal Verification process or our internal Institutional Verification process, we may require the STUDENT, themselves, to submit this form for any real estate which they (the student) own. Should this situation arise, we will notify the student via email of this requirement.

Step-Parent(s)

HLS requires business data from both biological parents and from step-parents if a biological parent has remarried. If the real estate in question is the primary activity of the step-parent, we will not use the income generated from this real estate in the determination of your eligibility for need based aid since we do not include step-parents' income in our analysis. However we still need to collect tax data on these real estate holdings because we do factor the net worth of all parental assets including the net worth of any real estate into our determination of your eligibility for aid. For biological parents that have remarried we compile total net worth and then divide it in half to remove the 50% that belongs to the step-parent from our eligibility calculation.

Complete documentation entails (for EACH real estate holding):

• A submission of the Personal Real Estate Web Form
• Any appropriate federal tax return documentation (i.e. 1040 Schedule E Rental income and Expenses, Form 8823 Rental Income for Businesses, etc.)
• If, upon receipt, we determine that your parents' personal real estate documentation is not complete (i.e. missing information about any properties on our real estate form etc.), you will see this document listed as "Incomplete" on the "Documents" tab of My HLS Financial Aid. Once you provide all of the missing pieces, we will update the document status to "Received".
• We have provided space for up to 6 pieces of real estate. If you own more than 6 individual properties, please submit this web form as many times as necessary for us to receive data about all of your real estate. If you wish to make any corrections after submitting it, please email them to sfs@law.harvard.edu.