This is a question I am asked by nearly every single client when they buy an investment property.

As a financial planner in Australia, the concept of an LAQC was new to me in 2004 and because you can achieve the tax benefits of an LAQC without having to have one I thought it was just another way for accountants to increase their billable hours to investors.
A loss attributing qualifying company (LAQC) is simply a normal company that has elected to be an LAQC.
This means that the losses a rental property makes are allocated to the individual shareholders to offset against their personal income, thus resulting in a lower provisional liability or a refund of PAYE paid.
Since you can do this in your personal name, many people wonder about the validity of setting up an LAQC for their property and even wonder why there even is such a thing as an LAQC, after all the idea of setting up a company is to make a profit, so why would you set one up knowing it is going to make a loss.
The answer is that in some industries in the first few years of the business it is impossible to make a profit, take for example forestry. In year one you plant the seedlings and then you wait…and wait…and wait, so each year that the trees are growing and being tended costs the business money. However, there is no income to the business and so it makes a loss. This loss is allowed to be allocated to the shareholders to offset their personal income from other sources; very handy indeed. Eventually the trees have grown large enough to harvest and so the business starts to make money and will be turned into a ‘non LAQC' company.
So quite a few years back some bright spark came up with the idea to use these vehicles for property investment and suddenly there was a huge influx of people wanting to own properties in an LAQC. Thankfully these days, people are asking more questions and sometimes even asking the right people.

You basically have 3 options when buying an investment property in terms of the ownership structure:
1. In personal name or names
2. In a company , LAQC or not
3. In a trust

So the question, should I buy my property in an LAQC or in my personal name? is immediately answered with, 'I will need to ask you a few more questions so that I can understand what you are trying to achieve with your investment property.”
In general though, for most people who buy an investment property they will be buying it with borrowed money, the property will probably be making a loss, they will be intending on keeping it for the long term and they intend to use the rent to supplement their income when they retire (of course there are many people who don't have those requirements like traders, developers and people who intend to use property to create wealth but will use other investments to provide an income in retirement) so in that case I would say yes to an LAQC because at some time in the future the property will be best sitting inside a trust (Financial Advisors take more into consideration than just what is happening today) and an LAQC makes this very easy to accomplish compared to if the property is in someone's personal name.