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I recently finished reading another book from the Seattle Public Library titled “What No One Ever Tells You About Investing in Real Estate” by Robert J Hill. As someone who would very much like to invest in real estate some day, I felt that this would be an interesting read. For the most part is was an interesting read. I would call it entertaining and informative.

This book, written by Robert J Hill, Esq, tells about many different real life situations that have happened to real life real estate investors. Some are horror stories that would make you never want to consider purchasing a home. Others give you a real life example of why you might want to purchase title insurance or any other product along those lines. Robert also threw enough real estate successes in there to convince you that maybe real estate investing could be the thing for you.

In this book , the author uses “real-life advice from 101 successful investors” to tell 112 different stories of things that they have had go right or wrong. Many of these stories came as submissions from his website realestatestories.com. Essentially, the author summarized the stories that the investors had given him, and then added his own personal comments and commentary. This made this book a very easy read. Because of the way the book is laid out with all the different stories, it makes it so that one can easily just pick it up and start reading right away without any need to refresh their memory.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It was something that I could easily just pick up at any time and start reading. The author also put many major examples that clearly show that real estate investing can have some major pitfalls and is not all fun and games. I would highly recommend this book to someone who is thinking about getting into real estate investing, but doesn’t have the time to read a giant instruction manual. I feel my time was well spent reading this book.

As I mentioned a few posts back I read a book called “How to invest in Condominiums” by Andris Virsnieks. I did not finish this book entirely, but this is mainly because the book did not fully captivate my attention. Mind you that I read this book because I have been very interested in investing in real estate in one form or another for quite some time.

According to the title of the book, it covers such topics like:

• Select the right condo
• Make the real estate market work for you
• Attain positive cash flow
• Reduce your tax basis through depreciation
• Live rent-free and retire early

Judging by the cover it seemed like an interesting read. After getting a ways into the book it seemed to cover the same stuff over and over again. I guess that since I had been thinking about investing in real estate for so long I had already thought about many of the strategies that Virsnieks covers in the book.

The basic investment plan suggested by Virsnieks essentially goes a bit like this. First you must select a brand new condo. A remodel or apartment conversion just will not do. He does not believe in buying an older unit to upgrade into a more valuable one. Not only must the condo be new, but it also must have high demand for the units. If there is not high demand for them, then it may be harder to sell them later. The other main point that the author reiterates throughout the book is the value of hiring a property management company to take care of all the dirty work for you. Virsnieks claims that the management company typically takes about 9% of the rent for their services, but it is well worth not dealing with all of the hassles. He says that by purchasing a new condo and hiring a property manager, then you will only have to spend about 40 minutes a month on your investment. That 40 minutes will be spend going over the property management statement and depositing the check in the bank.

Virsnieks makes the whole process sound quite easy in the book, and indeed it should be. There are a few problems that I have with how the book is set up though. The majority of his purchases were made back in the 1970s, so it is somewhat hard to wrap my head around the purchase of a $23,950 condo in Seattle that rents for $265/month. These days a cheap livable condo in Seattle goes for about $175,000 or more. He also makes mention of mortgage payments in the 13%+ range, which is unheard of these days. If you applied everything on a strict percentage basis, it would all probably match up about the same, although in Seattle I believe that condo prices have increased more than rents have.