Customer Reviews

Cash Flow Strategies: Learn to start a business and make money investing in real estate, factoring notes, and other debt instruments.

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I found the book to be a very easy read and provide the fundamentals to start a business and learn about investing in real estate. It shows that you don't necessarily need to have thousands of dollars saved in order to buy a home. What I like the most about this book is that it encourages and shows ways to build wealth in this "down" real estate market. This is the time to buy. You don't have to spend $2500 to attend a Donald Trump Seminar to learn about basic fundamentals of real estate and know that it is a good time to buy. I definately recommend this book to anyone who is trying to get their feet wet and enter a very profitable investment arena.

Having already read several real estate investing books by Robert Irwin, this book was a major disappointment. A lot of information, but most of it was only touched upon with not enough detail to help the beginner. Except for marketing... There are two chapters devoted to marketing; one of those is for internet marketing. Many experienced investors, and even some of those who teach, will tell you that internet marketing is a waste of time for real estate investors. My experience is that most sellers, INCLUDING sellers who are facing bankruptcy, list their homes either on Craig's list or with a realtor. But too many sellers just sit and wait, hoping for a miracle. Or perhaps they are waiting for that miracle worker, the real estate investor, to show up at their door and bail them out, or at least save them from a foreclosure or bankruptcy on their record.

As a real estate investor, that's what you have to do: HIT THE STREETS and find these PRE-foreclosure properties!

If you are an investor looking for that great deal, you're not going to sit and wait for the distressed home owner to come looking for you.

Another thing the Saidis say is, "Try to stay away from properties that need a significant amount of work, such as foreclosures that have been totally stripped or practically destroyed." Well, tell that to the investor couple who bought such a property in my neighborhood for $225K cash, cleaned it up, and sold it six months later for $410K. Let's see, even if they put $50K into it, "How much profit is that?" Not too bad for six months part time work!! If you know what you are doing, these extremely distressed properties can be a gold mine.

The Saidis devote just four paragraphs on "Where to Look." They say "...find FSBOs...visit the county courthouse...get a listing of foreclosures from VA, FHA, HUD...the classifieds in the local newspaper." All good places to look, except the newspaper. Our newspaper can't compete with Craig's list and so has very few, even on Sunday. The best places to look are ignored by the Saidis: Craig's list, the MLS (yes, you can use it, check with a realtor), and the multitude of listings in, for example, [...] and a host of others. None of these are mentioned in Saidis' book.

One of the Saidis' suggestions was to let the distressed foreclosed-on homeowner "rent back" their home that you bought. Is this really a good idea? If they couldn't pay the mortgage in the first place, how are they going to pay you rent and give you a profit? Especially where I live, where many foreclosed homes were mortgaged to the max when prices went up and are now worth much, much less. The banks can't sell them without a tremendous loss.

The book devoted over 30 on "Factoring Invoices." Why didn't they just call it "Buying Paper" or "Buying Mortgages?" Well, because it's not real estate specific.

I thought this was a book on real estate investing, but less than 80 pages only come close to real estate; the rest is useless word, some maybe motivational. The last 60 pages are investing in other than real estate.

Read some of my other real estate book reviews at [...]