|
|
330 of 335 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Definitive Guide, January 21, 2004
I recently decided to look into investing in residential real estate, but I didn't know enough about the financial risks and rewards to determine whether this would make sense for me. So I decided to give myself a quick education by reading the best books I could find on the subject. I had to wade through a lot of get-rich-quick-without-any-money books to find the good ones, but I wound up with ten books that looked like they had good, solid information for would-be investors. After working my way through all ten books, I can tell you without reservation that Gallinelli's book is head and shoulders above the rest. There was something to be learned from each them, of course, but the others tended to get a bit fuzzy about the financial details, often substituting simplistic rules of thumb for real analysis or doing a hand wave just about the time I needed hard information. Worse, there was a disturbing lack of consistency among the books where they did provide financial details, and there was no obvious way to sort out which book had the right take on a particular calculation or financial ratio. And it seems to me that, important as general principles may be, if the financials don't work then nothing else matters very much. Fortunately, Gallinelli took me right down into the nitty gritty stuff and showed me, step by step, just how the whole business works. He was also the only author to even consider the possibility that I, as a modern-day investor, might have the ability to run these calculations in a spreadsheet, and he provides clear instructions for entering the required formulas in Excel. Not that you have to be an Excel user to benefit from this book; the financial analyses he describes are absolutely essential to knowing what you're getting into, and you need to run them whether you do it on a calculator, use packaged financial analysis software, or build your own spreadshet. But for those who do know how to use Excel, it's a tremendous benefit to have the step-by-step instructions right there. After reading this book, I now understand how to figure out the total return on a residential property from all it's sources, including operating income, depreciation writeoffs, equity accrual, appreciation, and capital gains benefits, and I know how to calculate the effect of leverage on each of these sources. Better still, based on the formulas Gallinelli provides, I can quickly see how these sources play off against each other to predict my total return on investment in any particular scenario. More than any other book I read, this one prepared me to analyze a candidate property and evaluate its potential return, allowing me to determine whether it's a good investment and, if so, under what price and financing conditions. Based on what I've learned, I'm now shopping for apartment buildings to make my first acquisition. Of the ten books I purchased, nine now sit on my shelf within easy reach. But this one sits right next to me and will always be close at hand. If you are thinking about investing in real estate, buy this book and read it before you do anything else. It's that good.
|
by Andrew McLean
by James A. Randel
by Matthew Martinez
by Thomas Lucier
See all Editorial Reviews
