9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timing the Real Estate Market, May 19, 2004
This review is from: Timing the Real Estate Market : How to Buy Low and Sell High in Real Estate (Paperback)
Even after many years in the business, I found Craig Hall's book Timing the Real Estate Market to be full of useful and valuable industry insight. Obviously real estate, as well as other investment vehicles, is all about timing: evaluating local trends and identifying the stages of each cycle. Anyone, from the most experienced to the novice, can refresh and learn more about the unique real estate trading arena. Craig Hall's years of experience have paid off, and the advice and real life examples from both his successes and challenges can be helpful to anyone seeking knowledge on real estate timing.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best real estate book I have ever read, March 29, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Timing the Real Estate Market : How to Buy Low and Sell High in Real Estate (Paperback)
In Timing The Real Estate Market author Craig Hall makes the complicated process of buying low and selling high remarkably understandable. While no one can buy at the exact bottom and sell at the exact top, using Hall's tips will enable you to confidently buy low and sell high most of the time.
Timing The Real Estate Market is very different from other real estate investing books. Most real estate investing books only tell you what to buy and how to buy it. Hall's book is the first to tell investors when to buy and when to sell. Other real estate investing books say the only way to go is buy and hold till you die. Hall's book shows that conventional wisdom is wrong and that investors are often much better off buying in order to sell.
There are many real estate moguls that know what Hall knows. But Hall is the only mogul who is generous enough to share these insider tips with the masses.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good introduction to a fairly complex topic, January 9, 2007
This review is from: Timing the Real Estate Market : How to Buy Low and Sell High in Real Estate (Paperback)
Most real estate books talk about how to effectively purchase and/or manage properties, discussing cash flow, financing and tax benefits. And that's important, because that's the primary way to control your investment. But the author's belief is that usually, the biggest driver of total return is the one thing you have the least control over, market appreciation. So, if you can't control it, you must learn to read the market and time your moves accordingly. That's where this book comes in.
The author actually goes so far as to state that investing for cash flow is a myth of the industry. Whether you agree or not is not worth debating because it completely depends on your situation and goals. If you read the book you'll see that he clearly works with commercial properties and large developments, which is probably not what most readers are dealing with. So, clearly he has a different perspective on the industry. But let's just get past that and focus on market timing, shall we?
I appreciate that the author admits that he has been both lucky and unlucky in market timing. Some reviewers seem to mistake the author's frank tone with a dependence on luck. I think he's just drilling in the point that every investor needs to understand that risk and reward are unavoidably connected and even the best due diligence will not pay off every time. Like it or not, luck is always involved. But if you do your homework, you'll find that luck is on your side more often.
Key ideas discussed: National trends of inflation, interest rates, and "flow of funds"; Local trends of job growth, migration, path of progress, and new construction; How all these trends interact and balance each other; Contrarian strategy ("buy when there's blood in the streets" and "sell when everyone wants to buy"); Momentum strategy ("buy when prices are going up" and "sell before prices start to go down"); His thoughts on the current market (written in 2003).
I mostly gave this book four stars because it gets a little redundant at times. Sometimes, there is more storytelling to the examples than needed to make the point. And Chapter 6 takes ~25 pages to go through each of the seven market trends for each of six property types when most of the seven trends affect the six types in very similar ways. Rather than restate it six times, he could've taken half the time and just focused on how the six property types are affected differently or uniquely, rather than restate how every trend affects every property type. Also, Chapters 8, 11, and 14 were quick summaries of the basics of buying, holding, and selling to make sure everyone is on the same page. I almost skipped these 50+ pages, but he did mix in a few good nuggets that gave me a different perspective, so I'm glad I didn't. But I think the subtleties of market timing would've already been lost on anyone that needed such a rehash.
Overall, I was fairly pleased with this book. I'm sure everyone has their guesses and assumptions about how to read the market, and this book put mine into a solid context. For such a potentially math-heavy topic, this book is surpirsingly non-technical. That did disappoint my geeky side a little, but on the flip side, it's an easy read.
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