Reddit mentions: The best real estate investments books

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The first one I read was Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, which was a great introduction. It's short and very easy to get into. You can read it in an afternoon. It's actually from a speech he gave, so you can probably find the audio online for free and listen to it instead if you prefer.

But his best book, in my opinion, is Understanding Power. It's more of a collection of essays, speeches and interviews, but it really shaped my understanding of the world better than any other book I have read. I can't recommend this book enough.

If you're more interested in libertarian socialism, in addition to Understanding Power, read Chomsky on Anarchism. He presents the theories in very clear language, instead of being overly theoretical.

If you're more interested in his writings on US foreign policy, also read either Failed States or Hegemony or Survival.

Enjoy!

Solid plan. I think this is how a lot of Canadian investors get started.

Whatever province you're in, read the Residential Tenancies Act (or your equivalent) and have a good understanding of it. Even if you're going to eventually hire a property manager, look after the first property yourself so you get a good feel for what you're doing and build some experience.

Always screen all your tenants including getting a credit check. Don't ever, ever, EVER skip the credit check.

If you have clean rental properties in OK areas that are well looked after, you'll have no trouble finding good tenants. Treat them fairly and with respect and you'll minimize (or eliminate) nightmare tenant stories.

When I got started, I read Real Estate Investing in Canada by Don R Campbell. Good little book that's not intimidating. Well worth the $20 investment.

http://www.amazon.ca/Real-Estate-Investing-Canada-Creating/dp/0470158891

I looked into buying a 2-4 unit multi-plex to (a) live in one unit myself, and (b) rent the rest of to cover defray the costs of the mortgage and expenses. This was about 2-3 years ago.

I found that I couldn't make the numbers work. The rent (at the time) rarely managed to cover (1) mortgage, (2) taxes, (3) insurance, etc. This was including treating the unit I lived in as income that I 'pay myself' (or rather the fictional 'property company').

Of course rents have gone up since I last did the math, but so have prices (and recently mortgage rates).

Run the numbers yourself; a book I found informative:

• https://www.amazon.ca/Real-Estate-Investing-Canada-Creating/dp/0470158891
  
  If you're okay with a monthly loss, hoping to 'flip' at some point in the future via property values (and higher rents), then go ahead. But if you want to at least break-even cashflow-wise, things aren't as rosy AFAICT.
  
  If someone has made the numbers work in the GTA, please PM me, as I'd love to know how.
  

Here's a good starter book:

https://www.amazon.com/Crushing-Apartments-Commercial-Real-Estate-ebook/dp/B01N6DKA10/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499651167&sr=8-1&keywords=crushing+it+in+apartments+and+commercial+real+estate

Commercial real estate is where the big boys/girls play. Houses are nice but take too much time when you have a number of them. Typically you can only do so much to increase their value. In commercial real estate you can dramatically increase the value of properties by reinvesting in them properly.

The first and most important piece of advice is to read this book. All of your questions will be answered there.

> Any tips or huge pitfalls to look out for?

There are tons, but the most important is to know your market - what are rents in the area you are looking in? Are cheaper properties necessarily better? Maybe not.

> would doing this as a company rather than as individuals make things easier or harder?

This question was asked in context of financing and in that case it will make no difference except that incorporating may actually complicate things a little. On the other hand, you are entering into a business relationship with someone, even if it is your brother, and incorporating would require organizing the details ahead of time and avoiding potential pitfalls down the road.

> I'm wondering whether it's worth hiring a management company

For one property it is better to be hands on to understand what is going on. The 2 a.m. calls are infrequent (depending on your tenant class) and the learning you'll do is much more important.

> our realtor suggested that it might make more sense for one of us to move out into the "new rental" property for a year to shield it from capital gains

This is completely wrong information and would be enough for me to preclude this individual from being my realtor. You are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars here and to have someone steer you wrong from the beginning should give you pause.

That's a good list, BUT they should be secondary reading, sure you can get insights from them that can relate to any type of investing but you want to be RE specific right? Here is a list I would look into.

Private Real Estate Investment: Data Analysis and Decision Making

Real Estate Finance & Investments

Multifamily Housing Development Handbook

Real Estate Market Analysis: Methods and Case Studies, Second Edition

The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings

How to Pay Little or No Taxes on Your Real Estate Investments: What Smart Investors Need to Know

Investing in Real Estate

Real Estate Investing, Cash Flows, and Due Diligence: Making Better Investment Decisions (Volume 2)

What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow... And 36 Other Key Financial Measures

That's a lot, also info in those books may over lap so pick which ones you would want to answer your specific questions. Hope this helps.

BiggerPockets.com is a decent place to start, they put together a free eBook for beginners here: http://www.biggerpockets.com/real-estate-investing

Books are great, so here are some:

The Richest Man in Babylon okay, you're probably saying, "But TIGit, that's not a book on real estate!" It's a book on investing, and I consider it a must read. This is the book that started me off in life, I was gifted a copy by my grandmother when I was 16. Read it.

What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow and 36 Other Key Financial Measures this one is one of the best books on real estate. Real estate is a numbers game, there's a lot of emotion with all the negotiation and finding motivated sellers, but you need to keep the numbers in mind first*. If a property doesn't have a profitable enough margin you need to know to walk away. And to know "the numbers" this is the book.

How to Manage Residential Property for Maximum Cash Flow and Resale Value this one is for if you plan on building wealth through owning property and landlording. If you just want to be a wholesaler, buy a cheap personal home, or flip, this isn't the book for that. But it's important to keep in mind because the other REIs you compete with have this in their heads, and you should too.

Real Estate Finance and Investment Manual I don't like "fluff" books. Those quasi-motivational garbage real estate books are so common, but this isn't one of them. Stay away from those "Rich Dad Poor Dad" crap, those are just feel good word vomit. It reads more like a textbook, but it's good. None of that "Find the leader in yourself!" bullshit.

The 4-Hour Workweek this one also isn't a real estate book, but a must read. Ferris is a salt-and-burn serial business man, so bear in mind that he as a person is sort of shitty. I don't advocate taking advantage of people. But this book opened my eyes on how much of business is done. Exporting labor for cheap, using automation to save time and costs, selling products, setting up a business, and marketing. It's all there. And he's right. Tim Ferris is probably a sociopath, but he's dead on in how to succeed in business.

i cannot recommend this book more highly, yes it is old, but it is very straightforward and gives great answers to all of the questions you are asking and more....send me a pm if interested

http://www.amazon.com/Turned-into-Million-Estate-Spare/dp/0671253689

I don't have a specific answer but with your financial profile you can definitely do it. I highly recommend you read Crushing It. He goes through lots of scenarios for evaluating and doing deals.

On the triplex question, you mainly want to focus on 20% downpayment and getting a debt service coverage ratio of at least 1.25.

Also, check out BiggerPockets.com. They have tons of articles about how to do these kinds of deals.

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

I lead a GIS/BI team for a large retailer. There aren’t a ton of business specific courses I’m aware of. ESRI has made some effort on the past few years.

Here are the videos from their Gis business summit from July.

https://www.esri.com/videos/?event=5952b7d9806c83b40c5582d9&title=Esri%20Business%20Summit&year=2018&adumkts=industry_solutions&aduse=commercial&aduc=email&adum=list&utm_Source=email&aduca=community_building_for_business&aduco=business_summit_videos&adut=247350&aduat=video&adupt=awareness&sf_id=701f2000000mylBAAQ&aducp=simple_body_cta

Otherwise some books out there are:

The site book
The Site Book : A Field Guide to Commercial Real Estate Evaluation (Mesa Professional Development Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0940352109/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_t5d2Bb5F2TWW7

Location, location, location Location, Location, Location (Psi Successful Business Library) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1555716113/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_J4d2Bb4Q6XD2F

I’d be happy to discuss privately.

> But if the World Bank (and let's throw in the IMF and WTO as well, if you like) never existed, global poverty would be mostly unchanged. I'm open to being wrong about this, but I haven't even seen anyone lay out the argument that these institutions are primarily responsible for the persistence of global poverty.

Well, from a geostrategic point of view, the structural purpose of the World Bank and IMF - and debatably the entire Bretton Woods economic system - was to facilitate the continuation of traditional international power inequities in the post-World War II world. For American planners at the close of World War II, their country had leapfrogged over the declining European powers to become, by far, the most wealthy and powerful country on Earth. Invariably, they wanted to supplant those traditional European powers in their respective colonies and spheres of influence to become the dominant actor themselves, but - as the American political tradition has largely frowned upon overt imperialism - they needed to do it in a way that meshed with the liberal political culture of their society, as well as with their liberal propaganda about democracy and "free" markets. Herein lies the strategic purpose of the World Bank and IMF, at least in terms of their predatory relationship to the former European colonies (what we might today call "the 3rd world"). You can get pretty specific overviews of World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs, as well as their strategic purpose, by reading Dilemmas of Domination by Walden Bello, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, and Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky.

I hope I've helped illuminate this issue a bit, but really, nobody here should be surprised to learn about how this works; this is very basic realpolitik.

EDIT: I should note that in recent decades, the process of globalization has ushered in a remarkably different economic and political order from that of the Bretton Woods system, but that's a rather different discussion.

There are a couple big boy words in here, but if you want to actually know what you're talking about you should read Living in the Shadow of the Eagle. Or if you really want to stretch that pea brain of yours, I recommend Hegemony or Survival.

But seeing as you're just a right wing loon desperately trying to justify US Imperialism, I doubt you'll read either and just call me some derivative of "shit" again like a really smart guy.

I've read a few books from very reputable sources that agree with /u/mojo4mydojo

They even go so far as to recommend it as a tactic one should employ when necessary to make an otherwise risky deal more stable and possible.

This book for example has a whole piece on it in one of the earlier chapters. That doesn't make it legit, or proper, it just means that there must be some people who are able to do it.

Property Management Kit for Dummies would be a good read if you're new to the business.

Once you've got a foot in the door, earning a CAM credential is highly recommended if you want to make a career of this.

Have you read this one? I'm assuming you have since you've recommended it?

investing in Canadian real estate is something I've been seriously looking at lately as well. Would you also recommend Don Campbell's other book?

I strongly suggest The Complete Landlording Handbook or something very like it. You need a reliable guide.

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Landlording-Handbook-Socrates-Answers/dp/1595462457

G'luck!

I'm reading Trumps "The Best Real Estate Advice I Have Ever Received", which is a book with advice from 100 well known and respected Real Estate professionals. In the book, "How I turned $1,000 into a Million in Real Estate - In My Spare Time" by William Nickerson is held in very high esteem. I just purchased it recently and haven't gotten a chance to read it yet, but it's widely considered one of the most practical Real Estate books of all time.

The title of the book has been updated over time to reflect inflation, so now it's 5 million: http://www.amazon.com/Turned-into-Million-Estate-Spare/dp/0671253689

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Finance-Investments/dp/0073377333


https://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Development-Principles-Process/dp/0874203430


https://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Transactions-Finance-Development/dp/1422429865

Happy reading!

I highly suggest you don't read any Noam Chomsky. E.g., Hegemony or Survival. Nor any Howard Zinn. E.g., Peoples History of the United States. Nor watch any documentaries they are in. Definitely don't do any of that. No sir.

Any of Bill Blum's books are probably a good primer on US imperialism.

https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Deadliest-Export-Democracy-Everything/dp/1780324456

The obligatory Chomsky

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805076883/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i9

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250131081/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1

PS - don't buy directly from Amazon :P

okay. i just read this and i recommend that you do too.

https://www.amazon.com/Hegemony-Survival-Americas-Dominance-American/dp/0805076883

but hey maybe you think noam chomsky is an uneducated individual as well so idk

I'd personally start with a few videos, then work your way into literature. The literature I suggest below is intentionally easy to read.

• Howard Zinn - Marx in Soho, as played by Brian Jones
  
  
• Richard Wolff - Crisis and Openings: Introduction to Marxism
  
  
• Marx is Back - Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Zero
  
  
• Vivek Chibber - Capitalism and the State
  
  
• David Harvey - The Crises of Capitalism
  
  
• Slavoj Zizek - short explanation of ideology from the film The Pervert's Guide to Ideology & Violence
  
  
• Debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on the topic of Human Nature
  
  
• Ranjeet Brar - Dialectical Materialism
  
  Literature by Marx and Engels:
  
  
• The Principles of Communism & Manifesto of the Communist Party
  
  
• Wage Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit
  
  
• The Paris Commune (from The Civil War in France)
  
  
• Socialism: Scientific and Utopian
  
  I guess somewhere around here you can start reading Marx and Engel's other works, with Capital being your priority. Where you go after that is up to you.
  
  Some interesting literature:
  
  
• Oscar Wilde - The Soul of Man Under Socialism
  
  
• Albert Einstein - Why Socialism?
  
  
• Eric Hobsbawm works on history - The Age of Revolution, Capital, Empire and Extremes
  
  
• Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell - Towards a New Socialism
  
  
• Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent & Hegemony or Survival
  
  
• Bertell Ollman - Dance of the Dialectic
  
  
• David Harvey - Brief History of Neoliberalism and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
  
  
• Robert Biel - The Entropy of Capitalism
  
  
• Christian Fuchs - Digital Labour and Karl Marx
  
  
• Alain Badiou - Philosophy for Militants
  
  
• Julian Assange - The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire

On a smaller scale it would be a group investment - often called a syndication. Among advantages are that you, as a group, can control a larger pool of properties, thereby giving you more diversification and reduced risk. If you're the syndicator, and manage the investments, you can also recieve some sweat equity for yourself.

Samuel Freshman has a good book on the subject here, (in spite of the corny cover art).

So this is why I have to reread every other sentence in Chomsky's books.

If you can get through the errors this book is ok.

As an aside, you should look into areas like credit risk or retail, consumer-lending at banks. I routinely do real estate analysis and look at overheating markets for reporting purposes. Even if that's not a 1-to-1 it's definitely something to get experience in and be able to drill down to something more specific to what you're looking for.

I keep hearing this... so maybe we should revert to a college textbook sort of thing? Then again, it's prob just a DCF model, right?

https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Real-Estate-Financial-Modelling/dp/113802516X/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=

Buy this book: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Landlording-Book-All-one/dp/B000HWY5LG

And if youre looking for reading material, I suggest this book: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Ever-Apartment-Syndication-Book/dp/0997454326

http://www.amazon.com/Apartment-Building-Wealth-Investors-Financial/dp/1463679556/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314118605&sr=8-1

It's funny, this morning I was just reading about this U.S. backed terrorist in Noam Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival.

Political works by Chomsky:

The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967),
At War With Asia: Essays on Indochina (1969),
Government in the Future (1970),
The Fateful Triangle (1983, 2015),
The Chomsky Reader (1987, 2010),
Manufacturing Consent (1988, 2002),
Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1992, 2015),
Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky (2002),
Hegemony or Survival (2003),
Failed States (2006).

Works on Chomsky:

Noam Chomsky: A personal bibliography, 1951-1986 (1986),
Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1998),
Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals ( 1999, 2002, 2016),
The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (2005, 2017),
The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky (2000, 2002, 2004),
The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower (2007), Noam Chomsky (2015)


Also this, this, this and this.