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Do you want to start investing in real estate? There are thousands of books on the topic. And hundreds of those are pretty good! But you don’t have time to read hundreds. So I’ve narrowed the list down to the Top 3.
If you’re serious about buying your first investment property, these are THE 3 books for you!
1. The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller
The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is hands-down my favorite book on real estate investing. If you’re only going to read 1 book on real estate investing, make it this one!
Here’s what I love so much about The Millionaire Real Estate Investor: it provides immediate, actionable advice PLUS long-term models. So it shows you how to get started now AND what you can build over time. You’ll see the same brilliant structure in many of Keller’s other books (notably The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, and SHIFT: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times, both of which are well worth a read!).
This book presents a 4-stage path to becoming a millionaire real estate investor:
1. Think a Million: Get your mind to understand that it’s do-able.
2. Buy a Million: Buy a portfolio worth over a million in value
3. Own a Million: Build your equity in your portfolio to over a million
4. Receive a Million: Earn over a million in cash flow.
I started following this path in 2012 with my first investment property. Stage 1 and 2 are complete, and I’m working on Stage 3. This plan works!
1 last giant bonus: The Millionaire Real Estate Investor provides useful worksheets to help you budget your capital and evaluate your prospective properties. Invaluable if you’re new to investing.
If you want a clear path to success in real estate investing, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is the book for you!
2. The ABC’s of Real Estate Investing: The Secrets of Finding Hidden Profits Most Investors Miss by Ken McElroy
With The Millionaire Real Estate Investor being such a solid, complete guide to building a real estate portfolio, why bother reading anything else, right? Well, The ABCs of Real Estate Investing provides a completely different view of real estate investing. It presents more creative paths to making money in real estate.
Where The Millionaire Real Estate Investor presents a single, clear model for building your real estate fortune, The ABC’s of Real Estate Investing shows that there’s more than 1 way to skin a cat, so to speak. It introduces you to a few outside-the-box methods of manipulating real estate to make money.
One specific example sticks out in my mind. The author wanted to own a summer house for family vacations. But he didn’t necessarily want to foot the debt for a vacation home. So his solution was to buy a property on a few acres, subdivide the land, and sell the individual vacant lots to cover the cost of his purchase. Brilliant!
This book is about finding opportunities other real estate investors miss. It shows you how to pan for real estate gold, then how to make sure it’s real gold, not fool’s gold.
If you want to think a little differently about investing in real estate, The ABCs of Real Estate Investing is a must-read.
3. What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow…and 36 Other Key Financial Measures by Frank Gallinelli
What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow is the best book I’ve found for investment calculations.
If you’re a numbers nerd like me, this will give you calculations to daydream about.
And if you hate calculations and financials, this book will teach you to understand, if not appreciate, them. Like it or not, financials are a big part of investing. So you need to know how to calculate your numbers and how to interpret them. This book will teach you that!
It covers all the financial vitals including:
- Discounted Cash Flow
- Net Present Value
- Capitalization Rate
- Cash-on-Cash Return
- Net Operating Income
- Internal Rate of Return
- Profitability Index
- Return on Equity
What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow is a brilliant resource for any real estate investor. You’ll find yourself referencing it again and again for years to come.
We know there are plenty of other brilliant real estate investing books out there. Do you have a favorite that wasn’t part of our Top 3? Let us know in the comments!
PS: want more info on investing in real estate, check out Top 10 Real Estate Investing Tips for Newbies and Are You Financially Ready for Your First Investment Property?
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