Whether it’s a single family home or a 20 unit apartment building, residential rental properties are a great way to build wealth! The tax code is very favorable to residential rental properties, and at the end of the day, everyone needs a place to stay!

However, investment properties can be tricky animals to tame, and they’ve sent many well intentioned investors to the showers, usually with more grey hair and less money than they started out with!

That said, there is not enough room on this page to account for all of the variables that could be involved with the purchase and management of an investment property. But fear not, I’ve taken considerable time to write a book on the subject that is very detail oriented and geared towards the beginner real estate investor.

When I first started thinking about getting into the real estate investment game in 2008, I grabbed every book that I could on the subject. After reading a dozen of them I can tell you that they all gave good information here and there but lacked the all-important detail that a newbie is looking for to keep them safe.

I found that they were either too vague, buy low – sell high, and find good tenants and keep them, or they were geared towards a smaller percentage of the population that already has considerable wealth and looking to “…put $500,000 or more to work.”

My book starts off with the basics, giving tips and tricks on how to save for a down payment, how and what kinds of loans to qualify for, how to identify a good value, how to run the numbers to keep you safe, how closing will look, how to attract, identify, and keep good tenants, and how to maintain the property.

I then go into more advanced ways of investing and financing including commercial loans and I tell you probably more than you ever wanted to know about building construction, plumbing, electrical and HVAC systems.

To give you some background, in 2004 I started to notice that housing prices were getting quite high. In 2005 and 2006 I was paying attention to all of the people who were becoming “Real Estate Investors”. These people were regular folks like you and me, Police, Fireman, Nurses, Hairdressers, Cab drivers etc. At the time I had always thought that you had to have a ton of money to be in Real Estate. I guess not.

The more I paid attention, the more I noticed that something was wrong. I wasn’t educated enough at the time to know exactly what it was but I knew that if one used typical lending standards, one could only borrow about 3 times their salary, as first time home buyer. If the median salary (in Florida at the time) was ~$43,000, how then were all of these starter homes ranging from $239,000 to $260,000? Something was definitely amiss.

I would quickly learn what was going on. 2007 saw home price declines accelerate and more than 25 sub-prime mortgage lending firms declare bankruptcy. By early 2008 Bear Stearns announced severe liquidity problems and the N.Y. Federal Reserve stepped in to provide an emergency 28 day loan. A few days later, JP Morgan, backed by the N.Y. York Federal reserve, buys Bear Stearns for a 94% discount! By this time it was clear to me and many others of course, that this event was going to be calamitous.

I began saving money like crazy and looking at as many houses as I could, to get a hold of what was going on and how to accurately value them. From 2008 through 2012 I looked at an average of 40 properties per week, more than 8000 in all.

I saw some good and a lot of bad during this time. In my book I tried to convey all that I learned, from the sneaky way flippers will “re-wire” a house to plumbing and electrical that you will never get insurance on.

I wrote this book as guide for my kids and to help others that are facing the daunting task of getting into the real estate game. I wish that I’d had a resource like this when I first started, it would’ve saved me a significant amount of time!