There are lots of lists of best real estate books or rental property investment books. If you do a web search you often find a guru interested in selling you an expensive real course. If you search for ways to invest in rental property you often find yourself on a “squeeze page” where you feel compelled to “buy now” or you will “lose out” on millions of dollars in real estate riches.
Unfortunately, these types of sales pages do not really give you a full picture of what you are buying and often mislead people into paying a very high price for something that they don’t need. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to become an expert in rental property investing. Buying real estate books is a much more cost effective way of increasing your knowledge.
Investing in rental property takes a lot of different areas of expertise. You need to become good at budgeting, negotiating, marketing, loans, contracting and home improvements, legal issues, rental property management, etc.
So, where do you start? I have a few recommendations to help you find the best real estate books:
- Buy any book by John T. Reed. Reed has written a library of books on real estate investing. He covers just about every topic in real estate that you can imagine. His books on buying 20{cf291cfc7269490771c2e5c8f8cab8cac79ddb0009ca0d6c13a6d788af335a8c} below market value are excellent. You can find some used Reed books at Amazon but he only sells through his own website. His books are all reasonably priced and you won’t go wrong buying any of them. Reed pulls no punches when discussing the pro’s and con’s of real estate investing. He also has some choice reviews of so-called “guru’s”.
- “Real Estate Loop-Holes” by Diane Kennedy is an excellent short book about some the tax aspects you should be aware of when investing in rental property. You can learn about 1031 property exchanges so that you can sell your property without paying capital gains taxes.
- “Means Residential Repair and Remodeling Costs” is the bible of home repair estimating. Before you buy any rental property, you really need to know how much it will cost to update the property. Probably the biggest mistake new investors make when starting rental property investment is to under-estimate the costs to fix the property up.
There is one gem of a real estate book that can transform your ideas about real estate investing. Priced under $30 it can provide you with a strategy that will change the way you think about rental property investment forever.