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Summary: great book
Review: at some point, every investor needs this information. figuring out whether something is a good investment or not basically boils down to Return on investment. also figuring out when to sell is important. (basically when the Internal Rate of Return decreases).
must read!
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Summary: Required Reading for Real Estate Investors
Review: Before you invest $1 into income-producing real estate, be sure to pick up a copy of Frank Gallinelli's excellent book, What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow...And 36 Other Key Financial Measures: Guidelines, Formulas, and Rules of Thumb for Making Money in Real Estate. While the title may sound somewhat forbidding, the book is so well-written and accessible that even novice investors who wouldn't know a cap rate from a rate of return can quickly and easily master key concepts such as present value, gross scheduled income and discounted cash flow. Better yet, Gallinelli offers free spreadsheets that you can download from his site that do the numbers-crunching for you. I like to think that I'm a pretty savvy investor, but, thanks to Frank and his amazing formulas, I narrowly avoided overpaying for a five-story office building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. While there's no guarantee that the seller will accept my lower offer, I feel confident that, if I do get the deal, I will be paying a fair price now that Frank has taught me how to do the math.
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Summary: The Investors Bible
Review: Everyone wants to retire on real estate but no one shows you how to, today. Frank G does; he shows you what to look for when evaluating a prospective property and what financial analysis to do to see if it will even produce enough income to carry itself. Franks book is a great start and will give you all the basics to develop a cash flow from real property for your entire life. You need to buy this book to be successful investing in real estate.
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Summary: Inexcusable errors found in several pages
Review: I bought this book less than two weeks ago but I'm sending it back to amazon.com because of errors found in the text. The book contains errors in real estate math calculations. Visit the book's website at realdata.com/book and click on the "Errata" link for the listing of the errors.
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Summary: The Definitive Guide
Review: I recently decided to look into investing in residential real estate, but I didn't know enough about the financial risks and rewards to determine whether this would make sense for me. So I decided to give myself a quick education by reading the best books I could find on the subject. I had to wade through a lot of get-rich-quick-without-any-money books to find the good ones, but I wound up with ten books that looked like they had good, solid information for would-be investors. After working my way through all ten books, I can tell you without reservation that Gallinelli's book is head and shoulders above the rest. There was something to be learned from each them, of course, but the others tended to get a bit fuzzy about the financial details, often substituting simplistic rules of thumb for real analysis or doing a hand wave just about the time I needed hard information. Worse, there was a disturbing lack of consistency among the books where they did provide financial details, and there was no obvious way to sort out which book had the right take on a particular calculation or financial ratio. And it seems to me that, important as general principles may be, if the financials don't work then nothing else matters very much. Fortunately, Gallinelli took me right down into the nitty gritty stuff and showed me, step by step, just how the whole business works. He was also the only author to even consider the possibility that I, as a modern-day investor, might have the ability to run these calculations in a spreadsheet, and he provides clear instructions for entering the required formulas in Excel. Not that you have to be an Excel user to benefit from this book; the financial analyses he describes are absolutely essential to knowing what you're getting into, and you need to run them whether you do it on a calculator, use packaged financial analysis software, or build your own spreadshet. But for those who do know how to use Excel, it's a tremendous benefit to have the step-by-step instructions right there. After reading this book, I now understand how to figure out the total return on a residential property from all it's sources, including operating income, depreciation writeoffs, equity accrual, appreciation, and capital gains benefits, and I know how to calculate the effect of leverage on each of these sources. Better still, based on the formulas Gallinelli provides, I can quickly see how these sources play off against each other to predict my total return on investment in any particular scenario. More than any other book I read, this one prepared me to analyze a candidate property and evaluate its potential return, allowing me to determine whether it's a good investment and, if so, under what price and financing conditions. Based on what I've learned, I'm now shopping for apartment buildings to make my first acquisition. Of the ten books I purchased, nine now sit on my shelf within easy reach. But this one sits right next to me and will always be close at hand. If you are thinking about investing in real estate, buy this book and read it before you do anything else. It's that good.
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Summary: Finance 101
Review: If you have no background in finance, then you may find this book useful. There are really only a handful of formulas that you can use here and they're built right into Excel. The examples are basic.
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Summary: The book is as good as the software---GREAT!!!!!
Review: Initially when I began to read the book, I thought it was going to be a well written work that might be useful to me. Well, it is cetainly much more than that. Physicians have their chief referance book called the Physicians Desk Referance,(PDR), and Attorneys have various desk references which are used in their specialties. Now real estate investors have a wondefully written "desk book" that is suitable for the novice through the most highly qualified professional. All students of real investing should have this book. It will be perfect for beginners as well as "old-timers" who have been around. The presentation is extremely easy to read and is precise and accurate. The 37 calculations, explained in detail, are absolutely the calculations you have either already used or will need to perform -- at times on a moment's notice. There are also discussions and examples of much of the material found in the real estate analysis software published by realdata.com. If you are in a rush and don't like to waste time thumbing through volumes of vague examples and poorly written explanations you will absolutely appreciate this book. I wholeheartedly echo the comments written by David A. Taylor whose thorough analysis is "Right On." Keep the book handy on your desk
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Summary: Complete lack of fluff!
Review: One of the most annoying things I find about real estate investment books is that most of them can be condensed to about 30 pages. The other 170 pages usually try to sell you on the idea of getting into real estate in the first place, and offer plenty of examples that don't have anything to do with anything.
This is 252 pages of pure information. There are examples, of course, but they relate directly to the concepts he's working with and illustrate them clearly.
It's heavy on math, but that's why I bought it. I'm a math person and have been jonesing for something like this book for a long time. It's not difficult - all the calculations are high-school algebra at their most complex- but if you're not a math person, as stated, he gives out free spreadsheets that do them for you.
Also as stated, if you have a finance degree this book isn't for you. If you're like me, and want to know what to do with the numbers, then this book is a must.
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Summary: Read Tirone's Real Estate Problem Solving books if you want
Review: read Tirone's Professional Real Estate Problem Solving books if you want clinical/mathematical accuracy in each and every example the author gives in his books. The books cover a multitude of real estate calculations, some of them "hairy", some pace-setting to the field in appraisal computations for income capitalization and annuities. Tirone's books are second to nothing in the field where accuracy, utility and value are concerned. Nothing can compete with them.
I purchased the Gallinelli book maybe 2 months ago. I like it, but it is surely lacking when compared for real estate computations to the Tirone books. The errors in Gallinelli are inexcusable. How can one author, take Tirone, for example, give the customer 100% accuracy while Gallinelli's book mas many errors in it? It is all in the proofing of the book, attention to detail, attention to and respect for the customer, which is where Tirone's works excel.
Gallinelli is worth the expense by a "hair". I'd buy Tirone first and then get the Gallinelli book. Combine both and you have a very good package. And, if you have any questions Mr. Tirone supports his books, no charge. call him and he will help, as he did with me!
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Summary: A guide to all your unanswered finance questions.
Review: The book is truely an informative read. It answers all those subtle questions that Finance text books neglect to cover, but somehow you know the answers are out there. In clear and precise language financial concepts are explained with full clarity. Crunching the numbers is an essential exercise in the due diligence process of investing. Every investor and potential investor should read this book. I praise Mr. Gallinelli for this excellent book and look forward to other books yet to be written.
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