RealData President and founder, Frank Gallinelli, has just released his third book, "Mastering Real Estate Investment." For those of you who read his best-selling, "What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow...," this is an excellent sequel, which we think you'll find to be a valuable guide. Read more about that and about other articles and resources for real estate investors below.
New Books
Many readers of the "Cash Flow" book have asked for more example of the 37 key metrics taught there, so Frank begins "Mastering Real Estate Investment" with sample problems and answers for each of those metrics.
Then he takes you beyond the formulas and works through four comprehensive case studies covering situations you are quite likely to encounter as investors. The first is a single-family house held as a rental property. The second is a re-hab project, taking a small building and turning it into into offices
and apartments. The third is an apartment building and the last is a strip shopping center. The case studies show you not only how to "run the numbers," but also how to interpret your results.
The book is available at Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0981813801/realdata-20/ref=nosim
Frank's first book, "What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow...," has been one of the top-selling real estate books on Amazon since 2004. A second edition of this book containing new material was
released just a few days ago. You can find the new edition at Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071603271/realdata-20/ref=nosim
How Did We Get Into This Mess?
As real estate investors, we need to get beyond the evening news sound bites and try to understand the recent history of the mortgage market and the financial markets generally. We want to bring two articles from the Dallas Fed that we think can help us understand where we are and how we got here. The first, "The Rise and Fall of Subprime Mortgages" by Danielle DiMartino and John Duca provides some perspective on the mortgage crisis. http://dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2007/el0711.pdf. The second, "Complacency to Crisis: Financial Risk-Taking in the Early 21st Century" by Danielle DiMartino, John V. Duca and Harvey Rosenblum, is a very readable discussion of the large shifts that have occurred in the broader financial markets. It contains a glossary of some of the financial terminology we've been seeing in the news.
http://dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2007/el0712.pdf
Upgrades -- Real Estate Investment Analysis, v 14 and On Schedule, v5
We have recently been running some promotions to encourage customers who have not yet upgraded to the latest versions of Real Estate Investment Analysis and On Schedule. If you didn't receive our emails about these --
or if you did, but have just put off responding -- please give us a call at 800-899-6060 or send us a message via our helpdesk at http://www.realdata.com/helpdesk/. We very much want to see our customers have the up-to-date versions and benefit from the great new features in these programs.
Featured Resource - Quickspace
This month it is Quickspace that has caught our eye. A 19 year veteran in the commercial real estate marketing industry and features both automated and build to suit marketing solutions for commercial properties and real estate brokerage companies. Also interesting is their "Listing Collab" solution, which they describe as "...the most efficient way of showcasing your assets and securely sharing your due diligence files between attorneys, owners, brokers, partners, and lenders." They offer an image editor, ImageBling, specially designed for commercial real estate that allows you to "... Add corporate logos over your aerial or location map to indicate tenants or amenities. ...Outline any shape with the polyline tool to indicate property lines, or visually enhance an area. Use pre-built symbols to identify major transportation routes, parking, direction, amenities, subject site, etc...." You'll find a link to their site on the "Learn" page of realdata.com.
An Editorial...
We generally don't editorialize in our newsletter, but given the convulsive state of financial markets, perhaps a few words of purely subjective opinion would not be out of place.
As long-time real estate people, we are always reluctant to draw any comparisons between real estate and the stock market -- particularly while the stock market is bouncing from pillar to post in some sort of bipolar disorder. Nonetheless, we will submit that we do see a point of similarity -- and no, it is not that the sky will fall on you no matter where you stand or what you invest in.
Rather, in real estate as in stocks, there are those investors who manage to keep their wits about them at all times. When panic overtakes a market, the result is disturbing and disruptive, but investors who have been around the block a few times know that panic eventually exhausts itself and markets return to the levels of their underlying fundamentals. Now is one of those rare times when smart real estate investors might take their cue from smart stock investors, who typically see markets such as we have now as a source of opportunity. There are good deals that can be made. This is not an original or a novel idea that we're espousing, but maybe it's one that is getting lost in the noise of stampeding hoofbeats. If you're in real estate investing for the long haul, now is a time to be looking for exceptional long-term opportunities. Can you just hear yourself, a few years from now, saying, "If only we had bought that building when..."?
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