Whether youre a first-time real estate investor or a seasoned professional, The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings helps you map out your future, find apartment buildings at a fair price, finance purchases, and manage your properties. Now revised and expanded, this Second Edition includes tax planning advice, case studies of real acquisitions, and appendixes that add detail to the big picture. Plus, it includes a handy glossary of all the terms investors need to know, helpful sample forms that make paperwork quick and easy, and updated real estate forecasts. With this comprehensive guide at hand youll find profits easy to come by.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Informative but at times numbers are a bit optimistic
Comment: This is an excellent book for those starting out in this business. It has motivated me to acquire my first investment property. However, after presenting some of the facts of this book to experienced investor friends, their comment was that the book may be overly optimistic. In particular, Mr. Berges provides an example of how one can virtually double one's capital every 12 months by buying, rehabbing, selling for a profit one's property and rolling it over to a new property doing a like-kind exchange.

What he misses in his computation are the closing costs and commissions one incurs each time one sells a property (which can go up to 6 or 7%). Moreover, investors are skeptical about being able to sell a property after 12 months in this 2008 market.

Nonetheless, most of the other parts of the program are well written and shows the depth of Mr. Berges' experience. The level of financial analysis appeals to me - an ex-banker as the numbers are the end of the day will determine whether one is buying a good deal or not.

I would recommend this book to investors.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Complete Guide to Apartment Buildings and then some....
Comment: Steve is a prodigious writer of numerous real estate investing books. That said, this one is my favorite. He explains how one can invest in multifamily assets to gain financial independence. He avoids encouraging his readers to speculate in real estate. Instead, he offers sound advice for both the novice and experienced investor alike.

I highly recommend you purchase this book!

Matthew A. Martinez
Author of Investing in Apartment Buildings: Create a Reliable Stream of Income and Build Long-Term Wealth 2 Years to a Million in Real Estate
www.matthewamartinez.com

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Qualified reference without the fluff
Comment: This book presents a well written and comprehensive guide to buying and selling apartment buildings. As one who has brokered, managed, and owned a large number of multifamily units, I feel I am fully qualified to endorse this as a competent source of information on the subject.

This book avoids the hype often found in many real estate books and completely disassociates itself with the "get rich quick" mannerisms often seen in guru style books. As a result, this book offers much value as it focuses on principals and sound information giving you an honest and genuine taste for what is involved in this industry.

Buying and selling apartment buildings and becoming successful within the industry is certainly not easy. The best start is building a solid foundation of understanding, and this book accomplishes that task. I would certainly not suggest one should cease their study after a single book, or even a solitary resource for the matter; however, this is a very qualified initiation and one I recommend keeping as a resource.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: excellent resource
Comment: provides a good overall basic understanding of buying smaller multifamily properties (2 to 25 unit properties) that will undoubtedly help prevent real estate newbies from losing their shirts.
anything larger, and you definitely want to make sure that you have a good team around you.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great intro book to uncover the basics.
Comment: This is the first book I have read that focused solely on buying multi-family real estate. It uncovered some basic information for me, and I consider it a great primer for future learning before I actually get involved with attempting to purchase anything in commercial real estate. It does seem, as others have mentioned, that the author really wants to up sell you on his other products, but if he's selling something that is worth buying then I am not going to fault him for that. If you are brand new to commercial real estate investing that focuses on apartments and other multi family properties then give this book a day in court. Like the "basic" title says, it's a book on how to buy and sell apartment buildings, and I found it to be a great starting point.

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