FlanderFlop's Full Review: 101 Ways to Buy Real Estate Without Cash Books
This is a book written like it is for a novice, but really better for someone with at least a little experience. If you are completely new to the real estate game, you may find that you are in a little over your head with this book when you start reading. What Mr. Cook offers is 101 short examples of ways in which real estate can be purchased with no money down.
While there are a lot of great ideas in the book if you have already spent some time studying real estate, what he leaves out is a lot of the preliminary legwork that goes into finding buildings that are good candidates for this type of deal. One of the trickiest parts of the process is locating sellers who are willing to help finance the sale and have assumable mortgages. This topic is sort of left on the wayside. In most of his scenarios, the seller has already agreed to help with the financing and is just looking for some sort of cash down payment. Just so you are not fooled by this book, if you don’t do some preliminary legwork, almost every seller want all of his equity in cash right now.
If that last paragraph confused you a little, don’t worry, the basics are easy to pick up, but I would suggest looking elsewhere to find them. I found that the Carleton Sheets program is a great introduction to the field, and is much more useful that this book.
On the other hand, if you are already getting going on your real estate investing career, this book is a nice one to have lying around. My three warnings are these:
First, don’t expect to be able to sit down and read this book cover to cover. It ain’t exactly a page turner. If you try to read too many all at once, they all start to jumble together. I recommend reading two to four of them every morning over breakfast, or just before you check the newspaper classifieds for your next purchase. This will stimulate your brain a little, without making you brain-dead, and get you thinking in the right direction. At this pace, you should finish the book in about a month, and you will have come up with some good ideas and maybe even have had a chance to try one or two of them.
My second warning is that you need to be prepared for some “cheese factor”. As the book progresses, the relative cheesiness of each story increases. But I guess this is to be expected, if you are trying to come up with 101 scenarios involving made up characters with little made up life stories, it gets harder and harder near the end. Anyway you can’t really blame the guy, this book wasn’t intended to be pleasure reading, and this guy obviously didn’t intend to make his living as a writer.
Lastly, remember that this book is not a guide to buying real estate. It should be considered more like a springboard for ideas. Most of his ideas are presented and wrapped up in less than a page of text. As such, each of his 101 ideas are really just a little blurb, there are a whole bunch of little details and permutations that will have to be worked out in real life. It will be a rare case that you use one of these exactly as listed, you will use these ideas to tailor offers that you will make on real houses.
Filled with 101 creative ways to buy real estate without cash, this book is invaluable for new and experienced investors alike. Author Wade B. Cook re...More at Alibris
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