The Real Estate Game : The Intelligent Guide To Decisionmaking And Investment

Author: Jeffrey L. Cruikshank
List Price: $28.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 068485550X
Publisher: Free Press (13 September, 1999)
Sales Rank: 16,421
Average Customer Rating: 3.95 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
This is...
one of my two all-time favorite real estate books(the other is the Idiots Guide to Real Estate Investment). It covers real estate from a professional angle. It covers how to study the macro-environment in real estate and how it influences everyone in r.e. from the entrepreneur to the reit professional.

It's premise in analyzing properties is the "back of envelope" analysis. There is time to use a spreadsheet and do a thorough analysis later, but when presented an oppurtunity you need to act quick. B.O.E. analysis is a super quick, easy, first step number crunching technique that uses raw data to give you a basis to decide to either pursue or not pursue a certain investment. Instead of focusing on "location, location, location" it follows the premise of "learn the dynamics of how locations change, and figure out how that knowledge can help you buy and sell properties."

From the jacket, "Poorvu shows readers how to use direct investments, syndicates, and REITS to get into the real estate game across a broad range of property types: residential, office, hotel, industrial and retail." Not the "buy single family residential rental properties type of book," but an actual practical, professional look at real estate for those wanting to go more "big time".


Rating: 5 out of 5
A Sophisticated Yet Interesting Real Estate book
Harvard Business School Professor and real estate investor William Poorvu has written a book about real estate is far above most real estate books. This book is nowhere near the run of the mill generic real estate book that tries to tell everything about real estate to people who don't have a clue. "The Real Estate Game" is a sophisticated commercial real estate book written by a real estate insider. This is not a book about buying your first house with no down payment.

What this is, is a book about commercial real estate projects from concept, commitment, development, operations, and harvest. The authors bring a behind the scenes and insiders' approach to commercial development. He lays it out in the form of a game with properties, capital markets, players and external environment. One of the stories in the book is that of Bill Zeckendorf's classic assemblage of Swift slaughterhouses into the United Nations property and vicinity. Included in the book is the authors' commercial due diligence checklist. This book would be most interesting to a person involved in commercial real estate, someone interested in commercial real estate or someone interested in the business of commercial real estate. I think that this is the kind of book that you can refer back to time and time again. There is a lot of information in this book and it may even be a book that you will want to read more than once. It has a depth, and quality of information contained far superior to the average mass media real estate book without the dryness of a real estate textbook


Rating: 5 out of 5
Best of the RE Investment Books!
The vast majority of real estate investment books to be found in the Barnes & Noble investment section offer variations of Mark Twain's stock market advice: "making money in stocks is easy. Only buy a stock if it goes up; if it doesn't go up, don't buy it." By contrast, Poorvu walks readers through myriad real estate investment situations, fleshing out the risks and rewards, and the mindsets of the various players. While written in an anecdotal style replete with real-life examples, the book also presents an encyclopedic overview of investment opportunities (direct, REIT, syndicates, etc.) and asset categories (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.). This is a real estate investment book written by an adult, for adults -- in contrast to all the other get-rich-quick-no-money-down titles targeting gullible novices.

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