The Complete Guide to Real Estate Finance for Investment Properties: How to Analyze Any Single-Family, Multifamily, or Commercial Property Hardcover – September 6, 2004

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I bought this book, along with two others, after some careful research into real estate investing books on Amazon (customer ratings, reviews, etc.). These were part of a Christmas present several years ago to my younger brother who is working hard - very hard, actually - to break into the real estate investment world. I wanted to report back that he found this book informative and insighful and still refers to them today from time to time. I had been over at his house this weekend, and he actually mentioned the presents, and told me that he actually found some useful info in this book, and that it wasn't just another get-rich-quick or uninformed hack job, both of which are so prevalent in real estate literature (and have been for years, as you probably know). So, I can say that I definitely recommend this book to anyone - especially someone starting out in the field of real estate investment properties.

This is a great book, and well worth purchasing if you want to learn about finances for investment properties. It is not all that it could be, but don't let that stop you from using it to get started. All that having been said, here are the things that I had to be careful about: 1) Ten performance measurements and ratios are presented in chapter 6, and they represent the heart of the book. There is little overview of which ones are most importance or how to use or weigh conflicting or offsetting results. 2) The book is heavily centered on spreadsheets, which the author offers to sell to you. Others have criticized the spreadsheets for being locked. I used the book to recreate my own version of the spreadsheets, and the extensive explanations in the book helped, mostly, to make sure that I got the underlying formulas correct. What I noticed, however, is that the book sorely needed a financially sophisticated editor. For example, the spreadsheet on page 193 has an entry for "Expense/Foot." In fact, this entry is none other than the OER - Operating Expense Ratio - that was developed in Chapter 6. Why go to all the trouble to create and define ratios, if you aren't then going to use them. Other parts of the spreadsheets were equally problematic. For example, the Net CF's - presumably "cash flow" - for a 3 year exit only had the receipts for years 1 and 2, and not for year 3. Lastly, the book has nothing to say about (a) maintaining and growing a real estate portfolio of multiple properties as opposed to a single property, or (b) evaluating the relatively new 1031 multiple tenants in common investments that some long time owners are trading into in order to stop being a full time property manager as well as an investor.

Steve is the man. Stick with him and his books!! I've learned a lot. Steve writes practical. I have mentioned in an earlier review about authors claiming millions in X amount of years. This dude gets it. It's all about the fundamentals. It's what you do with them that counts, and, maybe, juuuuust maybe, the market and economy. Thanks Steve.

This book gets down in the weeds with the problems real estate investors face. It is sort of afocused companion book to Burges' other book, The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings, specializing in the leveraging/finance part of evaluations of the transactions. I got a great deal out of it, allowing me to look at deals with much more clarity and less "guessing."

Like other reviewers have said, the financial ratios offered by the author of this book are either extremely complex, and require a fair amount of research and head-scratching to figure out (and then are merely applicable in only a small number of instances), or are so simple they're almost useless.That being said, if you keep at it, I did find a lot of information in this book to be extremely helpful. The reliance on spreadsheets actually forced to me start some database management of my own, and the results have been great.There may be better books out there, and there certainly are simpler ones, but for the money, I'd say this is at least worth a read for novice investors.

Excellent book - I recommend for anyone interested in real estate. Easy to understand.

The media could not be loaded. I'm giving this a four star rating for one reason only. There's no excel spreadsheet provides on or offline that contains the example spreadsheets in the book for us to fool around with.If anyone knows where those can be found, will appreciate it immensely. I don't want to have to punch in those figures manually.Besides this, the book is a must have for Real estate investment newbies such as myself.I've learned tons from it.