How to Build a Real Estate Empire: Wisdom from the Best in the Business

This book is in my Top 10 for 2006. As of this writing, it's my FAVORITE book for 2006. It is probably the best book on the market for the bigger real estate investors. That is, it's for those who are in real estate as a business (or aspire to be). Marcus & Millichap is one of the nation's most active and respected brokerage companies for apartments, and the four clients they interview are all very successful real estate executives. The contributors all run companies that invest in multimillion dollar real estate deals. Each contributor's porfolio (or his company's) appears to be worth over $150 million. If you are just starting out, or just want to invest in small deals on the side and keep your day job, this is not your book. But if you are an experienced investor with multiple properties and want to make it to the "Donald Trump" level, this is your book. I really enjoyed this book and the sage advice contained therein.

How to Build a Real Estate Empire, by the gang at Marcus and Millichap What a great strategy, for a real estate investment brokerage firm to write a book that encourages people to learn about how to build wealth through investing in, you got it, real estate. What's even more brilliant is to highlight 4 of their (most likely) best clients and tell their success stories. Hats off the gang at Marcus and Millichap, they are definitely an aggressive firm that is going places! Although the book claims to be for the more seasoned investor, there is much to be learned even for a beginner as long as they are interested enough to stay with it. The first four chapters tell about four investors and their successes. I would like it to have been more in-depth but you can get more than a few sound strategies from the short chapters (one per investor) that cover each investor. For example: Ben Leeds says, "I am primarily an apartment investor. The multifamily segment is more definable, more predictable-a necessary commodity and more responsive to affective management. It is also easiest to finance...." He also says he regrets everything he ever sold. Leeds has 75 separate apartment projects totaling over 1,600 units with a value over $160,000,000. I would have liked more than 25 pages about his story. Next up is John Hamilton who built his real estate portfolio up from $0 to $200 million with some major hiccups along the way. I also would have liked more than 11 ½ pages on him. A good tip from Gerald Marcil who has a portfolio of $150 million is to constantly monitor your holdings to see if the equity could be better utilized, with less risk someplace else. Something else he mentions that I am a big believer in partnerships. If someone wants to be a part time real estate investor, they should partner with someone who is full time. His chapter ends with, "If it was profitable and easy, everyone would do it." The story of these investors absolutely shows that it is possible to build a huge real estate portfolio starting from practically nothing but determination and hard work. The book then moves on to a bunch of interesting statistics and annotations which read a bit like a textbook, but are well worth glancing at and remembering them to use as a reference in the future. Some of the topics included are: a growing population and how it will affect real estate, lots of different market indicators and some great reference web sites. There is also a great section on real estate partnerships and how they can be structured. Having written a book myself, A 20,000% Gain in Real Estate, by Kevin Kingston and having built a real estate portfolio of $25,000,000 starting from less than zero just 5 years ago, I will say that the concepts in this book are 100% worth knowing and the inspiration you can get from people that have built $100-$200 million portfolios are worth listening to. By Kevin Kingston, author of: A 20,000% Gain in Real Estate My Blog: h

I've been an investor and commercial broker for several years. During that time I've read many books and listened to many tapes on investing in real estate. This is one of the best, if not the best, I've read. This is full of real world, incredibly sound advise, that would otherwise take years of hard knocks to learn. Forget about Donald Trump. The investors featured in this book were once like all of us trying to build a real estate business from next to nothing and now have successful empires. The appendix is a gold mine of information that the serious investor may want to memorize. This is for the hard core real estate investor. Don't look for any cheezy "no money down" advise in this book.

For any halfway sophisticated real estate investor, this book is a must. It gets to the point without over verbalizing, and shows what one can do in real estate if they put their mind to it. The examples in the book were classic rags-to-riches people who had a lot of drive, and this book bore that out. In short, it is a definite must for anyone involved in real estate who wants to get ahead.

This book isn't a theoretical treatise on the concept of real estate. It's real-world advice from people who have made fortunes by owning and managing office buildings and factories. Marcel Arsenault's section, for instance, contains the following: Don't think of a building as an appreciating asset, but as a generator of cash flow. The best way to guarantee that a building generates cash flow is to buy it half-empty for pennies on the dollar and then fill it up by offering below-market lease rates. To find tenants, make friends with local zoning officials who know which entrepreneurs are building businesses in their garages and might soon need professional space. This strikes me as both a very powerful strategy and a very timely one. Arsenault built his initial fortune during the early 90s, when the Savings & Loan implosion created a lot of cheap real estate. That's not the case today but could well be the case in a few years, when the easy money ends and the real estate bubble bursts.