Gary Eldred's, Make Money with Affordable Apartment Buildings and Commercial Properties, give you real world approches to investing in Apartments and Commercial real estate. Although I'm sure that there are occations when you can buy no money down and even end up putting cash back in your pocket at the close of escrow, this book will give you what you need to know to deal in the reallity of real estate investing and being one up on your compitition.

I read a fair amount of real estate books. However, when I choose a book, I try to stay away from the ones that just try to sell you on a system. Those books that scream, "Buy me and I'll tell you how to make a million dollars in a month from real estate using none of your own money!" I have never found that useful.

Mr. Eldred's book is not like those books. He is not trying to sell the reader his system. In fact, he even states in the book that systems typically do not work. Sure, you could buy a book from an author living in Southern California that made a million flipping homes between 2004-2007 but is that really going to work in Cedar Rapids, IA? Probably not.

I bought this book after being impressed with Investing in Real Estate, Fourth Edition. (The link is to the Fourth Edition, which I read. Note, however, that there is a newly updated Fifth Edition available now.) In fact, I recommend reading "Investing in Real Estate" before reading this book.

This book is all about multi family residences. It does not discuss buying single family homes since the process for those are different.

What makes this book so valuable are all of the areas that Mr. Eldred touches on that should affect not only how you decide whether or not you want to buy a property but how you see a property's potential before purchase and then fulfill that potential after the purchase. And it is not just focused on the buying process. He discusses formulating a PVP (Preferred Value Proposition) and using that PVP to guide your purchases. He talks about performing market analysis to locate the right markets, finding the right properties within those markets, determining what improvements will help raise the property's value and rents, and more. Sure, he has a chapter about working the numbers, but this book is about much more than just running numbers. It is about learning to create the right strategy, find the right markets, ask the right questions and see opportunities that others have missed.

I will be reading this book again because there is just too much valuable insight to try and capture it with just one read. Even if you are someone who owns a couple properties and has been doing this for a little while I believe this book will have you thinking and doing things differently after you read it.

Before I sound too positive, I will point out two minor issues I had with the book:

First, the title is "Make Money with Affordable Apartment Buildings and Commercial Properties." Mr. Eldred mentions commercial properties a bit in the book but this really is a book about apartment buildings (yes, I realize that apartment buildings fall into the realm of commercial properties but if that's what he was going after, the title is redundant). If you are looking at buying commercial properties that are not apartment buildings, this is not a fantastic book for you.

Second, he talks a lot in the book about calling up owners of other properties, asking them about units that are for rent, visiting those units, and following up with those owners after a short period of time to see if the units have been rented. To me, if I were an owner of one of those properties I would consider it somewhat bad form for another investor to take up my time inspecting a unit I have for rent if the investor knows he is not going to rent it. Maybe that's just me and maybe this is an OK practice (as I said I am just getting started in this area of investing), but it doesn't seem to be the right way to go about it.

In summary, I highly recommend this book. Buy it, read it, and start working on your own system for making money in real estate!