After reading Donald Trump's books "The art of the Deal" and the "Art of the Comeback" I picked this book up. It looked more like a text book or how-to so I was excited to dive in after reading his biographical style previous books. It sat on my shelf for a week with that big Trump name sparkling in gold and his face on the cover. I finally got around to reading it and realized he wasn't the author but only had written the foreword. Robert Kiyosaki slaps his name on purple and black books in a similar way as Trump but I think he has been a bit more successful at this branding. I find this practice somewhat annoying but I have to hand it to both of them at getting the most out of their brands. I hope to one day have other people write books and slap my name on the cover to sell more copies.
So, after ten minutes of feeling tricked by Trump I flipped through and decided to give Gary W. Eldred a shot. He didn't disappoint in fact he did a fantastic job. As I read more and more real estate books this one surely did have a lot of overlap, but it did excel at making me think about re-purposing houses in a way that would make them more profitable. His thoughts on market segments in Chapter 7 were new to me, and will help me make money in the future. I'm especially referring to the part about college students and seniors. I see these as two rapidly expanding segments and so do the authors.
Also I've been guilty of focusing solely on price and not paying attention to some of the other deal points like available financing included in Real Estate deals so this was a good reminder. Using the Comparative Sales, Cost Approach, and Income approach is nothing I have not seen before but using them all together to create an Estimated market value is a logical extension.
In the end this book made me smarter, and isn't that what all books are designed to do? I'm going to keep picking up Trump University books even if they aren't actually written by Donald himself.