June 15th, 2010 
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Product Description
From the BusinessWeek bestselling author of Investing in Fixer-Uppers–a plan for building a real estate empire with little or no money down ” Fixer Jay” DeCima, the acknowledged king of fixer-uppers, delivers a much-anticipated guide to realizing financial independence through real estate investing. Written in DeCima’s trademark folksy style, Start Small, Profit Big in Real Estate provides a complete two-year plan for making it big in real estate star… More >>
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The author gave “how” examples and easy to understand explainations to help you build wealth.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a good beginners book to start buying, fixing and profiting from your real estate fix-up labor. The author describes very well how to find and profit from various types of properties: condos, town houses, single family, etc. The area that I thought was most interesting was the research to search and find apartments, the advise was more practical then other books. The more boring portion were the financials as I did not think anything was innovative in his approach: Buy low, fix then rent for cash flow and/or sell to profit. The author should have elaborated more on the mortgage and financing portion of real estate. If readers follow as described and if you can find the properties the 2-year plan should work.
Enjoy the read and good luck!
Rating: 4 / 5
This author is clearly very successful as a real estate investor and appears to have a great interest in sharing information and tactics to help new investors. His style is “down home” however my guess he is more sophisticated than portrayed in the book. I recommend this book for new RE investors.
Rating: 4 / 5
There is some good, useful information in this book. But personally I found it hard to get past the country boy, hick lingo that he uses so much. For example, “Never Try to Milk a Steer”. There are so many metaphors like this, I couldn’t get through the whole book because I was laughing instead of absorbing the information. Most of the information is good, but if the book was more well written it would be alot better. I stopped reading this book and moved on to another one that I purchased at the same time, Millionaire Real Estate Mentor, I think its written by Russ Whitney or Ross Whitney, something like that. That one is awesome so far and I would recommend it above this book any day.
Rating: 2 / 5
Author’s basic premise makes sense– there is money to be made buying fixer upper single-family houses that are rehabbed and rented for investment income. Author suggests focusing on houses that require cosmetic repairs and/or sweat-equity repairs that offer cost savings via investor completed repairs versus hiring and paying a professional.
Book’s shortcomings include ad nausea repetition, a lack of practical how-to advice and too many references to investment returns based on gross income versus net income or before tax cash flow (i.e., A $100,000 house that rents for $1,000 per month does not produce a 12% return unless the tenant covers all operating expenses, capital improvements and there is no debt service. John Schaub’s single-family house investment books offer a more detailed road map.
Rating: 3 / 5