Managing Your Rental House for Increased Income...

Managing Your Rental House for Increased Income by Doreen Bierbrier (McGraw-Hill, 288 pages, $17.95) is not a typical “get rich quick with no money down” real estate book. Bierbrier, a 38-year former government employee in the Washington area, makes a comfortable living from her four properties--houses that she rents to singles who share living expenses. Bierbrier explains how to acquire the right kind of house that will attract quality tenants and also discusses how to deal with tenants. She’s got a strange theory: treat tenants like human beings and you won’t have any problems. She covers a wide variety of topics in great detail, including probably the most important of all: how to screen tenants to protect your investment. Bierbrier prefers renting to singles, partly because she can get higher rents from three or four tenants in a house. She admits early in the book that being a land baroness is quite a shift from being an idealistic Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, but she seems to have made the transition smoothly. An excellent book for someone contemplating buying single-family investment houses.