Investing in Real Estate, Without Cash

If you are a serious real estate investor, or if you want to be, don’t miss Richard C. Powelson’s new book, “Formulas for Wealth.” The author, a former president of the Illinois Assn. of Realtors, former director of the National Assn. of Realtors and a longtime real estate investment seminar instructor, knows his topic.

Powelson focuses on how to get started investing in real estate with zero or little cash and build a fortune.

Along the way, he explains dozens of techniques he has used, such as land contracts, lease-options and wraparound mortgages.

The author doesn’t overlook the downsides of these investment techniques, and he shows how to avoid problems. For example, in the section on land contracts (where the seller retains title but the buyer is the equitable owner), Powelson emphasizes the importance of using an escrow agent to collect the buyer’s payments, to make payments on the existing mortgages and to hold the property deed until the buyer is entitled to receive it.

If the book has a flaw, it is the unrealistically low prices in the examples. The author lives in the Midwest, near Kansas City, Mo., where realty prices are cheap. His low-price illustrations, such as being able to buy houses for $40,000 or $50,000 when the nationwide average is more than $100,000, test readers’ skills in relationship to their local residential markets.

Written in the style of the classic “how-to” real estate books of the 1960s and 1970s by Bill Nickerson and Al Lowry, this new book is filled with techniques investors can use to build their cash flow and estates.

However, the book could have been better had Powelson used more specific examples to explain the theory.

This is a sophisticated book that novice realty investors will probably need to read several times to fully understand.

When I read my first real estate book back in 1963 by Nickerson (“How I Turned $1,000 into $1,000,000 in My Spare Time”), I outlined it to understand its unique realty techniques, which had never been explained in print before.

Powelson’s book, which is excellent, isn’t quite in Nickerson’s class. But it is a modern summary of dozens of real estate investment techniques. Not every method will work on every property purchase, but all you need is one.

The book’s theme is “how to invest in real estate with little or none of your own cash.”

Along the way, the author shares creative techniques he has used to build his estate over his long realty investment career. Some methods seem more relevant than others, but it’s up to the reader to decide which methods to use.

Although I don’t agree with all of the book’s advice, especially about using bonds to purchase real estate, this new book is a worthwhile read.

It is filled with old and new real estate finance ideas that most readers either haven’t learned yet or have forgotten.