Property Investing Guide Too Vague to Be Helpful

“Real Estate Riches” could have been superb if it had focus and direction. Wading through the first half, which compares realty investing with stock market investing, is a bore and a chore.

Author Dolf de Roos, a realty investor from New Zealand and Australia who now lives in Phoenix, never clarifies what properties he owns or his motivation for acquiring real estate, other than to “profit.”

Readers learn he presents real estate seminars and that he wants to sell them his property management software.

Although I know or have at least heard of most prominent names in realty investing, I’ve never encountered his name before.

This is not a “how-to” book for getting rich in real estate. It is so generalized the reader will wonder what the author is trying to say other than to “invest in real estate.”

Specific how-to details are left to the reader’s imagination.

De Roos includes several examples of properties he purchased. One is a $22,500 cottage in New Zealand, which is not relevant to U.S. readers.

Another is a vacant funeral parlor building that, before purchasing, he arranged to lease to another funeral company. Again, not typical for most investors.

He also shares how he added a carport to a house that didn’t have a garage, thereby increasing the property’s market value. But most single-family houses already have either a garage or a carport.

This new book, however, is not without a few redeeming qualities. The last chapter lists the author’s “rules” for realty investing, and rescues the reader from the misery of reading the prior chapters.

In a disorganized way, the author shares his real estate investment philosophy throughout the book. However, he could have done a much better job by clarifying his strategy at the beginning and embellishing it.

Instead, readers are left to wander until nearly the book’s end.

Toward the conclusion, de Roos explains the benefits of residential property (people always need places to live) over commercial realty investments. If that’s true, why did the author emphasize his commercial property investments throughout the book?

Although the book alludes to the benefits of investing in real estate, the author never clarifies all those benefits with a specific example. It would have been extremely helpful if he had included a U.S. property he owns, its rental income, its expenses, its depreciation and its after-tax benefits.