Commercial real estate investment is a complicated business on two fronts. First, aspiring investors must learn the “hard skills” of investment analysis like creating a proforma, evaluating potential returns, analyzing tenants, and analyzing the supply/demand profile of a real estate market. But, this isn’t all. Real estate investors must also learn the “soft skills” of building relationships with tenants, brokers, lenders, and sellers. It is these relationships that will fill the pipeline full of deals to analyze. To refine both hard and soft skills, education through commercial real estate books is incredibly important.
In this article, we are going to suggest eight of the best commercial real estate books that all investors should read. Doing so will introduce or reinforce some of the most important concepts in commercial real estate investment, knowledge of which will help individual investors determine if a commercial property investment is a good fit for their own objectives. Commercial real estate investing books we will cover include:
- The Ultimate Guide To Investing In Private Real Estate
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- The Four Hour Work Week
- The Real Estate Game: The Intelligent Guide to Decision Making and Investment
- The Commercial Real Estate Investor’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Road Map To Financial Wealth
- Mastering the Art of Commercial Real Estate Investing: How to Successfully Build Wealth and Grow Passive Income From Your Rental Properties
- Long Distance Real Estate Investing
- Crushing it In Apartments and Commercial Real Estate: How a Small Investor Can Make it Big
At First National Realty Partners, investor education is part of our core mission statement. To read more on our blog, click here. To learn more about our commercial real estate investment opportunities, click here.
1. The Ultimate Guide To Investing In Private Real Estate
Published by FNRP, The Ultimate Guide To Investing in Private Real Estate is an e-book that provides guidance on how to invest on private, commercial rental property. This commercial real estate book highlights all of the major real estate concepts around property types, asset classes, cash flow analysis, and return metrics and it is useful for both beginners and experienced investors alike.
2. How to Win Friends and Influence People
A perennial business best seller written by Dale Carnegie, this is a must-read book for real estate investors because it dives into the soft skills needed to build relationships in the business world. Specifically, the book provides information about how to become a better salesperson, a better speaker, and how to handle complaints.
3. The Four Hour Work Week
Investing in, and operating, commercial real estate can be incredibly time consuming, particularly for individuals with full time day jobs. For this reason, time management is another soft skill that is incredibly important to master for real estate investors. This book provides some tips and tricks about how to manage your time effectively for efficient investing in commercial real estate.
4. The Real Estate Game: The Intelligent Guide to Decision Making and Investment
Written by William J. Poorvu and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, this book focuses on the hard skills that commercial real estate investors need to be successful. Perhaps most importantly, the book introduces a simple, but powerful, back-of-the-envelope analysis technique that allows both new investors and seasoned real estate professionals to quickly assess whether or not a property is worth pursuing.
5. The Commercial Real Estate Investor’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Road Map To Financial Wealth
This may be the best commercial real estate book for beginners as the author, Steven D. Fisher, walks though all types of commercial real estate (office, multifamily, industrial, retail), all stages of a commercial real estate deal and discusses the most important fundamental concepts for each. Perhaps more importantly, the book also offers actionable advice for commercial real estate brokers, small investors and large institutions about how to maximize operational efficiency, find suitable real estate deals, and finance them, sometimes with other people’s money.
6. Mastering the Art of Commercial Real Estate Investing: How to Successfully Build Wealth and Grow Passive Income From Your Rental Properties
With over 35 years of experience in the commercial real estate business, Doug Marshall, uses this book to lay out his proven model for commercial real estate investing. With great detail, the author goes through how to:
- Tap into the six immutable laws of commercial real estate investing to build wealth and grow income fast
- Find the best possible loan to optimize the property’s cash flow
- Best manage a property to reduce risks and remove pitfalls
- Determine when to buy, and when NOT to buy the next rental property
7. Long Distance Real Estate Investing
Sometimes, the best commercial real estate deals aren’t found in the same market in which an investor lives. As such, they may have to chase them in another market which adds a layer of complexity to the transaction. For this reason, it may be a good idea to read David Greene’s book about investing in different real estate markets.
Specifically, the book shows real estate investors how to quickly and efficiently identify potential investment properties (like apartment buildings) in other markets, how to purchase them at a good price and manage the properties to produce passive income.
8. Crushing it In Apartments and Commercial Real Estate: How a Small Investor Can Make it Big
For some real estate investors, this may be a good first book to read as part of their commercial real estate investing education. Among other topics, the author, Brian Murray, uses this book to cover how to:
- Find and creatively finance commercial property
- Grow a real estate portfolio without any help from outside investors and without taking on excessive debt
- Use your small-investor status as a competitive advantage over corporate real estate investors
- Identify simple, practical ways to increase profits while keeping costs low
Why Reading Is Important for Commercial Real Estate Investors
Whether your goal is to advance your real estate investing career, become a commercial real estate agent, own your own commercial brokerage, or just achieve financial freedom and/or passive income through real estate investment, it is important to have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of commercial real estate investing.
Staying on top of the most recent thought leadership, trends, case studies, podcasts, and best practices of commercial real estate investing, including through real estate books, will make you a more educated and informed market participant. Only good things can result.
Interested In Learning More?
First National Realty Partners is one of the country’s leading private equity commercial real estate investment firms. With an intentional focus on finding world-class, multi-tenanted assets well below intrinsic value, we seek to create superior long-term, risk-adjusted returns for our investors while creating strong economic assets for the communities we invest in.
If you would like to learn more about our commercial real estate investment opportunities, contact us at (800) 605-4966 or info@fnrealtypartners.com for more information.
