Five years of essays on this site have grown up and become a book. It is called Our Adventures in Real Estate — What We Learned, and it is now on Amazon.
What it is
It is the writing from this site, but edited into a book you can actually read front to back — ordered into six parts, cross-checked, and rid of the dangling “see the other article” links that make a blog a blog. If you have followed along here, you know the voice: first person, opinionated, honest about the mistakes, and light on the guru nonsense.
The six parts follow the arc most investors actually walk:
- Why Real Estate — the case for it, the case against it, and the reference shelf worth owning.
- Entities and Ownership — LLCs, moving property into them, partnerships, and California’s peculiar appetite for franchise tax.
- Financing and Loans — conforming loans, second homes, creative financing, and the velocity-banking math.
- Taxes and 1031 Exchanges — how the exchange works, how to botch one, and the lesser-known traps.
- Buying and Deals — property types, short-term rentals, and whether to use a buyer’s agent.
- Agency, Risk, and Advice — becoming an agent, self-insuring, and pithy answers to the questions people actually ask.
What’s new versus the site
Everything here is free to read on the blog, so why buy the book? Because the book is the organized version:
- A curated Further Reading list at the end of each part, collecting the primary sources — the IRS, the California FTB, the Fannie Mae guides, the CFPB — behind each topic.
- A back-matter glossary of the finance and real-estate terms, so you never have to guess what a “DSCR” or a “1031” is again.
- No link-chasing: it reads in order, on paper or on a Kindle, on a plane with no signal.
It is available as a Kindle e-book and as a paperback. Whichever you prefer, start here:
Get Our Adventures in Real Estate →
As always: this is what worked (and didn’t) for us, not legal, tax, or investment advice. If it saves you one of the mistakes I made, it has more than paid for itself.