Book Smarts

Three new books offer tips on how to capitalize on your vacation properties.

text by: Lark Ellen Gould

May 1, 2006

Find It, Fix It, Flip It!
By Michael Corbett (Plume, New York)

You might be hesitant to pick up a new book written by a former soap opera actor and current TV host on Access Hollywood. But Michael Corbett is actually quite credible in Find It, Fix It, Flip It, using graphs and charts to illustrate his points. He claims to have personally flipped more than 30 homes. The tome is formatted into three sections, one each on finding, fixing and flipping. Corbett’s rules include not viewing payments on a 30-year fixed mortgage as a privilege, when the interest on, say, a $500,000 mortgage is as much as $1.1 million, and never to set your heart on either a pristine, expensive house or a decrepit, worthless one—instead, "find the house with the right things wrong." (Click image to enlarge)

Corbett appends two very useful final chapters: a list of 12 experts he regularly consults—from Rex A. Birkebile, a senior escrow officer in Beverly Hills, to Tony Robbins, the famous motivational guru; and an Internet resource guide, numbering 32 real estate resource and flipping sites.

Frank McKinney’s Maverick Approach to Real Estate Success
By Frank H. McKinney (Wiley Publishing, Hoboken)

Frank McKinney is a Fabio decoy, but has traction with more staid housing experts such as syndicated columnist Robert Bruss, who lauded his previous book, Make it Big! 49 Secrets for Building a Life of Extreme Success (2002). At the very least, both books prove that a self-taught developer can become a successful one. (Click image to enlarge)

In his teens, McKinney started fixing rundown foreclosure houses. Within a few years, he graduated to developing multimillion-dollar luxury oceanfront spec houses, mostly in Florida. McKinney is neither an éminence grise nor technical font of wisdom, but lights the path to success by encouraging readers to focus on creating a vision.

Additionally, McKinney possesses refreshingly straightforward prescriptions, such as "Think people first; the profit will follow," "Create vital relationships up front" and "Don’t just learn your market, create it." He complements such basic strategies with anecdotes. For example, he consistently aims for a 100 percent return on an investment. Unrealistic? Not at all, he claims, and has real-life stories to back it up.



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