Book Smarts

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

text by: Lark Ellen Gould

May 1, 2006

Reading is one of the most popular activities vacation-home owners engage in when inhabiting their second homes. While fiction feeds the soul, reading about how your home can make you money or how to flip homes for profit is a far more industrious endeavor. What follows is a rundown of three new books that may help you transform your mountain perch into a cash cow.

Profit from Your Vacation Home Dream
By Christine Hrib Karpinski (Dearborn Trade Publishing, Chicago)

This anecdotal book is an owner’s manual for vacation-home owners who want to earn rental income when they are not in residence. Author Christine Hrib Karpinski tells us that every vacation home has potential as a profitable rental. However, an owner has to accept that success hinges on viewing the endeavor as hands-on, as opposed to a passive enterprise, she claims. (Click image to enlarge)

An important part of maximizing profit, Karpinski writes, is to avoid the services of a professional management company. This means the owner must function as such. Karpinski shares her abundant experience in how to juggle daily, weekly and monthly renters and still maintain a personal life. Her "Karpinski formula" includes basics, such as gauging rents at nearby vacation rentals in order to establish a reasonable rent for a property.

The book is heavy on the management techniques she uses to operate her vacation rentals from a distance. She also discusses housecleaning, avoiding bad tenants, giving directions and making key transfers.

Although she lacks an academic perspective, Karpinski’s anecdotal accounts (to which she wisely adds those of her friends) make the book a must-read for any vacation-home owner who is interested in renting it out. Handled properly, Karpinski claims, rentals can cover all of your expenses—including your mortgage.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.