So You Want To Get Into Real Estate: A Primer for Everyone Who Wants to Be "In Real Estate" (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798255295593)

"I want to get into real estate." It's one of the most common sentences spoken at dinner tables across America-and one of the least understood.

Eli Verschleiser has heard it hundreds of times over a thirty-year career spanning over $10 billion in transactions, a partnership with Donald J. Trump, the first-ever U.S. private real estate bond offering on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and deals ranging from a vacant lot in Brooklyn to a developing 50+-story buildings. His answer was always the same: "The answer is too long to explain."

This book is that answer.

So You Want to Get Into Real Estate? is a complete, honest, start-to-finish education in real estate investment-psychological, practical, financial, and mechanical. No shortcuts. No hype. Just everything a serious investor needs to know, written in plain language by someone who has made fortunes, survived ups and downs, and learned every lesson the hard way.

What's inside:

Before you buy a single property, you need to know yourself. Verschleiser opens with a frank assessment of risk tolerance, business acumen, people skills, life stage, and the non-negotiable importance of getting your partner on board-because the wrong self-assessment here is where most investors fail before they even begin.

From there, the book moves systematically through every major property type: single-family homes (with the 0.8% rental yield rule that instantly filters bad deals), condos, townhouses, duplexes, small apartment buildings, office strips, retail centers, and warehouses. For each, you'll get an honest breakdown of risk, return, time commitment, and capital required.

The section on due diligence is worth the price of the book alone: how to read an Income & Expense Statement line by line, what anomalies to flag, how to verify a rent roll, what cap rates tell you about a market, and how to structure an offer that protects you when the numbers don't hold up.

The financing section covers everything from conventional mortgages to family equity syndicates to the 1031 Exchange-one of the most powerful and underused wealth-building tools in real estate, explained here in plain terms with a path to using it strategically over a lifetime.

Woven throughout are "Fun Facts"-unvarnished stories from Verschleiser's own career: the offshore casino loss that turned out to be a blessing; his first big deal a $98M deal structured; the Trump partnership that changed everything; the Tel Aviv bond offering closed two weeks before Lehman collapsed; and the ex-partner who bit him-yes, literally-in the middle of a fraud that still has active litigation.

The book closes with a complete glossary of real estate terms and a self-assessment framework matching four investor profiles-Comfortable Retirement, Second Income, Thriving Business, Real Estate Empire-to the personalities, capital levels, and strategies that actually fit each one.

Whether you want two rental properties or two hundred, this is where you start.