Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

The Real Estate Game is a comprehensive guide to successful real estate investment from one of the masters in the field. Drawing upon four decades of experience developing, owning, and managing properties and on almost thirty years of teaching at the Harvard Business School, William J. Poorvu offers an insider's perspective on how to make smart decisions about real estate.

The real estate "game" is played by people, and it's the stories of real people that make Poorvu's introduction to the industry colorful and interesting. The reader meets players ranging from real estate moguls to small-scale developers to individual investors in exotic investment instruments. Their stories evolve throughout the book and illustrate how these people -- with all their complicated needs, talents, and motives -- fit into the larger process and context.

In clear and nontechnical language, Poorvu explains how variables -- players, properties, capital markets, and the external environment -- come together to influence the shape and outcome of a real estate deal. He explains the time frame for different kinds of real estate investments and walks the reader through the key "periods of play" in the real estate game: concept, commitment, development, operation, reward, and reinvestment.

The Real Estate Game introduces a simple but powerful "back-of-the-envelope" technique for analyzing the financial implications of a potential deal. Using this tool and others, Poorvu shows readers how to use direct investments, syndicates, and REITs to get into the real estate game across a broad range of property types: residential, office, hotel, industrial, and retail.

Offering unique insight into the ways that developers and investors can create value, The Real Estate Game is both a perfect introduction for the novice and an invaluable overview for the experienced professional.

Average Customer Rating:

Great read for serious investors	Customer Rating:
Mr. Poorvu's book does an excellent job of teaching investors how to analyze real estate deals. It reads a bit like a text book but serious investors will appreciate the intelligence and depth of the content.

Great for deepening understanding of subject...	Customer Rating:
I found this book extrememly valuable in deepening my understanding of the subject and providing perspective for me to carry my understanding further on my own by looking at market information and events. Useful for beginner to intermediate level real estate interested people.

Not a get rich quick scheme	Customer Rating:
William Poorvu teaches at the Harvard Business School and also invests and develops on his own. He uses case studies to show examples of the techniques and rules he uses when investing which is how MBA's are taught. Overall its some great real world advice with no promises of making you a millionaire overnight.

Best of the RE Investment Books!

Customer Rating:

The vast majority of real estate investment books to be found in the Barnes & Noble investment section offer variations of Mark Twain's stock market advice: "making money in stocks is easy. Only buy a stock if it goes up; if it doesn't go up, don't buy it." By contrast, Poorvu walks readers through myriad real estate investment situations, fleshing out the risks and rewards, and the mindsets of the various players. While written in an anecdotal style replete with real-life examples, the book also presents an encyclopedic overview of investment opportunities (direct, REIT, syndicates, etc.) and asset categories (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.). This is a real estate investment book written by an adult, for adults -- in contrast to all the other get-rich-quick-no-money-down titles targeting gullible novices.

A Sophisticated Yet Interesting Real Estate book

Customer Rating:

Harvard Business School Professor and real estate investor William Poorvu has written a book about real estate is far above most real estate books. This book is nowhere near the run of the mill generic real estate book that tries to tell everything about real estate to people who don't have a clue. "The Real Estate Game" is a sophisticated commercial real estate book written by a real estate insider. This is not a book about buying your first house with no down payment. What this is, is a book about commercial real estate projects from concept, commitment, development, operations, and harvest. The authors bring a behind the scenes and insiders' approach to commercial development. He lays it out in the form of a game with properties, capital markets, players and external environment. One of the stories in the book is that of Bill Zeckendorf's classic assemblage of Swift slaughterhouses into the United Nations property and vicinity. Included in the book is the authors' commercial due diligence checklist. This book would be most interesting to a person involved in commercial real estate, someone interested in commercial real estate or someone interested in the business of commercial real estate. I think that this is the kind of book that you can refer back to time and time again. There is a lot of information in this book and it may even be a book that you will want to read more than once. It has a depth, and quality of information contained far superior to the average mass media real estate book without the dryness of a real estate textbook