I was looking through the real estate section Half Price Books recently and stumbled upon an interesting book: Tips and Traps When Buying A Home, by Robert Irwin. The edition of this book I was thumbing through was published in 1996, and was just chock full of all kinds of helpful advice, such as this:
You want to buy as soon as you see prices going up. Never mind that it’s a seller’s market and you’ll have to pay more today than you could have for that same property last year. If prices are going up, the home you buy today will be worth even more next year and, hopefully, more still the year after that. You want to catch and ride the wave.
And this:
How Do You Know When the Market Turns Around?
It’s easy to tell. You can simply read the real estate articles in your local newspaper.
…
Or you can make contact with a real estate broker, announce that you want to wait until the market gets better, and ask for a call when there’s a turnaround.
Following below is a four-page excerpt from this 238-page book of gems that I found to be especially entertaining. I hope you enjoy it as well. Click any page to enlarge it to a more readable size.
Mr. Irwin also wrote another, more recent book that was even more well-timed: Tips & Traps for Getting Started as a Real Estate Agent, published in 2006.