A thoughtful and encouraging guide to apartment ownership.
A veteran real estate investor offers a manual for new landlords.
In this business book, Barbera follows up on his Retire and Refire (2022) and provides recommendations to readers interested in following his path as an owner of a collection of rental properties. The guide addresses how to find investmentworthy buildings, how to finance the purchase, how to manage a portfolio of apartments, and how to deal with common problems that arise. The author explains how to decide whether a building is worth purchasing—along with evaluating the financial aspects of the transaction, readers should spend time investigating the neighborhood, assessing its characteristics, and deciding whether they could see themselves living there. He also discusses how to hire a building manager to oversee day-to-day operations while remaining an aware and engaged owner. The book focuses primarily on investing in residential, rather than commercial, properties, and Barbera illustrates his explanations with anecdotes from his decades of apartment ownership. For the author, real estate is a business based on relationships, a refrain he returns to throughout the manual even as he explains the mechanics of the gross rent multiplier and the workings of a property auction, providing examples of fellow investors, lawyers, and tenants who have contributed to his success. He is critical of those who invest in real estate only for the financial benefit (“Pride of ownership can’t stop at writing the check; you’re not hoarding buildings, you’re developing them”) or take little interest in the operations of their own properties. Barbera argues for profits without exploitation, emphasizing the importance of housing to all people and the responsibility of landlords to maintain well-kept and livable spaces. The book has a somewhat valedictory tone (with references to the days of $72.50 a month rent reminding readers how long he has been in the business), as Barbera reflects on his career and encourages others to take up the mantle of responsible landlording. An appendix delivers samples of many of the forms and documents the author discusses, although he reminds readers to comply with all state and local regulations.
A thoughtful and encouraging guide to apartment ownership.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781947431546
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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