Anybody read Steve Berges' book about buying apartment buildings?

[Todd Moriarty]

I have read his book "The Complete Guide to Buying and Selling Apartment Buildings" and I'm creating a spreadsheet using his "Value Play" model.  And one of his calculations is confusing me. How does he come up with the number for "Net CFs from Investment - 3 Yr Exit" and also the 5 Yr Exit.

For 1 year exit he simply adds the total return, gain on sale, and down payment.

But for 3 and 5 year it doesn't add up.  

Anybody? 

[Nick L.]

I love that book! It was the first real estate book I read that made sense to me. All the others were full of vague get-rich-quick promises or overly detailed technical approaches. Forced appreciation (or as he calls it, value play) is now at the heart of my RE business.

I don't have a copy of the book in front of me to answer your specific question but I do remember creating my own spreadsheets based on his figures and noticing that some of them seemed wrong. It's been some years since I read the book, but if I remember there is a particular part where he prints some or all of the same table twice on different pages, and they are noticeably different from each other.

There's no doubt that Berges is a quirky guy. His weirdly religious final chapters... the fact that most of his later books are chapter-for-chapter plagiarisms of his earlier books.... the fact that he keeps popping up in different RE businesses with weird homebrew web sites every few years... but I have to love him for empowering me to understand the business.

By the way if you like Berges you would probably also like Dave Lindahl. They have similar approaches and investment styles.