The Book on Rental Property Investing

The Fortune Cookie

Brandon Turner was eighteen and broke, eating Chinese buffet near Minneapolis with his best friend Matt the summer after high school. He had just said out loud that he'd probably settle for an ordinary life. Then his fortune cookie cracked open with this line: there is no such thing as an ordinary life. He still tells that story almost twenty years later, because the book he eventually wrote rests entirely on whether you believe it. The Book on Rental Property Investing is not a manual for getting rich. It is a long, patient argument that the difference between an ordinary financial life and a free one is mostly a matter of refusing to keep buying the ordinary story.

Turner is not a hedge fund partner. He grew up in a Midwestern town his parents wanted him to leave for law school. He had the LSAT score for it. He bailed at the last minute, googled his way onto a forum called BiggerPockets, and started buying houses one at a time. By the time he wrote this book in 2015 he was thirty years old, owned forty-four units across roughly a dozen properties, and ran the whole portfolio with his wife Heather and a part-time office manager. That is the whole credential. He repeats one line through the entire book: I only want to teach what I actually do. If you came for a guru selling a forty-thousand-dollar coaching package, this isn't that.

Why Rentals, of Everything

Turner opens with the reasons he is in love with rental property as an asset, and the list is more interesting than the usual pitch. The obvious one is leverage. A bank will hand you eighty percent of a house's purchase price and call it a mortgage. Try walking into a brokerage and asking for eighty percent leverage on Apple stock. Less obvious is what he calls hustle. The stock market does not care how hard you work. A rental property does. You can repaint the kitchen, screen tenants better, raise rent ten dollars, fight a property tax assessment, and every move shifts the return. It is one of the only investments where being awake on a Tuesday afternoon actually matters.