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Real estate books: Investing advice, feng shui and more

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Real Estate Salespeople, Beware!
By Mark Weisleder
ECW Press
$29.95
 
Toronto-based lawyer and certified real estate instructor Mark Weisleder has updated Real Estate Salespeople, Beware! with a bonus CD. The book and CD cover how real estate agents should deal with disclosure issues, conditions and multiple offers, mortgage fraud, identify theft, false advertising, the Privacy Act and more. It’s geared to Ontario sales reps, including references to the Real Estate Business and Brokers Act that was updated in 2006, as well as a section that outlines the role of the Real Estate Council of Ontario. However, the book has much practical and easy-to-understand information about how real estate practitioners anywhere can avoid finding themselves entangled in legal troubles. The book includes a section called Forewarned is Forearmed: The 14 Steps of Success.
Follow those steps and you should never have to see the inside of a regulator’s office or a courtroom.
www.markweisleder.com 
 
Answers to Your Real Estate Questions: Smart and Profitable Real Estate Investing for Canadians
By S.M. Herzog
iUniverse
$18.95
 
S.M. Herzog offers a number of ‘stories’ about real estate investing in Canada, each with their own lesson to be learned. Among the topics covered are how to evaluate and minimize risk, deciding what investment approach is best for you, mortgages and credit lines, and leasing a property. It’s a practical guide to buying and selling, with all Canadian content.
The book has current market information but warns that the real estate market is regional and cyclical. It’s a great primer for first-time buyers or first-time investors.
Available at local bookstores.
 
Real You Incorporated
8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs
By Kaira Sturdivant Rouda
Wiley
$29.99
 
Kaira Sturdivant Rouda is the president and co-owner of Real Living, the fourth largest residential real estate company in the United States. “A key message of Real You Incorporated is that women have clout – lots of it – and are gaining more every day,” she writes. “We rock in business.”
She tells readers that they need to learn to express “your unique personal brand as a real marketable business brand…Once you can discover and love your personal brand, you can launch it as a real brand, one that is powerful and different from a man’s.”
The first section of the book explains how to find your brand. The second section details how to extend that message to the world. The book includes case studies of successful women entrepreneurs and a series of Life Lessons to sum up the process of developing your brand and your success.
Available at local bookstores.
 
Sell Your Home with Feng Shui
By Christine Ayres & Cindy Coverdale
Authorhouse
$21.50 US
 
It takes less than 100 pages for this book to explain how to use feng shui to create curb appeal, deal with problem stairs, set up welcoming furniture, and even to rehabilitate a home’s bad reputation.
There’s a section that suggests materials for a feng shui portable staging kit that you can take to enhance any property. The book deals with how to make small rooms look larger, and how to downplay the sound when a house has too much street noise. The book is illustrated with large colour photos and diagrams.
www.authorhouse.com 
 
Sell Your Home in Any Market
By Jim Remley
Amacom
$15.95
 
This book, promising “50 surprisingly simple strategies for getting top dollar fast” is a timely arrival for the struggling U.S. real estate market.
Although geared to consumers, the book offers a number of selling strategies from real estate professionals throughout the U.S., so you may learn something you don’t already know. Much of it consolidates the basics of selling a house, including staging and curb appeal tips, how to hire a real estate sales rep, and the advantages of using the MLS system. But it also gets into marketing to investors, and surprising detail about different types of real estate signage, how to market to a specific buyer group, and how to anticipate and overcome buyer questions and objections.
Available at local bookstores.
 
The Home Decorator’s Color & Texture Bible
By Adrienne Chinn
Firefly Books
$29.95
 
The ways that colour and texture alter the look and feel of a room are illustrated in 180 colour schemes in this book for professional and amateur decorators.
For example, a natural scheme called earth and sky combines the colours brown sugar, Aegean blue, powder blue and bone white. These colours are shown side by side and then in various fabric patterns and textures for furniture, window coverings and flooring. Each scheme shows the featured flooring at the base of the page, and includes a colour palette, fabrics and alternative flooring suggestions. A complete list of suppliers, mostly from the U.K. but some from the U.S., is included.
Available at local bookstores.
 
51 Success Stories from Canadian Real Estate Investors
By Don R. Campbell with Joy Gregory
Wiley
$26.95
 
Don R. Campbell is the president of the Real Estate Investment Network, which has more than 2,700 members across Canada. This is a compilation of success stories from members of the network. Each case study outlines the member’s objectives, mistakes made along the way, and how they ultimately became successful.
Campbell previously wrote 97 Tips for Canadian Real Estate Investors and Real Estate Investing in Canada. Buyers of the book can register at www.realestateinvestingincanada.com and receive more success stories as well as free investor resources and research, Campbell says. All of the royalties from sales of the book are being donated to Habitat for Humanity.
Available at local bookstores.
 
I’ve Heard It All and So Should You
By Edith Lank
Dearborn
$28.50
 
Edith Lank is the “Dear Abby” of real estate in the United States. She writes a column about real estate issues that appears in more than 100 newspapers and websites. In this book, she collects some of the thousands of letters that have been sent to her over the years and offers her answers.
It’s aimed at real estate professionals to show just how little consumers know about real estate issues. A sample question: “Stamped return envelope enclosed, please send us all information on how to sell our home without using a realator. I think you call it being a FSOB. Cordially, L.B.”
Or how about, “I want to know how to calculate if it’s worth it to me to buy a house. My desire is to buy 100 houses. Right now I don’t know how to do it. Please advise. Respectfully, A.D.”
Or, “We bought our house last May and moved in right away. How soon can we sell it? Mr. and Mrs. S.R.”
Available at local bookstores.


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