Diary of a Real Estate Rookie: My Year of Flipping, Selling, and Rebuilding - And What I Learned (the Hard Way)

by Alison Rogers

With humor and grace as well as an eye for the fabulous and outrageous real estate rookie Alison Rogers offers an insider's tale of the hottest real estate market in the country. Expanding upon... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1427754659
• ISBN13: 9781427754653
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The definitive guide to real estate for first-time homebuyers AND new agents

There are no shortage of books out there for first-time home buyers, but Alison Rogers' Diary of a Real Estate Rookie: My Year of Flippin, Selling, and Rebuilding -- and What I Learned the Hard Way is easily the most interesting I've read, probably because it hasn't a how-to guide filled with platitudes like "don't buy the first house you see." As the title would suggest, this isn't a how-to guide at all. Instead it's a former real estate writer's tale of her first year as a real estate agent/aspiring investor -- it's a quick and funny read (I finished it in one sitting), and it's a remarkably candid expose of all the problems that prospective home buyers can face in dealing with agents. The book begins "More than six million Americans move each year. If anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, more than 5.9 million of them hate their real estate agent." She describes the unethical tactics that many of her competitors use to inflate their incomes at the expense of clients. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are informative sidebars like "tricks to keep from overpaying", "the greatest rental search tip ever" (definitely worth the price of admission), and "five tips to ease the pain of selling." In addition to being a valuable guide for rookie buyers, this is also probably the first book anyone contemplating a career as an agent should buy. At 212 fun-to-read pages, you can't go wrong with this book if you're interested in real estate. Zac Bissonnette AOL Money and Finance Writers/Editor

Alison Rogers tells it like it is

If this book were an apartment it would be a "sunny condo conversion - panoramic views, oversize windows, 3 BR, 2 BA, closets galore, one of a kind architectural details, built in window seat the perfect place to curl up and read a book." I gobbled it up over recent holiday weekend - it's funny and organized in short breezy chapters - easy to read. Some great stories - the fabulous BIG sale (!!!) with fully negotiated contract and the case of the missing buyers - the summer rental of a mansion that also didn't quite happen - and successes - first pitch, first open house, first sales. And I could really relate to the feeling of being pulled in ten different directions trying to balance needs of customers, sellers, family, and oh yes, self. Plus that whole adjusting to a new career thing. Great present for the real estate agent in your life, be he/she your spouse, friend, or your hard-working realtor. Or buy it for yourself...it's an investment in your sanity, for starters, and some good tips on working with buyers and sellers.

Fabulous and Funny

I tore through this book in a single sitting, mining it for real estate tips (of which there are many), and for the engaging narrative. I'd recommend it for anyone who wants to understand the basics but has no patience for dry "how to sell your home" tomes. I'd also recommend it for sheer entertainment value. It's a first-person window into NYC's crazy real estate biz and Rogers sounds like a smarter, savvier (but admittedly cash-starved) Carrie Bradshaw.

Funny, touching, helpful - it's memoir and how-to in one!

I love this book. It's not many people who can make you laugh with them AND at them, cringe at their emotional ups and downs and still come out admiring them. It's so much more than a real estate book.

Like a Virgil for a Contemporary Hell

I don't know anything about real estate; I'm scared of it, and if I didn't need a place to put my children and my furniture, I'd never have anything to do with it. Ms. Roger's book pulls back the curtains enough to show that it's a world at least as scary to those in it as it is to us. Her writing is breezy, funny, personal and honest... you end up liking her tremendously, and -- this is weird -- wishing you were in the market for Manhattan real estate, just so you could hire her. Which is a bit like wishing you could go whaling after reading Moby Dick, but still. A must read for anyone who's about to dip a toe into the waters of home buying... esp. if you find yourself thinking your broker must be a lizard person. She's not! Or, at least, this one isn't.