Architectural Inspiration: Styles, Details and Sources
By Richard Skinulis and Peter Christopher
Boston Mills Press
$79.95
This gorgeous hard cover coffee table book includes 528 pages crammed with design ideas and sources for all types of housing. Author Richard Skinulis and photographer Peter Christopher are Canadians but the book is aimed at a North American audience. It makes for a good mix of Canadian and U.S. styles and ideas.
The first section is devoted to North American housing styles, from Ontario farm houses to adobe homes in Arizona. A chapter about interior spaces follows, showing several different treatments for the main living areas. Then the book gets into the details, showcasing elements of the home from tiles to skylights and everything in between. There’s also an extensive listing of sources including phone numbers and web addresses.
For anyone who loves houses or is planning a renovation or new home – and could use a little inspiration – this book fits the bill.
The Millionaire Maker’s Guide to Creating a Cash Machine for Life
By Loral Langemeier
McGraw-Hill
$30.95
Loral Langemeier is founder and CEO of Live Out Loud, which calls itself a “global education company committed to revolutionizing how people think about money and empowering them to take responsibility for their financial lives”. This is the third in a series of Millionaire Maker books, and a new board game, The Millionaire Maker Game, was also recently released.
This book promises to show, step-by-step, how anyone can launch their own Cash Machine business, using existing skills and experience to generate immediate cash flow. It also offers ideas to fix or optimize an existing business.
The idea behind the Cash Machine also presents a different approach to debt. The book presents three ‘real-life’ client case studies proving that through launching their own businesses, you can generate cash first and pay down debt second. It illustrates these examples with worksheets, charts and checklists. Other topics covered in the book include chapters on how to model your business after other successful businesses, building a support team for your venture, marketing and sales tactics, managing business operations and finances, expanding a business, and exit strategies.
“I don’t suggest my readers start their first business venture based on what they’re interested in or passionate about, unless it coincides strongly with their skills and talents,” says Langemeier.
Instead, her approach is for new entrepreneurs to learn how to run a business first, based on something they already understand and know how to do. Once they have the experience and the money, then they can move on to the business of their dreams.
The board game, which is available online from U.S.-based Barnes and Noble (www.barnesandnoble.com) for $74.95 US, promises an “exciting and interactive experience where players are cast into the life of an entrepreneur where big deals are made daily. Players can lose everything or live the life of luxury based on the choices they make.”
Craving Community: The New American Dream
By Todd Mansfield, Ross P. Yockey and L. Beth Yockey
Abecedary Press
$38.57 (Amazon.ca)
The old American Dream was to own a house. The New American Dream, according to this book, is to be part of a community. With urban sprawl creating cookie-cutter subdivisions, “a new sort of revolution” is quietly brewing, say the authors of Craving Community.
“After nearly 100 years of urban diaspora into neighbourhoods where only concrete and automobiles could connect us, we are craving the community we lost along the way and searching out different sorts of dwelling places,” says the book.
Author Todd Mansfield was president of the Walt Disney Company’s Celebration Company, which developed the “new village” development of Celebration, Florida. It reflects an urge to recreate a small-town feeling of community in new home developments.
“It’s not The Truman Show. It’s real life and it’s happening now,” says a news release for the book. It uses examples of new development across the U.S. to show how the New Village concept is being implemented.
The Real Estate Agent’s Guide to FSBOs
By John Maloof
Amacom Books
$16.46 (chapters.indigo.ca)
Author John Maloof, a top Century 21 sales rep in the Chicago area, says in the introduction to his book: “What I lay out in this book are not theories or ideas, but proven techniques to succeed in listing and selling FSBOs. These techniques are presented here for you to digest and implement into your own action plan. This is not written as a motivational book, although it does contain some motivational tactics to give your career the push it deserves.”
That includes six ways to handle your emotions when tackling the difficult job of making money from FSBOs. Then it gets into how to find FSBOs, and outlines how to justify brokerage fees to resistant sellers. It covers defeating competition from other agents and outlines how you can capitalize on the disadvantages of FSBO websites.
Diary of a Real Estate Rookie
By Alison Rogers
Kaplan Publishing
$14.44 (chapters.indigo.ca)
“More than six million Americans move each year. If anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, 5.9 million of them hate their real estate agents,” says Alison Rogers in the introduction to this book. “So how did I end up going into a profession that ranks below ‘vampire’ on the trust scale? And why should that interest you? The answer to the first question is: I had a midlife crisis….The answer to the second question is: Things didn’t turn out like I planned. I ended up exploring a much wider area of real estate than I thought…and at every turn, stuff kept happening to me that wasn’t in the books. So I wrote my own.”
A journalist who still writes a weekly column for Inman News, Rogers uses humour to explain how she found success in the business. Much of the book is geared to consumers, covering topics such five tips on buying if you have a fear of commitment and five tips to ease the pain of selling. For consumers and real estate professionals, she includes a section about what the Internet can and cannot do for you. She also lists “five questions your agent is not going to have an honest answer to”. (Number 1 is, “What’s going to happen to the market in six months?”
