A property investment manual that appealingly puts candor before gloss.
Entrepreneur Faeth presents a no-nonsense guide to investing in short-term rentals.
This manual, which aims to help readers hoping to make “$250,000 Per Year from Airbnbs with One Up-Front Investment,” presents a healthy balance of serious, well-structured investment advice alongside simple pep-talk. The opening vignettes—which present readers with meditations on building wealth as a craft, the legacy of the author’s childhood in Bakersfield, California, and his mother’s kitchen-table accounting lessons—are brief and effectively establish the author’s credibility without dwelling excessively on his fortunes. The book’s central thesis is that anyone, with clarity and discipline, can forge a path to generational wealth, and it centers on his “250 Plan”—a strategy to scale five properties in five years, each yielding $50,000 in net annual income. Faeth asserts that success hinges on more than cash flow, although it is one of his “Four Pillars,” which also include appreciation, paying down debt, and tax benefits. These four elements, he says, can be used together to transform ordinary rentals into “Super Properties.” He warns of the risks of government regulation and inconsistent guest experiences—which he characterizes as the two great hazards of the short-term rental field—and offers advice on proactive risk management and hospitality standards. He guides readers through market selection, underwriting, financing tactics, pricing optimization, and the application of technology for automating marketing and booking. A sprinkle of cautionary tales, addressing such things as expenses for missed snow removal and lackluster property managers, gives the book some real-world color. Formulas, calculators, and anecdotes from the author’s protégés further underscore that the book features not armchair theory, but stories from lived experience. Overall, it’s a brisk, colloquial, and straightforward investment manual. Faeth delights in skewering lazy investors and bland, Ikea-furnished listings; he names names and shares secrets, demystifying a volatile, overhyped sector without dampening its possibilities. Readers may wish for more examples of what happens when things don’t work out, but aspiring investors who prefer a clear path over vague promises will find what they’re looking for here.
A property investment manual that appealingly puts candor before gloss.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798891387096
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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