With irresponsible subprime lending having led to a financial crisis, publishers of books about real estate are debating whether the future means greater or fewer book sales. On the one hand, readers are expected to flock to the genre seeking valuable information on “how [to] survive and thrive in the coming uncertain times,” says Rick Wolff, publisher of Grand Central’s Business Plus imprint. Peter Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press, agrees: “The hope is that more books would now become available for educating home buyers regarding the nature of real estate ownership.”
But there are publishers who’ve noticed a recent contraction in the number of books being bought by store buyers and readers. “With less activity on the part of home owners and investors, there’s less interest in books about financing or refinancing mortgages and buying and selling homes,” Amacom senior editor Bob Nirkind argues. McGraw-Hill editorial director Mary Glenn agrees. “We’ve seen book sales decline,” says Glenn. “Real estate books do well when the real estate market is doing well. The serious investors will always be in the market and will always buy books, but we lose the 'dreamer’ [reader] when the market is down.”
Unfortunately, no one knows when the market will rebound. Many journalists and politicians think that the government’s bailout package won’t be much of a solution. Here are just a few of the many daunting statistics facing real estate investors and homeowners: according to the Center for Responsible Lending, more than 1.2 million homes have already been lost through subprime foreclosure, and another 1.7 million families with subprime loans are in serious danger in the near future. This unprecedented number of foreclosures will extend to 44.5 million homes losing a total of $223 billion in value over the next few years, most of it in 2008 and 2009, according to the center’s report—a figure that averages approximately $5,000 lost per household. The trouble doesn’t end there: Credit Suisse predicts that, by the end of 2012, 6.5 million U.S. homes will have been foreclosed. Given these grim figures, what types of real estate books will publishers produce in order to avoid losing readers?
How to Thrive
“It’s been decades since the United States has seen a real estate crisis such as the one we’re experiencing now. The genre is shifting because of this,” says Wiley v-p and publisher Matt Holt. Compared to books published five to 10 years ago, Wiley’s current roster of books is more nuanced and caters to an experienced investor. The titles tend to focus on specifics, which is what Holt thinks readers are looking for. In fact, this season, Wiley has so accurately predicted readers’ needs that they are set to publish nearly a dozen titles that speak directly to the housing crisis—a triumph Holt attributes to editors Richard Narramore and Shannon Vargo. Two of Wiley’s recent titles explain how greed caused the housing market to implode. Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance by Richard Bitner (July) “tells the story of Bitner’s disillusionment after owning a subprime lending business for five years,” says Holt. The book begins with the foreclosure on a borrower that Bitner says shouldn’t have been given a mortgage in the first place. Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla (July) “chronicles the disaster of the subprime mortgage crisis, focusing on the executives on Wall Street in addition to the lenders and brokers.” Holt further describes the book: “It’s a national story of greed and avarice, one that hasn’t come down the pike since the S&L scandal.”
What is perhaps most interesting about Wiley’s roster is the selection of books that provide information on how to thrive during the crisis. How to Sell a House Fast in a Slow Real Estate Market: A 30-Day Plan for Motivated Sellers by William Bronchick and Ray Cooper (Nov.) “explains how to use all the strategies at your disposal when you want to sell your home in a tough market,” according to Holt. Though he predicts that the market won’t right itself for the next 12—18 months, he doesn’t foresee a major revolution in real estate literature. Even during these difficult times, Holt is certain that “there is no reason why one can’t publish a book on foreclosure investing. There are lots of properties on the market. Banks are desperate. This could be the buyers’ market of the next 20—50 years.”
Kevin Ryan, editorial director at Barron’s Educational Series, shares Holt’s optimism. Because people always need housing, Ryan doesn’t believe the market will remain in the tank for any significant amount of time. “The crisis will be steadied when sanity returns to the market, which will happen,” Ryan says. “The situation is unlike the dot-com stock bubble or other financial instrument and commodity bubbles. Prices will stabilize when they have fallen below replacement costs.” Not only is Ryan optimistic about the market’s resurgence, he cites Barron’s already published Keys to Buying Foreclosed and Bargain Homes: 3rd Edition by Jack Friedman, Jack Harris and Skip Stearns as proof that “those who do their homework can greatly profit from the imperfections in the housing market.” According to Ryan, the updated edition reflects conditions in today’s fluctuating market. “This book is about the opportunities to profit from the purchase, management and resale of bargain or foreclosed homes, the quantity of which has been greatly magnified by the subprime crisis.” Three Rivers Press’s The Wall Street Journal: Complete Home Owner’s Guidebook: Make the Most of Your Biggest Asset in Any Market by David Crook (Dec.) also examines buying and selling homes during national economic instability. According to associate editor Lindsay Orman, this book “offers valuable information to home buyers and sellers on how to maximize opportunities in a deflated market.” Orman attests that first-home buyers are presently at an advantage even if those who choose to sell or upgrade may be in a bind.
Alerting the public that they can still profit during the current downturn is also a critical goal for Dutton. New Rules for the New Market: 4 Steps to Real Estate Wealth by Michael Corbett (Apr.) “is a comprehensive resource to help readers navigate the new market and an essential guide for every homebuyer, homeowner and real estate investor—especially in a time of real estate downturn,” says Dutton editor Erika Imranyi. “It teaches readers how to build their wealth during and after a real estate crisis and outlines four steps on how to prosper in this new market.” Imranyi expects the market to “bounce up and down,” and she believes that Corbett’s title provides readers with the best long-term strategy for a fluctuating investment landscape.
“I anticipate that the real estate genre will start to focus on how people can thrive in the coming uncertain times,” says Wolff of Business Plus. Though Business Plus’s already published Rich Dad’s Advisors: The ABC’s of Property Management by Ken McElroy was written before the crisis ballooned last month, Wolff claims there is much readers can learn from McElroy. “The title tackles the fundamentally misunderstood aspect of real estate investing,” says Wolff. “Real estate investing is a business that requires management, not just investment. As McElroy writes, 'Poor management = Poor profits.’ That’s a truism no matter what the market is doing.”
How to Survive
Though it still may be possible for investors to prosper during the current crisis, many publishers have turned their attention to titles that help readers manage what real estate assets they haven’t yet lost. Richard Day, publisher at Self-Counsel Press, says it is impossible to venture a guess as to how and when the market will be steadied. Because of the grim forecast, Self-Counsel’s Do Your Own Home Staging by Tina Parker (Sept.) presents a realistic approach to surviving the crisis, according to Day. “The book addresses the issue of how one can make buyers want a house without price dumping.” In addition, Parker’s book tackles how one should go about selling one’s home in a town or suburb covered in for sale signs. Do Your Own Home Staging is not a get-rich-quick guide but rather a penultimate resort (price dumping being the last resort) for many struggling home owners.
“It’s a challenging time to publish real estate books,” says Nirkind of Amacom. “You need to be cognizant of the current state of the market and acquire projects that meet consumer needs, such as foreclosure avoidance. There will be a glut of books and an indeterminate time period within which most of them will sell.” Nirkind was spot-on in his prediction. Stop Foreclosure Now: The Complete Guide to Saving Your Home and Your Credit by Lloyd Segal (Amacom, Sept.) is one of many foreclosure avoidance books being published this season. According to Nirkind, the book “provides readers with the information they need to be able to tackle specific issues in their lives such as home foreclosure and refinancing a loan.”
Nolo’s just published The Foreclosure Survival Guide: Keep Your House or Walk Away with Money in Your Pocket by Steven Elias “discusses the most recent laws designed to help homeowners deal with the crisis and points them to resources (nonprofit housing counselors, government agencies and so on) that may help,” says Mary Randolph, Nolo’s senior vice president of editorial. Elias, a practicing attorney, former Nolo associate publisher and current president of the National Bankruptcy Law Project, advises that readers not panic. “Even if the lender does foreclose on the house, the process takes months at the least. You’re going to have time to evaluate your options and make smart choices.”
Atlantic Publishing Group’s Preventing Foreclosure on Your Home: Legal Secrets to Beat Foreclosures and Protect Your Home Now by Heather MacNeill Walsh (Nov.) educates readers on “strategies for getting legal advice, keeping current on mortgage payments, negotiating temporary delays in payments, restructuring loans, refinancing, filing for bankruptcy and creating and sticking to a budget,” says managing editor Angela C. Adams.
Another foreclosure prevention guide is McGraw-Hill’s recently published American Foreclosure: Everything You Need to Know About Preventing and Buying by Trevor Rhodes. “The mortgage meltdown is the biggest news story of the past year,” McGraw-Hill senior editorial director Mary Glenn contends. “It is the foundation of the problem our economy is facing. American Foreclosure offers defensive techniques on how to avoid foreclosure and teaches readers what to do if one is foreclosed so that one’s finances are not completely in ruins.”
Resolutions
Yale economist Robert Shiller has the guiding voice America needs during these tumultuous times, according to the director of Princeton University Press, Peter Dougherty. In The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It (Aug.), Schiller “provides a concise historical explanation of how real estate prices got so far away from their true value, identifies the irrational forces that contributed to the formation of the bubble and explains why the stratospheric price levels of real estate even in so-called 'super-star’ cities are unsustainable,” says Dougherty. Shiller’s main goals are to create a better informed consumer market and to initiate an aggressive response by government and financial institutions. The changes Shiller would like to see include “better market information for home buyers, simplified contracts, a new real estate consumer watchdog agency, better ways of hedging housing values and new ways of protect consumers against the pernicious effects of inflation,” Dougherty says.
If all else fails, consumers should take the advice of Zalman Velvel, author of Mobile Home Wealth: How to Make Money Buying, Selling, and Renting Mobile Homes (Square One, Nov.). The book’s assertion, according to Rudy Shur, president of Square One, is that while mobile homes have been the butt of real estate jokes, a small but growing group of savvy investors have profited off of transportable domiciles. “When everyone stampedes toward the same types of real estate investment, it creates an economic bubble that has the potential to burst at any time,” argues Shur. “By learning about other less common types of real estate investments, readers have a better chance to protect their assets.” Though it might be difficult to envision a nation of mobile home owners, Shur may be on to something. “Our potential reader is looking for a safer haven for investments—one that has not been overexploited,” he says. Whether or not mobile home investing is a safer haven is yet to be seen, but surely no one can argue that it has been overexploited.
Most publishers tenuously agree that the market should steady within the next two years. Should. How real estate literature will be affected—and how it is currently being affected—is still up for debate. The two main topics of debate among publishers are (a) will readers seek books that offer big profits or books that help them stay afloat? and (b) will the book market take a huge hit or will investors turn to real estate books in bigger numbers than ever before? Much like our mercurial economy, the future of this genre is in serious danger. Hopefully, somewhere in the titles listed above, a solution can be found.
