How to Invest in Real Estate Review: The Strategy Menu for Investors Who Haven't Picked Their Path

You know you want to invest in real estate. You've read the mindset books. You're ready to act. But there are a dozen strategies, each with their own advocates swearing it's the only way. House hacking. BRRRR. Flipping. Wholesaling. Syndication. REITs. Short-term rentals. How do you choose?

Brandon Turner and Joshua Dorkin — the founders of BiggerPockets, the largest RE investing community in the world — wrote this book to solve that exact problem. It's not a deep dive into any single strategy. It's the menu you read before ordering.

What This Book Is About

The book walks through every major real estate investing strategy, giving each one a fair, unbiased overview: what it is, how it works, who it's for, what capital it requires, and what the time commitment looks like. Buy-and-hold rentals, house hacking, BRRRR, fix-and-flip, wholesaling, commercial properties, syndication, REITs, notes, short-term rentals, and land — they're all here.

Each strategy chapter includes interviews with real investors who actually use that approach. A house hacker in Denver who eliminated his housing payment. A flipper in Memphis who quit her day job. A syndicator in Dallas who raises capital from passive investors. These aren't hypothetical scenarios — they're profiles with real numbers and real timelines.

Turner also provides his personal deal evaluation framework: $200/month minimum cash flow per single-family door, $100/month per multifamily unit, a 12% cash-on-cash return target, and the 1% rule as a quick screening filter. Simple enough to memorize. Practical enough to use on your first deal.

The final chapters pull it together with a getting-started checklist: set goals, pick a strategy, build a team, choose a market, learn to analyze deals, and start making offers.

What It Gets Right

The strategy overview format is the book's superpower. Most investing books are written by someone who's passionate about their approach. Turner flips houses, so he writes about flipping. Greene does BRRRR, so he writes about BRRRR. This book steps back and presents the full menu without pushing you toward any single dish.

That objectivity is rare and valuable. A 25-year-old with $15,000 and a willingness to live in a duplex has different optimal strategies than a 50-year-old doctor with $500,000 looking for passive income. This book helps both people find their starting point.

House hacking gets the most enthusiastic treatment — and for good reason. Turner personally used it to start his investing career, and the math is genuinely compelling. Buy a 2-4 unit property with an FHA loan (3.5% down), live in one unit, rent the others. Your tenants cover your mortgage. You build equity while your housing cost drops to near zero. For anyone asking "how do I start with no money?", this is the chapter.

The investor profiles add credibility that pure instruction can't match. When you read about someone who actually quit their job through rental income, or someone who built a portfolio of 30 units starting from a house hack, the strategies stop being theories and become proven paths.

Brandon's deal evaluation metrics — especially the $200/door and 1% rule — give beginners a starting filter they can apply immediately. These aren't sophisticated analysis tools, but they're better than no tools. They let you quickly eliminate properties that don't pencil and focus your deeper analysis on the ones that might.

What's Missing

The breadth-over-depth tradeoff is real. Ten strategies in 200-something pages means each one gets about 20 pages. That's enough to understand what BRRRR is and whether it interests you. It's not enough to actually execute a BRRRR deal. Turner knows this — he wrote separate books for rental investing, managing rentals, and estimating rehab costs. This book is the gateway, not the destination.

The deal analysis coverage is introductory. The $200/door rule and the 1% rule are screening heuristics, not analysis frameworks. There's no IRR discussion, no sensitivity analysis, no cap rate comparison methodology. If you need to actually underwrite a deal, you'll need Real Estate by the Numbers or Gallinelli's cash flow book.

Management gets acknowledged but not taught. Turner covers the "should I self-manage or hire a PM?" decision, but the actual systems — tenant screening, maintenance scheduling, accounting — are in his other book. For a beginner reading this as their first RE book, that's a notable gap.

The BiggerPockets ecosystem referrals are constant. The book frequently points you to BP calculators, BP forums, BP podcasts, and other BP books. It's not aggressive marketing — the tools genuinely complement the book — but readers should know they're entering a funnel.

And the book was published in 2018. The pre-pandemic market assumptions, interest rate environment, and strategy viability assessments all need mental adjustment for post-2020 conditions. House hacking in a 3% rate environment is very different from house hacking at 7%.

Who This Book Is For

If you haven't chosen a strategy yet, this is your starting point. Read it before you read any strategy-specific book. It will save you from committing to the wrong approach for your situation.

If you're an experienced investor looking to diversify into a new strategy, the overview format lets you quickly assess whether syndication, commercial, or STRs match your next phase.

Skip this if you've already chosen your strategy and need deep execution guidance. Go directly to BRRRR, The Book on Rental Property Investing, or The ABCs of Real Estate Investing instead.

The Verdict

Four stars for the best strategy selection guide in real estate. Turner and Dorkin created the book that should be read first but often isn't — because beginners jump straight to a strategy-specific book and never see the full menu.

The PRIME Framework shows balanced but shallow coverage. It touches Prepare, Research, and Invest without going deep on any of them. That's by design: this book's job is to get you oriented and moving, not to make you an expert.

Read it first. Choose your strategy. Then buy the book that goes deep on that one path.