RealShelf

I purchased the The Complete Book of Real Estate Contracts +CD by attorney Mark Warda after fielding many questions from real estate buyers and sellers not represented by me or any other real estate agent and looking for information on how to write their sale contracts. This is an excellent book, very well written with a wide range of contract clauses to cover many different situations. The author includes explanations of the various clauses in layman’s language that is easy to understand. He also includes several chapters that don’t involve the actual contract clauses at all - advice on negotiating, using an attorney, backing out of a deal, rescuing a deal gone south, closing and others. In addition to standard clauses to cover most situations in residential real estate, the author includes a chapter on “Creative Clauses,” though unfortunately he doesn’t include much in the way of creative financing oriented clauses like lease options, subject to sales, assumptions, etc.

Legally, you’d still want your attorney to review the specifics to make sure they’re appropriate to your state and your situation, but the cost of having an attorney review a deal could be considerably less than having an attorney “write” new contracts (quite possibly by popping a similar CD full of boilerplate clauses in his computer). Of course, if you’re represented by a real estate agent, that agent probably has contracts approved by his state trade association and you’ll likely want to use those as they are probably much more comprehensive. In fact, that’s my only complaint about this book…it’s a great basic primer on understanding the real estate contract with a lot of good stuff for the typical deal, but no deal in real estate is typical. The book is, in my opinion, a must have for the reference library of every real estate investor and very helpful for the average homebuyer/homeowner as well, but calling it “Complete” was hyping it a lot. I’ve seen and used a long out of print book of real estate contract clauses that was probably three times as long and was nothing but clauses - none of the extra information, but again, the extra information in this book is great. - and I’m sure that even it didn’t cover every possible contingency. With “over 200 clauses” and all the explanatory material, this book does provide a sufficient sampling that the intelligent layman can at least fashion his own contingency clauses for quicker review and rewrite by his attorney. I’d give this book Five Stars if it was called “The Book of Real Estate Contracts,” but with the puffing of “Complete”, I give it Four and Half.

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