Best Real Estate Books for Buying, Selling and Investing in 2025
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Ashlyn Needham, Contributing AuthorCloseAshlyn Needham Contributing Author
Ashlyn Needham is a freelance writer with years of experience covering real estate and home improvement topics. Her favorite pastime is tackling home improvement projects, reading, and writing real estate, food, and lifestyle blogs.
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Fran Metz, Contributing EditorCloseFran Metz Contributing Editor
Fran Metz is a freelance content writer, editor, blogger and traveler based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She has seven years of experience in print journalism, working at newspapers from coast to coast. She has a BA in Mass Communications from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and lived in Arvada for 15 years, where she gained her experience with the ever-changing real estate market. In her free time, she enjoys 4-wheeling, fishing, and creating digital art.
Whether you’re interested in buying, selling, or investing in real estate, these books can help you dive deeply into the world of real estate. We’ve found some of the best real estate books for 2025 to help you learn the ins and outs of how it all works.
Best real estate books for sellers
Selling your home is not a walk in the park. There are a lot of factors that come into play whether you’re trying to sell your home with a real estate agent or sell your home yourself.
Here are some sources to get you started.
“The Ultimate Guide to Selling Your Home: How The Nation’s Top Agents Break Records”
If you’ve thought that selling your home is as easy as slapping a “for sale” sign in your yard, then this is the book for you.
What better way to learn about selling your home than straight from real estate experts? This book is full of tips, strategies, and insider scoop on the housing market and how to sell your house effectively from top-selling agents.
This book also features insights to teach you how to sell your home at a great price. Figuring out how to maximize your earnings as a home seller in your local market can be a challenge, but don’t sweat it. That’s why agents are here to guide you.
“How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days: Fourth Edition”
The third edition of “How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days” was first published in 2007 and remains a popular and informative work. While the title is definitely intriguing, the information is even better.
Sure, maybe you won’t get as lucky as the book suggests and literally sell your home in five days, but you will learn some great ways to help your house sell fast.
Here’s the kind of crucial information you will get out of this book when it comes to selling your home:
- Understanding market conditions
- How to write a swoon-worthy home advertisement
- Marketing strategies for your home
- How to conduct round-robin bidding
- How to think like a homebuyer
Bill Effros’ book guides readers through a five-day home-selling plan that, while requiring some upfront preparation, promises a worthwhile payoff when it’s time to list.
“Selling Your House: Nolo’s Essential Guide”
Nolo seeks to provide helpful legal knowledge to the general public. When it comes to selling your home, understanding the legalities can be useful in helping to mitigate potential legal risks.
Nolo’s essential guidebook to selling your home provides bountiful information about the home-selling process and the basics such as price points, how to find the right real estate agent to work with, and what upgrades to make to your home to increase your home’s value.
Some topics covered include:
- Negotiation tactics to receive a fair price
- Making legally required disclosures to buyers
This book features insights from top-rated experts beyond just the real estate field, including home stagers, attorneys, and experienced home sellers eager to share their advice.
Best real estate books for buyers
Buying your first home or moving somewhere new? It can be a total rollercoaster, and making the right pick is important. Whether you’re a newbie or just craving a change, here are some great books to help you navigate the home-buying adventure.
“First Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook To Avoiding Rookie Mistakes”
Buying your first home is a big deal for multiple reasons. Not only is this an important chapter in your life, but there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with purchasing your first home.
For example, the timeline for buying your first house can be daunting. There’s the process of looking for the right home, visiting to inspect it, getting approved for your loan, closing, and signing endless amounts of paperwork.
This book will teach you what to expect and what to avoid to make the process go as smoothly and quickly as possible. You’ll learn about the decisions you’ll be faced with during the buying process and how to make sure you’re getting an investment you’ll be happy with.
This book walks you through the process in three parts:
- Part 1: Pre-purchase decisions to consider
- Part 2: What you need to do before buying your home
- Part 3: The details of how to look for the right home
If you’re new to the homebuying process, trust us, this is the book you’ll value.
“100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask, Fourth Edition”
If 100 seems like a big number to you, you’ll quickly realize it’s not once you begin the process of buying a home.
Buying a home is a tedious process since you’ll maybe be signing a mortgage at the time of closing. With that being said, you should feel fully confident in the house and homeowners you’re buying from.
Boosting your confidence starts with asking the right questions, but as a first-time home buyer, how do you figure out what those questions should be? That’s where this book comes in handy. It was written specifically by a top-selling agent who wanted to make the public aware of the questions to ask as you start to dive deeper into the home-buying process.
This book will teach you the right questions to ask the homeowners and questions to ask your real estate agent so you have all the information you need to make an informed and confident decision. You’ll learn how to have a keen eye for detail and what to ask homeowners before you agree to a sale.
Best real estate books for investors
Done right, real estate investing can be highly rewarding. It requires keeping up with the latest housing market trends and having the right mindset to avoid making a bad investment.
If you want to take a few steps closer to the wonderful possibilities real estate investing can offer, we advise doing your homework with one of these sources.
“Real Estate Investing QuickStart Guide”
If you’re curious about dabbling in real estate investing, you should probably read up on it before you go all in.
A top Amazon bestseller in the real estate sales category, this book will give you the information you need to break into this lucrative gig. It’s described as “beginner friendly” and will give you quick-learning strategies to see fast results in this new venture.
Here is what this book promises its readers:
- How to generate passive income with real estate
- Information on commercial real estate investing
- How to flip properties to increase your profit
- How to build your investment portfolio
- How to make deals and negotiate
- Financial options and terms you need to know
“The Millionaire Real Estate Investor”
Everyone dreams of what it would be like to have enough money that you no longer have to work. What if you could build that life with real estate investing?
What this book teaches are the fundamentals you need to know before you get involved in real estate investing. The book is a collection of insights from more than a hundred successful real estate investors. You will learn:
- How to develop the right mindset for successful investing
- Criteria for identifying viable investment properties
- Information for making the best deals
- How to find the right, trustworthy partners
- Models and strategies to track your progress, wealth, and success
“The Millionaire Real Estate Investor” is heavy on the financial aspect of investing and how to create a generous future as a property investor. You’ll be thankful you picked up this book and mastered the fundamentals before getting stuck down the line.
“The Book on Rental Property Investing”
Whether you’re a beginner investor or a master at the craft, “The Book on Rental Property Investing” is for you.
This book is nearly 400 pages long and is jam-packed with actionable advice on finding the right properties to invest in, financial aspects to consider, and trusted strategies to use when building this business. Written by an investment Realtor himself, this is another book that will give you inside information along your journey.
Here is a snippet of what you will learn in this book:
- Ways other real estate investors fail and how you can avoid their mistakes
- Strategies you can implement in your practice
- How to find stellar deals in any market
- How to optimize the cash you have for any kind of deal
- How to defer taxes
Time to nestle into your reading nook
Real estate books provide valuable information that goes more in-depth than any blog can. With these books we’ve hand-selected, not only will you be provided with high-quality information, but you’ll learn straight from top sources.
So, with that in mind, it’s time to grab your book (or audiobook), snuggle up on the couch, and get to reading.
Hungry for additional sources?
Good news — we wrote a book, too! Check out our eBook “Your House Has a Secret Life on the Internet.”
Header Image Source: (Aga Putra / Unsplash)