ABCs of Buying Rental Property: Review (2026)

Ken McElroy runs a real estate company that has operated thousands of apartment units, and this is his short book for people who have not bought anything yet. It is part of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Advisors series, which is both why many people find it and the main thing to read past.

Snapshot	Details
Author	Ken McElroy
Series	Rich Dad Advisors
Best for	Someone deciding whether to buy a first rental at all
Unusual strength	Written by an operator, so management gets real attention
Read past	The wealth-mindset framing that surrounds the practical content

What makes it different from the other beginner books

Most first-rental books are written by people whose expertise is acquisition. McElroy's company manages property for a living, and it shows in where the book spends its attention: tenant quality, on-site staff, how an asset actually performs once you own it, and why the operating side is where returns are made or destroyed.

That produces a specific and useful bias. McElroy is consistently sceptical of deals that look good on a spreadsheet and bad in person — the cheap building in the wrong submarket, the pro forma that assumes a vacancy rate the property has never achieved. For a beginner, this is the correct thing to be taught early, and most competing books teach it late or not at all.

He is also good on the idea that you are buying a business, not an asset. A rental property has customers, a product, competitors and a cost structure. Once you see it that way the operating decisions stop being chores.

The practical content

• Choosing a market and submarket, with emphasis on employment, path of growth and the boundaries within a metro that determine tenant demand.
• Reading a property's financials — verifying the seller's numbers rather than accepting them, which is the single most transferable skill in the book.
• The property management decision, argued from the position of someone who does it professionally and does not pretend self-managing is free.
• Building a team before you need one.

What to read past

The Rich Dad framing is present throughout — the cash-flow-versus-earned-income vocabulary, the asset/liability reframing, the occasional pivot into mindset. If that is what you want, Rich Dad Poor Dad is the pure form of it. If it is not, the practical chapters here survive without it.

More substantively: McElroy's own experience is in large multifamily, and there are places where advice sized for a 200-unit apartment complex is presented as advice for a first duplex. On-site staffing, professional management economics and institutional-style market analysis do not scale down cleanly. Read those chapters as a preview of where the strategy leads rather than as instructions for your first purchase.

Where it is dated

The financing is generic and old. The book predates the current investor lending market entirely. Nothing here on DSCR loans, which is how most first rentals outside owner-occupied strategies are financed now.

The numbers are illustrative and pre-2020. Every price, rent and cap rate should be read as an example of the arithmetic, not as a benchmark.

Insurance and property tax are treated as stable line items. In several states neither has been stable for four years, and both are now capable of deciding whether a deal works.

Who should read it

• Someone who has not bought and is not yet sure they should — the book is honest enough about the work to help you decide.
• Investors who came in through spreadsheets and have never thought seriously about operations.
• Anyone who wants a short book. This is a two-evening read, which is a real advantage over the 400-page alternatives.

Who should skip it

• If you already own rentals. You will find little you have not learned by doing.
• If you want depth on the numbers. What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow is the book for that, and this one does not try.
• If the Rich Dad framing puts you off. It is not incidental; it runs through the whole book.

What to read next

• The Book on Rental Property Investing — the longer, more tactical version of the same brief.
• How to choose your first rental market — current data behind the market chapter.
• Single-family vs small multifamily for a first rental — the decision the book gestures at but leaves open.

Final take

A good first book, chosen well if you want the operator's perspective rather than the deal-hunter's. Read it for the market-and-management judgement, treat the large-multifamily chapters as a preview rather than a plan, and get your financing information from something written after 2022.

This review is part of the best real estate investing books library — 40+ titles ranked by the decision in front of you.