Crushing It in Apartments and Commercial Real Estate: Review (2026)

Brian Murray was a schoolteacher who bought a small, half-empty commercial building in upstate New York, fixed its occupancy problem himself, and repeated that until he had a substantial portfolio. He did it without syndicating and largely without partners.

That last detail is what makes the book unusual. Almost every commercial real estate book is implicitly about raising money. This one is about not needing to.

Snapshot	Details
Author	Brian Murray
Publisher	BiggerPockets Publishing
First published	2017
Distinguishing feature	Commercial scale without outside capital
Best for	Investors who want control more than speed

The bootstrapped path

Murray's method depends on a specific kind of opportunity: buildings that are underperforming for fixable reasons. Poor management, deferred maintenance, below-market rents, high vacancy caused by an absent owner rather than by the market.

Larger, better-capitalised buyers frequently ignore these. They are too small to matter, too messy to underwrite cleanly, and they require an operator willing to do unglamorous work. That is exactly the gap a self-funded investor can occupy.

The book's most useful theme is that this is an operating advantage rather than a financial one. Murray was not outbidding anyone. He was buying assets whose problems were solvable by someone prepared to solve them, which is a strategy that survives changes in the interest rate environment better than most.

What is genuinely instructive

Small commercial is a real category. Strip malls, small office, mixed-use, light industrial — the segment below institutional interest and above residential. Murray is one of very few authors writing about it for a retail audience.

Do the work yourself first. He was leasing space, managing contractors and handling tenant relationships personally in the early years. His argument is that you cannot hire well for a job you have never done, and that the knowledge from doing it is what makes later delegation possible.

Commercial tenants behave differently. Longer leases, more negotiation, tenant improvement allowances, and a relationship that is business-to-business rather than landlord-to-resident. The chapters on leasing are the practical core.

Reinvest, do not distribute. The compounding here came from putting cash flow back into the next building rather than taking income. That is what made the no-partners approach viable, and it is a real constraint — the strategy pays you late.

Where the book is limited

Commercial has bifurcated since 2017. Office demand changed structurally after 2020 in ways that were not foreseeable, and small office — a category Murray was active in — is one of the most affected. Retail has split between well-located necessity-based centres and everything else. The asset-class judgement in the book needs updating even where the operating judgement does not.

Debt is treated lightly. Commercial debt is short-term with balloon payments, and 2023–2025 demonstrated what that means when refinancing arrives in a worse rate environment. The book was written when this was theoretical.

The market was specific. Upstate New York small commercial was cheap and unloved. Whether an equivalent gap exists in your market is the question the book cannot answer, and it substantially determines whether the strategy is available to you.

It is patient in a way that reads as slow. Murray's timeline was years of unglamorous work. Presented honestly, but it is not a fast path.

Who should read it

• Investors who have looked at syndication and concluded they do not want to manage other people's money.
• Anyone moving from residential into commercial who wants the operator's view rather than the capital-raiser's.
• Investors in secondary and tertiary markets, where the mispriced-small-building opportunity is most likely to still exist.

Who should skip it

• If you want passive income. This is the least passive book in this library.
• If you want to raise capital. Raising Private Capital and Financial Freedom With Real Estate Investing are the other route.
• If you need current asset-class guidance. The operating advice holds; the office and retail context does not.

What to read next

• The Multifamily Millionaire Volume I — Murray co-wrote it; the residential-adjacent version of the same move.
• Retail strip vs neighborhood office in small metro cores — current thinking on exactly the assets he bought.
• The Encyclopedia of Commercial Real Estate Advice — the reference companion.

Final take

The best available account of building a commercial portfolio without outside money, and worth reading for the argument that operating skill is a more durable edge than access to capital. Read the asset-class chapters with 2020 in mind — the buildings Murray was buying are in the categories that changed most — and take the leasing and management material at full value.

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