Jim Randel is a self described “attorney and real estate broker who makes his living buying and selling properties” and he has come across a unique method for explaining sometimes complex and convoluted concepts and practices into an easy-to-read format.

He has authored a series of books called: “The Skinny On:™…” and also referred to  as “stick people books™”. Why?  The books are heavily illustrated with, well, stick people.  You know.  The kind we used to draw (and sometimes still do) when we were kids.

The idea, as I understand it, is to create a book that people can read quickly and, since most people take in information visually, has a lot of illustration to explain what they are reading.  It seems that people don’t like to read non-fiction and, as a result, miss out on a lot of good information they might otherwise obtain.

The Upside (Or Why You Should Read This Book)

The Forward and Introduction to this series of books reminds me a little of a TV column in The Washington Post.  “We watch so you don’t have to….”  Jim Randel say as much in this book. He is the one who has read all the books and studied the subject and then has distilled the information into short, concise, readable book.  I’m not really sure how many pages it has (pages are not numbered, captions are numbered) but it’s not that big.

It is easy to read with it numerous illustrations of Billy and Beth (the stick people) and large print.  Jim references many of the books he has read in order to convey his knowledge and provides a bibliography in the back of the book. The content itself is solid, if a bit biased, and provides a good understanding of why things got of control.

Jim Randel does allow that there are many thoughtful and professional Realtors, mortgage professionals and appraisers in the world. You might miss that point in this book, though.

The author’s larger point about educating yourself and doing your own research and reaching out to obtain objective advice is a good one.  I can’t help but think that if many of the people who bought homes using “creative financing” with unscrupulous real estate practitioners stopped and thought about what they were doing and checked in with an objective third party we might not be in this mess.

The Downside

The real challenge with putting out books like this is that the information in them becomes dated very quickly.

Mortgage rules and credit standards have changed drastically since this book was published (way back in 2008). Tons of both real estate agents, mortgage brokers, settlement officers and others have left the profession to go back to “real” jobs.  Many of the “creative financing” schemes have disappeared.  In short, no one — not the home buyer or home owner, the real estate agent, the mortgage broker, appraiser, title company, home inspector or anyone else connected to the sale or purchase of real estate — can get away with the type of shenanigans that were prevalent in the early part of the decade.

The good part is that there is a website that hopes to keep people current with ongoing developments by way of a free newsletter and free eSupplements to this book and the others in the series.