Books: Bestseller Revisited, Jul. 6, 1959

How I TURNED $1,000 INTO A MILLION IN REAL ESTATE—IN MY SPARE TIME (497 pp.)—William Nickerson—Simon & Schuster ($4.95).

No book has enlarged the fantasy life of Americans more dramatically this season than an ex-telephone company engineer’s do-it-yourself account of How I Turned $1,000 into a Million in Real Estate—in My Spare Time. More than 100,000 readers have broken open this fortune cookie, and it is currently being snapped up at the rate of 10,000 copies a week. To back up its brilliant come-on title, the book offers would-be spare-time millionaires a sophisticated circus barker’s spiel plus evangelistic free-enterprise fervor, shovelfuls of down-to-earth business details plus the bargaining excitement of a Turkish bazaar, a fictional cast of heroes, villains and gulls—and even a bit of suspense. If a million dollars is not forthcoming in the author’s promised 20-year span, one has the publisher’s semi-facetious word for it that the price of the book will be refunded.

Beware Deadbeats. Real Estatesman Nickerson’s basic action verb is Borrow (“The road to riches is paved with borrowed money”). The parts of his scheme are equally simple: 1) “Buy only property that needs improvement”; 2) “Make selective improvements that increase value,” e.g., paint, landscape; 3) “Keep selling at a profit and reinvesting.”

With a $10,000, two-unit house in mind and $2,500 in pocket, a budding operator can borrow $7,500 and mount the first rung of the realty ladder. Two years later, according to Nickerson, the operator should have $5,800 in hand and be able to borrow $17,400 for a four-unit dwelling. By virtually geometrical progression, this mounts to $1,187,195 in 20 years. Arguing from the low foreclosure rate, Nickerson claims that an average man with “average luck” has a 400-to-1 chance of succeeding in real estate. By contrast, “Fifty percent [of new businesses fail] in two years.” Arguing from population growth, Nickerson assumes an ever-ready and probably an ever-rising market for his type of real estate deal.

Inevitably, the pitfalls just about equal the opportunities, and whole sections of Nickerson’s book might be subtitled “On Guard.” Example: many brokers understate the age of a building. A trip to the meter will reveal the tattletale yellowed card left by the electrical inspector and stamped with the property’s true age. While most tenants are reliable, there is always the hazard of “The Professional Deadbeat.”

Avoid “Janitor.” Encyclopedic in managerial lore, Nickerson is perhaps most fascinating in discussing the semantics of the trade. In what might be called Nickerson’s Law of Apartment Ad Copy, it turns out that “redecorated” and “spacious” will make a prospective tenant’s mouth water more longingly than any other words. “Owner” is the O.K. word today for landlord (“The New Deal fostered a bitter reaction to ‘Landlord’ “). An accomplished owner delegates most of his work to his “manager” (“Avoid the word ‘janitor’ … a higher-class manager can be hired by referring to the dirty work as ‘maintenance’ or ‘custodial’ “).

The closest 51-year-old William Nickerson gets to dirt these days is gardening at his spacious $75,000 estate at Alamo, Calif. After a quarter-century of pyramiding debts, he enjoys European travel, tennis, a dip in his swimming pool and telling his fellow-Americans how to make a million dollars the easy way. He makes it sound wonderfully plausible.