Book excerpt: An Introduction to Real Estate Finance serves as the core of knowledge for a single-semester first course in real estate finance. Unlike other real estate finance textbooks, with their encyclopedic but often stale details, it combines a short traditional text with a living website. The book gives students and professors highly applied information, and its regularly updated online features makes it especially useful for this practitioner-oriented audience. It covers fundamental topics such as accounting and tax, mortgages, capital markets, REITs and more. It also addresses the 2008 financial crisis and its impact on the real estate profession. This text is a valuable companion for students of real estate finance as well as financial analysts, portfolio managers, investors and other professionals in the field. - Offers a concise, efficient, "finance-centric" alternative to traditional real estate finance texts - Website gives readers the tools to find current information about their own areas of specialization—a unique approach not found in other real estate finance textbooks - Gives students and professors the material to examine every subject in broad and highly detailed terms