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Perkins on Real Estate

'Legal Companion' proves you can't judge a book by its cover

By Broderick Perkins

A new book's cover is adorned with the portrait of a handsome Labrador retriever, a breed that often serves as a guide dog for people who are visually impaired.

At first glance, a portion of the book's title Your Little Legal Companion, along with the dog's mug shot, could lead you to put the book back on the shelf, unless, perhaps, you are guide dog owner.

Don't.

This isn't a book about guide dogs, their care or their feeding, but there is a connection.

The subtitle Helpful Advice For Life's Big Events begins to explain why you really can't always judge a book by its cover.

A guide dog is a canine companion, a loyal partner and a confidence-builder that helps keep its owner on the right track.

When it come to life's big events, so does this new little book, which also puts a spin on "Your Legal Companion," the new mission-in-a-motto branding from Nolo.com, the Berkeley-based legal-self- help publisher that made do-it-yourself a household word 35 years ago when "Law For All" was its original catch phrase.

Even more symbolic, the Lab on the book's cover, Astrid (Greek for star or star-like), really is a guide dog breeding dog who posed for the cover to help bring more guidance into the world of two-legged animals who may be, well, legally impaired.

That sounds like a long way to go to get today's Internet-addicted consumers to open a book, but the trip is worth it, especially if you also happen to be a real estate consumer.

Once inside, Your Little Legal Companion: Helpful Advice For Life's Big Events (Nolo.com, $9.95) guides you through 50 of life's key events, events that almost always come with legal implications. More than a quarter of them include housing-related issues.

How Nolo.com packs 50 topics--from going to college to planning your estate--into a 200-page book that will fit into a backpack's gear pouch is an acknowledgement that today's paper publishers must marry the time-honored tradition of page-flipping with new digital content delivery.

Opened, the Net cafe-suited book is about the shape and size of a 12-inch laptop display (without a keyboard), and it reads like scrolling across a Web page.

After a brief introductory page, each of the 50 events is tackled with a sort of Top- 10-points-you-need-to-know game plan. All 10 thought-provoking points for each event are visible at once across the two-page display.

Here's a condensed rehash of each point in "Event No. 18: Finding the Right Spot--When You Start The House Search."

* Be patient. Remember how heartbroken you were about a high school romance and how happy you are in love now?

* Step on the gas. Get on your bike. Hoof it. From the street level, tour the neighborhood where you want to live and you may find a home you'll love.

* See through staging. Visualize the shell without the glitter.

* Spread the word. Your home may be nearer than six degrees of separation.

* Save. The bigger your down payment, the more house you can afford. Buy the old-fashioned way.

* Get good help. And be good about helping the agent.

* Touch stuff. During a home tour, open doors, windows, closets. Turn stuff on and off.

* Bid right. Visit open houses, get comparables and check recent sales and ads to make an accurate offer.

* Inspect the inspection. Compare the seller's home inspection with one you buy from an inspector obsessed with detail.

* Rent. Still available for less than a monthly mortgage payment, renting allows you to call the landlord when the roof leaks.

Each event's section ends with an extra thought-provoking insight, teaser, reference or other tidbit that will bring smiles, guffaws and even a few groans.

At the end of the "Renting An Apartment" event there's a list of excerpts from real missives fired off to landlords including this gem, "The toilet is blocked, and we cannot bathe the children until it is cleared."

The "Your First 'Do-It-Yourself' Home Improvement Project" event ends with the online casting address of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

And, in addition to the 10-point plan that goes with the event, "Holding the Best Garage Sale" offers some trivia: The garage sale isn't an American invention, but inspired in the 1950s by French flea markets.

Other events in the book with a housing angle include borrowing money, being a good neighbor, identity theft, landlording, bankruptcy survival, natural disaster survival, estate planning, living with a lover and choosing a roommate.

Your Little Legal Companion is a fine gift book, it's a good book to share, it's a cocktail table book for a little cocktail table, it's a book for growing up, and it's a book for getting out.

Carry it in your cargo pants' pocket, put it in your gear jacket or pop it in the case with your laptop.

Sooner or later one of life's events will send you searching, and your answer will be only a page-flip away.