Land Deals Revealed: How To Turn Raw Land Into Pay Dirt

We are changing lives. And me helping others get into this model brings me tremendous fulfillment. We have people that are looking to get out of their W2, and so they start this as a side hustle. One of the students I mentioned earlier, he just resigned from his W2, and he's now doing this full time. We have tons of students that have been real estate investors for years, but they're looking to level up, right? They're looking to get off the hamster wheel, like take a house wholesaler. You know, they can go do a hundred deals wholesaling a house or go do one deal in this model and make the same. Now they have what we call time freedom. And if you're on the hamster wheel and all, all you gotta get is you're trying to stay above water because you got to do so many deals. It's really hard to live a balanced life.

And so welcome to bacon wrapped business. This is Brad costanzo, and every week I bring you people who are doing very big things in a very big way. And today you're in for a very big tr. Today's show, land deals revealed turning raw land into pay dirt. Today I have Cody bugin on the show. Cody has made his wealth in real estate, but in a completely different way than most, and the results are remarkable. Cody, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Thanks for having me. Brad.

You know, when I came across your business model, it, frankly, it stopped me in my tracks. Like, I've been investing in real estate in one way or another for, I think about 20 years now. I've rehabbed houses, I flipped wholesale contracts. I'm a landlord. I've even done some notes and some hard money lending. And, you know, I thought I'd seen it all. And then I saw what you're doing and, you know, today I want to get, you know, the answers on what you're doing, insight, and maybe even discover a new way to build wealth like you've done. We've talked offline quite a bit, so I know some of what you're doing, but I really want to dive deeper into this because while most real estate investors are out there just busy hustling on the hamster wheel to do dozens of deals every month or hundred hundreds a year, you're quietly doing huge deals that are 50 to 100 times the profit per deal. And it seemingly without messing with all the headaches of traditional real estate investing. And better yet, it sounds like you've taught others to do this and repeat your success. I Can't wait to dig in. But first, can you explain just in a nutshell, what you do for a living?

Well, Brad, first let me say you're not the first one to tell me all that. Right. So people, when they discover this, it's. It's a blue ocean. But basically, I've been. I've been a land developer, owned my own business since 2002, so 20 years now. And then also a few Years ago in 2019, I started a company called Best. Right. And I teach people exactly what I do.

Now you're in the land business. So there's a lot of things about land that I don't have any clue about. What kind of results are you getting on these. On these land deals?

I'll just tell you the model we do and the model we teach. And this might even sound too good to be true, but it's reality and hopefully we'll get into that later. But, I mean, I can't. I can't remember the last time that. It's been a long time since I made less than seven figures on a deal. But the typical results that we tell people is, you know, you should be making six to seven figures per deal.

Six to. That's per deal. That's not per year.

Yeah, no, yeah, no, it's per deal. It's not. It's. Yes, it's per deal. Now, you might choose to only do one deal a year, and that's completely fine. Right. And go. Go enjoy your life. But, yeah, that's per deal.

Wow. And you've taught other people how to do this as well. But I want to hear about a few of the deals you've done. Give me just a sample of what some of these deals look like that, you know, you've done in the past.

So let me tell you. So I'm going to give you a couple examples, and I want you to understand. These two examples I'm going to give you are not. When I had the headquarters in Dallas and the big team, this was back when we were a very, very small. We were running virtual. It was just me and a few people, and we all worked from home, and we were a virtual business. So the first deal I'm going to tell you about, I'm going to share this deal with you because it's one of my smaller paydays I've had in the last, really, in the last probably 10 years on a deal. And it's a deal that I wasn't going to take the deal through the process, which we'll Talk about later, because the numbers didn't work for me. And so instead what I did is I, I, I turned the contract over. You can say flip, that's fine. I flipped the contract early in the process, right after I inked the deal. I think I flipped it within the first 90 days because I didn't like the deal. And so to give you some numbers, I had probably 20 grand into that deal, give or take, at the time of flipping it. And it took me, I think I was in and out in that deal in three months or less. And my buyer, or who I signed the contract to wrote me a check where I made 300 grand at the time of assigning the contract to him. So that's one of my smaller deals, like I said, I think, in the last decade.

So 300,000 in three months. And this was a deal, this was kind of like a small little toss away deal, it sounds like.

Yeah.

You mentioned the $20,000 that you had in the, in the, in the property. What cost 20,000 on a deal like that.

As far as that 20 grand, that was put into the, what we call the due diligence process. So I spent that money mainly with my consultants because my consultants do majority of the lifting on these deals. Right. And so I would say, I mean, I'd have to pull up my job cost report to know exactly, but I would assume majority of all that 20 grand went to my civil engineer that runs our due diligence process.

Okay. Well, 300,000 profit in 90 days, if that's a smaller deal, what's a more typical deal that you might do?

Yeah. So I'm gonna share another deal with you that the only money I had in this deal was the earnest money I had to put into escrow or give to the title company for the seller. Okay. Or yeah, for the seller. And so that's the only reason I even had money in this deal. But because the process of getting the project approved, which we can talk about later, but my buyer actually paid for all those costs. So it was the buyer's capital that got the project approved. And that's one of our, we call it one of our ninja moves, right? Getting your buyer to fund your deals. But in that particular deal we had, it was 185 grand. We, over the course of the process, we had deposited into escrow as earnest money for the seller. And at the end of the day, when the project was approved and we did our double closing, simultaneous closing, where we close on the land the same time my buyer closes with me. And we make our scrape out of the middle on that deal. After getting our capital invested back, we cleared just under 1.8 million.

In how long that deal.

I'm trying to remember how long that deal took. I think that deal took just under a year, if I remember right. Don't hold me to that. But I think it was. I think it was 11 months is what that deal took. If I remember right. It might have been a little longer than that, but right around a year.

But a 1.8 million. Nearly a $1.8 million profit. And you said the 185,000. That. When you said that that was financed by the buyer. So who is. Who's the ultimate buyer of a deal like this?

So that 185 was my money. But the other. Say, I don't know, let's just say they invested 500 grand into that deal. Just don't hold me to that. But let's just say, you know, they invested three to 500 grand to get it approved. It wasn't. Because what I'm doing is I'm delivering a project approved, and that's how I make the money I make. But the ninja move is, where does the capital come from? And so me and actually a few of my students, what. What we've done or what they are doing is they're actually having their buyer put up the money needed to get the project approved. So the 185 grand I put up was just earnest money to the seller, because my buyer's not going to put up that earnest money for me, and so is my earnest money to the seller. But I now have students that are talking to me about the earnest money they're getting from their buyer. They're having it transfer over to the seller file. And so your buyer's earnest money to you is actually being used as your earnest money to the seller. I don't want to get overly complicated, but just there's a lot of. There's a lot of creative ways of how to capitalize these deals.

So basically, and I know we're gonna get into this a little bit more, but you don't have to have 185,000 laying around in your piggy bank in order to do a deal like this. There's ways to structure that 100%. You met. Now, you mentioned some of your students. So you've been doing this for 20 years, right? And it's. You're an absolute pro at it. But you said you do teach people how to do this. You do mentor them. Can you Give some examples of what some of your students do. Might be seen as far as like these deals go.

Yeah, I mean, the fun thing, the thing that's fun about the model is what we teach in our course is there's numerous points within a deal that you can exit. Right. And there's numerous points in a deal when you can get paid. And those two don't necessarily have to be at the same time or they can be. It's up to you. Remember, whoever controls the dirt controls the deal. And so my students, they're out, they're getting these deals put together so they're in control, so they can decide when they're going to exit and when they're going to get paid. But I'll give you three different examples. So like there's a gentleman by the name of Jeff that he got in and out of the deal fairly quickly. And so he made a little over $100,000 in three months on a deal. He actually exited before the deal was ever even approved, which you probably don't know what that means at this point, but we'll get there, I'm assuming. But yeah, so he was in and out in three months, made six figures. And he's been a house wholesaler previously. And he looks at that payday and he looks at the time and energy put into it. And he's making, you know, he made 10, you know, 12 times what he would make on wholesaling a house. And he sold. Right. And so he's, you know, he's now working our model and super excited and sees it as changing his legacy. Right. Like another example I'll give you is a student of ours, actually a married couple and they're great people. What a blessing they are. But they recently between two deals they made, it was like 680,000 I believe they made on. And they did that over the course of nine months. Right. So they, they turned two deals and within nine months they, they made 680 grand. And, and they literally, they had no real estate experience. I mean, he was even thinking about going and getting his master's. I think he wanted to be an attorney. And then he came across my model and, and now he's thankful he didn't go get his master's. Right. He's, he's ecstatic. And prior to doing our course, he, he, he was in the screen printing business, I believe, where he, he had like a screen printing machine in his garage. And, and, and so, yeah, just amazing people. And the model is, is definitely changed their life.

You probably sounds like he's not printing screens anymore.

No.

Yeah.

And I think somewhere, you know, there's, you know, a video of them telling their story. But. And then the last one I'm going to tell you about is. Is a gentleman, that his name is Blake. And I'm gonna be careful how much I say here, because I don't want you to think I'm trying to share stuff that's too good to be true. Right. Like, I'm just being genuine here with you, just telling a story and it's. It's just. And it's reality and it's all can be verified. But Blake, you know, I think he graduated our course, I don't know, six months ago, give or take. And over that six months he's put together, it's like, I think he has eight, nine, maybe even 10 deals now. You know, Blake is beyond thankful. He's humbled by what's happening in his life right now. And. And he is. He's about in the next 12 months to generate enough wealth that it's generational. It's. It will change his life and his generations. But, you know, so easily.

Easily a couple million, it sounds like.

I'll say it's a whole lot more than that. I'll really. I'm not going to tell you the number, but I'll just tell you he has. He has eight figures coming his way.

For those of you out there listening, eight figures is. If you do the math, that's 10 million plus. So that's amazing. You know, you've told them their stories, but how did you get started? Like, what is your backstory in this business? How did you discover land?

Yeah. So I'll just tell you. You know, I thought I was going off to college and got my high school girlfriend pregnant and had had my son and got married just a few months out of high school. So I ended up going into the flooring union as, you know, working with my hands, right. As a laborer, as an apprentice. And the reason I went into that is that you get health insurance after three months. Right. And I needed to figure out how to pay for my baby. And so. And so I stayed in the trades, Right. I was in the flooring industry for, you know, the first five years of my career. And so I just got to know a lot of these home builders and land developers, and. And it just got to a point where I decided to go for it, right. And. Because I was hearing their stories, right. And the things they were doing, and it was a fearful time I had to make a leap of faith. I had to get uncomfortable. But ultimately I became self employed in 2002 in real estate doing this stuff. And I've been doing it ever since. Um, and I'll tell you, I've, I've. I've learned the hard way. You know, I can tell you I went through a time, I think all of us probably remember 0708, the Great Recession, and, and I was, I was pretty far over my skis and, and you know, I was worth eight figures at the time and, you know, my mid-20s. And within a year I had lost 90% of my net worth. And the beautiful thing about what we teach at Vestrite is we teach ways to play in this game without all that risk, without all that capital. And I'm able to teach that because I've been through it and I know what took me down. And, and so that was a hard time. Very humbling. But man, I learned a whole lot more losing it than I did making it. That's. That's for darn sure. And, and so today I'm, you know, we're back.

Experience is the best teacher.

Yeah, it sure is. And you know, today, you know, thank the Lord we're, you know, we're from a financial standpoint and just as a business as a whole, I mean, we far exceeded, you know, what we were prior to that Great Recession, and I'm thankful for that. But it was. I had to go through that learning process. Right. I had to lose it in order to be where I'm at today.

Well, I think, you know, any entrepreneur really, you know, worth their salt has been. Has gone through that, that, that dark night of the soul where you re. Examine everything you've done and when you hit rock bottom, you learn and not. I don't know if you did hit rock bottom, but losing 90% during that feels pretty bottomy to me. But to be able to come back through that, learn from those mistakes and, you know, reapply them and innovate and shift the model, which, you know, we talked offline about how you, you did an innovative twist to the land development business, and I want to dive a little deeper into that. But, you know, the profit on these, on these deals, like, to an outsider like me, I've never done a land deal. My only frame of reference is, you know, is flipping real estate, like real estate houses. Why is there so much profit, like, profit in these land. I understand why the, the value of a land deal, like the, the cost of acquiring, you know, 100 acres of land would be worth millions of dollars. Why is there so much profit in that space?

I'll first say it all starts with that. It's a blue ocean, right? I would almost guarantee I'm the first guy to ever talk to you about this model. And I'm probably the only.

Definitely me.

I'm probably the only guy that'll talk to you about this model. And so what happens is, is that what I do and what I teach, there's not one of me on every street corner. Like there is a household sailor or like there is say an apartment syndicator, right? Guys that are buying apartments, like they're everywhere. And so the blue ocean definitely helps. And another thing I said a moment ago is I said, when we were talking about the students, I said, whoever controls the dirt controls the deal. And so you're in a position when you are putting these land deals under contract, you call the shots. And you know, we're in a time, and this is, no, this is not gonna be news to you is that there's a home shortage, right? So what's really cool about this model is, yes, that creates a ton of demand, right? Buyer or, you know, home builders, here's the reality. They're desperate for lots right now, right? They're desperate because they're trying to fill this need of our country. And so that's, you know, and I was just thinking about this recently. That's really fulfilling for me. And I almost thought we could, you know, make it a part of our mission is, you know, we're helping solve the, the housing crisis. Which is, which is, which is really cool. But the other thing that's, you know, pretty, pretty amazing about it is, is we're in the value add business, right? So, and what I mean by that is we're taking raw land and we're turning it into an approved project, okay. And so that creates a tremendous amount of value. But also, you know, if it wasn't for us, these buyers, these home builders wouldn't know about these deals because what we specialize in is teaching off market. I can't say off market enough. Off market, off market, off market. We do and we teach how to go and do find these off market deals. And so now you're creating deal flow for these buyers that they otherwise wouldn't know about. And that's, that's hugely valuable as well.

Okay? And then so off market, for anybody listening who that doesn't immediately ring a bell, that means it's not listed for sale by a real estate agent. Or broker. Right now, it's a piece of land that an owner owns and they, they're not actively soliciting bids. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's correct. And, and that creates a less competitive environment.

Right. So let me see if I understand in a nutshell, if I, if I explain back to you what you're doing and correct me if I'm wrong, here you are there. There's a very large demand for houses out there in the market. As everybody listening to this probably knows, that large demand for houses obviously creates a housing shortage. I know that. You know, just trying to find houses that are listed for sale is extremely challenging right now. So one of the ways that whenever there's a huge demand and a low supply, home builders come in. And home builders are having absolutely recorded years, but it sounds like there, there's a big supply shortage of developable land that they can build on. So what you do is you, it sounds like you go out and find the land, ideally that's off market, it hasn't been listed for sale, which probably, you know, gives you a lot less competition for that, but a lot more flexibility in the ability to negotiate with the landowner. You get that under contract. I know you're going to explain this in a moment. There's some things you do with it. The, the value add portion, I want to get to in just a second. And then you sell that land to the home builders who need it really desperately. Is it. Did I kind of sum that up earlier?

Yeah, no, that's, that's right, that's right. And, but I will. I just want to add to what you just said. You said, you know, off market, it creates flexibility with the property owner. I want to make clear that doesn't mean that we try to take advantage of the property owner. That doesn't mean we try to pay them less than market. That's not how we make our money. We pay our property owners what their land is truly worth as developable land. We make our money on the value add, like you said. We'll talk about it in a minute, what I mean by that. But yeah, all in all, that's exactly what we do. But understand, when we go and put that land deal together, we don't close until the project's approved. That's how this industry works. And so it's a, it's a, it's a contract where you don't, you don't close it like a house transaction. You close it once you get through that value add or that approval process. And what's wonderful is you do the double closing, simultaneous closing, where you use your. Your buyer's money to pay the seller, and then you make your scrape out of the middle or your payday out of the middle. So. But. Yeah, yeah, you got your arms around it.

Well, good. Well, one of the things I love about this is it's anybody any entrepreneur understands that the way if you want to make big money, you solve big problems. And one of the biggest problems out there right now, I know in real estate is the shortage of housing and homes. And if you can bridge that gap between the supply and demand and be the one who fills that demand, in any industry, whether it's land or anything else, there is tremendous wealth to be made because you're solving big problems for big paydays. And I think that's. To me, that's. It makes perfect sense why now that, you know, the profit on these deals are so big, especially because each deal is so big. These are not like $200,000 houses. These are often, I imagine, multimillion dollar plots of land. At the same time, to the layperson who's never done this, you know, the land deals sound very, very complicated, very risky, you know, very expensive and time consuming. Is. Is that the case?

Here's what makes it not complicated. The first word you said was complicated. Once you. Here's the reality. And all in, all in full transparency, we don't have what we do and what we teach it. It's not some magic bullet. It's not some. We don't make all this money because it's overly complicated. And you gotta, you're. You gotta have a certain level IQ and detail and all that. It's actually fairly simple. Actually. One of those students I shared earlier, Blake, he told me at one point, he's like, cody, this is way simpler than I thought it was gonna be. But the key is you got to know the steps, right? And what's even, you know. And you talked about time consuming as well. And what makes it not time consuming or quite frankly, complicated is we do very little of the lifting. Is that our consultants, our civil engineers, they do almost all the lifting. They do almost all the work. The main thing we're doing is writing checks, right? We're paying for their, their, their work. And. And then you're right, like, as far as you're right, if you are going and actually developing the dirt, putting in doing what we call horizontal construct development or, you know, putting in all the utilities and streets and all that. Brad, you are 100% right. It's expensive and it is risky and it's what took me down in 0708 or took me down 90%, you know, 90%. But the model we teach is you're avoiding that type of risk that took me down. Right? You're avoiding the, the, the, the major, major capital needed to actually do the land development is that, you know, on average the money we spend to get a deal approved, if you were to go and actually close that land yourself and do the land development, it would, it would multiply that capital needed by about 10x. Right? And then, and then, and then, and then another 3x the capital you have in, in debt. Right? So let's just use simple example. Let's just say on our bigger deals, we have an average of 500 grand into a deal, right? If I was to close on that dirt and develop it, I would need about 5 million of capital in the deal to get the loan, right? And then another, probably 15 million of debt. And so that's where the real risk, that's where the real risk starts. And I've done tons of that. But in today's market I don't need to. And, and what you need to do is just get these projects approved and then exit or exit sooner than that if you want.

Okay, that's great. So one of the things I heard you say there was that you've changed that model where like in the past you did full blown land development, which means you found it, you got it, you know, all approved, et cetera. Then you would take very expensive loans and do the horizontal construction which is moving the dirt around and you know, laying the roads and utilities and all this other stuff that is needed before you sell to the home builder. And now you've shortcutted that process by getting out earlier and letting the home builders do like a lot of that heavy lifting, thereby reducing the risk and capital and even the time needed. Is that accurate?

All, all the above. I, I reduce the time, I reduce the capital, I reduce the risk. All the above. But here's what's amazing. Here's what's amazing is we talked earlier about how much demand is in the market right now. And here's the thing. I've been doing this model before all this happened in the market, right? This housing shortage. And so I have lots of people right now thinking I'm really, really smart because my timing is amazing. And I'm really, I was doing it before, the timing was amazing, but you know, now it's, you know, it's definitely special and you know, that's what's neat about our students that are getting involved is that I would say their timing is amazing because they're looking at the opportunity in the market and they're figuring out how they can be a part of solving the problem. And if you're a part of solving the problem, it can be very, very fruitful. You know, no questions asked. So, yeah, did I answer your question?

I love it. You absolutely did. So now let's go a little deeper into the basic process because I'd love for myself and all of the listener to kind of understand what does it take to do a land deal, at least as an overview.

So let's just put it this way. We find the deal, right? We get it under contract, we get it approved and we exit and get our payday. So first, let's say I'll take you through our model, what we do. But understand, as I explain this model, like I said earlier, there's numerous times throughout a deal you can exit or get paid, but I'll just show you the deal, right? One is we do prospecting. In order to be effective at prospecting raw land that has development potential, you got to know what you're doing, right? You got to know what you're looking for. You got to know what makes a property have that potential, right? And then once you understand that and you know what to target and how to target, we take that knowledge and we go and we prospect off market, raw land. Here again, I'm going to say off market, off market, off market. Okay? So that's the first step is we, we go and we find the land, okay? Next is we get it under contract, right? We put the deal together and then we take it through that value add process that I was talking about a minute ago, which is the approvals, political approvals. It's called entitlements. It's called the land use process. There's lots of different terminologies you can use, but basically we take that raw land and we go through a process with the jurisdiction, with our engineers, remember, doing majority of the work, and we get a project approved, right? So mean they've approved, they've approved that development on that land, okay? And at that point is when, okay, we can now pay the seller the, the developable price we've agreed to, right? Because. And they're very ecstatic because they're probably making, let's just say 5 to 10x what they would have if they just would have wanted to close like a house, right? Just close quick because if you want me to pay for a diamond, I gotta make sure it's a diamond and it's not a diamond until it's approved. And that's where that value add is, is that I've ran that process, and so the seller's doing really well, but then my buyers are excited because they don't have to go through that process. They don't have to go find that dirt. I'm delivering them a pretty little project in a pretty little bow, ready for them to go do their thing. And, and they'll pay a premium for that because I've now saved them time. Right. And, and, and here again, there's such high demand, right.

They're trying to.

They're trying to solve the housing crisis. They can't keep up with the demand. And so we do that double closing, that simultaneous closing where our buyer closes with us the same time we close with the seller and we make our scrape out of the middle. So let's just put it this way. We find the deal, right? We get it under contract, we get it approved, and we exit and get our payday.

Love it. Okay. How do you know if something's developable or not developable when you're looking for land?

So obviously we go deep on this in our course, but let me simplify it for you. One is you got to know what the property zoned. So you know, will the. And it might not even be zoned for a development right now, but the jurisdiction will allow it to be rezoned for development. Okay? So you got to understand zoning. Okay. Two is, you got. Does the property have access? Right. So can you get to the property through public right of ways? So through public roads? So because you got to get access to the property, you can't. You can't. There's no. You can't go develop a piece that. What we call is landlocked, where you can't get to it. Next is public utilities, you know, so like sewer and water and so on and so forth. Right. Do. Is there public utilities available to the property to where you can go do a development on it? Right. Three is understanding what overlays mean. So a lot of you might drive by a piece of property and you think it's just a beautiful piece, but what you don't realize is there are overlays on that property that limit its development potential or make it not developable at all. Right? It might. It. It might have an overlay on it is what we call it, right? And it might be. It might be a Wetland overlay, Right. Or it might, it might be a protected piece of property, right. Or it might be designated for a future park or whatever. And so you gotta understand overlays, right? And then you also, you need to understand topography, right? Because no two pieces of property cost the same to develop. Every piece is unique. And so a flat piece usually will cost way less to develop than, say, a piece that has topography. And so because some properties, we can't develop them because they're so expensive to develop that your cost into the deal is actually more than what the, the, the. The project is worth.

Well, that makes sense. Now, if you're looking at a piece of land right now, let's say you identify a piece of land on the map and do some research on it. How, you know, once you understand what makes land developable or not, how long does it typically take you to eyeball that and say that, you know, green light, red light.

Yeah, good question. And it really varies, right? Because, you know, as we take a quick look, it depends what we discover. But I mean, on certain pieces, I mean, we, we can greenlight it in hours, right? But if we, if we discover certain things, then we got to go deeper. But, you know, we can, we can look at a deal and know pretty quickly if it has potential.

Okay, perfect. Into the next step you talked about, you got a prospect, you got to find the land. You know, what are some of the methods you do to find that? My reference point as a real estate investor who's done houses is I would buy lists of pre, foreclosure, divorce, probate code violations, and I would be looking for a lot of the data that you can buy to send it out to find, you know, what we obviously call motivated sellers. How do you guys find and prospect for the land that you're trying to buy?

So you hit one of my, you hit one of my sensitive spots in what you just said. You said motivated sellers, property owners. I want to be very clear. This model doesn't work like wholesaling. We don't need to find desperate, motivated sellers. We don't need to try to maneuver and take advantage of property owners and buy their property below market so we can make a quick buck. I just want to cover that right now. Like, we. Part of our legacy is, is our property owner's legacy, right? So we want to make sure we're taking care of them. They're getting fair market value for their land. So I just want to point that out. But basically what we do is we, we come up with our criteria Right. So we want to be, we want to go look at deals in this area town with this zoning or, or can be zoned this way. It's a fairly simple criteria. It really is. And then you can go sometimes and use your title companies give them that criteria and they can produce a list for you of all the properties that meet that criteria and they'll do that for free. Or there's plenty of platforms out there now, softwares where you can go and put that criteria in yourself and pull the data yourself here. The thing, it's not complicated. It's not, I don't have some magic sauce. It's just the magic sauce is that we're actually willing to do it right, that we'll, we'll go and we'll pound the pavements, right and we'll, we'll do our cold calls which most, you know, a lot of people won't do it. But here's what's crazy is, is that the thing is you can outsource it. All right. Like all of our callers are all out.

I was actually thinking about that. Like what are the pieces I can outsource?

Yeah, like it's, I, we have, we have five VAs that all they do is call for us.

So what you're saying is that there's data out there, there's relationships like title companies and I guess even using Google Map to kind of look in certain areas for raw land. So those are some of the techniques it sounds like that you can use to define land prospects. And I think I understand right now why you say you don't need to go after motivated sellers and which is really another term for desperate people in desperate situations. In traditional real estate investing like that, you know, they all, they say you make money when you buy the house because if you can buy it at a significant enough discount to the after repaired value, then that you make your spread in the middle. Sounds like with the land deals you do, you don't make your money when you buy the property at a discount. You make your money when you sell it because of the value add that you bring to the deal. So you don't have to take advantage of, of people in desperate situations. You get to pay them a fair price. Which I have to imagine makes negotiation with the seller infinitely easier than the negotiation with, you know, people who are needing to, you know, sell their house because they're in pre foreclosure or something of that nature. Just the you. It's like you had me at hello. No motivated sellers, less competition Less negotiation. I absolutely love that. So the other piece is, obviously, you got to get it under a contract, take it through approvals and entitlements. And I mean, you've already mentioned that you outsource or especially when you're starting off, you can hire external consultants to do all this work for you. You don't have to be an expert in all of that. Obviously, it sounds like your company, Allied Development, probably has an entire team who does that internally. Is that correct?

I mean, we still use the consultants, but yeah, I mean, we were able to process a lot of different things in house that we didn't process prior in house. But I mean, we still use the consultants today. That's just part of the model.

Now, I've seen other. I have other friends and I know other people who've done land deals and they flip land. I don't know if they call it land wholesaling or just land flipping. And I've seen multiple training programs and things. How does your model, if you any different, differ from those models?

Brad, I'm actually glad you just asked me that question. And I want to make something very clear. Their model is nothing like our model. Right. Their model is basically, they're in essence doing house wholesaling, but they're doing it with land instead. Right. So they're teaching how to go tie up some land and, and. And flip it and make a quick buck. They're not teaching the value add. They're not. They're not focused on properties that you can really do a value add with. And what I mean by that is we've talked numerous times now about, we're not just going after any type of raw land. We're going after raw land that has development potential. That's where the magic is, is because that gives us an opportunity to do the value add, to go and get a project approved for development. And so, you know, at least the different people I've come across online, they're basically just teaching how to be in the wholesaling business, but with land instead of houses.

That makes a lot of sense. And it also makes sense why I haven't heard of the model that you've been talking about. I want to hear, how do you teach other people to do this?

Well, let me first tell you why I teach it. I'm trying to build the most beautiful legacy I can for myself. And legacy is much more than just land. Okay. Legacy for me is. A big part of legacy for me is impact. How can I impact others? And so I have this thing I call pif, which is purpose, impact fulfillment. And so I started vestrite back in 2019 as a part of my, part of my purpose, right is, is that I've, I've learned this industry the hard knocks way over the last 20 years. I have specialty knowledge. And so, you know, I want to change lives with that specialty knowledge. And that's the beauty of specialty knowledge, right? Like I'm not trying to go out there and teach something that everybody knows. I'm trying to teach something that truly is a blue ocean. And so, you know, over the, you know, over the last three years, almost three years, we've had hundreds of people now go through our course. We are changing lives. And me helping others get into this model brings me tremendous fulfillment. That was the foundation of why I started Vestrate. And the reality is our students are across the board. We have people that are looking to get out of their W2 and so they start this as a side hustle. One of the students I mentioned earlier, he just, he just resigned from his W2 and he's now doing this full time. He started out doing it as a side hustle. But then we have, we have tons of students that have been real estate investors for years. But they're looking to level up, right? They're looking to get off the hamster wheel, like take a house wholesaler. You know, they can go do a hundred deals wholesaling a house or go do one deal on this model and make the same. Now they have what we call time freedom, right? Because in life, to be successful, there's numerous pillars of life. And if you're on the hamster wheel and all, all you gotta get is you're trying to stay above wall because you got to do so many deals. It's really hard to live a balanced life. And so really our students, our grads, our success stories, they're from all walks of life. And, and so, and it's through Vestrite. So at the end of the day, how do you get started? Well, you get involved with Vestrite. That's how you get started. And, and you, you learn what we've put together.

Okay, so how specifically is your training, coaching courses structured?

It's an online login, right? So it's a portal. You log into and in on there. We have, it's an eight week course every week you have, you have action items, homework, things you got to do.

And okay, so you've got course. Is there coaching involved? Is there any access as people are going through this to be able to talk to you talk to the team and help fill in the gaps.

There is, there's a, there's a help desk, you know, 24 hour help desk. We're doing. We do live calls, Q and A calls where, where I answer questions and, and then we have a Facebook group for our students, you know, because we really encourage, you know, we really encourage the students to interact with each other. Right. For them to grow together, for them to learn from each other. And so them collaborating is obviously extremely valuable too. I mean, our goal is, is not just to sell you the course and then care less if you succeed or not. We want you to succeed. Right. Like, otherwise I don't really get the fulfillment that I'm looking for. Which is the third letter of piff. The. The. The exactly like the F stands for fulfillment. And the fulfillment comes through changing lives.

I love that we're going to get into the lightning round here in a second. But you set up a special link for people if they want to explain, explore the course and the training. Is that correct? Where. What's the best place for them to go to? We may have a button on the page.

Yeah, we set up a link. So when I said, you know, go start your journey with Vestrite or go discover Vestrite. So the link they would go to would be vestrite.com, which is V-E-S-T R I G H T vestrite.com VIP so go to that link, check it out and yeah, man, I can't encourage it enough. Yeah, we would be super stoked to be a part of your journey.

That's great. So now I want to get into a handful of questions I've been writing down as you've been talking. It's like the lightning round. So this is where we're going to fill in some gaps in my knowledge. So can this be done from home?

Great question. And that's one of the beauties of the model. You absolutely can do it from home. Yeah, it's, it's. There's definitely the. Definitely the flexibility of being able to work from anywhere.

Can I do deals in other places or do I have to do it in my own backyard?

Obviously you have a competitive advantage if you're doing deals in your backyard because you know that market. But literally, you know, you can do deals anywhere in the country.

Cody, how long does it take to actually make money with this? Realistically, these deals can take a long time to do. Is that, is that accurate?

Yeah, I mean, it depends when you exit the deal. Right? So like I said, there's numerous exit points and numerous points when you can get paid. But and let me get very clear is this isn't, this isn't a get rich quick scheme, right? I mean, I guess, you know, it might kind of depend on what your definition of quick is. I mean, if you can become a millionaire in one year, you know, I would say that's pretty quick, but it's.

Not like, it's not too shabby, right?

So it's not like house wholesaling where you know, you're in and out in a day, right? Or two days. But we're talking about different paydays, right? I would argue you could get to generational wealth quicker with our model than you could some of the other models out there. But if I was to say on average, if you're going to run it all the way through the exit to the homebuilder right, after approvals, that process takes anywhere from, you know, I mean, six months to 18 months. But I'll tell you, we figure on average, when we're underwriting a deal, we figure the average deal takes 12 months. That's what we figure. But we're not exiting earlier, getting paid early in the process. We, all of our deals, we take all the way through. Like that one I told you earlier about, where I exited in three months. We have students doing that, and that's great, but that's not our particular model.

You touched on this before. But realistically, how much capital is needed to do land deals?

So it depends on the size of my own. Yeah. Okay, so well, one is it decide. It depends on the size of the deal, right? When I first started doing this, I was doing two, three, four lot deals. And so that demands a whole lot less capital than the bigger, bigger deals we're doing now. But at the end of the day, you don't have to have any capital, you know. You know, you could, you potentially get your buyer, you know, one of the ninja moves I was telling about, get your buyer to capitalize it, you know, go and do friends and family money, go and find someone to, you know, just invest in the deal with you and make that a joint venture where they're getting a piece of the upside. I mean, there's lots of different ways to get the capital, especially in this market. You know, right now it's easier to get capital than ever.

Now, speaking about capital, how much does it cost the average student who decides to do this to operate a business like this, you know, from home, when they're looking out there, looking for Deals. Is this a expensive. Like I mentioned, when I'm doing marketing for real estate, like home flipping, etc. I'd be spending thousands of dollars every single month on mailing costs. I've got virtual assistants, I've got all this other stuff. Is this an expensive business to run and operate?

It depends what your mission or your vision is and how big you want to get. Right. But the simplest way for me to answer that question is your overhead could be next to nothing. Right. If you want to be a, if you want to be a one man show, right? And there's, you know, I, when I started out, you know, we didn't. Like I said, just up until a year ago, there was only three or four of us, right? So. And don't get me wrong, we were still making seven figures and all that good stuff. But you know, we just started scaling in a big way and now have all these people. That's, that's a recent thing, just like our office is a recent thing. But I mean you can execute on this model with very little, very little overhead, if any.

Wow. And well, the idea of like hunting for one deal, one seven figure deal a year, it doesn't sound like a high operating cost expense. And that's not a bad, that's not a bad thing to shoot for. Do you ever, Cody, do you ever work directly with your students on actual deals as opposed to just teaching them how to do it?

Yeah, that's really been a blessing in say the last six, seven months is. When we first started Vestrite, we were just teaching people how to do what we do, right? And we kept hearing people come to us and can they partner with us? Right. And so six months ago we, we started, we opened that door, right? So where the students, basically what they do is, and I should call them graduates, right, Is we'll only partner with people that know what they're doing and have been through our course because otherwise, you know, they'll just waste my team's time because they'll just be hucking stuff over the fence all the time to us that, that we can't do anything with. So. But their job is they just tee the deal up, right? They go find the ready, willing seller and then we get the contract Inc. We run it through approvals, we sell it, we capitalize it, and then we cut them in on our payday at exit.

Let me make sure I understand this. So these students, they go out and find you teach them how to identify developable land and they go out and they prospect for Them right now. Those are like, really the first two steps of the entire, entire thing. So instead of having to run all the entitlements, approvals, deal with the jurisdiction and political process, and then even selling to the home builder, you take care of all of that for them, Is that correct?

All of it, Yep. They're, they're. Their only responsibility is to find the property that is developable. Right. Or has development potential.

Okay.

And then we take it. We take everything from there. They don't even negotiate the contract. We handle negotiating the contract with the property owner. And this has just been a huge blessing to my development company because like I said so many times, now we're scaling across the country. Right. Like, and we know this stuff in and out. And so we need all the deal flow we can get. Right? Yeah. We have five people in house that are cold calling and yeah, we do mailers and. But we don't have. We're doing as many deals as we can. And so the more deal flow we have, the better.

Okay. So if we were doing a deal together and, you know, find you a piece of land that fits all the criteria, tag in your company, it's Allied Development, you guys become deal team six.

Right.

Come in as a specialist, you do all this work. What kind of money can be made if, you know, if partnering with a deal like yourself?

So it depends on the size of the deal. Right. To answer that question. But I'll just tell you we have a deal coming up here, going to close pretty quick, and a student brought us that deal. And, and I'll just tell you that that student stands to make mid six figures on that deal. You know, so their cut of the profit, they'll make mid six figures.

Just for bringing. Just for being a bird dog.

Mm, that is correct. Yep.

Or in this case, I guess they would be a dirt dog.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For that. So in bird dogging, for anybody who's watching this who doesn't understand, that's. Yeah. When you go find, like, leads on houses that might be for sale and you either sell those to a wholesaler or a rehab or somebody else, you don't even get it under contract. You're basically flipping leads. I know that I used to pay my bird dogs, you know, when we're doing this, like 500, maybe a thousand dollars if it was a really sexy lead.

Yeah.

Did you just. You just said that there was a. A student who stands to make high six figures?

Yeah. Mid six figures. Yeah, mid six figures. That's just one example. I mean, like, I said we're doing like eight or ten deals with students right now. But that's just one example that's just, it's coming, the closings coming up. It's right around the corner. And yeah, so our, our bird dogs, the difference is they're bird dogging land that has development potential, right? And, and yeah, that's what they do. But it's that, it's, it's. There's enough to go around, let me put it that way, right. So these deals are profitable enough and there's enough demand for them where, you know, it can be very substantial. Here's reality. If they don't go bird dog it, or I like to call dirt dog it, the deal doesn't exist. Right. So I mean, without them, the deal doesn't exist. So, I mean, I want it to be very fruitful for them.

I gotta be honest. That's this piece here at the end. I hope everybody's been listening. This is actually one of the sexiest parts of everything I've heard you say. Because if you can compress the amount of time and energy needed to go do these deals and still make six figures per deal without doing a lot of the legwork behind it, it sounds like, I mean, we all want to make more money and do less work, Right. I think that's part of the human condition. It sounds like you've given people options. If they want to go hit home runs and hunt elephants and take them down themselves, they can do that. But in this case, you'd almost be crazy. I would think you'd be crazy not to want to just partner up with you guys and have you come in as the expert in running the deal and entitlements and selling it while I take off. Are there any other students who've kind of been doing this successfully with you?

Yeah, yes, there's. We're doing that particular structure with a few different students. But there's one in particular student I'm thinking of, his name's Daniel. I believe we're doing four or five deals with him right now. And he, he, he actually, maybe you can show a video or a clip or something of Daniel because he got interviewed recently and he was actually on one of our live Q&As recently talking to, you know, people that were attending the call and, and he, he, he, he's an amazing guy. But yeah, we're doing four or five deals with him.

You can send me that video. I'll try to ins. Yeah, if you can send me that video of him. Being interviewed. I'll see if I can insert that here in the podcast for folks to listen to.

Yeah, yeah. Instead of me explaining it and telling the story, I'll suit you that video. And he, you, he can tell the story himself. Daniel is, he's implementing a model that is that like I told you guys, we just started six months ago because we had so many students that wanted to partner with us. We're like, finally said, okay, let's do it. Yeah. So you tell your story, buddy.

I'm the kind of guy that I like money to come in with nothing invested. You know, the least, the least I can do, the better. So I started bringing them in deals. And I mean, it's really. You use what you. They're taught teach in the course. You know, you go through verify the property, make sure it is developable, developable dirt, and then you pretty much send over the, the project profile to them. Other than the money in the course, I have Nothing invested besides $5 for, you know, a call list that I'm pretty intentional with.

Hey, how many deal. I don't even know how many deals are we doing with you right now?

So I have, I have four lined up and I'm just, just today I followed back up with a. Another one that I'm trying to get a fifth deal lined up.

So five deals I got, I got, so I got four that we've inked with you right now and a fifth coming. Let's just, let's just cut to the chase. So, so, so your partnership with Allied, you're going to become a millionaire. If you're not already. We're going to make you a million. You're. We're not going to make you a millionaire. You made yourself a millionaire, correct?

Yeah, but just to be modest, it'll be a couple million dollars and that's.

All right. So we'll make you a couple million.

I was just going to say it's not like I'm doing, You know, they're doing most of the strong lifting. You know, I just, before I poured in and I saw this model available, before I poured in more capital, I wanted to receive money back so that then I had that capital to pour back into my own deals.

Okay, so let me, you know, we come pretty close to the end of this episode, but let me really recap what I think I've heard you say, and I really am amazed when I, when I mentioned before that, you know, it's not often that, you know, I get stopped in my tracks to go, wait, you Know what you talking about, Willis? One of those moments for my, for the older folks listening where I was like, wait a minute, this is new, this is different. I haven't heard about this. You mentioned it's a blue ocean. And I mean, I've been investing in real estate for over 20 years and I had never come across any this. So you find raw land that has development potential, you get it under contract, run it through approvals and sell it to these home builders who are desperate for this land, thus filling the gap between the supply and the demand. You, you make between six and seven figures profit per deal, which those of us who are familiar with regular real estate Investing, no, that's 50 to 100 times the profit on a residential flip. Especially in wholesaling. You do it without needing motivated sellers, desperate people. You do it without hardball negotiation. In fact, you're trying to give them a fair market price for their land because you know that you're going to make the profit from the, from the home builder who buys it. You could technically do one deal a year and make a million dollars profit per deal. And if you're real greedy, maybe you make do two deals a year and you can do this from anywhere. You can do it from home. Cody, this is revolutionary what I'm hearing and I hope that the folks who are listening curiosity is piqued as well. The fact that you've actually offered up to teach this and train people when you did not need to do this, I imagine you would be very comfortable just living off the millions of dollars you're making from these deals. But the fact that you have a deeper purpose with purpose, impact and fulfillment I think is remarkable. The fact that other people can learn to do this as well without spending 20 years of trial and error is, I think it is a real testament to the legacy you're going to leave.

I'm not doing this because I have to. I do. I'm doing it because I want to. And another key thing that's really important and the reason that is is because understand I'm not just teaching it, I'm doing it right. And, and you know, anybody else that does what I do, they're not teaching because the way look at it is why would they teach it? They're making so much money doing it, why are they going to waste their time teaching it? And that's why the foundation of vestrite is not about the money. It's about, it's about pif. And you know, we're super thankful to have the opportunity to share what we've, you know, learned over our career.

So well, I'm appreciative of you doing it. I love discovering new business models hiding right under our feet. Pun fully intended. For anybody listening to this or watching this right now, Cody set up a very special link just for you. Vestrite.com forward/vip VIP so where you can learn if land acquisition and the land deals that he does are right for you. If this is something you want to explore. Investrite.com VIP everybody else subscribe to the show, leave a review, and can't wait to see you on the next episode.