Why I’m Buying UNWANTED Land (And You Should Too)

I just bought 10 acres of land for less than $10,000 and I never even saw it until today. Why? To figure out if the American dream is still alive and if we can buy it for cheap. Today, we're going to teach you how we did it, how we almost got scammed doing it, and how you two can make money on it. Oh, and we did. In one week. And you have to stick around in this video because we're going to talk to a couple who is killing it doing exactly this. So much so they're about to exit for millions of dollars. Okay, we're going to buy some land. There's three steps to get get this done. Step one, criteria. What do you want the land to be? In my case, I really have only a few criteria. First one is 10 acres or more. Second is I want it located in West Texas. Why? Because I think there's land available for cheap out there. Also, it's by a bunch of national parks, which is cool. I think we'll have a bunch of tourists come. The last thing is, I want this land to have no rules. I can do whatever I want. Second budget, how much money do you want to spend on your piece of land? In my case, 10k, no more. And the third? Timeline. In my case, this timeline is one week, which is crazy, but I actually think we can do it. But first, let's break down all of these listings. So on land.com, i've already got some saved favorites. So this one's at 14,276. It's kind of sick. Look at that river running through it. Vistas beautiful. It is 10 acres for 14,000, so we'd have to get it down lower. One of the issues with this one is it's right on the US Mexico border. It's cool that it's seller finance, but I don't love this location. We'll keep it on the list, though, and we'll run it down. This is $17,500 for 10 acres. It's an alpine, alpine suite because it's close to Marfa, but it's actually kind of a town. Also, look at these mountains, guys. We've got a ton of mountain property. Looks really level. I like that. Also, this thing, seller financing. $5,000 down, 10.5% interest rate. That's high. We're going to Mess with that. 5 years payments of $268 a month. Call today to own your piece of paradise, they say. I don't know about that. We're gonna call this guy, though, and we're gonna figure out this piece of land. This is keeping on the listing. Look at all these properties we have. We're gonna run through this list and we're gonna see which one of these we like best. I know that I wanna be close to Marfa. I know that I wanna make sure that we can have easy access land. And I think I found a couple places for us. We're gonna call some experts and see if I'm on the right track. We're gonna call pros. Hello?

Hey, Cody, how are you?

I'm good. Random question. I want to buy some land in west Texas. Like 10 acres inside of a week. Wanted to get kind of your take.

You got to be kidding, right? Inside of a week?

Yeah. No, I'm not kidding.

You've looked at it on your computer, I take it?

Yes, I found a couple that I like.

One of my clients came to me and said, hey, that's what I want you, I want you to do for me. Stan, I would just tell them absolutely not. But you're. You're probably going to do it anyway.

That is probably true. So if I go and get a realtor to help me figure this out, you can help me do a little double checksy later?

Absolutely. I can try to protect us as much as possible.

All right. You're the best. Love you.

Love you too.

Good luck.

Thanks.

Bye. Okay, trusted expert, aka dad, check. Now we go to new experts, aka realtors. So we got texasrealtors.com. we got Ramsey rated realtors, and we're gonna pick one of the top ones. What's up, Melissa? And we're going to call Melissa and say what's up? Hey, Melissa, this is Cody. If you could give me a ring back, that'd be great. I'm looking to close on a deal really, really quickly. Okay, talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Okay, let's do rule of three. Typically, realtors, I get one answer for every three phone calls. So we're going to call three right now and see what happens. Bank, Bank. Bank. Bank. Bank. No answer. Okay, now we're going to call Chris. Hi, Chris, my name's Cody. I wanted to reach out to you because I need to buy some raw land in West Texas. Kind of weird, but I think we could do it. I need to close inside of one week. Less than $10,000. If you could call me back. Thanks, Chris. Okay, we'll see. So, left a message for him. Nobody answered me. My rule of three did not work for realtors in West Texas. They do say it's slower out there. We will now wait for somebody to get back to me as we dig in a little bit more to due diligence. I need to get some inspiration and start putting together a list of all the ways we can make money on this thing we're going to buy. All right, I finally got a call back from Chris, so he left me a voicemail. Let's see what we got from our man Chris.

Your text this morning and I'm driving to a meeting. Your best bet is to go out there, and it's just. It's not gonna happen. For you guys to get out there and have a piece of property under contract, the chances of that happening are so slim to none. I'm not saying it's impossible, but every star would have to align. Give me a call when you get a chance, and if I can't answer, I'll call you back.

Okay, do it.

Bye.

All right.

Nice guy, Chris. But he obviously hasn't met us. He thinks that this is impossible. Now, it's fair, all the points that he made, but we're not going to let that stop us. I hit up a bunch of other realtors and we're going to see if one of them gets back to us, and we are going to keep working the problem until one of them does. Amazing. Thank you, Phil. Perfect. Okay, so Phil is our new realtor. He thinks that he can not only find us our land, but he already has a place. Phil is DTF down to find it. Guys, take it easy. Okay, so now that Phil's going to find our place, we've got a list of inspiration here that I want to start working on. A bunch of these are really expensive to stay at. I'm trying to keep mine cheaper, so I'm probably more like this TP tent situation somewhere between like 10 and 30k. I got a hold of this guy Ryan, who has this trailer that it looks like you just, like, put on the site. I want to see if I can do that so I don't even have to build anything. It's like all set up already. So let's go check out Ryan live.

This is Lula. This is our glamping camper. We're outside of San Marcos, Texas, out in the hill country. She's a one bedroom, one bath camper that people can come and stay whenever they want. Me and Brittany, my wife, we dreamed about having a place where everyone was welcome for a long time.

Did your wife do this?

She picked it out, but we. We bought it off Facebook. Marketplace. Turnkey $16,000.

It's ridiculous that you got this for 16K. Nice job.

Thanks.

So we got this Lula here. We're on 20 acres of your land.

That's right.

But you did it smart. You partnered with somebody else.

Yeah, so we worked with a group called Casa Marinella.

Oh, that's amazing.

It's hard to put a number on how helpful Casa Marinella has been. They welcome people who have recently immigrated to the United States, and they help them get on their feet. We partner with them in allowing them a place to work, sometimes a place to stay. And it just helps give this place hospitality on several different levels.

You rent this out for what, a.

Night on average on the weekdays, probably about 80, 90 bucks.

That's amazing. I'm coming out here.

140. 150.

Okay, 80 to 90 bucks. 140 to 150, you get your own trailer. Sweet little deck set up, beautiful views, nobody around. Bird song. I'm into it.

All right.

This is amazing. Three days later, huge update. We almost got scammed on the first piece of land. Turns out the guy didn't even actually own the thing. But that's okay, you guys. This is why we do due diligence. And we're gonna teach you all the steps to make sure that you can not get scammed either. But an even more exciting update. Bill found us a piece of land, 10 acres for less than 10k. It appears to be pretty perfect. So we actually already are signing the documents. We are going to right now go and give cash at the bank, and then we're gonna go check out our land. Are you guys ready to see what they said was impossible? Money sent. We gotta get out on this property now. But I'm feeling pretty confident. I think we need a website. Oh, you guys thought I forgot this. Come on. Before we get to the website, we got to break down the costs. I read your guys comments. So first we're getting 10 acres. We're paying $9,000 for that. But it's not just the $9,000. We also got to pay, I don't know, about 200 bucks for gas to get down there. We've got to pay about 500 bucks to get the title checked. I'll explain why that's so important later. And then finally, we got to pay 300 bucks to our main man Phil for finding this land for us. So all in. We're at 10k for 10 acres. But I want to spend a little bit less money here, so I'm going to get a website for Cheap for any business. A website's really important. We got to have a good online presence, especially if we're going to have a remote business. We got to make sure we nail the website. The problem is all the good website names are taken. That's where Dot ONLINE domains comes in. Unlike dot com, where good names are basically impossible to find, Dot ONLINE lets you get the exact name you want without weird extra words or dashes. It's trusted by over 3.5 million businesses and used across tons of industries, from global brands to small businesses. And here's the best part. You can grab your dot online domain anywhere at GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, but for a limited period. Right now, you can get the domain for just 99 cents@get.online using my exclusive code Cody at checkout or by simply hitting the link in my description below. Also, you guys, I need help naming this thing. What should the website be? Tell me below in the comments. And then let's go meet Phil. We gotta check out this land we bought. So now from Austin all the way to West Texas. Bill, what's up? How's it going?

Great. Pleasure to meet you.

Let's do this. Oh, wait a second. Let's talk about how you could really screw up a deal with titles.

Super important. Whenever you buy land or any kind of property, always get a title policy. Title companies are the ones that provide the policy, ensure that the owner is the owner, and there's no liens against it.

And sometimes you could be like, I bought this land, but it doesn't have a clean title, then you're in trouble.

You're in trouble.

Yeah, we don't want that. No trouble. The other important reason we gotta go out to the actual property is because we don't exactly know what we're getting. So you put some interesting things in the contract to make sure that they don't scam us.

We put an option period in there for 10 days, which will give you time to inspect it. We're gonna get a couple well guys out there to see if we can drill a well out there. We're going to get a septic guy out there for sanitation reasons. And then we also got to call him to the electric company to see how much it'll cost to run some power to that property.

And we're not talking black oil wells, right? We're talking water.

Right? When we have drilling, we want to be able to get water out there. That's the most important thing to our property.

And there might actually be, even though it looks like there's nothing and it's all desert underneath there. There might be a water table. We don't know.

It could be. And if there's not, you can always have it hauled in and put in tanks.

Bill, let's go. Fun fact. We chose Marfa because West Texas is one of the few areas where you can buy affordable land in the state of Texas. One other hack. If you want to buy cheap land, you can buy in the middle of nowhere, but make it kind of close to a touristy place like this. So people come here, but then they go back to your spot to get away. There's five scams we got to watch out for when we buy land. First scam is we got to make sure they actually own the land themselves. A lot of times they're misrepresenting. That's why we check title. Second is the land isn't what they say it is. This is another type of misrepresentation. So they might actually have land that has a bunch of issues and they haven't told us. The third is owner financing. They might put provisions in the contract that allow them to take back the entirety of the land. If we just miss one day of payment or we're late for one payment, the next is we've got to be careful for things like floodplains. A lot of times you'll see on this property, there's some drainage. We got to make sure we understand where they're at. Even in the desert, floodplains are dangerous. And the last one is mineral rights and drilling. So we got to think about the fact that if you are an energy company, you could have rights to the land that allow them to come in, drill on your site while the kids are playing, while your campers are hanging out, they're throwing up flares. They got in pipes. We don't want that. So we're going to watch out. The five types of land scales. One second. Also, if you're into crystals, turns out the land behind me is full of this. There's a mountain all full of what's called green calite. You crystal. This is your spot, too. Let's do this. So we bought some land like 30 minutes outside of Marfa. Right? Right. So we're not trying to get close to the border because sometimes that can be a little sketchy.

Correct.

We're still pretty far from it. And how far are we from Big Ben? What do you think? Hour and 40?

I think about an hour and 40 to Big Ben. Because Marfa is one of the Gateway towns to Big Ben and the Marfa lights.

This is crazy. So Marfa's known for aliens crazy lights, mysteries. I don't know what they're doing out here, but the wild west is really wild. Do you know anything about. About tax breaks on real estate for having cows?

Sure. There's always agricultural exemptions and it differs from county to county. So you always want to check that out. If you're looking to get that ag exemption. So you can run cows, you can do a wildlife exemption, which is hunting. Counting the number of deer or animals that are on there, that's one type of exemption. You can even do honeybees so you can raise bees on there. And you can get so many bees per acre and get your exemptions there. Most counties you want to be over 10 acres. 10 acres or more to get your exemption.

Or we could do this, but I don't think this makes any money. Phil, let's go.

So there's three access points to this lot. This one is chained up, which is an easement back there. So there's two other access points we're going to have to try to go down.

Okay. Otherwise we get out the wire cutters.

And I'm going to take a picture of this to send to the realtor.

All right. Off to the next one.

So gate number one locked. So we're going to go. There is two other access points to get to this property. So we're going to go down here and try those.

So we're having a hard time getting on the land. There should be these gates that are open. We have an easement for access. Somebody's locked it. They shouldn't have. It's actually a reason to bow out of the deal. Eight day option, period.

So I'm going to try to go back this way and see if we can get a cut across.

Yeah.

On a different easement, I'm going try to see if I can find a little road. It might get a little rough, but we can do it.

Is this it, Phil?

This is it. We have arrived.

Nice. Let's get out. See this place? Okay. We're on our land now we got to figure out where are the boundaries. What exactly do we own versus not own? And is this buildable? What can we do with it? We got to check out the driver drainage and figure out how do we make money on this thing or how do we live on it. Off the grid. I think it's time to call in Phil. Phil.

Hi, Cody.

All right, let's talk about this. So this is Mine.

This is yours. All 10 of them.

That's amazing. I'm a West Texas landowner now.

You are?

Okay. Absolutely. Let's talk about what we got here. How do we start to figure out where our boundaries are? What's in this? Like magic back here.

So what we've got is the GPS coordinates for each corner. Now, in our land contract, we've asked the title company to order a survey for you. So they'll actually put the stakes in the ground on all four corners.

Great. Love that. Also, what is this right here?

That's your deed. Congratulations.

This means we're official.

It's your contract for the deed. So you'll have the deed shortly. We have about eight days of our option period to make sure that electrical and water and everything that we need.

Let's talk about that. So theoretically, we've seen a couple things we really like about the land. Let's say something comes back that we don't like about it because we have this option period. We can bail.

Correct. It takes a while to get people out to verify that everything that you want to do with the land can be done.

Can't imagine why it takes them so long. I also bought this land because of this. How close it is to one of the biggest national parks in town. Excess, if not the country. People come and they camp in these mountains. They camp in the mountains out there and they look for that mountain, which is Needlepoint Peak, I think it's called. You guys will tell me in the comments if I'm wrong or not. Phil.

Yeah.

I need some inspiration. I'm thinking teepees, dirts, containers. I want to go see it live. So I'm going to take us and we're going to steal somebody else's homework. Hey, thanks for having us. I'm Cody.

I'm Ian Tyler. This is Brian.

And we're so happy to have you. This place is amazing. Thank you. Can we be totally nosy and walk around it?

Absolutely. Let's look at some yurts.

Okay. You have this view out. That's incredible.

So this is the quintessential hill country. Our property is 46 acres and we have six units that are down this way and then three that are up the hill and one straight across from going to go look at in a little bit. So 10 total.

10 total. By the way, we have Brian here for all the numbers. Brian, what did you buy this place for?

3.1 more or less million.

How many yurts do you have on this Property?

We have 10 yts plus one yurt that we use for spa massage.

Yeah, love that. What's the average daily rate?

As high as 550 a night. Or we could be as low as 198 a night.

How much does a yurt cost to build?

Leaving out land acquisition costs, we're between 125 and 150. Including all the utilities and infrastructure that goes around the yurt.

Yeah, yeah.

The word for yurt in Mongolian is ger. And so what we have are Mongolian ger. So we're going to go tour. Maggie.

Ger. Oh, let's get into it. All right, guys, let's go. Look at this. This is amazing. Wait, how much does that cost to build?

So that started as a galvanized tub, and we put tile on the bottom and plastered the sides and added a pool pump, like a sand filter, pool pump and a heater.

This is so sexy.

You can throw some ice in it in the summer and it's your cold plunge.

No way. You're tricky. I like this. Then we've got this little fireplace. Okay. This is amazing. Wow. How cool is this? Yes, they're very unique.

So this is a traditional Mongolian gur. It's all hand painted. The wood that they use to make the lattice is Siberian pine. And they hand strip it, and then you can kind of tell it's bent in places. They steam it to bend it. And then these are called bagan. This is the female and this is the male. And they're holding up the tuno, which is the connection between the earth and the sky equally.

What a cool spot. Okay, so I think we should go talk about not the type of business that gets done here, but the real type of business you want to do it. Okay. One, two, three. Okay. This is where the business actually happens in the laundry room. Talk to me about what's going on here.

So this is where all the real work happens. We bring all the dirty laundry in. We wash it, refold it, make sure it's clean and wrinkle free. We have a list here of which units are. Are going to be open on which days.

I love a checklist. This is so cool. So basically, you have all the things that you've learned over owning Airbnbs for this long. You're like, okay, do all of this. They have to check it off and then you know they're done when they've checked it off and signed off on it. Yes. You guys have turned this not into a job, but a business. And I think so often businesses are actually just glorified jobs because you don't have processes and people that overlay on top of the business.

The process is huge.

How much did you make with this property last year?

Yes.

We had gross revenue of just under 800,000 and net income of just under 300,000.

Nice. So this business makes money.

It does make money.

So it turns out you can buy land without having a ton of money. It turns out you can do it faster than you're told. And it turns out you can do it without a ton of permission from other people. Those who say it's impossible should get out of the way of those of us who are doing it. You can literally just do things. You guys, what should I do with this land? Comment below. Your best idea. I'm going to pick one of you guys and you're going to get a little surprise. Ah, this is rare. I can't believe we found this out here. Oh, wait a second. Did anybody not know that I wrote a book because it's.