In this interview, Jonathan Haveles recounts his lifelong involvement in real estate, beginning with obtaining a sales license after high school and working in residential sales in Florida. The 2008 recession prompted him to shift from agent work to investing, motivated by seeing investors reap profits while agents did the legwork. He experimented with fix‑and‑flip, REO, and short‑sale flips, and simultaneously pursued commercial real estate education (CCIM), where he first met Kim. Around 2010‑2011, his father's long‑standing interest in land led them to explore vacant‑land investing as a low‑effort, high‑return side hustle. The strategy quickly matched the earnings of his broader investing business while requiring far less time per transaction. Jonathan emphasizes that vacant‑land investing is not his sole focus; he and Kim continue to work on deals in other sectors, adhering to a diversification philosophy that avoids putting all eggs in one basket.
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So Jonathan, welcome to our show. Thank you so much for being our guest. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, super happy to have you here. So we always like to start with having you tell us a little bit about your background and what ultimately led you to focus on vacant land as an investing model.
So I've basically been in real estate my entire adult life, came out of high school and My dad was a real estate agent. I was interested in it, got into it. So I started like everybody else, got my license, or maybe not like everybody else, but that's where I started. I started with getting my license and just doing residential sales and focusing on that. And then I was in Florida at that time and 2008 hit pretty hard. We had just started investing at that point. I, and the reason I got into investing was honestly because I was working as an agent And I was handling investor transactions and I'm like, they're making all the money in this deal and I'm doing all the work. So I'm like, why don't I do the work and make the money? So I was like, I'm going to start doing investing myself. And so we started doing that. Unfortunately, the timing, we didn't really lose anything, but it never really got taken off the way we wanted because of what the timing was with coming out of or going into that recession. So we ended up doing some fix and flips and REO. Sales, short sale flips, things like that. During all of that, I started getting into commercial real estate. I went through all the CCIM things. In fact, that's where I met Kim 20 years ago, I think roughly at a workshop. And then we re— I reached back and reconnected a few months ago, but originally it was at one of those workshops because of that. And then my father was always fascinated with land and he did like some subdividing and did some stuff in the '70s and '80s and In 2010, 11-ish, he basically said we should be looking at land again. And so we did. And so it was basically just going to be like a little add-on because it was something he knew and it wasn't a market a lot of people were doing, like you said. And it just took off right around that time. It went well for us. We made basically equal money to what we were making in our regular investing business with a lot less time. It was just a little side hustle to add to it. And it was like, why aren't we putting more Time and effort into this just because of how much— I'll get into that, but how much less work time is involved in each transaction. And so we just rolled with it from then and it's been a great deal. It doesn't mean that's the only thing I do, obviously. The fact that I'm here, there's other parts that Kim and I were just talking about, some deals that we're working on in other sectors. I don't believe in putting all of your eggs in one basket, even in real estate.
