Mobile #MailboxMoney #Podcast Ep. 26 — From 9-to-5 to Full-Time Investor: Tommy Dee land shark

Don't forget that. Welcome to silver crest opportunity fund. 4, 3, 2. We're here today on another episode of the Mobile Mailbox Money podcast here with Tommy D. Tommy, appreciate having you on the channel today here on the podcast. We've seen each other at multiple real estate investment conferences, you know, just to name a few. I think it was think realty. Also Arizona Real Estate Investors association, avid investor, avid networker, happy to rub shoulders with the Atami. Maybe if you could just touch on who you are, what you do out in the market and we can kind of get underway here on the podcast today.

Hey, all, been great. Thanks for having me on your podcast, man. I, I know we've, we've shared a couple of hallways and a couple of conference rooms for sure, and we've had a couple of conversations about what you do, about what I do, and I just appreciate the opportunity to come and talk with you and your followers and viewers about real estate investing. It's a passion we both obviously have a strong affinity for. So I just appreciate being able to introduce myself to you and your clan. So you were just on a. I think you and I did an onboarding with my AI model, if I'm not mistaken. Right. For my podcast, actually just a YouTube channel. I'm not as fancy as, as you, my friend. And that's kind of, that's kind of where I'll start explaining what I do. You know, you're in the mobile home space, mobile home parks and private notes and stuff like that, which is one way of investing and making money in real estate. And then I do, I do something completely the opposite, but very similar in the sense that, that, you know, it's not something you're commonplace. So I'm in dirt development. I'm in land acquisition. I'm in, I'm in fix and flipping soil. And so I buy, buy real estate that is not developed. That's basically raw land. And then we do things to that raw land to add value by going and getting it rezoned or, or subdivided or entitled to be something in the future. So like a mobile home park. And sometimes, and oftentimes the places we develop will fit residential, commercial and industrial. And so when it comes to our market and where we are, we are in everywhere in Arizona, but I also expand across the country. We do, we do land deals from Maryland all the way to, all the way to Washington State, all the way down to New Mexico. So land for us is something that is kind of copy and paste, if you will, because, you know, you have all the same steps every single time, no matter what. And I think that holds true to the same in your industry, doesn't it?

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, can be replicated depending on what kind of market and things of that nature. How do you choose, you know, what kind of markets you go into? Say someone were wanting to put themselves in your shoes. You know, you've got a pretty wide breadth across the nation. It sounds like, you know, what are some identifiers that you use in order to evaluate the opportunity, you know, and ultimately take that bet in that market?

Well, if I've got two answers to that question, Alden, I got the old way and I got the new way. Which one do you want to know?

Hear them both?

Well, I'll start with the old way, which will bring the value of what, what, what the new way has, has come about. But the old way of doing land is to discover where people need to live. Like really that's what it comes down to is how do, how did, how we do and determine where real estate is needing to be bought, the raw land is needing to be bought is by looking at where, where people are going to need to live, to go to work and to go shopping. Now the reason why I say those two factors is because it's typically by a highway. So you, you find what is called the path of progress. And, and Arizona Real Estate Association, Arizona Real Estate Investors association has a great, great video about this. It was like a three spot segment, I believe I was in, I was in a segment of it where we, the path of progress and how, how we identify and determine where we're going to go. But it's basically just based on where we're going to find, you know, people and where we're going to be able to have a certain amount of people to support the employment and the retail. So you got to have a place to make the money, you got to have a place to spend the money and you got to have a place to live waiting for those two things to happen or while you're making those two things happen. So as a developer, that's what we do to, that's what we use to identify it. Where we identify it is a variety of places. Much like you guys have your resources to find mobile homes and mobile home parks. The resources I use are, for example, out here, it's the Arizona Department of Transportation. They're going to tell you where the roads are going out here. Currently there's a path called path of progress called i11. I11 is going to come through basically the state of Arizona and connect Las Vegas to Nogales. And they're going to do that because have you ever driven down i10 to try and get down to Tucson? Probably a nightmare situation every single time. But if you have a secondary path now that reduces the chances of back up some traffic because you're relieving the congestion of the area. And so I've witnessed over the eight years I've been in Arizona and I've only been here eight years, I've witnessed how bad it is getting around town. And the reason is because the people are coming, they're here and they need a place to be. Absolutely. So that's what I've been focused on for the last six years is identifying these places to put these things such as like build to rent communities. These are the. Not to, to say that you're in a bad, a bad market, but it's a similar, it's a similar market that's getting caught, you know, it's catching fire. But these built to rent communities, they're building stick built homes that are only 3 foot of concrete away from each other. Right. You have more, you have more privacy in a mobile home park than you do in a, in a built to rent community. You know, at least as far as like how many square foot per, per unit you have as far as the lot and, and stuff like that. So these are things that we look at as developers and we say, okay, the density here is high. It doesn't always mean that you're going to have a high return on investment. But it, it's definitely been one of the factors in driving real estate development is where can we get the best, the best property and get the most money for it. And literally out here in Arizona it's just becoming easier and easier to develop in the path of progress because everything is right there. So we currently have, Sorry, there's some background noise at the office here. We currently have a scenario where we're developing, we're developing in rural areas because people are wanting to get back to off grid living. They're wanting to get into doing specific like intentional living and stuff like that. And so we're using, we're using rural indicators, places that have like a post office and maybe a volunteer fire department nearby. And what we'll do is we'll take down sections of land and then it'll incorporate people to live there by putting in some roads, infrastructure, water, electric, doing those things that, that is what starts building communities and start building areas for people to be so there's two ways to do it. We can do infill lots where we're already building, where everything's at, or we can go out to the rural areas and build where there's nobody at. The cost is lower, but the risk of not selling is higher. So it really does depend on what you're after. So as far as the end. So that was basically the old way. That's.

That's the old way, right? Yeah. So what's, what's the new way that you kind of put me on the other day? I think we're thinking the same thing of art. Is it artificial intelligence that you incorporate in, you know, trying to find new opportunities or how to evaluate opportunities? Maybe you could touch slightly on that.

Absolutely. Do I have the ability to share my screen at all here?

Why don't you go ahead and try real quick? I'll grant the availability if it asks.

Yeah, yeah, Sorry. I should have probably pulled that in earlier, but yeah, I would like to introduce everyone to. What I use is artificial intelligence. ChatGPT. You know, a lot of people use ChatGPT as kind of like a search engine, if you will. Kind of like asking Google or Siri to do something and just parrot back information that it was able to scan off of the Internet. But the. It's not giving me the option to share it.

You should see at the bottom, there should be just a share option with a green arrow.

I got. Yeah, I click on it, it says the only the host can share in this meeting. Maybe it's because I'm operating from my cell phone. Could be. So to not delay your programming, you can go back and cut and edit that out if you need to. But what we did was with ChatGPT, we developed an AI model that acts as an assistant to us as an invest, you know, investment group or an investor. I actually am part of an investment group called Landshark. And it was started because of this AI model that we were, that we were able to build basically with the AI model. Now what we're able to do, what used to take like three weeks of what I just described, like going out physically driving around looking for property, finding it, going back, getting a parcel ID number, looking up the owner, doing a script, you know, skip trace, get the owner, get a letter, get them on the phone, go back and forth with, with negotiations, ask him, you know, like, well, can we, you know, can we be creative? Can we do owner financing? Because it's not the same as buying a house, but it is a little bit in the Sense that you're trying to get the best deal, you're going to make your money on the buy side. That still holds true. But when you do it with land, what you need to keep in mind is that it could take anywhere between six to 18 months to add the value to it. Like on a house, you go in and put some drywall and texture and new appliances and stuff. You're done with your fiction flip in about three months. But to take raw land and get it ready for development takes six to 18 months. And so our fix and flip time is a lot longer, which means that we're going to have holding costs. So we negotiate on the side of time over cash. If I can get the owner to appreciate the work that we're going to do, then what they'll do is they'll let me wait to close on it in 18 months, they'll give me a purchase option on it, and I might use a purchase option instead of a purchase contract because then I'm still able to get him to convey title to me. All he has to do is go over and just readjust the quick claim deed back to him. Done. So we do all that type of negotiating. It takes another couple of weeks to get through that. It could take up to. It could take up to a month to get a land deal under contract. So what I did was I took those 30 years of experience doing that. I spent 65 hours and a couple thousand dollars, you know, getting educated by people that know how to, you know, build AI models. I mean, AI has only really been out chatgpt since, what, 2022?

It hasn't all that long.

No, I've been. I've been on it, though, since 2022. I basically downloaded it when it came out. I was actually beta user of Deep Seq before it came out. I've been in the Iowa world since day one. And because I knew what it was going to do, I have a little history outside of real estate investing. I have a nursing degree and with a Bachelor's of Science, I understood the significance to what ChatGPT could do as soon as I started using it and began to educate myself. And I've paid with time and money to basically become an AI practitioner, meaning that I run my business off of AI. Now. I no longer go through the old method of acquiring land. I literally get on a map now and I take a picture screenshot of a map and I send it to ChatGPT through my AI model called Deal Hunter by Landshark. Deal Hunter by Landshark will take a picture of an aerial and identify the areas that would be best for development. Then it'll go. And I can deep dive into that. I can find. You should lay out those cigars, bro.

Under the weather here, unfortunately.

Oh, bless you, brother. I know I had some folks that were having some issues over the last week at work, and I'm. I myself am like, man, just stay away from me. I ain't got time to go down. So I hope you get better. But, no, the AI model that I built, I can feed it pictures, and it'll provide me more information than I could get in three weeks with four professionals. Not saying that we're replacing brokers and title agents or anything like that. I'm just getting rid of all the busy work, the legwork that professionals get bogged down with, you know, And I relate that to when I was in nursing. Doctors don't want to be bogged down by patient care needs. That's why they have nurses and CNAs and medical assistants, is because there's a hierarchy to taking care of people while they're sick in the hospital. Right. And so what I did was I incorporated that into my AI model and I made it to where this thing does all of the. All of the ancillary work that us professionals need, okay, to be able to do our job. We're practitioners. And so when I was working on my doctor and a nurse practitioner, I was basically going to be a doctor. I'm just not a medical doctor. I'm going to be a nursing doctor. And that was part of the American Healthcare Act. I was actually in ASU working on my doctorate degree when Covid hit and I decided I was going to retire. Oh, wow. Like, eight months of school left and I'm ready to go. But Covid was something I didn't want to deal with, and I didn't follow the science, if you will. I remember that. I'll remember that phrase for the rest of my life. But from that experience come where I'm at today. We've built a company up to over $10 million in construction services. Gross revenue is around two and a half million dollars a year. And all of it's done through AI now and our job schedule, our job budget, everything we do for, you know, going out and identifying where we're going to be building and where we're going to be setting up shop to sell. Because we've expanded beyond just buy. Like, I started with five acres and split it into four lots and sold it. We're up To I've got a meeting at 3:30 that I'm going to, to to buy 80 acres in Yuma and do it again. We're going to have of 40 houses down there. So some, some commercial development. We're even looking at possibly putting up a medical center, having a hospital built there as well. Oh wow. Five years ago in 2020 when I started the construction company, it was started to build, you know, just to build custom homes and now we're building custom communities. So AI has really helped us accelerate.

Our ability to do things to say the least. You know, saving you time, more efficient about evaluations. You can probably be more competitive on the buy if you can do all of those items that much quicker. You know, at the end of the day you got that, that next edge and actually people that are watching here, I, I was kind of blown away. You can go log into that chat bot right now. How do you navigate someone to do that? Just tell someone how to go search that right now.

Yeah, so I mean if you have the, if you have the chatgpt downloaded and you can go to explore GPTs, just type in Deal Hunter and it'll be pretty much right at the top. Deal Hunter by Landshark is what it's called. And there's a. Let me see. I think I might have a picture of it that I can share in my background. If I can't share the screen, I can at least change my background around to identify what it is. I could have thought of that prior too, but I thought I was really going to be able to share the screen.

We're on the fly here.

Yeah, I do have people that use both of the free version and the version as well. And we are noticing that people that are on the $20 per month version, they have a better experience with it because they're able to, they're able to work with the program longer. I mean people are getting addicted to working on it. And so if you don't have the $20 plus version, you only get about 20 or 30 prompts before it shuts you down. And you got to wait. Like I used to call it GPT Jail. So the, with GPT Jail the timer stops and then also deletes any memory if you ever. If you close the browser, I think. So the $20 per month one is really the best one to go with.

Which they're subscribing to the higher version of ChatGPT technically. So buying the full capabilities of ChatGPT and then utilizing his Deal Deal Deal Hunter in order to, you know, get those larger prompts. I run into that, you know, sometimes of doing too many prompts if you don't have the paid version. So, you know, huge utility at the end of the day. Love, you know, you kind of gave some gems there about finding new desirable areas, investing just outside of the high population density, you know, path of progress and identifying that through the artificial intelligence. You know, it's important to be nimble in the market currently because traditional real estate investments and traditional ways of doing things are kind of being phased out now, you know, with this new century that we're living in and new technology that we have available. And it's important to be on, on the next edge, you know, to give you the next edge ultimately to find and evaluate opportunities that much quicker and parlay your long time, you know, seasoning in the industry with the niche, the niches that you capitalize in. I love, you know, how open you are about all of that. You know, you could ultimately hold this for yourself, but you're actually putting it out. And actually what I love about this is it is an AI model. So it'll actually start getting better, you know, as the more people start feeding the AI. So, you know, love that. You know, if you want to just touch on it, you know, lightly, maybe a recent one that you did where you found, you know, new opportunity. Was there something recent that you, that you found through this?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, we use it three days, three times a week in a deal room that we host on Zoom. I'll share with you our Zoom link. You hopefully can come to one of our meetings where we're doing a deal room Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We've got them spaced out morning, afternoon and midday so that people can come and check them out. But Mondays at 9 o', clock, Wednesdays at 3pm and Fridays at noon. We're running a deal room for about 40 minutes on Zoom call and people can come and see how this works. And so we have people that actually, because our room's full of investors and people that are looking to do deals, we do charge for people to present their deal. But they bring it up, we show them what's going on, we run them through the entire thing and hopefully try to find them an investor, you know, and from what we've done so far, we've been, we've been doing really good with finding people and linking them up. Right now, the newest one was we had a guy that wanted to do an RV storage facility. RV storage facility typically develops for about $6 a square foot, and it usually comes out at about 10 to $12 a square foot. So it's got a pretty decent ROI. Right. So what I did was I used the AI model to identify, went on LoopNet and said to identify any potential vacant properties or already in progress properties. It brought back 10 properties. I said, minimize this list to the ones that will produce at least a 40% ROI. It dropped the list down to three.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Right? So now just simply by telling it to give it a parameter, that was huge, but they came back and said zero. Well, I could adjust that to 20% or something, you know what I mean? Right. I gave it a filter, and it knew exactly how to break that filter down within. Within seconds, not minutes, not hours, not weeks, not days, seconds. And so that's the value in it is that I eliminated seven bullshit deals that I would never. I would never touch anyway. Right. And so I had to give it zero time. How I know they were that way is because when I built the AI model, I taught it to provide me sources. And so when it gave me the sources of the first 10 deals, I could go back and look at every one of those listings if I wanted to.

Right?

Because I told it I needed a 40% ROI, it knows that I need to do really good on the buy side. So it eliminated everything that was too, too high, over $6 a square foot. Actually, it made it go down to $3 a square foot on the buy side. Right. So turning, turning around and being able to use those three deals, we narrowed it down to one deal already in progress, has permit or has engineering, but no permits, and the price point on it is too high. But it's suggested since it doesn't have permits to go ahead and offer owner financing, where we give the owner value after we get the project done. And so since the project is owner financed or can be owner financed, we were able to negotiate the deal so that the owner gets all the, all the extra money they wanted off of the. Off of the future value after we get open and refinance it with an SBA loan that's 30 years at 3%.

Loved it. I wonder if there's a way on the back end that if these deals end up hitting these benchmarks and it's just blanket surfacing search maybe once a week that it auto sends an offer or like a loi or something like that, that would be interesting to incorporate. Now you're just sending, you know, sending contracts out ultimately and then fielding great return on investment Deals that hit these benchmarks, you know, the capabilities are endless at that point.

Well, Deal Owner by Landshark does have that capability currently to use. If you, if you feed it a list, it will produce the letters, but you got to send it back out through your CRM. Deal Hunter 2.0 will actually be able to do it for you. We're, we're upgrading to the plush version. It's $200 a month and so and anyone who joins our Landshark Mastermind will get access to that CRM where they'll be able to just, they, they want to buy land and in Palm Springs, Florida that I'll be able to do blanket offers through mail, cold call, whatever, and they'll be able to do it all through Deal Hunter 2.0. So Deal Hunter 2.0 is exclusive to only the Landshark members. To be a member of Landshark, it's $5,000 a year or a lifetime membership of $50,000. The $50,000 membership, it also includes exclusive deal rights to all deals. So the $5,000 membership is just access, but the 50,000 is the profit share. And how profit share with it.

How would they go about signing up and contacting you? Maybe with some questions or want some clarity? How would they do that?

I do have, you know, you can contact me directly through website on stand store, Stand store forward slash Tommy D. And that's T O M M Y capital D E E so and Stan, my standout store also includes the Mastermind. So you can sign up for the Mastermind there. You can sign up for a one on one call, you can get a, a property evaluation where you call me up and you do the same same. We do the same onboarding that I did with you. It's 500 bucks. Like some people can just go and download it and use it and play with it and I have no problem with that. But if you really want to know how powerful it is and know how to use it right and get it to work right for you, it's better to just pay for the onboarding and get that, get that one hour training and go through it, or you can pay for the, the full property evaluation and, and get a, get a full on property evaluation done for you. So I mean it's, there's one way or the other. You can do turnkey or you can do it diy. This thing, this thing is powerful enough to handle it both ways. So we have clients that we do concierge investing for. I like the way that you put it Mailbox money, you know, and we provide a full concierge service to our clients that are, you know, the most passive of investors. And through this model, I'm able to actually share with them every deal we do in their, you know, in their portfolio. And they are able to see and track everything that's seen, you know, that's done on their behalf. So it's really that powerful of a tool. Love it.

You know, could be life changing. You know, at the end of the day, it is life changing, actually, now that I think about it. You know, we've discussed it pretty in depth today. You'll have to forgive me. It's slightly under the weather here. Went to SDIRA Summit recently. We were in Nashville at Diversified Mortgage Expo. I saw you at these other conferences. So we've been traveling frequently. Pick something up in the airport or something. But Tommy D, you know, dropping gems today. Go back and watch this. You know, go check out Deal Hunter. You know, get involved at the end of the day, take some action today. You know, the worst thing to do is to do nothing, you know, and to be a habitual educator and never do a deal. This may be able to provide you, you know, that next edge, that next step to go out and actually do your first deal in land investments, development, path of progress and. And all the above. So, Tommy, appreciate growing the relationship and having you on the channel today. If you're at all interested in anything Tommy has available, check it out. Feel free to reach out to him direct, like, comment, follow and subscribe, and we'll see you next time.

Bam. Bam, bam. Good stuff, man.