EP 457 – Land Investing with Jill DeWit and Steven Butala

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This is the no Closers show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Closure show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here and I am jacked up. Really excited to have our special guest join us today. You're gonna see him in a few weeks with our note camp commercial aspect of things, but it's been too long. We run in a lot of similar circles. We've got similar friends. I see them commenting on friends posts and vice versa, back and forth. So I knew when we decided to have not Kent commercial, I had to reach out to these two rock stars. Absolutely. Get them on here. And we're excited to have them on the noclusion show. There we go. How's it going? How's it going? Doing good stuff. Jill DeWitt and Steve and Jack Bachelor from landinvestors.com. what's going on, everybody?

Great to be here, Scott. Thank you. It's long overdue.

Yeah, man. Excited. So those that don't know you out there, you guys are rocking roll. You got an amazing podcast that I love and listen to out there. But talk a little bit about kind of what you guys, what your focus is and how you really made land the sexy niche that you love.

It's anything but sexy. You know, we've been buying and selling real estate since the 90s, specifically rural vacant land. In fact, we've done more than almost 16,000 deals. And around 2015, we just got tired of answering this question. How do you guys buy this so cheap? Can you show me how to do it? Because I love buying real estate from you, but you got to be doing it cheaper somehow. That was the birth of Land Academy. Jill and I spent, I don't know, two or three months putting it together. And then the podcast happened because it was a more efficient way to answer questions. And so now we're sitting in front of you.

That's a really Reader's Digest abridged aversion. I imagine that's tough, though. But I agree, the podcast is a great way. We've been answering a lot of questions and communicating out there. Let's talk about that, though, because I think a lot of people kind of shy away from land and there's opportunities there definitely that most people are missing out on.

Right? Yeah. I mean, my whole career I've heard some version of this sentence. Why do you buy land? You can't do anything with it. It doesn't generate any income, it doesn't produce any. And to which my answer is, would you buy a $10,000 piece of land for $900 today, right now, and then resell it for five? Because that's what we do, only add a few zeros now. So it's all about finding unwanted land. That's the whole key.

Now by the unwanted land, is that what you're saying? Where somebody's tired of having it or trying to move to something else? Or is it just a right of all those things?

Yeah. So over the years we perfected how we buy property. I call us like a tech company that happens to buy and sell real estate. So we in a very predictable manner send out mass mailed mail merge driven mailers in the mail, you know, the US then offers. Right, exactly. And for every 300 or so offers we send out, we buy a piece of property. And there's a lot of different ways to do it. And a lot of our members take on their own way. The most successful ones do anyway, but we kind of scrape the bottom. So we'll find a. In fact, we just bought a piece, a commercial piece of property in Ohio that's probably worth, I don't know, $900,000 retail. Retail for 50 grand. Just because they just, they didn't want it any longer. They were just tired of dealing with it. So there's a garage sale mentality that I like to use where people, if people hold a garage sale, they're not doing it because it's a profit driven thing. They're kind of, they're cleaning out the garage and there's tons of people who inherit land or any assets for that matter. We do it with houses actually every week that just don't want it anymore. They'd rather just get a check from us in a week or so and not deal with it. And they know full well, they know full well that it's. They're not getting top dollar. All they do is thank us.

When you say the garage sale aspect of things, that makes me think back to a decade ago. And I think we're starting to see more of that where we had a, almost like a garage sale economy for a while. Everybody got all excited about prices going up. They refinanced their house, they pulled the equity out, they bought toys and Then the market went south on them and they had to sell the toys to try to make the mortgage payments. Right. And I think we're going to see more of that.

You pull up to a garage sale and there's a shop room there that's 25 bucks at home Depot and it doesn't look like it's ever been used and it's got a 50 cent sticker on it. You're probably going to buy it and the set and the, the seller is not sitting around saying, I know this is worth $25 and I'm going to sit here and wait. They're just, they're happy to get it out of there. So that's exactly how we buy land. I'll cut to the chase. Our secret is that there's two of us. I'm the data guy. I have a completely different skill set. In fact, when Jill and I joined forces, our numbers literally quintupled in acquisitions and sales because she's just so good at with people and on the phone and that's not my forte. Including right now.

Jill, what do you think it is that makes you so successful? Is it just listening to people or is it just talking to people and seeing what they're letting them tell you what their underlying really need is and.

Just quickly figuring out if you're helping them or not. You know, even on the buy side or the sell side, people that they get our offer in the mail and they're excited and ready to go and I'm ready, then I'm here to help them and make it as easy as possible and take care of it for them. And they're just like, ah. I mean, they're just hugging me, saying thank you. I didn't know I was going to do with this and I just want it off my plate kind of thing. And then there's people that they're calling, they might be unhappy, they don't want to sell and I'm not going to talk them into it. I say thank you very much, I wish them well and send them on their way. So the whole thing is I always have said make my phone ring. And that's what he does, whether it's on the buy side, getting the offers out there and good offers and they come. And if, and if I need more flow, we just send more offers. And he's got the pricing down to a T. And then on the sell side, Steven really kind of oversees. He's really good with the marketing of it too. We're all involved. We have a Big team. But at the end of the day, he's got his hands in a little bit because no one knows how to do these postings as well as he does and make them look as good and do the videos. So he directs our team on how to do that and that's part of what we share with our community as well, how to do it too.

So you.

So selling is easy. And he gets my phone ringing there and that's it. And you just quickly. It's important to quickly figure out who's a tire kicker and who is your real buyer. And it's so funny because often you may have experience with this too. Scott, the guy that's on the phone the longest with you and asks the most questions is probably not really going to be the buyer. Your real buyer is the guy that says, hi, I'm moving your money around. I need your wire instructions, I'm going to send it at 5 o' clock kind of thing then. And you know, you have two phone calls like that and that's it kind of.

So works for dating.

What was that, Stephen? I missed that, Sorry.

It works for dating too. Like the person, the girl who asks you the most questions is really, really wants to know all the details is not right. That's not going to happen.

Yeah, she starts asking your social and all that. No, not the right girl. Exactly. What were your last three addresses?

What's your birthday in the last four social? That's a good point there. I liked a couple points there and that's why I hit a couple nuggets out there. I think everybody tries to do things themselves and if you can partner up with somebody, it's a true case of one plus one equals three, not one plus one equals two.

Right, Exactly. And it's great because in our community, with our, you know, all the investors that we work with, I'll talk to them on the phone and they'll say, I'm the Jill in the relationship and I'm Steve in this relationship. And it really does work out well. And we tell people often too, so much of what we do. Data does the heavy lifting. So it's really, it's not hard. You know, once you learn how to pick a county and price mailers, all the stuff that, you know, we go into great detail that Steven's perfected, you know, what you're good at, what you're not good at. And if data's hard for you, get a data guy. And if you hate talking on the phone, that's what Stephen did. He got Me, because talking on the phone is not his thing.

All these systems I've devised over the years, decades now, where I look back on it, we're all driven by the fact that I didn't want to talk to anybody on the phone. I still every mailer I do, I hone in my pricing. So then there's that much less people calling in and just making it more efficient for Jill.

Exactly.

And Jill's the absolute opposite. She starts down that verbal path with, and I can see, I stand in her office doorway in awe often.

Thank you.

She's just turned a deal that never should be happening into a transaction.

Well, the key is, though, you just listen, like you said, Scott, and you know, if they're really the right person that are not, and don't try to talk them into something they don't want or they don't need, that's just going to backfire.

Yeah. You can never force that hand there. You just gotta, you ask them questions, leading questions, and they'll tell you yes or no, and you kind of go from there. I would love, I'm sure our listeners out there, too, especially love the fact that can you give a little bit how you're identifying these counties? Are they smaller counties, bigger counties? I'm sure it's a mixture of a lot for you there. But, Stephen, what is it? What's are you finding your bigger bang for the bucks? The more the rural it is or the, the more, the larger the populations?

So if you take a look at, let's use, I don't know, we'll use Manhattan, New York as an example. Let's talk about Chicago and Los Angeles, three biggest cities in the country. In all three of those places, if you get in your car and drive two hours in one direction, you're going to get into a perfect spot, a perfect place to buy real estate. For this, I will say this, and I, and I truthfully mean this from my soul, there's no bad county to do this. And it's all pricing and yield, Mailer yield. But if you're starting out, you want to be about two hours within a really urban area. And then because think about a typical Craigslist buyer that's kind of, we don't sell everything on Craigslist, not even the majority. But if you think of that mentality where they want to buy it cheap, they want to be able to drive through it on the weekend and they want to use it really quickly. So that seems to work out great. And then from there, I really look for consistency so you can drive two hours in a lot of different directions, but you want to find pricing consistency for properties that are for sale. All kinds of properties, houses and land and everything. Because we kind of teach that it's all sort of one market working together.

That's a good point. I really like that aspect of two hours away. It's kind of not quite the what's. What I'm looking at here, the path of improvement, but it is a little bit worth thinking. People are looking at it and looking for those, I won't say bargain buys, but looking for something that can actually, like you said, go to on the weekends or hang out there, get away from the traffic in la for sure.

Yeah. Geez.

Yeah.

My gosh.

Or even just used for the weekends. You know, people that, you know, they want to. Some want to be off the grid and some just want a place to put a tent and fish, you know, or park their RV on the weekends and things like that.

Or hunting's a big one. I mean, the vast majority of the property that we sell are to wholesalers. We buy it so cheap that we just Send groups of APNs to other people and they say yes or no and then they go. It doesn't mask the fact that it still needs to be in a good area and it still be a good piece of property. We're just doing all the work for them, for the. For the retailers we call them.

Wow, I love that. Now with the commercial aspect of things, are you seeing a lot of the commercial stuff in those kind of same areas or zone stuff that's getting rezoned or things like that?

For commercial property, what we look for when it comes in is has it ever been marketed? And the answer is almost always no. And then I start to look for proximity and traffic counts and everything else that. I was a commercial real estate broker before I started all this. So I'm very familiar with what makes a commercial piece of property viable. And then we just go to town on the pricing. It's almost always the same story, whether it's residential, commercial or rural vacant land. That's just unwanted. You know, you sent out a few thousand letters and just like clockwork, two or three or eight people call back and Jill turns one or two deals out of it.

Yep, that's a smart way of doing business there. Now do you ever get properties that have been owner financed or defaulted debt? That's owners that are calling you on this as well. But there's a look at buying that stuff?

Well, I've been a Note seller. I've never been a note buyer, never. But I've sold a lot of property that I've sold it on terms. Let the note mature, and then we sell it at a discount. We don't do that too much anymore because we don't sell property on terms any longer. Just because Jill and I like our current hair color.

That is the truth.

Selling no properties on terms is we have tons and tons of members who do it successfully every single day. We just came to the determination, I don't know, about three years ago that we're cash people. Yeah.

We're just. There's nothing wrong with that. The reason why I would agree to that, too, because when we buy or take a property back, people like, oh, you could always own or finance and sell on terms. I'm like, yeah, that's not my main lane that I'm working in. I don't want to get on the exit ramp. It takes away from my focus of getting down the road faster. People are always looking for a different alternative with it to find leads and stuff like that. I just didn't know if you saw a lot of that, but I can agree to that. Yes. It's good to have current color hair versus getting a lot whiter. I know. Yeah, you always tell it, but who wants to color it, Right?

Exactly.

What's the. What's the biggest mistake that you see from people that are trying to get into this? They just don't send it out enough. They overthink it because it seems like you've. Once you've honed in your markets and the things like you talked about, and it's just kind of, you know, kind of shotgunning the leads out. Right.

I'm sorry. I have one too. You want to go for. Okay. For me, it's just getting off the ground. So many people overthink it. They're gun shy. They're afraid once I send the offers out, they're going to call me back and I don't know, what do I do? I'm like, never mind. They know what to do. It's just little fear factor. And, you know, it's just doing your homework. We are pretty good about showing people really well how to step by step by step. Anytime I hear someone late, anyone, it's been a long time that said, you know, I made a mistake. But they do make a mistake. They say, oh, I made a mistake. I said, what happened? Well, I didn't quite double my money. I only made 80% or whatever, you know, like, I made you Know what I mean? Like 180%. They're like, I did it wrong. I didn't double my money. I'm like, okay, let's all think about this now. How much did you make? You did just fine. So. And then some people get a little greedy. Like, I want to make 400%. Like, okay, hold on a moment here. Let's just. We want to buy them, right? And just sell them fast and move on. And our, our biggest thing, we both feel this way is I want my buyer to feel so good about this deal. I want them to think they got something fantastic and make more money. And then now we have buyers for life. And that's how we operate all of our businesses.

Isn't it funny when your woman says, oh, we both feel this way when I don't feel that way at all?

It really is. Then, Steve.

All right.

Oh, no. That's how she's feeling right now.

That's awesome.

That's funny.

All right.

The biggest mistake that I see is, and it's a. It's not even a mistake, it's not actually their fault. People that are successful with us have to unlearn everything that they've been learning about real estate since they were tiny little kids from their parents buy and hold path of growth. There's all these constant, use a broker, buy through an escrow agent, not a lawyer. I mean, all this stuff, we have to. We spend a lot of time and energy undoing all of that. Because when you look at a regular real estate deal that, let's say your mother in law might do, who's not in the real estate business, you know, there's just a ridiculous amount of excessive fees and time and a lot of really unprofessional people that are trying to just take a piece of pie out of it or take a piece of the pie. And so this system that I came up with a lot of years ago excludes all of that. And then the second thing that I see is this concept, and this is a key ingredient to what we do. When we send all these letters out, we reach all these people, and the ones that really are interested, they call us back. So we wake up in the morning with a bunch of emails and a bunch of letters, a bunch of signed offers in the mailbox, and all the work is done. And I think that so many people, even specifically commercial real estate people who are really successful, wake up in the morning and they go out and try to find a deal. They go out and don't let it come in and so that's a now you put yourself in a complete position of control. I can send out 10,000 letters tomorrow. I can send out 80,000, I can send out 100 or zero. And so the biggest hang up people have is they can't get past that. I got to send out mail. And yeah, it's not free. It was free. They do it.

Actually, it was free. They probably still wouldn't do it because free has no value. You know what I mean?

That's what she says. That's what Jill says.

They overanalyze their pricing. I'm like, you know what, Just move on. Get it out there. You'll figure it out, you'll tweak it. And every time someone says, oh, that mailer bombed. Well, what happened? I only bought two. Okay, come on. Kind of thing. You still bought some. How many did you get that you turned down? You'll get that traction if you price it all wrong and you send out you overprice. Well, okay, now everybody calls you back.

Okay?

We got to figure that, you know, bad news, good news, bad news. Everybody wants to sell, but you adjust and you can talk. And we teach this too. And I talk about a lot, how to say, all right, I goofed there. I looked at your property. It's really worth this. This is what I can do, you know, kind of thing. And it often will work out when you're really explaining it properly. And then the opposite is true too, if you really like. You know, we have some people that do this on purpose, by the way. They'll mail offers, crazy offers to the whole state just to see what comes back.

Because they're nuts like that.

Because they're nuts. It is hilarious. And they'll buy stuff and it works.

They'll buy a commercial piece of property in the center of the zip code in the most urban area for like $180. Literally.

Silly. I don't know.

It's truly amazing.

Or even just to get the calls back. And then they get this and then they'll figure out, okay, I meant instead of $500, I meant 5,000 because it's worth 50. And I think. But they got them calling and you can fix that.

That's. It all comes in getting the phone or the emails to ring. It all comes in getting the marketing on the front end.

Right, right, exactly.

And it's so much easier. I still, like, I can't realize that more people are still not using data this way. I don't understand people. You still hear agents getting in their car with 10 business cards in their pockets, and they're gonna go knock on doors. I'm like, are you really doing that? Just canvas the whole area. Everybody.

Which can work. That can work for certain people, you know? You know what also works? A certain percentage of this also works. If you walk into casino, sit down at a thing, crank it, and win the first time as a percentage, that's possible.

But many people then are leaving Vegas like this because they can't pay for their bloody Mary on the flight home. But we have such the same mindset. There's so much online data. There's so much great places to dig in. I tell people, oh, hey, I bought a portfolio of notes, and I've got this lot. Okay, why don't you just reach out to the whole neighborhood real fast, Do a quick metal merch, you know?

Yep, that's it.

That's the best way. We sell property. Sell it to the neighbors.

Exactly.

Yeah. One of the things that we see a lot of. You see a lot of it starting to see more of it coming back in from banks that are calling, and they've gotten. They've taken some land back or they've got some stuff on there on the books they want to get off. They're motivated to sell that debt at a cheap discount just because that's not their main focus of things.

Right.

And we're just like, the same thing. Hey, instead of. We don't do a lot of direct mail. We do a lot of email blasts out to thousands and thousands and thousands of asset managers. Managers. It's great to come in each morning and see, oh, we got leads in this morning. Oh, we got leads in today? Or no, we don't want to do it. Right.

That's exactly it. Let the ones who are interested in serious contact you back. How much easier is that?

I have a question for you, Scott.

Sure, go ahead.

So I have to tell you a short story about my very short note career. The only education product I ever purchased was how to buy notes. And this is probably in around 2011, because all the land stuff's going great. We're buying and selling houses. We don't renovate them. We just wholesale them to people who renovate them. But I'm like, you know what? I need to expand. So I go onto ebay, buy this used package, and I'm loving it, loving it, loving it. And then I got to the point where she said, now you got to call the banks and get this list of asset managers. And that's where I stopped. So you've obviously have a solution for that. Like how do you get that tens of thousands of asset manager list.

So there are literally. You could literally go online like a website Like Lane Guide, Lane Guide.com 160 bucks a year look for REO Asset Management. You can actually filter through by what they're lending on. And then they'll often give you a list of asset managers or some states in the country will publicize lists of mortgage bankers and banks doing business license to do business in that state. And they give you the names, the phone numbers and the email addresses of a lot of these people. Like Texas is really good because Texas likes to share that information. But I could go on right now and pull 3,000 banks that are doing business here in Texas. 275 servicing companies. I'll have the person either in charge of licensing or an interior phone number that or interior email that I can get that I could just market to and say hey, who's the person you talk to? And I don't spend much time on the phones. It used to be 10 plus years ago. I spent a lot of times just dialing for dollars. What I do these days is we'll send an email blast out, see who opened the email and then we'll follow that up with a phone call. If they've opened the email two or three times using Mailchimp FusionSoft to see who's the most opened email. And that's usually the person has something they just haven't gotten around to replying back yet. You know what I mean?

That's what we use too.

Yeah, we use FusionSoft too.

Yeah. And then if they click on it and then you've got them, you know, then you know you've got, if you've got something, they might have something every month to us, but it's every month the same email goes out. We send it out once we send an email out two days later to those that didn't open it the first time around. An opposite timer in the day they've opened it great. They get a different email campaign from us and then we go from there. And two, when somebody sent us a list, I like to send them a nice bottle of whiskey or something. That separates me from the rest of the herd, you know what I mean?

So what's a typical deal for you? Do you buy whole tranches or portfolios or just one offs? What do you do?

It varies, it always varies on what we have. So like I'll give you, we got in a list of 200 semi sub performing contract for deeds in 25 different states. And so we're looking through those, we'll be able to carve a chunk of those out, probably buy 40 to 50 of them once we go through and it hits our numbers. But the thing is a lot of people get stuck when they get a listing like that size. They're oh my God, I can only make three or four offers because this is all I can afford. And I'm like no, I'm gonna make an offer on the whole list, control the tape and then cause the bank would rather deal with one person instead of 50 people. That gives me a bigger bulk discount. I love doing this too. That falls into the land stuff. If I see like ugly assets, you know, really like there's no house on, it's a lot or something like that, I'll literally say okay, I'll buy the asset that you want me to pay full price on, but I want you to give me these five or six properties for free. Cause I'll do like you said, I'll wholesale them out, send a letter to the next door neighbors, you want to buy this on terms? Or give me 5,000 bucks and a $10,000 watch, yours.

So contract for deed is no longer, that's the end of the line, right? It's already been through non performing and all of that.

So what a contract for deed is, it's usually on a Lower valued property, sub 60 sub $70,000 that can't get a traditional bank loan. You had Fannie and Freddie Mac who was left with thousands of thousands of these low value properties. So they sold them off to firms like Harbor Portfolio, a few others who bought thousands of these. And then these funds went out and just offered like owner financing terms. Put $1,000 down, you'll have a 30 year 9.9% interest rate, but we won't care about your credit. Like a rental loan, lease to own before the deed stays in the seller's names for a while. So like I have a bunch of contract for deeds, it's in a variety of entities. We have a 30 year mortgage at 9.9% but the borrower doesn't get the contract or doesn't get the deed until they pay it off to me or get refinanced out. So it's like a traditional note. It's just that the deed is a little bit different. Each state's a little bit different how fast you foreclose. So. But we still see a lot of stuff out there. People like just walk away and I When I see bottom of the barrel stuff, we do direct marketing, actually. We send out a little bit of postcards out to the bottom of the barrel list. We get a lot returned, but all it takes is one person calling out of 100 postcards to make up for the whole mailing piece in a good yield.

Exactly.

Sounds like you have a system just like us. That's great.

Well, that's what I think. It's the 21st century. Can we agree to that? 21st century, not the 19th century. So it's all about systems. So I always like to joke that Scott's here to beam you up. You know what I mean? Steven's here to beam me up. Jill's here to beam me up. And work smarter, not harder, right?

Totally.

There's never been a better time to do this than right now.

I agree.

It's never been easier to purchase real estate based on the data that's about there and resell it. It's never been easier to just get a collection of. You can drop a pin anywhere in this country, get all the data for everybody who owns real estate 1, 2 miles around it, send them a letter and you're going to sell the property if it's priced right.

So that geomarketing aspect is awesome. I did a webinar last night, actually with some of my students about geomarketing to raising capital in an area or if you've got a house for sale, geomarketing from like a mile to 10 miles out to find the buyer for that house via Instagram or Facebook.

And doing that Facebook Marketplace is great for that.

Oh, my gosh. We're speaking technology. I got excited over here.

So HUD came out with a statistic that said 50% of the property, 50% of residences, single family residences. Residences are sold to the friends and relatives of someone who lives a mile from that asset.

Totally the truth. Totally the truth. They want to live near them. They want to come over and hang with them Friday night or Sunday night, watch Game of Thrones and walk home because they've had too much wine.

It sounds like you're speaking from experience there.

I just know marketing and I know people. Okay. You can see my shirt. It's not Game of Note, not Game of Thrones, it's Game of Notes. I love it. So, Steve, you told us how you got into this. Jill. What's your background? What's your previous background before you got into buying land? Let's look.

I want to hear this, too.

We don't talk much. Well, I grew up in Orange County. I was born and raised in Southern California and I watched it and my dad was involved. He was a pilot and he chartered for a lot of these guys. And so we were just in Orange County. We were just at the Newport Beach Boat show last weekend and I said, watch for coal everywhere. You'll see Don Cole's properties. My dad used to fly for him. So I watched it happening and then my dad would invest a little bit and I kind of just kind of tried to learn. And then my very first full time job were for a couple of developers and I loved it. And they would buy the dirt either for office or strip mall. And they would do the whole thing though. They would get the construction loan, build it up, lease it out and hang on to it. And I got to be. It was a real small kind of like, you know, it's like a. Basically a family run company and I got to have my hands in a little bit of everything, so. But then I took a step away from that for many years because I wanted, you know, young and goofing off and wanted to travel, so. And then when Stephen came along, it was like, huh, I know how to do this stuff. Just comes naturally to me. So. And then here we are.

We're all in the business of creating equity. And I like to say there's only two ways you can create equity in real estate. Number one, you buy it for cheaper than it's worth, which is what we do. Or number two, you buy it and improve it and maybe lease it up or do a bunch of stuff that's been going on since caveman times. And then you sell it. Both ways work great, depending on the personality type.

That's one of the big things. We've got some friends that are doing a lot of the development stuff. Are you seeing a lot of those opportunities bringing back up in those areas on some of the larger plots of land that you're seeing, or. No, where people.

I don't track it. We track new housing starts because it seems to be more tied to the economy and to what we do for a lot of reasons. We buy and sell for whatever reason. A lot of infillats right now. The buildable properties that are like between two houses in an area. There's a lot of that in California and Arizona. So we track housing a lot. Even though we don't buy and sell a ton of houses, we buy. We do buy and sell a lot, but not as much as land. So tracking commercial development. We were just talking about this and I want to Ask you this, are you concerned about the Internet and commercial real estate itself? I think less people are working in offices, less people want to drive to work, less certainly apartments, I'm sure, always go up. What's your take on that?

You know, I think that we're going to see much more of the wework executive suite aspect of things. I think it's almost like a reversal. If you think about how we started the United States, it was very entrepreneurship. Everybody ran their own little job or shop or did their own little thing. And then you had the industrial revolution where people started going to working for everybody else. But in the work of today, I think the whole solopreneur or that small mom pop company or somebody starting online or running a couple executive suites or WeWork is a really hot thing. We see that a lot in Austin here with the high tech jobs, people taking an old Walmart or grocery store and turning it into an executive workspace and subletting off a month at a time or six months or 12 months at a time. I think that's a huge offer. But also it's just getting more costly for a lot of people. So if you can work from your laptop, that's my goal here. I do everything basically from my laptop. Yeah, I have an office here, branding, obviously, but I can do my business from wherever. I'm here in Austin or at the house just five minutes away, or I'm, you know, on a cruise ship or I'm in Europe working on some stuff. You know, that's the beauty of today's Internet. And I think it's got to be less office focused and more virtually focused these days. We stopped doing with our education side. We stopped doing hotel workshops three years ago and started doing everything online and through zoom these days.

So, yeah, we have a single one annual live event and that we don't do anything else just because everybody wants.

To come and hang out once a year.

Well, that's true. You gotta touch, you know, rub elbows and high five the people. We have a. We just had this last week in a mastermind group where we had a bunch of our coaching students come hang out for a couple days with us. And we love doing those. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing that leads me to my next question. How valuable has the podcast been for you? And with driving leads, I imagine you get a lot of people that get referred out to the podcast and call you off of that too, huh?

Yep, totally. It's so funny because we're gonna hit show 1000 in.

Yeah, hang on a second. Hang on a second. Show 1000.

Wow. And I can remember, you know, how many. Three and a half years ago when it was funny because we didn't commute like here. We've always done this. We could do it from anywhere. That's part of our thing. And his saying, it's gotta be from the back of a boat. So. Okay. But when he came to me and said, we're gonna do this podcast, and I'm like, what the heck is a podcast? You know, and here we are, you know how many. We're about to start another show. There's one or two more shows that we are working on right now, too.

To answer your question. It's worked out great. It has nothing more cost effective. You know, that I actually started the show in 2015 with guests, you know, just like we're on your show right now. And I was so sick and tired of them net flaking out, not showing up. I don't need to tell you this. So Jill just. Jill would, like, step in when somebody canceled on us in the last minute.

You're the plan B, huh? You were the backup offering, huh?

And then it just got to the point where everybody's like, where the hell's Jill? And so I just became the Jill shelf.

You know what? People buy more from women. They don't have quite the wall. They have a talking you and me. And you've already admitted that you're only talking to people sitting here. I don't talk to my borrowers, and.

I do that every day. I talk to wives and other female investors, you know, and it's a little bit different.

We have a lot of couples in our group because of this.

Oh, I can see that. Totally.

And they're super successful. Because the bottom line is we all know if your woman is not on board, this is probably not going to work.

Yeah. Happy wife, happy life. And it's really hard, too. Yeah. If you come home and your spouse is not behind you, what your side hustle is. It's not a side hustle very long.

Exactly.

We get a lot of people that start off part time. They're doing it 7pm to 2am on the side and 10 to 15 hours a week, then work towards leaving their job. And you're right. If you don't have a. Unfortunately for most people that don't have successful or don't have supportive spouses because they burnt that bridge selling soap on a rope or something over the years.

You burnt the bridge to your wife. Nope. The bridge is burnt.

Yeah. You're not gonna go do that whole entrepreneurship thing again, aren't you? Are you gonna go draw circles on a board somewhere and sell soap?

That's so funny.

We get questions from people about our relationship constantly. Like, are you guys really together, or is it like some kind of act? You know, we really are together. Yeah.

Well, my spouse, everybody asks, oh, you guys married? No, we're happy.

I'm gonna use it. That's great.

Yeah. Everybody knows Steph, but it's funny. She does not like to be on the show. She's the VP of operations. She handles all that stuff there. But, you know, she's like, it's the same thing. You got to have that working cohesiveness. She works from home because I'm loud, which is the home is literally about 300 yards from the office here. You know, it's perfect. So I go home at lunch, check in, come home at night, check in. Okay. Where we focus on. Okay, let's turn off the business stuff and let's have some fun. You know what I mean?

Exactly.

Boy, we could do a whole show. If you can get your wife on, call us.

No, we're not married. We're happy.

Get us. If you can get her in front of the camera. We'll do a show with you guys. Just all we're gonna talk about is working with your spouse.

I think it's a great idea. Totally think it's a great idea. That's an awesome thing. But that's one of the great things I love is I think you're each other's yin and yang. Right. You stick in your lane, she sticks in her lane, or you stick in your lane, she's in her lane and your lane both, because whatever is yours is hers. Right? I'm just joking.

Not anymore, man. I'm like, that's all you.

Yeah.

You handle the data, I'll handle the talking.

Yeah, Just make my phone ring.

That's right.

Having a staff man, that just is life changing.

It's true.

Well, that's the thing, too. I'm sure you dropping those, that many mail pieces, marketing pieces. You guys are doing a monthly. You're not in there licking stamps and doing it all yourself. Right. You've got probably mailing houses that are doing that.

Actually, we own a company called offers to owners.com, and it's a commercial printing company. It's licensed out with the post office and all that. So a couple years ago, we started that. And it's for our members. I think it's open to a Public for, for a different price. We, that's been life changing for us when we can control the mail and control the mail for our members. You know that's a huge advantage though.

That's a huge wait. Not somebody else to get around to doing it in four or five days or whatever, or a week or two weeks or three weeks. Whatever young people are doing. Yeah, that's huge.

It's same day most of the time.

Or next day by like 2:00 clock or something, it will go out that day.

And it's just for us, you know, it's just, it's just for people who are sending offers. It's not like a bulk mail company for you know, door hangers and stuff.

That's smart. Very systemized, very specific on it.

Same with the data. We're the only licensed providers of the top three data solutions and we share that with our people.

DataTree Title Pro 247 and Real Quest, we're all licensed providers of all three and actually we're in discussions with two additional companies that I would. They're a little bit more obscure but for different product types.

I love that. We might need to have back and just do a show just on that. That's what's your guys big goals for what you got going on for the next couple years?

Well, Haas Academy is coming out this actually in May. That's our biggest thing and I think that the success that we've seen with LAN Academy we're like I'm hiring like crazy prepping for this because I, you know a lot of, not a lot of people understand the land part of it but they see it with houses and then to learn how to do this with that type of an asset they're like oh my goodness. So that's going to keep us busy I am sure.

You know, from a deal acquisition standpoint I just look at it as acquisitions because the sales is now automatic with her. But I like to see that increase dollar wise by at least 10% a month. And that seems to be doing it with the people that we have running it in our staff that does it on its own. I'm always really in my spare time if there's any. I'm looking for new creative ways to market all the services and the real estate that we provide like Facebook Marketplace or a different way to Twitter something or all that stuff.

Yeah, I just was on the phone with a friend who she no longer buys or pays for demolition on her rehabs. She markets Facebook Marketplace. The dirty carpet, the sinks, the cabinet. She Just puts them on there and sits there on her phone at the house and people come and take it and pay her for it and she uses that as her bar tab, you know.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, that is brilliant.

Yeah. I now call her now she buys the sells on her finance mortgages. But I call Kristen Gerst the dirty carpet queen now because that's. She's like, I got $100 for this piece of crap stained cat piss carpet from somebody. I'm like, that's awesome.

You know? You know, but I bet they show up right then too, right?

Oh, yeah. She's like, you have to wait for a contract hiding downstairs or outside for like the $15, like, corner stainless steel sink.

That's great. All right. That's brilliant.

Yeah, actually I'm gonna. That gets me thinking. Yeah, there's an Uber component to that, you know.

There is totally an Uber component to that. We can uber everything these days, basically. From your weed to your seed, whatever you want. Kind of crazy that way now with where the markets going, I foresee, as we're kind of getting close here, but I foresee kind of the market taking a downturn here in the next 12 to 18 months. I don't think we can keep going up and up and up and up like we are. How does that affect what you guys. Does it lead to more deals as people are motivated to sell stuff off faster like it does for us, or is it a bit of a transition process as people trying to figure things out?

So here's our sell price right now, and here's our buy price. And when it goes, this will be my fourth downturn in my real estate career. Here's what happens. This goes down and this goes down. That's it. You know, But I think everybody's imagine. Yeah, but we pay cash for everything, so we have to hold on to what we do. But I'll tell you what, actually, wholesaling houses when times get tough is a great. I mean, the last downturn, which is the worst, I don't think in our lifetimes, but we won't see another one like that around 2011ish. You know, we almost just got annihilated financially. And what saved us is buying houses and reselling them. We were buying houses on the west side of Phoenix for 20 or $30,000, selling them for 60 or 70. Those are the same houses now are 250, 300. So, you know, I was buying a.

Lot of the debt in the same price points, buying debt, working through the foreclosures. Doubling what I paid because you couldn't build a house for what we were buying and selling them for, you know.

Yeah, way below replacement value, below the land value. So you just have to adjust, you know, you have to adjust and believe in yourself. Jill and I lost a lot of friends like because they just for a lot of reasons back through that, that time or they got out of the business or whatever and it's. If all they had to do is have a little bit of confidence about changing gears. But you know, people are sometimes they just can't change anything.

They can't adapt and overcome. That's the. And when you start talking about technology, that's the easiest way to adapt and overcome these things because it's all your fingertips these days. It's so much cheaper.

You know, it's one of the first things I ask anyone that's getting into this business is are you comfortable sitting in front of a computer and trying new stuff eight to ten hours a day for the next six months. And if they're, if they're, if they like, you can see it right away. Oh man. No, Excel, I don't understand Excel. You know, they're just not going to make it. And that's. And we're at a point now in our careers in our age and stuff where we don't. That's about it. We all stop right there. Because if you have to learn Excel, this is not the business for you.

That's all I look at all day is Excel.

Basically tons and tons of convenience stores available to purchase.

Purchase are working at. What do you. Come on. But that's, that's exciting. Yeah, that's the thing. Excel and marketing, those are the two things that are gonna, I think are gonna drive the next 10, 10 years. Plus when it comes to thing when you start seeing like companies like Zillow and kw starting in the online buying, you know, aspect of houses or there was something the other day was an article a few months back where Amazon had a page up to buy and sell real estate. Then they took it down briefly. They're using technology, they're using lead sources to help find stuff. And if you're not using that things, you're gonna be way either price out of the market or gonna be pumping.

Gas at Circle K. You know, our biggest competitor for houses, if we had to name one is we buy ugly houses and we probably every 10 deals that we put under contract we have to come up against them and we just concede immediately. Yeah, I'm just like just take It, I don't care because. So they've been around longer than. Way longer than us, probably longer than everybody. And, you know, there's always competition. But when you have somebody that cares enough like Jill does to talk to the seller, or in her case, a lot of. Most of the time her staff, if it gets to her, there's some reason for that, then you're just setting yourself up into a whole different situation. Every seller I talk to, I ask them, you know, do you get a lot of offers on this asset? And they all say, yeah, we do. But none like yours. None that have an actual purchase price and a closing time and a frame and how it actually. A to B, 2C.

And somebody who answers the phone.

Yeah.

Yes. Answering the phone. Still a very key ingredient. Do you like. That's why he's not answering the phone. Is that what you're saying, Jill?

Well, just somebody answering the phone. But too, how many times people are like, you know, they're afraid that you got to answer the phone. There's somebody there trying to reach you to buy or to sell. You've got to answer the phone.

Yes. Gotta answer the phone is huge. What's the best way for people to reach out to you? Find more about land, everything you're doing. The land podcast. What's the best way to reach out to you guys?

It's all centered around landacademy.com that'll get you everywhere you need to go. We have an online forum that's completely free called landinvestors.com and incredibly popular. It's like bigger pockets for what we do.

Great stuff.

We've got offers to owners, of course, but it's all very, very easy to get to from landacademy.com Good stuff, guys.

Well, hey, I appreciate you spending time this afternoon. I really enjoyed this. Absolutely. Looking forward to having me on notecamp commercial here in the end of July as well. Talking about that, sharing some of that stuff. And guys, trust me, there is multiple ways to dive into real estate. This is a great way and I think a largely untapped part of what people should be looking at. Everybody loves going after the pretty houses or the fix and flips or the HGTV or the fictional shows, as I like to call those. Still, a lot of great deals we made and a lot of motivate sellers when it comes to land. So honored to have you guys on the podcast and looking forward to spending some more time with you guys. Getting to know you better, too.

Absolutely.

Let's make a habit of it, Scott. That'd be great.

Be great. Awesome. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Thanks. See you soon.

Welcome.

All right, everybody. Hey, that's going to wrap it up for this episode of the podcast. Like, go check them out. You're going to love it. Check out their podcast. Love, love, love the podcast. Love everything they're doing out there. You cannot go wrong by learning this facet of lan and how to make that stuff work for you guys, because you're going to see it regardless of what you're doing, and you might as well learn how to use it versus just let it get swept under the rug and not do something with it. So go out, make something happen, everybody, and we'll see you all at the top. Bye. RA.