2026 Anatomy of a Land Deal

Eat baloney, buy land!

Oh, eat baloney, buy land! Play the fork or the deed in your hand. Skip the filling, let the sandwiches stand. Your fortune will grow when you buy your own land! Bellas, Land Geek hive mind, how we doing? It's the Land Geek nightcap. Good to see everybody, uh, tonight. Very exciting. Maybe not exciting for some of you that are slinging deals, but tonight we're talking— it's, it's basically Land Investing 101 updated though for 2026. So we've decided that we're going to do an annual kind of anatomy of a land deal. Podcast because things change pretty quick in this business. Well, some things change and some things don't, in all honesty. So we're going to compare things now to how they were a year ago. And for those people that are coming in, uh, off, you know, fresh off Mark's book, things are actually quite a bit different than they were back in 2018. So this will be— this will be a good way to get up to speed as to how we're doing land deals today. So tonight we're walking through an entire land deal from beginning to end. The county research, the offers, the intake conversations and negotiations, due diligence, closing, marketing, selling, and finally how you turn one deal into an actual business.

I don't think you can talk enough about this, Scott. This is, this is the—

I mean, this is what we do over and over and over again.

So I don't think— I think this is great.

I think it'll be good, uh, and, uh, we'll share this with the masses and, um, Anyway, but I would be, I would be remiss if I didn't introduce, uh, well, all of us. My name is Scott Bosman. I'm DudeBuddy, the Nightcap OG. Zeno, I'm just kidding. Uh, and, uh, I, as always, I'm joined by, uh, Mike Zeno, breathing, uh, the Zen master, breathing the mail, the Zen master, breathe out the marketing. How you doing, Mike?

I'm doing great. I mean, you know, I, uh, relocated to, you know, I wanted to get a change of scenery, so yeah, the, uh, rarely used dining room.

Yeah, where are the keys?

The keys?

The keys, that's, that's slang for piano.

Oh no, no, this is a real— this is real, right?

No. Yeah. I just wonder where the keys are. Uh, and, uh, in the upper right, uh, of your screen is, uh, John— is it Eight Is Enough handsome Rob Burnett? John, how are you tonight?

I'm doing great. Can you hear me? Is it soft?

That's much better.

Hashtag jealousy.

Just hold it right in front of my face.

Yes, maybe 2 inches away is like perfect.

Okay, right here.

Yeah, it looks good.

There it is.

Maybe off to the side so we can see. There, that's good.

There it is. Yes. Anyways, I'm doing great.

The booms that hold it, you know.

Yeah. What are you guys drinking on this hot summer day? I don't know about there, but it's 95 degrees here in Wisconsin. We're, uh, we're boiling here.

Boiling, boiling.

Uh, vodka tonic infused with fruit. It's empty.

So now you eat the fruit.

I'm switching over to the Coors Banquet.

I like that. That is such— when you drink those, you know, it's such an old school looking beer.

Yeah, it's just like— it's a great hot summer day beer.

Oh, that reminds me of— that's Johnny Lawrence from the karate Cobra Kai drinks those kind of beers. Is that the beer?

I've been told I look like, uh, Johnny.

Yeah, I was in for Halloween.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, what about you, John? What do you got tonight?

I got a Spindrift Ginger Lime Mule, which is good. It is good. I like it. I recommend it.

All right, Michael, what do you got?

I have a dirty martini made for me by Laura. There were some hand-stuffed olives, but I ate them already.

Ooh, what kind of stuffed olives?

She puts blue cheese in them, hand-stuffed.

Nice.

I definitely heard ham stuffed. I just envisioned ham.

Yeah, that's what I, that's what I heard too, was ham stuffed.

Uh, throw some bologna in there. It's good.

You can put prosciutto in there. We've done that, I think.

I don't know. Like, uh, and this, this is for everyone actually, uh, tuning in, the, the thousands of listeners. If there's anything I've learned in my life, there is a 2-martini limit. Yeah, hold yourself to that. After 2 martinis, it's not pretty.

Yeah, just do, just do a virgin dirty martini, just olive juice.

Yes, yes. Uh, we're missing Mark J. Podolsky tonight, the godfather, the land geek himself. He's on vacation. He's taking the whole month off. So Mark, uh, we miss you, but, uh, this, this is a chance for us to, you know, have a little fun, you know, without Mark watching over Go a little off the rails. Yeah, we might go off the rails tonight. Uh, good to see everybody in the chat. Uh, hopefully this will be helpful to you. The Anatomy of a Land Deal 2026. Uh, but first, before we get into that, Mike Zanow, you're so good at this. Why don't you just— 30 seconds to 1 minute.

I knew you're gonna do this.

Just, just tell everybody why we're here, what we're doing, what is our function.

Uh, Conjunction Junkie. What was that old— you remember watching that when they, you know, Conjunction Junkie? Yes. Well, listen, well, why we're here is because we like to talk about what we do and then sometimes about what we don't do. Uh, we buy land 25 cents on the dollar, and this is land that's, you know, the acquisition price is $5,000 or less. I call it the penny stocks of real estate, right? Because we're buying these really small, inexpensive properties, but they were— they had a big punch to them because we sell them on owner financing. So like, I mean, you could— can you imagine a $3,000 property creating $250, maybe $300 per month? I mean, that's, uh, sometimes people will buy a really hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a rental unit to get that type of monthly cash flow. So these small properties have the ability for us to generate a nice cash flow So it's an attractive price. The people that want to own these properties buy them from us. They don't buy it all outright typically. We'll let them pay us month after month. Uh, once they're done paying, we give them the deed. So they have flexibility, they have easy payments. Uh, we can get into later why we don't even have to run credit checks on these people. Like, this is just— it's a very attractive offer that we give them, but it also allows us to have mailbox money, a passive income. Picture doing this once, $200, $150, and then just have this, as Mark says, river of nickels. You add up $50 a month on one deal, $250, $300, $175, and it just keeps adding up and growing, and you can eventually replace your income. The three of us have done that for ourselves and our wives, and we know many other people who have done so. But there's a lot of mini victories on the way, right? You can, uh, just maybe you're paying the cable bill, which is— I don't know, I guess it's a streaming bill now. People say there's no cable bills anymore, it's more of a streaming bill. You could pay a car payment, your mortgage. You can just keep growing it. But, uh, then the real exciting part is that since it repeats itself over and over again, we're masters of systems, automation, delegations. I feel like saying Masters of the Universe. That movie just came out. That's what we are. And so that, uh, you know, ultimately you can work a few hours per week on your business because what you do is managing people and processes. And these aren't people that work 40 hours. They work an hour here, hour there. And ultimately we're after one thing, you know, just like they said in Braveheart, freedom. But I would add in front of it, time freedom. That's what we're after.

And less limbs ripping from their sockets.

Time freedom!

Oh man. Well, that was a little bit long. It was a little longer than 30 seconds, but I appreciate it. Appreciate your explanation.

I'm just having fun. I study you guys' reactions and I know if I should keep going or not. I look at John, if he gives me like a little non-verbal like thumbs up, I know I can talk.

That's why I was just going like this the whole time.

But, but listen, okay, hold on, uh, before we get into the anatomy of a land deal in 2026, Mike, or somebody just tuning in they just heard you say we're in the penny stocks of land investing, we're buying land for between $1,000 and $5,000. Yeah, I mean, that's not really sexy, man.

No, that's right. That's why there's not a lot of competition. There's not a lot of TV shows on—

I, I would do—

do you guys think—

I, I don't think that we could do a show on like, you know, Fix It Flip It, but about John. Like, you've told some great stories about the characters you've dealt with, right? Um, you know, these meetings and vehicles with bags of cash, reminding me of HBO thriller movies. Like, I think those— that could attract some sort of a, of an audience. But no, it's not sexy, and that's why we love it.

So why, why wouldn't you do bigger deals? Why don't we do bigger deals?

Well, you can do bigger deals, but the problem is honestly a couple of things. One, our mailers produce deals consistently. Our acceptance rate is, uh, very high compared to people You want to buy a piece of larger property, typically you do what's called a neutral letter. Basically, hey, I'm interested in buying your property. If you're out there, if you've looked to buy houses, you've probably done something similar. What you end up doing is a lot of free valuations. Oh yeah, Scott, sure, tell me how much my property's worth. I have no intention of selling, but I'd like you to spend the time and telling me what it's worth. And then, you know what, I used to sit kind of quiet talking about this, but there's a lot of people out there that I know personally spent tens of thousands of dollars in mail trying to acquire these bigger deals and come up empty, and that really burns them. And then they don't even really feel like doing anything at that point, and they could have worked themselves out of a really incredible opportunity to change their lives. So, um, you know, you can do bigger deals. I'm not against them. I'm just saying that you really can't beat the bread and butter model of these little small deals and the cash flow they produce.

All right, I love it. So what's— is our market just bigger or what?

Massive, massive, massive, massive.

Yeah, I love it.

Say one more time.

Massive, massive, massive.

You should say it to the mic.

Massive. And we get this asked— we get asked this question all the time. Uh, you know, Mark's teaching this, you're bringing more and more people into this every year. No, but here's the thing. In the buy box we're talking about, we're buying land between $1,000 and $5,000. I mean, I still buy land for less than $1,000, right? Yeah. Uh, we'll say $500 to $5,000 really is the buy box for 90% of properties we buy.

Yeah.

There are millions of properties in the United States we can buy.

Yeah.

In that buy box. And there are only a few thousand of us doing this. Yeah, so the numbers are on our side, right?

Totally, totally.

The bigger deals are more competitive. There are less of those deals. They're more expensive. They're more risky. John, you've talked about this many times within our community. You know, you can go bankrupt waiting for a million dollar payday.

Yep, right.

Uh, you've done bigger deals. I mean, you've, you've done bigger— more— you've done more bigger deals than me and Mike. So, uh, I mean, talk about that, John, in your experience.

Yeah, so bigger deals. I think one of the biggest, uh, so our model focuses on inefficient markets, right? So we focus on markets where, um, I mean, think about it, like you were just mentioned the price point that we buy these properties for, right? You buy property for $500 to $5,000. You got a property, let's say it retails for say $12,000. So property that we would buy for $3,000, but the property's worth $12,000, right? Well, if that person's interested in selling their property, it's hard, right? Good luck getting a realtor up in the morning on that commission, right? Especially if it takes a 40-minute drive to get to, right? You could sell it for sale by owner, but if you live in North Dakota and the property's in Colorado, like, where do I even start? Do I get pictures? Where do I post it? What do I do? How do I sell this? And then there's me. I'm option number 3, right? I don't pay top dollar, but I close fast and I pay cash. And my pitch is, this property is hard to sell, and so I will give you an easy sale in exchange for a discount. Um, when you're dealing with big deals where you're looking to flip properties quickly for cash, you're focusing on efficient markets. That means markets where these properties are easy to sell. And when a property is easy to sell, it's much harder to get a discount. You have to have a lot more conversations, and, uh, you end up with a much higher marketing spend to find the property. So I've done some good bigger deals, and I've found some good opportunities. I've also had long dry spells where I talked to a lot of people and got no deals.

Yeah, so, but Yeah, people like to poke holes at this all the time, you know. They try to like put themselves— like set themselves apart. Oh, we do this and that. And it's like, oh, the NFC Podcast, land investing is no longer alive in 2024 and 2025 and 2026. Meanwhile, we're just sitting here doing deal after deal after deal. It's like, I, I, I don't know. I mean, you know, it's clickbait in my mind. Nothing but clickbait.

Well, we'll get in— we'll get into more of that. So, uh, I'm sorry for the barking dog in the back.

You can't hear it. We can't hear it. Zoom's doing its thing.

Okay, all right, all right. It's not Zoom, though. StreamYard. And StreamYard isn't as good.

Okay, I heard that one. I'm not gonna lie.

Uh, all right, so, well, we'll get— we'll get into more of this, I'm sure. But, uh, let's talk— let's talk land deals. All right, in 2026, things are quite a bit different than they were 10 years ago. Things are even quite a bit different than they were when Mark wrote his book in 2018, but there are, there are even some things different now than, than, than a year ago. I think a year ago we did a similar podcast. We weren't talking a lot about AI at the time, but I think that'll be part of tonight's conversation. But let's do this for the audience, especially for people that are new to this whole thing. Let's take them through the, the anatomy of a land deal 2026, gentlemen. Does that sound good?

Let's do it.

All right, so, well, what's this? What's the first step? We gotta, we gotta find a market, right? So, John Burnett, in today's world, talk a little bit about finding market. We get, we get asked questions all the time. Where do we do this? Like, how do I figure out where to do this? And, uh, I think that's— it is the most important part of the business, I think, right? So let's, let's talk about that a little bit.

So I'd say that the two things that I'm looking for when I'm looking for a new market— one thing is land that I can sell, and then the other thing is an area that I can build a business around, right? And so I need both of those two things to be in place, because if I find a property that I can sell but it's a one-off deal that's not really a market. That's just a place for me to do a single deal and then move on, right? I'm looking for something where I can do hundreds— like, I have a market where I've done literally hundreds of deals, right? And that's the kind of market that I want. And so with that, looking for an area where I can sell property, one of the biggest areas that we go to is land sites. We look at where other land investors are selling property. You know, one of the analogies we come to a lot is it's like fishing, right? When you are going fishing, you look for where the fish are biting, and that's where you want to go, right? You don't want to just pick any old spot. You pick a spot where somebody else has or is already seeing success. And we take the same approach, right? So we look where other people are seeing success, and then we start building in that market. Now, with the market, I want an area where I can sell property Right. But I also want an area where I can build a business. And so for that, I need there to be, I would say, repeatability and enough inventory. Right. So repeatability, one of the things that we focus on a lot is large rural subdivisions, right? So, you know, there might be, say, 1,000 or more 5-acre parcels in one of these subdivisions. And when I've got something like that, that it reduces all of the variables, right? Because— and so I'm doing the same thing over and over and over again. I'm mailing out my offers. I can actually put a number in that offer letter because I'm looking at comps that are all similar to one another, right? We call— you know, you look at these subdivisions, you know, we'll call them the sea of rectangles. It's just, you know, all these rectangles are the same shape, same size, same variables. And so we can mail out to those and actually put an offer number when it comes to due diligence, because they're similar to one another, we're looking for the same dang things over and over and over again, right? And so when I do due diligence on one of these properties, I'm doing 90% of the due diligence on every single other one of them, right? And so it reduces— it gives you consistency there. And then when it comes to marketing and selling these properties, right, it's a consistent product. And so I've got my audience, I know how to market this So at some point I'm just really looking to keep that product on the shelf. But with that, that becomes an area that I can build a business around because I'm doing the same thing over and over. And when you do the same thing over and over, when you have consistent variables, now you can automate, you can delegate, and you can actually start giving yourself time freedom because you're not in a situation where every single property is a snowflake and every situation is so unique.

I love that. I love that. Now, okay, but here, to play devil's advocate, all right, John, you're— okay, I love the repeatability. I love the— we're finding rectangles, we're finding squares, right? Did you know that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares?

Anyway, Mike Zaino, I did know that.

We hear this all the time, uh, people, people poo-poo the desert squares. So let's talk about this for a minute. Let's talk about desert squares because John's talking about buying squares and rectangles and areas where land is all platted out.

Yeah, right.

And there are areas that are desert squares, but there are areas that are treed and there are areas that are mountainous and that type of thing. But let's talk about that a little bit. Do people buy these desert squares?

I don't know. I think the easiest thing to say is I know, um, I know so many people that are making significant life-replacing income on desert squares. I mean, that's just it. That's just the reality of it. And, um, you know, so it just works, you know. I know people sometimes have a hard time thinking about buying property that's like not in their same city, or not— they can't put their feet on. That's probably one of the initial mental barriers initially that people have, is like, hey, um, wow, I thought— was I frozen or were you frozen? Because you both looked frozen for a second there. All right, I was like, whoa, they're just wigging me out. They're both like, um, they're like, yeah, how do— how do I buy a property that I can't put my I— you can go see it. It's not like you can't, but you don't need to, right? Something that John talked about, building up— I love how you position that, right? Where I can build a business around it. Why can you? Because the repeatable model means that you begin to understand at a very deep level everything there is to know about these properties. So, uh, you become an expert. And so there's no big deal not having to go to these properties. I've never visited— well, I have one area I've been to just because I did a massive deal there, but other than that, I've never been. Over 1,000 I've never been to these properties. I've had no need to go there. So, um, I don't know how I got off on that tangent, but let me pause there because, um, I think that's one of the initial— were you asking me? Because I think somehow it drifted in that direction.

No, that's okay. We were just talking about the whole Desert Squares thing, you know.

Yeah, people poo-pooing it, you're saying? Yeah, yeah. No, it just works. You can buy a property and offer it to someone, an easy monthly payment in an area where they can go RV, camp, own it as an investment, a base of operations for, uh, skygazing, rock collecting, name it, right? Um, it's gonna sell. That's just it. Yeah, plain simple. If you don't believe it, I'm sorry, it's true. You have to change your beliefs. Well, you don't have to, but you should if you really want to do this business, because it works demonstrably well.

Yeah, demonstrably well. And, and we can't be land snobs, right? So, so I think, you know, we've all been in this a long time. I think now more than ever we put our faith in data, or data, right? Um, if we can find data that land is being bought and sold in an area—

yep—

and there's not much we won't buy at 25, 30 cents on the dollar, I don't think. As long as, for me, I'd like to have road— I, I want to have road access and I want to have You know, John talks about repeatability. I want to have usability. I want the land to be, you know, you want to be able to use it for something, right? Um, but as long as we can find data that that land is being done in those areas, I think it's a good area whether it's desert squares or not. Um, quick before we get into like, uh, more of like how to actual— how to actually acquire property in an area that you've chosen, John, do you let like population trends dictate where you do deals? Uh, what— I mean, is there anything like that that dictates where you do deals today? Is it more, um, more the price of the land? What are your thoughts on that?

I don't really focus on like population trends or anything like that. I do think that like I, you know, pretty much all my property is remote If you go insanely remote where it's like, it's 7.5 hours from any city anywhere, then, you know, that gets a little bit harder to sell. So I do think like having it be, you know, 2, 3 hours drive from a city, I think is helpful for a property being just a good fit for more people. But, um, you know, other than that, I'm just looking— I'm just looking for areas where other investors like me are able to move property.

So no, I love that. And I think, I think that is, uh, the same as what we were taught in 2015, 2018 when we started this, right? Is buy land within 3 hours of a major metropolitan area. Um, and that still works really well. But, but Mike, before we get into like the actual how do we acquire these properties, I think we should talk budget a little bit. Because, um, when you're getting into this business, your budget does dictate maybe where you work, what type of land you buy. So let's talk about that a little bit for people on the call. And you know, uh, the, the cool thing is like we can reverse engineer this for people who have $1,000, $5,000, $10,000. So let's talk about the budget a little bit.

Yeah, essentially, um, you don't need a ton of money to do these type of deals. Now you're going to have some money to send out a mailing campaign, right? I often tell people we advocate 20 mailers a day. Round it up. I know it's really— but keep it simple math. A dollar a letter. I know it's rounding it up. So $20 a day, you're going to get some deals. When it comes to the acquisition, you know, you know, like you said, $500, you could buy 4 properties for $2,000 and, and be, you know, have a— and each of those properties could turn into $2,000, you know, when you're done selling them on owner financing. So, you know, what a, what a great return that would be, right? $8,000 off of a $2,000 investment, that's pretty good, right? So If you look at the multiple and you look at the fact that, you know, is this a good use— am I being a good steward of my money? Is this a good use of the money, right? It certainly is at $500 or $5,000. So you don't need a lot to build out the initial proof of concept. Um, I tell people when they're coming into this model, some people have a lot of capital, a lot of— I love how people call it, I repeat it now— dry powder or gasoline. People have it all ready to go, right? But it's like, you know what, It's cool. Put that aside for a second. Let's take a few thousand. Let's get some mailers out. Let's buy some properties. Let's build out a system. If you go crazy in the beginning and just mail, you could bring a whole bunch of deals in, but you could like bleed deals, bleed cash, lose opportunities. How about you build a system first, right, that can handle that? So you only need a small budget to do that, in my opinion.

I love that. Yeah, do some deals, right? Prove it to yourself. Yep, see the returns, then pour fuel on the fire.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's what I love. I— that's actually what I love about this community as well, is that I think, um, Mark, you know, has instilled and instilled in everybody, like, as you learn how to do this, we need to do this in a responsible way where you're not bleeding time and you're not bleeding money, right? So Uh, start with $5,000, start with $10,000, start with $20,000. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, $20,000 in real estate is, is not a ton of money. If you were going to buy a duplex, you'd need $50 grand for a down payment, right? Right. So, you know, start, start with $5,000 to $20,000, do some deals, then pour fuel on the fire, or just make it grow organically from that, which a lot of us have done. As well. So, but you know, I think for everybody on the call who has— if you have $1,000, if you have $5,000, if you have $10,000— spend some time on some of the land selling websites and get to know. You know, the nice thing is you can filter by price. You can see where people are buying land for $5,000. Well, if— or selling land for $5,000. If you're seeing Mike Zaino on a site selling land for $5,000, you can venture to guess he probably got it for like $1,500, right? And if that fits your budget, that might be a good area for you to work in. So, um, so, so I think, you know, we've taught— we, we went into county research, we go, we go to the hot fishing hole, right? We go to areas that, that match your budget. We go to areas that are kind of cookie cutter where, where we can find data and where we can find some of that repeatability John was talking about. And that's a great way to, to find an area to do deals. All right, so John, we found an area, could be a large county in out west. A lot of us work out west— Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, right? Um, we found an area and we picked a subdivision somewhere What do we do next, Joe?

So, uh, what we'll do is we'll build a list. So building a list, uh, used to be back in 2018, we were going and scraping the data and talking to the county assessors and trying— and, and treasurers and finding all these people that own these properties. Now it's a lot simpler. And there's software that we can, we can use to, to build a list. And so, um, one of the ones that, that we use a lot is called Zampleo. Um, Zampleo allows you to— you could draw a little polygon around an area where you want to, uh, where you want to send out your mailers, and then you can filter on it. You can say, I want only people, no companies, and I want them to live out of state, and I want them to have owned the property for at least 5 years. You can apply all these filters to find the people that are most likely to sell to you. And then we, uh, export that list, and then we upload it to, uh, to LG Pass. So LG Pass, basically when you upload the list, it'll automatically generate all of your mailers and it connects to a mail service and it will send your mailers. So you're not printing, licking, and stuffing. Is that the right— those— you're not doing those things?

Printing, licking, printing, stuffing, licking, lick and stick. Uh, yeah, people are so spoiled nowadays, right? Uh, and, and I don't know, I think a year ago, I don't know if we were talking about Xamplow as much, we were talking about DataTree and XAMPP. I think most of us have switched over to XAMPP. It's more affordable. It's a great tool. Like you said, John, there's a policy on the same data. That's the same data, but it's a little bit more the user interface, the UI. The UI is a little bit more friendly, a little bit more pleasing. You can drag and drop over an area. There's an AI tool now on XAMPP where you can say to them, pull a list from this county, all 1-acre parcels in this subdivision. And it's pretty— it's getting more accurate over time, so it's getting easier and easier and easier to pull a list. And, uh, so, so Zeno, we pull the list from Zamplo. Yeah, we pull a list of property owners from a subdivision in a, in a particular county. Uh, what's next?

We're going to price it so then we can ultimately send out our offer letters. And that's the beauty of this model too. If you are going to an area where there's, you know, just an enormous amount of properties similar size, shape, they're going to be similar value. So once you price one, they're all priced. So it's really just, um, another really nice part of— nice feature to using, uh, going after properties this way, right? So we need to price them. Which is, you know, in flight school we teach what's called the pricing matrix. I mean, you have to basically— essentially have to understand the market, right? So that you're able to then correctly send out your offers. Um, very important.

Yeah. And it, you know, there's some data collection that needs to be done to determine the right pricing for an area, right? But really A lot of people perseverate on the pricing, right?

Perseverate, grab a word.

Like, uh, I, I think what's most important is if, if you're in the ballpark with your pricing, right?

Yeah.

If you see, if you, if you see other land investors in the, in the area, if you see Mike Zaino in the area selling land in this area for $10,000, you should, you can venture to guess he got it for $2,500. $3,500. So price your offers between $2,500 and $3,500.

I've never stressed over it. I always thought it was just sort of like a fuzzy math thing, you know. I never really stressed over it. I just kind of— what's more important is to get the letters out there, because the interested people, when you're in that range, they're going to reach out. Then it's a conversation. You're not bound to that number, right? It's just a starting conversation. It's how we get people to raise their hand and say, I'm interested.

Yeah, and, and you know, Mike, you may have mailed that person 2 months ago and your offer was $3,500. Yeah, and I mailed them today, my offer was $3,000, but maybe my offer hit them on the right day.

Scott, I may have got a— you may see offers from a credit card company at 0% for 6 months, then a few weeks later 0% for 12 months, another one's 0.20. It really doesn't matter. The person needs that card the day they see that offer is the one they're going to pick. It's right, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, yeah. What I love about sending mailers out with a true dollar offer amount, right, is that people open the letter, and people still open the letter. We get this question all the time too. Are you guys doing text messages? Are you doing cold calling? No, we're doing direct mail. Yeah, why are we doing direct mail? We don't see any issues with teaching it.

It works, right?

I hope people still open their mail, right? People claim they throw stuff in the mail. I don't ever do that.

I open up every single piece of mail, every single one, and I throw it. Even the, like, even the junk mail.

I do too. I love opening mail. The sound of that.

Yeah, I got my, I got my letter opener right here.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I just weed through it and I give all the junk mail to my kids. And then they open it up.

Remember we had the flight school letter openers? I don't even know what happened to mine. Do you have your— Scott, I bet you have it. Oh, look at it, John. Do you have that?

No, I didn't get this.

I might have gotten this.

Look at this.

Look at that.

Oh my goodness, the flight school letter opener. That's so fancy, man.

It's like a— it's like a— what do you call it?

You know, we need to bring those back to the Dirt Ridge Summit. I think people will love it.

Yeah, I do, I do, uh, have some thoughts, by the way, on like—

please—

mail. Yes, mail versus, uh, cold calling or cold texting. So because I've, I have dabbled in those, and what I found is that like one of the great things about direct mail is that when you get a response, it's not a flash-in-the-pan lead, right? If somebody sends you an email and they say, I got your letter, you don't have to get back to them in the next 5 minutes in order for that to be an active and hot lead. If you send an outbound text to somebody, you do. That person is hot for a very short period of time, but if, if you don't get back to them quickly, then that lead is effectively dead, right? And so, and the same thing is kind of true of, of cold calling as well. And so one of the things that's great about direct mail is A, it's consistent, and B, if you're building something for time freedom, you want something that actually allows for time freedom and allows you to put in the, uh, actually do the responses when it's convenient for you.

Yeah, I, I, I just think of it like the people are self-qualifying when they, when they open the letter, they see the price, they call you. There are less conversations to be had. There's less energy to be put into the conversation of, you know, less negotiations, because a lot of people just accept the offer. A lot of people, they counter. If my offer is $2,500, they counter $3,500. Oh, that's a quick conversation. Let's meet in the middle, right? Um, so, so we love mailers because they open the letter, they see the price, they self-qualify, they call you. They're like, I'm interested. Right? It's so much less work than, than cold calling and texting. Saves so much, so much time. Uh, so we still direct mail and it still works. And, uh, how do we mail, Mike Zainal?

How do we mail? We use LG Pass.

We use LG Pass. We have a system called LG Pass that helps us mail. So we aren't licking and sticking and stuffing envelopes anymore. Uh, we upload our list that you've priced into LG Pass. And we click send and the mailers are out the door. So pretty awesome, pretty awesome, pretty, pretty cool, pretty, pretty cool. All right, okay, so we've mailed, we're getting responses. We should talk intake conversations a little bit. What do those look like? Uh, so, so they self-qualified, they've called you. John Burnett, I'm interested in selling you my property. What's the next phase in this whole thing?

The next phase is for me to call you. So one of the, one of the things that's important is you actually have to pick up the phone and you have to call the seller. So if the seller reaches out to you, they mail back a counteroffer, they email you, they text you, they call you, they leave a voicemail, the first and most important step is to actually respond and reach back out to them, right? And then we have a conversation. And, and like Mike said, that's like the whole point of our offer letters, to have a conversation. Sometimes we look at the property and we say, uh, this one maybe is worth a little bit less, maybe less than I offered, right? And we can have that conversation and we can negotiate it down if need be. Sometimes they counter and they say, I want more. And we look at it, we say, I think I can pay more because this property is worth X, right? And so We have that negotiation and then we come to an agreement, right? And so the agreement is either, uh, we negotiate down, we negotiate up, or it's an accepted right where we sent it. And then at that point we initiate due diligence, right? And so, yeah, so that's the next step.

I love it. I love it. Uh, Mike Zanier, the king of intake conversations. Anything to echo on that?

No, Chef, just don't be uncomfortable, right? These are just people that, uh, many of them are just super nice. You know, we talk about land therapy. They just want to talk to someone about why they bought the property and, you know, why they don't use it anymore. Life has changed, and then they'll release it to you. So just, you know, in the beginning, um, just enjoy those conversations. Don't try to pretend something— pretend you're something you're not. Just be um, inquisitive, be engaging, and just be yourself.

I love it. I love it. Yeah, being yourself, uh, can make the deal.

Yeah, right.

Um, it can, it can, it can take a high counteroffer down to your original offer, right? Yeah. So, so as a new land investor, as a beginning land investor, don't be afraid to spend a little bit of time on the phone with these folks. Get to know them. You know, let them, let them tell you their story. Yeah, you'll have a way to connect with them, right? We all have things in our life that help us connect with other people. I used my background as a physical therapist to connect with people, right? You know, Mike, you've talked to firefighters, you're going to use that, you're gonna use that experience you've had in life. To connect with people, and, uh, the, the relationships helps you get deals done. So, so, John, you mentioned we're going into due diligence, right? And, and to me, there's, you know, to kind of simply put it here— time, time is, is going by fast— but there, but there's really like, to me, due diligence, there's really two things. There's property characteristics. Wait, what?

I was gonna raise my hand. I was wondering Should we end up turning this into a two-part podcast? Because I feel like by the time we— I don't want to rush through everything. Is this going to end up being a two-part podcast?

I think we're fine.

Is it going to be a cliffhanger?

No, I think we're good. I think we're good.

I don't want to make sure we don't rush anything.

No, we're not rushing, are we?

Do we feel— oh no, no, we're not rushing yet, but it, you know, we're just looking at the timing.

I just wanted to see, you know, once, once we're done with this tangent, then we'll be rushing.

So that's what I mean. I didn't want to— I don't know, just—

let's see where we end up. Okay, here's my suggestion. Why don't tonight we get through just the anatomy of a land deal?

Yeah.

And next week we talk about how to grow a business. How about we do that?

Yeah, yeah. So we're just talking about the components tonight.

Yeah.

And the inter— and intertwining Intertwining.

Yeah, like, like tonight's Dirt Rich 1, right? But like 2026 revisited. Next week is Dirt Rich 2, 2026 revisited.

I like it, I like it.

What do you think of that?

All right, we better get to it.

All right, okay, due diligence. Uh, there's two things. There's the characteristics of the property.

Yeah.

And there's, uh, the, the legalities, title, right? So, so when we look at characteristics of the property Does it have road access? Is it in a floodplain? Uh, is there an HOA? Is there a POA? Are there utilities? Does it look like this?

Does it look like this? Is it a cliff?

Oh, is it a cliff? Sorry. Yeah, is it a cliff? Is it on an incline? Yes. Is it on the side of a mountain? Right. Um, is it, uh, is it a wetland? Zano, we've sold a wetland before, ended up being very profit— good, good profit. Um, you know, uh, are there neighbors next door and what do the neighbors look like? Is it just like one little mobile home or is it like 5 acres of junk, right? Yeah. Um, you know, what, what does it look like? You know what I, you know what I still do today, guys, on Google Earth is you zoom into the property and you pan up. And you just look around, you do a 360 view.

I like that. It's called the drone, the drone, the, the online drone sort of viewing. I love that.

Yeah, you zoom into the property, you pan up, you see, oh, look at, look at that gorgeous mountain view in the background, right? Uh, what does that tell you? Well, you know what, you're gonna have some killer views. Yeah, it's like, it, it doesn't look great on, on Google Earth but you can imagine what it looks like, right? So property characteristics, and then you have the legalities of the due diligence. So we're looking at, are there back taxes? Are there any tax liens? Are there any IRS liens, which are really rare in land, or mechanics liens, really rare in land, right?

Yeah.

Uh, what is the chain of title?

Yeah, right.

And chain of title is something that intimidated me a lot early on, but I think we're good at Land Geek at teaching people how to be confident in, in buying properties, uh, with— yeah, through title, which we'll talk about here in a second.

I think—

but, um, go ahead, Mike.

I was gonna say, Jeff, Jeff there has a great— I think this is important. Can you pull it up? I think it's important to answer that right now.

Oh, Jeff Davidson.

Yeah, because no, don't go crazy on a property until you have at least figured out you're in the ballpark for a good deal. You don't want to like, you know, go put all this effort into a deal that hasn't even material— hasn't even materialized yet. Like, you haven't— before I go doing a deep dive, I want to get— make sure we're in the right range, have a quick conversation, make sure this person wants to sell in the right price range before I go to all this effort that we're talking about.

Yeah, for sure. Uh, Rick Colcock— oh, this is for an intake conversation. Don't take the rejection personally. For sure. Yeah, we'll go back and hit some of the comments here in a little bit. But, but really, those are the things with due diligence, right? And at Land Geek, what I love is we really want to buy the property without going through title. So we're going to teach you how to be confident in doing that. A lot of people are like, how do you even buy a property without going through a title company? Right. But John Burnett, we do it all the time, right? So we've done our due diligence. We've determined this is a good purchase for us. John, talk to us about what's next.

So once we've done all of our due diligence, we've determined it's a good property for us, then we are going to buy the property. And so when we buy the property, first off, we draw up the deed. For the property. We send it to the seller and we say, notarize this deed, please. They then sign and notarize it, send it across, I record it, I send them payment. Is kind of the way that, that, the way that that works. And then I onboard the property at that point. I add it to and get ready to market it.

I love it. And 90% of the time Uh, today we're e-recording deeds, right? We're using a service called Simplifile or CSC to e-record deeds, and, uh, we're acquiring the properties, uh, like that. A lot of these, a lot of these counties, you'll, you'll upload a deed to the county and they record it within the hour or within a couple hours. Uh, there are a couple counties I work in, it takes a few days But even still, right, a few hours to a few days, you get a deed recorded, enables us to buy quick. And then what can we do, Zeno, after that? We sell quick.

Yeah, now it's time to do the other side of the equation. You know, first side is to buy and the second side is to sell. So, you know, uh, if you have a buyer's list, you're gonna at this very moment let them know new property has come in. That's just simply people that we have advertised to in the past who showed interest. Maybe they have or haven't, because they'll buy multiple times. We might say, hey, listen, sneak peek, first look before everybody else in the world gets to see it, um, here's a new property we have. And right away you might have a sale like that. That's possible. But it's time to start telling everybody that, hey, I have something available that you might want.

I love that. And the buyers list is one way to get a new property out there. The, the other favorite way of mine— can you complete me, Mike Zaino?

Neighbor letter.

The neighbor letter. The neighbor letter. But not even the neighbor letter anymore, because we can use skip tracing services to get to get phone numbers and email addresses of the neighbors.

Yeah, this is a time when you might use the phone, right? We have a VA, right, Scott, that she, she calls out. And, and because this is like, these are the people of the high— they have the highest interest. Like, hey, listen, you know, just want to let you know this is available. And people like, wow, okay. Many a time, you know, maybe not, but they're the highest and most likely most interested people typically. Not always, but so that the buyers list, and then general public, game on.

Yeah, yeah. And, and some of the neighbor sales, I mean, are just crazy fun, right? Because you've acquired the property, you bought it yesterday, you call the neighbor tomorrow and you sell it right away, right?

Yeah.

Um, so, so don't overlook the neighbors. A lot of people, for whatever reason, Uh, they're not reaching out to neighbors, and I think that's, that's really, really important, uh, whether or not there's a structure next spot, uh, next door, right?

Right.

If there's a home next door, we're, we're on the phone calling them. But if there's not a home next door, we're still calling them, and sometimes that even converts into a land purchase because they're like, you know what, actually I'm looking to sell that property. Oh really? Well, let us talk to you about that, right? And we'll double our acreage.

Yeah.

Um, and, and sell that to the marketplace. All right, so we got— so we're going to hit up our buyers list first, our neighbor letter, our neighbor, our, our neighbors first, and then John Burnett, we market, right? So let's talk about marketing a little bit. Marketing is a big subject. We could spend a whole podcast on marketing. But how do we market these things? Where, where do we find leads?

So there are, uh, a few core places that stand out to me. So one is— one that Mike talked about is a buyer's list, but that kind of comes later, right? So as you are contacting people and talking to people, you start building up a list of people that are interested in your land so you can advertise to them. So that's, um, that's a good spot. The other spot, and a spot where people often start, is Facebook Marketplace, right? Uh, so Facebook Marketplace, it's effectively free except for your time, right? And so you can post these properties and you can start, uh, advertising them to people who are interested and start having conversations. That's a great spot for people to start. The other spot is Land, uh, selling websites, right? So things like Landmoto, things like LandFlip, things like Land.com. Some of those are really expensive. Land.com is very expensive, but LandFlip and Landmoto are great spots to start. And so those are, you know, those are the places that I generally see people selling. And Facebook Marketplace, I think, is often where people start.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. The lands— there's lots, lots of land sites. Land Search, Land Sentry, right, as well. Um, so I, I think I always think of Tate Litchfield. He's a, uh, he's, he's a, he's a coach in our community, right? We gotta have Tate on soon. Uh, Tate, he's never had a job. He's only been a land investor. He's a big-time fisherman, right? And he said something to me a long, long time ago that just struck a chord and has helped me sell land is you need to cast your net far and wide with, with, uh, with marketing, right? So Facebook, Craigslist, buyers list, neighbors, land selling websites, right? And you need to have a lot of ads. You need to have a lot of ads. But if you market a lot, you'll sell land. So love it. Zeno, did we miss anything on the marketing?

No, I mean, there's obviously so much that can be talked about there, from creating, uh, specific ads towards different avatars, which means just different types of buyers. And but that's all the nuanced part of it. The reality is that we're going to let the world know that we have property available, and we're going to target specific groups of people and advertise the same property in different ways to those different types of people. So, you know, that, that's a whole big deep dive, but that's what we do. But no, that's— I think we've covered the fundamentals. You know, you get it, you have your buyers list, the neighbor letter, then you have the land sites, and then, you know, Marketplace or free platforms, and just a matter of consistency, and, and, um, and it's going to get done. You know, it really will. If you— and then if it's not getting done, then maybe there's something wrong with your pricing or your expectation, but, you know, we're not problem solving tonight, so to speak. We're just laying out the general fundamental plan.

All right, I love it. Okay, so we marketed the property, we're getting leads on the phone. The next thing is we're having seller conversations, right? And, um, and that will lead into a sale. I think the biggest thing with sales conversations, just, just be yourself, right? Yeah, we're, we're not putting pressure on people to, to buy these properties. We're having conversations with these, with these people to determine whether or not this property is a good fit.

Correct.

That consists of a lot of questions. Ask them questions. What are you looking to use the property for, right? How long have you been looking at property? Is this for building? Is this for camping? Is this for recreation? Is this just for investing? What is this for, Mr. Buck, right? And are you looking at any other opportunities? Uh, why do you like this area? It's just questions, right? So ask questions, have a conversation, be an authentic— you know, just have an authentic conversation with people and steer them down the road to, you know what, this property is a great fit, or it's actually not, but I might have a property over here, or John Vermette might have a property, you know, for you. So, uh, so the sales conversations, a lot of people are intimidated by those things.. But, um, it really is just getting on the phone and having a conversation. I do believe that sales happens on the phone more than not. So you may have to push yourself to get on the phone, right?

Be yourself. And all, you know, people, this to ease people's minds, you're not like selling, you know, like a used car salesman. You basically, although a used car salesman could be good if you use this tactic, I believe it's just like understand what they want. And it is what they want, what you have. And if that's the case, show them how easy it is to own it. Simple as that. And if it's not, be transparent. John, you always talk about the power of no, right? Maybe you should— you know, we're coming to the end here, but talk about that. That's probably— I love that tidbit you always give.

Yeah, I've always found it helpful to establish trust, to tell somebody something that they cannot do on the property. So if the zoning doesn't allow for horses, I'll be like, just so you know, like, this property doesn't allow for large livestock like horses. So you can have dogs, cats, that kind of a thing, but if you're looking for something like that, it's probably not going to be a good fit for you. And the fact that I'm not just forcing this property down their throat— it's perfect for you no matter what you want to do— that really helps establish trust. And so, you know, I've found that to be really helpful tactic. And then, yeah, to your point, Mike and Scott, like, you just got to be yourself, you know. You, like, every— oftentimes when we jump into this, we have this persona in our minds of what a salesperson is, and the best salespeople are the people that are themselves, and they come in all shapes and sizes, you know.

So I love it, I love it. All right, we're gonna sell these properties. There are a few ways we sell, right? Um, we'll sell for retail cash, we'll sell for owner financing. Uh, generally we're finding the end buyer through land selling websites and Facebook who are going to buy from us retail. So if we buy property for $2,000, we'll sell it to somebody for $8,000 cash, maybe $9,000 or $10,000 on owner financing. But those are the two ways we sell land. We love owner financing. A lot of people out there are like, don't owner finance land, it's too complicated. It's not, it's not complicated, right? We have systems that help us owner finance land. And, uh, John and Mike and myself, we have portfolios of properties that pay us monthly on owner financing. That's where freedom occurs.

Right?

When you can wake up on the first of the month and you know what's coming in that month, that's pretty awesome. So we sell for owner financing, we sell for retail cash. We haven't even talked about wholesale. We sell wholesale to other land investors because if you can buy land at 25 cents on the dollar, you can sell to another investor at 50 cents on the dollar in that county.

Yeah.

We could sell notes. That's another way to sell land, right? So, um, yeah, how do we, how do we sell? We, we use LG Pass. LG Pass is another system that helps us create contracts and deeds to do the actual sale. So a lot easier nowadays than, than it was. Um, Fellas, we went through the entire— we went through the anatomy of a land deal in an hour. We digressed a little bit. Did we miss anything?

I mean, I— they're like, each one of those topics we could have taken a full episode to talk about, for sure. Yeah, but I think from a 50,000-foot overview, I think we overviewed So yeah, we're good at overviewing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, I think so too, Mike.

No, I think we did a great job. I think there's, you know, there's a whole nother episode that could be problem solving. I mean, that's a— that could be episode after episode. That means that's what we do. We have a model that's very simple, and then it's all about fine-tuning that model. And that, and that is just like— that's constant, right? We're all continually adjusting But, um, you know, uh, we're continually adjusting while we're actually doing it, right? So that's the key thing, you know. It's not— I forget, was that— that might have been Scott Todd's book, or he was referencing a book where he said an entrepreneur is like fixing a plane while it's in flight. I think that it was in his book, but I don't know if he wrote that or he quoted another book, but it made sense to me. It's like You know, we're— you're still flying, but you're trying to fix it. So it's kind of very precarious, right? Like, we're like— so I say we're superheroes, entrepreneurs, right? And moms, superheroes.

No, I love it. I love it. Well, uh, let's hit one question for, for Jeff Evenson here real quick, and then I look forward to next week. We're going to talk next week on, on how we, uh, We're not just doing a land deal next week. We're, we're going to talk about how we grow this into a business.

Connecting the dots.

We're going to connect the dots. The dots. Uh, Mike Zano, do you re-mail neighbor letters, neighbor letters at any point? 60 to 90.

I typically don't. I don't know if you do. Do— nope.

I don't know if I re-mail neighbor letters. No. Um, unless Actually, this just happened, uh, in my business. I said to my acquisitions manager, uh, Love— Love, my wife's like, who are you talking to? Talking to Love. Um, hey, did we ever reach out to this neighbor? She's like, yeah, we did, but let me do it again. And she did again because there was a house next, next door, right? And we did end up selling a property for cash. In my business. So I think, I think for— I think it depends, uh, Jeff. I think, you know, if there are vacant properties around, I don't know if it'd be a high priority. But if there's a house next door, uh, and we contacted them a couple months ago and they didn't answer, uh, we're gonna try again for sure. Yeah, so awesome. Well, fellas, we did it!

We did it!

It's hard to take— hard to, hard to cover a land deal in an hour, but we did it.

Yes!

Yeah, it was pretty good. I like that.

We didn't talk about AI very much. Maybe we talk about that next week as well, because we're using AI in these different parts of our businesses, uh, as well.

Well, wait a minute, can you pull up my shout out, please?

Wait a minute, you didn't get a shout out?

Oh, Kyle, Michelle, and their dog Henry gave me a shout out!

And the dog.

I met with them tonight. They're a power couple. They're thinking about this business. So hopefully this helps you guys tonight. Looking forward to connecting next week. Yeah, I told them how it drives you crazy. I'm not gonna lie.

I said, let me scan the comments to see if anybody mentioned my name. Let me scroll up.

By the way, I— on the— for the— for our next get-together, I did I did put Henry on the appointment. So for Kyle and Michelle, you guys will see him on there. We'll make sure he's present. Cute little dog. He's very intent. He wants to invest in land as well.

All right. That's awesome. That's great. I love pet land investing. Oh, wait, look, I see it. Oh, you know, I totally went fishing for that, though.

That's all right.

But I listen, it doesn't count.

But Brad, I concur.

Oh, that's very nice, Mike. Thank you.

Like, that's like an off-the-backboard shout out, right?

Yeah. Yeah. All right, everybody. Well, this was, uh, this was fun. Hopefully this was helpful. Um, anatomy of a land deal 2026. Yeah, this can replace—

typically I send people the episode we did in 2025. I'm gonna be happy to replace it with this one.

Yeah, I think it's, uh, hopefully it's, hopefully it's better and up to date. I think it is.

We'll do it again next year. This is perfect.

All right, guys, well, um, before we go, don't forget the Dirt Rich Summit, October 1st through the 3rd, 2026. It's only 3 months away, 2 and a half months away.

Another shout out.

No way.

Yeah, Michael, you're welcome, Michael.

Really, Michael, you and I just shared an email today, Michael.

Michael, Michael, Michael, you're not gonna—

you're not really—

Michael, Michael, pay no attention to Scott. Thank you, Michael.

Wow. Okay. Anyway, this was fun, Michael. No worries. I know that, you know, I look forward to meeting you at the Dervish Summit and Yeah, it'll be a nice— it'll be a nice embrace.

Love you, dude, buddy. And we love you, John. Yes, yes, John, is it truly enough?

I— you know what, it's enough.

Oh, oh, look at this. Okay, all right, we're signing off now. Thanks, everybody. Have a good night. It's a— talk to you next week. Okay, bye-bye. Bye-bye. See you.