Building Your Land Investing Tech Stack: Essential Tools for Serious Investors

Talk to him.

Hey, all, welcome to Land Geek Nightcap. Tonight. John and Mike, I know you're excited. Tonight we're talking tools, tech and scaling because the right tech helps you grow faster and work less. So if you're still buried in spreadsheets and doing everything manually, it's time to level up, man. Right. Tonight we're breaking down the essential. The essential tools the land investors are using. At the 30 minute. Mark Ryan from Zamplo is going to join us to share information about his pretty amazing list building and data tool. And as always, if you're catching the replay, remember, we go live every Tuesday night at 9pm Eastern on YouTube and Facebook. Mike Zano, John Burnett. How we doing, guys?

Cheers. Cheers.

Doing great.

Cheers to you. What do you got? What do you got, Mike?

A little pinot noir. I like to drink that too.

The piano, nice bougie, very bougie. What about you, Scott?

I got a little bourbon. Wisconsin award winning bourbon tonight, actually a little bit heavier than the rye, so it's got that Kentucky hug for sure going down high proof.

But I like to think that Wisconsin bourbon, they just finish it off with a piece of cheddar or something.

I mean, there's a little hint of bacon and cheddar in it. Yeah, for sure. But welcome, guys and welcome. Welcome, Land Geek Nation. Hopefully I'm coming through. Okay. I'm. I'm actually at a family gathering out in South Dakota at a lake cabin. I know it's surprising. We have lakes in South Dakota. You wouldn't think that.

He got the one.

Yeah, the one.

You look cozy.

I like.

You can see the, the boards in the background. The. That's a cozy environment.

I can tell right now it's my.

Dogs actually cuddle up right next to me. And I got the bourbon. I'm talking to you guys. It's quite nice. It's very nice. My wife's in the kitchen whispering sweet nothings to me.

She baking some cookies.

All the way from the kitchen.

All the way from the kitchen. She made a killer dessert tonight. So. So, yeah, it was all good. All right, guys. Well, tonight we're talking tech stack. Mike Zano's favorite subject.

Oh, yeah, I'm right on it, tech sack.

But, but really we don't need to get into the weeds whole thing. We just want to talk a little bit about some of the tools we use to help us scale the business. Because that's the thing, right? We don't, as Mark always says, we don't want to create another job for you. We Want to create a machine and to run a machine, you need tech nowadays. Right. So I thought we'd start there. And if everybody on the, on the call has questions about the tech that we use, please let us know. But let's first talk about why these tools are important. I think that's kind of the big picture. Right. And Zaino, I know you can speak to that.

Well, yeah, well, we started off, Scott, without a lot of these tools. I always say it was still a profitable business. Nobody was paying me more money if I looked at my hourly rate. But certainly got a lot nicer and life got a lot easier when we started to simplify with different tools.

For sure.

And I think you, you don't grow as fast. Right, John?

Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. Like, there's, there's a lot that you can do to free up a good portion of your time and also it enables you to do a lot of things a lot better and a lot faster effectively. So. Yeah. But yeah, and I think it's interesting thinking about tech because there's so many things that you can use effectively for your business, but there's also like phases of tech adoption in this business. Like day one, there are some tools that you need to be using, but there are other tools, like after a year that are going to be very exciting, but probably aren't the things that you should be diving into right at the outset. So there's some tools like, I mean we could get into like AI and like all the things. But really there are some tools that are going to be core to your business from day one and then other ones that continue to build and allow you to scale as you continue to grow.

Yeah, and I think there's that. Fine. There's that, there's that balance that we talk about right there. You don't want to get in over your head with tech, but you don't want to not use tech either. You don't want to be licking and sticking and stuffing envelopes. But like we were in 2015, you do not want to be using the letter folding machine in the corner of your office in 2025 like we were in 2015. Right.

One, didn't you?

I bought one. That was Scott Todd's first recommendation to me to, to automate.

First thing you need is the Z539 prototype. Step one. Oh, yes.

So techie man, I hand folded my envelopes. I didn't, I didn't utilize technology, but handful. I did try to get one of those, you guys remember, like, like trying to like, moisten the stamps with, like, those little thingies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was.

This is a great time.

You. That's great. You automated the stamp licking since. Yes.

If technology back in the day was things to moisten stamps and let a folding machine come a long way.

Well, and not only that, but even. Even just. Just retrieving data. Right. Which we're going to talk about here at half past the hour. But. But 10 years ago, it was. It was. It was hard to get a list, number one, and number two, it was hard to. We had to scrub the list back in the day, there's really not any scrubbing anymore. Right. When we scrubbed a list, we had like 30,000 line items, and we had to scrub it down to a few hundred to mail to, like, that would take hours. Remember, we build a list in three minutes.

The first boot camp, Scott Todd there having this whole big segments on scrubbing lists.

Yeah.

It was just like, you know. Yeah, that was the focus. That was the. That was what you need to know.

He did a whole hour where he, you know, where he basically scrubbed a list and moved data around and he did Vlookup. Mike. Remember Vlookup? That was very confusing. I remember he's combining two lists together. I'm like, this is too. This is too much.

This is too techy.

John's like a Vlookup master. We know.

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's great. Vlookups every day.

Vlookups every day. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, so I think we should talk briefly about some of the tools that we utilize with land investing that literally, they buy a lot of our time back. Right. Tens and tens of hours, our time has been bought back by these tools. And, you know, the first one, we're a little bit biased, but, you know, Mark and Scott Todd created LGPass for us, which is a proprietary software that enables us to do some pretty cool things. Right. We can automate our mailings and mail like that. We can create contracts. We can stay organized. It's very important to stay organized and know where you are in the life cycle of the land deal. And now there's even a cool property tax feature in there where we can pay property taxes through. Through the tool. But John, talk about LGPASS a little bit and. And how you think it's helpful.

Yeah. So, like, you know, we were kind of talking about this a little bit when we first, like when. When Val and I first started, we were folding and stuffing envelopes every Saturday. Right. And stamping them and bringing them over the big blue post box and putting them in. And LGPASS effectively made it so that we no longer had to do that. Right. So it's connected via API to a mail service, which means that you can upload a list of ownership data and then it'll automatically trickle out your mailers for you. Right. And so it takes care of that. It's got the letter templates in there for you. And so it's a question we get a lot. It's like, where do I get the templates? All the templates are in LG Pass. And so you can send out your letters as people respond. You can generate the deeds with an LGPass. As you acquire properties, you can store due diligence information, like Scott was saying. And then when you sell your properties, it's got the sales paperwork templates in there. You can actually generate your sales paperwork in there, and you can generate your deeds when those people pay off their property. So it really automates a large chunk of the administrative side of the business for us. So there you go.

I concur.

Awesome.

Thank you. Mike concurs.

You gotta concur one for me.

Oh, man. Mike, I'm gonna let you talk about what. What's a tool that you love, Mike, in the land business that has maybe made a huge difference for you?

Yeah, definitely. But I'd like to just back up for a second and say again, we were. No, no. I just think it's good to point out that we were effective in the beginning. We weren't extremely efficient, but we were very effective. And I think even if we were to remove all these tools today, this business is still amazing. Right. It's just that it becomes easier and easier. And I think the benefit of people learning today is they get a combination of the effective principles, the core principles of land investing now, combined with efficiency. Right. So they're really getting this two put together where we started out being very effective, not so efficient, but still very profitable and productive. But things have just become a lot easier, right? And so we embrace that. And every. It's like every year something else comes out to make our life easier. The second half of the show is going to be a prime example, right. Of how life just gets easier. So to me, I think, yeah, first and foremost, the removal of licking and sticking envelopes, as John mentioned, that was huge. But also the fact that, you know, that the LG Pass is a CRM in the sense of it can track our deals. You know, you know, when someone calls you back, it's like who is this person? Who am I talking to? Like I mailed out hundreds of thousands of letters, who am I talking to? But if you can click of a couple buttons, pull up the person, pull up their property, you can have an educated conversation with them on the fly. So I think that's really important. You know, I don't know if I have a favorite. Well, probably the favorite tools on some of the. Again, going into the second half of the show. Things that allow us to look up properties and see where they're out. See, now we can even see values based upon, you know, some different functions the softwares have that we can actually see an estimated value of the property and so on and so forth. So just. But to look at it, I mean you can imagine this business when there was no people were doing things like this years ago with no computers, no software, but it's like, it makes it a lot more difficult. But now you can visually see a property on a map and you can look at it and you can start to acclimate to what the features of that property are. So I would say that the software is like the one we're going to cover. No, I don't want to, I don't know if we've already mentioned, I don't want to spoil alert, but spoil like.

We, we already mentioned it.

Okay, well this is what makes our life easier, right? To be able to see these properties. I think that's one of my favorite tools, right? Is to be able to look at a property that I'm thinking about buying and get some real detailed information, like in the snap of a finger.

Yeah, no, I love that.

I concur.

Thank you so much, John.

Gotta concur. That's awesome. Yeah. To be able to quickly survey a property that comes across your desk, right. And know within minutes when you get good at this, you know, in minutes if it's a good deal or not. Part of that is visualizing the property with some of these tools and seeing some of the property data with these tools. So yeah, the tools that, you know, a lot of us utilize, I mean from DataTree to land ID to Google Earth with there's overlays you can put in Google Earth property, property data to Zamplo. You know, these are all just amazing tools that give us property data really quick. So I think one other thing I would just say about LG pass that I love is you know, our VAs are in there, right? The VAs have permissions and the VAS are in there managing our properties on in the intake and managing our properties that are enclosing and managing our properties that are. That are being marketed and sold. And it's a really great way to keep track of where you are, you know, within the lifecycle of that property. So that's another really great thing that I think Mark and Scott incorporated in this whole thing when they got up and running is, you know, we need a tool that will enable us to use the delegation side of things to, you know, to efficiently run the automated stuff. So that, to me, I think, is pretty helpful.

That's a great point. I think, you know, using virtual assistants is pretty much predicated on having some sort of software platform or something. I mean, they're across the world, right. How else are we going to engage with them and have them do the tasks that we need them to do if we don't have some sort of software behind it? So that is really open the door, right? It's a good point, Scott. You know?

Good point. You.

You are awesome. You complete me.

Concurrent completely.

You're not gonna get it, Scott.

Sorry. Why don't I get a concur? You guys get. John gets a concur, Mike gets a concur, Scott gets.

And I agree completely.

I agree, Scott.

That's.

That's great.

I really.

I think it was a good point, Scott, is what I'm saying.

Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. Yeah. That's so nice of you.

Yeah.

In the hierarchy, currents, I agree, is very low. So anyway, John.

So thinking about. So LGPass, I think is great because it's like, that's one of the first tools that you're going to be utilizing, right? So like, week one, that's like one of the big things you're using. I think the other thing I guess we tapped into was the data side of things. Like when I first started, I remember, like, did you guys ever do imacros? You had like, the little, like, computer stick that you plugged in and you had it running all night and like. Yeah, so we, like, we had to build. To get the data, we would build these scrapers and it would crawl through the county website, page by page page, grab the data, and then we're doing all the spreadsheet stuff. And now there are data services, and we're, you know, where you can effectively pull the data that you want, exactly what you want, filter it down, and then that's just available to you right away. Right. And so that's a big thing that I think is really helpful. I don't know what, what else do you guys think so from day one, like, if somebody was like, what are the tools I need right away?

Hmm. Well, I think it's easy to just take advantage of something like G Suite, right? I always tell people, one of the first things you want to do is create a virtual office, right? And as simple as that. No, this is a great, you know, point when you start out, I wouldn't use your own email. That's when you start to mail and have people, you know, give them an email to respond back to you. I would not use your personal email for the very reason that you want to look to the future, that you're going to outsource this and delegate this. So it's unlikely you're going to hand over your personal email to a virtual assistant. But if you create an email, say through Gmail, you could use anything but just say Gmail then now you create a Google voice which attaches to that Gmail, right? And say you want to get a virtual mailbox, all the letters dump into that Gmail, right? So you start to build this little virtual office that can be something you hand off to a virtual assistant later on. So I think, you know, it's not really techie, but I guess it's a little techy, right? I mean, it's kind of cool to have all those functions in one that at some point you can just say to somebody, here, here's your Gmail, here's your Google voice, and this is where all the letters come and, and this is how you're going to, you know, and I'm going to give you user access to LGPass with this Gmail. And so it all kind of comes together.

I love that recommendation. I love that recommendation. I love it. I love it. I think when you combine, that's your organizational tool. But there's so many things you can do within G Suite or Google Drive with forms and sheets and Google Docs and automations and creating code in there that'll keep you very organized. You can have folders for, for all your properties in the. On the acquisition side and on the sales side, and again, permissions to give your VAs. Right. To help you in the business, for sure. So I think, you know, a tool like that, I think, John, to answer your question, I think a. I think a mailing tool nowadays is probably essential to, to get a better return on time invested. Because, you know, we don't want to waste three hours sending out 100 mailers anymore, right? If we have the ability to do that and pay a little Bit of money to do that in minutes. That to me would be another thing in addition to like Google Drive or G suites when. I'm sorry to first get started in this. In this.

I certainly concur.

What about you, John? Let's do a top. Let's do a top three or four. What's another tool you think for beginners.

They should highly consider, I would say one thing. Once you get a team of virtual assistants or even just one virtual assistant, it's helpful to have some kind of a communication platform. And there's a variety that you can use. But I really like Slack, you know, I've used that for a good bit and you know, it's great. So it allows you to, it allows me to communicate with my team. I can even send voice memos if I don't have the time to actually send them a big long message and then I can keep track of that. If you're on the free plan, I think it only goes back three months, your history. So that's like the one downside to that. But it gives us a very good communication platform with our entire team.

For sure.

That's an amazing tool. I think that. And like you said free and there are other tools out there that can really optimize your communication with your VAs. I think we would be remiss to not mention Geek Pay in all of this as a tool for beginners. Just because John, when you started was Geek Pay in existence?

I think it was like barely my. I remember my first note was I was, I took payment through PayPal. I do not recommend it. It's like because there was a requirement for me to reach out to the person and be like we need the money. And it just got very messy. And so yeah, so we, we switched everything over to Geek Pay and it's been great, right? Like I've got over 100 notes in geek Pay and it automates that monthly payment. It takes the ach every single month, right. And then if somebody misses a payment, it sends them a notice. If you know they've got a portal, they can log in, they can make catch up payments, extra payments, all that kind of stuff. So that's largely out of sight, out of mind for me, right. Like I don't want anybody mailing me checks, right.

And that's what I was doing in 2015. I was keeping stuff, keeping track of stuff on, on in Excel, right. And I was an Excel rookie to begin with and it was a little bit of a nightmare there the first couple years and then Mark. Mark released Geek Pay, and it was a big breath of fresh air when we could not only organize the data and. And, you know, not rely on my math and organizational skills, but to be able to automate the payments.

Right.

Which is just huge nowadays. We can set it and forget it for our buyers, and they can log in, like you said, John, and make extra payments. There's a great feeling right, when you wake up and you get an email that says so and so. Paid $500 toward their land payment. Well, wait, their land payment's only 150 bucks. Oh, that's nice. Right? So a lot of people are. Are motivated to go into that platform, pay the properties off quicker, which is pretty cool. So. Awesome. Well, we got some recommended tech tools here. Anything else, Zaino, you can think of that we might want in the tech stack for beginners?

Well, I think we should also. Do you see Dinesh's question here?

Oh, yeah, we should answer that question here. I'll let you answer the question, Mike, from Dinesh. Are there dedicated mail services that you recommend through flight school, to send mail outs through LGPass, or are there certain mail service companies who may not be compliant with LG Pass?

Yeah, so right now, I believe it's still LoB, right. It connects to an outside mailing service called LoB. We get a very good negotiated rate per letter. And yeah, there's. Yeah, the thing about LG Pass, you don't have to overthink things. Right. It's already. It's there. When you want to buy a property, the deed for that particular state is created. When you want to sell something, the owner finance documents are automatically created. So, yeah, it works really well. As far as other tools that I think are really helpful, I mean, I think we hit the big ones out of the gate. You know, we got software for collecting data, software for tracking our deals and sending out our mailers. We have software now that we can collect payments from simple Gmail, maybe a Google Voice or so. You know, I don't want to get too deep into the basics, so I think that would be enough to really get someone up and running, to be honest. Yeah, sometimes we play around with some other things like air table and whatnot, just to have some different data storage, but not really needed. It just might be. There's always room for personalization here, right. I tell people, like, there's a basic model, but you can also anytime personalize it. So I don't think there's anything that we haven't covered that is really essential. Am I missing something? I mean, I know.

I think I would recommend one or two more things. One would just be a platform. Well, one would be a hosting service for your email list. Right. And there are free ones out there. So mailchimp. Mailchimp or something along those lines. Right. I think you can have like up to a couple thousand subscribers on your MailChimp.

May not even know what you mean by that, Scott. So we talk about buyers list, we talk about mailchimp. Like what? Why would I even have that?

Yeah, so the reason you want a buyer list or your reason, reason you want an email list is because that's your list, right? It's your list of leads that you continue, can, can, can engage with over time. But you collect these leads when you're marketing your properties, right? So your marketing properties, you get it. You get a gentleman or ladies contact information, their email address, their phone number. You want to, you want to keep that information so that you can continue to nurture your relationship with that customer over time.

Because anything that we haven't covered that is really essential with a service like, like mailchimp.

Right. Which is a free email tool. So, so I think that would be a good thing for your buyers list. And then I think of just a really easy free CRM system. Whether, you know, John, you probably know better than me, I think Trello might be a good one or there's probably some other free ones out there that, that could help organize. You know, maybe your, your hot, warm, cold leads that you're, that you're trying to sell properties to.

Oh yeah, the buyer.

Yeah, yeah. Trello is great. I mean, Trello. I still use Trello often just to kind of sort some stuff and what's in the pipeline and all that kind of stuff. And so it does a really good job of that. It does something called a Kanban board where you've got all these columns and you can just move a card from one column to another. And it could be something as simple as, as to do, doing, done if you just have a list of things that you need to get done. Or it could be these are the properties that I'm working on buying and where they're at. And you could have different lists and, or people that you're selling to. So I think there are a bunch of great tools like that and there's a lot more stuff kind of like Mike was saying, you know, things like Airtable and Zapier and things like that that I think are really helpful. But you could definitely, like if you're Trying to do zapier, you know, in week one, you're probably getting distracted from what actually needs to be happening in your business, you know.

Yeah, so yeah, good point. Well, we have two quick Geek Pay questions that, that we can address and then let's bring Ryan in the room here. But first from Daniel, does. Daniel, good to see you. By the way, does Geek Pay generate the seller financing contracts or is that through LGPass? That's actually through LGPass, Daniel. That creates the contacts for us and the, and the deeds and purchase agreements for cash deals. And then Andrew Pond. Nice to see Andrew. Does Geek Pay handle escrow for when we are buying properties? John, want to answer that one?

No, it does not.

What would your suggestion be for?

So as far as. So ask grit when we are buying properties, if you're buying a property like you know, generally we're self closing on our properties because they're relatively inexpensive and so for those, you know, we're actually handling the whole process from. So we'll send the deed to the person and they will deed to us. I'll have them send the deed back to me and then I will send them the check for their property once I see the, the notarized copy of the deed. And so basically we, we handle it in house effectively is the way that happens. So there's not really an escrow service.

Perfect. There are some online escrow companies. I don't know if you guys ever use those. That's something that maybe look into but, but yeah, we like to keep things simple with, with that self closing process. All right guys, well this was a nice little short conversation about our recommended tech stack for beginners. I think we have some nice, nice tools and I think actually I'll just put, I'll throw, I'll throw a banner up. I love the functionality of this tool as well. Throw up a banner. These are our recommended technology tools from tonight's podcast. G suite, Google Drive, LGPass, Slack, Geek Pay Sales, CRM, Zamplo. I'm going to edit that to maybe add mailchimp. But speaking of Xamplo, this is pretty exciting guys. We now have Land Geeks here. Let me bring Ryan on stage. Land Geek now has a relationship with Zamplo which is a list service and also real estate data service. And welcome Ryan to the podcast. We'd love to chat with you for a few minutes about the tool and like to hear a little bit about you. So welcome. Tell us where you're coming from and what cocktail of choice did you bring tonight to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Obviously listen to the podcast a lot and excited to be joining you tonight. I'm actually on a sailboat right now just off the west coast up near Seattle on a little working vacation. So hopefully my Internet holds up. Looks pretty good so far and right now I'm drinking Naked and Famous. It's a cocktail with mezcal, chartreuse, aperol and lime and it's one of my favorites right now.

So that sounds good.

We may need to start a recipe. We may need a recipe landing page or something for nightcap. Totally awesome, Ryan. Well, your camera is very. The seas must be very stable because you're.

I am in a very sheltered, sheltered bay. Yes.

Awesome. Well, thanks for. Thanks for joining us. So I guess, Ryan, just to tell everyone who's watching here tonight, for those who are not familiar, can you just briefly break down for us what is Zamplo? How does it help people? How does it help land investors specifically? And I guess what inspired you to create this tool?

For sure. Well, let's start off with what inspired us. And it was basically everything you've talked about. We did that too. So we're land investors. We've been land investors for years and we've used every single tool and we used all of them at the same time. And it felt like we had 15 different hats on. And we built Xamplo for ourself to use because we didn't want to have to go to a mapping tool, a data platform, a CRM, all of these different places, and we wanted to kind of all live in one spot. And so we developed this in house for ourself and we thought, hey, maybe we shouldn't be selfish, maybe we should share this with the land geek community and the land investor community. And so we started to promote it about a year ago. We've seen some great pickup right now. And obviously we have a platform that plugs right into LGPass so people can pull their data directly into there. And then obviously we have clients as well that have other CRMs and other things as well. But essentially it's a one stop shop where you can pull your list so you can filter using our export tool. You can also use our mapping tool to draw polygons around specific neighborhoods or counties and then filter even more to build your lists. And then we have a bunch of pricing tools which is kind of the biggest piece that we really, really like to promote right now. And I think it was John that mentioned is you can click directly from your export into the map. And so if you have somebody on the phone in real time, you can click on that Zamplo link. It takes you directly to that property. It shows you comps, it shows you pricing estimates, and you can adjust those depending on what you're doing, which is pretty exciting. And then we're just constantly trying to develop it even more. And so adding more tools, adding better data, and that's another one that we're really working on, is trying to make sure our data is updated every day. And we've got some new data partners that we onboarded recently, which is pretty exciting. And so the data is getting better and better every day. And, yeah, just basically figuring out a tool that works for land investors in that specific way. And everybody does things a little bit different. And so we like to listen to our clients and try to create those tools that work for them. And so doing that quickly and responsively.

Very nice.

That's amazing.

I'm very excited about Zamplo, actually, personally for my own business, so. But yeah, we. Because we've. So I've used. I have also used all of the tools, every single one of them. And so. And the first tool was my own fingers and trying to build out a scraper. And we were, you know, we were talking about that and doing imac. Imacros. And it's really important, like, you need to. Because, you know, you're not just pointing and clicking at an entire county and just being like, I want all of the things, right? It's like, the filtering is where the power is, right? Like, it's where. Which. Which of the properties do you want? Like, how big do you want them to be? Like, what. What areas do you actually want those properties? All that type of stuff. And I've been very impressed with Zamplo and how effectively it allows me to filter that down.

And I remember getting a CD ROM in the mail from a county and being like, oh, this is okay, we're gonna have to increase the tech on this one for sure. So, yeah, definitely come a long way.

That's amazing. Ryan, how long have you been a land investor? Tell us about the.

So we have an interesting story. So we've been land investor. I keep saying we because I have two business partners, and we've been doing it since 2020. And so our history is we're entrepreneurs, so we're kind of serial entrepreneurs, and we always have at least a fairly large company on the go. But while we do that, we tend to do two or three other things on the side to kind of see what's working and ideally build new companies. And so in 2020 we had a large marketing company that we sold. And so during that exit process we were just kind of hanging out playing Grand Theft Auto Auto, listening to podcasts. And so we did what everybody else did is we came across land investing and we read the books and we did the podcast and we learned everything we possibly could. At that time I was kind of running one of our e commerce business. So the two other partners were doing that investing and when it started to grow, I saw that they were using airtable, they were using all these things that were kind of clunked together. And so I jumped in and kind of said, hey, let's try to make this better. You know, we had data relationships but we were lost into year long contracts. We wanted to make sure that this was something that was flexible and that people could grow and scale as they went. And so I jumped in and said, hey, let's make this for the team and make sure that it's accessible for VAs, make sure that it plugs into mapping tools, all of these different things. And then the two partners continue to buy and sell property at scale. And yeah, they use our tool as well. And so they're our best customer, which is nice.

Wow, that's awesome.

That's amazing. I, for one, I'm excited to use Xanthel. I'm currently in an annual contract that I'm waiting to expire, but I've seen demo videos on how it works and yeah, pretty awesome. And the fact that it's now linked up to LGPass to be able to acquire that data really quickly I think is huge for, for new and old land investors alike, for sure to be able to get that data more quickly.

Yeah, and one thing that we like to always highlight as well is we do have skip tracing built in as well. So obviously if you're, like I said, people do things differently, but if you're just doing mailing, obviously we have that data. But a lot of people are doing texting campaigns and phoning and door knocking and different types of things. Neighbor letters are huge. We have all that as well. We also have API capabilities as well. If somebody is very technical and wants to take it to the next level, we have people that, you know, plug in and customize into their own CRMs, maybe they've built their own software they want to plug into. So there's anybody that wants to talk to us about that, very simple to set up. But also we have a very simple ui, which is what a lot of our clients like, where you can have. You don't need 280 fields. You can, but you might only need 30, because those are the ones you actually use and want, and those are the ones you use on a daily basis. So very customizable.

Yeah, I like. I really like. One of the features that you guys have that I appreciated was that with the filtering, you can see, because one of the challenges that you run into with any of these data filtering softwares is it's always dependent on the county, like, how good is the data that the county is actually providing. And so sometimes you might have one field that you can kind of filter on for. For one county, right? Where they have like a classification where it's just vacant land, and you filter it, and then it. It just near zeros you in on the vacant land. For another county, they might not have very good reporting. And with Zamplo, what I like that you did is you can see kind of the funnel. So you can see you pick the county. It says, here's how many parcels you have. And then you say, I want this acreage and up. And then it gives you another. It gives you a new number, right? So it says, okay, well, it was 20,000, now it's 10,000. Then you say, and now I want it to be out of state property owners. Well, now it's down to 5,000. So you can see. And sometimes you can see you plug in a filter and you're like, oh, it's down to zero. I did something. And so you can kind of adjust and pivot and really build that list how you want to.

Totally.

Yeah.

No, that's a. I love that feature, too. The other thing that a lot of people use that for is they'll build filters that they know and they like, and it's perfect. But then they'll take the. Go to the map, use a polygon, and then apply that filter as well and start to drill down and build these different reports. And then you can come back to that same report and say, hey, I mailed this last time. Okay, let's do it again. But slightly different. Or maybe you're doing the same because you're hitting the same market. It's just really easy. Easy to kind of go back and keep track of what you've done in the past and what's worked.

Ryan, what would you say is one of the most underutilized features that people may be not aware of? Is there anything that stands out? I mean, there's so much it can do. Is there anything that you feel like is just maybe missed by a lot of people?

Yeah, I'd say the pricing tool is definitely the one that is getting the most up use in the sense that people are using it more and more. One thing that we're continuing to add is essentially a due diligence page. And so obviously you've got your data, you've got your pricing, you have the ability to skip trace and that link as well can be added into your CRM. So that you can either go to the map or you can go to your kind of due diligence page. And as we grow, we're going to add more and more information to that page, whether it's. Get a lot of sun here, sorry from, you know, information about the county, whether you want to contact specific service providers or realtors or whoever in that area. And one thing is obviously, you know, follow us on social media, talk to your rep, because we're always constantly adding stuff. It's not like we don't do quarterly releases, we do weekly or sometimes even faster than that. So we'll just try to continually communicate the new things that we're adding.

Okay, thank you.

And can you, I think you might have mentioned earlier, Ryan, but can you just tell me again, like how up to date is the property owner data on your platform and like how often is that updated?

Yeah, and so like I said, we're now updating our data daily and that obviously is dependent on the counties because certain counties do yearly updates, certain ones do monthly, certain quarterly. But we're constantly, we're updating all of our data daily as we get it. And obviously that's the most important thing is having the most up to date data possible.

For comps data typically there's a little bit of a lag, right. Because comps will be scraped on a semi regular basis. How up to date are the comps typically?

Yeah, and same thing is. So we're trying to increase that speed. It's depending on the MLS each place that we pull that data from, whether it's Zillow or Redfin or other data sources. But the short answer is we're trying to make it faster at all times. We don't have a solid answer, but as quick as possible. The one thing that's really cool is in the pricing tool you can now see, give or take, depending on the radius you put around a property, about a thousand comps. Obviously we use an algorithm and AI to actually price the property and we might use 4000 depending on what we determine. But you can actually go in and actively remove or add what you want, depending on how knowledgeable of you are in the area. Because this side of the tracks or this side of the river might be slightly different. And then also you might have knowledge that you've owned a property in that area. You can kind of add it and tweak it a little bit better. Because as smart as the algorithm is, humans are always better.

That's great.

Awesome. We do have a question from Daniel Bryan. Maybe you can help with that, Ryan. It says sometimes skip tracing pulls up a different name than the owner entirely. Any insight on how or why that might happen?

Yeah, skip tracing is obviously art, not a science, if you will. And certain people quite often skip tracing will pull up to five names. Might be relatives, might be family members, might be people that were on title got removed, weren't on title, got added. And so it's not always perfect. But obviously this is used for, you know, potential marketing purposes. But that would be why, I mean, it always go more off actual deed information. But if you're looking to, say, contact neighbors, you own a property, you might want to sell it. Skip tracing is obviously used quite often for that.

Yeah. I also like is, you know, a lot of the other softwares, when you start to scrape lists, use polygon features, you kind of have a hard time remembering where you left off when it comes for the next time. But you guys have Unique built into yours, right, where you can. You can go back and you'll know where you left off or how does that work exactly? I know that's something that's built in some sort of feature, right. That allows you to.

There's a couple. Yeah. And so that's one thing we hated. We used to download reports and then we'd go back and two weeks later we'd be like, where do we put that? Which Excel files where you can go back and export. Any export you've done for the past six months, there's an export feature where you can go back and basically pull anything you don't pay again, obviously, which is nice. Then with regards to the polygon and the filters or the queries, you can save those and name them in any capacity. And we have different color codings and that's something we're doing. Also continuing to improve off of feedback because people are saying, oh, I want to be able to name this, this, and I want my VA to be able to access it because they want to be able to know which polygons which. So, yeah, so all of that's in there. And the easiest thing to do would be to have a call with your rep and just say, hey, give me a walkthrough, and they'll show you how to do it. One thing we love is customer service and talking to people. So give us a shout and we'll walk you through how to use every tool we got.

Excellent. Excellent.

Yeah, that's amazing. Mike Zano, you remember that viral TikTok video you did a couple years ago where you did that, you did the Polygon. You got like 40,000 views on how to get a list and. And how to. How to find an area, get a list, and mail in five minutes.

Yeah, yeah, it was good, actually. Not to toot my home, but it worked pretty good. So. But, you know, I got to get used to. I am using a Xamplo now. I did subscribe, and so I'm familiarizing myself with that. And I'm sure there's even a better video that can be made with that.

Exactly.

We'd love for you to make one. Be fun.

That's awesome. So, Ryan, where can we learn more about xampl? So you mentioned like, the Facebook page, but I assume you guys, do you guys have like a YouTube channel? Do you have Instagram page, all that stuff?

We have all that stuff, yeah. So YouTube would probably be the best spot, but also Facebook, you know, Instagram, we are on TikTok, we're. We're becoming more and more on there. But yeah, and then like I said, is. Is just have conversations with us, is, you know, email.

Ryan, where can we learn more about sample. So you mentioned like the Facebook page, but I assume you guys, do you guys have like a YouTube channel? Do you have Instagram page, all that stuff?

We have all that stuff, yeah. So YouTube would probably be the best spot, but also Facebook, you know, Instagram, we are on TikTok. We're becoming more and more on there. But yeah, and then like I said, is. Is just have conversations with us, is, you know, email us up, book a meeting, have a call. That's the easiest way. And we're going to start doing some more webinars, obviously. We did a webinar with Land Geek, which went great. And we had, you know, almost a couple hundred people sign up from that, which is awesome. And one thing I wanted to mention on this call is we gave a kind of promo code on that webinar, and I thought we'd do the same thing for this. So anybody who wants to sign up can get us up book A meeting, have a call. That's the easiest way. And we're going to start doing some more webinars. Obviously, we did a webinar with Land Geek, which went great. And we had almost a couple hundred people sign up from that, which is awesome. And one thing I wanted to mention on this call is we gave a kind of promo code on that webinar, and I thought we'd do the same thing for this. So anybody who wants to sign up can get 20% off for three months on the basic plan just by putting Nightcap in the promo code. 20% off for three months on the basic plan just by putting Nightcap in the promo code. Or give us a call and say you heard the podcast and we'll hook you up. And we do have annual plans as well. Obviously, we don't want to force people into that, but if you did want to book the annual plan, we'd give you that 20% off on that as well.

Awesome.

Thank you.

First promo code.

Or give us a call and say you heard the podcast and we'll hook you up. And we do have annual plans.

Promo code.

Like, I was hoping the promo code would be John Burnett, but Nightcap is.

Okay, you say John Burnett, we'll give you a code too.

Okay. And Ryan, how can. Do you have an email address that we could post on the banner here for folks to get in touch with you, or how would you recommend they get in touch with you?

Yep, for sure. Let's do Ryan. R y a n PLO.com and so once again, we do have ZAMPLO.com please come use the platform. But there is also the. The Land Geek data platform as well, which is using all Zamplo's data and information as well. So you can sign up to either one.

This is great. I mean, if we go back. So he started this whole podcast about years ago, calling the county, trying to get lists. But when you get a list, it. You had to format the list. And that was just. I mean, to be at the. At this moment we're at now, to have software like Zempla where we can just go take exactly what we want. No calling counties, trying to talk to four or five different people, trying to figure out who has the list you need. It's truly. It's truly awesome. It really is.

Yeah.

I think one of the big things.

Yeah.

And like with. For me, because I used to scrape all my data from counties, and when you would move into a new county, it was like, oh, now I got to learn a whole New thing I've got to, like, the data is coming in a different format and moving to a data provider gives you consistency across all of your counties. So you get the same. You get the same fields, the same spreadsheet, and you can have the same process. So when it comes to, like actually delegating some of these processes, you can have a virtual assistant do it, because it's the same thing for any county you want to do.

Right.

And so it, it does give you a lot of consistency there, too.

You know, I was just thinking if someone might be watching this show, brand new to land investing. And so just perhaps maybe the most obvious thing we talk about, like, why are we. Like the data? We're just. I mean, this sounds really obvious, but maybe someone's first tuning in. Right, Scott? It's like this is like when we're going to set up a mailer. We want. Because we buy properties that are off market. Right. These are not properties that advertise a realtor. So we go to a given area. We need to know how to find these people. Like, who are we going to engage with, who we going to mail to? So what we're talking about here with Zamplo is that we can go to a very specific area and extract exactly what we need. Typically, it's out of state owners, people that own these properties that we want to send letters to. So I know we've been talking really more about inside the software, what it is, but I think somebody might be brand new watching us going, yeah, why would you even need this? It's because this is how we reach out to people who we buy properties from. This is really. This is the bloodline of our business.

Okay. You're making our lives easier, Ryan. We appreciate that for sure.

Happy to do it.

So, let's see. So, yeah, James had a comment here. Polygon feature is awesome. He adds a color and saves it. That's amazing. Daniel wants to know if you're out on the open ocean. You said you're in a bay, right?

Tonight I'm in a bay. But it is a little rocky. That's why the sun kept coming in, because I'm spinning around. So, yeah, I am.

Yeah, it's amazing. And then Daniel. Yeah. It's Nightcap N I T E. I don't know. It's just how it's always been. Right. Right, Mike? Like it's our thing.

Yes, but is that how you did the promo code? Is it nite. Okay.

It's nice. I don't. Yeah.

Once again, if people if people misspell it, just give us a call. But yes, it is. It is N, I, T, E.

Scott. Todd used to make fun of us, Mike. He'd make fun like he's spelled night wrong and like, I don't know what you guys are doing.

Came on with his pina colada. His trademark pina colada.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Awesome.

Well, if you guys watching have any questions for. For Ryan, please post them in the chat there. I do want to make sure we did have a question earlier that I just want to make sure we. We answer. I don't want to skip over it. It's not related to sample necessarily. But let's give Brock some help if you guys don't mind here. This is one of the reasons we like the show is because we like to. We like to give help to people, right? So we go off topic sometimes with the Q and A, which is fine. Which is why you guys should come next week. Sorry for the barking dog if you hear that. But here's a question from Brock. So you three seasoned land investors on the call. Brock started a few months ago, hopes to have four to six properties by the end of the week. Feels like an area I need to outsource is marketing. Figuring out how to hire a VA and give access to different systems seems overwhelming. Any suggestions? So it's probably another podcast topic, right? Suggestions for the beginner marketer, but.

To.

Me sounds like a job.

I was thinking it sounds like a Mike Zano question.

Maybe Ryan can take a stab at this one. Yeah. Let's all give 30 seconds of advice to Brock. John, you first.

So my, my first off. Hello, Brock. And I'm glad. So he mentioned earlier too, this is his first time tuning in live, so he listens, but it's his first time tuning in. But my recommendation on the marketing side would be the first and foremost, do it yourself, right? It's really tempting, especially on the marketing. It's one of those things I remember, like each of these little phases. I would hit it to get that little pit in my gut, right? You're hovering over the post button on Facebook and stuff like that. Doing that first post, you need to get your first few reps in before you can effectively delegate that. And then I think that what I would do is just one step at a time, right? Like one little thing at a time. You don't have to. You don't have to delegate all of marketing. You can do things like ad copy, right? Having somebody help you write the ad copy. If you've got that in place. And posting on Facebook is substantially easier. Right. If the ad copy is already ready to go. So you can do little bits and pieces. You don't have to, you don't have to delegate the whole thing in one go. Do it progressively and do it all yourself to start, and then start progressively taking some of those pieces off of your shoulders.

I like it.

I think John covered it for all of us.

Yeah, that was, that was perfect. I, I, A wise person once told me, though, is you shouldn't outsource anything that you don't understand yourself. And so that's perfect. It's giving it a try yourself. Doesn't have to be a lot, but, you know, after that, you know, we've used outsources all over the world. We've also hired local talent, we've also hired Realtors directly to do marketing on our behalf. So it's, it's different for, for every property, obviously.

Yeah. As far as giving them access, I mean, we could use TeamViewer, any desk. You can set up a separate computer for them. You could use LastPass to share passwords. You could build them their own Chrome profile. I mean, there's a lot of ways you could give them access, if that's what you're asking as well. Brock.

Yeah, Brock, I would just recommend do something every day in the marketing department and that's first going to be posting ads, like John said. So, so tomorrow's Facebook Marketplace. The next day, another platform, one of the LAM platforms. Right. The next day, Craigslist. We still get some leads on Craigslist. Right. It's a free platform. Why not post there? So do something every day in the marketing space. And it doesn't have to be perfect. You just need to get the ad.

Out there in front progressively taking some of those pieces off of your shoulders.

I like it in front of people.

You need to cast the net far and wide and get it out. Get that, get that property out there.

Right.

And, you know, you can do Zillow for. I don't know if Zillow if you can still do for sale by owner on Zillow or not. I don't know if you guys are doing that. I did. I did that a couple years ago and killed it for a while. And then for whatever reason, got kicked off and couldn't do it anymore. But there's, there's platforms out there where you can list these properties. So. Do something every day, Brock. And then, you know, I think it's a matter of. It's not necessarily hard. It's just kind of a pain. So just make yourself do it 10 minutes a day and then. And then start outsourcing some of those things. Like John said, a bite, you know, a little bit at a time. So. Yeah. Oh, we got some comments coming in. Ryan, we need the drink recipe, so if you could throw that in the chat and then I'll make a banner.

Sure.

Yeah. It's pretty easy. It's an easy one. I don't do math, so it's equal parts of the all four. So I can throw it in there.

It's.

It's super simple.

Nice. All right, do that. And the title of the drink again as well. Don Thrasher.

Who?

Guys, I think he's had his first sale already. He's a few weeks into flight school, actually, so that's exciting. Was introduced to sample in boot camp before I had started flight school and didn't know the value. After the second module, the value became clear. Zamplo creates the list we need to mail to it saves time and money.

There it is. That's one line. He simplified everything I was trying to say earlier. Zamplo creates the list.

I concur. Yeah.

Awesome.

Stephen Ray hired marketing VA at the beginning and regretted it now that I've been doing it. I know how to hire coach a va, so that's perfect. Right? Like, and Steven don't. I mean, we all do this in this business, right? We all hit little diffs. We all do things wrong. It gives us perspective. Now you're able to share that perspective with somebody else on the call and help them out. So thank you for taking the dip for some of the people on the call and giving us some perspective there. But that's great, and I'm glad to hear you're getting some traction. Go ahead, John.

Sorry. We're doing John Burnett story time about marketing VAs, but I heard a VA one. I heard a VA once and did kind of set it and forget it and forget it, Forget it. I forgetted it. I think forget and regret just no smash their way together.

It's a new T shirt, no fragrance.

But anyways, I. I paid this guy. I think over a period of time. I paid him like a thousand dollars. And then I took all. All of my leads and looked at them and categorized them and realized that I had gotten like two leads from this guy in that period of time he was crushing. So, like, yeah, yeah, they were. They better have been high converting leads. But it's important that when you delegate, like, you get people and sometimes somebody says that they know exactly how to do this. And you can be like, great, just do it for me. And you hand it off to them and you look away and you focus on other things. But you need to keep. You need to keep tabs on it. You need to know the process and know what they're doing. So there you go. End of John Burnett story time.

John Burnett storytime is always very entertaining. Sorry, I'm trying to get Ryan's. Ryan's recipe in here. Any other comments or questions for Ryan? We're coming up on an hour here, guys. Appreciate you joining us. We, at one time we had like 30 viewers, which is pretty good. Pretty, pretty good. But, but yeah, make sure to contact Ryan. I'll throw that banner back up here in a minute. And any last words? Ryan, thanks for joining us. Appreciate you coming.

No, just thank you for having me. And we're really excited to be a part of the land geek community and it's gonna be fun to. To grow this together.

That's awesome. Well, all right. So here is the. Here's Ryan's drink of choice tonight. The. The naked and the famous. Love that Naked and famous. Mike. Santa, you like that drink?

I think what is shot. I don't even have to say it right.

It's French. It's like some herbal, like, like, like, like a pair of teeth. But it's, it's. It. Okay, just try it. It's good.

And so with some ice and in a, like a pour. Like a martini.

Yep.

Just shake it up on ice and pour it over. Yeah, in the glass.

All right. I'm trying that.

Stephen Ray knows his drinks. He's even asking green or yellow. I mean.

Yeah, he might just be throwing out colors. There might be no such thing as green chargers.

It' a little too fancy. Too fancy for nightcap.

Yeah.

I don't know. We're gonna have to start calling it evening cocktail instead of nightcap or something next week. We do have a topic already. So to give people a little teaser here, next week, August 5th at 9:00pm Eastern Live on YouTube and Facebook. John and Mike, we're talking about the five land investing. Mistakes that keep beginners stuck and confused.

There's only five?

Yeah, we're covering all of them. It'll be great. Awesome. Well, Ryan, thanks again for joining us. Appreciate you taking time out of your, your, your sailing schedule there.

Yeah, that was a lot of fun. And anytime, I'd love to come back on.

Thank you.

A lot of fun, John and Mike. See you guys next week. Cheers to you both. And we'll talk soon.

All right, Take care.

Night, everybody.

Cheers, guys.

Good night.