Coffee Talk

Oh, nice. Yeah, nice.

I'm official. I'm official.

Hey, it's Mark Manolski, the land geek with a landgeek.com and I'm with David Benalis, the Facebook whisperer for Coffee Talk.

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning. In case you don't know who we are, we are professional land investors. I've been investing in raw land since 2001. Full time. I done over 5200 land flips and going strong and making the argument that this is the best passive income model. It is a one time sale. Then you get recurring income just like you would with a, as you would with a, with a home rental home without a renter, without rehabs, without renovations, without rodents. Because we're not dealing with a tenant. We don't deal with Dodd Frank or, or Respa or the SAFE Act. And our margins, David, Ben, Alice.

Oh man. Our margin, ridiculous.

We average 300 to 1000% return on investment. We shuffle paper. We make money. All you need is an inexpensive computer and an Internet connection and you are in business. David Benalis, do we have the best passive income model?

I haven't found anything better. I mean ATM machines. Nah, not gonna cut it. Not gonna retire your wife in three months. Land investing.

Yep.

Check done.

Check done.

There's one more stat there that I think is key. So, right. 300% ROI. So that's over the length of the entire term. What really matters is how fast your money moves. So the annual average rate of return for land is right around 180 to even 250. So you can compare that to a bank account. 0.0001%. What is it now?

Right.

We might get to negative interest rates soon. It's getting bad.

It's bad. Yeah. So if you want to learn more, go to landgeek.com schedule call with David or Mike. Forward slash training. All right, what are we talking about? Who's got questions for. For us this morning? Topics.

Otherwise, just talk about, you know, some recent calls I had with some people still. Again, I mean, no matter how many times we talk about it, Mark, like people want to work where there's no competition. Like I get it everywhere else in every other industry, you know, you try to either avoid competition or destroy them. But there is no competition in this business.

There's no competition in this business. There really isn't. I'm, I'm closing on a, on a deal soon. That's like a huge bulk deal. You know, I don't know, like 50 parcels in an area that I'VE been working since, you know, in Northern Nevada, where I know everybody goes, yeah. Why was I able to get this deal right? Other people didn't. Right.

Honestly, you probably mailed to them years ago.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's just. You just show. It's just showing up. It is just showing up. A good example is how big, you know, when you go to the mailbox, how many credit card offers do you get a day? They keep sending them to you. One day you'll wake up like, oh.

I need a credit card today.

I need a credit card today. And that's it. And so their margins are so big, it makes sense now, relatively speaking. There's no one doing this business. Size the market, and there's no big money doing it. There's no private equity groups. There's no hedge funds. They have too much. Too much money deployed. Too much money in this business is an issue. If I give you a million dollars, David, could you go out, buy a million dollars worth of land tomorrow?

I couldn't spend it in one year. That would be ridiculous. I don't know if I could spend it all that fast. Like, I'd have some issues. I need to keep money moving. I'd probably buy wholesale at that point.

I mean that. So that's a problem in and of itself as well.

So good problems.

Good problems, you know?

But if you don't have money, how could you do this business, Mark?

Oh, my gosh. So simple. Duran started with $800. I started with $3,000. Paul Mandel had no money, right? He had money for education. So he spends all his money on education. Calls me. He's like, mark, I've got no cash. I said, paul, no worries. No worries. Do you have enough money to send out a mailing? I'm like, he had 20 bucks, 30 bucks. He's like, yeah, I've got that. He's like, I thought I need thousands of dollars. No, no, no. Lock up a deal. Yeah. Like, okay, so he gets it. He gets an accepted offer on his mailing campaign. And he's like, mark, I don't have the $50 to even option it. I'm like, paul, don't option it. Call them. Tell them you're doing due diligence and that you're gonna close in 45 days. Calls him up, says, I'm gonna close in 45 days, right? He does due diligence in four hours, right? Yeah, right. Then he's like, well, Mark, now what do I do the deal? I'm like, mail the neighbors. He Goes out, he gets the neighbor list. The next day, he mails the neighbors. The neighbor buys it.

Oh, man, I love it.

Now, Paul gets the money from the neighbor. Cash, right? Closes with the seller, does two deeds simultaneously. Record this one first. Record this one second. He creates out of thin air with less than a hundred dollars in the mailings. Like eat Grand.

Oh, man, I love a double.

Close to do the double clothes.

I love a double clothes. Oh, I love it, though.

Yeah. All right. Mr. Obi.

Obi, good morning.

Morning, Obi.

There's an action taker right there, is Obi.

Which flight school is Obi in?

He's in June flight school.

June flight school. Obi, how's it going in flight school, by the way? Flight school is amazing. We're now filling up July. For those of you interested in the next flight school, we do have spots open. Go to thelandgeek.com training.

If you already own a toolkit, it's just perfect for you. You know, if you've got some block walls you couldn't get over yourself or you. You want to move forward, you want to move faster. Flight school is great for this. Like the money you plug, you paid for the toolkit is applied towards flight school. It's. You know, Mark, you're so generous to even allow that.

Yeah, I should cut that out, shouldn't I? No, no, no.

You are generous. Yeah. I mean, you're generous with the information. We all are. Really. We don't back.

Yeah, we. And we shouldn't. Like, that's. We want. I don't feel successful unless other people are doing really, really well. So no pressure. Obi better start closing some deals. Yeah, no worries. So. So. Any questions? Any questions? What's. What's on people's minds? What's going on the market? John Montero. Montero, John. Hey, guys, where the dates, locations for the boot camps the remainder of the year? So. That's a good question. So the boot camp is. Go to the landgeek.com boot camp. And we are now full for the next one in August. And if there's cancellations, you might be able to get in that room. But we're like, getting on that queue if you want to be in August. But Orlando is filling up now October. So the next One is October.

October 6th through 8th.

Yeah. Ben Clark. Here's Ben. Flight school takeoff is tonight. Best advice for heading to flight school from Land Geek and Whisperer.

That's a great question, Mark.

That is a good question. My advice, Ben, is I would say, you know, when when you have that first class, the first thing you guys are going to work on is getting the list. It's really going to be accounting, research, getting the list, scrubbing the list. Scott's going to give you a week to get your offers out. Right. I would say during that first three days of county research, ask a lot of questions in the group and make sure that you're doing things properly before you go out and actually obtain the list and go the next step. What do you think, David?

I got some good advice.

What's your advice?

So every flight school student has their private Facebook group. So it's them and, you know, the 11 other people or 12 of the people in that group. If you hit a rough spot, particularly with like a certain process, make a video of it and post it to the group. That is the best way for us to help troubleshoot what you're going through. So Marshall does this. He was in the May flight school. He posts a video every once in a while, like, you know, a pain point. And it's so much easier to help troubleshoot whatever's going on. That's great for, you know, training Vas, but it's also great for getting help. So the better you're able to explain whatever is going on, the best we can help and ask a lot of questions. We do not get tired of answering questions within the Facebook group. You know, we want to provide more value than what you think you're going to get.

Yeah. I mean, the whole thing about flight school is that it is. It is taking action in real time with your class and your, you know, Sherpa, if you will, Scott Todd, who's going to guide you through this. So I know for me, like, whenever I get like a home study kit and it's like this thick. It's like I'm just overwhelmed.

Right.

It's like drinking from a fire hose. This is going to take the fire hose and, you know, in real time, break it down and you're gonna eat an elephant one bite at a time with your glass and take massive action. And by the end of it, you'll be on your way doing deals.

You'll be.

You'll be in fight. Right? But what often happens that we see with information is you get the information and you just, you know, because it's hard. No one takes action. And then it just sits right where this is. Like you have to take action in real time, get your questions answered. You're gonna be working the business in real time during that class. So it's not Just academic. It's like, okay, now let's go do it.

Yeah, absolutely. When I see someone get an accepted offer and how excited they are, man, I remember that first accepted offer I got. I never bought it, but I printed it out. I taped it to my wall. First accepted offer. That was a huge milestone for me at the time. That was fun stuff. And then first close for sale. All the first. So celebrate every single win in this business. You know, there's a lot of times when you're in the thick of it and it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that's when you have to celebrate every single win. I still do. I get a donut every time I have a sale. That's a lot of donuts. I better watch it. I might get diabetes if I become a good salesperson.

Ben. All right, 20 offers a day. And that's the thing, is like, even 20 offers a day will move the needle.

That's one deal a week, Mark.

Yeah, easy, easy. So one deal a week, that's four a month. That's 48 a year. Yeah, it's great. David, celebrate your rejected offers as well. Absolutely.

Do you see me posting those in the, the Facebook group every once in a while? Like, if anything, I post them for my own personal therapy. If I can hedge out my rejection, I feel better about myself.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, here. Now here's a question, David. Our one on one coaching client, Ashok, asked yesterday. I thought it was a great question and I don't know if anyone's ever asked me this. And he said he wanted to know, when you get a ridiculous counteroffer, do you even respond right? Do you even respond? It's ridiculous. So they write back, counter offer, like you offered a thousand. They counter at 50,000.

I don't respond.

You don't respond, do you? I don't respond.

But I would.

I. Yeah, in fact. But I'll just mail them again. Yeah, yeah, I'll ignore it. Yeah.

The extreme hate mails. Yeah. You know, I do take those off the list. It is what it is. I mean, some people don't. Some people do. I know Scott's gonna remail them every hundred days regardless of what the outcome was. That's just me.

Yeah. Yes. The extreme hate mail I've get. I get it probably once. I probably get extreme, extreme hate mail. Like wishing horrible diseases on me, you know, just terrible, terrible afflictions. There's just so, so personally, like, I don't know, I don't know, the mental state that they have. Like, it's a piece of raw land. Like, I'm not offering like a. It's not like a quote unquote top down offer, you know, your pet or you know, like it's a piece of raw land you don't even go to. Yeah, like they take it really personally sometimes, but I just, I shrug it off.

I like those. No, I kind of get a kick out of all the different, you know, rejection letters. I think we saw a glitter bomb happened in the last few months. Remember that one?

Yeah, the glitter bomb was great. I've never gotten the glitter bomb. Oh, man, I feel like my offers are too high now. We're not getting insulted enough. I know. I'm waiting on the glitter bomb. If you're not getting insulted, then you've done your pricing wrong.

Yeah.

Just to walk everybody through how we price it. Like we want to have that huge margin of safety of 300%. So what we do is we look at the comps, we divide by four. Divide by four.

That's a big topic. That always comes up. Assessed value, market value, taxable value. What's the only thing we care about?

Mark, I only care about comparable sales, what the market value is. Exactly.

Market value.

Yeah, whatever the county says. I mean, yeah, it's all great. Here's Ben Clark. All the haters would buy at our offers. That's what I tell myself.

Whatever gets you through the day.

It's good attitude to have. I like Ben Clark. Any other questions? Comments? John Montero. I know you're closing deals left and right. Tell us the story, John. Last. Last deal. How much did you get down? What's your monthly, what's your ROI?

Some ridiculous, like 20,000 down, 6,000amonth for, you know, five months for five years. He does big deals.

Big deals, big deals.

So that's all good, but that's not really our niche. Right. So we move for velocity. Several small deals. You know, little tiny drops in the bucket. Before you know it, you got a gallon. Oh, there we go. See, look at that.

Here it is. Buy 23,600. Sell $23,000 down payment plus seller finance note value. Total P and I over life of the loan, 177, 40.

John's in a different ball game than I. I'm definitely am in. That's.

I mean, but that's a great deal. Now he can redeploy. So he's got his money out. Yeah, and he'll redeploy that 23 into another big deal. Nothing wrong with it. But you Know, the funny thing is, is like, you know, we say a big deal, like relatively speaking, like, that's not even a house.

That's true.

I mean, he doesn't have to go out. He doesn't have to go get investors, doesn't have to go out and deal with the banks. He doesn't deal with private money lending and all that. Like, he's got cash. It's just phenomenal. Right?

That's amazing.

It's, it's a, it's, it's great. So, I mean, look, would that not move the needle in someone's life? On deal. I'd rather do that deal than flip a house, 16% of my money and do all that work for six months and fix and flip and meet the subs and all that.

Not to mention just, you know, getting the financing from a bank for the deal or hard money lending. Now you're spending what, 14 and a half percent?

Yeah, it's crazy. Anyways, if you want to learn how to be John Montero. Oh, I do miss those days. Yeah. Miss days of opening the mail. Very inspirational. I am going to do that again. I've got the technology now to do it. And I'll tell you that the reason I'm not doing it is I'm not getting physical mail. It's all on my phone. So I've got to share my phone screen. Yeah. David did it. Phoenix digitalmailbox.com I gotta share my phone screen and then do it. So I actually, I will start doing that again, John. And I can even do that on BE Live now. We have to kind of. Yeah, so I'll do that. But anyways, John, that's amazing. If you want to learn how to be John Montero, go to www.thelandgeek.com forward/training.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

There's deals of all size out there, Mark. You can buy properties, certain states, for like a hundred dollars. Right? That's not like this weird whole tax shuffle thing where you're just, you're counter offering 100. You can legitimately buy a property for a hundred bucks, sell it for 600. Or you could be like John Montero, buy a property for 23,000, sell it for 170.

Yeah.

I mean, there's everything in between.

Everything in between. So, you know, let's say that John wants, you know, he needs. He's got another deal. Let's say it's bigger, let's say it's 50,000. Doesn't want to use his own money. He's now he's got this note. Right. He can sell 12 months of that note, generate another 25 grand, right. To an investor, and then he's got, you know, so here's unlimited funds as well. So what we're going to be doing in in Geek Pay is we're setting up a new platform to help you sell your notes if you need cash.

Love integration. Yeah, you're. So your first favorite word is free.

No, no, my first favorite is automation.

Okay, okay.

Because I can always make more money. I can't get more time.

Right, right. Your second favorite word. Free.

Second favorite, free.

Your third favorite word. Integration at this point.

Integration. Yeah, absolutely. John, are. John, John, are you using Geek Pay? How are you managing your notes? I don't know if John's in Geek Pay. I know, but anyways, we're. We're making lots of improvements in there, especially on the support side.

I feel like I got in at the perfect time because between you and Scott, you're just like any area of this business, you can improve. You're doing it. So now listing land, this is going to come out on the podcast next Tuesday, but now we can list on landmodo.com.

This is.

That's a game changer, Mark. Like, we're providing the platform to actually sell property now as well. It's. It's getting too easy. This is like throwing a grenade in a fish barrel.

Oh, I know. It's. It's crazy. And then Tim Sika sold two properties on land Moto. Eric Peterson sold one. He sold four properties last week.

That's great.

It's amazing.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Ah, boy.

So I love this business. I mean, there's nothing better. John probably didn't go look at that property. She, you know, I mean, I can't remember last time I looked at a raw deal, a raw land. I mean, I sit on my computer and shuffle paper and do deals and automation. I mean, yeah, it's crazy. Oh, VA services are. Have been launched. John Montero, we have our first client right now that we're beta testing and we're just getting things in place. But we have the office in the Philippines. We're testing out Internet, making sure that we have scale ready to go, training, all that. So when we say we're ready, we really want our clients to have an amazing experience. So it is coming. I'm thinking we should be ready very, very soon.

I love virtual assistants, like because of the whole time zone thing between the Philippines and us. Like, stuff is done while I'm sleeping. It's great.

Yeah, no, it's great. It's great. So any other questions? Any other questions? Comments? I don't know. Yeah, I can see people coming in, coming out, like fluctuating here.

Yeah, it's all good. So what's a common objection you have received in the past for the sales side? So someone calls you, hey, Mark, I saw your ad for this 40 acre in Nevada. What's the lowest price you could do? Or what's your most common objection?

You've received the most common objection I receive. That's a good question. You know, they're getting close. Usually it's not really an objection. It's like they want to buy time because you know me, I'm like, let's go.

Yeah, I need to talk to my wife, I need to talk to my husband.

Yeah, I'm like, how much you want to put down? Like, let's lock it up. Now I got a 90 day guarantee, right? If, if after 90 days you don't love the property, I'll either exchange your property you do love or I'll refund you. Right. Don't get, can't get out there. 90 days, you have a 365 day exchange guarantee. I'll exchange it for a like, kind property that you love. I have, you know, a very simple business philosophy. Happy customers guaranteed. How much do you want to put down?

So there is one scenario best. So yeah, Ben has a great question. Can I answer this?

Absolutely, yeah. Best response for blind ads when I don't have inventory.

So a blind ad is an ad on Craigslist saying, hey, I have properties between 1 and 40 acres. I have too many properties to list here. Contact me for my current inventory. So they'll email you. Do you have listings that I can look at? I would just say, you know what, I just sold out of everything. I have more deals in the pipeline. I will send you an email when I have something available. Or you ask them, what are you looking for exactly? So I can notify you immediately. That's pretty much it.

That's it. That's it. David, how's it going with our bot by the way?

It's functional. I've had a lot of people go through it now and check out flight school, check out toolkit. You can go in there and it'll point you in the right direction. So it's kind of like the. Not necessarily a gatekeeper, but it's a good compass. So based on if you're just seeing this for the first time, you're just interested, shoot a message over at the land geek facebook.com thelandgeek and then it'll guide you to the correct resources so you can learn more about this amazing business model we have here that's 90% automated at its polished level. And even then, if you have zero automation, Mark, it doesn't take much more than five, six, seven hours a week to do this business.

Yeah, yeah, Here it is. So just go there.

Yeah. Oh, there you go. Message us.

Messages.

Yeah. I can carry the conversation there as well. Yeah, it's always fun. I like talking to Messenger. I sell property in Messenger, Mark. I even click down payments there.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

Now see that? Apple is coming out with their own paid via Messenger.

That's great.

So that's. That's coming out in the. The next iOS version, I think, this fall.

Oh, nice.

I heard that. So that's kind of cool.

Yeah. Right now it's debit card to debit card within Messenger.

Okay.

But if it's Apple pay, that means they can add a credit card.

They got a credit card.

Yeah.

So, boom. What else? Any other questions? Any other questions? Well, I hope everybody's getting value out of these coffee talks. I know Dave and I have a good time. Yeah.

I mean, we just do this if there's zero listeners.

We're just getting together. How's it going with Facebook sales?

So a new thing happened with Facebook where a lot of the group administrators are starting to sell advertising space on the header. So it's actually like on the desktop. It's probably like 2 inches tall, 4 or 5 inches wide, depending on your screen, obviously. But that's a great spot to try to work an angle where you can get advertising space there. They're catching on. For, like, 30 bucks a month, you can buy the header space or you can purchase the pinned post. So, yeah, so some groups are embracing businesses posting there. Some groups are not. They're like, we don't want businesses here. So it's the wild West, Mark. You just got to use common sense, and you can really go deep with it.

It's crazy.

Or you can get kicked out really quick.

Yeah.

I've been put in Facebook timeout already. It's not fun. It's not fun.

Oh, my gosh.

But you know what? The best way to learn about that. My course, I put on the toolkit.

There you go. There you go. So if you want to learn more, just go to www.thelandgeek.com training. I want to thank everybody for being on today's Coffee Talk. John Montero, Ben Clark, Dave Tinkersley Mr. Obi, thanks for your comments. We really appreciate it. It's great seeing you guys. And. Yeah. And then, you know, I probably next week. John or John David. Yeah, because John Metro asked. You know, we'll try to figure out how to share our. Share our iPhone screens.

Okay.

And open the mail. That'd be kind of fun.

Cool. I think at the very least what we can do is just take a snapshot of the offer and post that. Yeah, that might work too. We'll figure it out one way or the other.

Yeah, but it's always fun to see. Like.

I know, right?

Let's see if I go in here. Let's go over tomorrow.

Yeah. Yesterday.

I love this service.

How do we automate that so that. Do we just give our intake manager access to this app so they can. It can go directly to them?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Okay. Because I got.

My VA going in there and going and doing the whole bad, bad mail and then going to LG Pass, putting in the right address and remailing.

So I was doing the. Take a screenshot and emailing that. So, yeah, I got to figure out. Let's talk about that after this.

I've got one here. Where is it? Here we go. 5.03 acres, Colorado. We offered a thousand dollars, and they countered at $5,025.

Not a deal.

That's no deal there.

All right, so what you could do is have someone call them up, ask them why they're interested in selling. Now, I think at best, you could probably get them down to like 2,500. And even then, that might not be a deal.

Yeah, I mean, that's. Yeah, Exactly. All right, Mr. Obi. I get value from these coffee talks. Awesome. Well, I want to thank everybody again. Learn more thelangic.com training David Owski. It's always great seeing you the Facebook whisperer. And hope everybody's enjoying the podcast and the. The roundtable talks. I know we have a good time in there, but. And also, if you want to listen to it on the Land Geek app, download the Land Geek app from the App Store as well. It's kind of cool way to. To listen. We're improving that, too. We're doing a lot. We got a lot going on.

There's a lot going on, Mark. Things are improving.

I like it. Yeah. Kaizen Daily continuous improvement. All right, thank you, Dave Tinkersley, and we'll see everybody next week.

See you next week.

All right, thanks, Joe McLean. Glad you're jumping on here. All right, thanks, David.

Okay.

End live broadcast.