Coffee Talk

Good morning. So you're probably watching the replay right now. More than welcome to leave any questions, by the way, if you're going to re watch this. So good morning to you. It's Wednesday morning, June 14th. This year is halfway done, isn't it? Mark Podolsky, the land geek himself, asked me to cover for him today. He. He's taking care of some family matters. But I'm David Bonellis, the Facebook whisperer, and if you don't know what we do, we flip land. It sounds weird, right? You could flip a house, but yes, you can flip land. It's actually quite simple process. So what we do is we identify areas that are good to flip land and have a demand for raw land, for recreational use, for tiny home camping or for. There's so many weird reasons people buy land and they fascinate me all. So, yeah, I am David Benalis. They call me the Facebook Whisperer. I've kind of just embraced that name. Having a nickname is always kind of weird, don't you think? Yeah. Mark is taking care of some family matters, so I'm covering for him this morning. So if you have any questions, please feel free to comment here. Let's have a nice, pretty cool conversation. Otherwise you're just going to hear me rambling about my own personal story within land investing. So it was about a year ago, let's say around May, that I was listening to the side Hustle Nation podcast. Big shout out to Nick Loper for putting that together. Really appreciate all the work he does there. So it was one of Mark's students that was talking about land investing, and there's a few things that really jumped out to me that made me, you know, just want to move forward as soon as possible. The first one was the guy talked about how little you could actually buy these properties for. So, you know, I grew up in Los Angeles and even a vacant lot is hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't have that kind of cash. In fact, I have that much in debt. So he talked about he was buying, you know, like four or five acre properties for like $1,000. And he was like, you know what? I could do that I can scrape up a thousand or so. And so I was continuing to listen and I got hooked. I ended up pulling over so I can replay the episode. It was just so fascinating to me and like, the downsides were so appealing because he mentioned, like, you know, if someone defaults on a property, well, then you just tear up the contract and resell it. Like, there is very little Downside. And I started researching. Honestly, like, I didn't do too much research. I just kind of. I felt it was right. I mean, I lean towards more intuition for certain decisions. I know that's not everybody. And you might have some more calculated decisions. I can help you out with that. Maybe we can have a good conversation here. Leave some comments. If you have any questions about land investing, please leave them below. Even some more advanced stuff, you know, I can. I can tackle that as well. So on that episode on the side Hustle Nation podcast, it was the downside of man. What are the downsides? You're gonna buy a property for 24%, 25% market value. So like any other aspect with real estate, you make your money on the buy. And this really, really attracted me because, you know, worst case, like Mark says, worst case, I'm going to own land. And you own an asset, a tangible asset, and no one can ever steal that from you. If you own a house, you need fire insurance, water, flood insurance, all these insurances, and you don't need to insure dirt. I actually had a property in Nevada where a dam broke. Okay, this is like a freak of nature thing. A dam broke above, so my property was down below it, and it flooded the area so no one could get to it for about a month or so. Part of the road was washed out. I actually had a pause doing some sales in this area until things were back up and running. But you know, what happened to my property? Nothing. It got a little muddy, and then it dried out, and then it's still my property. So what I love about this business is that there is so little risk involved that there is only opportunity to have solid, solid deals. And so what does a solid deal look like for me in my particular niche? It's buying a property for about $800. That'll give me about two acres in Nevada. I'm going to turn around. I'm going to market that property for about, let's say, $3,400. I might do a cash discount. I will probably sell it on terms, though. So that is the huge advantage when you actually own the asset. You can turn around and be the bank. You can offer financing. So if you were wholesaling a house, you have to use the bank's money to connect the seller with the buyer. And you're right there in the middle. And it's a hairy process. It's so much simpler. For land where I'm actually going to buy the property and I'm going to sell it in 30 days or less. But honestly, my properties don't sit more than a week and a half or two weeks. I did not found the Facebook Buy Sell strategy, but I did perfect it. And that's in the Investors Toolkit, one of the education platforms that we do offer. So, yeah. Thelandgeek.com if you want to learn more about land investing, there's a webinar there. You can go check out Mark Podolsky and what he's done. But I'm a protege of Mark Podolsky. I'm also a product of my own actions. Because you can have the best. The best education in the world, right? But if you don't take action, what good is it? Or you could. You'd be the smartest person in the world. But if you don't apply that and make this world a better place, what's the purpose? So, for myself, I add value in the transaction on the buy side. So, yes, we're sending lowball offers, you know, 25% market value. But at the same time, for someone who is in need of money, this is a great liquidation option. If they try to go through a real estate agent, it could take months to sell, and they may not get the full amount or they may not even sell it. Whereas if someone opts to liquidate through me, one, they're going to get money in less than a week. And so whatever they need it for. I've heard stories of people needing money for medication to buy new tools, to just cash out because you're no longer interested in the property. You know, there's tax bills. You know these properties who were once, you know, the dreams. Hey, Jessica, Good to see you there. Welcome. Do I charge? So let me post this. So Jessica says, do I charge interest when you sell a property on terms, if. So, how do you decide what the interest percentage is? So this is a really good question. There's been a lot of change in the market in the last two months about charging interest. So I'm going to opt for the Tate Litchfield method. So this is a yes and no question. So, yes, I do charge interest, but no, I don't charge interest. Okay, so let me explain. If I'm going to sell a property for $5,000, I'm going to advertise it as. Let me rephrase that. My cash price is 3,500. My terms price is 5,000. But because I want to add interest to it because of time value of money, like tomorrow's money is worth more than today's money, we're not here to provide 0% interest. So the, the way you would structure that is you can use, I think it's like bankrate.com or loan calculator. You can just calculate roughly like 8 to 10% interest over the course of your loan. So maybe it's 48 months and you calculate 10% interest. And so you'll get your total number for principal plus interest. Let's say that comes out to. On a $5,000 note. Let's say that Comes out to 5,800. So what I would do is take 5,800 divided by 48 and now you have your monthly payment. So to answer that question, it's yes and no. So I will advertise 0% interest. However, I will add it on the front end to the payments, hopefully. So Mike has a great question. When receiving lists, is it typical to have it show 5,000 to 10,000 properties? Is your list that small, Mike boy. So when I pull a list. So there's different types of lists to pull. So you could pull a tax delinquent list, you could pull a tax role. Bryce is here. Let me just give him a shout out. Hey, Bryce, how's it going? Good to see you, ma'. Am. Bryce is an amazing individual. He and his brother, they are off to big things. So yeah, the list, right. They can be huge. I once pulled a list for. It was a county in Nevada. It had 170,000 entries. So I had to scrub that thing down. Once I got it down to land, it was 70,000 entries. And then once I got rid of multiple. So people will own more than one piece of property, but they list each one individually. So I got rid of any duplicates for the names. It got down to I think 28,000. And then after that I scrub out anyone that lives within, you know, like a four hour driving distance. The way you could do that is just scrub out according to zip code or name. There's some cool websites out there. I don't know offhand. Sorry. That you can just, you know, have them pull up, you know how many zip codes are within a three hour radius of this particular area. So scrub those out. I scrub out railroad companies, you know, anything that's like owns like a development corporation. I do scrub out churches now. So here's why I do that. In the beginning I was mailing to, you know, churches and other nonprofit organizations. What I found out is that they own those properties because they're almost junk, so to speak. So someone just wanted to donate to get the tax write off. Because they couldn't sell it and it had no value. So I've done that a few times where I've done the whole process of due diligence and it was a mess. So now I just scrub out. Most nonprofits, that's a personal decision you might have to make. But honestly, 5 to 10,000, that's not much at all. So I'm mailing a thousand a month and that'll get me five, ten months. It's about right. It's about right. So you'll probably end up remailing every six months. Every four or five months. I mean, you're going to make that call because if you find there's a lot of deals and it was easy to work that county. Yeah. You're going to mail them quickly. And so here are my thoughts on. Oh, okay. I got a great question here. So Bryce has. Hey, David, can we schedule a call with Seth and I discuss CRMs? I love CRMs. So CRM's customer relationship management. I never thought in my life that you would need to write down notes about a conversation with somebody. It just seems weird to me. Right. Like, because I have a pretty decent memory. But once you start Talking to about 200 people or 300 people, you start to forget things. And I come across so many of the similar names that I'll start getting confused. And because you can't possibly remember everything, that's the purpose of a CRM within this business. It can track every conversation you had with the person. Just make a few notes. It can track the probability of conversion. So another fancy sales term converting somebody. Right. Just sounds so unhuman. So if someone converts, meaning they make a purchase, you can add them to a different section within the CRM so you can get a follow up for a second purchase. Yeah. So yeah, we can totally schedule a call with that. After I get done with this coffee talk. I will. I'm in your basecamp now, so I will post a link there. Basecamp's a great tool that we use. So we use so many great tools within this business. If you're just joining, my name is David Bonellis, the Facebook whisperer. I am one of the coaches for the Land Geek. Let me put that website back here. Notice I can't do more than one one thing at a time. That's the curse of being a male. The landgeek.com so go there if you have any questions about. You want to learn more on how lucrative this business can be because we talk about, you know, profit margins between 300 to 1000%, it gets ridiculous, you know, like 300 is kind of like the baseline. But every once in a while I see how a property can really just peak in value. It just has a few features that make, you know, worth selling that much easier. If it has good road access, there's a telephone pole next to it. That stuff is great, you know, so we're not selling residential lots within an urban area. This is very much rural residential, middle of nowhere properties. And just because you might not be interested in it, doesn't mean someone else is not. Now, whatever they do with the property, that's up to them. They might just want to brag that they have 40 acres in Nevada and that's quite all right. I'll sell property to them. And so a follow up question from Mike and you just go through until you're done with that county. That's a good question. I have not completed. So I work Alco County. No big deal. Right. So there's nothing about this business. There's no competition. So I'm not afraid to share that. I work in Alco County, Nevada. That list is huge. Okay, so it's even broken down to there's a lot of different one acre properties near Elko. There's a lot of five acre properties, there's a lot of four acre properties with electricity, and then there's just a ton of 10 acre properties in another area. So I'm not mailing to the entire list because I don't necessarily want those 10 acre properties. There's a lot of landlocked property. So landlocked is there's no legal access, meaning if your property's here, there's someone else's property next to it. Next to it, next to it, next to it. It's landlocked. There may be a dirt road or trail cutting through there, but it doesn't mean it's legal access. And all that means is that you have a right to get to your property, recreational purposes. But if you're planning to build and get permits, you want to have legal access. And that's actually not that hard to do. You can just get an easement through someone else's property. So they'll designate a ten foot section on someone else's property for you to have a driveway or a dirt road. There is a way around anything. So don't be discouraged about any particular property. Although if I had to choose between a legal access property and a landlocked property, I'm going to definitely go for legal access. So, yeah. So to Finish that question, Mike. I am focusing on a lot of smaller properties right now. My money moves faster within those. So what I'll probably do is finish off the one acre properties and two acre properties and then I'll go back and mail those again and then I might dabble in some 10 acre properties. Just kind of mix it in because, you know, my customers like to have options. I just don't want to offer just a one acre property. Chris Smith has a good question here. When first mailing offers, do I need to set up an LLC or have a company name? No, the first four or five properties I bought were in my own name. Just bought it. You know, David Banala sold and separate owner and I sell them under my name. Had a claim, short term capital gains on it. It's not really not an issue because when we market on Craigslist, there's a lot of individuals just selling property and for sale by owner is a very common thing. So you don't necessarily need a business name. I know the temptation is you want to look more legit, but to a certain extent, some people do not want to deal with big companies. They'd rather deal with mom and pop shop. So I like to keep a, like a low profile on the size of my business. So I don't want to be Walmart. I don't want to be Target. I want to be that not necessarily 99 cent store, but you know, that smaller shop around the corner that you can have a good conversation with the person at the checkout before buying something. So that's kind of the feel you should definitely be going for. And yes, I do mail with my llc. Now, I don't try to do the mail with under David Benallis buy under this. It's too complicated. So, yeah, I do function with an llc. Now the best time to set one up would be the first quarter of a year. Or I would say if you get to like September, you might as well wait until the following January because Filing fees for LLCs can vary between $0 in Wyoming all the way up to 800 in California. Maybe it's more somewhere else, but yeah. So, hey, my buddy Ryan Collins is on here. Yeah. Yeah. You want to be a Kmart? Maybe not a Kmart. Oh, man. Yeah. Ryan Collins is a great buddy of mine. He's got his Chicago Cubs jersey on there. Boy, Chicago. Yeah. So you're going to meet so many good friends in this business and then introduce this to other people. That's part of my passion. So Abe has a question when you buy them under your name, do you need to add your spouse's name to the deed? You do not need to add your spouse's name to the deed. However, when you sell a property, if you're in a communal property state, you will need to have your spouse quick claim the property to you, and then from there, you warrant to deed the property to your buyer. Is there a shortcut? Sure. You can have Abe de Gras plus spouse De Gras as joint tenants, and you can sell that way. And then when you sell, you still need two signatures, so there's really no way around it. There's two signatures. However, you could save on the filing fee, have it just be one deed. So now that I talked that out, yeah, you should probably buy as joint tenants with you and your wife. Otherwise, you'll need a second deed, and that can cost another $17. So, yeah, like 950. Maybe we'll go another 10 minutes or so. Any other questions you have for me otherwise, this is just how awesome, you know, the Land Geek is, because Mark can, you know, he has a deep bench of coaches where he can just call somebody up and say, hey, can you cover? And that's what makes a business function, is can you step away from your business and have it operate without you? Right. So Mark is getting really close to there within the Land Geek. I mean, it's his baby. And I'm really passionate about the Land Geek as well. Danielle's amazing. Scott Todd is amazing. All these coaches. Tate, Litchfield, man, I am surrounded by people that are so much smarter than me that I am just soaking up their knowledge and bettering myself, my business. And so that's kind of what you want to do for your own land business, is create systems and structures where you could step away for a week and make sales. It's a big road for delegation. And that's kind of what I've been focusing on the last few months. Mike has another question. What do you do when you know the property code, but they only have the provided the account number of the piece of property? Perhaps I'm not reading that correctly. What do you do when you have the property code but they only have the provided? So I'm not really understanding that question, Mike. So do you have the VA go in manually and type out each property? Could you rephrase the question? I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I'm also not the dumbest, so maybe I'm just missing it sometimes. Maybe I didn't have my coffee. Maybe A drink of water. So property code apn. Type it out manually. Yeah, could you rephrase that question, Mike, please, While he does that? Got some great news this morning. I hired an intake manager. So when you mail out these offers and you get accepted offers back, you are going to have to contact them, let them know you're going to start your due diligence process and then close with them and then coordinate the. The notary to go out there or show them how to go to a bank. And so I brought someone on to do that for me. It's amazing. So once I may be fully trained, maybe two, three weeks, but I'll never have to talk to another seller again. I get to focus on marketing or anything else that I really love doing. So, let's see. Property code that determines a property type. Okay, so what you could do with this, Mike, is there's two ways that we get to scrubbing out that kind of identifies what rural land is as far as property code. So, yeah, like a common thing I'll see is. Different. Which roll on. Does that make sense? Yeah, it kind of makes sense. You just. You're essentially trying to figure out what is raw land on your list, if I gather correctly. Yes. So there is property codes, and that's the shortcut. You know, property code 0120. I've seen that almost everywhere in Nevada. That's vacant land. R1 zoning. Another way to do this is to take the assessed value and scrub out anything above 25, 30,000. That will eliminate houses. Right. Some mobile homes might still be stuck in there. So the next thing is if you can find an improved value somewhere in that data sheet. And so vacant land, there's no improvements, so the total improvements are a big fat donut zero. So you want to scrub out anything that has an improvement of a dollar or more. That'll get you down to vacant land. Now, from there, you kind of look at APNs and see where they match up according to the GIS map, and you're most likely going to be left with residential land. There's a few other factors that could play into that, but honestly, I haven't seen commercial land be less than $25,000 in value as far as assessed value or full cash value. So you can scrub out those and end up with just the residential or rural residential lots. Raymond. Hey. Yeah, so we had a good conversation the other day with, with Raymond. Is anyone worried about this market being oversaturated? So at. At the level of those that are teaching the program. Right. So Mark Myself, Scott Tate, and the rest of the coaches and anyone that's doing this business is doing deals. We are not worried about oversaturation. The people that are worried about oversaturation are the ones that are hesitant to jump in this business. And I see this often. So myself and Mike Zano, we take phone calls during the week for anyone who just wants to learn more. So matter of fact, if you want to do that, let me put that link up here. Notice I can't talk and type at the same time. Landgeek.com training. Thelandgeek.com Training at the bottom of that page, you can schedule a call. Mike's in the east coast, I'm in the west Coast. Whoever, if you like his name better than mine, take a call with him. He's a great guy. And we're not going to pressure you to buy anything. We're just there to help you understand this business model more in depth and, you know, tell you about what education Mark offers to get you going in this business. You know, I started with a toolkit and I jumped into one on one coaching. So we can talk about my experience with that. Now we offer flight school. My goodness, if flight school was available when I started, I would have done that hands down and I probably would have accelerated much faster because of how fast paced it is. Mike says he's going to schedule a call with me tomorrow. That's awesome. Yeah, Mike, let's, let's dig in deep and get you going. I love that. Cool. So you can schedule on acuity. You can schedule anything 24 hours from now according to whatever time is now. So you can schedule anything from 10 o' clock onward according to my availability that I've set on there. So yeah. Is the market oversaturated? Simple answer, no. If you want an in depth explanation, here is why. I think so. There's so much land. Right? There is another easy explanation. Have you ever taken a flight over the US for, you know, any direction? Once you get outside of the city, you just realize how much land is available. And once you see how few people are doing this, my goodness, there's so many deals out there, we can't possibly buy all this land ourselves. So Mark Podolski, Scott Todd, the two kingpins in this business, they only did 192deals, so probably maybe like 215 properties or so because sometimes you'll sell more than one property on a deal. But my goodness, if you can at 200, they're probably scaled up to maybe 250 this year 275 there. So this brings me to my. The. The question I had earlier is seeing a list of 5 to 10,000 common. Is that too big? Matter of fact, I've seen, you know, 45,000 on the list and Mark's only buying 200 and selling those. There is no competition out there. So please, you know, come to my county. This is why I think the more people in this business, the better off we all are. If you saw so say you're a property owner and you get a letter once a year from me, simple life land offering you buy your property. Let's say your tax bill says the assessed value is $3,000. And by the way, I'm ignoring assessed value on my offers. I'm just going off of market value. So I'm going to send him an offer for let's say $800. And so if he sees one offer, it's going to throw in the trash. If he sees two offers. So someone else mailed to that county and let's say they got it a month later and they offered 900. So at that point he's starting to see more offers coming in around the same price. So they could be thinking, hey, maybe my property really isn't worth this much. So the more people that mail, the more seeds you're going to plant in someone's head that if I ever need money, I could liquidate this property. I can get fast cash in less than seven days. So you know what? I would encourage more people and more people to get into this niche so that selfishly, I can have more deals. And when you're selling, you know, it's kind of intimidating when you go on Craigslist, you just see how much property is listed there. Or you go to land watch and you see how many ads and you're afraid you're going to get lost in the mix. But I would rather have more competition than no competition when it comes to marketing. So let's say someone lives in Salt Lake City and they're looking for land nearby they can go camping on. Maybe they want to build a tiny house and they're looking on land watch and you know, places nearby. If they see Alco county has over 300 listings, well, okay, maybe there's a reason why land is selling here. And if they see box Elder county only has 100. Okay, I wonder why that is. And so for social proof alone, people are influenced and don't want to be lone rangers. They want to do what everyone else is doing because no one really Wants to stand out. That's just human nature and human psychology. So the more property listed in a certain area, the more sales there'll be. It's like reverse economics. You know, the supply goes before the demand. We always say you want demand and supply, but for human nature, it's supply first, then demand. You know, if there is a blowout sale on toaster ovens for Black Friday, well, there's a supply there and now demand follows. See that vs is there a demand for toaster ovens? Okay, there is. Okay, let's have a sale on toaster ovens. Doesn't work that way. Supply always comes before demand. So, you know, we're right around 10 o' clock now. Let me see if there's any more questions. So Mike sent his appointment. Looking forward to talking to you tomorrow, Mike. Anybody else have any more questions? Otherwise you can go to the landgeek.com there's a cool webinar on there. Mark Podolski has hope his family is doing well right now. I covered for him today and hopefully I did a good job. Mark, I just love talking about this business. It's done so much for my family. I allowed my wife to retire in three months. There's a lot of numbers that went into that. I had some savings, we cut some expenses. So it's not like I made 4k a month passive income in 3 months. So there's a lot more to it than that. But that I was able to make it happen, it brought so much joy to my life. My son is 18 months old now. He is the most amazing thing ever. He's going to be at Scottsdale boot camp so you can meet my wife and son there. That's going to be pretty awesome. Boot camps. Boot camps are amazing, man. If you get a toolkit right? So we're going to teach you everything in the toolkit from A to Z how to do this business. But there will always be gaps because we can't possibly have a home study course that's about 40 hours or 50 hours long. So that's where bootcamp will help you just drill the basics, be surrounded by other people and there's no distraction. Actions. Anna has a question. How do you Google Earth based on apn? It's pretty tough. So what I would recommend is just go into your county GIS map. So from there most of them have an ability to just you move the mouse and the coordinates will appear on the bottom portion of the screen. So you just move the mouse to the corner, write down those coordinates, move the mouse to the other corner. Write down those coordinates and for all four corners and then plug those into Google Earth and then drop a pin and then create a polygon, turn it yellow. Now you have a screenshot showing people exactly where the property is. Yeah. So let's see. 1003. I think this is the part where Mark would say, I get to have a call with Danielle now, so hope Mark's doing all right. Otherwise, let's call it a wrap. What do you say? If you have any more questions, feel free to just write them in the comments section here. I follow the landing page. If you ever message this page, chances are you're going to get me on the back end responding. The bot can also answer a few questions. I'm going to get the bottom, you know, get going. Pretty, pretty comical, right? So I like to have fun in everything I do. So you should be able to get a question, get some jokes on there as well. So Anna has one last question. Would you know how to convert township brain section? No. So it's as simple as calling the assessor, Anna, and just ask them, you know, what are the GPS coordinates for this property? And they're going to give you the coordinates for the center of the property, not the corners. And that's enough, Right? So when someone's buying a property, they just want to know if the area is nice. From there, it's up to them to get it surveyed. So we're selling raw land, a blank slate, whatever they want to do with it. So pass it along for them to get the exact positions of the corners. Otherwise you might be promising that this is the exact location when it's not completely accurate. You know, GPS coordinates from the county, they always say give yourself about 10ft of error. And so 10ft is huge on a property. When you're trying to, you know, build a fence, you know, you don't want to be 10ft off when you build a fence. So getting a property surveyed is one way to add value. And I would always, you know, have the owner do it themselves. There's no reason to, you know, put improvements on property because they just sell. Without that, we're just trading paper. You know, we don't want to be in the development business. We want to be in the trading paper business. Well, I'm going to call it off now. You know, rest up. Got pretty good day ahead of me. I got more delegation to do, so I'm going to be working on my business all day. Talk to you soon.