Coffee Talk

Happy 5th of July. I love 4th of July. It just feels like there's a war zone over my head. Never in my life has it been that noisy in my neighborhood. Well, welcome to Coffee Talk. I'm David Banelas, the Facebook whisperer. It's always weird quoting your own nickname, right? Well, I am from thelandgeek.com I am a professional land investor. Hey Danielle. Good morning. Danielle is the most amazing person we have within the community. And so Mark Podolski, the main dude within this company, is on vacation this month. And how awesome would it be if you had a job where you could just take a one month vacation and the systems you built will continue to allow the machine to keep going? I mean, that's exactly what we try to do with this land investing business. Because so many other niches within real estate do require a lot of work. If you're going to be a wholesaler, that's a lot of work. Whether you're driving for dollars or you have someone else do that for you, there's some huge marketing budgets required. Not so with land. You can literally build a machine that will work for you. And so Mark has built two machines. He's built his own land business machine where two hours a week and he'll be just fine if he doesn't even check in on those two hours. And he's built a land education business that's, you know, he can step away for a month. So this is pretty awesome. I'm really happy for Mark that, you know, he can do that and I'm so happy to fill in because I love talking to the community. Everyone knows that I am a typical oversharer. I've got that little bit of a moniker on me now, but I learned what to share. So I got a few questions from Ben Clark asking about Facebook boost post. I'll talk about those in a second. But first let me just break down the model for anyone who is watching this for the first time. And like, who's this guy talking? Right? So like I said, I'm a land investor. I buy and sell land. So the way our business model works in a quick synopsis, right. Is we are buying properties from out of state owners who typically owe back taxes, may or may not, but we're making them offers of 23 to 25% of market value and we're going to get about one out of every 100 offers accepted. So about a one. Right now I have a 1.7% buy rate. So it's a numbers game and that's What I love about this business is that it's predictable. I know if I sent out 100 offers, I'm going to get one deal. If I send out 200, I'm going to get two deals. And I love that, that you can expect what to get. However, I mean, there are some seasonal aspects of the year. Sales in August can be tough. Buying around, I think this month could be a challenge. But any business has its ebbs and flows. Once you do buy the property, you can do the due diligence yourself. You don't need a real estate license for this. And that was a huge appeal for me as well, because I don't want to spend more money on having another license or another certification only to not do anything with it. What I loved was that I bought a toolkit and within two months I bought my first property. I mean, how crazy is that, right? So I got a question from Chris. I'll answer that right now. Chris, just finish up my little spiel here. So we buy the property directly, right? So we can use the title. Company typically only do that if the purchase is over $5,000. Otherwise we close directly and we can close through a notary. We can have them go to a bank and notarize it themselves. And then once we do buy it, it's time to market it. And if you're doing things right, you already have a buyer's list of people who have reached out to you that the ads on Craigslist or Facebook or Zillow or other platforms and you know, send an offer to the neighbors. So we have, I have neighbor letters, automated send it to the buyers list, you know, post it on Craigslist, post it on Facebook. And if the property is taking more than a month to sell, it's time to liquidate, right? It's time to. If you bought at 25% value, maybe it's time to, you know, alter some marketing. But most of the time it could just be price. So what I would do at that point after 30 days is I'd go to my ebay Facebook buy sell strategy. Did I just say ebay? No, no. Correct me wrong. My Facebook buy sell strategy, now I can move a property there in about a day or two. It's all about pricing. So for there, I'll probably just drop the monthly payment to make that happen. And then from there we're selling it on terms. About 80% of the time you will have some cash buyers. But I love terms because you can get a large amount over a longer period of time. And don't worry. You typically get your money out within, I say 10 months is a good time frame. And if you want to pull money out quicker, you can sell a partial note. And once you break down the numbers on that, it just becomes goofy where it looks like you invested $1 in the property and you're going to make like 6,000. So it gets pretty crazy. I love this niche. You don't need too much money. I sold the car to have my startup capital and after that I needed about 10 hours a week. So it starts as a side business. It generally, I mean, usually is. And then from there it takes about a good, I would say a year to two years to build the machine because there are a lot of tiny aspects. It's probably about 50 steps for each deal. And each one of those, you know, you either eliminate delegate or automate, vice versa, eliminate automate, then delegate. Right. So between automation, delegation, I am currently at about 60% automated with this business. The last, you know, 35% will come rather quickly in the next few months. So at the end of this year, my personal goals, me, David Ben Ellis. I will not be a cabinet maker. So this is my cabinet shop. This is the office I'm in right now. So I will not be a cabinet maker. There'll be enough income coming in to support my own salary and my father's so we can retire him. And I will have automated this business where I'll be down to about maybe five hours a week. And then I can finally do what I truly love is the marketing aspect of this business. I just love getting geeky with the marketing. And so that'll lead me to a few of the questions I have from the community. So let's. We've got a question from Chris here. Did you do flight school or one on one coaching when I started? Great question, Chris. I started last year in June and at the time flight school was not an option. It wasn't, didn't exist. Flight school did not debut until I believe it was November or October of last year. So at that point I was already in a one on one coaching program. And great, I get to love talking about a flight school. So this is a perfect layup for me. Right. So when I started it was either toolkit or one on one coaching, several, you know, tens of thousand dollars for a program for that. So there's this huge gap in between. And so what Mark saw was that there is definitely a need for something in between. So what do entrepreneurs do? They find a need and they fill it. And provide value. So flight school has become the perfect program as an intermediate bridge to building a business fast. So while I did not go through flight school, I went to one on one coaching. I wish flight school was available to me. It would have been so much more valuable financially for sure. And there's a huge intensity built in. So one on one coaching is tailored to your specific goals. Right. So if your goal is to, you know, sell one property a year, well, there's a certain speed you have to go for one property a year. If your goal is to sell 50 a year, okay, there's a different speed you have to go. Whereas flight school, because things have a deadline, it's a certain time frame to accomplish a certain task. You'll have the hustle to keep going and going and going. And I love that. So you're pretty much going 50 miles an hour from the beginning. And don't let that intimidate you. What we really require of students is at least six hours, five to six hours outside of the class time to devote to this business. So you want to be like Scott Todd. So Scott Todd had two hours every single night. So a lot of us have two hours. Right, but how are we spending those two hours? Is it if it is on the business, is it within the business? Are you spending two hours licking and sticking, folding and stuffing? That's two hours wasted in my opinion. Whereas you can get a mailing service to do that for you and use those two hours to work on another aspect of your business. Maybe you have to review a deal at the time, do that. Otherwise work on the business and create a process where you can have someone else do it for you. Now that's a way to really scale a business as a part time job. So I believe it comes down to focus. I have a huge issue with focus. It's hard for me to focus, especially on things I don't really excel at. I mean, I grew up, you know, I definitely had my expertise. I was good at math. So I, I was drawn to things that were easy for me. So the creativity, the marketing part is easy for me. So I'm super drawn to that. Systems building. Things that require like really focusing, really, you know, laying out a system. I struggle with that because honestly, it's not fun for me. I mean, if you ever heard Scott Todd, you know, about systems building, that lights them up like a firefly. That guy loves building systems. But every human being is different. And I think that's what's beautiful about this business is that you can find the one part of this business that you love the most and only do that. So let's say you, you're an extrovert. You just love talking to people. Well, you could be the one who makes the phone calls to sellers. You could be the one who picks up the phone when a buyer is inquiring about a property. And you can just have all the joy you want talking to people if you're like me and you're like half extrovert, half introvert, like an ambivert, where you love talking to people but it drains you. So what I do is I only talk to potential buyers at this point. I don't talk to sellers. I have someone else do that for me. And I'm actually, you know, in the process of training a sales manager so that eventually I won't have to do that. I mean, I want to only be doing the marketing. And what's beautiful about this business, again is that you can delegate things that you do not want to do and stick with what you do want to do. If you don't want to do any of this business, well, I mean, it'll be kind of a challenge at the beginning, but you could get to a point where you're working those two hours a week. I think it's beautiful and it doesn't require a huge learning curve. I mean, what we're seeing is that within one to one and a half years, you've essentially mastered an entire industry or a niche and just love this. So if you want to learn more, let's go to thelandgeek.com to learn more there. And there's a lot of good information there. What it comes down to is there's a good webinar on there. You definitely want to watch that because Mark goes really in depth with some strategies that are valuable and you should be using. Also you'll see there's information about flight school, information about the toolkit, about one on one coaching. There is the Gold Mastermind Facebook group. So attention all toolkit owners. If you're not in that Gold Mastermind group, you're really doing yourself a disservice because I find that when someone has a toolkit but does not rely on the community, the fail rate is high. Right. So you don't want to be a lone ranger in this business. If there are other people doing this already and you can have them as a resource, you are increasing your odds of success greatly. So go to the Langeek.com that's a good question. What is that forward slash, Danielle can you help me on that one? Can you post a comment with the link for the Gold Mastermind group? There's a discount if you get the yearly subscription. Now the huge benefit to that is Mark Podolsky archives his calls on every Wednesday at 11:30. So it's him, Scott Todd, myself, a few other people, along with whoever shows up as the one on one coaching students. So that's a huge resource. Because the toolkit will show you how to do the business. It's not going to tell you specific examples of situations that arise within the business. Now, recently I had a property where it had a septic tank on it. I verified that with the county, with Environmental Services. It was documented as installed, possibly never used. So I sold it for a higher price because they had an improvement. Now the person who bought it from me went out there and, and he calls me, hey, David, where's the septic tank? That's not a question you want to hear in this business. It was scary, man. My heart dropped. So I brought that question up in a Mastermind call. And what it came down to was call Environmental Services, ask them if they've run into the situation before and take it from there. Worst case, there is no substitute tank. You give the person a discount. Because I bought it for so low anyway, I have a huge margin of error. I was good. So I learned all that in. Oh, here we go. So I will have to post this in the comment section. Some of it got trimmed off, but I love it there. So follow the comment section right after I post this. Okay. And I will have the full link there. Let me see. Oh no, I can do it here. So I love belive I'm still learning it. I believe it's a far superior product than things like ecamm. Okay, there we go. It's a bit of a long URL there, but langig.com.samcart.com products GMM for Gold Mastermind. Wow. Yeah. This is a tongue twister. Okay, I'm gonna create a bitly link for this and just shorten it up. So you definitely want. So the main point of that was you want to be plugged into the community. Lone rangers die. So I've heard the saying from another financial guru. He says, pioneers get slaughtered, settlers get rich. So you don't want to be a pioneer in this business. You don't want to be trying to figure out something unique to yourself. You want to be a settler. You want to just go where the gold already is and get rich and, you know, essentially have Freedom, because, you know, who cares about money? We want to have the freedom. It's the things money can allow us in our lives that would really move the needle. I got a question here from Tony. I was told some of the info regarding ebay and Craigslist and investors toolkit, let alone because do you have any tips in adding keywords? Yeah, so great question. So what Tony's asking is that the ebay course within the investors toolkit is a little outdated. Yes, it is, because, you know, the toolkit is recorded in one point in time. And while certain parts do get updated very often, some parts, you know, do not. So the ebay course is one of them. Mike Zano is currently working on a revised strategy for ebay. Specifically, things like, you know, ebay doesn't allow for HTML anymore. So it's just. That's not true. That's Craigslist. Okay, I got confused there. All these different marketing platforms, so many things. So. The ebay strategy in a nutshell is similar to any marketing strategy. You see what's working and you copy it. Crazy, right? You see what's working and you copy it. So the way I've had it explained by Mike is you go on ebay, you search for land. You search for areas where land is already selling. You see how many people were bidding and watching each auction. If you see there's a lot of activity there, well, you know that property is going to sell. So if it's working, copy it. So start mailing to properties in that area. And, you know, same goes for any other accounting research. We want to work accounting where there's already people selling property. So go to landwatch.com see what, how many properties are listed for, you know, one to two acres. Danielle is amazing. She made a bitly link so fast. My goodness. So let me put this here. Control V show. Boom. Bitly Landgeek. Gold Mastermind. Perfect man. When you are surrounded by amazing people, the business moves. So Mark struck gold when he found Daniel Clark Dibel. Oh, my goodness, Danielle, you're amazing. I'm just going to leave this link over here. Definitely join the Gold Mastermind group. I cannot stress enough how valuable that resource is to you. One, yes, you'll get the archived calls, not just of the ones that it record from here forward, but there's over a year and a half, possibly even two years of calls you can watch. Way more information than any podcast you'll ever listen to. They're just hugely valuable. You definitely want to be plugged in. Plus, your questions do get Answered slightly faster and slightly more in depth in that group. Right. So I get notifications. You know, I just, I love Facebook. I'm on it 25 hours a day. So if we see a question come in, if I want the community answer, I'll just stay quiet. Otherwise, I'll chime in. And same for Mark, same for Scott. We love helping everyone. So please, like, join that crew, pay for it. There's my spiel. So I got a question here from Sandy. What do I do with an accepted offer on a property where sellers name A is not on assessor's treasure docs can't find deed info on county Waiting for clerk to call back. Accepted offer on property seller's name. So it sounds like you got an accepted offer from a possible relative who maybe received the mail for that person. And their name doesn't match up with who the county says is the is the owner. So what I do there is contact the assessor to find out who the full legal owner is. Take that information, call back or email your seller and just say, hey, the county says this person owns it. What is your relation to this person? Oftentimes it's oh, yeah, that's my grandpa. And then you'd be like, okay, well, was there any legal transfer of the property? Because there's nothing recorded. It still shows that your grandpa owns the property. Oftentimes they'll have to go through probate court if there was no will. And they have to see who legally owns the property. So that's a process there, not a process you want to do for them. Let them handle that. If they want cash, they'll do some legwork themselves. Other options are an affidavit of heirship, assuming there is a will and assuming the state and the county allows that. Other times it could be an easy one where it's in a trust. And now you have an affidavit of successor trustee. Right. A bunch of legal ish, Jarvis. You know, gibberish in my opinion. Like I'm a cabinet maker and I'm a simple person and was over a year ago. I couldn't. Affidavit. What's an affidavit? This is how quickly you can pick up this program and really learn completely in depth and not all there is to know because you're constantly learning, but learn enough to be dangerous. Start making deals. So, you know, my last few minutes here. Let me talk about boosting a post. So had a question about, you know, when you boost a post on Facebook. So in Facebook, there are different how do I want to call it? Different entities. There we go. So you have your profile, which is you, your name. You know, you can see your friends posts, see cat videos. So that's a profile. There are pages. So theland geek, facebook.com the land geek, that's a page. Now you can have a page for a business. You can have a page for interests. If you like to sew while you have a hairdryer on, you could have a group for that, an interest group. You know, if you'd like to have an off road, you know, blindfolded, you can have an interest group for that too. So those are groups. So pages, groups and profiles. And Facebook makes it a little tough to, you know, for those to, to link to each other specifically when you're going from page to group. Right. So that's kind of there on purpose because Facebook doesn't want spammers just, you know, flooding groups with advertising. So now we get to boosting a post. So let's say you have a business page set up for your business. So let's say it's, you know, land holding company, you know, facebook.com landholding company, ABC company, and you post a property on there. You probably post it on your website, post it there. You should be posted on Craigslist as well. So at that point, the only people who can see that post is anyone who likes it. And even then, organic traffic is nearly dead at this point in 2017, let's say you had 100 likes followers on your page. Well, Facebook is only going to show about 35% of them your actual post. Just because someone likes a post doesn't mean everyone's going to see it. Facebook has a responsibility to guarantee that you will be on Facebook for as long as possible. And now how do they do that? Well, they want to provide you the most interesting content to keep you on there. Right. So if it's not interesting, you're gonna change the channel or you'll turn the app off and go to Instagram. So to combat that, they have an algorithm that shows you the most interesting things to you. So if you've liked anything from that page before, well, you're more likely to see it again in the future. So boosting a post can have the effect of allowing all of the people who like your page to see that post. It can also have the effect of, you know, having a custom audience. So let's say you're selling a property in Florida, Miami. And you probably wouldn't work that area anyway. Let's say you Boost the post there so you target people within 50 miles of that property. It's not a very effective strategy, to be honest, because you're marketing to people who don't even know they want land at this point. And while yes, that can be effective, it's generally a huge waste of money to boost a post. If you want to use Facebook paid traffic, there are definitely strategies that work for that. But the first strategy is going to be, you know, convincing them they have a problem. And the problem is they don't own land. And why is that a problem? Well, it's a problem because they don't have freedom or they don't have a place to build their dream home, or it's a problem because they don't have any assets right now. They're just renting and they don't have any value built up for their net worth. So you have to talk about a problem first. So this will be more effective for ads manager. So if you go to business facebook.com if you're already logged in, you'll be directed to Facebook Ads Manager. Now, at this point, this is just a complete red herring from what you really need to focus on. Okay, I only talked about that because I was asked about that question. Should you drive 85 miles an hour down the highway for no apparent reason? Not really. So this is a bit of an advanced strategy. So apply the 8020 rule here. So 20% of your marketing will get 80% of your results. What 20% is that? Well, that's Craigslist, right? I'm the Facebook guy, but I'm telling you right now, Craigslist is the way to get 80% of your sales or 80% of your leads. And it only requires 20% of of your time or your 20% of your marketing. Whereas to have a Facebook paid traffic strategy work, it's going to be kind of the opposite. It's going to take you about 80% of your resources and only get about 20% of the traffic, 20% of your leads. So it becomes unnecessary at this point of where you might be with your business. If you're doing 100 deals so far and it's July, okay, yes, start employing a strategy for paid traffic. But if you're trying to get your first, maybe second, even like within your first 20th deal, this is not the way to go. You definitely want to do the low hanging fruit. Low hanging fruit is Craigslist. And what better way to do it than have someone else do it for you with posting domination. So I will post link after this so let me get back to some of the questions here. Any service used for a title search. So if you're lucky enough in a county where deeds are available online, I have a person I've trained to do title searches for me. So it's as simple as going to the recorder's website, looking at the public documents, you know, searching the name or searching by the parcel number. And you can pull up the most recent deed. I read through that one, it'll reference the previous deed before that, the previous transfer. I pull up that one, I keep going until I can't really go anymore. That'll help me see if there's any defects in the chain of title. If you are in a county where that's not possible, you may have to mail in to get the copies of those deeds. Or you could find a service like titlesearch.com I think the name of the company is AFX. I think it costs about $125 to have a title search done. I think they send someone down to the county and pull the actual deeds and create a report for you. Some counties that might be necessary. In most that we work, that is not necessary. And you can learn to do a title search effectively and know a few times doing it yourself. Or what I would recommend is go on upwork, post a job for, you know, simple real estate title searches in the US and you're going to have so many qualified people. Like I recently hired someone to do simple title searches. They live in Bangladesh, $6 an hour. They've already worked for other real estate companies, so they're very familiar with the laws and instruments of transfer, whether it's warranty, deed, grant, deed, quick claim, deed, what have you, treasurer's deed. So have someone else do it for you and you know, that's the best way to really do it. I'm not doing any title searches myself anymore. And then absolute worst case, you can hire a title company to do a title search for you. So it'll be a preliminary title report that could probably cost a few hundred bucks as well. There's a question from Sandy. Do you use blind ads on Facebook like we are learning to do in Craigslist to build your mailing list? I love the great questions this morning. Boy, this is great. Okay, so marketing for me is like a playbook, right? I'm sorry to use a sports analogy if you're not into sports, but it's how I think. So in any typical playbook, let's for any sports team, there might be a couple hundred Plays. So one of the plays I have is the Facebook buy sell strategy, right? That's in the toolkit. It's just one play, though. You're not going to run the same pass play every single play. It's predictable for blind ads. This is how you would do it though. Okay, so if you did it, this is how you would do it. You would post something on your Facebook page for your company, right? So let's say a version of blind ads. It has to be more attractive. It has to have some nice pictures. It has to have a question. The questions should really pique interest, like what would you do if you owned five acres out in the desert? Or five acres of freedom. There you go. I like that. I'm gonna. I'm save the headline. Let me write that down. Five acres of freedom. So you would post to your page and then from there you can share to the buy sell groups that you are part of. Okay. Now that part can be automated within posting domination. So posting domination.com thelandgeek one of the modules Scott Todd has shows you how to use a Facebook auto poster to really blast that out to other groups. So I would not sell individual properties that way. It's tough to manage and it doesn't really work. However, I would use that as a lead magnet. So here's another good marketing term, a lead magnet. You know what is a lead magnet? So you want to put something out there that gets interest to become a magnet for these potential leads. Now, it would be tough to get emails using this strategy. At best, you would get people to like your page. And if that's your goal, that's totally fine. Within Facebook paid traffic, you could have a download where they have to give their email to do that. But again, that's a beast and I don't recommend that at this point for most people. Hopefully that answered your question. Otherwise, specific ads for properties within the Facebook buy sell strategy. If you're going to do the post your page and share that link, you could do a blind ad strategy to bring traffic back to your page. Mimi, good morning. Mimi, how much time do you need to write your ads or does your VA need for Craigslist ads? How much time? It's a great question. So I think that would depend on the property itself, what your goals are. So what Scott has told me is that the best ads that perform on Craigslist have about three lines in them or three sentences. So how long would it take to write three sentences? I mean, that seems I could go pretty fast. And then from There you just want to get creative with it. So hopefully Scott's okay with this. There's one tiny tip I learned in flight school. I think he'll be okay with this. If anything, this is a reason to join flight school because all these little tiny things that you get to pick out of Scott's brain. So what is the street name of your property? Even if it's a property out in the middle of nowhere, there are street names. So I had a property that's on Gunpowder Drive, so my headline was Smoking Deal on Gunpowder Drive. And I thought that was really creative. We'll see how it performs. But as far as time to write ads, if you can hunker down for half an hour, you could create a list of headlines. You could use. Put those in a file, and then you can create a list of blocks of content. So make the blocks be so vague that you can have like. So let's say, let's use Excel for this. Column A, column B, column C. Column A will always be my intro sentence for the ad. Column B will always be the more detailed info. Column C will be the call to action. So, and from there you can have a VA using posting domination. Just rotate A, B and C or this, the different A, this different B, this different C. So you can constantly have new ads and have another database of pictures. So that could be a really great way to do it. Hopefully I answered your question. I always feel like I ramble on for specific questions like that. So here's a good question from Derek. Derek Marshall. When you're writing up a deed for the purchase of a property, I've heard some geeks say they copy the previous deed, do copy of revenue. Other than name changes, of course, these are getting all like from the original development subdivision. Not typical warranty. Just curious if you copy all info. Very good question. In summary, do you copy the legal description plus all these subject to's and all the things that are included or not included with the property. To transfer a property, all you need is the grantee, the grantor, and legal description. All the extra stuff is not necessary. However, I added in anyway. So the original owners of most subdivisions at work held on to the mineral rights. So I would reference that in the deed because it doesn't hurt me if anything more transparency. Transparency helps. Here we go. Talk about striking gold. Valuable info. Do a snagged on Coffee Talk in the future. Nice. Cool. Well, I love doing Coffee Talk. Mark Podolsky is on vacation. Thelangig.com Go find out more info you saw me answering very specific questions in if you're even watching at this point. And chances are you're not because the way video works on Facebook is you'll get a lot of viewership in the first minute and after that you'll have a huge drop off rate and only the true fans will stick around to watch the end. So I've got at least 18 of you people watching my face this morning on a Wednesday morning post the 4th of July. If you want to learn more, go to facebook.com landgeek Definitely follow that page. Like that page so you can be notified of every coffee talk we do. We also post a lot of good content on there. Definitely sign up for the Golden Mastermind group. Use that link we had earlier. Let me find it again. Danielle, once again, how quick were you making a bitly link? My goodness, that was great. Here it is again. Bit Ly the Land Geek Gold Mastermind. I love it. So great. You definitely want to be part of that. And if you want to learn more about flight school, learn more about the toolkit. Schedule a call with myself or with Mike Zaino, the Zen Master. If you like Boston accents, I recommend making a call with him. It's just so fun to talk to some people from Boston. I love it. So look forward to speaking with you again next week. Otherwise, this is David Benalis Facebook Whisper signing off. I will talk to you soon.