Coffee Talk

Good morning, welcome replay watchers. This is Coffee Talk with yours truly, David Benaus, the Facebook whisperer. Mark Podolski, your favorite land geek is on vacation right now. Enjoying some much needed vacation. Right? We all need to unplug. I'm so happy Mark is doing that right now and he's actually getting ready to take his family to San Francisco. Right? Phoenix is like 120 right now. So if he stays there they are going to melt. So they are getting out of Dodge, going on vacation. Watching this replay. I am David Benalis. Like I said, I am a almost full time land investor. So I'm about 3/4 the way there, more than halfway there. What I do is I buy land from distressed sellers and turn around and sell it payment plans. So I'm adding value on both ends of transaction and in the middle that's where I make my money. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I do have some questions that I will get to that were posted in our Facebook group. So if you are not in those groups, I highly encourage you to join. It is called the Land Geek Official wealth creation and motivation Group. That's a great way to be plugged into the community. Learn more, ask questions. Chances are you're going to see me there daily. I'm on Facebook about 25 hours a day. I didn't know that was possible, but somehow I hold the record. If anyone has any questions during this broadcast, just please make a comment and I'll pull it on and answer any questions you have about land flipping. What is it? Land flipping. Prior to about a year ago, I didn't even know you could flip land. I knew you could flip a house, right? Get a distressed house, repair it, put some new tile, some new paint, maybe some molding, turn around and sell it for more. But when you're flipping land, we're not doing any of that. All we're doing is trading paper. So what we do is we identify areas where people are already doing this business. Right. Ever heard that saying? I think it's called it goes pioneers get slaughtered, settlers get rich. Well that's definitely true for this business. You know, when you try to do your own thing, you try to be different within snitch. That's when you're in for some trouble. You are in for some trouble indeed. And I did that the first four months of my investing career. Even with the resources I had, I was still stubborn and I wanted to be the king of Central California. Everyone else is working states like Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico. And I mean what it came down to is I wanted to be able to drive to a property, to be able to close it, you know, worst case. So if we really break that down, what it came down to is I was afraid, right? So there was some fear. And I let fear take the steering wheel and lead me to do something different outside of the model that Mark Podolsky has laid out. And it backfired. I mean, I wasted so much time and money on mailings to counties that didn't work, where people do not sell their land for one reason or another. Specifically, one county I mailed to, it don't work because the properties were so high and the property values were so high and the back taxes were high. So there is no way I was going to buy it and sell it for our typical, you know, 150amonth. So I mean, it backfired. I let fear take the steering wheel. And, you know, when I stopped doing that, you know, I got into an Arizona county. I live in Los Angeles. That's still relatively close, right. I can take a one hour flight or I can drive there for six and a half hours to close a deal. At that point, I was committed to doing it exactly the way Mark Podolski laid out in the Land Geek. So if you want to learn more about that, definitely go to thelandgeek.com post that link here for you. If this has already piqued your interest, I definitely encourage you to go to landgeek.com on the very top of the page. It'll say students and then from there click on prospective students and there's multiple tracks. You can start with this business and I encourage you to read through them all. But ultimately, just schedule a call with me or Mike Zaino and we can break down exactly which path would be optimal for you. So we are committed to every single person's success and we're not going to push on a program that's not going to fit what your needs are. And obviously if it's out of your budget, we don't want to make you progress broke. We're in the business of making people financially free. So why would we do something the opposite of that? So it's been a wonderful week for me. I had some face time with Mark and Scott this past weekend. Elite weekend. You can learn more about that at a bootcamp when we kind of break down the one on one coaching programs or schedule a call with me. But for myself, I have never had so much focus on anything in my life. You know, I've tackled big projects before, you know, Schooling seven years. So there was a level of focus I've had. But I tell you, when you really surround yourself with people smarter than you, people that are better than you, it's. It's just mind blowing. Like, I've never. This is a broken record now. I just, I'm kind of amazed with myself at this point, like, how much focus I've had. And I don't see it dying out because now I truly understand how powerful this business can be and where it can go and what kind of lifestyle it can afford you. And so, you know, probably, you know, thinking, I don't want, like, I just want enough in life. And that's, that's fine. You know, we're not trying to teach you how to be a filthy rich dirtbag. You know, we're trying to teach you how to be financially free. And what does that definition mean? It means your income, your passive income exceeds your fixed expenses. So imagine a life where your rent is paid or your mortgage is paid, your car payments are paid for all by notes generated by selling land. What would your life look like then? Would you spend more time with your family? Would you worry less? And that's exactly what we're going for with this. That's exactly why Mark started teaching, is because, you know, you can only get so rich before. Like, there's no extra enjoyment out of life between $1 million a year and $2 million a year. So to teach is what has really brought joy to Mark and myself and, you know, the rest of the coaches within the community. So anytime we get to share in your stories of a quick sale or your first sale or someone like Scott Bossman, who has already achieved financial freedom in 24 months, those stories just, they light my fire. That's what really motivates me to continue with the coaching part of the land geek for myself. And I really dig it. I just love going to boot camps where I can meet people. I can have one little tiny phrase that will inspire them or help them move forward. So I really dig that part. And a quick synopsis of our business model is we are buying vacant land for 25 cents on the dollar. We are turning around and selling it, sometimes for cash, most of the time on payment plans for returns of 300 to 1000% ROI. But really getting down, if you're a numbers person, you could have a 300% ROI spread over 40 years. And now does that look like a good investment? Not at all. The best part is that we're getting these payments, our money back from our investment and ideally 10 months or less, and our total money and the profit out in four years, less. I mean, sometimes we do have some notes that extend into the seven, eight, nine year period. But I love this business because, you know, I do take a lot of risks in life with my money is one thing I don't take that many risks with. So I wanted a business model where I knew I would get some returns quickly. You could do that with. You could flip houses. Takes a little while to get your money out. It takes, what, three months to flip a house? I mean, two months if you're fast. But if it's your first time, it's probably gonna take a long time. Or you can do tax lien investing, and that's a very slow money game. Still passive. Nothing wrong with that. As long as your money's moving, you're definitely doing something smart. But if you want a business where you can move things forward fast and I mean, you know, replace your income in 18, 24 months, now this is a beautiful business for that. So when it comes down to it, you can really get this business off your plate relatively fast. Right? I was a cabinet maker. You would probably have to spend eight years learning how to be a cabinet maker before you can, you know, teach someone else. When I got into this, I was taught very fast, and I'm already teaching it within a year. So, I mean, this is more of the exception to the rule. But it definitely shows you how quick the learning curve is, because once you do about two or three deals, you really understand exactly what has to be done. And absolutely, there's going to be some doozies that come along the way. Last night in flight school, I had a question where someone asked me, what do you do when a property is sitting in the middle of a county line? In other words, the property is on two counties. I've never even heard of that. That was crazy to me. I couldn't believe it. So honestly, I didn't even know how to answer that question. So I told him I didn't know the answer because I don't know everything in this business. And that's what I like about it, is that I don't know everything yet. I'm still prospering. I mean, you don't have to be an expert if you're the perfectionist type. You don't have to be a perfectionist with this for it to work. You know, 80% done will make you money. 80% done will move the needle in your life. And so this is a wonderful business. For that. And if you do want to be a perfectionist, well, then get things going first and then perfect it after that. So let's take some questions right now. I've got some. There are some good ones that came in. Let me find those real quick. So have you ever gone live and then checked out your notifications and saw yourself going live? So like this is like that right now, man, that's pretty cool. So let me, let me get out of that. Come on, come on, get out of there. Okay, so I definitely remember a question about getting a list. Okay, so Jason Lydiard had a question about, you know, the best ways to get a list from a county. So I think let's broaden that question a little bit. So let's go for the best ways to get people to mail to. If you're starting off and you want to shortcut the process a little bit, you could definitely use a service like AgentPro247 and it will put everything in a much neater format than it comes from the county. So that would be for, if you want to sample a county, see if you want to work there. I would say do about 500 to maybe 750 mailings to that county. You can use that list. I think it's about 5 cents per property at this point. So it's a double edged sort of. So AgentPro 247 will give you things in a very clean format. You'll be mailing much quicker. However, the data may not be the most accurate and up to date. If you go directly to the county, you're gonna have the best data. However, that's also a double edged sword where the format it comes in, you're gonna be banging your head against the wall. Because I mean, I'm not a data analyst. I mean there might be someone listening who is a data analyst and it could be a piece of cake for them. I'm very jealous of you. But I remember getting my first tax roll, my first delinquent list from the county. Kid, you not. It looked like I was reading the matrix code. I was so confused and distraught and I'm like, are you kidding me? And then you know what, I just, I got through it. I had the mentality that, you know what, someone has been in my position before. I can get past this if someone else has gotten past this. So all details aside, you got to have the mindset for this business that nothing's going to stop you. You have to keep moving forward. Right? I mean, Scott Todd refers this to as the Dips. You know, that's from a Malcolm Gladwell book, that when you're going through something and you're hitting some momentum, there will be a dip before you have an upswing. If you've ever read the 12 week year, we describe the informed optimism. It's an upward trend when you're learning about this business. Informed optimism, I'm going to be rich. And then you get a list and then it enters informed pessimism. And my goodness, it becomes a really dark time in your career. But then you just have to have the attitude that I'm going to get through this. And then after that, you figure out how to format one of those crazy CSV tab delimited files and then you're well on your way. I got a question here from Armando. Are delinquent lists usually available on county websites? You know, armando, there's about 3,007 counties in the U.S. and there's 3,007 ways that they present the information to you. So it's a little bit different in each county. I know for a fact I know of at least one county that publishes it for free. Right. I'll even tip it off. It's in Arizona, but that's as far as I'll go. Right. You can search for the counties there. Other states do publish the full tax roll online, but it's in PDF format. So there's a lot of work that has to be done to convert a PDF into an Excel. But what you're going to see in general is that there is no perfect list. So that'll give you a mind frame when you do get this list. Understanding there's no perfect list. So usually when I get a list, it's a full tax roll and it does not include the mailing address of the person. It's just the name, the acreage and the land value. So as long as I have the apn. Oh, I'm sorry. It does include the parcel number. So that's kind of the. The key to the kingdom is the parcel number. So if you ever, you know, open a list and you get overwhelmed, your first step is, where's the parcel number? Can I, you know, find that amongst the mess? If you can do that, you can just get the parcel number and delete the rest of the info. If you needed to, you may not need to. It may have the mailing address as well. So you can keep that information. But if you can identify the parcel number, that's the keys to the kingdom, where you can go to the assessor's website and now you can screen scrape. So one by one you can go to the assessors parcel search lookup, type in your parcel number, the apn, which means assessor parcel number, and from there it'll give you all the information you need about the property. It has the acreage, it has the mailing address. It shows the legal owner the legal description. So legal description just means, you know, there's no assigned address. Right. So every home that exists, every property has a legal description. The address is just something that makes it easy for government to identify where your property is easier. But you know, this house right here, it has a legal description. It's probably like the lot number 214 of the north quarter of the southeast quarter of the lower half of this subdivision of Los Angeles. So that part will be included on your tax roll. But I just delete that because that's not necessary for me to mail. So I want to only have the things that are necessary for me to mail. What are those things? It's going to be the name of the person I'm mailing to, it's going to be the property number, it's going to be the acreage. You know, how big is that property? I think, I think that's it. You know, I don't over complicate it. Matter of fact, that's it. So my offers are 25% of market value. So I know you might be thinking, now I have to go in and comp every single property. No, that's not how we do it. Right. So you'll find that in certain within areas, you know, things are similarly priced. So if I can identify that, you know, a five acre property in Colorado has a market value of $8,000 and similar properties in the area have a similar market value, $7,509,000. I'll just average that and then you divide that by four. So that's the quickest way. So we're doing one fourth of market price, that is 25% market value. So once you do have your list formatted, you're going to do a formula within Excel. So you'll create a column for your offer and it'll be acreage times 25%. And that's your offer. I'm sorry. No, no, correct me. So let's say it was $8,000 for five acres. I mean that comes out to. Let's do some quick math here. I like that. $8,000 divided by five acres, that's $1,600 an acre. Okay, so now divide by four, divide by four. $400 an acre. Okay? So that's your multiplier. So you would just, in your offer column, create a formula where you multiply the acreage for that row times 400, and that's your offer price. Now another question I commonly get on calls with people who are interested in this business are, do I send out blank offers? You know, the typical postcard. Do you want to sell your land or do I send out calculated offers? So I have very strong opinions about this. You can send out postcards. It's a little cheaper on the front end saying, do you want to sell your land? And this is the perfect way to completely waste your time to be on the phone all day negotiating for a price you don't even want to waste all your energy to keep you from moving forward. Do not send postcards with blank offers. All right, I made a mistake one time. I didn't have a merge filled in correctly, or I sent out 200 offers and they did not have an offer. So I know from firsthand exactly what it is. It's horrible. Like, you do not want to be going this route. So we are sending calculated offers because we are going to get a response rate of about 3 to 5%. Response rate, not buy rate. And of those five, we're gonna make some people angry. That's just what happens when you make a low ball offer. You're gonna make some people angry. And then from there, you will have some accepted offers. Some people will be thrilled to be, you know, have the chance to liquidate and get some money. You know, there could be a life event that happened where they need some quick cash. And you were there like a knight in shining armor, you know, or a princess in shining armor, you know, with cash at hand, able to close in less than a week. And you are their savior at that point. So, I mean, that's, you know, mailing. We're going to get one out of every 100 at that point. It's a formula, right? So this is a numbers game. This business is very much numbers oriented. And if you think that way, you do have a slight edge. If you don't, it can be learned, right? Anyone can learn anything. So even on the sales side, it's a numbers game. We want to plant a bunch of marketing seeds so that we can grow a nice sales tree. So if we're going to market on Craigslist, like we love to do, it takes about 25 people inquiring about the property before you get your sale. On average, I mean, you could be lucky. Your first person that reaches out will want to buy it. And I'm jealous. That doesn't happen too often. It usually takes a lot of people inquiring about it to develop a relationship, you know, with that property to make a sale. You know, if, if you purchase the investors toolkit, which is the base level package for the land Geek. My Facebook buy sell strategy is in there. So I have a course, has six videos and I lay out exactly how I sold the property in seven hours and consistently do that. So, you know, when it comes to sales, it's the ratio. Okay, I got a great question here from Joe McClain. So yeah, the main point of that is that it's a numbers game. Right. However, I do want to just, you know, set some expectations. It's easier than you think. It's harder than you realize. Have you ever started a business and, and it was easy. Well, then you probably wasn't working. Right. There are challenges. So it's not all peaches and cream. There's definitely hoops to jump through. Joe McLean has a great question. Do you clear title on all your parcels? Absolutely, absolutely. So if you're referring to clear title as go through a title company, that's only part of the time. So here's my kind of formula for this. If the property I'm buying is less than $5,000, I can do the title search myself. Okay. If it's really low dollar, you know, right now I'm buying a lot of one acre properties for $450, I can do the title search myself. It's actually very easy and much simpler than you think. You know, you're going to go to the, the county's public recorded documents website and you can search by the property number, you can search by the owner's name and you can pull the deeds. They're actually very easy to read. You know, there's a grantor, there's a grantee, and you got to make sure that, you know, the person you're buying from was the grantor on that previous deed. If there was an extra person, well, now we got to figure out who the extra person was in relation to who's buying it from us. Sorry, who's selling the property to us. So yeah, so we can clear title on ourselves. We teach you how to do that. If the property's 5,000 or more, now there's a little more risk involved. Right. So now you have a more high value property. So to mitigate risk, we're going to go to a title company. It can cost between 500 and $700 for that. But at that point, because we'll likely be selling a $5,000 property for 20,000, there's definitely enough margin of safety to dish out some more money for title company. Otherwise I'm doing it myself. That's not true. I have a team in the Philippines that is doing it for me. But when you're starting out, it's very easy to do it yourself. We have a community full of people that love to help and once you're in the community, you become family and we are just definitely committed to your success and want to keep moving forward. So yes, we're checking taxes ourselves, we're checking title ourselves, we're checking legal access ourselves. That's what's beautiful about this business is that it doesn't require a lot of overhead to do deals. You know, do you have a cell phone or you know, a landline? That's enough. You can get all these things done yourself. Eventually you move from being self employed within this business to being a business owner. Meaning you have a team underneath you and you can leverage services like Fancy Hands. They're a US based virtual assistant platform where you can send a request in to call this person from the county and find out what the taxes are due on this property number. And it's done in five, six minutes. And it's beautiful. And if they don't get through, they'll call back until they do get through. So yes, there's definitely ways to leverage your time. You know, if you are working full time 50 hours a week, there is still room in your life to do this business because if anything, you're at an advantage because you know, you have limited time resources. So you have to be smart with your time. So we're all about working smarter, not harder. We don't want to create a second job for you and we just want to, we want a side hustle that will turn into something much more beautiful than that. Okay, I think there was a question I missed that was posted, so let me pull that up. Okay. From John Odermatz. How soon in process do you contact neighbors when buying a lot? Is it early after signed purchase agreement and due diligence are complete or do you wait until the deed is in your name? Great question. So I have like a trigger sequence that I do with my marketing. So one of the very first things I do is a neighbor letter. So because we're relying on the good old US Postal Service. Gotta love those government services, right? It's going to take at least three days for it to arrive and I do not like waiting to get paid. I want to sell this property as soon as possible, less than a week. So what I will do is as soon as I am starting the closing process right so I'm emailing deeds to the my sellers. At that point I'll trigger a an action for my VA to go into the county GIS site and find out who the 10 nearest property owners are, the 10 most recent sold comps for the area and then they will put that into an Excel sheet that gets uploaded to click2mail where I already have my neighbor letter. So there will be some things custom to each property. But most of the time if you just have a neighbor letter that says hey neighbor, I just moved in next to you or I just bought my property next to you, I'm a land investor and I'm planning to sell it Right now is your golden opportunity to double your empire. And then you know, leave some contact information, let them know that you also mail to the neighbors. This way if there's some kind of competition between, you know, a neighbor rivalry, you can use that to your advantage and create a little mini auction. So to answer your question John, shortly when I start the closing process, that's when I trigger neighbor letters. Well, it's 10 o' clock Pacific Time and we usually keep these about a half an hour. If you have any more questions about land investing, leave them in the comment section. I will find them and I will find you like Liam Neeson and I will answer your questions otherwise to the rest of the one on one coaching students. I will see you on the Mastermind call and watch the replay. I will talk to you all soon. Mark Podolsky will be back very soon but next week we will have a special guest, right? It won't just be my face, but you can talk to Sean Rickman. He is an automation specialist and he and his fiance just vacationed in Europe for I believe it was two months. Still do this business. So tune in next week, find out how you could do this business from anywhere in the world. Have a good day.