How to Overcome First County Commitment

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek with your favorite niche real estate website, the landgeek.com. and on this week's roundtable podcast, we have almost all the usual suspects. We've got the technician, Eric Peterson. Eric, how are you? I'm good. It's good to see you. We've got. Oh, do I have to even say it? Landed. AI Harris, the aquatic investor. Landon, how are things? And how are you feeling about your new nickname?

Oh, feeling pretty good. I like it. You know, I'm accepting. I'm embracing it. Look, it's been good.

It's, you know, Scott Todd really, really lobbied hard for that one.

So that was Taria.

That was Taria.

Was that sure about the ultimate final say?

I mean, that's the whole thing.

Dude. Buddy. Nightcap OG Scott. Bossman Scott. How are things?

Things are great. Good to be here.

Good to see you. I love it when you call me Big Papa Tate. Litchfield Tate. Looking good after your fishing trip, man.

Thanks. Had a good time. Happy to be back. Back into the swing of things. I missed you guys.

Yeah, good to see you. And last but not least, you know you love him. Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net Lamboto.com Learn anything about anything. Invest your ninjas.com. the brain, the professor. Scott Todd. What's our topic today?

I think our topic is really revolving around, like, how.

How do you.

How did you commit to your first county? You know, like, a lot of people get fearful of that first county. Committing to it. And so then whenever you have fear, there's inaction in action. Is not what we're looking for, ever. So how do you. How did you guys. Or what advice do you have for overcoming that first county commitment, as I'll call it?

This is like a two minute roundtable podcast because everyone's gonna same thing, say the same thing. Wherever Eric Peterson is buying land. Let's just go there. Like, if we could. If we could take his website, we'll take his counties. It's all about just calling.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're not doing that. No, no, no, no.

Look, is the reality, Mark. Eric is not amused at all.

No, he's not amused at it. You know, like, maybe we have to restart this podcast too, because we need. We need happy Eric. Not. Not angry Eric.

All right?

Always the example here, because everyone loves your stuff.

No, you know, no one's taking anyone else's website.

That is true.

He's the only guy I know who's had his website literally plagiarized. Word for word, image for image, color screen for color scheme.

Yeah.

Bad thing when I, when I go on chat GPT and you know, I'm like, create an image that Eric Peterson would be proud of, and it just creates it. Bad time to be a graphic designer. All right, But Scott Bossman, seriously, that first county is sort of that first hurdle. There's 3,007 U.S. counties now. People in flight school have been trained on this. But there is this sort of mental hurdle, because imagine you've got, let's say, a $500 budget when we're saying you're going to send out 20 mailers a day and you've got FOMO, right? Well, if I pick this county, then I'm missing out on all these other counties. How do you get over that hurdle of this is the. A good first county to go after. And I really want to, you know, be see. So see some results or see some success. Get some sales, Buy some land right out of the gate in the land business.

Yeah. It's very important topic, very important question. I mean, you need to set yourself up for success. And by, by doing what we teach you to do, you put your faith in that model. Right. So you're going to be nervous. That just comes with the territory. You know, when I, my first day in the physical therapy clinic, I was nervous as heck. What did I do? I looked at the clinicians around me. I used what I had been taught to put my foot in front of the. Put one foot in front of the other and progress through that day. And each day it got a little bit easier. And that's how it is with county research. That's how it is with this business. So put your faith in what you're seeing. Right. We've said it a thousand times. Go where the other land investors are. Go where there's a fishing hole. Right. But you also want to make sure that you're setting yourself up for success. Because you don't want to be working in a county where the acquisition price is $5,000 and you have $1,000. Right. Or, you know, you have. You have $5,000 and you need to purchase for 10. Those are, those deals can be done. Like Mike Zaniel said recently on a roundtable, don't let your lack of money dictate getting the deal done or not. However, when that happens, you're going to be overwhelmed and not knowing what to do. So set yourself up for success. Go to an area where you know you can buy land based on your budget.

Yeah. I love that. But I wonder if the AI Landon Harris has anything he'd like to add to that.

I mean, everything Scott said was 100% true. And I think one of the biggest things that we go through is, yeah, it's the trust factor. It's, it's when you're looking at a county, you know, there are things to me that sell me on trust. One, am I following a model that I have seen success with? Well, I think this model definitely shows that over years and experience there are a number of people that go through this business that do it, that have shown success. Two, can I get, can I afford it? You know, that's, that's the thing. I, if I can afford the county, I'm going to want to move forward. The other thing is, you know, can I find other investors in that area? Well, those three things to me, set yourself up for success. And when you're just going through the hurdle, the mental hurdle of should I do this? It's more you just got to lay back that trust and, and just go. I think sometimes people get paralyzed by the fact that they are going to pick the wrong thing. Well, if you think you're going to pick the wrong thing, think about this business as a long term business. You might start in one county, but maybe you move to another county later after you understand the business. So I think, like I said, trust is a big thing. But don't get so stuck that if you're not in a county that you think that's going to be a perfect county forever, you'll eventually get there. So I think it's just more of like just running with that.

Yeah, it's, it's really good advice. But the technician, what's, what are your thoughts on it?

I think that.

You know, to me there's, there's this list of items or checkboxes that we have to be able to check off before we know that this is a good county to begin work in. And that's the things that have been talked about already are other investors there. Is this within my budget. And it's not, when we talk about your budget, it's not just, hey, I can afford to buy one property there, but it's, I can afford to buy a handful of properties there because we need the ability to do that in order to begin to grow this business. So, you know, if the boxes are checked off, I think you just have to move forward. You know, like Scott Todd likes to say, you got to take massive action. You've just got to go and trust that what you've been taught is the right thing and that you will see success. Now, in addition to all of that, we're going to be spending money once we start mailing. And that's, I think where people probably get tripped up is like, ah, you know, I'm going to mail 500 offers or a hundred offers or whatever and spend X amount of dollars. And that eats into my budget. I don't want to make a mistake. So if we're doing that, let's be wise and take a list and test some different pricing because we're new, we don't really know what the actual purchase price is in this area. So take five rows of data, price it at one price point, take your next five rows at another price point, do that three or four times and then duplicate that through your and, and have a quite a wide variety in that pricing so that you can have success in that mailing. Even if everything comes back at your highest price, you can still renegotiate that. You can, you don't have to buy those properties if it doesn't work out. But man, I tell you, it's a lot better to get some response even at a higher price than maybe you think you should pay than get absolutely no response and be, you know, out the cost of that mailing and just be like kind of back to square one. And I guess, you know, from my perspective recently, some of, you know, I've been doing this, this YouTube challenge with my son where we each took $1,000 and went and invested in our favorite asset classes. And he's going after stocks and options in crypto. And of course, you know, I know land, so I'm buying land. And I was kind of, in doing this, I was kind of taken back to starting all over because I had $1,000. I couldn't, you know, leverage anything else other than this thousand dollars. So I had to go out and I had to say what counties can I go to where number one, they're in my budget, I can buy properties for just a couple hundred dollars. And number two, there's other land investors there. And these weren't necessarily counties that I normally worked in in my day to day business. But because of the limitations I had in front of me, which is very similar to someone starting in this business, that's what I had to do. I had to go find these counties and begin to work there. And I think going back to the idea of other investors there and why that's important, number one, it shows us that land can be bought there, but more importantly, it shows us that it can be sold, whether that's in a wholesale market or retail market. Okay. And that's a very important piece. Over time, you're going to find it's. It's probably easier to buy land than it is to sell it. So we want to start off on the right foot. We want to be aware of those things, and we just have to take the next step sometimes and just be willing to be a little unsure, but willing to test and ready to refine when needed.

I love that. I love that. I have a lot. I wanted to riff on it, but I'd love it when you call me Big Pop with Tate Litchfield. What are your thoughts on this?

I mean, look at it this way. What's the worst that could happen, right at the end of the day, the worst that happens is you offer to spend too much or too little on a piece of property, and either, A, you get a lot of responses, or B, you get none. So if that's what's holding you back, so be it. And look, we talk about that.

You're so flippant with other people's money. Not everybody has amassed the amount of wealth that you have, so they want to come in, and you're not going.

To get it right on the first try.

Oh, well, I just. I just, you know, lost $500. I guess I can go to lunch today. Like, Tate, because of the mailing. Like, people are, like, very tight with that first. That first initial amount of money.

I get it.

I get it.

But every time you mail, you're getting feedback, and that feedback allows you to get your finger on the pulse. You are going to misprice your properties. It's going to happen. It has to happen, right? It has to happen. And you could do the best math and you could pull the best comps, but at the end of the day, you're going by what other people have given you as far as data points. So you have to go out and you have to test this. And, yeah, you're going to overpay for a property, but in doing so, you're gaining knowledge. And as long as you're buying at your perceived 20 to 30% of market value, you're not going to lose money. You know, like, it took me seven counties before I finally connected with one, and that doesn't mean that in the first one through six, I didn't make money. It just took me that many times to go through the county research process to where I feel I felt Comfortable, confident in the work that I was doing. And even then, if I were to mail a new county today, I'm going to throw the widest net possible on that first initial mailing. Because at the end of the day, I am fishing blind. I'm blind, Cassie.

Right.

I am going out there and assuming that this is where the fish are. But you don't know.

Right.

You don't know until you get. Until you get dirty.

Right.

You got to mail some offers. So I get it. I understand not wanting to waste even a single offer. I understand that point of view. But I also know, hey, the worst case scenario is you learn something, and that is land cost more than I thought it did or land could be bought cheaper than I thought it could. That's it.

Yeah. You'll be scared. Yeah. No. And that is. I think that is the correct mindset to have. I just wanted to push back on you because there are different investor DNA where there are some people who are coming in and they're very fearful. Where you have people on the other end of the spectrum, they're daredevils and they are. They take your approach, which I think is actually a healthier approach, where. Well, if, you know, these other land investors are there, I'm the male there. Oh, I didn't get the response rate I wanted. Forget it. I have faith. I know that there's deals here because if all these other people are doing deals, I just have to adjust my pricing or maybe I did something incorrect with my, my list. There's something like they, they can own it versus the person who's just so nervous, so fearful out of the gate and feels like that have that perfectionist tendencies. Well, I, I would, I almost would give them different instructions if you would. But we got to give Scott Todd a chance to talk here. I mean.

There'S lots of great feedback here.

Right.

But my thing is, like, look, you're not marrying a county for the rest of your life. That's not it. You're not committing to this thing and saying, I'm going to be in this county for the rest of my life, and so I have to not make a mistake. And I get it about not making mistakes because we all start off with a limited amount of money and none of us like to lose money at the same time, none of us like to like, not have result. However, that said, here's the. Here is the reality when you just get going and you start to mail that 20 to 30. I like what per day. I like what Eric said about you Know, blocking them out. When I block mine out, when I'm testing the county, I'll. I'll do, you know, one for this price, one for that price, and one for that price. I kind of choose three price points, and I rotate them. Every third one gets.

It.

Gets another price point. So that way you're. In a way, you're testing three price points every day that you're mailing. If you're mailing 30 a day.

So you're testing those three.

Three price points, and you have to see which one comes back. And then you have to adjust from there and then from that. From that feedback. Like Tate said, it's a. It's a constant feedback loop. You have to give it time to work, you know, typically six to eight weeks for these offers to come back to you. And then you have to. Then you have to be very gentle in your approach. And the best analogy I have for this is when you're driving a car, and I assume that everybody is listening to this, has driven a car. But when you're driving a car, you know, you're not. You know, in the beginning, when you first learned how to drive the car and you're trying to maintain the speed limit, man, you focus on that speed limit, and, you know, like, you notice.

That you go a little over.

Maybe you don't want to, or maybe.

You do, but you go a little bit over. What do you do?

Do you take the foot off the gas and the speed, the car slows down, and then you give it gas and you're like, okay, now we're going fast again. But over time, it becomes a more delicate, just kind of a natural thing to. Where how many of you drive your car and you don't even look at the speed limit, but yet you maintain the speed limit. You get the feel for your car. You get the feel for. For that piece. And that's what happens when you. When you get enough of these under your belt. So you kind of have to go through the process to gain the experience. And you have to remember it's never perfect to begin with, but you have to give the system time to work. I love what Landon said. If you have faith in the model, you have faith in the system, you'll just trust it and go. And the people that we see have success with this, I believe, just do just that. They just trust the system. They go through it, and, you know, they take their lumps as. As need be. Because guess what? We've all done it. And there's. Unfortunately, there's Not a perfect answer to the exact right price.

At the end of the day, it.

Comes down to what the person who's selling the land thinks is a fair offer versus what you have made the offer on which you think is a fair offer. And it's a delicate balance between the two. It's definitely an art and not a science.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a market. I thought everybody had great feedback. Tate, what were you going to say?

I was going to say, like, a perfect example of this is there's an area where I know that Scott buys land and I buy land, and Scott Todd does, and his buy price is significantly higher than my buy price. Is he overpaying? No, because according to him and his, you know, his recent sales and his numbers and in his working of that area, he's buying it at the exact price that he wants to. Now, do I look at Scott and think, oh, man, that guy is paying more? No. I actually look at him and go, interesting. He's getting a higher dollar for his properties than I am. I wonder if I need to make an adjustment here or am I content?

Right.

So again, there's. There's no right or wrong price. The market's worth, the property's worth what two people agree it is.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of this, when you first start, is just being honest with yourself and you're honest with your situation. How much money do I have and what kind of person am I? Am I a perfectionist? Do I not want to make a mistake? And if I'm that type of person, maybe your first mailing isn't even for you. Maybe you go and you buy wholesale, or maybe you do land arb. But if you're also the kind of person that is, to Tate's point, you want to learn deeply about a market and you have that mindset. Look, either way, I'm going to learn then you're the type of person that should be coming out of the gate, fearless and learning your market and then making adjustments from there. But I think it all starts with honest about your budget, honest about your investor DNA and going from there. For whatever reason, I feel like there's that great story. John Wooden is a coach, basketball coach, is the most winningest coach in. In. In NCAA history, and he's at the as the most talented players. This is where Lu Alcinder, who became a Kareem Abdul Jabbar, won. I mean, I think they won like, I forget how many championships in a row. Just dominant. And what's he do with his Players, very first thing, there's no basketball on the court. Say, gentlemen, this is how you put your socks and shoes on, literally starting like that. And these are the best players in the country coming in and the coach is telling them, here's how you put your socks and shoes on. And so when you first start in the land business, start with the very basics. Here's how you pick a county, Go to where the other land investors are, know your budget, be honest with yourself and start like that, and then start learning from there. But we want to get fancy and I get that tendency. But hopefully that little story sticks with you. Scott Bossman, what's your thought? Scott, you're on mute.

Oh, wait, sorry about that. Yeah. I would just say one last thing. And this is in line with something we heard last week from some people actually on the lunch call that we do land and weekly for people. People had. And I talked to Scott Todd about this a little bit as well. People had taken action and they followed the model and they picked a county and they had a successful mailing campaign and they bought land at 25 cents on the dollar. And then they found out that it was not an E recording county, and they were a little bit frustrated about that. Well, now I have all of this logistical. Right. I have this logistical issue like I have to snail mail stuff into the county. And depending on whether you're international or national or or within the United States doing this business, that could be quite a task. Right. But I think what people should realize is that they took action. Look what happened. They took. They followed the recipe. They took action. They bought an asset at 25 cents on the dollar and they ran into a little bit of a roadblock. But you know what? That little bit of a roadblock because you followed the recipe is going to result in you making money. And then you work your way around it. So you either adjust or you maybe move to a different county if that's too much of a pain for you. But the interesting thing is that they learned a lot. They're learning lots of this process. They're growing a business. And it's. It's a hurdle that sometimes you come into and then you make a decision. But. But the most important thing is taking the action, right? They took the action and. And look what happened.

Yeah. Well, very well said. Well, we are now at that point in the podcast where we're going to go and ask Landon for his tip of the week, a website and resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income. Listeners to go improve their business, improve their lives. But before that, we have to give a shout out to our sponsor, which is Flight School. Learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life. Go up that mountain of land, investing quickly, safely, efficiently with Scott Todd as your Sherpa. And I know what you're thinking, well, what about the investment in Flight School? It ain't going to cost you nothing, guaranteed. You make back that money 180 days or less. Just show us that you're working it. Learn more go to the landgeek.com forward slash training thelangic.com forward slash training Landon AI Harris, the Aquatic Investor. What is your tip of the week?

So.

Going through some things and I came up to this YouTube channel and it's called Motivation Hub.

It is?

Yeah. And I'll put it in the chat.

All right.

So this channel is kind of devoted to kind of motivational speeches by like number of influential people in the world. They're actors, there's businessmen and women kind of tell their story or they tell some story of somebody else that they know. What got me really sucked in was a speech by Warren Buffet. And Warren Buffett did this speech maybe about a year ago, it might have.

Been a year ago.

Anyway, it was at University of Omaha. And it was like, why 2% succeed, 98% don't. And in this story, it talked about this lady who came to this country who had nothing and she basically bought a company with $2,500 or started her company with that and ended up selling it to him for like a billion point five or something like that. And then he also talked about the guy who started enterprise and kind of how his business started from there. And it, I don't know. Like, I got really sucked in with that speech that Warren Buffett did. But then it led into all these other speeches. Like Jim Carrey is on this site, Denzel Washington, I mean, you name it there. There's a ton of people that have really good speeches or just even conversations. Robert Kiyosaki is in there. There's a ton of people that are in here. But I thought it was pretty cool. Thought it at least it can kind of flow into kind of what we're talking about today with this topic. Because there's a lot of little nuggets that a lot of these folks talk about starting a business and getting it moving and trusting. And you know, you're, you don't want to lose money. So it's, I don't know, I thought.

It was pretty cool.

So I, I Love you guys.

Being a judge.

No, this is great. And, yeah, Arnold schwarzenegger and Admiral McRaven, the guy that wrote that. That book. Book, right. And just starting off your day just doing something to get you feeling, you know, like you've accomplished something. It's. It's just, you know, mindset is we don't talk enough about it. I think this is a great tip of the week for sure. Tate, what do you.

Oh, nothing. I mean, I like. I like these things. I find them inspiring in a lot of ways, and it's cool to see just regular people succeed. I mean, and that's. At the end of the day, I think that's the underlying message of this, is these are regular people who worked hard, they stayed focused, they put the blinders on, they cracked the code, and they scaled the business. That's what we want you to do here.

Right?

That's what you can do.

Yeah. I will say that they're not getting much love from the alcohol industry. There's one from Andrew Huber. No more alcohol. That's right. I saw that one from Jordan Peters. Said, quit drinking alcohol, never drink alcohol. And then whoever's doing their. Their headlines needs to start doing chat. GPT. This one will leave you speechless. Well, who am I going to talk to this about anyway? I'm watching a YouTube video, not live, but this is good stuff. All right, well, I want to thank the listeners, remind them the only way I'm going to be able to corral these. These guys keep coming on the round tables. If you do three little favors, follow rate, Review the podcast, send us a screenshot of that review. Supportlandcake.com gonna send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich one of these days very soon, maybe a signed copy of Dirt Rich too. How to scale your land business without skipping a beat. So please do it. It really helps. All right, we ready to do this? 1, 2, 3, let's. Speaking of freedom ringing, has everybody booked Vegas for boot camp?

Already in.

You're in.

Book the hotel.

Book the hotel. Yeah, that sounds great.

I think we mean to get there heavy.

Yeah. For people that don't know we're talking, go to landgeek.combootcamp and register. But I think that VIP room is almost already full.

Love it.

Yeah. So book. Book your Vegas boot camp now, before, because it's going to fill up. We only have so many spots. All right, well, thanks, everybody. See everyone next week.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents. Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com training let freedom ring.