Land Investing Training Course (Nothing Held Back)

What's up, everybody? Welcome to. To Nightcap. Nice to see you both here, and welcome to the community. Grab your drink, settle in, because tonight we're pulling back the curtain on the entire land business. So that's. We're going through the entire thing. Zaino, you ready? County, research, pricing, mailing, due diligence, closing marketing, sales systems, and scaling the wall Enchilada.

And just said those things very quickly. I was very impressed.

Nothing held back. And if you're watching. And always remember, if you're watching us in the replay, don't just always stay in the replay. Right. Come out, hang out with us live every Tuesday night at 9pm Eastern on YouTube and Facebook. Although our Facebook link is broken tonight. So, John, if you could do me a favor. If you could go to YouTube.com thelandgeek and just grab the URL and maybe post it in the Facebook group for people to join us. Yes, that would be awesome. And yeah, let's have some fun tonight. Let's engage with the community. We would be happy to answer your questions. Let's have a few laughs and a few cocktails and dive in. And I have. I have a timed. Timed.

We're gonna be timed.

We're gonna be timed. I have a timed schedule for us. So we stay. So we stay on topic. And so Mike Zano does not go.

Into the weeds as many as I like to do.

You like to do that. I mean, you're. You're good at it. You go off to the weeds and give us many, many piece of. Many, many nuts of wisdom. But. But not tonight, man. All right.

Right.

Daniel Bryant is here. Nice to see you, sir. Dinesh is here. Good to see you. We've got some frequent flyers on the. On the. On the nightcap. I love it.

Yeah, yeah.

So you need to give them some badges. Can we, like, get some badges?

Right?

We have shirts like nightcap, frequent flyer badge. We don't need shirts. Yes. Shirts and badges.

We need shirts and badges. You're totally right.

Can we have. Can we have baloney badges? I want a bologna badge.

Where are we at?

Just a slice of bologna.

Where are we at with eat baloney by land? Where are we at with that? Because that needs to happen.

I mean, it does need to happen.

Yeah. I'm not sure where we're at with it, but I agree.

Yeah.

John Cohen Jr. Let's do it. Ready to do his first deal. He's in West Virginia. Ben Guthrie, first time tonight from Dallas. Ben, good to see you. Tell us where you came from.

Ben.

And Andrew Pond is here, checking in from Florida. Andrew, always good to see you as well. All right, so we're gonna. We're gonna start this thing off here, fellas. We're gonna do a land of us and crash course in one hour. And it all starts with county research, fellas. So in five minutes or less. Ready, go. We're talking county research. Mike Zano, it all comes down to county research. That's where we start this business. What are your nuggets of wisdom?

Well, you know, I always relate this to you. Help me out here. It's Peter Parker and the Daily Planet, am I right?

Yes.

So what does that have to do with this? So if you back Peter Parker, he goes in, he's got his boss chomping on a cigar. He's like, Peter, there's land being bought and sold out there. I need you to find out where, how much, and how to get some. That's county research, right? You have to be an investigator, reporter. You have to learn, where are these land investors? Where are we. Where are we doing deals? Where the other land investors doing deals? And how can you get in on the game?

All right, so let's. Let's give some tactical. Give some tactical nuggets on top of the mindset. Nuggets there. Yeah, tactical nuggets. John Burnett, let's talk about. For the folks who are just tuning in, in, in a very brief number of minutes, how do we do county research?

Okay, so tactical nuggets here. So as far as county research is concerned, one of the biggest questions is where are the other land investors? So if you're not seeing any other land investors in this model in a county, there could be opportunity there, but chances are there's a reason. And so you want to look in, you know, it's like fishing. So Mike gets to use metaphors. I can use metaphors, too. When you go fishing, you go where other people are seeing success, right? You don't go try to reinvent the wheel. Right. Sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors. But you want to go. You want to. You want to go to the places where other people are seeing success because that chances are you're. You're a lot more likely to see success there as well. So you're going to look for where other investors are. And then what I'm looking for is repeatability. I want an area where, you know, we invest a lot in rural subdivisions. And rural subdivisions being like, it might be. You might be looking at, you know, 1 to 5,000, you know, 1 to 5 acre lots or something like that. Right. And when you have repeatability, that makes it a lot easier for you to build a business around that particular area. Right. Due diligence, looking for the same dang things every time. Pricing your, your area, you have ample comps available to you. And then when it comes to marketing and selling, you've got a consistent product. And so that's what I'm looking for in a county.

Nice.

I love that.

Okay, good. I thought Mike was better. I didn't have any Peter Parker.

No, but, but, but here's, here's what I would add to that. So we got the repeatability. Right. And you also talked about. I'm coining a new term tonight, the fishability. Fishability, because you want to go where other land investors are. But here's another thing that I think is important, and I put it here in the, on the, on the bottom banner is affordability. Right. You want to target areas that, that are affordable for you right now. So if you're starting with $1,000 in land, you're not going to be buying $25,000 land parcels. Right. You want to buy $500 land parcels. And there are places out there now if you have 5 to 10 to $20,000 to put towards this, it gives you maybe some more opportunities to buy land of different types. Right. But part of the county research, I feel is go to some of these land selling websites and filter by price or filter by county. See where other land investors are doing deals. Stay away from the realtor areas. We don't like realtor areas. Right. Go where other land investors are working. Find areas that fit your budget, and those are the areas you want to target. How's that for county research fellows?

I think we did a great job.

How many minutes?

We're all experts now. Well done.

Yeah, it was only four minutes, so we got an extra minute.

Oh, we got to.

You back an extra minute, Zane.

Somebody tell a joke. Let's fill the minute.

Any questions out there about county research, throw them at us. And I mean, we're, we're pretty lackadaisical around here. So if, if you ask one, we'll answer it later. We're good like that.

Yeah.

Dinesh, do you recommend starting with the land sites to determine where most are buying? Yeah, definitely, definitely want to do that. So that's an awesome, that's an awesome thing to do. Go to the land sites. What are the land sites, Mike Zaino.

Ah, let's see. You got land moto land.com, which covers like Land watch and land and Farm and all of that Land Flip Land Century. Those are probably the few ones I would start with.

Yeah. Land search. One other one. Yeah, those are all places to start doing your county research and hang out in the Facebook group. You'll see where people are doing deals in there as well. All right, awesome. What comes after county research? Pricing. All right, so now we file. We found an area where we're going to do land deals. Mike Zano, talk a little bit about pricing, would you?

Yeah, so it's important that we follow the numbers. We want to get these deals 25, 30 cents on the dollar, which is again why we focus on property that, you know, $5,000 is usually the upper limit of our purchase price because these are the properties that people are not emotionally attached to. We target out of state owners. We want to make sure that these people, you know, we're not less likely to have someone who owns a property next door is going to sell it than someone who lives several states away. Right. So when it comes to pricing, it's very simple. You look at all the properties that are currently selling and you develop a sort of an average of what it might sell for on the market today. You know, it takes a little bit of digging in, but again, that's part of the whole research. You're an investigator reporter. What are they selling for? And then you want to make sure you buy them at an extreme margin of safety. We buy them at 25, 30 cents on the dollar. Even if the market were to take a little bit of a tank, we're still safe. Right. So we're following the numbers.

Well, so many, so many nuggets of wisdom there. Margin of safety. Follow the numbers. John Burnett.

What tactical nuggets?

Yes, tactical nuggets. What tactical nuggets do you have to add there, sir?

Man, I think that that's, I think that that Mike kind of nailed it. I would say that, you know, with pricing there is an element of kind of what the market is going for. You know, there's like the, the retail market and then there's kind of the what people are willing to sell their properties for at a discount. So there's a level of patience required. Right. As you're finding out where that, where that point actually is as you're sending out your mailers, getting responses, collecting data and at that point. So.

All right, awesome. Yeah, I don't have much to add to that. I think it's just a matter of, you know, go to these land selling websites, do your county Research and, you know, create a Google spreadsheet for yourself for some properties, gets. Get 10 or 15 values and. And throughout the high, throughout the low, divide by three, divide by four, send out some mailers. That's the next part of this business. Well, actually, land acquisition is the next part of this business, right? And you can do it through direct mailing, but you can also buy land wholesale, and you can buy land arb. But, Zano, how are we going to acquire land? That's the next part in this whole thing. We've determined where we're going to work. We've determined what the pricing is. We've determined what our buy box price is right now. How are you gonna. How are we gonna buy land? How are we gonna get some inventory?

We need to make contact with the people who own the land, right? So we're gonna send them letters, and we're gonna send them actual offers. It's called a blind offer, not a neutral letter. You know, some people out there in this space like neutral letters. I think blind offers kind of flush out the people that really want to sell as opposed to the people looking for a free valuation.

Mike, define blind offer versus neutral letter. For those people, just chime in.

Offer is, I will give you $1,200 for your property. Neutral letter, I'm interested in your property. Reach out to me if you want to sell.

John Burnett, you don't like neutral offers. Why do you like blind offers?

Yeah, so I think that with neutral. So with blind offers, it works for us because of the repeatability, right? With repeatability, when you've got a consistent property type, you kind of know what you want to pay. Right? The only time I would send a neutral offer would be if I have no idea what I want to pay. Right? Like, you're hitting a giant area, and we just don't do that. That's outside of the model. Right. And what it does is if you send out neutral offers, you get a lot of responses, right? But you're looking to buy properties that are. Let's say you want to buy a property that retails for 4,000, you want to pay 1,000. You get a lot of people reaching out to you and saying, actually, yes, I am interested in selling. The price is 7,000.

Right?

And so you get just a lot of tire kickers. It wastes a lot of your time. And really what we're about is, you know, the 80, 20 rule. Let's spend our time on the 20% of the things that yield the 80% of results. And that Scales, you can send more mailers. Right? But when you're just waste. You don't want to waste too much time on each deal that you do. So.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, you guys both touched on it. We send out a true dollar offer amount in these mailers, right? And you're right, John. It saves us so much time when people get the offer in their mailbox and they opt in to communicating with us and they accept our offer or the counter offer or they say, up your qubit. Right. Sorry, that's a.

Never heard that phrase before.

A cubit. I'm going to tell a story. My middle school science teacher. I'll never forget this. So back in the middle ages, they had a unit of measurement. It was called a qubit. The qubit is from the tip of the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and that's how you would measure things. Kind of interesting though, Mike. Right? Because my qubit is different than your qubit. Anyway, so he did this funny thing in class. Mr. Beerke. I'll never forget the guy. Love the guy. He would just say, you know, up your qubit. So anyway, up your qubit.

I like that.

We're integrating inside jokes from Scott's childhood.

We're going off the rails tonight. We're going off the rails.

Isn't Cupid an old game where you jump on top of, like, little blocks?

That's Qbert, Mike Qbert.

Very similar.

Not cubit. Cubert was the best game ever. Eva. It's the best game ever, ever. But in any event, back to the mailers, right? We show up. We show up in folks mailboxes and they get an offer on their land and they think, oh, look, Mike zano offered me $1,200 on this property today. Yeah, I'm good. And then Scott mails them next month for 1500 bucks, and they're like, ooh, Scott's offer's a little bit better. I'll keep that in mind. And then John offers. John sends him a letter. A couple months Later, John's offers 1400. And they're like, yeah, you know what? I actually would like that money. So I'm going to raise my hand and contact John. Saves John a lot of time, right? Because he's getting a qualified seller in his email inbox or via phone or that type of thing. So that's why we love blind offers. I always thought there's a little contradiction in terms there. Blind isn't really blind because you're actually giving an offer. Right?

So it's I felt that contradiction myself, but you're right.

Yeah.

I think we should come up with a different term for it.

We can call them visual offers.

Yeah. Like, I don't know, true dollar offer amount.

We'll come up with dated offers.

So. Yes, Juan, the model Lang Geek uses is blind offers exclusively. Yes, that is our model. We love it.

And welcome.

Juan.

We were talking today. Great to see you here.

Good to see you, Juan. Here's a question from Ben. Do you step one county away from where most are buying to reduce competition? That's a great question. Who wants to field that one?

I guess it depends on the county that's one county away. Like, one thing I think it's important is that, like, these counties are big.

Right.

Like, I mean, a lot of. When you're dealing with subdivisions with thousands and thousands and thousands of property, there's room for competition. Right. So that's one thing to bear in mind.

And.

And what you don't want to do is feel like you have to go one county over and go over to a county where nobody's fishing and there's nothing to do. Right. So I can think of some counties that work with the model that are neighboring each other. Right. But what you want to do is you don't want to veer away from. From working where people are actually seeing success.

Right.

I conclude the first concur of the night.

And. And the whole reduced competition thing is, Ben, it's just a different world. Right. It's not like. It's not like investing in homes. It's not like, you know, investing in duplexes, multifamily homes, that type of thing, because the competition is just so much less. So you'll see in the land geek community, a lot of us are just really transparent with where we work. I mean, John, you, Mike and myself I know are all in probably a couple similar counties. And that doesn't scare us away from working in that county because in some of these counties, there's. There are over 50, 60,000 vacant land parcels. Right.

Huge opportunity.

You do the math. The numbers add up that, you know, the numbers are just in our favor. They're completely the opposite of what's going on in the other traditional real estate market. Yeah, awesome. So we've covered county research, we've covered pricing, we've covered mailing. We haven't really covered how to get a list. So we should probably talk about that quick. John, how do we get a list of people to mail to? How do we get a list of qualified sellers?

So what you're gonna do is use a data provider, right? It's the quickest and easiest way to build out a list. Xampflo is one that we've had on the podcast here. And they're great, so you could use them. You can also go directly to the county and build a list. Just takes a lot more of your time. And so with the data provider, you can effectively, like, if you've got an area that you want to target, you can use this data provider to zero in on exactly what you want, right? This is the county. This is. These are the parcels. You can draw a little box around the area that you want to mail to and narrow that down as much as you want to. Just those pieces of land that you actually are interested in buying.

So that's awesome. Data providers, they're like. They're a gift from heaven, right? Compared to 10 years ago, we didn't have data providers. It would take forever to compile a list, get a list from the county, you know, scrub the list down from 25,000 records down to a few hundred that you can mail. Nowadays, it's just so easy to get a list. That used to be one of the biggest bottlenecks, I think, to success in the business was getting a list.

That's why we used to say, any list beats a list. No list. You know, all these things.

We used to spend hours talking about it at Land Geek Boot Camps, right? Now we don't even talk about it because it's so easy. So there's tons of ways to get a list. I think the other thing that I would just mention real quick before we get into, like, how do we buy these properties, is there are other ways to buy land, right? You can buy land through mailers, obviously, which. Which I prefer, because when you buy at a deep discount through a mailing, then it gives you opportunities to. Or gives you options. I should say when we buy a deep discount through mailing, we can sell retail cash. We can sell owner financing, we can sell wholesale cash, right? So I love buying through mailings. However, there are other ways we can buy land. One is wholesale from another land investor. Mike Zano, you were a wholesaler to begin with. A lot of people bought land from you. Why? A lot of land investors bought land from you. Why?

Yeah, they don't have to pay for the mailing expense, and I gave them a great deal. It's quick, it's easy, it's efficient, it works for both of us. And, yeah, it's just a simple way to get in the game, or if you're already in the game, to continually have the land you need for your customers.

Yeah. Like you said, you're maybe not getting it at 25, 30 cents on the dollar. You're maybe getting it at 40, 50 cents on the dollar. But like you said, you're not having to mail. Right. And for a lot of beginners, when you send out a direct mailing campaign, it takes a number of weeks to start getting responses.

Right.

So in the meantime, what they might do is acquire a property wholesale in the county that they've chosen. Yep. And then, John, we've talked Land Arb a lot on this podcast, but Land Arb is another great way to acquire property. So explain that for the viewers real quick.

So Land Arb is when you buy land on a payment plan from another land investor, and then you can sell that same property on a payment plan. Right. When you net everything out, those holding costs are extremely low. And so with that, you know, basically the general rule of thumb with Land Arb is that you're going to be buying it for about half of what you would sell it on terms. Right. And so if I bought a property, let's say a hundred dollars a month or a hundred dollars down, and say a hundred dollars a month for 60 months. Right. Well, I might sell that same property, you know, for 200, 250 down, and then 200 for 60 months. Right. And so my net off of that is $6,000. And if it took me a month or two to sell that, I'm only into the property for one to two hundred dollars. So it's a great way to build momentum. Like any time that you have a capital problem. I've done it. I've. I've acquired property dozens of time through land arbitrage, and I've done very, very well off of it. So it's a good way to maintain momentum if you don't have lot of capital. Also a great way to just test out a market, see what you think about it, see how you do marketing in that area.

Love it. Love it. Thank you, John, for those nuggets of wisdom, the tactical nuggets. Bob Hearn says cubits were the units of dimension for Noah's Ark in the Bible. I forgot that, but very true.

Was it 600 cubits? I'm trying to remember. I read this around the table with my kids recently, but now.

You know what a cubit is, John?

Oh, I knew, I knew. It's the elbow. Elbow to the middle finger.

Oh, man, I love it. All right, awesome. So. So we're looking at acquiring land. We get a little bit ahead of ourselves though, right? Because before we acquire the land, I mean, we do have to mail. We do have to find properties to buy. But due diligence is really key here, right? So before we just go out there and buy a property site unseen, we need to do our research, we need to do our good due diligence on these properties. So, Mike Zano, you're spend just a couple minutes talking to us. I know you love due diligence. Just keep it simple, man. Due diligence.

I want to say hi to Dr. Bob first. I'm happy that he's here watching with the.

Hey, Bob.

Dr. Bob.

Dr. Bob.

Yeah, Dr. Bob is here. Due diligence. You know, we used to target properties that were strictly delinquent in taxes. Now we realized, I think that. Well, I know that we were shutting out a big part of the market. You know, many people in these areas where we buy property, well, they like to pay their taxes even though they don't want the properties anymore. So we mail everyone and the due diligence is our way of. One part of that is uncovering whether or not there are taxes owed. If there are, for example, If I offered $1500 on a property, they owe $300 in back taxes. No problem, Mr. Seller. I'm going to take care of that. I'll pay you 1200 and I will pay the $300 in back taxes. We take care of that. So it's really us taking a look. One part of the due diligence, one major part is us taking a look at, you know, what is owed on the property, if anything, in taxes. And then also just double checking if there's use because again, we want to make sure we can have these be attractive properties to the end user. So there has to be some sort of use. What can be done on these properties? I think that's the first starting point.

Yeah, I think of due diligence kind of in two ways, right? You have your. You have your characteristics of the property that make it viable in the sense of, you know, are there back taxes, are there liens? Right. Are there any title issues with the property or is there clear title? Is the chain of title clean for the last 20 to 30 years? And those are all of the really kind of minute details that we get into in our due diligence that qualify the property. Is it a green light property? And then we have property characteristics, which I know, John, you explain property characteristics really well. Talk about that part of due diligence.

So when it comes to property characteristics, generally, like, for me, the core things that I'm. I'm looking for within a property is I want there to be access, right. First is I want there to be legal access to the property. Right. I'm not really interested in landlocked property. And then I want there to be physical access to the property. So not just, you know, when you look at the map, you see a road. When you turn off the little road, can you actually see that there is a road there? Right. And so I want there to be access. I like there to be the ability to. To build, ideally. And so that means, you know, from a zoning standpoint, can you build on this property? And then also, like, you know, is it a 60% slope? If so, building might be a challenge. You might be like living in one of those little hammocks that you nail to the cliffs, the cliff wall. But so I think. I think that that's important. You want to make sure that, you know, it looks like it's potentially buildable. And then recreation. Can you camp on the property? Right now, I'll buy property where one of those three things isn't necessarily in place, but I generally want the other ones to. To be strong. So those are the things I look for. You might, you know, I. I'll look at the property, kind of zoom out, right? Does it look like there's a giant trash pit on the property or neighboring the property or something like that? If so, those are, you know, potentially some warning signs. But those are. Those are typically the things that I'm looking for is I'm thinking about my end buyer and, and my ability to sell to them.

Nice.

I love it. All right, well, I think we touched on due diligence pretty well there. I think the only other thing I would add is if Zaino sends out a direct mailing campaign, he starts getting all these accepted offers, and maybe he's getting more offers than he thought he'd ever get. You got to verify the pricing, right? Verify your pricing. Make sure you're on point with your pricing, because every once in a while we'll send out a mailer, and we actually sent out too high of an offer, and that's sometimes correlated with a really high response rate. Or we'll send out too low of an offer, which is oftentimes correlated with a lower response rate. So it's really important to trust and verify your pricing in the area. You may have looked into the pricing a month or two. Ago when you mailed this area. But you need to look into it again and just make sure that your numbers are tight on these properties.

Right.

Because negotiation of price does occur in this due diligence phase prior to closing. So I think that's the only other thing I would say.

How many times have you guys had, like, cut your offer in half and had them accept? Like, a lot. I'm. I mean, and it's just like, hey, like, no offense, like, I just can't because of xyz. You know, if this works, that's great. If not, that's fine. And I've had a lot of people move forward with that.

Sure. I think the message here is listed. The market is talking to you. Right. Either loudly or quietly, but it's talking to you.

The market whisperer.

You guys believe it's only been 32 minutes?

Yeah, we're almost at the back half of the business, so. Yeah, we're getting there.

Great.

We're getting there. Hopefully this is helpful to everybody. Throwing. Throw. Throw a comment in the chat. Is this helpful to give kind of a broad overview of the business? We're trying to fit as many technical details as we can into one hour. As you can imagine, that's difficult, right?

Yeah.

So we're doing everything we can here. What tools do you use for determining pricing? So that's a great question. What tools are we using? Tools? Are we more manual with it? Do we. Do we maybe delegate this system out? What are your thoughts on that, John? For. For pricing.

I would say, like, for pricing, I'm looking at comps. Right. And so comps help me determine what things are going for, and that helps me understand what my margins would be when I sell this property. And so generally I'm going to land sites, you know, and I like one. Like one that I use sometimes is land.com. land.com has a searchable map so I can zoom right into where, you know, like on the due diligence side, I could zoom right into where the property is and then I can run a little search in that area and see what other people are selling their properties for. Just see what competition looks like in that specific area. So that, you know, I, I think land sites have. Have been my most helpful tool.

All right. Awesome. Yeah, I think, you know, this is one area of the business that you can try to automate, you can try to do, you know, you can try to use bots maybe to scour land selling websites to give you data, but we still use kind of the manual approach as well, right, we'll, we'll do a kind of a pricing matrix and we'll search manually and, and figure out, you know, where. How are we going to mail this? Or we're divide by three, we're going to divide by four. We're going to maybe do a little bit of both and tier our offer price, that type of thing. But that's, that's what we're doing. We're doing it more, more manually at this point in time, but you can definitely outsource that. Let's see. Do your contracts give you the option to back out for any reason? Yes, they do. Are. Well, our purchase agreement, what we sent out in the mail, the offer we sent out in the mail is basically contingent on our due diligence. Right. So if our due diligence comes up, or if the results of our due diligence say that we should not buy the property, we're backing out. And there's no issue with that. Let's see. Okay, so Dinesh, I think he has a question about Land Arb. And who holds the deed? The original seller or the second buyer? Looking forward to flight school in the fall. So that's always a little bit of a, I guess, mild confusing point for some people who buy a property. Land Arb. But Mike, can you explain that real quick?

I'm just trying to grasp the question correctly. Can you double click on land?

I think, I think what he's asking is when you buy a property, land arbitration. Who holds the deed?

Yeah, it's no different than when we sell to somebody we hold. It's a contract for deeds. So listen to me. Real estate's all about control. You're controlling a property through an agreement and a monthly payment, and you will then sell it through another agreement and a higher monthly payment. Simple as that.

But if you're buying a property from me on Land Arb, the deeds in my name, the land contract is in your name, Mike. And then you can assign the property to another buyer.

Absolutely.

All right, cool. You concur? The second concur of the evening, we're tied. Juan says it's very helpful. Well, very good, Juan. I'm glad to hear that. Andrew Pond. I've seen lower prices on Zillow for sold land as compared to land sites. Is that typical? And which prices are more accurate? That's a great question. I don't know.

I mean, that's very, you know, for sure.

Yeah, go ahead, John.

Okay, so basically we, we sell our, our property. So when you get a property that retails for, say, 5 to $15,000. A realtor generally does a flat fee commission on that, and then they sell it for cash. And one of the biggest tools that's in their arsenal is to discount that property. And so generally, as a rule, Realtor commission or Realtor listings are going to be priced lower because they're looking to sell quickly for cash. And so I would say generally when you're looking at a land site, like, that's where my prices are and that's where my sales are. Right. And including my cash sales. Right. And so that's where. That's where I'm pricing my properties.

I love it. I love it. Lower prices on Zillow for sold land as compared to land sites. Yeah. I think the other thing with using Zillow for comps is, you know, like you said, John, we're seeing all the cat, we're seeing all of the cash sales on there. And sometimes you're seeing wholesale deals, sometimes you're seeing retail deals. And I. I think what a better approach is to use those land sites to see what other land investors, not Realtors, other land investors are selling those properties for. And that gives you a pretty good indication as to what the market's like, I think a little bit better than Zillow. Awesome. So now we gotta close. We gotta buy the property. Fellas, different ways to do this. There's really three types of closing. So we're gonna do the 32nd fast on all of these. All right, so Zaino, you're gonna do direct closing, and John, you're gonna do mobile notary, and I'll do title. Okay, what's up?

We trade. Scott, can I tell you that in eight years, I've never used mobile notary?

Wow.

Yes, you have. I have. I've had people send them to me. Okay, we're trading.

I'll do mobile dory. That's crazy, John. That's. That's actually pretty rare.

Impressive, too.

That's impressive. Mike Zano, 30 seconds. Okay, 30 seconds for the direct closing. Here we go.

Yeah. So direct means that I'm working with the seller. They're going to provide me with a notarized copy of the deed before I pay them. Very simple. And, you know, why would they do that? Because we build trust. And here's the thing, if they sell you, send you a copy of the deed, photocopy, notarized, you can record that online, and then you can turn around and pay them so you know you're safe. And you're going to keep the transaction Safe.

All right, I'll give you.

I'll give you.

I'll give you half credit on that one. I'm just kidding. That was good, Mike. That was good. Direct clothing is what we prefer, right? It's the quickest and easiest.

Yeah. And it happens quite a bit. People are like, how does that have. Who's gonna. Yeah, well, when you tell them exactly how it's gonna happen in a very confident manner, because you've done this many times before, or you understand the process intimately or very well, you convey that trust and confidence to them and it gets done.

But, Mike, I'm not going to pay you money before I hand you over the notarized deed. That's where the mobile notary comes in. All right, so I'm going to talk mobile notary. So the mobile notary is another form of closing where basically I'm going to find a notary in the seller's area. I'm going to send the deed to the notary along with a check for the seller, along with a check for the notary, because I need to pay them. The notary's gonna meet with the seller face to face. The notary's gonna get them to notarize the deed, and after they notarize the deed, the notary's gonna hand them their check, and I'm gonna have the notary scan me back the documents electronically and then also send me back the documents in the mail, and then I will record them. Oh, my timer's gone. Where'd it go?

I guess I just beat it.

I just beat the 30 seconds. John Burnett. I can't believe we never had to do a mobile notary.

I know. I can't believe it.

That's crazy.

People have made me do mobile notaries before.

Let's build trust. You have a trusting voice, or your team does.

Look at this face like, how could you say no?

It's very true. Very true.

All right.

And then there's a third way of closing in addition to direct closing and mobile notary. John Burnett. We're going to use a title company. When and how in 30 seconds.

So title company, you're going to use if it's a bigger investment. So let's say you're investing 7, $8,000 in a property or something like that. You might close through title, and then that gives you an extra level of confidence that the title is clean and that there's no issues there. What the title company does, you send them your purchase agreement, and they basically do a level of due diligence on the property specific specifically surrounding the title. They make sure that all of the people who said they could sell the property could sell the property. They check for back taxes, they check for liens, they check all that stuff. And then they make sure that everything lines up in the closing. And then the closing, they handle themselves. Right. So with the closing, what happens is they acted as a disinterested third party. And so you are going to wire your funds to the title company, the title. The other. The seller signs the deed that the title company prepares, sends this to the title company. Title company records the deed, and then gives the seller the check. And so it's basically just out of your hands at that point.

I love that. I want to get a T shirt that says disinterested third party.

Are you going to. Are you going to wear it to the, to these calls?

Third party.

Exactly. Oh, my gosh. I. I like that terminology on. That's a good one. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for covering the title company. I've used a title company, I don't know, 10 times in 10 years. Something like that. What about you, John? A little more than that.

Yeah, I would say more. I mean, I lean really heavily. I've got like a title company that's kind of been in my corner anytime we have an A question. And so it kind of makes me feel like I'm closing through title even when I'm not. Great.

Yeah, but that's, that's, that's when you know you've. You've arrived. When you have title company people in your back pocket.

Yeah, sometimes I send them brownies. Yeah.

Awesome. John Palmer, he seems an online notary service. Are there any negatives to this? Oh, okay. So this is one other thing that, that you can do is an. Is an online notary.

But.

But what, Mike?

It's not always accepted everywhere.

Right.

It can work great if it's accepted in the county you're working in.

Yeah.

So just call the recorder and then make sure that they accept it.

And I think it's a statewide thing. Right. So I know it's accepted in Colorado. It's accepted. Well, it's actually a county thing because it's accepted in some counties in New Mexico, but not all. So it's probably a county thing. So I'd call the recorder just to verify that. You can do that. But that may be an option for a seller who lives maybe in a rural area that can't get to a notary. But they have computer access.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

All right, fellas. We've bought the. Well, we got to record. We got to record the deed. So there's two ways of recording. We're running out of time. We're trying to fit a lot in here. There's two ways of recording. You can either mail the deed in the county, or you can use an E Recording service. I would say most of us prefer the E. Recording service because you can buy the property very quickly. And I'm sorry, the deed is recorded sometimes within hours from when you submit the deed to the E. Recording service.

Yes.

Two. Two services we use are Sently, File and csc. I forget what CSC stands for, but those are two E recording services that we utilize. So we covered that quick. But we just covered. We just got to the. We just covered the first half of the business. All right.

Oh, boy. We got it up. Then we got half.

We bought a property. We did it. Bought a property. We did. Was exhausting. All right, now we gotta sell this thing. When do we start marketing, John?

Right away.

Today.

Yesterday.

Yesterday. Not tomorrow. Not a month from now. How many times do we talk to people? They bought a property. When did you buy it? A month ago. Are you marketing it? No.

What? Yeah.

It's the cardinal sin of land investing.

Yeah.

Right.

To not market that property. So, Mike Zano, talk a little bit about marketing and how we're going to get this thing out to the masses to find a buyer.

It's the exact opposite of the mailing part of the business. Right. We need to get the. The idea that our property is available for sale out there in front of a ton of people. So we use social media platforms. We use land sites. Prior to that, we have some ad copy created. We want to make sure we target all the different types of avatars. That means there's different types of people that will want to own the same property. We try to advertise to them all at the same time. You will advertise to none of them. So you have to sort of list the ads out specifically towards an investor or someone who's going to camp on us. Almost. Build on a Stargazer or a rock collector. On and on and on. Right. So build some ad copies specific to the buyer profile you're looking to bring in and then post those ads on social media and land sites.

Yeah.

And John, talk a little bit about not only catering your ad content to certain buyers, but we need to cast the net far and wide with our marketing. Right. So talk a little bit about that, what that looks like.

So it means that you're not posting one ad and then waiting for two months and assuming that your property is going to sell. Right. One ad will not sell your property. You need to be posting frequently, constantly. Right. It's one of those things that if you're not marketing, you're not going to be pushing your business forward. So even if you have one property, you know, put out a bunch of ads. Right. And then. And then you'll move it.

Yeah, so. So it's essentially digital marketing. We're selling on Facebook, Marketplace, Craigslist, Land, selling websites, and then other. One other very important aspect of marketing that we really tout at Land Geek is to form your buyer's list and start engaging with that buyer's list asap. Right. Letters. You love the buyers list. They know what. So explain to people, just chiming in, what's a buyer's list and why is it so important?

Someone responds to an ad, they like your property, but it's not the exact fit for them. Or maybe it is, and they're buying multiple properties because they're an investor and they want to invest in land. But either way, we say, listen, I get new property every week. Would you like to know about it before I advertise it to general public? And what's your email? And they'll give it to us and we'll send them out every week, a deal, half off the down payment, no dog fee, whatever it might be. We treat them like gold. And you can sell property every week like that. Just when you get enough people on that list.

Yeah, I think, you know, Tate said a long time ago, Tate Litchfield, one of our premier Land Geek coaches.

Right.

The buyer's list is really the only thing that you own. It's the only thing at the end of the day you can count on. Because Facebook Marketplace is unpredictable. Craigslist is unpredictable. The land selling sites are a little more predictable, but they're a little bit more expensive that that buyer's list is. I mean, in all, in essence, it's free. I mean, it. It's just email addresses and phone numbers and contact information that you've collected since the beginning of your land investing journey. And I, you know, I still have people for, on my buyers list from 10 years ago who look at the emails, right? And some of them eventually convert, some of them don't. John. Mike, you ever get those emails from people who are like, I love your emails, keep them coming, but they've never bought land. Have you ever gotten those?

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Email, I don't know I actually, actually, now that I think about it, yes, yes, we do.

Yeah, it's kind of weird. I love looking at your properties. Keep the emails coming, but they've never bought anything interesting. Oh, look who's here. Jeff Storley, the man, he's the giving Jeff.

I know.

Yeah. The Tony Stark glasses.

I know. I, I was thinking we should put out a poll and see how many people thought this was just some kind of a video filter on Mike's camera.

These are real.

Yeah. They look a little bit virtual. I don't know what it is. Yeah. But you look very sophisticated, I must say.

I'll take it.

Yeah. All right. So now we're marketing the property on all different platforms and we got leads coming in. We're cultivating the leads, we're nurturing the leads, we're having sales conversations. We got to get people on the phone. Right. This is very, this is a very important thing. Leads are coming in. Ask them a few open ended questions, engage with them. If they're interested, get them on the phone. Say to the person, larry, so glad to hear you're interested in the property. Like, are you comfortable continuing this via text message or can I just give you a call quick? And I think really sales do, most sales do occur on the phone. Would you guys agree? Yep, yep.

Yeah, it's an important. We didn't, we didn't touch on it in the, the acquisition side too.

You gotta get on the phone both.

To buy and sell property. Right?

Yeah. And take payment on the phone even. Right. Which is sometimes a little bit intimidating for some people. But we actually took it down. Or my sales assistant today took a, took a doc for you over the phone. I'm like, awesome job, Sebastian. Right. Pretty cool. When you have people in your corner helping you out that can, that can nurture those leads, have those sales conversations on the phone and close properties in real time on the phone. So the phone conversations are key. I guess the only other thing I'd say about sales because we're running out of time is Mike, we sell in three different ways. We're going to sell these properties wholesale, retail, cash or terms. What are your thoughts on selling? What's your preference? What?

It's all profit. It's all profit. It's just, you know, different ways of recognizing it. Right. Wholesale. We're going to take the quick, the quick money, you know, but we're going to move it very quick. Our holding, the time we're holding that property is very small. Right. So no holding, no real holding costs. There Retail. That's great. That's going to happen a lot as well. And what are you saying? Terms. Are you saying terms versus cash here?

Yeah. Owner financing. What are your thoughts on owner financing?

Well, that moves it really quick because somebody can own a property with like a very small down payment, no credit check, a small monthly payment, and they have full control over the property. We retain the deed. So we have a contract for deed. They're not going to be able to like, take advantage of us because we still hold the. The golden goose egg, the deed. But that's the way we can move property very quickly. Small monthly payment and no credit check. And people love it.

People do love it. People are buying land right now, right? You hear about the real estate markets down. People aren't buying houses. People aren't selling houses. Dude. People are selling land and people are buying land right now.

I don't think someone's playing my piano. You hear that?

Yeah. What is that?

It's my daughter. She's playing piano. I love it.

Every night Cap. That'd be great in the background.

I know she should we just pretend it's your piano.

She's hired.

This is from Bad Chad. I can't say that word. Show thoughts on commercial versus residential land investment. So. So, Brad. Oh, sorry, Chad. Bad Chad. Bad Chad. Okay, so Bad Chad. We specialize primarily in purchasing residential vacant land parcels. I've done a couple commercial deals in 10 years, but we're focusing on good.

Right. But these, you're not probably going to get commercial real estate. And the price point we typically buy our deal is 1 to 5,000. But hey, we do bigger deals and we reinfuse that money back into our smaller deal. So it's all good. I think it's. If you get a deal, that's great. But the primary focus are those small, inexpensive residential land investments.

Awesome. And we can get in the nitty gritty of what the terms deal look like and a cash deal look like. But running out of time. I think we covered.

How are we going to wrap this up? This is like when you're watching some of those movies and you're like, there's no way they're going to wrap this up. Is there a plot twist coming here?

I don't know if there's a plot twist, but I think there is a. Is there a climax? I don't know. I think what I would. What I would say is like in every movie plot there's a climax. Right. And maybe it is right now because what we've done is We've done every aspect of the business. The county research, the pricing, the getting list, the mailing, the acquiring a property through either mailing or land or wholesale, the due diligence on these parcels. Self closing without going through title, ideally, but you can go through title or you can use a mobile notary. Marketing and sales. In the end, we don't want to create another job for everybody. We want to create a scalable business. Right. That helps us buy our time back. So really, if you can do this process once, you can do it over and over and over again. Mark Podolski told me after my first sale, rinse and repeat. Ten years later, I'm rinsing and repeating to grow my passive income as high as possible. Because the passive income helps buy my time back. It helps me have time for my life and my health and my wife and my kids. And that's just really the entire purpose of this. That's the purpose of this entire business, I think. So if you can take it full cycle, then you can do it again and again and again. And then when you get really good at it, you just start outsourcing and then you create, you create automations and you delegate to people that help you run this business to where you can get to the point where you're literally working 10 hours a week versus 50 hours a week when you started.

You want to know why this is possible? I always tell people, here's the good and the bad news about land investing. It's boring.

Yeah.

It's redundant. It's the same process as the Ferris wheel, the hamster wheel or the conveyor belt. Same things happen over and over again. But that is our opportunity. That is our, our point of taking these things and automating and delegating them so that we don't have to do them.

John, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I agree. I like how I feel like we.

Tied it all together.

It was a good end of the movie. Like, yeah, I think ultimately it is about scaling. Right. Because our model is so repeatable. Right. Because we're doing the same thing over and over again. You could take things off of your shoulders and give them to other people and give them to other tools and actually free up your time. And you're just doing it like you said, Scott, again and again and again.

I feel like we were at risk of having a Stephen King or an M. Night Shyamalan ending. Horrible. They have these great story lines and then it's like, that's the ending.

The ending lets you down.

Ending to our Episode tonight.

Yeah. It's all just a dream. It's great.

It's all a dream. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. So I think too, like, it's so hard to cover all of this stuff in one hour. Right? We can spend an hour on each of these. We spend multiple hours on each of these topics. So we really showed you guys tonight, like, what we do. We didn't show you really how we do it in great detail, but I think we did do a good job of taking. Of giving you an overview of what the business is like from. From COVID to. I'm going to say, like Mike Zane would say, cover to cover.

I love it. And I think this gives people who are new to this and understanding of what's involved here. They don't really need all the how right now. They just know what. Like, what is this all about? What are these people doing? What. How do they do this? Again, not how, but what is it they're doing to create this income? And we covered all of that. Right. The how is in taking the action. And then you're going to flesh out all the different pieces of the puzzle as you do that. But if you understand the what that we're doing, maybe it'll inspire you to come along and do it as well.

I love it. Let's end on this question. I think it's a good one. So Daniel Bryan has a buddy who's watching this later in the rerun because he's. He's curious and he thinks it's too good to be true. So for. For him, for Daniel's friend, why do you think is this. Why do you think this is the business? You guys have any closing thoughts on that?

The business? Well, listen, I don't think there's all types of great business out there. Just this one is one we love. Mark has said this many times. It's not that we are in love with Lamb. We haven't found anything that we can automate and delegate. Something that can be systematized, something that's so boring and repeatable that we can invest like this. So too good to be true. I mean, it's. We're not saying it's easy. We're saying it's simple. Right? I always like to point that out. It's a simple process. But listen, Daniel, you know, your buddy or anybody who wants to do this has to stick to it. So really, that's difficult. You could tell them, hey, it's not that hard to be in great shape. You just got to go to the gym every day. And eat right. Why isn't everybody walking around jacked and thin? Right? I mean, it's. Because it's. It's not easy. It's simple, but it's not easy.

Love it. What about you, John? What's your advice?

I mean, I was. I was gonna say the same thing. Like, I mean it. I concur. I concur. But yeah, I mean, it is the kind of a thing, like, I mean, especially in those early months, it's kind of a grind, right? I think less so than when we all started because there's a lot more automation and tools available than there were back then. But at the same time, like, you know, it's.

You're.

You're putting in the time and the energy. It's not easy. It is simple. Right? But it's not easy. And then. But it does build, right? If you're persistent, if you follow the recipe, if you put in the hours. This works.

Monstrobly.

Demonstrably.

Yeah, demonstrably.

I think that was. That was Forbes word back in the day.

Oh, yes.

Our old refill guy.

Refill guy. How are you doing for us? We love you. You're out there.

Yeah. And I think what I would say to. To your friend Daniel is I don't think there are many real estate. I don't think there are many investment models out there where you can buy an asset at a deep discount and then turn around and make that asset perform. You can't buy gold at a deep discount today. You can't buy silver to deep discount. You can't buy homes at a deep discount. Right. You can buy foreclosed homes at a deep discount. You know, wholesalers, wholesale clothing to people at a deep discount, and then they turn around and sell it. We're kind of in an inventory business where you can buy these assets, a hard asset, something that's physical, something that isn't going to go away. Something that is limited. Right. It is a limited resource. You buy it at a disc at a deep discount. And basically you're parking. Mike, we talked about this today. You're parking your money in land for a while. And like, what's wrong with that? Like, you park $10,000 of your money, Mike, into a land parcel that you're buying at 25 cents on a dollar.

No bank.

It's better than a bank, man.

No way is it going to give you that interest. You're right. No way.

Yeah. So then we would just make these assets perform, and there's multiple ways we can make them perform. And you Know, we talked about, we talked about those multiple ways. There are other ways. We didn't talk about selling notes tonight. You can sell notes, right? So, so that's why I think it's the best real estate investing business. And hopefully that was helpful. John Palmer first deal was. John Palmer is new. John, how's it going? First deal was 750% on my money. I think that's a pretty good first deal. That's like the first deal of all first deals right there. Cheers to that. John Palmer.

Cheers.

Cheers. Well, guys, this was fun. I didn't know if we'd be able to get through the entire land investing business in one hour, but I think we did a decent, a pretty, pretty good job.

Good.

I think so.

Yeah. Always impressed by you guys. You guys are unbelievable.

You rock, buddy. You're my real deal friend.

These are real.

All right, fellas, I don't have a topic yet for next week, so you'll just have to all tune in next week and see what we have to talk about. And I'm sure you know Zaino's on the call. It's going to be very entertaining.

All right. Especially all the first time listeners. I'm happy you guys are here, hopefully. In closing, Scott, John, I always tell people what I think is awesome about the show truly, is that it shows people that anybody can do this. We're just regular guys, right? We just want to. Maybe I don't speak to you, maybe John's story does, maybe Scott's does, but, you know, we're just regular guys doing something over and over again and you can do the same thing.

Cheers to that, buddy.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Love you guys. We'll see you. I'll see you in person soon. Just two and a half months away at the Dirt Rich Summit. First weekend in November, we're gonna be in Austin, Texas, everybody. So if you guys are interested in joining us, that would be awesome. You guys have a good night. John.

Cheers. I was just gonna see if we're gonna wear tracksuits.

That would be appropriate business.

I'm happy we got through the whole show without you saying hive mind. That's a win.

That's a win. Oh, I love that term, the hive mind. I don't know why you hate it so much.

I bring it up.

All right, good night, everybody.

We'll. We'll see you next week. Thank you.

Cheers.

Bye bye.

That was tight.

I didn't know.

Cheers.