ROUND TABLE—Is There Land You Should Avoid Buying? Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Hey, everyone, it's Scott Todd. And filling in for Mark. Well, not filling in for him, like I am his co host on this podcast, but today's roundtable, we've got some cool guests. Scott Bossman's with us, and Scott said that his audio is a little laggy, but. Scott, can you hear us?

Yeah, I can hear you. Great.

All right. See, a little delay. It's okay, though. Scott, you still sound great and glad you're with us today. Okay. All right. Also with us is Jeanne Morum. Jeanne, how are you today?

Fantastic, thank you.

Jeannie's brought us a great topic. I can't wait to dig into it so we'll hear more of what she has to say. How can you go wrong with the next guy? Like the original Team Scott? He gave me the original Team Scott shirt. My friend Eric. Eric, how are you today?

I'm good, Scott. How are you?

Good.

I put on that Team Scott shirt the other day. I said to my wife, I'm like, team Scott, baby. And she looked at him, she's like, why did it say 700 again? I'm like, stop. A few years ago, so, always thinking about Eric. And then with us, it wouldn't be a pod, it wouldn't be a roundtable without, like, this guy. Because, you know what's going to happen is he's going to come around. He's going to claw all of us, knock us all down. Bearland.

Aaron.

How's it going? Bear Land?

Hey, I'm glad to be back. And just, hey, you know, don't poke the bear. We'll all be okay.

Well, normally the bear pokes us, so I don't know, we might need some bear repellent. And then, of course, the guy. You all know him. You guys. You guys know this guy. Some of you have named boot camp after him, but we're not doing that. And we're not gonna call him Big Papa either, because it's Tate Litchfield. Tate, how's it going?

I'm good. I'm very good. Thanks, Scott. You know, I really wish you would call me the Big.

Oh, he wants to call you the Big Papa. Hey, Big Papa, what's going on? And you guys will notice, obviously, Mark is not here. Mark. I don't even know where he is. He just said, hey, take the controls. So that's what we're doing. We're going to run the podcast the way that we want to, and we have, like, some good topics for you. So first up, Jeanne, Jeannie took a trip. She took a field Trip and Jeanne, like, I've done this and I know other people have done it as well. And it's kind of scary when you. Maybe it's scary when you go see it because, like, you took a field trip to an area where you bought some land and like, you were kind of surprised, right?

Yeah, it was dirt roads, no street signs. I couldn't tell where my property was. And I have several properties out there. The views were absolutely stunning of the mountains, snow capped mountains. But my kind of question I want to throw out for discussion. Is there such a thing as bad land? I've sold property out there. Not an issue. But do you buy more of that land when it's never going to be developed? And then I call it the county office to do my due diligence. And they tell me, every time I think they forget it's me and they go, oh, this is worthless land. You can't do anything with it. So they're extremely negative. So I get off the phone and I have to pump myself up to then market this property that I have. So I just want to throw that out there for all you experts.

All right, is there any bad land? So let's go over to Scott Bossman. Scott, in your experience, is there any bad land? Should this land field trip scare?

Jeanne?

Scott, you there? All right, we'll come back to Scott. Eric, have you taken a field trip to your land yet?

I have.

Some of my early properties were here in Tennessee. I think we've talked about that before, being one of the early mistakes I made going outside of the secret county list. But I had to visit one of those properties due to someone just leaving a disaster on the property. At any rate, I know what it's like to go out there and try to find your property. In my case, it wasn't. I wasn't disappointed per se, but I. But I don't know that I would be disappointed even if I visited, you know, some of my property that's maybe a little less desirable in terms of, you know, like you were describing, Jeanne, with dirt roads and, you know, street signs that may or may not exist and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I think, you know, we all know that people buy this land. You know, we may not be the end user of the land, but there are people out there that want that land, whether they're going to camp on it, whether they're going to, you know, plan to build on it in the future. You know, I mean, people have different perspectives about, you know, what's valuable and what isn't? But ultimately, it's very rare that I walk away from a good deal on a piece of property, even if I feel like, you know, there's a bunch of negatives against it. You know, I've said it before. I bought property on the side of mountains and sold it. I bought property with no legal access and sold it. I'm actually looking at a property right now that has a road that runs right through the middle of it, basically leaving either side of the property not very usable. I mean, it's like 90ft in depth, so there's not a lot of room there to do much. But I may move forward on it just because I can get it for a good price. I know that it's gonna sit around for a while if I do buy it. So sometimes you have to have that expectation in mind. But it's all good to me.

I think, Jeannie, I think that one of the things is that the price that you're paying kind of has some of that stuff factored into it, right? You know, like, literally, this guy calls me up the other day. Yesterday, actually, he called me up, and he's like, hey, I want to talk to you about putting a property on land Moto. And I'm like, okay. He's a realtor. I'm like, yeah, okay, no problem. So we start talking. I'm like, well, how much is the land? Tell me about the land. He's like, well, the land is, like, in Gulfport, Mississippi. And I'm like, okay. He's like, it's on the Gulf of Mexico. And I'm like, okay, how much is it? He's like, it's $2.3 million. And I'm like, okay. Well, it's probably not the type of land that land Moto customers would be interested in buying. But that said, it's all factored in. Price becomes the component. A property on the Gulf of Mexico is going to be more expensive than some of the more rural land. But, you know, let's see. Let's. Let's talk to Bear Land. Like, Bear Land. Have you gone and looked at any of your properties?

I actually have not.

You're staying safe.

Well, they're super far away from me, and we haven't maybe done a Bear Land family trip out to visit any of them, which we might, though. But to answer kind of what Jeanne's saying, I had a couple thoughts. You know, yes, there probably is some bad land, you know, something that's maybe had a toxic waste dump on it, Something that was you know, the super fun kind of stuff that is actually bad land. But as far as the stuff that we buy, I wouldn't so much say that there's bad land. Maybe just bad buys. Like, you know, anything can be good if it's at the right price, you know, and the people at the county, don't let them dishearten you because, you know, they're. They're kind of a. They've got a single track thought process going at the county. You know, they're processing papers and, you know, 90% of the, you know, things that they're doing there is building permits and stuff like that. So, yeah, as far as they're concerned, it's useless. But, you know, what about the guy that just wants to take his ATV out there and cram around or, you know, somebody that's a serious rock hound or something, that's extremely valuable property to them, maybe. So, you know, it's. That person at the county is not obviously your customer. So, you know, I would say that not so much bad land, but, you know, if something's got some undesirable bits about it, just make sure you get it at the right price and then it's good land.

Good advice.

That's great advice, Tate. I know you've made a field trip or two.

Yeah, I have. It was the first one I made. It was a lot of fun. We ended up getting stuck out at the property, had to dig us out, and I was with a friend, and he was an older gentleman, and we got stuck, and he basically said, well, this one's on you. And so out in the middle of the desert in 100 degree weather, no water, no supplies, using, you know, twigs and leaves to try to get the rear wheels to grip again on the dirt. So I've made the trip out there many times. You know, it's a lot of fun to do it. I don't do it anymore just because, you know, a lot of the land I buy, it's pretty much the same, right? Same piece of property here, same piece of property there. The only difference is the location. But desert is desert for the most part. So I remember I got back from that first trip and I'd spent a lot of my own personal money on these locked. And I thought, oh, I'm not telling my wife about this because this is bad. And I went through the steps, ended up selling it, and made a great return on the money. And that's when I realized that, hey, there's a pig for every barn, truthfully. And Mark says It all the time. Mark says, don't be a landsnob. We're not the end user. Right. We never know who's going to end up with this property. And I've had people who purchased those properties that were in the sandy desert call me and say that they were thrilled, they loved it, it was exactly what they wanted and I was happy to help them out. I don't think that there's too many bad properties. I agree with Fairland, Aaron, and say there's more bad buys where you might be upside down with taxes or something like that, but if the price is right and there's meat on the bone, it makes sense to do. Ultimately, I'm a land investor and I've got to buy land in order to sell land. And so sometimes I don't get to pick the best properties, but I make do with what's available to me. So I'll buy just about everything.

Yeah. And Scott, let me go back to Scott Bossman. Scott, are you there?

I am here, yes.

All right, so have you gone out and seen any of your properties? And if so, like, what'd you think?

Well, I actually have gone out to see one of my properties. I found a bargain on Craigslist, which, by the way, for people out there looking for land. Don't forget to look for land on Craigslist because you'd be surprised what bargains you can find out there. I mean, there was a lot for sale about two hours away from me here in Wisconsin, a half acre lot on a SnowMobile Trail for 500 bucks and the comps were crazy. So I bought it on site, ended up going out there. My wife and I were on our way out to Chicago, so we decided to take a little side trip and visit our land. And it was honestly a beautiful piece of property. Nice woods on the, on the property and nearby lake access on a snowmobile trail. It's like, you know, a Wisconsin dream lot for people. So, I mean, that's the only instance though where I've been to my land, right. The other land I own west of the Mississippi in these, you know, vast counties I have not been to. But, you know, I think like, like Tate said, we are land investors and we don't dictate the market. So if there is activity in the area, if there are lots within a few square miles of that area that are selling and the numbers are right, I'm going to purchase that property. I'm not going to be a land snob. I'm going to make sure that the numbers Add up. And that's how I run a business.

Yeah. So, you know, Jeanne, I would say that I've gone out and I've looked at some of the properties, and, you know, you drive through there. Some of them, I think are great. Some of them are like, man, I don't think I, like, I don't even feel like, Lock the doors, honey. Like, we're leaving. Don't even stop the car. Let's hope it doesn't break down, because, you know, it's just that type of an area. But I think it's all relative because I've also gone to, like, other types of real estate, like apartment complexes or, you know, some of the things that I would drive through there. I'm like, there's no way that I would, like, live here. No way I would live here. But I'm not the market. Right. Like, other. Other people have to dictate that. And so all I'm doing is I'm buying at the right price and I'm selling at the right price. I'm letting the market be the market. Make sense?

Mm.

Yeah. Good, Good stuff.

Awesome. That's a great, great, great question. And glad you got to experience the. The land at your field trip.

It's fun.

All right, look, that kind of allows us to move over to, like, you know, Bear land. Had brought up a topic also before today's call about ebay. He said he was selling a piece of property on ebay, and, like, the numbers weren't working out, so he, like, killed the deal. Now, bear land, Come on, give us the scoop, man. Like, what. What's the story? What were the numbers? And, like, how'd you kill the deal? And what happened?

Well, I bought a couple properties in this area and having a little trouble selling and selling them. So I went over to ebay and I put this on ebay, and I'd looked up some. Some previously solds in the same area, you know, and I essentially copied somebody's, you know, ebay ad that had worked and sold a property. And, you know, their numbers worked for me. So I was hopeful that I would, you know, see something similar. Even if a little lower, I would still be okay. So I put that thing up. I actually did it during boot camp. And, you know, yesterday I got down to the wire. We were about 12 hours, just a little over 12 hours from the end of the auction. And, you know, the numbers weren't. Weren't working. You know, they weren't even, like, the kind of. The bid pattern didn't match any of the previously solds I'd seen. So I knew this wasn't looking like it was going to go well. And I bought this property for 1200 bucks. Honestly, it probably maybe paid a little much for it. You know, it was an early purchase in the area, so I was still trying to get my footing. And, you know, it was only like $215 with 12 hours to go. I mean, there was 40 people watching it. So mean, there was the possibility that in the last, you know, couple hours of the auction, it could have shot up. But, you know, my thought process is, well, do I, you know, take a chance on losing, like 700 bucks on this property, or do I wait and see? You know, I did have like a 295 dock fee in there. So, you know, that's where that's. That split comes from. You know, 2, 215 and 295, you know, subtracted from $1,200. That math doesn't work for me, so. And I'm not in the business of just giving away property. You know, I've got to watch out for my business, which means that it needs to make money. So I went ahead and killed it. I felt a little bad, and I hope it doesn't affect my ebay rating or anything like that, but, you know, it's like. And I know ebay is going to charge me for killing it early, and I know have to pay to have that add up, but, you know, do I. It was, you know, it's a pretty easy decision. Do I pay $100 or do I lose 700? So I killed it. So I hope that was the right decision. I think it was.

All right. All right, let's go around the room. Eric, have you. Have you ever done that? Have you, like, posted on ebay? Have you killed an ad? What's the deal?

No. So I haven't, you know, maybe in the past with other items, not land, but with land, I definitely have not. Now, Typically, the way that I've posted land on ebay is usually at a price. So if it's an auction or a fixed price listing or buy it now listing, I'm going to price it in a way that I get my money out so I can't lose, like, if it sells, if it's, you know, a term sale, which you kind of can't really do very well anymore without getting into trouble. But, you know, those were the ones where you could easily start it at a penny and just, you know, if you only got a penny, it was okay. Because your terms were already set so you'd get your money one way or another. But on the cash sale, you know, I just. I typically try to price them so that, you know, I can't lose.

So what do you think? You think like having a higher opening bid?

Right. So with the combination of the opening bid and the doc fee, you know, that's. That's kind of how I factor it now. You know, when you do that, you don't get kind of the frenzy of an auction because it's no longer an auction. Right. It's more of a classified ad. But at the same time, you do protect yourself from the obvious of selling for less than you want to sell. I have actually a ton of experience on ebay. So those last five minutes, one minute, you know, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, all the way down to the end, I mean, things can go nuts during that time. But on a piece of property, if you're that far away from your price, it could get there. But, you know, chances are it probably won't. You know, it probably would have at least doubled if you really had 40 watchers and interest. I would have liked to probably see, you know, multiple bidders. It sounds like maybe you didn't. You didn't feel like there were enough bidders in there to warrant leaving it on, but. Yeah.

All right, that's good. Scott Bossman, ebay. And There you go.

EBay.

Have you done it? Killed the ad? What would you have done?

Actually haven't done much on ebay, but I. But I agree with what Eric said. You know, I think going into the deal with the numbers making really good sense will just protect you in the end. I mean, it's one of those platforms that you're going into with a little bit more risk. You know, you do have to put some of your own funds on the table to advertise on there and to sell property.

So.

I guess you're taking a little bit of risk with doing that. But I think as long as the numbers add up before you put it on there, hopefully you can avoid that situation. But, I mean, you know, I think. Aaron, hang in there. I think it probably happens to more than just you, so.

No, no.

Anybody else have good advice?

Jeannie, what do you think? Any experience with that?

Yep, I do. I haven't killed an ad yet, but I think Aaron made the right decision because I put my doc fee higher than what I paid for the property. So, for example, if I bought the property for 250, I put my. My doc fee for 499. So even if I get a penny, I made money and I'm good. But I will tell you, I watch it the last 12 hours, and based on what you're saying, I don't think you would have reached the price. It might have gone up a hundred dollars. That's why I think you really did make the right decision. Because from my experience, it's never gone. Maybe the most, maybe $300 or $400 in the last 12 hours, even though there's 40 people watching. So, yeah, I agree with you. You made a good decision.

All right, now, Tate, any. Any experience with that?

You know, nothing different than what everybody else has said for the most part. Scott, I typically don't take property to ebay unless it's on the lower side. I'm taking the cheap, cheap, cheap stuff to ebay. And that's when I tend to do quite well. But when I'm bringing expensive property that I'm looking for five, $6,000 or even $2,500 cash, I don't tend to get it.

Yeah.

Now, Aaron, the thing is, when I started, I would take properties to ebay and Mark used to have a strategy, and I kind of replicated it. And what he would do is, what we would do is we would go in there and let's say that we wanted $5,000 for the land or let's say that we wanted $4,000 for land or something like that. We would go in and we would list it higher. So we would like in your case, how much would you have been happy with the land for?

I had a buy it now of 1997 just to try to blow it out.

Yeah. So you had to buy it now of 1997. Did you have or best offer?

No.

Okay. So what we would do is we would go on a little bit on the high side. Let's say 1997 or 2400, do A. Or best offer price. Okay. And then we would do a longer term auction. So maybe not the seven or 10 days. We would go for 30. Then what would happen is people would start to bid. And you can actually, in ebay, you can say, hey, just automatically reject offers that are, you know, below this price or automatically accept offers above this price. And then we would have like the doc fee in there. And so then what would happen is someone would say, send you an offer, hey, you know, $1,700. And then I would reply back to them and say, $1,700 plus the, the DOC fee. 497, $500, whatever it is. Right. So your total payment will be this and spell it out. And if they replied back, yes, then accept it and go forward. But you want to have that interaction, a dialogue with them if they don't respond back to you? No. And you could always, like, you know, hey, can I call you? Or what's your phone number? And you can start to have a conversation with them. Close it through ebay, though. But essentially that or best offer price, you might be surprised, but it may be a little bit longer timeframe. So you're not necessarily building up. You're saying the buy it now price higher. You're setting the minimum price higher, and you're kind of doing it as more of a fixed auction price as opposed to an actual auction.

Make sense?

Yeah.

The other thing that I've done is I've actually taken and driven traffic to my ebay auctions. What I mean by that is, like, I will take a deal, like, put it up on ebay, and then take my buyers list and say, hey, I'm selling this property on ebay. And now you're taking the drive, the audience that you have that knows, likes, and trust you, and you're pushing them towards the ebay and tell them, hey, if you like this property, it's our best offer. So make me a deal. Let's do a deal. And it kind of sucks because, like, if they did close and they were in your network already, you're like, man, I paid this money to sell it on ebay. Who cares? You got. You got what you want at the end of the day, which is a sale. Makes sense. So those are, like, some things that I would have done, but I have closed down auctions, like, where they weren't producing. And, you know, it's just. I'm not gonna lose money on it, like, just the way that it is. I wouldn't let that stop you from moving forward either. That's a really good situation. All right, listen, appreciate you guys joining us on the roundtable today. If you want to take your land investing to the next level and look, you want to hang out with me, well, then I want you to look at flight school. Flight school tonight, actually, is the end of. Well, when you're listening this, it would have already passed for a week. We have just ended a flight school, and the. So in May. May 15, we start our next flight school. If you think flight school is for you, if you just have questions about it, I want to spend the time with you. You get to be on video with me. Like, I don't know, 10 times. We're going to build your land investing business to what you want. So if that's something that would make sense for you, I want you to go to thelandgeek.com training schedule, a call with Scott Bossman or Mike Zana, whichever one you want to talk to, or both of them, and learn more about flight school, learn more about the results that people are generating through flight school. They're taking action. They're getting it done. Again, thelandgeek.com training book. Your call today. Appreciate you guys joining us. And are you guys, like, ready? Like, Mark and I did a podcast earlier today where we did our, you know, our ending, and the lady said, you guys might want to redo that one. And we're like, no, no, we're letting it roll, so we're gonna do it right now. Ready? 1, 2, 3, let's.

Wow.

That was terrible.

Oh, man. Talk about the delay. Thanks, everybody. Later. All right, man. That was. That was like. Is it me? Am I laggy? Is it what? What is it? Like, what's going on?

Actually, I'm seeing your mouth move way before I hear your voice. I don't know if everybody else is experiencing that or not. I think your lens is throwing it off. I don't know.

I think it's. I've had this problem. Mark actually told me that this was a problem earlier, and I tried to fix it. We disconnected the call. We reconnected. It was fine. So I don't know what it is. And I even asked Eric at the beginning, like, has this happened? But I guess it's lagged up a little bit. So who knows? I have to look at it.

Not good.

Not good. All right, so what are you guys doing now? Scott decides to join my video. Look at that. Oh, you know what we didn't do? We didn't do it at tip of the week. Holy cow. How did I forget?

Oh, no.

Okay. Hey, wait. We're still rolling, right? Yeah, we're still rolling. Who's doing the tip of the week? Is it of the week?

I can do it.

All right, Eric, let's do it. For those of you that keep listening, you get the tip of the week. Go ahead, Eric.

So this week, I'm doing a quote in honor of Mike and everybody that loves his quote. So here we go. Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. And that's from Dale Carnegie. So there it is.

How are we going to argue with Carnegie?

Very profound.

Look, we. We have changed the rotation of the.

Tip of the week.

It comes, like, after the call actually ends. Look at that. And did you guys notice, too, that now that Mark's not here, bear lands like, like, tame. Like, he's calm. He's not, like, destroyed. He's calm. Like, I think Mark gets bear land, like, roused up over there.

Yeah, I think so. I think he gets me. He gets me, like, all.

He pokes.

Yeah, you get. You get, like, Tommy boy around him. Like.

Tommy boy.

All right, guys. Appreciate you guys joining. We'll talk to you guys later.

See ya.