This is a transcript of a Land Geek group discussion where a participant (Dave) asks how to move from flipping small 5-acre parcels to larger land deals. Speakers (including Mike) advise keeping the existing small-deal business model as the cash-generating foundation while building systems that allow experimentation with bigger ‘dolphin’ or ‘whale’ deals; they stress outsourcing, testing marketing (mailings), capital considerations, and that larger deals may take longer and have different economics.
Chapters
This is from Dave lefay. I just finished my first year after flight school and it's been a wonderful, productive year. Thank you to the entire Land Geek team for your support. Now I'm looking forward to medium and long term. What advice would you give on moving from a flipping slash finance or from flipping financing 5 acre parcels to bigger deals? What does that look like? What advice would you give? That's a great question.
It's not on YouTube. It's only place I'm looking.
Yeah, me too.
It's on Facebook.
On the Facebook. I don't even have Facebook.
So he's done flight school. He's doing a few deals per month now.
It sounds like he's flipping a five acre parcels. He's. He's doing minnows. He's doing minnows, Mike. He's doing them for cash. He's.
A business is built. Yes. So the business is built upon minnows. That being said, if you have the capital, you can do a dolphin and a whale. The whales can take longer to turn. Not always, but I think a healthy land business in the long run could have a variety of things going on. They're all going to be turning like that cement truck. It's going to be turning and deals are going to be popping out left and right and that's just going to come with time. If you have the capital supported, then I say, like Forbes said about the oyster, do what you want. You've got a business model now that can handle the deal flow. Right. It can handle any kind of deal. It's going to handle it as it comes through. So you can mail whatever you want. But remember that the bread and butter are the minnows because your money comes back quick and those are very easy properties to move. But that being said, if you want to do the dolphins and whales, your system should be able to handle that if you built it correctly for sure.
That's. So that's the key. Right. I don't know where.
Who was it?
This was Dave.
Dave Lefe.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So Dave's been around.
Right.
I think the thing to stress is, is the business built properly? Are you doing all the work or is it like you're really figuring out where to mail and how much and you're sitting outside the business making good CEO decisions. If that's the case and the business is what Mike was talking about, where it just spins like it's good, then 100%, you get to start experimenting with other areas maybe, or other sizes of parcels. Or you start to get to do different stuff. If that's not the case, if that business isn't really spinning on its own, then my advice is to spend time on that. Once you've been doing it for like a year, it's not hard to outsource the stuff that you know you should outsource. It's actually really easy to do it because you've done it so many times in so many other ways. So I would urge you to get that done first because this is minnows. I don't know, name your analogy here. This is a base hit business, but those base hits add up, man, for sure. So as long as it's going, as long as you're buying, you're marketing and you're selling with very little work that you're doing effort there, that frees you up to go start looking for bigger deals. And you know, I'm in that place where I'm looking for bigger deals and I feel like a hero because I bring in a bigger deal and I'm like, this is awesome. Like, hey, we're killing it. And my wife's like, yeah, well that's great. But we also sold like six little deals in the time it took you to go get that one there, sunshine. And you're like, oh, okay. I'm like, well, good thing we built that business then, hun. There you go.
Right?
So just, just keep that in mind as you're going after that kind of stuff.
Well said.
Yeah, very well said. I think, Dave, it sounds like you've built a solid foundation. Just don't let that slide. Don't let that keep, keep the foundation, don't let that base model die and experiment with bigger areas. Of course. Are you going to be able to buy larger parcels at 25 cents on the dollar? I mean, possibly not. And you know, you're gonna have to just test the market with your mailings. But, but the equation works. It's just the numbers might be a little bit different.
