The Land Investor’s Tech Stack in 2026

I once dined on steak with a candle's soft glow, but the bill left my savings despairingly low. Now wisdom has taught me, so simple, so grand, Eat baloney, buy land. Oh, eat baloney, buy land. Play the fork for the team in your hand. Skip the filling, let the sandwiches stand. Your fortune will grow when you buy your own land.

Hey everybody, welcome to Land Geek Nightcap. Tonight we're talking tech, so we're gonna, we're gonna break this down tonight. We know a lot of you out there, you have leads in one place, notes in another, contracts somewhere else, Xanos digging through emails trying to remember where deals are. Uh, that's really not the land business we want for you. That's more like organized chaos. So in 2026, we're really more dialed in than ever. We're more organized and systematized than ever. So tonight we're going to break that down for you. We're going to talk about all the tech that we use, from Google Drive to LG Pass to Geek Pay to everything, breaking it down. So, uh, fellas, good to see you. Welcome back to Nightcap.

Welcome back.

Wow, I love when I find out about the topic.

Yeah, I know, right?

When—

if Mark— if Mark flies in, uh, that'll be great. Not sure if he's joining us tonight, but, um, Uh, if, if he does, uh, that will be awesome. But welcome to, uh, Land Geek Nightcap. We're live here every Tuesday night at 9 Eastern. We talk land, business, and how to build, uh, real freedom without traditional real estate, uh, headaches. Yeah, uh, I'm Scott Bossman, DudeBuddy, the Nightcap OG. I've never called myself that before. It's not very—

it's not very humble, a bit presumptuous.

It's a little presumptuous, but I was not deemed that myself. Yeah, I'm just, just saying. And, uh, we're joined by the man, you know, who stays calm no matter what with all the deals coming at him, the Zen Master Mike Zaino. Breathe in the mailing, breathe out the marketing.

Cheers.

How's it going, buddy?

It's going great. Happy to be here. Um, a little chilly, so I hope you don't mind. I zipped up a little bit. Weather's been a bit unpredictable, probably like for you, Scott. I don't know about for you, John, but up and down, up and down. Summer, spring, it's fall, it's winter. Doesn't know what it's doing.

It's winter. It is winter a lot, a lot right now here in Wisconsin. Up and down. You're exactly right.

You just get one season.

And we're also joined by, you know, the guy who makes land investing look really sexy. John, 8 is enough. Handsome Rob Burnett. Hey John, good to see you. Uh, we got people, people chiming in the comments, uh, as, as always, which is fun. We, we're back after a 2-week hiatus. We've been here, there, and everywhere.

Yeah, I know. I mean, you, you guys have been more here, there, and everywhere.

You guys are both on islands.

I'm just here in Idaho.

John's on his island of—

I'm here, you're there, you're everywhere.

It's just a bigger island, John. North American island.

Yes, this is a very, very large island called the— just America.

I was on an American island as well. Mike, you were on the island as well, weren't you?

Island, you call it, I guess. St. Thomas, a little bit to the— some of the other—

whoa, it's easier.

Yeah.

Hey, live.

We're live. How's my mic sound, by the way? I've been having mic issues.

Oh, I'm right here, Mark. You don't have any issues with me, man. Wow, wow.

Easy. All right, starting early.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And well, I mean, we were just doing introductions, Mark, and we were talking about how it's fun to be back, but the, the Godfather himself is on the call with us, Mark J. Podolsky, the reason we're here. The reason we're able to take vacations, 7 to 10 day vacations, right, without a W-2.

So good. I love living vicariously through you guys. What were the highlights?

Uh, the highlights? Well, so I was on the Big Island of Hawaii, and, uh, the highlights were just— I mean, if you've never been there, it's just beautiful. It's like 10 climates on one island, and We did that. We had a lot of drive time. We saw some amazing sights. We saw wildlife. We went snorkeling with the manta rays. We went, you know, we were beach bums. We saw family. Just a lot of fun.

Did you say 10 climates? I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.

Yeah, the Big Island, it's kind of, it's like dry and like tundra-like on one side and there's mountainous terrain and there's like a tropical rainforest on this side and there's waterfalls over here and there's volcanoes over here. There's black sand beaches. It's, it's absolutely spectacular. Wow. Yeah, so, so we had a blast. And Zeno was on an island. John was on an island of sickness with his kids. Oh, we can't hear you, John.

You're on—

He lost his voice in the sickness. I think that might be what happened.

Yeah, there we go.

Yes, sir.

I just said yes, I was in the island of my house with sickness. It was very exciting.

So, uh, well, like John and I were talking, uh, when— John, when you're an old man, you're gonna have the most— you're gonna have the most staunch immune system, uh, ever because of all of these germs you're being subjected to.

I will have had all of the viruses, everyone. There won't be any left.

So, uh, I love it. Well, Mark, uh, do you know what tonight's topic is?

One of my favorites— tech. What?

You love tech?

I love tech. Let's get geeky.

Let's get geeky. We're going over the tech stack, the complete, the complete stack. All right, so I thought it'd be fun to just kind of go, go through the business. So like, um, I think Uh, at its foundation, uh, organization is really important in this business because we're dealing in high volume, right? Uh, you know, you get, get to the point a lot of investors own hundreds of properties, so it's very important to remain organized. So John Burnett, kick us off here. What's, what's a favorite tool for you for organization? In the land business?

So I mean, it's kind of a cheaty answer, but like Google Drive is definitely something that we utilize heavily. So we, we have Google Docs, we have files and folders and things that are shared amongst team members. And so we lean on that a lot just in terms of just general organization. If something needs to go somewhere that's accessible for everyone, then we generally put it in Google Drive.

So I think there's gonna be a lot of concurring on this call.

Whoo!

Cheers.

I concur. I think Google Drive is probably the main tool in our business that helps keep us organized.

There are others, but yeah, I mean, it's in terms of just documents and, you know, deed copies and things of that nature. I think that in that particular type of— those types of things, yes, then Google Drive. But if you're looking at like from a, from a just a next step up, I guess, though, because those are all part of a deal. If you're looking at the deal, then I think LG Pass becomes more of the organizational— I'm not kidding.

Are you—

what was that?

Did you see that?

Let me see that.

No, I just, I, I just knew you would be the first one to mention LG Pass because Listen, we were here before we had LG Pass. So you and Mark kind of got this thing going on right now. There's— I don't know, there's this—

we're insane.

I don't know what it is. You're insane.

What have I done?

I'm kidding.

I haven't even done the shameless plugs yet.

But the reality is you're exactly right, Mike.

He's doing the business before we had LG Pass, and then Mark started talking about this great new thing they created, saving all kinds of hours. I don't know how many times I had to bug him before I could finally try it.. And finally, you know, because that, that is like, that's the deal flow, right? That's managing where the deals are. That's the pipeline. That's so that to me, yes, I agree. And I'm not disagreeing at all with John. I'm, in fact, I'm concurring, um, that, uh, you know, for all the different documents we have, Google Drive is, is really important. And you could use Dropbox or something else, but, you know, a lot of us, you know, are in the G Suite there. But when it comes to the deal itself and moving into the various stages and just getting a snapshot of where, what, where it is and what's going on, I think LG Pass is the organizational tool that I would lean on. And I'm not kissing anyone's butt. Just being truthful.

I actually concur. So yeah, it keeps, you know, it keeps track of where a property is in its life cycle. And again, when we're dealing in high volume—

yeah, and I tell people, Scott, that what I think is unique about it is that by itself it starts to create efficiency, right? I mean, you know, we talk about this business, first and foremost you want to be effective, you want to, you know, get deals in the pipeline. But then when you start to look at efficiency, that alone is going to scale you as an individual because it's going to automate your mailings, it's going to you know, create the documents when you buy and sell property. Like, it's going to start to make you— but when you introduce the workflows with the proper people, giving them user access to virtual assistants, now you really start to become the CEO, right? This is a— this— so this tool really does have that ability to do that, you know. And prior to that, that we would just— I don't know what we were doing. What were we doing? We were just making up things, right? What was your Spreadsheet.

Yeah, Excel spreadsheet. I ran a whole business off an Excel spreadsheet, and I can't tell you how many times I double-sold property because, you know, it's hard to see.

Yeah, put 100 lines on a, on a Google Drive, a Google Sheet or Excel sheet. Yeah, it's going to get—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Rick, Rick Colcox here. Rick, good to see you. He says he's a big fan of LG Pass. Scott Elliott says there's some things that need to be updated. There always are.

We'll do that.

Uh, it's coming. We're working on it.

We're working on it.

Yeah. Um, but, but yeah, it makes life so much simpler now than when we started. I love the property tax payment feature in LG Pass. Um, John, do you use that yet or not?

I haven't used it.

I mean, uh, it, it really saves hours and hours of time. It's really amazing. Um, so I love— so for those of you who use LG Pass, uh, or for those who don't, we have a feature in LG Pass where you can pay property taxes to the county. And when you get to the point where you own 10, 20, 50, even more properties in one county, uh, tax season can be a little bit of a challenge or burden, right? Going through all those properties.

So, and, and Mike Pronounced D-A-T-A. D-E-A-T-A.

Data.

Okay.

Yeah. How about, how about in LG Pass? LG Pass Data powered by XAMPP Flow?

Yes.

LG Pass Data powered by XAMPP Flow. Yeah, yeah, definitely. We wait for more of a New England accent. Usually comes out and I can't just, I can't just It has to come out in the flow.

Yeah, I feel, I feel like when Dude Buddy's like, you know, I'm trying to steal his thunder and failing miserably. So again, I would apologize to the state of Massachusetts.

What was the app? He just tried to do one of your, uh, the Boston segment.

He just tried the Boston leg segment. Yeah, well, we actually already made fun of, of Mike before you got on, Mark, because of his pronunciation of the word winter.

Okay, I didn't see any problems with it, but—

well, so I think we can all agree those are probably the two main tools for organization, right, in the land business. Some people use Airtable as well, good organizational tool. Yeah, but that actually, Mark, you bring up Xample, and that leads me into the next kind of segment here as far as tech tools go, and that's lead generation, right? So how do we, how do we get our leads and compile them? And you mentioned, uh, we utilize Zanflo, which is a data service, a list generating service that enables us to pull lists easier than ever before.

But you get 20% off when you integrate through LG Pass.

So if you just go straight to Zamplo, you're paying retail.

If you do through LG Pass, paying, you get the discount.

You know, I know we didn't talk about this a couple episodes ago, but literally, Mark, you would have entire blocks of boot camp set apart just to show people how to get lists from the county and scrub them. I mean, hours long of meticulous training and teaching. And now we go into ZAMFLOW and like, imagine how our minds would have been blown back then if we were like, what? What'd you just do? Yeah, we clicked a couple buttons and now we have a list. And it's ready to go. I mean, we used to spend hours scrubbing lists.

Did you guys ever build a scraper with the Not iMacros.

That was like a curse word.

iMacros. I did.

I remember I had that little stick computer that I plugged into my TV. And I got it going. And then I go to bed and I'd wake up and there was data in the morning. It was just like Christmas, except under the Christmas tree was my list.

So that was iMacros.

I was like, macros.

I don't even know what it was other than people used to make fun of it and say, don't ever say that word again to me. Like, I've never even tried it. You plugged it into your TV?

Yeah, no, it was like this— it was this Lenovo stick computer. Yeah, you like plug it in and yeah, it's great.

And, uh, yeah, it would take hours to get a list from the county to begin with.

Right?

You'd have to, you'd have to go from person to person at the county and try to figure out how to get this list. And some of them, you know, some of them would send you a list, but it was a horrible list. And then somebody else would send you the entire tax roll, and it would take hours and hours and hours to, to scrub this thing down. Or it's in your CD-ROM in the mail.

Yeah, it was all coded weird, it was cryptic. It was like, you're right, you had to talk to like, I think though it's like a minimum of 4 people you'd call up. I don't know, and I think maybe, maybe Sue will know. And Sue's like, I think that Bob handles that. And then Bob will give it over to Phil, and then to John, who's eating the apple with his Thai tuxedo. I think I got what you want here, hold on. Puts the apple in his mouth, sent you. Again, you're like, all right, I can't wait. You open it up and it's like gibberish, like, what is this?

It's like, oh, you can't, uh, you know, understand AXI format. Like, what is Axie? Oh my God.

Oh man. Yeah, we've come a long ways. Uh, I, I, uh, I figured out pretty early on to, uh, to just avoid the count— the people working at the county and go straight to the GIS website. And I hired a VA to screen scrape for me.

Oh, it was big. You're right.

Yeah, and I had an amazing screen scraper. She, she would get me 100 leads, uh, in an hour, right? And paying her $5 an hour to get me 100 lead— 100, uh, people to mail to. So, um, she even does some work for us to this day, which is pretty—

everybody, what a screen scrape is, because that might not be common.

Yeah, so screen scraping is, uh, we would just hire people to go through and, man, you know, we'll find a subdivision somewhere in a county and, um, you know maybe there's 1,000 1-acre parcels in the subdivision, and we would just hire people to go through and pull data on each, each parcel, right? Owner name, owner address, acreage, APN.

And then how did you mail back then? What was— now how you got the list, now how did you get it out in the mail?

Yeah, I, I printed envelopes at— I printed letters at my home and, and stuck envelopes. Yeah, I think we all did that. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah. So, so yeah, Zample and other services like DataTree, although Zample I think is, is great, like as you said, Mark, because it plugs right into LG Pass and get that discount. So awesome. That's probably our main lead generation tool, I would think, now on the list acquisition side.

Yeah, it's gotten pretty dialed in.

I concur. I concur.

Dishing out concurs all day.

Get another bottle of wine, a lot of these concurs.

Oh man.

Okay, Mike, what about wine, by the way, to go off topic? We're about that time in the, in the pod to go off topic. On Apple TV, I've watched a great show, Drops of God. Just trust me, just trust me. They did a terrible job marketing it, but if you watch it, you're like, oh wow, this is really good.

Happy taking notes. Yeah, taking notes. Drops of God.

All right, I already like the sounds of that.

Can, can the— can John and I watch that, or is that just for my It's just—

did you guys— I guess, I guess you guys could watch it. I should watch it first, though.

Uh, awesome. Well, uh, you know, and as, as always, the, the folks watching, please, please, uh, comment or make any questions, uh, in the comments about any of the tech tools that we're talking about or any of the tech tools that you utilize. Um, Yeah, Scott Elliott here. Here's, uh, he mentions Mike Zaino's word of the night is scraper.

Yeah, scraper.

We're on a roll here. What's that? Screen scraper. Yeah, screen scraper. Uh, great. All right, well, let's talk due diligence. So what are some tech tools we're using in due diligence?

Anyone?

I mean, now LG Pass powered by Zamplo. You can do due diligence right there.

I think it's so cool when you say it that way, powered by Zamplo. It's like, no, reminds you of another commercial for another— but powered by Zamplo. Yeah, that's true. I mean, the Zamplo can even help you with the due diligence piece of it. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's really nice to have it all integrated like that.

Yeah, I think like the other thing is, or like when you're just starting GIS, right, so whatever the county GIS tool is, it's helpful to have your eyeballs on what the property looks like, and you can click in, see whatever data they have on that property. And then, um, if you get to a point where you're a little bit bigger, you know, LandID is, is nice to have. Um, that one's like $100 a month, right? Um, but it's, it's basically a GIS for everywhere is, is kind of what LandID functions as. So those have been, you know, I think— but at the outset, really, you just need the GIS, you know, so you can get eyeballs on that property and see what that looks like.

Good point. I like LandID, which was— wasn't it, um, MapRight, formerly known as MapRight. Yeah, especially when I would do bulk deals like 30, 40 properties, I could map them all out and send someone the map and it would look kind of cool to see them all there. But, but Scott, I was wondering, maybe, uh, you know what would be helpful, and I bet you'd be good at this, is like we're talking about assisting with due diligence, but there might be people listening like, what do you mean by due diligence?

Oh yeah, good point.

When you say due diligence, Scott, what is— what are you talking about?

Yeah, so, uh, when we're determining whether or not to purchase a property, we need to look at property characteristics. So, you know, does the property have road access? Uh, does it have— what's the terrain like? Is it in a flood zone? Are there power poles nearby? Are there near neighbors nearby? Uh, you know, what's the usability of the land? What are the zoning characteristics of the land? So that's kind of one phase of the due diligence in my, my mind is the property characteristics. And then we have the property, uh, then we have more of the legalities with the property. So chain of title, back taxes, liens, that type of thing. And I think the go-to tech tools still for those things are the county websites, right? Uh, and I think that Um, some tools like, uh, DataTree, uh, can help with title search. Um, there are other sites like deeds.com. You may have a person who— you may rely on a person for a title search, like a paralegal or a VA who specializes in title searches. Um, so unless I— did I miss anything on the tech side as far as like chain of title stuff goes, guys? Or would you—

ParcelReview.com.

Oh yeah, Parcel Review. Yeah, yeah.

So I like this. You gotta coin it as usability, viability, and visibility. I think visibility is more like, you know, things you need to—

to—

so you just got me thinking about that, Scott, because you said those three things: usability, viability, visibility.

Love it.

Sticky notes.

And those determine, those determine the viability.

Viability.

Viability. The second word I've created today.

I don't know if it's Scrabble-worthy, but viability sounds good.

You need a t-shirt. It's got— I can't remember what the first three words were.

But visibility, viability, and Visibility, viability, and oh my God, usability.

So visibility plus viability plus usability equals viability. T-shirt. Yeah, we need our t-shirts.

Yeah, the, the geeky term of this in real estate is highest and best use.

Oh, highest and best use. So there might be other uses, but you're seeking the highest and best use. Is that what you mean? Correct.

Or it could be the usability, viability, buyability.

I like it. I like it. I see. I see.

Awesome. Does that help, Mike?

It does help. It does help.

Good, good, good, good. Jason Simpson says he still uses DataTree. Still a great tool. Mike Zadel went viral on TikTok a couple years ago doing a DataTree video.

Remember that? Yeah, it could have been viral, could have been viral. It was when I did the, um, scrubbing. Yeah, but it was buying land for $500 in 5 minutes or something like that. Yeah, but it was also incorporating, um, LG Pass. So what I did is I did the same thing in Zillow. You go in, you identify an area, 5 minutes. Can you imagine, like, 5 minutes compared to what we were doing years ago? I mean It was 5 hours of scrubbing. Never mind, because one thing you missed before you mailed the letters, you had to mail merge them from Excel into Word so that you could get them printable. So there's a whole other step that was in there, right? And, uh, anyway, yeah, fun stuff.

That's not fun stuff.

Not, not really.

Um, well, let's check in with the community here. We have a win to celebrate. So, John, Don, Don the Land Thrasher, man, he's just killing it. You got, you got a check, a check today for 2 sales, Don Thrasher.

You call him the Land Thrasher?

You just keep it.

I didn't— I cannot take, I cannot take credit for that. I, it may have been the Hollingsworth, it may have been Kathy Hollingsworth that called him the Land Thrasher. Maybe Scott Elliott. That's a great name, isn't it?

Is Don gonna come on next week?

We need to get to talk about his journey.

Let's do it.

Are you available?

You know you're gonna be watching anyway, Don.

Just jump on, throw in the chat, Don, if you can make it next week. Uh, we, we'd love to have you on, uh, for sure. Scott Elliott got a sale today as well.

All right, you're killing it.

Scott Elliott, I'd like to know in the chat, how many sales is that now? Uh, I'd love to know that.

Better not be one.

Am I the only one stressing about where Dawn's square is gonna go? Because I'm really not sure how that's gonna work.

You are the only one stressing.

Yeah, I imagine right in the middle, just right over there, like 2 and 2 and 1 in the middle, or is it gonna be 3 and 2? Uh, I don't know.

Can we call dibs on our square?

3 and 2, I believe.

Yeah.

Uh, awesome. Any other wins? We'd love to hear about more wins, um, uh, from, from folks that are actively doing the business, so throw those in the chat. Wes Mantooth has a question. Oh yeah, we'll answer this, Wes, and then we'll move on with our tech. Do you need, do you need an LLC to e-record 'Or complete any aspect of closing, can we just mail the deed to the county if we don't have an LLC?' I also take that—

believe, and Mark can concur or correct me, I believe to use some of like SimpliFile you have to have an entity, I believe. But anybody can mail it to the county, uh, you don't have to have an LLC. Would you concur, Mark, or am I off?

I concur. So for SimpliFile, have to have an LLC, but Again, anyone can mail a deed to a county. But you know, West Mantooth, you want to have an LLC anyways. And why, Mark? Well, first of all, you're going to get limited liability protection. So you're gonna get a little bit of asset protection with your LLC. But the most important thing is you're going to be able to use your business expenses pre-tax dollars. So you make $100, you do your mailings, they cost $10, you hire a VA, they cost $5, and then your taxable income is $85, right, with an LLC. But if you don't have that LLC, then you're, you're not running your expenses through it, and The whole tax code is built for companies. It is not built for the W-2 wage earner. So that's why.

Thank you.

Love it. Thank you, sir. All right, Scott Elliott, I have a, I have a tech tip for you here. So he just says he really needs LG Pass to generate contracts on the buy side. Uh, so I think what he's wanting is a purchase agreement on the buy side. Uh, title companies need a contract when buying land through title, uh, and currently it only does it on the sell side. So Scott Elliott, um, I come into this occasionally. There are some tools out there that can easily generate a purchase agreement for you on the buy side. Rocket Lawyer is one. Um, even ChatGPT had come up with a, with a contract probably on the buy side.

Also, like, if somebody signs the offer letter, I've had title companies go with that. Yeah, you know, it's, it's an agreement. Yep.

So get them to sign the purchase agreement and use that as well. Cool. All right. Well, should we continue talking tech here?

Tech, tech, tech talk.

So, well, we kind of touched on it. We need tech to buy property and we're looking at Simplifile for e-recording, right? LG Pass to purchase docs, or sorry, to create docs as far as the deed goes. Um, but then once we've bought the property, we need some other tech tools. So now we've acquired a property, what are we using, guys, now for, for tech on the, on the sales side?

John Burnett, tech on the sales side. Um, so one thing you need is a way to organize, and I guess this isn't like on the marketing side, this is when you're actually getting leads in you need to keep track of all of these different people, right? Because you need to follow up with people. And so there's a wide variety of tools you can use, and some of them are free, right? And ultimately, like, I don't know who said it, and so I'm gonna say it's me. I'm saying this for the first time. Nobody's ever said this. But people— so the— what is the best tool that you could use? What's the best system you can use? It's the one that you actually use, right? So you just need to do something. And so, you know, in terms of organizing your leads, one tool you can use is Trello. Trello is free. You can create a card for each of your leads, you know, cold, warm, hot, right? First follow-up, second follow-up, however you want to organize that. But just something to organize your leads. Eventually, um, as you get bigger I think it's worth investing in a CRM. One that I use that, you know, a lot of us use is Follow Up Boss, and that allows us to really keep close track on all of our leads. And it's got all of our communication in the single spot, so we can see the story of the lead from when it came in to all the text conversations, the emails, and everything. So, um, I think some kind of a CRM, but ultimately you start with just You can start with something basic just to keep track of everything as it comes in.

Love it.

I love it.

Zainal, any thoughts on the tech on the other side?

Well, I think he nailed it. I mean, we are talking about managing leads on the sell side.

There's a very important tech tool you need, Mike. You complete me now. Are you going to complete me? Very important tech tool on the—

you do need something. Are you talking after you make the sale?

No.

Well, no, there's a technical—

well, you do need this. No, because this comes into play both ways. I'm gonna go with it, and then you're gonna do your little nose thing, but GeekPay Really important because to make the sale, we, we're not going to do any paperwork, we're not going to do anything until somebody pays us some money. And how do we collect their money? But with a unique link that we create in GeekPay that we can put in our ads or on our deal of the week. And that's how we initiate the sales process. We never want to create— you never want to create— none of us want to create documents without ever first having someone truly commit by making a payment of any sort, some sort. I don't care if it's $50, they got to put something down before we go ahead and start creating documents. So those of you listening, I did this in the beginning— don't do this. Don't create documents for people because they say they're going to buy the property. They have to show initiative by making some sort of payment first. So did I complete you?

You complete me. I was thinking, uh, yeah, I was thinking I should have called it the payment stack. Like what are the tech tools we're using when we get paid, right?

Yeah.

And Geek Pays It.

And people sometimes ask why, why not LG Pass? But I believe, Mark, the answer is because this is like has to follow banking regulations, so it's completely different. All in one, right?

Yeah, we, yeah, we are working on an integration with LG Pass so that when you have your buyer information in LG Pass you have to retype it again into GeekPay. And we are working on one single login as well, unified. So we're— we got a lot going on. But, uh, I concur, it's geekpay.io. It's a set and forget payment system. Is it time to plug a shameless plug segment?

Uh, yes, for sure.

The way that I always explain this to people is GeekPay, LG Pass, they weren't created to generate profit. They were created to solve problems, and then we just shared the solution with other people. Simple as that, right? So you don't have to use it, but you're probably going to want to because we've done it without it and it's a pain in the butt. I mean, it's still okay, you're collecting money, but you're tracking it whichever way you are, back to Google Sheets or Excel sheets or whatever it is, and then Did they pay? Did they not pay? What's their balance? Oh, ah, ah, you know, uh, it gets on and on. So, um, these were created to solve problems. They weren't created to be like profit engines or whatever you want to do, but now we offer them to other people. So I say to them like, you don't have to use it, but you probably will want to because this solves a very specific problem in the business.

Yeah, yeah, that's really what Land Geek is. Is a way to solve all your, your pain points in the business. In fact, when you start Flight School, we give you these tools for free.

Yes.

So, and then it's like, and we haven't raised prices I think in 7 years. I think GeekPay is what, $49 a month for up to 10 notes? I mean, this is not a profit center, but it is, you know, we're all eating our own dog food. That's why we started it.

I like how you said eating our own dog food.

Are we dogs?

We made it for ourselves.

I've never heard it.

We eat it. Let me give it to you.

But where'd the dog come in?

Who doesn't love a dog?

I love a dog.

Yes.

We have other people.

Dog food. Okay.

Uh, we have other people chiming in here. Uh, Scott Christianson, uh, by the way, Mark, uh, said it was cool to see the monthly update email today about Geek Pay. There we had a big update with Geek Pay today. Tell us about it.

Big, big update. Uh, we have a new dashboard, color-coded, so at a glance you can see your passive income, what you're going to expect for the next month, your defaults um, who's late, all that, all the data that you'd want at a glance is going to be on your dashboard. I actually, uh, because the team worked so hard on it, I didn't want to like throw a wrench into it, but like I personally like to see like what is my default rate for that month. So I want to add that in there, but otherwise it's, uh, it's a nice I like it. It's a nice, it's a nice. So if you haven't logged into GeekPay in a while, check it out. And I think that you're going to start noticing the communication is better. We used to be a very silo. We'd be working, working, working. No one know what we're doing. Now you're going to see a changelog every month. You're going to get a communication on what we're working on, what we're doing under the hood. And you can see there's a lot done last month, so more to come. Yeah, and OG Pass is also getting the same kind of makeover down thrasher, the land thrasher.

People are chiming in with some other tech tools. Facebook Marketplace, we all use that on the sales side. Not all of us. John doesn't. He's special.

Special.

SignNow or some type of document signing service. There's a new— there's a Google Docs, there's a Google Signature one now that's free, I think. So that's maybe one to look at.

Yeah.

Can we talk about the future, by the way?

I was thinking we should definitely do that. Okay, please.

Oh, you— okay. So I think, I mean, John and I— John, you're using Codex and Opus, right?

Coding?

Like, no, like, agentic engineering?

I am doing a little bit of like, uh, vibe coding, but I haven't done anything agentic yet.

Okay, so vibe coding is now a prerogative term. We're going to call you an agentic engineer. Okay, but, but I think what's going to be happening is that non-techies like myself are going to be able to go in natural language. You are just going to be able to build yourself these tools. So today, yeah, there's tools. And if you're just starting, to John's point, you don't need them.

They're not—

I mean, they're nice to have. OG Passkey, absolutely, right? But like, yeah, Open Claw, Paperclip, these are— these are— this is the future. And you just will be able to, in natural language, be able to create your own tools. You'll be able to create your own Trello for you. Now, will you be able to create your own LG Pass? Probably, right? Probably. GeekPay was probably going to be a little bit more challenging because of the whole money piece, but all these other tools you probably are going to be able to build in the next 3 to 5 years, and dare I say, maybe even one shot it. Where you just write, hey, make me a Follow Up Boss clone. Here's the website, and it would just go and do it. Or a GeekPay clone or an LG Pass clone, and it'll just do it. And as an owner of software, it's really depressing because the value of software is like gonna go down to nothing. But as a, as a consumer, it's never been more exciting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go on, John.

No, you're gonna say something smarter.

We all— that's not true. That is not true at all. Please.

Well, I was just gonna say, like, I think that there's a couple distinct ways to think about utilizing AI, right? So AI is an automation tool, and you can either use it in specific workflows consistently where it's like every time this happens, inject AI, right? And AI solves this particular problem. And then you can also just use it on a one-off basis on a project-by-project standpoint, and it's really helpful for that. And so I use AI a lot for just planning, right? So, um, I wrote—

did I—

have I showed you guys my book that I wrote.

Your business manual.

This is my business manual. And so I went on a walk for like 4 hours and just talked into my phone, right?

Yeah.

And then I created a Claude project. I created the structure of the book. And then every chapter, I'd be like, write the next chapter based on this transcript, and it would write it. And then, and then this is the training manual for, um, for my team, you know. And so you do stuff like that. I've used it if I'm in a new area. I'll do deep research and just copy everything from LandID, paste it in there, and say, tell me everything, like, find out everything you can about this particular area and what could be done and all that kind of stuff. And I found it to be really helpful for those, those one-off projects. I even threw like I took— I exported everything. This was, um, I, I used the, uh, the expensive model for this. Um, I found it really, really helpful for it. But I, like, I, I went into QuickBooks and I exported everything, and I was like, find everywhere I'm wasting money, every single spot. And then it spat out all these things, a priority list, how to, how to start segment, you know, working my way through it. And I just found it enormously helpful.

So yeah, no, it was amazing. I found $12,000. $12,000 doing the same thing. Wow. I mean, real money. So that paid for all my crazy toys that I use.

$12,000 in wasted money spending every month.

$12,000 of wasted money on tools that I was not using.

Subscriptions and things.

Subscriptions and a I was getting charged in overage on Zoom.

Oh, wow.

And so that was really easy to take care of.

It's like, oh, to find that, no, loaded, like statements, bank statements. Oh, how did you find it? Like, what, how did it, how does it—

exactly. So I uploaded all my bank statements and my credit card statements into, I used Claude Opus 4.6.. And I just said, analyze this, look for waste, look, look for ways to save me money. Where, where am I duplicative? And what tools am I not using based on what you know about my tech stack? So I also do the same thing as John, where I talk to the AI, have a Claude.md file, this markdown file, so it knows all about me and the businesses. And it just keeps learning more and more, it's getting smarter. And so it's like, oh, well, you're not using this. You don't need to use this.

You've actually given— you've created a file like about what you are and what you do inside of Claude so it can reference that when it goes to talk to you or answer. Okay.

And what we're going to start doing at Land Geek is, because I'm so geeky, is that once a month I'm going to actually do a training for people on how to use AI for their businesses and their lives. And then the next month, I'm actually going to give them the tool that I'm using and then train them on how to use the tool and how to even edit the tool for their, their use case. So you'll get 6 tools for your land business plus 6 trainings.

That's great.

And that's all because of DudeBuddy. Boxing me and be like, bro, why don't you teach more on this?

Who, who gets access to that, Mark? How someone's—

only, only Scott and John are gonna get access right now. But if you apply, Mike, you could get access.

I meant the Greater Land Geek community. Like, are they— is this flight school people? Like, who, who, who— how will you— you said I missed the part when you said you were gonna, you were gonna show it. Is Is it weekly, or how is that going to play out?

We're still working out who, who's gonna get access to it. It's definitely going to be coaching clients and Unfair Advantage.

I'm not sure if it's useful yet for flight school people because they're still building.

To John's point, like, they're like— we don't want them to get shiny object syndrome with all the toys, and there's just— there's startups. You want to keep them super, super focused. On just doing the thing, the most important things. And then it might, you know, so, but I'm open to it. We might— I might do flight school too.

That's a really good point. I think that one of the dangers of AI is taking you off target from what you do that really makes you money and getting you all the— instead of just taking what you already do and making it more efficient. Because it's like this new toy, like, I could do this, I could do that. Yeah, you could. But should you?

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And maybe we should talk about that too. Because like, there's the tech stack, right? But I don't know, I think about it like, like parenting, right? Having had 6 kids, right? We have all of these routines and things that we do and family traditions. But it didn't just happen in a day. Right? And if we were to think about implementing all of those all at once, right? When we had our first kid, like, it would be completely overwhelming. Like, ultimately it evolved over time, right? And we gradually built it out, and now we've got kind of our family culture, right? So, um, so thinking about, like, um, I think one temptation people can have is they can get into land investing and they're like, I'm gonna automate, automate, automate, automate, automate, and then they never do anything. They haven't actually taken action. So maybe we should talk, talk a little bit about that.

That makes sense. I feel like what you're saying, unless I'm mistaken, is like, we see people sometimes that try to build too much of the structure too quickly without having any cash flow behind it, any, you know, so, you know, keeping it— because what really happens is like, just like we said with your family, like you go through a routine, and all of a sudden it starts to become Well, you do these things over and over, it becomes a routine. Then it's like, oh, this is what we do. Well, you do deal after deal after deal, and you start to recognize the rhythm of a deal and where things should be inserted. And but if you try to do it too soon, it's sort of artificial, right? It's like, oh, let's create all this structure, but you haven't even done a deal yet. Does that make sense, Mark? Like keeping it light like that?

Oh no, 100%. I, I mean, I could see Doobuddy shaking his head. I want to hear what, what he has to say, but From my point of view, uh, the land business when you first start should be super boring to the point where it's just so simple. I'm gonna get a list, I'm gonna mail that list, or price that list, mail that list, I'm gonna wait for offers to come back, and then while I'm waiting I'm gonna do a wholesale deal, a land arb deal, and, and then I'm gonna start marketing properties and sell property. All the other things that we're talking about, they're nice to have. Even a website is nice to have. You don't even need to get a website, just create a Facebook business page that is free. You're a startup. Don't spend time and money on things you don't need until you need them. And so I know I'm going off on a rant here, and that's why we give you the two important tools that we think are going to save you time, like LG Pass and Geek Pay. Because we know it's going to save you time at some point. But it's 6 months for free, not 6 weeks. It's going to take months to really start building momentum in a business, and then you can start investing in, like John said, the more fun tools as you grow a business, like, like a Follow Up Boss. But Scott, what were you gonna say?

No, I mean, I, I concur with all of you. The triple concur. That's 3 drinks. Um, no, I think, um, it's, it's very, um, we all have a tendency, or there's a tendency in this business to put the cart before the horse, right? And, and the horse is the mailing and marketing. Like, that's where the money is made. We make money on the buy, we make money when we sell.

Right?

So, um, but, but what I do love is, you know, compared to 10 years ago, we have all of these tools that make the, make the horse and buggy go, or make the cart— yeah, the horse and buggy go a lot faster, right? So the horse and buggy is going a lot faster. The horse still needs to be in front of the buggy, right? Um, and that's where some of these AI tools, you know, I think people can, can, uh, can definitely spend maybe a little bit too much time and energy you know, sitting down with their new Mac Mini and OpenClaw and all that type of thing, trying to create, uh, an AI agent, right, to help me do all this work when I haven't done a land deal yet, right? So, so keep it simple. Do the, do the deal, right? Do the deal, learn it, document it, you know, create, uh, playbooks and create manuals like John is doing, and then get fancy later. The fanciness can come later.

Right.

Like Scott Elliott just confessed to us in the comments that he has 4 grand a month of recurring revenue. And he does not have Follow Up Boss, right?

Look at that.

Amazing. Yeah.

Would you rather have the perfect sales system, but no sales, or have $4,000 in monthly recurring revenue and no Follow Up Boss?

That's amazing. I don't I missed that. Yeah, where'd he put that? That's amazing, Scott Elliott. Um, yeah, good for you.

So amazing.

Yeah, and, and I always tell people, I'm like, you know what, the— there's a CR— Mike Zaino loves this CRM— there's a notebook right beside your desk. Like, really, if you want to be old school, be old school. Like, just keep a notebook beside your desk. There's a hot page, there's a warm page, there's a cold page, or the Rocketbook that you can erase The Rocketbook. Yes, that's very revolutionary.

Revolutionary.

That's much more 2026 for sure. Yeah. So awesome. Very good. So, so Mike, are you saying you don't too much— you don't put too much in your hopper at first?

Rich seal. I love it.

Oh, that's awesome.

Oh, I get it.

Okay, okay. Everybody's catching on to your, uh, your Boston lager accent tonight.

Don, you didn't answer about next week. Did I miss the answer?

Oh no, he said he said he said he'll be here.

We gotta get the link.

We'll be great. You can meet in the middle.

We'll be in touch. We'll get you the— we'll get you— we'll get you the deets between now and next week. That's gonna be a lot of fun.

And we were saying like once a month, I think we want to bring people on to talk about their journey and, and, uh, do like a little hour of Gorilla Geek type of segment, if that's cool with you guys.

I love it.

Well, not you guys, I mean the listeners, our millions of— our millions of viewers.

Millions.

1 billion viewers.

Uh, well, this was fun, guys. Uh, I don't see any questions coming in. Uh, Are there any last remaining questions about tech or any questions about the business in general that we can help with? We're here to help.

We're here to help.

Can I tell you guys a true story about tech?

Yes, please.

No, so we want a good story, only fake.

This is completely fabricated. So I— when I first got my Mac Mini and my OpenClaw, I was obsessed, and I'm going on X and I'm seeing all the things that I'm watching on the videos, and I'm like installing this tool, installing that tool, and I'm going to this Git repo and, and doing this. I'm creating this skill and this skill, and I was like, it was like overwhelming. And then in the middle of the night, I couldn't sleep. I was so excited about it, I literally got sick. And then after I got sick, I was like, okay, I went for like the Jon Bernett long walk and just calm down. I was like, okay, what do I really want from this thing? At the end of the day, you know what I wanted? I wanted an executive assistant. So I went back to my open call, I said, look, stop this cron job, stop doing this, stop doing this. This is all I want you to focus on. Like, I was getting like a tool every night, I was getting like this huge brief every, every morning. This is what I created for you, you know, here's your dashboard. And it was like waiting on me and like screaming at me like, this is in progress, this is pending, like, what are you doing? And I was like, okay, enough. All of this is— we're done. This is all I want you to do. And now it does it and it saves me time. And, um, and I'm still learning. I still have fun. But what I'll do is when I see something that I think might be helpful, I actually will ask it, see, based on my focus right now, is this useful to install? Will it help us? And 9 out of 10 times, it's like, no.

Wow.

It's amazing. No, it's all focused.

Yeah, that makes total sense. That's what I was thinking about earlier when we were talking. What I brought that up is like, yeah, you can do all these things. But what do you really want to do? What the highest use is to make your life more efficient, right? Not to go create 10 different AI projects, which is fun. And yeah, interesting. But what's going to make your daily experience of life better? Like, what, what's, what, what can it do? And it is like a really good— and I like it, you know, mine's called Nova, back there listening. And but it's like, to me, it's no different than having a VA in the Philippines. Like, I don't see them, I just talk to them, I chat with everybody. So it's just like, this is another assistant.

Yeah, no, I love it. I would say as a, as a tech tool that's free right now that people could use for their sales calls, if they're on a cell phone, is use Granola, granola.ai. And then take that transcript or ask it like, hey, you know, what, how would you improve my, my call? Now let them know that you're using it, by the way. But because like, it's not always obvious to somebody, but you know, that's a, that's a really simple free tool to use that could just help you on the sales side.

Yeah, I actually have a shortcut on my phone home screen. And when I press it, it'll start a Granola recording. And so I'll use it like if I'm meeting with somebody, and it'll just transcribe. It does a great job at differentiating between who's talking, and then I can throw that into, um, I could, I can throw that in ChatGPT and have it create a very detailed transcript. Or sometimes, you know, um, like, I don't know, like I was, I was helping somebody who needed, uh, who needed to build this presentation for the company. I was like, just tell me what you want. And so, and we just met and talked and went back and forth. And then we threw it into ChatGPT, and then out it comes, you know.

It sounds a bit crunchy. Yeah, that's what, a bit crunchy, this granola. Yeah, that's good. Can we ask a personal Question, mine's— I mean, I just told you mine. My, my open car is Nova. What's yours?

Name?

I named it Claude Buddy.

Oh, Claude Buddy.

It's kind of like Dude Buddy, like an homage to Dude Buddy. Oh, I like that.

I like it a lot.

It's gonna be Zen Claw or something like that. Why is it gonna be Claude?

Well, my main agent is Zen Claw. And I have your avatar.

Oh, wow. I'm the only one left out. So it's Claude Buddy with Mike's face.

No, but then I have 6 other agents and they all have kids. It's called Burnett 1, Burnett 2, Burnett 3. So absolutely. Wait, Ethan Evans had a question.

Yeah, let's— I found him. He actually has 2 questions. Let's answer them real quick. So number one— Ethan, good to see you, by the way. Uh, number one, is there a neighbor letter template in LG Pass, or can I add one? Is it better to use LG Pass or handwritten envelope for neighbor letters specifically? So that's coming, right? We don't have one yet, but there should be one, Ethan, in the, in the, in the investor toolkit if you have that from before, which I think you do because you went through a couple years ago. There should be a neighbor letter template in there. Or you could probably easily create one, uh, in, in chat or something like that. And then, uh, LG Pass handwritten for neighbor letters. Yeah, I, I don't know, I think you could do either way, handwritten or printed.

See which, which gets a better response for you.

Yeah, I like that.

They're pretty— especially if you're just doing the ones that touch the property, like we'll just, we just print them out and then just handwrite the address.

Yeah, you know, yeah, because you're not sending out like 100 neighbor letters typically, right? We're sending out neighbor letters primarily to the adjacent parcels, maybe down the street here and there. So, you know, if it's, if it's 10 to 20 letters, I think some— I think handwriting on there is good. Give your kids something to do, Ethan. Pay them, you know, pay them per letter. And then, uh, another question: what tools are best for formatting? Designing ads, Canva AI tools. Canva's great. You can do some, you can do some picture modifications in Claude or ChatGPT as well. Any other things, John, that I think you might utilize for that?

Even just like, like I have a Mac and is it Preview? I can't like whatever. Yeah, like I think even if you've just got whatever your native editor is, like you'd be surprised what you can do with a gray sad picture of sagebrush, right? Yeah, like if you just drag the saturation level one direction or the other, drag the contrast level, same thing, drag the brightness. Like, you can make something that looks sad look like a place that you want to be. And, and I mean, and I think it's important. Sometimes you'll go to a land site and you'll look at the same subdivision and there's, you know, two properties that, you know, are basically identical, but one looks very, very sad. It's like, it's like that scene from The Wizard of Oz before they actually go to Oz. And it's just, you know, and then another one, it's just bright and beautiful and you want to be there, you know. So I think just use, use the tech that you have to modify the images that you've got.

I love it.

Phenomenal.

Well, I, I think we had a great show. I think we talked, uh, we talked tech, right? I think there's, I think there's a moral to the story here. I think we need to embrace the machines, but but not then not let them consume us, right? You use the machines to help us grow this business more quickly, get fancier down the road. Hopefully this was helpful, everybody. I'm sure we, I'm sure we missed a few tech tools here and there, but, uh, the tech tools we have now, it's just fun to think about where we were 10 years ago. Mark, I mean, you're, you know, 25 years ago, like, you had no tech whatsoever. You were using like college-ruled notebooks and stuff. So pretty exciting.

Yeah, it's, it's crazy to think about the, the changes and how spoiled everyone is.

Yeah, but we're, but we're— Mark's glad to spoil you.

But I'm glad, I'm glad.

His software tools and his AI prowess, uh, engine it— what's it called?

And Engineering.

IngenTIC.

Thank you. Yeah, wait, can I do one last shameless plug?

Of course.

Okay, so if you are a, uh, in flight school coaching or Unfair Advantage, you get to sell property on wholesale.thelandgeek.com. So it's only for Land Geek members. So it's just like, it's just, it's a really small little community. But if you are on there, do me a favor, because when I look at the, the analytics, we have more sellers than buyers. So the only way to get more buyers is if you actually email your buyers list and say, hey, check out the listings at wholesale.thelandgeek.com, and then we'll get more buyers register because you want to We want 50/50, and, uh, so please do that favor. You're wholesale buyers list for wholesale buyers? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Wholesale buyers list.

Yeah, yeah.

Not, not—

yeah.

All right, cool. Well, thanks for putting that tool together, Mark. That's another, another geeky tool, see, you've provided us with.

Yeah, and that was all Agentek engineering.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah.

All right, everybody, well, I'm excited for, uh next week's episode with Don the Land Thrasher. Be a lot of fun.

Is it— can that just be the title of the episode? Don the Land Thrasher?

Oh, I think so.

Yeah. I also— and on the topic of, of t-shirts, I want a t-shirt that's just black and white of Don Thrasher, and then it just says Thrasher with like the Metallica font across the front.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I think we should all wear those for the Derby Summit.

I think we should.

Yeah, amazing.

Uh, awesome. Well, thank you guys. As always, this is a lot of fun, and we'll see you, uh, next week. All right, all right, everybody.

Peace.