This is episode number 2000. I can’t believe it. We are calling it Acre by Acre 2000 Episodes of Land Flipping. Jill and I will be covering the high and low points in the last ten years serving the land community, I guess. Moments we remember big land wins and amazing members and then ultimately Jill’s going to cover at the end the future of Land Academy.

What do you mean by low points? Hold on a moment. What are you talking about, low points?

I can summarize this whole thing like this. This is not anything that Jill and I anticipated. It’s been like a windy, curvy, switch-backy road.

No, for me, it’s been all peaches and cream skipping through a field of dandelions. That’s how this has been. No, but seriously, this has been an amazing ride. I’m going to start right now because I peeked ahead on the script here, and I know it’s not in there, but I have to remind everyone here that I’m not even supposed to be on this show. I was never intended to be. It was never the Land Academy Show, but it was never the Jack and Jill show. It was always Jack and the Land Academy Show.

Day one or not even day one. As we’re on episode zero, episode negative two or negative three, we’re figuring this out, testing this, and having guests, some of which showed up and some of which didn’t show up. Some of the shows that you recorded, we could air, and some of them we couldn’t air. It’s funny. We had one guy particularly said, “We can’t cut that much of this up. This is G-rated. It’s just not going to work.” Back in the beginning, I was just a filling guest.

When people didn’t show up, Jill would sit in. The numbers on the shows where she sat were two and three times the regular numbers and downloads.

That means three people. Two and three people.

Three or five instead of three. Both of our parents included. We’re going to cover some of the high and low points through this, but the Land Academy doesn’t look anything like what we intended when we started. We’ll cover the real reason for this in a few minutes. We were constantly and are constantly listening to what our members want. The changes that they want and how we can better serve the Land Community are what this has been. It ended up being through different products that we’ve released which we’ll talk about in a few minutes here.

I still think it’s funny. You could go back and dig if you want to. You can find some of the old original ones on our YouTube channel and our website, where you just call me at my desk and we talk for 45 minutes about the deals I’m doing.

They’re all on there. That’s a great point. Think of this. If you want to go back and laugh, they’re on the free portion of our website. You can go back to zero. You can’t do it on iTunes or wherever. It’s too much data storage.

YouTube and our website can do it.

I don’t think even YouTube can. I think you have to go back to it on our website. I know you do. Those are all audio-only, anyway.

Feel free to make a collage and laugh at Jill’s hairstyles or Jill’s hair color over the years.

I was thinking about that because we don’t look the same.

No bangs. No, we don’t. Exactly. That’s so good.

Most Memorable Moments

Let’s start with the moments we remember. I’m going to phrase this in the form of a question to Jill. What do you remember the most or the least or the most painful?

Starting just Land Academy? I remember the yellow pad. I remember having a yellow pad and when we finally decided, I wanted to stay around the holidays or something. I just thought for some reason, I’m thinking it was December 2014 because we launched in 2015. I remember getting a yellow pad out and drawing a circle.

We have it somewhere. I know I scanned it in and saved all this. In the middle of the bubble, I wrote Land Academy. We had all these little lines drawn out from the circle, going into what goes into doing a land deal. I just remember writing down ten big pieces to the puzzle of getting a land deal done. It was the beginning of sharing our whole business model.

In there, we would put down things like, I know what it was, “Soup to nuts.” I’ll get back to that in a second here. We would put down all the different things that went into having a business like ours. That was the whole point here. I remember every time we’d say, “Should we put that in?” “Do we talk about that?” “Do we cover this?” “How much detail do we go into this to share our business model with?” We had no idea how many people would be interested, but who we thought would be interested, we always said, “Let’s just put it in there.”

That was when you taught me the saying, “Soup to nuts.” True time. I didn’t know what soup to nuts was. It was so funny. He taught me that. For me, that was what this was about. In my mind, I was one-off teaching people, our customers at the time, people were buying land from us. You and I were one-off helping them and teaching them. Here’s where you get the data. Here’s what you do. Here’s how you could do this. Here’s how to do that. We just decided and said, “One by one, it’s going to take a long time. Let’s put something together and call it Land Academy.” You came up with Land Academy, shared it with the planet, and saw what happens.

Let’s take a few steps back. I’ve been buying and selling land since 1994. There was a huge real estate recession that happened between 2007 and I was very good at it. A huge recession that sunk what I created between 2007 and 2009. Enter Jill and Jill brought in what I didn’t realize at the time was a massive missing piece to all this, which was personality.

Personality, sales, and just a presence. This is long before Land Academy. I was forced to retool the business entirely and she got on the phone. I provided a bunch of real estate at very good prices for her to sell and that’s when this thing took off. Fast forward to 2014, we’re on vacation with Jill’s Yellow Pad. We created Land Academy because we ran out of money. We needed more money. We were buying so much property because Jill wasn’t as fantastic on the phone from a sales and acquisition standpoint.

We put this thing together to raise capital. We said, “What we’ll do? We’ll describe to the world whoever wants to listen to it or watch the program. This is how we buy property. If you’d like to get involved in funding with us and share in the profit, that’d be great because we have tons and tons of deals.” After that, it became something that I can’t describe. How would you describe that? I just want to cover the cost. It was a pretty big undertaking. I had to learn the Adobe suite. We didn’t hire anybody.

Yes, it was true. It’s us.

We bought a camera, then bought a DVD burner and put the program together. I had to learn about the Adobe suite of products so that I could take a screenshot of them.

I ordered them, and we lovingly created these beautiful binders together with an embossed Land Academy logo on them. That is how it was delivered. That was so funny back then. We did it all down to I’m going to the mailbox and I’m popping this in thing and printing out our shipping labels. We did it all.

I remember when I knew that we were doing it wrong when multiple new members would send us to say send us a note saying, “I want to be a part of this and I love the product, but I don’t have a DVD player.”

That was true. Remember there was one person that we bought a DVD player and gave it to him? I remember that. It’s $39. We bought a DVD player and sent it to him. “You got to be kidding me.” That was funny. That’s a good memory. What about you?

I was thinking back. We have lived in five places since we started Land Academy. That’s funny. What’s wrong with us? We’ve moved five times. That’s not counting the summers that we spent in RVs, plural.

True. We’ve got the starter RV out of the way.

Here’s Land Academy from the beginning until now, by the numbers. We’ve had thousands and thousands of members. We’ve had tens of thousands of just land deals. All land deals, Land Academy-wide. There’s no way for me to confirm that, but I know it’s true because we look at these land deals on our Thursday member call, which we’ve been doing for years. It’s been years and years, probably seven-plus years. We have a webinar once a week. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of ebook downloads, millions of podcast downloads, and about 5,000 hours of recorded and available content.

That’s a lot.

How does this make you feel? It makes me feel old and happy.

Tired. I was going to say we should not look as good as we look, but you be the judge. I’m sure you’ll say, “No, Jill. You look tired.” That’s fine.

Did you know that there’s a politician who gets elected and looks great and then four years later, “What happened to that guy?”

They aged twenty years. That’s probably us. That’s good. Thank goodness for hair color.

Big Land Wins

Let’s move on from moments that we remember to big land wins. We’ve completed again by numbers over 1,000 deals since we started Land Academy in 2014 and over 16,000 since I started in 1994. She’s the average land deal for us right now. We generally will buy a piece of property for less than $100,000. Let’s say between $60,000 to $90,000 and we’ll sell it for between $150,000 and $350,000.

That’s the sweet spot now, but it never was. It changes all the time. There was a time when we started the first program. We’re up to Land Academy 3.0 now, but the first program was called Cashflow from Land. We were still buying real small properties that were inexpensive and selling them on terms, which we’ve long moved on from. Not because it’s a bad model. It’s just we saw a better opportunity elsewhere. That’s a recurring theme at Land Academy. We continually grow, change and adjust to the market.

A recurring theme at Land Academy is we continually grow, change and adjust to the market. Share on X

True. Let’s pause on that for a second because that’s a bigger deal than I think gets talked about. You figured this whole thing out. I want to back up. This is all in his head. You didn’t have a mentor. You didn’t have an education program. You had nobody to learn this from. You figured that on your own. Even I had you. I had a mentor and an education, if you will, which was me at your desk and you showing me what to do.

Not on the data side, you always kept on that, but on the sales side, “Here’s how we run the properties through the system. Go with it.” “I got this.” I would post my property and all that good stuff back then.  Together, we have 15 years of full-time transaction history and experience, not counting the 15 years before that, which you created.

Back to what you were saying about pivoting and growing and learning. That’s who we are and you know it. Those of you who have been reading from day one, you know who you are and I know who you are. You will say, “Wait a minute, I remember when you hated real estate agents, now you love them, and now you hate them again, and now you love them.” There’s all different things that we’ve done.

Our data sources have changed. This has changed. I got tired of eating my words, but I’m good at it now. We continue to do that and we will continue to do that. This is episode 2000, by the way. Mic drop. You’ll hear more at the end here of this show. This is like, “Hold on. We are positioning ourselves to do even more and greater things with you.

You’re right. I’m glad we paused on this because adjusting to your environment is a theme that should be happening in life, not just in business, but in relationships, all of it. If you’ve ever had children, you don’t treat a two-year-old the way you do a 17-year-old. You just don’t as a parent. Why should your business be any different?

Adjusting to your environment is a theme that should be happening in life, not just in business. Share on X

The deals that we were doing 10 years or 20 years ago completely don’t even look the same at all. We’re going to talk about some of the big land winds that we had here in a minute. Had those big land win opportunities come across our field of vision, I would have passed on that. Largely because Jill’s involved and she knows now. I’ve had fifteen years to work with her.

There’s another set of partnership eyes on the types of deals that we do that we would have passed on because I wouldn’t know where to start from a sell side. I know Jill and I can buy and fund anything now because of Land Academy. We can fund any deal. We can fund it and we can receive funding. I think it’s almost infinite. The reason why we started Land Academy is to get a group of people together to have a bunch of money, so we’re better together. That is just a win right there.

True. Exactly. You had some good notes here about some of the past and some of the transactions you used to do. That’s pretty good there.

For me, I always remember the first land deal and the most recent land deal. The first deal I ever did, I was on eBay, sitting at my coffee table in Cincinnati. I was one of the vice presidents of the Deaconess Healthcare System and I hated it. I got onto eBay and didn’t know you could buy property. Thirty or 40 minutes later, I bought 80 acres in Arizona for around eight to ten thousand dollars. I cleaned the posting up.

I never went to Arizona and never thought about it. Made the posting look a lot better. Added a lot of information after I researched it online. Got on the phone with the county and the whole thing and resold it for $16,000 or $20,000. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I remember receiving the payment for that.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Receiving the credit card payment, processing credit cards, and the check clearing and me saying to myself, “That’s it. This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life. All I need to do is institutionalize buying inexpensive property or undervalued property. That hasn’t changed. That is exactly what we do now. That’s what happened.

I sat up and quit that job, moved back to Arizona, and went on a quest, a physical, and what ended up happening was I would travel around the country at tax sales and tax deed sales, buy property, and resell it online. This was before Jill and I joined forces. There were some real memorable deals during then.

I bought a big property release, an escrow lease property in Grant’s, New Mexico. We made a couple million bucks. That’s a memorable big win-win. I bought several hundred properties close to the Grand Canyon, which, by law back then, we had to sell on six-packs for a bunch of reasons. I made $800,000 or $900,000 on that. Jill and I did a tax deed deal right in the middle of the recession, and we hit this tax sale at the right time and bought 1,400 properties.

We had to wait. We were sitting in the county offices waiting for an hour or two. I can’t remember how long it was while they printed out the deeds and they sent us home with a big stack, like a ream of paper, with all these APNs. I said, “This is hilarious.”

I remember driving home, stopping to get a nice tea and I said, “It’s probably about the time you should quit your job.”

You did. I didn’t get it at the time. I remember you looking at me. You’re like driving. You’re like looking at me saying, “You don’t realize. This is it.” I said, “Okay, I got this.”

We paid $11 an APM. We ended up selling those for over $1,000 each.

You can’t calculate those numbers.

I can calculate it in my head like everyone else.

That was insane.

From there, what was interesting happened and this is a great example of the dynamic between Jill and me as professional partners. She said, “Are there other deals out there like this?” This is her sales mind at work because I’m over here doing all the accounting. I said, Yes, we should wholesale some of these properties out and suck some cash out of this so we can go buy all these other deals that we have on deck.

She said, “Can you just make a list of the top ten people that you think would buy these?” She did and that launched. This was around 2009-ish or 2010, maybe. Launched what would be the next several years of how we bought and sold land. We would buy land. She built an email list of probably 20 or 30 people. I would put a spreadsheet together with prices and APNs, the most basic thing you can imagine. Not maps. No, there were no real copier pros at all.

They’re other investors, they’re pros, they don’t need that.

These are people who were selling stuff all over the country and online, on terms of what God knows what they were doing with it. My job became very easy. I had to just do what I knew how to do, which was either tax sales or find in the little corners of places where I knew where to buy back inexpensive land and create a spreadsheet for Jill.

She then would distribute it, take the phone calls, and process the deeds. That’s a huge win, that milestone. That’s a fantastic example of just changing with the times, improving ten times the revenue. I was out of business because of the recession, but she came in and breathed new life into the whole thing.

Let’s define out of business. We had a lot of property but just not a lot of gas.

We had a ton of property and no sales because it was me. She came in and sifted through. We had tons of real estate. Tons of free and clear real estate that was sitting there and no way to sell it. Cause eBay was done, too. Single point of failure.

Totally. Over the years, we have pivoted, grown, and moved. Do you know what’s funny? You remember the deals. Did you want to?

Just to finish the thought, and then I’m sure you have land wins, too. We did a transaction that I would have passed on. The deal came in, and we bought it. I can’t remember where it was. I think it was Oregon, but I am not sure. We paid about $140,000 and sold it for $280,000.

It was an easy double.

That’s always been our thing. Try to double it and now it’s try to double it and make $100,000. If we end up doing 40 deals a year at $100,000, you don’t need a calculator for that, either. I try to make $2.5 million in profit in our land-buying endeavor here. It ends up working out. That was a great example. I’m just about done with our 2023 tax return and I can tell you it all worked. I don’t remember the deals anymore. I know the money. I think you know the people.

Do you know what’s funny? It’s even different for me now. Someone once told me this. Don’t think about this. Don’t think about how pretty it is. Don’t think about where it is. Don’t think about the attributes. Don’t get hung up on these. Think about all of these properties as a line item on a spreadsheet. I was almost like a general giving a soldier a speech and I’m like, “Noted.”

I remembered that. I’d stop paying attention. If you want to ask me what I closed on last week, I can’t tell you. I have to go look. I cannot remember. I moved on. What I do remember, though, over the years, is I pay way more attention to our deals. I can remember some of the deals that are going on right now. I’m not going to share them but some good deals are in the works right now that our community is doing.

More importantly, our members and their lives, and all of you who have shared with me we call it the Quitters Club. When you’re quitting your day job and have sent us notes over the years, I remember that. That’s what I pick because that’s life-changing. “My wife was able to retire.” “We don’t have to go back to work.” “I quit my job, fill in the blank.” I love all of that. That’s the stuff that I remember. Those are some of my big wins more than the deals.

The name of this segment is called Big Land Wins, but there have been other wins now. I’ve realized that I like to instruct. We directly keep in touch with our membership group every single week on a Thursday call and Discord on a minute-by-minute basis. We know what deals they’re doing. We know what makes sense to them. Jill went through a whole phase in Land Academy a few years ago called Adding a Zero. You’re going to buy it for $10,000 and sell it for $80,000. Just add a zero or add a one in front of it.

What was even to be before that was because a lot of people were hung up with buying for $1,000 and selling for $8,000. That was a big hangup for a lot of people. I said, “Knock it off.” Especially with our deal funding now, you don’t have to buy for $1,000 because that’s all that you have. Buy for $10,000. Make it count.

The deal funding was a massive pivotal point for our members than us. It was pivotal for us because we started Land Academy, and we immediately had 4 or 5 people throwing money at us. More money than we needed. We then realized that there are a lot of other people that want to be involved in this. We did that and then at some point several years ago, we came up with LandFunding.com. Now, we fund people’s deals. We’re very choosy, so we’re almost sure that if we fund it, we’re all going to do pretty well.

If I sign off on it, it’s going to be good. We’re going to be okay. Either way, it’s my money so don’t worry about it. Best use of the case. Yes, it’s awesome.

Amazing Members

The next segment is our amazing members. Without naming names yet, they all have the same profile or MO. Imagine you take a college course and there are 30 people in the class and the instructor is somebody with gray hair. If you ask it, and I’ve done this with college professors, “What are the students that you enjoy teaching or get out of?”

They will always say as some version of this, “The people that actually got something out of the program and then went and used it in some different way that I never anticipated.” The same situation happens here. My favorite members are the ones who take this basic concept of finding and trolling for real estate, which looks like it might be a good place to buy undervalued land and resell it for more.

Send people offers and then process the deal on the sell side. They see something else in there that no one’s seen, including me. These 80-acre properties can be subdivided or split into fill-in-the-blank, or I noticed there’s a ton of variance in a mobile home for sale and sold pricing. They take this concept of direct mail offers and make it their own or they make their spreadsheets that we provide their own. It just takes on this life of its own and then we hear from them six months later and they’ll say, “We don’t need to be members anymore.”

It’s not that. They’re like funding other people’s deals. That’s the thing that happens. That’s what I see. The progression. Some people will come in and they need the education, “Got it.” The funding, “Got it.” After a little while, that’s going great and I’ll say, “Let’s do some more deals.” “No, thank you, Jill. I don’t need your funding anymore I can afford to do this myself. I’m not splitting any profits.” “Noted.” Wait six months and now they’re the bank for somebody else.

I know that there are people who have hung out at Land Academy for a very long time, and some even just come to Land Academy because they know how smart this group is. How strategic and focused we are. We’re using data and making sure we make really smart decisions. People love to fund our deals and love to work with us.

I remember years ago, too, when we were first starting, and I’d have my peers at the time. Other investors were doing deals together. I’m doing deals over here, and they’re doing deals over there. We all knew who each other was. I remember what they said, “I bought a property off one of your members. I know exactly that this person came from you.” I responded, “That’s great.” That’s cool. They actually would thank me. They said, “Thank you for teaching the planet how to do a deal and what all this stuff means and things like that.”That was good.

Over the years, we’ve had people reach out to us and say, “I’m in a position in life where I’m happy to help you guys with Land Academy because it’s working out for me. I’d love to take on partners or whatever their motivation for that is. I have to mention Kevin Farrell. He was with us for years.

He’s still with us.

He doesn’t, but he’s not a moderator. Kevin stepped up. He was directly involved in the live events that we had in the distant past. He was a moderator on all of the community sites that we’ve created over the years, the most recent one, which is used now as a version of Discord. He was a moderator and he also ended up being a consultant. 

He did some coaching.

Coaching and consulting paid for a half hour and the response we got from people who talked to Kevin was, “He cleared up chapter 7.” “That’s the push I needed to get the mail out the door on and on and on.” Same thing right now with Carl and Samantha Laetis. They both showed up. They’re brand new members. They’re career path graduates. They’re giving it their all. They’re funding people’s deals, and it’s been a pleasure working with them.

I was going to say that what I noticed that you just touched on here is people can’t have, over the years, realize, “There’s a lot of giving going on in this group.” “There’s a lot of abundance in this group.” There’s more help than anything. I think that’s what you’re speaking about. Thank you for sharing all that. “I can’t believe you shared all that with me. You just gave me all your secrets and everything. I’m like, “Awesome. Please help us and pay it forward.” That’s what’s going on.

I remember a huge compliment. Somebody said to me that you guys have created what social media is supposed to be.

It’s nice to help each other and not cut people down. There’s abundance. There’s enough property to go around. Remember at the beginning? This is a good one. We used to get this all the time, but now we don’t get it anymore. “Aren’t you guys nuts for sharing your business model? Didn’t you just create a competition for you?”

To which I say, “I understand your thoughts, and don’t think we didn’t talk about that.” Seriously, before we sat down and even put Land Academy together, we did say, “Are we nuts for teaching other people to do what we do? That could create competition in the land buying and selling space.” We did the math and trust me, there’s enough property to go around. I still don’t worry about it.

It's nice to help each other and not cut people down. There's abundance. There's enough property to go around. Share on X

There are 150 million pieces of property in this country.

I can’t touch them all.

There are almost 2 million licensed real estate agents in this world, all scrambling to try to get the same listings. There are probably less than 800, maybe 1,000 people buying and selling land actively like we are.

True. I want to talk about amazing members on my side of the sheet here. Who do I recall and remember and get excited about? All the strong women in Land Academy. I remember early on my Bae and Chelsea from a while ago, who’s back and Bae’s been with us for quite some time. In the beginning, there were very few women investors, and then it transitioned to more couples coming in. The men would join Land Academy and get the wives involved.

I remember, in particular, buying Land Academy and handing it to his wife. “If you don’t want to go back to work, this is a way you can not go back to work and be home with the kids.” I thought, “This is smart.” You’re good. Watch the women get into this and take off. Thank you, Bae, Chelsea, Michelle, Sam, and Shannon. I’ve got some new ones coming up through the ranks right now. I have a Tara and a Zane that I’m keeping an eye on. I’m hearing about you guys and excited to see what deals you put together.

As far as it is to take this little trip down memory lane. I’ve tried to live my life by this saying, “You’re only as good as the last great thing you’ve done.” I believe that. It’s so great we did all this. Congratulations, Jack. You started in 1994. You did thousands and thousands of deals and you and Jill made it together. Congratulations.

You’re still together.

Future Of Land Academy

Yes, how does this affect me and what’s going to happen next? This brings us to our final segment called The Future of Land Academy, which is my favorite.  This is what I want to talk about. Both of us are looking forward. I’m not patting myself on the back about past tax returns. As I said earlier, all the products have been developed in response to members’ requests.

From the very first product, people were asking us that long before the Land Academy was even a thing. How do you guys consistently buy cheap land? We would tell them, we wouldn’t hold it back. “This is what we do.” I didn’t give anybody the seller’s phone numbers but we told them the concept.

This is where you go to get the data. That kind of a thing.

Then it happened so much because Jill was selling so much property to the people by email and verbally, “Can you teach us?” That started happening. We said, “Sure, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you give me this piece of property that we know you own, and then we’ll all sit down for a few hours and I’ll answer your questions.” That’s how it started.

Then that happened more and more. Finally, Jill and I sat down. This is where the yellow pad came in. We were actually on vacation. “Why don’t we just create a program so we don’t have to do this individually, one-on-one all the time? I remember saying this to Jill, “If we make $5,000 extra a month, it’ll cover all the costs and the grief and the labor and all of it. We’ll go on our way.” That was the whole goal of Land Academy, to generate $5,000 to cover costs. Here we are.

I will never forget I launched it early. I was doing my little social media posts, my little pictures, and all the little stuff on Facebook. Just did what I thought and then I opened up we had a checkout. You made the website and had a little checkout page. I sent a little email blast and here you all came, “What just happened?” It was so good.

My point is those products were made at the request of our regular land-buying customers, and I remember launching the Land Academy website. It was LandAcademy.org back then because we couldn’t afford the dot com. There were all these questions, so they got these DVDs. They watched them and they emailed us question after question. Jill said that we need a place on the internet where everybody can communicate with each other and help each other. Not just get help from us. She said, “I’m going on vacation.” This is all a true story. I said, “Alright.” She was gone for 4 or 5 days.

It’s a weekend. You gave me some tasks and said, “I’m going to do this, but you have to come back with three blogs. I had to write three blogs. I said, “Deal.”

Did you write them?

Yes, I had to. That was my assignment. I remember that.

She makes it sound like a one-way street.

No, but you were doing something and I was doing something.

Make no mistake, I work for Jill. Let’s just be clear on that. I created this website called Success Plant. It was a WordPress plugin. It just immediately took off. All these products, with a few exceptions, which I’ll mention in a minute, took off. We had a free section and a paid section. Everybody was within the Land Academy.

That’s when we got to hear or watch the hangups where people were fumbling, and one of them was data. Can you believe how much this RealQuest data costs? Then they started saying, “Maybe we should put together a group where we know we can buy this much data every month.” Jill came up with, “Let’s just have a membership.”

We went to Irvine and sat down. RealQuest at the time. We sat down with one of the directors or vice presidents of RealQuest and they said, “You two are out of your mind. We will never resell data to you. You guys are land investors and I get it, but we were for oil and gas companies and all that. Enter Jill. We came out of there with a drafted agreement on how we can provide low-cost data in RealQuest. Now it’s DataTree. We did the same thing with DataTree. A lot easier with DataTree because they were looking at our usage in RealQuest. That became the data situation. I can keep going.

That was fun. I wonder what happened to that guy. We had a good time.

Then we got frustrated with attempting to find or do our mailers that Jill and I started offering to owners. That was pivotal, too, because that’s all we do. Offers2Owners.com only processes offers for us and members and people in the business. We got good at it. This is a few years ago.

It brought the cost down. That was the whole thing. We needed to have a place where people were getting hung up on the mail merge. That was one of our first products. We’ll merge the mail for you, and we can bring the cost down. One by one, people were trying to figure out how to save money, including a sweet member who’s been with us for this whole time, too. Whose first initial is L. He has his big printer in his garage, thinking that that would work and then realizing that’s way too expensive.

By the way, I did that.

Yes, I know, but we turned it into a company now, not like a one-off. For us, one-off. You can’t one-off and do your mail. It won’t work financially.

You can’t one-off and get your data.

You don’t have a backup and the printer doesn’t work and your envelopes don’t show up and all of that. That doesn’t work.

Getting your data and doing your mail will end in tears. It’ll end in bankruptcy and tears. I know this because that’s what happened to us. Minus the bankruptcy, but there are a lot of tears putting this stuff together. We started a company that’s still around called Deed Perfect because we noticed that people are having trouble doing their deeds.

Getting your data and doing your mail will end in tears. It'll end in bankruptcy and tears. Share on X

You plow in your information and it kicks out a deed. For a very long time, our transaction coordinator was using Deed Perfect to do our deeds. I don’t even know that. She said that recently. We provided a place to sell land called LandPin.com. It’s not used so much now anymore because we use real estate agents for much higher valued real estate deals on the sell side.

We started LandFunding.com and LandTank.com. Both of those are places where, if you need to get a deal funded, you can put it in there. We started HouseAcademy.com. and House Tank. Jill and I consistently still buy houses and because of the economy, we will get back to that. Not exclusively, it’ll never replace land, but it’s a good product type that we can add to what we do. We started our career path which is our high-end class. Let’s say an eight-week class, like a mastermind group for people where it’s their career. They’re not just horsing around; they’ve passed all that and are really serious.

“I’m done making $200,000 a year. I want to make that $2 million a year.” “Okay.”

These are all the result of us getting floods of email requests, “How do I do this?” Finally, the answer is that you should take a career path, and all these things will be answered. We have a program now as a result of again, and this is my final product. It’s not a conclusive list of all of our products, but it is because people in career paths were being introduced to the people in Offers to Owners.

Who put the mailers together and introduced them to our transaction coordinator team, the people who do our deals? Their response was, “Can I hire them?” “Why can’t they be my staff?” We started Land Academy Pro. Now you can use our staff and our people to send the mail. Just the same people that Jill and I used to buy and sell property in this very small group.

That’s a good recap. There are some other things that we don’t need to bring up that didn’t work out over the years. There are several sites. If you go back and dig, you’ll wonder what happened to them. That’s part of why you’re here, too. We’re going to pivot. This is our thing. This has been our gig for 30 years for you, and 15 years for me.

We’re not going anywhere, and we’re even better at pivoting, spotting these things, and staying ahead of them. For me, right now, my big exciting thing is LandGals.com. There’s going to be a live event in the works. I’ve got new program stuff in the works. I’ve got special breakout things I’m already doing right now just within the Land Academy community for my sweet ladies’ group because you guys are figuring it out and I want to help you. Our theme has been retiring your husband and I love that. We have had people do that, and it’s so great.

Who knows what’s next? I can tell you we’re coming into a flat real estate market now. For the first time in many years, professionals are reading their opinions about what’s going to happen with real estate. A lot of them say that nothing’s going to crash like it did the last time, but it’s certainly flattening. There’s a shift in high-demand real estate in urban areas to rural areas, which is our specialization.

Why not? We will be buying and selling more rural real estate than we ever have and so will our members. If that becomes some type of special product, then I’m sure it will. Then we’ll get involved in that. Forever, people have been asking us to pool revenue and our pool investment capital and do syndications. I kept that in my back pocket, but we’ll see.

We’re too good at what we do to stop. Honestly, I’m going to end it on this for me. As I said, we’re too good at this to stop. Why would I? We have built this amazing community that is just taking over the world here and I’m pretty proud of them. We have so many good ideas and things. The lifestyle that we can do all this. We can take our RV and be anywhere. We’ve been showing you how to do this too.

Wherever you are in your investment journey, if this is something you’re just thinking about, you’re not too late. I’m going to say you came in at the right time. No matter where you’re coming in, it’s the right time because we’ve learned a lot and solved a lot. We’ve got new things going forward, and that’s who we are. Maybe when I’m 90 and I can’t talk on the phone, but by then when I’m 90 and it’s hard to talk on the phone, watch me still get some good deals. It will happen. It is in your soul.

We’re here to help you and I’m excited for what’s to come. I have to share one little thing too before you end this. I know you have a wrap-up, too. One of our team members sent us the sweetest celebration personalized M&M thing. I just wanted to thank Erin for this. It has our faces on it. I can’t show you, but the staff’s all laughing. “I don’t know if I can eat an M&M with your face on it.” I bet you can.

I bet if you try hard. Maybe put it under the sole of your shirt.

Our faces and “Congrats on 2000.” We are going to be celebrating tonight. Not with M&Ms, but with a real bottle. Thanks to the Land Academy members for this and our staff. Also, to you.

Thank you, Jil.

This is your brainchild.

Do you think we’ll do episode 3,000 someday?

Yes, maybe 4,000 and 5,000.

I do, too. If you ask me, around episode 1,000, I would have said, “I don’t know. It’s a lot of work.”

I think it is episode 10.

On Episode 10, I said there would be no Episode 11. Join us next Wednesday for episode number 2001, You Are Not Alone in Your Real Estate Ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.