Five-Part Series Overview

This is the show.

In this episode, we are talking about pricing and sending your mailer. This is a five-part series from Monday through Friday. Monday, we talked about setting your land acquisition criteria and finding places to send mail. Tuesday, we’re talking about pricing and sending your land mailer. Wednesday, Jill will talk about creating a land deal out of a phone call that was based on the mailer. Thursday, we buy the property. Friday, we sell the property.

Part of the problem is we have a tendency to make this sound really easy like, “Anybody can do it.” You’re like, “If you guys can buy it for half price and sell it for whatever, then can’t anybody do that?” There are a lot of moving parts. We’re trying to explain this and paint the picture for you.

Is it easy?

Yes and no. I have to say that that way. Some parts of it come easily to me. 

We’re going to play this game. Is it easy for you to talk to sellers?

Yes.

Do you look forward to it?

Yes.

Why is that? 

I don’t know.

Be truthful.

What was the question?

I expect you to fire back questions for me. When you’re buying a property, any type of property, by the time that it’s under contract and the deal’s happening, what is your confidence level on a scale of 1 to 10?

It’s a 10.

Why is that?

It’s because I wouldn’t have bought it. I know.

Did you ever go to four years at real estate school to learn how to do this?

Not four years. You’re my real estate school.

Here’s my point. It’s easy for us. I don’t say this to excessively talk about Jill and me. I’m saying this to see if you identify with us or not or if you identify with success or not. Jill and I are great at this for two basic reasons. Number one, I believe we were born to do it, both of us. It’s in our souls. What we do all day is look at real estate, talk about it, and do deals. We like it.

It’s sometimes to a fault.

Number two, we have a ton of experience. Experience is not anything that you’re going to fast-track yourself on. There are things you can do to increase or decrease the amount of time that you have a high-level experience. The first biggest one is to tune in to a show like this and surround yourself with people who are already where you want to go or successful. That’s why I ask all these questions.

Parenting is so important. It’s such a huge part of every society from top to bottom anywhere around the world. There’s no education for it. There’s no manual. The best thing that you can do is to hang around people who have been relatively successful at it, which ends up being family members which is debatable. It’s debatable if your parents were good at parenting or not.

That’s what I was going to say. Don’t we all know sucky parents? The toddler is running the household. We all know people like that. That’s a little scary.

Alternative Methods To Contact Sellers

Exactly. To be really good at this, you have to have a real, honest, serious interest in it, first of all, and then you need some experience. Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

To be really good at land investing, you have to have a real, honest, serious interest in it, first of all, and then you need some experience. Share on X

Marcus wrote, “My wife and I are wondering if there are other ways to contact sellers besides direct mail. It seems so old-school in this day and age. Are texting, email, or phone calls possible?”

Marcus, I appreciate the question. This sentiment that you have, I had this when I started sending mail in 2000 and before. It is old-school but it’s effective. There are variances in effectiveness. We talked about this on the Land Academy Pro Call not long ago. When I started, I would send out 400 or 500 pieces of mail and buy 2 or 3 properties. There was nobody doing it back then.

Now, to buy 2 or 3 pieces of property that fit your acquisition criteria, especially the 1 that we talked about, it’s going to take you 7,000 units. The most advanced people, the ones that enter Career Path, which we’re starting, are throwing the number 6,000 or 7,000 units to get a really good deal. It is one that they can flip pretty easily and make a bunch of money on. The mail works.

Before I even sent mail out, I implemented faxing. That worked fantastically well. What happened is from a legal standpoint and a spam standpoint, there’s legislation put in place for contacting people. The technical term is solicitation. It’s not legal to contact people who you don’t have a prior relationship with via text, phone call, email, or any other way. You can do it on social media. You can do it by sending snail mail. Those are your options from a legal standpoint. How many phone calls do you get every day where people are contacting you when you don’t know who they are? The speed limit is 55. Do you want to drive 55 or do you want to drive 75?

What’s interesting about that is you brought up a really good point. If someone calls me and I don’t know what the number is, they don’t even get a chance. They’re not even going to get a chance to ask me that question versus if it’s in my mail, I’m going to open it. They get a chance. I’m serious.

Do you mean in the post office?

Yeah. If they mail me a letter, I will open it. They stand a chance of getting an offer in front of me. If an unrecognizable phone number pops in, they’re not even getting the chance. I don’t care how great the email is or the voicemail. I’m famous for not even listening to the voicemails. I’m like, “I don’t know who that is. I don’t know what the number is. I’m not even going to waste my time.”

We’re all sickened by all this.

They don’t get a chance. At least you get a chance to make an offer and get in front of that person.

Here’s what you’re really asking, and here’s what I know works from decades of doing this. If you send somebody an offer for their land and it’s priced relatively correctly, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes, you are going to either spark their interest or discuss them in general. Usually, about 70% are disgusted and 30% are interested. A very small percentage of that 30% is going to respond to your mailer.

If you send somebody an offer for their land and it's priced relatively correctly, you are going to either spark their interest or disgust them in general. Share on X

If you send them a well-placed text message that says, “I  want to let you know I sent you an offer for your land in XYZ county for some number,” that’s really specific. It’s not some spammed-out like, “To whom it may concern I’m selling XYZ.” It’s specific. You send them an email to the same effect. It’s like, “I haven’t heard from you. I am interested in buying a piece of property or at least talking about it with you.” Your success rate is going to be amazing.

Are you breaking the law? You are. If you get lazy and implement robo texting a robo email, so you’re sending out thousands of emails that are not personal, then you’re going to get in trouble. At least at the time of this airing, you will. At some point, that’s going to catch up with you. At the very least, you’re going to upset everybody, so what’s the point?

If you have a strategic plan and you send out a few thousand mailers, and you implement the tools that are out there that are available to you to send text messages, follow-ups, and emails after skip tracing and developing a great database, huge success is going to happen. That’s not what most people do. It’s a classic case of a couple of people that have screwed it up for people like us who want to do something good. That’s the real answer.

I don’t worry about it too much though. They won’t be around very long. They can spend a whole lot of money and try stuff. If it doesn’t work, then it works itself out.

Here’s the kicker. What’s next? How else are we going to contact each other? I cringed.

Do you remember for a while, it was a thing on Facebook? Several years ago, we were all into social media more than we are now. It has peaked, at least for me and the people I know. The thing was you would get the letter out and then you would buy these ads and have your land company logo pop up in that area or those groups so it’s on their minds like, “That’s the same person that sent me a letter,” kind of thing. I don’t know if that was effective or not, but I remember that was another way to touch on them.

Here’s the kicker, and I’ll end on this. We’ll move on to pricing. It costs thousands of dollars and you have to be pretty smart and educated with this topic specifically to send out mail. You have to have no intelligence in any way and no money to send out 5,000 text messages. That’s the problem, in my opinion. Anyone can do it overnight.

It costs thousands of dollars and you have to be pretty smart and educated to send out mail. Share on X

Pricing And Sending Your Land Mailer

This episode’s topic is pricing and sending your land mailer. We decided how much money we wanted to make and established an acquisition criteria based on that. We tested a bunch of markets to make sure that they can fulfill that goal of how much money we want to make and the basic deal we want to do. We’re sitting down. We’ve tested the ZIP codes. We’re going to pull the data for all the people who own land and those ZIP codes and price it. This is what you do. You use a tool. I would highly recommend DataTree. Jill and I are licensed providers. There are only a few out there that are worthy. DataTree is the best for us. You download the properties that do not have structures on them from DataTree. I’m not going to go into how to do that.

In the universe of properties in a ZIP code, there are properties that have office buildings on them, rural vacant land, and everything in between. It could be farmland, mobile homes, and all kinds of stuff. We want to remove all of that. In general, it is just land. You download the data from DataTree and go to work putting together a mailer.

In the Land Academy program, we give step-by-step directions on how to do this. I know it works because I’ve been doing it since before 2000. I’ve made countless mistakes and count them every single time. When we do a mailer, I do it a little bit differently to make it better. We haven’t said this in a long time on the show. Jill and I have been Land Academy members before. This isn’t something that we’re regurgitating because we joined Land Academy and started our own group and we’re talking about it. We created all this.

Do you know what’s great about that? I love it when people go back and dig and are like, “I realize you guys are the masters.” I’m like, “Yes.” They’re like, “Did you say Land Academy will be ten years old?” I’m like, “Yes. 2025 will be 10 years.” They’re like, “When did you guys start doing deals?” I’m like, “The ‘90s.”

It was the early ‘90s for me. It looks so different now than it did back then. You’ve got in a spreadsheet or a relational database, whichever makes more sense to you, thousands of records where you have the owners of land who may want to sell it. You need to price it. You can’t send them an offer and say, “Give me a call. I want to talk about buying your land.” If you do that, and we’ve done that in the past, you’ll get 1,000 meaningless phone calls.

The only way that I know of or the most accurate way that I know of to price a mailer is to look at, in that market, what is for sale and what has been sold in the last twelve months or so. From there, you can extrapolate a price per acre, a price per square foot, or whatever makes sense for the type of land that you’re selling. You’re going to establish what I call retail price per acre. From that retail price per acre, let’s say it’s $1,000. You will offer something much lower than the actual retail price. In our case, we go, in general, around 20%. $1,000 an acre becomes $200 an acre.

It’s very easy in a relational database or a spreadsheet to say, “Let’s multiply by 20% and then multiply by the acreage size.” If this makes sense to you, that’s great. If this stuff is making sense to you, you’re a real logical candidate to do this. You have a priced mailer. Jill and I established a company years ago called Offers2Owners. That’s all we do. We send your mailer out. If you want us to do all of this for you, we have a product called Concierge Data, which I personally utilize. I created it. The people that work there, I vetted. They do my mailers.

It’s like they don’t pick the areas or they don’t do that stuff, but going in, downloading the data, scrubbing the data, scraping the comps, and queuing it all up for you to go in and do your magic, they do that, which is great.

You then let it rip. You got yourself a mailer. In our partnership, I wipe my hands off that whole thing and Jill takes over. That leads me to this. Join us in the next episode where we discuss creating a land deal where there wasn’t one before. It is also known as how to answer the phone. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.