Our Financial Sweet Spot

This is Episode 2099. Jill and I are talking about how we are scheduled to earn $2.5 million next year in 2025 by buying and selling real estate, and we are going to share exactly how our plan is to do it. It’s not the first time we have done it at all. It’s relatively consistent. I have broken it down, as always, into five daily short episodes, and we will do the best that we can to share the secret sauce that makes us different.

A lot of people are doing this now, and maybe to some degree, there are many Land Academy members that are doing this, making much more money than this, but this is, for whatever reason, where our sweet spot is financially and workload-wise. If we all sat down and said, “We need to make $10 million this year,” we could do it. It would be a lot more work, and I’m not sure my business partner is up for that.

No. I am and I’m not. Does that make sense? I like doing lesser deals and bigger deals. That’s where we land.

When To Expect Responses When Sending Mailers

They are easier. We are going to start the week off with how we identify and data-test markets that are conducive to flipping real estate. 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.

Chris and Chris, I know these two, wrote, “I’m wondering if others have experienced sending a mailer and getting zero responses when they are delivered. I trust the overall process. I’m trying to gauge if this is unique, common, seasonal, or something else. We triple-checked our mailers,” This is my first thought here too, “even after sending, to make sure our contact information was correct, to eliminate the possibility of operator error. Any feedback is appreciated.”

That was their first thing and then they came back and put another little thing in here.”Fun fact. Within fifteen minutes of posting this, we got our first call. I know the mail has hit. That said, I’m still curious about other experiences. It’s so soon.” That happens to everyone.

It takes two weeks.

Then they get it. Sometimes they sit on it. There’s usually a handful that’s originally like, “You know it hit because they are mad right away.” Here they come, but then it takes a little time. I’m going to argue that maybe the holidays. Maybe they are not even sure you are open. I’m serious. There are places that I wouldn’t call, like, “It’s Saturday before New Year’s. Maybe I won’t call them because they are probably not there.” We are here. We answer those calls, and if you have PATLive, they will answer those calls, but the sellers may not know that.

Here’s a normal course of a mailer. You get it out in between 10 and 14 days, and you will receive, like these people did that first call. It usually takes about three days to express anger. We call it the hate. The first wave. That’s how you know you price the mailer correctly, and everything’s great. The second wave will be some people saying, “I talked about it with my husband, and we do want to sell, but I’m not sure. I don’t think he’s going to sign off on the price,” some version of that. The third wave is signed offers and people calling and saying, “What’s the next step? Let’s get this thing done.” Hopefully, at the price that you identified.

This is a very timely question because, on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, Jill is going to talk about managing the massive inflow of sellers if you do everything right in the mailer. How to sift through the secret sauce to sift through these sellers a lot of them and see which ones are for real. Do I want to buy the property? Things like that.

There’s a fourth wave, which happens after 6 months have passed, and then there’s even a 5th wave, which we have experienced. I had one. We have decades of mailers that have gone out. Seriously, for many years we have been doing this. I still get people saying, “My parents passed. I found your letter. Do you still want this property?” It was over ten years since we mailed that area. I’m like, “Maybe. What do you have?”

These guys posted this in our Land Academy member Discord channel and one of the things that struck me was the response. It got a lot of responses. This is a pretty hot topic. His name is Aaron, and he is pretty active in the channel a super bright guy said, “It is possible and depending on where you sent the mail, potentially likely, that you sent mail,” to what he described as a desensitized market. This is not something that I have ever experienced. True and it’s a direct result of the sign of the times. There are so many people out there now who have joined Land Academy or peeled off and started their own Land Academy-type education entity that have no real experience compared to us.

There are a lot of what I call one-off mailers people join. They send one mail. They are not fully educated or into it, and so it tends to desensitize the market. One of those markets is North Carolina. North Carolina comes off as the shining star of the red-green-yellow test, which I will talk about. It’s over mail and people are desensitized.

When that happens, you can make this work for you. Please retain this In a market that’s heavily mailed or desensitized and this goes for houses too the people are apathetic and over-receiving offers on their land or houses until they need to sell it. If you happen to be the person who sent them the last mailer, the last offer on their property, they are going to pick up the phone and call it.

There’s desensitization, and maybe all those offers warmed that person up to the fact that now they are ready to sell. The moral of the story is here and this is what we do, this is a secret sauce deal. We talk about this all the time, not so much amongst ourselves, not so much on the show here. Send a lot of mail out. They are going to grab that offer, and if something happened the day earlier somebody lost their job or they are having a life event, they are going to call you.

How To Identify And Data-Test Markets

Jill’s going to talk about this. You are the person who’s answering the phone, and you are amazing at speaking with them, and meeting them where they are coming from. They are going to call you back. They are going to do the deal with you. Making it work for you is my point. This topic is how we identify and data test markets that are conducive to flipping real estate.

I’m going to pop in here for a moment and say this is one of the things that over the years people have come to us and said, “Thank you.” What we are talking about here is we don’t tell you where to mail. We will show you. This is what Jack’s going to talk about what triggers and what things we look at, what’s important, and how to pick an area all over the country for yourself. That’s one of the beautiful things that still happens in Land Academy.

We don't tell you where to mail, we show you. Share on X

We still sit down in our weekly Thursday member calls, and now and then there’s someone, I’m like, “I have never even heard of that county.” It’s the greatest thing on the planet. I wanted to kudos to you, and that’s one of the things that you have done very well over the years, sat back and said, “This is what would pique my interest, and this is how I would test it, and this is how I confirm that.” That’s what we are talking about. You can go off, find your little part of the country, your little corner of the world, and quietly kill it like a lot of people in Land Academy are doing.

That’s, for me, the most important piece here. It’s not, “Let’s all hit North Carolina because that’s stupid, or Tennessee, or Texas,” fill in the blank wherever we are all going right now. It was Florida for a while. You need to know what to look for. Even now it’s even more important. I know you are watching little dips and peaks in the market. You are like, “Now I can see what might be coming to that area, and I might be ready for it.”

People on the internet will say anything. They will sit and make statements that are obscene and ridiculous even when it comes to buying and selling real estate to get you to click on their crap. Jill and I started this company a long time ago, Land Academy, anyway and we don’t do that. We are not going to stoop to that level, and consequently, our group is nice and small, how we like it.

The Red, Green, And Yellow Test

If somebody is jumping up and down saying, this is how you do it, because they joined Land Academy months ago and started their group and saying, “You should mail North Carolina,” I bought and sold the property and made $10,000 run the other way. People don’t talk about, including Jill and me, exactly where to send mail. What we do talk about is, and what I’m going to talk about right now, identifying markets and then testing those markets to make sure you can flip real estate and make some money. I devised a long time ago, like everything in Land Academy, a system that had no name. It was something that I did to test the market. It’s known now as a red, green, yellow test, but in the end what happens is you take a look at 3 or 4 or a handful, let’s say, of statistics that identify a market as a place where property gets sold pretty quickly. There’s less property that’s being listed on the multiple listing service than there is being sold.

There’s always this entropy-type push to get property cycled through the market. When you find a market that’s got low days on the market, that’s an indication that the property sells pretty quickly. There are new lists to sell. There are a lot of properties that are being sold or more properties being sold than are listed, and a few other statistics, you have a pretty good idea from a data standpoint that it might be a good place to buy land and or houses. The only way you can effectively test this is to look at the relative market.

If you take one ZIP code and you test it, it’s pretty meaningless unless you test all the ZIP codes around it. That’s what I want you to do. Even if you are practicing, pull the data or research area of Realtor.com. You can pull the entire country, all 26,000 zip codes, and look at what’s happened in those markets in the most recent months, and you are going to very clearly see. If you are a Land Academy member, you already know this. I spent a whole module in the Land Academy education on how to test markets.

I want to pause here for a moment and tell you, that it’s scary the first time you are looking at this data. He’s flippantly talking about data. Let’s start with this girl. You are like, “I did what he said. I went to a Realtor. I went to the data section. I downloaded all the ZIP codes. I’m like, ‘I got 1.8 million lines of data.’” What are you doing?

It’s a million lines of data.

I want to say he’s like, “It’s so easy. You sort it and do it all.” If you are not into it, please get someone who is, or spend some time and prepare yourself. I want to have a little truth time and say, “This is not a small thing the way he’s talking about it, and this is why he’s so smart, and this is why we are so successful. He sits and looks at that million lines of data and knows how to make sense of it.

You can do what Jill did and just sleep with your business partner.

It’s easy. You don’t have to sleep with him.

No. I think she’s asleep with him. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. It’s up to you but just test for a reason.

You don’t have to go there, but it is cheaper. I will say that.

It’s faster and cheaper, and she didn’t have to learn any of this stuff.

I like to think you were also bringing something to the table.

That’s what I mean. Test it for a reason. You might like it. You might not.

Not in that department as far as the businesses.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Don’t be a wet noodle in any situation. Whatever you are thinking, it applies to that.

It’s not daunting if you have the right personality for it.

Data-testing is not daunting if you have the right personality for it. Share on X

That’s what I want to prepare people for. People will sit down and do this and go, “What? I broke my computer.” Don’t do it on a Mac.

If it’s daunting to you, you have two choices. Get a partner like Jill said, “Find somebody.” You can do it on Fiverr, or if it’s not daunting to you. That’s the reason we have so many engineers in STEM-related professions, people that are in those professions in our group because they are data people. I would argue, and Jill, we can talk about this in the next episode. It’s easier to hire a Jill than it is a Jack, but who knows?

If you grew up like Jack taught our kids with an Excel spreadsheet as your chore chart, you’ll do fine.

Is there another way?

No. Exactly. You’ll do great.

Join us next time as we are going to talk about how we execute a weekly mailer schedule to ensure a healthy acquisition pipeline. You want every day you want to be reviewing new acquisition candidates. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.