This is Episode 2125. Jill and I are talking about why land sellers ghost you after accepting an offer and what you should do about it.

Let me explain the situation. You send out your offers, you get a callback, you have a conversation, and you get all the information. The guy’s like, “I like your offer. This is going to work for me.” You find out whatever you need to find out about the property. You are like, “Let me do a little more due diligence. Can I call you tomorrow and we’ll put this all together? I think this is all going to work out great,” and then you call back. Let’s even say you have that conversation too. “Let’s do this.” You are timely to that point, and then you’re like, “Let me get this to whatever it is.” They are dark. At some point here, they stop taking your calls, they stop answering your emails and your texts. They are ghosting you. What do you do about it?

How To Fix The Red, Yellow, Green Test

The topic is called Staying Ahead of the Land Market in 2025. 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.

Ben wrote, “Hi guys, I’m starting and working through the red, yellow, green test. I’m inputting the data, and the numbers are coming out in the cells, but the cells don’t turn red yellow, or green. Is that something you have to do yourself to go in and highlight each cell the color you want?”

This is a common question also, Ben. I’m super glad you asked it. The red, green, yellow test is this and where it fits into the whole scheme is that we ask you to go fishing, some people call it trolling, around the internet to look for markets that make sense to mail, based on how much money you want to make. If you want to make $30,000 a deal, then you look for properties that you could logically buy for $30,000 and sell for $60,000 or $70,000 or some number like that. I won’t go into the details, but I go into it in a crazy amount of detail in Land Academy 3.0 in our program.

Once you do that, I ask you to then validate your thoughts. The eastern county on the east of Dallas might make sense for what I’m trying to do. I’m going to go seek out the data and drop it into what I call the red, green, and yellow tests. Ben is saying, “I did that. I copied and pasted the data back into Excel, into your red, green, and yellow tests. It didn’t generate any colors,” and here’s why.

When I designed Land Academy, I had a choice. I could make this an easy button. I could create what everybody now calls an app where you drop in a market and it says, “That’s going to work,” or I could make it so that it forces you to learn what’s happening and go through the thought process before you spend any real money on mail. That’s the reason I didn’t choose the easy button app way because I don’t want you to press an easy button, spend $10,000 sending out mail or whatever the numbers end up being for you, and say, “That’s not what I wanted at all.” This forces you to learn how to do this and to understand, and make good, well-educated decisions for yourself.

Ben drops the East Dallas information into the spreadsheet, and it generates the numbers. They are not colored, they are not red or yellow or green, but they are. What you have done is establish a relation to each of those ZIP codes. If you put twenty ZIP codes in there, it’s very glaringly obvious when you are relative to each other, which one has the lowest days on the market? Which one has the highest velocity of sales?

Why Land Sellers Ghost You After Accepting An Offer

When you are done with the red, green, yellow test, and you manually go in there and say, “This market’s fantastic, I’m going to make it green. In this market, I still have a bunch of questions. I’m going to make it yellow, and with these two ZIP codes, there’s no way. There’s way too much property for sale, and every time it gets listed, it doesn’t get sold. It’s got 100 days on the market. No way am I going to waste my time here because when I do eventually buy property, I can’t sell it.” I’m glad you asked this. It takes an extra 15 or 20 minutes to learn this entire process, in my opinion, for the rest of your life. You can use some version of it and get to understand those markets. Our topic is Why land sellers ghost you after accepting an offer and what you should do about it.

I explained what that was. The offers went out, you think everything’s going great. You think you are on the same page, you are like, “They like the offer. I’m waiting for them to send it to me, but I’m doing my due diligence anyway,” and then you call back, and now what happened?

Just like if you go on a date, maybe your second date, everything’s going great, and she ghosts you.

You think you have a date for Friday night and then all of a sudden, she’s not answering.

Meanwhile, she’s out on the internet, and everything’s great. She’s out with a girlfriend, she’s having fun.

Is she trolling because you’re watching?

She’s not interested in talking to you ever again, for no apparent reason.

This is not exactly apples to apples, I will say. The point is, what happened? It’s usually 1 of 2 things. Number one, they slept on it and they don’t need the dough, and they don’t want to sell, and they don’t need to sell after all. That’s option one. Option number two is they talked to somebody. Option number two is there’s a little too much time in there.

Somehow, they talked to their brother, they talked to their next-door neighbor who happens to be a real estate agent. They talked about it at church or the bar. Something like that. They talked about somebody, and they said, “For $12,000, I will buy that,” thing. Those are the things that usually happen. I want to say, “Was it something you could have done?” Maybe.

Here’s a couple of things you should do about this. Number one, you’ve got to act fast, especially in this environment and in markets. That’s what you are picking. You didn’t pick the slow market anyway because you wouldn’t have mailed it. If things are taking 300 days on the market on average, you wouldn’t have mailed it. Number one.

You know it’s a good area, not too hot. I don’t want you to go for properties where there’s a bidding war. Let’s go for good, solid markets where things are moving, or maybe they are going that fast. That’s not a bad thing too, and you try to find those deals in there. Acting as quickly as you can when you know you have a good one is key, number one.

Act quickly as soon as you can when you have a good land deal. Share on X

Get that signed purchase agreement in open escrow. That would have been something you could have done while you were doing your due diligence. Say, “Before we even hang up, let’s go ahead and have you sign that. Take a picture of it. You can do it with me on the phone and send it to me right now and I will get this going.”

That’s how you stop this.

That’s the number one thing that you can do. It has two parts. That’s 1, and 2, make sure this is a qualified seller. What are the reasons? This is a thing that we joke about because I’m always getting to the bottom and he is like, “Does the math work?” I’m like, “They are psychological,” because on my side of this, there is a psychological piece.

Number one is building a relationship with them where they trust me. That’s part of it. Know who I am and I’m going to follow through and do what I say, but number two is I have to have a conversation with them and find out why they are selling. What’s going on there? I need to make sure that it is, as best I can, going to go through.

It goes both ways. There’s a guy that needs the money and the guy that doesn’t need the money doesn’t care. You have to figure out if this person is a real seller. Am I solving a problem for them? That is the thing. If you go at this and uncover that, even though they are loaded, you are solving a problem for them because they are tired of getting the bills for this.

They don’t even care about it. They want it out of their life because someday no one’s going to want it in their world, let’s say. You are still solving a problem for them. It’s not money. It’s getting it off their plate, and one less thing to think about. When their state is someday settled, they’d rather have the money now and take a cruise with it or whatever it is. They don’t care. That’s the thing. Do you want to ask me some questions?

You are smashing it. People ghost for all kinds of reasons, but the fact is, back in the day, there was a long period when we would buy the property and we would record it ourselves because the deals were small. Buy for $500, sell for $1,500. As a deal machine, we were doing a lot of transactions like that. When somebody called back with a $500 or $1,000 piece of property that they have owned forever and they just can’t wait to get rid of it, we would do the entire transaction right there. This requires a mindset change if you have any type of real estate experience.

I thought you said state experience. I had to ask what the word was. Thank you.

You are very used to probably, depending on the culture that you come from or whatever, it’s taking a long time per transaction to get done. Some real estate agents will drag it out. Most title agents will drag it out. If you have those types of people involved in your transaction, it’s the time that kills deals. Let’s put it that way. You want to get it all done as fast as you can.

There’s something psychological about signing a document taking a picture of it and having the seller text it or email it immediately. In their head, now we are moving forward. I made a decision. I’m going to sell it. Especially if you do the magic that Jill has, which is you’ve befriended them, you’ve established a little bit of trust for 3 or 4 minutes first on the phone call. She knows if she wants to buy it. They want to sell it or they wouldn’t have called back to you. When all these things that cause a regular ghosting event happen, the switch in the seller’s head is, “I already sent it to Jill and she’s going to buy it and we are going to close next week, Tuesday.”

You brought up a great point too, that it could all be going smoothly and you are in escrow, and then they start ghosting people so you have to manage as well. You don’t want to go, “I got the signed purchase agreement, I opened the escrow, and now I’m walking away and working on the next one.” It could still happen way into this process. They could get freaked out by the documents. It could be taking too long. They lose their excitement. Your job is to manage them and keep them excited all the way through. They get their payment and you get the signed deed. That is when you can breathe, not when they are in escrow.

Your job is to manage the land sellers and keep them excited all the way through. Share on X

What do I do? Myself in the day and my staff now, we have a two times a week touch. It could be a simple phone call like, “Hi, I want to let you know, Mr. Jones, I talked to Susie at ABC Title and she said we are all good to close on the 23rd. I want to let you know that everything is going smoothly. It looks like nothing they need from you, and by the way, are you getting excited? How are you going to spend the money?” Something like that.

That’s all it takes, but twice a week. Even if you have nothing to say, check in on them. I’m not the seller. Do check in with your title agent. I want to make sure that they are moving forward because sometimes they are famous for emailing documents to a seller and then they move on to the next transaction. They don’t follow up with a phone call or a text to the seller or you like, “I threw it out there,” and they trust that it’s going to get done. Maybe it got in their junk or spam or they deleted it by accident, whatever it is, or they open it up and they are like, “What the hell is this,” or freaked out by it.

This is again, your phone call to the title and to the seller to check in on everything is so critical. The nice thing too is when you are on it and on top of things, you might be able to close early. There’s a nice little thing. “Susie. Do you have everything you need?” “We do.” “It sounds like we have got everything we need and we are five days away. Why don’t we close tomorrow? Can we do that?” “I can’t do it tomorrow, but I could do Friday.” “Fantastic. This is great. Let’s get the seller and the vault here. Everybody loves to get their money sooner and get this done.” “Sure. Works for me.” There you go.

Here’s my final point. Jill and I have countless stories of heartbreak when these kinds of things happen, and one deal in particular very quickly is a whole section of property, 640 acres of property in southern Arizona that is unharmed, that comes with water rights. A guy from a different country. I don’t know how he got a hold of it, but he called Jill back, this is a lot of years ago, and said, “I saw it. I’m happy to sell it.”

This is a dance-around-the-office deal for us. The property being farmed and ranched except this one section of property. He ended up ghosting her. We went pretty far down the path, and what you want to do, and we and Jill did this for a long time, is get the seller in a tickler system so you are contacting him, “I thought we went out. I thought we were going to do the deal.”

Whatever you are comfortable with, once or twice a week until it’s either dead or something happens. Hopefully, the seller will call you back and say, “I changed my mind,” so you can put it to bed. This never happens. I call the salesperson’s disease. There’s something about professional salespeople where follow-up phone calls don’t make them high like that initial phone call sale or that initial contact on a dealership floor. It’s all over the internet with sales managers. It’s their biggest complaint about actual salespeople.

If they are ghosting you, you should have a ghost file. That’s what the system that we have in our CRM is. There’s a number for that, and they should be in a system where you spend one morning on Thursday or something like that. You spend a half hour, or twenty minutes leaving messages for people and seeing if anybody, because chances are, they ghosted you because they got a better offer and they went down the path to somebody they didn’t complete. If the buyer didn’t complete the deal, you need to be in their face saying, “I will do it.” It happened to us. It’s very often.

Very true. I thought I had a different offer and they ghosted me. That can happen. I’m like, “I’m still right here. Let’s do it.” They were going to give me $20,000 and you are giving me $15,000. I’m right here ready to give you $15,000. Isn’t that better than nothing? I tell them this too. I’m wondering if they found out it wasn’t worth $20,000, that $20,000 was too much, and maybe that’s why they ghosted you. That could be. “Jill, you might be right there. I’m here with my checkbook open. Let’s go.”

Closing Words And Next Episode’s Topic

Join us next time where we discuss this topic, Is remailing land offers effective? You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.