The real estate landscape is always shifting, and staying ahead means understanding key land market trends as they unfold. Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit break down the latest insights on where land buyers are heading in 2025 and how investors can adapt accordingly. From changing market hotspots to new property types gaining traction, they share practical strategies for navigating the evolving land market. Whether you are an experienced investor or just starting out, knowing these trends can help you make smarter and more profitable decisions.

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Navigating Land Market Trends: Key Strategies For 2025

Episode number 2,127 believe it or not. Jill and I are talking about navigating land market trends to stay ahead in 2025 right before we turn the camera on. I didn’t choose this topic. Our staff chooses them now which is good. I said to Jill, “I’m not exactly sure what new trends there are.” She said, “Are you kidding me? There are this and this.”

Thanks.

Experimenting With Mailing 3D Objects

To which I said, “I don’t have to talk.” All week this week, Jill and I are talking about staying ahead of the land market in 2025 spot-on for our episode. Each day on the show, we answer questions from our Land Academy member Discord forum. Take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular requests.

Wes wrote, “Before Land Academy, I was shoulder surfing info on how to wholesale homes. I decided I didn’t like the risk and the business model, but I do recall some podcast discussions about how they did mailers. Lots of similarities with land investing. I cannot recall who they used, but one podcast was about how they used a small Coke can as the envelope for an offer letter. What the heck? The 3D nature of this strategy was to deliver an almost 100% open rate. Does anyone have experience with this or no companies that allow 3D objects in the mail?

I know it’s not currently possible with offers to owners. I called to ask.” I love to know how this phone call went. Like, “What are you talking about?” “I’m not looking to send Coke cans, but cross-promote my other business and maximize my marketing spend. I wanted to experiment with some 3D objects. Any ideas on mailing companies who do this?” I got to ask the question. Is this about West’s other company or is it about doing it for land people? I know the land people. I don’t know the other companies.

Other companies ranching related. That’s all I know. Could be fed.

It could be sent a bale of hay. Send hay and a lasso or cow manure. I want you to get their attention.

The answer to this question is I want you to think. I want you to think about this. What do you open and what don’t you open? Who do you take seriously and who don’t you take seriously? I came up with what our envelope looks like, which is completely blank. It’s completely blank. It’s for this reason because I want a high open rate. If you don’t know what it is, you’re going to open it. To this day, I will open every letter that comes to us or Jill or Sapp will, if we don’t know what it is. If it says on the outside in big, bold, silly letters with some silly font that’s with a yellow highlighter and an exclamation point at the end, offer for your land in Mohave County, Arizona, I will put it in the shredder. I do not care.

Something cheesy. Pretend fonts, pretend yellow letters.

All of us have received all this stuff over the years. Even if you’re new, you’ve received stuff in the mail. It’s like, this is a gimmick. I don’t believe in gimmicks. I’m not going to partake in it. Plus when you price it, when you price doing this thing, you will never consider doing it ever again. You’re going to need 10,000 Coke cans.

I cannot even imagine how much that would cost.

I cannot either.

That would cost a lot of money to send out something like that. The bottom line is, it just sends the wrong message. I’m very comfortable with a full-color pizza coupon, I know what it is. That’s how they roll. I could tear off a little thing. I know I don’t need to tear it off and bring it in but I do sometimes I could. People are used to that. What we do is a professional letter to a guy that makes so much sense. When you get gimmicky and weird, you put a dollar in there, you put lipstick on it. I don’t know, silly stuff like that. My favorite is pretending it’s handwritten when we all know it’s not. That to me really sends the wrong message. If I get anything that I can tell is pretend handwritten, then I really do immediately shred it.

My final point is this. I never want to take away your creativity. Thinking about and bringing these things up is great. That’s part of what Land Academy is so we can all grow together. There’s a point where you can accept, especially if you’re new, the millions of mistakes that I’ve made. I’ve tried all this stuff. The fact is, it’s just blank. You’re going to get a very positive response rate on that. Can you measure it? No, you cannot but you can measure how many deals you do and you can measure how cheap it is. There’s nothing cheaper than this except postcards and postcards don’t work.

Our offers of orders came to me recently. I don’t know how this ended. They said there were so many people asking for postcards. When our staff comes to us and says, there’s this huge trend, this is what’s going on. It’s because of all the other schmoes out there that think that they can buy and sell land that has a land academy like a company and with no experience, start spouting some stuff off and postcards don’t work. They don’t. I shared a postcard. Is it cheap? Yeah. Are you going to get a deal? I doubt it. Keep the creativity flowing and really think to yourself what type of real estate. I cannot imagine sending a Coke can to a rancher. Not a personality tap out there that isn’t more direct than a rancher. I’m not going to be sure they’re going to appreciate that.

Keep the creativity flowing when it comes to handling real estate deals and offers. Share on X

The only thing I think of that makes sense is if you send tennis balls to a tennis player and golf balls to a golf player. Again, how much does all that cost?

I still think it’s like these aren’t the golf balls I want. This isn’t my brand.

I know.

Here’s an exception. Jill found a block in a small town where she wants to buy a house as a rental property because she thinks it’s cute and it’s going to double in price over the next five years. I would put something maybe that says outside of the envelope that says, “We want to buy your house and we live down the street. We live down the street, we want to buy another house for an investment.”

Would you still put it on the outside and just leave it on the inside and write that? That’s what I prefer.

In the end, we’d probably just send a blank envelope. I just don’t want to sound like an old man and take creativity.

I got to say though, truth time, in a recent one that we did that was just like that, don’t worry about it. With the response raise was overwhelming, we have a response rate on an 8,000-unit mailer that I have never seen. I have never seen a response rate like this. Every day I have like it’s more than twenty calls a day. It’s probably adding them all up. Our weekend is under this one right now. I’m probably averaging 40 responses a day between email calls, maybe more, between 40 and 50 a day of emails, calls, text messages, you name it. It’s nuts.

It’s profitable.

It’s good.

She’s a little burned out, I have to tell you.

I am.

There are a few times where she’s come to me. I’m not sure I approve of this.

Navigating Land Market Trends To Stay Ahead In 2025

I did not approve of that, by the way. That’s a whole nother show. That’s back to when your partner throws you to the wolves show. Our topic, Navigating Land Market Trends to Stay Ahead in 2025. This is the meat of the show, as Jack used to say. We were thinking about it. He’s like, “Jill, what do you think?” I’m like, “There are two glaringly obvious trends that if you don’t do these and you don’t pay attention to this and you’re not open to it, you will not survive and they are these.”

One is you’ve got to constantly be moving to different markets where it makes sense. For example, we all know Nashville was a big deal. Out of COVID, people were, there was a whole Nashville thing. It’s so cute, it’s loving. Even HGTV pivoted and started doing Nashville country out there renovation shows because it was hot. Guess what? It’s not, it’s still warm. It’s not cold, but it’s not hot like it was.

You have to always stay ahead of these markets and this is what this is why Jack is so good at what he does. This man spends probably an average of, I’m going to say one to two hours a day trolling areas in the country looking for where people are going and what they’re pivoting to. The perfect example we all know people are leaving Southern California they have to. There are a lot of people we all know what happened with the fires that they’re looking for places to go and where they are going to move.

They got to get their kids in school. You better believe he’s going to be ahead of all the stuff because he micromanages that. He’s watching, he has a laundry list of markets that he’s watching, days on the market and trends, and where the buyers are coming from. You’re going to be ahead of CoreLogic and ahead of DataTree reporting and Realtor and all that because that’s just who he is. He sees it coming before that.

I don’t want to interrupt you because I know you have a list, but watch what is pending. If this month there’s 13% of the market and some zip code is pending and next month based on and you can identify why it’s 18% then it goes to 40%, then it goes to 19%. That’s a lot of pending property for some reason, and you need to get involved in that market. That’s a trend. You need to watch where people are going. Trends could be areas.

The second thing I want to talk to you about that is so important, if you don’t do this, it could sink your ship. You have to be open to other property types. Not just I only do Rovac at land now do commercials because that’s something. I’ll look at AG that could be something but also really being open to this one had a barn on it. This one had a fallen down mobile on it. This one has a house on it.

You have to be buying and selling what people want. That’s it. Again, this is why as much as I love him, I don’t always get his full attention because he has his head on his phone and he’s not surfing social media. No, he’s looking for what they want right now. Where do they want it? What do they want? What are they spending? Where do we need to be sending mail to stay just ahead of it or catch it on the upswing?

Some of the parts of the country right now are frozen. If somebody lists a property that’s, in my opinion, undervalued in January or February, which is the bottom of the seasonality in the market in a place that’s usually not frozen, that has a real, like a summertime that is touristy, they need to sell a property. Very often, and we’ve done this for success recently.

We call the real estate agent and say, here’s our offer on the property, and it gets accepted. That is a way another creative way to buy property in the offseason. I don’t care if it’s a house or mobile home or piece of land, you’re not going to get it. You’re not thinking about the price if you listed in January in one of those markets, the exact opposite. There are places like Arizona and Florida. This is our tour season. You don’t want to course around markets like that very much. Trends.

That’s it. Trends. I was just talking to somebody to we did a coaching call. We can end on this side of a coaching call with a guy this week. We were talking about an area that’s cold and frozen right now. I said, “Look, if you really want to hit it home, go back to where you got that data when you did the red, yellow, and green test, you only did one month.” You’re only looking at a snapshot because as we’re recording this, it’s the end of January. I was looking at the December snapshot of the data. I said, “Go back and look because, in some of these zip codes, you can get 36 months back.”

Go look at the trend because what often happens in an area like this, if you really want to feel good, is that you buy now because the days on the market are good, but not great. Look what happens in May, June, and July with the days on the market, they go down. I said, “You could be in a situation where you’re going to come up for air in June and wish you had ten more properties.” He’s like, “I see, I get it.” That’s what you need to think about too.

We’re almost always like that in the springtime. I wish we had ten of those.

That went fast. Here you go.

Here’s another trend. I don’t know if you’re done. Are we done? It’s imperative for you to expand your product type if you’re already in this. If you’re very new to Land Academy, just stick to land for a year or so. Get your feet wet, do a few deals, and see if you are into it. It’s something you want to do as a career. If you’re already into it and you’re just joining Land Academy because you’ve been a successful real estate agent for years and you’re ready for a change or a successful business owner, I would very heavily consider if I were you sending mailers out to mobile homes and small rural houses.

They are not getting any mail and they are just as needy of a letter to exit their property as everybody else. They’re not just rural markets, but everywhere. Find your little niche. Some people love we just got done with a career path. Some people love urban properties that are undervalued, that are absolute disasters. They can renovate them. Some people like big, large pieces of property that are outside places like Jackson Hole. They’re really expensive, they can mark up to $100,000. Find your little niche and apply some of these logical common sense type trends. You’re going to do great.

Find your little niche and apply logical common sense for you to do great in real estate. Share on X

“Wait, Jack, how do I price those?” Check out HouseAcademy.com. Seriously, just so.

There’s a joint Jill and I own HouseAcademy.com. We don’t talk about it often.

It’s a little bit different.

Closing Words And Next Episode’s Topic

There’s a bunch of members and it’s very effective. We buy and sell houses all the time, Jill and I do. Join us tomorrow where we discuss why the number of blind offers you send directly ties to your success. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.

Important Link

• House Academy