The Ever-Present Role Of Technology In Land Investing

This is Episode 2,131. Jill and I are talking about how technology is changing the future of land investing. I did not write this title. If I did write it, this is what it would be, “How technology is always ever and always will be ever present changing the future of land investing.” Jill and I are going to talk about when we started, the technology that was available to us, and how we made decisions about sending mail and analyzing the properties when they came back. If you think we are old now, wait a few minutes. You are going to realize. Grandma and grandpa here. It’s land research week.

Wait a minute. I don’t think I’m going to go with grandma. Someday when we have kids, I don’t think I’m going to go with that name. What are you going to go with? Have you thought about it?

That’s a good point. I don’t know.

It’s not going to be grandma.

The whole guy over there. What’s wrong with him? He’s done. He’s lost faith in humanity.

Let’s see here. I do. It’s funny. Along those lines, I do know some people that call their Grandpa Grumpy. He was grumpy. That was his. I don’t know grandma and Grumpy. That was them. I don’t think we should be Grandma and Grumpy, and I don’t know if Pop Pop’s a good one.

Here’s my theory about why old people behave how they do. A person who’s 30 years old or 20 years old has had, this is a data description, X amount of experiences. A person who’s 30 years old has had Y amount. If they are a salesperson, they have had way more than that it’s Y plus something. 40 years old Z, and then 50. The person who’s 60 years old or 70 years old, who has had so much more experience and so many more opportunities to be let down, disappointed, and angry about stuff than a 20-year-old. A twenty-year-old is still running around saying, “Are you kidding me? I can smash this. I’m awesome.” 70-year-olds running around saying, I tried that, and I was let down 42,000 times. This is why Jill and I do well together because her glass is half full and mine’s half empty.

That’s okay. I wasn’t half paying attention. I’m still thinking about my name.

What is it?

I might go with this one. My mom wanted to be Grandmom. That got smooshed together, and so she’s Gum. Maybe I could be Gum 2.0. Is that a good one? No. I got to figure out something.

Maybe we draw an identity, and you and your mom are not all not very similar.

I’m not a Meemaw. I know that one. No. There’s going to be a name. We’ll figure it out.

How about Grandpa Jack? I’m good with that.

If you are in this industry at all, spreadsheets are a great mechanical way to figure things out with serious limits. Share on X

Grandpa Jack. Grandma Jill. I know. It doesn’t have a good ring to it. I will get it.

You have a long time to figure it out.

I do. No one is anywhere close.

Our children are not interested in reproducing at this time.

Anytime in the near future.

I don’t know if that’s a win for us or not. I see it as a huge win.

I do.

If they are out kicking babies out, I would be concerned about that.

It would be expensive. This is nice and

It is irresponsible.

All the toys we have because we’d have to buy any grandkids anything.

This is awful. I’m going to stop talking about this.

That’s true.

You have to learn how to drive a stick before you can truly enjoy an automatic transmission. Share on X

Let’s talk about data or something.

Back to the topic.

Automating The Land Investing Process

Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord forum. Take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

West wrote, “I’m still going through version 3.0 of the Land Academy program. My plan is to do the work manually for 2 to 3 deals just to ensure I know the nuts and bolts. However, my experience is as a technologist engineer, so my data engineering brain wants to automate much of the trolling and lookup aspects of this. It’s not the best use of my time, however, so I will refrain, but I’m curious if the Land Academy community knows or has created tools or automations to help make this process faster getting the good data, finding ZIP codes that work within the red-yellow-green test with AI advance I imagine this should be very doable, even manipulating a few Excel files together.”

I love this question. My job at Land Academy, not my real job. My real job is to buy and sell land and keep Jill happy, which takes about 90 hours a week all that.

Eighty-nine percent goes to land.

I wanted to see if you listened.

You do the math.

She listens about half the time during the show. She listens 100% of the time while she’s talking and about 1% of the time while I’m talking.

That’s true.

My job in Land Academy as an instructor, and hopefully a positive influence on people who want to buy and sell land and generally become entrepreneurs, is to show you what’s possible and show you how we do it. If after 2 or 3 deals, like West says here, it’s making sense to you, you’ve made a little bit of money. You’ve tested the concept, proved the concept to yourself, I would heavily encourage you to start creating or using other tools out there that you think make this more efficient for you. I can tell you that this is what we talk about a lot, and again, in Career Path, which is the mastermind group that Jill and I hold 1 or 2 times a year. There are people that are coming to us like Wes that say, “I did it. I’m on my 10th, 12th, or 15th deal. I have cleared $800,000 doing this. Now I want to know how to make that $1.8 million instead of $800,000.

Our answer is here are some technical ways to start automating things using VAs, and there are all kinds of other serious automated ways. If you are in this industry at all, spreadsheets are a great mechanical way to figure things out with serious limits. If you are doing any type of spreadsheet work at all, you are going to have to figure out how to create and implement your own relational database. That’s a real simple example of what West is talking about here, but you have to do this through hard work in the beginning. You have to learn how to drive a stick before you can truly enjoy an automatic transmission.

I tell people to do exactly what West is doing. As you are starting this whole journey and creating your own little company or however you want to take this, I always think about already starting with figuring out ways to replace yourself and create your own little SOP. This is what West is going to be doing as you go anyway. You are going through the system, and you are already thinking, “Next time I’m going to do this, next time I’m going to do that, and then I’m going to do this. Create procedures and all of that. When you get to the end, like Jack was saying, you’ve done this many deals, you go, “This is the stuff I’m good at. This is what I like to do. This is where I suck. I’m going to hire that out, and you already have a blueprint for them.

You are going to embrace technology or it's going to eat you alive. Share on X

Like all businesses, in the end, your full-time job should be decision-making, delegating things to people that you are working with, or in our case, usually it’s outsourced services, outsourced labor. You shouldn’t be doing any of the work, but that’s way down the road way down after you understand the whole thing. We also have a product that Jill and I don’t talk about very often called LA Pro Land Academy Pro where we do everything for you. Not Jill and I, but our staff. Our staff is sitting there doing this stuff for us anyway.

We allow you to utilize our staff within reason to do your mailer, complete the acquisition side, and the sell side of the transaction for certain parts of it. You don’t have to go out and get your own staff. You can use ours. If you have questions about that, ask Land Academy Support. It’s not published. It’s only been around for a year. We have a bunch of people in it that I’m sure now will never leave. Once you use our team, our team has gray hair. They have a lot of deals under their belt.

They have been with us for years. They know what they are doing.

How Technology Is Changing The Future Of Land Investing

Today’s topic is how technology is changing the future of land investing. When I started this, think about this. When I started, it was before Google or before Google was a household word which means it was before Google Earth. In its infant stages. It was called Keyhole, and eventually, Google purchased them and renamed it Google Earth. We couldn’t find property online. We would have to use a legal description, order a plat map and send a check into the county. They would cash the check and send us a plat map in the mail.

From that plat map, we would go over to a wall of atlases that we had and look up the legal description to find the location of the property. If there were roads and stuff in those maps, which were constantly aging, then we’d say, it’s got access, or we think it’s got access. We’re not sure. We would call the county to see if there were any back taxes on it. We had a whole list of stuff to do. All of that, what we described, takes maybe 30 seconds. Maybe 15 seconds while Jill’s on the phone with the seller saying, “It looks good.” We’ll do the deal.

Isn’t that amazing? What a relief. I know people who thought they missed the boat are like, “I missed doing it back when you guys were.” There are pros and cons to everything. I will tell you this due diligence and finding property, like you talked about, is mind-bogglingly easy and fast now. I would spend hours sometimes trying to find a property.

You want to shock yourself? Pull up whatever AI tool you are using and ask it something like, what’s the best value for my money when I want to buy a house in Alabama, and watch what the response is. That’s cool. That’s the beginning. We are in the top of the first inning with AI.

The Pros And Cons Of Technology In Land Investing

When I thought about this topic, I wrote down a pro, and I wrote down a con. I was thinking about that. It’s happening. It’s here. Jack did a great job describing what it was like back then, and I know you have a lot more examples of things that have changed a lot. For the better. I’m thinking, it’s here this is it. What are the pros? What you talked about for me is a pro and a positive, and it’s basically that technology has made it so easy for us to not only find the property, but I can check out overlays. I can see elevation, I can see flood issues, I can even see fire issues

It was shockingly fast how quickly our data sources DataTree, First American Title’s data company within probably 2 to 3 weeks of fires in California, already had an overlay on their maps. When I looked at each individual property, it would tell me the percentage of what had been damaged. It would be like less than 8%, less than 50%, more than 50% meaning destroyed. I feel so sad for those people who lost their homes in Southern California during those terrible fires. Technology has made it so nice that we can get a gauge of what’s going on and see that. Like I said, these overlays and images are amazing. Those are pros having that at our fingertips.

Here’s a con. I thought about it. This has, unfortunately, created a lot of lazy people who are now constantly looking for easy buttons, and they don’t know to double-check the work to make sure. The result is they are overpricing mailers. That’s one of the things that happens in our industry a lot. People look for easy buttons. They say, “I can download a list. It’s already priced for me.” Then stuff goes out because they don’t know what’s behind it, who put the list together, how old it is, or how they even put the data together. It resulted in overpriced mailers so over-spent on properties and then lost money. That’s a con.

Technology has created a culture and the younger you are, the more this happens. Every generation thinks they are smarter than the older generation. What’s fueling that for young generations now is technology. It fueled me too. The reason I was so incredibly successful in putting all this together when I was younger was because I was the only guy in the office who had a computer on my desk. Everybody else said, “That’s a fad. Those computers are going to go away. You are wasting your time.” They didn’t go away.

This generation, fast forward to now, thinks every single solution to every single problem is in an app or an easy button, and that people with a little bit of gray hair like me don’t get it. That’s too bad because I do get it. You, as a young person, might have a better way to do it, and I’m listening. Jill is right. There are pros and cons to this. Like it or not unless you have enough money to stick your middle finger up to the world which I’m working on. You are going to embrace technology or it’s going to eat you alive.

Let me know how close you are to that goal? Truth time is where Jill and I are long past that. We do this because we enjoy it. Plus I can say stuff like I said with no implication. Join us next time where we discuss why research is the backbone of successful land investing. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration. To buy undervalued property.