Why Research Is The Backbone Of Land Investing

This is episode number 2,132. Jill and I are talking about why research is the backbone of successful land investing. I can tell you research is certainly substantially in the beginning part of any real estate deal. You don’t just decide you’re going to send mail to Wisconsin without really looking into it or you don’t make a statement like, Florida is a better place to buy land than Texas. That needs to be backed up. Research is the backbone of a lot more than successful land investing. That’s my gig.

You shouldn’t pick a career without research. I don’t care what it is. Shouldn’t pick a college. You surely shouldn’t pick a guy without doing research.

Tell everyone to go about researching a man.

That’s very easy. Check their profiles. Ask around. Ask their friends. Are they really successful? Did they make this up? I don’t know. What’s his family like? What’s it going to look like when he’s 80? Don’t tell me you men don’t do that.

Men do not do that.

Really?

Yep.

I thought men looked at the moms to go, this is what’s going to happen.

That’s way into it. The research happens upfront with women and happens at the end with men.

Don’t you want to see what the woman’s going to look like when she stops going to the gym every day?

I do. I’m very interested in that. Before that, I was more interested in things we can’t talk about on the air.

Got it. I think and I’m going to talk about this and then when we get to the meat of this here. Research, I’ve made notes about research at the beginning, research in the middle, and the research at the end of everything that we do in our deals.

Make notes about research at the beginning, middle, and end of your land investing deals. Share on X

If I came to Jill and said, “Look, a bunch of stuff happened in the market in the last four months, and I really think we should send a mailer out and seriously consider southwestern North Dakota as a place to buy and sell land.” She would say, “Okay.” That’s a conversation that would stop right there because she knows that I don’t make statements like that unless it’s so crazy over research that she’s just in. There’s a bunch of stuff. Here’s my final point Jill. Jill comes to me and I say, “I’m in.”

I think I personally do enough research to satisfy you and I’ve learned to do more. However, the amount of research you do is ten times needed to satisfy me. It has to satisfy you. That’s why.

I don’t mean extraordinary as in top-notch. I mean, extra. It’s a lot.

That’s nice. We know each other now. I think you do also, I know that when you come to me with that idea of here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we’re pivoting, maybe it’s a new product type, not only a new area, it’s a new product type, whatever it is. I know that you’ve run the numbers twenty different ways and you love them all. I’m like, “Let’s go.”

I’ve been involved in a ton of businesses before I met Jill. She and I have been involved in a lot of business since then and I can tell you that we are still in this business for a reason. For research reasons, we can turn it on and off whenever we want. We can do it from anywhere. It’s incredibly profitable with not a large staff. There are a lot more variable costs than fixed costs with each of these transactions and on and on.

When you line up buying and selling land from a research standpoint, as a career against being a real estate agent, working on a dock, owning a chain of convenience stores, and any type of career that you can think of, startup costs, how much are they, risk in general. If I see a risk in a deal, we don’t do it. We just moved to the next deal. Research is the backbone of successful land investing and pretty much everything else you do. How much is this house we live in now? How much research did you do on this? I didn’t, this is not, this is Jill’s side.

A lot.

Cooke’s amount. Price per square foot, neighborhood, block by block.

I was just thinking about it. Like there’s looking at another personal acquisition for us. I’ve had to stop myself like this is overkill. I know more about this than anybody ever does. I know more about this place right now than the guy who owns it currently. He’s had it for seven years. I know more right now.

If you’re listening to this like a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about on the show how people buy cars. I brought up a Facebook post where someone said, “Should I pay cash for a new car? Should I finance it?” To which, and I didn’t write this, but to which I dropped my phone with disgust. You should never be buying a new car. You should be buying a car that you can afford, not the payment you can afford.

You should be buying a car that you can afford, not the payment you can afford. Share on X

You can afford a $5,000 car, or you can’t take the bus for a while until you’ve saved up $5,000 and then buy a piece of crap used car and continue to save your money. If buying a new car is really important to you, and I understand that maybe you’re a young woman, maybe a nurse or a teacher or I don’t know, a car, an engineer, then he’s a really reliable car. You drive a lot of miles a day. I get it but there are better ways to go about it than just feelings. Feelings are inappropriate.

I don’t see feelings in the topic. Do I need to worry about this? We’re okay, right?

Research is appropriate because it’s land research week.

Discord Question: Thoughts About LandVAs.com

It is. Each day on the show, we’re going to take your question from our Land Academy discord forum.  Of course, as you know, we’re going to get more in-depth with this topic that we’re going to talk about by popular requests. Here is the question. Ben wrote, “Folks, has anyone in the group ever used LandVAs.com? They seem like a good option, but I can’t find any reviews on them. If you had their third tier membership and got tied up doing a lot of volumes, like $15,000 per month mailers, the discount they have with DataTree would almost, if not pay for 90 hours per month of the VA work included in the membership. Just thought I would ask.”

Like many of you most of you are all of you listening to this you’re just learning about LandVAs.com as am I? When I decided to put this in here the first thing I did was look at all the discussions. The people who responded to this in the Land Academy discord forum and then I looked at it myself and it’s a joke. Like many of these products. For some reason, this generation loves to create these cute little dot coms. Dangler carrots saying it’s going to be cheaper and easier but the work never gets done.

That’s a bummer.

We utilize VAs and we recommend one specific group of VAs that have been with us since Jill and I started. Are they the best? They’re the best option for us. I know the reason all the time to process all kinds of stuff very successfully.  Many of our members do too. Are they perfect? No. Does it have issues? Yes. But I can tell you, look, there are a lot of places on the internet now buying and selling land largely because of the success of Land Academy has become a lot more common than it used to be ten years ago.

Where To Focus Your Land Investing Research

All of these apps have popped up. There are people sitting in their basement that are fourteen years old, grabbing it at LandVAs.com and putting some stuff together, making a few phone calls, and making this look easy. It’s not. If you want to be rewarded financially, this is a place for you but it’s not through little easy buttons like this. There’s a lot of them. Our topic, Why Research is the Backbone of Successful Land Investing? We covered a lot of this out of order.

We did. I have three areas that I want to just highlight where we are really research-heavy and focused. In the beginning, we used research like we talked about earlier this week, just picking out places to buy and the properties to buy period.  A lot of the research is what people are buying. That’s it, what’s selling? That sounds like a no-brainer, but you can’t just assume that everybody because you like everything, you love anything smaller than an acre or smaller than five acres. You can’t assume that that’s what everybody else wants.

You need to put the research in to see what people want. When you’re trolling and looking for play or now it’s fishing. Fishing/tolling, trolling, whatever you want to call it. When you’re looking for areas that you are putting together to start doing your red, yellow, and green tests of where would be good potential areas to buy and sell land, you’re doing the research, your research in the area, and your research in the properties that should come up. You want to buy well, “Everybody’s buying 5 to 10 acres in this area. Look at the flying off the shelves.”

That’s what I’m going to focus on. There you go. Now in the middle, what research am I doing in the middle of this whole process? Again, this is research. Why it’s the backbone of everything we do as land investors. You have to do some research on pricing. Not only now I get the area figured out in my research, but I also got the property type. I got to think about what’s the sweet spot here. Jack calls it the breakpoint to what? There’s a point where people up to this price flies off the shelves. Over this price sits on it sits.

It might be six months or days on the market. I don’t want that. I want things to sell anywhere from 30 to 90 days. For me, that’s a good spot. If it’s less than 30 days, which certainly happens often, you’re my instinct is like, “Now I underpriced it.” That’s okay but I made the money that I needed to make, and it’s totally fine. I easily doubled my money, probably a little bit more, and I got out. It’s totally fine. Research goes into that on what I’m going to spend and pricing, because based on what I’m going to sell it for, research. Now the third part at the end, for me, the end is selling it. The research that goes into it is, A, how am I going to sell it?

What’s in this market? Where is it selling the quickest? Is it people listing it themselves and doing it like Facebook Marketplace? Research is going to tell me or is it going to be, “Look at this in this area? Everybody goes, these whitetail property guys are the places to list it.” That’s a research component. Also, what is a good listing? What looks good? What’s appealing? What do these buyers want to pull the trigger and quickly purchase these properties? All of this is research. It’s basically marketing. I look at it as everything I just described falls under the marketing to sell it. Who’s going to market? How is it going to market? What do I need to do to make it look good to market it and what’s a good posting all research?

Why are we doing all this research? Why does anybody do research? To reduce risk? We do all of this research show perfectly in these three steps along the way and write any given transaction. We can reduce the risk of wasting time and money where we send mail where we buy property, reduce the risk of buying the wrong property in the middle and reduce the financial risk or speed up the efficiency of selling a property in the end. There are a lot of things in life where your research effort and the resources that you need are not available. We didn’t have every question to every answer you’d ever wanted in our pocket like we do now.

There was a huge separation between we live in such an amazing world now. When we were younger, there was just a massive separation between people who knew stuff through experience and people who didn’t. We were younger, we were the ones who didn’t but when you do always meet people there that are like, “They’re a master at this because they’ve spent 10,000 hours plus doing it.” It’s just not the case anymore. A lot of times, false information is just everywhere. It’s one of your jobs is to research the sources of the research.

Good point. I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s really true. Don’t land on the first website that says, “I have all the answers. I’ll do your due diligence for you. Hold on a moment.” “How many deals have you done?” “A hundred.” That’s it. I’m not putting my money there. Hold on a moment. Sometimes even less.

Do not land on the first website that claims it has all the answers and promises to do due diligence for you. Share on X

All the people who are teaching how to buy and sell land with very few exceptions out there on the internet were once Land Academy members. Knock yourself out if you want to join their group. More information is always better, more education is or you can learn from us.

Talk about research. That’s a good place to do some research. I love it.

Closing Words And Next Episode’s Topics

Join us tomorrow where Jill and I talk about avoiding analysis paralysis, which is when land research becomes overkill. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration. To buy undervalued property.