Introducing Karl, A Land Academy Ambassador

I’m here with Karl Lathus. You may know him as the Land Academy Ambassador. He and his wife, Samantha, have been with us now since Career Path for I guess over two years. He happened to be in town. His wife’s in town, too. In fact, Jill’s recording with her as we speak. Probably going to air on different Wednesdays. We’ll see how it goes. I guess we’ve been talking about all kinds of other stuff except work. What I’m intrigued with is, how did you guys made this work for you. Was it just a natural thing? Everybody wants to know what the secret is.

There’s a lot that goes into that. Discipline has a lot to do with it. Samantha and I are very disciplined when it comes to this business. This is a great business. Jack has set this up for us, and we’ve learned from his teachings and through Land Academy, through career path, we did all that. Most importantly, we’ve taken those things that we’ve learned, and we’ve applied them, and we’ve been disciplined with them.

We’ve consistently send out mail when we say we’re going to send out mail. We consistently answer our phone when we’re going to answer our phone. We do what we say we’re going to do. We’ve learned all the subtle nuances that make this business profitable, doable, and easy. We focus on those, and we don’t get distracted very often from those. I think our discipline towards this craft, towards investing in land, and towards building this business has really been pivotal for us.

You came to this with entrepreneurial experience and corporate experience under your belt already.

I started my construction company. I started that when I was 25 years old. We built that business. I’ve said it a million times, but when I started that business, I couldn’t afford extension courts. We couldn’t afford to make a singular mistake. We built that business from the ground up, and it’s been great. After that, we moved into real estate, buying and selling houses, flips, you name it, the nightmares. I’m not doing flips anymore. Tell you that. We made money. There’s money being made there. I know you guys made money doing it, too, but I don’t see you guys on very many flips either.

I choose life.

We built a rental portfolio that we’re proud of, and we still do own and operate. When we really did come across this land and how this business works, it just resonated with us. The data aspect of things. Samantha is just wonderful at that. I have so much faith in the way she aggregates our data and the way that she sends out our mailers. I have so much faith in that process that it really helps me do what I have to do because I do a lot of what Jill does. I answer the phones and I use that. I’m that part of the business. It’s nice to have faith in my partner who is getting out the mail so consistently, and I have faith in what she says we could pay for the property. I know that’s somewhere where we need to be.

I don’t think it’s any surprise to anybody that we have a ton of married people, married couples like Karl and Sam and Jill and I in our group. I cannot imagine doing it. I did this for a really long time, for decades, without Jill. It was a whole different. Do you run your construction company by yourself entirely, or does she help you there, too?

She does the books. The construction company.

Probably why you’re still in business.

She doesn’t know what I do. That’s the thing about this business is that it you’ve done the same thing with Jill, you can work together with your team and your business, and you can build it based off of the roadmap that you provided. With that construction company, with doing these other businesses. You don’t always have that roadmap. There’s not always room for somebody else.

The way my construction company works is that I need to be in charge. I am the person in charge. Ask me if I’m in charge of our land business. There’s a little bit of a different story there. This business is set up for this, in my opinion, is set up for exactly who we are. We’re very ambitious. We’re very much go-getting, but Samantha is extremely intelligent, and she’s able to really do that part of the job so much better than I could ever do. Why would I?

Karl’s Success Numbers In Land Investing

I’ve long said that these roles choose us. We don’t choose them. I didn’t choose, I didn’t set out to be the data person. It’s just how and who I am, and that’s it. We’re still having a blast with it. Did you give us some numbers? What are you just ballpark success numbers, year one, year two thing.

That’s the wrong person. I can tell you what I told you. We were discussing earlier about that. The minor split that we had just done. Samantha and I purchased I’m comfortable giving you the real numbers on that. We’ve we purchased the property. It was for $140,000. We went through the process using Jack’s transaction coordinator to help us through the process of minor splitting the property. We split that property from one APN to four APNs. At that rate, we’re selling all each APN for around $100,000.

Buy for $100, 000 sell for $400,000.

We’re pleased with that. Not every deal is like that. That’s the truth, and that’s something I do want to stress is, at times, we buy for five and sell for 25 and things of that nature. The reason we’re playing this game is so that we can do things like buy for $100,000, sell for $400,000 because that’s really what gets your blood going.

The reason it is thrilling to play the land business game is because it gets your blood going. Share on X

You send a bunch of mail out. The real truth is, you know this, unless maybe you have a different experience, but you send a bunch of mail out, it all comes back and you’re staring at 5, 10, 15 deals from the mailer. What we do as we look at the deal and we decide based on a piece of real estate, we didn’t send it out with intent. We just sent it out to get some deal flow. When it comes back, you decide what you’re going to do. There might be a $15,000 margin on a deal. It might be conducive to a minor split or just a regular flip, or you might just throw it in the trash can right there, and the numbers really vary.

Play the cards you’re dealt. We did run into that this year for whatever reason. We had taken the stance that we’re going to start doing bigger deals, larger dollar amounts. That was our stance. That’s how the beginning of the year started out for us. That was great. For whatever reason, and I cannot explain exactly why, but the deals that had started coming to us about the middle of the year were in the $5,000, $6,000 acquisition price.

They were able to sell for $25,000, $30,000, $35,000. We’re very against making our mail or smaller. When there are $5,000 offers in that data set, Samantha’s leaving them in there, but she’s going to make sure that it’s going to be something that’s going to make sense for us. When she’s going through and doing her test for a reason. She wants to know, “If this comes across our desk, would we still do it?”

No, we don’t want $5,000 properties at this point in our career. If we do, we want to make it profitable. I trust what she does. When I get these deals that come across my desk, we inevitably purchase them. I’m not going to pass that up. We play the cards that were dealt because of that. We had a great year. Wonderful year. The beginning of the year, larger properties. At the end of the year, larger properties. For some reason, right in the center of it, we were just hit by these smaller properties, but we did great. I’m not complaining about it. It was wonderful.

I have to systematize everything. Every time I do a deal, I multiply it times twelve. On your minor split deal, buy for $100,000 and sell for $400,000, and you make $300,000. If you do ten of those, you can make $3 million. If you can do that in a year, that’s spectacular. It usually doesn’t happen that way. There’s no bad news in any of this. You buy for $5,000 and sell for $25,000, you’re making $20,000.

You do ten of those, or twelve of those, it’s a quarter of a million dollars in profit. I’m not here to simplify it. Just like you said, there’s a lot of work that goes into these real estate deals. There’s not a lot of work, I don’t think, in setting the mailer up, setting the systems up, and getting the mail out there and getting the deal flow in. There is a lot of work, it seems like more and more as time goes on and getting these deals done. Are you guys seeing that with title companies and real estate agents on the sell side and all that stuff?

I think getting the deals done. We’re not seeing it in our business. We’re blessed we’re a part of Land Academy. We use Jack’s transaction coordinator to close our deals and through Land Academy Pro. We don’t really struggle with closing the deal because, honestly, that’s a system that we have in place for that. Samantha and I do see members, we help members out often. We do see that happening. Deals not getting to the finish line. As I said at the beginning, discipline where it’s important.

If you don’t have a transaction coordinator and you have to be your own transaction coordinator, that’s fine. You need to make sure you’re following up and you’re making those phone calls. You’re making sure these deals close because there’s a lot of these deals that we’ve come across that if it wasn’t for either our due diligence or Jan’s due diligence and moving forward and continue to follow up with sellers and continue to follow up with title agencies that these deals would fall apart. They’re profitable deals, and there’s money to be had there. That’s important.

It is fine to go traditional with land business and not get a transaction coordinator. But you need to make sure you are constantly following up and making those phone calls. Share on X

The Power Of Consistency And Commitment

You were talking earlier, just horse around, not even talking about business, but you said you get up around 4:00 in the morning, right?

Yes.

What’s a regular day for you? What’s the regular day for you, Samantha, and your whole family?

I wake up early. I’ve just always been that way. I usually wake up at 4:00 or 4:30, and I have to run my construction company. That’s really when I do that. I set up everything. I set up all my systems and get everything ready for that. I’m usually down in my office working for those hours because quite frankly, any phone call that’s coming through from the land company at 4:00 in the morning. PATLive can handle it for me. I typically found that those are the calls that don’t really need my attention. Around mid-morning, around 7:00 or 7:30, is really when I switch my focus, and we start focusing on the land company. A little shame to say it, but I don’t really spend that much time with her.

Neither do I.

I answer phone calls, and we make sure everything’s uploaded into our CRM and we make sure everything’s in line. Realistically, when you have systems in place, you can really see what needs to be done on that day. Very rarely does that day extend very far into my day. Most days, Samantha and I are done well before 3:00.

I just think that’s a trait for an entrepreneur and somebody who is a systems person. I’m sure you are. I spend 90% of my time on Land Academy or on the mailing company offer sellers. Maybe 10% probably end up in the bitter end 5% of my work hours on buying and selling land or whatever we’re buying mobile homes or houses or whatever. Jill and I have been saying this forever. If we only spent time buying and selling land, that’s all we did.

Our numbers would be staggering, and they’re pretty good now. What I hear you say is it all comes on a time management organization and consistency. Honestly, I’m sure I bet you’re more consistent than I am. I don’t get up at the same time every morning and do the same thing. It’s in my calendar because I set it up that way, but it’s not the same thing over and over again at all.

I’ve been a man of habits my whole life. That’s how I am. That’s how I’ve always been. Samantha has her mailer Mondays. She makes sure she gets a mailer out. That’s what we do. That consistency. A lot of times I see a lot of members of Land Academy be like, “I’m going to send out this mail. I’m going to receive those phone calls. I’m going to buy this property. I’m close on it, and then I’ll list it. When I sell that property, I’m going to send out my next piece of mail.” That just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for me on a personal level, but it doesn’t work as a business as this business.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to consistently send mail. When that phone is consistently ringing, you’re in a pattern. When my phone rings every single day, I’m in that pattern, and I receive those calls better, and I move forward better. The business continues to move forward better. Samantha’s consistently sending out that mail it changes everything. We’ve had times where we said, “Let’s take a couple of weeks off and not send mail.” Yes, we’ve survived, and we’ve done great. I can tell you the business does, it feels more clunky. I get in a rhythm, and I continue to move. It really does well for us.

When you get that like that, when you are relatively consistent, and it stops for whatever reason, I don’t care if you go on vacation or some life event happens. It just feels like you’re all out of whack, doesn’t it? Your body and your mind are trying to set yourself back on that track that it was comfortable in.

I wholeheartedly agree. That’s why it’s tough for me as much as Samantha, and I don’t live a life that’s completely 100% focused on working all the time. We are always in the saddle, so to speak. When we remove ourselves from that, it is so hard for us to get going. Consistency is just so important.

Doing The Hard Work

It’s no secret that there’s just a ridiculous amount of noise about buying and selling land out there on the internet. We talked about it a little bit earlier, all four of us. What we’re seeing, I’ve been doing this for 35 years together with Jill for fifteen, and then Land Academy is about ten years old. We’re seeing a lot of people trying to make a quick buck in this business by explaining to everybody how to buy and sell lan, and itd just cracks me up a little bit.

The effect of that for us is we’re seeing a different type of person join Land Academy. I would love their opinion on this. There’s a section or a subsection of people that are joining Land Academy. They join. They don’t call us to talk to us or our sales people or anything, but they join they sign up and they have the attitude where they say, “Make me some money.” What do you say to that?

I don’t even know what to say. You’re going to find those people in life. Here’s the thing. The reason the right people are joining Land Academy in finding us and not finding those other groups is that we’re serious about this. That’s not a serious way to go about a business. As much as we joke around, like we’ve spent the last 3 or 4 hours together just talking and we are joking around having a great time. There’s a time and a place for that. When it comes to business, we’re very serious about it.

I think that when you take a look at the track record of who Land Academy is, who you are, and who Jill is about how this has been built. It speaks for itself. I think that’s the members we’re trying to attract. At the same time, you have everyone out there. Whatever business you’re in, you need to take it seriously. It’s okay to joke around and do whatever. No one’s going to go out there and do it for you in life and anything. You’ve to go out there and do it yourself. That’s something that we’ve attempted to do in our lives, and I feel success has been followed by that no one cares about you. It’s like when you say, “Karl, make me a million hours.” I say, “Cool.” I don’t know what to say that.

Whatever business you are in, take it seriously. No one will go out there and do it for you. Share on X

I can tell you exactly step by step how to do that. I’m just not going to do it for you. I could do it for you, but I’d rather do it for myself.

It’s, yeah. We do see that. I have seen that, and I’m sure you’ve seen that when people are saying, “How come I’m not making any money?” You ask 3 or 4 questions.

Really just one. How many mailers have you done? I haven’t done one yet. That’s the answer.

For sure. What is your routine? What’s your intake like? A few simple questions. If you’re serious about this business, be serious about it. Go through the modules that Jack provided for you. Go through as much education as you can. Surround yourself with people who are successful and people who are motivated, and you’ll see that not a single one of them is going to ask you, “Can you make me a million dollars?” No, they’re going to go out, and they’re going to do it. We have a pretty great group here, and there’s a lot of information out there. If you are not going to educate yourself and be a part of it and help yourself, no one could help you.

Karl’s Career Path Program Experience

It’s self study. I’m not selling anything here at all. The Land Academy caters to a lot of different levels of commitment. Let’s call it. The self-study program, which is our most popular, it’s probably because it’s the cheapest, and it has the lowest success rate. The highest success rate comes from a program we have called career path. In fact, that’s how I think you started. Didn’t you start? Tell that story. That’s a good story.

It circles back a little bit further than before I joined. I met a member who’s been a long-time friend of mine. I was calling Mike for now. I’m not sure how much he wants his name blown out there. Mike, you guys were starting the Career Path. It was an earlier career path. He knew Samantha and I, and we’d been investing for a while. We hadn’t done a land deal, but we’d done lots of real estate deals. He approached us and said, “You’re perfect for this.”

We didn’t even know what Land Academy was, to be honest. He said, “You need to do this.” We ended up looking into it, and he ran through some numbers with us to show us how he’d done it. He’d been a member of Land Academy for quite some time. You guys know him pretty well, too. What we ended up doing was just say, “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to sign up for Career Path.” We did, which was pretty funny because we had to do an onboarding interview and all that.

In the questions, we’re like, “How many land deals have you done? How many mailers have you done?” “None. Zero, but we’re going to do this.” Thank God you guys took a flyer and let us do that because not everyone is allotted who wants to join Career Path. Career Path is set aside for people who want to elevate their business and who want to continue to grow.

There’s not going to be a person who joins Career Path who says, “Now I’m in Career Path. Make me a million dollars.” These are business people. People who understand how to make themselves a million dollars. We started our Land Academy journey at the same time we started Career Path. We really haven’t looked back since Samantha quit her job less than six months after we joined Career Path. It wasn’t just a standard job. She was a pretty important individual in her career.

What where was the thought process there? Was there a series of deals that just convinced you guys like you obviously had to go through some type of a set of experiences that led you both to say, especially for her quitting that and a pretty amazing job, two intelligent people are making an intelligent decision to give up a huge revenue stream. Lead us up to that. Do you regret it?

Worst mistake we ever made. No, it is honestly, to get in front of it, it is the best decision we’ve ever made. It’s not the decision for everyone. We didn’t make the decision out of necessity. We made the decision after we had evaluated everything. We had gone through Career Path. During Career Path, we sent out a mailer. During Career Path, we purchased a property. Shortly after that, we sold that property for around $140,000 in net profit.

It’s not normal.

At that point, we had several other properties in escrow on the purchase side as well. We decided and we took a look at it and we realized what a lot of members, what you’ve realized, what Jill realized that, “This works. There’s no doubt about it.” I remember when I first started this, everyone has that thought. We don’t get that question that much anymore as things have progressed. People ask, “Does this really work?”

Proof of concept. You proved the concept to yourselves. You didn’t watch somebody else do it like us or anybody else.

A hundred percent. We proved the concept, and we really realized that this is something that we are good at. I will say that we have a natural ability to navigate this specific business. We’re set up for it for whatever reason. We’re blessed for that. We also put ourselves in a position where we can cultivate our abilities to increase what we’re capable of achieving. We realized that when selling that first property, was like, there’s no reason for you to continue down this W-2 job to continue, to travel, to work, to continue to do all these things that we took.

We weighed the negatives and the positives, and there wasn’t very many things that held us back. Samantha’s a CPA, which is difficult to achieve. That was our big holding ground. Was like, “She spent a long time moving down that path and she’s done very great with it already. She was moving up the corporate ladder faster than we could ever imagine.” Now, she’s the boss. It was an unusual path, but we proved the concept to ourselves, and we knew that that’s what we were going to do. Realistically, it’s the best decision I think we’ve ever made.

Did it ever cross your mind that closing those original deals it was a fluke? I’ve had this happen before. We close a few great deals right in a row, and I’m not sure we’re going to repeat that and then it happens six months later. Did you have that talk with her? Like, “This might have been just a weird, strange experience, and how are we ever going to get back?”

No. I understand that thought process. I think you even said it to me though before, is if you continue to produce, and now this is fast forwarding a little bit, but if you’re able to continually do something and be successful at it for two years, you have a successful business. I’ve had my fair share of struggles. I’ve had my through business, and I’ve had to fight, claw, and move my way forward through businesses before. I saw how ridiculously easy that was.

If you can continually do something successful in two years, you will have a successful business. Share on X

Even if it wasn’t a fluke, and I can make a tenth of what I made there consistently, it would make sense. It just made so much sense for me because it’s like, this works, I know that. I’m in a community. I open up Discord and scroll to success stories, and then reach out to those people and say, “Can you tell me a little bit more? I guarantee you that they’re going to respond to you and help you and talk with you.” I did some of that. I reached out to people on my Career Path. I reached out to other people and just said, “How is this going?”

Mike is helping you, too. You’re probably asking Mike questions, too.

Mike’s been a resource, and we love Mike. He’s been great for us. We re-immersed ourselves into it. At that point, it was like, even if no deal ever becomes as good as our first deal, which is a crazy first deal to be able to have, it’s still going to work, and I know that.

Exciting Things Down The Pipeline

What are you working on now? Anything that’s just come across through the pipeline really recently that you’re excited about?

I was excited about was one, but we’ve moved on from that. We purchased the property and we took our backing up when I say staying focused. This is why you don’t move down the path that we all end up moving down, just thinking about it at least. We purchased a property for, it was around $30,000, and it was a commercial property. We ended up just on a whim called the county. We usually call it county and just asked them what we can do with the property. One of the things they listed off was boat storage.

They said that?

Yeah. They want it. It’s on a lake. Right next to the lake in there out of boat storage and it’s a small community.

Not a specific zoning for that is there?

No, she started rattling off. She said the zoning, and she started rallying of,f and the first thing she said was boat storage, and I said, “Boat storage sounds cool.” We started moving down that path, and we realized that the return on our investment wasn’t where we wanted it to be with a building facility like this. We were really excited about that. Now we’re even. Now we’re excited because we’re listing that property for $ 150,000.

There you go. That’s the return on investment you want.

That should be listed any day now. It’s just funny because it is easy in this business to get distracted and start saying,” Maybe I’m going to start a boat storage company.” Now I’m thinking, “I don’t have time for that. I don’t feel like doing that. I want to not start another business.” That was our excitement of last week. Drone photos will be coming in soon. We’re to move on from that boat storage dream.

Isn’t it amazing when you really just take a few steps back every once in a while? I’d take a few steps back. Again, I’m not blowing smoke. It’s just shocking that at any given time, how much real estate we control. I know you’re you help out with Career Path now, you and Samantha. There’s a lot of different people that show up for career path that have stories. They all have stories like Karl’s got one. I’ve got one. What they bring to the table is so very different sometimes than the way that we do it. I remember the last Career Path to guy wholesaler in there that would just send out hundreds of thousands of letters at a time as backwards into money.

The entire state in time.

I saw him in the chime in the success stories. There’s a big run of success stories in the Land Academy Discord because it was the end of the year and then the beginning of the year. We’re all going to try to hit our numbers again. He said he did not have the year that he wanted to have. He made a ton of money, tons and tons of money. I was a little surprised to hear him say that after all the stuff that he brought to the table, that Career Path. Are you surprised?

Honestly, no. The reason why is that we’ve talked about this before a few times of how important it is for us to control the deals. I was surprised at how much money he was making, and he’s a great guy, and I think he’s going to do great. He’s so smart. He’s so motivated. Jill talks about it all the time. When people say, “I’m going to wholesale this deal,” Jill pumps the brakes. She said, “If this is a good enough deal, let’s close on this. Let’s make this deal our own.”

His problem, specifically, if you really want to get into that on Discord and read it, was that he wasn’t able to find a buyer before his contract expired. Samantha runs those reports with the days on market going up and down on the trending reports that she does. If you have a contract, if you’re confident in the deal, we close on the deal. We buy that deal. If you’re not confident in it and you’re going to go through a wholesaling situation and days on market, say increase due to maybe something crazy happens, like someone increases the interest rates or something happens.

Days on markets jump up, now you’re going to have a divide. Now you’re going to have this situation where you have a property under contract where you don’t own it, but it’s worth $30,000 more than you have it under contract for, but you’re not able to quite find that buyer within that short frame of time. Deals can fall apart. That’s why I see an issue with that wholesaling model. The more I get into this business, the more I realize how important it is for us to control every aspect of the deal and that’s why we close on the properties when we have confidence, and we close on these properties.

You will find success in land business if you have confidence in every deal and control every aspect of it. Share on X

That’s exactly my point. In a roundabout way, you made my exact point. We’re in the business of controlling real estate. There are a lot of different ways to do that. Wholesaling on property, you can get equitable title to a piece of real estate. You make an offer. The offer is accepted. You have 30 days to 90 days to actually close on the deal. In a roundabout seedy way, in my opinion, you go and try to find a buyer and you cannot. How do you really control that real estate?

I don’t think so. If you really want to control real estate because you believe in the deal like this boat storage deal, I’m sure you guys believed in it, or you wouldn’t have bought it. You just buy the thing. It’s not a matter of, “I don’t have the money though Jack.” Come on. There are tons and tons of people, us included, we have a lot of money and a lot of knowledge in this industry within the Land Academy group that is going to fund your deals.

I don’t understand the wholesaling model. I’ve never done it. I understand that I really think in the end, wholesaling sings to two types of people or there’s two things that are really attractive. Number one, you don’t have to put any money into it. That innately concerns me. I don’t like to do things for free. I’m not a person who searches around the internet for two hours to try to find a free version of an app when I can spend $3 on it. I just think free is bad. Number one.

Number two, there are a huge element of investment or entrepreneurs who want to be people that think that you have to halfway or underhandedly accomplish something without doing it above board to make money. There’s always been like the whole organized crime of those persons. Those people are rich because they cheated. That’s just not the case. We have a packed group full of really affluent people that have made money in real estate above board. It’s sad. Wholesaling is it’s just that I would rather do half the deals that I could do if I were a successful wholesaler and actually buy the property and sleep at night and resell it.

Back to the boat storage deal, we purchased that for $30,000, knowing very well that if we move forward with boat storage or if we sell the property, which is what we ended up with the direction we ended up going in. We were going to be successful at it because we had confidence in that deal, and we controlled every aspect of it. I couldn’t imagine if I put that thing under contract and try to list it and just watch that thing fall apart.

What you would do is probably try to sell it for $40,000. You but is for $30,000 and sell it for $40,000 instead of buying it for $30,000 and selling it for $150,000. What’s going to happen because you control it.

You’re not calling the county. You’re not doing all that stuff when it comes to these things. If you are, I don’t know, I doubt it. We own that property. We were able to really own the scenario around it because that property wasn’t worth what it was worth being sold as a piece of residential raw vacant land as it was perceived because that’s not what the city planning had in mind for it. Now it’s on the radar. That’s why we did the legwork on that.

What’s Next For Karl And Samantha

What’s next? What are you trying to improve on in 2024?

We’re always trying to improve on everything. That’s a hard question to throw at me.

That’s why I’m here.

What is next for us?

We can talk about working with your spouse if you want. Is that what you’re going to work on this year?

Yeah, we’re going to work on that. No, Samantha and I are moving into what our third year in this land investing business. This is the year that we’re really wanting to start to narrow down. Last year, we really narrowed down our processes. We got into the CRM. We air the tables that we use. Any of them we use. We really narrowed down a lot of our processes so they’re streamlined and more efficient. Moving forward, I’d like to hammer that out because it is nice to used to preach about.

This is a business that you run from the back of your boat. That resonates with me. When you have systems in place, when you’ve done the things that you need to do, that’s possible. It’s not possible to run around like a chicken with your head cut off, answering phone calls, writing down, and offering ID numbers on a piece of paper and then say, “I’ll call John back and put it on a post note.” You cannot operate your business from a distance. We really do want to be able to operate our business at arm’s length to do quality work but to be able to be consistently operating this business at a high level. You need to have systems in place. We really want to test that water a lot more.

You’re improving on your systems?

Yes.

We’re just increasing our volume. That’s it.

Volume of deals?

Just the volume of mail, which will have a direct effect on the deals that we do. To our fault, we have been over selective on the transactions that we do for probably the last three years. I would like to put some channels in place where we take a fantastic $15,000 profit deal and send it to somebody in our group. We’re trying to figure that out because we’ll pass on that deal. We’ll pass on it. We will just say, which just doesn’t fit our acquisition criteria instead of sending it to somebody else. We’re trying to do that.

We haven’t done that in the past because it ends up for whatever reason. I’m sure you can attest to this. It ends up coming back to us somehow with work that we have to do. Selling a car to a friend. Don’t ever do that. For whatever reason, selling a car to a friend because you think you’re doing something good for them is going to come back to you somehow in a negative way. People are laughing on the other side of the camera. Sold a car to your friend. Do you know what I’m talking about because they’re not your friend anymore.

That’s interesting, though. Expanding the amount of deals that you guys are doing. Are you expanding the areas that you’re going to?

No. I’ll tell you why because we’ve sent millions and millions of offers out. We’ve got about four specific areas that we work, and they’ve always been good to us.

A little bit about how Samantha and I send mail. We don’t work for specific areas. At a time we do, we enjoy finding new areas to mail. It’s like one of our favorite things to do. Regionally, we stay in areas, but we move around quite a bit. It’d be something to look into if we should start to narrow down our area because it is nice to work in the same area when you have your resources in place.

Is this what it is?

Yes.

That’s really one of the reasons we have real estate agents there.

Title companies that you trust. We ran into a few title companies this year that I cannot stand. When you’re going to new areas like that, you have to find a new title company, and you don’t know until you know. Picked the wrong title company sometimes.

In an area that you’ve mailed fifteen times before and a property comes back and you could just know within seconds in my case, because I’ve been there physically. In all the areas where we send mail, I can just tell you, I know it’s going to work or it’s not. It’s on the right side of the highway or nope. On the left side, yes, we’re buying it. That stuff. It may be some of it’s lazy. I’m not sure, but you know what it is? I know we will hit our target financial goals if I stick to it. That’s what it is.

Did you see the mailer that came across your desk? Samantha sent you a mail on accident?

Got a couple of your letters.

Jill signed it and sent it back.

She did?

Yes. It was it. She wrote on there. Just kidding. It was a property you had already sold, but it was just funny. We got a signed purchase agreement from Jack and Jill. That’s nice.

I don’t know. That’s how much Jill and I talk at work. I didn’t even know what she did back then.

It was just funny.

Closing Words

Thanks, Karl. Great information, and I look forward to drinking with you.

Absolutely. From what I understand, the girls open a bottle of wine on their show.

We’re stuck doing this.

Thanks, we’ll see you soon.