This is episode number 2204. In this episode, Jill and I are talking about the two tools that changed everything for us. I just learned one second ago that they’re very different from both of us. My tools are different than Jill’s.

You didn’t look at my list, did you? I’m covering it up. I’m covering up my list.

Spoiler alert. I have three.

You called me one of the tools last time.

You are still one.

Okay, got it. You added two more.

All week, it’s reality week again. Last week was reality week. Numbers came out great. This week, we’re doing a reality week for your land business again.

Whether or not you like it.

We’re talking about the 2 or 3 tools that changed everything for us on Tuesday. What the next ten years of land investing might look like, not might look like. I’m pretty sure they’re going to look like what I think they’re going to look like. Wednesday, succeeding in a market. Everyone says it’s too crowded. Thursday, making the land business your own, not just copying others. Finally, on Friday, revisiting the why behind your land business and really the why of anything. Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord Forum. We take a deep dive into land related topics by popular requests.

Access Issues & Easement Negotiation

Joseph wrote, “Question about a piece of property I’m vetting,” which I’m assuming his word is doing my due diligence. “The seller owns the adjacent property and the only way to access this property is through an easement over his property, which doesn’t yet exist. What would you do here? Negotiate an easement? For how much?” I like this question. May I go first?

Yes. First and final. The property doesn’t have access.

The person owns two properties. Let’s just say he owns the front 40 and the back 40, and he’s selling the back 40, but you can’t get to the back 40 without going through the front 40. I think this is easy and I love these transactions. I would just say, “Dear seller, I will happily buy the back 40 as long as it comes with an easement in writing that we could get to the back 40. Now let’s talk money.” That’s it.

I’m not going to bump up the price. I’m not going to add anything to it. I’m going to say, “This is part of the deal. However it pans out, they need to be able to get there.” I’m going to follow up on one more thing, too. I wouldn’t go all the way through with all of it. I would have it in writing because I’m not going to take the time unless I know this county really well and it’s a real fast, easy process. I would just get it in writing and then sell it with that in writing so that the buyer has the option to act on it.

If you walk into a jewelry store, Jill, and you look into the case. There’s a beautiful ring that you’ve it’s got, I don’t know, big center. You’re not a big center diamond person, but it’s got a cluster of diamonds and then maybe some black onyx around it and it’s in, I don’t know, white, yellow gold and it’s your size but it’s expensive.

There’s a case next to that case, there’s a couple of rings in there that you love, but they’re a mess. You have to put some diamonds into it. You have to clean it all up. You basically have to be your own jeweler, but you have to basically complete the ring before you can enjoy it, but it’s a lot cheaper. Which one do you buy?

You don’t have to wake up and figure out what to do with every single property. With a CRM, it's easy to see what needs attention—whether you have 10 deals or more in play. Share on X

I bought both. Remember that? Diamond in the rough. Remember that ring?

“You know what, in fact, i’ll take all of these.”

Do you remember the white buffalo ring? I got the smoking deal on a beautiful white buffalo ring in Estes Park, Colorado. I love it. It was forgotten and it was on the discount table and it just needed to be polished up. I love that ring. I wear it all the time. I’m not wearing it now. Anyway, I buy both. I’m sorry if I messed up your exercise.

No, you didn’t at all. It’s the same thing. If you walk into a house that’s completely done, it’s within your budget and all you need to do is just execute a mortgage. Most people want it that way versus the HGTV way where you buy a house that’s almost free but you have to spend a year, maybe two in some cases, cleaning it all up, putting it together while you’re raising a family and you have a job. There are both types of people and whoever you are reading this, you’re generally going to be a DIY, clean it up yourself type person, or you’re going to be somebody who just wants it all cleaned up and done. I tend to be, the older I get, somebody who wants it all done. Earlier in my life, I was a total DIY person.

We did really well with that. Every time you’re looking at a property and pricing it, get inside the head of the person who’s going to buy it from you, “If this is a DIY property, then sell it that way and make sure it’s priced that way.” I love bombed-out mobile homes because there are so many people, DIY-type people, that are going to look at that and say, “That’s the right price. I’m just going to drop a new mobile home on there.” I’ve done this three times before.

Make sure the piece of dirt’s priced that way and leave that bombed-out mobile home right on there when you go to sell it. Don’t clean it up or replace it for them. You’re going to get a different type of customer is willing to pay full price and probably go get a mortgage. When you have a piece of land that you can’t get to it, you better be priced cheap because even if it has legal access, someone’s got to put in a driveway somehow, whatever that version of that is. Jill got bored. This episode’s topic, the 2 or 3 tools that change everything for us.

No, it was a good story.

You go first.

I was thinking about this and let me remind everyone, Land Academy started in 2016. I’ve been at this over sixteen years with you. I have a little bit of experience before that real estate and then you’ve been at this 30-something years. I was thinking back. What are the main things that have changed for me? I got 2 things that really changed for me from 16, 20 years ago to now. One is our tracking systems. Back in the day, we’ve had spreadsheets, we had Google Drive sheets, we had Excel sheets. You created a proprietary software. It was before you could get this. You created one, what did we call that? I can’t remember what we called it, but our database that you made.

The Importance Of Efficient Tracking & CRM Systems

We would have to VPN remotely into the database when we were traveling to access our files and the seller information and buyer information and the property information and the photos and anything about the posting and things like that. I remember that. There was an acquisition section, an engineering section, and a sales section. You had it divided into three things and that just carried into all kinds of other stuff. It was really cool.

Fast forward to now, in Land Academy, we’re just like, “Here’s your Airtable template. It’s filled out, ready for you to go. Start plugging in your property.” There’s no learning curve. It’s so easy. You click it and you put it in there too. No having to write a format. Even back in those days, you had to type things to get stuff entered in the cell and it’s just crazy. It’s so much easier and faster to track not only properties moving through the system.

One of the things that’s changed everything for you is a CRM.

In a really big way because I don’t have to wake up in the morning and go look at every single property and figure out what I need to do. “I have ten in play, what do I have to do today?” It’s really easy with a CRM where I go, “i’ve got to that call that person back. This one, I’m waiting for the photos. This one, I can go by sections.” I can pull them up six different ways to see what I need to see. One of these, I could put them on the calendar. I could look at a calendar at a glance and see when things are closing on the buy side and the sell side and just be ready for it all. It’s so nice and easy and customizable.

That’s the thing, too. I had to learn the way you set up our system. There’s no, “That’s it. This is how it goes.” Now I can do it however I do it. Every person, like in our personal land company CRM, there are multiple different views. I look at a different view than the transaction team looks at and the selling team looks at and the inbound call team looks at. They all have different views and people helping doing due diligence behind the scenes have different views. No one’s going to mess everything up, too. I remember, too, the days even floppy disk backing up data every night before you left.

Multiple disks.

Everything dries up eventually. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end to every deal. You need to find a better way to buy cheap property. Share on X

You didn’t want to lose anything overnight. It’s just a game changer. Now with the click of a button, I can go back in history and recapture the spreadsheet 3 moves ago or 3 days ago. I love it. The second thing that really, over time, a tool that just changed everything for me in land is how easy phone numbers are now. It’s just technology. It’s not even related to cell phones, but just technology, how I’m going into a meeting, I can push a button and my calls can go to somebody else so we don’t miss them. I can push a button and they can go to PATLive. I can set up timers so they go there.

The two tools that you’ve chosen that were life changing for you and made you ridiculously wealthy in real estate are sales tools. They’ve made your sales job easier.

Yes, they have.

Mine couldn’t be more different, and I’m so glad you brought those up. Do you have another one that’s noteworthy?

No, that was it. I was told to bring two.

I’m going to give you my 2 or 3 in chronological order with a tiny bit of a 30-second backstory. I’ve been in real estate my entire life. In the mid-1990s, I bought a piece of property on eBay and resold it for twice as much. It’s in the eBook if you want details on that. I was hooked forever. From that point in my career, I set a sentence to myself. All I’ve got to do is figure out how to buy properties cheaper than what I bought them for on eBay.

That’s my one thing in life I have to do and it turned out that way. It all happened that way. My way to do that was to go to auctions back in the day. I traveled all around the Southwest, standing on steps and court steps and libraries and buying properties and shipping them back, shipping the information back to my 1 or 2-person staff here in Scottsdale.

The Critical Role Of Accessible & Aggregated Data In Finding Cheap Property

They posted them on eBay and resold them and we doubled our money. This is for a lot of years. That dried up like everything dries up. There’s a beginning and a middle and an end to everything just like that. I realized, out of necessity, I needed to figure out a better way to buy cheap property. Enter RealQuest, which is a data aggregation company. Its first American title is Data Arm. From there, I developed the concept of a mailer that we still use now. Data is my number one. That data changed my life, getting ownership data all across the country for everybody who owned land and sending mail out and things like that.

You could have gotten that before in CD format, which you did, or in physical format. It was changing it to where you could sit at your computer and get it all over.

I’m trying to paraphrase here. I used to go to the counties and actually get the actual data. There are several counties that made you sit there and extrapolate it. Anyway, data, in all its forms and we still use data nowadays. I think the most recent tool we use is PropStream. Anyway, so a lot of years went by, very successful years. I made a ton of money, did great. I sat on the back of a yacht and the whole thing. Enter 2008, 2009, everybody just stopped buying property. The whole real estate market tanked. It was a real estate depression. It brought me to my knees financially, both personally and professionally. Jill and I, very luckily at that time, met each other.

My number two is Jill. She came in and I’m so glad your two things that changed your world here are sales-related because I realized what was missing in my life, although I had a partner at the time, a guy buddy partner of mine who was very like-minded. He was a data person just like me, maybe even more so. What I needed was a sales person from a business perspective. She came in and very politically correctly looked around and said, “This is a freaking disaster. No wonder this doesn’t work anymore.”

The Transformative Impact Of Having The Right Partners

She got on the phone, which no one has ever done up to that point in my career, including me. She took a lot of inventory that we had that I nuked. It was over and I resold it, turned it into cash. Started calling around, getting new deals. Anyway, she changed the whole thing. We moved on and we were buying and selling land and Jill and I were doing very well. I had a mantra that I had it at one point on in my office, on a sign on the wall that said, “No debt.”

I learned that a long time ago from a lot of really smart people in my life. We were always running out of money because we were spending money, we were making money, we were always doing really well. There was a lot left over. We were rolling it back in. We were living very frugally because most of the money we were putting back into land and converting it into money and on and on, until we sat down together, this was more me than Jill and said, “We’ve got to bring on a money partner.”

I don’t mean any type of debt. I mean a partner that we can share equity with who doesn’t own the company or anything like that, who’s got a stake in the deals, the actual land deals that we do, and that changed our lives. Two of my three are partners. Jill as my partner and then a money partner. Our money partner is long gone. Long, long gone. That only lasted about a year. We needed to get a springboard. We needed to get ahead of the deal flow that I was creating and we did. That’s my story.

I love it. That was perfect.

Join us next time where Jill and I talk about what the next ten years of land investing might look like. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.