Fixing Your 2024 Playbook For 2025

This is episode number 2225. Jill and I are talking about, Is your 2024 playbook broken? Fix your mail, market, and mindset for 2025 just like Jill and I have.

I have known individuals since we have many years at Land Academy, they are with us and are starting to go, “This isn’t working.” I’m saying, “What are you doing?” “The same thing I’ve done many years ago.” I was like, “Let’s talk about that.” I remember one guy in particular who came back to the Career Path. It was a few years ago. He’s like, “I’m here because I need to refresh some stuff, and I don’t even know what to refresh.” We helped him and hooked him up.

Each week on the show, we answer a question from our local Land Academy Member Discord Forum. We take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

Capitalizing On Imperfect Properties & “Broken Down Stuff”

Zayn and Tara wrote, “I’m seeing some guidance here. I’m trying to determine if I want this property at any price. If you have any experience with Alabama or with any of these facets of real estate, please let me know. It’s 15 acres in redacted county in Alabama. The property is being farmed with a handshake deal dating back about 30 years. The farmer doesn’t want to buy the land, and he’s paying $500 a year to farm it.”

“There used to be a house, which had a kitchen fire, and then they never repaired it. They let it fall down, and then they dozed the entire structure with everything in it into an underground concrete pool in 2023, but filled dirt over the top. There are two old septic systems that have not been serviced in years, and without testing, we have no idea if they function or don’t. Also, I don’t know if the dozer went over the drain fields. The title is messy, too. I’d like to buy it for $15,000 max, and once all the above shenanigans are fixed, I hope to sell it for about $90,000. Is a potential environmental disaster, dozing over septic fields, and burying an old house even fixable?” Hilarious.

First of all, don’t say the word environmental anymore. Not on this deal and not in the future ever. The vast majority of environmental issues out there are for commercial property owners to deal with and not us. This is just my opinion. Is there an environmental situation? I honestly wouldn’t have thought of that and unless you brought it up. People do crazy stuff all the time on farmland, especially agricultural land that’s out of the city. Nobody cares at all.

As far as you know, you lose your memory of what just happened there. That’s my opinion on the environmental scenario. In the most positive way in the world, this reeks of DIY. There is a massive DIY purchasing group in our market segment buying and selling land that nobody talks about. Largely because we can do math very well. We understand sheets and computers. For that DIY group, that’s not their skillset. Their skillset is smelling out amazing real estate deals, dealing with what’s there, and hopefully, they can salvage it. You can probably salvage all of this stuff and then put a mobile on it, and they either move in, or their mother-in-law moves in, or they resell it.

That’s what this reek of. Now, you need to get enough information so that you’re sleeping at night and feel good sleeping at night decision on the acquisition price. If you think when it’s all done, just the land, and you can safely say, “At one time, there were a couple of septic fields here and there was a well here, but we don’t know what the current condition is.” You can sell it for $90,000, $70,000, $60,000, $50,000, or some conservative number, and you should decide how much you can buy for it.

Think about this, though. This is my final point on this. I’m sure Jill has much to say. Think of all the differences this property has from just a piece of raw land that’s always been raw. It’s being farmed. It had a house on it. The house had utilities when it was there. We haven’t talked about electric, but electric got there somehow. It was a huge thing for a small-town person to say, “I’m going to buy this for $50,000. Everything else out here. This size is 200,000. I’ll figure it out.” That was a speech from him to his wife, by the way.

I don’t have anything to add. I’m just looking at it like I’m not worried about it. I’m not worried about the property itself. It’s being used and farmed, and it has been for a while by somebody. He’s not going to buy it, but somebody else is probably going to do the same thing with it. It’s 15 acres. It gives me plenty of room to do whatever I want to do, too, by the way. If I want to keep farming, great. I want to farm it, or put a house over here, or build a ranch. Who knows? I am not worried about that at all. If you can get it for $15,000 or $25,000, I’m good with that, based on your math, Tara, because I know Tara.

That’s it. It’s worth $90,000 and you screwed up and you sell up for $70,000 by the time you’re down with an agent and everything. If I paid $25,000 for it, I’m okay with that. I doubled my money, and everybody got paid out. It’s fine, and it’s just got a messy title. She can undo this stuff. I know Tara. Good job.

Don’t be afraid of the broken-down stuff on your land. It usually makes it more valuable, not less, in 99% of cases. Share on X

Don’t be afraid of the broken-down stuff on your land. It makes it more valuable, not less, in 99% of the cases.

Do you know what’s funny about this? Sometimes, you’re going, “I wish I didn’t ask all these questions. There are things I want to know about the property and things I don’t want to know about the property.”

Our minds have been poisoned with HGTV. “Let’s renovate this. Let’s make it look pretty, and we can maximize value.” That’s not the business we’re in. Let’s make the price amazing and give them something to work with. That’s our model. Our topic: Is your 2024 playbook broken? Fix your mail, market, and mindset for 2025.

Here are some material changes that we’ve made with huge success in 2023 and 2024 because we saw this coming. We were as loud as I thought appropriate about the changes that were happening and are happening, but our members, our community, and now our staff are saying, “You guys aren’t loud enough.” That’s what this is about. How many times did that happen?

Can you imagine? That’s our new motto, “Be louder.” Do you want me to be louder? Okay, look out. I thought we were. That’s awesome.

All Jill ever tells me in our personal life is to be quiet and small like Steve Light.

Yes, and think of inside voice and outside voice. That comes up a lot. We don’t need to do the baking soda.

Inside joke.

The Evolving Role Of Mindset & Relationships In Real Estate

What I want to say is, what still works? Some things are probably still working, and some things are not working in your business. You need to lean into it and, in this case, maybe amplify what does still work. For me, what still works is getting on the dumb phone. I am picking up the phone more often now than I ever have. Not trusting email and not trusting texting. If anything, I’m having a voice-to-voice conversation.

I can pick up on things and little nuances. I can pick up on people like pausing and maybe any possible issues they might have with the tone of their voice, and I’m addressing them right then and there. Personally, that’s something that still works. What things haven’t been working? As Jack even mentioned, about how few mailers were needed to get a deal. Now, it might take more. You might have to surgically strike a little bit differently.

There’s stuff that he’s doing that we don’t even talk about, but I know goes on when he’s picking counties, pricing units, and getting people to call and act on them. That’s his job. He watches the volume that I get to deal with and my team gets to do with, and he adjusts accordingly. Those are the things that you need to be thinking about.

Here are the three topics I agree 100%. Here are the three things that this episode is about. What have we changed in our markets, our mailers, and our mindset? I’ll tell you exactly what we’ve done successfully. There have always been 4, 5, or 8 markers that Jill and I love. We continue to make money there largely because we have a ton of inside information. This is the market now, and we continue to make money there, but I’ll tell you what’s different, and it’s very different.

I bought, quite some time ago, my first mobile home there. This is a journey and a burning landmark for us, and it still is. It has calmed down a lot. The resale market is much more difficult. Consequently, we have a bunch of properties still sitting there at the original prices that we’ve asked for, and we’re in no real hurry because I know the market will come back. I know these markets well.

The real estate industry won’t be affected by AI in any substantial way in the near future—and here’s why: it’s relationship-based. Share on X

We started buying mobile homes and now houses in those markets because we know I’m so well. We know the real estate agents, the people at the county, and we know how long it’s going to take. We’ve expanded our land market to a new product type. I urge you to do that. If you’re new, even better, because you should start off doing that. Go to HouseAcademy.com for information.

Number two, mailers. I said this. When I started out, I could send out 25 mailers and do a couple of deals. I started sending out 500 to 1,000 mailers and getting a lot of deals. I wasn’t pricing them. I was pricing them at, “I’ll give you $500 for your land,” and they screamed back and said, “Please. I’m tired of paying the taxes.” That low-hanging fruit has been picked. Is it negative? No. We make way more money now. Every time we have to make a change like this, we end up making more money. The 50 mailer became 500. A 500 mailer now, for several years or decades, was 5,000 mailers. That doesn’t work anymore. You have to send out more mail. No one wants to hear that.

It’s okay if you’re new and you’re like, “I don’t have the budget for this.” You will. That’s your goal. Scale up to that. When you start doing deals, put that money right back in the mail. Put all those efforts, and it will pay off.

The way to offset that, and we’ll talk about that in the next few days on the show, is by adding zeroes. Buy a property for $1,000 and sell it for $5,000. I built a company on that model. We don’t even mess with that anymore. In fact, for houses, we don’t buy them unless we make $100,000 on them. It’s easy to send out 25,000 mailers now for us and buy 1 or 2 houses where we make $100,000. The numbers are beautiful. It’s a beautiful return on investment.

That’s the markets we address, and mailers we address, and the mindset. Jill covered mindset first. It used to be that someone would receive an offer. Back in my day, we signed it and sent it back. We literally had no telephone number associated with our companies at all. We did, but we didn’t put it on anything. We didn’t put it on the mailer or anything.

It wasn’t like, “Call me and we’ll talk about it.” Nothing like that.

There’s nothing to talk about. Make good on it. For $500, I don’t care if this is the worst piece of property in the world. I’m buying it and reselling it. That was the mindset then. My mindset then changed to, let’s expand into larger properties, and here’s a customer service type number. We’re not going to negotiate the price or talk about the deal, but we found out that our mailer yield was much better if somebody could call and talk to somebody and say, “Is this real? What’s the process?” The price was never discussed, or they never knew about the land anyway. It was all inherited, and they didn’t care.

That was the mindset up until Jill and I joined forces. Jill said, “Maybe you guys, you dingbats, should put a phone number and see what happens. By the way, I’ll answer the phone because I’m sure you don’t know how to do it,” which is all true. We changed the mindset to Jill answering the phone and making friends with the people, and walking them through the transaction. These are probably very real numbers, but we quadrupled how much money we were making within the first 60 days. That hasn’t stopped growing since.

All because Jill came from a different industry, and looked at the whole thing with a fresh set of eyes and said, “You need to be refreshed.” Now, Jill describes it with a whole different mindset. You have to engage these people. Do you know what I want all of you to do? I want you to go to your favorite AI input scenario search engine. Not Google, but anything else. I want you to type in this: “How will AI affect the real estate industry?”

I’ve done this on our ChatGPT, on Google, or Copilot for Microsoft. They all say some version of this. Don’t trust me. I want you to do it yourself. “Real estate industry will not be affected by AI in any substantial way in the near future,” and here’s why. It’s relationship-based. Selling a piece of real estate is too complicated for the vast majority of people, and they need somebody to talk to about it. They need their handheld. They need to know how things are going to move through the system, and when they’re going to get their money.

Jill was born to do that. If you’re thinking about getting into this business, or you’re into it now and you’re not doing this, you’re missing this part of us because you’re not technical or great with Excel, you know how to do mailers, and good at pricing. All of that is like me. You need to learn to be Jill, or you need to find a Jill. I’m very fortunate this happened a long time ago. Very crazy. It was like falling backwards into a lock.

Thank you.

Join us in the next episode. Jill and I are going to talk about From Stale to Scalable: 2025’s New Rules for Land Mailers and Market Moves. You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.