Why Add Houses Now?

This is episode number 2234. In this episode, Jill and I are talking about adding houses to your land investment operation in 2025. This is not an ultra-new topic for us, but the further we get into this year, the more important I think it is.

It might save your business.

That’s what I think.

Keep food on the table. It’s a little thing that’s important to me. I don’t know about you, but I always want to make sure there’s food on the table.

This isn’t the first recession where things have slowed down in the land business and Jill and I have turned to houses to do well. We did it times 10 in 2009 and we’re doing it now again, not because it’s our favorite asset class to flip or invest in, but because Jill needs to eat, I guess.

I’m the only one. You know what would be really funny? Let’s pause for a moment. Let’s mention a few things that we’ve thought about or have pivoted to in the years that were not so profitable. I got one. Pizza.

Yeah. That comes up too often.

I know. Pizza, buying a bar. Not that we did it, we went down the path.

We didn’t pull the trigger on most of these. A lot of offshoots. Most notably, it gets no attention, is products that we have started that we thought would enhance our land investment business and yours consequently. There are just some of them that just didn’t take off. One is Title Mind. People still bring it up. It’s our version of closing escrow for people who don’t want to get title insurance. This is a lot of years ago.

It didn’t work in that form.

We had to close it down because it was so popular.

We couldn’t handle it.

What ended up happening is we were getting all these deals that people couldn’t close on their own and really, nobody can close them because they were really intense legal-type scenarios that were associated with the property.

I’m going to keep you on the topic. Let’s just lightly talk about things, like funny, crazy things that we’ve tried just to say we knew of what we speak now when we say, “Don’t do this to fill in any land sales gaps.” That’s my point. I go down the rabbit hole you were going down, which is lovely, but thank you. Pizza. We had a mint. We’ve thought about a bar. We thought about other various restaurants.

You can’t just say we had a mint and just move on.

It was really cool.

Jill and I started a full-blown gold and silver processing mint.

It was great.

It was freaking awesome.

It was a little bit of a distraction. That’s what happens. We’ll talk more about houses here in a minute. What you have to be careful of is when you start looking around other things to do, then if it’s not tied to your core business, it could be a big distraction and then end up pulling you away more than you need to go or you should go. I’ll leave it at that.

Well said. All week, we’re talking about off-market real estate. It’s off-market week. You already know the topic for this episode. Monday, Tuesday, we’re going to talk about can you flip land with no money down. Wednesday, why double closing land rarely works? What does work? What’s better? Thursday, the best way to find off-market land deals in 2025. I can’t wait to talk about that personally. Friday, it’s our first Friday of doing off-script Friday with Jack and Jill.

What does that mean?

It means I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to ask questions for me. It’s not necessarily about land itself, but it’s about where do you want to go in life? Are you upset with the choice of men?

I’m writing things down that now. I’m thinking now that you’ve opened that door, I will have a laundry list by the time we get to Friday. We might need more than the usual time.

Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord Forum and take a deep dive in land-related topics by your request.

Key Differences Between Land & House Flipping

Okay. Ronnie wrote, “i’ve been buying and selling land for several years with pretty good success. My business has slowed down in the last few months. I hear you talk about houses. What are the biggest differences in buying and selling land in houses?” I love this question. Can we roll it into the topic?

Yeah, that’s exactly why I chose it. This episode’s topic, adding houses to your land investment operation in 2025. Go ahead, Jill. This assumes that you have a land investing operation.

I have three points to make. I will talk about those a little bit. I’ll hand it to you and then i’ll make sure that we answer Ronnie’s question in that. Adding houses in 2025, why the heck would I do it? As Ronnie’s talking about, it’s just you need another property type. Land might be slowing down, but houses aren’t. If you’re in Land Academy and cruising along and know what you’re doing here, know how to find areas, know how to pick things, know how to run your red, yellow, green tests and see how it’s trending like, “Look at this. It’s a good place to where people are buying houses,” the same way you look at land, you got this.

My point is diversification is always good. I really want you to be open to it. Number two, you’re going to learn. What’s better than learning a whole new property type, getting a little bit out of your comfort zone going, “I didn’t even think about this. I’ve got to turn on utilities for this thing. I just bought a house and i’ve got to get insurance.” There are other things that you have to think about that we do not consider or even worry about or think about with rural vacant land. My third point I want to make is the Land Academy way of doing it is key. Maybe I’ll hand it to you now to take over and explain what we mean by that.

Diversification is always good. Stay open to it. Share on X

I love learning. I love learning about new stuff. I like new challenges. I think there’s probably a certain percentage of people out there reading, saying, “Now i’ve got to do houses?” I don’t think that’s a good attitude.

“I just mastered this.”

I think that when we started buying and selling land, I couldn’t sleep. I was so excited. This is a million years ago. I bought and sold that first property and telling myself, “All i’ve got to do is repeat this about 10,000 times in we’re all set.” That ended up happening, literally. With houses, we’ve bought and sold a lot of houses, made a bunch of mistakes, cleaned them up too much, renovated them too much, put up too much time and money in and then got some money out. We’ve never had any catastrophic financial mistakes buying and selling houses and certainly not with land. It’s totally different. Here’s how. Here’s a basic biggest picture differences between the two.

When you find an asset and we find the assets exactly the same way that we do with land. We do a red, green, yellow test. We make sure that we do our due diligence. It’s all the same. Very similar. Once you find that asset, though, you have to add the actual physical inspection. That’s a little bit different.

Physical inspection of land doesn’t happen too much. We do it, if at all. In most cases, we do it from our desk or we have somebody out there to take pictures of a house. You need to seriously inspect it. You need to have a licensed inspector look at it. Once you’ve done that and the numbers work, because the numbers already work before you even get to that point, you know how much that house is going to sell for.

That’s the difference. The huge difference between buying and selling land in houses. With land, “I’m not sure. There’s a range. The house next door should be valued this way. I’m not 100% sure of the demand.” I can look at statistics in a housing market very quickly and see in a zip code how fast a house is going to sell that is 1,800 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2 baths or more, has a 2-car garage and was built in the ‘80s.

I can tell you almost, plus or minus 5%, how long it’s going to take if it’s priced the way that it’s priced and pricing it and valuing these types of housing assets is crazy simple. There’s no guessing. The last 10 houses in the last 30 days that have those statistics I just ran off sold for between $380,000 and $420,000 and I’m buying this asset for $220,000, $280,000. I know it’s going to happen.

It’s really easy once you secure it, the property, and get it purchased to resell it. What’s harder and more expensive and more time-consuming and more talking on the phone to sellers is getting the price that you want for a property that you know it’s going to sell. You have to send out more mail. You have to manage more inbound flow.

It takes more mail and more time to find somebody who just doesn’t want the house anymore. We just went through it on a property and it was pictured perfect scenario and we got the property for exactly the amount of money that we wanted. The guy that was selling it to us didn’t care. He didn’t have any debt and his wife recently passed away and he was moving back East. When you get the asset, it’s smooth sailing.

The “Land Academy Way” Of Flipping Houses

I would like to add the Land Academy way of flipping houses is not building a garage and putting in a pool because we’re going to add the value thing. No. It is in its current condition. We buy it for X price and then we sell it in that same condition and we don’t even sweep the floor. That’s another key thing that I want to make sure you understand and know.

Again, we’re buying it for, I don’t know, $50,000, $75,000, $100,000, depending on the market, below what we know we can sell it for in its current condition. We sell it to somebody else who’s either going to do it themselves or they are a flipper. They’re the HGTV guy that wants to go in and make it beautiful and then try to make even more money off of that. That’s what we do.

Jill’s totally right. Our proven methodology over decades and decades and what thousands of present and past Land Academy members has proven is to use data-driven decisions. Get the data, capture it. It’s really interesting. Jill and I bought a sailboat and it’s on the Pacific Ocean. The first thing I did was try to find somebody on the internet that makes data-driven decisions about sailing and all the things that surround that.

We found a couple of people and the methodology, the tools they use online, about what path to take. They’re even using AI and things like that for predicting the weather. It’s the same deal here. I’ll leave it with this. You’d be crazy not to add houses to your land investment operation, especially if you’re buying and selling land and it’s slowing down a little bit. It’s pretty much the same thing. There are just a few things you need to teach yourself. Look up HouseAcademy.com.

That’s what I was just going to say. I forgot to even mention that. By the way, we are HouseAcademy.com. If you really want to learn about it, go there.

Join us next time where Jill and I discuss can you really flip land with no money down? You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.