Introduction

This is episode 1,964, and we will talk about a couple of topics. First, how Jill and I make buying and selling land easy, and we’re going to deconstruct that and see what’s easy and maybe somewhat more challenging. Then after that, we will talk about working at full speed and effectively.

I was going to talk about the first topic. This came up because it happens often, and this person brought it to my attention and I had to say that you’re right. He said, “You make this sound easy.” I said, “What, hold on.” No, you’re right. I feel bad. I feel like I’m doing a little bit wrong, if you will, because you just buy it, sell it for more, double your money, and get out fast. That’s it, an hour a day, especially if you’re new, maybe two hours.

That’s not the case. I want to talk about that and let everybody know what’s going on. A lot of this comes out, especially this last month, I’ve been helping out our sales team and I’ve been doing a lot of the initial Land Academy inquiry calls myself. I’ve been telling people that, explaining this, I should say, over the phone. That’s when they get a handle on what’s involved, so I thought it helped the planet here too.

I think the root of this and the root of everything is you got to look inside yourself and say, “Okay, here’s what they’re saying.” “Here’s this concept of buying and selling land.” “How does it fit in my world or does it?”

I’ll save it for the show.

Each week on the show, we answer questions from our Land Academy member Discord forum, review land acquisitions from our weekly member webinars, and take a deep dive into two land-related topics by popular request. If you want a sneak peek of our Discord forum, go to LandAcademy.com, it’s free.

Pricing Land Offers

Under resources, if you’re looking for it, it’s cool. By the way, if you would like us to answer your question here or just simply need some help getting involved in our community, don’t forget you can easily text us at (480) 530-7383. All the texts are read and again, your question just might pop up here. The Stevenson Brothers wrote, “Generally, what are land buyers offering? 20% to 50% of retail seems to be the amount.”

“Please send me any quick thoughts on the exact percent of this. Want less? Take me off your list and more deals obviously, like if you offer less. Thank you.” Shannon already replied, which is correct. She wrote in. “It all depends and sometimes how competitive the market is that you’re mailing, that makes a difference too.” I’m going to stop right here and let you answer because nobody knows better than this guy.

Pricing your mailer is important and there’s no specific. This is a very popular question, top five probably of all time. It’s something that we spend at least two modules on in our career path advanced program. There’s no magic percentage. You can’t say in Michigan it’s 20% and Utah it’s 24% or even in county by county or zip code by zip code.

It has to be some percentage that you believe is attractive enough to keep someone’s attention and not too high where you’re pricing yourself out, offering too much money, and removing the possibility of a profit margin for yourself. For us, that generally hovers around 20%. The silver lining in all this is at the end of your mailer, you need to spend several hours testing for a reason.

There’s no way out of this. There’s no electronic way to avoid this. There are cute apps out there that are available that don’t work at all because it takes a manual set of eyes to go through your mailer at the very end and pick out if you’re brand new out of every twenty lines of offers that are going out and test it for a reason. Test it if you’re going to buy it.

If the offer came back signed with the offer amount that you sent in, what would be the deal? That’s how you become great at pricing. That’s my first point and it’s relative, it always changes. The way that you price per acre on 2 to 5 acres might be very different than how you price 5 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 and beyond from an acreage standpoint.

Larger acreage property as a price per acre is always lower than a smaller acreage amount. That’s why subdividing is rooted in pricing like that. It’s the bottle case theory. You can buy a case of beer cheaper than you can buy a single beer. That’s how a bar stays in business, and I think hopefully I made that point.

That’s just how it is. We know that these are all facts. This is all explained in great detail in the products of the Land Academy 3.0, and of course, Career Path. As far as Shannon’s response goes, it all depends on how competitive the market is that you’re mailing. I could not disagree with this more. It’s not anything towards Shannon or anybody at all. These are very good questions and they need to be discussed so we can all become better land investors.

You don’t agree with Shannon?

No, I completely disagree. If you’re in a competitive market, you have to ask yourself why. Let me put you into Jill’s shoes for a second. When Jill believes that she has competition from, maybe, six people who sent an offer to one landowner. Here’s what’s going to happen with that. Two people aren’t going to respond. A seller calls six people back all equally. “I got your offer and it’s all the same price.”

This is a theory. This is an academic exercise. Two people aren’t going to even respond at all. Maybe three. One or two more might answer the phone like this. “Yes, I know I sent you.” That leaves Jill, and bubbly Jill over here is going to be a friendly person. She’s going to throw her dynamic personality all over the seller.

Make it easy and fast. Yes, you’re going to get your money and thanks for responding, because we’re in this business together and we’re here to provide you a service. Jill’s going to get the deal done and I don’t believe in this competitive market. To cap that point, think about a regular real estate agent office. Ten people are sitting around and trying to get into a closed market.

We’re in an open market. It’s free. There are 150 million properties that you can potentially buy and sell today, or at any given time. There are 10 or 15 real estate agents in a closed market, maybe one or two zip codes at most. Maybe half of a zip code in an urban area trying to get the same listings.

Somebody in that office is going to do fantastically well. That’s the way all real estate agent offices are. Those two people over there, they’re never in the office, by the way. Those two people are smashing it and the rest of them are wondering why. Which side do you want to be on? First of all, I wouldn’t mail a competitive market.

I have a thought on that. Let me back up here because there could be a personal reason that someone’s looking at a market. For example, you and I, truth time, have been driving the country. As you can see, we’re still in our RV. We are still up in Michigan. We’re in northern Lower Michigan. I’ve learned this. The upper-lower, that’s it.

Anyway, there might be places that you want. There’s one example. I don’t care what’s going on in the market. I want to be in there, personally for my use. That might be a reason that I would accidentally or I would purposely mail offers in a more competitive area and I would mail them a little more aggressively.

Still, I’m not going to go here and buy retail. That’s not who we are. I don’t care what it is. Our primary residence, anything, we’re not spending retail. We’re going to make a deal because that’s who we are, but I might change my percentage a little bit. That could be where Shannon’s coming from. Just a thought but I agree with you.

The big picture is I don’t want to play with that. When these deals come back, or here is an even better example. When I look at, “Would you do this deal?” on our Thursday member call, we’ll pop in Zillow or something like that. If I see a lot of red dots, like a ton of red dots of for-sale property, I don’t want to swim in that pond.

Jill’s exactly right. You don’t have to take a lot of notes here. It’s all in the red, green, and yellow tests. All the systems that we have in place in our education smoke this stuff out for you. All of them. If you run the red, green, yellow test, it’s going to tell you whether or not to send mail there. Then you’re going to assess whether or not that market is competitive or it’ll tell you. The data tells you everything.

Just don’t mail there and if you do mail there, you better go in with guns blazing. You’d have a dynamic personality or the person who answers the phone who works for you needs to have a dynamic personality. As far as pricing goes, I’ll close on this to answer the question because it’s such a popular question, I did spend more time on it than I thought I would. 20% to 25% is not going to matter.

When you’re new, you believe that how you price it is the reason why they’re going to respond. The fact is, it’s not the case. Nearly all the people that we buy property from just want to get rid of it. They probably inherited it. There’s some other thing going on in their life. They have some life events. They might psychologically want $500 more, a couple of thousand dollars more. Every situation is different, but obsessing about price is not going to make or break it.

Price is very important. However, don’t let it sink the ship. Don’t let it keep you from getting offers out. I will help you. You’ll get good and we’ll help you.

Price is not the biggest factor. However, don't let it sink the ship. Share on X

Ease Vs. Reality Of Buying And Selling Land

All the answers are in the education and on the Thursday call. Our first topic is related to this previous question. We make this sound easy, but, Jill, take it away because I know you had a real specific conversation with somebody recently that sparked this topic.

It comes up often. People are saying, “I got this.” Even when we’re talking with our friends, and here’s an even better example. You’ve heard us in the last several weeks, Jack talking about reconnecting with his high school buddies, and a lot of them don’t know what we do. We’ve been sharing with them, and they think that it is a piece of cake and one went as far as to say, “Can you teach my kids?”

Here’s the deal. Mine are 25 years old and 29 years old, and I got to get them off my couch. Here’s what we’re going to do. This is true. He said, “I’m going to buy this for them. Can you just help them and get them on their way and teach them how to do this because it sounds like it’s easy? They just have to do this thing, answer the phone, buy a property, and double their money. They can do this all while playing whatever game on another screen, because that’s what they’re doing anyway, on my couch.”

I was thinking, “Uh-oh.” Jack had a very sweet conversation and said, “Truth time here. There’s a lot more to it than that.” That’s what I want to talk about today. We want to talk about it and bring it up to you. We get on the air here, we tell you how much we love it, which we do because we are land people and we tell you how little we work.

We’re educators.

All of this is true. I’m not making up anything. When I tell you I work a couple of hours a week on my land business, yes, I only work a couple of hours a week. It’s not that much. Two to three hours a week, I’m doing it. Why is that? It is because I’ve been doing it for fifteen years. That’s the reality. This one, since the 90s. I want everybody to take a step back and realize too, if you are new to Land Academy, you’re getting into this and you’re wondering, “Why do they say it’s easy? I don’t think this is easy at all.”

You’re not nuts. You are right. There are a lot of moving parts, especially getting into this. You watch the whole program. I tell people right away, go right to Land Academy 3.0. I want you to watch the whole thing through. I want you to go back and re-watch it. You start paying attention. You start taking notes. You start hitting the pause button.

Then you have two monitors going. You’re doing it right as Jack’s doing it and you’re looking at his screenshot, making sure your screen matches his screen. You’re getting that into it and you’re spending time on it, and it will take you a little bit. After some time, for some people, it’s six months, for some people it might be two years. It’ll click and you’ll get the hang of this. You either love it or you don’t. I like to think it’s nice that people that do come to us, when they finally pull the trigger and they’re in it, they’ve done their recon.

We have a very smart group. I don’t have people who just say, “This isn’t what I thought it was.” Usually, they don’t even get to that point. Why you’re here for us is to take ten years or more off of your learning process. You could sit down and start from scratch and take ten years to catch up with us, or get into Land Academy, and take six months to catch up to us.

Forget about the land business for a second. There’s a section in Discord called Success Stories. I love it when people take their camera and shoot whatever they’re looking at. You can see their feet stretched out on a Chaise lounge. I do. I mean it. I’m not being satirical. His post was him taking a picture of a sunset in Greece. The caption was, “Started my land journey four years ago, spending the summer in Greece.” That says it all to me.

It takes years. My philosophy in life has always been, it takes two years to get any real traction in anything. Again, forget about the land business. Let’s say you get accepted to medical school this month and or you start buying and selling land now. You have equal talents in both, and then in four years, you’re going to be sitting on a chaise lounge if you’re good at it in Greece for the summer.

You got all the pieces to the puzzle in place, and four years in medical school, you’re going to be wondering why you ever did this in the first place at all. In eight years, when you are now a brain surgeon, the eight years that into your land business from a financial standpoint is going to pay out times 80. You’ll be done if you’re any good at this.

You have to ask yourself. Yes, we make this sound easy. If you have the right personality, the right attitude, the right skill set, and some element of life experience, unlike the two kids who can’t get off the couch, then yes, it is going to be easy for you. Jill and I happen to have that combined, much better together than we would be apart. For us, that’s our niche that we’re doing this together. Not everybody does it. I don’t think Greece Guy’s got his wife involved at all. I don’t know.

Maybe she’s the whole reason he’s there and he just took the picture. I’m not sure. I don’t know, but maybe you can tell us, we’ll put you on the show. It’d be fun to hear about your four years. You have to like everything, in my opinion, look in the mirror. I used to say this a lot. I haven’t said it in a long time in the show.

There are a ton of things that people do that make it look easy and would be impossible for me in life to succeed at it personally. This is a personal thing. I’ve tried to play the guitar probably 15 times. I bet I’ve owned 10 guitars in my life. I can’t get through one scale. I probably can play two chords. It’s not because I don’t want to, but in the end, it comes down to my lack of raw skill. I could overcome that if I wanted to. If I wanted it that bad. I just don’t.

I think you could.

That’s what this is. Forget about land. The bigger picture here is, there’s all kinds of stuff. Math came easy to me in my entire academic career and things like accounting. I didn’t have to try hard. Naturally, I gravitated toward it. Everything else in an academic environment did not come easy to me, and my grades reflected that.

What do you think about this? You brought up something about attitude, which I agree with. I picked out of that whole speech, in a very positive way. What are the nuggets here that you have to have? Seriously. Attitude, because you know what? A lot of those other pieces that you just brought up in our business, you can find a partner. That’s the thing, we have many people in Land Academy who are the Jills or the Jacks. They’re the talker, they’re not the data person. Fill in the blank, but they have very smartly partnered with somebody like we have to fill in those gaps. That’s the best.

I’m a self-identified. I’m terrible at operations. Anything from an operations standpoint. I’m not good at it. I’m not good at managing people. To get over that to a point where it’s acceptable. Not to shine at it, just to be acceptable. I hire the right people, train them, and then give them the tools to succeed. We have multiple people in Land Academy, the education company, and Offers 2 Owners who, after a couple of years of working directly under me, are shining now.

They’re the ones who have risen. There were lots of people who started with them who are no longer with us. The people who are left here now are doing a great job. Does that make me a great operations person? No, it was my complicated and psychological way to avoid being a manager because I put people in place who could do it for me. Then shoved them on their way like you do with children and hoped for the best. It worked out. The same thing can happen in this land career or anything else that you try.

I’m sure it’s like anything, like saying that so and so has a liquor store and they’re making bank, or has a bar and they’re doing whatever, and you’re like, “If they can do it I can do it.” Hold on.

It’s not applied to anything. You’re right.

It’s not always that easy but if you’re passionate about it, you have the right information, and hopefully some support, you can do it. You can do it. That’s what we wanted you to know today. Please don’t think you could walk into this in 90 days, have a 2 to 3-hour work week, and be sitting in Greece. That’s not realistic.

It's not always easy, but with passion, the right information, and some support, you can achieve it. Share on X

I’ll close on this. Making a lot of money and having an amazing life because of it. I never gave myself any other option. Never. If that sounds familiar to you, then you’re going to make whatever it is that you choose, you’re going to make that work. It might take you two years, it might take you two months, it might take you 4 or 5 years. That’s it.

I love that. That’s your goal. My goal is time. It’s not even about the money. I’ll get by with a lot less money to always have my time and have fun.

Franklin County Land Deal

Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar.

“We’re in Franklin County, Virginia. Would you do this deal? Access plenty. I like that. Buildable. Yes, towards the end of the property on Dogwood Hill Road, 5.6 acres for work. No attributes. Attributes, none. Everybody’s alive. Affordable, it can be. The offer price was $7,300. Don’t have any good comps to compare it to. You could sell it for $20,000. Property selling in that zip code, but not near my property. I’m completely unsure about the sales price. Buy for $7,300. It’s across the road. I see plenty of access. I like it.

This is great. Look at this is a place where the sign. It goes right up there.

It’s like a little creek along there. I think that’s a whole little something in there. I think it might go down. Even though that one little piece is the flood area, I think it all drops down from there. That’s why they already built on the other side of the street. It’s looking left over to me. No, he built it in 1927. I bought it. I was looking for sale information, just assuming it was all bought at the same time. That’s what I was going for. I just think he happens to own both sides of the road and he never uses it. He even picks up his thing in there.

Maybe it’s perfectly okay and perfectly buildable. It’s just sending up some red flags about drainage and topography.

We need to confirm. Those are trees. I thought that was a flat spot. It’s the top of a tree. That’s the trouble I’m having.

You can see the part that’s in the flood zone is way down here. The question is, is this usable part here wide enough?

That’s 75 feet. Let’s call the county to find out what can I do there. Where would it have to be able to use it?

From here to here is 13 feet, which is honestly not that big of a deal.

Maybe there’s a spot right there. I don’t know.

Maybe there’s another use for this too.

Not hunting. It’s too small. I mean, don’t know. We have to find out.

$7,300 is cheap.

Toward the back of it is less stroked. Put this room in the middle and then you got to have a little bridge to get to your property, which could still be cool. We just need to know.

Buy for seven, sell for twenty. Maybe now buy for five, sell for twenty. That’s not bad.

Maybe even cheaper. Just make sure that we can do something.”

I am excited to announce that Career Path is still open. Career Paths 7 and 8 are coming this fall. What is a Career Path? It is our highest level of coaching. It’s the Land Academy mastermind group, if you will. It’s an eight-week intense program that’s led directly by Jack and myself and It’s coming at the end of September 2024, probably on the 28th. I can’t remember what it is.

Here’s what you do. Go to LandAcademy.com and look under Programs, you’ll find Career Path, and all the details are there. The schedule, how to apply, and what’s involved. Everything. The people that are coming out of that, holy moly. The numbers that they’re doing are just astronomical. This is why. The career path is for someone who’s here to Sit in Greece for the summer, four years from now.

Exactly. That’s the whole goal. You’re not here to mess around. This isn’t a side thing or whatever. I’m not supplementing my income or supplementing this just to pay for, fill in the blank, my kid’s college or something like that. This is a family business. We are not messing around. That’s the Career Path. Check it out. We’d love to have you.

Discord Queries

Let’s take another question posted by one of our members on the Land Academy Discord online community. Again, if you want a sneak peek, go to LandAcademy.com. It’s free. We’re going to try something a little different instead of reading a question, although it might seem similar to you on the other end. But for us, it’s a little different.

I’m going to open Discord. Jill doesn’t even know about this. We’re going to go to the most recent submissions in a few of the channels, and we’re going to read maybe one or two or a few to see how it goes. She and I are going to comment about it, and we’ll see how it goes. It might be a dismal failure. We don’t know. Here we are in Discord, and I’m going to look at a couple of the questions here.

We’re just going to randomly pick, and Jill and I are going to give our opinion. Give us your opinion. Yuri says, “How many extensions will you grant a buyer before putting your property back on the market? They put down five times what I requested in earnest money. They want the property. I put $1,000 down, and they put $5,000 down, but the transaction is dragging on much longer than I am comfortable with. Any advice?”

My first question is what Sid already wrote. “Why?” Is it they didn’t do their due diligence in time? That could be one. They could have put a deposit down before totally making sure they want the property. Number two could be they don’t have the money to buy the property, and they’re running around scrambling to try to get the amount. They had the $5,000 but they don’t have the $50,000. It could be something like that.

If they’re getting some stuff done like surveys or appraisals because they need financing, I’m okay with that. The lenders are taking their time, or they have some things they need to work through, whatever. I’m good with that, but I need to be in the loop and know what’s going on. I hate to say it, but how many extensions? It depends on what’s going on.

If they know in 90 days or not even that, let’s just say that they’re going to build on it. They need a perk test. The guy can’t get out there for three weeks and exactly that, I’m cool. But then if it’s just fluff, “We want it,” or “We’ll call you back,” whatever like that, then I’m going to set a hard deadline with them and just say, “Here’s what’s going to happen. If I don’t hear from you guys by this day, it’s going back on the market. You have first right of refusal when I get another buyer, but I’m putting it back on the market, period.”

What’s rooted in the way Jill answers all of these questions and the way she solves the issues that come about in our land business is communication. She’s going to answer this question based on what the buyer says. The buyer says, “I’m trying to get my money together and I’m waiting for my uncle to die because he’s going to give me money,” then no more extensions.

If it’s like, “I’ve got $182,000 in this account over here, and I’m waiting for the wire to clear, just give me till Thursday and we can close the deal.” Okay, extension number two. It’s all communication with Jill. For me, I would not have allowed a down payment in the first place. I would have said, “This is an all-cash deal. The escrow agent’s going to handle it, and we’re not extending.” For me, I would ask myself, if this is happening, did I price this wrong? Why aren’t there 50 people that want to buy this property?

Maybe there are. That’s the thing.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. What did I do that’s causing this situation with these extensions? I solve all problems by looking in the mirror first. Is that right? I don’t know. It works for me, but this is a good question. This is what Discord’s for. Christian says, “How much mail is everyone sending to get a deal they buy? I’m curious about what yield everyone is getting. Thanks.”

Hugely popular question. Again, top five. It depends on your experience and it depends directly on who’s answering your phone and to some degree, how you’re pricing it. If you’re pricing it effectively, you’re doing everything right on my side. All the things that I do from a data standpoint, choosing the county research and all of that between 2500 and 5000 mailers are what you should be seeing from a yield standpoint. If Jill’s answering your phone, it’s going to be much better.

It’s funny because we used to say when we started the Land Academy, about three, 400 units, you’re going to buy a piece of property. This is 2014. We said this, which used to be true. That was the case. That’s how it is for us now anyway, but we can’t say that. I can’t say that out loud. I’m saying it out loud here, but please don’t expect those kinds of results. This is 30 years plus of experience that she and I have. Bank on $5,000 if you’re answering the phone right and doing the data piece right.

Thomas says, “Does anyone use that delinquent filter and DataTree with any success? I’ve never used it.” Delinquent, I believe, means the property is delinquent in some way, like the taxes aren’t current. The DataTree’s financial component, whether or not there’s a loan and how much is left on a loan, and all of that is pretty big in DataTree. We don’t use it because we think it pertains mostly to houses and commercial property.

Not much to land because there’s not a ton of property that has loans against it from a land standpoint. The bigger picture here is that just because there’s a button in a data overlay or data aggregator like Datatree, I’m not picking on them. They’re the best in the business for what we do. Just because there’s a button there doesn’t mean that what’s behind it works.

If you are into mailing people back to only mailing people offers that are delinquent in their taxes, There are way better tools out there starting with the county. Way better tools to use than DataTree. Now, you’re creating a tiny little mailer for yourself, which doesn’t reek of success. Recklessly mail, create the largest mailer you possibly can and you’re going to do a bunch of deals.

Fred wrote, “Hi everyone, I recently had a call with a landowner in Ohio who owns around 300 acres in an area known to have a lot of oil. The project is way too big (Financially) for me, but I thought maybe there’s a Land Academy member with big funds who looks for deals like this. I did not want to let this potential deal go to waste, that’s why I informed you guys first. Please feel free to DM me.” I love that.

This is just a sweet little example of what goes on in here that people can’t see and don’t know. I’m sure behind the scenes, there’s a conversation about this like, “How much? What is it?” I love oil property. I’m assuming it comes with the mineral rights here because that would be why it’s expensive. That’s what’s happening. That’s cool. That’s this group.

People come into this sometimes thinking, “What if I don’t have the money to buy the deals?” Don’t worry about it. Just like Fred here, you stumble across something great, throw it out there, and watch what happens. There’s probably somebody in our group who is very set up for something like this and the deal won’t go to waste. I’m excited.

You stumble across something great, throw it out there, and watch what happens. Share on X

Working Ineffectively Despite Effort

There are tons of opportunities like this in Discord and Land Academy. Today’s second topic is called Working At Full Speed But Doing It Ineffectively. This comes from a conversation that Jill and I had with somebody who’s very successful in real estate, but I believe could be probably 10 times more effective. She was confiding in us about how hard she works. Believe me, she does financially but she said flat out, half of my business takes up 90% of my time.

Can I clarify this is not a Land Academy member?

Yes, my family and my close friends from high school whom I haven’t seen for decades are in Northern Michigan right now. I’m meeting with them all the time and this conversation came up and our obvious answer was, “Why don’t you take out this?” I don’t think we got an answer.

No, I don’t think they got it. That’s why we want to talk about it.

Then it got to the point where Jill and I started to say to each other, “I wonder how much this happens.” “Is it important enough to create a sub-module in Career Path?” I think this is a huge issue. This is an offshoot of the old Steve Jobs quote, “The biggest reason people fail is because they’re not working on the right stuff and what you don’t work on is just as important as what you choose to work on.”

The undertone in that statement is I’m great. I know exactly what to do. I know how to make a ton of money. Now I’m going to take that as to II) What should I do? What should I work on? Where am I most effective? Me on the phone? That’s not effective. Jill on the phone? Very effective. Me in front of a database in a dark room is pretty effective. I’m going to come out of there with some answers in just a couple of hours.

That’s a good idea. Could you imagine Jill going into a dark room, coming back out, and having a perfect mailer? I would come out in tears.

It’s not just that. It’s not the tears. It’s the big picture. Take a step back and ask, “What am I doing anyway?” Maybe sending mail to Alaska doesn’t make the most sense. Maybe sending mail to Michigan makes more sense. I’m just picking on those two states. I don’t know if they’re effective or not from a mail recipient standpoint but by the time I’m done looking at it, I’m going to know.

Exactly. That’s interesting. I’ve noticed that people think that they have to be busy or appear busy to justify their fill-in-the-blank. I don’t think that’s right. This individual that we’re talking about that we met, she’s successful, but there’s just much running around and unnecessary talking. She plans these drives. She has to take drives to look at properties and show properties.

She’ll spend the whole hour in the car talking. I’m going to argue, why don’t you listen to a book? Book on tape. Why don’t you do something else? Some of these things, I don’t even think need her. I think she sometimes puts herself out there where she doesn’t need to, and I’m like, “Go to a movie. Do something fun with your time. You’ve earned it.”

I’ve noticed when I’m getting older, some people talk their way into what they want or talk their way out of what they don’t want. Talking or communicating, whether it’s on the phone or with a client or whomever, there’s just much talking. It’s the way that they’ve learned. It’s either a bad habit, which I don’t think, or they’ve just learned throughout a lot of years doing it that the outcomes are positive for them, or at the end of it, they feel like, “I tried.”

Sometimes I think they feel that It needs this much time. It takes two hours. Whatever it is to get the deal done. No, it doesn’t. Do you know how many deals I’ve done in one phone call? Seriously, on the buy side and the sell side. It doesn’t have to be a long phone call too. We don’t need to uncover stuff, get to the bottom of things, whatever it is.

Do you want to buy the property? My main thing is with sellers and we even had this within Land Academy. We’ve had people who have come in and felt like they have to have long conversations with sellers to win them over. I’m going to tell you right now, and this is what we teach in Land Academy, you could do this in five minutes.

I remember that.

Remember I did that whole intensive thing too. You should be able to connect with these people in less than five minutes. In less than five minutes, you should be able to answer the phone, calm them down, find out if they want to sell, find out how much it’s for, and get them on your side.

I’m going to address this slightly later in the show at the end about my inspiration, but what I see as a chronic problem that is the beginning of the end for people financially is working on things that don’t make any money. It’s very hard in my teaching here or in an instructional experience since Jill and I started this in 2014 or 2015.

I think you either come to Land Academy and understand that or you don’t. It’s not something I can sit there and explain or something that you relearn. It has to do with math, just its natural ability with math. I used to have a transaction coordinator a lot of years ago, and she was famous for saying, “I work on all deals equally. This transaction, we’re going to buy this. I know we’re buying it for $1,000. We’re probably going to sell it for $3,000. I just give that as much time as this one over here where we’re buying for $80,000. I know we’re going to sell it for $180,000.”

It’s not how I roll.

Marshall County Land Deal

That’s right. She had a military background, which is usually a massive positive thing for us from an employee standpoint, especially on the land side. I think it was just taking orders, military background, I can’t think out of the box. I’m only going to work on this thing that’s right in front of me and that’s it. She lasted about 22 minutes in our environment back in that time. Let’s take a look at another one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday Member webinar.

“We can do something. Marshall County, Alabama, purchase price, $15,177. Thinks we can sell it for $40,000. I’ve got two lots, .3 and .4. New house around there is worth about $400,000. Minor slope, all utilities available, and possible water view. I seriously like to see this. I hope they’re next to each other.

Do you know what I immediately saw? I see lots of vacant properties.

There it is. He owns both sides of the street.

There’s no street there.

There’s a street right there.

There’s no cul-de-sac, which is where utilities are supposed to be.

Quick claim, that could just be written in a thousand bucks or maybe you did pay a thousand bucks. Back in 2014, document number 6324. This one is the same document. It was all on one little transaction. That may or may not be correct. Lot eight, double-check each way. When you see lot eight in Cherokee Hills.

Good. Two lots in the Northeast have brand-new houses. Excellent.

We’re standing right where the cul-de-sac entrance could be. There are the boxes to go to stuff.

I hope it’s not way less graded than we think.

There’s a bit of a drop there.

That’s what I mean.

Dodged that bullet.

It’s beautiful. Look at this. This house is substantially lower than this, and this is substantially higher. I would check usability. It concerns me that there are not any houses built here at all.

I got one in here. When you go to the other view, the Google Earth, I saw. That’s 2022. Maybe that’s the new one.

This is 2020. It must be older than.

Who’s Perry? Is that a company that they’re just splitting off?

We would be interested in it to talk to them. Is it usable in its current condition without some serious grading? That’s my question.

They have a whole acre across the street there, which is nice. There’s a half acre, almost. I got to see some movement. These are info lots. We ought to think about this too. There’s one use. We have to make sure that we can build upon it and that is anybody doing it. That’s a full-acre lot. That’s very different.

It’s a full-acre lot. It’s a custom-made home for $300,000. You need to be at maybe $15,000 per property, which is where you are. It’s priced. If it’s usable.

I hope $15,000 for both. Buy in for $7,500 each. I could wrap my head around it. Just to make sure that we can do what we want to do with it. For $7,500, let it wait as long as, again, there’s going to be some movement and you’re not staring at these. You’re like, “I could have spent that $15,000 on something else and tripled my money by now because it’s been a year and a half and nobody wants it. Then check the HOA.”

Something Inspirational

Jill, I have something inspirational to share with us.

I do. I was thinking about a couple of things. I was thinking about what makes someone successful and one of the things that I picked up on recently, spending time with your friends and traveling the country, I noticed that some cultural things can make people successful. Let me give you an example. I remember we lived in Southern California for five years, you remember that.

We were on the beach there, it was awesome. We were just down the hill from Palos Verdes. Palos Verdes, where Marineland used to be, pretty area up there. The two high schools up there are phenomenal. We did our research, because when we moved there, we were looking at where to be and put our kid in the right environment, smartly. That was our goal.

We did not live in Palos Verdes, but for other reasons, a little too quiet for us. True time. Anyway, we lived just down the hill. The funny thing is, these kids, I remember being in a Starbucks in Palos Verdes, and a girl comes in and she connects with her old high school buddy, “How are you?” “Great, how are you?” “Nice to see you.” “Where have you been?” “What are you doing?” “I’m on a little break right now. I’m home from med school. I’m getting it.”

I’m like, “Of course, you’re in med school.” The next one jumps into whatever her profession. These kids, it’s just in them. They’re raised automatically, that’s just how they are. Then fast forward to now, and we’re connecting with Jack’s high school buddies, haven’t seen some of them in years, or decades, and they are all successful. I thought, “You Grosse Pointe kids had that same Palos Verdes mindset where you just go to college, you’re going to be successful and you’re going to run a company. That’s it.

I think because they’re immersed in the Ford community and all these big companies and all this stuff going on there. Ford, General Motors, and fill in the blank. That’s just all they know. I’m from Garden Grove. I didn’t have that. It wasn’t the same mindset. It’s very interesting to me. That’s probably why I pick up on it.

This is a little bit foreign. The point that I wanted to make here was that if you weren’t in that environment, you need to put yourself in that environment because that makes a difference. I know that that’s a lot of why people are here at Land Academy. When we launched Land Academy, I did not expect this community.

I thought we would share our business model one by one with individuals who would learn how to start, grow, and have a company like us, and then ride off into the sunset, period and we’d never hear from them again. It was never about, “Let’s make a Land Academy world.” What we found was, everybody wanted that. I’m like, “What?”

I remember the first live event that we did a couple of years ago and everybody was excited. I said, “This is interesting.” They responded, “No, you don’t understand. We love seeing that we’re not on an island, that we’re not alone. It’s not just my company against the world. I’ve got all these people in my group who are doing the same thing as me. I can bounce ideas off them. They’re my peers. Heck, we could partner on deals. We could partner on all kinds of stuff.” This is amazing.

I just wanted to share that with you and let whatever you want to do, you got to not just put your hat on. I’m going to be a land investor today, but you got to put your hat on and stand shoulder to shoulder with other people who are doing it with you and preferably that are ahead of you because they’re going to pull you up. Get yourself in that situation.

To be fair, I didn’t just grow up in a magic land. I realize now, after this many years ago, that we all chose to be friends with each other based on personality traits which I think would lead to this. It’s not just the 100% amazing high school environment that led to success. That wasn’t it at all. When we had children, somebody said to me, it’s always stuck with me and not just in a raising children environment.

It’s the age-old nature-nurture discussion. She said, “When you’re raising your children, you’re either emulating what your parents did with you. You’re recreating that because you had success with it or you’re completely going to do 180 degrees different from what they did because they sucked as parents.” Both things lead to the same place, which is happiness and success for your children, which is what we all want.

In the end, I think it’s probably a combination of both, especially because the way technology is, our kids are exposed to technology way more than we ever were. I don’t care who you are. That’s just how it is. There’s a huge issue here about, again, looking in the mirror and saying, “I’m the product of this amazing high school/parental environment.

I look back on that, we had a choice about where to go to college, and Jill describes it differently in the environment in which she grew up to the point where I think that she was held up a little bit because of her gender, which is just an outrage. Absolutely an outrage when you think about it. It’s an outrage at any time ever, but especially in the 90s.

That’s just ridiculous to even think about but the fact is you got to overcome or ride whatever hand that you were dealt. What we’re not talking about is blaming your circumstances or environment. What we’re talking about is taking advantage of it, deconstructing it, looking at what’s good about it, what sucks about it, and using it to your benefit.

Excellent. Jack, what do you have to share with us today?

Somebody from our most recent career path put this in the Career Path section of Discord, and I will never forget it. It’s something that I will use with our employees shortly. He said that his friend came to him and said, “You need to tape a $100 bill on your computer monitor where you work every day and stare at it because whatever you’re working on, if it’s not generating revenue, you need to stop what you’re doing and find somebody else to do that.”

Whatever you're working on, if it's not generating revenue, you need to find someone else to do it. Share on X

A great example is my talking on the phone. That’s not going to generate revenue. It’s just not. Jill talking on the phone is a money machine. To the point where she doesn’t need to have a computer monitor or a $100 bill because honestly, that’s all she does. I, on the other hand, have some operational responsibility in the education companies like Land Academy and Offers 2 Owners. Some of the stuff that I do is not generating revenue. Please soak that in because working on the wrong stuff will stop you from being successful at anything you’re doing.

I also read, it was an accident that I read it, but I loved it by the time I got done was a short piece by Grant Cardone. He’s not somebody I follow. The guy’s got an amazing dynamic personality, but I don’t religiously follow and do what he says. Most of what he says makes a lot of sense to me anyway. He said that without leaving the current position or the job that you’re in, you can ten times your revenue, and here’s how.

Whatever you do in your job, whatever it is, for whatever company that you work with. If you can get closer to the gold, you will be ten times more successful. What he means is, if you work in the mailroom, which they probably don’t even have anymore in the world. If you work in the mailroom, you’re about as far removed as you possibly can be in whatever office you’re working in from the revenue. What he means is sales.

Wherever the money’s coming in, whoever’s in charge of that, they are dying for more money to come in. Then I got to thinking, I used to be in accounting, and how did I rise through the ranks faster than I ever could have imagined? I went out and got more clients, increased that revenue, and became a partner in a large accounting firm because of that.

I didn’t know that at the time. It just made sense to me that it’s easy to share without breaking confidentiality. Share what we’re working on, go out and get more clients, and tell them why they need to be thinking about this other thing over here that their competitor might be thinking about, again, without breaking any confidentiality. You need to be working on revenue.

I love it. Thank you. That was great. Don’t forget, you can reach us for questions and help simply by texting (480) 530-7383. Join us next Wednesday for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.