Putting Your Land Business On Autopilot

Episode number 2050 and we’re talking about putting your land business on autopilot. This week each day we cover one of the five phases that you’re working toward building your real estate empire. Each step we cover each day. Yesterday, we talked about Nailing The Basics Down With Your Land Business. I chose to go down the path of building a real estate empire by doing the easiest and cheapest type of real estate deal possible and I hope you do too, which is buying and selling a piece of land. Go ahead.

Nailing the basics in your land business is the first step to building a successful real estate empire. It’s all about laying a strong foundation! Share on X

No, I was going to make a joke.

Go ahead.

I chose to follow along with the coolest, easiest, and simplest. Now you’re not simple, but for the most part, an easy-going guy.

Monday was a bit, whatever that meant. Nailing the basics to our land business on Tuesday, which is today, we’re going to talk about putting your land business on autopilot.

This is my favorite part, by the way.

I know me too, not my favorite.

I love, love, love this phase. When people are, this is like the light bulb went off. This is like, “I got this.” I’m like, “Yes, you do.” You’re like, “Jill, I did everything you said. I’m now staring at $75,000 in my bank account and I’m still wondering where that came from.” I’m like, “That’s wonderful. Now I want you to do that again and again and again.” Then people are like, “Okay, I gotcha.”

It should be past the moment where in the middle of the night you wake up out of bed and sit up in bed and say, “I’m a land investor.” I haven’t ever thought about it that way. $75,000 in the bank really helps a lot.

It does.

I’m looking at 5, or 10 deals a week. I understand the basics. I need improvement here, improvement here, improvement here. The truth is, if I’m being really honest with myself, I don’t like these five things about this business. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Getting that stuff out of the way, putting it on autopilot, so you can always be, as a startup owner of the company, way out in front of what’s going to happen next. Each day on the show we answer a question from our Land Academy and Marlboro Discord Forum and take a deep dive into a land-related topic by popular request.

Zane and Tara wrote, “Any Florida experts particularly knowledgeable about hurricane properties? I have a unique situation where the seller reached out to me regarding his lot and a tear-down home. It was hurricane-damaged. He reached out based on a referral not because we mailed there. Before the hurricane, a lot was worth about $800,000 market value.” I’m assuming that’s what the house is on it. “Now realtors won’t give any advice because the entire area was flooded. The seller wants out but doesn’t know how much. He’s owned the property for 69 years and I’m sure he has a number in mind.”

Most probably the old number. “I’m not sure what to offer or even if I should offer anything because two more storms are brewing off the coast and I truly don’t know what this lot is worth. If you’re experienced in buying and selling land in hurricane areas, I’d love to chat. I know the entire area was flooded badly and realtors have said there will be a severe market correction as a result. If we move forward, I’d likely need funding.” This is a tough one because I think no matter what you buy, it’s going to be held for quite some time.

The Florida experts in the group piped in here and their advice is fantastic.

Did they say pass?

No, they said send me the deal and I’ll tell you exactly what to do, which is a huge benefit to being in the land academy. My point, the other part of this is we just don’t, the people in these areas are having huge misfortune. There’s a big insurance component to all of this. This is not something that you want to hang your hat on.

There’s a little bit of a silver lining in there. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t have happened. Scratch that. Now we’re in an imperfect world, but I would hope that this person has insurance and it would be nice if the person got enough insurance to pretty much pay them for what it’s worth. Now they can move on and rebuild a new life somewhere else. That could be. Now Zane and Tara, now you guys are here, they’re still trying to get a little bit of money out of the dirt because of what’s left over and that could be gravy for them.

That could be the situation. They’re not expecting a ton if they really are getting reimbursed a good amount, but we won’t know. That’s the hard part. You never know. My bigger concern is assuming that’s all correct they’re walking away with. It was worth, maybe before that was worth $800,000, right? They’re walking away with $750,000? They’re like, “We can restart our life in Texas, fill in the blank. It doesn’t matter wherever they’re going to go and have a nice and move on.” The bigger thing is now you need to look at this and look at you.

I want you to make a smart decision. Even though I know Tara very well. I know you have a big heart and you’re going to want to do the right thing. I don’t want you to be stuck with this, right? I don’t want you to spend $50,000 on a property that you might be sitting with for a couple of years before things turn around. People can buy, and people can rebuild. People are going to be gun shy too, for quite some time, as would I.

There’s 10 or 15 things going on here. I’m not going to address all of them. They all come down to walking away from this deal. Any deals in this area, we’ve never done deals or tragedies.

I’m not going to roll the dice. 

It’s not just that. Just the insurance part of this alone, did it have flood insurance? What was insured? Was the house insured and not the land, which is really typical now? They’re going to get money for the house. They still own the land. There’s all kinds of things going on. This is my biggest concern, aside from ethics. My biggest concern is this is the first call you got. This is a hurricane-ravaged area, and there are two more storms coming.

By the time that we’re recording this, we already know what happened with those other storms, and it’s not good. There’s going to be so much for sale property and all kinds of issues. Please, if you want to know about what happens after a huge storm in the southwest eastern part of the country, please research Katrina, and look at what devastated it, and the real estate environment there will never recover.

That’s the thing. That’s my fear. I have been in our little discord group and saying if it was for Tara or for home, but I was making comments about that too. Like, “Be careful. It may not come bouncing right back in the next couple of years because we’re how many years, like you said, post Katrina and there are blocks that just never be rebuilt.” It’s really sad.

You never want to be labelled a storm chaser in this business or really any business.

That too.

It’s just not worth it. There are so many good deals out there. I know who Tara is now too because of your coaching. You don’t need this. You’re better than this. Today’s topic, Putting Your Land Business On Autopilot. Jill seems to have a really clear idea.

About what about what?

About how and why you want to put your business on autopilot because she loves this phase.

I didn’t say I didn’t say about the how and the why but I was talking about this is the most fun for me because this is where the people are all excited. You’re coming. Now you’ve got all the kinks out, we’re the most of them I should say. Now it’s like all right now I need to put some systems in place. It’s fun talking to people when you’re brand new. One of the things I coached is to think about replacing yourself from right as you’re getting started and you’re learning how to do deeds. After the couple’s deeds, start thinking about what’s the best way to do them.

What’s the best way to work through escrow? Your mailer picking areas, due diligence, all these things. Start thinking about how you do it. How do you like to do it? How are you most efficient? How can you someday replace yourself? What if you could someday replace yourself in what areas thing? Phase two is now you’re like, “That’s why I was supposed to document all this stuff.” I always hate to fill in the blank. Now I’m going to have posting properties for sale. How about that one or just getting them sold, talking to agents, all of that stuff?

That’s just one example of what could be a pain point for somebody. Having a process in place, now you could start looking around and going, how do I want to outsource this? Maybe just even selling the property. Maybe leading up to now, you’ve been selling your own property. You’ve been doing land watch, Facebook, all the social media things, Facebook marketplace, whatever you’ve been doing flat rate listing, MLS, writing your own listings, navigating, getting your own pictures and drone, picking them, getting it posted, taking the phone calls. That’s one easy example of how you can like an autopilot because that takes a lot of time to do it.

Seriously, you’re selling ten properties at a time, maybe even 5 that’s a lot of work. You could go, “Now I’m going to only do properties that are worthy of agents and I’m going to let an agent do all that work. They’re going to get a commission. I don’t care at this point. I can afford it now, too and I’m doing the deals that I bake into it. No problem, I know I’m making $40,000 a deal because I won’t do it otherwise so I can afford the commission.” That’s an example of autopilot and that’s what this whole second gear is, and getting it on, getting it rolling.

Understanding Your Performance

Note there’s no magic thing that happens when you shift from first gear to second gear. One of the transitions into second gear here or the second phase of five phases is that as I said, you sit up in the middle of the night and you say, “I did 10 or 15 deals.” What I want you to do then is sit down and say, “Where do you think you did well? Where are there areas for improvement?” Hopefully, you made a bunch of mistakes during that first phase. It didn’t phase you. It’s to stop you and you’re ready to get on the second to number two.

Take a moment to assess your performance: Where did you excel, and what can you improve? Self-reflection is key to growth. Share on X

An autopilot for me is getting organized. The first phase of this should look like a disaster. You made a bunch of mistakes, a comedy of errors, some hopefully got lucky a little bit. Second phase two is removing as much as possible the risk out of the rest of your land career, meaning making good decisions about acquisitions and sales and getting organized.

You want to look back and say, “Those eight markets that I mailed, these three, I did really well. In fact, I did all my deals in these three, most of them, maybe this one market. Boy, I better put that market remailing that market into my system.” What did I go through that made me choose that first market that’s different from the other one, so I can repeat it somewhere else.” Really assess what positive and negative what you did in phase one. Maybe it’s a type of a deal. “80% of the money I made was in this one deal in this one market.

I would like to do thirteen of those a year.” Serious self-assessment about what you like and what you’re good at and assessing your performance and the deals that you’re doing and the mechanics of it. Get everything into a schedule. Get your mailing. Chances are your mailing consistency could use some work. Mine always can use work. My mailing consistency is never. Has now, for about 30 years into this, I still don’t and just ask Jill this, consistently mail the way I should.

Automating Your Business Tasks

Can we talk about the difference? Before we wrap up, I want to give a couple of different examples of the parts that you might hate and how you can autopilot them. One is the sales, I just talked about that. No problem, give it to an agent. In the beginning part, what I’m trying to think is, what if I hate scrubbing data, I hate trolling? I’m just like, I did it. It was hard, it was scary, it worked. What about the whole beginning piece?

If analyzing real estate markets is not something you enjoy, it’s an imperative part of this business and just generally like real estate. I’m looking outside of our RV right now and I’m still to this day amazed by the Pacific Northwest landscape and just the real estate part.  It’s in our souls. I don’t think you would make it to the second phase here if you weren’t in love with real estate. Whatever you cannot stand doing, you have to get somebody else to do it because eventually if you’re going to work and sitting at your desk every morning and you’re doing something you don’t want to do, it’s going to end at some point.

I’ve got two answers. I was going to say the first part, you hate, well I shouldn’t say hate, you’re uncomfortable. Maybe you could bring in a partner to do that. Who’s good at it? Who has experience at it? For the data part, you could easily outsource that too. You can get like, we have concierge data and they’ll do it for you.

We have real experienced people in our group. This comes up in career paths all the time. Real experienced people in our group have hired former interns and put them on the payroll eventually to analyze data and to set up systems for them, Jill’s point, to feed off making the phone ring. Intelligent people are calling, seeing what the deal is about. How they’ve been contacted because you want to sell their property.

There you go. Then the middle part, what we talked about, putting it on autopilot, “I got the front end, I got the end of the sale, I got the acquisition, and I got the sales in the middle of the engineering part, the all the minutia and the due diligence part and that a thing.” If you were not comfortable with that, answering the phone, or creating the deal, I’d bring in a partner. There’s stuff like that, that you cannot really trust a staff, employee, outsource person to make the deals.

This is harder. After you’ve assessed everything and you really want to do put this on autopilot so you can go do the stuff that you’re good at.

It’s your money by the way though too. You have to be careful.

This is easier said than done because the people that ultimately run whichever, if you’re not a Jack or you’re not a Jill, whatever the opposite is that you’re putting in place to get that out of your life, they need to be better at it than you are. It doesn’t do any good to hire 1 or 2 people and then just stand over their shoulders and see if they’re doing a good job. If you don’t like answering the phone and doing that social personal piece which is what I don’t like it doesn’t do any good for me to not do it and stand there. 

Expect results.

Staffing and putting people in place has been the single most challenging part of this business and any business that I have ever owned. Jill and I got really lucky that we joined forces when we did and I got pure and you could have been a data person.

A data person or a dating person?

You were dating? Should raise your standards by the way.

I’m not dating anymore. This is good.

Moving On To Other Real Estate Types

At the end of the autopilot portion of your business, and hopefully, I wish for you that it’s a short phase, short phase 2 here of 5 phases. You’re going to move on to expanding your land business into other real estate types, which is what we’re going to talk about tomorrow.

Embrace the transition to other real estate types as an opportunity for expansion and greater success in your journey. Share on X

Cool.

You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.