This is episode number 2054 and we are talking about case study number one. We are going to do five case studies of actual real-life very successful Land Academy members, all of whom we have interviewed on the show in the past. We did not seek out their approval to use their names. We are going to use their initials. I’m sure it would be okay in every single case.
We will talk about them as individuals. We will do that. It will be fine.
They are five very different people from very different places that have one thing in common, and a lot of personality attributes that are common that lead to their success in buying and selling land, and they are interesting stories. They are interesting social stories. Much of what we talked about on the show is driven by me and data analysis, reviewing lands from a technical standpoint, largely, because I write the content and I’m the producer for the show. Jill has always been the guest. We are going to take one case study each day. Jill is going to talk about the social components because she knows these people very well.
We both do. The main thing I want you to learn, and through these stories is like, “That makes me think of me.” I hope that you have picked out little nuggets of what sounds like you and your personality, and you can see how to use that as an attribute to be successful at this.
We are going to talk about a social media expert who’s turned into a land-flipping millionaire. She’s in the Land Academy Pro.
My ladies group, all kinds of good stuff.
All five examples here are former Career Path members. They have gone through our Career Path. Case study two, we talked about a professional Canadian couple who flipped at least five properties a month from a different country. Think about that for a second. Case study three, we talked about a former global pharmaceutical brand manager who turned land investor and then shoved it all into her husband’s lap. These are all new members. We see them on the Thursday call, and he’s the one who shows up for the calls and runs the whole company.
Land Academy Member Question
Case study four, we will talk about two first-generation European people who came to this country, not speaking this language and made this work out. Talk about things to overcome. Finally, we talked about a young, outgoing Southern Californian who focuses on 1 or possibly 2 counties and does extremely well. These are very vocal members in our group, so we are both qualified to talk about them. In each episode, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord forum, and we take a deep dive into land-related topics by your request.
This is not a question. It’s a little kudos. Kimberly said, “I want to say how much I love the Airtable CRM. Thanks, team. This is so helpful.”
Joe has spent years chipping away and improving, let’s say, the original CRM that I created many years ago and the framework of it, actually wrote the software and all that in a relational database. We use an Airtable now and she and her land-flipping team have made it what it deserves to be.
It’s a free tool that we provide to you in Land Academy, which is nice. You could sit down and have something ready to go to work with. Start in putting your properties and have a system and it helps keep you on track and see where you are, manage your money and your deals, and especially your due diligence. It took a lot of time filling all that in. I’m glad. Thank you, Kimberly.
What it allows you to do is, if you have a team, manage a team, our Land Academy Pro members use our staff to close your deals. It eliminates almost all of the communication between you and your staff and any vendors that you might be using.
Why don’t you use this for our day-to-day life? I’m thinking about that. We use calendars. We don’t talk about stuff like I will schedule where we are going to dinner and when we are going to dinner. We just put it on there and it’s up to him to accept or decline the invitations. I’m thinking it would not be bad. I’m shocked you haven’t brought this to me before like we roll our lives into an airtable base.
The vast majority of the stuff that we don’t want to talk about gets communicated through email, texting, or Teams and all of that. We are there spiritually.
I might take it to the next level. I see that you didn’t check off the three things I put on your Airtable base to get done.
Jill, you are not the only one in this relationship who wants to reduce inefficient communication.
It’s for you more than me.
Case Study #1
That’s what she does. She says that. Now it’s all my idea. We are going to talk about this case. Study number one. She came to us years ago.
It was summertime before our Career Path a few years ago and came from another group. She did well building up a lot of properties where she was an owner financing a bunch of properties. It’s probably 70 or 100 of these deals., collecting anywhere from $199 to $399 something like that a month, and making great money. Everything was awesome, but she had to build up a team to manage these customers. She said, “It’s killing me.” I said, “I got it,” and I could say because we have done that in the past, too. I said, “I have been there and done that.”
Nothing is more frustrating than chasing people for $230 a month, and because that’s all they have. The reason that they are doing these payments, it’s because that’s how they can afford to buy some land and it’s so often that it’s never one perfect month. There’s always going to be someone that there’s a payment missed, or something happened, or their car broke down, and they need to move this and move that. There’s always something that’s why you need to staff for that, and so she’s like, “I know there’s a better way.”
We talked about it and helped her bundle. I said, “Here’s what I would do first. Call everyone and see how much they have and sell it to them. Let’s get out, we will bundle up the rest and figure out what to do. Maybe sell them off.” Anyway, she came to Land Academy and immediately that very next session of riff raff, she jumped in. A couple of things I want to say about this individual. She has no fear, and she goes right for the top and I respect that. That’s part of how I roll, too. It wasn’t always that way like, “I don’t know if I belong in this room.” This individual knows she belongs in that room, and if not, she’s going to keep up and make sure she belongs in that room and goes for it. I love that. She’s never looked back.
On the front end of these examples, the outcome is all the same. There’s a user interface here, in computer speak. How is her success manifesting itself in one specific way for her, but the stuff behind it, how she got all the way to the point where she is being successful buying and selling land, is very consistent with the other four people that were talking about now, and in general, people that are successful at doing this.
When people come to us from another group and they say, “I have very successfully done,” fill in the blank. In her case, it’s buying land in terms sales, which is infinitely harder to manage and do successfully than what we do, which is buy for cash and sell for cash. I get excited because if she can do that, I know how much work this takes. If she can successfully do that, then that happened. It was like the curtain opened, the light bulb went off and she said, “This is how you do this. You are buying it for $20,000 and selling it for $60,000.”
You get your $40,000 profit now. That’s the biggest thing. As a side note, why would you not do that? Think about it. In one transaction, you can get $40,000 in profit, like you said versus $299 a month for 10 years. Let’s think about that. How long does that take? If they would pay, which we know from experience, they often fall off and you are stuck doing it all over again, and it takes so long to build up a good bank balance.
I have always been fascinated with the allure of collecting payments on real estate. They are not just land but it’s everywhere on the internet. The concept of rent has been going on since the beginning of time, since people have had shelter. It’s that far back. I understand on a very large scale, like an office building or a Class A apartment complex or series of apartment complexes where you can put people in place, you can afford to put people in place to manage that, the tenants, termites, and toilets or whatever they say on the internet. You are not involved in that. You are a dealmaker.
The two talents here are creating a real estate deal, which is what we are very good at, for a bunch of reasons, and then there’s another completely different town, which is managing tenants. Those things don’t go together. I understand buying an office building very inexpensively and capitalizing it correctly, and doing all that. You can never have the same talent and then go manage tenants.
That’s why you have to bring leasing agents and that’s why we have to bring in property managers and things like that. The big picture is like you touched on, though, that I like to focus on, that’s all those customers can afford. What kind of customer do you want to work with? Let me tell you, there are plenty of customers that can write those $60,000 checks, like Jack just mentioned. That’s who I prefer to work with.
Wrap Up
Back to this individual, she had no trouble. I wanted to focus/wrap up on some of the key traits that she had that made her uniquely successful. One is that she had no trouble changing gears. She was like, “Okay. I will take my payment hat on and I’ll put on my I’m only taking cash hat on,” and it wasn’t hard. She asked a lot of questions. She still does. That’s in her nature and it’s great, partially because she never wants to stop learning. She’s like, “I perfected that. Now, what?” She’s so involved in everything, all of our groups and everything we do and every Career Path going forward. She’s like, “I’m going to learn something about this type of property and about that type of property,” and that’s what we are watching her do, too. She’s moving into all these different products, which is amazing.
She’s in LA Pro, so we see her once a month or once every other week. We all get together, look at deals, and talk about stuff. We had a lot of Facetime with her and the other Land Academy Pro members. The one thing that strikes me about her, she always has 8 or 10 questions every single session and probably 4 or 5 properties for us to look at, and those are the ones that she’s on the fence about. They are not the ones that shits are slam dunks that she’s pushing through the system. She is fearless. She’s a machine and she doesn’t have any real emotion. Emotion can stop people from doing a lot of things in life. Lack of emotion is how you become successful.
We are going to move our whole socials and everything into an Airtable base.
That’s a good idea. I want to work on this.
Talk about taking emotion now.
I want you to build a list and hopefully, they tune in to all five of it.
We have five shows to talk about.
All five examples. I want us to build a list. Number one, she came to Land Academy and she came to this business already being successful at something else. She’s a business owner and in social media. Number two, a huge dynamic involved personality. I bet she’s on the phone 4 to 5 hours a day, and when a deal is not going her way, she does all kinds of stuff. This is what Jill does, too. Jill could be the sixth case study. I toyed with making you a case study.
Every single one of these trades. She came to us with already successful businesses or experience or generally successful at what she’s done. Number two, an amazing dynamic personality, and there are other things too, but number three, she is on the phone all the time, solving problems and creating deals. Three things. Join us next time when we look at case study number two, a professional Canadian couple who flip five-plus properties a month. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.