This is episode number 1938. We are talking in depth about the Land Academy bucket system, which I’ll explain in great detail, and also how to build a lifelong fortune by consistently investing in land.

I talked about that. I had a live webinar for people looking to join Land Academy. If you were there, thank you very much. We had so much fun. It was much shorter this time. It was only two hours.

That’s impressive.

I wanted to answer everybody’s questions. It was fun. We talked about how learning to buy and sell land, as you and I have proven for decades, could keep food on the table. The conversation came up about, “Can I get my child involved?” It was Casey. One person said, “Yeah. I’ve got my nine-year-old doing land deals.” They’re learning the value of this and how to make money.

What percentage of women were asking questions versus men? I know this is your third, fourth, or fifth time doing this. I know we don’t continually do stuff if we don’t feel like we’re helping. You’re continuing to do this.

Thank you. I’m going to go with about 50/50. I don’t know what shift is happening on the planet. Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s us. I am getting great feedback. I’m seeing so many more women investors come into this. I’m so excited. It’s awesome. Land Academy Ladies is coming back.

Maybe that’s why.

It’s cool.

I hope you’re also enjoying our 2023 weekly show. This is our third show. We’ve gone from a daily show to a weekly show. As far as the numbers go, they’re much better. I checked right before we sat down to record. On YouTube and on audio, the numbers are better. Each week, we answer questions from our Land Academy Discord forum, review land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar, and take a deep dive into two land-related topics that are requested on our Discord channel. Let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the Land Academy Discord online community. If you want a sneak peek of our Discord channel, please go to LandInvestors.com.

Also, LandAcademy.com. It’s there also.

It’s in both places. Peruse it. It’s free. It’s read-only, as you can see what the community is doing in real-time.

Discord Question: Why You Need To Forget About Assessed Value

Prabhakaran says, “I’m reviewing my spreadsheet before uploading to Offers2Owners. I looked up at ParcelFact and I found out most of my offer prices are much lower than the assessed value, like 20% to 25% of the assessed value, and sometimes 10% to 15%. Is it a common practice? I know we try to buy property under value, but when the owners look at my offers and then compare my property to their tax bill, they would laugh at it and never call back. What is your experience?” I love this. 

Assessor value is a very good new person question. It’s been coming up through the years. The very honest truth is, in my soul, I looked at this when I started, too. What’s the relationship between assessed value and market value, and the actual price that we offer? The offer price has to be lower than the market price for us to stay in business. What does that have to do with the assessed value? Nothing. This is hard for new people to digest. I’m glad you asked this question because we haven’t talked about it in a while.

If you look online and you look at any house anywhere, and you ask yourself, “What’s this house worth?” It’s pretty easy to go on either side of the house and look at what the values are. Those houses, maybe the history of how many square feet they are. You can start down the data rabbit hole of assessing what any given house is worth. In fact, there are algorithms out there that do it for you pretty effectively. Especially because there are a bunch of algorithms, you can average those out and get a good value for what the property is worth.

With land, that’s not the case. You can’t look at a parcel on either side. Look at the activity. Maybe it hasn’t sold since 1960. There are all kinds of reasons that valuing land is harder. What do we do? We look at the assessed value as a natural course of trying to figure out real value because every piece of land somewhere has an assessed value, and it’s almost always incorrect.

Assessors don’t care as much about rural vacant land as they do properties that are improved with higher values because the taxes are higher. People’s interest is more focused on improved property. Assessed value has nothing to do with market value. The market value of that property is set by what people are willing to pay. The only way you can do that is to look at completed sales and active sales. Average all that stuff out in a ZIP code where the property is or whatever. We teach that in Land Academy.

Assessed value has nothing to do with market value. Share on X

The message I’m trying to send here very clearly is to please forget about assessed value. You go on to say, “When the owner looks at my offer and then compares it to the actual assessed value on their tax bill, they laugh.” That will never happen. I can tell you that in the 16,000 or so deals that Jill and I have done, I don’t recall anyone ever saying, “My assessed value is $30,000. You guys offered me $20,000.”

It has come up. I explain a little bit of what you explained very lightly, not that much for the seller. I go, “Let’s look at your house, shall we? Let’s see what your house is assessed at.” It’s always so off and so different.

That’s a great way to handle that.

I explain to them, too, “Especially with property with land, it’s often a year or two behind.” All assessor data is often a year or two behind. It takes something for them. There’s got to be some trigger, like a sale, for them to go in and reevaluate that. It’s a gauge, too. I tell them, “It varies all over the country. It’s often a gauge to collect taxes.” That’s what they’re trying to do with it here. They base their taxes on the assessed value.

If you go from county to county, state to state, or anywhere, their methodology is completely different from county to county and state to state. The further apart the property is, in general, geographically, the different concepts they used to assess property and then apply tax. You need to forget it. As counterintuitive as that is, that number is sitting there.

It’s a good question. I’m glad you asked it because it does come up. It’s important to know, “Why am I ignoring this?” That’s why.

For instance, assessed values in California are high. They still have nothing to do with the actual value of the property. Here’s an example. In California, assessed values are set by a percentage of the most recent sale. If I go buy a new property in California, and we all know California’s property values are more expensive than the rest of the country, then I get a new assessment automatically of some small percentage between 1% and 2%. It constantly changes.

The Land Academy Bucket System Explained

That’s not the case, let’s say in Michigan, where there’s a millage rate that’s applied, which is very complicated. It’s a complicated equation to figure out how much tax you’re going to pay. Completely two different markets and different ideologies on how they assess taxes and send you a tax bill. The first topic is the Land Academy bucket system explained.

I was thinking about that. After talking about assessed values, I never want to talk about it again. I hope that you’re talked out.

These kinds of topics are not Jill’s favorite.

My answer is to forget about it. Let’s look at what’s happening in the market. That’s what you need to be doing.

I talk about it in the programs. Hopefully, they watch the Land Academy Education program, specifically 3.0. Before people sit down to do a mailer, I say, “Please forget about this assessed value situation.” We’ve had members come back and say, “I offered 13% of the assessed value and I didn’t buy any property.”

That was a little hot. That was coming in way too hot.

I’m glad you asked the question. The Land Academy bucket system is something that I flippantly and on the fly came up with during one of our Career Paths. It’s not something I sat down and thought about. It’s something that Jill and I do anyway. I know we do. We’ve been doing it for a lot of years anyway.

We didn’t have a name for it.

Here are the buckets. Bucket one is to fulfill your Land Academy typical deal scenario, whatever you define that as. For a lot of people, it’s buy for $5,000, sell for $10,000. For us, it’s buy for $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000, and sell for $80,000, $90,000, $100,000, $110,000, or maybe more. It has been like that for probably a year or so. It’ll probably go up and change with the market as it changes. Bucket one is whatever the acquisition criteria that you set for yourself. You find a target area to send mail using the systems that we have in the program. That’s bucket one.

Can you give us numbers?

Sure.

Give me numbers.

Buy for $30,000, sell for $80,000 or $90,000.

For me to grasp this, and I hope that there’s at least one of you reading that’s going to sympathize and not understand like me, I need to hear all the buckets and then I can put numbers in them.

That’s what I was going to do. That’s bucket one. Bucket one is to execute the system and buy and sell as fast as you can.

They’re easy and fast.

That should be your bread and butter. Hopefully, you do a few of those a month or maybe more. This is what’s important to take away from this segment of the show. I don’t do bucket-based mailers. We send it all out the same way we price it, and then when they come back, we look at each individual deal and say, “I would love this deal,” or, “No way. I’m not doing this deal at any price,” like we do on a Thursday call. At some point, we assign a bucket to it based on the land that comes back.

Bucket two is I love this property at $30,000 and they accepted our offer. If it were bucket one, we’d sell it at $80,000, take the money, shove it back into the system, and continue to do it, but I don’t think so. This property, for a lot of reasons, is maybe zoned for something very specific like a mobile home park, which is unusual to find. We’re going to buy it. We’re going to take some different steps and put it into a second bucket where we know it’s going to take longer to sell. We know it’s going to take more work, but we sell it for $200,000 or $300,000 instead of $80,000 or $90,000. That’s bucket two.

I’m not a fan of bucket three. There’s a certain personality type usually in Texas that loves bucket three property. You buy a big piece of property. You know you can subdivide it. You know you can sell it on terms, so you start down this long 2 to 5-year path where you get investors and you buy a big piece of property. That becomes your business model.

For some people, not for us, it’s great. We have bucket three people in Career Path every single run who that’s what they’ve been doing for a long time already anyway. They found out about Land Academy and they want to learn about the mail. That’s a typical bucket three person. I still love bucket one, and I know Jill does, too. If Jill had her way, she would have bucket one property only. That’s it.

The main thing is about how you’re doing the transaction, the speed, how you look at it, and what the end goal is for each property. Sometimes, I feel like we have buckets four, five, and six.

What’s bucket four?

Bucket four is Steven coming into my office saying, “Did you look at this property? We can’t sell it,” and then I go, “We have to sell it. There’ll be another one.” He goes, “I’m not letting it go for less than fill in the blank.” It’s like his, “Make me move,” number. That’s bucket four.

That’s bucket two. We have a bunch of buckets for your property. I’ll tell you what’s great about bucket two. You know it’s going to take longer to sell it. You price it at or even maybe in some cases above retail. You’re fully prepared that you won’t get an offer for, let’s say, a year, but then you get an offer, and somebody buys it. It’s very difficult to do bucket 2 deals and bucket 3 deals if you’re not the entire time in the background doing bucket 1 property to pay your bills. It takes some balance. We brought this up one time, and it’s stuck. People are still talking about the buckets.

It’s easy to think about it like that. It’s good. I see them all the same way. I don’t differentiate like that, and I certainly don’t need to hang on to him because I know there’s going to be more great property. We haven’t said that in a while. We used to tell everybody, “The last thing you want to do is go look at your property because if you do, you won’t want to sell it.” That’s what happened.

Favorite Land Acquisition For The Week: Green County, GA

Jill loves bucket one property because she’s a career corporate salesperson. She needs to sell something. It works out great for me because I don’t get up in the morning needing to sell something. I get up in the morning needing to analyze something or I don’t feel right or I get up in the morning making some system better. She gets up saying, “I got to sell these properties,” or, “I’m going to buy a bunch of properties,” or, “Why is my phone not ringing every single minute?” I say that with the biggest compliment ever because if we were both analysts, nothing would get done. No deals would get done at all. We’d be bored. Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday webinar.

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King County, Georgia. 5.22 acres. We have access. Affordable. Alive, no. The husband passed on the land isn’t an estate trust, but the wife is alive and wants to sell. We need to double check in Georgia if it’s an automatic thing. The wife may or may not know.

If it’s in a trust. That’s what it is.

She may or may not know. That’s okay. Let’s help her with a phone call to her attorney who can help her with this. If you’re going to get the attorney involved in this, ask if the attorney can close a deal for you because that would be cool. They would like that.

If the estate has any money left in it to pay him or her.

That’s a good idea. The purchase price is $10,500. She thinks we could sell it for $35,500. Large piece. I’m already worried. I see there’s a power line running through the Western side of the property.

I pull this up and see that they built up properties everywhere. A couple of vacant lots are okay. It has great access. What’s wrong with this property? Why is it still like this? It looks great and the price looks great. The question is we’re going to dig deep and we’re going to find out what’s wrong.

The plane is okay. I hope the answer is it’s left over because this guy was older and his wife has it. They want to get rid of it. If that’s the case, I’m in, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. The question you have to ask yourself is if a lot of this property is in this easement or if you’ll own and pay for it infinitely as the end user of this and the right to look at that.

Will you check the legal? Make sure there’s nothing funky in there.

That’s the bad news. The good news is you got a bunch of usable property here. A lot of it, actually. There is a ton of usable property here. Maybe Mrs. Widow, you can pull a Sam here and say, “I thought it was worth $10,000, but we’re buying half the property because this is all under an easement.” What do you say $5,000 and we call it a day?

Ironically, they paid $4,600 for it.

When was that?

2000. They tried to sell it and couldn’t.

It was him. What’s the deal here? He put it from his name to his name. That was probably it. I love it. You’re like, “The mail hit.”

He’s like, “I’m going to go run errands.” I’m like, “Perfect.”

I’m trying to find out the value of this house to get a gauge. $179,000 in 2016. I would buy this.

Would you buy it for $10,000?

Yeah, I would buy it for $10,000, but I’d try to get it for $5,000 because of the easement.

Hold on a moment. Don’t forget, we’re not even sure we could transfer it.

We don’t know if we can transfer it. Honestly, you don’t know if it’s usable because you’ve got a pretty narrow piece of dirt. It looks like it’s okay. By looking at it, this is usable. You need to confirm all this. Look at what Sid Dean writes here.

“I got a hate call and a signed contract all on the same day. What a business.”

That’s how it is.

Isn’t that great? I swear when the hate calls come in, I’m like, “We priced it right. Sit tight.”

I got a couple of validation calls where they’re like, “You offered me 1/3 of what it’s worth.” It’s like, “Perfect. That’s what I was aiming for.”

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Did you know Land Academy is reopened and LandAcademy.com has a refresh? If you’ve been following us, the site has got a beautiful facelift. We’re very excited. It’s much easier to navigate. I’m excited about all the great things that have come on. Go check out LandAcademy.com. See where we’re communicating. You can get to the show. You can read more about Career Path and some of the exciting things we’ve got coming. 2023 is going to be great for us.

Discord Question: Low Score In The Red-Yellow-Green Test

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 of our Discord channel, please go over to LandInvestors.com.

They could also go to LandAcademy.com.

It’s free.

Chuck M wrote, “Has anyone else experienced this for their recent Red Yellow Green tests? The problem I’m finding with Realtor.com data is that it only goes back one month. If I compare this to the active slash sold historical data on Zillow, such as six months, the realtor data gives me a much lower score than Zillow because it’s only one month of data. The Red Yellow Green test does not seem to work as well without comparing more historical data. In addition, the real estate market as a whole is slowing. Days in the market are increasing. Only 30 days is not enough data to accurately do a Red Yellow Green test. In my opinion, it’s very unfortunate that Redfin moved the ZIP historical data.”

More than half the time, people ask these brilliant questions at the beginning of their career where I say to myself, “This person’s going to do amazingly well throughout their career if they stick with it.” This is one of those questions. He’s questioning my methodology about how to do a mailer, how to price a mailer, and the Red Green Yellow test, which is the greatest thing ever.

Lots have changed in the last couple of months with these websites to the point where I’m going back and rerecording or putting addendums into the actual education package. He caught this change. Realtor.com only looks at comparison values and sold comps. They only go back one month, and you can’t move them. It’s not a lever on the website. For whatever reason, they want you to keep focused on what’s for sale, probably because you have a better chance of buying something.

Zillow gives you a sliding scale. You can look at 1 month, 6 months, 12 months, depending on what you feel is appropriate because of market conditions. I teach in the program to use Zillow for the Red Yellow Green test for that reason. I don’t care if you’re a healthcare scientist. You want a bigger sample. You want a much larger sample to get as much data as you possibly can to get those averages, those means, and whatever you’re trying to solve for into a group that you can analyze.

Looking at real estate data is no different. Please stick with the program as I deliver it, especially chapters 3 and 4, about finding places to send mail, doing a mailer, and pricing it with Zillow. Our second topic is how to build a lifelong fortune by consistently investing in land like we have and like many members have in our group who have been with us since day one and gotten so good at it and wealthy at it. They’re gone. They’ve graduated. They’re on to great stuff.

They pop up again. That’s the best thing. The people who have been with us this whole time and are like, “We got it. I don’t need anything. I’ll see you later,” they pop up now and then usually with an amazing deal, which is nice. That was the ultimate goal here.

They come back for deal funding. That’s what Jill means.

They’ll pop up going, “You haven’t heard from me in two years. I’m here. I’m still doing my thing. I got somebody’s portfolio. They’re retiring. I need some help taking it down with the best way to do it, and financially, how to get this done or how to eat this elephant.” I love it.

Favorite Land Acquisition For The Week: Edgefield County, SC

Before the second topic, let’s take a look at another one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar.

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Edgefield County, South Carolina. .65 acres. Accepted offer price of $500. They offered thinking they would pass, but they accepted. I love it when that happens. They won’t get off your phone. They’re like, “What would you give me?” You’re like, “$500.” They’re like, “I’ll take it.” You’re like, “Do I even want it for $500?” This is good.

This is a perfect example.

Would you pay $500 for this? You’re like, “I don’t know. I might not. I’d rather go out to dinner than deal with this. What am I going to do?” It’s in my inventory. It’s off their plate. It’s mine. Do I want to go through all the motions and then try to sell this? This is hilarious.

Look at the structure.

There’s wetland stuff there. “I made an offer on the property hoping the neighbors to the left, right, or in front of it would buy it for $2,000. The county doesn’t care about building on wetland. An alternative septic system would be needed. It oddly meets the setback requirements as well. I know it’s a low-value property, but I’m wondering, what do you guys typically do with cheaper leftover property?”

He’s right, though. These properties are all right in the floodway.

They’re in the river.

Are they built up? They’ve got to be built up.

I might change my answer here.

It’s South Carolina, North Augusta. This is hilarious.

I changed my answer. I would buy this for $500 all day. I don’t know what’s going on. This is a utility box in a regulatory floodway. I would buy it and put a sign on it.

It looks less that.

They paid the lot for $5,000 in 1985. The property was built in 2002. The house across the street was worth $100,000 in 1986. People will be there for a long time.

They don’t move.

I would buy this. This is how you accumulate wealth. $365,000 bucks in 2021 and you’re going to buy the infill lot across the street for $500. Welcome to Land Academy.

With $500, what do you have to lose?

That’s what I think. The title amount to get the deal done will cost more than the actual piece of property.

You can say, “I own a half acre in North Augusta.”

On the water. I would have a serious Jill-type conversation with the county about usability. I’m like, “These houses that are adjacent to it were built in 2002. They built right in a floodway.”

That’s how you avoid the HOA. I don’t want them to see what’s going on back there. That’s awesome.

Without getting a side check use because this could be a two-year problem for you.

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Building A Life-long Fortune By Consistently Investing In Land

How do you consistently create wealth for yourself in the land business? I can get all nebulous about this or I can simply say this. Jill appreciates when it’s simpler. If you learn how to do this, you give yourself the right amount of time, let’s say 3 to 6 months, to learn Land Academy, spend time on Discord talking to other people who have been through it, who are going through it, and succeeded at it, get yourself on a mailer schedule, and never stop that mailer schedule because every mailer, you’re constantly learning, you’ll become generally wealthy. Unless you’re missing huge parts of this, you will, at some point, get a consistent pipeline filled and buy and sell a lot of land.

I talked about that. There was someone on the call who said, “We’re now in a system. We’re doing 1,740 units or something like that a week. We have it all plotted out. This is what we’re doing.” I’m like, “You can’t lose. You will not lose if you keep doing it. What’s going to happen, too, is like with us, the deals will keep coming from the new mailer, and then your old mailer will start picking up steam. After a year of this, you’re going to be looking at yourself going, “Did we even mail that county?” Things come back at the end of the year. They come back in the summer. We have stuff over ten years that comes back.

Due to the way interest rates have dramatically increased over the last couple of months, they’ve doubled. I mean mortgage rates, not interest rates. When this happens, commercial real estate becomes available for purchase. For people who own trailer parks, strip malls, or any type of commercial real estate, it can be analyzed on a capitalization rate.

Due to that increased cost of capital, it’s very common for commercial real estate to be on funky types of loans. There are variable-rate loans that are tied to interest rates or 30-year amortization loans that only have a 5-year term. In five years, you have to renegotiate the loan. You’re going to do that and prevailing rates at that time.

When people have a marginally good deal, let’s say it’s a trailer park and use that as an example, that extra interest rate doubled. Their cost of capital has doubled in twelve months. Their rent didn’t double. Their operations didn’t get that much better to offset that extra expense. They panic and sell.

I ran a whole analysis on what it takes to buy a trailer park. Right next to it, I ran an analysis on what it takes to be successful at buying and selling land. Buying and selling land in 2020 is exactly the same as it is in 2023. Why? It’s because we don’t have a cost of capital. To make things even better for our own situation for land investment in 2023, people who do have a lot of commercial real estate or anything else that is tied to an interest rate, let’s say a house with a variable-rate mortgage, are going to run out of money.

If they have extra land lying around, that’s one of the first things they’re going to sell. If they have an offer stuck to their refrigerator for you to buy, they’re going to call. We know that because we’ve been sending out mail since the early 2000s. We’re getting these calls and emails now way more than we were a few years ago. That’s the result of consistently sending mail and consistently creating wealth. I don’t know if we’ve ever had a bad year buying and selling land.

If you are consistently sending mail, you will never have a bad year buying and selling land. Share on X

Isn’t that interesting? I was talking about that. Everybody’s worried about recession and things like that. They’re like, “How’s it going to affect the land business?” I’m like, “This is not my 1st and 2nd rodeo. This is not your third.” I could say I watched our peers or other investors not make it through. I felt bad. You set us up correctly. That’s another point about this, too.

One of the things that we do is we buy these properties. I’m not running around with contracts. I’m not assigning things. I own this property. We bought it right. We know we’re going to make money on it no matter what happens. Maybe I’m not going to 3x my money. Maybe I make 90%. Big deal. I’m fine with that. We have consistently proven it. That’s why a lot of people have been with us for decades. It kept food on their table thanks to land. We’ve done other things. Have I thrown renovations in there? You threw renovations in there? I loved it. You hated it. It was funny. My joke is I never worked so hard for $35,000 in my life.

She means renovating houses.

I’m not doing that again. We’ve done renovations, commercial properties, office buildings, and all kinds of other things. In the land space, that’s great. When you put something on it, it’s not our forte.

That’s because we’re land people. There are still people in this world who do well with office buildings. I read that office buildings are at 50% occupancy. They were at 80% occupancy a few years ago. This is all because of cost of capital going up. The reason that the Feds are raising interest rates like this pretty consistently, and they’re going to raise them again about a quarter point if they haven’t already, is because it’s a way to hedge off inflation. It’s the fact that eggs are more expensive than they were a few years ago. What caused inflation? It is the Feds generally printing too much money.

It’s this cycle that goes on with fairly uneducated politicians that I’ll never go into. Our job is not to judge these people. Our job is to sit down, run the numbers without emotion, and say, “Here we go again. How am I going to change what I do? How am I going to change my mailer? What am I going to do with my business partner? How are we going to make some changes to capitalize on the fact that the market’s changing?” Forget about any emotion, politics, or any of that.

People are like, “That’s great. I don’t have $300 million like you guys seem to have every time an acquisition comes up to go write a check.” I realize that and so does Jill. That’s why we put together Discord and LandFunding.com. We have a massive community of people who have a lot of money because they’ve been through this, too. Some of them have gray hair. Some of them don’t. You can go to them if you have a good real estate deal and fund your deal. It’s not tied to interest rates. It’s equity funding. It’s not debt funding. Travel forward until you don’t need their funding anymore.

These people are not like your typical lender, if you will. They are people in our community like me who understand land.

They’re your partner who understands land and who is educated about how to buy and sell land and how inexpensively you can do it like you.

They might be 6 months, 1 year, or 3 years ahead of you sitting on a bunch of cash, going, “That is a good deal. I remember working in that area a while back,” or, “I didn’t even know this was going on over here, whatever it is. That’s a great deal. I’ll give you the money for that.” It’s awesome. I love it.

Do you have something inspirational to share?

Couples Working In Land Investing

I want to talk a little bit because this is coming up a lot. It came up in the live webinar. I’m noticing this shift with more females and more couples. I love it. It was sweet. Is it Melinda? We were talking about it. She was saying how much we have helped her, because she and her husband are in this together like us, by listening to us and hearing us and what we talk about, which I want to talk about a little bit with you.

Some of the things that we had to do to survive, work together, be supportive, and move forward were hard with your spouse. You have different ideas. Whether it’s your spouse, your partner, your best friends, or anyone that you’re close with, if you’re saying, “We should do this together. This is the greatest idea,” it all sounds romantic and great in the beginning until you realize you both want to work on the same thing or you both don’t want to work on the same thing.

There’s nothing romantic about working with your spouse.

Stop it.

It doesn’t sound romantic in the beginning to me at all.

You’re a guy. I’ve talked to guys who said, “My dream would be to have my wife come in and do this with me.” I think that’s great.

Do you want me to translate that for you?

Go right ahead.

“My dream is to have my wife work for me.”

I am not even going to comment on that at all because you got your dream, didn’t you?

No. That’s exactly the opposite of what I got. It may have been like that for fourteen minutes. That was never my intention. I’m horsing around.

I love that we are attracting and helping couples do this. If you could think of one thing that has made this work for us, please share it. What is your one thing?

I’m going to answer your question, but I do have something to follow up.

Go ahead.

It’s been fourteen years. The reason this works is because way out in the future, she and I can see what we want, and it’s the same thing. I didn’t know this when we started working with each other. Honestly, it was dumb luck. We didn’t develop this after we met, started working with each other, or any of that. I found out way later that she was. Whatever she was doing and wherever she worked, she showed up in the morning, met her sales goals in all cases, and smashed them. She was constantly the best person in the office who was selling, reselling, and all of that. I was, too. Where I wanted to work, I was very successful at it.

You have to have that long vision. The first thing I would do if you’re considering working with your spouse or even if you’ve worked with your spouse for a while is to get out of the office, sit down somewhere, and say, “Where do you see all of this in five, fifteen, twenty, or 30 years?” See what they say. You’re going to be shocked at how it’s not the same.

If you are considering or are currently working with your spouse, ask about their plans in the next several years. You will be shocked at how it is not the same as yours. Share on X

Do you think you can get them on the same page?

Yeah. This is a huge difference between you and me. I don’t want to sway anybody or beat a path for them so that they start following down a path that I want them to follow down where I think it’s better. I don’t think that’s healthy in a relationship professionally or socially.  I don’t want anything to change. I want it to be the building blocks of it to be built before I get there.

What if there’s a way to get each other’s goals separately? For example, your goal is to retire early and my goal is to have my beach house. Maybe we could do both.

If you want to set goals whether you work independently or together to hit those things is a great idea. That’s fantastic. To change somebody’s work habits, mindset, or hours that they work will never work. People are never going to change.

Early on, Jack taught me this phrase, and I never forgot it. Here’s the definition of compromise. Nobody’s happy. That’s true.

I’ve used that 100 times since then.

Do you know what my number one thing is? My number one thing is if you’re going to sit down and you want to work with your spouse, and you want to make this successful, stay out of the other person’s lane. You both want to work on the same things and you both do not want to work on the same things. Divide it up. Make it fair. There’s stuff even within us where I’m like, “I hate doing this, but I hate doing that more. If you’ll take that on, I’ll take this on.” You can have those conversations and be like, “Thank you.” We’ve done this.

We still do it.

It’s been a little while, but we would take a sheet of paper and draw a line in the middle. This is true. We still do it. We’re like, “You’re marketing. You’re O2O. You’re this. You’re that.” We divide up responsibilities in our other companies. The land part comes naturally for us. Why would I even question it? His data, his picking areas, his pricing offers.

You know that. That’s the thing. We have the luxury of hindsight.

Somebody’s going to naturally be better at it. Someone’s going to be naturally better at answering the phones, getting the deals done, and things like that. The nice thing, too, is that because of us and our experience, you listen to me when I say, “I know you’ve got a mailer going out. Can you please roll in this area in this size?” You’re like, “Sure, fine. Whatever you got working on, let’s roll that into it, too.”

The part about staying in your lane, though, is when you draw that line and you say, “You’re data. I’m the phone,” the other person can’t say, “I want to do this too. I can do it better.” You’ve got to stay out of their stuff because you’re going to fail if you don’t. If you come along and critique the person, try to get all up in their business, try to do it better, and try to change their process, that’s not going to work.

Stay in your lane when working with your spouse. Do not try to get all up on their business and change their process. Share on X

What Jill is describing is a boss. If you think that you’re going to be the boss of your wife in a workplace, you can stop. In fact, you can stop reading.

You think you’re going to be the boss of your wife in the home with child-raising.

The same thing is the reverse. If your wife thinks she’s going to sit you down at work, tell you what to do all day, and have you deal with it, then there’s something wrong with you, not her. All kidding aside, in every single couple I’ve ever met, and usually, people in business make this mistake, you can’t let it happen, like, “I’m going to work with her next week. She’s quitting her job. She’s put in her two weeks’ notice. In three weeks, we’re going to be working together and we’re going to figure it out. We’re going to sit down together. She’s going to do sales, and I’m going to do acquisitions. That makes sense to me.” I give you one week.

You can’t let that happen like you can’t let a mailer happen. You have to manipulate a mailer. You have to seek help from Discord and all the education products that we provide. Sit down with yourself in a dark room and map all of it out. What you’re doing is building a sense of confidence. It’s the same thing that happens with working with your spouse. You need to put some rules in place.

A few years ago, Jill and I decided to have a meeting. We call it a partner’s meeting. That’s what it’s called in our calendar. It’s at 9:30 in the morning, 3 days a week. All the stuff that goes on that she needs to talk to me about, if something’s not on fire, she writes down, and so do I. In this partner’s meeting, we talk about it.

Do the meetings get heated sometimes? Yeah. What it does is it stops her and me from barreling into each other’s office to talk about something that’s going to end up being entirely meaningless anyway, and then everybody wastes an hour talking about something or debating something that has nothing to do with whatever. You can’t let it happen. You have to have a plan with some rules in place.

For instance, this show has always been my baby. She knows that now. She didn’t in the beginning. She wanted to be involved in all the sound checks, camera angles, backgrounds, and all of that. She’s not happy. This show is eight years old. She’s like, “Why is it so dark in here?” I’m like, “It’s because it’s dark in here. It’s because I’m dark.” If you look at Jill’s stuff, it’s all light, airy, and fun. That’s who she is.

It’s pretty. I have colors.

You’ve got to let that stuff go. We’ve all accepted it. Getting that first deal done and then maybe getting the first ten deals done, 95% of it goes away because everybody’s got confidence in their spouse and confidence in themselves. It’s like, “The system works. We’re consistently getting mailers out. Money’s coming in and it’s going out.” That’s how you know it’s going to work. You can’t say, “Let’s try this. I’ll see you on Monday.”

You can’t say, “Everybody else does it. Jack and Jill do it. We can do this, too.”

Now, we can work in the same building. For years, we worked not in different buildings, but in different ZIP codes with different staff and different everything.

This is true. One of us had the home office and one of us went to the office. That was it. Remember the time we were on different floors? That worked out. One of us would pop down to the other person’s floor too much, but that helps.

Here’s my final thought. This is not just working with your spouse. This is living with your spouse. The concept of blame has no place in a relationship. I learned this, not because I wanted to, from my parents.

The concept of blame has no place in a relationship. Share on X

Keep going.

You can’t blame somebody else. Deals go bad. True. We have bad deals, probably 1 or 2 a year, where stuff’s still for sale. We have accumulated properties for sale that are not priced right. It’s usually because I want to sell them for too much. Stuff goes wrong. Computers die. Cashflow is not what you expected.

Sometimes, you forget and you’re like, “I still own that?”

What I’ve found over the years is that this is a personality type. There are some people who need to blame somebody. The closest person’s going to get blamed. Who knows where it comes from? It comes from some type of personal, “I can’t fail,” or you got slapped on the wrist too many times when you spilled milk when you were a kid. I don’t know where it comes from, but I know that blaming people for stuff that is not going well doesn’t end well for anybody.

How about you? Do you have something informational that you want to share with us?

Role Of Emotion In Land Career

Your topic rolls into mine. My Jack informational topic is as follows. What’s the role of your emotion in your land career? I would argue that the role of emotion in land is none. The more that you can check your emotions at the door when you’re buying and selling land, especially if you’re working with your spouse, the further and faster you’re going to get it.

Is it possible? It’s possible. Have I ever seen it? No. I even get emotional about buying land because it’s awesome. I love land. I get way too emotional about the sales price. At the beginning of my career, I  wanted to sell everything constantly. Now, I’m like, “Maybe we should hold on to some of this property. We’re getting it for 10% of what it’s worth now. What’s this going to be worth in 25 years?” I’m starting to have those thoughts that cross over into emotion. Is it effective to make money? No. Is it effective for Jill to come to me and say, “I don’t think we got the best mailer yield out of this last mailer. It’s not your best work. I expect more out of you, Jack.”

That’s awesome. That’s great.

Is it that effective? No, it’s ridiculous. It’s emotional and silly. Fireworks are going to happen after that. Keep your emotions in check. Tony Robbins does a whole thing on this. He does a huge tenure thing about, “What’s stopping you from where you want to be?” He’s famous for saying this. Your emotion.

You listen to Tony Robbins? That’s good.

Sometimes.

I like that. That’s good.

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

I said this on a Career Path once. It was a long time ago. There were two women in a business partnership. They didn’t lose it, but they had a lot to say. They were like, “What do you mean? All the best deals I’ve ever done were because of emotion.” They were being emotional. It’s not gender specific, trust me. Men express emotion in rage, which is still emotion. Join us for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.