This is episode number 2173. Jill and I are talking about what a recession could mean for land investors and how to prepare. Here’s a spoiler alert. There are four stages in real estate that are in some type of constant and forever cycle. Stage one is recovery. What are we recovering from? Stage four, which is a recession. We’ve got recovery and expansion or expanding from the recovery.

Three, hyper supply. Capital is easy, and there are a bunch of reasons why things get overbuilt and cheaper. Then, recession. Recession is the best time to buy real estate. We are in a recession. This is the best time to launch a career or complement your career, or what will end up being, for the most part, the end of our career.

Discord Question: Feedback For A First-Ever Deal

This is my fourth real estate recession, and I’ve finally learned that this is the time to buy everything. In the back of our heads, every time there’s a recession, especially if you’re younger, what you’re thinking is, “I missed it. I missed the whole cycle. My parents are rich. I’m not. They suck. It’s never going to come back.” It always comes back. Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular requests.

Jack wrote, “This is my first deal, so be patient with me. I have a five-acre property in North Florida. High and dry, no flood zone, no serious regulations. It has a county-maintained dirt road frontage, an electric pole and panel box, but previous owners before the seller took the wires in between the septic and a well that needs a pump, and a concrete pad for a trailer or RV.

I love this so far.

“The lot is mostly hardwoods and cleared space that is being used for deer feeding and hunting. The seller signed to sell for $32,000. I visited the property. A good guy and a good area I would live in. It is surrounded by mostly country homes with woods and pasture land. Twelve minutes to a boat ramp on a river. Fifteen minutes to the nearest grocery store in a cute, small downtown with amenities, social activities, and restaurants.

There are four stages in real estate: recovery, expansion, hyper supply, and recession. Share on X

Twenty minutes from Walmart and many springs in the area for recreation. Going rates for lots of near identical size within a mile or so are between $45,000 and $62,000 based on sales in the last 12 months and current for sale, none of which have any utilities at all. Anyone open to giving me some feedback?” How much is he buying this for?

$32,000.

Buy it for $32,000 and sell it for $45,000 or $62,000.

Multiple people in Discord, people who are seasoned Land Academy members and new people, said, “You did everything right. Let’s look at the deal.” That’s what I think. You don’t have vacant land here. You have a pad with the utilities, septic, water, and electric. You’re comparing it to properties that are vacant.

I understand that. They have no improvements. So I can see that. Maybe it’s a sell for $70,000 or more and buy for $32,000. I can handle that.

Maybe sell for $60,000 when you’re doubling your money. I’d have to see the deal. You’re new, so I’m going to say it super nicely. Please get in the habit of putting it into the Land Academy format with all the As. You analyzed the As anyway. You didn’t call it that. What’ll end up happening is the next deal will be a hodgepodge like this. I’m not criticizing you at all. It’s important for everyone to analyze every deal in the same format so that you can look at them all in a spreadsheet or in your mind and say, “The Access was great on this. It’s questionable on this one.” You can start to make good, lined-up-against-each-other decisions.

Analyze every real estate deal in the same format so you can look at them all in a spreadsheet. Share on X

In the CRM that you get with Land Academy and Airtable, the As are in there. Maybe you could even copy and paste it out of that, too. He’s already looking at it like that if he’s using the CRM that he has in his hands. That might be a good way.

You’re going to have a tough time selling this because you love it. This is what happens when you go see the property and you love it.

That’s true. Sorry about that. This is one of the reasons we don’t go visit the properties. You might like it and you’re like, “This one,” and then you have too many. There are a lot of properties in our inventory that Jack goes into and marks Do Not Sell. He doesn’t say anything else, but, “Do not sell.” If you notice, that was not, by design, one of the status situations set up for you in Airtable. Jack went in and made one.

Can you imagine if we taught that in Land Academy? Buy it and never sell it. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.  Why would I sell it?”

“It feels good owning it.”

There’s always going to be another one, I promise you. That’s what I tell him after. He goes, “What happened to that one with the waterfall?” I’m like, “Gone.”

We had a waterfall property and Jill sold it. We had a property on a full-time, all-year-round raging river in Arizona, and Jill sold it. We made a ton of money on both of those properties. It was not a good day in our house.

Sorry. I’ll get you another one.

What A Recession Could Mean For Land Investors

This topic is What A Recession Could Mean for Land Investors and How to Prepare. The last recession that we went through, Jill and I met and joined forces socially and professionally, and we were immediately taken to our knees financially. She inherited my business practices that were 80% complete. We were in the business of buying super rural, very inexpensive land all over the country and liquidating it on eBay. It was crazy successful and fast. I woke up one day during the last recession, and people stopped buying our real estate.

She came in and I said, “It’s over. I’m not adjusting.” Lucky for me, we had a ton of money and no debt. I never leveraged anything, which is why we’re still here and have a lot of real estate that was paid for. Jill came in, looked at all of those things, specifically the real estate that we owned, and got on the phone, started calling people traditionally a lot like she does now, and got us out of it. We bought and sold a couple of thousand properties. We made probably $1.5 million-ish buying and selling houses on the West side of Phoenix and a very rural property that we already owned. Jill got us out of it.

What we should have been doing, and we will do this time, is place equity and partnership with the network that we built since 2009. We call it Land Academy. We will buy hundreds of properties where there’s a short to medium range gap between $100,000 to $200,000 of property. Most of them will be houses, and most of them will sit there. That’s it.

That is what you need to do, some version of that, in this recession that’s already happening. We have people in our group who have never bought houses before who are inundated with houses in their mailer. How do you prepare for it? You don’t do what I did. First of all, it’s a mindset. You don’t believe that it’s over.

Don’t panic.

We have four children. The oldest one is almost 30. They’re four years apart. For a lack of a better description, they’re thirty, twenty-six, and twenty-two. The two youngest ones believe that it’s over. They believe that people like us from Generation X and the Baby Boomers before us wrecked everything and wrecked their chance at wealth. I thought that about my parents at that age, but the fact is, it’s one big cycle. Mm-hmm

It’s going to come back. I was thinking about this recession and one of the things that we’re doing to it. It’s not the first time we’ve been through this. That’s one of the great things, too, about Land Academy. They can come here and breathe knowing that we’ve done this before. He has been doing this for 30 years and 10 years of Land Academy. We got this, and we can help you through it. We’ve done it before, and we made a lot of mistakes.

This is not the time to panic and take your money like this. What’s the time to do is collect all the money you can and make smart acquisition decisions. I was on a coaching call with a small group. Most of us agreed. One person was still going, “Really?” I was like, “Yeah, this is happening.” How often is it that you see price reductions? This is the time to say, “This is it. Of these offers, I don’t need to buy that 1 because if I wait 5 minutes, there’s going to be a better one.” That’s what’s happening right now. We’ve experienced that before. It’s the time to get it cheap or don’t buy it at all. It’s a good thing.

For us personally, we’re going to buy a lot of stuff. I’m not messing around this time. I’m going to buy all kinds of things. I cannot wait to see what’s coming. That’s what I think. Every day, there are more and more things going on in the market, and they’re sitting there. We’re looking at properties that had 120 days on market and 120 views because it was way overpriced, too. They’re getting a view a day. I’m like, “Why are we even looking at this? At least not at this price.” There was a comp and we were using that. I was like, “We can’t use this comp because it’s terrible.” You need to pay attention to all that stuff. Go ahead.

There are more things going on in the real estate market, and they are just sitting there. Share on X

Think of a regular house around 2019, and think of the trail or the graph of its value. Around ‘18 or ‘19 is a pricing baseline in my mind. COVID happened in 2020. I thought, “Here we go. Everything’s going to get deflated price-wise.” We were already done buying a bunch of property. That’s not what happened. The opposite happened.

Everybody moved out of the cities and moved into rural areas. The prices, for the most part, across the board for everything, when some people moved into the cities, went dramatically up. It turns out it was a bubble. From 2020, you’ve got a 2018 and ‘19 baseline. From 2020, it went up dramatically and sometimes doubled over the course of 2021 and ‘22. ‘22 and ‘23 were the height of it.

We saw a pretty serious flat line in 2024. In 2025, we’re seeing prices go down and inventory go dramatically up. In some places, it’s 50%. There’s 50% more property listed than there were a few years ago in some parts of the country. It’ll continue to go down. There are a lot of factors involved with interest rates and inflation. I don’t want to complicate it. It will get back down to around those 2019 prices, and then the cycle will change from a recession to recovery. You want to own tons of property at those recessionary prices. You tell me what you think, but by the end of 2026, we will start to recover.

That’s a good time.

It doesn’t mean you have to wait till the end of 2026 to buy it all. It’s like the stock market. Some properties, you’re going to get at a good price. Some are going to be great. Some are going to be amazing. It’s all about those averages. It needs to be a big spread. You need to buy it below 2019 values, in general.

I love it.

Closing Words

Join us again for five more, hopefully, interesting episodes. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.