Transcription
In this video, I'm going to reveal the numbers from my business in [music] 2026. And most importantly, I'm going to talk about the crazy technology changes that have been playing out, [music] which are leading to us having our best year ever. So, let's dive into the computer.
Okay, so here we are. The technology changes that have changed my land business in 2026. What we're going to talk about here today is one, how I use AI to run my business or parts of my business; two, my secret drone photo hack; three, how to sell your deals in less than 30 days; four, efficiencies in underwriting and comping. I'm pretty sure I misspelled efficiencies. That's funny. Five, DNC scrubs and a couple other goodies that we'll hit on here, okay?
Now, this is kind of the year of innovation for the land business. You've got this crazy kind of converging of the AI revolution, which is starting to wake up this antiquated, outdated business of buying and selling land in America. And frankly, Land Insights is kind of at the forefront of that innovation.
Now, if we go and peel back the onion, we can look at some numbers here from my land business. So, I do run this business part-time, okay? I do still run Land Insights and Lea. We've got an amazing team behind us that makes this all possible. So far this year, we've acquired 63 deals. I'm filming this in the middle of June. We're averaging about 500 new leads in the CRM per month. Expected gross profit from our current acquisitions is 1.95 million. The exit value: 6 million. If we look at the forecast run rate, we're forecasted to acquire 144 deals with 4.45 million in expected gross profit.
Now, that's a forecast. Will those 144 deals sell this year? No. Will all of those deals sell? No. So, that 4.45 million is not what we're going to make in 2026, just to be clear, but that is the forecasted run rate. Naturally, we're probably going to sell about 60% of these deals in the same year. Some of those contracts will either just, you know, we won't move through with them because there's a title problem and we can't get them at the right price or, you know, whatever it may be. Or we do acquire them, but they sell in 2027 or something like that.
But, if we look at our average days on market this year, in Q1 we were averaging 21.75 days on average from listing to sign contract on the disposition side. Those are the best stats I've ever had in this business by a country mile. And what's really interesting is this is one of the softest/worst real estate markets I've I've experienced in my short 7 years in this business. And so, I can tell you those numbers are hard-fought. Those are hard-earned. And a lot of it is through what we're going to cover here today. I'm very, very proud of those stats.
So, heck, maybe we will sell all 144 deals this year. Probably not though. We're tracking to sell something like 80 deals this year if I look at our forecasting right now. That's what we should hit.
Now, to be clear, you're probably looking at these stats and saying, "Sumner, how are you getting these stats? This is either my worst year in the business or it seems like everyone's struggling or yada yada yada yada." And you really just see a lot of blood in the street right now in the land game. And frankly, it's because we do things completely differently. The way that I run the business is unlike anyone else. And I I've coined a model which I call the mid-market land flipping system, which is now what we teach inside of LEAP 2.0.
It's a really simple, super affordable subscription. You can join, you can leave when you want. It's just a monthly subscription. If you're serious about building a land business right now, you owe it to yourself to be in this room. Not only do we run, I think, some of the best, most in-depth coaching calls, and we run multiple per week, but just the the actual playbook that you're getting access to everything from how we pick our markets, how we make our offers, how we underwrite our deals, how we do our dispositions. I mean, every part of the business is different than what you'll find anywhere else.
And I find that a lot of the education in the space right now is people teaching theory. Um, they're armchair land investors. They don't really live it and breathe it. And uh, because of that, they're teaching models that don't work. They just don't realize that they don't work, right? 'Cuz they're not doing it themselves. And so, if you want to learn from someone that's actually in the trenches, I would recommend go over to our school community. It is super affordable. It is a no-brainer investment if you're serious about building uh, something serious in this business.
So, anyways, let's jump into it, guys.
Okay, so I'm here in Chat GPT, and you're probably wondering, "Sumner, why are you in Chat GPT?" Well, we've been using Claude and Chat GPT to run a lot of the kind of tiresome, uh, manually intensive processes in our business for uh, the last couple months, and it's insane. Now, I don't think there's many folks that are doing this because the way that we're using Chat GPT and Claude, we are not using them how you're using them. You see, we built an API integration to where now Land Insights pairs into these platforms, and Claude or Chat GPT can go and use the Land Insights database. And so, let me show you what that actually looks like in practice.
Now, depending on when you're watching this, this may or may not be public yet if you're a Land Insights user. So, TBD, um, but this is coming out here in the next couple weeks, which is just been earth-shattering in our business. Like, I I cannot stress how incredible this has been. There's two reasons. One, I can now never log into Land Insights if I want to, right? I can run my business out of a chat log just like this and command AI to go do the thing that I want in Land Insights. "Hey, go pull the data. Hey, go do the skip traces. Hey, go do the comps." I can just literally command it from one place and never have to leave this LLM tab for whatever tool you're using. That's insane, right? That's insane. I think there's a world to where in a year or 2 years, you might not log in to Land Insights more than once a quarter, right? Because we have these LLMs that are doing the work for you.
Now, on top of that, you can start to build a gen tech workflows, right? You can build an army of AI agents that do the repetitive, annoying, frustrating, manual tasks through Land Insights. And if you think about a lot of the recurring manual tasks in this business, most of them are layered on top of some kind of software, right? And Land Insights is at the forefront of pairing its software and opening up its software to work with these LLMs. And so, let me give you an example here, okay?
>> [clears throat] >> I was on a call with my team earlier this week, and we have a subdivide deal that we were looking at here together. So, all I got to do is I just pop in the APN here, and I put in the county, and I put the state, and I say, "Hey, would you underwrite this as a three-way split and a six-way split for the subdivide? I also want you to combine this with the county subdivide regulations." And so, now what this does is this goes into Land Insights, it logs into the comping tool, it underwrites the deal as a three-way split and a six-way split. It pulls that data in, and then it goes and searches the internet and pairs the subdivide regulations with the data that it got from the Land Insights comping tool. And so, now you're enriching the data with the proprietary information inside of Land Insights and what you can get on the internet, and you're just doing it from one simple uh, chat log, right?
Now, this took it 4 minutes to think through. I mean, I asked it to do a pretty big project here. Um, but if you think about what this would take for me manually, you know, 20, 30, 45 minutes to do this manually. So, 4 minutes is still pretty incredible lift. Now, just because this this is AI doesn't mean that it's always right, no, right? If you've used AI enough, you know that AI hallucinates or AI misses things, so please understand this is still AI. You still should be spot-checking the work, right? You're never going to write a book with ChatGPT and not proofread it. If you did, it might be one of the worst books ever written. It's the same thing here. I do recommend always proofing your work.
So, here's the Land Insights Comp Tool results. I see a median price per acre, adjust the price per acre, gives me a confidence score on the underwriting, and then it shows me the genie index. And we start breaking down the information for the zip code here, okay? Based off of the different lot sizes that we would create. I can see the sold volume, average days on market, and then AI comes in and kind of gives its little read, its analysis on what it thinks about these different size options for how we could split the property. This is what I really like, though.
>> [clears throat] >> Now, we're pairing underwriting with the subdivide regulations. 'Cuz in a lot of cases, if you're new in a market, you don't really know like you're like, "Okay, I would like to take this down to the smaller increments, but I don't know if the regulations allow for it, and it can be kind of confusing to know what you can or can't do or how hard it's going to be to go down to the lowest increment." And so, now it just says, "Hey, three-way split, this is called a short subdivision, short plat, very easy. Six-way split, only a short plat of Sunnyside, which is the town, allows short subdivisions up to six to nine lots, otherwise it becomes a full subdivision/plat." And then it gives me my three-way underwriting, my max offer, my six-way underwriting, on and on and on again.
Now, to be clear, though, this was just one micro example, right? We can use this for uh, looking at new markets, we can use this for pricing out our offers, or running our due diligence, or tracking down owners, or building our lists, or checking in on our markets, or triaging leads. I mean, the use cases here uh, damn near unlimited. You just have to have creativity and a little bit of experience using these LLMs to now automate a bulk of the grunt work inside of Land Insights. And to set this up is really, really, really easy. You're just connecting the API. We'll walk all of our users through how to do this when it comes out. Um, and we're providing training on all the different use cases, but this has been a big one for us.
Now, before we get to the next point, which is a big one, so please bear with me. Um, you know, just as a quick side point, you know, it's interesting a year ago, 2 years ago, everyone was like, "Sumner, AI, it's the thing. Like, you should be using it in your business." But I didn't really see the value. I was like, "I got to micromanage it. It does a lot of really just okay work at best, and then I've got to revise it, revise it, revise it." And I felt in particular for the land business, it was pulling from general information on the internet. So, it was never like land-specific, land-tailored responses that it would give to me. And now that these systems can use the API within Land Insights, now I'm like, "Okay, I see it. Like, yes, this makes sense now." Finally, we have a model that's trained for what we do. And so, it's it's taken me a while to come to the other side, but now I'm an AI addict myself.
So, the next thing that I want to show you guys is how we solved one of the biggest frustrations in my business, okay? Right now, we're acquiring, call it 12 to 15, 16 deals a month. I think last month we acquired 17 new contracts in our business. And so, for every single property, what I've learned is you have to get drone photos. There's no way around it. People buy land from an aerial perspective. It's just damn near impossible to sell land with only boots-on-the-ground photos.
And so, if you do the math, let's say that we spend between 300 and 500 for drone photos on a property, let's call it $400. Let's say that we're acquiring 15 deals per month. Uh, what is that? 6 grand a month or something of that sort in capital that we have to outlay for drone photos every single month.
And on top of that, those are 16 or 15 or 17 different businesses we have to interact with that we have to micromanage these people separately, these drone pilots. And I've used all the drone services out there. It's all the same thing, right? You're still coordinating with these drone pilots. And what I learned on top of that is the variance in quality is ginormous. Some are great, some are terrible, some are slow, some are fast. And so, I was just so fed up with this process and I needed a way to like standardize our listing quality and then just standardize the process to where we get signed contract, clear title report, bang, we can get it listed. Because what was happening is we'd have clean title and then we'd have to wait 3 weeks to get the photos. And I'm like, this is just killing me. It's so annoying.
And so, we built out what's called instant drone photos within Land Insights, and it is insane. Now, we've been using this for every single one of our listings, and I'll just show you an example here. Um, this took a few minutes to create within the platform. Instant drone photos cost $25, okay? So, you're spending a fraction of what it costs to use a drone pilot. And frankly, the quality is better than what I've really ever gotten from any drone pilot. Now, you can build out a bunch of different variations if you like here. So, we can get it obviously you're going to get multiple angles here. But what I like is you can use something like the golden hour overlay. There's a bunch of really interesting overlays that you can use. And we are just constantly getting feedback from realtors where they say literally I got one at the beginning of this week. They said, "This is the best listing I've ever seen. How how are you doing this?" And we've even had realtors that are moving over to Land Insights for their own listings because this is so good.
Now, here's the cool thing. So, all you've got to do is just go to generate drone photos. You're going to come in and we're just going to put in the county name, and I can go for my saved markets, right? Now, you can search from your saved markets down here, but I'll just go pull a random property here with you. Okay, so we'll do Clark County, Nevada. Plug in the parcel number here. Okay, there's the property. So, it'll show you right here, "Hey, just to confirm this is the right property." You can see the current owner name. We say, "Yes, that's the right property." Now, here we've got two interesting bolt-ons. We can add the golden hour, which is my personal favorite, and then we can bolt on the disclaimer text, which is free. I do recommend always using disclaimer text, even if you're using standard drone images and you're drawing lot lines. Technically, you should always have a disclaimer that those lot lines are an approximation. Now, the cool thing with this as well is it draws the lot lines for you, so you you don't have to do those lot lines yourself. And that's an important point. We used to pay 500 bucks for drone photos, wait 2 weeks, get the drone photos, and my team was manually editing these photos and drawing the lot outlines. These photos come to you perfect, no editing, no lot outlines, etc. And then we just hit purchase and generate.
Now, as you can see here, this is still in beta, so something like one out of 25 drone photos that you do might have something a little odd with it. For example, you might have a tree that looks a little different or something of that sort. It still is in beta. We are still improving it. But even while being in beta, if you look at the cost of this and you look at the quality, it is still a far cry from what you'd ever get from a drone pilot at a fraction of the cost. And that's why we literally move all of our inventory through this currently, and I do think this has played a very large role in our disposition success this year, both in terms of just getting more listings live. Like this month, we'll get 15 new deals listed. That's a lot of new volume. That's partially because of this. And then also just truncating our days on market because our listings are standardized and usually the best listing in the entire market.
Now, speaking of that, the next thing that's been pretty radical for us is something called Deal Flow. Now, Deal Flow is our AI disposition brain. It's essentially having a disposition manager in your business that is tracking and managing all of your listings. Now, this is just a cookie-cutter account that I have here, so don't mind any of these here. But, you can see we've got this broken down with our Kanban board, so we can track our pipeline. We can also track here uh, estimated profit, sales value, total listings. You can track your average days on a market. So, there's a bit of kind of like KPI reporting to where you can get a really easy snapshot on your pipeline. And that's always one of the funky things like when I ask my team and I say, "Hey, how much do we have in our pipeline right now?" Or, "What's our average days on market?" It's always like, "Uh, okay, I got to check four different spreadsheets and then crunch some numbers." And so, now you can just get like instant visibility into your pipeline, which I think is really cool.
Now, where this becomes exciting though is we can go over here. Oh, and before I hit on that too, if you guys want to add a listing, all you got to do, put in the Zillow link here, fill out the information, add it, and now your AI Deal Flow Dispo brain will be tracking that listing for you. So, let's go down here. We can take a look at this listing. And what this is doing here is a couple things. One, it's grading all of our listings. So, we can see this listing grade over here. This listing's been taken off market, so just FYI. But, we've got our listing grade here. We've got our traction score here. That traction score shows us how much demand is being shown on this listing. That tells us like, do we have traction or do we not have traction as the name implies. And so, what we do is we get a new listing up, we make sure that all of our listings are at a listing grade of A. Now, a lot of our listings don't start there, right? We'll upload a new listing and we might be at a B minus. What my team then does is we go through and we make sure that all the recommendations are done or as close to it and we've got as many kudos here. This is essentially green lights or positive stars for saying you're doing the right thing. And we take a B to an A or C+ to an A. And with that's our that's our job on the Dispo side. Again, standardized quality. And so what this has allowed us to do is to take essentially a virtual assistant and turn them into a Dispo expert because now they're just following the instructions that the AI tells them to do. The AI says you need to do this and do this and do this. Get it to an A. Naturally, once we're at an A, our traction score tends to improve dramatically and then we're just tracking this traction score to make sure that we're always in a good spot.
Now this traction score will help tell us if we're price advantaged or if we need to reprice. Um, and so we will listen to the repricing feedback. If it says, "Somner, this has been up for 65 days. Your traction score is low." It says it'll time it's time for you to reprice and we'll go ahead and and reprice it. Um, and so it's important that you do listen to the feedback from the platform. I think a lot of land investors don't understand that you don't just buy land and sell land. You buy land, you list land, you manage that listing and then you sell the land. And so there's inventory management that goes into it just like if you were selling stuff in a brick and mortar store, right? You have to run flash sales and change the positioning on the shelf and put up little cardboard cut out next to it if you want to drive sell. Like you need to get creative with how you manage these listings. And for years either weren't doing it because they weren't organized or they weren't doing it just because they just didn't know. There was no awareness around this. And so with Deal Flow, you can now take a average land investor and turn them into, you know, a disposition savant.
Now on Land Insights, we have over 800 users on the platform, and out of the first 100 users that started using this, okay? Only about 100 users actively started putting their inventory on this platform. We launched this about 60 days ago or so. Uh, we've had a $103 million of land deals move through the platform with something like 35 plus million dollars of profit that those 100 users are generating through Deal Flow. So, think about that, right? 1/8 or so of our members, over $35 million in profit moving through their dispositions in the last, call it, 60-70 days through Deal Flow. And so, the the feedback on this has been insane. People are saying days on market coming down. They're saying that they're spending less time on dispositions but getting better results. And ultimately, um, that was the goal. This also goes through and reviews your listing photos, and it reviews the listing sequence. And so, it again, it really holds your hand and tells you your listing copy needs to be like this, your photos need to be like this, the layout needs to be like this, you need to be priced at this. Um, and it's just been a game-changer for us. So, this has been a huge one.
All right. So, this next one is it's kind of cheeky. It's one of those things that's way more important than you realize, which is how do you keep the quality of your underwriting or comping at the same level but reduce the time that it takes? Um, that's a that's a hard conundrum, a hard nut to crack. In our business, we underwrite, say, north of 100 properties a day, some days way over that. And so, if we can pick up, you know, two to four minutes, let's say, of time savings per property that we comp, that compounds to be a really, really big deal for our team. This shift within the Land Insights comping tool uh, has been freaking insane for us this year. Now, on the surface, it looks like, well, what's the big deal? Um, but the goal that we wanted to create was how do we build a comping tool where you never have to leave that tool? That might sound weird, but actually, one of the issues that we found with our comping tool is we would look at comps on the MLS, and when we looked at that comp, it would take us to Zillow or Redfin. And so, we were constantly switching back and forth. And so, the idea here was, how do we never have to leave this tab, okay? How do we go and keep all this information in one place? And so, let's say we take this comp here. We click on this comp sold 9 days ago. Now, we have all of that MLS information nested inside of here to where you never have to leave the comping tool. We can see the listing description. We can see the sold details, the photos, uh, the MLS activity, the agent information. Now, I can go click here and I can go look at the original listing if I wanted to. But, for us, we just stay native inside of the platform. And this is one of those things that, you know, you pick up an extra 2 to 4 minutes here, but that really starts to stack as you guys are underwriting a lot of properties daily. In fact, this has been, I would argue, one of my favorite releases of the entire year, and it's a total sleeper, and I just don't think a lot of people know how crazy this is.
Now, speaking of sleeper features, um, this year, we've gotten really into cold calling. In our business, we've gone buck wild with the cold calling. It's been a big, big focus for us. And um, obviously with cold calling, the integrity of your data really matters. And the first thing that we think about is DNC data. Okay? You want to respect people that have raised their hand and say, I don't want to be contacted. I'm on a DNC list. The problem that I learned as I started studying this uh, middle of last year is, most people I are either belligerent and just call people on the DNC list, which is not cool, or they're using DNC data, but they're getting it from a so-so source. And so, we set out on a mission to get the best DNC data in the industry within Land Insights, and we've done that. And what we also learned is that most people are just using federal DNC, but you do still need state DNC. And then we also have a previous litigator or known litigator flag as well. So, this has been in the platform for some time now. We run all of our data through this um, to respect people's privacy and and to stay safe.
But the interesting thing here is with the update that we just shipped, if you're using premium skip tracing, you get six phone numbers, okay? Now, all of this DNC data and the previous litigator data, it applies to all six phone numbers in the list. And so we run that DNC scrub with all six phone numbers. That was a recent improvement. Before, it was just running on the first phone number. So this is like a small change, but a profound change if you're doing any kind of uh, telephone marketing to property owners.
And again, I just think some people justify the risk to the reward and they say, "I'll just call everyone and I'll make so much money that, you know, if I get in trouble, it doesn't matter." And maybe that's true, but I just think out of integrity, it is in our best interest just to respect people's privacy. And so I recommend every single person to be using this. And on top of that, I would say be very careful with some of these like free DNC services, like you're using some kind of uh, marketing platform and it's like, "Hey, we'll we'll do the DNC scrubbing for you for free." That data is usually free for a reason and it has a lot of latency because every time they refresh the data, they get hit with pretty serious cost. And so a lot of times they'll just keep that sitting there for, I don't know, months or years or something like that. And I know multiple people that have gotten in trouble using DNC data that they thought was good, but it was actually outdated and there was new people on that list that were on the DNC list, etc. You get the point.
Now, speaking of that, let's say if we come down here and we look at this property over yonder. So I've been getting into uh, the world of buying, you know, mobile home parks or things like that, or at least making offers on them, right? I've got a couple under contract. It's actually been a much harder, longer, crazier process than than I thought it would be. But anyways, that's the world that I've been cracking into, uh, mainly for depreciation against the land business. Now, one of the frustrating things is there's no good way to search these properties, okay? You kind of have to go literally like on the map and my team just goes line by line and we try to find people because in a lot of cases the zoning doesn't overlap with mobile home parks and a lot of them don't even It's just they're hard to find, okay? There's no way to easily scrub the data and so we do it visually. Um, and then I promise this will relate to land. Um, and so we find this one-off property, but then we had to go through this really annoying process of doing a one-off skip trace and it was a real pain with Land Insights. And so now what you can do on any property, you can just come over here, you'll click the property, you can see this skip trace icon right here. So we click this. Uh, it's two credits, so it's 2 cents if if a match is found. If there is no match, it is free. So we'll click skip trace here. And we'll make sure that we blur blur out his phone number. So there we go. That's his phone number. Let's make sure we blur that out, respect his privacy. Don't want to blast him on YouTube. And there we go. And now I can now go take that phone number and give him a call. Um, I'll probably actually do that.
>> [laughter] >> But this becomes really interesting if you're contacting neighbors or one-off properties or what have you. Just to be able to like quickly rip a skip trace right then and there is huge. And again, mainly how I'm using it is like pursuing mobile home parks and more buy and hold properties. Um, which by the way, if you guys have those deals, uh, let me know. Hit up your boy. I am a buyer.
So anyways, guys, those are just like a couple of things that I've just been like really excited about um, over the last like 2 months or so inside of Land Insights. I really think that are despite what anyone will tell you, we're in the golden age of land investing. Like the economy's in the pooper. It is a weird time. I'm not going to lie. There is hardship in the land space. But what is happening behind the scenes is this crazy convergence of AI clashing with this old-school business. And I think for the players that can stay in this business long-term and can weather the weird recessions or lack of liquidity or weird, you know, weird times in the market, they are going to do so, so, so well long-term because they're early adopters with these technological changes that are happening, they're going to clean up shop. And that's what I'm trying to position myself as. Sure, this year, next year, I I think we're going to have good years and we're still working really hard for every dollar in the business, but I think there's going to be a tipping point where things go nuclear in a positive way. And so, I'm just staying patient and trying to be an early adopter of this technology and stay on the forefront. Yeah, to swing when when it's my time to swing.
So, anyways, guys, if you want to tap into what I've shared and what I've walked you through here in this video, best thing to do is to go to landinsights.co/apply. We'll walk you through a demo call, no pressure tactics, no hard sales. We'll just walk you through the platform and show you how you can run this like a true operating system in your business.
You know, Land Insights, I would would argue, isn't a data platform anymore. It's truly an operating system for every every piece of the business. And so, we'll show you how we can install this inside of your business, how you can start ramping up and becoming more efficient in your business. And yeah, I think you're really going to be pretty mind-blown about what's possible with this tool.
Also, just for booking the demo and showing up on the demo, when you leave, we'll build you out your next marketing campaign. So, we'll give you 1,000 leads that you can use for your next marketing campaign. What's crazy is we've had people that have gotten on these calls and then ripped 20, 40,000 dollar deals on the back end just from the data that we give you. Because at the end of the call, we want to show you, "Hey, go test the fruits. Take a bite of the apple." We'll give you the data, we'll skip trace it, we'll run it through Seller IQ, we'll show you the sauce. And so, you can go go and test it yourself. So, anyways, guys, thank you for watching this video. See you in the next one. Cheers.