Transcription
How do you invest in vacant land? What on earth does that mean? You're flipping dirt. You don't have to do anything to the dirt. You just you buy it for cheap and you sell it for cheap. Who actually buys this stuff? Right.
So, on this set of videos, I'm going to be doing a series of three to six different videos answering the most common questions that I get. And I'm going to be diving deep into each of these. In fact, I've got three questions here. And I actually then came up with three additional. Then I started thinking, well, okay, I'm going to do one big long honking video answering all of these common questions. But then I realized this is going to be a really, really long video. So, I'm going to break this up into maybe three to six different points. And I'm going to be answering the questions.
Number one, how do you find good land deals? Number two, how do I determine the value of vacant land? And number three, do I need an LLC to get started? And then the fourth question is, how do you do vacant land without using any of your own money? How do you find the money? Do you need other people's money? Do you actually need any money to do land deals? I'm going to talk about that and then I'm going to answer some questions like what is the best way to sell your land quickly? And what are some of the biggest mistakes that beginning land investors make?
So, if you're ready to join me in on this ride, it's going to be a lot of fun. If you don't know who I am, I'm Joe McCall. I've been doing land investing for a long time now, done hundreds of deals. I've coached and helped people from all over the world flip vacant land. You know, I've done maybe hundreds of deals. I've trained people to do thousands of deals, literally from all over the globe. And I meet people all the time that maybe learn it from me, maybe from other people, but are doing land in the United States from literally dozens and dozens of countries around the world. It is by far the easiest and fastest way to make money in real estate in my humble opinion by flipping dirt.
All we're doing, it's real simple. We're buying land for five grand, selling it for 10 grand. We're buying it for 10, selling it for 15. We're buying it for three, selling it for 12. We're just buying it cheap and we're selling it cheap. Who on earth buys this land, you're saying? Well, campers, people who want to go hunting, people just want to diversify their money and their assets and put some money outside, take some outside of the stock market, put it into a different asset class like real estate. They're looking for long-term appreciation. And then we're selling a lot of land to people who just they maybe want to build a house someday. They want a place where they can go with their family, go hunting, put the tiny house, build a cabin or whatever.
And here's the crazy thing about land that I love it so much is that's so much easier than houses. Way less competition. Sellers just don't care about the land like they do about a house, right? On a property that they've lived in, a house that they've lived in, they've lived there for 30 years, they've poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into it. With vacant land, it's completely different. These folks just don't care. They haven't been there in 10 years, right? It's just a piece of land that uh they just want the cash. They want it now. They're going to exchange the speed and convenience for selling it quickly for the price that we want. And so, it's a numbers game.
And the reason I got started in Lane is I wanted something simple that I could do with my teenagers. And so I started developing the same kind of systems that I was using to do houses and implanted it into the land business. And with my teenager boys, I just wanted to kind of like prove it to them that they could do land and do real estate, but also prove it to my audience, my podcast, my YouTube channel, that if my kids can do it, then you can do it as well. And so doing it very very part-time with my two teenage boys over a couple three years from a laptop on the kitchen table, we did over $153,000. And I'm not promising any of those results to you. But my boys did over $153,000 doing land very very part-time. Now I've done lots of deals besides that on top of that. But it is very very simple. It's just a numbers game.
And so in this video series, I'm going to be answering the most common questions I get about how do you do that? And the first question is how do you find the good land deals? And I'm going to share this Google doc with you here. I'm going to be putting it on my screen just like that. And I'm going to actually give you this Google doc if you want in the description down below. And I'm going to give you a bunch of links here. I'm going to be demonstrating stuff. And so all of the links that I'm going to be sharing are going to be down below. And if you're listening to this on an audio podcast, just go to my YouTube channel and and check it out. Okay.
How do you find good deals? The important keys. Number one, it's all about marketing. It's all about consistency. Consistency is the key. And I like to say this, consistency beats perfection every time. Now, this business, many times we kind of complicate it. It really comes down to a couple three or four things. Three things, right? Number one, you got to do marketing. You got to get leads to come in. Number two, you got to talk to sellers. You got to talk to people. And number three, you got to make offers. That's pretty much it. That's all you need to kind of worry about to do any kind of real estate. It's even easier with land. But the key to it all is marketing. Okay? How do you find the good deals? You do a bunch of marketing. And you have to be consistent with it. And I hope if anything that I share in my video on my channel here is you understand the importance of consistency. Even if it's just a little bit, a little bit every single day, every single week helps build that momentum so that you don't have to. You can just set it and forget it.
So, one of the first rules that I talk about a lot is getting your marketing done for you in spite of you. Let me talk about this here for a second. Let's say you want to make $10,000 a month. Well, you can't control that, right? Let's say the average profit is five grand on a deal. You can't control that either. That means you need to do two deals a month. You can't control that. Well, let's say you have to make 30 offers to do one deal. So, if you want to do two deals a month, you need to make 60 offers a month. But you can't control that either, right? But you can control you you can't control that you do one deal out of every 30 offers. But you can control how many offers you're actually sending, right? And then, so if you need to make an offer, what does that mean? You need leads to make offers, too. So, I'm breaking this down from a revenue goal of, you know, $10,000 a month down to things you can control. So, if you need to make 60 offers a month, let's just look at the numbers here. I'll get my calculator out. I know you can't see this. If you need to make 60 offers a month divided by four weeks, that's 15 offers a week divided by five days a week. You need to make three offers a day. That's something you can control, right? Maybe you don't have a big budget for doing a bunch of direct mail. There's other things you could do, and I'm going to talk about that in this video. But if you want to make 10 grand a month doing land, that's cool. But how are you going to do that? You got to break it down. If your average profit is five grand, that means two deals. If you need to make 60 offers to do one deal, that's 60 offers. Now, I'm not talking blind offers. We'll talk about that in a minute, but basically comes down to, all right, you got to make three offers a day. Three offers a day. Oh my gosh. I guarantee if you could just make three offers a day, you will never be broke again. Money will never be a problem to you if you learn how to make offers. It's the number one rule in real estate. Make offers. Make offers. Make offers. But you can't make offers if you don't have any leads coming in. So marketing is the foundation of everything. We're not in the real estate investing business. We're not in the land business. We're not in the YouTube podcast business. We're in the marketing business. That's rule number one. You got to understand the marketing.
And so to do marketing correctly to make it work for you, you need to give time to build momentum. You need to be consistent. Consistent. It won't be perfect when you're getting started out. You may not know what to say to sellers. You may not know how to make the right offers, but you're consistently doing it and you're building the momentum. I remember when I was first getting started, I heard, you know, people, my coaches at the time talk about the importance of marketing and you need to get marketing done for you in spite of you. I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but I thought, man, I can do it myself, right? But I was busy working a full-time job. So, I'd do a bunch of marketing, get a bunch of leads, and now I'm like overwhelmed and busy. So, I shut the marketing off and I start working the leads, get a few deals under contract, sell a few deals. That takes about two or three months. That whole kind of process right there. Well, guess what happens? Two, three months later, I turn around, I do a deal, make some money. Great. This is exciting. I turn around and my pipeline is completely empty. And it's not like a little light switch you can just turn on and leads start flooding in again. It takes time to build that momentum. At a minimum, it takes two to three months. And so now what happens? I'm like the video image behind me. You got this up and down roller coaster of making a lot of money, all excited, and then like, oh my gosh, I got to make more money. and now you're don't have any money and then you make some money and you So like wouldn't it be nice if you could just make it a consistent steady flow of leads.
So and and here's the great thing too. When you understand the marketing aspect of this and the consistency and how important it is, you're now getting so many leads they're just coming in automatically, you don't become you're not anymore the desperate buyer like, "Oh my gosh, I got to turn this bad lead into a deal because we're deal finders, not deal creators." Write that down. We're deal finders, not deal creators. So you don't want to be in this place where like you're desperate to turn a deal a bad deal into a deal into a lead into a bad you know into a deal. You don't want to be the desperate motivated buyer. So when you are consistent with your marketing the leads flows coming in now you get so many leads coming in your job is a whole lot easier because now your job is to just disqualify the leads. Not to try to qualify a bad lead but to disqualify the leads. You got so many leads coming in you can cherrypick the best ones. You can do deals. And that's the name of the game. That's how you win at this game. Marketing consistently done for you in spite of you. You don't have to worry about it. Every single day it's going out the door. Every week, every month, whatever it is you setting up, and that's what I'm talking about in the marketing plan, right? If your goal is to make 10 grand a month. All right? So then you got to do two deals, you got to make 30 offers per deal. You need to make three offers a day. How do you do that? Well, maybe it's for you, you send out 500 postcards a week, 500 letters a month. Maybe it's just call five realtor a day. cold call a hundred sellers a day. Whatever it is, you need to have this written down. It can be on a napkin. It could be on a, you know, doesn't matter. But write it down. Some kind of plan. Every day you're going to do these activities. Just two or three things, one or two things. Every week you're going to do this. It could be, again, like I said, write this down. 500 postcards a month, 250 a week, whatever it is for you. One hour of cold calling a day. You need to have two or three things that you write down that you're just doing every day. And then once you're doing it and you know how to do it and you got it all figured out, well then you can hire someone else to do it for you. Does that make sense? So like when it comes to how to find good deals, it's all about marketing and your job will be a whole lot easier if you have a full consistent lead pipeline coming in. Does that make sense? All right.
So, let me go back to my notes because I already kind of talked about this already. I should stay on track, but consistency is the key. And we're not in the real estate investing business. We're in the marketing business. So you need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel. just do what works. Sometimes we look at that letter or that postcard that somebody else is sending or you buy some course or you get into my program and I say send this postcard and you're like, I don't like that. That's ugly. That looks nonprofessional. I can probably do it better. I wish I could just like slap you across the face. It's like stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Like it works. I'm not teaching you what worked three years ago. I'm teaching you what works today. So stop trying to make it better or different. All right? Just do what works. After you've done five or 10 deals, then go ahead and change it. But test it, right? But stick to what works. All right. The number one rule in real estate is what? It's not location, location, location, is it? It's make offers. Make offers. Make offers. And guess what? If you're not making offers, you're not making money. If you're not making offers, you're not making money. All right.
So, the key to all of this, too, is followup. Followup. Followup. I hope you can see my text here. By the way, again, I'm going to give you this is a really long Google doc. I'm going to share this Google doc with you in the uh description down below. But the key to this all is followup because 90 maybe 75 85 90% of your deals are going to come from follow-up. I tell this all the time. Gavin, my coaching business partner and I looked back. We were doing a bunch of house deals together at one time and we did 58 deals in that 12-month window. Of those 58 deals, guess how many came from follow-up? 54. If we would not have done any deal any follow-up that year, we would have only done four deals. But on average, of those 54 deals that came from follow-up, it was seven to eight touches over two to three months. Write that down. Seven to eight touches over two to three months. Don't do a bunch of marketing and and waste a bunch of time and money on resources on marketing if you're not going to follow up with those leads. So, when the lead comes in, you talk to them, send them an offer, and follow up. Now, follow-up means every 30 days. Every 30 days, you send another offer, you send another letter, you text, an email. So critical and important. If you're not following up, if you don't have a system in place that does that follow up for you in spite of you, you're throwing your money away and it's really tragic. That's really important.
So, kind of summarizing all of this, and I'm not even in the meat and potatoes yet, but summarizing summarizing all this, the rules to doing deals are very, very simple. Number one, marketing. Always be marketing, okay? Consistently marketing for leads. Number two, talk to sellers. And we'll talk about that here in a minute. Talk to sellers. If you could talk to five people a day, you will never have a problem doing deals. Just talk to people. 3 to 5 minutes long. I'm not talking about being a sales guy trying to negotiate hardcore. Just talking about asking questions, talking to sellers, talking to realtors. Okay? Tell them, "Hey, I'm looking for deals. Do you got anything?" That's it. Tell me about this property. Why should I want to buy this property and not another one? I've got a million dollars burning a hole in my pocket. I'm looking to buy a deal. Do you have anything? That's my attitude when I'm talking to people. You could talk to five people a day about that. Okay. The third thing is make offers. Make offers. Make offers. Make offers. This is how you find deals. It's so very simple. Make a lot of offers. And then four, follow up. Follow up with every single offer that you send every 30 days. That's the magic formula to doing a lot of deals.
Okay, so back to my notes here. Oh yeah, by the way, I have a 5day flip dirt challenge. This is a challenge that I do every single week. If you go to dubdubdub.flip dirtchallenge.com, I do this challenge every single week. So join me next Monday. I'm going to teach you how to flip vacant land. I'm going to be going through this really fast on these videos here, but if you want to actually see the nuts and bolts and see me doing this so you can do it as well, go to flip dirtchallenge.com. It's free. flip dirtchallenge.com. Go there right now. Okay. Cool.
Back to my notes. So, a lot of the fears and objections I hear from folks are things like, you know what, there's not enough good deals out there. Well, here's the bottom line truth. There are plenty of land deals out there and there is hardly any competition. Hardly anybody knows about land yet. land is one of the most abundant and overlooked asset classes. I'm, you know, some people sometimes don't realize how much vacant land there is. Uh, let me show you something here. I'm going to pause this and I'm going to show you how much actual vacant land there is in the United States. It's, it'll blow you away. Okay, so I found this on the internet, so it must be true, right? But I've seen this many different places. I'm pretty sure it is. This is I got two sites things I'm going to show you here. This first one is um, if you can see this. Let me try to zoom in a little bit here. In the yellow, 60 654 million acres of pasture range, 539 million acres of forest, 391 million acres of crop land, 169 million acres of special use, 69 million acres of miscellaneous, and then see the purple, the purple is urban. Now, check this map out in this one right here. See the the red and the pink here? That's rural housing, urban commercial, and urban housing right here. All of the rest of this in the United States, that's like basically the New England area is urban housing, commercial, rural housing. Okay. The rest of this private family timberland, federal state timberland, land or land, a corporate cow pasture ranges, federal wilderness, national parks, wetlands, food exports, cotton, land. Florida's is 100 largest landowning families, whatever, right? Food we eat, wheat exports, all vacant land. Some of it is for national use, some of it is for agricultural use. But you see how big the United States is. My point is in showing you this is there is tons of vacant land out there. And I already mentioned this too, but vacant land owners are more likely to be motivated at larger discounts because it is land, right? There is just so much land out there. And sellers that have owned it for 10 or 20 years, they just don't care about it anymore. They don't want it anymore. So, when you use the right lists and you send the right marketing, you will consistently uncover hidden vacant land deals.
All right. The other fear objection I hear sometimes is like, "Man, I don't know where to look. Choosing the wrong county or pulling the wrong lists will waste a ton of time and money." Well, you're right if you do it the wrong way. So, don't do it. Right? This is actually very, very easy. There's a very simple, repeatable process where you can find the best markets, pull the best lists. It's not a guessing game anymore. And I'm going to show you that on this video. Another fear, objection I hear is like, "Man, sellers are not going to accept my lowball offer. They'll probably get mad at me." Well, you know what? You're right. Again, most sellers will reject your offers and they will get mad at you, but who cares? Nobody. Nobody cares, right? In fact, sometimes I say, "Listen, if you've not made a seller upset by 12:00, you're not doing enough marketing. You're not marketing hard enough." That's the crazy reality here. You see, sellers want speed and convenience, not top dollar. Many of them do, right? So, we have sellers every day that are accepting our offers at 40 cents on the dollar, sometimes less. Just recently, we bought a property that was listed for $340,000. Vacant land listed for $340 grand. We offered $215,000. That's $145,000 difference. Guess what? The seller accepted it. Listed for $340. We bought it for 215 and we turned around and sold it within a couple weeks for $260. So, you can certainly do it. And I have clients all over the country that are doing it as well. These sellers are typically glad to unload their vacant land. We always give sellers, by the way, an option to list their property with an agent. We tell them we're not retail buyers, but we are the easy button. If they want full price for the property, they should list it with an agent. And hey, listen. If our offer doesn't work for you, that's great. That's fine. No big deal. Here are five realtors that have sold land in the area. You should call them. Guess what happens when you do that? it many times it like makes them to trust you more and they will accept your offer later on down the road because you're the only one that's actually nice and trying to help them sell their property. Okay? And it's again it's just a numbers game. Many will say no but a few will say yes.
You might also be afraid or feel like you know what I don't have the money to actually buy these deals. If I even found one I don't have the money to buy them. Well you think that maybe only deep pocketed investors have the money to find these deals or to buy them. That's just not true. That's why we do wholesaling. You don't need the money to buy them. And I'm going to be talking about that in another video. You might also think, man, I'm not good at negotiating or selling. That's fine because you don't need to be. And in fact, some of the best deals that I've ever done have not come from hardcore negotiating and trying to trick them. And you know, there's a great books out there, Split the Difference, Go for Know, and all of that, but the best deals are just been the ones where, you know what, tell me about the property. What's going on? What's your situation? I'll talk about the script to say in a minute, but you just got to be yourself. You just need to be nice and ask lots of questions and make offers. That's how you do a lot of deals. My teenagers did deals without even talking to sellers. All we did is we sent out marketing. We got the li to listen to a voicemail. We sent out an offer and one out of every 30 offers got accepted. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. All right. If my teenagers can do this, you can do this as well.
So, here are the steps for finding good deals. Number one, we want to find the hot spots. Where are the buyers actually buying right now? And one of the first places I like to go is Landwatch. Landwatch.com is a family of It's part of a family of websites owned by land.com. And it's where the most people will go and and list vacant land. It's land.com, landsofamerica.com, and landwatch.com, and maybe a few others. But I like to start with we only look for cheap vacant land, right? So I like to look for land under $100,000. Now, if you didn't see what I just did there, I'm at landwatch.com. I'm going to click on the orange search button, and I want to look for land under 100 grand. I might even go down here and say, "All right, also show me, show me the sold." So, I'm looking at now available under contract and sold under 100 grand. Now, these are not sold from county records. These are just solds that have been listed on land.com websites and then marked as sold there. Now, you can see the most popular states right here, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina. Now, when you click on show more, it actually right now it's sorted by by numbers. Okay? When you click see more, it's sorted alphabetically. But you can see the hottest states are Texas, Florida, North Carolina, California, Arizona, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia. And Georgia is at 8,900. If I skip this, and now I'm looking at all of them. You know, New York State's a great state, 6,500. New Mexico is up there. Pennsylvania is a good state. South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Michigan should be up here somewhere. Uh, yeah, there 8,200 Missouri 8700. So the point of this is you need to pick one or two states. Find out where is the activity happening. Where are people buying and selling houses or vacant lots, right? Hawaii is a beautiful state, but you know what? There's only 516 transactions there. Maybe you shouldn't be doing land in Hawaii. Idaho is beautiful. Not very much activity there, right? And so can you flip land in Ohio, for example? Yeah, there's been there's almost 4,000 records there. What we're doing here is I want you to pick some states where there is a lot of activity. Now, that doesn't mean you should go into Texas and Florida or North Carolina because they're in the top three. Sometimes those top three states can be a little bit more competitive, but maybe you're from Texas, maybe you like Texas, maybe Florida is way to go. Now, what's interesting is the states that tend to be more I don't want to get political here, but you know, tend to be more conservative or red. I think I always get the colors confused, blue or red, but that's where a lot of the population is kind of going towards and that's why the numbers are higher there. But again, California is really high and that is definitely not a red state. But Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, there's a lot of activity there. Now, when you've written down, I want you to do an exercise here, writing down one or two states and then each of those states, write down one to write down about 20 counties. So, let's just look at let's look at Arkansas here. Okay, if I click on Arkansas, guess what? You can see the most popular counties in Arkansas. And what I want you to do now is write down the top 10 or 20 of these counties. And we got Isizard, Benton, Sharp, Carol, Fulton, blah blah blah blah blah. Write all of them down. Then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go to Redfin. And let's just look here. I'm going to go to redfin.com. All right. And the first one is county. So I'm just going to copy that. Let's put it in Redfin here. Isard County, Arkansas. And what we're doing is we're just looking for vacant land that is sold in the last six months. Okay. So, I go sold six months. Land only. And I like to do price maybe max price 100 grand because again, we want cheap land. All right, you can see right here, 44 have sold in the last year. Write that down. Then you go to the next county. Benton County is a popular place. Let's look at Benton County. Benton County, Arkansas. Now I need to redo the filters here real quick. You only have to redo them for the the first time, which is kind of weird. All right, there we go. Wow, look at that. A lot more. 1366. Okay, write that down. The next county is Sharp County. Let me copy that and paste that right there. Sharp county, Arkansas. And you can see I don't have to do my filters again. It's already set to 6 months under 100 grand land only. 91. All right, write that down. Then Carol County. Let's just do one more. Carol County, Arkansas. There you go. 79 properties. Now, Benton County is obviously really high. That's a lot of activity going on there. I may not recommend Benton County because it's maybe a little too competitive. The other reason why I don't like Benton County, for example, is the competition. Now, check this out. If I look at active for sales in Benton County, let's try this again. Active for sale in Benton County. There you go. And I sort from price low to high. You're going to find a lot of really cheap properties here. 5,800 6200. I don't want to compete with this in this area. So maybe I'll if I do land in Benton County, I'm not going to target little quarter acre or halfacre lots because I don't want to try to compete and sell my property for $6,500. Do you see what I'm saying there? Or maybe I'll avoid those areas. But the main point I'm trying to show you is to find a good market. You want to go where the demand is. You want to go where the fish are biting. And if I scroll back here, let's look at maybe Florida next. Okay, so we've got Florida under 100 grand available under contract and sold. You see all of these counties right here. Lee County, Charlotte, Putnham, Marian, Citrus, Sarasota. I've done deals in almost all of them. And I got a lot of clients that do deals in these counties. And guess what? They're still doing deals in these counties. There's still a lot of activity there. So, what I want you to do is pick a couple states, write down 20 counties in each of those states, and then rank them. Sort them by the number of solds recently, and you can find that in Red Fin. Okay. Now, you're you're going to look for you're not your goal isn't to pick the top one county. Your goal is just to pick top three to four or five counties, and that's where you're going to be focusing on.
Okay, so back here to my notes, you look at Landwatch and Redfin. And one of the cool things I like to do next is looking at Freedomoft. Okay. Now, I talk a lot about Freedomoft. If you want my Joe McCall signature edition of Freedomoft, go to freedomoftnow.com. Freedomoftnow.com. And I'm going to show you something cool here that will help you find the top zip codes because again the purpose of what we're doing here is we want to be focused in on where the fish are biting. Imagine you're and I don't like to fish, but you're on a boat and you got one of those radar things on the boat and you you're going and you see the pods of fish and you know, okay, that's where a good place to go is. That's all we're doing here. And so, let me log into one of my Freedomoft accounts here and I'm going to show you an example of what I'm talking about. So, let's say we're looking at Putinham County. Okay. Or how about Marian County? Let's go to Marian County. There's a tool here in Freedomoft called Zipfinder. I'm going to go to tools, zipfinder. We're going to look at land. I'm going to go to Florida County. What did I say? Marian. Yeah, Marian County. All right. M A R. Boom. I want to look at the last 180 days. What we're trying to do here is we go from the state to the county to the zip code. We want to find the most active zip codes. We don't want to do spray and prey marketing. in this county. I don't know, it's got maybe 50 zip codes in there. Well, we're going to focus on just the biggest zip codes where most of the activity is happening. And you can see in this zip code here, this zip code, and this zip code, and this zip code, and this zip code. All right, so there are five zip codes where there's a lot of activity going on. Guess what you can do now? You can click right here, find buyers, and you can see who are the active buyers that are actively buying land in this area. I'm going to remove duplicate owners. they've bought in the last 6 months. I'm going to click search. And in a minute here, it's going to show me all of the buyers in these top five zip codes that have been buying property in the last 6 months. And there's a,034 different buyers. So, if I'm fishing, I'm in my fishing boat and I'm looking at Florida and I say, "Okay, Marian County is a good county. Now, where exactly in Marian County are these buyers buying?" And I can see here, oh, well, I can see there's 1,034 different buyers here. So, I'm going to pause my video here in a second. I'm going to add this these buyers to a list and I'm going to show you something really amazing here and show you how simple and easy it is to find who the most active buyers are and what they are buying. Okay, so that list is being built right now. I'm going to show you something else really cool that I like to do inside of Redfin. And we're going to go to Marian County, Florida. Fell Mar. Here we go. Marian County, Florida. And we're looking at solds. Let's do the last three months. Let's do under 100 grand. Yeah, sometimes Redfin you have to do it twice. Last three months. Done. There we go. And we want land only. All right. Boom. Solds last three months under 100 grand land only. There's 451 properties. Now, I'm going to sort this list by most recently sold. Cool. All right. Now, I'm going to go down all the way to the bottom here, and there's a little button called download all. I'm going to click that. Oh, and I have to log in. Hold on a second here. All right. I need to download all into a spreadsheet. and I'm going to go into chat GPT. All right, check this out. I'm going to upload this file into chat GPT and I'm going to talk to it here. Let's see if this works. So, I'm uploading here a spreadsheet from Redfin of most recent vacant land that has sold in Marian County, Florida. I want you to analyze this spreadsheet and tell me the most active zip codes. And I want to know the median acreage. I want to know the median price. And I want to know the median price per acre for each zip code. Now the column that is lot size is in square feet. You need to convert it to acres. All right. So boom. I'm going to search. Now it's uploading that spreadsheet. It's looking at all of the recent solds and it's going to give me some data and analysis on that. Okay. Let me pause this here and I'm going to show you what the spreadsheet looks like so you kind of see what's happening behind the scenes. Okay. All right. All right. So, I just took the spreadsheet I downloaded from Redfin, uploaded it into Google Docs, and you can see it here. I've got this one column. I'm just going to a row. And you can see I've got the zip codes for all these properties here. I've got the price, and I got the lot size, which is in square feet. I want to look at it in acres. And this is really good information on all of these sold lots. Okay. I want to know who are the buyers and what are they buying. What's the average price? What's the average size and all that? Let's see if chat GPT is done here. Hot diggity dog. Look at this. All right. Let's look at this table. So, it's given me now this zip code had 55 transactions. The median acreage. Now, I could go back and I could say, hey, in fact, let me just do this real quick because sometimes it's hard to see. I'm going to say that looks good, but make the median acres column just two decimal points and make the median price and the median price per acreage a currency so I can read them better. All right. Some of you are like, "Joe, stop it. It's not a big deal." But I like to be able to look at something and understand what I'm looking at, not be confused. Here we go. Isn't that nicer? Oh, look at that. Isn't that better? Here we go. In 34431, the median acreage in that zip code is 0.99 acres. So, when I'm doing my marketing, am I going to target little quarter acre lots in that zip code? No. I want to target maybe half acre to 5 acres. The median price is 23 grand. The median price per acre is about 27 price per acre. Okay. In this zip code, you can see all the data here. The median price by zip code. Cool. Yes, it is. Thank you very much. All right. Now, here are those recent buyers. I'm going to This is in Freedomoft. Now, I've got a,036 buyers who have bought land recently in the only those top five zip codes. And I'm going to go to the filter button here, and I'm going to go all the way down to owned properties. I know you can't see it, but I'm going to click owned properties or greater than or equals to 10. All right. So now there's 191 different vacant land owners who have bought properties in the last 6 months in those top five zip codes that already own more than 10. How about own more than 25? Boom. 123. So wouldn't it be cool if you get a property in one of these five zip codes, you now have a list of 123 buyers that you can just call or mail, send something in the direct mail or email to them and say, "Hey, I see you've got some property here. would you like to buy another one in the same area, etc. So, let's just look at this. I'm going to click on one of them. How about this one? They own 28 properties. And you can see now on a map where their properties are that they own. Let me zoom in here to Florida. All right. You can see where they're buying these properties at. They own a bunch of properties right in this area. Okay. And you can see what price they're paying for it, etc., et. Now, we have some other tools that we use that make this very, very easy. But now, you can Oh, there's one more filter I want to show you. We're looking at all these active buyers. I want to now also see purchased properties. They have purchased greater than or equal to five on or after 6 months ago. 1 2 3 4 5 6. All right. These are buyers that have purchased more than five properties in the last 6 months. And there are 99 different buyers in those five zip codes. So this kind of technology is really, really important because now what I'm trying to do, and I'm trying to show this to you, your job will be a whole lot easier when you find good deals. If you're going in areas where there's already good demand because why? Number one, you've got buyers with money who are looking to buy land. You can just quickly sell them. Make a few phone calls, send a few emails, and you can sell these deals like that many times without closing on them, without going through the MLS or listing them with an agents, without taking them down and buying them. You can just do quick simple assignments by calling these buyers. One of the other cool things about Freedomoft, by the way, I want to mention this before I forget, they just announced on their Facebook group page that they are going to be giving away free unlimited skip tracing to any subscriber in the Freedomoft ecosystem. So, if you get the Joe McCall signature edition of Freedomoft at freedomoftnow.com, you go there to just get a dollar trial, you get free skip tracing, which is insane. So, now I can get these buyers when I get a deal, call them up, and it even skip traces LLC's. Hey, how you doing? I see you bought this property. I see you own some land here. Are are you looking to buy more deals? Because I've got one right now. Maybe you'd be interested in it. Is that awesome or what? Yes, it is. With Freedom Soft, the cool thing now is with tools like this, you can find the top zip codes. You can find out who the best buyers are. And it's as simple as that. Again, count. We're going to the whole country, to the state, to the county, to the zip codes, and that's where we are going to start marketing our for for deals because that's where we can sell them the fastest. And yes, there is competition there, but that's okay. We don't care about competition. It's all about collaboration. This is where we sell our deals the fastest. Remember, we're looking for cheap land. Why cheap land? Because there's more motivated sellers. There's a larger pool of buyers, and we would rather make a quick nickel versus a slow dime. There is a place, a time and a place for for slow dimes. But I'm telling you, it's better to make a quick nickel than a slow dime. Especially as the market is shifting and, you know, we might be going into slowdown or whatever it is, right? We want to be in and out of our deals very very quickly.
So there are two ways to get leads. Two ways. You go out and get the leads or you get the leads to come to you. Let me repeat that. We're talking about how do you find good deals? Well, you either go out and find them or you bring you get them to come to you. I prefer the one where we get the leads to come to us. But you know that's because I've got some money that I can invest in direct mail. I like direct mail. It's my favorite strategy for marketing. But if you don't have the money or the funds right now to do direct mail, that's fine. You can get the you go out and get the leads and we'll talk about that right now. So, where are these leads? Who are these land owners? You need to get the right list. This is important. Where do you get lists from? I have two resources that I recommend. Freedomoft and the land portal. Okay, I'll show you freedomoft here in a minute and then I'm going to show you get land portal, which is pretty crazy. Now remember here we were looking at the top zip codes in this top county and I clicked on find sellers or find buyers right in those five zip codes. Well now you can click find sellers. And this is why I love Freedom Soft so much is because I now have it's allin-one. I can find the best markets. I can find the best buyers, the best sellers. I get my data and I can do free skip tracing. Okay. And then I can get these lists and I can market to them. I and oh I also have MLS access in Freedomoft. So I get the realtor's names and phone numbers. Now I can do marketing. I have lists of buyers, sellers, realtors, and I can send text blasts, do cold calling campaigns. I can do direct mail, all of that stuff. So, let's do search properties, all land in those top five zip codes. All right, those five zip codes right there. And I'm going to do remove duplicate owners, vacant land. Okay, financial filters. I want them to have owned it for over 10 years. So, they bought it before 2015. And I don't want little tiny properties. So I'll do maybe three acres.3 acres to and I don't want huge expensive properties either. So I'll do.3 acres to five acres. There's an option here to I always say only for out of zip code owners. What that means is I don't want to mail somebody that lives next to the property. So I'm only going to mail owners that have an mailing address that's different the
zip code than the property address is. Does that make sense? All right.
And so all we do now is we click search. And just like that, it's going to give us the the sellers that own land in those top five zip codes where the most activity has happened and they've owned it for over 10 years and they don't live in the area. So, the chances of them being motivated are pretty high. And I'm going to get a big old fat list here, which is awesome. And so, I'm going to go ahead and stop this search. It'll probably be five or 6,000 here.
But now, what I can do is I can select all of these, add them to a list, and now I can skip trace them for free. I can do a cold calling campaign. I can do direct mail, all that good stuff.
Now, let's go back here. Another really cool thing that Freedomoft just added. Now, this does cost an extra $67 a month to get MLS access, but it's really worth it because if you're not going to do direct mail, I mean, you just need to do one deal from the MLS from a listed property. One deal, and that'll pay for three years worth of Freedomoft. Okay.
So, I'm going to click in these top zip codes, find sellers, and I'm going to do search MLS, and I'm going to do activives, and I'm going to do aged listings, and I'm going to go click next. So, these are vacant land in these top zip codes that have been on the market. Let's do over 120 days. So, that's what, four months. These are properties that have been on the market over four months. And I want to do max price 100. I don't want to mess with real expensive properties here. And now I'm going to click search.
And what this is going to do now, now this doesn't work in all of 50 states. MLS data, it works way better for houses, but some for some reason with land and some states, like one or two with main ones, like North Carolina is one of them or whatever. The MLS data is just not very good in those counties. It's it's it's hard to explain, but in Florida, for example, it's working really really well. Here, look at I got 210 different properties listed for over four months under 100 grand. And guess what? These might be some motivated sellers. They haven't sold their property yet.
So, I could add them all to a campaign. And this is one of the really cool things about Freedomoft. I don't have the time to show this right now, but I could actually do a text blast campaign and an email blast campaign to all those agents and tell them, "Hey, I see you have a listing here. It's been on the market a little while." And I might put in parenthesis the list price. You know, I can I say, I see you have this 2.6 acre vacant lot in this city, near this area, whatever. I'm an investor. How negotiable is your seller on their price?" And I'm prom I've been testing this and it's I can only send like 20 or 30 at a time every day because I easily quickly get overwhelmed with leads. But this is all done now in Freedomoft where you can now message and market to the realtor of these older vacant land listings. And you could also even say things like, "Hey, listen. If you ever find an offmarket vacant land deal, please send it to me. I'll pay you 10% commissions."
So now I got all of this data from these top zip codes. I can find the sellers, find the buyers, find the realtor in these top zip codes where most of the activity is happening. Cool.
Now, another place I love to get lists of vacant land is the land portal. And if you go to getlandportal.com, you get a free trial there. But the crazy thing about this, and I'm going to log in and show it to you. This uses AI to help you find the properties that are not landlocked. They have road access, right? They're not wetlands or flood planes and they are have at least, you know, 5 10 25% buildable. So, let me give you an example of what I mean.
So, let's look at Florida here. And I'm not going to do by zip code like we were doing before, but I'm just going to say here vacant lots only. And by the way, the cool thing about the land portal too is that it determines whether a vacant lot is vacant by AI. It looks at the satellite image and it can tell the difference between a house and a pullb barn. And so it sometimes the county doesn't classify it as vacant, but it actually really is. So it's using AI to determine whether these lots are vacant or not. Does that make sense? You have to choose the county. I chose Marian County right there. Cool.
Now I do vacant lots and I want 3 acres to 5 acres. And you can exclude or include active MLS listings. I'm going to say exclude active listings. And I'm going to also exclude sold listings from the last 3 years. And I want to say, you know, the last sale date was before 2015. So they've owned it for over five years. Let's do 2020. They've owned it over 5 years. Property slope. You could say, and this is really cool, if you're in an area like Tennessee or North Carolina or Colorado where there's a lot of hills and mountains, you could say, I don't want any more than 5% of the property has to have a slope under 15% or whatever. Or you could say 50% of the property has to have a slope under 10%. But what I like to do is just say buildability total. I might say I want at least 10% of the property buildable, which means that the acreage, the slope is under 10%. Does that make sense? Okay, cool. Landlocked? No.
This is amazing because now you now here's the thing with with a land portal. It's about $50 to $100 a month depending on which level you're at. And then you have to pay5 to 10 cents I think for every export that you do. So you do have to pay a premium for this but this is for a more specific narrowed list. And this might be good if you have a limited budget and you don't want to just download a,000 or 5,000 records which by the way in Freedomoft is included depending on the level you're at. you can download either three or 6,000 or more a month, every single month and it's included. But this is something that with if you have a maybe a smaller budget and you want to actually like I have clients in the community right now that send three or four offers every single day and they look at specific properties and they send them. So you could use something like the land portal to do that.
All right. Now you could even say all right I want at least you know 50 feet of road frontage and I want no more than 50% wetlands and no more than 50% FEMA flood zone which is cool. Now I click apply. And just like that, I'm looking in Marian County, not landlocked, at least 50 feet of road frontage. They've owned it for over five years. At least 10% of it is buildable or whatever. And that's really not a problem in Florida because there's not much slope there. And no more than 50% wetlands or flood planes. So I'm getting a very very specific narrow niched list. And then here from the LAN portal, you can take that list, you can download it, upload it to Freedomoft, you can skip trace it, or you can do the skip tracing here in the LAN portal as well.
So, it's taking its time. I'm going to pause this video here for just a sec. Okay, so I had to stop the video for a little while and figure out what was going on with the land portal. And the problem was with the land portal when I was doing the searches, I was searching for the entire county and it had over 20,000 records that came up. So, that's why it was taking so long. So, I went in and I actually updated a few things here where in Marian County, I just looked at those five most active zip codes there. I went to vacant lots. I narrowed my search for before I didn't have a filter size for acres, 3 to2 acres, exclude active listings, exclude MLS listings that have been sold in the last 36 months. And then I said sale date before 10 years ago, and I did minimum, I'm sorry, maximum FEMA flood zone and wetlands at 50%. So, in other words, it's removing all properties that don't have a road and have too much wetlands. So, yeah, that's it. And then when I did that, I get a list of 389 where before when I was looking in that county with Freedomoft, I don't remember my numbers, but it was several thousand. So, I've really kind of narrowed this down.
And here, you can go into each of these properties and look at it. And the one of the cool things about, if I just pull one of them up here, one of the cool things about the land portal is this property here. It gives you an estimate of the price that that property might be worth. So, they're saying this property might be worth 52,000. And I'll talk about this in a future video about how to make offers, but you always take any of these websites and services that provide pricing information, you always take it with a grain of salt. But when you're looking at these properties, you know, you can turn on the flood flood plane and wetlands features and uh you can also look at 3D image of the property to see what the slope of the area is. And that's more important when you're looking at land in, you know, Colorado, Tennessee, or North Carolina or something like that. But it gives you a lot of really good information about this property, maybe the previous sold date. This property was last purchased in 2014 for $10,000. Gives you information on who the owner is. tells you the the slope of the property and FEMA flood zone wetlands and whether it's landlocked or not. So really cool resource for getting your list, right?
So I get my lists mainly from Freedomoft, right? Because I want to mail everybody in my top zip codes. And one of the things I didn't mention before in Freedomoft that you can do if in those zip codes that we're looking at, these five main zip codes here, I can also I can search for MLS, but I can also search land and I can do searches for things like tax delinquents. So I could say remove duplicate owners, yes, but I want tax delinquent. I could say yes. And I could say they had to, you know, I could say maybe individual only exclude corporations. I could say they had to have bought it more than, you know, five years ago. So they've owned it for over five years. Land filters. Let's do minimum 0.25 acres, maximum three acres. But I want tax delinquent. Yes. And this will give you all of the vacant lots that have been tax delinquent at least once in the last few years. It doesn't mean they're currently delinquent on their taxes, but they might have been late at one time. And this varies county by counties, but there's 1,800 records here.
So my point is when I'm doing direct mail, I prefer to get as big of a list as possible. And I mail them all. Why? because I will actually make offers on properties that are on wetlands or are too sloped or even don't have road access. Why? There's a saying in land that there's a pig for every barn. And when you make offer, I might only be 500 bucks. It might be thousand bucks, but I'll make an offer on everything because I know that there is a price that that property will sell for. I might sell it to a neighbor. I might sell it to somebody who wants a property that is wetlands because in the four or five months of the year when it's dry, they can go camp there, it's close to the river, they can go mudding with their four-wheelers, you know, and just it's recreational land. So, I buy it cheap and I sell it cheap. Make sense? So, I prefer getting my lists in Freedomoft. I get as much as I can. And in Freedomoft, again, I'll talk about this in a minute, but you can mail them with a postcard. You can cold call them. And I I make an offer on everything. I've sold a lot of land that has been landlocked to neighbors and I made a lot of money on it and most people ignore those deals and pass on them. Make sense?
All right, cool. Back to my notes here. My main preference with list are absentee owners. In other words, they don't live on the property. They live outside of the county or outside of the zip code. They've owned it for over five plus years and maybe they're tax delinquent. All right? And you can also add to that list if you want. Not landlocked that has road access, you know, not wetlands and flood planes, not sloped or whatever.
Now, there are different ways to go out and get leads. Either you go out and get them or they come to you. Now, let's talk about you going out and getting the leads. One of my favorite ways if you don't have the money and you don't want to do direct mail is to go out and get the leads. And there's two main ways to do that. Realtors and cold calling. Okay? And then the third, other investors old leads. But let's talk about realtors. This is fantastic. This is fascinating. I showed you how to get older vacant land listings in in Freedomoft, right? where you go into the best zip codes, you click find sellers, you search, you click search MLS activives, you can also look for inactives, which are expireds or canceleds. And I like to look at aged listings, but you could also look at price drops, but aged listings, for example, in those top zip codes. And you could say, all right, I don't want anything o under or over 100 grand and has been on the market for over 6 months, which is 180 days. All right. And now it'll search for all of the MLS listed properties that have been on the market over six months. And then you go into these and you could actually start contacting the realtors, right?
But there's another way you can do that if you don't want Freedomoft on sites like Redfin and Homes.com. So one of our zip codes that we like is 34473. Okay, let's just go look at Redfin here. 34473. That's one big zip code there. And I'm going to go to active for sales. Let's do max price 100 grand. All right, Red Fin is still asleep. Active for sale. Boom. There we go. Up to 100 grand. So, there's a lot of them. There's 243. Oops. Let's do land only. All right. 235 vacant lots under 100 grand. But, I'm going to go here to more filters. I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to say time on Redf Fin more than 180 days. Would you believe this? There are 61 vacant lots in that hot zip code that have been on the market longer than 6 months. You think maybe the sellers might be getting interested, motivated, maybe negotiable on their price?
So, I go in and I start contacting the realtors of these listed properties. And you can see this is listed by Janelle Lemu. And there's no phone number there. Well, there's actually a phone number right there, but I could always just Google them. Okay.
One of the things that I also like to do is sometimes I like to go to homes.com when I'm looking for older vacant land listings. If you don't want to use Freedomoft, let's look in that zip code here. Now, I'm going to go to price max 100 grand, let's say. Boom. Let's go to all filters and we're going to do scroll down land only days on market more than 6 months. There's 96 properties here. And the cool thing about this is if you sort it by newest and my screen's kind of shrink here, shrunk here to make it easier to see for you guys. Let me zoom out maybe. And so now you can yeah, you get a little bit more information there on those properties. But you click on them and you get the contact information of these realtors a lot easier on.com. So, this is listed by Eddie Shapiro and there's his phone number. And you scroll down. Sometimes you can get their email address, but it's easier to get phone numbers on homes.com of these older expired vacant land, not expired, but older vacant land listings. All right. That might have been the same one we were looking at before, isn't it?
All right. Now, I'll tell you in a minute what to say to these realtors, but how much does it cost to go to homes.com in these hot zip codes looking for older vacant land listings and calling them? Doesn't cost anything.
Another cool thing that you can do with these leads, I'm going to say no max, no min time on Redfin and I'm going to go down to keyword search and you can type the word like motivated. You're not going to get a ton of them, but maybe there are. Here we go. There's three properties that have the word motivated in that one zip code. You can click on it and look at it. Nice property between two houses already built. Seller motivated exclamation point. Okay. Call these agents up. Talk to them.
There's another thing I like to do here. If we go to filters and redfin again, and you can do the same thing in homes.com. Let's not do any keyword search and let's go down to price reduced in the last week. All right, here's seven vacant properties that have reduced their price in the last week. You could also say only show me the ones that have reduced their price in the last week that have been on the market for longer than 30 days or whatever. But these are sellers that are getting maybe a little antsy. They're like, "Oh my gosh, what's going on? This hasn't sold yet." And they're dropping their price. So you call the agents up and talk to them.
So let's talk about what do you say to those agents. We look again days on market motivated keywords recent pride price price drops. We call, text, and email them. You can do this inside of Freedomoft or you can do this with this thing right here. Remember this. This is a phone, right? You can make a million dollars on this thing. And if you're not on this thing, you're probably not making money to be honest. It's the fastest way to a deal. The fastest way to money is to get on the phone and talk to people. It's called the TTP method. You heard that from Brent Daniels. The TTP method. All right.
Anyway, what I like to say is something like this. It's real simple. And I'm going to give you my realtor script here in a second. Hey, I see you've got this listing that's been on the market for a while. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about it? Okay. I also did a YouTube video. I'm going to share that to you in a minute. Let me Don't let me forget because it's right here. Anyway, just say, "Hey, you know what? I'm an investor. I'm looking to buy some land in the area. Do you mind if I ask you some questions? It looks like a nice property. How long has it been on the market?" Oh, man. Why is 6 months and it hasn't sold yet? Is something wrong with it? Oh, I love that question. Well, I don't know. I don't think so. But I just Why hasn't it sold yet? That's just overpriced. Okay. Well, listen, I'm an investor. If you could represent me, you can get both sides of the commissions on this. How negotiable is your client on their price? Okay.
The other thing I say is like, listen, I'm an investor. I'm looking to buy more land. Do you have any other off-market properties that I might be interested in? I'll pay you 10% commissions. Do you think realtors like listing these properties, letting them sit on the market for six months? Maybe they might make 500 bucks to $1,000 in commissions. No, they don't want to list those things. So, what if you just called five realtors a day and said, "Hey, if you ever get a property, instead of listing it, call me. I'm a cash buyer. I'll pay you 10% commissions on any offmarket vacant land deal that you send to me." Why do I say offmarket? because I don't want them giving me listed properties unless they know that this property is listed for 50 and the seller would be willing to sell it for 20. Yeah, send those deals to me. But here's my point. I am recruiting an army of realtor bird dogs that can go and find me deals. And so what's going to happen next time they get a call from a seller that says, "I got some land." They're going to think, "I don't want to sell that thing. Oh, wait. This guy Joey keeps on calling me and following up with me. Maybe he would be interested." Well, you know what, Mr. Seller? I have a guy who might be interested in buying your property. you just want a cash offer and then they can call me and connect me with them. All right, super simple.
Now, the cool thing about using tools like Freedomoft, and this isn't intended to be a Freedomoft pitch, but I just use it every day and it's amazing. You can do all of this, the conversations, the phone calls, the texts, the emails directly from inside of Freedomoft. And you may never need to do any direct mail because you can, if you just do this realtor outreach, you may never need to do any direct mail ever again. It's it's works really, really well. So you can send an email, a text broadcast right from inside of Freedomoft.
All right. Now, here is my realtor script. Where can you get this? Again, it's inside the description. And I'm going to give you this Google doc in the YouTube description of this video. And and this basically it's like, hey, my name is Jimmy Bob. I'm a vacant land investor. I see you have a property listed here. You don't have a couple minutes, do you? I'd like to ask you some questions to see if this would be something I might want to buy. I want to get them to sell me on this property. I'm not going to sell them on how awesome, amazing, and how much money I have. No, they need to convince me why I should want to buy their property. Why should I want to buy their property for 50 grand when I see there's another property down the street currently listed for 30 grand. All right. I don't have an agent representing me. If you can, maybe you can submit the deal for me, offer for me. You can get both sides of the commission. So, tell me about the property. Looks like a nice property. I'm sure you've been getting a lot of calls on it, right? No. Wow. How long has it been on the market? Why hasn't it sold yet? Is something wrong with it? They're not in a hurry to sell it, though, right? Okay. Boom. I'm going to ask them about the property. Do you think that's a fair price? What what would be a fair price for this crazy market, right? You know, if I do buy this property, you wouldn't be interested in helping me resell it again on the market with owner financing, would you? How negotiable is a seller on the price, etc., etc. But this is the key. This right here in highlighted yellow. If this deal doesn't work out, do you have any other offmarket properties that I might be interested? I'll pay you 8 to 10% commissions. And then what you do is now you get their contact information. You add them to your CRM, your database, whatever you're using, and you text them and email them every 30 days. Hey, this is Joe. How's it going? You probably don't remember me. We talked a month ago. I'm looking for more offmarket land deals in Marian County, whatever. I pay 10% commissions. Do you have anything? That's it. It could also be, "Hey, Jim, following up. Have you sold that property yet? I'm still looking for deals. Just remember me if you find anything." I've got this YouTube video that actually you can watch me call realtors for 135 and I walk through this whole strategy. I walk through the script and I call a couple realtors in this video and uh you'll hear the script and everything that I'm saying to them. This is I'm so excited about the strategy and why more people don't do it. I don't know. And look at that. I'm wearing the same hat in that video as the one I'm wearing now. All right, but check out that YouTube video. And uh if you want, you could just go to YouTube, do a search for Joe McCall Realtors, and you'll see that video. It's a great video in my humble opinion.
All right, the next thing is you could cold call land owners. Now, if I had the time, I could show you. It's so simple to get this list in Freedomoft. Skip trace them for free. And as I'm recording this, it's not released yet, but it is coming. Skip trace them and you could cold call them right from inside of Freedomoft. And here is a real simple script just real quick. You can you can get this from the from the show notes here. This is what I like to do right here. Hey Jim, you're gonna hate me because this is a cold call about your 2acre lot in whatever Marian County. Do you just want to hang up now or can you give me 30 seconds and then decide straight up? Hey, this is a cold call. I know you're mad at me, but I'm looking to buy some land in the area and I want to just see if you'd thought about selling it or if you'd be interested in entertaining an offer. That's it. And you just go through and you start asking them questions. Very simple, easy peasy. All right.
Another great source of leads is other investors old leads. I'm telling you, this is a gold mine. You might have a bunch of old vacant land leads, but there are probably other people in other communities that you're in in the land investing communities. People have old leads. One of my my my coaching business partner, Gavin, tells a great story of how he got started. He was in Phoenix, Arizona, where it's super competitive. He was doing houses. His coach at the time, which was not me, told him, "Send some direct mail." And he did like sent 5,000 postcards, whatever. Got zero response practically. I think maybe literally he did. He's like, the coach said, well, go find somebody that's got old leads. So, he went to the next real estate investors club. You know, people stand up deals they have or things that they need. And he stood up and said, "Hey, yeah, if I have time, I'm good on the phone. If anybody has old leads, I will follow up with your old leads and we can split the deal or something like that." Two or three people came up to him and said, "Yeah, I got some old leads." One lady in particular said, "Hey, I've got about 30 or 40 old leads. I haven't talked to some of them in over a year, so it's probably trash." And she said, "Let me go through it." He went through that list. It's only like 30 or 40 leads. Called them all, got three deals. Now, he only made 1,500 bucks. But all of that just got him so fired up and excited because he realized this is doable. And that, excuse me, that lady, you know what she did? She said, "Hey, listen. This is great. You're good on the phone. You can call people. You're not afraid of rejection. Why don't we do more of this? I'll actually do the marketing. I'll pay for the marketing. You work the leads and we'll split the deals 50/50." And so, I don't know if he did that or not, but now he had some money. he could do his own marketing and that's when he fell in love with cold calling and just getting on the phone. So, if you don't mind getting on the phone and just being nice to people, talk to people, ask them questions about the property, you can make a ton of money following up with other investors old leads. All you need to do is go into Facebook groups, go to local real estate clubs, and just say, "Hey, who's got old leads? I'll follow up them for you."
All right. Now, the second way that I like to do marketing is where you get the leads to come to you. This is a main thing that I do. I don't like doing cold calling. It works, but I don't do it. I don't like calling realtors. It works really, really well, but I don't like doing it. I just want to send direct mail. The leads come to me. And the way we do that is we send a postcard that says, "Hey, call or text our 24hour recorded voicemail." Would you like to see what one of our postcards looks like? All right. I'm going to actually go into my course here. I'm going to go into the Google Drive folder. And here it is. Letters and postcards to sellers. And this is one of the postcards I like to use. It's an ugly third notice postcard. She says, "Hey, I urgently need to speak with you about your property. I'm hoping this card catches you in time. I've recorded a brief voicemail. All you have to do is call this voicemail 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to listen to my message. No one will answer." The powerful thing about that postcard, it's just listen, I've got a message for you. I need to talk to you about your property. You get a lot of curiosity. You get a lot of angry calls, but you know what? I don't care. They call probably 35 45% will leave a voicemail. the system, Freedomoft, will send them a text message right away. Hey, thanks for calling. What was the reference number on that postcard? We'll do a little research. We'll send you an offer. And I get another 25 35% that will text back that um the reference ID. And so now all I'm doing is I'm sending a postcard to people I know who have land that I want to buy in the specific areas I want to buy in. Sending them a postcard. They call to listen to this voicemail. The voicemail says, "Hey, thanks for calling. Listen, normally when you selling land, you're faced with you only have two options. List it by yourself or list it with an agent. But now you have a third choice. You can list it or I mean I can buy your land. I'm butchering this, but I can buy your land. I can pay you cash and I can close in as little as 30 days. If so, if you're tired of fake offers and dealing with the uncertainty of when your property will sell, leave your name and number at the tone and the reference ID on that postcard and I will send you an offer within 24 to 48 hours. That's it. Okay. That little voicemail tells them who we are, what we do, the advantages of why they should sell with us. Bam. There you go.
Now, I recommend you call them back and talk to them. But when my teenagers did about $150, $3,000 in vacant land deals. This is all we did. We sent out these letters. We got the voicemails. My boys listened to the voicemails. Then they went to Zillow and Redfin. And I'll talk about that in a future video. And they sent the offers to the sellers. And that's how we did tons and tons of deals. And we only talk to sellers after they got our offer, which is a great strategy if you maybe are another part of the world, different time zones, English is your second language. This is why I love land so much is because and why I love direct mail with land with neutral letters, not blind offers, is because I can get them to respond if they want to sell their land. They leave a voicemail message or they text me the reference ID and that postcard. I can pull the property up, look to see what I could sell it for, and I make an offer at 40% of that. Bam, there you go. And my numbers are as solid as as a rock. One out of every 30 offers gets accepted if I am sending them an offer without talking to them first. If I talk to them first, it's about one out of 15, one out of 20. Yeah, it's just a numbers game, right? And I love this better than blind offers because a lot of other investors that are doing land send blind offers, but you're losing a lot of deals by doing that way because when I make an offer, my offer is going to be better than anybody else's that's doing blind offers because I'm looking at that specific property. And again, in another future video, I'm going to show you how we evaluate land deals. So, just pay attention to that. Blind offers, I don't like them. I like neutral letters, neutral postcards way better. I like postcards because they're cheap. I send them to a voicemail. real simple voicemail. Benefits of direct mail, you target the exact specific properties that you want. The positioning is better as well. They are calling you. You're not interrupting them. You're calling them back. And you can have a voicemail do all of the selling for you that tells them what they do, what you do, etc., etc. Okay.
Now, talking to sellers, really simple, right? Let the voicemail do the selling for you. But when they do call, you might want to call them back if they're interested. And all I do is ask questions. And there are three main questions that I like to ask. Okay, write these down. Pay attention. This is so simple. Number one, what's your situation? What's going on? Tell me about the property. And you notice I don't care as much about the property as I do about their situation. Why are they selling? Do they need to sell or just want to sell? They're probably not in a hurry to sell, right? So the next question is, what would you like to see happen? Well, I want to sell it. So, you know, okay, Mr. Seller, what's what's more important to you? To sell it fast or to sell it for the highest price possible? And this is something I always say. I'm probably not your buyer. Oh, doesn't that take the pressure off? You're not stressed about trying to sell them or be like Grant Cardone or so, you know, these other guys that, you know, teach hardcore sales tactics and all that. No, I'm just like probably not your buyer, but what would you like to see happen? And when would you like to see that happen? You're not in a hurry to sell this, right? You is this a now thing or a later thing for you? I'm probably not your buyer. I'm not I'm an investor. I'm not a full retail buyer, but I am the easy button, Mr. Seller. If you want to sell it in 30 days, you know, I I can probably do that maybe, but how quickly are you wanting to sell this? So, that's very very simple. What's your situation? What would you like to see happen? And when would you like to see that happen? All right, I'm almost done here. I know this has been a long video.
The next step is to make offers. We're again, we're talking about how do you find good land deals? It all starts with marketing, right? Talk starts with marketing. You either go out and get leads or you get the leads to come to you and then you talk to them. You talk to people. You ask them questions. What's your situation? What would you like to see happen? When would you like to see that happen? And then you make offers. I'm going to be talking more about making offers in a future video coming up here. But here's the deal. This is really, really critical and important, okay? I want you to make an offer to every seller that calls you. Let me repeat that. I want you to make an offer to every lead that comes in. Your number one job is to make offers. If you come to me and say, "Joe, I've watched all your videos. because I've bought all your programs and I've not done a deal yet. This doesn't work. I'm going to ask you one question. I'm not even going to apologize. I'm going to ask you one question. How many offers have you made in the last week? There's only two numbers that you really should care about. How many offers have you made in the last week? How many offers have you made in the last 30 days? I can tell immediately how good of a business you have or how much money you're going to make by just asking those two questions. How many offers have you made in the last week? How many offers have you made in the last month? If you're not making offers, you're not making money. It's as simple as that. Make offers, make money. You might have to make a hundred offers, but if you're not making offers, you're not making money. What else matters? Nothing. Your website, your LLC's, you know, how many podcasts and videos and books and courses and programs you buy? No. If you want to make money in this business, you need to learn how to make offers. What if you just made it a goal? Number one goal. Keep this simple. Simplify everything. I'm just going to make three offers a day. That's your goal. You will figure out a way to do it. That's your goal. And if I if I could say anything in this really stupid long video here, this is it. Make offers. It's the most important part of this business. All right? That's all that matters. How many offers have you made? If I look back in my business, when I'm not making much money, it's because I'm not making much offers. Whether it's real estate deals or education coaching programs, if I'm not making money, I'm not making offers. And so I'm always making offers. That is your highest revenue generating activity. You need to go into every day and ask yourself, what is my fastest path to cash today? Okay. What are the I got all these 20 things to do. What is the highest revenue generating activity? That's what you need to ask yourself every day. Fastest path to cash. Well, okay. I got to do a deal. I need to make offers. That's it. So go out and make some offers. Stop asking, "What if this happens? What if that happens?" Forget it. Make offers. Now, I'm not talking about blind offers either, although it's better than nothing. Blind offers, I think, are lazy. They kind of work, but just, man, make offers. Talk to some people. Send some letters and make offers. If you talk to a realtor and they say, "No, the seller's not motivated." Make the offers anyway. Okay, I got to hurry up. That was my timer.
The next step is follow up. The secret to all of this, if you don't do any follow-up, you're kind of wasting your time. 90% of your deals are going to come from follow-up. So, follow up every 30 days with every offer that you send. Send them a letter, send them an email, a text, a phone call, maybe a ringless voicemail. Send an offer every 30 days. Send the same offer every 30 days. Okay.
Now, I got a video here if you want to learn more about this. I did a video, watch me find a land deal in 5 minutes or less. And I don't like the picture. this video right here. You see that ugly weird picture right there? Yeah. Video editors watching this video right now. Please don't do that anymore. I got this weird thumbnail on it. See that right there? All right. But this is a great video. If you're wanting to learn, watch me land a vacant land deal in 5 minutes or less. I rented this cool Airbnb in St. Louis to do these videos in. And this is I love this video. It's really simple. So check that out. If you don't have this Google doc, just search for watch me find a vacant land deal in five deal five minutes or less. and I talk about one of my favorite ways to find vacant land deals. Cool.
So, that's it. On the next video I'm going to do, I'm going to be turn talking about how do I determine the value of a vacant lot, right? So, if you got a piece of land, you're looking at it, how do you know how much to offer? That is coming up next. Listen, if you like this video, please give me a thumbs up, subscribe to this channel, and comment down below. Tell me what you got out of it. What were some of the big takeaways? Why you like this video? What could I have maybe done differently? Or maybe I missed something. Maybe I made a mistake somewhere. But comment down below. Let me know what you think. I really appreciate you guys very much. Thanks for watching my stuff. Take Oh yeah. Hey, join my uh Dirt Flippers challenge, right? Dubdubdub.flip dirtchallenge.com. We'll see you later.