How To Research Land Markets for the BEST Vacant Land Deals! 💰

Hey, what's up? Joe here, Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. We're going to be talking about vacant land today. On this episode, we're going to be talking with the guys who started the company called Priced, P-Y-C-D. And we're going to be talking about best practices today for researching markets and pulling lists. Markets for, what markets for specifically vacant land? How to find the best places to market for properties and how to pull the best lists.

Because here's the thing, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is going into the wrong markets. You know, you might think, "Well, I live in, uh, Oregon, and it's beautiful here. Who wouldn't want to live here?" And you can do deals in Oregon, but you know, and we've done a lot of deals in Oregon, but like, what part of Oregon is the best place to do deals in? Is it better to go into Washington State or California? Is it better to go into Florida or the Northwest? The north, Southeast, or the Northwest, right?

So, like, we're going to show you on this podcast here with the guys from Priced on how to research and find the best markets. And then secondly, once you've picked some markets, how do you pull the best lists? Because you can't, we want to be like specific and targeted, but we don't want to overanalyze everything. We don't want to do spray and prey marketing. We want to be very specific and intentional in going into the best markets where we have the best chance to find a good deal and sell it as quick as possible.

So, we're going to be talking about all of that with the guys from Priced. These guys have done this for a long time. They work with some of the biggest land investors in the country, and I'm glad to have them here. Um, and we've got Max and Ryan here. Let's see if I can bring them on and unmute them.

No, now you're good. Can you hear me, guys?

Yep. How you doing?

We can hear you. Good. Max is in the middle, Ryan is on the right. Um, by the way, first of all, guys, if you want to get more information about Priced, um, before we go much further here, go check it out right now. There's a 7-day free trial, is that right?

Yep. Correct.

Cool. Joeacall.com/priced. Joeacall.com/priced. P-Y-C-D. And in full disclosure, I do get a small referral commission from these guys, but I'd be recommending them anyway. I use them myself. I've given them a lot more money than they've given me, I promise you that. Um, but I, I refer them because they're really, really good at what they do, and they've, they're specifically for land investors. They're not trying to be all things to all people. They've got a very good product that is for land investors, and what they charge for it is really, really crazy, and their customer service is really good. Um, so go check them out. Joeacall.com/priced.

Okay, so, uh, Max and Ryan, can you guys introduce yourselves and tell us who you are, what you do?

Yeah, um, my name's Max Edson, one of the co-founders of Priced. So, been land investing now for about six years. Uh, before that, I was in the military. Got out last year, and now I help run Priced full-time.

Yep. And, uh, I'm Ryan, Ryan Jette, the co-founder of Priced. Um, was also in the military along with with Max. Got out last year at the exact same, exact same time as Max. Uh, been doing the land investing for about a year less than Max, so he was the one that actually introduced me. And when we started working on this, this product together, um, and I do, I do Priced, uh, mostly full-time. I also have another job as an engineer at Amazon.

All right. Anyway, good. So why did you guys start Priced?

Yeah, well, um, when I started in land investing about, um, a while ago, it was really a manual process. Um, so I learned through one of the education groups, tried to do it on my own, and I personally did not like the process at all. Um, it was really mundane, it was just really manual again. It took a long time to figure out, and also there wasn't really any numbers that backed up any of the things that I was going for. And I'm a numbers person with stats. Um, I like the numbers to drive where I'm trying to go, and it just wasn't out there in the market.

Uh, but like learning the process, it did feel very repetitive and something that we could bring together. So Ryan and I were, um, on the side trying to come up with other business ideas, and it just so happened that we listed out a few that we were going to try next, and land investing was one of them. And so we got together, picked that one out of the list that we had, and I told them, it's like, "There's no way we can do this though unless we try to automate the entire process, at least the acquisition process." So we put our heads together then, uh, which is now Priced today. But it took a while to get there and a lot of edits and reversions to get that and feedback from users and land investors, um, that we still are in talks and, um, with today and have a great connection with, um, throughout the whole process.

Nice, nice. So how big is your company? How many people do you have working for you?

So, we're just under a 10 right now. Yeah. Not, not a big company by any means. Um, but, you know, we, one of the things we've been proud about is maximizing, um, the amount of self-help on our platform and try to making it as streamlined as possible to go through that process without reaching out. So, um, obviously, I help out with the, the stuff. We have Ryan, and then we have our support team. So we work together and try to make things again, as, as quickly and possible for the users. And we have a great feedback loop as well. So if there are any questions or any sort of sticking points that they may not understand, we try to obviously improve that process and also make YouTube videos for that. So now that we have visual aids to help them through moving forward. And if there's one person that has an issue, usually there's more people that are running into the same problem, so we can help, uh, multiple people at the same time with that process.

Cool. We're going to demonstrate Priced here in a minute, but can you guys talk about what Priced does from a higher-level view?

Yeah, I could. Yeah, I could sort of speak to that. Um, so the, the, the core, the core functionality of what we do, um, is allow you to pull property data. Um, and what we, what we add to that element is our market analysis and our pricing, obviously, based on on our name. And so what, what we do for each of our properties, or each of the properties that you download through us, um, is we have a database of over two million comps that we can match up. Um, and so if we take our Geo pricing, for example, which is, um, you know, our more popular pricing model, which is, we'll talk about a little bit, um, today, and we'll go find for each property on that list that you're going to export with us, we're going to go find the nearby sold comps, the nearby listings, um, to match up the acreages. We're g-, you know, we're going to create our model based off distance and, um, you know, recency of the sale, um, and we're going to provide a market value for you. And that's all in real time. It takes, you know, on our platform, it takes seconds. Um, so if you export a list through us of 10,000 property records, within 5 to 10 minutes, you're going to have that list. It's going to be, you know, neatly organized in a in a CSV file. It's going to be, uh, cleaned up for you, scrubbed up with, you know, certain filters that you want to see, and it's going to have that pricing data. So it's ready for you to do your, your market campaign, whether that's a, a texting campaign, whether that's, you know, a direct mail campaign, um, you know, or however you're, you want to do it.

Um, the other big features that we have on our site that you, we provide is our research page, um, which I think we're also going to talk about a bit today. I'm using that comp database to do some market analysis and see, um, like to mention on the intro there, like where, where is the hot market, what's trending up, what's trending down, um, based on maybe my investing criteria, my timelines, my my price ranges, um, where do I want to go to find quality, quality land?

Nice. So you can do market research to pick some good markets. You can, um, pull lists of vacant land leads. You get that list from, um, DataTree. DataTree. And they're the first, the second largest list aggregator in the in the country, right? Um, and some would say they're the best, but I think the two big ones are CoreLogic and DataTree, is that right?

Yep. Right.

Yeah. So you get really good data from DataTree, which gets the data from the counties. And then you also help comp property. So vacant land is a lot different to comp, find comparables than houses. And sometimes you have to, um, look at different websites. There's not like a, a lot of vacant land is listed on the MLS, but it's, it's just a little different. So you get comps from active listings on sites like Zillow and Redfin, LandWatch, Land.com, Realtor.com, etc., etc. And then you'll help find comps. So you, you help price the property. You say, "Based on the average price per acre of properties in this area, your property might be worth about this, and you should sell it for this, depending on what percentage you want to offer." So it helps people get, when I'm, when I, I use Priced to help me get in the ballpark of where I want to be, and then I look at Redfin or Zillow to see more recent sold comps and active listings and kind of, it helps get you 85, 90% of the way there. And sometimes when you can't find any comps, I just go with 100% of what Priced says and I go from there. And I, sometimes you just don't know, you, you don't know what a property's worth until you put it out there on the market and you start advertising. Um, so it's, it's an amazing tool. I really highly recommend it. And again, guys, if you want to go check it out, go to Joeacall.com/priced. You get a 7-day free trial. There is a different pricing levels. I just recommend getting the $500 a year level, and then, um, that gives you the most comp reports, the most extra features. It's $500 bucks a year. And then you just pay on a, um, what's your current price right now, guys, on a on a list that you download per record?

Uh, per record. Uh, right now, eight cents.

Eight cents? Yeah. That's going to be, um, that's going to be to get, that gets you the property data and the pricing, um, included. That's also comes with, you know, sort of all the tool sets. So, you know, we scrub it out, we, you know, so we do a little bit of, you know, man, I wouldn't say manipulation, but cleaning up of some of the the owner names and some of the addresses, because there is sometimes, I mean, if you, if you ever pull a list directly from a county or from a list aggregator, there's always some some weirdness to that. And there's, you know, sometimes the names come out a little weird. So we try and we try and make it as easy as possible so that you get that list from us and there's not a lot of manipulation or or modification that you need to do, um, to to get that list, um, into into your CRM or into your production workflow.

You know, there is one thing, um, do you guys ever run across this problem when you're downloading, like sometimes if I'm downloading a list and I want to send a letter to the owner, the mailing address, if it's in a Northeastern state, some of the ZIP codes start with a zero, and when you put it into a spreadsheet, sometimes it removes the zero. Um, do, how do you guys resolve that problem?

So, so this is something that comes, comes up with not just with the ZIP code, but with APNs. It comes up with almost any field that has a numeric value. Um, it is a very known, a well-known issue with Excel specifically, not to call out, it's not you, it's, it's Excel when it comes into Excel.

Right, right. But here's the thing, and we, we try to, we try to sort of help people with this, or at least when, when, when you have a CSV file and you open an Excel, Excel is going to interpret that zero, but it's still there. It's just visibly not showing to you. So if you don't, if you don't save that file, if you just maintain the original CSV file, even if you can see that there's no zero, it's in the CSV file. It's just Excel is sort of clipping it and making it shorter. Um, we've done a little bit of extra work on the APN. We actually have what's called an APN protected APN. You can put little backticks, um, around it, and it tells Excel to auto-format this, leave it as is. And so you can kind, because we see all the time, the, the back end of the APN will get sort of truncated off, and then you have, you know, maybe a 16-digit APN that had maybe a 004 at the end is now, there's like 30 that are all the same. And then folks go, "Hey, like, these are all the same." It happens so much, and it's such a, it's, it's such a process, it's such a battle to to keep to keep things in line. But, um, yeah, I would just say don't, don't worry. The other thing we would recommend is actually uploading it to something like Google Sheets. Um, they all do that, and you, and you get that nice, uh, clean list still without, uh, the auto-formatting.

We're, we're diving way too deep in the weeds. I don't want to confuse people with that. Um, but it's, you know, it's not a big deal. Just, you, you can, there's, and I teach in my course, well, when you're uploading the list specifically to FreedomSoft to do the mail inside of FreedomSoft, there's simple ways to fix that. The other thing though, that I love about Priced is it gives me GPS coordinates. For some reason, that's like the hardest thing to, if you get a list from anywhere else, they do not give you GPS coordinates. Now, GPS coordinates are important because sometimes the APN that you can't find, there is no property address. But if you have the GPS coordinates, it's so easy to look that property up in Map, or whatever the blank it's called now, um, or Google Maps, and then you can find the property. So sometimes all you need is just the GPS coordinates. You don't need to know the county, the street, the address, or the APN number. So I love that about Priced. You get the GPS.

Don't ever change that. But, uh, you never will. It's, it's, it's the basis of our Geo pricing, right? So, you know, we, that is how we were able to pinpoint properties to where in the US and then match them up with those comps. We need those coordinates. Those are key.

All right, so let's jump into Priced again. Guys, go to Joeacall.com/priced to get a 7-day trial. And it's P-R-Y-C-D. P-R-Y-C-D. Can I share my screen and can you guys walk me through kind of what, um, well, by the way, I want to show you guys, and you guys already know this, I'm sure, but I'm using, um, some new marketing now, and I'm using the the offer number from Priced. But let me share my screen here and, uh, don't let me forget to show this to you. I'm, I'm doing this as a teaser, guys, to show you the new letters that I'm sending that, um, are working really well. So how's that for a tease?

All right, so here we are in Priced. You guys see me good? We all right? Now, um, I'm logged in. Uh, can we do some research? Can you guys show us some best practices for, um, picking a good market? And, and I'd like to go to research. Is this where you're going to tell me to go?

Yeah.

All right. And then what I like to do, and this is all good, by the way, let's talk about this real quick while we're here. Um, sometimes people get stuck in analysis paralysis because you've got, you have such good tools here, but sometimes, do you see this where students just spend way too much time overanalyzing things?

Absolutely. Um, and we do have a quite honestly, a lot of data. And so it can be intimidating with all the different numbers. And especially if you're starting out, you really want to obviously hone in to the place that will give you the best chance to succeed. And everything, um, what we will say is that we do provide a lot of data. Nothing has been back-tested. So the good news is that there is not one specific strategy that's going to give you the golden goose or anything. So what we've seen personally from a lot of successful investors, they use a lot of different strategies, whether it's just research data or or honing into another accy that they already know about, but just figuring out the criteria and the strategy that works best for you is what's going to give you and lead you to success. So, um, after a little while, once you just kind of come up with your own strategy, it's really important to just pull the trigger and and pick that area, um, filter down to your list and send that mail out because one of the biggest things is going to be persistence and just continuously sending out that, um, that mail and just learning from mistakes too. If something doesn't work, edit it and change it a little bit, and then figure out what will work better next time and just, it's a continuous process of improvement.

To, okay. Yeah, I, I totally agree. So let's look here. What, what do you recommend starting? Do you say, let's look at the nation, the entire country, or would you say let's look at a specific state first?

What we typically recommend is to look into a specific state first. And the reason why we say that is because different states, um, process and upload the comps differently. So we really want to have an apples-to-apples comparison. And to figure out what state you want, with, um, there's a bunch of different things. If you have one in mind, you can go for that, but you really want to think about your end buyer. What kind of land do you want to sell? Do you want more forested land? Do you want desert land? And then what type of price point as well? Because depending on that type of land, you're probably going to get a different price point too. So again, forested land usually sells for more than again, desert land. So it comes down to that. Um, some other things and techniques you can use to hone into specific states is looking at migration flow data. And what a great proxy is for that is U-Haul migration data. They, they always post annually where people are moving to across the United States. So if you type in U-Haul migration data, 2023, it'll give you a list of not only where people are moving to out of the 50 states, and top number one is the best, 50 is the worst, but it'll tell you what it was last year as well. So it's a great way to hone into again, the different areas that you're targeting, and you can match that up with the type of land that you want to go to as well. So, um, again, if it's forested land, you'll be able to see the list that Joe is showing out, you could see those states that kind of come to the top. So that could be a great tool if you really don't know and want to kind of have a starting place, that can be a great tool to utilize.

Yeah, it's interesting. We have Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina is the top three states right now. Well, this is 22 data. I don't know. I didn't spend too much time looking at it, but that's fascinating. That's cool. One of the other things I like to do is look at LandWatch just to see the most popular states. And I don't like the real cheap ones. Um, I like more recreational land. You're right, but let's say we just did a search for 50 to 200 grand, 5 to 40 acres. Which are the most popular states right now? And you can see, um, it's Texas, Tennessee, California, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Georgia, Michigan, and Arkansas. So you could kind of start from that. You also could go down to LandWatch and say, "Show me the actives and the solds." Now, the thing with LandWatch, you got to understand, I don't, we don't know solds from when a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. And these are only solds that are that have been listed on LandWatch. These aren't solds from county record. But basically, what this is doing is giving you kind of a good glimpse. Now, Texas is just, whatever reason, it's huge. But look at this, Missouri is second. That's interesting. Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas. So these are maybe some good places to start to see what are the most popular states to look at, right? Um, but what can you guys, just want to pick a state for me and we can do some research here?

Yeah, absolutely. So it looked like Tennessee was on your list. We can choose Tennessee if that works for you.

Let's do that. Don't ask me how to spell it. My gosh.

T-E-N-N-E-S-S-E-E, right?

Yeah. And if you just put in most of the word, it should populate everything down below too.

All right. Tennessee. Now, let's just say, um, I'm going after all vacant land. So I used to say, "I only want, you know, big recreational vacant land, like two plus acres." But then I'm like, "You know what? Some of these states, I'm in most of the properties, vacant lots being sold are like quarter acre to half acre lots. So I don't care anymore. I just want to find the most popular counties where the most vacant lots are being sold, and I'm going to target all of them." And this also, by the way, helps you guys eliminate the overwhelm, analysis paralysis, right? Let's just, I like to, I like to cast a wide net, but at the same time, I'm casting a wide net in a very specific area. Um, so I'm not too worried anymore about small or big or rural or infill. Let's just go find the best counties and let's target all the vacant land owners there. Um, so we'll look at that here. Now we're like, Tennessee. Um, what next?

So again, if you're going to target different acreages, one of the new features we have is you can select which acreages we're going to show you in the data table before. So because again, you want to just search every single parcel, we'll keep it at all acreages, but you do have that option. Um, the first thing you're going to want to do is is just figure out what types of filters you want to include, right? So, um, you just from basic economics, you have your supply side and demand side. So you really want to marry two of those types of filters up to figure out which counties within Tennessee are going to rise to the top. So by the way, to sometimes people need to add some visible fields here, don't they?

Yes. If you click on edit visible fields, I hope you can see this. Yeah. So there's a bunch of fields you can have here. And the ones I like are population, population change percent, and population per square mile. Um, total comps, for sale comps, and sold comps, sold to for sale ratio, total DataTree parcels, total, total out of county owner parcels, because I like targeting owners that live outside of the county, out of county to total ratio, days on market, month over month price change, and parcels on market ratio. Those are just some of the ones I look at. Do you recommend anything else I should add into this?

You know, it's going to really vary. One of the big things that's been coming up lately, just because of how, uh, drastically the economic conditions have shifted lately, um, we do have time frame data now. So instead of like sold to for sale ratio of all, which encompasses every comp in our database, you can now look at it in just a 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month time frame. Oh, so we have those for a few different filters. So that can be pretty, um, helpful in just kind of determining what is the current economic condition as opposed to as far back as a year, where it didn't necessarily matter as much before, you know, everything started shifting with the interest rates and everything.

Let's do 12 months. Perfect.

Okay, cool. Yeah. So basically, these are fields that you, when you click save, it now shows up in this table below. All right. Because right now, this table shows all, um, there's probably 7, there's almost 100 counties in Tennessee. So this table has 12 pages and it's showing all of the counties. And as we do these filters, it's going to narrow down the counties. All right, cool. So, um, now when I click on fields to filter, it shows all of the, oh, you can't see it. Okay. Well, some of the things I'm going to show you when I click on this dropdown menu on the screen right now, you can't see the things that are dropping down, but as soon as I select it, you'll see it. So, um, anyway, um, one of the first fields to filter, what do you recommend?

So, just again, coming back from basic economics, on the demand side, one big one that a lot of people typically use is the sold to for sale ratio that we mentioned. So, um, what we can do is just come up and use that sold to, um, for sale ratio at the 12-month, as that we kind of, um, selected before. And then you want to always have a greater value. Just from amongst a lot of investors, what we kind of say is the, the greater that value, um, the more sold comps are really demanding over the for sale comps, which means it's a hotter area. So, um, you want to go with the filter type is greater.

Okay. And then to come up with that value, there's really two different ways you can do this. So the first way is going to be just a fixed value. If you scroll down to the actual, the sold to for sale ratio heat map, that's where we're going to determine what value we're going to use. So it should be the, the second, or third one down.

There we go. Right there. Um, and one big way is, so if you look, and if you hover in the top left corner of this map, you can actually type in Tennessee and it'll zoom into Tennessee. So we can just focus on the counties there. Um, yeah. And then again, there's two different practices that you can do here. So we'll show you what the, the mean and median averages of sold for sale ratio across the United States. So you can, you can use that. It's going to be just above the map on this page. Uh, and we do this for all the maps as well, so you can, you can utilize that number if you wanted. Um, another way though, is going to be to figure out what that median point is within Tennessee specifically. So there's two different, again, ways you can go about it. One, just nationwide, and then one specifically to Tennessee. Uh, and the way I like to do it is to focus specifically on Tennessee, because again, uh, each state's going to upload and process differently than one another. So you really want the apples-to-apples comparison, and you don't want to limit yourself too much in states where they kind of filter everything out with that mean ratio. So we're going to look or focus in on the 50% arc within Tennessee. And to do that, on the right hand side, you're going to see the little slider bar. So you're going to look for the sold to for sale ratio. And then what that, we're going to do in the left input box, we're going to, um, so yeah, just above the, the sold to for sale ratio slider bar, in the left input box, so above that number, um, yeah, if you just, yep, on the other side though, yep. We're going to put in to start out that mean ratio. So if I think it's 36, and then you're going to click enter on there. And that's going to, again, it's going to box out all the the counties that did not meet that criteria. And from here, now it's just all about adjusting it to try to find that 50% mark within Tennessee. So you wanted to, um, go another one, maybe 0.4 might be better. Uh, and it just takes a little bit of adjustments this feel. And it doesn't have to be exactly right. Um, that could be good right there. And so what we can do now is scroll back up and put 0.4 in that that value to filter on for the sold to for sale ratio.

That's good. Sometimes what I do is like, I look at this table, and right now, this table has 12 pages of counties, which is about a hundred counties. So sometimes I just put a number in here. I do 0.5, and click run filter. And you can see right here, now I have 92 counties. All right. So now let's do 0.6. Now I have 78 counties. Let's do 0.7. Now I have 61 counties. So I've eliminated almost half of them just by playing with the numbers right up there, right? Um, so, so now I have all of the, by the way, when, when it says sold to list ratio here, is that all, or is that the 12 months?

That's going to be all there. Oh, actually, it's going to be combined, right, Ryan? I think that's the combined one.

Yeah. I want to call out that I think we're looking at two diff, we sold the listed in the filter, but we were looking at the sold to for sale in the, and then just to call out what the difference is there. Is this not all, like you mentioned about, you know, land.com not having necessarily all its dates? The sold to list ratios, we'll only look at comps where we know exact dates of their listing. Um, whereas for sale is, it's an active market comp. Um, but we don't have, so there's more data in the for sale ratios, just so you know.

My dropdown, I know you guys can't see it, it just, all I see is a sold to listed ratio. I don't see the sold to listed ratio 12 months in the dropdown, but okay, regardless, um, sold to listed ratio here. Let's add another filter. Um, sometimes I like to look at sold comps. All right. And I want to know, I want to be in a county that has a lot of sold comps. And so I'm going to do, again, the greater than sold comps. And I'm just looking here, I've got eight pages now. Before I had 12. And here is the sold comps. And I'm just, you can see there's 239, 209, 199, 504, 81, 180. So let's like, what if we looked at, they had sold comps greater than 200? That's going to take it down to 36 counties. All right, that's good. If you wanted to, you could do 300. Let's see. That's 22 counties. So why are we doing this? Because we want counties that have a lot of sold comps in them. So that's good. Now, from the 100 or so counties, now I have 22, right? Um, let's do another filter. What would you recommend? I have sold to listed ratio, I have sold comps. What about, um, days on market?

You like days on market? Works. Parcels on market ratio, um, those are some of the common ones that we see. Days on market tells us, you know, how long does a property typically stay on the market before it gets marked as sold? So the less, the better, right?

Yeah. So let's do less than. And if I'm looking at my table here, the days on market, you can see this column right here, 164, 209, 190, 149, 213, 170, 209, 220. What if we did less than 200? Less than 200 average days on market? That brings me down to now 12 counties.

Is that good?

Yeah, I think we're getting there. So I've taken from 100 counties down to 12 that has a good sold to for sale, sold to listed ratio, a good number of sold comps, and a good number, a low number of average days on market. Um, cool. Anything else if I want to filter this down some more?

Um, the only thing we'd mention again, if you want to do some supply side filters as well, it's not going to be a perfect science. And what we do always recommend is still don't filter it so much where you're left with one county remaining, because then if you ever want to scale or target a different county, you basically block them all out. So having a decent amount of counties is always nice to have. And you can go down the list, especially depending on how many records you're trying to send out, you may not have enough for one county, so you want to kind of give yourself enough buffer room to have that.

What if we did population percent change and said, "Just greater than zero"? So the county is not shrinking.

Now we have 11 counties.

Okay, that's good. And let's do month over month price change. Change month over month price change is greater than. Again, I'm looking at this table here. We have 2.07, 2.68, 3.62. There's some that are less than two. So let's do greater than 2%.

All right, here we go. I got seven counties. This is a pretty good list. Seven counties in Tennessee where we have, uh, a good sold to for sale ratio, good number of sold comps, good low days on market, it's a population, it's a county that's growing in population, and the month over month price change is greater than 2%. So there's some appreciation here. And we have seven counties. We have Bledsoe County, Fentress, Franklin, Knox, Loudon, Monroe, and Overton. Um, another thing I tell people is like, if you can get like 5 to 10 counties in a state, that's a good place to start. Like, don't, you don't want to just narrow it down to one or two counties because once you start pulling lists, some of these counties, you're only going to get a few thousand, and that's, you need more than that. So this is a good place to start here, isn't it?

Yeah, I would say it's wrong. Simple, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And all you have to do is click that send to search now, and it just, it'll kick off that, uh, that search process, which is, which is also really handy. So now your counties are already loaded in there. And yeah, and you already know the, the market conditions. Now you can start to sort of drill down at your, your actual criteria.

Now, the thing I would say though, sometimes when you have too many counties in here, it sometimes your list will be too big, and you can only export 10,000 at a time. Um, and sometimes too, because each county has submits different data, sometimes DataTree has a hard time getting all of this information when you're doing too many counties at once. I, I prefer personally just to do one county at a time. So what I'd recommend, guys, is write down each of these seven counties on a piece of paper and then just do one at a time. So, so let's, can I just click the counties? That'll just, yeah, that'll remove them all. Right. Let's, let's just do one of them. Let's look at Franklin County. I don't know where Franklin County is.

Let's, Nashville. Oh, it is. It's very close to Nashville. It's on the southern border, I think, of Tennessee, just below Nashville. Well, there's a Franklin, the town of Franklin. Yeah. Okay. This looks like a great county because it's kind of out in the suburbs. It's got a lake, some lakes there. It's next to Chattanooga, not in the suburbs, it's out in the country near Huntsville, Chattanooga, Nashville. I like these kinds of areas that are more rural.

One thing I like to look at is sometimes I just go to Zillow. Well, let's look at Redfin instead. And let's look at, uh, Franklin County, Tennessee. Is that, did I get that right?

No, that's Franklin, Tennessee. Up Franklin. Yeah. Made the same mistake I did. Franklin County, Tennessee. There you go. Big difference.

All right, let's go to filters. Let's go to solds. Let's look at land only sold in the last three months.

Okay, good. There are 30 vacant lots that have sold in Franklin County in the last, um, three months. That's good. You can also change this to maybe solds in the last year. 131. So sometimes what I like to do is when I'm looking at multiple counties, um, I just go to Zillow or Redfin and look at the number of solds and just compare them to each other. And if I have a list of seven or eight counties, I'll just start with the one that has the most solds in the last three months, go through that list, then go to the next county, go through that list, then go to the next county. But this is all about following the demand, right? Following the money, making sure we're in good areas.

All right, so we have Franklin County, Tennessee. Right now, you know what? I'm just gonna, um, I'm just gonna clear my search and do it all over again because I want, I want to kind of start from there. I'll click clear search and I'm going to type in Franklin County. It's a lot of Franklin counties.

It is. Franklin County.

Okay. Um, now, most of the other reason I like doing this in Redfin sometimes is I want to know what is the average size of properties of acres that are selling. And sometimes if you go to Redfin, if you scroll down, there's a download button right here, and you can download all of those sold comps and get an average, um, acre size of what they're selling. But, um, what maybe I'm gonna show you what I do, and you guys can tell me if I'm doing this wrong, okay?

Um, I like to look for anything above 0.2 acres. So I'll go 0.2 to one. These are increments, okay? And I'll do 0.05 increment. 1.01 to maybe two. And I'll do 0.1 acre increment. And then I'll go 2.01 to 20 acres and I'll do one acre increment. How's that?

That looks good. And I will call out because this is a a common question we get on the the increments. It's, it's a sort of a unique thing that we, what we do here. Um, so it's, there's two things happening. One is it's how we're going to break up the search and look for properties. So on your first one, we did 0.2 to one and five increments. So we'll do 0.2 to 0.25, 0.25 to 0.3 and so on. Um, but it's also how under the hood, we're actually modeling the data. Um, and so for the increments, you just, you select, it's, that's how we're also going to take that range of 0.25 to 0.3 for example, and actually model those comps independent of the remaining of the rest of the ranges. Um, and so for example, if that 0.2 to one was at a 1 acre, which encompasses the entire range, we just model all the comps and data in that range. The same, if the more granular you make the increment, the more granular the pricing model. And so there's sort of a give and take there with how you want to break up the data, you know, you know, chop down on the number of properties maybe in that data, but also, you know, uh, sort of set up how you want to start modeling, uh, the different acreage ranges.

Yeah, the reason I do this is because I don't want a list of 5,000 records and, you know, 90% of the records are all in one price range. I like, I, I want to try to get an even distribution as much as possible of of these properties. So just screenshot this if you're watching it, and that's kind of a good general increment. What we'll also say to this though, which is actually a common mistake, is the max acreage field is going to actually go down to a hundredth of a decimal point. So it says, just above it says rounded to 0.99. If you start your secondary min acreage at 1.01, it will actually not go to the 1 acre, so you'll miss one acre, um, properties in that. So you actually want to do that one.

Yeah, so you can either move that one to 0.1 or the next one down to just one, uh, so that way you're actually getting all of the the properties within that range. Uh, okay. So this should be 0.2 to one acre. And then this should be, what?

Yeah, and then you'll want to put the, the, the first max acreage to, um, oh, yeah, no, you got it right now. That's perfect.

Okay. And then this should be, yeah, and to make it simple, you can always, yeah, to make it simple, you can always just go again, like the, the first one, one, and then the second one, one. There won't be any overlap when you do that.

Yeah, you'll see above that it says rounded to whatever the the nearest decimal point is. And so we do that for that very specific reason so we're not overlapping anything.

Okay. So if I, so, okay, because what I was doing before, if there was a property that was exactly one acre, it wouldn't, I wouldn't get it, would I?

No.

Oh, right. Okay. So now, yeah, we started doing that because what was happening is if we didn't round that, you actually get it in both, and it started like duplicating where the property would end up, because it would be show up in the first, you know, segments and then also in the later segments.

All right, well, I'm just gonna do it like this. Is this okay?

0.2. I know. This is really small. Try that.

Works. Okay. Because what we're looking at is right here, this, this little thing, uh, you want to make sure you're getting the 1.00 acre properties. And sometimes there's a lot of them because they're, they're right at two acres, right at five acres, you know, so.

All right, good to know. Uh, these next filters here. Well, these are where you would filter out, like, "I only want properties that are worth $20,000 or more." But I've never really used these. Do you guys use them? And what do you recommend?

We don't. And the reason for that is these, these filters are sort of from our original, original, um, construct, and they filter at the county level. And so what we mean when we say that is when you run this initial, initial search, it's going to look at the initial model that we create as the county as a whole. Um, but because we, you know, we're using our tools, years, we're using Geo pricing, we're not terribly concerned with those filters because as I'm sure you know, when we use the Geo pricing models, um, there's a lot of adjustment that happens that'll completely, you know, could really radically shift, uh, the price per acre or or, you know, price of a property, um, well beyond what it was originally set for at the county level. It, you know, depending on where you are with within within the state or within the county. A great example that is if you're in a county that has a major city in it, like say Maricopa County, you know, Phoenix is, um, and you, you know, you're going to get a much larger shift up in price when you get closer to that city versus when you're out on the outskirts. So, yeah, this is another common question we get around these filters, um, and that that read more page is very helpful to sort of explain, um, what's going on there, um, and why, you know, why the filters work the way they do.

We'll just ignore these then. Pricing characteristics. I, I just price all comps. I usually leave this 50/50. What do you guys recommend?

Uh, we recommend that, um, you know, we, we do see, uh, folks that will, uh, sometimes do the price with sold comps only. What we will say to that is our models are set up to have a bias towards sold comps, just by how they're created. Um, and so when it says 50/50, that's, that's, that's allowing you to adjust the weighting against what our model is. But our model is already weighted sold comps higher. Um, so it's not, not really inherently shown there, but that's what's happening under.

Okay, very good. Um, filters, data tree filters. I just leave them all checked. I don't care. Um, the one thing worth mentioning there is, um, for the land uses, what we've noticed is that, uh, land uses are not uniform from county to county. So what you may see from time to time if you search or get, try to get a count for certain counties, you may see your count go completely to zero. Um, and when that, when that happens, sometimes it comes down to the land uses that are actually being used and they don't classify them as vacant land at all. Um, instead, they're classified under maybe residential land uses, such as single-family residences, even though they're completely just land. So if you click the more button at the bottom right of land uses, that's going to be our residential land uses. Um, and so if you select this SFR button, um, just be careful because most of them may have houses actually on them. But if you pair that with our living area square footage filter and put zero zero, um, that may help you get more vacant land in certain counties than others too. That's a real good point because again, sometimes you'll, you won't get any records. You're like, what's wrong? It's because it may be classified as a house, but it's a vacant land. So go ahead and select houses, but then the living area square footage, the square footage of the house, do zero. Or you can also do improved assessment values or improved values as zero, and sometimes that will also filter those out.

Okay, that's a good point. Um, now for me, the only thing I look at here is in-county owner. I want to exclude people who live in the county. Um, anything you'd want to say about that? That's, oh, I was gonna say, um, that's, that's a pretty common one. Um, obviously the further out the owner, maybe more likely they are to sell. Um, the only other one that I would say that might be nice to just have is kind of a default setting, uh, especially if you're not trying to mail outside of the US owners. If you go to mail state and if you drop that down and say mail state is USA, we can automatically filter out those owners before you even download your list, um, that live outside of the United States. So if, yeah, you just put USA in there, we'll auto-filter out the, um, those owners that are outside of the US.

Okay, that's cool. That's good to know. That'll save you a little few pennies. Yeah. Um, all right. Um, you know, if I'm targeting buyers, I might want to say here, show me all the ones that own at least a certain number of properties already. What's, remove unavailable owner names? What is that?

Um, yes, so there's, there are a, a handful of properties in the data set from Data Tree, um, where the name is, is not available. I mean, it'll just say unavailable or it'll just be blank. Um, and for some people, when they're sending out, you know, say a letter, they want to have, you know, "Dear John" or "Dear Nancy," um, and so they don't want to just sort of have a generic blank fill-in, uh, fill-in name. Um, so this will sort of get rid of those. But if you're, if you're not too concerned with that, or maybe you're running a text campaign or something that doesn't really require their, their first and last name, it's not, that's necessary.

And, you know, what else, um, I wonder if, if you just included all for the owner location, you'd get a lot more records. Um, I bet you I'm missing out on a lot of deals because I'm only sending mail to people who don't live in that county. My thinking has always been, I don't want to send a letter to somebody who owns a vacant lot right next to the lot where they live, um, because they probably don't want to sell it or they're probably not going to be super motivated. Um, so I guess, you know, if you have a good county and you've already mailed it and you, it's a honey pot, you're getting a lot of deals from it, you might consider just mailing everybody who owns land in that county, regardless of where they live, and you'll probably pick up some good deals out of that.

Yeah, but the, the exclude in county just means you're more likely to find somebody who lives farther away from that property, who's going to be more detached from the property, not as much emotional tie to it. Um, okay. I don't worry about assessed filters unless you, there's something there you want to say.

No, nothing really. I think that's pretty, yeah, it's pretty fair. I think, I think to what we were talking about earlier with, with land data, this is another one that we see a lot where these, these values are not necessarily filled in for every county and it's, it's really hard to get consistency with that. Um, and, and if they are filled in, it's hard also hard to get, uh, some accuracy with that. Uh, and so it's, it's, we personally don't use them. But there's nothing to say that you can't use them. If you are doing a search for, um, residential single-family residences, this is where you'd put in a living area square filter of zero. And we actually recommend it regardless, uh, if you're, if you're doing farmland, uh, too for your vacant land uses, just because there could be barns or other sheds, um, that this may pick up as well. So it's just kind of a, a safety check, just in case.

Sometimes I don't do that because I found when I had a living area of zero, it would filter out too many because if the, if there is no data for living area, sometimes I wouldn't get that record because there, there was no living area, so it just didn't give it to me. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's just probably a little bit of risk tolerance too. If you're okay with having, you know, properties with structures on them, yeah, just were misclassified, you know, in the land use, I think that's totally, totally reasonable. It's just, just understanding that that is, that that is a possibility.

Flood zone codes. I don't worry about that. I mean, I just don't trust county records to know whether property is in a flood zone or not, so I just check them all.

That's fair. Um, last sale date. What do you guys recommend for this? And I'll tell you what I like to do. Um, you know, go ahead.

Max. Oh, I, I was just going to say, um, it's good to understand how the last sale date filter works. So kind of the theme behind land investing is it's an imperfect data set. So the data that we get, a lot of the times, it doesn't show you what that last sales date is. So if you click that, um, absolutely again, okay to use, there's nothing wrong with it, but just know when you do that, uh, what our data provider does behind the scenes, if you say, "Hey, I want, um, any properties that sold with, uh, before five years." So, um, if there's a property record that's blank, they're going to leave that into the result, just to air on the side of caution. So it very well could have been sold within that five-year time frame, they just don't know. And so, um, just using that filter, again, nothing wrong with it, just know how it works and that there still could be some properties in there, um, that might be in within the time frame. But again, typically, as some investors like to say, the further they bought the property away, the more kind of, again, they, something happened or they don't have a mortgage on it, or they're just kind of, um, okay and ready to sell it by now. So it just depends on what type of, um, strategy you're using at the time.

So I, I want the unknown sale dates because that usually means it was last sold before they started keeping track of that, which was a long time ago. So if I say last sale date before five years ago, um, will that include unknown sale dates?

Good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah, it just, it's just the other way that will not, right? So if you do last sale date is after, um, then you will not be including those unknown, those unknown dates.

Okay. Um, I wonder if there's a way you could have a checkbox for include unknown sale dates or not, right? I mean, nice.

I think the, the challenge there is, it's, that's, that's sort of the, uh, internal logic of, of Data Tree, that's, that's how, how they, they've, um, decided to handle unknown dates, you know, where this property, so it's sort of out of our control on that case.

Okay, cool. Um, I don't worry about sale price. I don't worry about deeds. I don't care about listing status because that's, I'm going to guess that this is most of the time not accurate. Am I right?

Yeah, and it's really hard to, to know as well, um, because there's going to be probably some sort of delay. Well, it's, everybody that I've seen that provides MLS data, it's, it's when you dig and start looking, it's wrong. It's just because MLS data is so hard to get. The best place to get MLS data is from the MLS or Zillow or Redfin. Um, pretty much. I, I ignore anything else that says they have a database of listed properties. And anyway.

So, cool. That's it. I'm going to click search and see what comes up.

And, uh, I was going to say, while this is loading too, if you do again get a count and your, your record zero, um, best practice to just figure out what filter may be causing that issue is just to, um, basically restart your, your, yeah, remove your search and then just plug in one at a time with getting a count, and that way you can see exactly which filters are removing all the records.

One of the, I want to show here real quick is you can see the kind of the even distribution of owner records here. And I like that because it's not like 500 here and, you know, 10, 20 here. So I've got 64 records, 60, 54, 53, 41, 32, 27. That's good. And you can see the ranges here, zero point, two to zero, two, four acres, then two to three acres. So it's, I like that. Right. But I am surprised a little bit. I have only 816 records. So it could be some of the data that Data Tree is getting from the county records is a little screwy, or it could just be that really is all there is. Um, so if I looked back here, what are some things that maybe I could do? Maybe mailing state is a problem. So I'm just going to say no mailing state filter. Um, I could say, well, just include all people who live in the county or not. And I could do, well, there is no living area filter. Um, I'm back five years. I, I don't want to change that. Let's try it again. So you just sometimes have to go back and and change some filters to see if you get more of this.

I think, I think kind of as a callback to when we were looking at the research page, um, when we, when you have the, the those, those, uh, you know, I think they had seven counties, um, you can actually see the total tree count or the total, you know, all basically all properties and all acreages. Um, and so you can use that as a reference point when you're pulling this data to say, okay, if I only get 800, but maybe there's only 2,000 total, that sounds pretty reasonable. But if it's 800 versus say 100,000, then there's probably something that's, that's missing, right?

So now I have 2,200 records. That's good. All right. Now, some of these are going to be people who live in the county, but that's, I don't care about that right now. That's awesome. Uh, real quick, this is where you adjust the, the offer percent. Okay. Now, this letter that I'm using right now, this is the envelope, and it looks like there's a check in the envelope. Okay. And then, um, this is the letter itself. It's just, "Hey, do you want to sell your land?" Um, and if you want a real check instead of this fake one, um, call or text is 24-hour recorded voicemail, and we don't give them to a website. We, we want their phone number. We want them to call us. And, uh, we've just been, we've done different variations of this letter, but right now, this is working really, really well for us. We get a lot of calls, and I want as many calls as I can get. So, you know, what I do, I change this offer price percent up to 50%. Now, this is something I teach in the course. This is going to get you more calls. It's also going to get you more angry callers when they call and they find out that you really can't offer them 12 grand for their property. But this, this is something, this is for another video. But, um, this is where you just say, "Hey, great, thanks. I got your message. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about your property to see if this is something that I really want to buy?" All right, then you just turn on your sales hat and you start asking them questions. You know, it doesn't have an asphalt paved road, but you ask them, "Does, well, tell me about the road to the property. Is it paved?" "Oh, no, it's not." "Oh, shoot. Okay." You know, maybe it's half wetland and half dry. So, um, "Tell me, is it, is it on a wetland or not?" "Well, I don't know." "Okay, I'm looking here, it looks like half of it is." "Oh, shoot. Okay. All right." Um, and, you know, part of it is sloped. You know, you ask, "What percentage of the property is buildable?" "Well, okay, I don't, you know, okay, looks like here it's on a slope, only about 25% of it's buildable." "Talk about utilities. There's, there's utilities on the property, right, or real close?" "No." "Well, you don't know?" "Or so." You start asking questions and you say, "Well, you know, I don't know if I'm going to be able to offer 12 grand for this property anymore. Um, what is the best you can do?" And shut up and let them talk. And you're going to get some people that say, "Like, you offered me 12 grand? Well, this, you know, this, I just can't do it. I mean, and I'm also looking at properties here on Redfin that are cheaper than yours, that are bigger than yours, that have been on the market for over a year. So why would I want to pay you? I'm really sorry. I sent you this bad, this really, I made a bar, I made a mistake. I'm embarrassed. But like, why would I want to pay you 20 grand for your property when I can buy a similar one a mile away for half of that? So I'm, I'm sorry, but like, what is the best you could do? What's the lowest price that you would be willing to sell this for?" And I'm just asking questions. I could say, like, "You know, why, why would you even want to sell this property? Looks like a nice place. Why would you even want to sell it? You're not in a hurry to sell it, right? You should probably just list it with a realtor. You know, I can give you some agents that can list properties in this." This is all sales 101. I'm just talking to them, asking questions, playing the role of the reluctant buyer, and trying to get from them now the lowest price that they'd be willing to sell it for. I'm still going to send them another offer. But this is how it works. And so this is a little slider here, which is so cool because, um, if you're sending a blind offer or a check letter, like the one I just showed you, I want as many calls as I can. And I know I'm offering more than I could probably really buy it for, but I'm, I'm just doing it to get them on the phone, talk to them, and to, um, uh, get them to negotiate a lower price. Now, if you don't want to do any of that and you just want to make lowball offers and get one out of every thousand accepted, go ahead and move this down to maybe 30%. All right. And, um, you know, if you find that price maybe is a little high in these areas, go down to 25% or 20% and just send a bunch of blind offers, and you'll get one out of every 500 or a thousand accepted, which is good. Um, so it's just how, depending on the game that you want to play.

Do you guys want to add anything to that?

Nope. I think that's, uh, yeah, that's, that's pretty, uh, it's pretty spot on. I think the other thing to mention is it's not visible on the screen is, um, doing things like range offers, which is, which is also very popular strategy. So, um, we do have a tool that allows you to sort of generate incremental 5% incremental, um, uh, offer prices and then you can sort of set up your, your, your letter template if you're, if you're, you know, kind of going off on your own strategy and setting up your template to say, "Hey, I want to offer between, you know, based on your properties characteristics, I can offer between 30 and 60%." You're sort of the ballpark. And then like you were just saying, with the sort of the sales, uh, strategy, sort of say, "Hey, like if, if those things are not present, it's going to fall closer to that 30% mark versus maybe that higher 60%."

That is really cool. Can we talk about how to do that?

Yeah, sure. Um, so we'll get to it, uh, when we keep going through the, uh, if we keep going through the selection process, like you call, I calling out when we get to that, that let's, that's important. I want to do that here, but I just want to show people real quick how to get comps. This is one of the really cool things about Price. Like you can get comps from Price, if you're a paying member, um, without downloading any lists. So let's say you have a two and a half acre lot. Well, just click on this right here. So I have two, I'm right in the middle, two and a half acres. And go right here to for sale and sold comps. Click on that. And now you get a table of five pages of comps. And you look at this, and it's going to give you all of these properties. Some of them are the same. Like this one, this property is probably the same from realtor.com and redfin.com. Um, but you can click these and you get sent to that listing on realtor.com or redfin or whatever. And you can see this one's currently for sale for 33,200. Um, and you can also download this whole table into a spreadsheet and start playing with it. So this is a great way to get comps on similar size properties in the area. And I've never used the chart before. This is it.

Chart. A cool visualization of the, uh, of the comps. Um, just a call out on those, on those comps, because this is also another, uh, fairly common question, um, is saying, "Hey, like, these are duplicate comps. Is that going to affect the price?" We do remove those duplicates when we do modeling, but we like to leave them in on our comp, uh, visualization because sometimes the listings on, you know, say Realtor or Redfin, or maybe it's on Land.com and Zillow, and it's the same comp. They have different pieces of information about that comp. You know, maybe, yeah, whoever uploaded that comp put more or less data. Um, and so it's nice to have sort of a, a little bit of a, a different, uh, you know, perspective from each of the listing sources. And this is also helpful in non-disclosure states, like Texas. This is a great way to get comps for properties in Texas because you can see the ones that have been active, you know, or are off market, and what they were priced at. Like this is a deal that was off market. It was on Land.com and it's not anymore. So did it sell or did it not? I don't know. But you can see. All right, well, it's, it's 2.2 acres at 85,000. So it's, whatever, $40,000 an acre. Okay. Um, so great little tool that you don't have to, you, you don't really pay for it. Well, you do in the monthly that you do, but like if you do the $500 a year, you can export these comps and get them without downloading a list. So that's pretty cool.

Um, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about this, but you have different pricing schemes. One based on the county, all the entire county. One of them based on the city, and that's the city mailing of the mailing the property address. And then you have Geo pricing. And Geo pricing is just an algorithm that you use, right?

Sure. Correct. Yeah. And, and, and sort of at a high level, what it's doing is, I think I mentioned it earlier, is for each property, it takes the lat long, it'll look at the nearest comps around that lat long that that match the same acreage profile, and then it creates a model based on proximity and then also weighting. Like I read earlier, sold comps higher. Um, and the closer the acreages are together to the property you're trying to price, the more, the more weight it'll, it'll add to that, to that property. And again, I like how I did my, I'm just bragging about myself here. I like how I did my ranges for acreages, cuz look at it's a pretty good even distribution there. I got 189, 150, 126, 117, 107, etcetera, right?

So let's say I want to download this list. I'm going to click on and I want to, I want to do 40% of my offer price because I'm going to use that check letter. I want to get a lot of calls. I'm going to download all of them. Um, and I'm, I want you guys just show me how to do the range thing.

Yep. So we want to click continue. Yep. Continue here. And I love that range idea because, um, one of the things I'm going to be testing soon here is a postcard with the offer on the postcard and with a phone number to call because I can send postcards for super cheap. And if I can send an offer price that, you know, I know was high, I'm going to be getting a lot of calls on that.

All right, so we're looking here at some field names. I usually just leave them all checked.

Yeah, that's fair. Uh, I will point up the protected APN. There, it's not a huge deal, um, but if, like you said, if you're running into that issue where your APNs are getting truncated, um, from, from Excel or something like that, where the zeros are going, the way that that could be helpful, but it's not, it's not something that's required. And the APNs, like I mentioned, are fine with the CSV files.

Personally, I remove blank owners, church owners, and government owners.

Blank addresses. Is that blank property addresses or blank mailing addresses?

It's going to be blank mailing addresses.

Yeah, that's, um, yeah, cuz typically in, especially vacant land, there, there is not a proper address or it's, it's not a full, you know, US postage address.

All right, so I'll also remove non-US addresses. And I also remove same zip code as parcel. If we're doing the owner is outside of the county, wouldn't that already take those out?

Yeah, so some of these are a little redundant. Um, some of these are were sort of created back when we first started and we've just left them in there for for redundancy. Um, but you know, sometimes maybe you also might forget or miss that filter. So it's sort of a last, also a last check. But hey, we'll remove those just, just in case you're not mistakenly, you know, you're, you, you'd rather, you know, spend a little more money on the data than spend more money on the letters, which are going to cost, you know, substantially more money for you.

Any filters that you would recommend I should have checked or should not have checked?

No, I think those are all pretty, pretty standard.

All right, um, go to continue. Now, this is cool. You can get skip trace data if you want. You can generate a campaign map. Campaign map is like a KML file that you can put into Google Earth. Um, I used to use that a lot more than I do now, but, um, right now I, I just get my comps right from Redfin or Zillow. Um, but if you want to put them into Google Earth, that's a way to do that. You can skip trace your data. We have a lot of clients who do that.

Remove duplicate owners. I, I use this because this now removes one owner that might own five properties, so I'm only getting him once.

Ah, here it is. This is the new thing. Split pricing. Is this it?

No, so this is actually another unique feature that we have, um, on our site. And so, um, what we're doing here is when we do something like Geo pricing, not, not every property in your Geo pricing model is going to have the requisite number of comps around it to create a model for. Um, and so when that happens, what we're going to do is sort of fall back to the next, like layer, if you want to call it that. Um, you know, so that checkbox actually below it, we say, "Hey, when you do have that, I want to revert back to city pricing." By default, we'll revert back to the county. Um, and so that's sort of a, another check where we say, "Hey, if, if there's only like maybe one or two comps around your property within a few miles, we're not going to, you know, mistakenly create a model off of some, you know, so few of comps." Um, and so, you know, it's just like a, another way to sort of segment out that data and then maybe you do some manual work for that. Um, and then for the, um, for the range offer, let's, if we actually go back, if you want to click to X, actually, we actually skipped over and I apologize for this. Uh, if you scroll to the top here, it's going to be that checkbox right under where you selected Geo pricing. Um, if you see on the left hand side, that "Show offer price all increments," that's the button we're looking for there. Um, and so what that's going to do, like I mentioned, is it's going to create on your, uh, Excel sheet, it's going to create offer prices at 5, 5% increments from zero all the way to 100. And then they're, they're named appropriately. So you know, it will be say, "offer price underscore 5," "offers price underscore 10," all the way up and so on. Your template, you can actually do "offer price 30" to "offer price 60," and then it'll fill in those numbers for you. So it's a really, uh, easy way to create that range offer letter, um, with a strategy like you're mentioning, where maybe you have, uh, some wiggle room in your offer based on some, some characteristics of the land that are not inherent in, in a property data set, like utilities. And to set it and forget it, you can click the "Set default increment" button. So that way, when you go through this, you don't have to check it each time either.

Ah, I'll keep that. Yeah, because I, I want to start. I've never done the range offers. Do you? I want to. I've been wanting to test it for a long time.

Um, guys still using that and do they like it?

We, we've heard, we've heard some good success stories about that. Um, you, you know, it, I think there is a lot of value, um, especially when you know that you're going to sort of negotiate, um, in having that, that high and low, sort of boundary, um, so that way, I think it also sets a better precedent with the, with the seller, that hey, like, you know, we would love to offer the most, but there's just things about certain land that we, you know, whether if it's in a flood zone, if it doesn't have direct road access, or, um, you know, maybe like you mentioned, it's not buildable, where we just, it's going to, you know, take a mark, it's going to take a hit on, on what we're able to to provide, because we have to, you know, maybe do some, do some work to the property to, to bring utilities to the property or, or, you know, bring a road or what.

Yeah. Well, that's cool. All right, so we'll keep the offer price adjustment at for pluses. Do 45%. I like pushing it up because I just want as many calls as I can get.

Um, all right, so then we just go to continue.

Y. And well, now we'll go back through again, just sort of can skip. Continue. Remove church owners, blank owners, government owners. I'm okay with trusts and corporates. Um, blank addresses, non-US addresses, same zip code as parcel. Boom. Continue. And then you can skip trace the data if you want. Remove duplicate. Split pricing. Revert to city pricing. That just means again, if there's not enough pricing from the geolocation pricing, then it'll revert to county pricing by default, or city pricing if you click that.

Yep. And you'll be able to see that directly on your, in your data set too, which pricing tier it priced. It'll say the source of the pricing, and whether it's, you know, a county name, a city name, or an adjusted value.

I forgot. What did I choose up here? Oh, I was doing Geo. Okay. Okay. Uh, one other question I have for you real quick, then is, let me just do this one more time because I like to put reference IDs on my letters. And sometimes I have to do it inside of Excel. And when I'm teaching students how to do this, they glaze over when I, um, start doing adding a column and doing reference numbers in my spreadsheet. So can you explain the custom reference number and exported file label thing here?

Yeah, absolutely. And so what the export file label will do is, so, uh, a lot of times, and this is what happens a lot, where folks will export several times, uh, in a day or in a short period of time, um, and we have a default naming convention for our files. So, you know, for us, it's just price data and then the date of the export. Um, but if you're someone that exports maybe 10 times or 12 times, uh, and then puts all those zip files or final lists, um, into, you know, a folder in, you know, on your computer, and they all have the same name, it's hard to know what data goes to what, you know, you were exporting. And so that's the most, what you've typed it is probably the most common thing we've seen. You know, sometimes they'll put like an acreage range. Really, what the idea there is, is it's sort of labeling the files, and it'll label the zip file and your final list file, um, with some sort of custom, uh, annotation of what data is this, right?

If I'm doing, I'm doing Franklin, then I'm going to do another county. I can put, you know, "Franklin County, Tennessee," and that way I'm aware of what, what's there. Um, and then the custom reference number, what we do is we actually provide a reference number for all of our exports. Um, and so what this allows you to do is to say, "Hey, I want to actually, um, create my own scheme for this." So whether it's "Frank-something" or just "Frank," and then you could say, "Yeah, exactly that." And so that just is going to, um, just numerically count off, and it'll put "Frank-" and then it'll start at 1500, and then every property will be, you know, 1501, 1502. Um, so if you want to create your own reference scheme, uh, that is easy for you or for your phone service or whatever process you're using to to follow, um, but just knowing that we also create a reference number, um, which helps us internally track all the properties that are being exported, all the data that's being exported, um, but sometimes you want to have, you know, something easier to read. It's, and so it's okay to do the dash. You could do the dash. I believe the dash is so I would just, you can probably leave the dash off.

Okay. So like this. I like this because when, when the seller calls, the letter reference is on the letter, and my voicemail says, "Give me the letter reference ID," and so it's just easy when it's in the spreadsheet. I can send it to the mail company.

And awesome. That's it. Then you check out. You get your list.

One, one more thing I'll add to the before you check out is, uh, and we get this question a lot, is we highly, highly recommend using the preview option. The reason for that is, you know, there is a lot of buttons being selected, there's a lot of filters, there's probably a lot of back and forth when you're setting things up. Um, and so the preview mode allows you to export. So we had, I think it was like 2,000 records for each of those rows we selected. It'll export five rows or five properties, and then you can go in, and it'll look exactly like your final list is going to look. Um, and it basically, for, for no charge, will allow you to sort of review those properties, just double checking that, you know, you set up everything that you wanted, maybe spot checking a couple for price to make sure, "Hey, like, I, I set up my, my pricing criteria correctly." Uh, and, and, and that'll help you feel more confident when you go in and export. You know, because sometimes, this one's not too bad with 2,000 records, but if you're going to set up maybe a 20 or 30,000 record export, you want to make sure that there's, you know, you're not going to make any any mistakes that are going to require you to maybe export that again or have to, you know, vote through our support channels to sort of fix, fix, you know, certain things. So we do recommend that preview mode.

So, was that preview? Did it email it to me?

Yep. Uh, yeah, so it'll email it directly to whatever the email on the account is. Um, it's the same email that would get the.

It is. Okay. So I'm, I'm opening it now. I'll open it up here in just a minute so we can see the preview. At the final list, I'm now going to be able to show my screen, but I'm opening up the spreadsheet and I'll tell you how many records are in here. There are cool 40 records. And I can see here, I got the, the right data. Um, I have the mailing, the owner's name, I have the mailing address, property address, the APN, the lot size. It's good. Um, I have the county, I have the GPS coordinates. Thank you so much. Legal description, which is good. Property taxes are good. I sometimes I like to, um, filter out, I'll sort the whole list by property taxes and I'll remove the real expensive ones. I see the offer price, the market price. I see the pricing source, how it was the sourcing of the pricing, Geo adjusted. Most of them are Geo adjusted here. And then I also see the price ranges. Nice. So I can like, when I'm sending my letters to the county or to the printing company, I can send, all right, you for my range, use the 40% to the 60%.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So instead of saying "offer price" in that template letter, when you put the offer price, you know, into the, the thing, you can say, "I want offer price 40" and then "offer price 60."

Yeah. Oh, that's cool. All right. I know you guys can't see it right now when I'm just looking at the screen. Um, all right, awesome. Um, anything else that we should talk about? I, I know we went long and I know you guys are busy. I apologize. Um, I feel like we did a really good job there of looking at the picking the right market, getting a good list. Can we talk about real quick, best practices that you guys are seeing with your customers on type of letters or direct mail, skip tracing, cold calling? What are you seeing for best marketing practices right now?

I think the best practices we've seen lately are people hitting, um, potential sellers multiple times. So whether that's sending letters and then also skip tracing data and creating text marketing campaigns. So they're getting hit multiple times. And then also, um, having ads run through their website. So there's certain mail houses out there and everything where they can basically align the property sellers that you're mailing to with the website that you have. And so now they're seeing your website, they're getting your letter, and then they're also getting texts from you as well. So just those multiple hits seems to be the best, uh, practice right now that people are doing, just because of the added competition. There's more people in this space and so it just takes more times. And, and you hear it a lot too, right? Seven times, um, to get a potential seller and any sort of type of thing too. So the more times you can hit that person, that seems to be really working right now.

Yeah, good. Um, anything else, Ryan?

No, I think, uh, I think Max nailed there. Um, yeah, I think the only other thing I would, I would maybe call out, just from our, our website, I know we did go long there, is we do have a really great comp report tool that I think some people, oh, I didn't even talk about that. Um, it's, it's actually something, you know, funny enough, we've had it for quite some time that is, uh, is still not as well known as as our main workflow, but we, you know, we use it every for every property that we get a lead on, um, we're pulling a comp report for it, to get the most in-depth data and analysis we can on a single property. So, yeah, if you want to just look at the sample report, just to kind of quickly look through it, it's going to give you the property overview. It's going to give you that pricing breakdown, and what's cool here is you're going to see all the different tiers of that pricing. So you can kind of get a sense of where everything's at. Um, you know, for this one in Bulo County, you see the city of Bulo and then our adjusted Geo price. Um, and then what's cool about this too, is if you keep scrolling down, um, you're going to see the breakdown in comps. We have a little analysis, you know, high-level overview analysis of all the comps that are in this report, and there'll be a hyperlink here. You can download the comps into a, uh, into you can download the comps directly to a spreadsheet. The other thing that's cool about our reporting tool, as you see right there, um, we have a map that comes with it too. So you can open it and, you know, Google Earth, and you can sort of see visually where they all, oh, I didn't know that. So when you click this, it'll give you the Google Earth KML file. The, when you download the report, it will. So if you, if you actually go back to the comp report page, there's a sample map that you can download along with this, sample, or I think it's right there. Yeah, right there. And so you can open that, it'll download a KML file for you that you can open up in, yeah, Earth. You can't see it, but, um, it's a, it's a, if you're familiar with Google Earth, and it's a little clunky, but what it'll do is it'll put a bunch of pins on Google Earth around your property where the comps are coming from. Just a good visual tool.

Yeah, and I know I, a lot of people use that with something like Parlay, and they'll be able to sort of see, like the, the layout of the land, you know, right there. Um, but if you keep scrolling here, so we have our, you know, our high-level overview, we have our comps, we have some cool charts that sort of give you a visual dispersion of those comps, where they're coming from, sort of scatter plot, you know, where they're falling from a price to acre perspective. Here's all that comps to sell. So if you remember back when we're looking at the single county, see those comps, these comps are very specific to this property. So these are the closest comps to your property that you're, you're looking to comp for.

Sold comps and then sold comps. Yeah, absolutely. With the links, you could look at them. Yeah. And there's no realtor.com sold links. That's just one thing about, I don't, it's just one thing we don't have. They don't provide those. Um, so if you see that, it's not, uh, it's not your your report, it's just that not something that's provided. Um, and then if some of this cool stuff we've added over the last couple of years is these property insights. Looking at, um, buildable area, the, the breakdown of slope of your property, which I use this a lot. This is huge. Let me, let me just explain this here. The maximum slope on this property is 26%, but the total buildable area is 95%. So that's good. Um, and you can see some of the, like 67% of the property is flat, 18% is gentle slope. This is really cool. If you see a property that is maybe only 5% buildable area, then it, it might not be a property you want to pass on or just be really conservative on your offer, right?

Yeah. Um, that's helpful. Septic breakdown. Um, how accurate is this? I've always wondered about this.

It's, it's pretty accurate. Um, we have used it in our own properties, um, and we've sort of validated. It's, it's very hard to sort of go one by one and validate every property. I think every county is going to be a little different, every property is going to be a little different, and, you know, how up-to-date this information is. Um, you know, we, we've sort of used this as, I wouldn't say as an all-encompassing, this is, you know, the truth, more of, "Hey, this gives us a better feeling about whether or not, um, this property is going to have this capability." We're still going to validate this most of the time, but it's sort of a good first, first wave check to say, "Hey, like, is this, is this something, um, you know, we're going to feel confident in?"

One thing to note on this too, is, uh, we mentioned that map that you get earlier, you're also going to see visually where the 99% is and where that 0.01% is on the property itself. Um, and so you can kind of get a sense of, um, where, you know, where within the property there's more likely, um, to have this capability, which you could potentially use, um, if you're going to do, so you kind of study on that to, you know, sort of push someone towards the in the right direction.

Cage. Yeah. Yeah. So those are some cooler insights that we have on the property itself. And then here's that appendix we were talking about with the range offers. This is sort of a different visualization. I, I use this all the time. I use this all the time. So if I got a property, there's three columns here: County offer, City offer, Geo adjusted. I'm usually at about 35, 40%. And so I see different. If I'm at 40% here, I'm looking 24,000, 30,000, 27,000. So I just usually go with the lower one, and that's where I make my offer. Simple as that.

Yeah. And if you keep going down, I mean, there's, there's a lot of, it's a, it's a longer report, but we now, we have this is another really cool one that we've, we've come up with, as we started to move into the subdivision space, looking at, you know, what is the breakdown of, uh, of market competition, also pricing, when you start to chop up your property into smaller lots. So this particular example is a 40-acre lot. And so you could say, "Hey, like, if I wanted to, you know, at, $1,500 an acre to start, you know, where can I get some forced appreciation, where's a sweet spot at a price point if I wanted to say, make four 10-acre lots, or, you know, eight five-acre lots, or, you know, what have you?" And you can send it also see, like, sort of like I mentioned, the competition on the far right columns, you know, see parcels are there on the market and sold at those.

I didn't know he did this. I didn't know this. Yeah, this is really cool.

Yeah, this is one thing we use. We use a lot in our, in our subdivision analysis. This is, if you're going after bigger properties and you know, what would the comps be if you broke that 40 acre up into 8 five acre lots?

That's cool. Exactly. And it's just another tool in your arsenal, you know, if, if you're trying to negotiate with a seller, they're not able to come down to your 40, 50% mark, but they will want to sell it to you at 80, 90%. It doesn't work as a flip, but you can see it where it may work as a subdivide property. That's where it can be really useful.

Yeah, you also get some skip trace data in there. Um, and it's cool too, with the comp report, you get, um, the, you get a KML file where you can open it up in Google Earth. You get at the $500 a year level, you get 25 reports a month, and then 10 free reports are added every month if you don't use them all. So it's a really good value. I really recommend.

$500. Let's look real quick at the pricing here. I'll pull this up. Um, the bronze level is $25 a month. I'm sorry, yeah, bronze plus is $50, and gold is $499 a year. But you get all of this stuff at the $500 a year: research location, searching analysis, location analysis, comps viewing, comps, owner property record, exporting, external list upload, pricing. So you have, you have a list from somewhere else, you can upload it into Price, and they'll give you comps on that. Comp reports, customer service, export comps and price data, polygon drawings. I use this a lot. This is really good if you're looking at a certain area and you only want, like, you can draw an area that only gives you comps or properties in that little subdivision or area that you draw. And you get 10 free comp reports per month.

Very cool. Right. Anything you want to add to this, guys?

No, I think, really hit there. And you, I think as, just mentioning, I think you mentioned earlier in the, in the call that, um, we do, we do pride ourselves on our, our support. Um, and if there's, if anyone ever has any questions or, you know, runs into trouble, please, you know, we have a pretty solid, you know, template of of pages to help, you know, navigate you. We have a really large collection of YouTube videos to help, but, you know, if you're still stuck, you know, please feel, feel free to reach out to us and, and, you know, we'll, we'll try and, um, we'll try and get you the help that you need to get you point you in the right direction.

All right, thank you guys so much again, Max and Ryan. Appreciate you being on the show from Price. If you want more information about Price, get a 7-day free trial. I'm telling you, I use this every day. Joe Mall.com/price. P-R-Y-C-D. This is way longer than I normally do podcasts. So me, sorry. Um, and, but this has been such a good video. Um, thank you guys. Appreciate you.

Definitely. Thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Bye-bye, everybody.

Hey guys, thank you so much for watching these videos. If you like my channel at all, please hit the subscribe button. Get the notification bell thing. Click so you can get notified when new videos come out. Really appreciate it. If you like this video, please give me a thumbs up. Comment down below. All right, thank you.