Turning Emails Into Cash Flow: Meir Shemtov's Clever Email Marketing Tactics for Land Deals | 170

So I offered her 7,000 and she was happy about that. I sold it for 45,000. That was an email. And right away, I realized it was an opportunity. An email because emails are free. Like, you don't have to pay anybody to send emails. That's Mayor Shmo, a land investor who is absolutely crushing it in the land business right now. He has a team of 14 people and he does 10 to 15 deals per month. How does he do it? I have this radical idea that bills are paid with dollars and not with percentages. We make money when there's like 20 to 30 grand on the deal. In this episode, you'll learn Mayor's framework for when and why he can make higher offers than anyone else. Why I think we got a lot of the deals that other investors don't is because you'll also learn how Mayor uses email to find land deals all over the country, including his four tricks of email marketing. You want to have a domain that isn't your actual domain, and you also want to use multiple instead of putting an unsubscribe button at the end of your email. You sure, right? You'll also learn how you can take the same $20,000 and instead of doubling your money, you can 10x your money without any additional risk. Buy a property for 20 grand and flip it for 40. Sound advice. But how about buy a property for a million, put 20 down, the same 20 grand that you have, and then flip that for 1.5? Now, instead of making 20,000, now you just made $500,000 with your 20 grand. And an unexpected twist that you probably won't expect. How effective is this? Like, is it worthwhile to do this? The answer to that is, we're about to dive into all of that and much more, right now.

Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and AJ Sharma. You're listening to the REtipster Podcast. This is episode 170, and today we're talking with Mayor Shemtov. So, born and raised in Uruguay, Mayor moved to the US at 13 years old. He started his first e-commerce business at 23 and became a partner in a creative retail company and then sold it to WeWork at 25 years old. And then he launched a co-living startup and then exited that in 2020. And then he launched Lot of Land Inc. shortly after that and got into the land business. And Mayor has about nine people on his team and he does a lot of double closings and assignments, about 10 contracts per month. And, um, he is passionate about charity and mindfulness and he turns off all devices for 25 hours per week with no TV or social media at home. And he lives on a farm. And there's a lot of unique things about that. We're going to talk about the way his business works, the volume that he's doing, the sizes of the assignments and the double closings that he's doing. It's pretty cool stuff. So I think this is going to be a great one. Mayor, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Thank you, Seth, so much. Thanks for having me. Really, this, uh, this podcast and this community is probably responsible for a lot of my growth, personal growth also, but mainly in the business. I definitely wouldn't have been here without you, without the content that you put out. And I just wanted to say thank you. And, uh, when I started out, it was more about, you know, taking as much information as I possibly can. And I think I'm at a point now where I would like to share some of the different tips and tricks with everybody else. So, so excited to be here. I'm so grateful to be in this position and to be here with you guys.

That's awesome, man. Appreciate the kind words. And yeah, I'm really glad you decided to do this with us. Looking forward to it.

Yeah, and shout out to AJ. AJ's been a good friend also in the land space. And, uh, thanks for the intro as well and always connecting me with, with the right people. So thanks, AJ. I appreciate it, man.

I do my best, but you're an easy person to connect with.

Thanks, man.

How did you guys get connected, the two of you?

So I think we first met. So there are some episodes from the, um, REtipster Podcast that I've listened to multiple times. Duck Smith's episode was amazing. The episode with Callen Faulkner was really good. And through Ken, we kind of met with AJ. And then we flew to Texas. We had a little meet-up there. And then AJ introduced me to a few other people. And, you know, the land community is so amazing. Like, you get to know everyone. Everyone's so giving. Everyone's always sharing resources. And it's not that big. So, you know, it's, it's just so much fun to have this community to be a part of. And that's really, uh, that's really special.

Yeah, that is a striking thing about the small size of the land community is that everybody does kind of know each other. Like, if you're at all vocal anywhere about anything, like there's a good chance that you're connected to somebody else through at least, you know, one or two degrees of separation. So it's kind of cool.

Yeah. So let's start from the very beginning. So when did you first hear about land investing and what made you decide to give it a shot?

It's a, it's a pretty, uh, unique story. A little unconventional, like everything else about me. Yeah. So we started, like you, you mentioned, uh, the co-living. That was kind of my foray into real estate. Margins were very thin. The concept was super cool, but it was very, uh, much a city, New York kind of thing. And the time came that we, we had to, we just didn't like living in New York in the city. So we moved to the West Coast. And I'm very passionate about hospitality. I love real estate also. When you, you know, real estate has really good, like hospitality real estate, like short-term rentals. They have really good margins. It's also fun. It's not the typical landlord-tenant kind of thing. So in California, I started looking for land to build a lot of short-term rentals and create like an experience. And very quickly, I realized that California is not the place to get permits for, to do things. It's just a little bit difficult to get anything done, especially in 2020. Things were just closed and it was just so hard. And incidentally, I had a brother. My brother Levi, he was buying and selling land. He was just getting started. I think he saw it from his friend was doing it or something. And I'm like, hey, you know how to send mailers, right? So he's like, yeah. He's like, why don't you show me how to send mailers? Cuz I wanted to start buying land to do this thing. So he's like, sure, let's get on the zoom and he showed me how to do it. And then he's like, I got one request for you. I'm like, yeah, what? He's like, just drop your Airbnb thing and start flipping, man. And I was like, I was like, why? He's like, what do you mean? It's, it's so much easier. It's so much fun. The margins are there. You don't need permits. It's just like, why don't you just, let's do one together. And, and really, credit, credit goes to him. He guided me through it. He, he was super instrumental at the beginning. And then, you know, I started doing a little bit more reading, more watching, more listening to everything. And I actually remember cuz he, he didn't know about the REtipster, uh, community. He just kind of started through his friend. And then one day he sends me a link to your website or to your podcast and he's like, oh my God, I think I found the OG. It was like his brain was like, oh my God, I found the guy. And ever since then, I obviously started listening to every episode and and it was just, it was up, up from there. And then, you know, slowly, gradually, we started building up the team and then, than thank God, we're where we are today.

So when was that? Like, what year did this all start for you?

That was, uh, I think 2021.

What did your first year look like? Did you just start sending out mail like everybody else does or, I guess, what was your, your volume that first year? Your typical deal size? And when did things start changing for you? Because I know you do things a bit differently than the average course teaches how to do this stuff.

I would say most courses say to send mail and I think it's for a good reason. If you're new and you don't have a team, texting is very difficult. And mail, it's just kind of the, you know, especially blind offers, they kind of qualify the sellers for you. So there's a lot less work. So I started with mailers. I started in, uh, in Do Retreat, which is kind of where I wanted to do these hospitality retreats. And it was, I was living in LA, so it wasn't so far. And I speak Spanish. My first language, actually. So a lot of the funnels that were coming in were Spanish-speaking people. And a lot of them lived in LA. So it was just answering the phones. I sent out, I don't remember how much mail, but I, I would go to people's houses to meet with them. So like this one guy was like, I don't know who you are. And it was a good deal. There was like a, you know, 20,000 profit. So I was like, okay, I know where you live. Why don't we just meet? You know, all this is in Spanish. And he's like, I'm not signing any purchase agreement. I'll just sign the deed when I, this is when I was at his house. And I didn't know the difference between a purchase agreement and a deed. It was my first campaign. So I'm like, okay, I just need to FaceTime my partner real quick. I just called my brother and hey Levi, what, what should we do here? So it was very much like that. The first few deals. And then right away, I realized it was an opportunity. And email. Because I guess I'm a millennial and like this whole concept of sending letters was weird. So I started sending emails from the skip trace that I would get. And they got also in California. And they got this, this woman whose grandparents left them a parcel. She knew it was worth a lot, but she said, every land investor calls me. They know that it has to go through probate, which means that my grandparents died without, you know, a will or without putting it in my name. And they all, they all just leave. And I really want to monetize this property. So I offered her 7,000 and she was happy about that. And I paid for for all the legal fees. I sold it for $45,000. And that, you know, that was an email. It was straight up email. This before I got fancy with emails. This was literally mail merge emails from like, I was jeopardizing my personal email. This is this is stupid, you know, rookie mistakes. But it worked. And, and I started doing, um, a lot of these like very time-intensive personalized deals with people. And I really learned the ins and outs of the business that way. And that's how slowly I started scaling. You know, first brought someone to help me in general, then brought in a texter, then another one, then a comp person, then a data person, then, you know, and we can talk about the team later. But that, that was kind of my early beginnings. Was very deal by deal. I still miss that, you know, talking to sellers and negotiating. But deal by deal, paying attention to what their needs are, bringing value to them, and then learning the process and scaling from there.

We got to get into this email stuff because you're right, this is not something that I hear often. I mean, I've heard it a handful of times, but this is definitely not the norm. Of the dozens of questions I can think of, the first one would be like, what software are you using? Like, what are you saying in your email? Right? What kind of response rate do you get? Just tell us how that works.

Okay, so if I were to break down my whole business into four pillars, the first pillar, the first pillar would be marketing channels. The second one would be markets, which markets do I go to? The third one would be employees, and then the fourth one would be inventory. Okay? Now, each one of those pillars have metrics tied to them. So how well is this particular channel performing? How well is this market, you know, how well is this employee performing? And then, you know, this, the inventory that we have, how many views, how many saves, how many offers? So everything has a number and everything is trackable. So, you know, right now, let's talk about acquisition channels. Well, let's say we skip trace 130,000 people per month. Okay? So we start with texting and we text everybody. Then we take the people who never replied and we send them emails. We send them them ringless voicemails. We send them mailers. And we also cold call. Now, cold calling is still like, not fully our strength because the other four that we do, it's always range offers. So when we're texting somebody and they're like, oh, how much you want to pay for my proper? You know, everybody wants, wants to know how much you're going to pay. We throw them a range offer. And if they're within, they say yes, then we take the time to comp and we take the time to to qualify them further.

And how big is your range?

The range, we usually tell them like, let's say 2,500 to 3,500 an acre. You know, cuz we think it's worth around 40, from 45 to 65, you know? So it's kind of just to keep the conversation going because everybody wants to know the number. And we don't have time to give everybody a number. So we give them like a, a low ball range. And if they say, sorry, I want, you know, whatever, then it's not a good deal. And if they're cool with it, then we look into further. We do the same thing with email. We do the same thing with mailers. And then mailers, we do more of a blind offer. And if the property is too expensive, like if we're dealing with like a million dollar property, you're not going to, we'll just give them a range. So we kind of, there's also, it's very hard to comp and to send blind offers for properties that are 100 acres plus at volume. So for those, we just do a range. We just want to get on the phone with people. But anything smaller than 100 acres, we'll still in the blind offer. And, um, RVMS is very similar where we don't give a range in the voicemail. But it's a voicemail. The problem with cold call is that you're calling a guy, okay? And he's, uh, Whole Foods, right? And he's getting a phone call from you. He's not down to start discussing numbers with you, right? Text or voicemail or email or a letter, it's, you send the piece, and then they have time to think for a second, and then they get back to you. A phone call is very, very instant and very intriguing. So we haven't been able to do range offers on a cold call. The problem with that is, is that it has generated tremendous amount of leads that aren't very qualified. They're just people who said, yes, I want to sell my property. So then, you know, we have to, we have to still perfect that. So in, in this business, my role as a CEO is, is optimize, scale, optimize, scale, optimize, scale, optimize the process, optimize, you know, the four pillars of the business, the way I see them, and then scale. Right? More texting, more channels, more markets, more employees. But, you know, to your point, before, I tend to scale and to do things before optimizing. And that's kind of my, um, blind spot where I'm very eager to hire more people and scale and do TV ads or whatever, without first optimizing everything else that we do have going on. And to answer your question specifically about email, since I know that that was something that was interesting to you, I started doing simple mail merge. Mail merge is for those that don't know, is you have a spreadsheet, let's say Google Sheet of, um, let's say a thousand emails. And then you create a, uh, there's a Google Chrome add-on called Mail Merge. There's, there's thousands of them. And you create an email, simple email, say, hey, your name came up because we're buying property in your county. And let me know if you're interested in selling your land. Very simple, you know? And then it kind of sends like 50 a day or something. I think I didn't have money then to like pay for the pro account, so I was literally going out of my personal inbox. And that's like a very high risk, let's just say. What's right about that was that I took action. And what was wrong about that is that I almost, I almost jeopardized my entire email and and server and website, everything. Because obviously too many people report spam, and then everything just goes into spam. And then, you know, buyers trying to get a hold of you, title selling you, sending you like closing documents, everything's just going. So just a terrible idea.

Yeah. So what, what you should do is a few things. So there's a lot of, um, email platforms out there. We use Mailshake, but there's, there's a bunch. And what you do is, you first want to qualify all the email addresses. So there's a lot of tools out there. There's one called Debounce, debounce.io. And there's so many of them that basically, you pay like very little, but you upload your laundry list of thousand of emails that you got back from your skip tracing. Because a lot of investors don't realize, but when you skip trace lists, you get emails that nobody does anything with them, and you get them for free. So a lot of them are garbage, most of them are garbage. But still, there's enough, especially if you're doing the kind of volume that we're doing, you can be sending a thousand emails a day, verified, qualified emails per day. And emails is free. Like, you don't have to pay anybody to send emails, right? And emails, as opposed to texting, you don't have to sit there sending email by email. You can actually just send a bulk email. Now, there's a few, you know, tricks of the trade. First of all, the whole objective with email marketing is deliverability. Okay? Because everybody can send thousands of emails a day, but if they all land in spam or in promotions, no one's going to see them. Now, if you check your promotion tab, you'll see there's some billion-dollar companies that are still landing in promotions, and they couldn't figure out how to land in your inbox. So if they couldn't figure out, chances are I cannot figure it out either. So I don't pretend to know better than than these humongous companies that are still landing my promotions and spam. That being said, they don't have the luxury to do smaller batch testing or to do like little tricks that we do. So first of all, you want to avoid bad emails. Okay? So you want to clean those lists. Second of all, you you want to avoid spam words. You could Google what are some spam words. Third of all, instead of putting an unsubscribe button at the end of your email, you should write, "Reply unsubscribe if you'd like to opt out." What that does is, people reply unsubscribe, but that tricks the system to thinking that you're having engagement. And that's actually good for you. So when somebody replies unsubscribe, we obviously delete them, right? Because, you know, we do what they say we should do. But that's good engagement. The problem with that is, on the flip side, if you're trying to track like engagement, every unsubscribe is considered an engagement as far as the platform is concerned. Because you had all these people that replied to you. But it still works, you know? You also, there's some like backend stuff that you could do, like, you know, emails going back and forth. You can schedule emails between two accounts just to like show that there's some sort of, and another tip is that you want to have a domain that is in your actual domain, right? So our domain is lotofland.com. We have my lot of land, the lot of land, lot of land with hyphens. Use a bunch of stuff that look like your company but aren't actually your domain, cuz you want to keep your domain safe and clean. So if anything happens, your domain doesn't go down. And you also want to use multiple aliases. So if let's say, you know, Seth Williams, my lot of land, or seth.williams, s.williams, williams.seth, so multiple variations. So if one of them gets spam, you know, you have to also, there's a recovery period till you come back. So it's a, we actually have a deliverability team outsourced, but they're in our Slack and they're basically on our payroll at this point, and their whole job is to ensure that our emails are landing in inbox.

Yeah, I will say that whole, uh, unsubscribe button thing. So I've got like a filter set up in my Gmail where if you even say the word unsubscribe anywhere in the email, it, uh, sends you to a separate folder where I will most likely just delete your email and block you. So that's a, and I kind of, I kind of hate those people who don't put the word unsubscribing there because they, they're doing exactly what you say, and it, uh, it's kind of gets past that filter I set up, and it's annoying to have to reply to them. But I guess it works.

What if someone sends you like a love letter? Hey Seth, I love your content and I'm never going to unsubscribe.

Oh man, that's that would be very unfortunate for them and me because I want to get emails. But so with email, there's obviously a huge benefit in that it doesn't really cost hardly anything, other than whatever you're paying to ensure deliverability. But what kind of response rate or close rate? Like, how effective is this? Like, is it worthwhile to do this? Is it like one in a thousand or one in 100 or how well does it work?

That is a very good question. And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot because let's talk about the other marketing channels, like mailers. Mailers is expensive, but super effective. Texting, like they work. So sometimes I ask myself, like, why reinvent the wheel? Why not just scale my texting team or why not scale, you know, the mailer team? So the answer to that is, you never know what will change with the texting regulations. The minute they change something or they stop something, I'm an expert in email marketing. I can just ramp that up. I already have the team for it. There's no waste of time. The same with mailers, you know, some states are banning or not, you know, it's always good to to have that. I would say it's a different kind of person. So if I, if I identify a market that really works for me, that there's super high demand, anything we get works. And you mailed that place already, you've texted it, you, and you still didn't get a hold of the owners. Like this woman in California, the mail was going to her grandparents' house, no one's checking that. Tax her phone number wasn't associated with anything, but somehow her email was because maybe she was paying the taxes or somehow her email was associated with that property and she got the email. The kind of leads that we get with email are actually very good leads. They are people who have email. You know, you could imagine there are people who are doing business with you as if you're a businessman, and you know, it's, it's a different conversation than a spam text or. So I don't know the exact number. I know we've closed a bunch of email deals. The ratio, I don't know how good it is compared to the other ones. But here's the thing, the margins are so good in this business that one deal, you know, it pays for, you know, the time of the people, the deliverability team, it pays for the software. Like just one deal. So you do one deal and then everything else is. And obviously, the goal is to automate all of this as much as possible so it doesn't take up much of my time. And then it's kind of just extra funnel, if you will, of, of cash flow. So, so to answer your question, not great, but still profitable. And I, I still keep, you know, there's a saying, what is it? Don't kill a cow that gives milk, or something. So if it's giving milk, you know, just let the cow be.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So of all those different marketing channel pillars that you mentioned, we got text, email, ringless voicemail, direct mail, cold calling. Which one is most important? Like, what is the one that you live and die by? Like, you're in huge trouble if that one disappears, or does that even exist? Like, maybe it's not a big deal because you have these other four?

I've built my team around texting. Texting is very labor-intensive. So everyone in the team has a scorecard, okay? So we meet every week with the team, and everyone, every day, logs in how, you know, the texts have, how many texts you send, how many people answer, how many leads. So everyone's got a number, which is great for them because they know what they're doing and, you know, they have goals they can aspire to. It's great for us because, you know, I see what's going on, what's not going on. And texting is so labor-intensive, there's so many people, you know, sending those texts, qualifying those texts. That if texting goes down, a lot of my team won't have what to do. So that's why texting is, I think, the most important, just because the amount of families that it's supporting currently, if, if you will. Mailers doesn't take that much time, but mailers is super effective because like we mentioned before, they kind of, especially blind offers, they do the qualifying for you. So if texting goes away, I would, I would definitely do mailers. It's more expensive, let's just say, but it's more effective. And then the rest, you know, RVM and email and cold calling, those are kind of the alternative methods.

We should call them. Is direct mail that something where like, you may not ever send a mailer to somebody? Somebody like, if they just reply to the text, maybe that's all will ever happen? Is mail like one of the last resorts? Like, if they don't respond to this and this and this, then I'll send the mail, or is it one of the first resorts?

No, no. We scrub out the people who already answered us in the other channels. And cuz mail's expensive, you know, we also send like nice mailer, color with, you know, questions, answers, you know, we, we do it proper. And I wouldn't want to send a blind offer to someone who already agreed to sell us via text for cheaper. And that would be a disaster. But also, I wouldn't want to spend money or waste money on people who said unsubscribe or people who said, you know, we sold it or whatever. So, so we obviously scrub up for those. But mailer comes after.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's worth noting that like, I heard this recently from, can't remember this house wholesaler's name. He's the guy that owns InvestorLift, you know, that big house wholesaling platform that helps wholesalers get buyers. Basically, maybe maybe not, whatever. The point is, he was in this interview talking about how anybody in real estate's goal, whose, you know, primary objective is acquisitions in terms of metrics, is to track cost per acquisition and cash conversion cycle in terms of when you spend money versus when you make money, right? And your goal is to drive down those two things as much as possible, right? You want the cheapest cost of acquisition and the fastest cash conversion cycle. And so, you know, with regards to the marketing, I think it's really interesting because with like texting, for example, my team's addicted to it because of how fast that feedback loop is, right? We send out texting in a new market and we might get a deal that day. And if we do, we can buy it in two to three weeks. Like, we, we had one recently down in Florida. It's in North Florida. And we, we bought this property for 150,000, which is exactly what the seller asked for. So sometimes when people ask for things and I know I can do it, I don't even try to negotiate. I'm like, don't rock the boat. We can make money on this. We cut it up into 22 acre parcels and listed each at 150, and we've been getting good traction. So that was one. We sent out the texting and it was like within, I think two or three days, we had this guy. And then a day later, we had a contract, right? Whereas with direct mail, it can be a lot slower. But at the same time, you know, and I think what Mayor is talking about is like, your, your leads are so much more qualified. So maybe depending on how your team is designed, you get to it quicker, or it's a lot less follow-up intensive. And that's why a majority of investors that try to go from direct mail to text messaging fail. That's like the biggest issue I see. Is like, our team will follow up usually 24 times before we put them back on a drip manually. We'll double dial twice a day for a couple of days, and then every day, 24 times. 24 times? A lot. I go, we are, yeah, we are ruthless. But, you know, we get the sellers' permission to contact them. And and typically that 24, so we have, we have two layers of follow-up. And I'm sorry, Mayor, you're supposed to be the one talking here. But we have two layers of follow-up. The first one is to do that first, like, intro phone call, basically. So we don't talk numbers until our lead manager goes through like the basic script. And then that 24 is actually after that phone call. So we may follow up a lot more than that. But it's, hey, we're ready for an offer. We want to get an offer to this person. And that's when we'll go really aggressive because we've done a lot of work. Our cost for that lead is probably around 50 bucks at that point. And I don't like throwing $50 in the trash and lighting it on fire very often. So I tell my team to go ahead and go really aggressively to, uh, get in contact. But we had a guy who lived in Alaska. Does this thing every year where he goes to a remote cabin in Alaska and disconnects from all of his devices. And he said to me, he said, AJ, your acquisitions manager left over 17 voicemails on my phone over the past. Did you give her a raise? Yeah, we actually ended up paying her for some maternity leave because she had a baby, so she was gone for a bit. Um, but I think we did give her a raise a little bit after that too. I can't remember, but I know we did at one point. But it was it was hilarious. And I was like, sir, that's, that's what we pay him to do. So I'm glad to hear it. He was like, well, I'll tell you what, you know, I'm a business person. Anybody that's willing to follow up with me this much clearly is going to follow through. So I'll give you guys my business. Let's go. And so that's, that's a double closing. We we got under contract at 160 and we've got an offer right now at 230 and we're taking it. So we haven't closed on it yet, but it's a good double closing with good margins. But follow-up wins in this world. But I'm sorry, I just need to go through that quick. That's worth going on a little tangent about because a lot of people don't know how to do that. A lot of new people, I feel like, like they just kind of feel like, I just take this first step, but like they don't respond to people or they respond multiple times. And it's like, why are you doing anything if you're not going to follow up? You know, it's like, seems kind of a no-brainer, but, but a lot of people don't get that.

Well, we've kind of hit the marketing pieces quite a bit. There's a lot more we could talk about, but there's other things I want to move on to. So tell us about what your average deal looks like. I know you do a lot of, you know, assignments and double closings. So like, what size are we talking about? Like, how big are these deals? And I guess we talked a little bit about how you're finding them through texting and that kind of stuff, but maybe just walk us through a typical deal.

Sure. So I have this radical idea that many people on the land business don't seem to agree that that bills are paid with dollars and not with percentages. So like, as a company, we make money when there's like 20 to 30 grand on the deal. And that's kind of like my sweet spot. Like, I want to do a deal less than that, just because of the time and energy. You know, they say that, um, a lion doesn't chase a rat or a mouse because the energy that it uses to catch that mouse is more than the energy that it gets that's from the mouse, you know what I mean? So there's so many low-hanging fruit. There's so many amazing juicy deals to do. Like, why bother with the small ones? You know? So we try to like, kind of 20 to 30 also work well because the minute you start doing more than that, there's a lot of earnest money that needs to go down and it, it's just more complicated. So that's kind of the sweet spot for us. And then we work our way backwards from there. You know, so if a seller wants 200 grand for a property and we think it's worth 250, and we'll list it for 240 and will get somebody for 230. I'm never going to buy that outright. But if I can make 30 grand in that deal, why not? And, um, sometimes they'll want earnest money, and that's fine. If it's, you know, a good enough deal, we'll do that. So that's kind of why I think we get a lot of the deals that other investors don't end up getting from the sellers is because we'll pay more. And I'm okay paying more because I'm okay with the margin that is left for me, whereas some investors won't do it because if I'm not doubling my money or if I'm not paying 40 cents on the dollar, I'm not going to do it, even though it's just not the way it works. So we try to do a lot of volume. It's a, it's a numbers game. It's just a volume's game for us at this point. And that's kind of one part of the business that that's run mostly by the team. And there's already processes in place and and everybody knows how to do it. But then there's like the bigger deals. And, and there, there is the housing shortage in America. And there's plenty of developers out there. The developers don't necessarily like buying, finding land, having this like million or $2 million land sitting on their balance sheet for a full year until they figure out how to do the entitlement and how to get the permits and all that. So there are people actually that we work with who are kind of the bridge between us and the big developers. So they'll get the property on contract from us and they will entitle it and they'll make, you know, millions of dollars on these deals because they'll sell it, they'll sell the paper lots, basically, they'll sell the parcel already parceled out to the developers, shovel ready, so they can come and start building. So they go through all the entire process. I know there's a lot of land investors who do this themselves. I could technically do it myself. It's just very time-consuming. And right now, I'm kind of super focused on on the team and on the company that we have now. So it's hard for me to do that. That being said, I can flip a contract from a seller to an entitler who then goes and entitles it and sells it to a developer. Now, those deals are more complicated. Those deals require a lot of money down, require a seller who's willing to work with you. So a deal like that, I would, let's say, put in, you know, $20,000 earnest money every 60 to 90 days. I'll explain to the seller that we're going to entitle it, we have to develop it, and we're not going to buy until everything's ready to go. Best case scenario, everything's good, we buy the property. Worst case scenario, they keep all of our earnest money. So it's really a win-win for them. And then I go and and shop, by now I have contacts, but, you know, we still have to shop for somebody who's willing to buy that off from us with the same kind of time frame and sort of the same earnest money as that we put down, right?

So what's interesting about this is that a lot of courses will tell you, like land courses or, you know, people who are early in the land business will say, hey, you want to double your money. Buy a property for 20 grand and flip it for 40. Sound advice. But how about buy a property for a million, put 20 down, the same 20 grand that you have, and then flip that for 1.5? Now, instead of making 20,000 with your 20 grand, now you just made $500,000 with your 20 grand. It's assuming you can find that buyer in the back end. If you don't, then you just wasted the 20 grand, right?

No, because you could have a 60-day due diligence period for those 20 grand. Ah, and then you get your deposit back. Then, yeah, you put it in there, you but, but all this with, you know, utmost honesty and integrity with the seller. You say, hey, listen, I deal with developers. I, you know, this is an interesting property. It's an interesting opportunity. I need 60 days. I'm giving you 20 grand. I just need 60 days so I can see if this is even feasible. And part of feasibility is finding an, you know, an entity who's going to do it. And you're dealing at that level, you're dealing with people who understand business, people who understand what you're doing, and they're okay with it. And they're okay with making their million dollars, okay? So, so it's just a little more sophisticated, but it's actually a lot more enjoyable and of course, a lot more profitable. So that's sort of one of our key hires for, for the, the last quarter of this year is going to be someone focused so on finding. And you, you don't even have to do a lot of marketing to get these. They don't have to be off-market deals. You could just find them on land.com. You know, the margins are so good that you don't have to go crazy. You literally have to go to markets where you see a lot of development, see land that's just looks like it's sitting there waiting to be developed. Reach out to the owner, say, hey, what's the story? And sometimes there is no story, just nobody came to them yet. But sometimes there is, you know, there's wetlands or there's this, there's that. But it's just a matter of finding these things. You do one deal a year and you're doing better than, and flipping a bunch of these other ones, you know?

You're going after a lot of these, uh, deals with the intent to assign or double close them. And that is a big part of the reason why you were able to offer so much more money, correct?

That's right.

And that is another distinction to make compared to those who are not willing to offer so much more money and they're more concerned about percentages, is because that thought process is more of, I'm going to buy this thing and take title to it and then just hang out for however long it takes to sell the thing. So there's kind of more skin that they're sinking into the deal. Al doesn't have to be that way, as you've proven. And you could just go into it with the intent of never really owning it long term at all, or even short term. I'm wondering, of all these different deals that you pursue where you get them under contract with the intent to assign it or double close it, I mean, in my experience with that, the main risk on the table if I'm not putting any earnest money down is just that I might be wasting my time. Like, I could be putting all this effort into trying to find another buyer to assign this thing to, maybe I can't, and then this contract will time out and I just wasted a lot of effort. How often does it not pan out for you? What percentage of the time do you successfully find an end buyer in the time frame that you need to?

Most of the properties pan out because if it doesn't sell within the first 10, 15 days, we keep lowering the price. We keep lowering the price. We keep lowering the price. Now, if we lower the price till we're barely making any money and it's still doesn't sell, then it's a problem with the property. And then it's a conversation with the seller. So if a property doesn't sell, there's one of two issues that could be wrong with it: the price or the property. Either your price is too high or the property has an issue. If the property is good and the price is good, it will sell. So if a property is not moving, must be a reason. Must be something that we didn't know when we signed the contract. And it's always a conversation with the sellers saying, hey, you know, we didn't know that the first half of this property is fully wetlands. It didn't show up in the wetland map. Or we didn't know that the easement wasn't a recorded easement, you know, we thought you had access to the property. So a lot of times we have issues that we have a conversation. Now, here's the thing, we try to provide value for the sellers, okay? So somebody who has land in the middle of nowhere, there's two issues, two things that they do not know that we do, and that is why we're in business. Number one, they don't know how much it's worth. They don't know data. So we're essentially a data company. Number two, they don't know how to market land. We know how to market. So we're a marketing company. That's why we have data analysts on the team and we have marketers on the team. Because we know how to price land and we know how to sell land. We also know how to do a lot of the due diligence, a lot of investigations. We'll find out about the wetland, we'll find out about, you know, all these issues that come up. So the conversation with the seller is always, we are the best chance you will ever get to selling this property. You give it to a realtor, they're not going to hustle the way we do. I mean, we sell, I mean, our dispo team is pushing these properties everywhere. Like we're talking so many platforms, not just the MLS. And we send drones out there. And we literally do our 110% best to get this property sold. If it doesn't sell after a little while, we'll go back to the seller. We'll explain to him the issues. We'll give him everything that we have for free, right? Here's, here's the pictures. Here's, if we had a survey, we'll do a survey. Like all this stuff. And then it's a win-win. So like, they either sell it through us, or they don't. But now they have all this information that they didn't otherwise have. And they had somebody who for free hustled it to try to get it sold and still couldn't get it sold, which means they have to lower the price or maybe they have to fix something and then they can sell it whenever they want. So it's really a value that we bring to the sellers. And we also bring value to the buyers, you know, a lot of the time, you know, buyers are so happy with the properties and the price that we bring, especially when we do splits. Because we also do some subdivide projects. We haven't spoken about those, but, you know, I do some minor splits all the time. And what's interesting about my minor splits is that lately I've been double closing subdivisions. And it's, it's a pretty crazy concept, but it's a very

"Hey dude, you got 80 acres? Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to start selling these off in chunks, okay? 'Cause we'll sell them off at, you know, 10 acres, 15 acres. Every time somebody wants to buy a chunk of the property, so we market it as if it's already 10 acres, 15 acres. And we write that, you know, we haven't yet subdivided the property. But somebody calls me up and says, 'Hey, I want 15 acres, I want this.' I literally go on Photoshop and we do a zoom and we're like, 'Okay, which 10 acres do you want?' and we draw it together. We send over a surveyor. This is assuming that you could do a minor subdivision with the exemptions and you don't have to go through the planning process. But in counties that allow for that, then we just do that. And then we create a new survey, a new meets and bounds. It's called when you, like, you know, draw the new area that the person is buying. The seller signs and notarizes the A to B. Then we do the B to C. And, um, and we started doing a lot of those. And then that's, that's another way of doing subdivisions without fronting all the money. Obviously, the seller has to be cool with it. And this 80-acre one in Texas was a little bit complicated 'cause there were so many parcels that we got out of that one. But sometimes it's as simple as, like, you know, somebody, like AJ was saying, you know, he had, uh, you know, the 150, he split it into two and now he's selling at 150 at a time. You don't necessarily have to buy it yet. You just market it as, as two separate parcels. And if somebody wants the whole thing, great. If somebody wants half of it, then you're on the hook for the other half. If you don't find the buyer by the time you got to close, then you got to front the money. But that's, that's another way of, uh, of, um, subdividing these tracks.

You had said something a while back about, 'Probably doesn't sell in the time frame you have in mind. It's either a problem with the price or a problem with the property.' And the thought that came to my mind when you said that is, what if it's a marketing problem? Like, what if the price and the property are good, but the right pair of eyes just hasn't seen it yet? And, you know, as I know from my experience, I'm probably not as good a marketer as you are. But sometimes it takes many months for a deal to come to fruition. So I guess what that leads me to believe is that you are very, very good at marketing these things. Like, you're able to consistently sell these things quickly. And maybe that's a function of just getting really good properties under contract. I don't know. But where the question is going is, how are you so good at this? Like, when you say that we're going to do 110% best to get the property sold, what does that look like? Like, where are you advertising these things? How does a person get as good as you are at doing this?"

"Yeah, I don't think I'm really good at it. I just only go to markets where there's a lot more demand than supply. So I won't touch a market that doesn't have an insane amount of demand. So it, it really begins from there. Choose a market that you have at least 100% more, more demand and supply in the last six months. If you're not seeing that kind of activity, I won't even go there. So, so that's already, you know, I'm dealing in a market that works well, that sells quick, that people are looking to buy property, that I'm seeing stuff sell. And if this particular parcel doesn't sell, yeah, there's always, you know, bad luck and there's always, um, you know, just the right people didn't see it yet. And if it's a good enough deal, I'll buy it, you know, I won't let it go.

But to answer your question more specifically, where do we advertise? So we, most of our deals come from the MLS. We actually don't really use agents. We feel like when we list properties ourselves, we have more of a finger on the pulse of what's going on. Every lead comes to us, every negotiation, every conversation works with us. We can move very quickly, right? We can send a drone guy there tomorrow and then in two days we can have it listed. We can change the price on a whim if we want to, you know, drop it a little bit. We feel like we have more control. Sometimes if it's a bigger property or a property that doesn't have easy access, then we will work with the realtor. Or if in the process of comping this property, we asked an agent for their opinion and they gave us their opinion and they were good and they took the time to go to see it, then I would actually give them the listing just out of goodwill, you know, I wouldn't want them to work for free. So there are cases where we use agents, but most of the time we list them ourselves.

We also list on land.com. We have a signature account. Although I wish I can say we have a lot of deal flow from there, we don't. We have a lot of eyeballs, we have a lot of people who want seller financing. But, but we do that, you know, we sell a little bit there. Facebook Marketplace, a lot of tire kickers there, a lot of time wasters, but we do list there as well. And, uh, we put a sign on every property. We actually ask the drone photographers to go and buy a sign and put it there. That's a nice little tip. You can just give them 50 bucks, they'll do it. And we call neighbors next door neighbors. Say, 'Hey, we're selling the property.' Also, because we don't buy property from people who live near their properties, we don't run the risk of them being, 'Hey, why'd you put it for sale? Selling my property?' or, you know, 'Oh, you're selling Timmy's property? Why are you selling it?' People don't really know who these people are. And, and it's also more value to the seller, you know? I, I don't want to steal someone's backyard. I just want to, you know, give someone money for property that's across the country that they don't even use that their great-grandmother left them, you know? That that's kind of where I'm at. So, so yeah, we really push it. We really try marketing it. We could do better, I think. As we scale the dispo team, we're going to start hiring some people to literally do call calling to agents and say, 'Hey, we have this in this property,' just to kind of give them a pocket listing, as we call it in the industry, so they can always, uh, you know, sell that, you know, if they have an interested buyer. So we could do a lot more outreach that we currently do. But again, optimize, scale. Optimize, scale. It's hard to be scaling constantly before optimizing what we currently have. It's kind of a chicken and egg thing. It's like, how do you optimize until you scale to some point? It's, uh, I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about that. It's like, I don't really know what the right point is. But, uh, it's hard to nail that perfectly, for sure."

"I was just gonna say to try in, really quick, one of my really good buddies that's a multi-seven-figure house wholesaler, his name's Chandler. Say he, he built out a really pretty framework for people to evaluate whether you just need to like spend more money, AKA scale, versus optimize your current process. And he boiled it down to a couple of key inputs. So just like, high level, just for everybody here, I want to make sure people leave with something actionable out of this. Is, you know, typically, like, metrics we're tracking in our business that model this are, number one, like, net leads. So out of every single lead that comes into your pipeline, what percentage of those can you actually do business with? Right? For example, let's say, like, 40% of your leads are landlocked properties, okay? And then it's a question of like, well, what if I filled my pipeline with just properties that weren't landlocked? Right? Is there a way to filter that out on the front end and now your pipeline is filled with people you can actually do business with? And I always say, people you can do business with, that's two things. It has to be the right property, the type of property I would buy, and the right seller, type of seller I can work with. Right? Because if it's some type of, like, undivided interest that I can't find the other heirs for, like, if it's something messy like that, I can't really work with that depending, you know, there's, there's a lot of different angles people hit in this business. But the point being, those are the two main variables. So we track net leads. And then you want to see out of those leads, how many can you actually get on the phone? So we track both calls and connection rate. And then it's how many offers you make out of that. Um, then how many people accept. And then how many contracts you get signed, okay? And that's kind of like the whole flow there. I would love to, like, put something together and share it with the audience if that's something you want, Seth. But like, that's something we've been working on kind of in the background. And recently, to, we, we found a huge gap. We found out a few months ago, only 50% of our contracts were getting signed, which is a huge issue because you're like, if you're just looking at like verbals, it's like, oh man, we're doing a great job, you know, we're getting all these contracts signed, but like, where's the money? Right? Or where are the properties? Or where's the inventory? Whatever, whatever metric you want to look through that at. And we realize, okay, where's the gap? And look through our KPIs and realize, oh, for every six contracts we send out, we're only getting three signed back. So something we did to optimize versus scale here was, we don't need to spend more money on ad or marketing. Right? We don't need to send out more text or send out more mail to get to basically double our business. For us to double our business, we needed to fill a very small process gap. And so what we have our team doing now is, we actually on our offer call, our acquisitions manager will preface the to the beginning and say, 'Hey Seth, our objective on this call is, if we come to terms on price, to get an agreement signed today, right?' And so as part of the process, if we come to terms on a price, our acquisitions manager is trained to put them on a brief hold and draft up the contract. After that hold, walk them through it, so you can work through any contract objections live. Because you know how many times do you send out a contract and then it either takes three weeks to come back or they just ghost you? Right? And sometimes people ghost you because they're lazy, not because they don't want to do business with you. So we'll follow up aggressively. But we have found if we just talk them through it live, we are able to get so many more signed contracts. And now we're closer to like 80, 85%. If you don't screen for, like, that front end, like husband-wife objection, or are you in a place to sign an agreement, that'll screw that up a little bit. But you want to make sure, like, oh, so you're the only person on the deed? Are you the only person that has to make a decision on whether this is sold? That way, later on, if they hit you with like, 'Oh, I have to talk to my wife.' Oh, okay. You know, obviously, please go talk to your wife, man. But just out of curiosity, like, is this something she would like, divorce you over? Is this something like, you know, you mentioned you were the only person on, so I just, you know, I'm trying to get a feel for. So like, you make, I train my team to always make it funny. Like, we like keeping things like lighthearted and funny. But anyways, we're putting together a framework on how to optimize versus scale based on what things look like. So it's a fun topic. Something you can tell, I I get a lot of energy from this stuff. So I just wanted to chime in. Those are kind of the key metrics we run through. I could put together something prettier, but I'll stop there."

"That's great. That's really good. And we also, well, when we meet on Thursdays, everyone's got a number, like I mentioned. But then we also do a check-in. One is like your head and your heart, basically. So we do a check-in of clarity, one to 10, where are you? And everybody has to check in. And also, how you feeling? How you feeling your life? How you feeling at work? And those two numbers are so telling. Because if someone gives me clarity from one to 10, I'm a five. Then you ask why. Like, why are you a five? Well, because we just went on the new market and whatever it is. And then I, I start realizing issues before they become bigger issues. And that's one way to optimize. Literally, just ask the team what's going on, what are you overwhelmed with? And that's also a way to scale. 'Cause if somebody's at capacity, then we hire somebody else to help them out. And then, you know, let's say the, you know, the texter is out of capacity, we'll hire another texter. And then there's too many leads for the comp, we'll hire another comp. And then there's, there's. So that's kind of how we optimize and scale at the same time, just getting the feedback there.

Yet, a few clarifying questions from what you said earlier, uh, Mayor. So first of all, we're talking about, you know, you're not really that good of a marketer, you just pick markets where there's 100% more demand than there is supply. So how specifically are you measuring and verifying this? Like, what stats are you looking at and where is this information coming from? We've tried with many different sources of information. We tried with land.com. We tried with, now we basically follow Zillow. Just go, go to Zillow, just click land, click past, you know, six months. If there's a lot of yellow dots, which means a lot of sold, and then you toggle over to for sale, and you don't see that much, then you know that's a good market. Could you verify it with land.com and with other platforms? Yes, but you're just going to get more confused. And also, we don't really do counties anymore. I know a lot of people like are very like, I'm going to mail counties. I think counties are very big. In some cases, and counties could have a city that's super expensive in the county, and then then the suburbs, which is super high or demand can vary within the county. So we don't really do counties anymore. We do areas. So like, we'll do like, you know, if there's a specific city that we think is great, we'll do like Northeast of that city. I don't care what county or city it is. I'm going after trying to stay very objective and and very focused into where are we going? Yeah, like what are we doing? Where are we going? How can we maximize what we're doing? So just to verify, so on Zillow, and I like Zillow too, I think it's an awesome tool to use for this, in terms of verifying that there's 100% more demand than supply. What I'm hearing is that you're basically just looking at sold comps and comparing that to for sale comps and if there's, what is it, twice as many sold comps than there are for sale comps, and you're just kind of eyeballing it, right? You're not like literally counting them up and saying, 'No, I am. I am.' In the past six months, so let's just pick me, go to Austin, right? So go, I know, just look at Austin. Go, uh, last six months, land sold, okay? If you're seeing 700, and then go for sale, and you see 350, that's 100% more demand than supply. So obviously, I wouldn't recommend you go after Austin, it's a city. But you can go an hour away from Austin in any direction as long as there is more demand and supply. So yeah, we do count. You know, we do want to hit at least that. There's also a number that you don't want to go above, which is, you don't want to go above, um, too hot of a county, too, too hot of a market, you know? So if it's too hot and there's nothing for sale and everything selling, it's going to be hard to get a deal. It's just not necessarily a good place to go. So you kind of want to be somewhere in between. Yeah. And what do you consider too hot? At 800%? You know, you go to these places where there's nothing for sale and like anything, you know, anything that's for sale is already sold within a day. You know, sellers know that it's a hot market and they'll want market price. So if there's nothing for sale and so many things sold, it's just, it's kind of, you know, rule of thumb. And on that, the sold comps thing, so are you getting granular at all about the size of the vacant land or like any specific, or is it literally just vacant land? I don't care if it's a half acre or 50 acres, just vacant land. Yeah, we do minimum of five acres. And it's just a random number, but it's very hard to, 'cause we want a minimal of like, let's say, $30,000 profit. So it's hard to kind of filter out the cheap properties, right? So the sort of way to filter them out is by size. Yeah, if you use price, then you can technically do that, but that is not that accurate. So let's just, if you're just using, you know, any data provider, the best way to eliminate the cheap properties that I know of is just the smaller ones. Granted, a half an acre in Times Square will cost you a billion dollars, even though it's a half an acre, right? So not necessarily is size equal, you know, price. But that's kind of why we weed out the smaller ones. Now, there are people that do infill lots, and infill lots is very profitable. It's just a completely different business. You know, we're more after the like, you know, rural recreational, rural. And infill lots are very good. You know, if, if you're in that business, then it's a completely different strategy. And of all those different selling platforms that you mentioned, it sounds like, you know, you're on land, you've got the signature account, but it doesn't do a whole lot for you. You're on Facebook, but you get a lot of tire kickers. So it sounds like there's understandably problems with all of them. But I'm wondering like, what is the most effective one? Like, what is the one you're actually impressed with? Like, man, we need this thing, we sell lots of stuff to this platform. For me, for me, it's the MLS, hands down. If I get a call from an agent who has a buyer who saw the property, wants to submit an offer, there's a 95% chance that we're going to close on it. If I get a call from somebody on land or in Facebook, there's like a 3% chance that they're going to go see the property, let alone close on it. So the MLS is just the most serious buyers who are in the market to buy property with an agent. And that, yeah, we give, you know, 2, 3% to the agents. Depends on the market. It's expensive, 'cause don't forget, they get a percentage of the gross. So if we're buying for 200 and selling for just 230, they're getting 3% of, let's say, 230, right? That adds up. That's $7,000 or something, you know, plus closing costs. So that's big. So we have to kind of be careful also with the seller agent commissions with the buyer agent commissions. And that's also another reason why we don't, we don't sell, we don't sell to sellers, is because, uh, seller agents, sorry, for ourselves, is because they also take a chunk, right? And if we're dealing with very thin margins, relatively to the price of the property, then it's hard to do that unless you work out a deal with the agent, be like, 'I'll give you a, a percentage of profits,' which we do, by the way. Forgot to mention, um, another time that we use agents, I've used this in the past, is if an agent, if I, in my mind, this property is worth, let's say, 450, and an agent tells me, 'Hey dude, it's worth 550.' I'll, and and he's right, and he's very confident, I'll go with him because out of gratitude, basically, because it's because of him that I can make another 100 grand. I'll give him the business. So if, if an agent really was able to show me something that I did not see before, they definitely earn my business. But you don't typically list your deals with agents, right? So you're just like posting it for sale by owner on Zillow, and an agent happens to come across it? Is that what you mean when it says comes from the MLS? So it's not actually on the MLS, but that's how it's found? No, it's, yeah, it's on the MLS. It's for sale by owner on the MLS. Flat fee services we use to list our properties. And then, and then it goes through, like, a flat fee service listing provider. And then, for for me, the leads, it's a little complicated, but it works. Yeah. Which, uh, flat fee service are you using? Every market has a different one. Flatfee.com is a good one. Bom.com is a good one. I've tried others, but some, some are more annoying, some are archaic. Yeah, some are good."

"I know you talked about, you know, buying these big, maybe 80-acre properties or something and then selling it to somebody, and then they will put the land entitlements on there and then they will sell it to a developer and make a lot of money. So, so question number one, is there some like repeatable formula to find these deals? Is it just like a big old parcel of land and that's all you need to see? Or like, do you go to markets where you know it's easy to subdivide or you know it's easy to get these entitlements? Or you just kind of looking for large parcels where there's subdividing, uh, potential there? There's two types of subdivisions. Um, there's minor subdivisions, which is what we were talking about, you know, the 10 acres, 15 acres, or what AJ was doing with the splits. Then there's like the big entitlement deals for major developments. Those are, this is actually super easy. Like, I mean, we have LandVision, which is instead of DataTree, it's a different data provider, but they have a filter there where you can have like a layer where you can see all the, um, developments and developers with their logos and everything. So if you see a place that's super hot and there's so many developers, then and you see like a 50-acre track just sitting there and it's flat and there's no wetlands, I mean, this is gold. And it's just a matter of seeing if the seller wants to sell and if they want to sell at a bit of a discount. Now, you don't have to get fancy with LandVision or anything. Just go to markets where you know it's hot. You know, there's a lot of developments. You can see the developments in, you know, Google Earth and start, you know, even in DataTree, you know, you see the developments in DataTree, you see all these little small little parcels, you know, being built and you see like the, the dirt and all that, you know, there's development. They're usually near like, um, like an interstate highway. Uh, they're usually near big cities. And try to find those big parcels and and see if the seller, like, like AJ was saying, if the seller wants to sell. And if the property is a good property, those are the two ingredients. And then if you can strike a deal, then go to the, uh, developers and call them up. You know, go to DRHorton.com and just speak to the real estate person in charge over there, or go to LinkedIn. It's not that complicated, you know, there's, it's just finding the people who are developing and, and pitching it to them. And, and by the way, many times they're okay with you flipping it. Like, nothing secret. You know, they'll send you an LOI. And if there's a margin, good enough margin for you to make the deal work, you kind of negotiate the terms of the earnest money deposit, the trenches, you know, the the timing. And you want to try to align as much as possible so you're not out of pocket so much. But those are amazing deals.

So let's talk a little bit about your team. So when did you hire your first team member? Like, why did you find it necessary to hire them? Like, like what role were they doing? Like, who are some of the other roles that you've hired for? And given that your team is the size that it is now, at nine people, like, what is your role in the business? I love talking about my team, 'cause, uh, I really, uh, it's like a family. And, and it's, it's amazing, you know, when we get together on the chat on Zoom, it's, it's so much fun to have like a team. They're actually getting together now, some of them who are in the Philippines, they're having like a meetup. And if I wasn't married and with three little kids, I would totally go there. But, um, yeah, I love my team. So the first hire was actually another new land investor who's kind of, you know, testing the land investing waters and he's trying to do a deal. And he asked me if we can partner up. And I said, sure. And we did a deal together. And then I said, 'Hey, why don't you come join?' And he was doing initially a lot of the, a lot of the texting, a lot of the outreach. Um, I was traveling at the time, so it was kind of good timing 'cause I wanted to keep the machine running. And ever since, his name is also Mayor, like me, and he's amazing, you know, he really, uh, he really hustles. It really knows the land business in and out by now. And as Mayor was getting very busy cycling and making offers, we had to hire somebody to do the texting. So now we have our acquisition team is made out of six people. There are two on the front lines, as we call them, doing texting, doing the RVMs, doing the emails. Then there's, well, it really starts from the top. It starts with one person, his name is Dean. And Dean does, he does the finding new markets, downloading the data, scrubbing the data, uploading it to all of our platforms so we can do the marketing. So it all starts with Dean. Mayor, he approves what Dean does, uh, his markets. And then it goes down to the actual marketing. Ron and Angela, they are the ones who are front line. And they are their job is to qualify the seller and qualify the property, right? Make sure the seller wants to sell, make sure he agrees to arrange, and make sure the property is not landlocked, make sure the property doesn't have a ton of wetlands, make sure the property is relatively flat. And if the seller's cool, the property's cool, boom, they go into our CRM. Now, in our CRM, we have Randy and we have Chantel. Those two are the acquisition managers, I would say. They get the leads that are somewhat qualified. And now they have to call the sellers and just kind of chat them up a little bit, make sure they're actually interested in selling. 'Cause before it was a texting conversation, now it's actually like a human interaction. And they comp the property. Eventually, I'm going to get somebody just for comping, so they can focus more on negotiating deals and talking to sellers. And not, but they speak to the seller, they qualify them, they comp the properties, and then they put all the comps and their opinion of value on the CRM. Mayor approves every deal, and then I approve every deal. And once it's all approved, sometimes we have questions. I'm, I'm mostly looking at the property, not so much the comps, but mostly like looking at things they might have overlooked. Like, 'Hey, there's like this, you know, trailer park next door and it doesn't look very well kept. Like, this might be an issue.' So that's something that sometimes Dean and Mayor don't really see that I kind of see those things. That's sort of more what I'm looking for. And then they go back to the seller, back and forth, and then they send, uh, a purchase agreement. And then we're off to the races. Once they get the purchase agreement signed, we have John on our dispo team. And John orders the due diligence. We don't do it in-house, it just doesn't pay. So we got to due diligence back, we order a drone photographer, we order, you know, we write the copy, we start listing the property everywhere and start pushing really hard. Once we get also, once we get the purchase agreement signed from the seller, we have a transaction coordinator who has made my life incredibly better. It was like that one hire that was like, 'What took me so long?' You have no idea. You're dealing with 10 contracts, yeah, 10 contracts a month. That's 10 sellers, that's buyers, that's title issues. You, you don't even, you don't even know. Like, I don't know why it took me this long. And, um, also, I, I've given her power of attorney to notarize everything for me, to sign everything for me. So I, you know, these things were very, were huge time wasters. So she really is like the oil of the engine that keeps everything just moving. So she contacts the seller, congratulations, and explains to the seller the process. And then John looks for buyers. And, uh, when we get a buyer, we send it to title and then we schedule closing. It's very difficult. There's a lot of moving pieces. For double closings, it's not for everybody. Double closings, you have to make sure the buyer and the seller both at the same time, you know. If I had unlimited money, I, I wouldn't do double closings. It's just because I have to sort of, I'd rather use the money that I have for earnest money on bigger deals. I'd rather use it to scale the team. That's why I do it, you know, 'cause. But if you had the money, do it then, just. But that's a side note. And then what, so what do I do? I mean, so right now, I'm actually, like I said, I'm in the market for some, for an operations manager or COO, someone to, you know, oversee the four pillars of the business, make sure everything runs smoothly, make sure we scale the things that work, and we, you know, optimize the things that don't really. So my job is really finding the talent, training the talent, creating the systems, the operations. I try to be in as many of the weekly one-on-ones that I can. I try to review the team, the process, and really, you know, working on the business, not so much in the business. And eventually, just, you know, scaling and and scaling and optimizing. I, I think that would, that would be my role. I'm also, like I said, you know, I have, I have a three-year-old, a two-year-old, I have a newborn. And, um, the time that I have for work is very focused time, but it's not a lot of hours. So I, I really try to optimize the time as well."

"Mayor, the man, you dive into so much. I love that you don't hold back here. I feel like you've dropped like a trillion nuggets throughout this. I'm really curious. I think you said his name was Dean, uh, is your data guy? Is that right? Yep. What, what's his background? Where'd you find him? Because if this guy's pulling 130,000 records a month and then dealing with the flow through all five of your marketing channels, I assume he's got to be pretty advanced and organized to handle all that data. So if you don't mind sharing, where'd you find him? What's his background? And then maybe what's his pay band, if you don't care? Sure. Totally not what you think. He's just a regular guy who follows the process that we set in place. You know, he has to look for markets who are more demand than supply. He has to pull the data. More like a data entry job. It's a very entry-level position. Yeah. And it's more, you know, Mayor and me who oversee the work and just kind of make sure that that it's done properly. And there's definitely a lot of, uh, holes that we need to patch and, you know, we're working on that. But again, it's kind of like a spray and pray at this point. It's just like a volume's game. It's just text and market to as many people as you can and try to, you know, lowest hanging fruit, you know, the most motivated sellers and just get deals. And it's kind of working. So sometimes I get complacent. So it's hard for me to like optimize his work. But it's, he's really just following the process. Got it. And is he overseas? Yeah. Got it. Okay, cool. With these, uh, double closings that you're doing, are you using single-source funding, like using the end buyer's cash to fund everything? Or do you have to get, like, transactional funding to make this stuff work? And if so, where's that money coming from? Yeah, so it all depends on the title company that we use. It also depends on who the title company that the buyer wants to use. And, and again, I make things seem super easy and simple. It's kind of a tendency that I have, but things are very complicated the minute you're doing also the volume that we're doing. But like I said, if you have the money, don't do double closings. It's more if you want to scale at this level and go crazy, then do it. So depends on the title company. If we're, if, if I manage to convince the end buyer to use my title company, then I vet the title companies that I use very carefully. And I'm very picky because I need them to A, be okay with this, B, allow for me to use the end buyer to pay for the seller to pay the seller. And C, I don't want title insurance on the A to B, on the first transaction, because I'm only holding the property for 10 minutes. I'm okay not having insurance for 10 minutes, you know, especially when my margins aren't like amazing and I'm paying everybody out. So, so I'm very picky with the title companies that I use. Now, sometimes we need to put up the cash. So I'll put up the cash, or, you know, I'll get, you know, a transactional funder for the day and I'll pay them whatever it is to put up the cash for a day. So that that answers your question."

"So looking back at your team right now, what would you say is your biggest challenge in managing this many people? Or even like with your business in general? It kind of seems like you have things going really good and you know what you're doing, but like, what is difficult? Like, what do you kind of hate about your business at this point? I hate that I've become a manager. I'm, I'm not a manager. I'm, you know, the EOS, the visionary and the integrator, definitely the, uh, the visionary. A leader and a manager are two completely separate things. I'm more of a leader. And I've become a manager. You know, I've become a people manager that I'm just not good at it. I don't like doing it. I actually like talking to sellers. So whenever there's like a complicated situation with a seller, I call him up. There was a seller who wanted a FaceTime, he wanted to FaceTime me. And so Chantel texts me, 'Hey, this guy wants to FaceTime you.' And it was, uh, before he signed. So I, I facetimed him. I'm like, 'Hey, what's up?' He's like, 'Oh, it's you. You're real. You're actually a human being.' He saw my face on the, uh, on the website and on the mailer and everything. He's like, 'I just want to make sure that you're a person and that I'm selling it to you.' I'm like, 'Yeah, I exist.' You know, with with AI, you got to be a little weary, I guess, these days. But, um, I like that. And every time we close, I call the sellers, every single time. And I ask them for a video, a review of their process. I just want to see their face. I want to see what they say. Sometimes they say, 'Yeah, sometimes they say, 'We love it and we had a good time, we just don't want to do a video interview.' But I really miss talking to people, doing deals. Maybe I'm a deal junkie. I don't think so. But I really like conversations with people. And I've become so far away from that and essentially just managing spreadsheets. And it's also stopping me from growing the team. Which is why I think an operator or an integrator running this size team will enable me to scale this to 20, 30, 40 employees, even more. Yeah. I've actually found, uh, that whole thing about being able to show your face and your voice and all the stuff and show people that you're real. Like, that goes a long way. One way that I have done that is through just like video emails, like Loom or BombBomb. And the nice thing is, like, I've actually closed with some pretty big deals based solely on that. Like, it played a major role in getting the deal done, just that they could see that I was a real person. And, you know, I say their name in the video, so it's not some, like, Yeah, but that's also 'cause you're a good-looking guy, Seth. Not everyone can pull that off, you know? Well, I mean, obviously, it's an unfair advantage. I'll admit that. But, um, yeah, I mean, yeah, no, thank you. But, uh, I hear you. But anyway, for those who, um, the struggle that I have with my schedule anyway, is like, I would get on the phone with people all the time, but like, for them and me to be available at the exact same time can be kind of hard. So if I can just like, put a message together and send it, and then whenever they get around to seeing it, they can see it. But it kind of fixes that scheduling issue, I guess. I like that. It's actually a good idea, Seth. I think every contract we send, if it hasn't been signed within seven days, I'm going to get on the Loom and record a video and say, 'Hey Jonathan, we sent you a contract. This is Mayor. Just wondering what's up?' Literally, 10-second video. Give it to the acquisition managers. Have an email. That's a great idea. I'm going to write that down right now. And it can be like seconds, it doesn't have to take a ton of time. Just something to show that you're real and you took time to actually talk to him directly. Yeah, I could also do an AI impersonation of myself. Yeah, I would strongly encourage you to do that. See how it goes."

"So you seem really passionate about giving money away to charity. Like, that's almost like a core value of your business. And I'm just curious why, like, what is your motivation for wanting to do that? So if we zoom out a little bit, I believe that it's clear that there was a world before I came and there will be a world here after I leave, right? So it's not, the world doesn't revolve around me. I showed up to this world and there is a higher purpose. I'm here for a reason. And this is not just some sort of accident, you know, that the world came into being. I don't, it doesn't really matter what you believe in, but it's clearly not just some random accident, right? Obviously, there's a reason why we're here. And the reason why I'm here, and I think that reason is simply to leave the world a little bit better than how I found it. So land investing and, and just this business that we're in, it's a very good vehicle for change. So every time we sell a property, we have many different buckets in our bank account. And the first bucket, which is actually a separate bank account, just for the money to be completely gone, is charity. And we're very passionate about three things. The first, and these are three things that are, you know, ancient texts just tell us that are very basic to humanity. Number one is procreation. Having children, infertility treatments, anything that can help a couple who's struggling to have a baby and they can't, we want to back that. We're living in times now where it's amazing how literally with money you can solve infertility in some cases, obviously not all of it. So that's, you know, children. Children is the source of great joy. And this could also be a source of great pain. But that's the biggest one. It's literally making more humans. The second one is health, right? If somebody doesn't have good health, they could have a hell life, you know? It's health is very important. And some people are struggling, whether it's mental, physical health. So we, we really want to solve as much of that as we can. And then the last one is, you know, putting food on the table, or anything that has to do with people making ends meet. Whether it's soup kitchens, whether it's just supporting people, you know, helping people get married, helping people through school, whatever it is, just really helping people with their livelihood. And it's a completely different way of doing business. Because when I go to, you know, I take my scooter every day to work and listen to Ari T. Sometimes there's no episodes to listen to, so I just, you know, space out or think about like crazy things. It's not Ari T. It's silence. We are the only voice worth listening to. That's it. That's it. That's it. Dude, you got to put them out more often. No, but it, it really, it, it turns, it turns my work into something not just meaningful for me. I'm not saying that I'm doing it because it makes me feel good, but, but it really does. You know, ultimately, it does make it super meaningful. Because there's, you know, obviously there's supporting my wife and kids, which that in itself is also my responsibility. And I don't do it just because I love them. Because if I didn't love them, and I, I would stop doing it. But I do it because it's my duty. It's my responsibility. It's my privilege. So they're supporting those people, which is my family. But then they're supporting, you know, on helping the world at large. And I really encourage everyone to see this as as a pillar of their business and as a core thing of their business. And, and I'll tell you even more, I decide how much money I want to give away that particular year. I do this at the beginning of the year. And I basically tell God, I want you to give me 10x whatever I'm giving. But I pledge that money and I give that money. So. And if a deal doesn't work out and it's not working out, I'll give money for that deal to work out. In other words, I'll give the percentage as if that deal already happened. And now it's, it's really up to, up to God, up to the universe to make that deal happen, you know? So it's, it's kind of, um, very powerful. And it works. I've heard this concept many times. I never thought it worked. At the beginning of last year, I set myself an insane goal. I only had one employee. But I said, I'm going to give this tremendous amount of money away. And I mean, fast forward a year, this has been an incredible year. So I look forward to a new year. I look forward to doing bigger pledges and to, I guess, educating as much people as possible about this phenomenon of just, you know, doing it, but doing it for a much higher purpose, not just flipping dirt and making money. So that's why I'm passionate about it."

"That's a fascinating approach. I never, I don't think I've ever met anybody who kind of goes out a backwards like that in terms of like, 'I'm going to give this much away and God, I want you to give me 10 times more than that.' It just makes me wonder, like, has that ever not worked out where you've given the money away and you didn't make 10 times more than that? Or do you make more than 10 times more than that? Or how does that pan out for you? It's"

been my first year, and so far, I'm happy to report that it worked. Now, don't send me an invoice if you pledge a million bucks and you didn't make 10 million, and then, and then I got to float that bill. You got to be somewhat responsible, and it has to be a plan. You have to put in the work. That's how that's how God created the world, in my opinion. You know, people need to work for it so they, you know, so they deserve it, so they appreciate it, and it's not just free.

But, um, yeah, it, it works. And even if you don't do it that way, just 10%, 20%. My wife and I just started the 20% Foundation, we call it. It's a nonprofit where we're going to, you know, put all the money in, and then from there, it's going to go to all the causes. You know, I really, really encourage you. It's just, it gives me so much, even just from a selfish perspective, it gives me so much happiness, you know, to be able to support causes that before I couldn't. I didn't have the vehicle to do it. You know, sometimes we have these humongous deals that we're doing with subel, sub, you know, with developers, these subdivisions, and like, what am I going to do with all that money? You know, so it's, there are real causes, real people who need treatments, who need food, who need whatever it is that they need. And every week, uh, somebody from our team picks another nonprofit where we give money away. So they get to choose also where a lot of the money goes to. And these are, you know, regular people who work at the company, and they've never been able to give that much money away, and it's going to whatever causes they care about in their communities, and that's also very special.

I actually want to jump in here real quick, um, and reinforce this idea of like inverse tithing, in a way. Um, reverse tithing, I don't know what you want to call it. I don't know if you want to coin a term here, but I, I actually had a similar situation, I think, two months ago, where I had like five grand that was supposed to come in. Not a significant amount of money, but enough that I wasn't like, I don't know, it was just like annoying, you know, where I was like, you know, the, the moving, shuffling, shuffling money around sometimes between like business and personal stuff, and I just moved recently, so I'm down in Texas now. So it was just like moving money around, and all of a sudden, I didn't have this five grand. It was slightly inconvenient, and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to trust God here as if I had gotten this $5,000. And I went ahead and tithed 10% of it, um, even though it was like the opposite that had happened. Like it didn't come in, and I went ahead and just gave away $500. Um, and it was really funny because I didn't know what to give it away to, and then like some things were revealed to me, and I ended up giving it to this orphanage that supports Nepalese women. So like, really cool. My family's from Nepal, women just aren't treated as well there socioeconomically, don't have as many opportunities and privileges. Got this beautiful, beautiful email, this blessing that they were able to use this money for. And, um, I found that God just has this way of like turning on the faucet, right? And like, no way that you can predict it. Like we had a bunch of inventory that had gone stale, we had a couple deals fall through. I turned that on, I got a full, like, priced offer on my one rental property that I own that I decided to sell for five grand over asking. So immediately, he replaced it. And then I had $60,000, uh, of gross profits in my land business that all came in over the next week. Like it was like contract, contract, contract, contract.

Like I just want to reinforce, and again, don't send me the invoice. I can't, you know, there's an element of like faith component, and like it's not in your control. But anytime I have done this on a much smaller scale, I'm sure mayor, I've seen it reinforced. Like I've seen the money come in, you know, 10x over. So it's, it's actually a really cool concept. And honestly, a reminder for me as I'm sharing this with everybody, but it's not something I do regularly, and I think this is a maybe a sign that I need to be. But just, just really cool, and I appreciate you sharing that.

I've, uh, I've said this before, but I'll just, uh, I'll read it again. This is Malachi 3:10-12. "Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house. And thus put me to the test," says the Lord of hosts, "see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing." It's kind of getting into the essence of this. I think for most people, having that courage to actually put God to the test, or even if you're not like doing it because you expect something more, like just giving until it hurts because it's the right thing to do. Is that difficult for you guys when you do this thing where you go out on a limb? It's like, okay, I don't know if the money is coming in or not, but I'm just going to do it. Is that a hard decision for you, or do you have this gift of giving?

It is, there's no way to sugarcoat it. It's not easy. It's not easy. But, um, thank God, you know, it's just, you know, worst case, it went to a good cause. So, you know, with crypto and the stock market with 2020, you know, I made a ton of money, lost a ton of money, made, lost. You know, the money that was lost was lost, but the money that I gave away, you know, a bottle of water is worth a dollar, but if you give it to someone who's about to die in the desert, it's infinite value. So you're transforming something material into something finite, and you're turning it into something infinite. And we have the power to do that. That's like super powerful stuff. So, yeah, a couple grand here, there, but it's really the fact that we could do that. It's amazing.

There is a, a book by a guy I know named Clay Clark. It's called The 10-Second Rule, and it's kind of an interesting concept where he talks about this idea of when you see a chance to do something good or be helpful to somebody, like offering assistance, whether it's financially or whatever, just any good act, like if you just have the thought, do it within 10 seconds. Like, don't wait because you, you can rationalize and explain your way out of it, or just like daydream about doing something good and give yourself a pat on the back, but you never actually do it. This idea is like, don't think about it, just do it immediately. And because a lot of times, it could be God prompting you to do that. But even if it's not, even if it's just you having the thought and you do it, worst case scenario is you just did something good to help somebody. You know, it's like, there's not really a lose to that situation. And especially if you do have the viewpoint of everything that I have isn't really mine. These are resources God has entrusted me with. So it's like, it's not like it's mine to claim or say that it's my own, I earned it, and me, me, me. It's just like, no, I'm, I'm the steward over this. So what's the wisest way to, to do that? Is it, is it to get the new Tesla, or is it to save somebody's life and build an orphanage or something like that?

Yeah, we're exactly right. We're bankers. You know, it's, we deal with a lot of money, but it's not my money, it's the bank's money. I'm just here to distribute it accordingly. And, uh, yeah, that's, it's not easy always to have that perspective, but it gets easier as I see what it does. And as I, it reinforced that pattern in my brain, then it definitely gets a lot easier. Also, like you said about the 10 seconds, I get a wire in my account, I don't wait 10, I five, right away, boom, chunk of it away, gone, done. And, uh, it's also very good, by the way, if you give a lot of charity to have an account, whether it's nonprofit or donor advisory fund, or even just a bank account specifically for it. Then you get a debit card, and then all the charity you give just goes through that account, and then you could also look at the account, see how much money you have left there, how much money you have. All of a sudden, there's like, oh my God, there's a bunch of money in there, you know, and you can give it away without feeling guilty, without before I had this, I was always giving and always like, could I afford to give? Can I not? Did I give too much? Did I give too little? Is just showing up, and it was all like intermingled in my credit card with all my bills. This is like super clean, this is great. You know, just make an account, transfer money to it, you can Zell it to it, even, it won't cost you anything. And, um, and it, it's, it's really, uh, made my life amazing. We also have different buckets we can talk about that later, but we have a bucket for taxes where we put money away every single time we get it, you know, we don't touch it. So taxes can come around, it doesn't hurt as much because the money's already there. We have another one for, you know, profits, uh, which is good. It kind of builds up like a profit chest, and then we can do different things with that. So I advise you to do that as well, if you don't already do that.

What, uh, what bank do you use for your business banking? I've been using Bank of America since I was little, so I kind of stuck with them. They do have wire fees, which I don't like, especially the volume that we do. So I start, I got a new bank called Row, R-O-W. It's like an online, online bank, similar to like Ally or Mercury. They have free wires, incoming, outgoing. They're like an internet bank. They're super easy to use. They don't have Zell, which is annoying. But yeah, we also have Ally for the charity bank. Always, you know, playing around with different ones.

Yeah, I was just asking that because, uh, I know some banks like, I think it's Relay is the one I know of. I haven't used it, but I've heard it's set up specifically for this purpose to make it super easy to to create new accounts and like just make it like seamless. So yeah, they, they all really work well. Mayor, I totally appreciate your time. I know we've gone a little bit over, but appreciate you sharing your wealth of experience and information with us. Uh, if people want to check in with you or reach out to you, you don't have to share anything, but if you do want to, is there a way they should do that?

Sure. Um, my email is Mayor M at lotofland, singular, lotofland.com. And if you want to chat, or if you have a deal that you know, it's more that you can chew, or it's, you know, you want to partner, I, I love JV partnering with people as long as, like I said, if there's enough meat on the bone and you need help, you know, whether it's a double closing or subdivision, whatever it is, uh, you can always feel free to, uh, send me an email and we'll review it. And, um, once again, I really want to thank you, Seth and AJ, for, you know, for really all the content that you put out. And it just, it, I wouldn't be here for sure without everything that that you've done for the community. And I speak for myself, but also for all land investors out there. So thank you so, so much.

Yeah, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it very much. And thanks for coming out on the podcast and sharing the awesome information. The student has become the teacher, it appears. If people want to check out the show notes for this episode again, it's retipster. Thanks again, Mayor, and we'll talk to you again soon.

My pleasure.

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