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Uh, who's at our event in Arizona earlier this month? Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay, cool. So, I'm kind of like built off of the stuff that I covered there, but like way more. So, hopefully it's not too repetitive for those that were at the event. Who here's a little tired? Who here didn't sleep that well last night? Anyone? Yeah, I'm a little sleepy, man. I don't know why I always get jitters before these things, but I have a feeling being up here is going to give me some energy. Um, I have one other question, too. Who here's a full-time land investor? Like, who's doing this like for their career? Pay the bills with it. Okay, cool. Sweet. Okay, cool. Well, I'm going to share how I rebuilt my entire land investing business again. This is going to be different than any other presentation here. One, cuz it's really ugly. Uh, two, because it's kind of like a story. It's like a parable about my land investing journey. So, it should be pretty fun. Uh, I do tend to run long, so hopefully I don't go too long here.
So, who am I? There's a bunch of new faces here. I checked the guest list and there's a lot of names I didn't realize. So, I was like or I didn't recognize. So, I had a little intro. These things are always BS. Like, we're all way more than these titles or where we live. So, I'm not entirely sure who I am. It's more complex than these things, but I'll give it a crack.
Anyone know where that is? Any guesses? >> Bali. >> Bali. That's Mount Aung. The most sacred volcano in all of Indonesia. And Bali. This is kind of like the the birth myth to how the world was created. Uh, in their opinion, it's with this volcano. I live in Bali. I've lived there for about a year. This island's changed my life. I think I'll live there forever. I always tell people I think I was an Indonesian man in a previous life because somehow I just feel like I belong there. I really do love it. Here's me on top of that volcano, Mount Gang. I love climbing mountains. Took me about 12 hours to get up there from 11:00 p.m. to about 11:00 a.m. It was It was a pretty big slog, but we watched sunrise up there. It was awesome.
There's me and my beautiful girlfriend. Who here has been to one of our events before? Maybe not the one in Arizona. Yeah, we run an annual event every year. That was our uh event last year. We're not running it this year. Tax reasons. There's a whole bunch of reasons as to why I'm not running it. That's why we did our quick one in uh Scottdale earlier this month.
I'm obsessed with Bulldogs. Who here likes the English bulldogs? Anyone? Who here has an English bulldog? >> Dang, you guys are missing out. The love of a bulldog. Man, it's different. That's my little girl, Gloria. I love her to death. I can't wait to see her. That's her and I enjoying a morning together in Bali, staring off into the distance. It's how I like to spend my mornings. She's so cute.
Uh here's my a couple of my team members. So, I went to the Philippines. One of the things I'm really big on is I always get my team members together. I got a bunch of our team members here. I've been hanging out with my team pretty much all month since I've been back. I travel to them. They come to me in Bali. This guy right here is Aries. He's like, he's kind of weird. We have like an interesting setup in our business. And I'll talk about how our team is structured. Him and this guy named Newman. Who knows Newman? Anyone here know Newman? Yeah. These guys are like the glue that put our business together. He's been with me for almost four years. This is a gal named Karen. She's not with us anymore, unfortunately, but she's amazing. And yes, I did have cornrows. It was pretty wild. Cornrows and a mustache at the same time. It was sick.
All right, I'm going to tell you guys about my land investing origin story. I haven't really talked about that this much. I got into the business June of 2019. I was 24 years old. It's been 6 years now, which is crazy. I was broke. I was lost. Most people get into this business cuz they're broke. Who started cuz they were broke at first? Want to make money. Yeah, it's classic. Uh, so that was my origin story. I got my first deal in seven months. And I'm going to come back to the 7-month number cuz I've got a crazy case study at the end that's going to blow your mind. So, it took me 7 months to get my first deal. I'm going to show you guys all the deals I did my first year. That was January 2020. Then I quit my job later that year, December of 2020. I was so scared. Who's been scared making that leap? Anyone go from like job to It was terrifying. Who leaves a job, gets in the land business, and you have no idea what to do with your time? You're just like, "What the [ __ ] am I supposed to do?" That was me.
So, I did 57 deals my first calendar year. Um, this is where I built my business. There's a little 500 foot apartment. It was my one of my dogs, Dallas, in the background. It's 1,200 bucks a month. And I literally put everything back into the business. I didn't have kids, dependent, none of that stuff. So, yeah, I probably lived off of I don't know, $1,800, $1,900 a month and just every dollar I made right back into the business. And yeah, you know, it's funny like I this sucked at the time. Like the little popcorn ceilings. cuz I hated living here. But I look back at it with fond memories, man. Those were the those were the early days. Those were the good days.
So, here's every deal I did that first calendar year. Okay, there's a lot of crap on here. A lot of NY County. Shout out to Ken. I cut my teeth and prompt. My first deal was in NY County. Buy for 1300, sell for 3,000. Took me 3 weeks to sell it. That deal obviously changed my life. What's so funny is I didn't even know what a deed was. I didn't really know what a purchase agreement was. Obviously, counties aren't supposed to give legal advice, but I called the county over and over and over again. I'm like, "How do I record a deed? How do I notoriize a deed?" And there was a sweet lady, I think her name was Dawn, and she took she to she she took sympathy to me. She said, "You know what? Call me after work." And she walked me through the recording process, the recording fees, how to notoriize it, off the books. And Don changed my life. I really owe everything to Don. It was pretty incredible. I should send her a gift or something.
You know what's funny though is like probably a third or maybe a little bit more of these properties were landlocked. I bought some properties that were in a moratorium. You couldn't even build on them. I mean I was [ __ ] reckless. Like I was ready, fire, aim. Thought I could figure it out and it worked out. I didn't go through any programs. I just went like school of hard knocks. It was probably a bad idea. But yeah, who's worked in any of these counties before? NY County, Mojave. I mean, these are CL number here. >> You're kidding me. >> It's a personal number. >> You're kidding me. Are you joking? Okay, >> here. Look at here. I'll send it to her. >> Are you joking? Are you being for real? Wow. All right, we'll have to talk after. We should give her a call or something. >> Yeah, that's crazy. Costilla County, San Bernardino, all the usual suspects.
Problem is, I fell out of love with my land business. I love building things. Honestly, I don't really like land is just a widget. I just love creating things. For me, it's borderline spiritual. I know that sounds crazy, but to have an idea and to bring it into the real world to me is really gratifying. And yeah, it's my art. It's something that I just love to do. So, I launched LEA in 2022 September. Uh, we've had 448 people go through it. It's a 12-month group coaching program. Uh, pretty awesome. Who here is inside of Leah or gone through Leah, current Leah member, blah blah blah blah. Yeah, Ryland was our third person that we ever coached. Pretty cool. You guys probably know Ryland. Then, in June of 2023, Ryland and I decided to launch Land Insights together. Uh we've got hundreds of active users there. Ultimately, these are shiny objects. They distracted me from my land business. Uh later on, Kyle joined us on the land inside. Actually, made it a real product. It was pretty insane at the beginning. It was pretty bad. Um so, yeah, this stuff derailed me. Like, I just kind of fell out of love with land. Who remembers like the weird turn to like it's like July 2023, interest rates went up, business kind of changed. I was like, "Ah, I was still doing deals." Um, but my business stagnated. Like I just wasn't that excited about it. I still pulled in good money from my business. I still paid myself well. It wasn't like we weren't making money, but I wasn't growing it. You know, I wasn't pushing the envelope at all. And I find that frustrating. It kind of gets gets annoying. Who here like you're going through the motions, but you know you're not giving it your all. And that kind of pisses you off. You guys know what that feeling feels like? You go to the gym, you're like, "Ah, kind of just going through the motions."
So, it started to eat away at me. At this time, I was working 3 to four hours a week in the business. And I I mean that legitimately. I was getting on two meetings a week and that was it. Everything was automated except our growth. So we were not growing and I sort of feel a bit like a fraud. Like I was detached from the frontier of land flipping. We still were able to teach land flipping at a high level. We still got incredible results. But it just felt weird that I wasn't living it. Like I wasn't really obsessed with it and I wanted to change that. So the thing is I knew I wasn't going to be able to put more time in. Like the time commitments to land insights and weren't changing. In fact, they were getting more intensive. So, I wasn't going to be able to put more time to the land business. So, I wanted to figure out how can I grow this thing just by putting my focus in the right area. So, roughly 12 months ago, I decided to go all in on land flipping once again, but with totally different constraints. So, my constraints were no more than 5 hours per week. I wanted to get excited about this business again. Uh, I've been in this business for a long time, almost half a decade. So, I wanted to feel that feeling again and I wanted double revenue. Okay? Uh, and I wanted to figure out what the true inner workings of true inner workings were of a of making a land business success successful. Geez. And then pass those learnings on to other people. So the real goal, not just revive the land business, but revive my relationship with it. Who Who's still excited about the land business? Yeah. Who wakes up excited every day to work on you do, Justin? You do. >> Oh, yeah. >> Oh, yeah. Cool. Have you has that ever waned for you? Has that ever kind of gone up and down? I think it goes up and down in direct relation to like the the the amount of time I feel like I'm spending with my family that starts getting like impacted or I start getting like some respect for my family. >> That's when I start to be like, "Oh, but I have all these obligations in land." >> Yeah. >> And it kind of makes me take a step back. But >> okay, >> those things are in balance, we're good. >> What do you love about the land business? Just like one thing, just a sentence. >> I love solving problems. >> Okay. >> Like doing Yeah. Hard things. >> Hard things. Okay, cool. Who here is kind of in a season of like not being as obsessed with the lamb business? Anyone? Peter? Drew? Okay, cool. Yeah, we all go through it.
Ultimately, I wanted to feel proud again. I wanted to feel a deep satisfaction of being good at something, especially something that I've dedicated pretty much most of my adult life to. Uh it's a sense of pride for me. I guess it's a bit of a identity and I wanted to bring that back. So, today I'm going to be sharing a lot of numbers. I'm going to pull back the kimono. I'll show you guys show you guys all of our numbers from our land business. So, I'll show you the difference that's happened in the last 12 months, but 12 months is not really a good time scale because like the work I put in today, obviously, I don't really capture that for quite a while. So, a lot of the numbers that we're seeing right now comes from work in like September. And the real juicy stuff has happened 3 months ago, 4 months ago. So, it hasn't even really picked up yet. But, I'll walk you guys through it. I find that not enough people really want to share their numbers. And that's always to me what gets me excited. So, all right. All right. Let's share some numbers.
So, I just pulled numbers for May and June. Okay. Uh, you can actually see April's numbers in here, too. You can see the point of reference. So, you're going to see there's a lot of stuff here. I won't go through all of it. You're going to see only one marketing channel listed here, and that's cold texting. And I'm going to loop back and explain why that is. Doing about 188,000 texts in May. Uh, 509 leads generated, 77 hot leads, 37 contracts sent, 15 contracts signed. uh about 730 some odd thousand dollars of pipeline profit uh from 236 the month before. I know a lot of people have problems with pipeline profit. We'll walk you guys to the disposition numbers as well. I've been doing this a long enough to be really conservative in our numbers. We have about one contract fall through every month. We underwrite every deal that we're going to sell at about 85 90% market value. Like we're very very conservative with this stuff. So this stuff usually comes through. In fact, in some cases, we're actually so conservative that our pipeline profit numbers are a little bit lower than what they actually end up being. Here's our individual texture stats. We've got two ST texters that hit about 188,000 texts combined. Acquisition manager stats down below. Anyone have any questions on this before I move forward? It's a lot of information. Yeah, >> 188,000 text messages a month. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Which platform are you using? >> Launch control. I'm loyal to Launch Control. And I'll show you guys how I'm doing that only with two textters because a lot I think the industry average is probably like 30 to 50,000 texts per texter. But I found some ways to really juice that up. But yeah, I think we've cracked the code on texting. And again, I'll tie that in why I think that's important. Uh so yeah, here's the disposition numbers for May. 17 offers received, six properties sold, about $111,000 in gross profit, 512,000 in total sales value.
Here's our stats from June. So, this was pulled from yesterday, no, two days ago, and we actually got one new contract that's not reflected here. I think it's got about $40,000 of spread on the acquisition side. So, yeah, a little bit wishy-washy. We also sold the property yesterday, too. It's a really weird commercial lot. This is a crazy story. Bought it for 50 like 4 months ago. A realtor told us it was going to sell at $600,000. I was like, there's no way. That's absurd. Uh, we got an offer at $115,000. So, still a good deal, but a far cry from what from what the realtor said. Um, so all my numbers from June are actually only with one acquisition manager. Well, essentially one. I one of our acquisition managers that's overseas, her name's Eva. She had like a midlife crisis. She thought she was having a heart attack. Turns out she's having a panic attack. She's just got a lot going on. She's got a lot of people that rely on her. She's very responsible. And so, it just kind of started to weigh on her. So, she's been working like probably six days for all of June. So, our numbers have gone down. And so, my texting team calibrated and they've kind of throttled back leads. So, we've been really pre-qualifying in text. We don't really open up the floodgates for our one other AM Jordan. We also added in cold calling. Again, I'm going to loop into why this is important a little bit, but here's our first like 25 days of cold call stats here. Uh, we've generated 85 cold call leads from two cold callers. Is that good? Someone can someone tell me it was a good call. >> How many days? The whole one. >> How about No, less 20. I don't know. We started like a couple days into June. >> 20 odd. Yeah. Okay. We got like four super hot pending contracts. So, we'll see what happens. And this was just dialing. So, I cut their teeth just dialing nonresponders from launch control. So, I wasn't even giving them fresh data, any of that stuff. We've moved them over to that now, but I wanted them to start there. Uh, anyways, overall 77 new hot leads, 26 contracts sent, six contracts signed, pipeline profit of 320,000. You can see Eva had some stuff convert 118,000. That was like from her old pipeline. She didn't really do much to get that. So, pretty much all coming down to Jordan this month, which is a lot for one person to manage. >> Yeah. Yeah, we're using Mojo. No, ready mode. >> Ready mode. Yeah. The thing looks pretty historic, man. It's not a great not a great platform, but it gets the job done. What are you guys using? Anyone that's doing a lot of cold calling? >> Ready mode. >> Ready mode. All right. >> What was that? >> Ready mode. >> Ready mode. Okay, cool. >> UI sucks, but it's a great >> It works. Okay, sweet. Uh, here's our disposition stats. Um, funnily enough, the one of these properties in about 40 minutes I have to sign the deed on. A notary is coming here cuz it's it's going to close like today or something like that. Um, so yeah, these are all the deals we've sold this month. uh brought in a total of $149,000 of pipeline profit. 13 offers received, seven properties sold. A little softer this month. I mean, we did better this month relative to last month in terms of gross profit, but less offers. It kind of softened this month. I don't know, people going on vacation or something like that. >> Counting offers written offer. >> Written offer. Yeah, it has to be written. We get a lot of verbal offers and they don't really translate to much. Now, this is like 95% MLS. I would say like once a month maybe we get a sale through our website and we've just had it up for a long time. People go there, they put a holding deposit down, but pretty much all MLS uh all with realtors, no flat fee and I'll tie into that as well.
So, what did I do to 2x my business in 12 months while only working 5 hours per week? That's exactly what we're going to go through here today. I'm going to walk you guys through everything that I changed to essentially double the business. And really, I could just wrap up on this note here. This could probably be the whole entire presentation. Most of my job ultimately is just to find what is the biggest lever I can pull on and then just yank on that like that. I spend most of my time just thinking about what is that thing and then relaying that to my team. And that's how I'm able to throttle back my time. Now, it's kind of misleading like the 5 hours per week is legitimately real, but some of these people have been with me for 4 years, so like they're very well verssed. That makes it a lot easier. If I was with a brand new team, that number would be ridiculous. you'd be like 20, 30 hours a week. But I do think by spending more time thinking about leverage and less time just blindly doing things, you can really throttle back your time and bump up your results at the same time.
Okay, you guys want details? So, I'm going to walk you guys through I believe it's 21 changes that I made uh that have been pretty impactful for me. So, step one, team overhaul. The first thing that I did middle of last year, I fired three what I call non a players on my team. They were ROI positive. What that means is when I paid them, they brought in more money, but they were ultimately a bad culture fit. Anyone have someone like this on their team currently? And you know, you got to let them go, but you haven't done nothing about it. Sucks. But it's one of the best things that you can do. I think they really do hurt culture. It's like a systemic cancer in the business. When I let them go, I immediately hired four new what I consider A+ team members. Again, A+ is relative to me. These people might be A+ in someone else's business. That's two texters, one AM and one underwriter. I started using a recruiter for the first time ever. That's like been a game changer for me. That was one of the last things that I delegated. I was heavily involved in uh getting candidates in, helping with the first interviews, definitely running the last few interviews. Now, I use a recruiter that's kind of top of funnel. They filter down, you know, most of the people that reach out. Then it goes into my ops team. They do all of the initial interviews, the onboarding, the training, the everything. So I'm completely out of that. It's changed my life. Anyone have that fully delegated? Yeah, it's been a game changer for me. >> This US based or global? >> Yeah, this is well it's a bit of both in the team. These are all global. So this is Philippines here. This is um Egypt and this is Egypt. So one of the big changes that I made too is I started hiring in Egypt in South Africa. I think there was like a big opportunity to hire out of there and most folks are like hung up on the Philippines. Yeah. Uh, what was your thinking behind hiring an Egyptian AM versus a US-based AM? >> Yeah, I had been listening to like random podcasts about stuff like that. People were saying they're having good luck with cold callers over there. So, I use outsourcer task for the recruiting and I was like, "Hey, can you find me some people from Egypt and we just jelled. I just got on the my team got on the phone with them. They showed us their resume. They showed me the recorded calls." Uh, I was I was pretty stoked. and the first AM that we brought into. One of the things that I look for when I hire folks, obviously, everyone tries to avoid the resumes that have a lot of turnover, right? They leave every year. That's obvious. But I also look for the inverse. Can I find someone that's been like risen through the ranks? So, I found this gal, Eva. She started as like the most entry level cold caller, this this wholesaling cold call agency. Then she moved up to like team lead for her pod and then she moved up to running a team of 100 cold callers. So I was like, "Okay, this person's got to be pretty savage." Again, that's not particular to Egypt. You could find that anywhere. But that really stood out to me. One of the big things that I look for with sales people, too, is like they got to have some big hairy scary goal. And so for her, she wanted to build a rental portfolio. And she had already bought her first rental property, so she was self-actualized. I'm like, "Oh yeah, you're amazing." Um, she's also an Italian teacher. She's traveled to Italy a bunch. Like, she's just very well spoken. Uh, so there's a lot that stood out about her. I typically don't do this, but her husband and we also hired him too and he's been amazing. Usually that's a bad idea. Uh, we hired him on his own merits, not because they're husband and wife. Um, one of the big things that I did as well is I redistributed roles internally and updated comp plans. I'll show you guys all those comp plans here in a second. And that was a pretty big change for us.
Step two, incentive restructure. Everyone on the team earns from gross profit. I used to have it so like sales people would get a piece of gross profit. Now, literally every single person gets a piece of gross profit. Sure enough, the business seems to grow in proportion to how much incentive people have. Uh, I also started hiring interns and use that as a recruiting funnel and move them into salaried employees. This has been really interesting. I've had folks that like were interns for a year and a half, unpaid. They were getting a little piece of gross profit and they were grinding eight hours a day. It's like, do I think a person's going to be a good full-time employee? Hell yeah. And sure enough, they've been a great full-time employee. uh hiring A+ players and paying them very well is one of the single greatest hiring arbitrageages because like most times an A+ player might be like 120 grand and like a B player is like 80 grand. It's like that $40,000 difference isn't that much because you're probably getting four to fivex the output. It's that big of a difference. I don't know if Kyle's in here. There's an idea called 10x engineers. Anyone ever heard of that? Yeah. There's one guy that built all of Google Maps in one weekend. Just one guy. Those people do exist out there. Like that's orders of magnitude in terms of the difference that you get from someone that's truly an A+ player. Again, that's relative, right? There's A+ players that I'm not qualified enough to bring in. So, it's relative to my standards. This is a terrible, terrible infographic I made in chat GPT. I know Ken's not in here. I just signed up for uh ChatGpt Pro 3 days ago. So, I was one of those people. My team's been using it for like 2 and 1/2 years. I used the free one six months ago and then I finally upgraded and I'm so bad at prompting it. So I'm like make me an infographic about A+ versus B minus. This is what it made. It's okay but you guys can kind of visualize it there. So here's the incentive restructure. You guys can see this broken down. Uh underwriter they get half a percent overseas textures 1.5% on gross profit for deals that they bring in. It's important right? Overseas AM it is variable 3 to 4%. Um, we have two overseas AMs. One started at 3%. Eva, who's a little more senior, is at 4%. Senior ops, these are like COO type people in your business. They get anywhere between four and 5%. Like I said, I've got two of them, so they have a slightly different comp plan. Newman, who's been with us a lot longer, he's at 5%. And we've got one USAM. Um, I put a range here cuz we've slid them up over time. We started him at 7%. He's now at 10%, which I think is pretty good. Yeah. Is this on deals that they touch or is this across >> deals that well deals that they touch for overseas amus overseas text these folks here just holistically for the business? Yeah. >> Is there a salary there or is it just >> Oh, no. They get salary. Yeah. Do you want to know? >> You don't mind? >> Oh, yeah. Um USAM $30,000 base. Uh both these senior ops people are overseas. Actually, one's in Canada now. Uh, I believe Newman's at like 12 or 13 an hour and then Aries is at 10 an hour. Overseas A.M. 950. Overseas texture one's at 550, one's at 650 and our underwriters at 550 an hour. That's >> Do they know each other's cut? >> No. No. Yeah, that's Yeah, it always gets a little tricky, but there's a real explanation. Newman's been with us just longer, you know. I think there's we definitely reward tenure.
Step three, finding honey hole market. So, I stopped chasing the classic hot markets. What's a hot market? It's the platitudes that everyone talks about. Oh, 3 hours outside of Dallas, go buy land there. Well, like the arbitrage has been sucked out of that for the most part because everyone's thinking like that, right? >> I've been running that for seven years. So, I would call that my money mobile. >> Well, there you go. But you're vertically integrated. I'm sure you've got resources there that I wouldn't have access to if I came in. So, you have a different kind of arbitrage. Uh, I focused on finding what I call non-obvious high demand markets. I use land insights through this. This is ultimately stuff where you're like, "What the hell? Why are people buying land here?" That's the kind of stuff I like. Random markets in Minnesota, random markets in New Hampshire, in Maine, in Wisconsin. And obviously, demand is a puck that is always moving. But this single change here took me a couple months to make, and it's been a big freaking difference in our business. Most of these markets are like 10 hours away from a city. Like they're like way rural. for like our best ones are usually somewhere around like 30 to like a 100 properties actively listed and they're turning over like 15 to 20% annually. Um, one of the other things that we do too is I find what I call needle in the haystack markets. So you can have a great submarket in a so so like broad market. So you have a county that's kind of soft, but there might be a few uh subdivisions or zip codes that are ripping in there. Take Costa County. There's a couple subdivisions in Costa County that are actually pretty good. The county itself sucks, but there's like little pockets that you can find and so we pursue those as well. Typically, we're breaking down our markets either county, zip code, or subdivision. That's how most of our markets get broken down. Ultimately, I think this is just a game offormational arbitrage. The entire business from start to finish. You know, your market selection is kind of the top of the funnel. It's the original arbitrage. We use land insights for this. You guys have probably seen that before. Just a little picture of the heat map.
Step four, a delegated market selection. Two of the things that I was overly involved in, hiring and selecting our markets. So, I haven't picked a market in over a year. I literally just created a blue blueprint inside of Land Insights. It's like, click this, put in these criteria, look for this, and now it runs weekly, and it's completely hands-off. And it was something I was very nervous to pass off. We've honestly had like almost no issues with it.
Step five. Okay, so I was running four channels for the last couple years and I was like kind of mediocre at all of them. They were all profitable. I turned them off if they weren't profitable, but I wasn't amazing at them. We're doing texting, mail, uh, cold email, and PPC. Who's running multiple channels here? Yeah. Do you guys feel like you're top tier at all of them? You would say so. Okay. >> Did you say so? Pretty good. Yeah. I found that I got more upside by going and being A+ at one than whatever B minus at the other ones. Kind of like hiring. And so I said, you know what? I'm going to tear this down to the studs. I'm going to become an expert at one for the time being. I'm going to build it up and we'll move on to the next. What happens is with myself and a lot of other people, they get like a little bit of success with texting and it's kind of like, oo, what's next? Let me do cold calling. Let me do mail. Instead, I want to go really, really freaking deep on something before I go horizontal and start adding more channels. Um, the reason I started with cold texting, I already had a cold texting team. I had uh 2 AM. So, I'm like, I need to feed them a lot of leads and I need to feed them leads really quickly. Ultimately, all channels work. People are dogmatic about marketing channels. They all work. Generating leads is pretty freaking easy. It's what comes after it's a lot harder in my opinion.
All right, mastering cold texting. Let's walk walk you guys through this. So, we went from 50,000 texts a month to 180,000 texts a month with just two textters in here. Anyone doing texting? Yeah. How many texts are you getting per month for one texter? >> You're about 20,000 per day for two texters. >> That's really good. >> Yeah, >> we're like four 5,000 a day. >> Okay. With two texters a week each. >> Okay, cool. Yeah, I think industry average, I don't know, it ranges. Justin's got insane numbers, but 30 to 60,000 a month per textter is pretty typical. We bought brought them up to 100,000 texts a month roughly for each tester. We'll probably hit close to that this month. So the thing that we were doing which wasn't working very well is we were pre-underwriting our data and then texting and then providing an offer off of that. That kind of sucks. So I'm like no let's underwrite it bespoke in real time. But that was taking forever. And so what we did is we started underwriting the land insights comp tool. Brought our time from like 15 minutes to about 5 minutes per comp. And we have our texturers run these comps. So like they're super bespoke. I also created interesting rules for pre-qualification with price. So, we make an offer between 40 and 80% of retail value. If the property's over a4 million and it has value ad potential, I don't even care what they respond to my price. We'll just add them in. Just get them in the CRM. Those are a diamond in the rough. But if it's like a regular flip, 40 to 80%, and I allow them to bid me up by about 25% on the top end. So, they come back and counter me. And even if it's over that 80%, bring them in. Bring them in. That's interesting to me. I want to avoid the crazy people that want like a 100x retail value. Ultimately, I'm going to talk about this in a little bit. The price really doesn't matter that much. I'll show you guys some examples. It's it's kind of a fugazi, but we still have some rules around it. And I just got them really good at being conversational. And so, it's, you know, we're not super templated. We have templated uh openers. And then we just riff with them. And so, I've just spent a lot of time training our texters on being really, really good at texting. Of course, uh it's become easier for them. So they spend less time going uh getting lost on individual conversations >> and it can't make a relative comparison from your property to the other property. So there's a little nuance there. We still use some of that manual stuff inside the comp tool. We just sort by proximity and that usually solves for features usually. What I find with comping is like you need like one or two comps. Like if they're high quality roll with that usually more is not better. In fact it just get gets confusing. >> I have a quick question. So sending 180,000 texts a month. Are you still hand selecting like markets or are you just pulling the whole whole state? Because when I ramped up my texting, it's like I can't pick that many markets that >> Yeah. Yeah. We're doing counties, zip codes, and subdivisions. We do a handpick them. We're not doing whole states. Make that offer. We let them know, hey, like we got to cross our tees, do our eyes. Like this is just a starting point. So, it's pretty non-committal. Uh but it's just like a little hurdle that if they jump over it, cool. We'll let them in and bring them into the next step. But it's not the ultimate hurdle for us for pre-qualification. >> Summer on the 180,000 texts. Yeah. >> Is that multiple numbers for one APN or is that 180,000 AP? >> Yeah, we So, right now we're doing the standard skip trace inside of Land Insights is 2 cents. That's one phone number. >> So, that's just Yeah, each one's an individual APN. I know some people that are doing like all like the phone numbers you get with a premium skip trace and that that's fine. I'm probably losing some deals because of it, but I don't know. We're going wide and I think I think there's more benefit to that. in my opinion.
Here's the comp tool inside of Land Insights. You've never seen it. Bada bing, bada boom. This is really helpful, too. So, this kind of is like a little DD trigger. It shows red flags, yellow flags, well, they're like yellow icons and then these little green check marks here. And so, this just kind of tells my team what they need to look out for both in terms of the market and the property. And so, it's just like little DD triggers. And if we get a trigger here that's red or yellow, we can use it to to ask a question through text. So, it's just like a little nudge for our texting team to be aware of certain things with both the property and the market. Uh, we have this coming out. I don't know where Kyle is, but coming out in the next couple weeks. This is our deep AI analysis and research. You click this and it gives you the due diligence on everything you'd ever need to know about the property, the county, regs, everything. It's it's really cool.
Okay, step eight, adding channels back, but very slowly. So my thesis you'll get more output being A+ at one marketing channel than B minus at four separate channels or fill in the blank. So we finally feel like we cracked the code on cold texting. We just added in cold calling. So for cold callers, we've been doing non-responders and high value leads. Those are like creme to creme properties. We're kind of moving most of our cold calling to this opposed to the non-responders. But we started our team here. So, like the junk text data we had them calling and we're slowly introducing mail again and we're using that for like very sniperesque uh highv value properties. I'm actually doing a public challenge right now on YouTube. I'm documenting everything that I'm doing with $5,000 with direct mail. I'm giving you guys all the markets I'm mailing to, all my templates, my letters, my purchase agreement, everything. And that's free on YouTube. So, should be kind of interesting. You guys can watch from the sidelines.
Step nine, redefining prequalification. This is a huge one. Who here is still just like yes, no to a lead based off of what they ask for with with price or what they respond to with with uh your offer? Anyone? No. You guys are savvy. Okay, cool. So, this is kind of confusing. I'm still I like to build frameworks. I'm a framework guy. I like frameworks cuz it's like one or two sentences that packs a punch of a couple paragraphs. This is a new framework. I'm working on it. So, it's a little rough around the edges. What I'm saying though is that pre-qualification via price is no longer the trump card. I'm thinking about it from three separate levers. One lever I call effort. The second lever I call the three W's. And this one's pretty ugly. The third lever is property backstory. I got to work on it. It's not beautiful yet. I'll walk you guys through it though. So effort signals. I spend a lot of time doing what I call like a meta analysis. I'll go through all my deals for 2024 or 2023 and I'll start pulling out these themes. This is a crazy one I'm about to share with you guys. Day one responsiveness. This has been like the strongest signal for pre pre-qualification. All my deals from 2024, 95% of those deals, the seller responded in our CRM on day one. Oh [ __ ] Like I mean correlation isn't causation. Maybe that's not the ultimate thing, but that probably matters a little bit. Either when we call them, they pick up or we call, they return a call, they leave a voicemail, etc. I also think about the quality of the communication. When I go back and I look at the text threads or the phone calls with my team, there's a quality to the communications. It's not, again, it's not the end all beall. Some sellers are really short and to the point, but when a seller's playing ball with us, for example, there's a deal we did recently. The seller texted us on Friday and he says, "I'm at home whipping up some old fashions. I hope you have a great weekend. I'll give you a call on Monday." I'm like, "Wow, okay." He said he's gonna call us. He's telling us what he's up to. He's wishing us a great weekend. That took effort on his part. Like there's quality to that. He has some skin in the game. I also think about talk time. Who tracks talk time here? Yeah. More talk time, higher likelihood. That's a pretty engaged prospect. Uh and it's probably a pretty good sign for for uh pre-qualification. I also look at that holistically for our AM team on a daily basis, just like the total talk time they have. That matters more to me than just like individual dials in my opinion because talk time ultimately leads to deals in my experience. >> The average talk time for your deals >> for for well like collectively for all the calls put together or one call >> the deals you do is the average talk time >> for the first call or all the calls would that seller >> calls? >> Oh god. >> Or first call. >> I don't I I can give you the first call. It's about 15 minutes. I don't know about the all the calls. I mean, I'll show you guys a deal here where there's literally hundreds of phone calls. So, I mean, it can get it can get insane. But yeah, anything under 15 minutes I'm not really loving. Unless we caught him at a bad time. That's fair. That's totally fair. >> So, you want them to talk to the seller for 15 plus minutes. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And then to me, this matters as much if not more than just the price that they're asking for. Because again, we come in with our lowest price, they're going to come in with their highest price. They're going to see what the hell they can get from us. Uh, and I would do the same if I was in their shoes. You know, here's the other thing that not enough people think about. Who here owns real estate outside of their land business, a house or whatever? Okay, cool. If I called you and made an offer, would you pick up the phone? >> No. And if you were to pick up the phone, would you have a 15-minute conversation with me? Hell no. I never would under any circumstances. So, that means something. The fact that they're even engaging with us and having a conversation. I think it's really easy to generate leads. Again, if you're new to this business, it probably feels very hard. What's really freaking hard though is if I gave you a thousand leads today, how could you figure out what leads are worth your time? Because time is finite. Generating leads is finite as well, but there's a [ __ ] ton of leads out there. That's really hard. And so pre-qualification is kind of our secret. Once we get a lead in the CRM, how do we know who deserves our time? So, I spent a lot of time on this pre-qualification process. I'll walk you guys through the other two here. The three W's framework. These are questions that we need to get answered when we have a call with the seller. This is really what most of our first call is around. I don't ask these l like in a linear fashion. I don't just go bang bang bang. I don't ask these directly, but I want to get the intel around this because this ultimately tells a story. And the story is, do they have a need? Do they need my service? Can I solve something for them? So, it's why sell now? Why haven't they sold before? Why not sell themselves or list with a realtor? If I can get this intel, it's going to tell me a lot about what's going on. A lot of times sellers will be like, "Yeah, I want 500 grand. The propertyy's worth 100 grand." but come to find out, they haven't
sold before because they just got hit with an IRS bill and they don't want to list with an agent because they need to get it paid off in 3 months. It's like, well, that's a conflicting signal versus the crazy price that they want. I'm going to stick around and hang out here even though we haven't agreed on price yet.
Property backstory. This is what I call ownership context. Things like obviously length of ownership. Most of our deals, they've owned for over 5 years. Most people know that. How they acquired it. This is an important one. Frequency of use and then do they have a succession plan for the property and then owner age in my meta-analysis. Last year, we did over a 100 deals. I think three of the deals, the owner was under 50 years old.
Okay, cool. So, I can filter my data on the front end for this stuff, but I can also keep it in mind when a new lead comes in and pre-qualify off of it. If you do a postmortem on all of your deals, you'll start to see a shocking correlation to the property backstory. Like, it really matters. And so again, you can do this proactively on the front end, or you can start to filter for it once leads come into your CRM. At some point, AI will do all of this for us. Like, that's coming, and you just have it lead-scored for you.
Okay, putting this into practice. I'm going to walk you guys through a real deal example. This is a funnier one. So, this lead landed our CRM May of 2023. This was in Bastrop County, Texas. Good example of a county that used to be pretty hot. It's kind of crap now, to be honest. A lot of supply out there. Uh, within minutes, my team underwrote the deal. So, speed to lead, everyone knows that that's paramount in this business. We're trying to get in touch with these people as fast as humanly possible once they get in our CRM. The catalyst to that, though, is we want to just briefly do our underwriting. It typically looks like five sold comps, five active comps. It's really lean and mean. See, my my team puts us a really simple note in there, and my AM is getting on that call. Typically, the first call is pre-qualification, and then typically, again, it ranges. The second call, we make an offer. We make an offer within two business days of that first connect. That's what we shoot for.
Okay. Um, again, there's situations where it changes. A seller's pressing us for an offer. I'm going to make the offer, but for the most part, this is what the flow looks like. So, took us two years to lock up this deal. Hundreds of calls, hundreds of texts, hundreds of emails. But I'm going to walk you guys through the reason that we were able to stay in the fight in this deal. Here's what's interesting. When the seller reached out to us, they wanted $315,000, and they had other offers on the table. You can see our contract here. We locked it up for $92,000. That was on November 14th of 2024. Now, why did we stay in the fight for 2 years when the seller wanted triple what we were willing to pay for it? Well, the seller went to rehab, lost her son, had a stroke, fell on hard financial times, and even ended up in the hospital during closing. It was a crazy situation to get this deal signed. What's funny, though, again, there was other land investors making offers in the beginning and through the whole process. Why did no one else lock up this deal? Well, they probably didn't see that there was gold here because they didn't pre-qualify it correctly. They just said, "Ah, this seller wants too much. I'm out." This deal will sell for a little north of 200K. We got it listed at like 240 right now, I think. I'll actually show you guys the listing photos for this property in a bit. There was a lot of minutia that had to get solved, too. 7K to clear junk off the property. There's title issues. So, you know, we did a lot of work to get this deal at the price that we did.
All right. Cleaning up our KPIs. Who here has like their KPIs dialed in? No one. It's a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to do. >> Yeah, exactly. Um, so yeah, we're building out like a unified KPI dashboard inside of Notion. I used to have like 12,000 different spreadsheets. It was a mess. I never would look at them cuz it's like so fragmented. We'll be adding this Notion dashboard to Leah soon so everyone could get access to it. So, the way we break it down, we've got our KPI dashboard that's updated weekly by my COO. That's quantitative. That's the quantitative data. All like the numbers I was showing you before, that comes from our dashboard. Okay? And then I collect what I call qualitative data via end-of-day reports for my team. So, that backs into the math. Why were the numbers this way? Well, I slept like [ __ ] I was really hungry. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. So, I can kind of pair these two data points together. I don't think it's enough just to get the quantitative stuff. I also want to see the flip side of it in terms of what caused these numbers to to actualize uh in the works.
So, something that we're working on right now is we're building out a project management tracking system inside of Notion. Who here runs like project management style stuff in their land business? Yeah, of course. Of course you guys would. Huh? >> Yeah. So, if it's like, "Hey, we're going to like do X, Y, and Z thing in the business. We're going to hire two new appointment setters. We're going to train our team on X, Y, and Z. We're going to build out this new thing." It was just all over the place. So, it wasn't owned by one person. So, in the project management system, it's owned by one person. We get to see that there's a deadline for it, and then we get to see progress reported inside there. There's a lot of tools you can use, monday.com, whatever. I just I prefer Notion. Um, I think it's important to get like really comfortable with one tool. I hate using like a bunch of different tools. I feel like that just causes a lot of friction, and friction with KPIs typically leads to them either not being tracked or being tracked incorrectly, or they are tracked, but you just never look at them. So, clean it up, get it dialed in.
All right. Fixing dispositions. So, whatever, 6 months ago, 8 months ago, like we pretty quickly started to see the inputs playing out from all the acquisition stuff and the marketing stuff. We were getting more deals, but of course, the cash lagged. Now, some of that's just the reality of this business. There's just a long uh lead time to get deals to convert to money in your bank account. But some of it was our disposition process. So, the reason was we had weak realtors, lack of visibility with our realtors, variable quality with our photos, and optimistic initial pricing. I'm going to walk you guys through all these here in a second.
All right. Realtor standards. You guys are going to see a common theme here. This like A+ concept. It's like the same thing with realtors. It's the same thing with marketing channels. The same thing with hiring talent. There's an arbitrage to getting whoever is the best of the best out there. And you usually pay a premium on the front end, but it typically catches up with you and it still has like a positive expected value. And so I think it's probably of uh in your best interest to find the best of everything in most cases. So, we moved from paying whatever, 3 to 4% to a realtor, bumped it up. One of the things that we were doing too is we were using flat-fee MLSs, but I was still paying 3% to a buyer's agent. It's like, why am I doing that? Why don't I just put that towards a listing agent, find a great one, pay them a little bit more, and typically we sell our properties faster. And in some cases, we sell them for a bit more. They also help with some of the front-end due diligence. Uh, the way I pre-qualify realtors, they must have access to a drone. That's a weird one. What land realtor doesn't have access to a drone, though? I'm trying to use land realtors. I don't want to use Suzie at Coldwell Banker. I'm looking for the real land realtor. So, they must have a drone. They must shoot the photos for free in quotes. They're not billing us for those. And they must use our drone photo SOP. So, we literally walk them through. This is how you take the photos. This is what angle. This is the quantity. We make it very, very simple. They're just plugging into our system. We pull all of this from the agent dashboard inside of Land Insights, both for double-close agents and then for standard agents. Um, obviously, I like to look at who's turning volume, who's got active listings. You can look at that for the brokerage. You can look at that for the individual agent. We got to call a lot of agents to find good ones, though. So, like even with this system, I still have to call 10 agents.
Yeah. >> In your um your the previous slide, you said, "Hey, you know, the agents are the ones that are actually taking the drone photos." >> Mhm. Intrinsically in that you're you're saying, "Hey, basically before we talk to the agent, we have a complete assessment of value." I found um a lot of times we're actually relying, even though we might have an internal assessment of what we believe value to be. In some counties, it's it's not very clear, and they actually have to visit the property. So, we will use drone photos as sort of a visual assessment, but are you saying, hey, as a part of the, you know, the initial consultation with the agent, hey, you go out to the property and you have the drone photos, like how does that conversation work? Cuz we usually find that we have to go to actual brokers to get the valuation. >> Yeah. So, I used to heavily rely on brokers. I gave you guys the example at the beginning, like they often give us wacky numbers. There are a few situations that I do rely on brokers to underwrite on the front end. I still typically get a title report before I engage them. So, I'm happy to if I have to change the price at closing, whatever. I don't love to do it, but I'm willing to do it, but I want to get a clean bill of health on the property and then I'll engage the realtor. The only time we're really using them for feedback on pricing, value add, weird zoning, like commercial lot, or just some crazy [ __ ] on the property, like just weird stuff. Oh, it's like a hay farm or something. What does that do to value? Outside of that, for standard flips, dude, I trust my underwriting more than I trust their underwriting. And of course, the incentives are misaligned. They want to get the listing, so they're like, "Oh, you could sell it for $600,000." Uh, and if you really go and back-test what they say, there's some good ones out there. They are, there's a big spread in quality, but most times we're right and they're wrong. That's what I found at least.
Yeah. >> I feel like you could be more comfortable with that in areas that you're familiar with. So how do you bridge that gap especially when you're looking at new markets and you don't know you don't have a network in there you don't areas you don't know the gremlins in the ground you know you got data for the market analysis and all that kind of stuff with that localized knowledge how do you bridge that gap >> in a way that you are have high enough confidence to do so that your underwriting internally is going to be close enough on >> point yeah so we do use realtors who go into new markets it's not a guarantee that we will one of the things that I do when I go into a new market I'll contract things as the double close to kind of dip my foot into the pond so I'm not getting myself into a crazy situation. Even in a new market though, like I've done enough business to know like, okay, perk tests are super important in North Carolina, they're probably important in Virginia, too. Like you start to get like regional knowledge that like cascades to multiple states. If you're new, yeah, have the backstop of a realtor and a funder and like you want that extra assurance. I mean, I've been doing this for 6 years, so I have a pretty good like level of confidence. The other thing too is that there's so many stops of underwriting in our process. The texters underwrite, our underwriter inside our CRM underwrites, our AM reviews that, when we send the contractor ops people review it. So, there's a lot of checks and balances. Um, you know, it's funny. We just we just sold the deal. We just got an offer on a deal that we bought at 35. I think we thought it was going to sell at like 70, 75, and we got an offer at like 149. So, like I think we're like some in some cases very conservative, honestly. Um, so we still make mistakes, but yeah, I'm not super bullish on going heavy on the realtors. Uh, but there's a time and a place for it, and there are markets that are frankly confusing and and require the the feedback. One of the things that I do as well with realtors and with uh title companies is like if you're in a community, try to get a warm intro from someone cuz I found when I would call agents and I'm like, "Yeah, I'm new in this market. Can you help me with this deal?" They're like, "Dude, [ __ ] you. I'm not I'm not interested in like like no thanks." >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Or like they're like, "Pay me 500 bucks for a CMA." And so when I get a warm intro though, that's been helpful. So we do a bit of that.
>> Hey S. >> Yeah. >> So I learned it more uh when I was reaching out to like on-market stuff. Sellers really do like what John was saying earlier, sellers want a lot. >> If you're being conservative on the sale, like what are you buying these at to make it worth it? Is it just you closing with your own money that makes it worth it? Or >> what do those conversations look like with the seller? Yeah, maybe. How long do do those take? >> Okay, there's a couple questions in there. Um, yes, I use my own money for things. I haven't used outside money in a long time. I don't know. It kind of makes me feel weird using outside money. I just it gets me feeling jittery. I don't I don't love it. So, I try to self-fund most things. If you're just getting started, definitely use JV, graduate to debt. You said, how long does it take to contract these things? Yeah, especially if you're trying to be >> conservative to offer less, which I mean most of these sellers have had conversations with someone out there where they're being offered more or they're they're at least now they want more because they've had all these conversations. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. There's a difference between someone that wants more and someone that wants more but has a real need. So, we generate a lot of leads, so we get exposed to the ones that have a real need, and they might want more, but we spend our time there. If you're generating 40 leads a month, like you might not be getting those people that I'm talking about. That's helpful. A majority of our deals are 30 plus days old inside of our CRM, so there's a longer sales cycle for sure. Um, what was the other part of the question? >> That's it. I mean, how are you getting them lower, but you're focusing on >> Oh, yeah. I'll talk about this, too, and we're going to hit on this in a future slide. I'm not like purposely trying to buy things at 20 cents on a dollar. Like, yeah, weird [ __ ] happens, but I'm not trying to do that. We typically anticipate, depending on the demand of the market, we're going to capture like 80 to 95% of that retail value. So then I'm basing an offer off of that, whatever, 50 to 70% of retail. We'll contract things, double close. We'll take them down with owner financing. We'll cash close them. About a third of our deals right now are like creative contracts, like double close or whatnot. Um, but yeah, I mean, like, kind of the cure-all in this business is generate a lot of leads. Like, you just get exposed to more opportunity, and then you got to get good at spotting, "Oh, this is where I should go really deep." Ignore the other 450 leads for the most part. Put them on some kind of drip cadence and check in once a month.
Yeah. >> How long usually your contract for? And how are you funding your deals? The ones that you have to buy? >> Yeah. So, I I self-fund my deals. I I fund them myself on the double close. We start everything. It's it's variable. I'll tell you guys the story, but we start everything at 120 days. I always put down EMD. I do not double close without EMD. Your contract is pretty much worthless without EMD. $500 earnest money that's non-refundable. I'll pay it to them right when they sign. I'll sell it to them, wire them, send it on a carrier pigeon, >> the money to them. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there's cases where we go up a little bit, but for the most part, it's never more than a few thousand. In some cases, we'll have it go hard in increments, too, but typically it's just non-refundable on the front end. And then, yeah, cash deals, we're funding ourselves. Um, we just we had a property that just closed today that we just got the money on. This is a double-closed. It's a hunting property in Michigan. They gave us a year on the contract. We contracted it at 175. We sold it at like 290. I think they gave us a year. We controlled it with $500 earnest. So, like, you mean the stuff is negotiable, right? And what the reason they did that is they wanted to hit one last hunting season in the fall, but we contracted before then, and they gave us a year on the contract. Um, so yeah, you can really get away with pretty much anything. You just got to ask for it. That's the crazy thing. What I've seen inside of Leah, you know, when people get the best deal of their life is when they think the property is worthless because then they finally feel justified for asking for the crazy offer because like it's a crap property anyways, and then they lock it up. And I'm like, what if you had that mindset in every deal?
Yeah. >> Are you doing no-ation agreements or are you being very straightforward about double closing? >> Super straightforward. Yeah, super straightforward. We've got two different contracts. One that's like a more like a POA crazy long one, but mostly what we use is a one-pager, one-page, and it's like, we got the right to market and sign listing documents on the MLS. Like that's pretty >> having that conversation with the like, "Just so you're aware, here's what's about to take place." >> We are super, super candid. Now, there are some buzzwords I want to avoid, double close, things like that, that just have like a negative association or will confuse them. But we'll say something like, "Hey, if you can give us more time, we can run through our due diligence. We can play matchmaker. I think that's something that AJ says. Maybe I'm wrong. We can play matchmaker with the property, try to find the the best buyer for it. That might mean that we have boots on the ground with the property. Is that going to be a problem for you?" "No." "Okay, cool. And in the event that we make more money than what's listed in the contract, is that going to be a problem for you?" "No." "Okay, cool." For most of them, it's not. You know what I found about double closing? The worst situation is you're about to close, the seller backs out, you got a buyer that's put five grand into a survey, and now they're hunting you down. I want to avoid that at all cost. A lot of what I do might not be optimal, but I'm trying to avoid those painful situations because those really set me back.
Yeah. >> Yeah. So, I mean, that's going to happen, right? The scenario you just >> uh so as you're talking to the seller, buyer, what realtor, whatever it is you're using, how do you go about to present that or at least to paint 80, 90% of that picture >> to possibly prevent that? To possibly prevent the buyer saying, "Hey, I just did a perk test." Yeah. >> Just did a survey. We ran across them. Yeah. My partners could have been like, "Ah, shoot. I mean, this could be a lawsuit." Probably not. >> How do y'all go about >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, a couple things. One, what I just said, I kind of use that framework. And if the seller seems like a flight risk, like he's kind of crazy or she's a little crazy, we're going to go even further in our explanation. And I'm going to file a memorandum of contract. I'm just going to save my butt and just get that filed immediately. I've got a great lawyer on speed dial. So, if that buyer backs out or sorry, the seller backs out and the buyer's pissed, I'm going to threaten a lawsuit to that seller. And usually that's enough to shake the tree and they're like, "All right, fine. Let's just get it done with." Uh, I've only had it happen once, and nothing really became of it. But it was scary, and I was like, I never want to deal with that again. Um, yeah. I think there's also double closes that we've said no to because the seller just seems crazy, and we're like, "We can just buy it cash." That's our only option. And so I think you need to know when to walk away from what looks like a good thing. It's kind of an illusion. And I, again, there's certain situations in this business that just set you back 10 steps. And I want to avoid those. So much of it is like staying in the game, one foot in front of the other, every single day. And so I try to avoid those those painful situations. And that means using your discretion.
>> What about with the conversation with the buyer to talk to the realtor to explain that? >> Yeah. So >> that could be very sensitive. >> Yeah. I the one situation that got squirrely with the with the double close, I was using a flat-fee MLS. So I leverage the halo effect of the realtor. The realtor loops me with the title company. They're good with it. Cool. Usually the buyer has no fuss at that point because like, well, the title company's cool with it. The realtor's cool with it. But we do spend a lot of time selecting the right realtor, right, for a double close. That's why we built that double-close database as well. Literally in every single MLS, we called agents and like pre-qualified them on double closing. "Are you guys cool with it?" And if they said yes, we added them into the platform. Um, so usually everything with double closing, for the most part, is usually like a "who, not how" phenomenon. And so you'll get some agents, they're like, "Yeah, I'll take it on, but you got to jump through these 10 hoops." I'm usually like, "I'll just go find a different agent. It's not worth it for me."
All right, step 15. We drive the process. So, often times in most situations, like when you're dealing with a realtor, usually the realtor is the expert. The landowner is sitting shotgun. They're kind of like the consumer idiot that doesn't know anything, and like the realtor's driving the show. We've inverted that process. The realtor's walking into our process. They're like an employee of ours, essentially, for that 6 months. And if they're not cool with that, then we're not going to work together. And so, like, we are really clear about that on the front end. And again, it's kind of a pre-qualification step. So, what that looks like, we send in bi-weekly KPI check-ins. They have to report their KPIs to us. A, that creates visibility. With visibility, you start to get people that behave uh at the highest level because they know they're being watched. But also, we're able to give feedback. "Hey, you had 10 showings, but none of them got offers. Have you followed up with them?" You know, usually you're just completely blind in the realtor process. And so, this has been huge for us. This template's inside of Leah for anyone that's here, and we send that out bi-weekly. Um, and we also have SOPs in terms of how they take the photos. We edit all the photos and we write the listing description ourselves.
All right. Designing listings that sell. So, I think great listing photos are the original value-add in land. Screw subdividing all that stuff. I mean, it's awesome, but like a great listing package is like the first thing that you should do, and it's $500 or less, and it really moves the needle in a big way. Most land investors have terrible listings. I'm sorry. They're just not very good. Both in terms of the cover photo, but also in terms of the photo that the stories tell. When someone clicks on Zillow, they've got like five photos, and that has to tell the full picture of the property. Is there a well casing? Is there a driveway? They're an old oak tree. Like all of that needs to be shown in those four to five photos to tell a compelling story. Ultimately, dispositions is a game of views, clicks, and saves. It's internet marketing at its finest. And for a lot of people, that's kind of a shock. Yeah, you could buy something, right? But if you're not mastering those, good luck getting it sold in a reasonable time frame. And so photos are the easiest place to start. I'm going to show you guys an example of what that actually looks like.
Okay. What I found as well is you don't really sell properties unless you get a buyer to the property, obviously. The other thing is getting a buyer to the interior of the property. So, there's two things that I look at. One, does the agent have the ability to get the person to the middle of the property? Do they have like an ATV or a truck or whatever? The other thing is, does the property lend itself to it? Right? If I pull up to your 40-acre property and it's just overgrown and there's no path to get to the interior, it's really hard to sell that thing. So, I'll discount those properties in the acquisition phase. Um, but I think getting people to the middle of the property, they got to touch it, feel it, smell it, taste it. They got to feel the property to get an offer on the property. But again, that all starts with getting the view, getting the click on the listing, and getting the save on the listing. And saves is what is the catalyst to getting people to reach out to your realtor, which leads to showings. But to get showings, you got to have a realtor that's following a sales process and like following up with these people because you might get a phone call, but that doesn't mean that they're going to show the property.
So, here's a real-life uh example. This is from that property in Bastrop County, the example I showed you. This is the before. This is the after. You think this is going to move the needle for us? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Every listing of ours looks like this. But a year ago, some looked like this. Not all looked like this. And sure enough, those properties were taking forever to sell. We designed all of these in Land Insights. My team does some stuff in Canva with some of the font, but this is all designed inside of Land Insights. Again, this takes 30 minutes to design. You can use Photoshop or whatever. Uh, and it really moves the needle.
All right. Pricing with precision. So, typically we're thinking about listing things 80, 90% of retail value. People are still kind of following this like COVID behavior pattern where they think they can get retail. Guys, that's never been the business. It will never be the business for the most part. You cannot. It's so hard to get retail. Even if you got one of the best properties out there, unless you're willing to sit on it for a while, you're probably not getting retail. So, underwrite as if you're not going to get retail. Underwrite at 80 to 90% of market value. And this is relative to the demand of the market. If you're in a smoking hot market that's constrained on supply, like there's no 10 acres available, yeah, maybe you're going to get the top end of this. You're still probably not getting 100%. Okay. Uh, way too many people try to sit on these listings for 6 months and get top dollar. It just doesn't work. I've got a bit of a hypothesis that I've seen as well. We are reliant on these third-party MLS platforms, Redfin, Zillow, whatever. If we come out of the gate and we have a too high of a listing price, even if we adjust that listing price, I find that we're still throttled on performance. So, even if I come in, I get it wrong, I adjust 7 days later, it seems like it still doesn't really want to show my listing as much, where if I come in and I'm just booming with momentum, they just keep on showing me over and over and over and over again. An obvious part of this though is repricing. We look within 48 hours when we get a new listing up to understand if we've done a good job. Typically, if we're thinking about Zillow, that's about 50 views per day at about a 10% save ratio roughly. It is relative to the market. That save ratio never really changes, though. And that save ratio to me is a canary in the coal mine if you're priced correctly. Cuz if they're saving it, they see value. If they don't save it, it's like, ah, I don't really understand this property. Seems like it's priced too high. I'm not going to save this and come back to it at a later date.
So, here's a property that we just listed. It's in a uh it's in Florida. Florida's got a lot of supply. It's not the best example ever, but you guys can see the save ratio right here. 365 views in 19 days, 42 saves. The views are a little soft. Again, there's a lot of supply here. Um, but that save ratio is on point. So, I know, okay, our pricing is probably dialed in. I don't think we have to make any adjustments here. And so, we'll wait. And if I don't get an offer within 60 days on something like this, then we'll readjust. But, if I come out of the gate and I've got it right and I've got these ratios in place, I'm going to let it sit and let it ride. But if I see within 48 hours or a week that I'm not getting any of this, I I've got to adjust. Assuming that your listing photos are correct.
Step 18. Made meta-analysis. Anyone know what I mean when I say this? Kind of like a buzzword. Yeah. I mean, it's like the 30,000-foot view and doing a meta-analysis on all of the data in your business and finding these patterns. I think far too many people are like hanging on to these stupid platitudes that all these talking heads have talked about that don't really work. I think your data is more valuable than pretty much anything else that you can get out there. So, learn from your data. If you're doing deals and sending marketing, that's the best educator right there. And then you pair that with ChatGPT, which I don't even know how to do, but I bet it gets pretty crazy. I bet they can uh find some interesting threads. And I started doing this, looking at really weird stuff like credit scores, mortgage, do they own their home, when did they buy their home? Just looking for little patterns, anything that I can glean.
Okay. Pareto principle. Anyone know what this means? 80/20. Yeah. This is really like a 90/10 business. I think uh if you go back and do a meta-analysis, you'll probably see this ring true. 10% of your deals, 10% of your markets, 10% of your realtors, yada yada yada. Move most of the needles in your business. So, I want to avoid tribal knowledge. Find out what that 20% is and just do more of that. And ultimately, that's what I just did in the last year. I didn't work more. I just figured out what is that 20% and then can I ratchet it up? Can I do more of it? Everyone here has been in this business for more than a year, right? Yeah. You guys have so much data. Who here's learning from their data? >> Yeah. Who here's reviewed all of their deals ever? Okay. Nice. Did you learn anything from it? >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How not to lose money. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's important to lose from the learn from the losers and the winners. You know, they both tell a story.
Step 20. This is kind of woo-woo and cheesy, but it's real. Rediscovering my why. Who here knows why they're doing this business? Anyone want to share? Yeah. >> Financial freedom and generosity. >> Boom. Okay. You >> to have fun. >> To have I love it. You and I are on the same wavelength there. When I got started, my why was that I had a chip on my shoulder. I had to prove something. That's what I felt like. At least it was made up. That's kind of a finite source of motivation, though. How long can you really run uh run away? Ultimately, you're running away from something, right? Uh, I want to run towards something. I want to be excited by a big vision. And so, I was running away from something. And that that works, you know, that's a anger is a decent motivation, but it's not perfect. And so I eventually hit a wall, and ultimately I had to rediscover my why, and it had very little to do with making more money. The beautiful thing about making money is then you get to make decisions that have nothing to do with making more money.
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