6-Figure Profits from Cold Emailing Land Owners with Meir Shemtov

[Applause] Hello everyone and welcome to the Only Land Fan Show. My name is Kendall Lun, and our guest today is May Shimo. Born and raised in Uruguay, May Shimo currently lives with his family and kids in South Florida. In addition to successfully running his 14-person, seven-figure land business, May is also the founder of Lands.com, a done-for-you service that gets hot seller leads for land investors using cold email marketing. May, thanks so much for joining us. How are you today?

I'm doing great, so grateful to be here. How are you guys?

Well, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so excited to talk to you today about our topic. The topic is six-figure profits from cold emailing land owners. I know a lot of people are excited about that, lots of buzz around this topic right now. Before we jump into that, though, would love to chat a little bit about your background. Tell us, how did you get started in doing land deals?

Land deals? We love land. Yes, we do. Land. I was doing, I was living in New York back in 2020, and I had a co-living business. And I had that for a couple of years, and then I sold that right before COVID, actually, to my partner. And I had a, my brother had a friend who was buying and selling land. And, and my brother got into it. And my brother and I had an e-commerce company at the time, right after I left my co-living business. And he was like, so busy with this land business. And we were starting out this e-commerce company. And, and he was like, "Dude, I'm just like, not, I'm not passionate about this e-commerce stuff anymore. It's so tedious and time-consuming and boring. And like, I'm doing all these deals and I just don't want to continue doing these e-commerce." And he's like, "Would you be upset if I like, stop working with you on this Amazon stuff?" I'm like, "I won't be upset. Just show me what you're doing." And he was just showing me what he was doing. And I was like, "Great, this is just, is going to be our next, our next thing." And I actually wanted to do a like a luxury glamping resort. So I asked him, "Why don't you help me find off-market land owners that we could reach out to?" And he's sure. He showed me how DataTree works, and he showed me how all his stuff worked. And then I was about to send a mailer to Joshua Tree, just so I can find some land and develop a a resort. And he's, "May, don't do that resort thing. Just mail Joshua Tree, buy land, sell land, do what I do." And I was like, "You know what? Let's go for it." And that was my first mailer in 2021 or two, something like that. And, and that was the beginning of a very fun journey that I'm in.

Wow, I love that. Background in e-commerce, quite a common path. I've talked to quite a few land investors who had like a background in e-commerce. So there's got to be some kind of parallel there. What type of skill did you bring over from the e-commerce space into the land business, if you had to say this translates pretty well, what would you say that would be?

Without a shadow of a doubt, is demand and supply. Like understanding a product that is in high demand and there's low supply. And that's the, that's the same in every industry. But in land, we're using software, we're using technology to identify what is, you know, a market that has high demand, low supply, where we can bring this product to market and right away get it sold. It's the same thing online.

That's fantastic. Do you remember your very first deal? Your very first land deal?

Yeah, so it depends what you call the first deal. The first property I bought, or the first property I sold?

Oh, that's a good one. Let's go with bought first, and then we can go with sold. Or the first contractor, the first seller?

Yeah, so, so there, there was a lot of firsts. Um, because I was living in LA at the time, and my first mailer was in Joshua Tree. So some of the sellers would call, and I would look up where they live, and they live in LA. And I would be like, "Let me just go to their house and just thought talk to them." And also, I'm from Uruguay, so Spanish is my first language. So I remember this guy called me up in Spanish, just talking to me. And I quickly look up where he lives, and I'm like, he's like a 40-minute drive. Let me just go to his house. And I printed out a purchase agreement. And I go to his house. And he said, "I, I don't want to sign this." And he's, "I want to sign the deed. I just don't want to sign this purchase agreement. Just bring me a deed and pay for it, and let's go." And I'm like, "Yeah, sure, absolutely. It sounds good. Great. Let me just call my brother real quick. He's my partner." And I call him up and I'm like, "Hey, what's the difference in the deed and the purchase agreement? I don't understand. He signs a paper and then the property is mine. So why do I need all those papers?" Why don't I? That was very funny. Like, little I knew about what I was doing, but I was just doing it. And as far as he was concerned, I'm, I'm an investor. Like, I'm a land investor. That was my first seller that I was talking to. And then in terms of my first deal, it was a 90-degree angle slope. And, and I called an agent. Before, I didn't know. I didn't know that we had to check topography at the time. And the property across the street sold for $70,000. And this property, I was buying it for nine. So this was like amazing. I, I called an agent. The agent was like, "Yeah, we can sell that for 70." I didn't realize that the agent didn't actually go to the property, they just looked at it on the map. And then we bought it. This was before I was, I built out this double close machine that I have now. It was just buying and selling. So I bought it for nine. And then when we, when she went to take pictures to list it, she was like, "Oh, whoops." "Oh, no." So, so that was the first deal that I purchased. And, and obviously taught me a lot of lessons. But I was so motivated to get that thing sold that I called everybody that ever, ever bought any land in the area. And I stumbled across this guy who I see kept them buying stuff, stuff in the area, land. I'm like, "This guy's an investor of sorts." Let me call him up. I called him up and I said, "Hey, dude, I got this. Do you want?" He's, "No, man, I don't want this. But if you have anything like 40 acres or plus in this area, let me know. I'll buy it." So I was naive and I was like, "Let me do a campaign, 40 acres plus in this area." He's for sure gonna buy it because he told me he's gonna buy it, right? So I did a campaign. Crickets. I didn't get anybody, nothing. One guy texted me and he's, "I have these 40 acres and I want to X them out." So I called the buyer. I'm like, "I have these 40 acres. How much do you want for it?" He wanted to pay less than what I was paying for it. So I had to basically, and they were both also in LA. So I had coffee with the seller, I had dinner with the buyer. And I squeezed the buyer, I squeezed the seller. And there was a $30,000 spread. And, and we closed on it. And then I ended up selling that shitty lot for 14. So I made some money on that one because I hired somebody online to create a 3D rendering of a house overlooking the whole mountain, which made it look very cool. And that was our from picture in Zillow. And then we started getting a bunch of calls. And so we sold that as well. A lot of lessons learned. But sometimes my biggest lesson is that every challenge that I have is an opportunity for growth. It's an opportunity to learn, to push myself, to do new things, to meet new people, to figure out creative ways to dispose of something, to maybe put a house on it, maybe sell it to the neighbor, maybe build out. So that was my welcome to, to the land business.

Calling all ambitious land flippers ready to transform your business with proven systems and processes. Imagine this: one of my students recently closed two land deals and got another under contract in just 24 hours. That's the power of a well-oiled land flipping machine. My exclusive coaching program is specifically designed for action takers just like you. We'll build out your entire operation from lead gen to dispo, implementing these systems on real deals from day one. But hurry, I'm only accepting three new students until 2025. If you've done deals, have a growth mindset, and are ready to scale, visit KendallCall.com now. Let's turn your land business into a consistent profit powerhouse.

I love that. I love the action. I see so many people that are like, "Oh, I need to set up an LLC, and I need to get this, and I need to do this, and make sure I have a perfect logo, and make sure I have a perfect website, and do all of this stuff before I even sent out my first campaign." I love the messy action stuff because you learn lots of lessons that way. So you mentioned that your very first business model was more of the traditional, you buy and then turn around and flip. So when did you, is that your current business model? You mentioned something about double closing. What are you doing now?

So right after that mailer to Joshua Tree, I sent the mailer to Chattanooga, Tennessee. And I sent like a small mailer, and I got 14 contracts. 14 sellers who wanted to sell. These are like smaller infill lots, whatever. And I said yes to all of them, and I signed all of them. And I flew to Chattanooga. I'm like, "I gotta see what's going on here." Okay? And they started meeting with the neighbors, meeting with the sellers, just meeting with a title company, meeting with a broker. And I realized that I didn't have money to buy all of these. But there were, there was some, some profits to be made. And that's when I started developing, learning more. It's not my strategy, but developing my own flavor and how to really double close something, how to explain it to the seller, how to explain to the buyer, how to explain it to the agent. I wasn't very confident. And I was able to sell a lot of these parcels without actually buying them. And shortly after that, I started getting into the more the six-figure deals. And I double closed something for a half a million dollars. And it was just growing from there. And that's when I realized I could do bigger deals, much bigger deals with much bigger profit margins if I don't necessarily buy everything. And, granted, there's a lot of issues with that. We, if you want, we can get into it. But double closing has a lot of challenges and risks and like everything. But if, because I was cash-strapped, and also I learned from my mistakes with this 90-degree slope, I was like, "Okay, I got to maybe take it a little slower here." So that's really how I got into double closing. And today, we buy some stuff, we fund other people's deals as well, subdivisions. We have to pay for, not always, but a lot of the time. And then, yeah, the bread and butter is still double closing. It's still getting properties under contract, finding an end buyer, working with the seller, working with the buyer, paying everybody, paying title, paying the closing costs. And then whatever is left, that's the spread.

Fantastic. So you mentioned there are definitely cons, right? There are pros and cons to everything. So can you talk to us a little bit about what are some of the the biggest takeaways and the biggest aha moments that you had when you started developing or employing this double close strategy? For those of us who maybe are listening and have never double closed, just used to doing this traditional flip, can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Sure. By the way, I'm in a guest house that we just built out of containers, and it's really cool. But I don't know about the Wi-Fi strength here. Do you hear me well, or is it choppy?

Yeah, you're great. You're great. Okay. Okay, good. Because I, I hear a little bit of a delay, just making sure that we're good.

You're good. So I guess the, the way double closing works is, let's say a buyer, a seller wants to sell his property for $240,000. Now, the property is worth, let's say, $300. Okay? It's not a good business practice to buy it for 240 plus closing costs, plus title, plus everything else, and then sell it for 300. And then the agent's going to charge you, let's say, 5%. Right? So that's 15. And then you're left with nothing really after you do all the things. And if you're borrowing money, or you're taking an equity partner, like, it's just, there's nothing left there. So what most land investors do is they tell the seller, "Listen, I need to get this for 100. I need to get it for 120." And a lot of sellers would be like, "No." So what we do is we say, "Listen, we're 300. You want 240 for it? We'll give you 240. You give us three to four months." Three months. And we explain there's a due diligence process, and there's a lot of different things that we have to go through before we close on it. And during that time, we have permission from the seller to market it to, in the MLS, or to market it to, to the public. And we market it for, let's say, 290. And then we market it ourselves. Because if we bring in an agent, a realtor, there's just not a lot of meaning. The margins are, the profit is good, but the margin relative to the purchase price isn't great. So like, they'll eat up all your margin. So we do that sort of strategy in where we can still make 20 to $30,000 per deal by double closing it. Or if a property is very risky, or if a property has just different kind of issues, you're like, "I don't really want to risk my money." But let's get in the contract and let's see what we could do with it. And that way, we can do a lot more volume than if we were just buying everything. Also, eventually, you run out of cash, you know? You buy every deal, and then you're going to have to take investors' money. And investors take half of that, right? And investors want to see a certain return. So it's a good strategy to be able to scale. And I was able to scale a team fairly quickly in terms of lead gen, acquisitions, dispositions. And then we can handle a lot of volume. And then we can turn around these contracts. So that's, that, that was the aha moment of double closing.

Yeah, I love that. I'm a huge fan of double closing. I do that in my own business as well. Obviously, different types of double closes. Are you specifically doing pass-through closing? Can you talk a little bit about how you do that? Which closing? Like the pass-through closing, where you're using pass-through funding?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's, there are three, three ways of maybe four ways of doing this, right? One way is double closing where you need to bring money to the table, but both closings are happening on the same day. So you still need to get that the first contract to cover that for the first. So if you're buying for 70, selling for 90, you bring 70 for that day, you wire it to title, and then the next day, they'll wire 90 back. And a lot of people lend transactional funding, which is money for, and they'll charge one, one, 2% or whatever, 3% for that day. The best part, the best type of double closing is pass-through funding, where the title says, "Hey, we'll take the money from the buyer, we'll pay the seller, and we'll give you the rest." So you don't have to bring anything. And that's very, like, very much title dependent, or county, or state. Everyone's got their own rules around how they do that. Then the third way of doing it is you do an assignment. So the assignment of contract is you're, you take your contract with the seller, and then you assign it to the buyer. And the buyer pays you a fee for that. The pro of that is that you don't have to have two closings, so you save on closing costs, and you save on the hassle. If you don't have a transaction coordinator and you're doing all of this yourself, it's just so easy to just send a contract. You don't have to, not anything, you don't have to do anything. The risk with that is that it shows up on the settlement statement, and both the buyer and the, and the seller are going to see how much money you're making. So it only works in two cases. It works if you're making very little money. So let's say you're buying it for $6,000, and then you're selling it for $8,000. So you just assign it for two grand. No one's going to care that you're making $2,000. Or if it's a very expensive property, let's say it's a million, $200,000. Right? And you're assigning it for a million 250,000. So you're making $50,000. But because relative to the 1.2 million, and you're dealing with people that understand that you're a wholesaler, understand that you have your cost of getting these properties on contract, your marketing expenses. So it'll work. So ironically, it works for like, really expensive property, or really cheap properties, or in a property where the profit you're making is not that great. So that's when you could do it. That's when I do it usually. But if it's a buy for 80, sell for 100, like nobody wants to see that you're making 20. So even though you're not really making 20, you have to pay a lot to get the property on a contract, to market it, you're paying the brokers. So like, people think you're making all this money. It's not true. It's, you're making money, and that's that's the business. But the seller is going to feel like they're getting ripped off, and the buyer feels that they're paying too much. And none of them realize that someone's paying all closing costs, and someone's taking the also creating this opportunity for everybody. So when no one knows what everyone's making, everyone's happy, right? The seller got his property sold, the buyer got himself a beautiful property, the agent got paid, title got paid, everyone's happy. So that's why you want to keep everybody in their lane by doing two separate closings.

Yeah, that's great. Because in those two separate closings, they have two separate HUD statements, two separate closing statements. You only see the seller only sees what you paid them. The buyer only sees what they've paid you. So no one knows what what's happening except for you.

Yeah. Awesome. So you mentioned earlier about double closing a $500,000 property. My ears perked up a little bit whenever you said that. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Give us a little walkthrough of that case study.

Sure. I'm closing one now at the end of the month, a $1.3 million property, double closing that as well. It's just the same thing, just a couple more zeros, man. It's, I mean, well, tell us about the property. Is it, you? Is it, or I can think of, I can think of many. One of them in Texas. This guy wants 360 for property. This is when, you know, before I, I built out the team. This was a while ago. I remember, I just remember because we were texting, and the guy texted back, "360." Just those three numbers. 360. 360. That's how much he wants for property. No, "Hey, how are you?" Nothing. 360. In my mind, I'm like, "This guy's a waste of time. He's not motivated." Whatever. I called an agent, and he's, "Maybe you can get 400, maybe 410." I was like, "Okay, maybe after eight, maybe I'll make 10, 20 after everything." Then I called another guy, and this guy was much younger, and and more like in tune. This was like an hour 40 minutes away, about 40 minutes away from Austin. And this guy's, "You can sell this for $510,000." And I said, "You sure?" He said, "I'm sure." I'm like, "Who? Why? When?" He's, "You're right out, out of Austin. There's a lot of money in Austin. There's a lot of young tech people. This is a beautiful view." I drove there, I saw it. You can get 510 for it. He listed it for 510, and we got 510 for it. And when the time came to close, I didn't wire anything. The 510 came in from the buyer. And he even got a loan on it, which a lot of people are like, "How do you double close with a lender?" It didn't matter. 510 came in. The seller got his 360. The agent got his like 20 something thousand that he made on it. And everybody else got paid. And then they wired us the rest. And you better believe that agent answers my phone calls every time I call them.

Right? Yeah, yeah. I'm sure I would answer. I would answer when I saw your number come up. Speaking of agents, can you talk a little bit about how you work with agents specifically? Like when you're doing these double closes? I know through my own experience, there are some agents that won't touch a double close listing if you don't have a, a power of attorney signed, if you don't own the property. So can you talk a little bit about how you go about finding agents, particularly in that example? You said that agent actually listed that property for you. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, just from the few stories that I shared, there's that first property that the agent didn't even bother going to see it, and almost screwed up my entire land career. And then you have another agent who casually made us an extra $100,000, right? So clearly, there's very different types of agents. So your question is actually a very good question. And to answer the question of, do we even use agents? So not always do we use agents, right? So if there isn't a lot of profit to be made, and the property is very straightforward, it's a square with road frontage, everybody can go see it, we don't need anyone showing it, it's easy, we know what it's worth, just sell it. Now, if the property is complicated, or the entrance to the property is complicated, somebody needs to be there to show the property, to be able to sell it. And that's when we use agents. When it's either a difficult entrance, or it's a difficult sell, or we don't really know what the price is. So then we need to call somebody to go see it and tell us the opinion. And if we do that to them, we're not going to leave them hanging. So we're going to use them. And so that's like the rule of thumb when we use and when we don't. Sometimes, if we try to list something ourselves and it's not moving for a little bit, we'll give it to an agent because typically, if it's a good one, they'll do it. Now, how do we find good agents? It really depends on the type of property. So if it's like a large, like right now we're looking at 100 acres, you go to like Lands of America, Lands.com, and kind of you see who's got a lot of listings that are similar to yours in in a very similar like area. So that person that's selling 100-acre tracks Monday and Thursday, like the guy knows what it's worth, he knows how to sell it, he's got a buyer list, he knows what he's doing. So that's like where I would go if it's like a large recreational rural, uh, property. If it's, it's like a smaller property, just go on Zillow, Redfin. You can even go to Zoom, X, O, M, which is another MLS website, and you could download all the listings that are in that view. And then you just put it into JABT and you say, "Who's got the most listings?" And then you could do it also. I think with, um, Redfin, because yeah, when you search for a property on Redfin, you have the map, and then on the right, you have all the properties. And then in the bottom of every property, it says who's listing it, right? So you literally do Command A, the whole screen, Command C, or Control C if you have a window, and then you paste it in J 2D, Command V, "Who's got the most listings?" or "Make me a list of, make me a spreadsheet of all the agents that I'm pasting in here, top to bottom." And then it'll give you a spreadsheet. And then you'll see, "Oh, this guy or this gal has 16 listings, right?" So then you go back to to Redfin, and then you do Control F, and then you search the name, and then you see all the listings that they have. And then you start going through them. And not just in the for sale, but also in the sold, obviously. You want to see who's selling. And then you very quickly start realizing, "Okay, who's the main player over here? Who knows their stuff?" And then you call them and you try to get them to go see it, try to get them give you an opinion of value. And that's a little trick how you get the most active land agent in the area.

Imagine having a complete toolkit for success right at your fingertips. That's exactly what you get with Only Land Fan School. Our premium online community for a low monthly fee, access our treasure trove of resources: the On-Market Deals Course, Acquisitions Tool Suite, and Dispo Secrets Library. Plus, connect with fellow flippers in our active community. Whether you're hunting for deals or closing sales, Only Land Fan School has you covered with step-by-step guidance and insider knowledge. Ready to supercharge your land flipping journey? Join OnlyLandFanSchool.com today. That's OLFschool.com.

That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that. Now, whenever you are talking to these agents, let's say it's the very first time you've ever talked with a particular agent, you're explaining the situation, you don't own it, you have a contract. How do you handle like objections or pushback whenever they say, "Hold on, you have to own the property before I list it," or "My broker won't let me list it unless you own it"? How do you handle those types of objections?

Move on to the next one. X agent. Yeah, yeah. There's so many. You don't want my business? It's fine. I don't.

Fantastic. I love it. I love it. Very good. So we've talked a little about how you started with that $99,000 lot. You've told us how you're now doing million-dollar deals. What type of mindset shift did you have to make in order to make that leap? So there are people that are listening and say, "Oh, I'm going to, I, I just want to do small deals because the big ones are risky," or "I'm afraid of doing a big deal for whatever reason." Can you talk to us a little bit about what that mindset shift was like for you going into those bigger deals?

So I, I believe I'm Jewish. I'm, I'm religious. I believe in God and the creator of the universe. And I believe that everything that I have comes from above. The world was here before me, will be here after me. The world doesn't revolve around me, okay? And there's, whatever money is going to come my way will come. Whether I do, it's just, we believe that it's all predestined on like, the first day of the year, like how much everyone's going to make that year. And that's why before the year starts, we make a commitment, how much charity I want to give. And then based on that, 10x that is what you're going to make, right? So that's a little bit how, in terms of mindset, like how I operate. And married, I have kids, I have bills, and things, things need to get paid. So things get, you know what I'm saying? So that's how I see money in general. We give about, these days, about 25, 28% of profits away to the causes that we care about. And for me, that's why I'm doing this. There's a certain amount of money that I need. And thank God, I have what I need. I don't have the jet, but not besides of the jet, I'm, thank God, I'm so grateful. I have what I need. So then what's motivating me to like, work harder? What's motivating me to the hustle? And that's because there's a lot of things I care about. There's a lot of change I want to see in the world. With that mindset, I know that if I'm, I just need to do the work. Meaning, I just need to like, go through the motions. So adding a couple zeros to a deal, it's the same buyer, it's the same seller, right? It's the same title company, it's the same agent. If you're double closing, it's even the same level of risk. Now, in the bigger deals, there's sometimes like earnest money deposit that people want to see. So that's when you're starting to play with real money, where if it's like a million-dollar deal, you might need to put down 20 grand, right? But people are putting down 20 grand to buy these shitty squares that they're trying to flip for 30, right? So why risk 20 to make 10 grand, when you can risk 20, make 100 grand? Right? There's land out there. And then, okay, so we spoke about belief. We spoke about just going through the motions and doing, adding a couple zeros and doing bigger deals. And then there's a third, I think, mindset that I think that I've been blessed with that most people can learn from and maybe just take into account. And that is that basically, you need to act like you know what you're doing. And just, you need to just pretend, fake it 'til you make it, kind of thing. Like, who do you think sells these big deals to title companies? Regular people. That's who sells it. Who do you think goes on contract with regular people? And, and if in my mind, I'm this small little dirt flipper in a corner of Nevada desert, then that's who I'm gonna be, right? But DR Horton, they need to build houses. There's that housing shortage in America. Who are they going to buy the land from? Right? Why don't they buy it from me? They could buy it from you. I'm not more special than anyone else, but I'm also not less. You get what I'm saying? It's like, they're going to buy it from somebody. Might as well buy it from me. So I think when we realize that this land is going to exchange hands, and I just want to be part of it because I have things to fund, and I have ideas and visions and plans and goals and dreams and the purpose, then I just get involved. And then I get it done. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I love that. That is so good. That is so good. So we've talked a little bit about your business model. Let's dive into the lead gen component of your business. Topic of today, we're going to be talking about six-figure profits from cold emailing land owners. So let's dive into this cold emailing lead gen strategy. Can you give us a 30,000-foot view for people who have never heard of this strategy before? Can you talk to us a little bit about how this works?

Uh, sure, absolutely. So who are sellers? People who own land. And we want to buy from them, right? Who are they? They're regular people, right? They wake up, they check their phone, they go to work, right? So these people, they're getting mail left and center. They're getting texts from every land investor, especially if they have land in some county. They're getting bombarded from all sides. But none of them are getting an email to their either work email or personal email, a well-written email, professionally written, saying, "Hey, Kendall, I noticed you have 10 acres in whatever Georgia, or whatever North Carolina, or whatever Nevada. And I was wondering if, if you want to sell it. We're paying roughly about $3,000 to $4,000 an acre. Would you like to, would you ever sell it?" So something like that, right? That's very different than getting all these like blind offer mailers that go to the garbage, okay? That's very different. So when I started skip tracing data to send text messages, I noticed that some of the columns had emails, email addresses. And I'm like, "Why don't we use email? Why don't we send them emails?" And I noticed that it was very difficult to do it and to land in the inbox and not in some like spam or promotion tab. And that's when I realized, "That's probably why no one does it." Because texting doesn't really have any, not yet, probably in a couple of years, Apple's going to roll it out. But if you text someone, it's a text. It doesn't matter if it's spam, and it doesn't matter if it's your, if it's your mother, it's going to show up in your text. But email is different. So I started doing my own stick with email, trying to see if I can figure out how to get into people's inboxes. And I did. And it was a lot of work. And I almost compromised my entire domain because, like an idiot, I was using my actual domain, my actual email, and next emailing documents to title. And it's going to their spam folder because I just spammed a thousand people. There's a lot of mistakes that I learned, and I've gone through that I had to, that I had to overcome. And, and it was pretty complicated. And it's still is, right? So think about it, when you check your email, when you go to your promotions or spam tab, there's like multi-billion dollar companies that are still landing in those tabs. So who am I to say that I have better marketing than them? But because I'm smaller, and becomes a more nimble, and I'm able to do all these little tricks, I'm able to actually land people in a very, you know, clean way. Now, whenever we talk about lead gen, consult your attorney, okay? Talk about cold calling, talk about voicemails, all these things. I'm not saying what's, I'm not trained. I'm just saying that what, what we do is we try to stay very much compliant and still landing people's inbox and asking them if they want to sell their property. And very early on, actually, one of my first deals, I started doing this right away when I realized I'm paying for skip trace data and I have all these emails. I'm like, "Let me put them to use." I got this woman who, this was my first email deal. She got the property from her grandparents, and they had to go through probate. And no one, she never really got any of the marketing material because it was still on her grandmother's name. But she got the email. And the reason she got the email was because she was paying the taxes. So I was able to, she showed up in the emails, and she got my email. She said, "Yeah, I'll sell it." And I ended up buying it for maybe like $4,500 or something, and I sold it for $47,000. So that was like a 10x return. And this was from an email, right? And that actually, I have the HUD statements, and I think I put it on Twitter or something. So you can actually see, like, you can see it, like it's there. So that's when I realized that mailers are good, I guess they work, they're expensive as hell, and everyone was mailing. Email is like sending mail 2005, before all the land investors got involved. That's number one. Number two, there's something about list penetration where you're, you're, you're showing an omnipresence, and you're really targeting these people from every angle. So like, they get a letter from you, they get a text from you, they get a cold call from you, and now they got an email at work. They're like, "Okay, this company's big, and they really want my property. So let me do a deal with them." So there's like this omnipresence. And then there's also like, really touching people from all the different, all the different pipelines and methods that you can read someone. I, I think personally, that that's very effective. And after that, I started scaling it and started growing that. And, and I started getting more. I actually made myself a t-shirt that I'm wearing now. It's "Land Emails." You mentioned is the, so a lot of people ask me how to do email marketing for land. And I figured, why not let people use my team and my systems? But in the back of the shirt, if you can see it, I basically printed the email. I printed an email that we sent somebody, and his response, his response was, "Sure, call me." We bought it for 80, and we sold it for 85,000. Something like that. And it was an email. And it's so interesting. Like, I literally go to the email, and it's there. I see it. It was an email. The guy got my email, he answered, he sold it. We bought it, we sold it, we made 100 grand on it. And there's a few more. There's another one that like, um, we were in touch with MVA text like two years ago. And then they got our email and they're like, "It's time to sell." But we're not going to text people. It's just, it's a matter of just doing things repeatedly. And then you get deals that way.

I love that. So some specific questions. I'm going to drill down just a minute here on this cold email strategy. It sounds like you're essentially sending a blind offer or some type of like offer range in your email. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, we're doing that.

Okay. And what does the sequence look like? Are you sending only one email to the person, or is it multiple emails? How does that?

We send an initial email, then we send follow-ups. About four follow-ups. Because every domain, you can send about 500 a day. You have to make multiple domains with multiple email addresses under every domain. Uh, if you want to send thousands every day, you certain have a limit eventually of how many emails you can send a day, right? You don't want to just burn those bullets on follow-ups after four or five times when you can be reaching out to new people. It's like a balance of how much you actually wanna want to email people about.

Yeah, four is fine. You can do more if you want. You could do. And how do you space them out? Is it once a month, or every other month?

Or yeah, every like two, three days.

Nice. Okay. And so you mentioned about burning the, the domain. For people listening that may not be familiar with that, can you talk a little bit about how that works and how you actually approach it?

Sure. There's, where do I start? So when you go to your email, right? So you see there's some emails that end up in promotion, some end up in spam, right? What happens? Why are they going to these places? So there's a lot of, let's would say, parameters that all the email servers put in place to identify what this email is, and what is this domain, and is this a real person or is this like a person trying to sell something? And then divert those emails accordingly. So if someone marks you a spam multiple times, then that's not good. If you're sending a thousand, 2,000 emails from one email address, not good, right? There's a million things that you could be doing wrong. And then you end up in these places, in in the email Purgatory. So what you want is you want to sound like a person, you want to not include links, you want to not send so many, you want to send content that's engaging and people will answer you. You want people not to mark you a spam, because if they do, then your domain, your company email address, and all the emails associated with that domain might become flagged as spam very quickly. And in that case, they're going to just go to the, they're not going to. So anybody can send email. The whole idea of email is deliverability, okay? Anybody can open up a Mailchimp account and send a million emails. It's how are you going to actually land in people's inbox and have those open rates, respond rates, get people to become leads, get people to sign those contracts? So you really want to be monitoring constantly those emails and those domains to make sure that you're landing an inbox. And if you're not, then you have to take a break from it. You have to warm them up. Warm them up means you have to send emails back and forth and create the account to a place where it's backup and not marked a spam and be able to reuse it for marketing.

I see. So how do you monitor those domains? Is there like a service or a site that you can do, go to monitor?

Yeah, so there's a lot of different, like, you have to monitor, monitor many different, I would say, parameters, or many different potential red flags. So there's the DKIM, there's the SPF, there's all these different, like, models that have been invented to track the validity, the legitimacy of your email, right? So it's not just checking one website if your domain is good or not. It's the first tell sign is if your open rates and your response rates are going low. If you're not getting open rates, response rates, something's wrong with it. So then you got to check it with all these different, so to speak, agencies and see what's up. And then try to start cleaning them up again. And not use them so much. Go to a different domain for now. And then until it's healthy enough to continuous tuning mail.

Got it. And when you say that there are multiple domains that you have to use to cycle through, how do you approach that? So if someone is listening to this and they're like, "Listen, I'm used to texting or I'm used to sending mail. I want to start this to test it on my own." What are the steps that they would have to go through? You mentioned, don't use your personal email address. So can you talk to us a little bit about just, yeah, very basic steps?

Sure. So if your company name is, let's say, land.com, okay? Let's say that's your name, all right? And you don't want to be sending emails out of that domain because that's your website, that's your personal, that's your actual email that you use to communicate with title and everyone else. So what you should do is you should get a similar sounding domain, like fastcashlandusa.com, or fastcash today, or just add a word. So when they actually go, go to the website, it directs them to your actual domain without that extra word. And it's okay, they don't realize, and it's the same thing. But if anything happens to this USA domain, or this try, or get, or hello, or any random word that you added, it's just the domain. And if you can never get it back to working again, okay, you close the domain. It costs you $14, you know what I mean? So you want to open multiple of these. And then also, because I mentioned every domain, you can only send about a thousand a day, or 500 a day per domain. So if you open a lot of domains, and they all sound similar, then you can send a lot of emails. So if you want to do this yourself, hey there, land fans. If you're enjoying this episode and would like to see more episodes like this, please be sure to let us know by liking and subscribing below. Number one, I would recommend you educate yourself a lot in how to do cold email scale. A lot. There's a lot of email marketing companies out there or agencies, but they don't specifically do cold email outreach. They'll do like email outreach, which means people signed up. And people. So that's a very different animal than showing up, hello, unannounced to someone's inbox. Learn about that. Open up different domains. Start testing it out. See how it goes. See what your open rates are, what your response rates are. And if they're healthy, keep rocking. And if not, and if you're getting tired of doing things yourself, just you can come to us, or you can go to any cold email marketing that agency that will do it for you. Again, if you're a solopreneur and you're just starting out, I wouldn't even recommend you do email marketing. I would say do, do whatever the mainstream stuff. Email is mainly someone who's got like a ton of

data because they've they've ski traced so many people and they're sitting on so much right and they've already texted them and mailed them and they want like another layer like on top of everything else to really hammer in the message and to try to get these deals that I'm getting then go for it but if you're just doing it yourself you could do email marketing but it's so much work and so tedious compared to just opening up a texting platform launch control whatever it's already it's easier so it's definitely not the easiest thing to do and again that's why we created this service because people didn't want to deal with all this stuff they just wanted it done for you but if you're starting out you can give it a shot for sure but it's definitely a lot of it's a pain yeah lots of nuance uh for sure I'm sure um you mentioned open rate and response rate what are some what would you say are some benchmarks that that you would consider good open rates good response rates I can pull mine up here let me pull them up from the past six months let's see what we did so we have so we sent 36,000 emails in the past four months and we've gotten 2,000 replies that's above 5% which in email that's pretty good um our open rate is been about uh 40% open rate a good open rate means that you are actually Landing in pe people's inbox because if you're not landing in people's inbox then there's no way they could open your emails so that's a strong indicator that you're actually not in their spam or promotion tab got it so we want to shot for 40% open rate 40% is if you know what you're doing if you don't maybe you get less and but if you get really low if you get like 5% or starts to dwindle out then you have a problem gotcha and whenever you're sending these emails are you attaching contracts to it what's the CTA is it give us a call if you want to sell or how does that work yeah yeah a lot of people ask me that are you sending a a contract are you sending pictures are you send sending my philosophy is don't send anything like that we're very straightforward we don't even include links nothing and I'll give you a little trick we don't even put an unsubscribe button but what we do is we write if you'd like to opt out just reply unsubscribe or reply opt out and then when they reply then it actually tricks the system to think that we're having conversations with these people and it actually improves our servers and it improves our domain liability so every person who replies unsubscribe thank you but which is legal we're giving them an option to subscribe so it automatically we unsubscribe them obviously right so that's just in an effort to not include like we're trying to sound and look and feel like we're just a random person like a friend like a human not a company right so we don't include attachments we don't do any like weird stuff like that just a regular straightforward hey man do you want to s property yes or no and we include a price yeah that's really good so what are you finding as typically the lead or the email number to contract ratio that you're getting so for every x amount of emails you're getting one contract do you have that data yeah yeah I have that and it's not going to be super high and I'll explain to you why we got from from the 36,000 emails in the past four months we got 2,000 replies like I mentioned so that's about 5% replies and from all the people that replied 54 people said yes I want to sell and yes to the price that we gave them okay because we qualify a lead not just somebody who wants to sell but somebody who wants to sell at the price that we want to give them we want to pay them so that's about uh 0.15% okay okay so you know this was four months so that's about let's say roughly 15 leads a month from sending the Val the the volume that we're sending but these 15 leads are people who again they agreed to our purchase price so they just need to get on the phone we need to so like I said if you're starting out and this is your only lead Source maybe start with cold calling maybe start with texting maybe start with something else but for someone who's got this on the done for you kind of thing like a toz on the back Bur someone's taking care of it getting an extra 10 motivated leads a month why not you're going to get leads out of it yeah definitely yeah that's really good Insight do you do you know exactly like whenever you are sending out your offers do you change the offer amount like the percentage of of market value how do you determine what you are offering is it 40% of market value 70% yeah I I don't care about percentage I care about profit okay so am I making 20 to 30,000 at the minimum on this deal if the answer is yes I don't care if I'm buying for 200 and selling for 250 or if I'm buying for 30 and selling for 60 right if I'm gonna make 30 I'm gonna make 30 so we just how much are we are we selling it for let's subtract 20 to 30 grand got it and so you that's how you're calculating exactly what your that initial offer is going to be oh yeah the more expensive property is we subtract more because there's more percentage closings and cost and all that but yeah generally speaking that's it fantastic very good you mentioned your business this this obviously there's lots of different moving parts and pieces to the the cold Emil game can you talk a little bit about what you like how you actually work with investors do they need to bring the data to you do you pull the data how does all of that work yeah so it's a done for you a toz service what you do as a line investor is you give us all your skip Trace data and then we give you leads it's simple so that's basically how it works yeah you can change the copy if you want better different but we use the copy that we know that works um you can choose the domains that you want but we'll suggest domain names like there's not a lot of work on your end we handle all of all of the the front end meaning the campaign management but also the back end which is ensuring deliverability and right now we have like a monthly rate but we're actually doing a 2.0 launch very soon where it's going to be more and this is the first time I'm actually announcing it which is more paper lead model so that will make it a lot easier for land investors where it's like there's not really there still be maybe a monthly fee like smaller and then it'll be like you don't get any leads you don't pay it's more like paper lead and we'll we'll be delivering leads to you that way fantastic and so do you have any skip tracing services that you love whenever you are doing this in your own business so you can get email addresses I use direct skip I've tried versum didn't really like it but I've heard good things about it from other people they then I tried another one there was a third one that we tried and it wasn't that much cheaper than the rec skip that Rec skip you can get it also Landon sits has it you could basically get it for five cents a record and it comes with phone numbers it comes with emails so that's the best that I've seen and I've seen that it works well excellent very good let me ask I'd love to jump over to dispo really quickly whenever you mentioned that sometimes you use Realtors to list the property sometimes you list the property are you using like flaffy agents is there any other way that you're list that you are marketing the property Facebook Marketplace how are you finding your buyers yeah MLS is most of my buyers come from the MLS we use a lot of flat fee listing services every everyone's always asking me which ones I use honestly every County and every state is different they have like their own some of them are a pain in the ass to work with but it but the process when they buyer calls is a very good process like they'll call it'll get routed to you right away others are like very friendly and very user friendly and very cheap but when a buyer calls that number in Zillow it takes him to some crazy phone tree that you never hear back from them again you got to test these it's a trial and error all the time we sell on Facebook Marketplace it's not it's a lot of brain damage for the kind of quality leads you get some people swear by it we don't have that much activity we we have a lot of activity but I not I don't that I can say that he sold a lot of things in face Marketplace land.com we have a subscription with them it's very expensive not sure it's worth it I've sold some stuff there but not sure it's worth it yeah we call neighbors we do a lot of this kind of stuff but honestly if you're in the market that's like a good market and your price the MLS is your best shot we also put a sign do all those kind of stuff got it and would you say that you're the majority of your buyers are retail in buyers or are you also working with Builders develop ERS how does that work yeah it depends on the asset type right so if it's like a it's like a rural infill like a five acre track 10 acre track so that's the the the bass boo uh property right like so then you're dealing with somebody who just wants land hunting or just want to go out there in the weekends if we're talking about larger tracks where it's like in a subdividable area then obviously you're looking at developers builders en tiers so developers and Builders aren't the same thing okay so developers are people who do a lot of the horizontal development or the paperwork and then they create those paper lots to sell to builders right so like the Dr Hortons and the these Builders they don't necessarily want to develop things they just want to show up with their trucks and build houses and getting it out right so there's a lot of those kind of in between developers which we are starting to be