Joe: What's going on, everybody? Joe McCall here, Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. We're going to be in a really good episode today talking about land investing. One of my favorite topics. And I'm excited to talk to two guys, Justin and Adam, who have been doing it for a long time. I've probably interviewed everybody in the space that it has a podcast or does videos or teaches about land investing. Also a couple of guys that just do it and don't teach it. I love land investing. It's something that my boys and I have been doing for a few years now, two or three years. I'd say over the last two or three years we've probably flipped about thirty-five vacant lots in North Carolina and Texas, Washington and Oregon and Colorado and even one or two in California, in Riverside County, believe it or not. But anyway, it's a cool business and I like it because my boys who are teenagers can do it. And sometimes, you know, like when you're dealing with a house, it's just there's some more complexity to it. Like land has its own complexity. But with houses, I don't know if I could trust my 13, 14-year-old boys to kind of negotiate with sellers. But with land, you don't even talk to sellers until after they accept your offer, which is crazy.

Joe: So anyway, we're going to be talking about land investing with Adam and Justin from the Casual Fridays podcast. So I'm excited about that. First couple of things real quick here. This podcast is brought to you by my book. Some of you guys don't have this. I've had this out for, I don't know, about a year or so, but it's called, REI Secrets. If you've not heard of this book, you need to get it. It's like a legit book. Right. And it's got not like 20-point size font, but it's a real book. And the way I wrote this, I just wanted to do it as like kind of like a devotional for real estate investors where it gives you daily nuggets of real estate investing wisdom, where you help you get more leads, close more deals, make more money. And basically what I've done is I've taken some of my best podcasts that I did while I was driving around in my car, turn them into blog posts, and then edited them for a book. And you can get this book for free at REISecrets.com, REISecrets.com. All I ask is you pay a little bit, seven bucks I think for shipping and handling. Going to get it out to you. It's a real good book.

 

Joe: Somebody told me once I think he was maybe had a little too many beers, but he said this was the tool of titans for real estate investors. And I was I was pleasantly pleased and surprised to hear that. If you've heard of that book, that's from Tim Ferriss. OK, so we're broadcasting this live right now on YouTube and Facebook. So if you are listening to this or watching this live right now, please do me a favor and say hello. Tell us where you're from. Comment down below this video, either on Facebook or YouTube and just say hi. Do you have a question about land investing? Well, this is a place to ask it. Ask the question right now in the comments below for Adam and Justin. And I'll ask them. I'll bring up your questions. We'll talk about whatever you guys want to talk about. Cool. Are you ready to bring them on, guys?

Joe: Here's Justin Sliva and Adam Southey. How are you guys?

Justin: Good. Good. I was going to.

Joe: Awesome. You guys can hear me all right?

Justin: Yes, sir. Nice.

Joe: Glad to have you guys on the show. I've been listening to your podcast off and on for the gosh, how long have you been doing it? Over a year. Couple of years. Maybe three years now. Yeah, it's called the Casual Fridays REI podcast. Is that right? That's right, yeah.

Joe: Did you change the name or is it still called that?

Adam: Always been called that. Always been. We used to be three days a week. We've just now switched to Fridays only, so we're three hundred and twenty something episodes in I guess for youguys. That's awesome.

Justin: I feel like we made it though because we're on the call. So I've been listening to you for so long. You're like when the first ones that I ever listen to.

Joe: I appreciate that. I appreciate that you guys got a good show. I encourage you. Anybody listening to this to go check them out. It's just called Casual Fridays REI podcast. And you got some flip flops on the logo of the podcast. You still have that? That's right. Yeah. I love flip flops. I'm wearing them right now, actually wearing flip flops right now. You guys are in Texas, right? Tell us a little bit about how you guys got started. Have you always been friends? Did you become friends after you kind of found you're both interested in real estate?

Adam: Yeah, we've been friends for over twenty years. Went to high school together. Wow. Really? Yeah. I mean, we were friends in high school, but then even though when are people graduating to go their separate ways like Justin and I still kind of worked across the street from each other at two different jobs. I worked at Subway, I worked at Winn-Dixie, and then he worked at an ice skating rink and I worked for the police department. And while everyone else kind of doing their own things, like we were still hanging out and we just got friends over.

Joe: OK, very cool. And what got you then interested in real estate?

Justin: He's being light on how the real estate game got started for us? When we had an Amazon company together, it was fulfillment by Amazon side hustles that everybody get into you hear across the podcast sphere. And we had a really big sale on one of our items and Tiger Woods Foundation came in and bought it. And Adam had been a real estate agent and worked in real estate, had been an investor early on and through college. And I went through the corporate ladder with the railroad and just kind of ran that route. And we had this business together and say, hey, man, I wanna get back into real estate investing. I heard about buying land and I want to liquidate the rest of our Amazon stuff so I can do this. I'm like, great, we're getting into real estate. He's like, no I think I'm going to do it by myself. And so I said, OK, he goes, but you can do it, too. We just won't. We'll have separate companies. We'll just talk about it, do it together. And it's not a bad idea, right? No, no. So he sent out some mail and I'm working corporate America, and he sends out a bunch of offers for like five hundred bucks for five acres and he's getting them back. And I'm like, holy crap, this thing really works. I will buy every five-acre property you can get for five hundred dollars.And then it just kind of went from there and we just snowballed it up.

Joe: How long ago was that?

Adam: That was in April of 15 or 16. Yeah. So I did my first mailing and they came back the first three days, two and a half acre parcels. But I was getting these five acres, I was getting one acre was getting all the stuff back. And this is right after he loves to tell that story to like I just intentionally kicked him out. He didn't want to be with me anymore. But, yeah, that's when we he really dove into it at that point, too. And then we just kind of took off and grew.

Joe: When you guys do your podcast, I'm just curious, do you do it in the same format? You guys are in the same room or do you do it?

Adam: Yeah, except we're sitting on opposite sides of the table facing. Yeah.

Joe:  OK, so where in Texas are you?

Adam: Fort Worth. Yep.

Joe: I was just doing a coaching call, doing teaching some marketing and a realtor was from Fort Worth on the call and I did some marketing for him for houses and got him some really, really good leads. Dallas is a great market. Yep. But you guys handle the you guys got out of the whole winter storm chaos.

Adam: We were both really lucky. Neither one of us lost electricity. I didn't lose water. Justin lost like in one sink or one sink in a bathtub. We lost some water. My family moved into my house for the week and all his neighbors were at his house for the week and somehow we get through it and didn't lose power. No. Wow.

Justin: OK, good for you. We were really lucky comparatively to a lot of people in our area. We had friends houses burned down. We had friends that had a lot worse than us. And so we just I think both of us just tried to help where we could throughout that.

Joe: Wow. Can you believe it? I mean, is this this kind of relates to what I want to talk about, this whole idea of being prepared, being in a place where something bad happens, or if depending on where you are in the political aisle, if a certain president comes to take away all your guns in case you have any guns, where are you going to go? Where are you going to hide them? Or I mean, in all seriousness, I'm trying to I'm trying to be funny, and I'm probably not. But like, you know what? If you had a huge storm that came through Iowa, this happened earlier or late last year in Iowa. Do you guys remember that they call it derecho or something like that? Just devastated half of the state. People were without power for weeks without water. Like, you know, one of the things that we need to be thinking about is if this happens to us, what are we going to do if I lose my house, if I need to just get away? Do I have a place, a piece of land that I can go to? I know a lot more people arethinking about this right now. Would you agree?

Adam: I would say that is a I mean, that is a very strong thought on a lot of people. So, I mean, just in our experience through covid, through this 2020. And continuing on now to 2021 land is hotter than it's ever been. I mean, I've been a real state. This is my 16th year. I've never seen anything like this. And so we saw land go into bidding wars. We saw land sell the day it was on the market land. Dotcom reported that the traffic to their website is like ten times higher than it's ever been in the entire company history. Wow.

Joe: And that's not slowing down any time soon, I would think.

Adam: I don't think so.

Justin: No, it doesn't look like that. It's crazy to think and ask a question about being prepared, but a lot of the stuff that we sell is off grid or it's kind of that survivor type. Where are we going to go and kind of bug out to? And we had a we actually had that show last week. Do you really know the little things, intricacies that you need to be off grid? Do you have a generator? Do you have solar? Do you have firewood that's dry? There's just basic things like that that we take for granted in our day to day life that we don't see.

Joe: Yeah, that's a whole nother topic in and of itself. That could be there's some people that go overboard with the whole survival thing. Right. But I tell you what, if you are if you're in the business of selling rural vacant land, there's a huge demand for vacant land right now. People aren't there. Look, they're just looking for something out an hour or two hours away, someplace where they can go in more off the grid, the better.

Justin: Sometimes my neighbor is a pilot and they are dead set on having something within a tank of gas drive that they can bury a container and have everything they need. There's been an air force and he flies privately now, but he's on me every time I get a piece of property back. Does it have water? Does it have access to power? And is it within a drive, a gas tank away from so they can have that kind of a bug out spot just because they think it's coming to that?

Joe: We looked at Jasper County just in a few weeks ago. How far is that from Dallas Fort Worth? It's kind of east of Houston.

Justin: Yeah, that's about that's about three hours from us. From me. I'm in Burleson, so you kind of cut across the back way down there. But it's about three hours for me.

Joe: I'll be talking to you guys later offline about that. But we're really close to getting about six different lots that we're going to be buying at like fifteen, twenty cents on the dollar. And it's my first we just started going into this county recently and we just sent neutral letters and we got a bunch of them back saying, yeah, we'll take an offer. My son sent the offers like twenty cents on the dollar and we got some accepted and they're pretty good. In fact, one of them, there's six of them, and they're all definitely road access because there's a road that kind of goes in it and the land is all around it. Yeah, it's a great time to sell. And the things that we've been just dabbling in, I mean, maybe we'll do a couple of deals every couple of months. But just we've seen the same thing in the last six months. The calls, the volume of these people, of people trying to buy the land that we're selling is off the hook. It's going crazy. Yeah.

Justin: We have seen deals in forty-four states since we've started this. And right now we're closing a deal about every six days, seven days on the sale side. So it's constantly just turning what was taking one hundred days money into money out. Now we're seeing it on the market for less than a week and then it's now it's the title companies that are the bottleneck from both sides getting the abstracts done or the title reports because the title plants in these rural communities can't handle the volume that they're seeing right now.

Joe: Yeah, OK, so you guys have been doing land for about five or six years, right? Why land? Why not houses? Why did you guys choose land?

Justin: I think both of us have done houses prior to. So it was land was neat because the entry level, the barrier to entry so low. We have a book out, coffee, money, real estate, and it talks about buying property for 50 bucks for four-piece property for 50 bucks. So to think about somebody that just doesn't have a lot of money to get started and become a real estate investor, which means I buy a piece of real estate and sell it for more than I paid for. Right at the end of the day, that's the simplicity of it. But seeing that Adam talked about his first couple of deals he bought for two hundred and fifty bucks and he sold them, would you sell them for a thousand dollars apiece? So you buy three of those and that doubles a lot of people's salary real fast. And so as a side hustle or a way to get your feet wet in doing deals, it's the barrier entry so low and the risk is not as much as it is with the house like is there Termite's is there a foundation problem of missing? Is there a tenant that I can't get out? And that's why they're dumping the house to me. So you can do this virtually with less risk and talk about the systems that we have in place that help us with that.

Joe: Very cool. And what's that book called?

Adam: That book's called Coffee Money Real Estate.

Joe: And can people buy it on Amazon or do you have a website?

Adam: Or CoffeeMoneyREI.com. How much do you sell it for? Is it. I think that book's nine ninety-nine on Amazon it's nineteen ninety nine. So if you go to the website it's nine ninety nine there. I'm sorry, coffee money.com, coffeemoneyrei.com. OK, and the idea behind it is how to buy a piece of real estate with using the money you spend at Starbucks every day.

Joe: Reminds me, I was just thinking about this. The there was an Internet marketing class that was really, really popular. I don't remember ten years ago called Coffee Shop Millionaire. Do you remember that? Actually kind of sounds familiar. Coffee shop millionaire. I wonder if it's even still available. The guy who did it did very, very well. He was one of the first guys to do that kind of Internet marketing and teach it on a big scale anyway. So what does your business look like now? And you both have separate businesses, right?

Adam: Yeah, they're separate. It's so for me, it's kind of the three pronged we have the education that we do together, the media company that we have together, which podcast and that. But I also have my land business, which it specializes in what we call the best property. That's stuff that sub fifty sixty thousand dollars market value. It's not all we deal in, but that's the primary piece of our business, our average. If we talk about numbers all in our average deal is by four fifteen sell for thirty to thirty three thousand dollars, it's average about 20 acres. So this is that recreational piece of property that any I say. Eighty percent of our workers, either white collar or blue collar can afford because it's kind of like a Harley Davidson, a bass boat, a recreational vehicle. They can go there on the weekend, come back to work around the lunch table and talk about, hey, I spent the weekend at my cabin property. I went out and hunted on my property and I get to kind of have that chest puffed up and they're boasting about it. It's not something they need, but they can sell it to their wife as an investment and they can enjoy it too.

Joe: Let me ask you something about that. So a lot of guys, when they start, they will target the quarter acre lot. And I've done a couple of those. And it's such a hassle planning. You can make good money with it. Right. And I'm not knocking the coffee money book, but it's more work. It is. And when you have some capital, then you can invest in the bigger lots. Do you find like there's less competition maybe for the twenty acre lots.

Adam: It kind of goes with if you if you look at all the different education courses, you've interviewed a ton of guys that have been landing like I'll call them gurus, if you will, and they all have their own methodology and the reasoning behind it. We have found that the best property sells quicker. You can sell it for cash, but you can also offer terms. So you have to exit strategies. And then you mentioned needing the capital. My third part of my business is Plum Investment Group, which is a capital funding group for raw land. So we joint venture with people that don't necessarily have the capital for a twenty acre purchase. They may not have the six to ten thousand dollars and we put up the money and we split the profits with them. And so they don't have interest payments. I don't have anything like that. So that allows us to make that barrier entry lower to get somebody in a better-quality asset.

Justin: Perfect. And like you mentioned, these quarter acre lots, they're really easy to get into. You can buy them for fifty. 250 bucks, right, that's where I started with 25 to 50 bucks for I really want it to be that guy who had one hundred, two hundred three hundred of these things that were cash flowing every month. But it is hard work, just like you said. And then you start making a little bit of money and you can move in these bigger deals. It's just easier. Someone's doing the mail for you. The title companies are closing, you got Realtors are selling and it goes back to a title company on the closing side. All you're doing is like keeping it in order. You're managing that project.

Joe: Adam, are you also focusing on the larger lots then?

Adam: Now I am, yeah. Yeah. And now I am. I mean, I'd say it's all the time. Like, I don't have that desire to do one hundred or two hundred anymore. I have a dollar amount that I want to make each year. If I can do that on one day, I'll do it. If I can do it on ten deals, I'll do it. I mean, it's my business. I've transitioned tenfold since Bill Gates at the beginning, very early shows.

Justin: We used to buttheads about the cash flow, like I want to do these all these payments and have all the stuff. And then we did a couple of hundred acre deals where we bought them for 50 or 60 thousand bucks and then sold one of them I think was one hundred and eighty thousand. The other one sold for one hundred and like ten grand. So when you do that once and it was the same amount of mail, it was this, you just put up a little bit money up front. And I think we leverage those. So our cash outlay on that deal, on those two deals alone was probably it was six thousand dollars on a marketing material and four thousand on leverage. On interest. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam: Actually did the taxes on that day it was thirty six fifty in interest to make over two hundred thousand on two deals.

Justin: Yeah. So I mean that's for us is why the bigger deals seem. You hit these good singles and doubles and then you get one like that and it just Ts up for you and you're ready for use. Knock it down.

Joe: So I wanted to ask you about how you're finding these deals, because I know a lot of people are saying this. Maybe you have no idea. And this is interesting. This is new to them. Why do you find these sellers that are willing to sell their properties at such big discounts?

Adam: Like, I mean, we're doing blind campaigns offers right now.

Joe: You're sending a letter with just a straight up blind offer.

Adam: Targeting these bass boat properties.I mean they're counties are two to three hours outside of the major city. We're looking for pricing consistency counties where the market value of the land is roughly a thousand two thousand bucks an acre. We're looking for very rural populations. We're looking for good attributes, like maybe there's mountains or oceans or what or lakes or something like that. And then we pull the county data or we run the comps up front. We run pull the county data. Then everyone gets an offer that offers typically thirty five percent or low of market value. And then we wait and see who calls, who's so excited to sell to us. But they just call us. We take them there.

Joe:  Adam, you were talking before about when you're dealing with a higher property is now you can use title companies and you can use realtors to sell your properties. Right. Is there a certain price point or acreage that you it makes more sense to self-close, close yourself without a title company. Sell it yourself without a realtor. Where's that?

Adam: I think it has to do with how much equity you have in the bill. If you're spending a thousand, you're going to sell it for three thousand. You don't want to close with a title like you're buying it for a thousand, you're going to sell for fifteen thousand. That's more than enough room to hire title company to do it. Now hiring a realtor. I think it's a different story when you're first working in a new county. There's a definitely a level. And I think that we've probably seen thirty, thirty-five, forty thousand dollars that level when you're working with the new agent, because if we go below that, it's like a fifteen thousand dollar property. By the time a realtor charges six percent or 10 percent, whatever they pay their broker, they pay their marketing fees that they're not going make any money. So we have realtors who are take those lower lease listings from us, but we've built the relationship up front by the time you hit that. Thirty-five, forty thousand a market value, if they get both sides or just one side, they're still going to pocket fifteen hundred two thousand dollars. It'll be worth their time at that point. But I feel you've got to make that connection first.

Joe: Are the commissions for land similar to houses about five or six percent, six?

Justin: Six to ten. There's a couple of states you see tends typically to the standard form, but for the most part it's six percent and they give three to the buying agent.

Joe: So in a forty thousand dollar lot that you're selling, that would be about twenty four hundred dollars to land these land.

Adam: So we want to work with land specific brokers. Yeah, yeah. The ones you see that are like a they're specialized in houses. They always get it wrong. That's why they separate these land brokers. They show up looking like they just came out of the woods. They've got mud boots and all that. Well, they've got a client list a mile long. And so a lot of the time they'll get both ends of it. So they'll get the full six percent or 10 percent. And that makes it worthwhile for them.

Justin: We have a land broker in Oklahoma where I think she won highest land producer and volume for land deals, because I think we did, I think I've done 20 deals with her personally. And then any of the recommendation from people that came to our live event and worked with her as well. And she wears like the camo hat and her boots and she carries a gun like a gun on our hip. Why? She's in the mountains. She's a voicemail tells you I'm maybe in the mountains. I'll call you when I get back down. And that's what her specialty is. That's what she does. But she has ten people on her phone at any time. They're looking for a ten to a forty acre property in that county. If she calls this, hey, I got this you it's coming in. Y'all ready to go? And I've had to slow her down because I'll have her go walk a deal for me and she'll take a client with her. And I'm like, hey, hey, hey, it's not under contract yet. And she's like, well, they're making an offer right now. Justin.

Joe: Are these are these realtors OK with marketing a property that you haven't bought yet?

Justin: She's just she just does it. She's like, Oh yeah, I got a client with me tomorrow. I'm going to walk out tomorrow with him and I'll sell it for you.

Adam: She'll have it sold and done before you ever get the listing agreement finished. You know, it's like a kind of an afterthought for her.

Joe: But it's also well, there's probably a little more flexibility with land, I would think. So do you ever do that? Do you ever double close on a land deal that you you're buying at the same time you're selling it?

Justin: I don't. I take everything into inventory, so I actually put the cash up and then resell it. And I've done some assignment deals, but I don't do double closes now. It's not something that'suncommon. I just I don't do that.

Adam: It wouldn't be done intentionally. Like if someone happens to see it and knows it's for sale and it just happens to work out. But that's not the exit strategy for us.

Joe: Yeah. OK, so about over the thirty-five, forty thousand dollar mark, you will hire a realtor and a title company that kind of help you with that just because they've got good buyers already.

Justin: Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to I want to clarify that though, because I don't want people to say, well, just an item said forty five thousand dollars. I've got three properties listed with an agent that's sub twenty, they're ninety-nine. But I guarantee her a thousand-dollar commission. So your commissions guaranteed a thousand because I don't want to take the calls and I can't grow my business if I'm answering sales call. Does it have power? Well the picture has a power line in it. Yes it has. How is the access? Well it's on a road, you see on the map. So there are instances like that where we will make those adjustments and do that.

Joe: Yeah. By the way, your audio sounds really, really good. I brought my microphone a little closer so my audio might sound as good as yours. All right. So I like that idea a lot because we've kind of sold all of our properties house and taking those calls can be laborious. But when you can get a realtor who can actually go to the property and if the realtor can't get to the property, guess what? Or maybe it's not a piece of land, you should buy.

Justin: Exactly right. That's the nail on the head right there. And one of the tricks that we talk about in our course, but we also we share to give you a little nugget there, when you're going and checking your comps on these websites and you're looking at these folds in the listed and you see that agent's name at the bottom and they put up a great ad and they have great copy. That's the person you call when you start to work in you county. You don't have to go to these area meet ups and things like that.

Justin: You can just look at the product that they have as an unsolicited way to say, hey, this person really knows the crap, let's work with them and let's get them on board and make them our team in that county or that state. Because the next question I ask them is what counties do you work? And they say they work if they're in Tarrant County and they say, well, I work Tarrant Johnson and this now I've got an agent that it's solid, have a reputation within three counties. I can work all three of those counties and I have boots on the ground, have teams ready to go.

Joe: Yeah, well, that's awesome. Do you sometimes like the model that we've done is we'll buy it at twenty, twenty-five cents on the dollar, sell it for cash typically is all that we've done except for one deal we sold on terms, but we typically sell it at maybe 60, 70 cents on the dollar. We want to be the cheapest property when somebody sorts low to high, we want to at that size, we want to be the cheapest. We'll realtor still let you. Well, do they still list one of your properties when you're pricing at that low and aggressive to sell?

Justin: I mean, I haven't had somebody tell me no on a price. I've had them give me their opinion and say, hey, look, I'm listing one right now in Arkansas. I thought it was going to sell at seventy-five eighty and I assume that's what it was going to be. I sent it to the broker and he said, Hey man, I'm going to list at ninety nine five. Were you OK with that. I was like yeah go ahead and get your feedback for the next two weeks. Cause the market's hot. We will know instantly what that's going to do. If it's not said, get an offer and always tell the agent that comes out that, hey, we want to offer, let's look at it. So I don't necessarily want to agree that I want to be the cheapest when somebody sorts because somebody doesn't say, hey, I want twenty to twenty acres, they're going to sort, I want 20 to 40 acres. So unless they're really good with the sword function and they say price per acre and I'm going to sort of buy that, then they're going to miss your property or you're going to, you're going to leave money on the table.

Adam: On these bass boat properties that we are specializing in. It's not the price that they're buying on. Right. It's at that point it's very much the pictures, the ad like, we always put listings. Right. Ad it's not just a tiny bit below market value, sometimes a little higher than I feel like it probably should be worth. And we get it because we do quality photos. We'll hire a drone person, we'll make video, we put awesome or we spend time making sure the copies good where we have this motto like be everywhere. So we're not just putting it one place and we're spreading this thing all over the place looking for that right person that makes us price we don't want to rely on. Is it just cheaper?

Justin: OK, I'm going to add on to that, because one of the things that we do as a teammate with our agent, because, again, you're looking for somebody to be your resource, their bull run sponsored ad, using their links through Facebook. And we'll target major metropolitan areas, the two to three hours from that major metropolitan area. We target market that. So their link is getting blasted right around their biggest buyer pool. They don't even know what's going on and they're getting hammered with calls. I'm like, dude, we don't know what's going on with the markets probably blowing up. We know why it's doing it. We're not taking the calls. We just put the fifty bucks behind it, drive it to them. They're answering the calls and emails and they said, we've never seen anything like this. You need to turn that off. And we've had that happen multiple times.

Joe: That as fascinating fastenings. You're running Google ads. I'm sorry, Facebook ads. Are you having any problems? I've heard people having problems with Facebook marketplace.

Justin: We're running it through sponsored ads like a boosted post, and we used their link. So if it's Lands of America, dash listing one, two, three, four, we copy and paste that into the picture of the property pops up. It says Lands of America. When the person clicks on it, it has all of our agents information, not ours. It's just ran off our company page.

Adam: Same with Craigslist. I've got we've got a guy that does do 10 ads a day and we always put the realtor's information or not ours. So our agents, no shortage of leads coming in there.

Joe: And so you're doing Facebook ads for your land. Yeah, and I've never heard of anybody doing that.

Justin: We know how many clicks we're getting on the spend. So if we viewed ten thousand people looked at it, typically it's about a 10 percent click. If the ads built right. It's like, hey, your wooded retreat in southeast Oklahoma. And then we hit Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Dallas. And so we put sponsored ads in those and then we'll usually cover a 50 mile radius around the property as well. So it's kind of like a virtual neighbor letter. And now you have ten thousand people. Look at it, a thousand people click on it. They will typically get one hundred calls off that.

Joe: Holy smokes. Do you guys teach that in your course?

Justin: We have that in the marketing, but we talk about Facebook.

Adam: I don't know. I don't know how detailed we go in the sponsored ads part I think this came after.

Joe: But do you have a Facebook page where you put the post in there and then you sponsor that post.

Justin: It's like on my on a sale side that we have.

Joe: Very good. That's awesome. You don't even need to put your property on a website then do you.

Adam: It's part of the be everywhere like you don't want to miss something.

Justin: So it's kind of that's kind of one of those things for us that I put it on my purse because I remember our websites are separate. I put it on mine just because people like to check and see if we buy and actually buy and sell land so all of them don't go on there. We do put areas that we talk about where we're working. It's funny in the investing world, everybody wants to know what the next person is doing. So I never thought it would get to the point where we'd have to split Halsey's where one maybe doesn't have my name attached to it. It's kind of hidden in the corporate docs because people will search your LLCs to see where you're buying and selling. So it's funny that you get to that point. But I want to say it's a good problem when you on a podcast or your media, you're talking about buying and selling land that they can actually see that you're doing it versus somebody says, oh yeah, buy and sell all this land and you can't find them anywhere on the Internet where they happened to me so many times.

Joe: It's frustrating because I'm sending out a letter to absentee owners and they see my name on that letter anyway, or they go with you. It's a normal seller, Google you and they see that you're a guy who sells teaching and does podcasts on investing in real estate, and they immediately assume you're trying to take advantage of them.

Justin: But I don't even update my website anymore. I keep the properties that we had on there. I can't see who the traffic is, but I've done zero SEO on my website. I'm getting a massive amount of traffic. I can only assume 90 percent are people just wondering who is this guy? You know, they're not they're not the buyers for my for my land. People listen to a podcast or something. So there's definitely things you've got to keep to yourself.

Joe: So you're back to your Facebook and you're spending what, to get a thousand clicks?

Justin: Twenty-five to thirty bucks will usually generate those if it's targeted. Right. And a lot of that's because you're not putting the price in the ad. So they're just want to see what the price is. But it does get people to looking at it, which is driving that lead for them. So your agent knows something's going on, but if they're getting one hundred, they're getting one hundred emails or phone calls out of that and you're doing pretty well and you priced it right.

Joe: Is the realtor doing the premium listings on Land Watch or Lands of America? Are you doing that?

Justin: Everyone's a little bit different. I keep account. I keep an account that's got ten slots in it. So if I'm not getting the feedback from the realtor that I want, I'll change the pictures and split tested so I know what kind of feedback we're getting. And I've had to do that in states where I've got the agent says, yeah, I can work at County, but it's really not his county to work. And I'll run a test and he's like, oh yeah, we're getting all these showings and I'm getting two or three leads a day. And I know that he maybe he's not responding to him. And so you can kind of do that. I do that to split test. That's basically what it's for.

Adam: A lot of times we'll pick the realtor we want to work with if it's in a new spot by their listings on Lands of America or something.

Joe: I was just going to say that I've done that before.

Adam: So and a lot of these land specific brokerages will have a brokerage account. So it's just part of what comes with it.

Joe: If you ever use a realtor to sell a property on terms for you, I have, yeah, multiple times. And how does that do you pay them the regular commissions then?

Justin: Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't like there's I hate to say this, that this is going to sound kind of funny, but newer investors, they look at how to save a penny. If you build a team around you and you've got the resources in county and you do what you say you're going to do, if you said, hey, I guarantee six percent, I offer owner financing, these are my terms and they get it for you. They did their job. So pay them the money and its impact quickly. Sometimes it goes through title. Sometimes we'll sell close those. They just ask for a summary breakdown of the deal for their brokerage, like a settlement statement. And then I write him a check for the commission. I ask, do you want it to you or do you want to your brokerage? And I just send them a check and I've never had one balk at me sending them a check.

Joe: I tell people that all the time. Go ahead, Adam.

Adam: Ultimately, the goal is to get enough down payment to cover the commission your money back. Right. We're taking higher down payments for that stuff. Sure. Of course.

Joe: All right. So you guys send letters, you pull lists. Do you guys still use that one service? Is it OK if I bring up their name to get it?

Justin: Go ahead.

Adam: We're heavily, heavily invested with pryced.

Joe: We let me just spell it for you guys. It's PRYCD. These guys just specialize on land data.

Justin: They get the data from the studio. They do. Yeah I forgot about that. Yeah they do. They we. So me and Max we sit next to each other at a live event of three or four years ago. He's one of the co-founders forum, one of the guys that had work with me. We had work with a show we called The Intern, but he actually he was doing an exit program from the military. So he worked for one of our companies and then worked for the podcast as well. His name is Brian. He hooked us back up together when they got this thing up and going. And they had a really good I guess the hardware was really good. They just didn't have some of the dial in the experience of investing and in percentages and to build the algorithm just one hundred percent. So we help them down in the algorithm. We spent twenty hours with them on the back and getting it out and now it's come out really close and they have the ability to scrape from two million different comps and get you pricing. And it's really neat to see what they come, they've come up with and their customer service is second to none. If you're a new investor and you have questions, you just reach out to them and they help you.

Joe: These guys are really good. I need to get them on my show. Maybe you can hook me up with them. Definitely. They're getting their data from Data Tree, which is one of the best data providers, I think, isn't it? The two big data providers, first American and CoreLogic, is that right? And Data Tree is under the first American title. That's umbrella because I used to get all my data from data tree directly super expensive. Some ways it's better than CoreLogic, but it hard to kind of figure out with these guys if you're at all interested in land. And I get nothing from promoting these guys, they just do a real good job. You can get the lists and they will give you the comps and they'll you can, on a sliding scale, set what you want to make your offer at. And then but I keep on getting this pop up that says I need to refresh my browser. You guys do that as well.

Justin: I just keep going. I don't even know how to do that.

Joe: I just I did it right now I'm at their website, but cool. You guys should check it out. What are some of your other favorite tools that you guys like to use?

Justin: One of my favorite four for this is I mean, you talked about this on the call. It was just it's a simple tool. It's really cheap. It's two ninety-nine a year and it's an overlay on Google. It's parlay. And so when I'm looking at Google Earth in three days, I can see the outlines around it. And you can search by AP if you want, but it allows me to check access really easy the topography and know where my property sits on that. Now it may shift six feet because this it's not perfect, but it's GIS, you a really good idea what your properties look like. Now that's a good one for us, is our direct mail is the lifeblood for us. Rocket print mail. We have had nothing but good stuff from them and I would bet to be willing to bet from us and the people that we've worked with, we've probably sent, what do you think, five million pieces of mail from six million pieces of mail that I would guess that seems low, but yeah, that when it comes to mailing rocket print mail, they are awesome.

Justin: We have found lower pricing and better customer service. And the cool thing with them is they are complete custom print shop so they can do anything from post cards to neutral letters to blind offers. They've even told us they've done ads where they put a bullet in in the thing for somebody seems like don't shoot yourself in the foot, use this dental service so they can do complete things like that. So when we when we built our course, we said, hey, we want tools that you can go out shopping, get your own tools. We're going to tell you what tools we use because we found the best and the cheapest. They're out there. So data tree, like I said, it's one of the best providers out there. PRYCD gets that data and gets it to our clients cheaper with the lower monthly overhead and then talk about the different tools like that.

Joe: So what about database CRMs to track and manage to do this?

Justin: We are the anti-CRM guys. So I ran my previous experience. I was a chief operating officer at a railroad or we call a general manager and a short line world. We ran our business off an Excel workbook, so I'm super comfortable in Excel. Adam's the same way he's got I never say this right. SQL Developer, which is a database guy that's based out of Excel. So we both are real comfortable with that. A lot of people like to have fancy CRM that do all this stuff and we just haven't found a need for it yet in our business.

Adam: I think it's really easy when you're a new business owner to get caught up in the fact you need all this expensive stuff and the overhead of creating a new business is what kills you. And so, like, CRM can be great. I think maybe they have a place in your business of Ataman, but I hate when I see people drop in two or three or four or five hundred dollars a month on the stuff just to start a business like it's hard enough to start a business without all this crazy overhead.

Joe: I used to say, you've heard of Podio and I was one of the first guys to start using it in the real estate investing space. I started really promoting it and pretty soon a lot of other guys and it was everywhere, but got to a point where I had this thing. If you show me a Podio expert, I'll show you a broker wholesaler that there are so many people that were really good at Podio and had it all built up to do this fancy stuff. And you say, all right, show me your deals or your app for deals. And it was always empty. It's the same way of. People can go overboard, I think it's maybe just an excuse to find something to do.

Justin: It's comfort. We are trained to be employees and it becomes a comfort to have this task to check off every day when at the end of the day, whether it's houses, whatever, asset class, multifamily, if you're not looking at deals, you're not you're not going to be an investor because you're not going to have deals that you're buying. And so the CRM may keep you organized, but really the lifeblood to being a real estate investor is looking at as many deals as you can and taking the best and trying to get them back to market to make your money or get them into the rental process where your cash flow and whatever your asset in themedium.

Joe: Let me ask you guys if you knowing what you know now about how to do land, you put yourself in a normal nine to five job in a cubicle. Right. Mean it's just so funny the other day. Well, this is a couple of years ago, I was looking for maybe leasing some office space. I have an office at home and I had a friend who has some software and I went to his office and he is supposed to have an office that I could rent. Well, really, what it was a cubicle in the middle of his floor. And I walked to I walk in there and he shows me and I literally had I felt like I had to throw up. I had this something in my stomach like I was going to throw up looking and just thinking about working in a cubicle. And that is enough right there to say, like, I'm never going to go back to that. So put it in context now. Pretend you're back in that cubicle. All right. You know what I'm talking about and you want to quit your job and you need to make, I don't know, let's say ten grand a month to quit your job. Would you number one, would you do land would you do something else to get started making money? Would you go flip or do Amazon stuff? And then number two, what would be kind of your roadmap to get there as quick as possible? Maybe both of you can answer that. You want to go first?

Adam: I'll go first. I would say, yeah, I would definitely do land. What I would tell myself if I could go back is go bigger, faster, like this or I don't know what's the right word. Common misconception that like if you don't have a ton of money, maybe you need to start with the deals after spending two fifty three hundred five hundred dollars on and you're selling them for a thousand, two thousand or whatever, but especially when you join our group, money doesn't necessarily become a concern if you have what it takes, let's say the guts to mail more mail at bigger acreage sizes, bigger price ranges than the money isn't necessarily a problem. I mean, I can't I don't know how many times Justin has done another deal with someone who bought for ten thousand, sold for thirty thousand and there was ten thousand dollars. Right. That's what Plum was created for. And I hope I'm not about stealing his question here. Right. So it's just and when I was first started in real estate to someone gave me that advice. They're like, it's just as easy, if not easier, to go for the bigger deals than it is the smaller ones. I mean, you said it earlier, like selling these quarter acre lots is hard, but when you sell a 50 acre lot for one hundred thousand one hundred and fifty thousand, people just show up. So, yeah, that's perfect. Here you go. Right. And so I think that's what I would do if I could do it again.

Justin: Yeah. If I were to. And I've had this conversation countless times with people that I've called and set up consulting and said, hey, I want to quit my job in a year and I've quit. I've left the workforce and did this. It wasn't in my time. I didn't do it on my own thing. But I was set up like this. So I would say have a year's worth of living expenses. You don't need to buy property with that set aside. So now you know, you have six months of running room in your business. You just for one, because not everybody is a good business owner. But let's have a year set aside that you can do that now when you target your properties, you're going to want to be able to hold enough inventory that you can sell with whatever your run rate is. So for me, I try to keep anywhere from two hundred to three hundred thousand dollars in inventory. Now, that's gotten up as high as a million. It's gotten is low to where I have fifteen thousand dollars in inventory and I've got stuff coming a desk. But there's the good average is there. I know what my turn rate is so you need to understand that versus just saying, hey, I've got fifty grand in the bank, I'm going to quit my job and I'm buying land because you may fall into a time like covid happen. Where our mailer count to get a piece of property. It tripled and land was moving so fast that our inventory was just burning through.

Justin: Now we spent more to get a deal, but we started making more money per deal because we were buying better properties, bigger properties and they were still turning as fast. So you hedge against your risk, put it together and understand that it's going to be a sickening feeling for you. And I hate to be the Debbie Downer here, because it is tough to say, hey, you look at your kids, you look at your wife and they want to go on vacation and, you know, you need to buy another 50 acres or one-hundred-acre property with that money. And that's where it's better serve than go into Cosmo for the weekend. And you have to get OK with that. But three years from now, you turn that money three times or four times. You're in a totally different lifestyle. You sit back, you breathe, you can enjoy it. So understand. So I'll take it all back together, understand that you need to have the risk covered and that it's not an overnight thing. It's going to take three to four years to where you get actually OK with not clocking checking the clock for somebody and putting it all together. You're going to have to be OK with that.

Joe: So you're saying it would be three to four years?

Justin: Yeah, OK. I know you can do it quicker. I'm saying that three to four years till you're comfortable being on your own. Once you have that year set aside. That is your paycheck, so you know that you have a year salary that you have you have running, whether you have that ready to go now. Great. If you have a line of credit you're buying your property from, I see a lot of people go, oh, I'm going to use myself to record IRA. And they don't necessarily know how to get the money back to pay themselves. So they're making their self-directed IRA look really good, but they can't pay their bills behind any of that money. Yeah, they can't dip into that money. So that's that is my thought on it. And, you know, I could be that could be way off base, but I would rather not some guy or girl say, hey, I quit my job and I'm going to feed my family. My wife doesn't work. And now we're sitting here because I've had to have that come to Jesus conversation with myself, looking at two kids and my wife's not working and I've lost my job and say, OK, I've have a year's salary in the bank, less money to buy property, plus inventory. Can I make this work? And that was two thousand and sixteen or seventeen. Seventeen. And we've made it work. And the first year I didn't realize how much stress it was on me until we kind of get to take that breather.

Joe: Adam, would you agree with that or are you a little more, are you not as conservative?

Adam: I think it kind of depends. I mean, I think people have definitely said I'm more conservative than Justin. I track every dollar. But it also I need far less live. I'm a single guy. I could take a much, I don't have kids besides my dog. I could take a bigger risk without needing that. Right. But it's definitely a comfort level. Three years. I was definitely, definitely seeing people build a big business and leave their jobs much quicker than that. But we're very hard against saying, no, you're not going to make six figures in your first three months, four months. It's just this isn't a get rich quick overnight type of thing. Your first year is definitely going to be a learning experience. Now, you may make a lot of money. We've had a fireman come out, make a killing off of his first mailer.

Justin: He made a yeah, he made six hundred some thousand dollars off. His first mailer ended up doing seven figures his second year or two. And he had money to back, though, because it's compounding. So he had backing behind it. But those results aren't normal. That's what we tell you at the live event. Hell yeah. You know, we had a guy here who made a million, one point five million off this one day. He did last year. And I'm going to make one point five million. Yeah.

Adam: So you can certainly say you can do it. You can leave your job quick. You can make a ton of money. But when we look at averages, right, your first year learning here, you're going to make money, you're going to keep learning your second year, you're getting better third by the third year. OK, you've got this on lock. You can get Ninja on accounting. Go just mail these certain points or parts of the county and buy these. You know exactly what your inventory needs to be. You know how long it's going to take to sell things. I mean, you just dial down.

Joe: So if you were starting and wanting to quit your job, would you be focusing on creating notes, selling properties on terms, owner financing, or would you be just trying to flip them for cash, get faster cash reserve?

Adam: I'm going to say a solid mix. Yeah, yeah. You need to build up enough cash flow to cover your business expenses to cover some life expenses. But you also have to do those large cash flips that give you like the big income to come in. Right. I mean, because it does take a long time to build up one hundred notes that are if they're special, they're paying one hundred bucks an hour. Twenty bucks a month. Right.

Justin: Because then more money to buy land with my average since we started. And I'm going to clarify something real quick, Joe, on when I went on my own, I had been my first mailer had just went out and then I ended up on my own in my business. So when I say that I'm really conservative, I get nervous for people. I do that coming out of experience, of knowing I didn't know as much as I needed to know. I thought I knew more than I did and so was forced to make it working at times. So I want to be more concerned because I don't want somebody to have the same panic attacks that I was having. But the note business on our side, it's an exit strategy at all times. But the way we set up the notes for in my business is 20 percent, 20 percent of my sales go to notes, but they are twenty-five to 30 percent down. Remember, we're buying for twenty-five to thirty percent on a 30 cents on a dollar. Our money back out and it goes back to work. Then we've generated our income for up to ten to twelve years at a certain interest rate. And so we've created cash flow for a long time. And I think right now I'm right around fifty notes that are paying every month and they will for the next nine, they got about nine weeks.

Joe: What's your average monthly payment on those notes?

Justin: Just over two hundred and fifty dollars, like two fifty. Anywhere from two fifty. My highest one seven hundred dollars. So they kind of range and they're good.

Joe: Good. We're getting some questions from people here. I want to bring them up that this is a question from Helena. I'd like to know how much it costs to survey the land and how do you determine which lots are buildable and awareness of wetlands. So it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of three questions in there.

Justin: Yeah, I'll take that. The surveys vary in the different locations and when the last time they actually were surveyed. So the most I've ever spent on a survey is nine thousand dollars on a ranch I bought in Virginia. It was two hundred eight acres, very mountainous. Penns hadn't been done. There was a lot of zigzag parts in it. The cheapest I paid four hundred ninety-five bucks for a lot to have it surveyed.

Joe: You don't have to survey every lot though.

Adam: You know, that's what I was going to say is, I mean, surveys aren't something that we always deal with. Once you get these higher, nicer ones and someone's getting a loan for them. Yeah, for sure.

Justin: But it's not like every deal has a service and it's probably about 20 percent of the deals. Have surveys done. You will do. You will like when he said they get a loan for it and the quality properties, we're selling these bass boat can get loans against, so they will ask for it and typically what we've done, we've done deals together where we've just said, hey, give us fifteen hundred, we'll give you 1500 credit towards your survey. If it's cheaper than that, we pay cheaper. We pay all of it. If it's more than you pay the difference. And that hasn't been a problem. The wetland question the way checker, you can look up. FEMA has wetland checkers and you just put in the lat longitude and you can check there and see about the wetlands.

Adam: Then I think there's a part about buildable. Yeah. Yeah. Nine. I mean a huge percent of the stuff no one's building a dream home on. Yeah. It's rural recreational stuff at the most are putting a cabin on it. I got a guy who dug a 20-foot hole in the ground and covered it with sticks and hey, he lives there. I mean, that's the type of building that goes on here. It's not three thousand, four thousand square foot stone brick dream home.

Joe: You know, that reminds me of a question a lot of people I think have is if you're and I've had this where you're selling a property on terms and it's a contract for a land contract, so that buyer will get the deed after they fulfill the terms. Right. Are you concerned with them violating all kinds of codes and getting in trouble with the county and then you're now the one responsible because you own the land? Does that make sense?

Justin: We have that that they're signing. They won't do that inside of our land contracts. So in the event that it happens, you do have a little bit of risk there and you kind of vet the person when you're talking to them. What they're trying to do, they're like, oh, yeah, I want to live out here. I'm going to move them in my RV and want to homestead those people you kind of have to watch. But on the flip side of that, I've had people that said, hey, we know we can't build on it. Call me three months later and say, hey, I'm going to build my house on here. Now, what do I need to do? I just turn it into a mortgage and call a title company, have it put in their name or you move it to a deed of trust and have that recorded with the county.

Joe: OK, the question from Keen. Adam, what's your clickthrough rate on your Facebook ads? Do you know that?

Justin: I'd be lying if I told you any kind of typically after every it's for ten thousand views, we're going to have a thousand people actually click on the link to look at it and it's all dependent upon the wording. So if I leave, for me, if I leave the price out and the location, I just like a general area. If it's somebody in Tulsa and I put southeast Oklahoma, if I put in Dallas and I say it just outside of Dallas, they're going to click to look to get that exact location. So it comes a little bit higher. But the idea is we want to drive people in traffic and they see the brand or they see the type of land we're selling.

Joe: Quick question here from Stewart. What's the full name of the Plum site again?

Justin: Plum investment group Dotcom. How do you spell Plum, please? Um, it'll be OK. Yeah, my last name is pronounced Sliva. It means in Czech. So Czech as well. Is that where you're from. Yourfamily. My, my grandparents on my mom's side. Ah I have my mom's maiden name.

Joe: I've lived in, in the Czech Republic before for a long time.

Justin: So they say I guess the term they used for us they're bohunk because we're from the Bohemian Valley in the north part.

Joe: A question from Engo I believe. How much commissions are you paying the agents? Most agents here in Georgia ask for ten percent.

Adam: It's going to vary. Six percent on, I would say, is a strong number, but five to ten percent. A lot of times when you see our experience, when you see an agent who's saying they want ten percent, it's because the list price is fairly low. Thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars, they'll have a border or they'll have a line that when you cross that price wise, it will go down to six percent. And if you find someone who's like, I'm only taking ten percent on your one hundred thousand one hundred fifty-thousand-dollar property. Well, unless you're the onlyagent in town, you've got options.

Justin: And so just go find someone else six to 10 percent offering. And there's a few states that do require that South Carolina's ten percent, Colorado's ten percent standard, Arizona typically that kind of range. But you'll see a lot of ten percent there, like Texas, six percent. And on houses, we have agents that do like one and a half percent on the one half percent for the sale, but get three percent on the buy. So just kind of depends on the relationship you have.

Joe: How do you structure deals with realtors? I assume it's just like houses. They give you a listing agreement and you pay them the commission. Right. All right. Here's another question. Is there a way to quickly value a land parcel similar to estimate for houses?

Justin: Yeah, there is one of the cool things about Costar and how big they are and all the data they can put together. If you look at Lands of America and you put in the county, you can say, OK, hey, I'm looking for a 20-to-40-acre property and you can actually get on the map version and zoom in and find your parcel and start working back. We did this on the the six of the seven properties you're talking about, Jasper County, where you can actually seereal listings sold and under contract right around your property. And so, you know what that market's doing right there. And it gives you a good field with houses. You have fits and finishes on the inside. They're going to change the value a little bit. Where on land if it's got the same type of topography and trees, same type of access and doesn't have any of the improvements, it's all going to be relatively similar in pricing.

Joe: Yeah, Lands of America dot com. It's a great website. You can search for properties, filter them down to general size location, go to the map, switch it from a list. To a map, and you can really see some good comps there and sold comps, yep, very cool. And there's not a site that estimates the value of land like Zestimate does for houses, which we don't even I don't even know, working anymore.

Justin: They have the ability now with the geotagging, they can tell you what's going around it. They have that. But you're pulling data to do that versus just looking at the free site Lands of America. So Prcyd is getting real close to being almost to Zestimate format for land.

Adam: Cool. So how can guys get a hold of you? What's the best way? Our Web site, Facebook, Instagram, everything is casual fridays, REI, podcast, Casual Fridays REI, everything.

Joe: Yep. All right. I'm putting a banner here, see if this is correct. That's it. That looks good doesn't it. Casual Fridays REI.com. You can find them on podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts. You guys have a favorite podcast app by the way.

Justin: ITunes really. For Apple. Yeah.

Adam: Wherever they can. My favorite. Everyone listen.

Joe: Are you guys on YouTube? Do you have stuff out there?

Justin: We do. Coming a lot more coming.

Joe:  Instagram.

Justin: Instagram. But Casual Fridays REI we have a personal account there as well. So you can see that we're real people. We actually live lives that aren't just model shots and things like that.

Joe: And if people want to get information about your course, you're coaching your programs, they can get it there. Casual Fridays REI dot com, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. All right. Justin, Adam, good to meet you guys and look forward to working with you guys soon. I got one more question here. Oh, yes. Somebody is asking for the spelling of the PRYCD. So you can get you get more information about Casual Fridays the podcast, CasualFridaysREI.com. Thank you, Justin and Adam. Don't go anywhere. I got a question for you. We appreciate all you guys very much. Thanks for listening in and have a good one.