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 Advanced Land Investing Strategies with Travis King - Part 1

Travis King has been doing land longer than I have. He's a beast. He's got a great reputation in the industry, and he was recommended to me by a friend, so I wanted to get him on because I've seen him around for a long, long time. He started doing land deals in Montana back in 1999 when he was just a year out of high school. Travis and his wife focused on houses and house investing for that next decade, but it all came crashing down in 2008. He took some time off real estate to regroup and then started learning about flipping land as a business model. Today, he’s crushing it as a land investing expert and coach with well over 7 figures of land investment deals under his belt.

Travis talks about how he finances his deals and how he got started. We also talk about how he initially found his leads and the lists he used, since the same great tools we have today just weren’t around. Travis shares how he likes to target properties, the difference between rental and residential lots, blind letters, and subdivisions. We couldn’t fit this great conversation into one episode, so make sure you tune into part two where Travis shares more secrets from his land investing empire.

Watch and Learn:




Listen and learn:

What’s inside:

  • How Travis switched from a housing focus to vacant land.
  • The tools Travis used to start up his land investing business.
  • How to target deals, price campaigns, and do blind offers.

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcription:

Download episode transcript in PDF format here…

Joe: What's going on, guys? Joe McCall, this is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. How you doing? Glad you're here. Listen, it's been an exciting week. Those of you that as I'm recording this right now, you're watching as we're doing a live challenge where we are actually documenting live how to flip houses in virtual markets and flip vacant land. So I'm doing this with my coaching business partner, Gavin, and he's doing houses, I'm doing vacant land. We're going into a brand new virtual market that we've never done before, and we're documenting the whole process, which is exciting. So depending on when we're releasing this, you can probably go to my YouTube channel and see the videos. Just go to the YouTube, do a search for Joe McCall and you'll see the videos in there. We have a new playlist probably titled New Market Challenge, so go check that out. We're just documenting the steps A through Z on how to do this. And our goal is to get a house or land deal under contract, a really good one in 30 days or less. And I'm million times confident I can do that with land. Super easy. Gavin I'm a little nervous about just getting bought houses. We'll see. All right, so I wanted to tell you something. We got a cool guest on today. His name is Travis King, and we're gonna be talking about scaling your land investing business. Travis has been doing land longer than I have. He's a beast. He's got a great reputation in the industry. And he was recommended to me by a friend, and I wanted to get him on because I've seen him around for a long, long time. So we're going to bring on Travis here in just a minute and talk about more about vacant land investing. I want to let you know right now I have a free contract that you can get your hands on for free. This is the main contract I use for my vacant land deals. And if you want it, it's a one page contract. You can get it for free. No strings attached at simple land contract dot com, go there, opt in, get my contract. We'll send it to you in an email and then on the next page you'll be a little invitation to watch a class that I did that teaches you how to use the contract. So again, it's free. Go to simple land contract dot com and get your hands on it. Cool. All right. We ready to bring Travis in? Travis is a good friend that I just met, but I've heard about him for a long, long time. Travis, how are you, my man?

Travis: Hey, Joe. Great, man. Thanks for having me.

Joe: Glad you're here. Welcome to the podcast. I've seen your name around for a long, long time. You've been doing land investing for a long time. You're still active in the business, doing lots of deals. So congratulations to you. Let me ask you some questions. If it's all right about land, how did you get started in land? What were you doing before the.

Travis: Well, the irony here is let's rewind here. And I'm dating myself, right back in like 99, a year out of high school. Ironically, I did a land deal. You know, I did my first subdivide land up in from Montana. I actually did a 40 acre subdivide into five, eight acre parcels. That was kind of something that my dad helped me out on and that he was he subdivided and he did okay. So it was kind of like, you know, he kind of teed it up for me, right? And I didn't really appreciate it at the time or really understand it. And now houses and house investingm right, were a lot sexier and a lot more attractive to me than than walking land. And this is traditional like this was walking land, right? This was in the county we lived in. So as far as walking the land, I, I wasn't real excited about land or land investing and definitely wasn't introduced me as like a business model of flipping land. This was 1999, right? Yeah. So this is right out of high school. I did that first deal and and then kind of moved on right to start career. But really that was the solo land deal and that's kind of the funny part of it because then it really focused on houses and house investing for the next decade or so. And we kind of all know how the 2008 when I say that next decade, right? 99 2000 to 2008 but know how that story ended. And for me, it ended in my wife, her fiancée at the time, you know, like the 2008 crash, you know, it ended in a condo. We had been foreclosed, most of us losing our jobs in a matter of six months.

Joe: Where were you living at the time?

Travis: I'm from Montana traveling for work, and I was actually in Northern California, so I met my wife down in Sacramento area, and that's where I was working at the time. That's where she was working. And of course, that that the bubble burst a little bit in some of those markets. You know, the ripple effects don't hit places like Montana or the Midwest a little, little later. Right. But so for us is more like the the crash, the bubble of 2006 or seven, everybody else refers is oh eight. Right. But it came a little early there so far. So for us, that's kind of when I made the mistake of reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, getting all excited and then not really studying it. I say, right, skimming it, you know, it was enough to give me the motivation to get into houses, but not really be like us a do.

Joe: We have a very, very similar story. I got into real estate around the same, well, 2005 reading Rich Dad. Poor Dad got all excited and lost my shorts, lost a bunch of houses because I was way over leveraged. I was ignoring the fundamentals. I was counting on appreciation, and I thought real estate always went up, right?

Travis: Yeah, and that's how I feel. It's like that one's on me. That's not about him. Because if you read the book, he talks about like buying cash flow in houses, right? So not like counting on appreciation. So that one's 100% on me, but being, you know, being in your twenties. Right. And naive and just taking that massive action. But like I'm a fan of massive, not massive, like ignorant, uneducated action. Right. Yeah. So anyway, I took my lumps right there and then kind of went into like, more like retreat, more like I would say, you know, then my wife and I moved back to Montana somewhere I was familiar with. Right. And to get the money just to travel.

Joe: You live in one of the greatest states in the country. I love, love, love Montana. I was just there two weeks ago. Went flew in to Kalispell. Yeah. Spent some time in around Glacier. My son's there for a Christian YWAM youth with a mission organization for five months. I've been there probably two or three times. Besides that, I absolutely love Montana. I'm super jealous that you.

Travis: It's incredible. Montana is incredible. Yeah, it's just amazing. And as you travel and tell people that they why are you when I used to travel on my job like why are you here? You know, like people, you know, I mean, it's on people's bucket list to go up to Yellowstone and Glacier. Yeah, some of these places. But when you grow up around it, you, I think you kind of take it for granted. You don't really know. But at the same time, as a young guy in his twenties, there's not a lot of job opportunity, right? Like if you're trying to build your empire, I don't know. That's where you go. That's where you go when you're ready to retire and fly fish and stuff like that. Right. Or buy a second home. But it's not the place that I would say that. A young buck. Yeah.

Joe: Oh, where. Where do you live? In Montana. I'm just curious.

Travis: So we still have our house in Missoula, which is about western Montana. Ironically, image is Kalispell. My wife's family homesteaded like late 1800s early 1900s of whitefish watch right now very close to ski area now so yeah my dad still lives up there. We relocated about three years ago down to Phoenix, so we still have a home in Montana. So we have two houses are our primary is here in Phoenix area and then we have a house in Missoula in Montana.

Joe: So you'd rather live in Phoenix than Montana?

Travis: Well, it's kind of taking that long view, right, with the kids now where I want to be in the summer, that's for sure. Right. But for more, looking ahead at kids, you married three boys and it's really opportunity colleges and you know, everything from yesterday we went to a preseason NFL game for the Cardinals. So that's just stuff. In Montana, there are no pro sports. Can't take it. We used to drive down to Denver to catch a ballgame, you know? Well, there's no teams.

Joe: I don't know, who just swept the Arizona Diamondbacks?

Travis: Take your pick. I think everybody's had their turn. You know, that was the toughest thing I'm trying to tell my kids. I'm moving down Arizona. He's like, Dad, have you looked at their the pros, the record? I said, I'll take you to every pro team game for every pro team is like, have you looked at them?

Joe: Right. Sorry, I'm rubbing it in because the Cardinals, my St Louis Cardinals just swept the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Travis: Yeah, they are. They're kind of a doormat right now. But, you know, we're we're kind of we're more beating our chests about the Phoenix Suns right now than, you know, the baseball, that's for sure. Yeah. It's a it can be a suffering contest up in these cold weather states. Right. And I grew up shoveling snow, scraping windows. I mean, some of those things so is is beautiful as it is in the summer and stuff and throughout the year. There's also a long, cold winter that you got to live with. So. All right, people watch the movie Yellowstone, go excited, you know, run up there and buy a house and first snow hits and then they're gone, right?

Joe: Well, you know, it's funny, as I watch Yellowstone and you never see any dirt or dust on any of the trucks. Yeah, the trucks are always spotless and clean and come.

Travis: Yeah, yeah. I can tell you that's. That's not what it is, right. Yeah. That's people aren't driving those king ranch additions everywhere at the ranch. It's like a typical ranch, but they probably have a full time crew of a dozen people that just clean all of the trucks whenever they do any filming.

Travis: Well, yeah, exactly. Because nobody up there is concerned about how their truck looks to anybody else. Right. That's the least of Montana. That's the least of people's concern. But for us, it provided like at the time when I look down as living Northern California, kind of a landing spot, right? Like a foundation for me to rebuild. At the time, it felt a little bit like retreat because of that crash and how hard we got hit. It just took the wind out of my sails, but it allowed me to kind of like start over and got married, started a family, right? I had our boys and I kind of started rebuilding. And then it was just like most people, you. Commute into that Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, you know, and listening to podcasts, wanting to get back in the game of real estate, but also suffering from a slight case of PTSD, you know, from houses. Right. And not wanting to dove back in. You know, we started doing rental houses and stuff, but I was kind of running the math and I'm like a door every two years. This isn't going to hit my here. And so we wanted to get back into to real estate investing in our community and and just heard a podcast one day. And Seth Williams our tipster was being interviewed. This is back in 2013, being interviewed on figure pockets. Yeah. And then you start talking about land flipping as a business model. Well, I had a familiarity with land from my dad and growing up, and my dad had done some subdividing, done some land and I'd done a deal. But in ten or 12 years since I had and then he was really talking about it as a model, right? As a business model, not like to point out in the land investing or doing a flip, but like let's repeated flips and building a business. So I listen to the episode several times, reached out to Seth direct and actually he was kind enough to reply to my email, you know, and give me some guidance. And I said, Hey, dude, I'd love to buy your course. You know where's the buy now button, And at the time, Seth is running his blog in RE tipster blog. I don't I don't have a course. Right. He said he basically said if you if you print out all my blog articles, you put them in sequential order. You basically have a course handing out a duct tape together. And we were kind of I think he's kind of joking. But I did that right. I did just that. I reminded him how I put it together as my own course, kind of ran through it. And then, you know, I bother two or three other courses out there at the time around the land, but most of them were focused on like delinquent land flipping and delinquent investing and it just they all had their gaps. But I felt like between two or three of them and what Seth had, it kind of filled in all the gaps and gave it gave me a whole picture. But I think I also gotten that, that like paralysis by analysis where I was even out one more course, one more. I just need one more thing now, one more piece of the puzzle component to do this, you know. So I don't know, looking back, I cost myself, if you're 100 grand that you're like being in education mode all of year. And then one day I was talking with my wife about it and again. Right, telling her about real vacant land. And we're actually looking at it for assets, an online auction site. And I was telling her, look at these cheap lots. You know, you can buy these lots of like 500 bucks on online. She's like, I'm so tired of hearing you talk about this. I just buy it by do it. I don't know. The worst could happen. We could lose the money, right? So we bought one. I think we sold it for like 2500 bucks. So, you know, not a big windfall, but it was like buy for five or 600, sell for about 2500 in less than 10 hours into it. Sound like this is why couldn't we do this ten, 20, 50 times a year? Yes, I think it validated it. And once it was validated. Once it was validated, then I'm like, okay, I'm going to go now. Now it's more about like, how big came this get and how fast can we get it there right now at work? But I, you know, like most people, I do a lot of coaching and training now and I know you do. And I think that's common right. With everybody is you just go, what, just one more course, one more piece of information, and then I'll be ready to poke holes in the courses. Then the reality is for 500 or $5,000 doesn't matter because the course can't cover every single thing, you know? I mean, it's incredible value people deliver and that they're willing to give you a course and put their distilled knowledge together. But you've got to have some confidence. I mean, and you've got to take some action. And I think I cost myself a year, that first year of doing that. But eventually we got we got started, right.

Joe: I can relate. I always say I was a professional student for three years before I started doing deals. Right, because I was just dabbling here and there. I would take what this guy did, what that guy did. I would try to do it. At the time I was just doing houses. I would do wholesaling and lease options and subject shoes and owner financing and short sales and foreclosures. And I was trying to do these all all these different strategies. And it wasn't until I just focused in on one strategy and got really good at it and I did buy like three or four courses on wholesaling, right? Yeah. And I finally had that epiphany like, you know what, I'm just going to do what this guy says to do and I'm not going to change it. I'm just going to do what he says to do and trust the system. And that was when I started doing deals and having success, not trying to change anything, not trying to add anything or take anything away. And this was a friend of mine, Chris Chico, and he had a wholesaling course on virtual wholesaling. And I just did what he said. I didn't like the postcards, I didn't like the list. I didn't like how he made his offers. But I did it anyway, right?

Travis: Right.

Joe: It's magic, it worked, I couldn't believe it.

Travis: I think, you know, John Lee Dumas, writer as a monster podcast, he always talks about focus. Right. That follow one course until success. Well like literally of course that's a. I said, You know what I mean? With us, you've got to follow a course. It doesn't matter whose course, there's maybe ten different ones and they all work. It's really about like, you know, following that course and that system and that person's recipe, right? And you can get cute and you can switch things up and you can put your own spin on it down the road. Right. You know what I mean? But to get started, why not? If somebody, you know, you win back matches and then rewrite their SOPs like their process manuals, right? If you found it, like you follow it, you know, then I think that's the thing about, of course, is just like following that course till you get that traction and then if you identified areas to optimize, absolutely do that. But at first, we are just getting going getting started and using somebody else's methods is the best, right?

Joe: Yeah. Good. All right. So you got started. You were buying these little lines for 500 bucks. Selling them for 2500. Is that what you said? We signed them for cash or an owner financing. What were you doing there?

Travis: No, cash. Yeah. So we just did a couple at the time, I'd say I was taking courses and really what I was trying to tie together was and there wasn't a bunch of data sources out there where you just got like single user licenses. There's all these like enterprise or business to business license to buy data. But there it was like list source I think is the only one I could find at the time where a guy could get a, you know, an individual membership and download a list. So the teacher at time was like, go to the county and get their delinquent tax list. And that comes in this gobbledygook format. Then you reformat it and put together a direct mail campaign. And so for me, I was like it just was like I cut out all of that part of it that seemed kind of overwhelming by like identifying, you know, this fit for assets website and buying those individual lots on the auction. But at the same time, like knowing like just from a business perspective, like if you become reliant on one platform, right, what happens to that goes away or gets saturated, you know, and, and the the margins weren't huge there. Like, you know, I didn't know making a grand or two grand is great, but like how many would you have to do a year? So I knew I had to figure out that like that dataset slash mailing list and then direct mail campaign piece of it. So that's kind of where I drove it in. And actually when I started I used like county websites like their GIS system or the parcel viewer. I would just like run a buffer and then download like an Excel list right off the county website. And Arizona, it's really common where you can actually export from the GIS website. You draw a circle or a polygon and you can download as an Excel list.

Joe: You were talking about you were going directly to the county websites, the GIS website mapping systems that they use and downloading these lists yourself because it was hard to find a list of vacant land.

Travis: Correct, like there weren't there nowadays. So like when people ask depending on market conditions or anything like what is now a good time to start? You know, my wife and I kind of just chuckled because she works the business with me. And when we started that, the tools weren't out there, the tools were out. There is a land flipper, land investor, there's incredible data sources, you know, and CRMs. And there's so many softwares out there right now that didn't exist. So yeah, we would pull like our list from the county website, right? Right off their viewer. And then we would bring that into click email and we'd send a campaign. And so we were doing direct mail campaigns targeting properties like very low end properties, like a less than $10,000 rural vacant land, because that was kind of like the courses I had been through were focused on that. And quite honestly, that was like the our bank balance, our play money. That's all I had to play with, right? Was I was only allowed to lose like four figures, right? Not five figures. So I had to start really small and do small deals. And we kind of just started one at a time with, I mean, buying things as cheap as a thousand, reselling them like own or financing for three or four or 5000 on payments, buying them.

Joe: You were sending neutral letters.

Travis: We were sending blind offers, so unsolicited by including a price, but we would identify like pocket areas where the market value was very homogenous, like kind like size, you know, which is more common in the Southwest, you know, except to find these subdivisions, it's like 3001 acre properties, right? It might be worth several thousand or 5000. So we're kind of taking out these little these just com subdivisions. Right. And sending in blind ops at the time. So not like letters of interest. And we would we would buy properties for as low as six, $700, up to 2000, you know, and then we'd sell anywhere from three to, to seven or $10,000 and then we'd sell an owner. Financing was our model in the beginning, really trying to build that like that empire of notes, because for me, the goal at the time was to replace job income so I could step away from job because family was growing and. Two kids are planning a third. And it was it was like, okay, I want to spend time with these you know, spend time with my family. I was traveling out of town. Starting to get tough on myself and my wife. Like missing out on things, being gone. So I was like, okay, I got to make this work. I didn't really have the option of doing one big massive flip right and walk away with a bag of money. It was like, this has to be like incrementally one owner finance deal at time. So that's really what we focused on the first two years because we were using our own money and just plowing our money back into it and doing more and more notes, right? Creating note income. And then eventually got to that point where about two and a half years into it, where there are no our monthly note income was close to 10,000 a month and that replaced my job income and was kind of able to fulfill that dream. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people have a vibe, you know, stepping over, exiting the job and not like and having some runway, right? Like, you know, exiting the job. But having that note income, there's the safety net.

Joe: Nice. So do you think it took you two and a half years to get to that point? Could you could you have gotten there faster if you would have put more time into it or you would have had more money or.

Travis: Gosh, I've got so many learnings, yeah. So absolutely. And that I look back, you know, and like there's just you don't know. You don't know at the time. And I think the other thing is you quite often, like we our goal, we set our goals based on either our current means, like our current means or a certain mindset. So we set small goals. My goal is never like 100,000 a month or a million a year. Like I couldn't even think that, you know, being in like a $80,000 a year job, like I couldn't even think of $1,000,000 fear, what that would look like or bigger goals, right? But 10,000 a month sounded realistic, you know what I mean? So you set those goals, you work towards them. And then the other thing is like even like where would you go to get money? Like, I was using my own money, you know. So I'm like, it's not like the house industry where I was really mature and there was funders or hard money lenders all over the place. You'd say land ten years ago and people get, Huh, that stuff is terrible. I don't wanna get stuck with that, right? So for us that was a big part of it. But I left a job and it felt like a big win. But what I didn't see coming was like the fact because I had built up all these notes and they were small notes, so they were like 36 and 48 month notes because they were less than $10,000 deals. So what was interesting is like you're 336 months at that same clip, I was originating notes four or five months, you know, two or three years ago. They were now I was now experiencing no churn. Right. They were dropping off. So I'm like hemorrhaging cash, 550 a month, losing note income. So that hockey stick growth we had early on was because it was our first two or three years, you know, and we were originating these smaller notes, some kind of takeaways from that. Right. And that now, like I teach people to build, I know the empire of like 5 to 15 year notes so that you're not combating churn. Right. And then the other thing is, is we had to rework our model about the same time we started to experience the pain of no churn. Having left the job, I need to pay myself a salary now. Right. So I'm cannibalizing the business, you know what I mean? Instead of plowing all the profits in before, because I was living off a job income, I'm paying myself a handsome salary, you know, and then I'm experiencing no churn, so you know what I mean? So it's really like that scaling up. So I identified, okay, this, this model doesn't work of these like cheap property seller financing, right? That's not going to work one. But at the same time, we realized that like we had built up almost 500,000 in like a note portfolio, but we had less than ten grand in the bank account. Right? So it's like a humbling moment because it was like, am I a success or am I not right? What's going on here? Whereas really like not looking ahead and recognizing that. So we'd identified all that. Note equity. It was it was trapped, right? All that equity is trapped in that solvent. We couldn't get to it. So two things I realized, all right, I've got to redo our business. And then also I need to like I've got to add a zero. I've got to do bigger deals, I've got to do more cash deals and I've got to do bigger deals or but then that's when I go, oh, but I'm, I'm basically dirt rich, but cash for. Right. So that became okay. The next thing is, is other people's money. How do I get capital? So that's for me when I started really and that's what circling back to answer your question, that's what I tell people right out the gate now is, you know, like it's kind of like this model works at every level. When I started it, the way it was kind of presented to me was this is an inefficient market, which it absolutely is, I agree. But it's an inefficient, inefficient market, up to a couple million dollars in land. But as explained to me is we have this opportunity because agents won't take these listings. No agent wants some cheap land. It's a liability. There's no commission in it, but all of the opportunity lies in the 30,000 or below market value. Right. And that's completely untrue. As we scaled up our business and we started to go, I lined up outside money. Right. I lined up a funder, a capital partner. And then we started targeting values. We used to just pull data on like 30,000 and below values. We started targeting ups like 200,000. And these people had never received an offer before from a land flipper. Right, because nobody was targeting those. So it's like we stumbled into like this blue ocean of higher value properties. And then when we do a flip, we're making ten, 20, 40 grand a deal instead of adding 150 a month note income. So yeah, that's kind of my takeaways to people is like as and now you're fortunate because there's 20 different places you could go to JV or get your deal funded in the land community. But I would say like don't avoid bigger deals because you don't have the money. There's tons of people Joe will probably partner with you. Heck, there's 20 people. It would work with you out there like but don't limit the value properties you go after based on your bank account, right? So go after bigger deals quicker and then leverage like real estate agents and title companies and really move away. It's a it's a method I teach. It's called the boss method. It's the bigger deals offering more. So instead of like a 20, 25, 30% offer, we're probably more 40% or 50% of market value. So we're going after bigger stuff. But that's the B.A. And then the assets first is stop self-fund, like stop funding everything, right? Leverage a partner or funder and then stop doing it yourself. You know, like don't sell clothes on the buy side, don't sell on the sell side, lose title companies use land agents and this is all stuff to save time. I know it's a long answer to a question, but it was good. My wife and I both worked the business together and we're almost ten years in. So combine you take the first moves thrown at this business and the scaling points along the way. I can kind of distill that and shave off you people. Those are like those first tips, you know, when you're getting started as closing with title companies, the buy and sell side selling is land agents, and that'll put you at a price point that you have to be doing bigger deals because there's not enough money in it. If you try to close the title, companies pay an agent on a small scale. So it's going to force you to do bigger deals and then identifying a capital partner so that you can go after deals that you won. You put that you're not all the risk, you spread the risk, but too, it just allows you to do bigger deals. You know, that that's I think the biggest takeaway can only somebody can kind of start at like my your three, right. Your three or four that's that would be like the starting point if I were coaching somebody. You know, it's not like suffering is not a requisite to scale up and have a landing. You can like, you know what I mean? You can start here and get to where I am and half or a third the time if you don't go that route of small deals and self-funding and self closing.

Joe: Yeah, for sure. I love it. So you know, how do you target those bigger properties that are worth like is there a what's the price range, what's the acreage size or are you doing deals that are closer to bigger cities?

Travis: Yes, absolutely. So there's two like product types. I would call on our business, you know, where we're all vacant land and then like residential lots, some people call rental lots, but it's, it's just like a residential lot. The end buyer's going to build a home on it. It's got utilities at the street, a paved road, right? So those are kind of the two products in our business we work with. Yeah. Rural vacant land like under 100,000. Under 80,000 is fantastic. You could create a that's really where we build like our note empire in selling properties like 30 to $80000 in value on a note with a 30 to 50% down. So we really some are going to sell cash, some are, but the majority sell seller financing. So we really like to create our note income with rural vacant land and then we like to do cash flips on residential lots and metro area. As you know, within an hour of anywhere within an hour of pick a metro city. Right. Like we said, with a client, a partner in Tampa, area of $350,000 lakeside lot. Right. So that's I say it it's really works all over we do a 30 $500 a lot in New Mexico or you can do a $350,000 a lot in Tampa. You know, it really works. So we go after residential lots and real vacant land. But in me personally, like when I pull the data set, I don't separate the two. I'm going to keep that like so like acreage range for my mailing list or data set. I might say from quarter acre up to 52 acres. And then I'm just focused on the value that I pull that like everything below three or 400,000 value, right? Like and that's going to give me everything because some real vacant land is going to come back there because of that max acreage I put in and then some infill and residential lots at quarter acre to acre are going to come in there. So I don't segment that because what happens I found when you segment it, you end up missing out trying to run two different campaigns. It's just a necessary to run campaign. So. So yeah, we go after that quarter acre to about 52 acres is what we go after. You know, if you're doing big ranches in Texas, obviously you would adjust that. But overall, that's kind of like our county wide criteria.

Joe: All right. So we're still breaking up a little bit. We may need to break this up into two parts. So maybe we'll wrap this up soon here and do a part two with you, Travis, because I have a lot of questions I'd love to ask you. But just real quick and let me ask one more question. When you're sending mail to quarter acre lots and 50 acre lots, are you just sending a neutral letter then so you can get them on the phone and talk to them about the kind of property they have? Are you still sending blind offers to them?

Travis: Little bit of both. And that will like if we're targeting like Lakeside lots or we're targeting something with if we're pulling a county wide list, there could be a big variance from one part of the county to the other. No in value per acre, per square foot. So something like a letter of interest or a postcard of interest where we're not committing to a price that gives us time to like, value it before we give an offer. Makes a lot of sense. So the higher the value that works better. But if we if we find in like zip codes or subdivisions where there are a lot of similar sized properties, they're easier to value. Those are like better candidates for blind offers, but a lot of the time. So we run both well, when somebody is new, a lot of times I'll tell them to lead with like a letter of interest rate or a neutral because they don't know. Pricing a campaign is something that takes a while to build an experience. So I think when somebody starting out like just sending a postcard of interest or letter of interest is the best route to go. Soon as you start to know your market or markets and you understand how to price the campaign, then you can blind offer. I feel like that's probably the best route. But in our business, we run both and we teach both.

Joe: Yeah, I'm kind of on the same page. Like, especially with beginners, it's just. Just send out a neutral letter until you get familiar with the area and you get familiar with the subdivisions and, you know, certain unique things. And then you can send blind offers maybe your second time around or follow up or whatever.

Travis: Yeah, absolutely. I'd say tell people, based on the feedback from your campaign, you're actually going to learn your market or learn your county. You get two or three leads from the same subdivision or same area, and they're all telling you it's worth this. You know, like you now kind of might identify areas to send a little micro mailer to a blind off or micro mailer. So sometimes leading with that county wide, it's not something I didn't get a deal or somebody. I go, Well, it's never wasted. You had to learn something based on the feedback you got and the seller leads, right? So yeah, I'm same page with you on that.

Joe: Awesome. Let's do this, Travis. Would you be open to doing another interview? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. How can people reach you? Get a hold of you.

Travis: Easiest way is just go to Travis King dot com, you know? Yeah. That's probably the easiest, fastest way to go there. I've you know, we I run a mastermind. I have an advanced investors course. I do group coaching. We do subdividing a lot a lot of things having to do with scaling your land business upset that we've learned along the way nice doing portfolio deals subdividing there's just a lot of those and things as we scale that I've now put into training, content and share with people. But Travis King dot com works.

Joe: T r a v i s Travis King k i n g dot com.

Travis: Perfect.

Joe: All right. Well, listen, guys, appreciate you all being on the podcast. I know we had some problems with the Internet connections there, so my apologies, but we will do a part two. I'll get with Travis right now and talk about when we can go do part two. And we'll see you guys later. Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.

Travis: All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Joe.

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