Joe: Hey. What's going on, guys? Joe McCall here. Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Got a great guest on today for you. His name is Ken Dunn, and we're going to be talking about how he's doing over seven figures a year, renting out small little cottages or small little cabins on his land. Now, Ken is from Toronto, Canada, but he's doing these deals in very, very different, unique places that there's very little competition for them, very high demand, very profitable deals. And so we're in a mastermind together. I was talking to him and he was giving me a hard time because I didn't accept his invitation to go speak at his last event. But I had a good reason. And we won't get into that because we don't want to get into politics. We are not going to talk about politics, Ken. But anyway, listen, it's going to be a good show. You're going to learn about how Ken is making a lot of money, renting out these tiny little cabins out in the middle of nowhere. And he's having zero problems getting them filled. And it's amazing. I also want to let you know, too, if you are interested in my new book. Here it is. Boom. Ken also has a book publishing business. Don't ignore it. Ignore the cover, Ken. This is I don't like this cover at all, but this one I've got it's a book I wrote called Simple Land Flips 10K in 10 hours. How to Make Over ten grand a month, 10 hours a week, flipping vacant land. And this is why this is important, because you can get this for free. It's simple land class dot com, free. Get the PDF version of this book for free. It's simple land class dot com because in here I'm going to show you how to buy the land that you can put your little tiny houses and cottages or cabins on and buy these properties for 25 to $0.50 on the dollar. So there are a ton of properties out here. And so after listening to this podcast with Ken, you're going to get excited. You're going to want to do some tiny houses and cottages, and you know what? You might need some land to put them on. So we're going to talk about that. But you can get this book for free at simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com. And what that URL is, it's a class. It's a webinar or a class that I did teaching you how to do this strategy. At the end of that webinar, I'm going to give you a link on how to get that book for free. All right. One more thing here real quick for house cleaning. You guys are watching. A lot of you right now are watching this on YouTube and Facebook Live as we're recording this. So, hi. If you're watching this on Facebook, YouTube, please say hi in the comments down below. Tell us who you are. Tell us where you're from. I'd love to say hi to you back. And also I just had a ladybug on my cheek. Anyway, if you have any questions, if you have any questions, type them in the comments. And I will be able to bring them up for Ken and have him talk about his questions. All right. Let's bring Ken on. Hey, Ken.

Ken: Hey, buddy. How are you, man? Awesome.

Joe: How are you?

Ken: I'm doing fantastic. You know, as you were talking about, like, vacant land, I just got giddy as a schoolgirl because I've been really wanting to take this strategy into the vacant land game, and this is really geeky. So I'm excited about this conversation.

Joe: Right? I am, too. And by the way, thank you, Elmo. What's going on? Elmo from Florida and Nick from I don't know where Nick is, but hey, Nick.

Ken: Nick leases in Michigan. He's a good man.

Joe: Oh, you know him?

Ken: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome.

Joe: Cool. Awesome. All right. Now, Ken, let's talk about your background a little bit. You've got some really cool double comma club awards there. That's how we know each other through the Clickfunnels world. But you're also really active in real estate. Talk about what you're doing.

Ken: Yeah, man, it's really it's exciting. And I think like you and a whole bunch of other people that I've been known of and hanging out with for the last 20 years have kind of always kept real estate on my radar. You know, my background is investigative policing. I was a homicide detective when I was 30 years old, and when I found out I was going to be a dad, I walked away from policing and one of my best friend's dads helped me to start my first business, which was a mortgage company. And back in 2000, we started doing mortgages for families all across Canada, and it exploded. In four years, we funded 400 million in mortgages, and it was my mentor at the time. When I started making all this money, I was like, Well, what should I do with it? I was buying cars and all this. And he said, Stop it, you idiot. You need to start buying properties. And that's what he did. He got me hooked on apartments. And so back in 2000, I built this little portfolio of apartments. And a couple of years later, when I sold the mortgage company, we sold that company and moved to Toronto. And, you know, ever since 2010, I've been online building a publishing company, and it was back in 2017 I bought my first cottage. It was really interesting because back in the day, you know, as my kids were growing up, I've always been the guy who every summer we go and rent somebody's cottage and we always look. For really cool places and, you know, really neat features of what we're doing, big lakes around us. And in 2017 I had a cottage rented and three days before we were supposed to go there, the guy canceled on me and I said, Screw it, I'm going to go buy my own cottage. And you know, at first when I when we bought it, it was really just to use ourselves for our family. But we were in our early fifties and we're really freakin busy doing our thing. And I thought, you know, I might as well rent it when I'm not using it. So I put a listing on Airbnb. I didn't know anything about what I was doing and it literally went about six or seven weeks and nobody had looked at it. And then I just kind of slapped myself in the head and said, What the frig? I'm a digital marketer. I know how to build funnels, I know how to run ads. So why don't I put a little campaign together so I can get the right people looking at that Airbnb page? And it exploded and I spent a thousand bucks in 30 days and rented the place out for 58 weeks and $1,000 a night. So literally on about $1,000 in ad spend, I created about $275,000 in revenue and about 150,000 a net profit on that one unit. And that's where this strategy came from. You know, it's.

Joe: Where was this unit at?

Ken: It's about two and a half hours north of Toronto. And that's kind of one of the most important things. I didn't realize this upfront, but, you know, the more vacant, the more remote you can find a place, the better the more money you're going to make.

Joe: So, explain that. You're saying again, the more remote it is, the more likely it is to rent.

Ken: Yeah. So there's when you're looking at these types of properties, you have to put yourself in the minds of the people that are actually going to stay there. And my cottages rent for a thousand bucks a night, 1200 bucks a night. So I'm not renting them to Johnny lunch bucket. And I don't mean to offend anybody that listens to the show, but that's we're in business to make money, right?

Joe: Johnny Lunch bucket.

Ken: Yeah, we're going after high end people, people that say six figures a year. And when they're want to go to a cottage, they don't want to be in some type of community. They want to be remote. They don't want to be able to hear anybody or see anybody. And so what I've found is finding the most remote, remote properties you can with a couple of caveats. You got to make sure that it's within ten or 15 minutes of a city or a town, and you want to make sure that it's also close to some type of off season activities, like skiing or fishing or hunting, so that people are more likely to come all year round.

Joe: So not literally in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere. Right. And it's got to have electricity.

Ken: Yeah, for sure.

Joe: Got cell phone coverage.

Ken: Yeah. Listen, you want to kind of think about it as if you're building a five star resort hotel room in the middle of nowhere because people are coming there. They're still working longer there. You got to make this, like, such a memorable experience that they never have a one single issue, nothing to complain about while they're there. Here's the other thing, Joe. 70% of the people that come to my cottages come back every year. Wow. And that's because when they're there, there is nothing that they see that they complain about. We've created like a virtual amazing lifetime experience. They love the properties.

Joe: So what do these cottages look like?

Ken: You know, the average cottage is four bedrooms. It's got one bathroom in it. It's on private waterfront. The waterfront, I only by cottages that has waterfront that what I tell my students is make sure you have waterfront. That mom with her one and a half year old child number when our kids were young and we held them by their hands and walk them.

Joe: Yeah, yeah.

Ken: Yeah. They got to be able to walk those kids into the water. So sandy beaches, easy to get into the water. And another rule of thumb when you're buying these places is stand on the deck of the property and only buy the property if you can't hear or see the neighbors. So it's just so the road is shot so that when people are there, they really feel like they're on their own. But then the creature comforts need to be there. Air conditioning, hardwood floors, you know, really great high speed Internet, cable television games for the kids. It's it really is a very special place when people go to these properties.

Joe: So they can't see or hear a neighbor.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: They need to be able to walk their kids on to the beach.

Ken: Yep.

Joe: And then so he needs to have a good view of the water.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: You need to have the amenities. You need to have nice things in there. You're targeting the thousand dollar night buyer.

Ken: Yeah, exactly. Now, here's the most important part about it, the way this strategy works. And this took me about five or six places to figure this out. When I first started doing this, I was just spending my own money. But then I realized I could scale it faster if I used other people's money, right? So I put together a strategy that I tested on a property and I thought if I could go find an old cottage that was in the right location. So it had the beach. It was a little bit isolated. It was close to the amenities we could get high speed Internet. But a beaten down old pre-season cabin. So I could literally take that place. Most people don't know this, but if you find an old three season cabin and you completely winterize it, so you turn it into a four season home. You're going to minimum double the value of the property.

Joe: Hmm.

Ken: So I'll go buy an old place for 300 grand. I'll put 200 grand into it to renovate it, and I'll turn it into $1,000,000 property. So I'll borrow the whole 500,000. I'll do the refinance, give them back their money. And now I have a property worth a million bucks at 50% loan to value.

Joe: Okay, amazing. Now, can we look? Can I share my screen here? And can we look at where some of these properties are on a map? Would that be okay?

Ken: Yeah, for sure. And we can actually go to Airbnb and I'll actually show you one of them as well.

Joe: All right. Well, let's look at a map first. What, like what city or zip code would this would some of these properties be near that you're talking about?

Ken: If you search Peterborough, Ontario, P E T E R B O R O U G H.

Joe: Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Oh, boom. There it is. I'm going to share my screen here. Yep. And those of you that are listening to the audio, I apologize, but you can go to my YouTube channel. Just search for YouTube, Joe McCall, and you'll see what we're looking at here. All right. So this is Peterborough. I'm going to zoom out and you can see there's Toronto right there, Lake Ontario.

Ken: Yep.

Joe: So you're about an hour from Ontario. From Toronto?

Ken: Yeah, it's exactly an hour's drive from where I live in Whitby, Ontario, which you saw there. Okay. You might have your screen, but it's the same area.

Joe: So there's a lot of good lakes, lakes out here.

Ken: Well, if you take a look at if you just drag it down just a little bit, this series of lakes are all connected together. No, nice. And it's like I have three cottages on Stoney Lake that you can see on the right side of the screen right here. That's like 50 miles long.

Joe: These are natural lakes are many are.

Ken: Yeah. They're all natural lakes and they're all connected together. It's a really, really popular place. But you know what? These lakes are not unlike. Hundreds, thousands of lakes all over North America. Right. And that's really what makes them special is just how close they are to the major centers. And, you know, we canvased all the guests that stay at our properties and they all say, you know, they're comfortable driving about an hour and a half to get to a cottage. To get to a cabin. Keep that in mind.

Joe: Some people like who are pretty ignorant, like me, are thinking Canada. Isn't it like snow up there? 12 years, 12 months out of the year. Talk about how what is the climate like that in this area? You can see, by the way, this is south of Minneapolis.

Ken: Yeah, so I was about to tell you. Where I live is actually south of 30% of of American states. I live in Toronto, Canada. So, you know, you're talking in the summertime in these this cottage area where our dot is right now. Daytime highs are about 100 Fahrenheit. We were over for most of August up in this area. Now, in the wintertime, we get down to zero two degrees Fahrenheit. We get three or four feet of snow over the winter. But in my cottages in the wintertime, we have cross-country skiers and people that like to go snowmobiling and people that like to go hunting stay at our places.

Joe: Okay. All right. So these is this area kind of hilly or flat.

Ken: You know, it's your typical if you think about what you would see around a lake anywhere, it's pretty all the same. So it's pretty flat. It's in the woods. So there's lots of trees around. And it's just it's just really, really great property to be around with your family.

Joe: All right, so how would I find one in Airbnb? What would I look for?

Ken: If you go to air, if you want to pull up Airbnb, right?

Joe: Yeah, I got it right here.

Ken: And then if we want to just click where it says anywhere type Stoney Lake, Stoney space lake and then click that first when Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. And then for the check in it. Just choose any time in January, say a week in January or something.

Joe: Okay.

Ken: And then for the amount of guests, just put four guests for adults. And if we scroll through this, if we go, keep going down. Let's see if one of my properties actually shows up here. There's a lots and lots of properties.

Joe: The reason I wanted to show this to you guys as well is to show you, number one, like what the areas are like, what are the pictures like? So this isn't in the mountains and this isn't in the Antarctic as the North Pole either.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: Very beautiful. So there's a bunch.

Ken: Here's what we can do. Go to the map over on the right side.

Joe: All right.

Ken: Oh, something happened.

Joe: There. Yeah, it is. There it is.

Ken: And then that hover click on the one that says tool one.

Joe: This one right here.

Ken: Yeah. Just curious where that's going to take us to. No, that's.

Joe: Want me to zoom into that area?

Ken: Yeah, I would say there's going to be more of them there.

Joe: There's a bunch of them.

Ken: Okay. See the one on the bottom of the stack that says 400 for 60?

Joe: Yeah, this one.

Ken: Can you click on that one? No, it's an you'll have to make that area bigger because ours is we've got one rate in that little batch. They're the one that says 331 at the top, maybe. Yeah. You click on that. That's my property. Beautiful. This place in January, we discounted significantly. We'll get it down into 3 to $400 in the summertime. This place rents 4000 bucks a night. Okay. And it's literally booked probably 85% of the year. This this is a place that we do on this one property, 200, 200 and 225,000 a year in rent. And it costs us mortgage and everything about 140,000. So we make 120 grand a year on this property.

Joe: So it does get in the upper nineties Fahrenheit in the summer.

Ken: Oh, yeah. This this place here, this property you're on in the dead of the summer, we'll get up to 100. We'll have about six or seven days. Between July and August, there are over 100.

Joe: Wow. Which is why a lake is so important. And there's the beach.

Ken: Yeah. Every property I have, you'll see that exact situation where there's some part of the property where a mom with a little baby could literally walk their kid into the water.

Joe: All right. And a little dock where they can jump from.

Ken: Take a look at the inside of the property so you can see that in these places are decked out. These are really nice. But you can do this like you can take an old piece of shit cottage and turn it into this. And in the wintertime, we build ice rinks out there. That's my son, which I got a little picture of as he was skating on the lake. Wow. And so families love that. You know, families take vacations all year round and it's just a really great situation.

Joe: This is beautiful. And so you've got 200 and 250,000 a year in rental income from this little cottage right here.

Ken: Yeah. And I got to, you know, pictures here with my boats just to show people that if they've got boats, they can bring them and put them in here pretty easily. And yeah, I'm telling you, Joe, what people don't realize and some people say, like, how are you getting a thousand bucks a night for a cottage when you see the competition and there's people that are, you know, doing cottages four or five and $600? The answer is really simple. Two things. Number one, these are elite level places. We put only the best Finishings and I spent $100,000 just on that firepit that you see there in that picture. How much? $100,000. We put all the granite in around it, we put the retaining walls, smokes, but everybody freaking loves it and it makes all the difference in the world. We put the site in and just really jazzed up the place.

Joe: There's a retaining wall. I got to check this out.

Ken: This is what's really amazing about this strategy. I got into this because I love staying at the cottages, right? Yeah. I found this property that actually had two cottages on it. That brown cottage you see, if you scroll down a bit, is a private cottage that I don't rent. It's my family's personal cottage. So whenever we go to this property, we stay in the brown property. And we don't we don't stay there. When we have guests on site, I book out five or six weeks every summer just at this place.

Joe: Nice.

Ken: So that's what I love about this strategy is, you know, there's lots of ways you can make millions of dollars in real estate, but I don't know of another strategy in the real estate game where you get to enjoy the properties as much as we do.

Joe: So how many of these do you own?

Ken: Right now we've got we have seven different properties right now. And now we've obviously because it's going so well, we've jumped up into cottage resorts. So we're developing two resorts now up in Canada. That one's going to end up with 30 cottages on it and another one's going to end up with 16 cottages on it.

Joe: Okay.

Ken: And Joe, as you can imagine, I mean, I don't have to prove this to you because you're going to you're going to believe this and you know how to do it yourself. But I don't I don't use any of my own money anymore. Like all these properties, we just borrow money from rent, from lenders and investors do the flips, give them back their money, and bring in institutional lenders on the back end after we get them up and running.

Joe: Okay. Let's talk about how you find these deals. And imagine there's not a lot of properties that are on lakes that you can't see or hear anybody nearby. How do you find them?

Ken: Well, you know, there's I have a network of real realtors that are always trying to pitch me on deals because they know I'm in the game. And so every once in a while, I'll find a property through a realtor. But the biggest way we actually generate the leads for these properties is through direct marketing. So we run radio commercials, 30-second radio ads in cottage country so people can hear them as they're there. And we run Facebook ads, we target gardens country, and we run ads that say We'll buy your old dilapidated cottage as is, whereas and those people reach out to us, fill out the forms. I've got some folks that work for me that screen them all, and if they fit our model, they refer them over to me. And if not, we just send them off to other people.

Joe: Nice. So when you're doing radio ads, are you targeting the local radio stations then in those areas?

Ken: Yeah. And you're going to get the best advertising on those stations anyway, but we run ads on the radio stations that we know people in the area are listening to and we say, Hey, listen, is your cottage old and tired and you're thinking of selling it? Well, don't call us instead. We'll give you top dollars. We'll leave it, let you come back and use it after it's renovated.

Joe: Don't list it, sell it.

Ken: Yeah, exactly.

Joe: Okay, so then you the at least in the States, I don't know what it's like in Canada. It seems like there's been a lot of restrictions coming in on Airbnb, making it harder and harder to do. Yeah, because there's always there's restrictions in cities and stuff like that. Are you finding out when you're out in the country like this you have fewer restrictions?

Ken: Well, we still are seeing the same things happening. I've obviously decided to become a bit of an advocate and develop a higher understanding of what's actually happening with all of the restrictions around short term rentals. What I've discovered is the number one reason for that, for all these restrictions happening, is a bunch of crotchety old people that live full time at properties. And this was fake. Like the people that are doing these types of rentals, they're their own worst enemies that are causing the problem because they're buying cottages in really tight knit communities where there's a lot of cabins close together and all the neighbors don't like the Airbnb around. So my strategy, we don't run into the same problems, number one. The other thing is I teach my students that are learning this system from me to know where the problem areas are, which jurisdictions are not in favor of short term rentals and just don't buy the properties. Rather, stay away from the problem areas and you won't have any troubles. But the most important rule that I've seen is that old adage right out of sight, out of mind, and that that applies to this. You know, we've got two cottages personally that are in really, really highly contested area that are putting rules in the both of our cottages. There's nobody else around them. And we don't have any complaints whatsoever.

Joe: Okay. But is it still part of homes then?

Ken: No, no, we have it in Canada. I think that's one of the things we might be lucky with. And I know in the States, not everywhere has any type of has some type of HOA. Typically where you see those is in areas rurally where there's a lot of cabins and cottages in a tight knit area and those associations are like so formed they put them together to, you know, keep the road clear and keep some of the utilities under task. Most of where we're doing these cottages in our system, we just don't have a lot of people around, so we don't have a lot of associations.

Joe: Okay, cool. So you've got a realtor that's finding these for you. A couple of realtors, maybe. You get doing radio ads. You're doing Facebook ads for Facebook ads. You're targeting those zip codes, maybe. In radius where these properties are. Are you ever. Or have you yet bought some vacant land and built a cottage on it yet?

Ken: For I didn't even think about it until you and I were talking in Austin. And ever since you and I have talked, I can't stop thinking about it. One of my best buddies up here in Canada I'll have to introduce you to him owns a company called Ballance Containers. Ballance Containers dot com. They are taking old sea containers and turning them into the freakin coolest cabins you could ever imagine. And so I'll and what's really neat about it is they're doing it at about 60% of what traditional construction would be. So they're nicer cottages and they're cheaper. And now all I can think about is just buying vacant land, making sure it's zoned properly so it's easier, and then just dropping these things on them. It's an untapped market.

Joe: I'm looking at this guys photos right now. Can I show him? Is that all right?

Ken: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Joe: Let me see. Do they do? Let me move them to this other page I had. Okay. And share my. Oh, shoot. There it is. Very good, Ballance Containers.

Ken: Yeah. Just click on that first link there and then go up to homes and cottages at the top.

Joe: Do you see my.

Ken: We do.

Joe: I missed it. Let me just click this. Yep. On this right here. Okay. Here's pictures.

Ken: And then just scroll down. So they've got all kinds of different sizes, but we take it down to the three bedroom. Once these three bedroom houses are 1600 square feet, they're are 23 to 2400 square feet. And you can build them complete for 350 grand. Canadian, though, $290,000.

Joe: You can build a three bedroom.

Ken: Yeah, this place right here, this did 1920. You can click on it. It'll give you more pictures. But this kind of carport, yeah, it's 2300 square feet and you can get paid for about 290,000 U.S..

Joe: So how many shells is this container.

Ken: That's actually 4 40 foot containers linked together.

Joe: It's got a carport.

Ken: Yeah, it's got like. It's beautiful. It's got that second story deck off the master, off the living room. It's got four bedrooms in it. There's a floor plan somewhere on this page. You can see as well that really laid you can see the layout of it, but they're just freakin beautiful.

Joe: How much does it cost to build?

Ken: You build this for 350,000 Canadian sailboat to 95 U.S. House.

Joe: That includes the foundations. Utilities.

Ken: Yeah, glass windows, finishing interior flooring walls. Ready to put furniture in.

Joe: Wow.

Ken: It's ridiculous. So think about your strategy around vacant land and this.

Joe: Yeah.

Ken: I can rent these for 12 to 1300 dollars a night.

Joe: That's amazing.

Ken: And if you think about it, Joe, when people are going on a vacation, they know they love the idea of staying in something like this as opposed to just your typical host. If they can add some type of cool feature like, Hey, we're staying in sea containers for a week. I mean, that that sells. And it's it's just unbelievable.

Joe: And there's a lot of these are very energy efficient, too, aren't they?

Ken: Totally. Yes, they are. This company actually owns the Canadian rights to a technology that's in the states where you don't need a septic system. These come with an incinerator that all the septic and all the greywater in the property goes into. The incinerator gets burned and it leaves. For every thousand liters of waste, it leaves about a tray full of ash that makes great fertilizer. Because one of the things you're always going to run into if you're doing development like this is the septic systems is what kind of subject you put in place, what are the rules? But when you're doing this type of property and they've got in an incinerator system like they have, you don't even have to worry about something.

Joe: You don't need a septic system.

Ken: So it's included built right into the property.

Joe: Wow. All right. So really cool. Now, these guys are do they operate in the U.S. as well?

Ken: Yeah. You just have to get a hold of them. They'll build them in their factory and ship them anywhere.

Joe: Amazing.

Ken: They're a great deal. They're doing fantastic.

Joe: So if you were to build one, you'd want to. You'd want a 3 to 4 bedroom. That's the most rent.

Ken: Yeah, well, we've got a resort that we're building on Lake Ontario right now that we're going to be adding. Five of those three bedrooms. And then we are putting in some smaller ones. We're putting if you go to the top, you'll see the one bedroom ones, if you're still looking at it. What's really neat about these is, as the owner Eric Ballance described to me, he said, they're like Lego, so you can stack them. So if you go to that be 323 below here actually is. Yeah. And you can click on click here to learn more. The green button there you can see the floorplan, but it's a one bedroom. Okay. It's basically 220 foot long containers hooked together. We're going to do it. The resort is we're going to we're going to join six of them. So they're beside each other. So they become one unit, although they're all separate buildings. And then we're going to put six single room. So basically one eight by 20 container, which is like a hotel room together with a kitchen. So we literally have 12 cottages all linked together, which in most when you're doing land development, one of the challenges you're going to run into if you're wanting to put multiple buildings on is every jurisdiction you're going to work in has rules about how close buildings can be to each other, and that really limits what we can do with the property. But once you link them together, it becomes one building. So you can make it as big as you want.

Joe: And when you are buying your own lot, many times you can avoid a lot of the restrictions that typically come with an HOA or homeownership association in that area.

Ken: Right. Totally amazing. I think your whole strategy about buying vacant land and doing things that way is just brilliant. You know, it's well, once they get into real estate, they need to look at what you're doing.

Joe: Is there a lot of land? I think of some of the lakes that we have here in Missouri and not all of them, but a lot of them have communities around the entire lake. So it's hard to find maybe a vacant. Well, you can still find vacant lots there, but there's strong, really tight, restrictive ways in there. Right. So like, how hard is it to find vacant land where you can't see? I know the answer to this, too, by the way.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: I'm giving a lot of these people are.

Ken: You're being the witness here, aren't you?

Joe: Yes. Yeah. All right. How hard is it really to find vacant land where you can build something on it, where there's utilities that you can connect to that you don't hear or see neighbors?

Ken: Yeah, it's easier than most people think. You have to think outside the box, you know, because the first thing people are going to think of is like what you just said. They know of this one lake that's close to their house that's completely developed. What most people do not understand is that in North America, in Canada and America, literally 30% of our land is covered by lakes and water. And so think about how many lakes are out there right now. I would say in one state, whether it's the state you live in or what, whatever it is, I guarantee you, if I asked you how many lakes do you think are in your state, I guarantee you you're going to be off by about three quarters. There's four, three or four times more lakes than people realize everywhere. And there is a shitload of vacant land around these. Some of these lakes are uninhabited.

Joe: Amazing. I'm Googling it myself. It's 568 lakes in Missouri.

Ken: So there you go.

Joe: 568 lakes in Missouri. And there's another article here.

Ken: Never would have guessed in a million years, would you?

Joe: No.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. And I'm wonder I don't want to do it now, but I bet you if I Google like how many of them are uninhabited or not and they don't have water. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Ken: And if you look like, say, you got 568 lakes in Missouri, I'm betting maybe 10% of them are established that have had houses and houses around. Maybe. But there is a significant amount. And you're talking Missouri's not in the middle of nowhere. It's smack dab right in the middle of the country with big states all around it. Yeah. And it's still that's just the way it is. Like our countries are just so under-utilized and there's so much vacant land and there's so many lakes out there that it's a no brainer. I'll come back on your show in a year from now and I will purchase three or four pieces of vacant land and put those containers on. And I'll tell you how it's going.

Joe: Let's do it.

Ken: Yeah, totally.

Joe: All right. So somebody who's interested in this can and they want to start looking into how do I find a good area to start thinking about this trade? How do you suggest to people to do some research and due diligence on this?

Ken: Yeah. I'll give you a quick list of things that I tell my students. Number one, you got to put yourself in the mind of the people that are eventually going to be staying at your property. They do not want to drive more than 2 hours. So look for lakes in areas that are within a two hour drive of a major metropolis, major metropolitan I target. And you know how to do this as well as I do, Joe. I target people that make at least a quarter of $1,000,000 a year. All my ads run exclusively to people that make over a quarter million dollars a year. So you got to have a big enough pool of people that you can keep a place going. You want to find a place that the most important thing is having. You got to be removed from everybody else. You can't be in a nature where you can't be in, you know, a heavily populated area, but you want to be within 15 minutes of a town of at least four or 5000 people. So it's got all the most important amenities. And you got to be very careful. If you want to make the most money doing this, you've got to be within 10 to 15 minutes of really established off season activities like snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, winter fishing. Any of these things will do the trick. You just got to make sure you're close.

Joe: Yeah, okay. That makes sense. So out in the middle of a farm field. Probably not going to do it. I'm looking at VRBO right now and I'm selecting Missouri. And there are some options there. I'm clicking lake waterfront beachfront or beach. And it took I don't know how many properties are in Missouri, but I have over 300 right now.

Ken: There you go.

Joe: That are in the air. So let me just share my screen with you guys. I'm just looking in Missouri. See that?

Ken: Yep.

Joe: I went here to filters and I checked. Lake and then further down. These things. Okay. Yeah. And it tells you where the pockets are. Right?

Ken: Yeah, it's just a couple of lakes, isn't it?

Joe: Well, this is these are just there's 300 plus properties, so my filters are too big. There's. Let's say there's a thousand is only going to show me here the 300 if I zoom into an area.

Ken: Yeah.

Joe: Little update the search. And that shows me some other pockets. Because I know this. Yeah. See, there's a bunch here. The more you zoom in, the more you kind of see where things are.

Ken: Exactly.

Joe: Right. So this is kind of where you might begin your search for these kinds of a little oasis tucked away.

Ken: This. Yeah. You know, here's what. Here's what will surprise a lot of people. You'd be surprised how many of these perfect cottages for what we do are actually listed on MLS or I wrote. They're listed right now because you're looking for the property nobody wants. You're looking for the three season cottage that's never been updated. It looks like 1962. It still needs a lot of work. It's where you're going to get your best dollars and you can turn it into exactly like you see on the screen right now.

Joe: This is because I don't know you don't know this Washington kind, but this is literally a middle of nowhere. No offense to anybody who lives out there. But look at this beautiful place. This is a tree house, maybe really? Just a house built around some trees. Yep. But look at this. It's beautiful, right? For me to show you on a map where it is because you'll be blown away by this. And they're charging this is now January or December as we're recording them.

Ken: This is a low season for these guys because they don't have a ski hill really close.

Joe: So I go to a map. This. Okay. Can you see this map? Let me zoom out a little bit. There, Saint Louis, this is about a two and a half hour drive, two hour drive from St Louis. There's nothing around here.

Ken: Yeah. So they won't get heavy rent in the winter, but they'll be packed in the summer.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

Ken: They'll make all their money, they'll make profits and everything just in the summer months.

Joe: And they have a lot of good reviews here from other sites it says. But anyway I wanted to show this too because look at the views from this thing and. Yeah. Do you, do you do ads, by the way, for people to rent your places.

Ken: We only run ads for our properties. We also have a program for cottage owners in Canada. My company will actually set up their Airbnb and say, take the right pictures, list their properties for them and rent them for them. We take a little 20% of whatever we make them. We've got 40 different cottages that we're running ads for right now. And it's we're getting the same results with everything.

Joe: Nice. Super cool. Now, what I'm thinking too is like, look at this area. There's a bunch of properties out here. This is an area probably an hour outside of Saint Louis called Innsbruck. Yep. Right. Lot of their views there. And some people freak out about the competition and all that. But I'm looking at this thinking, oh, man. Opportunity. Lots of lakes. You can see that, right? I can easily pull a list of all of the vacant land in this area, in this county or in the zip code.

Ken: Oh, yeah.

Joe: And send them a letter.

Ken: But if you've got that many short term rentals now, you know that that area is generally not against short term rentals. Yes. So it'd be a great area to do it in. But I if I look at that Alpine Lake, I'd be looking really close at that. That's a big lake and you only got two or three properties on there. So that tells me that that's worth taking a close look at.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. You can get very easily in about 5 minutes. I could get a list of every land owner, vacant land owner in this whole area here and send them a letter and then send them an offer. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah. You got me. You got me thinking now. Now, here's the other thing, too. You may not want to be that if you're listing this, you may not want to be that guy who is building new construction or managing of the RBO right. But as maybe as a wholesaler, you can find somebody like Ken who is doing that and you can do a couple of things, right. You can wholesale the deal to him, you can wholesale an old abandoned house to him. You can wholesale a vacant lot to him. Right. But you can also be a private investor. So can you talk about that? Do you take on do you do you syndicate money or you work with private investors and things like that as well?

Ken: Yeah. So we are actively raising money from private investors for our resorts. These are big projects, you know, seven, $8 million budgets for renovation. But we'll also work with people that have money that just don't want to do the work. They want to see the return on their money. And we'll go out and partner on them with a property and do all the renting for them and send them a check every month. But I'll tell you what, if there's anybody in Ontario, Canada, in Canada that is listening to this right now and you're looking for a way to make money guaranteed. Here's what you do. Go to what was the name of that link where they could get your book.

Joe: Simple Land Class dot com.

Ken: Go to Simple Land Class dot com. Watch the webinar. Join Joe's program master how he teach you to go find the land and wholesale it and I'll buy it all from it. I'll tell you exactly what I want. I guarantee you I will buy every piece of vacant land you find.

Joe: That's awesome. As far as I am, I'm trying to find well, we're live right now on a podcast. I'm just trying to find the zip code in that county where that that area is and how many. Now, when I teach for vacant land, we're finding vacant land. Normally we're making offers like $0.25 on the dollar. When you're in more of an area where there's higher demand, more of a tourist area, you might need to be offering 40 to $0.50 on the dollar. But still. You're making just as much money flipping the land there as you would a house in in the city.

Ken: Oh, for sure. Without a doubt. And that's true, too. If you know somebody like me that will buy the land, it's just a matter of you finding it, getting under the contract and making one call.

Joe: Yeah. Can. How does somebody find out about you? How do they get in touch with you? And then also have like, let's say they're looking for somebody who can find these deals. How do they find another guy like Ken Dunn, who maybe in the area of Innsbruck, Missouri, that they can flip these deals to? What do you what do you recommend or teach about that?

Ken: You just have to go look and see who those super hosts are that are on VRBO and on Airbnb that are in that area. If they're a super host, they're taking this seriously and they're going to want to buy more properties. And all you have to do to get in touch with me is just go to Cottage Dream Vacations dot com. That's the name of the company we teach people all over North America.

Joe: How does it again let me type that in here.

Ken: Cottage dream vacations dot com.

Joe: If I spell it right. Cottage, dream, vacations.

Ken: Got it. That's it.

Joe: I am all right.

Ken: Yeah, it looks pretty good.

Joe: And what do you. What do they do? What do you do on that website? What does somebody expect to see when they get there?

Ken: When they get there, there's a link at the top of the page that's going to say, learn how to get into the cottage rental game. And it's going to take you to a webinar that we run that we teach people to do it. And our whole program for anybody that wants to get involved and it's a couple hundred bucks.

Joe: Nice.

Ken: Yeah, it's just about building the ecosystem as big as we can.

Joe: Okay, cool. You've got an event coming up in January. Do you want to talk about that right now or you will talk about your event in June?

Ken: We'll talk about it. So we'll talk about both of them in January. We're doing a online version. For five day event series. It is all about raising money in real estate investing. It's all about finding investors. It's all about some of the best strategies for real estate investors that are available in North America. Mr. Joe McCall is going to be there. He's going to be speaking with Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. Michelle Romanov from the Dragon's Den, which is the Canadian equivalent. Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank and literally 20 of North America's top real estate teachers. It's going to be freaking amazing. And then we're live. We're going to all be in Toronto, Canada, June 23rd to the 25th. We're going to be joined by Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank and the Property Brothers from HGTV, the Shop. It's going to be really cool.

Joe: I've heard they're really nice guys.

Ken: They're pretty cool. They're from Toronto, Canada. They have to be cool.

Joe: And how can people get more information about the virtual event and the one in Toronto in June?

Ken: Real Estate Investors Summit dot com.

Joe: For both of them.

Ken: Yep.

Joe: Awesome. We put that in the banner here as well. Full service podcast right here.

Ken: Real Estate Investors Summit.

Joe: The investors with an S?

Ken: Yep. Dot live.

Joe: Real Estate Investors Summit dot live.

Ken: You got it. Perfect. That's it.

Joe: Dot live. Yeah. Awesome. All right. So all these links will be in the show notes as well. If you go to my podcast, real estate investing mastery dot com. But again, cottage dream vacations dot com. If you're interested in working with Ken on this specific strategy, I highly recommend Ken and what he's doing. He's been doing this for a long time and he's super fun to hang out with and talk about business too, which is really cool. And then if you want some more information on his virtual summit on how to raise private money and then the what's this? Did you say this to the theme of the event in June?

Ken: It's all it's all things real estate. It's a summit for real estate investors to bring them together so they can learn from some of the greatest minds in the real estate, can them?

Joe: All right. Real estate investors summit dot live they'll be in both of those events are coming up here in the next few months. Cool. Ken, anything you want to wrap this up with final words?

Ken: You know, the only thing that I want to say and Joe, I know you're going to agree with this. I know that thousands of people are going to see this show or hear this show when you get it out on the podcast. And what's really most interesting about it is there's thousands of people who are going to hear it that aren't in the real estate game, that have been looking at it for years. They have been hearing about it that are still getting skeptical when they hear you can do this without any of your own money, but everybody you have on this show and you yourself are making millions and millions of dollars in the real estate game, and you're never going to know if it's going to work for you unless you do something. Just kidding.

Joe: That's good advice. Get advice. Get off the fence. Get off the fence.

Ken: That's right. Get off the bench.

Joe: All right. Appreciate you, Ken. Thank you very much. We'll see you guys all later. Have a good one. God bless.