If you want to succeed in land investing in 2023, you need to know the best counties to flip land in. Here, I’m making your life so much easier and teaching you how I do things with the use of my trusty mind map. Following the demand is key because you can only sell things people want to buy. As the housing market slows down, we’re transitioning from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, and we need to know who’s buying. With land, it’s more important to have boots on the ground, so I’ll share why it’s important to form relationships with good realtors. Realtors are a big part of a successful strategy as they can connect you to the best buyers in a certain area.
I’ll show you the websites I use to target the best counties and walk you through how I filter down my search results to get the best information. One thing to keep in mind is that there’s no one size fits all approach to this, so feel free to play around and find what works for you. I share the best tools to use to research and you can get more information through the links below. I’ll also share tips for sending out letters and how to talk to realtors.
Watch and Learn:
Listen and learn:
What’s inside:
- How to find the best counties for land flipping.
- Which tools to use to research like a pro.
- Why you should work with realtors on vacant land deals.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Joe McCall on YouTube
- SimpleLandClass.com
- SimpleLandContract.com
- Support@JoeMcCall.com
- JoeMcCall.com/Prycd
- PropstreamJoe.com
Download episode transcript in PDF format here…
Joe: Hey, what's going on, guys? Joe McCall here. Got something cool here cooking for you. I'm going to show you how to find the best counties to flip vacant land in. I actually did the same video a few days ago, and I wasn't happy with the quality, and I felt like I missed some things. I'm going to do it again here and I'm going to keep this straight to the point. And I think this is going to be really, really helpful for you because this just makes your job so much easier. And I've done some videos in the past recently about how or why I think that flipping vacant land beats houses every single time for very, very for very many reasons. So if you decide, yeah, you know what I want to do land here, I'm going to show you how to pick the best counties. Now, I am actually live right now on YouTube and Facebook. So say hi, please go to the comments. Tell me hi, tell me where you're from and if you have any questions about what I'm doing, if you have any better ideas on what I'm doing or some that I've not thought of or something that you don't think is a great idea, If you think it's stupid, let me know. Type it in the comments. I'd love to see that. All right. I got some things for you real quick. First, I did a webinar where I teach all the steps on how to flip vacant land. It's free. You can go to simple land class dot com to get that. And I also have a place where you can get the contract that I use for my land deals. Looks just like this. I know you can see, but this is a deal I did with my son we made there we go We made $11,224 on this deal. We did this deal when he was, I think, 17 years old. And if you want this contract for free, you can get it a simple land contract dot com. So are you interested in learning how to find and pick the best counties to flip vacant land in? Cool. All right. We got people here already putting in some comments and some questions. I love it. All right. Let me switch my screen here to my mind map, by the way. I'm going to be doing more. I'm going to be doing more and more of this content. And sometimes the easiest way for me to teach this stuff is straight up front of mind map. And so my goal is to I really want to start growing my YouTube channel. So I'm going to be teaching more stuff for my YouTube channel. And if you want this mine map for free, I'm going to give it to you for free and I'll tell you how in just a minute. I put a lot of stuff in here. And so like I did a video recently, Why Land Beats Houses Every Time, how to find the best counties to flip land. And I'm going to do some more soon on how to pull the best lists for sellers direct mail that works the best. So if you want the mind map and all this stuff, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel to get it. So again, like I talked about, here's some free stuff if you want the mind map, this is what I want you to do. I want you do subscribe to my YouTube channel and I'll put the link in the description on my YouTube channel. So if you're watching this on YouTube, there's a link in there. If you click on that and you can actually subscribe to my channel and then send me an email for now, later on, I'll have a website where you can just subscribe to the channel. I want to see some kind of prove you subscribe to the channel and but for now send an email to support at Joe McCall dot com. Just send us a screenshot here, subscribe to the channel and then we'll send you a link to this mind map. Cool. And like I said before, you can get my watch my free webinar on how to do land from A to Z at Simple and Class dot com. If you want this free contract, you can get it for free at Simple Land contract dot com. Cool.
Joe: So let me talk about this. Following the demand. It's so important why you can only sell land people want to buy whether it's houses or land. You can only sell things people want to buy. Right? And it's always easier to sell buyers what they want rather than what you have. What does that mean? Well, you know, imagine you're walking down New York Times Square and yeah, it smells like pot and it's there's tons of trash everywhere. But you know what? There's a lot of people that smoke pot there and they're probably really, really hungry. Right. And you walk around in your carrying a big bowl of spaghetti, trying to sell your bowl of spaghetti to people. What do you think they're going to do? They're going to be like, no, man, no thanks. That's weird. But what if instead you went around and you took people's orders, you got a piece of paper and said, Hey, maybe you pretend you're from DoorDash or have GrubHub or whatever that's called. It is, you know, Are you are you going to go get you something? They say, Yeah, I'm hungry. And you take their order and you go to whatever restaurant they want and you get it and you sell it. You bring it back to them. You sell it to them at for a profit, right? It's kind of like that. So it's always easier to sell buyers what they want rather than what you have. So I'm going to show you how to go find the buyers where they are, and I'm going to show you what they want, what they're looking for. And I learned this and houses early on, and this just makes everything so much easier, especially as the housing market is slowing down. This is very critical even right now, especially as the market is slowing down. We're transitioning from a seller's market into a buyer's market and there are fewer buyers out there for houses and for vacant. So we need to know who are the ones that are buying. And listen, we need to know who they are and what they're buying, where they're buying it out. And you may think, Oh man, the sky is falling, everything's falling apart, the markets fall apart. There is still a huge demand right now for housing. Makes sense. All right. So it's always easier to sell houses that people want rather than the properties that they want rather than. What you have and don't think that you can be a pioneer and succeed in this business. What I mean by that, I don't think that you can go out and find the secret county that nobody's found yet, where no investors are doing deals yet. Just because you might like it doesn't mean that other people might not like it because competition is not a bad thing. Competition is actually good. If you see an area where there's not a lot of activity and not a lot of sold activity, a lot of active listing activity, but not many sold, stay away like the plague from that kind of an area. So we need to get rid of our scarcity mentality. I know this is tempting. You might look and see why would I want to go into this area when there's so many investors right now in that area flipping houses, flipping vacant land? Why would I want to go there? Well, it's important that you do, especially when you're getting started in this. Right.
Joe: So why is this all so important? Because I'm all about more cash flow with less overwhelm. Doesn't that sound nice? Make more money, less overwhelm. And this is how you actually make more money on your deals. It's how you sell your deals faster. And you can sell these properties sometimes even before you start marketing them. When you do it this way. And this is really, really key and important here, you can hire the best realtors to market your properties for you. One of the things with land that's important is you need to it's more important to kind of have boots on the ground, people that can actually look for your look at this land for you, take pictures, put signs out, show the properties and things like that. So I'm going to show you how to find the best realtors that have the best buyers in the hottest, best areas so they can sell them for you. We want to automate and outsource as much of this business as possible. I talk about this a lot. The three keys to success in this business is marketing automation and delegation, right? Marketing automation and delegation. So this is kind of the start of all of that. All right, let's get back into this. I'm playing with some new tools here and I'm excited about this content because it's so good. Now we're going to talk about starting with Land Watch. Then we're going to go look at Sold in the last 90 days on some different websites. We're going to call some realtors who sold property recently. We're going to call some investors who are buying land and we're going to maybe you don't have to do this, but maybe mail some letters. I'm actually going to show you the letter that we sent. So it all kind of starts with land Watch Land, which is a site I'll show you in a minute how to do this. That kind of can rank states and counties by the most popular, the most activity. That's where we're starting from. And then we're going to take those that data and we're going to look to see which ones have the most salt. So we're going to pick two or three states. We're going to pick 10 to 15, maybe more counties in each state. We're going to write them down and we're going to then look at which ones have the lowest, most salts. Now, remember, I like to invest in cheap rural recreational land because I like to buy it cheap and sell it cheap. There's you can certainly do deals like infill lots next to major cities. But for beginners, I recommend going out where you can buy land for a couple thousand bucks, sell it for seven or 8000 bucks real fast to somebody who wants to just go hunting, camping right there for readers and stuff like that. I want to stay cheap, you know, under 150, maybe 100 grand. I like to look at 1 to 20 acres. Now, There are some guys I know that do cheap rural recreational land. Well, maybe not cheap, but they want to do more premium vacant land. So you might want to look for ten plus acres. And the advantage to this is there's more things you can do with a ten acre property than with a one or two acre property. Right. But the thing is, you're not going to be able to buy it for a cheap on a ten plus acre property. You're going to need more money. You're going to you need to make sure you have some private investors or some funding companies that you're working with that can fund those deals for you. Okay. So it's kind of depends on your strategy. We'll take a look at this as we go through it. It's important that we look at active properties and sold properties, and I like to stay away from vacant land that is in big cities. So we're looking to be one or 2 hours outside of a big city. We want land where somebody can go to go camping, ride their four wheelers and stuff like that. I will show you land, watch how to look for owner financed properties. And these are all investors and this is a pretty cool thing. So let's look at land watch right now. I just went to land watch.com. Okay, I'm going to click on Search and it brings up the whole country and you can see the country that has the most active listings are is Texas and Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, etc.. Right? So I like cheap land. I'm just going to do maximum price of 150 grand. I know my camera webcam might be in in your way on some of these things.
Joe: So let's do this. I'm going to make this a little better so maybe you can see it better, huh? To, to make my screen a little bigger. Okay, so what did I just done do here? I'm zoomed in so big now I have one more time. Okay, here we go. I just want to land. Watch, click, search. All right, Now you can see the states right here. And then if I go right here to custom price, I'm going to max 150. Okay? Now, I have my active filters up here. I'm looking at all properties under 150 grand. I also don't want to do the little quarter acre lots, just me personally. I want loads that are kind of more rural. So I'm gonna do one, ah let's just do 20 acres, let's say. Okay, I have to act. It filters here and there's 80,000 listings. Now, Land.com Is the biggest website for selling land out there. And you can see now that Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Tennessee, Michigan, Virginia are the most popular states. I'm going to do one other thing here and I kind of like you got to play with this. The sold if you click sold, it brings up all the sold. But those are just properties that were marked as sold on the land, dot.com or land watch dot com websites. Doesn't mean they were sold from county records. So it's kind of deceiving a little bit. And we don't know how long ago these properties were sold either. Right. So is click on sold. So now we have zero 151 to 20 acres available under contract and sold. Texas is now by far the biggest. So it's also the biggest state in the union. Right. So sometimes, again, I don't know if I like looking at that sold because now this makes them a little more even. Does that make sense? So here you see Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Tennessee, Michigan and Virginia. But I want to emphasize to you don't always want to go just after the most popular state, because if I click on Texas here and I scroll down, you can see Randall County is the most popular county by click on Randall County. These are where almost most of the these are where most of the properties that are listed for sale are currently at. Right. Well, I'm going to be competing against a bunch of other investors. So sometimes we get I don't like going after the most popular state or the most popular county in that state. Now, you certainly can't. We're doing deals in Texas. We just got a 20 acre property under contract in Texas, which is pretty cool. So I'm trying to remove Texas. Here we go. So now my only two filters are under 151 to 20 acres. Okay. Let's just look at North Carolina, for example. So what I want you to do is write down two or three different states. I'm just going to go to North Carolina. We've done deals in North Carolina, Oregon, California, Texas, because I say North Carolina, Florida. I think I counted last six different states. I don't remember them. All right. Now, let's say Colorado. We've done deals in Colorado. All right. And this is really important, too. I recommend you diversify as much as possible. You want to do land in as many different states and counties because you can't have all your eggs in one basket. And you may find after doing this, like you're going to find the states that you like better, the counties you like better. I know some guys that just stay in one state and one state only and do really, really well. So you just get to kind of figure it out on your own.
Joe: This is something else I should say too. There is no one size fits all scientific formula to make this work. This is kind of a science and an art. There is no formula that says, All right, you can go here and then these are the best or these are the top ten counties for anybody, everybody, all the time. It's not exactly like that. And I wish it was not that easy. All right. So the cool thing about land watch, you see this right here. It lists the counties with the most activity here. If I scroll down, there's like a hundred counties in North Carolina. I'm going to also here just for you know what and grins. I'm going to click social. So now I'm looking at if I look at my active filters, I'm looking in North Carolina under 151 to 20 available under contract in. So the most popular county switched to Cherokee County before it was something else, wasn't it? Cherokee County was number one. If I uncheck sold and scroll down, Cherokee County is now number four. So kind of I don't know. It kind of plays with your numbers a little bit, plays with your head. So I'm going to go ahead and had it in for whatever for, you know what? Ingram's okay. Now what I want you to do is I want you to write down at least the top 15 counties. You may say why so many counties? Because when we're pulling vacant land, I like to pull back. And landowners who don't live in that county that owned it over ten years. And some counties, there's not that many of them. I only may get one or two or 3000 in that county. And so if I'm going to be mailing my goals to mail 500 to 1000 letters, so if I'm mailing it, let's say a 500, let's say a thousand letters a week, I don't suggest you start there. That's pretty crazy. But let's say you're mailing a thousand a week. You need 4000 letters a month. Write people to mail to me. I usually mail them once a year. So I need 4000 times 12. I need 48,000 records. Right. That's a lot. So you can't just give that all in one county. You're going to need to get two or three states, 15 to 20 counties in each state. Cool. All right. So we're just going to go write this down, write down Cherokee County. And one of them to show you here next in the mind map is look at sold from the last. Oh, I forgot one thing I want to share before I leave. Before I leave the land, which I want to show you something cool here. You can look at which counties have the most owner financed properties in there. What does that mean? Well, only investors sell deals with owner financing typically, right? So I can scroll all the way down here and I can click just owner financing. And there are 486 in North Carolina. And these are the counties that have the most owner financed lots, which means, again, there's probably an investor you can see right here, LW Land, Patriot Land Group, Cape. Real Estate Scout Land Group. These are all owner financed deals. And I'm not looking at this thinking, Oh man, I'm intimidated. There's so many investors already here. I'm not. This is good. You understand what I'm saying? This is really, really good, right? So I'm just going to turn off owner financing there. And let's look at now we have all of this filter and the first county is Cherokee County. Right? So when we go back to the mind map, what I like to do is look at sold in the last 90 days. I'm going to go start with Zillow, then Redfin. Now, to show you a couple other sources here. The goal is to rank them from most sold to least. Okay. So if we go to Zillow and let's type in that county right there, Cherokee County, North Carolina, by the way, if you look at this county here, let me just look at it on Google will show you where it is and why I like these counties. Well, number one, they're beautiful. Did you see that picture right there? This is the kind of land that people want to go by and build a cabin, get away, get off the grid. It's just beautiful country out there. Right. Okay. So if you look at Google Maps, let me get back there. Oh, come on now. Here we go looking at Google Maps and I zoom out, you can see it's not next to any big city, but it's close to one. It's couple hours, three or 4 hours from Atlanta, Charlotte, Knoxville, Chattanooga. It's right there in the middle. Do you see that? Okay. So this is this is good. I want some areas that, you know, you've got some lakes and rivers and darker green, which means it's forested or they're state parks or national parks or whatever. Right. Okay. So if I go to Zillow North, I like to look at North Carolina. I mean, Cherokee County, North Carolina, and I'm going to switch here, two souls, click apply. I'm going to go to home Type D, select all and select only land click apply here. And I want to go to Moore and I want to look at minimum size one acre max, 20 acres, and I want this is so important now because the market is shifting. I don't want to be in a state or in a county where there's not been a lot of sold the last 60 to 90 days. Right. So I want to do last 90 days. Let's see what we've got. Boom. This county has 75 results. So I'm going to write that down right here. Okay. 70 county, Cherokee County, 75. The next county was Ash. Let's go back here. Pay Sage e Ash County, North Carolina. Ash County has 60 to 62 counties. What's next? Jackson, who? I like Jackson County. You'll see why in a second. Paxton County, 38. Okay. What's next? The next county is Clay. They county 96. So it's interesting, isn't it? So 96, That's that. So far the first that's number one if I go here. Clay County. I said Clay County, right. Yeah. Yeah. They're number four in this list but their number one, according to Zillow, let me say this also. Two, you may be looking at some states where Zillow just doesn't have good solid resorts results. So you might want to look at something like Redfin instead or Realtor.com. And I'm kind of share more of that later as we go. Let's just do one more Macon County. I've done several deals in Macon County. Again, you made me thinking, Oh man, I was thinking about Macon County. And Joe is now showing the whole world that he likes Macon County. Don't think like that because I'm telling you, I've been in some of the most competitive counties in the entire U.S. and still do deals. My response rates were not as good as they were in some of the less competitive markets. But I still did deals. I still made really good money. In fact, I could probably argue I even sold those deals faster because they were so competitive. Look at this property. I mean, you see why the sell so quickly here. This is gorgeous, right? One of the things I'll talk about later is how to find the realtors that list these properties. And a lot of times you can go in and find the realtors. If these are realtors that listed these properties. Now, again, it depends. For some reason I don't see it here on these properties. Depends on the county, whether that's information that's available or not.
Joe: Okay. So we've got our list. We're writing them all down the sold in the last 90 days, right? Not 12 months. Not six months. I want 90 days. And if I don't see much activity there in the last 90 days, this is only like two or three. That's a warning sign. That's a red flag. You want you don't want to be in those areas. It makes sense. One of the other things you want to check out too, is like you want to see kind of a healthy balance between active properties and sold properties. So there's 24 here. Let's imagine that's what was that other county? Clay Let's look at Clay County here because 96 in the last 90 days, let's change those two for sale and they're 62. But this is important with Zillow. It's a little quirk. When you look at actives for sales on Zillow, you need to scroll back down here and say days on Zillow and move that back to any. Otherwise, it's only showing you the actives that have been on Zillow less than 90 days, which is frustrating, but that's kind of the way it is. All right. So here we got 431. Now, that's a big difference than we saw before with sold right of 96. But again, we were looking at sold in the last 90 days. Now you could over analyzes to death and do a spreadsheet of like. A ratio of the soldier to actives and see it that way you could do it. But like this kind of research I'm showing you here shouldn't take more than an hour or two. So don't like get narrow this down to the gnats. You know what? Because it's kind of unnecessary. Again, we don't have to worry so much about picking the right county, the one or two best counties. We're picking 20 or 30 counties. Some of them are going to be good. Some of them are going to be awesome. Some of them are going to be bad. That's okay. We're not trying to pick like the top best county that we're going to. So when you have that kind of mentality, it puts a lot of undue pressure that's unnecessary. That makes sense. All right. Let's look at Redfin. Let's say we wanted to do this kind of search in Redfin if because whatever state you're in maybe is not working very well with Zillow, but you just type in the county here, Redfin over the last year or so, seems like they've gotten a lot more areas around the country, which is really nice to see. It used to be they're only in major cities. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to change to for sale from for sale to sold last three months. Yeah. I'm gonna do home type land and I'm going to do if I scroll down here I'm going to do lot size one. I forget what I did before but 1 to 20 acres right. That's it. Click this. So you can see right here, there's 34 homes. Redfin shows 34. Now, this is Cherokee County. I think Zillow said that Cherokee had 75. You're again, you're going to get different data, different websites, just kind of the way it is. Usually, I'd say seven or eight times out of ten. Redfin is better. I like it. Sometimes you see just a big difference and it kind of just depends on where they're getting their data from. The Net the other county was Ash County. Right. Let's go back here, type in, look at this as age. Come on, Ash County, North Carolina. Now be careful when you're is. I don't want to get too technical deep into the weeds here, but a lot of times when with Zillow, all you need to do is type in a new county and it keeps all of your filters. When you do this in Redfin, sometimes you lose your filter. You just have to be aware that this confirmed case sold last six months, home time land, you won't have to do this again for whatever reason. And then we click all filters, scroll down. We have to redo the filters for lot sizes. Not a big deal. Okay. And then sometimes again, this is one of the one of the things that just comes with it sometimes Redfin is it's still refreshing. Here. He has 70%. Sometimes it gives you listings that are outside of the county, but it says nine. So if you count the numbers inside, it's nine. Even though there's some that are showing here that are not makes sense. Whenever I'm looking this, I usually like to sort it from low to high. All right. So Ash County only had nine. Zillow was way more. So this tells me maybe in some of these counties Redfin's Zillow has better data than Redfin. Is that makes sense. All right. What was the another county Let's look at one more. Clay County was a big one. Let's look to see what Clay County has Pay County, North Carolina to buy online or we're going to sold Now they kept the filter there, vacant land, 1 to 20 acres sold in the last three months, 48 I think Zillow showed 96. Probably what I'm going to guess is whether using Zillow or Redfin, you can still if you still sorted the counties by the most sold, you probably get the same order of salt. Okay, cool. All right. Let me show you how to do this on Realtor.com. Let's just look at Jackson County real quick, because I was looking at Jackson County earlier when I was prepping for this. You got to give it time to kind of load up. I'm going to go to property type land done listing status recently sold.
Joe: Now, one of the things Realtor.com doesn't let you do is search for like sold in the last 90 days, but just go with it. There's 382 properties that have sold recently, whatever that is. Right. I'm going to go here and update the lot. Size 1 to 20 acres. All right. So now you can see Jackson County, North Carolina, is 277 properties, Zillow. And remember what they showed, Jackson County or sold home type land, more 1 to 2 acres sold in the last 90 days, 38 now maybe I do six months, 102. So maybe Realtor.com is using six months or a year, I don't know. But I like to sort this by lowest price. You can do sort by you can do saw by actually sold they couldn't you I don't know if Realtor.com is showing you just MLS listed sold or if it's showing you sold from county records. One of the things too that sometimes I'm looking at when I'm trying to get comps on properties, I will actually exclude the really expensive properties. So I might exclude anything over $100,000 in my numbers if you feel like you need to do that. Net brought it down to 131. Okay, cool. Yeah. There's some other resources that you can use to do some of this research is research as well. I have a special deal with price. If you go to Joe McCall dot com slash priced and if you get the mind map to you just click on my links here and it takes you to these things. So with priced price is a tool that. Was made for land investors. I use it all the time where you can do some research and you can also do some last 90 day sales. Let me show you first last 90 days and I'll show you some kind of research and I'll show you how to do this also in prop stream, if you go to propstreamjoe.com. So on Prycd, do you want to look at last 90 days sales? So just open a Prycd you go to price land, put in your county and then for advanced search I like to look for 1 to 20 acres. I know this is looks really small for you all so hopefully you can see this. Okay, cool. All right. Well, we got lots of comments here. Cool. Give me some more. Give me some more comments. Say hi. Hello. Let me know you are watching me and can see this and it looks good for you. Okay. Jackson County, North Carolina, has an example. If I scroll down 1 to 20 acres acre, Anchorage one, don't worry about why all of this stuff is here yet, okay? I just want to look. I'm looking for. Well, I was playing with this here. I'm going to do include all and just don't worry about this here. This is normally just blank and this is normally just blank. I was just kind of let's just do this. I'm going to actually reset it, clear this whole search, because I want I want you I want to see it like you would see it play County, North Carolina, with to 120 acres to one acre, increment it going to scroll down. I don't care where the owner lives. I just want to see which counties had the most activity in the last 90 days. Right. So I do last sale date is after then I'm going to take three months ago. One, two, three. All right. So after April 1st and I click count and then from here you're going to see right here if it works, it's kind of thinking in the background for priced. Is it, say, 326? Well, I didn't do exercise. I did. I did. I did. When to 20 acres. Okay. One of the things that you're going to get the numbers very wildly, but you kind of compare them so you would compare all of Zillow and then maybe all of Redfin, all of Realtor.com, all the and to kind of sort them to get your best counties. I kind of like priced state up better because it's coming directly from data tree, not relying on Zillow or Redfin or Realtor.com and whatever they're giving me. The way Prycd works is pulling it directly from Data Tree, which is the number one and number two top data provider in the Oh, you know what? I'm going back here. This is like six or eight months. So this is January, December to tell you to go to October or something like that. That's why that number is so big. So I'm just going back now three months to October one. So this one, 29 is more like what we were seeing before. Okay, makes sense. So priced. That's where you can find the sold in the last 90 days. Let me show you something else. Here they have. Okay, I'll show that. Let me show you something else here. They have something called research. And this is cool when you want to see, like let's say you've already chosen North Carolina and you want to actually narrow down to some good counties in North Carolina. Prycd has a really good research tool here. I'm scrolling down and I'm gonna start typing in the name North Carolina. If you look at in the entire U.S., you can say hide nondisclosure states. Okay, Now there's filters here. I'm going to zoom back out a little bit. There are 100 counties in North Carolina, 100 counties. We need to narrow that down. So I'm going to create some filters. And there's first filter I like to use is sold comps. The more sold, the better.
Joe: So I'm just looking here at these counties. I want souls that are over maybe 200 so sold greater than 200% filter. There's 80 counties. I dropped it from 100 down to 80. Let's do maybe 300. What do we get now? 62 counties. All right. Now there's populations per square mile. I don't want a real populous county. So I might say population per square mile is less than. So I want to avoid the really populated ones. So I might say under 500 now, we have 53 counties. It's still maybe not enough. So I might of course keep it there for now. There are some other filters like sold to for sale ratio, ok? Sold to for sale ratio. That just means the ratio of sold properties to active properties. The higher the number, the better. It just means that there's a lot of stuff that is sold recently. So I might say I want that to be greater than I. Just looking at this column right here, I want it to be greater than 0.50.5 run filter now and filtering it down to 35Ks. Cool. All right. There is one more filter that I like to use. It's called Days on Market. So what price does is they actually go out and they scrape all of the land data from websites like Zillow and Redfin, Realtor and Land dot com and all of them, and they'll track how long they've kind of been on the market. It's not exactly 100% accurate all the time, but it is decent. So I'm looking at days on market, so the less the better. Right? The average days on market, the less than better. So I'm going to say show me all the ones with less than 250 days on or let's just see what happens. Now I've got 23 counties, so from 100 down to 23, I'm doing pretty good here, right? Looking at here, what else Can I kind of narrow this down? Maybe I did population change greater than zero. So it. Lose the ones that have a declining population. How about that? I can add a new one year pop. Population change is greater than zero. Now I have 15 counties. Okay. Just something like that. Again, not an exact science. You have to just play around with different numbers. The goal isn't to find the best ones. The goal is to find the top 20%. It's all 8020 thing. That's the whole thing we're talking about, isn't it? You're going to find 80% of your profits come from. 80% of your deals are going to come from 20% of the counties. That's what we're trying to do here. So you can play with these filters some more and then you have your counties here. These are all good counties. You know, we've got a lot of solid comps in here. So there's a lot of activity. The sold for sale ratio is good tire. That's good. There's good number of records from Data Tree. There's low numbers of days on market. The population change is positive. It's not negative and it's not a big populated county because the population per square mile. Cool. All right. So I'm just looking at these just to make sure this looks good. These counties are going to be different now. This is something I recommend you do in addition to the research you're kind of doing with land watch and then looking for sold on Zillow and Redfin and all that, because sometime you're going to get some counties up here that look and you look at the data and there's not a lot of soldiery like, Joe, what were you smoking when you said to do this? There's nothing I'm finding enough in here. So this is just kind of a secondary way to do some research. Cool. Yeah. So we're looking at last 90 days. It's kind of another way to look for last 90 days in addition to Zillow or Redfin prop stream. If you got a prop from Joakim to get a special trial, I think 14 days or something like that, this might map has some example criteria that I like to use. I'm going to kind of review this with you right now. So if you have a prop stream subscription, you can look up vacant land. And so let's look at Clay County, North Carolina. That was one of the counties we were looking at here, Bay County. It's got two filters, quick list choices, vacant land. I know this is really small, but I can't zoom in. I'm an owner. Occupied. No, because that means the address of the property is different than the address where the tax bill was set. Right. Property characteristics has to be in square feet. So one acre is 43,560 square feet. I would say minimum of one acre. I'm going to go to ownership info. The last sale date was 1 to 3 months ago, October one. All right. So just looking at this, the last 90 days, according to prop stream, there's been 88 sold vacant lots in that county. All right. The let me look at that example criteria when we're talking. Was there something I was missing? Okay. One of the things, if you want to find out who are the active, who are the actual buyers that are buying these things, you could do some other things in here. Pretty cool. You can go into filter and you can say our ownership info is owner type corporate BS. I only want to see the corporations, the LLC, that are buying land out here and you can even say, show me only the ones that have that already own at least four different real estate properties. And then a good deed for there you can say, okay, show me all the ones that are out of the county or out of the state. And now you break this last list down to six. And so you could go into these and see who are the places that are buying vacant land. Somebody bought here, vacant land from Saint Petersburg, Florida. Someone bought some vacant land from Phoenix, Arizona. So I want to show you later here on this video how you can find these guys and actually send them a letter or something like that. So, hey, are you looking for more properties here? Okay, that's Propstream, pretty cool. You rank them from most sold to leased solds. You understand This is very critical and important because now instead of targeting 100 counties in each state or whatever you stay, you're looking to follow the demand and you're getting a list of 30 to 40 different counties, I'd say 20 to 30 different counties.
Joe: One of the things that's really critical and important here is calling the realtors who listed land here recently and this is so amazing and important if I'm looking here, Zillow, right, we're looking at sold 1 to 20 acres in the last six months that have sold here. A lot of times you can go in and get the realtors information. And why would we do that? Well, we can call these agents up and say, hey, I'm an investor. Well, I have my script here in the mine, but I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. Let's focus on this here first. When you're calling realtors, don't be that guy. You know what I mean? Don't waste their time. Don't waste a realtor's time pretending to be somebody you're not. You're you know, I see a lot of people do this. They're afraid to do marketing and talk to sellers and make offers so they'll do all the other stuff. First. They feel like they got to get their buyers, they got to get the realtors, they got to get all of this, the LLC set up and the websites and all the tech stuff. You don't want to be that guy who's wasting a realtor's time. If you're not serious and you're a player, you want to be a player, right? So don't waste their time until you're already starting to market in the area and you're already starting to get leads. All right. Makes sense. Now, what do you say to these realtors when you call them? I'll show you that in a minute. But let me let me show you kind of what I'm talking about. These are all realtors. Let me just. Narrows down a little bit more to 90 days. Think about it. These are realtors who have sold properties in the last three months. You think they might know who the active buyers are and you think they might have some clients who are looking to buy more? So if you look at some of them, you can see which ones were listed and sold by a realtor. And if you scroll down, hopefully it's here. Yeah, here we go. This shows you that the listing was provided by Martha Sawyer. So I would write down her name and just. And then write down this guy, Yvonne or Lady Yvonne something. Something from Keller Williams, Great Smokies. Right. And go to the next property. And you're looking for who are the ones that are selling a lot of land deals. This was Ted Schmidt and Mike Aquino. All right. How do I know which ones are listed with an agent? Well, this one has some text down here, and this one doesn't. I click on this one, and this one was Ralph Allison. And bought with nonmember. One of the cool things, too, if you're going into some of these counties, you want to see who the active realtors are as well. You can go to land, watch on and turn available off under contract off. And I'm looking at just Ashe County just sold. There's 161 here. Right. Then you can see this isn't always the case, but these are sponsored listings. There are sometimes investors, sometimes they're realtors. And so what I like to do is look to see, are there any realtors that are advertising vacant land here? Because this is a realtor that is spending premium money on these premium listings right here. Okay, Here we go. Chris Barr, this is a great example. This is a realtor who's actually from the area, not out of state. He's with a company. It looks like a realty company. And he says, I'm Chris Burn, Ash County native. This is a guy who does a lot of land deals. How do you know? Well, he's got a lot of land properties here and he's paying probably close to $1,000 a month to get these premium listings on these land websites. So if you've got a good land deal, this is going to be somebody you want to call. And if you look here, you can see he sold 54. And you can see all the ones that he sold. And you could actually if you go on one of the other websites like Land dot com, you can look this guy up and see on a map where all of his properties were that he sold. So, look, you know, this guy's got a lot of big properties that he's sold here. This is, again, one of the advantages to using a realtor on the bigger properties. These guys can get beautiful pictures. They can get drone footage like this. They can put it on the best websites. They probably have a whole team that can go and put a sign in the yard or they just they're really, really good at what they do. They already have buyers. They already have the buyers. So that makes sense.
Joe: I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but this is so important. So when you when you call, when you look at Zillow and Redfin and Land watch, find these active realtors and call them up, say something like, Hey, I'm an investor in Missouri. I'm looking to buy more land in North Carolina. Right? I'm an investor, but I do I'm starting to do a lot of marketing in the area. I'm getting a lot of leads. Sometimes I buy and hold properties and I sell it with owner financing. Sometimes I just flip them. I don't have any agents representing me yet, and I see that you've listed and sold some properties there recently. Do you have any clients you have any more clients who are looking for more vacant land? Simple as that. Cool. What are they looking for? What are they not looking for? What are they paying per acre? And if we decide we can work together, can you actually. Can you help me list my properties and sell them? Maybe take some nice photos, do some signs or whatever, and they on the yard. And I ask them, Do you list any properties on premium lands listing sites like Land dot com, etc.? And then I ask them about commissions. You know, if I like to sell my deals very quickly, I want the realtors to know and they probably appreciate this. And I'm not trying to get top dollar. I want to sell my properties fast. And so what kind of commissions do you typically ask for? You need to build this in your price. A lot of land agents are probably getting 8 to 10% because if you think about it, except, you know, in the higher priced properties that are like, you know, these kinds of things, they're probably getting closer to 6%. But on the cheaper properties where we like to be there, it's probably negotiable. Probably the scale is probably going to be, you know, 6 to 10% range. But you want to find out about that and it's worth paying these guys. Well, because they can if you've got a good property at a good price with owner financing, they probably just need to make some phone calls and send some texts and they can probably find you a buyer. I interviewed one investor for my podcast who he will pay the realtor generous commission 10% and 10% of his net profits and he says it's worth it because these guys work harder than anybody else for him. All right, cool. Just a few things else that I want to talk about. Call the land investors who are buying the land. Similar questions to above. Find out what they're looking for. How quickly can they close? What do they do with the land when they buy it? So how do you find those guys? You can look at land, watch dot com, Look for the ones that aren't the realtors. If I go back here and back, one more. Here you go. Cramer, I know he's an investor. He's based out of South Carolina. He does a lot of land deals. If he can get a hold of them, he might be hard to get a hold of. But, you know, tell him, hey, I'm doing some deals here if I can bring you a property. Be under contract. Would you be willing to partner with me on it? Maybe he can sell it with you and for you. And just do it like a JV partnership with a right. So some other land investors here. You can see they're all here. Best deal Land sellers. That sounds like an investor, doesn't it? He's out of Delaware, Got a lot of active properties here. A lot of souls. Hmm. This is really good, right? And by the way, look at what they're doing. You don't think that will be coming on? This guy is doing a lot of deals in North Carolina and Florida. Maryland. This is also, by the way, a great way to see where are these active investors going. Success leaves clues, doesn't it? So follow the crumbs, follow the trail, but like contact him as if he can say, and again, don't be that guy who's just getting started and you're making a bunch of phone calls and wasting their time. Listen, I'm starting to do some marketing. This investor is doing a bunch of deals. If I click on Souls in North Carolina, this investor, the best deal and sellers. I saw deals in Caldwell County, Cherokee County, Madison County. So, hey, I got some deals in Caldwell County that I'm just too busy to sell right now. These are actually really good deals. If we partnered on them and you sold them, would you want to split the deal If I brought you these deals? If you don't want them, that's fine. I'll bring them to it. I'm calling a bunch of investors right now. All right. The whole goal of this is find where the demand is, Follow that demand and then call the players. Who are the players in these markets? Call the realtors. Call the investors, send them letters, find out what they're want wanting, and be willing to pay generous commissions and pay a generous referral partner. These splits make sense. All right. One more thing I want to show you. There's a way in like this source. This is prop string. In prop string, you can download the who these people are and you can add them to a list. You can export them and you can send them letters like you can also download the list that I showed you before from Prycd. You can get a list from list source too, even if you wanted, and you can send them a letter. And I have a sample letter here for you as a free gift. And how do you get this mind map which has this link, which has for this letter? How do you get that again? You go to my YouTube channel. I even built a thing here for you. You see that? It's a scrolling thing at the bottom. I subscribe to my YouTube channel. Go to YouTube, You search for Joe McCall, click the subscribe. Send a screenshot to support at Joe McCall dot com and say, Hey, Joe said I can have this mind map and they'll send you a link, will send you a view only link and you can get in there and play with it. It's completely free. I'm just trying to grow my YouTube channel and if you like this video to give me a thumbs up. All right. I might. I'm really going to hit it hard this year. I want to do a ton of really good videos that are going to be educational and helpful for you all. And some really want to grow my YouTube channel. I got a hairy, audacious goal, a big, big, hairy, audacious goal to get 100,000 YouTube subscribers. I think I can do it with your help, but I got to bribe you to do it right if you want. I'm going to be doing a ton of things in here. All of this will be in this mind map which you get if you subscribe to my YouTube channel. So go do that.
Joe: All right. So the letter that you can send, this is real simple. Hey, my name is I'm the owner of Company I. We're the premier land investing company in the North Carolina market or the Jackson County, North Carolina market. I understand you just purchased a vacant lot in the city County. Based on this, it appears that you are a land investor. And how do I know their land investor? I'm pulling a list of LLCs you bought. They've owned multiple properties. They don't live in that county. They live out of state or whatever. So I'm assuming they're an investor, right? And assuming that you're looking to continue to invest, we're ready to help you. This is just like houses. We're finding the active buyers. Obviously, you know that now's a great time to invest in vacant land. I think that we could be very beneficial to you as you continue to grow your business. By the way, we are the premier land investing company. You may be just brand new and started well, you could be brand new and still be the premier land investing company, right? So don't worry about that. We're not saying we're the number one. We sell, buy and sell the most vacant land in this market. We're just saying you're the premier, you're the best and you are. Okay. If you'd like more information on myself, my company like to see a list of our current property and if you don't have any that, just remove that. But or whatever. Contact me at phone number. Really simple. You can send this letter out. By the way, this phone number. Listen, this is important. In fact is so important. I want to zoom in here. Make it your cell phone number. You when you're talking to realtors and buyers, you want to be accessible. You want to be that guy who answers the phone. You don't want to be the one that just ignores them. I'll please phone. Dag doesn't answer the phone. I can't tell you how many deals we've sold houses and land, mainly houses at the time when we were doing this. But who said things like, You're the only guys who answer your. That's how you do it. That's how we sell our land for more than anybody else. That's how we sell more than anybody else as well. We are accessible and we answer our phones. Is such a lost art, isn't it? It's such a lost art. Okay, cool. If you want this mine map, guys, it's yours. You can get it by. Just subscribe to our YouTube channel. I'm going to do some more videos coming up soon. And how to pull the best seller lists, the direct mail that works. So this is going to be for land. I'm also going to do another mine map. I'm going to be teaching more stuff on houses and land. Our land is my shtick. I love it. I'm excited about it. We're doing a lot of deals right now with my sons, and so I want to just be able to help you guys get this stuff cool. So one more time, if you want to get this mind mapped, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Send an email to support at Joe McCall dot com. If you want to get my webinar, watch my free class on how to flip vacant land and make money doing it with a simple land class dot com, it's free. And if you want the actual contract that we use to flip our vacant land, you get the contract for free. It's simple land contract dot com. Cool. All right. Listen, I appreciate you all. This has been a really long video, but it's been a lot of fun. And I hope you got something out of this. Let me know what you think in the comments. We got a lot of good questions here. Great value. Thank you very much. Donna is asking, what software do you send letters from? We use mail house. We also use FreedomSoft. My Joe McCall, Custom signature edition of FreedomSoft. Cool. Hello, Joe. Amir Howard taking notes. Come on. Yes. 48,000 records for the year. What's up, Russ Ross? Okay, cool. We got to go. I appreciate you guys very much. We'll see you later. Bye bye.
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