Joe: Hey, guys. How you doing? Joe McCall here. Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. I'm doing a new series. I'm starting a new series. And now that I'm looking forward to and I sent out some emails and some Facebook posts and things like that saying, Hey, if you want help, if you want a quick little 20, 30 minute coaching call with yours truly. I'd love to help you. I'd love to answer any questions you might have. If you're stuck on one or two things, you feel like you've got a challenge you need some help overcoming. I want to do some coaching calls on and release them as podcasts and YouTube videos. So Mikel is our first victim? No. No. Yes. That's very a better way to put this. He's been responded to my survey thing, sent me an email, said, Hey, great, let's talk about that. So Mikel is the first guy that I'm going to bring him on here. So I'm going to talk about. We're just going to ask him some questions. And listen, we are doing this live right now on YouTube and Facebook. We're releasing it later as an audio podcast. And I know some of you listening to this are going to have maybe better advice that I'm giving or you're going to have. What about this? Or, you know, don't forget to mention this. So you're somebody you're going to have really good tips or may even have better questions that I should be asking or whatever. So type them in the comments because I can bring them up and I'd love to be able to see your comments. So say hi, say hello wherever you're watching right now, because I'd love to have your live to share your thoughts and comments on this podcast as we go through. One more thing too. I always want to give away something free on these podcasts. If you want to get my land contract, same contract that I use to get deals under contract, basically we buy dirt for a thousand bucks, sell it for eight thousand bucks on Facebook, and I do this kind of stuff with my sons. If you want the letter in the contract that we use to send to sellers, go to simple land contract dot com right now. Get it for free. Simple land contract dot com, get it for free. All right. We ready to get into this? Let's do that. Let's bring Mikel Miller on. Mikel, how are you doing?

Mikel: Great. Thanks for having me on, Joe.

Joe: Awesome. So tell us real quick about you. Where are you from?

Mikel: I'm actually in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. Smithfield is more exact. I've only been here for a year and moved around a lot. Used to be an insurance adjuster. And then I actually did a lot of virtual wholesaling, a lot of stuff that I learned from you and gathered from online years ago that kind of got out of it and I'm looking to get back into it. I've got a family of six and I own a business, a roofing company, and I have the ability now to spend more time and money on some things like this to get back into the real estate market, which I'm really excited about.

Joe: So were you where were you doing deals before?

Mikel: Primarily Central Florida and the Greenville, Spartanburg, South Carolina market.

Joe: Okay, cool. And how many deals were you averaging a month?

Mikel: That's a good question. I figured you'd ask that. But I think that did probably anywhere between 3 to 10 a month.

Joe: Nice. And why did you get into roofing?

Mikel: I was an insurance adjuster, so I was on roofs all the time, estimating, talking to insurance companies, you know, determining if there's damage or not. And I wanted to stop traveling because I traveled all the time away from the family for months at a time. I'd be away from my kids and my wife. So I wanted to do something that translated well from the training and experience I had that could keep me at home and still sleep on my own bed. So I decided to get into roofing because it transfers really nicely with what I'd done, you know?

Joe: Okay. Why did you stop wholesaling though? Was the roofing better income?

Mikel: Oh yeah. Arguably in a lot of cases it's kind of like real estate, though. I mean, it's not always consistent. It's not like you get a guaranteed amount of money every month. Right. So they're both that way. I can make a lot of money in both or no money in both. It depends on the time. And, you know, certain things take a little longer than others. I would say the reason I got out of it is because deals were just so hard to find. The inventory just got so low. I got burnt out trying to find out what year, 18, 19, maybe 18 ish, somewhere in there.

Joe: Okay. Yeah. What are some of the ways you were working on getting leads before.

Mikel: Successfully the 24 hour voice mail postcard approach? Very effective. One of the best, you know, postcards I sent out for sure. I was also doing handwritten, you know, yellow letters. And in the beginning, my wife and I were sitting there in the bedroom at night right now, right in the stacks of them and spraying them with perfume and all those they all the things you can do to, you know, lumpy mail and all that stuff. Right.

Joe: And so, you know, I was doing a I was doing a coaching call today. Yeah. And I was talking to students about how good these letters work. Mm hmm. You take a handwritten yellow letter, you crumple it up, and then you reopen it and you fold it, and you put this in an envelope that double your response rate. Anyway.

Mikel: No way. How cool.

Joe: Still does. Still does a lot. Works really, really well.

Mikel: I would say that was a really good way to do it. And then also, surprisingly, a couple of things that were really helpful were asking the seller, Hey, what other properties do you have? Because a lot of times they don't even think about it. You're talking about property and they have several others and they don't even realize you're interested in them. You know, that's an easy way to get more. And then also investors that have a lot of a lot of property back then I was seeing a lot of them just had too many and not enough have time to mess with them all. They would offload them to me sometimes, Yeah. So those were the three main ways that I got leads, mainly postcards, I'd say.

Joe: So depending on the market that you were in, There was the last four or five years in the houses specifically, right? Direct mail got really, really hard. So many people started doing it. And it's always been hard, by the way. Yeah, don't think that I was complaining about competition back in 2007 when I got started kind of doing this. And I remember people back then complaining about and the direct mail used to be the top secret nobody knew about. Now everybody's doing it.

Mikel: A very low response rate, I mean, it's 1 to 2% a lot of times, you know.

Joe: Well, what happened like.

Mikel: The 10%, if you get lucky on a certain mail piece or a good list or something.

Joe: But, you know, we back in 2016, 2017, well, 2012, for about four years, we were getting really good response rates to three or 5%, sometimes 10% response rates. Yeah. Then things got really competitive and we started we were transitioned into a seller's market, so sellers were less responsive. Agreed. So, you know, we got to a point where in our house business we were getting half to 1% response rate. We were doing really well. If we got 1%. I have friends in California that were ecstatic. If they could get half of a percent, half of 1% response rate. Wow. So it's got you got crazy in direct mail. That's basically like it's just not even not even worth your time for houses. Yeah. And land we're seeing double triple those response rates pretty regularly. We're seeing two, three, four or 5% response rates with our direct mail for vacant land. So it's always been that way 2 to 3 or four times higher than houses. But you know what a lot of people started doing back in 2018, really, because these hedge funds started coming in and these hedge funds started coming in, gobbling up all these houses, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing, way more than any of us normal investors were willing to spend. Right? So then they were buying up all the inventory and it became easy to sell houses on the MLS. Sellers were selling them. Yeah, within days multiple offers above asking price. Right. So yeah, all of that compounded into Yeah, I can see why it got hard.

Mikel: Yeah, that was why I got out. I was so frustrated with it. It just it wasn't the same anymore. It used to be real easy.

Joe: You know what I was going to say though? And an idea. I created a course with the guy named Larry Goins from Shirley, and he saw it at the same time he transitioned out of the busy big markets into small towns. And the crazy thing about small towns is direct mail never stopped working. Their direct mail still today works really, really well in the small towns. And so he saw all the hedge funds. I learned this from him. He saw the hedge funds coming into Charlotte. And so he started going one or two counties out. And then even then, the hedge funds, the counties and funds started going in to those counties. So he went out another further one or two or three counties out, and he's sending direct mail to these little small counties with little small towns in them and still getting two, three, 5% response rates in some of them and still doing tons of deals. And he found that it's easier to do deals in the small towns because people are friendlier. You call there's discounts and you would think, well, who would want to live in the small towns? But he's still selling these deals very quickly. Bandit signs putting them in the local newspapers. Yeah, Facebook marketplace, things like that. So.

Mikel: Well, not necessarily traditional buyers. It's more probably more retail buyers, wouldn't it. Yeah.

Joe: So and so down the street who's got their 25 year old kids still living with them and wanting to get him out of the house and you know there's very there's a huge inventory problem in some of these small towns. So he's buying these things. He's not doing anything to fix them up, maybe taking trash out, putting some signs out there, maybe listing them with a realtor and getting selling them to these local people who want to live there and sometimes selling them for cash. There's a lot of mattress money out there. The other thing he said, well, no, this is I did a lease option deal in a small town in Nebraska with 400 population, 100 people in the small town. Right. So guess how many houses are available for sale? Hardly any guess how many houses are available for rent that are nice. Hardly any found. This one guy was going to jail. He did some really bad stupid. He was drunk. His wife and daughter have to move out to go live with family. He has to sell his house. He can't. I offer him a lease option because he didn't have much equity in it. You know, I found a tenant buyer before I even finished signing the paperwork. With the seller. In this little small town of 400 people, there's a huge demand. So anyway, I'm saying all of that because.

Mikel: Yeah, the supply and demand deal. Yeah.

Joe: If you decide to get back into housing, I definitely recommend small towns.

Mikel: Rural, small towns.

Joe: Rural, small, 2 to 3 counties outside of the counties you're in before. Lots of opportunity, very little competition. It's kind of like what we're seeing in land right now. Very little competition, right? Well, so what? You're not doing any real estate now, is that right now? Okay. Your target markets are Raleigh, Eastern North Carolina. North Carolina, South Carolina. There's tons of really good small towns, by the way. I love North Carolina for vacant land. We've done a lot of vacant land deals there. So you don't spend any money on marketing right now?

Mikel: No, I haven't focused on it. And, you know, and that's one thing, too. I look back and I did I did spend some money on marketing, but I should have spent more. I mean, that's definitely one of those things that looking back, I felt like in the time that I was there that I was doing like, Oh, I'm spent a lot on, spent 1000 to 3000 a month or whatever. I should have been dropping ten, 20,000. I mean, honestly, I mean, I would I probably still be in it at that point.

Joe: Well, you know, what was happening, too, is because the response rate started getting way down, PPC ads started going way up. Oh, yeah. The only people that were prospering were the ones spending ten, 12, $15,000. It kind of filters everybody out. But then the good thing about all of that is the margins started going up also, because there's so much demand for these houses, you can instead of buying them at $0.70, you could get away with buying them for $0.80 on the dollar and you could sell them for full retail price to these hedge funds. So it became like even though became harder to get the leads, you could actually start making the same amount of money, if not more than you used to because the demand was so high. Yeah. Now if you look from what I'm reading in the notes here, you're ready to get back into real estate. Yeah. And the market is changing again. Inventory is is actually still low. And so what is the, like, one or two big main questions you want help with? I don't want to assume I know what I'm on.

Mikel: Yeah, I mean, if you were me and let me give you a little bit of a context to this. So I do have, you know, couple hours a day that I could, you know, if I needed to go run around and look at property, go do some research, make calls. You know, I can I can set up a team to do this for me. I have no concerns with that. I have the resources for that. I have resources to do rehabs, pretty much of any sort. And but at the same time, do I want to go the traditional route of physically going out and making the deals, which I feel I'm going to get a better deal because in person I feel like I can. It's harder for them to say no to someone in person. It's more uncomfortable right for them than it is on the phone or email. So I feel like I can get deeper discounts and also identify properties that are better than others and so on. Some that want to stay away from the photos may not tell me or do I just stick with the virtual mode and just go heavy and just try to submit as many offers as I possibly can and just play the law of averages? Which would you recommend on that? And then it based on that, would you suggest land or houses based on the like is the second part of that question? Yeah.

Joe: I'm writing my notes down thoughts. So if you want to do houses, you will always make more money, negotiate bigger deals when you can go meet them in person. Belly button a belly button, right. Well, but that that can be hard. And it can I don't know. I kind of don't. I've never liked doing that. I think you can still negotiate really good deals on the phone. Right? You sound like a good people person. You understand the simple, basic psychology of sales. You know, you know how to build rapport, pull away, not try to chase them.

Mikel: Can't see the desperate. You don't need to do that.

Joe: I like the phrase be the reluctant buyer. Even with a reluctant buyer, you want to get them to sell you on why you should want to buy their house. So if you want to do houses, my recommendation would be already talked about it. Start focusing on the small towns. Do the same mail that you did before handwritten yellow letters, postcards, the ugly postcards with call or text, or 24 hour recorded voicemail. As much as you can, though with houses especially, you need to have somebody answering the phones live as much as possible, even though your voice, your letter says 24 hour recorded voicemail, you should still try to answer the phone line. Nobody's going to complain about it. Nobody's going to say, How dare you answer this phone. So same direct mail works. You're going to find, you know, depending on the small town you're in, I bet you get 3 to 5% response rates on your headers and postcards. So that's why it's so important to answer the phones live, because the calls that you get, I wouldn't start huge, but I would start small, you know, like I'm also going to recommend their small town profits course that I did with Larry.

Mikel: I apologize. I'm looking down. I'm writing notes.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah, me too. Had had the same thing.

Mikel: I've got my remarkable tablet right here.

Joe: Oh cool, I was thinking about getting one of those.

Mikel: Yeah they're pretty handy.

Joe: So I would I would recommend direct mail in the small towns that the big towns are still competitive. Not maybe as much as they were before. I think if you're if you still want to do deals in Raleigh and Durham, you can still like there's a lot of opportunities on the MLRS, right? Like, you can actually start calling realtors of properties that have been on the market over 30 days that haven't sold yet, that need work. Mm hmm. You could try to negotiate really good deals. You're going to have to buy them cheaper than you had to a year ago, right? Like instead of 70 instead of 80% RV like you could had to do a year ago. Now you're maybe 65, 70% of a RV. Right? So I probably wouldn't do direct mail in the bigger cities. I would do more calling realtors. Okay. And the doing, the more of the networking thing making offers. Your goal is to make five offers a day. And while you're waiting for leads to come in or the leads are slowing down for a little bit with direct mail, you can be on the phone, you can be calling property managers, you can be calling realtors and other investors and say, Hey, I'm looking for deals. Do you have anything? What do you got? You know, you call a realtor of an older listing that's been on the market for 30 days that needs a lot of work. It's real simple conversation, like, Hey, how's it going? My name is Michael. I'm an investor. I'm interested in this property. Can you tell me a little bit about it? Sounds like a good deal. Like, why do you think it hasn't sold yet? It's been on the market. What does it say here? Oh, 30 days, 90 days. What's the neighborhood like? You know, what do you think it would take to get this thing fixed up? The seller is not in a hurry. Right. Are they negotiable on their price at all? They're pretty firm. And, you know, try to get a feel, talk to them about it. And you want to, you know, just the simple formulas that we did before. But you want to fill feel them out a little bit on the phone with you. I'm seeing more and more investors right now in this slowing housing market, finding more deals on the MLS, on market properties, properties that need work. They've been on the market for 30, 60, 90 days. And you can find those in Redfin just by looking at Redfin. You make it a goal to call five realtors a day. That doesn't take long at all. And then what you do is you tell them, Hey, I'm an investor. I'm getting in the business here in this market. Do you got anything else? I don't have anybody representing me right now. If you bring me a deal, you can represent me and maybe give both sides of the commission. And if you find one, here's. Take my name and number. Can I. Can you. Can I send you my contact info? Right now, you're starting to build a list of you're talking.

Mikel: Send business, you know, send opportunities my way.

Joe: Yeah. And, well, this is important. You follow up with them every 30 days. Hey, how's it going? This is Mikel. Probably don't remember me. Do you have any deals? You have any properties? Having a hard time selling? The other thing I'll say is I've done this well with realtors. I'll try to see if the seller's negotiable. I say, Look, I'm seeing some sold here that are in the 75 $80,000 range. They're not thinking anything like that. Right. And then I might say, well, you know, if I could get them their price that they're asking for, if I could give them the price they're asking for. They wouldn't consider maybe some seller financing or something on terms, would they? So then you can offer them a higher price if they'd be willing to carry some of the financing, maybe do a lease purchase or finance subject to something like that, right? Mm hmm. But you start just talking to realtors and somebody is mentioning here a good comment. You can use privy and there's there is something on privy, but you can do the same thing on Redfin right now. And I can show you this if you want a second option, it really previews a software that you pay for. And it's good. It's really good, but I don't think you need it. Go ahead in that way here in a second. But I love the strategy when if you're going to be doing homes in the bigger markets, I don't recommend direct mail yet.

Mikel: No, I mean, honestly, Joe, I've always gone through the fringes, always, always. Like I do that in my business, in the roofing business as well. I feel like I have a lot more success. There's less competition. Yeah, less riffraff. You know, if people can choose, there's not as much confusion in the market. It's more of a Oh, Oh, wait. You can help me with this. Absolutely. You know, like, you're not you're not getting the people that are just going to, like, try to shoo you away.

Joe: Well, things have. They've changed a lot. Yeah. The last 8 to 10 months, things have changed a lot. Realtors are more open to doing creative terms deals. And that's good.

Mikel: Because you and I both know they were not a year or so ago. My gosh, it was insane.

Joe: No, I have some friends that are doing a lot of them. They're getting calls from realtors saying, hey, you know, I urge you to do lease options or you take over mortgages or something like that. Yeah, well, there's a lot of people right now, especially investors, that put a lot of money into these rehabs and they've not sold yet. And when it does sell, they're going to lose money. Yeah. And if you could just if they can find just somebody to take over their note, start making their payments for them or a tired landlord that the rates are going up or they can't refinance and pull any more equity out because there is none or the rates are too high. They would love to just get rid of their property and you can come in and buy it on terms. There might be some opportunities for you there. Okay. But small towns I like if you want to do direct mail, man there, you know, just look at your county that you're in and then start going out two or three counties all the way around. Okay. And there's no you know, you can buy and sell anything. And I'm going to, if you want, the small town profits course I did with Larry. We sold it before for 1500 bucks. If you're interested, I'll give it. I'll give it to you for 500 or anybody else that's listening to this. But in there, we talked about how Larry picks his counties, when he how he makes his offers. And basically it's if it's on a paved road and it's I think he said within 20 minutes from a Wal-Mart or Piggly Wiggly or something like that, he makes an offer, right? Yeah. I don't know what's out there in North Carolina, but.

Mikel: You can have one of those around here.

Joe: Right. So it's there's a lot of opportunity there now. Vacant land. Yeah, I love vacant land right now. That's my shtick.

Mikel: Yeah. And that's why I've been hearing you talk about. So that's why I was like, Man, I hope he can kind of give me some insight on that.

Joe: You can. Do you see this? The thing I love about real estate, you can make money wholesaling. You could still make money today, rehabbing, fixing flips, buying old. There's so many different ways you can make money in real estate. And anybody who wants to start doing houses, man, this is a great time to get into that, especially wholesaling. I don't recommend I don't recommend fixing Flip right now, but like me. So there's a lot of opportunity and you need to learn how to make a quick nickel rather than a slow down. So with land you can. You'll do wholesaling with land, and you can still sell your deals on terms and cash flow. So I prefer right now land. I think it's easier. There's less competition. We're seeing right now a huge uptick in the number of offers that are getting accepted. We're still selling our deals. Usually takes 2 to 3 months to sell our deals. But, you know, we're all in for $7,000 on these vacant lots and we're selling them for 15, $20,000. Right. So it's not a lot of money, really. You can borrow all that money from a private investor or credit card if you want.

Mikel: You're not actually purchasing and closing on them, you're not really assigning them like a typical wholesale deal.

Joe: Now it's a little harder to assign vacant land. You can, but it's a little harder because, you know, I'm buying this thing for $5,000 and I'm selling it for 15, so I'm buying it for five K, and I have to have the buyer sign an assignment agreement for $10,000 assignment fee. And they're like, Wait a minute here, I'm buying it for 15. And you get a $10,000 assignment fee on this thing could just sets off alarm bells.

Mikel: So you could use a double close it?

Joe: We could. But here's the other problem. Sometimes you find, as with vacant land, specifically, they will look to see who's the owner of this property. And if they don't see you as the owner, they're going to be like, What's going on? Why are you selling this thing? You don't even own it yet.

Mikel: Yeah, okay.

Joe: Then you have to explain to them, Well, we're in the middle of closing it. Or you could say, Listen, the county's really slow. The paperwork's going through right now.

Mikel: Which is true, I usually take months to get updated sometimes.

Joe: So I'd say, you know, we give ourselves three months to close on our land deals. We have 90 days to close, and we can extend it 30 days if we want. Okay. So when, when we make the offers, we start advertising it immediately. And after about a month, you know, we can tell if we're getting interest from it, If we're starting to get buyers calling us and expressing interest or whatever, then we'll start the closing process. And that usually takes a couple, three weeks. We use a national nationwide title company. North Carolina, you might need to find an attorney, a real estate investor, friendly attorney, but then you can start the closing process. And yeah, you just you have more time because you don't have to close, unlike a house where you've got other investors breathing down your neck, trying to go behind your back in sending offers to these sellers. You know, you have a little bit more time with vacant land. You should still try to close it as soon as you can. But I recommend just closing on it, then turn around and turning around and selling it. It's just easier.

Mikel: Okay. And then valuation on the land, I mean, would you run comps the same you would on a property? Just look at solds and look at actives and kind of get a feel for it?

Joe: Yeah, it is. Hold on one second. Those of you I see people are putting in comments. If you want to buy my small town profits course for $500, just send an email to supported Joe McCall dot com and we'll help you with that. Okay but with land it's different right because you've got you don't have as many comps and there's not going to be as many close. So some areas the way I teach it in the course, you want to pick a county where there's already a lot of sold activity that's very easy to find in the hundred counties that are in North Carolina, you find the, you know, ten, 20 counties that have the most activity in them. And I show you how to do that in my in my course. And then you find you start with the ones that have the most sold in the last 90 days. You download a list, you send them a letter, send them to voice mail, you listen to the voice mail, you send them an offer before you ever even talk to them. That's how we do it with land. And then we only talk to them after they get our offer at 25 $0.30 on the dollar. Yeah. And right now we're averaging about one out of 25 offers getting accepted. We just started marketing in a new county in Texas, and we're getting about one out of ten offers accepted. Right now. We're offering way too much and we're still offering $0.25 on the dollar. So you have to look at actives and souls and you're going to have to look at actives at just as much over what's as much interest as you do sold. But you can get comps Redfin and Zillow for vacant land on Realtor.com, land watch dot com, Land dot com sites like that. So my advice would be if you want to do land, get my course. And I we talked about this at the beginning. You can get my contract if you go to simple land contract dot com, you'd opt in to get it and then you'll get an invitation to watch the webinar. And in that webinar I teach all the steps on how land deal works and you have an opportunity to get my class if you want, but you also get the contract. You can see the contract that we use if you want to get the small town profits course, I need to get a link for this, but if you just send an email to my team support at Joe McCall dot com.

Mikel: I will, I'll get that from you.

Joe: You can't go wrong doing land or houses right now. I think. I think land is easier, but there's still a huge opportunity for houses. If I had more bandwidth and I had a whole huge team which I don't want. I would be telling them. All right. Half of you guys go after houses and now I'd probably say a third of you guys go after houses. Two thirds of you guys go after land. That's probably what I would do. Yeah. Does that help? Is that helpful at all?

Mikel: It really is. Yes. I had one more question, but I seem to have lost it. I guess it's all this gray hair kicking in.

Joe: Your goal here, you said, is to make 20K a month. And I always work backwards from that, right? Yeah, it's a good little exercise to do. And I call it a marketing plan where you can't you can't control making 20 grand a month. You can't control that your average profit is ten grand and you have to do two deals a month. You can't control that, but you can control, ah, the activities. Yeah, and I talk about this in my courses like you work backwards. 20 grand or something. That's two deals a month. Well, let's make it three just in case. Yeah. And if you have to make 30 offers, 30 times three is 90. You need to make 90 offers a month. Divide that by four. Let me get my calculator here. 90 divided by four. You need to make 22 offers a month. Nine divided by five. What do they say? Offers. Well, let me start this again. You want to do three deals a month and you have to make 30 offers. So that's 90 offers a month. Okay. 90 divided by four. You need to make 22 offers a week. Right? By five, you need to make four and a half offers a day. Now, you getting into this is what you can control, right? Yeah. Let's say that you need to make four offers a day if you want to do three deals a month. Well, then you work it backwards. And I have a spreadsheet for this that makes it a lot simpler. I But now you break it down into, okay, how much mail do I need to send a week? How many? If you wanted to call, but how many cold calls do I need doing? And that's where you get your marketing plan into a daily and weekly thing. I'm going to make 20 grand a month. It's pretty simple. It's like maybe sending, let's say, a thousand letters a week. I mean, that'll get you there. Just if you want to do land 20 K a month, send a thousand letters a week, and that's you'll get there. If it's for if you want to split it up, maybe it's called five realtors a day or property managers send 500 postcards a week and you know, do an hour of cold calling a day, whatever it is. Mm. So you're working from my whole point of all that is work backwards. You want to make you work backwards into the daily and the weekly things that you can control. Right. And then now you figure out, I want to do these three things, these three types of marketing or whatever, because to talk to five sellers a day or five realtors a day now you say, All right, I can do this, but I can get a virtual assistant that can do this and this. I can get my kids to do this. Yeah, I can get the stay at home mom to handwrite and crumple up 20 yellow letters a day and send them to. I used to send these crumpled up letters to owners of rentals on Zillow. So anyway.

Mikel: I have one more question now. So I used to pull all kinds of the lists. I used to, you know, go into the county and certain counties would allow you to pull others or better than other lists. Source at one time was able to give me what I needed and there's list ability and all these things. Right? So I guess my question is what couple lists would you say to start first? Like what? Where would I start first on, on those.

Joe: Absentee owners of equity. I probably you know, you can at freedom soft Joe dot com you can have freedom soft and do everything you need for houses in freedom so you can't get lists for land in freedom. So I still use freedom soft for my land deals, but at freedom soft joe dot com You can get your lists, you can skip trace some. The simplest best list is anybody that's owned a house over five years, maybe ten absentee owner with at least 50% equity, and you'll get plenty of them to call. Right.

Mikel: And that's on the houses. What about on the land?

Joe: The land. I want that the specific counties where there's a lot of recent sold activity, I want 1 to 20 acres. Typically, I want them to have owned it for at least ten years and I don't want them to live in that county. That's it.

Mikel: Not so absentee owner again, I mean, essentially more than absentee is to be out of the county. Okay.

Joe: Out of that county, Yeah. Now, let me tell you a couple of things, too. There's freedom soft Joe. You can get great lists that's included in the subscription at Freedom Soft and I, I really like them a lot because you can do your cold calling directly from there and skip tracing and cold calling from there. Pretty soon he's coming out with Rob Swanson's coming out with the direct mail engine where you can do all your direct mail like we're talking about. From there you can Propstream is a great place to go get lists as well. Propstream Joe dot com. It's like 97 a month and you can download 10,000 records a month.

Mikel: And you can adjust these filters or, you know.

Joe: Yeah.

Mikel: Yeah, do that. Okay.

Joe: For vacant land there's if you want I use Prycd, you go to land list dot U.S. and you can get your vacant land lists from Prycd. Land list dot U.S.. I think that link still works. Land list dot US should redirect to affiliate link if not. Oh it does. It works. Good.

Mikel: Okay. Man you've been you've been super helpful today that that gives me the stuff I need to implement right now. I'm just going to get I'm honest. I mean, I've done it before. I mean, yeah, we're so close. I flip. I don't know. Not. I didn't do three or four. I did probably closer to 100. I think it was 80 or 90 houses or something like that in a two or three year span. You know, some months I do a lot. So I wouldn't, you know, whatever. But so I know how to do this. I'm very confident with the process of wholesaling and that kind of stuff, buying the deals, running cops. It's just. Thank you for telling me kind of some of the differences and what it's been like right now and kind of just you're saving me a lot of the, the wear and tear on myself trying to figure out what it looks like now in today's market. So thank you for that.

Joe: Good. All right, Mikel Thanks, man.

Mikel: Yeah, Thank you very much.

Joe: All right, See you guys. Hey, listen, if you like this podcast, give me a thumbs up and let me know what you thought of it. Let me know. Subscribe to the channel. Give me your comments. Give me thumbs up, share the video, subscribe whatever. Right. And if you listen to the audio podcast or leave a review, really appreciate it. We'll see you guys later. Take care, everybody. All right. Bye bye.