Joe: What's going on? This is Joe. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. I haven't done one of these in a long time, so I'm excited to jump into this. We're going to be talking to a good friend of mine, Zack Boothe. He's been around for a long, long time. He's done some pretty cool things. Go check out his YouTube channel right now. Just go look up Zack Boothe and his YouTube. And he did this thing where you follow. He had a camera guy follow him around, and he did a bunch of deals in Florida while his family was in Utah. I think you would say that thing was a success. It was hard. It was not easy. But he still did a bunch of deals and he documented them all in YouTube. And hopefully it's still on YouTube, isn't it, Zack? Just nod your head. Okay, good. It is. So this guy's a beast and he's been known as the driving for dollars guy. And we're going to be talking a little bit about driving for dollars because it is one of the best ways to do real estate deals. But he's also been getting into land, and so I'm excited to talk to him about how he literally just started a few months ago. And he's been outsourcing almost all of it to other people that he's hired. He's brought on and they've been doing some vacant land and they've done about five deals since they started five, six months ago. Net profits of about, I think, 50 or $60,000. We'll get we'll have Zack kind of hire 60 grand. We'll have Zack kind of give us the details on that. Not a bad day. Nice. Better than a poke in the eye with a stick, because I like to say so. He's been flipping vacant land in addition to houses. So I wanted to get him on to talk about that. First, though, I want to say this show is brought to you by me. Really? Like I'm the spot. I'm the main sponsor for my show. But if you go to SimpleLandKit.com right now, you're going to get one of the most amazing free giveaway things I've ever done. I should be charging money for this. I should be charging at least five bucks. Ten bucks, 100 bucks. But what it is, it's called SimpleLandKit.com. And in there you can get my direct mail swipe file. You can get my contract I use for wholesaling deals, my option contract I use sometimes if I don't want to get it under contract to buy it, I just want to get it under an option contract. Give you my motivated seller script. What I say to sellers. I give you the scripts and the tools that I use to talk to realtors and find realtors to bring me deals and sell my deals. I also give you on their my due diligence checklist for vacant land cause you want to make sure you're not getting a bad deal. What are some of the things that you look for? Vacant land. It's different than houses, so you get my due diligence checklist. One or two other things that I can't remember right now, but also one of the most amazing things you get into this thing and I'm telling you, it's this is not going to be for free for very much longer, because every time I talk about this, I'm like, I can't believe this is free. It's a software I created that helps you evaluate it and come up with offers for vacant land deals. The software is really amazing. You put some stuff into it and it spits out to you three different offers, three different cash offers that you could make. You pick one, and then it gives you an owner financing offer you can make to the seller if they say no to your cash deal and then it generates the contracts for you, gives you a letter and you can print it and then just mail it to the seller completely free for a limited time, really, because I'm not going to be giving this away for free much longer, but go to SimpleLandKit.com to get that right now. Okay. I think we should bring Zack on. What do you say? Zack? Let me make sure this is working. How are you, Zack?

Zack: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back here.

Joe: Nice. I'm glad this is working here. I've been playing around with this tool called ECam Live for my YouTube videos on my podcast. And so far, so good. So far so good. If you guys are watching this on Facebook right now or YouTube, I think I'm only streaming the Facebook this time.

Zack: And if you notice my screen, my video is just a little wider than Joe's just cheating. The system here is make my cheeks look fuller than they really are. Just want that to be out there now.

Joe: Now, just so you know too, I've lost like 40 pounds in the last three or four months.

Zack: Well, you're looking good, but you also had a heart surgery, I understand.

Joe: I had.

Zack: It's good, too, to see you so chipper and up and going. How are you feeling, by the way?

Joe: Good man. It's been five weeks, so. Right. Wow. Five or six weeks. And I'm feeling better, stronger every day. My chest hurts a lot. Feels like, you know, a horse mule kicked me in the chest.

Zack: I'm sorry. They cut your ribs, too, right?

Joe: They cut my sternum. I got a big old six inch scar. It's crazy, man, what they do. I could talk for a long time about it. If anybody curious to know it was major open heart surgery. They replaced my aortic valve and I am still kicking. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. I'm going to be around for a long, long time.

Zack: Going to take more than that to take you out.

Joe: Here's a cool thing, though. I didn't have a heart attack. I was look, I looked healthy. They couldn't believe I was still standing, though, because my valve was so bad and I was having a little slight heart palpitations and stuff. And they said, you need to get this thing replaced. When I was in surgery, they took out my valve and they said it was so calcified that if you would have given it to another doctor didn't know me, they would have thought I was 75 or 80 years old. So was a congenital thing, whatever. And they replaced with it was a steroids.

Zack: Was it all those steroids at high school or what?

Joe: I don't know. It's just hereditary. Something I got from my family. Thank you, Mom and dad. No, I'm just joking. But they've fixed it. They put in a new valve that's made out of tissue from a cow. It's not a cows valve. It's tissues made from a cow. They put it in there. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger has done this. He's got this done three times. He's still looking good. So it's just the way it is. You know, and I've been out of commission for the last five weeks. But here's the cool thing I love about this business, Zack, is, you know, we set up our businesses to run for us in spite of us, don't we? And that's what I want to talk about on this podcast, because you're doing house deals in multiple states now. You're also doing vacant land deals. You're not all doing this by yourself, are you?

Zack: No, definitely not. Especially because I also coach and help and, you know, create TikToks and podcasts and videos and help other people. So to be able to do multiple different real estate strategies in multiple states, yes, I have to have an incredible team. You know, you spoke Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I got emotional watching his documentary over the weekend that just came out on Netflix. And he said, oh, you got to watch it. You got to watch it. At the very end of it, he said, you can call me a Kraut, you can call me Schnitzel, you can, you know, all the insults that Arnold, too, obviously has been called. He said, But don't ever call me self-made because there's so many people that have helped me in my journey and helped me along the way. And, you know, incredible people that accomplish amazing things. It's very interesting how they always surround themselves with incredible people to help them succeed.

Joe: That's amazing. That's really cool. I watched the first 10 minutes of that. It looked good. I don't know why I just got busy or something. Okay, so, Zack, I've had you on my show before a couple of times. I think we've talked about driving for dollars. You've got a great program. You've been doing that. I love driving for dollars as a strategy for getting deals because you go out and you're basically looking for cars from your car. You're looking for properties that are needing updating. You know, the windows are damaged, the gutters are hanging, yard's not been mowed in a long time. And you basically skip, trace the owner and call him or send him a letter postcard. Is that right?

Zack: Correct. Yep. Keep it. Just keep it simple. You're trying to find someone that has a thorn in their side that they want to get rid of. And so you look for those houses that obviously aren't loved and see if they're willing to sell to an investor or not. That's it's pretty, pretty basic. If you have the right systems in place.

Joe: And then what are you. What's the favorite way to are you doing this driving yourself or are you outsourcing this to other people, hiring them to do the driving for you?

Zack: Yeah. So we had 4000 addresses every single week. So we're finding 4000 ugly houses every week between Utah and Florida. And we have one driver in Utah and one driver in Florida. That is it. It does not take a ginormous team to do this. You know, this is a you know, in Utah, we were only doing 2000 a week and we're doing a million a year in Utah. We just kind of really started ramping up Florida. So we're not quite to a million a year yet in Florida with our driving $4 system. But yeah, this should be $2 million a year just at Maneater.

Joe: I love this because how many people are doing this really?

Zack: To my level, none.

Joe: Zero. Nobody's doing this. Maybe they used to do it. Maybe it was kind of competitive back then, but like, nobody's doing this, right? And the great thing about this is you are finding deals that aren't on any lists that you can download and buy, right?

Zack: That's why it works so good.

Joe: Yeah. You're going into great neighborhoods where there's a lot of investor activity, right? Or rehab landlord activity, and you're paying these people to go look for properties that are derelict, that need updating. They put them into their phone on an app or something. And I think you're using deal machines or something else.

Zack: Yeah, we're using deal machine. Yeah.

Joe: Okay. Glad I didn't mess that up. That because there's a lot of good tools out there that's probably the best one.

Zack: And then it is by far the best one.

Joe: They that those leads come in, you skip trace and call them. Call them or how are you handling that. Yeah.

Zack: So we text, cold call, and send postcards but we're also you know a major thing like you said, there's a lot of properties on that list that are not on other lists. And it's very interesting how many people come on to my podcast, The Driving for dollars Mastery Podcast and say, We found this seller, we made $60,000 passing it to an investor. You know, we wholesale the opportunity in the house. It's out vacant for seven years, ten years, five years, right? It's insane because you get weird situations like the people died and the only person to inherit the house is in jail and estranged from the family. And so when they see that it's been vacant, when you use Deal machine, you can actually tag the vacant houses. You can tag the worst of the worst. The ones that are like, okay, some superficial going on. So when you touch the property, imagine you have a Google Maps image and all you've got to do is touch the property, upload it to your list. You can then click another button that tags it and we'll put in. You know, when you export that Excel spreadsheet, one of the columns is special tags. So you'll be able to have that subsection of properties that you wanted to go back and doorknock the neighbors or spend a little bit extra effort trying to find the situation because you know that there's more money there. You know, we doorknock and. Very few properties. But it's crazy how many huge deals that we do from this.

Joe: How are you paying your driving guys, the people that are out there driving? How are you paying them?

Zack: So a lot of people think, Oh, I'm going to hire all these different people that are already driving Uber drivers, mail carriers, things like that. I am a commission and it's a huge mistake because you don't get consistency. You know, you're kind of at their mercy if they feel generous enough to work for you that day or not. So you're better off to set a goal of how many properties you want to add each week. And the way we compensate is we pay hourly. Plus, we offer some bonuses. So we pay 20 bucks an hour, you know, up or down, depending on where you're at in the country. Right. If you're in a, you know, average, you know, median economy. 20 bucks an hour is decent enough. You want to pay well. So maybe you got to go up to 30, 40 bucks an hour. If you're in somewhere like California, where cost of living is extremely high. And then you do you know, you cover gas. If they hit their goals of their goals, 500 properties for a week or a thousand a week, if they hit that goal, you actually you pay for their gas. So incentivizes them to hit the goal. And then if they close a deal, you give them an extra 100 to $300 per deal. Right. Which will incentivize them to make sure they add properties that are actually going to turn into something. So they're not just tagging randomly.

Joe: Which is interesting, too, because I think a lot of people when this is first the thing, we're trying to pay their drivers just 100% commissions. Right.

Zack: And I did that cost me so much money.

Joe: That's fascinating because there's also licensing issues that come with that. Right. Like, if you're paying somebody for bringing you leads or bringing you deals, you could argue that's brokering activity, but now you're just paying them as an employee, which is probably, I would guess, more aboveboard and simpler. And you're saying it's at the end of the day, you actually are paying less. Is that right?

Zack: Yeah. So if I compensated at 20 bucks an hour, plus the, you know, pay for gas plus pay $100 per deal in the first seven months or so, first for 6 to 7 months that I started doing this, I was paying 20% of the deal to my drivers. And I calculated the difference if I would have paid the commission versus the hourly paying the commission like I did, I overpaid by over $70,000.

Joe: Serious.

Zack: Serious. Yeah. I was like, ouch. That was a painful learning lesson.

Joe: Well, lesson learned. But thank you for doing that for us, because now we know why what you're willing to do. Wow. Okay. So you're paying them hourly. Good. Let's talk about vacant land. Is there anything else about houses you want to talk? Oh, let's talk about your YouTube challenge. This was a couple of years ago, wasn't it?

Zack: It's been a couple of years.

Joe: And what did you do? What crazy idea did you attempt?

Zack: Well, you know, I actually became a coach, right. And with becoming a real estate coach came some challenges. One of the challenges I found is if I wanted to help people become successful, they had to believe that they could be successful. They had to believe that it was possible. They had to see that it doesn't take someone extremely intelligent or a ton of experience. It takes a work ethic. You can't have any kind of success in life without some work ethic. But it's not as complicated as most people think. And I needed them to trust me and believe in it. And I thought back to my experience and I used to like hate gurus. I used to think that they were all full of it. And, you know, they actually didn't know anything about real estate. They were just selling information. And if you really.

Joe: Made all that money in business, you wouldn't be teaching it. That said, you can't do it anymore. You're teaching it. All right.

Zack: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I believe that then you see it on all the comments on Joe's stuff, on my stuff, on anyone that puts out content on real estate. And this is like, how do I fix out? Like, how do I give people belief and hope? Because what happened to me, because I was a same skeptic, I was very skeptical and I was hearing about wholesaling and hearing about finding discounted opportunities and creative financing and lease options and all this cool stuff on podcasts and so forth, but very skeptical because then they're like, Well, then click on the link below and pay me money. Now I will shoot. Like, that's not what I want. I want I want to make money. And so and it was a windows for a wealthy gentleman. His name was Stan Nelson, and Stan was a wealthy investor developer. And he and I talked to over like an hour and a half was cleaning his windows and I was like, Man, if I get to rentals this year, it'd be amazing. How did that handed me to rentals right there? Like you signed a paper on blank, you know, blank piece of paper, really? And he said, Take this is the title company. He's like, Do you have 10% down? Which would have been like 20 grand, as I know. You know, I was like, I don't have that kind of money. And he's like, well, what do you have as a goal? I got 2000 bucks. He's like, Oh, that's fine, right? We signed the papers, signed the agreement, what the terms would be on payments to him. And I went in and closed on these deals and I ended up selling them the next year for over six figures profit.

Joe: Nice.

Zack: And I seldom using lease options which Joe is very fond of, has made a lot of money over the years with. I sold him as a lease option to my tenants. They cash me out the next year, made I think I made like $130,000 and plus, you know, a few thousand bucks every month or not every month. But overall and renting it to him as well. So for me, I was like. Wow. Like, this is real. This stuff exists. So I was a believer, and all of a sudden now I started paying for coaches. And then my success exploded. Because now I had belief. And with belief, I took action. I got coaching. And so. So why did I do the 40 day challenge is I wanted to give that gift, that gift of belief and hope so people could take action, so people could have results and take that work ethic and put it to where I would make more money than what they're currently doing.

Joe: Well, let me guess to another reason I bet you did. It is because you wanted to prove to people that you could actually do it yourself.

Zack: Well, yeah, because if I'm. Yeah, it's the credibility. Because if they don't trust me, they don't trust my process. And if they don't trust me or and or my process, why would they ever allow me to serve them and coach them in? Changed their lives. That's what I want. I want to change their lives. But they have to see that and know that and believe that. So I was like, That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go give them that gift of belief, of hope, of faith that it works, that I know what I'm doing, that my system works and what it's going to take on their part to be successful because they see it happen. Right. And so I took a thousand bucks, flew across the country.

Joe: So how many how many kids do you have?

Zack: I have two.

Joe: And a wife.

Zack: And a wife. Yeah.

Joe: Okay. Who's a lady?

Zack: Yeah. Yep, yep and two kids. Yeah. And so what? We did what we planned. I told my wife I was like, This is very important to me. I want to do this. This is kind of like a charity thing. I'm like, I'm going to I'm going to have to run my normal businesses and basically become a self-employed startup company for the next 40 days. So my wife's from Brazil, so I was like, Go be with your family, take my kids. I wasn't going to be with my family for 30 days to do this project. It was horribly difficult. I'm crazy about my kids. This is a huge sacrifice on my part there. So they're in Brazil and I'm just working from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed with a thousand bucks for marketing. And the goal is to make the average American income in just 40 days. And I ended up I ended up crushing that goal. Actually, I did really, really well.

Joe: Yeah, I remember watching some of the videos. I didn't watch all of them. You were stressed at times like it was not easy. You were missing your wife and kids. Yeah. By the way, sorry for making a stupid joke about your wife being a lady. Sorry. I know I offended 20 people the least with that, so my apologies. I'll never do that again. But. So you're missing your family, right? Like you're in Florida. You thought it was going to be easy because I'm. I can relate to this. I've done something similar. And it's harder work than you realize. And you don't really need to do it because you're already making money. Who are you trying to prove this to? And so you're out there, you're driving for dollars. You have a camera guy that's also going with you. And I want I guess one of the frustrating things with it was you had a camera guy, so you were also explaining what you were doing while you were doing it, which made it twice as hard, right?

Zack: Yeah, it was hard. Like, I'd like knock on the door for a cellar appointment. I'm like, Hey, I'm doing a kind of a documentary thing for my YouTube channel. You know, we flip houses. Is it okay if they come? They're like, already, like, completely, no way. And you know, that's not happening. And so it was really hard to get some of the footage. But yeah, there was so many obstacles to make it all happen. There was in like you said, I did not do this for me. Right. This was 1,000% to help people. Yeah. I'm going to bring on more students and help more people. But the only reason I'm a coach, only the only reason I really do the coaching is it's a passion project. Yeah, I authentically make 90% of my money from real estate, so.

Joe: Okay, you get a rental car, you go to Florida. Yeah, a thousand bucks and you start driving for dollars using the deal Machine app. Right? Right. What's your link for Deal Machine if anybody wants to look into it.

Zack: Yeah. So there's a discount code. I use it on the 40 day challenge. It's PIN the reason PIN so PIN, you can actually get 100 bucks for free when you sign up using that discount code so you can get free postcards or free phone numbers for those addresses you want to market to. You get $100 for free.

Joe: All right. So you go down there, you're just driving, looking for property vacant like we talked about before. And you then go back to your hotel room and just get on the phone and start making calls. What was the result of this challenge? How long were you there? How many deals did you do and all that?

Zack: Yeah, so I was I was in Florida for 30 days, supposed to be 40 days. But on day 30, my wife's supposed to fly home, test positive for COVID. Couldn't fly home. That's right. And then her father. Her father got it. He has heart issues as well and had a heart, heart open heart surgery like a year before, really worried about it. So I immediately jumped on a plane. I had my passport just in case. I immediately bought a plane ticket and flew down there, finished the last ten days with COVID, you know, because I, of course, got it. And luckily it didn't affect me. My my father in law was hospitalized for a month. I got stuck in Brazil for like another two months because I had to test negative before I flew home. We just kept testing positive. So that was interesting. I wasn't even home for like three months of the year. Weird, right? But anyways, overall result from that is I got a total of seven signed contracts. Two of them I had to cancel. Right? We ended up during our inspection, found that it had. Mold and some foundation issues because of a tree. And just where we were under contract to high had to cancel them after inspection. Three of them I wholesale. That means that I found a buyer to close on the contract. I didn't have the money to buy it. Right. I sold I sold one of them for $10,000. One of the contracts they sold the next one for $30,000. And then the last one I sold for 52 or 53. I can't remember exactly.

Joe: That's your assignment fee. That's your profit.

Zack: That's my profit assignment fee. So overall, cash generated was $93,000. That left me two more rentals that I could not help myself. I bought them as rentals. I just took cash out of my savings account and bought them because they were too good. I could have assigned them and sold them. I've now sent sold them. I sold them each as is. I never put any remodel into them. I sold them each for I think about $38,000 profit each. So really I made like an additional 74,000 on top that 93 and just that that time frame.

Joe: And you're just making simple cash offers for every one of these, right? Yep. How many of them did you meet the seller in person at the house?

Zack: All of them. That's how I like to do it. All of those. I did meet with them in person.

Joe: So even when you're doing deals in Florida now today, you have an acquisitions manager, local who goes and meet sellers in person, correct?

Zack: Yep. We have three acquisition managers and two real estate agents that work our retail leads. Right?

Joe: You think you still could have done what you did on the phone? Just negotiating these deals.

Zack: And I've done a lot of deals over the phone. I totally believe that it's easier. It's easier to do it in person. And if I can't do it in person, I try and do it on Zoom. Worst case scenario, I do it over the phone. And the reason for that, Joe, is it's not that it's not possible to do it over the phone, but I like to be able to read people's posture and facial expressions and because people communicate more than just what they say. And so I like to see when you say something, if someone like folds their arms and rolls their eyes, because I want to address that. I want to address those frustrations in those struggles. You seem upset by what I sent, you know, Do you feel like you have a better option? I want to understand what people are thinking and how they're feeling about the situation. So I push my team to go in person because I believe it's easier to build a relationship. It's easier to build trust, right? Because people want to do business with people that they like and that they trust. Right? So, for example, if you got an appointment and their brother that they love wants to buy the house, he's willing to pay 100 grand and you make an offer of 100 grand, you're out. You know, the brother's getting the deal. So I want my acquisition guys to be the one that they want to work with. And then the price is next.

Joe: Yeah, right. Let's really get into. Some of you are wondering. Hey, I thought we were talking about land here. Would you stop talking about houses? But this relates to land. I mean, everything we're talking about here can relate as well. What got you interested in land? Vacant land.

Zack: So more than anything, I want to make more money. So. So for me, it was you know, we have an amazing culture here in Utah with my employees here. We were kind of struggling building culture. We've since fixed that with our Florida team, right, with our sales reps out there and our driver and so forth. And we've got that fixed. But before that all started taking place, I was looking for something that I could do more virtual. So I looked at virtual wholesaling, I looked at, you know, then virtual land. Yes. Next. And I couldn't find really people that were actually doing what they were teaching when it came to virtual wholesaling, right like that. We're actually making money with it and there's a lot of guys that are doing virtual land that I like and trust and respect. You're one of them, right? Raise another and some others that I think you've actually been on your podcast.

Joe: Yeah.

Zack: And so, you know, kind of asking around, I was like, Man, this is exactly it. Because I can have my acquisition guy that's crushing it, doing $1,000,000 a year in wholesale fees here in Utah, service some leads. Let's test it right. He can do it all over the phone all virtual. Let's throw some marketing out in the world and let's see if it actually works. Nice. So that was it was just kind of a test. We weren't sure if it was going to work, could we test? So we started testing about seven months ago and it's turned into a whole thing.

Joe: Then about 60 grand in profits. Yeah, we done exactly 60.

Zack: I can break this down. Actual realized net or like actual profits after we bought then sold them. What we got to take home was $63,000, 63,597 and $0.64.

Joe: Flipping five vacant lots.

Zack: Five vacant lots is all.

Joe: I got to do my disclaimers here, guys. Listen, Zack is an exceptional energy investor. He's not your typical guy. You know, he's very atypical, right? He's a massive action taker. I have to say this because it's just true. Most people don't have that kind of success. Most people who get into real estate investing don't make any money in the business. Most people fail and quit and give up. But the few of us who do persist and do deals and never quit and just grind it and do a lot of marketing and work really hard, have success and do deals. So I'm going to ask you a question. Here in a minute. Zack, of like, what kind of marketing were you doing to stuff like that, But.

Zack: Well, do it just, just so you guys know too. That's we have eight more. That's just what's like since the beginning year that we bought and sold. Done. We have eight more that I bought. We own them. We have them listed in our projected profits. Off of those eight is well over 100 grand and that's the profits off those eight. So. So really it could be it could be darn near $200,000 already in revenue.

Joe: I love it. Okay. So what did you do? How did you pick your markets?

Zack: Yeah. So a lot of it was the amount of volume of transactions that are happening. Right. So we went into I and we.

Joe: By the way. Hold on, hold on. You don't have to tell us the specific counties if you don't want. So like, maybe states are okay. Tell us like north, south.

Zack: East, west or. Yeah, we found that like Texas was a really good one, right? More than anything, we just went kind of state by state. And you can do this in your own state like I have a student, Brian Hammersley you probably should have Brian on your podcast, by the way, were you not out? Thanks. Yeah, I will. Brian. I didn't know this, but he started doing land. He's in Kentucky, Louisville, Kentucky. This can be done anywhere, right? You probably start in your own backyard. I probably should start in my own backyard, but then I kind of, you know, anyways, we, we started looking at different states and what we were looking for is, is how many pieces of land they have sold in the county. And we were looking for counties that had volume. I wanted this to be a volume business. I wanted to not spend very much per deal. So I expected my average deal size to be smaller around that 10 to $15000 range because I only wanted to, you know, spend 5 to $15000 per deal to buy them and to spend on marketing to then make ten $15,000 back. And, you know, as far as profits, after all expenses. And so I looked for counties and I literally just went to Zillow and Redfin and I looked up the different counties in in the last six months, how many vacant lots had sold in that price point? Anywhere between $10000 to $200000. Right. And I was like, I just wanted to see that there's a volume of land that's being sold.

Joe: Well, you're following the money.

Zack: Yeah, I'm following the money. And most people think most people think, Oh, well, that's where the competition is. We got to find this new little niche hole that nobody knows about. Right? And it's the same concept that I use with driving for dollars. If you want to know where the deals are being done, where to go, do your driving, get on wholesalers, cash buyers lists, go drive the same dang neighborhoods because I guarantee you there is a deal on the same street guarantee you.

Joe: Yeah, the competition's a good thing in real estate.

Zack: Yeah. Points. So like it marks the x, like the gold's here. Guys, come here.

Joe: I talk about this in in all of my videos talk about land is follow the demand follow the money and find the best states. And in those states, find the best counties. Find out where the demand is. Okay, so Texas is one of your states, by the way. I've had a hard time in Texas because it's hard to get comps now.

Zack: You kind of have to have MLS access, right? Like it's because.

Joe: Yeah, so you do.

Zack: No, I'm not doing it in Texas, but we looked at like the Carolinas was good, Like we found multiple states that had, you know, volume like that. So, so we just kind of looked around and started dabbling in in a couple of different areas. And we ended up just choosing Florida more than anything because I'm already doing wholesaling there, right? I already had kind of a cash buyer's list. I had a reputation, a title company, you know, some of those things that I already needed.

Joe: Yeah. Okay. So let's say Florida is your state. You pick some how many counties did you pick in Florida?

Zack: So we're currently testing them all. So, so we, we picked the ones that were close to where our title office was because we already had a real estate agent in that area that was helping us with our single family stuff. So we're like, okay, well, if we find a deal, we'll have an agent right there in the area. That's why we picked that area. It wasn't like it was a lot of math that went into it. But for me, we've just kind of been picking one county at the time in in hitting, it was our first round of mail. And just seeing the overall results, do we get some quick revenue off of that county? What's our total ROI on that county? And we're quickly eliminating the worst and the best and then we'll go back through and really laser focus on the best counties is kind of how we're going to approach it.

Joe: All right. So you doing direct mail?

Zack: Yes.

Joe: Yes. What kind of direct mail are you sending?

Zack: So we've we just started split testing some new things. We were doing an offer letter actually was about 40% of what we thought the value was of the law in those subdivisions. So like on Zillow, you can choose. So once you find the address that you want to market to, you can find out what subdivision it's in, right? Once you find the subdivision, you can have that be one of the filters on Zillow. And we were just saying, okay, lots of that size in that subdivision. Go for, let's say, $40,000. Well, then our offers was 40% of that roughly. What is that, $26,000? 16. 16. Okay. 16.

Joe: Yeah. Right. So then you were sending your first you were sending blind offers, which was what is like a cover page and then a contract attached to it. Yep.

Zack: So it was actually just a one page thing. It's like, Hey, this is who we are, and then here's our offer and go ahead and sign below and you know, the return mail. So it's actually just a one page document that we were using, and it's actually kind of flawed. We started getting signed contracts back in the mail, and it shocked me, absolutely shocked me. I mean, from the, you know, single family space.

Joe: So then those calls where somebody's answering them live or they're going to voice mail or What were you doing?

Zack: Yeah. So if they call, we have it go directly to voicemail. And we do that with all of our marketing. Just because I don't want my acquisitions guys getting burned out with the F-you, you know, how dare you send me a piece of mail calls?

Joe: Okay, So then are you still sending the blind officer to be changed, though?

Zack: Yeah, exactly. So we started with the just like just the offers because like I said, we were just testing this in the beginning. So all this revenue came from that. All this revenue to the state, the roughly the 160 to $200000 in revenue. Right. It all came from offer letters. We did like a small little test, like it was like a couple of thousand of the addresses we sent just letters with no offer. Dude in our response rate was crazy. We had so many people calling that we could not keep up like our my acquisition guy here in Utah couldn't keep up with leads. He had too many leads. He couldn't even call them all. So we're like, okay, let's go back to all four letters and let's start preparing and training someone to take this over. So, so over the last three months, we brought on who's actually a student. He wanted to come work for free. We flew him out here. He started driving for us. He started doing lead management. We obviously didn't have him work for free, but I love the initiative, right? Yeah. And he started driving. He was doing driving for driving for dollars for here in Utah. But then he also started doing lead management, helping Hayden qualify these leads that were coming in. And now he is our full time land acquisition guy actually signed a land contract today. Shout out to Dustin. So proud of him. Yeah. So, so now we're going a straight letters. So now because he's going to be able to service those and have the time to do so.

Joe: I've always argued you do more deals with neutral letters, I call them, right? Yeah. It's just a postcard or a letter that says, Hey, do you want to sell your lot? Call our 24 hour recorded voicemail and we'll send you an offer because you're going to get more calls that which means you're going to get more leads, which means you're going to have more. You're going to be able to make more offers and do more follow up, are going to have more follow up people. So and then he's a buyer. Offers are going to be better, too, aren't they? Because now you're looking at a deal and saying, all right, well, this one's on the water. This one's got to better access this one. So you make a better hire or.

Zack: Or you send an offer. Yeah. Or you send an offer too high. And they're like, I'm interested. And then you do more due diligence on it and you're like, Crap, We sent it out offer in, you know, 15,000. We should have only offered four, you know, So that that's a hard that's a hard sell.

Joe: But you know, you were, when you sent these blind offers, you're sending them at 40% of what you think they were worth. Which how much of them did you have to actually go back and renegotiate a lower price on what happened?

Zack: A lot. There was especially one subdivision. We really screwed up our comps. And you know, for Miguel, he does all of our marketing. He got he got razzed pretty good by the sales team.

Joe: But. But you still did deals.

Zack: That's yeah, we sealed the deal. Yeah.

Joe: Ray, I had him on my podcast and we've had him on twice to my most popular podcast ever on Vacant land. And he was saying sometimes what he'll do is he'll intentionally send offers four times to high just to get the phone to ring. And then what he does is like, Oh, you know what, I'm sorry, that number is just not going to work. I'm looking here and, you know, like, what's the best you can do? And shuts up and listens and the seller comes back. But I love that strategy. And sometimes there's a letter that we send that has the check in that shows through the envelope, you know, I'm talking about. And we did that and got about a 2.2% response rate, which is pretty good. But every single on on that check is a dollar amount of what we can offer for your deal. Now, it's not a contract. So it's kind of this combination of an offer and a neutral letter, but it's a check that's coming through an envelope and it says, Hey, if you want a real offer, call us. You know.

Zack: I wonder how many people try and cash it.

Joe: Well, on the back it says, do not deposit, not a real check and all that stuff.

Zack: But still, how many still tried to defy that?

Joe: Maybe. And I don't know maybe that's need it be careful about we're more careful about that. But anyway every single one of them that we turn of the 3500 letters that we sent, we got seven deals under contract. Six we got six deals under contract. So far we've sold five, and we might just cancel the sixth one, I think. I'm not sure where that's at yet, but we it cost us, I don't know, bucks four grand in list and mail for that. Probably less. And we've made 24, 48 and then 15. We've made about 65 $63,000 in profits from those offer letters kind of as it was. And but those were the most hard. My, my acquisitions guy was upset is like Joe, everybody is so mad at me. This is humiliating. This is embarrassing. I said, I know. Just apologize to blame them on, you know, your manager made a mistake on the mail and just apologize and but then turn around and ask immediately, Hey, this won't work for us. We're sorry, but what is the best you can do? Can you go any lower than that? And then listen to him talk. It's amazing. It works. Yeah.

Zack: Yeah. And we didn't necessarily want that either. And partly because we have both in Utah as well as in now in Florida, we have a real estate agent that we push leads to for people that want to work with a real estate agent. So for me, I want anyone that has any intentions to sell to call us because we can pre-qualify. What do you need? What do you want? What's your timeframe? What's the condition? Once we identify that their best interest is to not work with an investor, we say, you know, maybe we're not the best fit. If you don't want to work with an investor, you want to squeeze the most. Maybe it makes sense to work with a specialist that can get you an end buyer that will pay top dollar and it'll take more time and more hassle. We have someone on our team that's a we don't call them our real estate agent. We say we have someone that is a valuation expert where they.

Joe: Why don't you say a real estate agent? Why don't you say realtor?

Zack: Because nobody likes them. All people are. So people are going to hear that the podcast and be like, No, that's not true. It's true. Nobody likes real estate agents. I was kidding everybody. But nobody wants to be sold, right? For example, you pull up, you pull up to the car dealership and there's hungry salesman walks up and he's like, I've got the car for you. You're going to be like, You know what I mean?

Joe: Like, I was that age that my family and I were in Jackson, Wyoming, probably ten years ago on a 4th of July parade, you know, in Jackson, Wyoming, beautiful town. And this there is an announcer announcing all of the community floats that were coming by. And one of the floats or whatever was a realtor and a realtor was walking through is a popular realtor in the area, in the community, and was throwing candy to the kids. And the announcer says, Oh, hey, there's Debbie, the realtor. This is a hard. And I never seen her work. There was like, I could there was a several thousand people there. This poor realtor lady is giving away candy and the announcers on the P.A. system that everybody is listening to like, oh, there's a real Kelly whatever. And he was this is the hardest I've ever seen her work. He that batting la her she was so embarrassed. I can't believe I'm mad. She must have been from that.

Zack: Oh, I bet you're so mad. Well, I it was a joke, right? Like, there is a time and a place. That's why we passed people to real estate agents. There's a time and a need, and they shouldn't work with an investor because it's not in the seller's best interest. It's not what they want to do. Yeah, and sometimes they is the opposite is true and they don't want to work with an agent's not their best interest. It's not what they need, it's not what they want. So our job is to find out, you know, find people that want to sell and then find out how they want to sell and how they want to proceed. And so we do this with land. We do this with single family homes. And in just the last, I think month and a half just here in Utah, we've signed for listings on single family homes, just passing those leads. One of them was $1,000,000 listing. Think we got like 70, 60, $70,000 in revenue coming just from retail leads.

Joe: Now, you're a realtor yourself. Is that how you get the money from it?

Zack: No. So what he does is he has some marketing stuff that we built him for. So we have ways that we can have him pay for marketing and so forth. So we don't necessarily make much off of it or make profits, but it helps supplement our marketing costs, which is, which is huge because our leads that we're throwing away, there's people that need to be helped in. These agents need to pay for marketing. We be so good for them. Yeah, that's so good.

Joe: Whenever I'm talking to an agent, you know, I try to find out what's their timeframe? Do you know what's more important to them? And I always ask like, you know, sounds like a nice property. Why would you even want to sell it? Or I might say something like, but like, why would you even want to say, Oh, yeah, this is I was like, you know, why don't you just listing with the realtor? Because if you want to get that much for the property or if your goal is to you've got lots of time and you want to get the most highest price for it, I'm not your guy. Why don't you just listen with a realtor and I'm not an agent, by the way? I tell them that. And so it really does a lot on the negotiation part of it, because I'm not chasing them for a deal, right? I'm making them come to me. I'm not sounding desperate.

Zack: Most people don't believe that we really do this show. They don't, right? They're like, Why would you do that? You're going to talk your way out of a deal. And to prove Joe's point, if you watched day four of the 40 day challenge, I get Jerry Tidwell on the phone who I loved to death, wealthy investor himself. In three of the wholesale contracts I got there, one wholesale contract and the two rentals I got from Jerry. And I said that it's recorded, it's on day four. And I said, Jerry, they're great condition, they're remodeled. Why don't you just listing with an agent, you'll make more money. And he says, I don't care his sentence, I don't care.

Joe: He really has time to do the other day. She just wants to leave Arkansas and go to Alaska. She doesn't care. I just want him anymore. Yeah. All right, cool. So these deals, real quick, you did you try to buy them and close on them as soon as possible? The land? Yeah. The land deal.

Zack: Yes, yes, yes. I funded all of them with my own money. I bought them and just listed them is what I've done. I know there's ways to make more money by selling them like seller finance, selling them on contract, basically, and charging interest and even make more money on the total price. So he sold all of them to on the MLS and pretty and all of them bought our land with cash offers.

Joe: Right. So you closed on him as soon as you could. You didn't wait, you know, until you found a buyer and then closed on them.

Zack: No, no, we've, we've closed on them within a week every.

Joe: So what are you telling people. What do you teach people that may not have the money. You can't close on them like you did. And how do, how do you recommend they do it?

Zack: Yeah. So you can wholesale them just like, you know, you can do with a single family home. You can go to someone like me that's buying in that area. I have people that call me because they see me buying land and I'm having people call me wholesalers that are wholesaling land. I talked to a guy this week actually, so you can wholesale them. What that is, if you're not familiar with this process, your purchase contract basically has to have a paragraph that says you can assign the contract to an end buyer, right? Obviously talk to an attorney about the ins and outs of this. Make sure you have a solid contract and then you can sign a contract with someone like me, the end buyer. And we have, you know, how much the assignment fee is going to be coming to you. What's the total purchase price, all of that stuff, right? So it's a simple process. There's other options where you don't necessarily have to assign it to an end buyer, but you can go to an end buyer and partner or you can go buy or borrow money. You can borrow private money. I do borrow money as well, like I have. I have two Reynolds that I've purchased, that I have private money. I borrowed money. I have like a half a million dollars in rentals that I've purchased in the last 45 days. And I borrowed money from people that I know that I've met and I'll refinance them out for long term financing on these rentals. So I do borrow money as well.

Joe: That's a cool thing I like about land too, is easier in my experience to borrow money on a five or $10,000 property than it is on a $150,000 house. It's just easier. And we're buying them for so cheap, we're buying them at $0.35 on the dollar. It's just the private investors. So much more protected. Okay, cool. That was funny, too. I hear people all the time say, oh, you can't assignments don't work anymore. They're illegal, immoral and fattening. And you can't list properties on the MLS that you don't own. We just did two deals in Florida, southern Florida, where we bought them under contract for about $4,000 each and we sold them each for about $28,000. So we bought them for 4000. We sold them for 28,000. Would you believe it? We listed them on the MLS with a flat fee agent. We found a flat. The broker that listed them for 500 bucks put them on the MLS and we found a buyer that was willing to pay us a $23,000 assignment fee for those two deals. So we're buying them for four grand, we're selling them for 30, whatever the numbers were. Our assignment viewers, 24 grand. I don't know what percent that is, but this guy didn't care because these were such good deals and he just wanted he said, listen, let's make this easy for everybody. I don't want to pay any more closing costs. And I have to and I'm sure you don't either. Let's just do an assignment fee. I don't care how much your assignment fee is. And it just blew me away. Like I even was starting to get skeptical because it is harder to find a title company that lets you do that. It's getting harder to find a realtor that will list your deals that you don't own yet. But we did. We just started going around and asking found a realtor that was willing to do a listing for us. We found a title company that doesn't have any problems doing an assignment. And the thing is, it's a cash deal. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. The seller was happy to get rid of this property because they owed a ton of money in back taxes and we took care of all of that. Anyway, I just like this business. I love this business because it's easy. I would say it's easier to do these deals that houses in many ways. Yeah. So what's your Zack what you going forward then what what's your goal. You're going to keep on doing more land. We'll keep on ramping that up. Still do the houses too?

Zack: Yep. We put in a lot of infrastructure this year, right? We went from a couple. Sales are up to two. We're up to five counting our real estate agents. And you know, since the beginning of this year, last year, we did a little over million in total profits, mostly all from wholesaling like we had like one or two flips. I did cherry pick some rentals or I'm cherry picking rentals every year. None of that. Counts. I have a separate business for that. But this year, our goal and we're pretty well on pace to do a couple million and a big part of that is land. I think land will attribute to about a quarter of that and the rest will be from driving for dollars and wholesaling between the two markets. But we have enough infrastructure in place and everything's set up that if not much else, changes or improves what we've already built, we should be able to do 3 million the following year. Right. Because, you know, it takes time to build up the team and train the sales reps and get them, you know, on their appointment to lead ratios that we need them to be. And so, you know, things are things are looking really good. And it's mind blowing, too, because I think back to eight years ago, you know, remember in Wash and Windows, you know, I purposely bank it. So my biggest window cleaning contract was America First Credit Union. I purposely bank there to remind myself of how horrible it was. So every time I go to a branch I like, I remember being on a ladder right there. And in washing these windows.

Joe: I used to do janitorial work. I used to clean toilets and kitchens, and that's good. That's good to be reminded of those things, isn't it? And not forgetting where you came from.

Zack: Well, and it's and it's also it's you know, this business is hard to it If you guys watch the 40 day challenge, you see that it was a grind. It was a struggle. And then, you know, it's not just rainbows and butterflies here. Even when you're making big checks, there's some hard moments. You know, there's mistakes that you'll make and there's deals that you miss out on. And it can be painful and frustrating and discouraging. Like, I don't want to paint like this perfect picture because it doesn't exist. But one of the reasons that I try and remember to focus on where life was is to help me stay grateful, right. To stay in a positive state, even with some of the stresses and struggles that we go through. Because, you know, I remember fighting over a $20 DVD player that my wife bought because we were out of money, you know, And it's pretty amazing how much life can change when you stay consistent and you learn some of these strategies and stay consistent to implementing them and make the mistakes that's required and have those growing pains that's required to find success. But yeah, it's work. It definitely is.

Joe: I was going to ask you some advice you would give leaving this interview here, some advice you'd give to beginners. What I think you just said it right there. It's consistency in your efforts and not quitting, not giving up because we've talked about some big numbers on this podcast, everybody. And these results, again, are not typical. We're not promising that if you do what we tell you to do, you're going to make this kind of money. But I can promise you this if you don't do what we tell you to do, you're not going to make anything. And the most people, most people fail in this business. Most people do not pay well. They just quit when it gets hard. And they didn't realize that, Oh, I have to work. Oh, I have to invest money in marketing, I have to send letters, I have to talk to people. I don't want to do that. I just want to push buttons and have money fall from the sky. It just doesn't work that way. But yeah, the this is this I love this business. Zack If you were to if you had, if you had to, he could verify those numbers, those big numbers that we talked about. I could verify the numbers I've talked about. So this is a real business. You just have to make the decision. You guys listening? How bad do you want it? Do you really want to do this? Are you willing to put in the work, do the marketing, put the investment, and then be consistent with it? Be consistent is the key. That's the word for the day. Consistency. How about that, Zack? How can people reach you? You've got some cool stuff. You've got a course on driving for dollars, you got a YouTube channel. How can people get in?

Zack: Yeah, so you can follow me anywhere you like. Social media. So podcast is Driving for Dollars Mastery podcast. You can find it anywhere. You find podcasts, you know, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, I have all of them. And so if you have a particular place you like to learn and consume educational content, I definitely create some pretty awesome stuff to help you guys. I want to bless your lives. I do like my way.

Joe: You see my fancy graphics there. Is that pretty impressive.

Zack: I love it. Yeah, it's popping it up. They learn and learn on the system as we go here. I love it.

Joe: Better? Look at that. That's a little better. Yeah, I love it.

Zack: So. Yeah. So Driving for Dollars Mastery Podcast. That's okay. But you can also go to DFDMastery.com. DFT, stands for driving for dollars, DFDMastery.com, have a website there that breaks a few things down for you. Trainings. There's also a hyperlink to our 40 day challenge to that. That website DFDMastery.com. Give full access to that for free.

Joe: So awesome. And if you guys are watching this on YouTube, we will have all the links for everything we've talked about in the description down below. Let us know what you think of this podcast too. Let us know. Was this helpful for you? What would you like me to talk about more Next time I interview somebody like Zack, who's doing a lot of deals and there's some things that I forgot that you wish that we could talk more about. I'd love to hear that from you. Okay. So thank you, Zack, for being on the show. I really do appreciate you, man.

Zack: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's an honor. Always. Thank you, Joe.

Joe: All right, guys. We'll see y'all later. Take care. Comb your hair. And don't forget to remember this thing I talked about. SimpleLandKit.com. Go there right now to get my blanket and see some of the direct mail that we send. It's actually in there and maybe it might be something. You know what? Can I ask you something? Zack? Hmm? Can you send me a copy of the letter that you sent? Can I put it in my second kit? Would you let me do that?

Zack: Yeah. Yeah, I'll do that.

Joe: I'm not putting you on the spot. There's millions of people watching right now, so you can.

Zack: Yeah millions of people, I know I'm totally willing to give back in any way. I'd be happy to. To share the template that we write.

Joe: So let's do this. Put a cover page on your letter. Do it like insert a blank page, cover page with all your contact information and your links to get your stuff so people can reach out to you. But I'm going to put into the kit Zack's letters that he likes to send with his contact info in there, and you guys can see it for yourself. That'd be cool. Thank you.

Zack: Beautiful. Yeah. I'm putting a note here to get all over that. That was not planned, but I love that idea.

Joe: Thanks, man. We'll see you guys later. Take care, everybody. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks, Zack.