Joe:   Hey, Joe McCall here. Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Glad you're here. Today, we're going to be talking about how to fund your land deals. And let's talk about it from a different perspective. Let's talk about it from the perspective of somebody who actually lends money on deals and how do they underwrite your land deals specifically land here. A lot of what we're talking about, you can apply to houses as well, right? So, you know, we prefer to fund the deals to actually take them down to close on them so that we can close on them in 30 days and turn around and resell them. It just makes everything easier, right? With all of these licensing laws that are being passed in different states, making it illegal, immoral and fattening to wholesale properties that you don't own yet, you know, it's hard to put them on the MLS. It's hard to get a realtor to help you if you don't own it yet. So whatever. This is what I've been saying for the longest time. Let's go ahead and take the properties down. Let's buy them. Well, you don't have to use your own money if you don't have a need to do that. You can use OPM, other people's money. There's a lot of funding companies out there. And we've got a guy today, his name is Logan Swanson. We're going to be talking about how he actually lends money on deals, what he's looking for and how he underwrites the deals. What are some of the things that when you're presenting a deal to a private lender, an investor, somebody to partner with, a land funding company, whatever, when you're presenting the deals to them, what are the things you need to be aware of and show them so that you look like at least you know a little bit about what you're doing, right? You're not sending them junk, you're setting them really good properties and this also helps you then in the offer making phase, right? When you're looking at properties, you're evaluating them and you were trying to figure out what to offer. That's what you need to be focusing on. So this going to be a great episode. So stay tuned. Buckle up. Let's bring Logan Swanson on. Logan, how are you?

Logan:   I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Joe:   Glad you're here. You are with a couple of different companies. Land Fixer is your main podcast. You have a podcast about land investing, right?

Logan:   Yes, sir.

Joe:   So talk about just real quick, how did you get into land investing? What were you doing before that?

Logan:   Yeah, kind of the same dopey story you hear from a lot of folks why I quit my day job. I wanted to get into real estate. You know, I'm here in Dallas and everybody said wholesaling the home wholesaling market was saturated and I don't got money to compete there anyway. So, you know, I started with pretty much nothing. I was bartending at night and project manager for a construction company during the day and I borrowed a couple thousand dollar zero interest from a friend of mine to start my company. And I was about six, seven, seven years ago today. And it went from flipping desert squares, got closer to DFW, then kind of went all over the map and got to the point where I was well-connected enough where I was like, Hey, let's just let people bring the deals in. We found out and it was more of a community service in my opinion, because I got to underwrite a lot of deals. And really everybody we partnered with kind of came like a de facto USA coach and student. But, you know, I was able to consistently help folks that I was funding who are maybe newer to the space. So that's kind of where we developed, got into marketing a couple of things along the way.

Joe:   All right, cool. And how long ago was that again when you started doing it?

Logan:   2018. So six years, Yeah.

Joe:   Would you could you give a guess? Approximate. How many land deals have you funded since?

Logan:   So yeah, so funding. We started about a year and a half ago. We've done something like 70 deals, though we do have one big development in Tennessee right now that's going to be about another 24 and that's just coming to market. So really excited about that one. Before that, my land flipping day is probably about 250, maybe 300 properties flipped over that whatever, four years, five years that I was a full time flipper.

Joe:   And when you were flipping, what kind of properties were you flipping? Rural infill.

Logan:   Everything. That's kind of what I prided myself on, and it was ultimately what made it the biggest headache. You know, I think I was kind of a product of the time we were doing the Covid heyday of land investing. We went all over the map because you could miss wherever you went. And then right when that started to slow down, I started looking at this huge inventory was like, I have like 50 properties right now spread out all over the US. I have to sell became its own headache, but now we're pretty selective. We stay pretty much in Texas, a little bit in Tennessee. And I you know, I still like doing rural deals, but not small squares. Big, big rural deals are still great. You know, one of my highest profit deals was a half a square out Brewster County, Texas. And man, I love those. They're still they're still excellent. In fact, I know a guy who he started before me. He worked in two counties, both of them in West Texas. And he never he never changed. There was no reason to he became such an expert in that one area. He made it sold hundreds and hundreds of property owner financed sort of 99, down 99 a month. He's happiest to be in the simplest line and best in company I've ever seen. A cash flow is like a pig, you know? So, yeah, I mean, now it's usually about an hour, hour and a half outside of major city in Texas.

Joe:   Okay, nice. And when you with your own deals, do you sell them for cash or owner financing? You trying to get the cash flow?

Logan:   Both really a goal. Now on the one off deals were mostly shooting for cash, really anything over 40,000. We're trying to get cash on. You know, ideally, if you can do it in six months, you'll get cash. But if our net if our properties are extending past that six month threshold they're not selling, we'll usually start entertaining our financing. But we buy some properties now still that are just geared for owner financing. You know, if you're operating in the sub $20,000 price point, you can still buy some of those lots, right? 2000, 2500 bucks you can own or finance those and be cash positive. Day one, you know, it's in a down payments on a dock feet, but it's just on in the cash flow for like five years. Yeah. So now the sweet man we still like to scoop those up. Any time we are operating in a Texas county. I'd go to the little towns and I try to scoop up little infill lots or lake lots in that area. And those are ideal.

Joe:   I know you'll probably like this, but I I've always found Texas to be a little intimidating because it's hard to get comps. Yes. And you know, so what do you teach what do you recommend? How do you get the comps for properties in Texas?

Logan:   Well, we're at the point now where we don't really go into new areas very often. So what I tell folks now is don't go a lot of places. You know, you need to kind of be an expert in 1 or 2 counties because camping is very difficult. So if you're trying to spread yourself out across the map and Texas, you're just going to constantly be learning expensive lessons. So right now, the best thing to do is know a few solid agents or brokers that you can either pay for MLS comps or work close enough with you to provide them for free. That's your best source. Then you typically look at on market and apply some sort of factorial. For us, it's usually around 75%. That's what we're seeing. If we list a property in Texas, it's usually selling for around 80, 75, 80% of the retail asking value. So that's a good rule to operate with. But the best thing to do is.

Joe:   If you're going to sell, you're going to sell yours at 75 to 80% of what everything else is selling for.

Logan:   No of my retail. So if I go in, say I'm trying to match what I'm seeing as the retail value, I'm trying to listing where everybody else is listing it or maybe slightly below it, right? Typically the offer that I received that I'm gone with in the last 60 days is around 80% of that value.

Joe:   That's the offer you're sending out to the sellers.

Logan:   Now we buy all of our deals, so we're usually buying 40%. I'm saying, okay, if I have a property, I bought it for 40, 50,000, I'm listing it for 100,000. The offer that we're usually taking and accepting and walking away from the table with is around 80,000, around 80% of our retail list value. And this current market that's going up and down. But right now it's know this actually really informs us on the funding side because we fund a lot of deals. We're tracking these metrics internally. When our partners come to us, they say, Hey, this property's worth 100,000. We kind of know it's usually it's going to go for around 80% of what they're thinking. Then we see pretty much the same thing in our business.

Joe:   Okay, good. I love it. So you guys do deals yourself, but you're also lending money to people who bring you deals. And I wanted to talk about what are some of the things you look for, what are some of the mistakes that you see people make and how does somebody find a bring you a good deal? What is a good deal for you guys? Does that make sense?

Logan:   Yeah. So, you know, probably the hardest part about funding is it's sort of tripartite in your underwriting. You're underwriting the deal itself. Just the property as it lays is trying to determine a retail value for it. You're trying to evaluate the returns on that. So you're trying to you're looking at your calculator to see, okay, if I insert myself and I use my capital and work with title companies over here and we have a survey or at some point what are we actually going to walk away with? So then you just have that sort of internal calculation of is it worth my time and my money to invest in this deal? But you're also underwriting your partner for us. We still lean on our partner to be a chief marketing driver in the deal itself. So a lot of the times we're underwriting first and foremost is the person, right? So we have sort of a detailed application process. They have to stay within our system, provide us good comps. All that stuff sort of helps facilitate that. So the deal itself for us, we have to kind of rely on selling cash as a funder. So we have to be very picky with what our retail value is and our loan to value is about 50%. So if someone says this property is around $100,000 retail value and we believe it, we are probably spending up to $50,000 on that deal. If you go above that margin, say you're willing to fund it 60%. But it's our internal metrics are telling us we're selling for probably more like 80% of the retail value. All of a sudden we'll look like this huge spread on the deal is actually shrunk down dramatically. Then you start incorporating closing costs and things like that and well, it looks like a big spread can really widow itself down dramatically by the time you get to the closing table. But it's not a bad thing if you start with the right price point. And that's kind of why we were talking earlier before we got on the call about the two different types of lending. That we do, whether it's the start of the journey profit share or the fixed rate option that we have. All right.

Joe:   So what is the JVs share? When you lend money on a deal, you'll partner with people on it sometimes, right? How does that work?

Logan:   Yeah. Yeah. So it's pretty standard. I mean, this is what I walked into when I started investing five years ago. Six years ago, I needed money. Partners and the money partners are like, Hey, I'll fund it. But I get 50% of the profit. And boy, that's the lion's share. Now, they were taking a gamble. I kind of understand and understand it from the funders perspective these days, because every time you're working with a new person, you have no idea what that relationship's going to be like. They could disappear into the night. You know, you do encounter hairy deals upon deals that have kind of gone sideways. I lost money on deals there, funding and the partners can disappear. Right. So, you know, it's expensive, but if you're relying on someone else to underwrite it, you know, that's what we do. We underwrite it. So we fund it. We're telling you we think it's a good deal. We provide the money, we assist with marketing. But for us, that profit share starts at 30%. So we start at 30%. That goes at 5% quarterly. So every three months the property doesn't sell. We go up 5%. And if we get to a year and that property hasn't sold, that's when we have to, you know, kind of look into defaulting because chances are we underwrote a dud and we have to scream, sell that puppy and get out of the books.

Joe:   I've seen some funding companies and this what I've done sometimes is I will actually buy the deal in my own name and that do a JV agreement with the person who brought me the deal.

Logan:   Yes. We take title on. Yes. Typically, I should say about 95% of the deals we've taken title on. Now we have funded some bigger ticket properties, some properties that did have some forced depreciation and now where the partner was bringing capital. And any time there's messy capital where they're maybe they're contributing some and we're contributing the bulk of it, then we're willing to share title. So we've done tenants in common in that scenario. But for the most part, if we're funding 100%, we're taking title on that property.

Joe:   Maybe you don't have to answer this if you don't want, but are you using your own money or how much of other investors money are you using or do you have lines of credit? I'm just kind of curious how that works on that side.

Logan:   Yeah, So I have I have one partner in the business and he has a pretty big collection of homes, rental homes. So we typically draw on his line of credit. I do have other options that say we have a development that comes to bear and we're kind of at capacity. Like sometimes these subdivision projects can be millions of dollars, right? So in that case, I do have funders that were willing to bring in on the deal. That can be complicated, though. It kind of doesn't run through land partner funding anymore. It kind of becomes its own LLC and, you know, yeah, it's a bigger deal at that point. The one off deals, our line of credit is perfect. My partner, you know, it's easy to draw off of it's readily available. And since he's underwriting the deals himself, it's full confidence. I don't have to have some passive partner somewhere. It was just trusting me My partner goes improves every deal with me.

Joe:   Okay cool. Let's talk about underwriting. What are some of the things you look for in deals and what are some of the big mistakes you see?

Logan:   Yeah. Well, the, you know, the most obvious we have some pretty much across the board denials. You know, the ones that I say when I'm under any deal, I'll try to kill it as fast as possible. So I start with the most obvious things that would kill the deal for me. And that's, like I said, if the property is fully in flood, if there's access issues, flow is a big issue. And a lot of the properties I've been seeing recently. What are the drag? You say mountain subdivisions are just properties that are too steep to do anything with junk debris. Those are the most common issues, flood plain if I didn't mention. But then after that, if it kind of checks all those boxes, that's when we start opening up Redfin and Zillow and looking at comps and things of that nature to see if they have an under contract at the right price point.

Joe:   So they got to have it under contract, obviously.

Logan:   Yes. Yeah. We don't want to look at anything that's a well, maybe, maybe I'll get it. You know.

Joe:   General rule of thumb, they need to be at about 50% the most. Your land is about 50% of what you feel like you could sell for. We've gone.

Logan:   Above that. But we just have to have like very explicitly clear cops. The 50% allows for fudge. Whereas if you start having and we've done it, you know, 60, 65% of retail value, but the sort of things that we see is like, hey, this is someone who's been through this area multiple times. They have not only comps that are on MLS, but they can show me, Hey, I bought and sold six properties in this subdivision. I already know a broker who has a bunch of people ready to buy it. We also funded deals that were under contract to on the sales side and they wanted someone to step in and hold the property for a couple of months while it went through surveys or whatever else. So if we go above that 50% threshold, we have to have a whole lot of confidence that the property is going to sell quickly and for the value that they're telling us.

Joe:   Okay, so talk about how do you get that confidence? What makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside and like, okay, good, let's do this.

Logan:   Yeah. So that's when you get into like, true camping. True camping out land is a little more difficult than you might think. It's not just pulling like there's services out there called price and a number of other ones that sort of aggregate any properties that are in a similar price. Points within a certain number of miles, and that's where they come up with the per acre value. And that's really not the best way to do land. You can get burned doing that. So where we start is we identify like, all right, who's the ideal buyer for this property? If it's, you know, a homesite somewhere near DFW? Okay. It's probably going to be a builder. If it's a lake, like, well, maybe there's a community or a building near there. If it's a recreational log, well, it's probably in the Hunter, etc., etc. They identify the best use for the property, who that buyer is. Do a little research to make sure that that person exists. Right. Because sometimes it doesn't. And then you really try to find property comps that align with that. So instead of looking at any 50 acre property, say, and that's what we're competing against in Tennessee, you have to look at Tennessee properties that are actually suitable for those exact purposes that your property is for home sites. No, that's it. Say it's a mountain home site. What people are buying in North Carolina. Here's an example. If someone because we do a lot of these North Carolina mountainside home sites, what people are buying isn't just the land and its proximity to something else. It's the vehicle, right? So you could have 3 or 4 property that are all very close to each other with very similar comps and one sold way higher and one sold way lower. And the reason for that is because of the view. And a lot of people don't know to look at that. See, if you go into Google Maps, you kind of have to do that. So once you determine who it's for the exact details of your property. So that's the road access, the quality of the road, the utilities, the slope, the drainage, the floodplain, all those sorts of things that line out on the diligence report. And you have to compare apples to apples to the best of your ability. So you should only be topping that property next to properties that are similarly flat. Similarly, access similar utilities and that gets you as close as possible to how you can comp.

Joe:   All right, So I've done that a lot. When I'm looking at comps, I try to find the property in Zillow and Redfin, get as close as I can and zoom slowly out till I find similar properties and look at average price per acre or median price per acre times you can get too many comps. And if you get too far away kind of makes it hard. But I love that. So one of the things I've told people too is if you present this deal to a private investor who's experienced in land or a funding company that does a lot of land, they're a great filter is if they lend money on the deal, right. You probably shouldn't do the deal. You should probably pass on it. But at the same time. Logan, you don't want people just bringing you any deal that they find to make you do their work for them, right? Like, so you talk a little bit about like he did already, he's got to have road access, can't be under floodplain or whatever. But what are some common mistakes that you see people bring you? Do they not give you enough information?

Logan:   Yeah. That's trying to be yes. As you see, you're kind of getting into underwriting the partner. So the person that brings you the deal, you know, if have to get into bed with that person for a little while, you know, a lot of our, you know, kind of a 30 to 90 day timeline for turn around is ideal. But a lot of these they'll stretch into, you know, five, six, seven months, especially in this market, things are slower. So what we're looking for is we actually designed the application to do a lot of this for us. So if you apply for funding on our website, we're going to ask for your due diligence. We're going to look at your contract. We have you upload a signed copy of your contract. That's a good indicator. Some of the junky contracts, it might not know what they're doing right. If their due diligence is really just a price sheet that's uploaded or that's all the research they provide us, that's a big indicator that they don't know the market very well. We ask them if they've done deals before in that area and if they say no, okay, well we have a way that I like them. I prefer to work with somebody that sort of experienced, at least in the States, maybe not ideally the county. But besides that, one of the big things that we're also looking for is like they should already have a broker contract. Like in this day and age, you can have a realtor or a broker that you're already talking to. That's part of the due diligence before we send any sort of acquisitions out. We actually I mean, that's one of the big things that we offer is I've done a lot of coaching of folks. Just how do you find a good broker or good realtor? So if they've done all those things, they have good comps, they have a good realtor, their due diligence actually itemizes all the things that would be a cheap concern, etc., etc.. Well, the cherry on top is we request them to record sort of a live video that overviews the property. So they pull up the property and they get on Google Maps and they explain the pros, but more importantly, the cons. I want them to be able to be as straightforward and genuine as possible and acknowledge anything that's kind of a downside on the property because most properties have some downside to them, especially if we're buying them at a discount. Usually there's something that makes it a little hairy. So we want that address. We want to see that they are experienced and knowledgeable enough to identify it, bring it to our attention and kind of already have a solution or an explanation for how we're going to address that in the dispo cycle.

Joe:   Interesting. That's a great idea. Getting them to do a little more video, talk a little bit about how do you find a good realtor? Good broker.

Logan:   Yeah. Well, and they're kind of rare, actually. I mean, especially in land right here. And do yourself this. Great example. I think there's I don't remember the exact date stat, but I'm pretty sure it was like there is two realtors for every one transaction now, two transactions for every realtor in Dallas and a six month period. So they're everywhere. I mean, most these people do two 0 or 1 transaction a year. So do you just go into like a Facebook store and say, Hey, does anyone know a realtor in this area and some buy sell group, whatever, or go to Google? Chances are that you're just going to start running into people who maybe have done transactions. Some have no transactions, but very few are going to have a lot of experience with land itself. So we always advise folks like put together kind of scripts, right? Try to pick, you know, three or 4 or 5 questions that you can quickly ask a broker or a realtor that will tell you if they're good or maybe not a great fit for listing and selling your property. For us, we really like folks that have been born and raised in an area. Land is almost always going to have some sort of history behind it, you know? yeah, Well, it used to look like this ten years ago and then sell. And so we have built this over there and changed or modified it. I like locals. I like locals with connections. So that's one of the first questions I asked, like, hey, if we had to do any improvements, do you know someone who could put a driveway in or clearing the land for us? And if they say, yeah, absolutely, and they start naming names, that's a really good indicator that they've done land transactions before. Now you ask them explicitly, Have you done a lot of land transactions and if so, how do you market and show properties? That is its own trick. If you've ever like, you know, my first subdivision, I was the guy who sold all the properties. So I met people out at the property on a regular basis and I realized it's kind of a challenge to actually walk someone through a property, explain the vision to them, especially if it's ten acres and it's wooded. And that's not uncommon for our industry. So they'll usually have some techniques. They're going to ask how they develop marketing material. And as you're talking to them, you kind of just start typing this information out. If you have five questions and you talk to ten realtors about it, you can actually create a spreadsheet and share whether or not these people that answer this question well. So I would suggest getting in touch with anywhere between 10 and 20 realtors before you select the person that you want to work with, because ideally you're establishing a long term relationship. I don't suggest kind of jumping from county to county and state to state. I suggest taking a few areas and settling in because that's where you can then become an expert and have some seasonality and and establish relationships that are going to transcend any individual deal or go beyond, you know, multiple deal, ten, 20, 30, you know, Yeah.

Joe:   So explain again, where do you start looking for those realtors for us?

Logan:   I first start with my network. So here in Texas you can go to any Facebook group. I mean, I guess from anywhere in the country, go to any of the land Facebook groups and start with like, Hey, does anyone have a great realtor for this area? I really like getting suggestions from. Find out if they give me some suggestions and I start with them, but I also have my admin go and call the people that rank on top of Google. I also have go to landscape com and see who comes up when you're searching for those properties in that area, especially if they have things that are land related in their description, that's a good indicator. And then I also look at say I'm looking to buy like every mailer or acquisition cycle should have its own very specific product here and searching. You're not just randomly blanket sending mail to an entire county. Ideally your mailers going to like, I'm looking for development properties in somewhere in East Texas and Hopkins County. So I'm not blasting mail anywhere. I'm looking for properties of a certain size that are running either north or south of I-30, and you start putting restrictions on it and you kind of get an idea of the exact sort of property you're wanting to buy. You then go and try to find that property on Laska Zillow or whatever, and the realtors that have those listings are a great person to go talk to because ideally someone might have done that homework for you. So if you contact people who are already listing similar properties in the area that you're moving into, it's a great place to start. And especially farmlands.com because I don't like hanesbrands.com. I want my realtor my broker to pay for lands that.

Joe:   I usually always start with Land.com like you said. But I also just like to go to homes.com and look for land in this certain area. Sold recent sold and you'll get a ton of vacant land listings that have sold recently and you can get the contact information of all the realtors there that have sold land in the last six months and just write down all their contact information and call them all you can find the listing agents and the buyer's agents names and phone numbers and emails. It's a great place to start, but.

Logan:   I like that idea. Shortcut.

Joe:   Yeah, I like that. Of the ones that can already advertising on Land.com and the family of websites there. I mean those guys, they're spending 500 to a thousand dollars a month to advertise on Land.com.

Logan:   That's not cheap.

Joe:   No. And they're local.

Logan:   It's more than that. I think the distance directions are starting at like 700 people paying 1400 bucks a month for ten listings out of damn control.

Joe:   Yeah, it's crazy. And why people are still doing it, I don't know. But, you know, it's a number one place. People go to the list website to list their vacant land and yeah, there's demand for it.

Logan:   Yeah, yeah, I love that. And that also will. Be informative of their quality of photography. Like did they get a good drone footage out? Is their description really well done? Do they actually are all the details filled out? I mean, some of these people put zero effort into listings. It's. It's bizarre.

Joe:   If they have Google Street View maps in their pocket or.

Logan:   Gifs.

Joe:   Or. Yeah. Or satellite images. Yeah. You don't want to. You don't deal with them. Okay, so you sent me a link. Here's some cool things at the land fixer.com. A five minute underwriting. Can you go through that a little bit? I know we've already touched on a lot of this, but kind of talk about that.

Logan:   So the idea is this is kind of something that I had to build out of necessity for myself. And this I kind of put it together in a slide show for your audience here. But this is exactly what I do when I get a new application for my funding. The idea, again, is to kill the deal as quickly as possible, because when you get to a certain level, I think any of us at any level of real estate, you get to a certain level where now your time is the biggest commodity that you have, right? So for me, if I spend an hour underwriting a deal that was obviously in floodplain, now I just missed it in the beginning or something stupid like that, you know, I'm in trouble, you know, I'm not doing my job very well, so I need to be I need to guard my time really well. So I put together the sort of five minute underwriting template. We can start pretty much at the beginning, like the first thing I use where I identify problems. The biggest thing that.

Joe:   What I shared on the screen here, which has your slide show in it, do you see that?

Logan:   Okay. Okay, Perfect. Yeah. So. Well, there we go. There's the outline mapped out. Find the easy deal killer, simplify it, find out your buyer carpet, and then create a realistic retail valuation. And what we're trying to do is we're solving for the most obvious things, like I saying the time waster. But really the biggest one is number three is not being overly optimistic in your retail valuation. You really do not want to buy a property with a hope and a dream that this is going to be worth a lot more than you think it is, that that is where you start getting into real trouble. You're holding on to properties way too long. Every once in a while I'll get into a series of phone calls. I do this. I kind of reach out to the year ahead as I'm struggling right now, and maybe I can help them with five ten minute phone calls and it almost always comes back. Number three is they overvalued a property and now they're at a point where if they short sell it, it kills their business that they only started with 30 grand to begin with or whatever. And for us, that kills our funding. You know, we jam up our pipeline any time we buy a property that sits in inventory way too long because we might lose money on it or not make the money necessary to cover our debt expense. Yeah. So, you know, first thing mapping it is obvious, but there are different mapping services that are well worth it. Getting something like land in the land line. Or if you really don't want to spend any money, you know, you can do the 3D Google Maps and get a lot of this stuff done as well. But big things that can catch you up if you're new is not knowing to look for flood plains, utility easements and Texas can be a big deal. Zoning school districts water features are awesome. Another one that I've been using a lot recently is the well feature. If you're buying land out in the middle of nowhere in Texas, you can assume there's not water nearby. And if you see, you know, a bunch of wells nearby, it's that's a pretty safe bet that you're going to be able to drop well on your property. But do you buy a property and there's no wells around it? You could be in trouble. We've dealt with that issue before. But I start with literally if I it's variance and you're coming into this experience, just go turn on every overlay, either one at a time or all at once and kind of see all of the data that's being handed to you. School districts, you know, different parks, what's owned by the state, what's owned by the county, city lines where it's the city limits. So it's a big one. And you'll start seeing things that like Florida wetlands, you know, they're distinct from floodplain, right? But you'll start to see the things that a mapping service will suss out very quickly. And if you're in a new area, you'll oftentimes you'll probably catch 95% of the issues before moving forward. So this is the easiest way to kill it. And then you just kind of start zooming out on that property. You start taking notes of what's around. You know, this is a recreational property. People always want to know where the closest Walmart is or the gas station or whatever features are around state parks, etc. So you got to zoom out. Slowly but surely. You start taking notes on what you're seeing. Is there value around this parcel other than the parcel itself? Because most of the time when you're selling vacant land, you're actually selling a dream or the future intent of that property a little bit more than you're selling the property itself. So let's zoom out a little bit and then you start looking for the easy deal killers that maybe are pop up in the overlays on a mapping system. The biggest one is access. And I think one of the guys I don't know if you're familiar with Fridays, Ari Fridays or something like that, they will only buy a deal if you can see it from Google Maps, Street View. And that kind of blew my mind because when I started, I worked in a lot of rural areas. And call me up a couple of times where he pulled it up on a GIs map. There was a there is a rogue straight to their property, no problem. But it was so rural, the Google Maps didn't follow it. But if we follow that road out to the highway, it's gated. I had that issue a couple of times. Right. So access that's unencumbered is huge. And ideally now we don't buy anything that doesn't have a road to it. We don't buy easement to access stuff anymore. It's not a deal killer for a lot of folks, but you just have to be strategic about it. Sure. And there are some states that allow for you to maybe go too far there, but you can gain access if you don't have legal access. And that's its own business strategy right there. But you look at for wetlands, flood plain, irregular shape, this kind of brings you to the conversation of who you're in buyer is, but it's kind of funny. You'll see some really crazy looking parcels when you start digging around GPSs maps on a regular basis. It's kind of nuts.

Joe:   Yeah, yeah. I saw sometime somewhere. I was just looking recently and there were these lots that were long, super long and scant. They were about maybe 20ft wide and maybe a half mile long. It was the weirdest, most bizarre thing. And I. I don't know what it was. Yeah, that's something that's a little irregular.

Logan:   Yeah. Divided interests, for sure. But even, like, think about it in residential. A residential sense. There's, for example, there's subdivisions where they subdivided lots for homebuilding, but they structured the easements in such a way that if you got an irregularly shaped lot, you can't actually build on it because the setbacks from each road is a certain. And it's funny, actually, that's not a long story, but I worked in a subdivision where I was buying and selling land very, very cheap, where the people had no intention to ever build on it because you couldn't build on it because of the setbacks. But they did want the street address to get their kids into a specific school. So we were buying these lots just to get the address. But they're getting the students while yes, they're still buyers out there but isn't very careful. So then, you know, once this, it's kind of passed all those all those different steps. It's there's no easy deal killers. We map that out. It looks great. And you've taken some notes there. Well, now is when you're really trying to get into like, how do I comp this property? And again, when we're comp and we're trying to apples to apples, we're not just doing arbitrary per acre or in a third mile image or anything like that. This is where you start taking note. A There is a flat. Is it rolling, Does it have views? Is there a water feature? Anything that you think could affect the retail value in this property, whether up or down, you want to scribble it somewhere and this can be really quick. It can take you 30s to pretty much absorb most of these features. You know, here I listed in the shape, is it cleared or not clear? You go look the soil types. That's actually a really neat feature of land ID and I think a couple of others. Yeah, you scribble this down so that when you're looking at other properties you have a quick reference for if you're comping or comparing, it's one property years as a water feature in this other 1000 well, maybe years as justification for a slightly higher value. Or you're looking at a property you're wonder why is this one like so high above market and you find it has a waterfall or cave on it or something like that noise. Okay, well, I should mix this. And then you're looking at the big question like, who's the buyer? Because ultimately we don't list a property on the MLS and then some mind, you know, it's not bought by some arbitrary figure somewhere. It's usually bought by someone who has the intention. Maybe they never do it, but they have at least the intention of utilizing the property, right? So if you're buying Eloqua in Texas and this property is really close to the amenities and it's right next to the boat area, well, those are things that really stand out because the person is looking to buying that property is going to value those things highly. Or if you're buying a property that's a hundred acres and you really only see it's used as recreational and your ideal buyers a hunter, well, that's actually too small. It's kind of hard to hunt just a hundred acres if you're comparing it to all the parcels around it. So if your ideal buyer for a 100 acre parcel somewhere is a hunter that it's not the right size, well, you need to really take that into account because they might be motivated to go buy something that's of the right size and not necessarily your parcel. So you can make it pencil out looking at the resale values and not price per acre, but it may not have a real buyer for it, or at least not a long line of them.

Joe:   Cool. Next is comps.

Logan:   Yes. And this is where you take all your combined information and you put it on a spreadsheet. I don't think there is any specific, best or highest way to count parcels, but there are some things that you can't ignore. Right? So you need to, if possible, not all states allow this, but if possible, you need to look at sold comps and not for sale comps. You want to put them all out on a spreadsheet. You want to write down what it was listed for, what it sold for the acreage. And based on market, that's a really big one that I think it's ignored way too much. We could justify the retail value of almost anything, but if it took four years for that property to move, that's not a market you probably want to operate in and shoot for that retail value. So you just gather as much that information, you put it down and as you're putting each comp down, I usually put a link to that individual property so it's easy to reference if you need to, and I'll put notes. This is where you. And to go back to that previous Slide three where I was taking notes. So the comp, as you know, is flat cleared as road access. That's good. And utilities make those notes and keep going. You'll find that you can kind of apply a factor to all of these times based off on what is most important to your and by. So if you're and buyers looking to build a house on it well it's they're probably going to really want out roads utilities you know school district things like that will really matter. So those are the sorts of things that you're going to weight highest when you're looking at comps. If they check out and they have all the qualities you want, that's a comp and you give that 100% value and the weight of your copy, if it's missing 1 or 2 of those features that the beat comp and you apply some sort of factor to lower the value or the weight of that comp in your formula belts, really you're just going to aggregate these comps, weight them, and then you're going to do some sort of median or average function to give you a price per acre, you know, median or average divided by acres. And it gives you a price range.

Joe:   Yeah, Whenever I'm looking at median versus average, just whatever numbers lower, that's the number I use.

Logan:   Yeah. It's actually exactly how it's built into my spreadsheet is it's got a median, it's got an average and they just start next to each other. One is not better than the other. It's usually what's most realistic. That brings us to number six. In this day and age, especially if you're looking to flip land, one of the things that you need to weight very heavily when you're addressing the retail value of property is that timeline. It's that days on market. It's if I list this property, it's got to be almost below everything else. If it's of average quality, if it's exceptional. Okay. And then maybe you want to creep higher towards like a standard retail market or a type of market. But for us, especially if you're working with a funding partner who makes more money, the longer it's on market, you're incentivized to move that puppy real quickly. It's possible. So for us that's outlined in car value, we're always as realistic as possible. We might say pessimistic as possible. Not necessarily, but we tend to we tend to be on the conservative side when we're looking in every comp or establishing a retail value. And that kind of final decision for us is a gut call almost every time, unless it's very obvious. But we look at each other and say, Hey, is this really 50% of our retail value? And if it's not, we're learning it. Best of what I would rather do. Ten speedy deals that sell quickly. And we really dialed in that retail value than 20 long hold confusing up and down, emotional swinging, taking up bandwidth deals. You know if I make more money on the long ones, I want I want to move quickly. That's our industry.

Joe:   You know, it reminds me of transactional funding. And if you ever use transactional like one day transactional funding for deals is something that something that we have with for our students inside of our inner circle. Some of these properties, you can't get funding on them from a private funding company or from a guy like Logan's because there's just not enough room in there. But if you have a seller that's willing to wait and can let you and give you six months, you may be able to market that property while you have it under contract. And when, if and when you find a buyer, you could use our transactional funding to actually close on the A to B and sell it on the B to C on the same day. And we don't charge any money for that, which is crazy to think about. But I know I have some people that do that. They just if the title company won't let you do an assignment, then you can use their they if they require you to have money in escrow to actually close on and then turn around and sell it. There are resources out there called transactional funding. So sometimes you don't want to deal and I say this too often too, like you need to put yourself in the mind of the buyer and what's going to make this deal so sexy to them? They're going to be like, my gosh, I'm going to drop everything and I'm going to go make an offer on this property. I want to go look at it. And it's mainly the price. And I see this over and over again. People are too optimistic with their values and what's what they think they can sell it for. And if you just did something as simple as take the lowest three or 4 or 5 properties that are currently listed and get an average or median price per acre, whatever number is lower, and just multiply that number by 85%. And that's the price that you're going to advertise your property for. You'll probably sell it pretty quickly. I mean, that'll get you 85, 90% of the way there.

Logan:   Yeah.

Joe:   And that's where you start, right? You start from that, what's that conservative number? And then you subtract your numbers from there. You subtract your profit, you subtract realtor commissions, your funding fees, you subtract closing costs. I call it an oops factor. Yeah. And you subtract photos or whatever, and then you come up with your number. General rule of thumb, again, you don't want to be more than 50% that number. And you do that. You can get those deals funded all day long.

Logan:   Yes. Yeah. And I mean that's, that's usually like I'm, I'm kind of a big hearted guy. So people are bringing me these deals and I think they're like incredible. They're going to make all this money. And I tend to have to be the person to bring them back to reality and say, okay, I know you're seeing this. Grand a profiteer. You think you're going to throw of it? That's only going to take 30 days or whatever. But that's just not how it goes in this market in the most part. Now, it does sometimes, like, you know, if I to share a success story, we had someone I guess it's probably about three months ago we bought a property was $72,000 on the acquisition. He said it was worth 200, maybe $220,000. Now look at it. The car is in Ohio. It didn't seem like a very busy market. And I was I couldn't dismiss it. I couldn't go and find comps that said this wasn't going to sell at this price point. But I got in touch with the broker. This is something I do on almost every deal I find as I talk to the broker or the agent directly. And I kind of beat him up and I say, what's your experience? You know, if if that partner is providing that by broker a realtor and everything seemed to check out, but I just had this feeling like, I don't know, man. It's a slow market. Well, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Well, he proved me wrong. That property. We bought it 72,000. He used the fixed rate like I was telling you about. And that thing was under contract in 20 days at full. Asking price under 9000 is where we listed it. And he walked. 45 days after we bought the property, he walked with $100,000 in his pocket. And it's incredible because it was for every time that I have to have one of those like sad conversations where I'm kind of deflating, someone is really excited about a deal. I have one of those, whereas there's someone like they're like just, you know, to walk away from a landfill and we're able to help them feel very confident in it. And we supply the money. And I mean, that was that was insane. And that's just a real blessing.

Joe:   It happens. All right. So let's talk about how people can get more information about you and your company. You've got a couple of websites. Your prime land exchange is one of your main ones. And this is where you do what?

Logan:   Yeah. So probably an exchange where we it's a listing service for other land investors. We're in the business of creating a unique audience of real estate investment minded individuals that may not necessarily see land as an asset. And it really is like if you compare a land to gold or a bunch of other places where you can put money if you're lucky and smart, especially in this market where cash is king, you can buy some really cool properties very affordably, kind of at a wholesale price. So our goal is to connect those real estate minded buyers with good properties that I think are safe investments online. We also have a podcast there that's the Land Fixer podcast where I kind of, you know, it's not really geared towards land flippers per se. They, you know, they do, they do chime in. You know, I said Kendall LeJeune on last week so we do and those sorts of folks on but I'm really more interested in learning about all of the things associated with land that aren't talk well very often like I have a soils expert coming on shortly my talk to a surveyor as I've gotten a big Texas broker that's going to be coming on and talking all about how they list land market as brokers and agents and all sorts of really cool stuff from other funders. Really, whatever I can think of that interests me as it relates to land I'm bringing to folks when it really helps reinforce that, make that purchase of a piece of land if they know to get investment.

Joe:   So that's called the Land Fixer podcast. Yeah. And you also have here land partner funding.com, land partner funding.com. Talk about this.

Logan:   Yeah so that's for my land flippers right so if you need capital for your next flip come check us out. We have two options. One is kind of that traditional profit share and the other one's kind of our fixed rate where we charge points that increase monthly. Happy to talk about that. It's all zero out of pocket and we pay for everything. Closing costs within reason as long as it don't get too crazy. And then we also market that property using land exchange. So they're kind of hand-in-glove your property gets listed and blasted out. I have 30,000 plus buyers list that's growing every day. I get splashed out on our social media channels organically and they have a whole host of other things for land investors. I sell website templates. We'll go on and on. But yeah, I just get in touch with me. If you're an investor and you need help marketing your property and I'm very capable and able to help you good.

Joe:   And you, are you active on the social medias?

Logan:   Yeah you can find me on Facebook. You can also just email me directly if you want, the land fixer @ gmail.com. That's usually where I speak with folks in regards to podcast appearances. But you know, if I'm out based, my company is on Instagram, Tik Tok, you know, pretty much anywhere you look.

Joe:   The land fixer at gmail.com.

Logan:   That's it. Yeah.

Joe:   All right, cool. Thank you so much Logan. Appreciate you having you on the show and wish you the best. Thank you, everybody. Again, appreciate you being listening to the podcast, watching this on YouTube. Appreciate you guys. Good. Check out Logan with those links and information. We'll try to put them in the show description down below as well. All right. We'll see you guys later. Take care.

Logan:   Thanks, Joe.