Joe:   On this video today, I'm going to show you how Grant closed 53 vacant land deals in his first 18 months while working a full-time job. And I'm going to show you how you can do the same thing too, all right? Think about that. 53 deals, not over five years, not with a huge budget, not by spending hours a day on the phone with sellers. Grant figured out a simple repeatable system that allowed him to flip land consistently even while managing a full-time demanding corporate job. And here's the best part. He wasn't some special media influencer. He wasn't spending a fortune on marketing. He didn't have a massive team. He just followed a proven process. He stayed consistent and built his way to financial freedom, one deal at a time, and he just recently quit his job. So in this episode, Grant breaks down exactly how he did it, including number one, the step-by-step marketing system that keeps the deals flowing in. Number two, how he scaled from his first deal to quitting his job in under two years. Number three, why most investors quit too soon and how to avoid it. And number four, the number one number that determines how fast you can scale in this land business. So this isn't just theory. Grant is proof that if you put in the work and you follow the right simple system, you can make this happen too in your life. So if you're ready to stop overthinking and start flipping land, then this episode is for you. Let's just dive right in, shall we? How are you doing, Grant? Doing great, Joe. Thanks for having me. I got a message. How long ago was I got, did I get that call or that email from, Was it Ryan?

Grant:   From Ryan, yeah. I don't know, maybe last May or June last year.

Joe:   Yeah. So six, eight months ago, eight months ago. And so Ryan said, Hey, do you know Grant? Like, who is like, he's went through your program and he's doing a bunch of land deals and he lives in St. Louis. And I'm like, what? And Grant is one of those guys who was just quietly working away, doing the deals while he was still working in his full-time job. And I don't remember seeing you much in the Facebook group, Grant, and you were just putting your head down doing, We're doing the work, and so it was so cool. You live about 20 minutes away from where I live in St. Louis. A few weeks ago, I asked Grant, who just quit his job, by the way, because of vacant land investing. Hey, let's have some lunch. And so I started talking to them about this. And the cool thing was this morning I had a coaching call and I was telling them, I said, sometimes like it's easy for somebody who's been in the business for so long, what it was like back then. I quit my job in 2009, started doing real estate in maybe 2006, 2007, part-time, and I forget what it was like to that, the feelings of the insecurity, maybe just the like, does this even work? And so I wanted to ask Grant some questions that my coaching clients from this morning were telling me questions that they got going on in their minds, doubts, some fears, some anxieties they have going on in their mind, because they put a lot of at stake into this. And does it really actually work? And this is why I love interviewing people who are doing land deals, because it helps instill some faith in people to like really believe, oh, yeah, this actually works. And it's not just Joe, the guru guy, it's other people doing the things and it works. And so when I had lunch with Grant, I was asking him And I was like, what do you do again? He's like, I just do what you said to do, Joe. It's like, I thought, dang, is it really that easy? And it is, isn't it? So thank you for being on the podcast, Grant. Congratulations on the success you've had and appreciate you, man. All right. Yeah, thank you. Grant, you told me you quit your job a few months ago. Is that right?

Grant:   Yeah, I retired from corporate America as an engineering department manager in December of last year. Been two and a half months or so already, which is crazy.

Joe:   Okay, how is it working for you? That’s pretty awesome.

Grant:   Yeah. I took a little bit of time off after that because I was burning the candle at both ends and I needed to decompress a little bit. I was a little bit burnt out. So I'm playing catch-up a little bit because of that, but it was totally worth it. It's pretty great being able to spend the time to actually build out my business more and improve inefficiencies. And I plan to scale more this year.

Joe:   Awesome, I love it. Okay, so when did you first buy my program or start learning about land?

Grant:   I think maybe I bought the course in February or March of 2023, I think, started, did the course, started marketing in maybe June-ish of 23. And then it generally takes a couple of months, three to sometimes six months to get the consistency of marketing. I was just doing direct mail, still am. My plan to layer on additional marketing strategies, but right now I'm still just doing direct mail. And after that six months, I really started to see the consistency of doing multiple deals per month. And I was able to do while working a full-time job in a little bit of carryover 2023. But 2024, I did 53 deals while working full-time, which is pretty incredible.

Joe:   53 deals and that's in about a year and a half because we started doing it in June of 23.

Grant:   Yep. Fifty-three deals in… Yeah. To get the pipeline wet in six months or so, really started closing deals and getting things under contract at the end of 23 and all of 24.

Joe:   Okay. So six months, this is something I hope you guys are listening and paying attention here because there is this, the consistency of doing the marketing, doing the work, doing the follow-up, and then you finally start building. It takes a while to build the momentum, but do you think, were you doing mail consistently for six months before you started seeing some results or was it like scattered?

Grant:   No, that's what I meant. That was the biggest change. I've been investing in real estate since 2017, doing by rental properties, done the burr method, done lease options. I've done quite a bit of wholesaling houses. But then after I switched to land, that's really what allowed me to scale and work in the evenings and the weekends after my wife and kids went to bed to really build out the business more and be able to do just to scale it more.

Joe:   So when you started doing direct mail, by the way, you were sending just the plain old boring letter I have in my program, right? That's right. That's funny because I stopped using that. Not that it didn't work, but I just wanted to start testing postcards because they were cheaper. And the particular postcard I send gets a lot more calls, but they're a lot less qualified calls. And you've just been plugging away with this simple letter that still works. And I was remembering like, yeah, when I first got started, I did my first 50 something deals from that letter. And we're still doing deals with postcards. It just doesn't matter. I think maybe sometimes we overthink this and overanalyze it.

Grant:   Yeah, I think that is part of it. A big thing is just to take action and do it, right? And to make sure that the marketing is going out. And that's one of the big changes that I made is making sure that I get a list to a mail house to send marketing out in spite of me. Yeah, so that it goes out every week, regardless of what I'm doing. Let's set it and forget it, so to speak. And then you just receive the calls that come in. and handle the lead info.

Joe:   You said it took three to six months of consistency, but what was your marketing like that first three months?

Grant:  I started out doing just 500 letters a week. And then the first deal came in maybe a couple of months after that, six weeks or something like that. But they were sporadic, right? I'd get a deal and then two deals and then no deals one month. And then it was, that's what I met by six months to generate the consistency. Yeah. And then I scaled up to 750 and then now I'm doing a thousand a week. And I plan to scale higher from there. It's a simple numbers game, isn't it? It's just…

Joe:   Yeah, and we were looking at your numbers and this was so exciting to me like you know your numbers so well You know how many letters you need to send on average to do a deal and what is that number? If you don't mind me asking

Grant:   Yeah, right now about 12 leads that come in, I send 12 offers and I get a deal under contracts.

Joe:   And so 12 offers, those are to people who respond to your marketing. Right. And then, so how many letters to get an offer out or how many letters do you need to send out? The initial letters, because we send neutral letters, right? Yeah. So it's not neutral letters to get a deal. You know that number.

Grant:   Yeah, I mean, it's six hundred or something.

Joe:   We worked it backwards from when we were having lunch over at Cybergs and he has about 600 letters to do a deal, which is crazy. But it doesn't happen like right away. And I love that we're talking about this because people sometimes when they're getting started in this business, when you're doing land or houses, it's easy to get discouraged because it takes some time to start seeing results. And people often many times quit too early. So I wanted to ask some of the people this morning I was talking to were really wanting me to ask you about follow-up. You know, what kind of follow-up are you doing? And is that actually really as important as I'm always harping on?

Grant:   It absolutely is. And that's actually majority of the deals are from follow-up. And even some that, one, we discovered a contract this week, they actually rejected our initial offer over a year ago. And then just from constant follow-up, and most of that's automated from putting them in an automated follow-up workflow. And then when they respond, then it prompts me to reach back out to them or answer whatever they texted back or if they call back and then just work out something that works for both of us to come to an agreement. It works for them. For me, and maybe it was a little bit higher than what we originally offered them, but it still works.

Joe:   Yeah. So what kind of follow up are you doing? Is it direct mail, texts, emails?

Grant:   Both I'm sending additional mailers out as as follow up. So periodically scrub the list of who is, who has responded and then resend that back out to send follow up letters a second, third, fourth time. And then also once they call in, they go into an automated follow up. Once we send the offer, I put them in an automated follow up until they, until they respond positively or negatively. If they reject, then they go in a reject follow up. So they're always in follow up.

Joe:   I love it. We looked at, I think I told you this, in the previous 12 months, this was a few years ago, you did 58 deals and of those 58 deals, four of them came from that first conversation with the seller. So if we would not have done any follow-up, we would have only done four deals that year. And that was, it wasn't like the deals that we were doing were from new leads that were coming in. I'm trying to make this point. On average, it was seven to eight touches over two to three months of follow-up. We looked at our numbers, it's just consistently following up. And sellers, they're very good at hiding their motivation. They're not just going to come out and tell you, yeah, I'm going through all these financial difficulties and problems and I'll sell my property at a huge discount. Because that's one of the things I want to ask you more about because sometimes when people are getting started, they're getting discouraged. They've meant they've sent, they've talked to 20 sellers and they've made 20 offers and they've all been rejected. And the feedback they get at the beginning can be a little discouraging when it's, no, I've gotten offers for higher than that that I've rejected. I always say the rule of thumb is maybe 30 offers, maybe 50, even if it's a hundred rejected offers before you get one accepted. So what do you say to somebody who's just getting started, they've been mailing for a month, two months, three months, and they're like, every seller I talked to says, no, are there really motivated sellers out there that will sell their properties at a huge discount? What would you say to them?

Grant:   Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, that not everybody is going to be our seller. We're not going to be everybody's buyer. Majority of people that respond are going to not like your offer, and that's why they go into a follow-up. And there are some that say, take me off your list, and we take them off the list, and that's fine. There are several that the first initial offer, it's exactly what they're wanting. Or they even, if I get them on the phone and they give me a number, and it's actually less than what I was going to for them sometimes. Yeah. So it's really across the board. Sometimes they're, I offer more and then they accept it, but they still say that what I offered them was less than what somebody else offered them, but they want to go with us just because they want to do business with us. So it's really across the board. All right. They're definitely motivated sellers out there, but the fur, the biggest mindset shift that I think I had a few years ago was that it's a numbers game and you have to expect the no. And especially once you get consistency and you track your data and have KPIs, key performance indicators, then you can understand that I need to talk to or send 12 offers at this point to expect one of them to accept it.

Joe:   Now that's really good. Now sometimes that's less, sometimes that's more, but average. Yeah. Let's talk about KPIs because for me, it depends. When I first got started doing LAN, I just sent them all the voicemail, didn't answer the phones live, and then I'd sent them an offer and only talked to them after they got my offer. What we do now is a little different. Goes, still all of the goals go to voicemail, but we try to call them back first and when we were just sending offers, we would average about one out of every 30 accepted. And then when we started talking to them before we send the offer, we're averaging about one out of every 15. those are just approximate numbers. It may be worse, better for you. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on the market. So are you talking to the sellers first before you send them an offer?

Grant:   So, I started trying to do that more early on because I was working full-time. A lot of the offers that I'd sent out, yeah, I hadn't talked to them. They call in, they request an offer, they give their name or their reference number from the letter. We have them put a reference number on there. And then I put them in a follow-up and say, hey, the offer's on its way. They respond back, okay, thanks. And then whenever they get the letter or in seven days, I automatically send out a message saying, hey, did you receive the offer? just to kind of spark conversation or remind them, and then they respond or don't respond, but either way they're in automated follow-up.

Joe:   You talked about automated follow-up. What tools are you using for that?

Grant:   So I'm, my CRM is REI Blackbook is what I'm using and I built out all the workflows and automation within that. But I also, I built a good portion of my business based off of your course, Joe, and that, but I, because of the need that I had at the time with my job, I was in charge of three different manufacturing facilities for manufacturing engineering in Missouri. And so I would travel is about an hour and a half drive to each one. And depending on which facility I had to go to for the day, I needed to be able to respond quickly and have all the information at my fingertips. So what I did is created a Trello work board, a Kanban board to be able to see visually and move the leads across the different stages and be able to see at a glance and at my fingertips on my phone what the deal is and all of that. So it's a combination of Trello and our ad block book essentially.

Joe:   I love it. I remember when I was working my job and I was working as a civil engineer for these power plants in North St. Louis at the time and also in Illinois, but I used pen and paper. And for me, it was like, I'm on the computer all day. I don't want to be on the computer anymore. And I had a truck with a big old thing in the center that I could write on actually. Don't tell anybody, but I would write notes while talking to sellers on the phone, driving between job sites and I had long commutes. But I remember I developed a system with a bunch of blank lead sheets and every call that would come in or every seller I would, I was doing a lot of PPC at the time. The leads would come in and then I had four folders. One for blank lead sheets, warm, cold and hot. And if it was something I had to do like right away, I'd go in the hot folder. If it was something within the week, I'd put it in the warm and then not motivated or 30 days out, I put them in the cold. And so every day I'd go through my hot folder first and see what did I have to do? I had to send an offer or I needed to call and follow up or call an inspector, realtor, whatever contractors. But whatever it takes man, whatever it takes just get it done. And I tell people all the time. I love freedom soft It's awesome and amazing and rei black books really good, but it does not matter use something right?

Grant:   Yeah. Yeah. It helps when you're using a software package that has the workflows and automated follow ups like freedom soft, like our ad block book. But yeah, to your point, you, as long as you're taking action and doing something, you can still do deals.

Joe:   It doesn't matter the type of mail that you're sending as long as you're sending mail. Yeah. Cool. I got some more questions. You're doing great, Grant. I really appreciate your openness. Some motivated sellers. I'm looking at some of the questions that my coaching clients this morning were asking me to ask you. And some of them was like, before I get to these actually, I know you said you've done about 53 deals. Are you at a, what helped you quit your job or what made you decide, okay, I can quit my job now. I feel good enough with the income coming in from deals.

Grant:   So it wasn't just that. We have rental properties too. And so really, once your passive income is greater than your expenses and then your salary, that was really what gave me the permission slip, so to speak. And then generating additional active income from selling cash, buying and selling for cash. And then it's about 50-50 now where we sell cash and then we sell on terms. So the terms generate monthly cash flow as well to make sure that we have the consistency and the recurring revenue, and then you have the windfalls from cash deals too. All of that, and then just what was in the pipeline at the time too, and just knowing the numbers and having the consistency and the data to show what it would take and just make sure it's predictable, that all of that combined gave me the confidence and the permission slips, so to speak, to put in notice. And I put in two months notice before I left, but yeah, it was time. Did they know you were doing real estate on the side? Yeah. Okay, and they were fine with that? It wasn't really an option, right? I told them, but I wasn't asking permission or anything. I was like, hey, yeah, I have this going on.

Joe:   So for me it was a big deal I did not want them to know that I was doing it and I tried to hide it and I'm a little embarrassed to admit even today like sometimes I'd get my hard hat on and walk the job just because I wanted to make phone calls and get out of The office and call my realtor and call my partners JB and talk about deals while I was walking the job But I always felt for me personally like I wasn't giving a hundred percent to my employer I was doing just the bare minimum because I couldn't wait to quit and did you ever struggle with that in your business or your job?

Grant:   No, there were times I would take a call or respond back to somebody during the day, but I really tried not to do that. While I was working there, I tried to concentrate on that. That's what I was being paid for. I had multiple teams. I was constantly busy anyway, firefighting and dealing with issues and problem solving for my day jobs. That's one of the main reasons why I also set it up to go to voicemail and then call them back whenever I had a chance, right? So I did that really out of necessity to be able to scale. And I've tried call services and some things too, and it was hit or miss on how somewhat successful, somewhat not depending on who's answering the phone. Yeah, all those deals I did with the initial call coming into voicemail because that's really what I had to do. I tried to separate it and do most of the business during the real estate, during launch or after work. I really tried to minimize what I did during the day and do most of it in the evenings or the weekends.

Joe:   I love that and I appreciate your integrity there. I didn't have as much as you did. I'm just saying and I could, I called it my cubic hell. I could not wait to get out and I did the bare minimum. I guess I felt guilty because I was doing the minimum. I got good job performance reviews, but I wasn't giving 110% and I was giving 90%. But anyway, regardless, not about me. So I'm looking at the questions that they were asking me. Motivated sellers, hard to find. It feels like when you're getting started, but it takes the consistency of the marketing to get, oh, I remember what I was gonna say. And this relates to this, the consistency. When you're just getting started, you would send mail, the voicemails would come in, would you, and you said you were sending offers at first and then talking to them if they were interested in your offer.

Grant:   I tried to call them when I could, but depending on what the deal looked like, or I really only called back the sellers that requested an offer where I needed to ask a question. If there was something on the property or something was a little bit unclear, or it looked like maybe they had additional parcels right next to it and wanted to confirm if they wanted an offer for all three parcels, for example, instead of just this one, things like that, starting out is really why I would call. If it was pretty cut and dry and there was comps and it was pretty easy to just generate an offer, then I would just mail it. Yeah. And then see what they're responsive to.

Joe:   Okay, good. And then, because you've done some houses too, what's the difference in terms of doing a house deal or doing a land deal? And have you noticed the difference where it's not as, you don't have to be as quick to make the offers on land?

Grant:   Yeah. I've noticed with land that, and it really depends on the seller, right? And I'm trying to change the business model so that I am a little bit more responsive because I have that luxury now. But I will say with land, the majority of the sellers are way less emotional about the property. A lot of them, maybe they inherited it or they bought it 30 years ago. And so, honestly, a lot of people treat the parcels as, I think you said this before, Joe, about the exercise equipment in your garage. Somebody pays $2,000 for a brand new treadmill and then they use it once and it sits in the garage gathering dust and then they sell it at a rummage sale for 50 bucks. Honestly, it's that same mentality a lot of times, I feel. They don't come out and say that, but it's just the general, you get that feel from talking to them. Whereas with houses, there's a lot more emotion, there's a lot more that goes into it, there's lot more history there usually. So, yeah, overall, I would say land is easier. But let's go to this place. Yeah. There's, yeah, I would say there's less competition. There's more competition and land now, I feel, than there was, but still way less than houses, for sure.

Joe:   OK, cool. Why did you choose the markets that you are in? You don't have to tell us which markets you're in, but.

Grant:   Really, it was starting out, it was a shotgun approach. I chose based on, I wanted to stay relatively close, but then also branch out. And so I am in multiple states, but I chose based off of some of it's in your course on how to select the markets. I ultimately just followed a lot of that. So you take the selection. Thank you very much for your time, and I'll see you next time.

Joe:   You stayed out of the most popular areas where there's a lot of land competition and you're more, are you going after more of the recreational, larger recreational land?

Grant:   Yeah. Yeah. It's all vacant recreational land. Yep. Mainly in the Midwest. Is that right? Yeah. We're branching out to other states, but it's all hunting land or land that somebody wants to go out and be off grid or something like that, or somewhere to go camp. It's all just recreational land. And then when you're pulling your list, or is there like a minimum acreage size that you're pulling? Probably one, one and a half acres is the minimum that we generally set. I'm probably going to increase that just to increase the spreads and just do bigger deals. But average, it ranges from one acre to 60, 80 plus acres.

Joe:   I was going to ask you about this because I've seen some people, I know two in particular recently, they went from doing a lot of deals, making good money, to being like, you know what, I can, for the same amount of work, I can make, do bigger deals and make more money or work less. And I would encourage you not to stop what has gotten you to where you are. Because some of these guys that I know, and we'll talk about this privately later, I'll tell you more about them, but they lost a lot of momentum because they stopped going after the little deals where they were just making five or 10 grand and started chasing deals where the minimum profit was like 20 grand. And it's the same kind of thing that we've talked about already is that consistency. So they didn't give themselves enough runway to market long enough for those bigger properties. Because if you think about it too, those larger properties, there's a couple of things in there. The sellers who own those 20, 50 acre lots, 100 acre lots, they're maybe not as motivated as sellers who own smaller lots. They just don't need the money as much. And second, there's not as many buyers that are looking for or can afford the bigger, more expensive properties. So while your profits might be bigger on them, it may be harder, it may be slower to find them and slower to sell them. And so that's something I'm telling you and everybody listening to this. If you're making enough money to quit your job by just making small little small little $5,000 paydays, $10,000 paydays, don't stop that. Keep on doing that while you're also chasing the bigger deals as well. Does that make sense?

Grant:   Yeah. That's what I plan. Well, whenever I scale this, started doing higher volume of mailers going out per month, the new lists were larger, but I kept doing the follow-up on the previous list. Yeah. I'm still scrubbing and still doing follow-up and then just layering on, and then we'll layer on additional marketing strategies as well. But yeah, I didn't want to stop for that reason, what you just laid out, Joe.

Joe:   Yeah 'cause I've seen some people actually lose momentum have to get another job just because they're getting scared about the money running tight.

Grant:   So the other thing I'll say too with land Joe is that it doesn't, they don't move as quickly as houses in terms of selling, especially the larger parcels because the buyer pool is smaller. Whereas with a house, you could flip it in a few days, a few couple weeks with land could be a few months, maybe six months or something like that. So.

Joe:   It depends on how aggressive you're pricing them, right?

Grant:   Most of the time, I'm basically trying to whole tail most of them. If it makes sense, and if we're not getting any activity, then yeah, we'll drop the price. But yeah, we're selling at a little bit of a discount, but it's pretty much trying to whole tail.

Joe:   Yeah. So you're not, you're not trying. Whole-tailing for you means you're buying it at maybe 40 cents on the dollar. You're trying to sell it for what? 90 cents on the dollar. They are 95. 95 cents on the dollar. Yeah. You can get to that if you have the room for it. I've always encouraged people who are just getting started, man, sell those things as cheap as you can so you can flip them as quick as possible. It's better to make a good nickel than a slow dime, especially when you're getting started as you start building more experience and that's, you could play it a little looser.

Grant:   Now, are you using realtors to help you sell your deals? Yes, in some markets we partner with local agents and then they put it on the MLS for us. Some of them we use flat fee listing service and then most of them we're also putting I'm like Facebook Marketplace and things like that.

Joe:   Yeah. Are you taking the deals down? Are you buying them and selling them?

Grant:   Yeah, sometimes we still have because the purchase agreement grants us the authority to still list it while we have it under contract. So there are several that we still do that with, and if we're able to find a buyer before we're able to close on it, then that's a bonus. But yeah, for the most part, we're closing on them and regardless of whether or not we find a buyer yet, if it's a good deal, it's a good deal, and then we sell it.

Joe:   Are you using private investors or are you using any of these land funding companies to get the money?

Grant:   So we use our own money, we use private investors' money, and then I've also used the name of the companies escaping me right now, but it's who you recommended for the larger lender. The interest rate is higher, but it was still totally worth it. It was seamless and yeah, they were great.

Joe:   There's a lot of land funding companies who will lend you the money. They'll also do the work of selling it for a larger percentage of the profit. Have you ever done that with any of these funding companies? No, I've not done that. It might work for some people. If you have a full-time job, sometimes the way it works is it might be a 30, 70 split where you get, if you do all the work of selling it, they'll lend the money if it's a good deal and you get 70% of the profits, they get 30. If they do the work of selling it, it's 30 to them, a 70 to them, 30 to or 60-40, after all the numbers shake out at the end, it can be a really good deal. The good thing I like about using funding companies is they will vet your deal. So if you've got a bad deal, they're not going to lend money on it, which means maybe you shouldn't buy it. Okay, cool. One of the questions that my clients this morning asked me was like, what are some of the things that you see other people doing that you just shake your head and are like, what are they doing that?

Grant:   Yeah, and it's, but it's probably the main one, Joe, is that we talked about earlier is the consistency. So sending out mailers for a month or two and then stopping because you're not getting lead flow or you're like, this doesn't work and you stop. That's the worst mistake. I think that's the biggest mistake people make for sure. They quit too early. Yeah. You got to give it at least six months. I think. Yeah. I love that. If you ever doubted the process. Yeah, there's times where you, especially with inconsistency, you have ebbs and flows. There's months where I have, like for January, there was nine contracts this month. So far, there's three. There's months where you don't get any, and so it ebbs and flows too. It does average out over time, but it's hit or miss based on what list is being sent and in that list that's being sent, who the motivated sellers are within that. So yeah, there's times where you can get out the process, but you got to have the commitment and to stick with it. That's the probably the number one thing that I learned.

Joe:   Do you ever take your profits from deals and re and take an allocation of that and reinvest it back into marketing? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I remember my coach, when I was first getting started, told me to set aside 15% or 20% of any profit that comes in. So if you make 10 grand on a deal, set aside two grand for marketing. And then it just becomes this thing that gets bigger and bigger. And we'll stop. Okay. We've talked about follow-up. A lot of people are asking, how much follow-up do you do? And you just keep on, if I'm understanding correctly.

Grant:   They're in follow up forever. It even loops back until they respond. It is crazy how some sellers will reach back out to you and then you look at the history. You've texted them and called them 20 times and then all of a sudden they reach out to you like you've never talked, like you weren't doing that basically. It's just, you hit people when the time is right or something changes in their life or they're just, I don't know if you just wear them down. I'm not sure. Try not to be too invasive or the follow up messages are very casual and just, Hey, just following up type of messages soon. So yeah, pretty simple.

Joe:   Some of the clients this morning were complaining about it's so hard to get people on the phone. They leave us choice mail. I'm trying to call them back. They don't answer. I want to ask them questions they don't answer. They don't call me back. What do you, what's your philosophy and thinking around that?

Grant:   I just, I try to, if I don't get a hold of somebody and I'm trying to call them back, I'll make sure that I put something on my calendar to remind me to call them again the next day or try different methods. There are a lot of people that don't answer the phone or even text and then all of a sudden you'll catch them. So you try different times without being overly crazy, you don't call too many times, but just trying different times of the day, maybe they're working, things like that or send a text. A lot of people surprisingly don't have their voicemail set up, so you can't even leave them voicemail. And a lot of people don't even listen to their voicemail these days as well. You just try different methods to get a hold of them.

Joe:   But you still send them an offer in the mail.

Grant:   If I'm not able to get ahold of somebody after engaging, then I'll put them back in a follow-up routine.

Joe:   When you send your offers, you get a voicemail, you send them, send it by email and the physical mail, text, how do you send the offers out?

Grant:   It depends on if I've talked to them or not. It's usually mail. It's usually sending them snail mail. But if I'm able to get them on the phone or I talk to them and they do have an email address and would like to receive it that way, then we send it via DocuSign.

Joe:   Awesome. Okay, cool. Are you do work? Are you working directly with buyers? Or are you working with buyers first, and then going finding the deals for them? So like, how do you the question had to do more along the lines of, are you going kind of like a buyers first strategy where you're finding out, okay, this is what buyers want, and then you're going to go get it for them?

Grant:  I am not. No. I know a lot of people that do that. I've thought about doing that in some markets. I do that locally in the St. Louis market with houses, but with land, we're basically trying to sell everything retail or close to it. So most of the buyers are retail buyers. They're not investors or people buying multiple properties. Some of them are, right, but they find it from it being on the MLS or something like that. Yeah. So that is something that I may, with expansion, try to do more of, but right now I'm not. Questions were like, what kind of properties are you targeting? What kind of properties do you avoid? Although I've flipped and done several deals that are landlocked and things, you tried not to do that because they are harder to sell. The value is significantly less with limited or no access. So I try to avoid wetlands and things that are harder to sell where just your buyer pool is diminished. But so most of them are road frontage vacant land. A lot of them have a timber all over them. It's just full of trees. Some of them have open clearings. It's really just all across the board. Yeah. But it's all outside of a major metropolitan area, maybe an hour or two outside of a major city. So it's land that people want to be able to get away or build something remote for either a second home or a retirement home or to live off grid.

Joe:   So are you chasing infill lots and subdivisions.

Grant:   I have, so I've done some subdivision lots, but for the most part, I'm not targeting that.

Joe:   It was interesting. I heard the story of the other day of a guy who does a lot of land deals and he only does land deals if it has Google Street View. I thought that was fascinating. His reasoning was if it has Google Street View, it has road access. He's at a point where he's been building, doing this for so long, he's been doing so much momentum. He's probably sending a couple thousand letters a week just consistently doing the mail and he's getting so many leads coming in, he can be selective like that. But I thought that was interesting. that is the idea is impressed that you'll probably sell it pretty quick if the price is right.

Grant:   I would agree. I also think that might limit what you could do because there are a lot of roads that, especially rural communities, that there is no… Google hasn't been to yet, surprisingly, because it's everywhere.

Joe:   I was looking at one this morning in Oklahoma and I forget which county it was. One of our clients had it. We were looking at it and it was a beautiful property and it did have a street view, but it ended about half a mile before that property. But you go down on the street view, we're looking at it and man, you are in the sticks in the middle of nowhere. You're just looking around in the Google street view, really narrow road, heavy overbrush and scary. You're driving through this thing and you look at it. But when you look at the property and what's in the area and around it, I love properties with no restrictions because they could sell so much faster.

Grant:   Yeah. Agreed. I try to target those. We do have some that we've sold and have that are in a Landowners Association or something like that. And they still sell, but your buyer pool is significantly reduced because a lot of people don't want any restrictions. They want unrestricted land that they can go and just do whatever they want with. Yeah. They don't want somebody to tell them what they can and can't do. But there are people that they actually want that and they prefer to live in like a gated community or so it's a smaller number, but they're still out there.

Joe:   Question was how does he find out what he wants? Where do you go to get your lists from?

Grant:   Right now, most of the lists are coming from Prycd

Joe:   PRYCD and so I they were asking you how are you wholesaling? Are you buying them taking them down or do you do any assignments ever?

Grant:   With houses, I used to, but with land, I've not done any assignments. We either do a double closing or we close on it and then sell it.

Joe:   Have you used our free transactional funding yet in the course?

Grant:   I've not.

Joe:   Did you know it was available?

Grant:   I did know it was available, but I haven't used it.

Joe:   You should look into it. It's like legit free. I'm partnering with a friend that does that. Okay, cool. Dude, we talked about KPIs. I wanted to ask you about that. What are some of the KPIs you look at that's most important to you?

Grant:   Yeah, the number of offers to get a deal, which we spoke about, the cost per lead and the things like that, those are probably the main ones, Joe, that I look at. I'm tracking how many leads come in per month, which are just to see the consistency. And I'm tracking by county, what comes in, how many leads we get, how many of those actually convert, what are the percentages of those just to see which leads or which counties perform the best and then try to increase the activity in the ones that are performing the best and know when to stop doing follow-up on the ones that really aren't performing at all. So yeah, it's important to track the data, in my opinion, to try to see how you can adapt. And a lot of them are lagging indicators, right? Your ability to adapt might be a little bit too late sometimes, but at least you can respond accordingly and try to improve. the most important key metric to track is? Probably the number of offers that you need to send out to get a deal. Yeah. Because not only does that allow you to have the data to know, especially the more that you do and that just increases the statistical probability of it coming to fruition, the more you have that meet that number, the more likely it is to happen. You just increase your sample size. That's probably the most important one. Yeah.

Joe:   You must have bought a really good course on how to do land.

Grant:   Yeah, I heard that from somebody before.

Joe:   Yeah, it's the number one most important metric in the business. In fact, there's two numbers that you should, that will tell the health of any real estate investing business. How many offers have you made in the last week? How many offers have you made in the last month? That's all of that. That's it. It's just as simple as that. And when you know, imagine if you could make five offers a day, you would find a way to do it. Wouldn't you? Maybe you don't have the money yet to do direct mail guys, but you know what? If your goal, if you really wanted it bad enough, was to make five offers a day. You know what you could do? You could go find guys like Grant, find guys like me. Don't ask me because my sons are helping me with my old. But find other people with old leads and just say, hey, I'll call all of your old leads for you. And we can split the deal somehow. Just give me 20% of the profits. Give me 25% of the profits or something like that. Find other investors with old leads and just start calling them and make it a goal to send an offer to everybody you talk to. Five a day. The next thing you can do if you don't know anybody that has old leads and they are out there, promise you that, find realtors who have old vacant land listings. Find a realtor that has land that's been on the market for six months. Call them and make an offer on that property. Ask them do you have any other vacant lots that are off market that you can and make offers on those. Five offers a day, that's 25 offers a week, that's a hundred offers a month. you just not do deals. But then adding onto that is the follow up, following up with those old leads, with those realtors, with those offers that you made and I get excited.

Grant:   Pretty much everybody gets an offer. There's some that we still don't send an offer on, but even if they reject it over the phone, they generally still send an offer. And there have been properties that we've gotten under contract where their original asking price was way higher than what we offered. But then after six months, they call and say, hey, I can't do that, but can you do this? And it's only slightly higher than what we offered and it still works. So you don't know unless you send an offer, because you don't know what's in somebody's head, or especially with follow-up, you don't know where they're gonna be in six months, a year, things might change. If it doesn't work out, then that's fine too. If it's not a good fit for them, you move on to the next.

Joe:   This reminds me of another question that I've had from many people is they're afraid to make a bad offer. And so have you ever had to back out of a contract that you've made an offer on before?

Grant:   Yes. Unfortunately, I mean, we try not to do that, right? But if there have been some times where either the information that was provided by the seller wasn't correct and so the valuation changed, like they said it had access, but it didn't and there was no easement or something like that, or the valuation wasn't what we originally thought it was, or generally, most of the time it's something was wrong with the property that we found with the due diligence that caused the valuation to be a lot less, or it just something we didn't want to do. So, yeah, we have to cancel the agreement, unfortunately, but yeah, we try not to do that.

Joe:   Okay, cool. Can you give us a quick crash course on how you comp deals? How do you come up with an offer, especially in a state like, I won't say the state, but one of the states you're in, it's a non-disclosure state, which means you can't get information on solds. So how do you handle that?

Grant:   It's not an exact science. You try to get, you lay it out in your course show. So it's basically following the same thing that you do for comping properties. And just the more you do it, the more you learn, and especially when you're in an area, the more you learn the area, the more you know what the valuations are. And when you're entering a new market and trying to understand what the comps are, then you just, you try to look at the solds, you look at the for sale, what's on the market. Some areas, especially in the rural markets, there's not a lot of comps. So you just try to go low and see what do I think a good offer would be that's pretty low. And hey, this is what I think I can offer. And can you do it or not?

Joe:   Do you look at it where you think, all right, I'm going to try to sell it for this. And then you want to, you subtract your profit. You subtract real commissions and closing costs and that kind of stuff.

Grant:   Yeah, it's a percentage of what the market value is. I typically try to set what the market value is that I generate the offer at 85% of what the true market value is so that I'm buying it at sometimes 10% of market value, 20, 30, 40, generally not more than 50, but sometimes it's 45, 50, but it depends on the parcel and what I think the probability of it selling at that market value would be.

Joe:   Let me give you all just a real quick rule of thumb and maybe a couple of rules of thumbs here. And Grant, you can say yes or no, you like that or don't. But what I always look at is, and sometimes when you're in a non-disclosure state, those are some of the best deals states to do wholesaling in because there's so little competition. But you just look at, all right, I want my property to be the cheapest on the market. So let's say it's, maybe I could sell it for a hundred. I like to list it and plan on selling it for 85% of that. So I'll try to list it for 85 grand. I want to sell it for 85 grand because I want to sell it quick. And just general rule of thumb, you don't want to be more than 50% of that. You want to be under that. So your offer would be about, what, $42,000. Is that about ballpark of where you would be?

Grant:   Yeah, that's generally what I try to do. And it's all about, because especially with land, it can be all over the board in terms of what somebody might offer you, especially if the market's generally slow. So you want to make sure that you have enough cushion to still make a profit. There was a couple last year, I think I talked about this with you at lunch, but there was one in particular that we had it for three grand or something. and we thought originally we'd be able to sell it for a lot more, like 25 or something, but we were able to get it for a little over three grand under contract, but it only sold for eight. There was some limited access with that one. It didn't perk. So there were some things that brought the value down, but because we still had it under contract for so little, we're still able to double our money, essentially.

Joe:   Yeah, and you could have backed out of it if you had to.

Grant:   Yeah, isn't the good sometimes you go back and you get to you try to do a price reduction to the hey, we need to do an amendment and reduce the price. But luckily that hasn't happened very oftenreally just a handful of times. I got a couple more questions are really

Joe:   I got a couple more questions, really appreciate your time. Are we okay with time here? Yeah. Nice. Some people when they're starting out, they're just afraid to make low ball offers and make the sellers mad. Did you wrestle with that, right? Like, I don't like conflict. Who doesn't? There are some people that do like conflict, right? But we naturally don't want to make people mad at us. Sometimes you got to make these offers that are ridiculous low. It's way less than what they are asking. How do you navigate those bars?

Grant:   You kind of just have to deal with it. Yeah, whenever I first started and you start sending offers like that, you really just, you just have to put your head down and follow the process and just do it anyway, because that's really where you need to be at. And so that's the mindset that I, that I took was that this is what I can offer. Can you do it or not? If they come back and there's somewhere close and then it still makes sense, then great. If not, that's okay too. And you just have to have that mentality. You're going to make some people upset. You're going to, you're going to make some people upset. There's nothing you can do about it.

Joe:   Sometimes I'll say if you haven't made somebody upset by 12 o'clock, you're not making enough offers. So when you're talking to sellers on the phone, maybe talk a little bit about your philosophy and when you're talking to them, are you trying to make them come up with a number first? Are you asking them questions about their situation in a hurry to sell? How do you do that?

Grant:   Yeah, I generally just ask about the property. I asked about what's the situation, tell me a little bit about the history, if they can, if they know, sometimes they don't. And then do they have an idea of what they want for it? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Regardless though, I try to get a number out of them first. If they don't have one, then we send them an offer regardless. But yeah, I try to get that number out of them first. Because sometimes it'sdefinitely happened where the number that they tell me is actually less than what I was going to offer them or it's right in the range of what I was going to offer him. And so then I can say, yeah, I can do that and then send them a purchase agreement. If they don't know or it's too high, then you can say, I can't do that, but I can do this. It's pretty easy.

Joe:   Do you ever have, do you ever pull the property up on Redfin or Zillow and look at the surrounding area and the comps while you have them on the phone so you can get a feel for where they're at? Yeah. I have done that sometimes. Yeah. I always try to do that. I guess I, cause I'm looking at, if they're telling me they want 10,000 an acre and I'm looking at similar size properties that are 5,000 an acre, I zoom out far enough until I get 10 or 20 comps. I'm going to ask them like, I'm sure your property is really nice. You want 20 grand an acre or whatever it is. And I'm, but I'm looking at properties here that are half of that per acre. So if you don't mind me asking, like, why would I want to buy yours when I can buy this one for so much, just to get a feel for where they're at. And you'll be surprised sometimes sellers really do legitimately have no idea. It's not like there's a zestimate value for vacant land.

Grant:   Yeah, it is somewhat harder to comp land than it is for houses, for sure, especially in some rural areas. So that's why, that's also why you have to, your offer needs to be lower because there could be something significantly different with this parcel than some of your comps, but you don't know that until you dig deeper into the due diligence, which I don't generally do until we have an agreement because I don't want to waste each other's time.

Joe:   Good, so helpful. Grant, this has been a great interview. Thank you so much. Any final advice you'd give to somebody who's listening to this, maybe they just, it's not my program, they invested in some program to do land, somebody else's, and they're like, what advice would you give to them?

Grant:   You really get out of it, what you put into it. Take action and put the work in, and then you'll undoubtedly see the results. Simple. It's not rocket science. Yeah. And that's why your course is simple land flips or whatever it's called. It's generally a relatively simple, it's a simple business. It did take a while to put the systems in place and to build out SOPs for the assistant and the train and stuff like that. But once you build the systems and you have the consistency, then it's kind of like a machine.

Joe:   I remember one question somebody wanted me to ask you. Do you have any VAs? And when did you hire them?

Grant:   Yeah, I have one assistant. Yeah.

Joe:   Okay. How soon did you hire them?

Grant: I hired her specifically for this business and it was probably about the same time that I started doing the first mailers.

Joe:   Okay so pretty quick. You had also had some experience with houses. You knew already what you wanted them to do. What advice would you give to somebody who's new, doesn't not have a VA yet? What could the VA start doing for them?

Grant:   The VAs can put offers together and do the comps and do the original upfront work to be able to generate an offer. That's mostly what my assistant does. She does other things as well, but that's primarily what her role is.

Joe:   By the way, you should have your VAs watch all the recordings for my Monday deals calls. So every Monday I do deal analysis and I spend an hour or two hours looking at people's deals that they send in and I just review it and show how I would comp it, how I would come up with an offer and what I would offer. Those of you that are in the Dirt Flippers community, watch, have your VAs. And I say this too, as soon as you can, hire a good virtual assistant. Sometimes the best automation that you can get is a good VA. That can sometimes you just can't software can't do it. You need somebody to manually go in the software.

Grant:   I completely agree with that because I wouldn't have been able to do the volume and everything that I did without her help and it took a little while to train her, but after that she's been fantastic.

Joe:   Where did you find her?

Grant:   Onlinejobs.ph

Joe:   Love it. Who told you that website, I wonder? Okay, onlinejobs.ph. Good. And did you hire somebody who already had real estate experience? Was it hard to find somebody like that?

Grant:   Oh, she had no prior real estate experience at all. I've hired multiple people because I've been an engineering manager for years. And so I knew I've hired a lot of people. So I knew generally the hiring process and how to filter out and things like that. So I put a process together to do that. And then it came down to a top five and then you have them do some tasks and some general examples of some work that you want to do, and then you pick the best one. And honestly, she's been fantastic, but I did not think that she was going to be the top, to be honest with you. When it comes down to it, she was clearly the top though.

Joe:   Yeah, I found my best VAs. My VAs worked for me an average, I've got four VAs right now and they've worked for me an average of, the minimum has been seven years. I've hired every one of them by, almost every one of them, but I started hiring like three at a time. When I needed something done, I hired three of them and I gave them tasks and I didn't tell them how to do it. I told them what I wanted to have done. I told them where to get the information on how to do it is either sending them to a YouTube video or sending them to Freedom Soft support, watching the tutorial videos on Freedom Soft's website, and then making them learn and then giving them these tasks as a test. And I'd pay them, all three of them, but every time you'd find the cream rises to the top, you find the one that figures it out, gets it done exactly. And I'll say little things like, when you're done, send me an email and put a smiley face in the subject line. Just look to see are they paying attention to those little details like that and who gets it done best, the fastest, and who's communicating. Then the second thing I would say one of the keys to our success with our team is we talk to them every single day. No, I'm not talking to them every day right now. First we were. At first I was, but now I've got assistants that manage my VAs for me because I got a bigger business. But that daily communication is so important when you first hire your VA. It doesn't have to be about five minutes every morning or evening, whenever it's good for you. But you got to talk to them about what's going on, what are some of the bottlenecks, what are some questions that you have. look at what they're doing, and make sure that they are understanding what you want. It's so easy to get good VAs if you just do those few things right there. Cool. I agree. Grant, I think we're both tired of this 10 degree weather in St. Louis. I am looking forward to seeing the green grass again. And so when it gets warmer, let's go play some golf. When we had lunch, that was a month ago or so, it was January, I think. So it's been a weird winter. I am getting cabin fever. I want to get out the golf course. We'll definitely play some golf this spring and then maybe we'll do another podcast because it would be, I think you've got so much knowledge and wisdom that I would love for you to share more in our community if you're open to it.

Grant:   Yeah, if I need to, I'd be better about sharing and posting on social media. I'm generally not that person to post on social media a lot. So I do sometimes, but I can do more for sure.

Joe:   All right, Grant, do you have a website if anybody's interested in reaching out to you or maybe partner with you on a deal? Maybe they've got some deals that they would want to bring to you to partner with them. Would you be interested on, do you have a website or social media, anything like that?

Grant:   Yeah. You can find me on Facebook or you can go to emeraldhomeland.com.

Joe:   Emerald Homeland. com

Grant:   Yep.

Joe:   Very cool. And Grant on Facebook, right?

Grant:   Yep.

Joe:   Okay. Sorry about that. All right. It's okay. Thank you so much, Grant, for being on the podcast. Listen, everybody, rewind this podcast. You don't even rewind podcasts or things anymore. Hit the back button and go back, listen to this again, and take notes because I'm telling you, this business is not complicated. It's actually really quite easy. And some of the big keys that I think for me in takeaways on this was consistency, right? Consistency, consistency. If your budget would only allow a hundred letters a week, send a hundred a week. Don't quit. Be in it for the long haul. If you're not committed to sticking this business for at least six months, I'd say something maybe three, but I like six months better, then don't even start. You've got to have that kind of a long-term commitment because it takes time to build the momentum, right? That was my one big takeaway. And the other big takeaway was the most important metric in this business is offers. How many offers are you making? And I love it. Cool. Thank you, Grant. We'll see you guys later. Grant, don't go anywhere. Everybody have a good day. We'll see you all later. Take care. Bye bye.