Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. On today's episode, we've got Dave Denniston on, we're going to be talking about all things vacant land flipping. David has actually been an entrepreneur, self-employed business owner for longer than I have. I've been self- employed for 16 years now. I think David said 17 years. Is that right, David?

Dave:  Yeah, you got it.

Joe:  So maybe we can talk about the trials and the success stories and the pain of being self-employed, right? Because there are some challenges. It's pretty cool to have the freedom and the flexibility to be able to work when you want, where you want. I've always joked aroundthat the coffee's so much better at home than it was at work where I used to work, right. The bathrooms are cleaner. And there is no commute. So it's awesome. But sometimes, man, I find myself, maybe David, you're the same way, right, you just find yourself, I kind of miss being with people. Are youkind of that way or do you like not being with people?

Dave:  Well, in my case, I do have an office that we run. So small office, not a lot of us here. So there's a total of four of us, a good chunk of the time, my wife, my executive assistant, Kara, and then kind of my right-hand guy, Cameron. So I do have an office with people. So I don't do the 10 second commute of roll out of my bed to the bathroom, but I'm only 10 minutes away from home. So it's still pretty sweet.

Joe:  I used to have an office and I couldn't handle that either. So who knows? Whatever. We're all different, different strokes, different folks. Okay. So I heard you on a podcast with Seth Williams. I think you recorded this five, six months ago. Do you remember? Is that right?

Dave:  Something like that. I think it was like January. Yeah. Yeah, so like

Joe:  Okay, real good podcast and you talked about on there a little bit your journey and I want to ask you these same questions here because I think my audience will find this really interesting. Your journey in from doing a bunch of land deals, how you quit your job to maybe now you're doing some lending. Is that kind of the main focus of your business right now? Would you say?

Dave:  I started out in 2002, being a financial planning intern for a gal, then did door knocking with Edward Jones to try and get clients and got licensed in financial planning and stuff like that. And then I got burned out after a year of knocking on 2000 different doors multiple times in some cases to try and get friends. So I was fresh out of college, you know, they told me that's the formula, let's do it. And so that was probably my first experience where someone says, do this formula. And it was like, all right, I'm going to try it and see what happens. And it didn't work for me in particular, but it led me to being an employee for somebody else. And then August 1st, 2008 made the dive of acquiring another financial planning practice, which led me here to Minnesota. So moved from Seattle all the way to Minnesota in 2008. Worst possible time, August 1, 2008, but we did it. We survived. Why was that the worst time? Oh, the housing market? Yeah, one month later, AIG, Lehman Brothers, It's Washington Mutual, all going bankrupt, you know, financial markets in crisis.

Joe:  Did you sell your house in Seattle at the peak of the market, it sounds like? Was it after?

Dave:  So we had no debt before this acquisition, and then I levered up majorly to make it happen. It was literally a $1 million down payment with the $3 million purchase price. So really took a lot of risk at what ended up being the wrong time. And that's why for me, that experience really crystallized. For me, I never wanted to be solo dependent on one income stream ever again. So I still do financial planning today, and I have the land business still today where last year I think we bought and sold something like 250 properties or something like that. And I have now doing some hard money lending and then I do this land and conference thing for land investors to mastermind, get together, have high level discussions with experienced operators.

Joe:  Yeah, so let's talk about that real quick in case somebody bails and doesn't finish this podcast. You're doing a conference coming up here in a couple months in August to the end of August. Is that right?

Dave:  The beginning of Augustthe 7th, 8th and 9th.

Joe:  Yes. August 7th. 8Th. 9Th and I'm going to it. I heard you on the podcast with Seth and I thought, that sounds really interesting. I saw Seth post some stuff about it and I don't remember the last time I've gone to a real estate conference as an attendee, not as a speaker or presenter or whatever. So I thought this would be cool just to kind of kick back and relax and learn some cool things, network with some people. One of the reasons I'm looking forward to going is to learning about how to lend more on deals. And that's one of the things you were talking about with Seth, and I wanna ask you some questions about that. So to get more information about that conference, where do they go, David?

Dave:  Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you, Joe. Appreciate that. Landunconference.com because it's not a traditional conference. It's an un-conference. So landunconference.com toto go check that out.

Joe:  Cool. And this is the third one you've done.

Dave:  This is yeah I've done I've been doing mastermind events for since about 2019 I've down them for now six years But I made it a larger scale back a few iterations ago back in 2022 or 2023 I guess was the kind of the first bigger on conference. That wasn't just ten of us, but we did 50 of us and then 60 of us. And that's, that's about what we got this year. We got about 60 experienced land investors.

Joe:  Yeah, and so it's not for beginners, right? You require that they have done deals before and there's an application process to go there to sign up. So we want people there that are experienced that are already kind of doing deals, right.

Dave:  Exactly, which, hey, if you're just getting going, we love it. And I would encourage people to apply if you might be interested in the future. It wouldn't be a good thing for you now, but if you wanna stay involved, hear of different events and stuff that we do in the feature, definitely go ahead and apply because we'd love to stay in touch and help people out. And maybe when you are ready, you can pull the trigger. But yes, we're looking for ideally people with $100,000 of revenue or more, which in some cases for some folks, that's just two deals. That's not a lot relatively in the big scheme of things.

Joe:  But okay, good. So landunconference.com. Talk about how you discovered land. What about land interested you and when what year was that?

Dave:  Yeah, so that was 2017 actually. So eight years ago, I had been on this journey that as I said, hey, I don't want to be solo dependent on one thing ever, right? So I was doing financial planning. My wife and I had our youngest daughter super duperduper prematurely in 2012. She was less than a pound. She was 12.4 ounces when our little miracle girl came into this world. And so I really wanted to get back to doctors. So I started a podcast because I was thinking, oh, this could be a great way to give back to the doctor community. And maybe I'll get more financial planning clients of it, have another stream of revenue with some books and stuff like that. So I did that through 2023, that podcast. So I Did it for about 10 years, had a great time, which exposed me to a lot of different things. So I tried Amazon FBA, I tried a few other things. I bought a, through Empire Builders, I bought mobile gaming kit business with a cousin to see what that was like, and then I got into land. And of all those things, land is the thing that stuck, which it was so exciting, especially early on in 2017, back in the good old days, as some people might say now today.

Joe:  Obviously, I think we're still in the good ol' day.

Dave:  Yeah, it's different but there's still plenty of opportunity for people getting in and I think for great operators There's always room for someone to come in and disrupt and do more things and and have a great business. So

Joe:  Okay, do you mind if I ask who you learned land from?

Dave:  Yeah, so I learned through Mark Budolski, land gear. I created initially, you know, a lot of the cheaper properties. What I've loved about my land journey is, as you think about, oh, it's just land. There's not that much to it. And I discovered just how deep we can do so many different kinds of things, which for me has just kept me intellectually interested and engaged in it. So I've done everything from sending out letters to hiring cold callers, to tax lien investing and foreclosing on properties, to participating in tax deed auctions and going in auctions, and raising my hand, and the bidding and buying properties that way, to minor splits, you know, and just there's so many different ways you can chop this thing up. It's been a blast. Certainly had his down moments, make no mistake about it, but overall I feel very lucky and blessed to literally have now, you know, a business that's probably worth three or four million bucks, you know, if you add up all of the assets and the tax lien.

Joe:  Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So like you said the good old days back in 2017 or whatever, right? But you still did 250 properties last year or in the last 12 months

Dave:  So what I've been doing with my business, I got to the point, Joe, where I had 500 notes paying, which is amazing cash flow, but anyone that's been in this business for a while will tell you it is a management headache. It's a bookkeeping headache dealing with all of those notes. And I'm so grateful for what we've been able to build, but I just got, I started looking at my staff and the amount of staff it took to say, hey if I wanted to double this, if I want to go from at the time I think I had close to $2 million in revenue for the business, I want go to $4 million, $6 million, 8 million, $10 million in Revenue, to do it on the cheaper stuff like I had been doing was just going to be such a huge amount of staff needed, which God bless people who do that kind of thing, but I decided that I had taken enough brain damage that I want maintain my note portfolio, but I really wanted to get more into some of the bigger cash sales. So I'm a little bit late to the game in terms of what some people were doing back in 2020 and 2019 and 2018 with what I call medium sized deals and subdivides, all those kinds of cool things that this last couple of years, you know, we've gotten deeper and deeper in and, and we had about three million, little over $3 million in revenue in 2024 and hopefully, you Rev this year as we focus on. I'm not totally changing the business. I still love having the diversification of all these payments every day coming into my bank account, but the early payoffs and the defaults and late payments and all that kind of stuff that comes around with it, which are very good problems to have at the end of the day, but there is an expense and a cost, both mentally, physically, financially, you know, to running that kind business in in bulk.

Joe:  So at that time, how many employees did you have?

Dave:  I got up to 25.

Joe:  25 virtual assistants. Okay, and doing about 2 million a year with 20 to 25 virtual assistance and they were doing what? Marketing your properties for you like putting them back on land.com or Facebook or the MLS or whatever, right?

Dave:  Yeah, yeah, which not all those people were full-time, you know, probably 15 of them were part-time people. So this is, we're talking about two, three years ago now. So at the time I had people do a lot of access scrubbing, which now today there's some great AI tools and data providers that will do things for you that help you eliminate some of the properties. We used to have VAs manually scrub, right? So it was hours and hours and hour, but it was worth the cost when you looked that, hey, we don't want to be mailing people that have 100% of their property in wetlands or doesn't have physical access or legal access or some of those kinds of things. A lot of money that was wasted on our marketing in a lot of cases. But in some cases, it ended up working out, but most of the time it didn't. That was probably six or seven were access scrubbers of just those VAs.

Joe:  Six or seven just accessing like looking at data before you mail them is it floodplain road access things like that.

Dave:  But today we have none, we have nobody doing that because it's not necessary with some of the tools out there now.

Joe:  Well, let's talk about that real quick. I'm loving the LAND portal. Is that one of the tools?

Dave:  That you use? Yep, exactly. Yeah, so Land Insights has a program as well too, and Land Portal are the main too. And I know some friends that are software people that have developed their own thing internally, you know, to write the code and do that kind of thing. I think…

Joe:  Which is, which is crazy. Now, I'm assuming in your direct mail for Mark is I'm gonna ask you more about this later. Are you doing blind offers?

Dave:  Yeah. So over the last couple of years, Joe, we've just really been experimenting a lot, you know, just trying to say, hey, as we're moving up channel, what do we need to do? Traditionally, coming from the land geek world, they really focused a lot on blind offers. It was like a one page blind offer letter. And so we started experimenting with two page blind offers versus one page blind offer. And still today, we're constantly experimenting. Every month we're trying something different. For example, in the month of July, we are going to be trying to try yellow envelopes versus white envelopes just to see can we get a better ROI with yellow envelopes using the same font same letter the Only difference is it's yellow rather than white it cost us 10 cents more to do that.

Joe:  Now, have you tested just neutral letters, like, hey, do you want to sell your land? Call. And why don't you like those? Because I prefer those. But tell me, I'm just curious to see why you…

Dave:  When we've crunched the numbers for us, we did neutrals, ranged offers, and blind offers, side-by-side-by side tests. In 2024, it was pretty close, but blind offers were beating when we looked at how many letters does it take to get it deep. So we did a one page neutral versus two page neutral versus one page range, two page range one page blind, two-page blind. And so this year, 2025, as we record this in late June, we limited it down to our top. Three performers. So we had a two page blind offer, which beat the one page blind offer. We had a to page neutral, a one page neutral and then a one page range. So those are the top performers with we had different variations even within that. And for this year, the blind offers have creamed all of those other ones, like literally, I could pull up the numbers, but it was something like blind was like 5000 letters per deal, which this is, this is stuff that we're trying to buy for 30,000 sell for 60, not the desert squares, if you will, the cheaper land that we did before. Whereas the neutrals were like 15,000 per acquired property.

Joe:  I'm looking forward to talking to you about this because when we look at our numbers and numbers of my students, we're at maybe a thousand neutral letters to a deal. And I have one student right now, his name is Grant. He's averaging one deal out of every 600 letters that he sends. And it's, my philosophy has been different because I came from houses and I've always just thought, you know what, I just want, I want as many leads as possible. And so, and why is because I want, as many phone numbers as possible so I can make as many offers as possible. So I can follow up with as many. And if you set it up with systems, right? So instead of spending the hours that I got frustrated with of analyzing properties to come up with a subdivision of a subdivison of a sub division, right. And then pricing that and then doing a blind offers which takes forever. I would rather just, I find the top zip codes where the most activity is where most of the buyers are buying recently. Just give me everybody who owns land there for over 10 years that doesn't live in that zip code and just mail them all a cheap ugly postcard get all the calls come into voicemail so i say on the postcard text or call this 24-hour recorded voicemails And the voicemail explains what it is we're doing. We're land investors, we buy land, we can close as quickly as in 30 days, blah, blah blah. And then each letter has a reference ID so we can look it up quickly, right? And then the system texts them. So I have found that that works better in, but I've never tried a blind offer. Sometimes I'll even in my voicemails, I'll say, hey, are you tired of fake offers? Which is funny because you hear that sometimes from sellers, right, they get frustrated with these. And when I can actually nowcomp the properties as they come in, I can throw them away. I throw 25, 35% of them away because it's 100% wetland or there's no road access. Or I might still make an offer, but a ridiculous offer, like 500 bucks or a thousand bucks, because I know I could sell it to a neighbor. I know we've sold lots of landlocked properties. But anyway, I'm looking forward, you guys gotta come to this land unconference so you can see what David and others are doing and how they are doing this, because obviously it's working for you, David. You did 250 deals last year through direct mail and maybe your numbers, I get it, because your numbers are higher because you're chasing the deals you can buy that are worth 60 that you can by for 30, right?

Dave:  Or higher. You know, we have one that we got from mail that we're going to be buying for 100, selling for 200, right? So generally, the more expensive the property, the higher the mail quantity is going to, the cheaper the property the less mail it's going to take to get it, right. So if I was targeting $10,000 properties, I would bet you our Mayor yield would probably be like 600 letters or 800 letters or something like that. Because there's not as much competition in those kinds versus, Hey, I'm going to, I have a realtor friend or whatever that we're going to be talking to someone, which I will say to Joe, I have noticed in cheaper properties are neutral letters were performing well. When I look at data from 2024, 2025, we haven't mailed any cheaper properties, only medium sized stuff. So I can't speak to cheaper properties for this year in terms of actual stats to go off of yum. As I look at the industry today, I think, particularly in the medium-sized stuff, you have some people that are really anchored to certain prices. I will say, too, that everyone's land business is a reflection of who they are, right? You probably have an amazing background in sales and sales training and stuff like that. Me, I've always been much more of a numbers nerd by nature. I'm sure you're great with numbers too, and I can do sales too, but it's just not my my strong suit So the blind offers for me speaks to really who I am as a person in In the way that I lead my team where I'm probably not as great at closing as you are You may not see it staring with the analysis and spreadsheets as I am right that that's yeah, that's really good naturally

Joe:  Because some people, again, don't like talking to sellers. I don't enjoy it, but whatever you do, find what's you and do what's you, do what you're good at. I've always said, outsource your weaknesses. Don't fix them. Don't try to fix your weaknesses outsource. So you're, you're sending out blind offers to remove the tire kickers, to just remove somebody that's going to just waste your time and just try to see what you could offer only to reject it. Now you're only talking to people who, at least you're in the right ballpark, who wants something similar to what you want to offer them. Okay, so let me ask you when it comes to pricing offers now. Do you do that on your own? Have you ever just used the data from Priced, for example, or are you going down into the subdivision analyzing it yourself?

Dave:  As part of my staff, as we have it today, I hired one Cameron who's here with me in my right hand guy in the office. I hired him about a year ago and I've spent a lot of time with him, training him in looking over thousands of deals together and having him price it, me price it stuff like that. So now he oversees my team. So I have a team of VAs that do it. Now I have three, and all three of them are working at least 25-30 hours a week. In pricing blind offers. So there is an investment into the team for doing the blind stuff, because I'm not doing it, right? Like I've developed the process, I trained it, and then Cameron's continued to hone it and improve it. And we look over the results together, but literally just in the last two weeks, I said, okay, anything over a hundred grand needs my stamp of approval of it. Anything under a hundred grant, go ahead and go for it. And if I take a look at it later, you know, before we actually close, I can still kill the deal, you know, if I don't feel it's a good price or not.

Joe:  So before before you listeners freak out of like, oh my gosh, I'm not gonna have to be able to hire other people to do all of this stuff free relax, because I'm gonna ask David questions about if somebody were just starting and they wanted to get to 10 grand a month, what do you recommend that they do, because you don't have to hire people to price your offers for you. That's where you get get eventually after a few years of doing this, right? I got a lot of questions I want to ask you about your your favorite tools that you like to use the favorite data providers and software and stuff like that. But let's go back to what I was just saying, like, there's beginner listening to this who's just getting into land. They're really interested in it because they're tired of the frustration of the competition from houses. And by the way, I say this to everybody too. If you are complaining about the competition in land, all right, go try to do houses for just a few minutes and you'll be like, oh my gosh, this is so much easier and better. Talking to sellers is better and easier. Like getting your offers accepted at 50 cents on the dollar is easier with land than it is with houses. And yes, it may be more competitive, quote unquote, maybe, in land now than it was five years ago. But still, when you compare it to houses, land beats it by far. And by the way, too, people complain about land being competitive, more competitive than it maybe used to be five years ago. But I don't know if I agree with that. In some markets, it is. But in some markets we're still getting huge response rates on our direct mail. And a lot of people come into this market, into this land investingthing, and then leave. They quit. A lot of people are quitting.

Dave:  Well, it's fascinating too, Joe, we've been through. The multiple cycles of the land and conference and you have the cream that rises to the top. Sothe 20% ends up making it. I don't care what business you're talking about, whether it's land, wholesaling, my financial planning days, when I first started out with Edward Jones, 20% sticks, 80% doesn't. So the twenty percent that sticks, what's special about them? I would say, you know, in the land business, they might have a numbers bet or a sales bet. They usually have one of those two things. Usually, they've been through some other kind of small business, right? Whether household sailing or running a software company or you name it, financial planners, accountants, you know, I've seen people from so many different walks of life that succeed in this business and stick. And then, so anyone can do it. And with so many ways, we're just talking about neutral versus blind. Well, there's cold calling now today. If you're awesome at closing people, cold calling gets you a crap load of leads. And you might have a better experience than I did. There's PPC, there's PPL people that are, you can pay per lead, you know, nowadays. I mean, there are so many ways that didn't exist seven years ago, eight years ago when I started in this business of marketing channels that beyond just mail, everyone did mail eight years ago, nobody was doing cold calling. Nobody was doing PPC. That stuff was totally not done at all. So totally a lot of opportunity for a beginner.

Joe:  Oh my gosh, so much opportunity. And guess what, just like with houses though, you know, you think houses is competitive and it is, but there will always be tired landlords, right? There'll always be somebody that bought that rental property a year ago that has been through their third tenant already in one or two years and is like, forget it, fine, I'm done, I've out, I gotta get rid of this thing. And that'll be the same with land. So there always will be new motivated sellers coming in into the picture who will get your letter at just the right time. And I'll be like, yes, fine. I remember when I wasfirst getting started doing houses, I was getting frustrated with all of the competition out there and I remember some seller called me and he says, yeah, you know, I'm ready to sell. I keep on seeing your billboards, signs all over the place. And I got, this is your 20th letter that I've gotten. So yeah, I just want to get rid of it. He thought I was the home vestures guys, right? Doing those billboards. He thought it was all of my letters that he had gotten over the last year. When really I just sent him one postcard or letter or whatever it was. Yeah. So sometimes, you know, even in a competitive areas, you can be that fly riding on the elephants back into some of these markets. Okay, so, David, let's talk to the guy or gal right now that wants to get to 10 grand a month, 5 grand a month in recurring revenue, which I love. That's one of the things I like about The Land Geek. Mark Podolsky's got a great book. By the way, all of you should get his book. It's called Dirt Rich. Just go to Amazon and buy it. It's a great books. And I've learned a lot from Mark over the years. I love the emphasis on passive income from notes, right? Yes, you might have a higher default rate with land than you do with houses, but It's really easy to find new buyers to replace the new, the old ones, right? What would you recommend to somebody getting started who wants to get to that five or 10 grand a month in recurring revenue? Let's start with what kind of areas of the country would you look at? Yeah. Desert squares in Arizona, the little quarter acre parcels in Florida. You know what I mean?

Dave:  Yeah, well, I think there are certain areas I would tell people that is so uber-competitive, I just wouldn't go there. Like, for example, Lee County, Lehigh Acres, people that are buying above wholesale. And I don't know who the heck they're selling to, but they must have relationships with builders. Maybe that's you that's listening to this. I don't,know but in terms of a traditional land investment model, a place like that, that last time I tried to mail there, which I think was last year, because I said, Okay, let me just give it another try just to see. It's been a couple of years. Let me give it a try. We skunked. We got nothing out of 5,000 letters, you know, we're trying to buy for 9,000, sell for 18,000 or buy for 10, sell for 20. Like, you know. We got nothin' after 5,00. Like, okay, clearly it isn't the time yet to go back to that particular county. I would say places that are just uber-uber competitive like that.

Joe:  That doesn't mean all of Florida. You're just talking about like, just the most.

Dave:  Particular county with quarter, quarter acre to half acre type lots. You know, you might be a lot of great success in Lee County with one acre or two acre lots or something like that. I haven't done those in a really, really long time, so I can't tell you about that. But absolutely, Florida is a great place. We've bought plenty of land in Florida and made good money on it. This year, I would say there are some areas that land investors have pretty heavily trafficked, like Costilla County, Colorado, as an example. I have not mailed there in a very long time. So I can't tell you how competitive it is or not, but a lot of us started there. I still sell properties there, but I don't mail to acquire properties in Costilla County, for example. But all that being said, I think there's so many areas like here, I'm in Minnesota, right? I mean, how many land investors mail Minnesota? Not many, right. So you could target a smaller acreage, like let's say, one to two acres or one to three acres or something like that, here all across Minnesota and your competition is going to be far, far less than in some of the places I was just talking about, or Indiana or New York or a lot of different places. Now, there are some places that are attorney-closed states, so you have to be careful of those. But places like New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, you know, that's how I got started in my career, was all of those kinds of places. Today, we still acquire land in many of those places. There are a few things that you have to be aware of, like Arizona. There is this rule that once you have bought more than five in the unit of a subdivision, you arehave to get a property report done, which costs about $10,000 to get this property report. And actually, last year, I got fined by the state of Arizona for not filing that property report in like six units of subdivisions across the state. So you do have be careful in certain places. But if you're just getting started, it doesn't really matter. I doubt you're going to buy enough to acquire more than five or six in the unit of a subdivision. But the more specialized you can be, the better. If I was recommending someone just starting out, do your research, take a look at what's out there, see what's in your budget, and then find areas. You could go on lands.com and see whereis a lot of land available that people are trying to sell.

Joe:  I was just doing that right now while you were talking. I went to land.com and I looked in Florida and you can do a search for owner financing as one of the options and go see where everybody is doing owner financing right now, right?

Dave:  Absolutely. Absolutely. And then if you get, which I'm sure, you know, if you've talked to other people that have talked about going through the lanky type program, hey, find subdivisions, right? In a lot of cases, what's beautiful for blind offer pricing, for someone that's just starting out, in many areas, not all, but in many areas, if find subdivision, you can price your blind offer letters practically all the same, depending on what it's like, you If you end up having water, mountains, trees versus no trees, stuff like that, that gets more complicated. But part of the reason people love Costilla County, Colorado is because they all freaking look the same. So you can price them all very, very easy. They're why people liked Lee County, Florida or Charlotte County, Florida. All of these properties are the same size. It's super easy to price a blind offer for 10,000 letters. And then you could be done with that for a while. So that's a much easier way to go about. And that's how I started in this business was really digging into subdivisions, studying subdivisions seeing what's working, not working, adjust, do more of what's working less of what not, you know, that kind of thing.

Joe: I'm looking here and there's a ton of properties on land.com listed for owner financing. In fact, one of the ladies I interviewed a few months ago from the LandGeek community, you might know her, Dr. Quinn, an Asian lady and her husband from a company, I forget his name. Very nice couple. She's also a pharmacist. So it's like Dr. Quin, medicine woman, whatever. I interviewed them recently and they're doing a ton of owner financing deals. I didn't dive too deep in their numbers, but man, you can go in and see somebody like that and see where they are doing deals and piggyback on some of that success. Okay, so let me ask you an obvious question for me at least, but maybe not for other can you do owner financing deals in Minnesota or Indiana and places like that, even though it may not be like a real hotspot that you see in land.com

Dave:  We do it all the time, you know, it's I prefer cash now whenever possible, but I sure as heck aren't going to turn down owner financing. And that's why I want to keep about 400 to 500 notes, you know keep in that range because I do love the income that comes from that. And so we have some higher quality notes now, you know stuff that's paying us 700, $800 a month each, you know kind of notes that are coming through now. So you don't need as many as when you have $100 a month or $200 a month on average coming which is normally where we've sat. $200 a month was our very typical monthly payment for what folks have been doing. But yeah, I think for the most part, which I am not a legal expert on every single state, but the vast majority, you know, land contracts are totally fine and you can do owner financing. I've never ran into a problem not being able to do owner-financing in the eight years I've been doing it. And I've now probably done half of the states in the union on owner financing.

Joe:  So just go to land.com, do some research to see what states there's a lot of owner financing in. You know, you'll find Texas has a lot, Arizona has a lot, Florida has a lot. I'm just looking here. It's, it's pretty easy to search for that California, but let's just look at California. I've done a lot of deals in California. And for some reason I stopped really targeting California that much, but there's a lot of owner-financing land in California, okay. So somebody wants to get to 10 grand a month, you know, their, their capital is limited. And they're going to need to either borrow money from a private investor or something like that. But so to get to that 10 grand a month and you, let's say you're averaging the small, you're doing the smaller deals, you're getting $200, $300 a month. What's next? Like you, you got some good counties, you've got five or six counties that you're looking at. They're not the number one, two or three, most activities, but they're kind of like in that they're below that maybe they're maybe five through 10 or five through 15. Right. And so now what, what do you recommend?

Dave:  Yeah, so if you have your list of counties, you're just getting started in this business, I think I would really look to, as you think about having money, you know, what does that look like? How do you do it? What I have done in my particular case, of course, you know any equity you have, right, is always good, right? So if you've have a W-2 job or you're in another business or whatever, hey, the more money you can plow into it, fantastic. If you don't have that kind of capital, we could look at, hey, do I have a 401k? Can I borrow from the 401k? I would not use that for operations at all, only for property acquisition. Do not borrow from your 401k if you're using it to send mailers. Bad idea, because the mailer could skunk on you, all right, or to pay employees or anything like that.

Joe:  And don't use your 401k for coaching and mentoring either.

Dave:  No. No, no, no. I'm talking about something that gives you a direct ROI where you've gotten to the finish line. Yeah. You have, you know, money borrowing from the 401k can do be great for you because you're paying yourself back with interest. And I wouldn't also recommend anyone to do that until you've done two or three or four or five deals where you're gone full cycle and proven it to yourself that you could do it. All right. But you can do it early on. I did and it worked out great. I also got a credit line from the bank. So with me having my existing business, oh, I got a credit line from the bank. They started me out at 15,000 bucks. Now today, Wells Fargo gives me $100,000 credit line. Amex has given me a credit of another 150 grand. So those two, I have $250,000 at my disposal to borrow. I didn't have that yet to start out with, right? But you could get 10 or 15 grand, which again, I would say early on, you can do it, but don't do it for your first or second or third deal. Prove it to yourself to go full cycle and get the money done. But if you think about it this way, like my line at Wells Fargo right now, I borrow at about 10%, right? So if I'm borrowing at 10, and let's say that after all my costs and everything, my ROI is 40 to 50 cents on the dollar, I'm not talking about the raw gross profit number. I'm talking actually after all your expenses and everything said and done, you're making 40 to 15% because you are going to be the one doing everything. You haven't hired everybody yet. So your ROI should be very, very high because you have almost no labor costs. All right? So you're making 40 to 50% versus paying the bank 10. I mean, that makes sense all day, every day, right? I mean heck, if you added a 25, that still makes sense, all day every day. But you have to know your numbers and know what you can't afford and not afford. If you suck at mailing and your operational expenses are crazy high, well, you probably shouldn't borrow money to do it yet. But outside of that, the other thing I started doing was talking to friends and family, right. Say, hey, I'm looking at doing this deal. Back when I started in the business, back eight years ago, 50-50 was a very typical equity split that you would do with someone. Today, I think 60-40, 70-30 is far more common because operational costs are a little bit higher for us as operators. So talking to friends and family and say, hey, if you give me $5,000, again, if you've done a few deals, hey here's some of my track record of what I've been able to do. Now as you talk to your parents or aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, brother, sister, whoever you know that is interested in it. And guess what? If you do well for them, they'll keep wanting more and more and more and more. And that's how I've been able to build up my business is doing a combination of those two things much cheaper capital with debt stuff, but not crazy expensive like Amex now is like 6% is my interest rate on the Amec. So all I have to do is beat 6% to have that make sense versus the equity split. I'm currently paying more 70 30 on that kind of thing. And And then I have hard money loans, which I take on, and I also give out to more expensive properties. Not the cheap stuff, but where you're buying for 30, selling for 60, buying for 50, selling for 100. You know, those kinds of things. Not buy for a thousand, sell for 3,000, but much more margin and those kinds of things

Joe:  One of the things I found out too, and I always do your due diligence with anybody that you do business with. But I've noticed in a lot of different Facebook groups, land investing Facebook groups. There are people there willing to lend money on deals. And so always do you do diligence when it may be always careful when you're JVing with anybody. Right. But for your first couple of deals, find somebody maybe that's already doing deals that you can JV with them on that deal maybe and do a 50 50 split again, just to get some deals under your belt. Would you agree? Get some deals under your belt, then you can go to your private investors and friends and say, hey, you want to partner with me on this next deal? Here's five that I've done recently. And here are some numbers on this one. This is what I plan to do. Okay. So you get some capital lined up through private investors, maybe, or with some funding companies or other people in Facebook groups or communities that you're in, like dirt flippers, all you guys see right here. Okay. So now what you've got some counties, maybe you got some zip codes, you like to do blind offers. So maybe break down, how do you get the list? What tool do you like to use to get lists? And then how do do the pricing.

Dave:  We used to use data tree, but now we're just exclusively over the last, a little bit less than a year. Using Land Portal, just like you were mentioning earlier. So that's our favorite tool of the day. Land Insights thing uses Data Tree, by the way. So if anyone subscribes to Land Insight stuff, it's Data Tree. Data that they're using. I'm not so sure where Land Portal is getting their stuff from, but we compared side by side. There's also Land Vision that a lot of people have used over the years to get unlimited data, pay kind of a flat fee and you get unlimited data. But it doesn't have all the cool AI stuff that you get through Land Portal or land insights today. So in our case, we doubt we're sending out, we're probably downloading something like 80,000 records a month is what we're getting here downloading 80,00 records a month. In order to mail out 50,000. Cause we still do zoom in there. Okay. Because we're trying to eliminate stuff below a certain price and I'm trying to eliminate stuff over a certain price. And until we do our pricing, we don't know where that's going to be. So we have to download more data than what we need in order for us.

Joe:  Are you howare you doing that? Are you going off of county assessed values or taxes owed or something like that?

Dave:  No, no, so what we do, we don't use zip code data, but basically in our case where we're trying to target buying for 30, selling for 60,000, you know, those kinds of things, or buy for 50, sell for 100. We end up have, it depends on the county, right? Because we have to, in order to get 80,000 records every month for four out of six months, that takes a lot of counties and stuff to do that. So some counties might only have a thousand records. Other counties might have 10,000. Some might have 5,000. So the more data we have, the more honed in we can get on a pricing, right? So like a 1,000 record county, there's not a lot to chop up there. You know, we might divide it in two, we might just do average county pricing just to get it done. Whereas if we have 5 thousand records, well now we can chop up the county into four or five different parts, right, and we can more honing inon pricing. So, the data we have the more specific we can be. Certain areas, you know, there's mountains and trees, there's lakes, there is like here in Minnesota, there's lake everywhere, right? So there's a lot of lakefront stuff. It makes pricing a lot more trying. And in some cases, when you pull the data, you might be able to see in land use or some sort of zoning, oh, this is waterfront property. So in some counties case, you can make an adjustment for that as you do pricing. Other counties don't tell you jack squat, and you don't know. The greatest thing about land portal is, hey, they have road frontage. They have various filters you can put on to really hone in and really sniper stuff if you want to. We're currently not particularly going after subdivides. We have looked at different plays on that from mail that comes back to us, but we haven't specifically tried to like sniper subdivisions, doing subdivides our own selves. So that's basically our process of, hey we get all this data, figure out how we want to play out. The more data we have, the better we can divide it up and be more specific on pricing. The less data we had, the less time we're going to spend on it. And we just give it a shot and see what happens, which means sometimes we have people really happy with the offer, but then we can't do what the offer said when we really start to dig into the details because all blind offers are is a good guess. We could be really low, we could be really high, we can be spot on. So sometimes that leads to more profit potential. Other times So we get a lot of pissed off people because, you know, we can't do what the price says. And it's the goal of the lead manager and the acquisition manager to talk them down into something that helps us acquire the property at a price that makes sense for the margins that we need to have as a business.

Joe:  Okay. So somebody's going to ask this, what do you, what do you do when you offered 50 grand and you should have offered 25 grand and your way over, right? How does that conversation go with that cell on the first call?

Dave:  Definitely, it's a challenge, right? Because people are now anchored to what was said on that paper. And so, the question is, how motivated are they? What are they motivated by? How can you connect with them as a human, right, to relate to it? To be honest, you know, an awful lot of the time, it is not going to work, right. I would say probably 60% of the time 70% of time someone's responding, they were excited, we don't get a deal out of it at that time. 30% of the time, we do. And it's just about connecting and being human and getting to know someone and gaining their trust. And that they are motivated enough that they will then take the offer, right? In a lot of cases, it's follow-up. So, even though we couldn't get it to an offer today, hey, we paid, we're probably close to $200 for every mailing lead right now, whether they gave us the middle finger or they accepted the offer or everyone in between, right? So after five of those leads, I've now paid $1,000 to get in front of these people, right. So it's like, we're going to follow up with these people because it's so stinking expensive to get into touch with them in the first place. So we've had deals where we've done follow up, follow up follow up and some automated sequences and manual follow-ups and stuff like that, and we've gotten deals six months, a year, two years later, where we're not having to send the mail, but because we're texting, emailing, calling, continuing to develop a relationship and look with them. We win the long game, right? Because there's going to be plenty of other land investors that come and go, but I'm not intending on going anywhere, and so we're going to keep after them and keep dripping on them and keep after it.

Joe:  Yeah. I love that. And again, those numbers are intimidating for some people. I know. Cause you're like, Oh my gosh, that's a lot of money. I can't do that. That's not where you start. Okay. If you're just looking to do your first few deals, we're just to get to 10 grand a month. You're not going to start there. Okay? So you get a list, you download the list. Can you give a quick tutorial on how to price property? You get, you get 5,000 records. You divide it up into quarters into fourths, maybe. What do you, what are you doing to get pricing?

Dave:  We don't rely, we do it all in-house. And before I even had VAs doing it for me, I was doing all of the pricing, right? So just starting out, Dave was doing the pricing. That was something that was a good skill set for me being a numbers, analytical, financial guy, right. That's up my alley in terms of what I can do. And so, and I enjoyed it. And I still enjoy it to a degree. I'm just pulled in a thousand different directions. But anyhow, what I would do if someone's just starting out is do what I talked about of subdivisions. If you're now graduating up where you've divided it. Some people do zip codes, right? Zip code pricing you were talking about earlier, Joe. We don't usually do zip code. We tend to look at what's the disparity of pricing in an area. So certainly when you have like a city, right, it's a major city that's in that, or even a minor city that might have a hundred thousand people in it or something like that, you'll have more expensive land around that, right. So that might be one region of around the city, and then you have the east side of the county that has a lot of water on it. That's going to be priced differently than the west side of the county has a lotta mountains on it, right? So we price off of each of those things as we look at dividing up an area, because we know around the cities gonna be the most expensive stuff, right.

Joe:  Okay. So let me, let me ask you something then. You know, if you're wrong, when you send an offer and they call you and you're wrong 60, 70% of the time, I think that's what you said. Maybe I misunderstood 30% of the time. You get it right.

Dave:  When we are wrong on an offer, we don't get the deal 60 to 70% of the time. I would say, you know, probably since I have Cameron and the team really focused on it, I feel like probably 60, 65% of the time, you know we're really solid on the offer and probably 35, 40% of time we're not. So better than a 50, 50. But it's surely not 80% or 90% because with the volume of mail that we're doing, it's an issue. But when it's just you and it's you starting out, if you're an analytical like me and you're not sending out 50,000 offer letters a month then you're sending out a thousand. It's a lot easier to focus on a 1,000 record set and really price it very well. You know, look at Zillow, look land, look at some of the county records, you know, as you're clicking around. Like we use Map right now called Land ID. Sometimes there's stuff that doesn't show up on Zillows. Just by clicking around a neighborhood, you can kind of find out what stuff has bought or sold for. So I would spend a lot of time on that if I'm someone doing blind offers just to look on different sites. You could go to Scott Todd's website, Landmoto, you could go too. Landflip, you know, look at multiple sources to pull data and you could kind of get an idea of what's happening out there. And then if you find someone like myself and my company that's buying and selling a lot of land in the area, go study their website, right? See what other stuff they have listed Because more than likely, they probably have a couple years of history out there that you could go and poke around on and see what they're doing and study.

Joe: And they probably bought it at 50 cents, 50% of what they're selling it for. Why not just use some of these pricing software tools like Priced, P-R-Y-C-D? And I'm sure there's others, but I've used Pric'd in the past. And you know what? I know it's not gonna get me exactly right. I could probably do better on my own, but just from a time standpoint, just forget I'll just use PricED 40% of PricEd value. You know what I mean? On a blind offer. Now, why don't you use those kinds of tools?

Dave:  I have in the past, so I have used Priced, which I think there's some great things about it. But what I found was that there were a lot of duplicate records that they were using and there were lot of outliers. Now, it's been a few years, so maybe they've improved it. I'm sure they probably have improved it since the last time I used it a few years ago. But at the time, there were some big outliers that was like, as we did the pricing versus they did the pricing, there was a huge difference between them. For someone just getting started out, maybe you're not very numbers-oriented. Fine, you know, you could go for it. I mean, I would still encourage you, even if you use Priced, to do spot checks. You know, start spot checking through the list to see, hey, if I'm going to buy this property, what would I buy it at based on what they offer? Does this make sense or not? And if you're finding the majority of the times that it does make sense, then use it. Because I think in certain counties, for example, certain areas, it can work fabulously well. Other ones not so much. So when you have a lot of pricing, like in a subdivision we were just talking about, where, hey, everything's priced the same, you don't really need it. It's not necessary at all. It is very easy to do. Whereas if you have something with a lot more difficult geography and things going on, that might save you a lot of time using something like Priced. But even there, you have to decide what are you going to wait, like on Priced. Are you going to do 50-50 sales to availables? Are you gonna do 60-40, 70-30, you know, one way or the other? So there's still decisions to be made, even with a tool like PricED, that you as the operator have to decide what are you going do with it? And that might be a good decision or a bad decision, depending upon what you're putting in there and where you're looking.

Joe:  Well, sometimes, you know, you're looking at an area and you see active listings and sold listings, especially in Florida. Sold listings are way down here and the active listings are away up here. If you're getting an average median price per acre, but a lot of these sold listings are investors like you and me. So one of the things I've always wrestled with, and I'm trying to price offers in advance is, well, what do I use? Am I using investor comps? Because they're buying it where I want to buy it at. Or should I use retail comps where that's where I went to sell it at? Do you ever run across that problem?

Dave:  I find, Joe, right now today, as we're talking in June of 2025, that availables are generally listed for a much higher price per acre than solds. And I'm talking solds on a retail basis. Like, right this second, there's probably a 10 to 20 to 30% haircut on the difference between availables versus solds, at least in… There's different counties, different areas. I'm giving a generality here, not like super specific to any one thing, right? But As I look across the country, all of the stuff that we're doing and even our own properties and having to reprice stuff and trying to get stuff sold, I'm finding 10 to 20 to 30% haircut is pretty typical. I like solds right now over availables because… But you have to check it out because you're right, there could be other investors that are pulling things down. If you look at Zillow or Redfin or places like that, you hopefully can find a parcel number so you can look at that property to see, hey, does this make sense? Who if you look at on land ID, you might be able to see who the buyer was, right? So you could tell who the person was or not, assuming that you can get the parcel number to work from one place to the other, which I think at the end of the day, everything I'm saying is the ideal world, right? But in the real world, we have to make decisions and make them quickly. So sometimes I would encourage everybody, you can spend so much time in these analytics, you get paralyzed, right? Paralysis by analysis. And so, sooner or later, you got to take action. And I think that that's probably what's helped me is I take constant, massive action.

Joe:  Massive imperfect action because you're going to make mistakes and that's all right. And that's why I'd say, man, yeah, if you're just getting started, use priced. If you want to do blind offers, bam, go with price. Or I knew a guy that I've had on my podcast a couple, three times. He just goes straight to land. It goes to list source and he downloads a whole list of a county and he breaks it up by subdivision. If there is a subdivision and then just gets the pricing right from a spreadsheet, figures it out by subdivisional price per acre and makes his offers at 40% of that or whatever. It's just a numbers game and you're gonna make mistakes but you're okay with that, right? Okay, we gotta move on David, because this has been good, really good so far and we're approaching an hour and I'm actually over. Do you have time for just a couple more questions? Yeah, go for it Joe, absolutely. What do you, have you ever tried making offers where you give the sellers a couple options? Here's a cash price and here's an owner financing price maybe where I can buy it from cash with cash at maybe 40 cents on the dollar and if you're willing to finance it, I'll pay you 60 cents on the dollar, 70 cents on a dollar. Have you ever tried doing that?

Dave:  We don't specifically haven't used owner financing on the buy side, but what we do do is with our acquisition team, so our pricing team, once someone responds back to a marketing and say, hey, let's check this property out, see what's up, lead manager talks to them, lead manager sends it to pricing team and says, hey, I need to know what we can be able to do for this property. So we have three different prices that we call offer one, offer two, and offer three. In our case, that we're targeting more medium-sized type properties, buy for 30, buy for 20, buy for 50, and so on. We have basically, let's kind of 40 cents on the dollar approximately. We have 50 cents on the dollar for offer two, and we have like a 60 to 70 percent offer, which is 120 day double close kind of a price. So if we, our preference is always to do number one or number two, right? Cause that way we own it, we control it, we can take it over, but if we can't get those, Hey, let's see if we can squeeze some more profit out of this by trying to do a double close on it.

Joe:  Now, when you say double close, you mean you'll buy it if and when you find another buyer to wholesale. Exactly. Interesting. And you're giving you're asking for six months for that.

Dave:  It depends, right? That's a negotiating point. Our minimum is 120 days, double close. So that's our minimum. But we do try for up to six months, you know, say, okay, you like the price, you know, it's like, well, how long are you willing to wait, right, and see, see what you can get out of them, because obviously, the longer we have, the better chance we have to sell the thing versus- Yeah.

Joe:  Will you do like innovation in that instance or will you just have it under contract with six months to close?

Dave:  We won't do innovation yet, our goal is to close it ourselves, so we want to come to the tape

Joe:  Even on the higher priced option? Okay, what is some of your your favorite software tools that you're using right now?

Dave:  Talked about Landportal, talked about MapWrite. I still like to call it. I know, I know. We have our own.

Joe:  Listen, I've been using Regrid a lot lately. Regrid is super cool because you can just search for, by APN number as coordinates, you just put it in the search bar, address, GPS coordinates, APN, and it just bam, takes you right there to the property. You don't have to click through a bunch of buttons and create a bunch maps. Check out Regrid. What are some other tools?

Dave:  We have our own custom built CRM in Podio, which is probably a whole podcast to itself of the joy and pain of building your own CRM out. We use Rocket Print for the mailing. We use an EOS software called EOS One to help with our leadership meetings and team meetings and rocks and all kinds of good stuff that EOS has, which it's a pretty cheap software. We really like that a lot.

Joe:  I'm sorry, look back to rocket print and you're using rocket printer. You're sending bulk rate mail, not first class. Okay, exactly. And if you tested first class versus bulk rate.

Dave:  Not recently, but I have in the past and the cost wasn't worth it. It was like 30 cents more per letter for first class. So you're talking about having to get, you know, 50% more ROI on the letters. I used to, but, but I don't anymore because when I compared the two a few years back, I haven't done it recently. You know, it was the cost per acquisition was so much more expensive. Okay. First class stuff. We used to skip trace old bunch of stuff too.

Joe:  The phones, what do you use for phones? Open phone. Open phone, and that's done through Podio, right?

Dave:  We actually, we have to work on it in the integration. So it's currently standalone, but that's, that's one of our rocks. Actually for Q3 is we want to get the open focus. It does have a open API now, which it didn't use to a year ago. So in the last six months to a, year, they opened up the API. So now we can do it, which is great. I've used direct skip for skip tracing, but land portal now has that kind of ingrained in it. The Gmail suite is great, you know, just in terms of.

Joe:  If you were not using Podio for CRM, what do you think you would be using?

Dave:  That's a good question. I think there's a lot of things out there. Don't you have a CRM, if I remember right?

Joe:  That's right. Okay, so I'm pulling up my freedom soft shirt. It's a custom signature edition, I call it a freedom software. I've kind of customized it. There is no perfect CRM out there. I wish there was. I would create it if I could. And I tried. I was the guy that actually kind of introduced Podio to the real estate world. I had a student from Lebanon, the country of Lebanon, that was doing house deals in the United States. And we were trying to figure out a way we could like manage all these deals we were doing together. And he said, we should check out Podio. And I said, no, I don't want to try new software. He said, oh, don't check it out. And so this is at least 12 years ago, maybe 13 years ago. So I showed it, I loved it, fell in love with it. Cause you could kind of design and build your own CRM. I showed to a couple big gurus in the real estate space. And then it just kind of exploded and took off. And then I got the domain, podiojo.com. And I even got joepodio.com, I wanted to be the podio guy. And I started creating, I created this service that set up and installed podio in people's workspaces. And I quickly realized this is a nightmare. I tried doing like just a long story and it got to a point where I said you show me an expert in Podio and I'll show you a broke wholesaler because you could spend so much time digging into the weeds and you have all these connections and links to each other and then your chain is only as strong as a weakest link and if one of the links is broken you may not know about it for like three or four months well three or three weeks and then what so I just gave up on the perfect CRM that's not why I settled on freedom soft but I settled on Freedom Soft because it's kind of an all in one thing. You get the phone numbers, you get the direct mail, you get lists and it manages everything in there for you. And I could send one-off offers. I can do the automated follow-up with texting, with emails, whatever. So, but I'm just curious, you know, a lot of people use Pebble, which is a great CRM. A lot of use Asana, Trello. I know a guy that does almost a hundred deals a year using Evernote as his CRM, crazy.

Dave:  I think Seth has a new software that he and Mike Balcom are doing too. So I mean, I'd probably check out yours and Mike's and Seth's and Pebble, if I was just starting out. But I think reality is when you're just getting going, right? Google Sheets is your best friend, just as you're tracking your first few. If you're sending out 500 mailers, 1,000 mailers. Google Sheet works great. You don't need to spend $100 a month, $200 a month whatever it is, you know, on stuff. Like in my case, we'd probably spend 250 bucks a month because we have all these users, even though it's custom built, we still have to spend a lot of money for all of the users that we have and all of phone numbers and stuff like that. So it definitely does get more expensive and you know we just started out with a Google Voice and Google Sheets and that worked great to get the business going. So you don't need to have all this wonderful software. Now after you do five deals, right? You start sending out more mail, now you need a CRM to help you out. This is where Freedom Soft can come in and help you, or any of these other guys that have software. So as you do more and more volume, you need to get more and better organized, and that's absolutely where CRM should come in.

Joe:  Okay, cool. Any other favorite tools you want to mention real quick?

Dave:  We've used Drip for a long time as kind of a email CRM thing, which frankly we could fold it all into Podio. I just haven't done the brain damage enough to go and reset stuff up in it. I mean, the vital ones at the end of the day, right? You gotta have a phone system of some sort, whether it's Google Voice starting out, a CRM as you get bigger, and a data provider and something you can look things up like a map, right. I think if you have those tools, you're good. All this other stuff, you know, is just additive on top of that. Terra Notes, formerly Your Land Loans, is another software that we use for note management.

Joe:  Oh, that's a good question. I was gonna ask you, what are you using to manage your notes?

Dave:  So we have old ones which are on ZimpleMoney and then we have new ones which are on TerraNotes which is part of the problem of when you've been around a while you start kind of Frankensteining the thing you know because the the pain of switching from one thing to another like to have to reset up 300 contracts from Zimplemoney to have all 500 of them all in Paradox is just not the brain damage I want to have at this time.

Joe:  So have you ever tried geek pay? Yes

Dave:  Geek Pay has really fallen behind Terra Notes, I would say, at this time. I think Terra Notes is a far, far better product than GeekPay is. I think for a long time, Mark spent a lot of money getting that thing set up. My impression is, you know, it's like, I don't want to put more money into this thing. And so then JT Olmstead comes and creates Terra Notes and does a whole bunch of iterations of it. And it's a far superior product, in my opinion.

Joe:  Yeah. And we were kind of stuck with Geek Pay. Not that it works, right. It does the job. And so I don't want to knock anybody. But if you're just getting started, take a look around and see what else is out there. One more question. I just realized, I wanted to ask you, what are you seeing right now working best for marketing your properties? Where and how are you doing that?

Dave:  Well, I think it depends right on what style of property you're doing. I know people still today that they're doing those medium-sized properties and all they do are realtors. You know, realtors do the work for them. I found for myself and my career… I can never find just one thing to work the way that I want it to. So we use realtors, we use lands.com, we land flip, we use land century, we do ringless voicemail drops on realtors and neighbors and all those different kinds of marketing activities to be able to sell property. So basically anything and everything, I just tried cold calling on the sell side, rather than cold calling buy side, tried doing cold calling sell side just to see could we drum something up there. It didn't work out, but I'm always testing and trying different things just to say, okay, can we figure out something else out that other people aren't doing? I've tried paid Facebook ads that didn't worked out too well for me on the sell side. We do a fair amount of YouTube. I think now we put out 340 videos on YouTube at this point. And so we're probably getting one, maybe two sales a month from YouTube, but that's a lot of time that we've spent. No advertising spent, but in terms of the number of videos we've created and all that kind of thing has worked out great for us too.

Joe:  Unfortunately, land.com is so stinking expensive, but you know, a lot of people are using it. I like realtors and you got to talk to a lot of them to find the good ones. But I recommend that. I have some students right now that are selling a ton of deals on Facebook Marketplace. They're just active on there and they're going into Facebook groups and marketplace. Yeah. So there's a lot different ways to skin a cat.

Dave:  So I mean, which we do sell a little bit on Facebook, but it's such a small percentage of what we do. I know friends that do great on flat VMLS. They say, screw realtors, we're just gonna list it ourselves and they do great there. So, I mean there's so many different ways you can do this business. But I think… One that gives us the most leverage out of them for us is lands.com. That's our number one sales source for cheaper properties. If you're talking about more expensive ones, now realtors are our best source. Or flat fee MLS is the best source for more of the medium-sized stuff. But all that other stuff works too. We still sell medium-size stuff through lands. Com, right? It gives us one or two or three more of those a month that we can sell on top of the cheaper stuff. So it all works, and it's not one thing that allows us to sell everything. For us, it's doing a whole bunch of different stuff, and because we never know what's going to work. And so, yes, do a lot of different things.

Joe:  Well, listen, guys, I didn't even have time to ask David questions on lending money, right? But I wanna encourage all of you, go listen, go find Seth Williams' podcast, it's called REtipster, and do a search for David Denniston, D-E-N-N-I-S-T-O-N's interview with Seth. And they talk a lot about lending, why he started leaning towards lending now on deals and how you can too. It's a whole nother business, but it's really, one of the great things you guys talked about on that episode was finding where your strengths are. You know, and some people may be good at one thing and you may be not good at that thing, but good at another thing. And so where are you at? And if you're great with sales and marketing, then you should be on the operation side. If you're better with behind the scenes and raising private capital and crunching the numbers, maybe you need to be raising private, capital and starting an equity fund and start lending on other people's deals, a lot of different ways you can make very good money doing all of that. So go check out that podcast that David did recently with Seth on the RE tipster podcast. Just Google it. REtipster, Dave Denniston, and Seth Williams, and you'll find that podcast. Cool. David, how can people reach you? You want to give the website of your company, the landunconference.com. It's a place people can go to get information on this conference that we're that I'm going to be at. So how can people get ahold of you?

Dave:  Yeah, absolutely, Joe. So people are welcome to send me an email if they'd like. Dave@genfamland.com. That's D-A-V-E at gulf-echo-nancy-frank-apple-mary-land. Com. So if you have questions about lending or whatever, I love networking with other land investors. I'm super busy with all the different things I'm doing, but I will make time for you. It may not be in a day, but within a week or two or three, happy to connect and chat and discuss with other Land Investors, if you want to check out our buy side or sell side, GenFamLand.com is the buy side, GenFamproperties.com is our sell side website. So check it out. Let me reach out in time, guys.

Joe:  Hey, thank you so much for your time, David. Appreciate you, and I'll see you in a few weeks. All right, Joe, thank so much. Look forward to seeing you in about six weeks, right? Yeah. All right. Hey, see you guys, take care, have a good one. Listen, if anything we talked about overwhelmed you, just throw that away, right, but focus on keeping it simple. Keep it simple, that's how everybody gets started, right. To do your first deal, just focus on the simple basic things, right do the marketing consistently, even if it's only a hundred letters a week, right just consistently keep on doing it and it will happen, just gotta be consistent. Alright, that's all I wanted to say. We'll see you guys later. Take care, everybody. Bye bye.