Joe:  What's up, guys? Welcome to REI in Your Car. Hope you're doing awesome.

Joe:  I got a short little episode here. I'm going to tell you why wholesaling is the best business in the world, I think. It doesn't matter if you're wholesaling land or houses or shoes or watches. This business is amazing, amazing. And so lately, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Shout out to my friend Seth Williams at the REtipster podcast. He was interviewing another friend of mine, Travis King. Love those guys. And it was a really good podcast, so I'm not knocking anything they said. I'm just, I want to re-emphasize what they were saying and why I believe this is such an important topic today, all right? A lot of people are talking about how the market is shifting and how it's changing, and there's more comp- so it's funny, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and hear some people say, there's so much competition, it's just like, it was so much easier five years ago, three years ago and nobody knew about this.

Well, I call BS on that and that this isn't what Seth and Travis were saying. So it's not what they're saying. What I'm saying like some people say that and first of all, that's BS. I heard the same thing when I started doing houses back in 2006 and I've been hearing it ever since. It was always easier back then and so whatever right and if I've always heard people complain about the competition other people are starting to say man, “This sucks, all these, everybody's leaving the business. There's nobody like, all of these land investors that I knew were doing so well are not doing land anymore and the sky's falling.” Land doesn't work anymore. All right, so I want to address this and this is why wholesaling is so important and why wholesaling works in any market. One of the biggest reasons why so many land investors are leaving, and I've seen this in my own Dirt Flippers community, is because they are chasing the bigger deals that were selling a few years ago that aren't selling as fast anymore. So, and I’ve seen this a lot with houses, right? I've seen people who are wholesaling houses, they're making good money. They're doing deals, you know, five, $10,000, $15,000 profit deals, but they get bored with it. And they're like, man, I want to do the bigger deals, right, I wanna go fix and flip by they hear stories of people that are rehabbing and making 50 to $100,000 on a deal. And you're thinking, oh, man for the same amount of work, I could rehab a house and make $50,000 for the same amount of work, quote unquote, I can just buy a big parcel. I'm not going to go after these little parcels anymore. I'm going to got to the big ones and I'm just going to subdivide it. I'm gonna do entitlements. So they go after the bigger deals.

Here's where the problem with that is. That is so dependent on what direction the market is going. That is so too dependent on the interest rates. It's dependent on home builders, whether they building or not, whether retail buyers that are buying land to build a house eventually on what depends on interest rates and how, how they can do. So like that works really well in a bull market where things are going up, right? But maybe the rehabbing fix and flips, right, the entitlements, the subdivides for land, that just doesn't work as well when the market isn't as strong, okay, not saying it doesn't work at all, but it doesn't work as well. So what happens is people get their eye off the ball and they start chasing these shiny objects. And I've seen this over and over and again. This is why I'm so important to get a coach or a mentor, guys, or be careful who you're listening to. You want to listen to people who have been there, done that, who've been through the cycles that have seen the ups and the downs, all right? Because this is so critical to understand because you could get easily discouraged to quit or you could start chasing the wrong things. And so what I'm here to tell you is a little bit of street smarts, a little bit of wisdom here because during that same time, that six to 12 months when you're rehabbing fixing that house to flip it, or you are subdividing that 100 acres or that 50 acres and doing entitlements and parceling it out or whatever.

During that same 6 to 12 months where you could make more money, you could have wholesaled 10 or 15 deals during that same time and made the same amount of money, if not more, with a lot less risk. So when you take on risk where you buy bigger deals and you borrow the money or you use your own money, or tie it up, there's a lot of risk in that, especially with houses. Right. You've got, there's so many things that go on that you don't know about. You don't see that are behind the, behind the walls or under the foundations or whatever. So like it's the same with land, right? You go out and you do these bigger deals. You could get wiped out. Like what if you put a couple hundred thousand dollars into a big 50,000 or you know, 58 or a lot of whatever and you subdivide it and you can't sell it in the six or 12 months that you thought you could, what are you going to do with all that money that you borrowed? So there's a risk to it. There's a great reward, But I've seen this over and over again where people stop doing those little singles those little base hits and they go after the home runs and then all of a sudden three six months later, they've not done a deal yet. They've not made any money and they're getting discouraged and like this doesn't work anymore. Here's my point, don't stop going after those little deals. Those are your singles. Those are your base hits. Those are the things that pay the bills and that will keep the engine humming. All right? So don't start chasing those.

There's this thing called the velocity of capital and this is really important to understand. And I remember hearing this interview with Jerry Norton and a guy who created, he's the guy who create the software Investor Lift. But this was a guy that came out of an Ivy League college in the financial markets. And we're talking like hedge funds and you know, these, he is not a savant, but he's a really smart guy. But he was talking about in this interview, these financial hedge funds, and you know, thisbig huge companies are hiring these savants to create these really fancy, complicated, technical software and trading bots or whatever. Okay. Forget that. But what I'm saying is these guys coming out of these Ivy League colleges are super, super smart and they're looking and they are in the financial markets, right? They're trading features and currencies and options and all of these weird, complicated things. All right. So this one guy came out of that and he has had some interest in real estate and he was looking at real estate and looking at how normal investors do deals. And he's like, this doesn't make sense. And he studied it from the financial market’s perspective, right?

It's like why are you guys spending all this time rehabbing houses when you could do these systems, do these things, and just wholesale houses, and you won't make as much money each deal, but you can make your velocity, the velocity of your capital turns faster. So you do fewer deals. I mean, I'm sorry, you do more deals with less profit, but your money turns faster, and when you look at it from the bigger perspective of things, it's a much better business model to wholesale. And if you learn how to wholesale right, you don't have to make just five, 10 grand on a deal. You can make 25, 30 grand on the deal if you wholesale the right deals. All right. So, this guy though created a software called Investor Lift that helped investors at the time. And this is groundbreaking when he did this. Find the best buyers who were most active buying and you could dispose your deals a lot faster. All right. Here's what I've been teaching from the very beginning when I started doing land. Find the demand, right? Follow the money. And when you do this, it doesn't matter if you're in a recession or if you are in a hot market, bull market, bear market. It does not matter when you follow the money, follow the demand. Because then what happens? All right, well, you just look, now you're not at a state level, you're now at a county level, you're at a zip code level, right. You're looking to see, all right, where are the properties being bought and sold today in the last three months, in the last six months, who is buying property and where, and what are they buying? Because guess what? Even in a slow market, there will always be people buying land. Maybe different people, maybe for different reasons. You know, it may be home builders, it may be recreational buyers. It may be retail buyers, just like buying land for future appreciation because they're taking their money out of the stock market and they're putting it into real estate, right? So maybe a few years ago, three, five years ago when a lot of people started doing land, there were a lot of home builders that were building houses. All right.

So they targeted those buyers, but here's the dealio. Listen, this is so important to understand when you follow the money and you go to where the demand is, you can always make wholesale deals. There will always be opportunities there for you to go and find what the buyers are buying and go get it for them. Okay. I saw this in the housing crash in 2008, nine, all the way through.But from 2008 to 2012, when a lot, that was kind of in my mind, the big window of the housing recession, maybe 2007 to 2012. I mean, everybody was running to the hills, and you talk to investors that stayed through that. That was like their most profitable years ever, right? And the guys that were wholesaling, you would think nobody was buying properties back then, right, because the prices were falling, but there were a lot of people making money during that time. You know who those people were? They were wholesalers, because they knew people were still buying properties, they just went and found where they were buying them and got it for them. So there's a saying that I learned from a guy named Kent Clothe here. And at that time in 2009 or so, he created the software called Find Buyers Now or Cash Buyers now, Find Buyer now or something like that, Find Cash Buyer. He wrote a book called Reverse Wholesaling, but at the time the software was created, because you could instantly go into a market and see where are these buyers buying, what are they buying and stuff like that. And you could then go and say, all right, well, I see they're buying these properties and these zip codes in these areas for this price. And then you go get it for them, right? And you can sell your deals really, really quickly, even in the worst housing market we've ever seen in our lifetimes. Okay, so he said something that was so important to me and just radically changed my life. He said, it's always easier to sell buyers what they want rather than what you have. And so that's where people are getting in trouble in land and in houses right now. They're getting in trouble because they're trying to sell what they have, not what people want. And when you go and find what people want, you'll always be able to sell it fast. And you can make a quick $3,000, $5,000 to $10,000 profit by focusing on what the buyers want. Does that make sense?

By the way, if you're wondering what I'm doing here, I'm driving around this neighborhood next to ours and it's just… Really, really pretty. But I'm wanting to talk more about this. All right. So there's this show, maybe you've heard of it called Undercover Billionaire. Undercover billionaire. And the guy who did the first, there was two or it's been done two or three times. But the first one was the best and it was done by this guy. I forgot his name. He started a mortgage company, and he went into this little, small town in Pennsylvania. And his goal was to, within three months, I think, start a business that was worth at least a million dollars in three months. And all he had was a hundred dollars and an old beat-up pickup truck, okay? Just go find that first episode, and I forget the guy's name. It was really amazing; it was really good. He actually was just diagnosed with cancer or something like that halfway through the filming and he was in the truck in 30-degree weather and coughing blood, it's just like this guy was insane. Butso watch that because there was an episode in there where he had to make some money so we could get our hotel room, right, and get out of this truck. And he started talking about, this Business Fundamentals 101, go find the buyers, go find that demand and go meet it. Find a problem and fix it. And so, he went and looked for people on Craigslist or something like that, that he looked for the wanted like ads, like wanted, we want tires.

So he found somebody that wanted tires, a certain kind of tires for tractors or whatever. And so, he just started getting going door to door in this industrial area and asking people, hey, do you have abandoned tires that you don't want anymore? And he found somebody that had tires, I'm not sure if he, I think he just took them away for free or something like that. And then went to this other guy and sold it and made 50 or 100 bucks or whatever, which is enough to give him a hotel. Maybe he got more than that. But he started talking about this. It's one of the most fundamental foundational principles in business, period. Find the demand, find what the buyers want and go get it for them. Find a problem and go solve it. It's the same thing with wholesaling, okay? You will never be hurting for money. You'll never be broke if you understand this principle. Find what the buyers want and then go get it So you can go in and you could do this for free on Zillow on Redfin You don't have to have fancy software for any of this, right? Go find where buyers are buying land in the last three months Not a year ago not two years ago in the three months What are they buying? Where are they? And how much are they paying for it? All that. Alright, good. You found it They're buying in this zip code. They're Buying, you know, and there's this concept of median versus average so find the median acreage Find the most popular zip codes, right, the median acreage, and then find what price are they paying per acre.

So if you go into, and I'm talking about not just state level, but go down to the county level, not just counties, but down into the zip code level and see, all right, so they're buying median acre, 0.25 acres, maybe it's two acres, all in these zip codes. And then dig into it. Like who are the buyers? Are there a lot of buyers that are buying multiple properties there? All right. Then you go and you see, all right, they're buying this, they are paying this, these are who the buyers are. Boom! That's 90% of the battle. Well, that's a large percentage of the battle, then it's really, really simple. You get a list of people who own land that meet that criteria in that area and you market to them. Now, I like direct mail, it works. These houses are gorgeous. Send them a postcard, send them a letter, skip trace them, call them, or text them, whatever. I don't even like doing that anymore, actually, but I just say send them postcard. And there's different postcards you can send, but man, I'm telling you guys, direct mail still works.

People are complaining, those don't work anymore. I wasjust in, Ihave an apprentice program where we bring somebody on and we do the marketing for them, we give them leads and all of that. And so, this particular person, it's been about 11 months, And I don't know what happened. They dropped off the planet. They I just I don't hear from them anymore Anyway, I was in this person's freedom soft account looking at their leads and in one of the most competitive markets in the southeast We had done some marketing for her and she had over six percent response rate six percent Response rate we promised her 60 leads We gave her a hundred and eighty nine and she just for some reason is not working the leads only of the hundred 69 maybe only 20 have been reached out to okay, so maybe something happened I you know, I don't know but I see this over and over again right like the direct mail works That's my whole point We're seeing in some of our clients right now that we're doing this direct mail for Response rates on average of two and a half to three percent on average once in a while I might even say that's on the low end because we're saying response rates Sometimes three four or five percent in markets where people are complaining. That's so competitive. It's hard then it used to be a lot easier. So I, you know, I don't know what's going on. And when you're talking to sellers, sometimes they'll say, you're the 20th letter that I've received today, you know, and that can get discouraging. And you think, oh man, it's too competitive. But here's the deal. Number one, that's not true. They have not received 20 letters today. Okay. They maybe have received 20 in the last six months. I don't know. But who cares? Because they're calling you, they want to sell some property.

And again, I've heard sellers say that since I started doing land and I've heard sellers say the same thing since 2006 when I started doing real estate. There's always going to be competition. And in fact, competition is a good thing. It's a good thing. It tells you, oh man, there's activity going on here. This is good. So, I would be more concerned if you were targeting an area where there wasn't any competition, where nobody was actually marketing to these sellers. So you now need to think about, all right, I'm in the areas where there's demand. I'm not going to hits okay I'm going into it doesn't matter what I want I'm only gonna get what people other buyers want who are actively buying land right now okay you go find what they want you go get it then you need to think about this this is why wholesaling works and always will work in any market no matter the level of competition and I would say the competition is actually going down it's better this is the best time to get into land this is a best time to get in the wholesaling houses okay I'll tell you because people are they're leaving, they're getting nervous, they are scared, you know, they just giving up. And so, because they don't understand this. This is so important. So, you got to think about in your competition, what are they not doing that you should be doing? They're not consistently marketing.

Number one, write this down, this is so critical. I'm telling you, somebody listening to this is going to make a million dollars in the next 12 months by doing what I'm saying right here and right now. This is not complicated, it's not rocket science, there's no secret magic pill. There's no secret list. There's no secret postcard letter or marketing strategy that works. There's no special software that will make any of this easier for you. This is fundamental basics stuff. And the people who are brilliant at this basic stuff, I call brilliant at the basics, will make a million dollars in the next 12 months. Okay, so I'm not promising that, but somebody here probably will be. I'm just saying. So listen, pay attention. So you got to do the things that your competition's not doing. Number one, they're not consistently marketing. Every week, whether you like it or not, you're sending 50 letters, 100 letters, 500 letters every week to the honey pots, okay, to the markets in the areas where there's a lot of demand. That's number one, okay? Consistently marketing whether they like it or not, whether they're busy or not. They're always doing it. And in fact, they're getting it done for them in spite of them. They're just setting it on autopilot, cruise control, all that marketing is consistently going out the door in the right markets, okay. That number one.

Number two is they're picking up the phone and they're talking to people, all right? Stupid AI automation, this stuff, it's such BS, okay? I'm telling you, it is a trick to sell you software, it just, it stupid, right? And people that are using AI for automated outreach, you're gonna get in trouble, right. There are so such strict laws and the government is gonna be cracking down, they already are, but they're gonna be crack down on all this automation stuff and the do call list and this anti-spam telemarketing laws like it's getting it's a big deal all right so just stop it and you know what?I can outsell you.I can do you a hundred to one just forI’m picking up the phone,I am talking to sellers,I’m not an AIbot you just talk to people.That is like the secret magic sauce.Just pick up the phone and talk to five people a day.If you talk to five people today you will always do deals you will also make money so number one, always be and consistency. Number two, talk to people. Pick up the phone, talk to them, all right? Talk to five people a day. And number three, make an offer to every seller you talk to or every realtor that you talk to. Always be making offers. Make an offer for every seller, right?

And then number four, I think is number four right? Follow-up. 85-95% of your deals are going to come from the follow-up, so you should be following up with every single seller that you make an offering to every 30 days. And if you do those four fundamental things consistently to the right in the right markets, you will always do deals because you're going to now start selling what people want rather than what you have and you're gonna stand out above any quote unquote competition and nobody will be able to beat you and you'll be able to make a lot of money. Alright, so I got to figure out what I'm doing here, something's got back up.

Alright, I'm so passionate about this because I am tired of people quitting, tired of people getting discouraged and complaining, when they don't understand these simple basic things, they've taken their eye off of them all. They've gotten distracted, they've chased signing objects, they've forgotten what has gotten to them to be successful where they are. It's always, it's like, I see this in tons of different types of businesses too, not just houses, but like, or land. You get bored, entrepreneurs, like they say the definition of an entrepreneur is somebody that finds something that works and stops doing it and does something else, right? Like, entrepreneurs were crazy people. We're the only ones that will work 80 hours a week just so we don't have to work 40 hours a week for a boss or whatever, right? I remember I used to look down on wholesalers. When I was first getting started in real estate, I thought wholesaling was for beginning. Beginners was for rookies. I've kind of looked down at like a scam, just a get rich quick scheme. But wholesaling is where the money is at. And it works in any business, whether it's shoes or jewelry or houses or vacant land or whatever. You find what are people buying, where are they buying it, and you go get it for them and you'd mark it up a little bit and you sell it to them. That will always work. So I feel like I'm beating a dead horse. I think you understand what I'm saying. Listen, if you like this podcast, subscribe, leave me a review, I'd really appreciate it.

Also, every week I do what's called the Five Day Flip Dirt Challenge and I teach how to flip vacant land and it's free, at least right now it is. So go to flipdirtchallenge.com, maybe www.flipdirtchallenge.com. Join me on my next five-day challenge and learn how to flip the lamp. I'm telling you, this is the best time to get back into the business if you've left or if you're just thinking about getting in. Don't worry for heaven's sake, stop worrying about competition. Stop worrying about, oh man, everybody's doing it. I hear people ask me like, why are you teaching this? If it works so well, aren't you worried about competition? If it worked so well, why aren't she like, oh listen, the reason I'm teaching this stuff because I want to do more deals. I've got a, I'm not humblebrag here, I've got a lot of money and I want to start investing in deals. So we JV and we partner with folks on deals. We got a lot people in the community that are partnering with each other on deals and I love this business. I love teaching and coaching and helping people do deals, to do land deals. We're still doing deals ourselves.

I just, I just telling you from experience, from our own business, us doing deals to me helping and coaching other people to do deals. Yeah. I'm just telling from what I'm seeing, this is what works. And I, from experience, been there, done that, have that t-shirt. Sostay with wholesaling. Stop, I mean, maybe you can do those other things, those bigger deals, but like, don't stop doing the simple, basic things that will pay the bills. Always be wholesaling the little properties that people want. And, you know, I forgot to mention this earlier, but one of the reasons why going after those bigger deals doesn't work as well is because there's fewer buyers that want those bigger deal. Why do wholesaling small deals, cheap deals always work? Because there's more buyers looking for those deals. With houses, why is it always going to be easier to wholesale the medium price properties, the properties that are in the median price range in the good school districts, the good blue-collar middle-income areas, because there will always be people looking to buy properties there. The same with the little $50,000 rental properties, there will always be landlords looking for $50 thousand rental properties. So you want it, it doesn't matter if you would not want to live there, if you do not want to own that land, whatever, it's not up to you, you just need to follow the man. All right, so I appreciate you guys. Peace out. God bless.