Joe:  Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Hey, what's up guys? I'm going to tell you three land investing secrets that the pros do not tell beginners. It's going to be a very simple video — I'm going to go straight to the point. Most beginners think that land investing is about finding cheap land, but the real pros know it's about choosing the right markets, making the right offers, and selling it the right way to the right buyer. Most beginners fail at land investing because they're taught the wrong things. They're told to go after cheap land, send a bunch of offers, and hope someone says yes — but the pros play a different game. And in this video, I'm going to show you these three land investing secrets and why — maybe it's a conspiracy, I don't know — why the pros usually don't tell beginners this stuff. The good news is this business is simple when you actually understand the right frameworks. Are you ready for the secrets? Let's get into this.

Number one: the money is made before you ever even talk to a seller. Most beginners think they just need to find motivated sellers, but the pros know they need to pick a market where the land is already selling. Before you ever send mail, make calls, or make offers, you need to know: What properties are actually selling in this area? Is this a good market? How many have sold in the last three to six months — not a year ago, not two years ago. What acreage sizes are moving? What zip codes are hot? What price points are buyers paying? And are properties sitting forever or moving quickly? There's a thing called the sell-through rate, and I'll get to that in a minute. Bottom line, it's always easier to sell people what they want rather than what you have. Don't chase cheap land — chase land that buyers already want. If you're in Montana, beautiful state, but are there a lot of buyers buying land in Montana right now? No. Chase the land where the demand already is. Think of it like being on a fishing boat with a depth finder — you can see exactly where all the fish are biting. What kind of fish are they? What bait are they liking? What are the best strategies? That's how you need to think about markets.

So how do you find the right markets? I'm going to show you one of my favorite tools, the Land Portal. But before I show you that, here's something I like to do first. Go to landwatch.com and click the big orange search button. LandWatch is part of the land.com family — the most popular website on the internet for buying and selling land. I'm looking at the entire United States, filtering for anything under $200,000, checking available, under contract, and sold, then setting date listed to past 60 days. What this shows you is which states are the most active in the last couple of months — where successful investors are right now flipping land. Look at the big sponsored listings: some of these investors are spending $3,000 to $5,000 a month on sponsored placements. Do you think they'd be doing that if they didn't know what they were doing? Look at the most popular states on the left — Texas, Florida, California, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Arkansas, Arizona. All good states. This is where you should be starting. Don't go try to find some secret market nobody knows about — go where there's already a lot of activity.

Now let me show you the Land Portal. Go to getlandportal.com — this saves so many hours of research. Go to Market Research on the left, then Drill Deep. Set the time filter to six months. I want to know where all the activity is happening in the last six months. Sort all states by count — this tells you the most popular states where land is being bought and sold. You'll see Florida, Texas, North Carolina, California, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan — pretty much the same states as LandWatch. Let's click into Florida. Now you've got columns that matter: DON is days on market; STR is sell-through rate, which is solds divided by active listings — the higher, the better; months of supply — the lower, the better; population density; population growth; and median price. I can run filters to find the best counties — say, count minimum 200, days on market under 90, sell-through rate above 50%, months of supply under 10, and population density under 1,000. You can go from 67 Florida counties down to just 7 strong ones. Then within a county like Walton, you drill into zip codes and see exactly where buyers are concentrated — for example, Santa Rosa Beach. You're not doing spray-and-pray marketing. You're being hyper-focused, laser-targeted, going where the demand already is. This is something the pros do not want you to know about.

Secret number two: pros don't guess at offers — they use a formula. Most beginners are terrified of making offers because they don't know what to offer. What if I offer too low? What if I offend the seller? What if they say yes and I made a mistake? The secret is you don't need to guess. You just need a simple formula. I make two offers. My cash offer is usually 40 to 50% of whatever I can sell it for. If I think I can sell a deal for $25,000, I'll offer maybe $12,000 to $13,000. When I do owner financing, I usually offer 70 to 75% of real market value. If the seller wants more, I can offer more on better terms — but I'm always thinking price or terms. Until you've done a few deals, just make cash offers and keep it simple. Never offer more than 50% on a vacant land deal, especially under $100,000. I also like to give sellers options: a lower cash price or a higher price with owner financing. You can negotiate the price, the down payment, the interest rate, the terms of the loan, the monthly payments, and when the payments start. Terms sometimes matter more than price.

Let me show you a calculator I built called the Dirt Flippers Deal Analyzer. You can get it free at flipdirtchallenge.com. Here's how I use it. Say I found a 0.64-acre lot. I go to Zillow, look at comparable properties — quarter acre to two acres sold in the last 12 months — and use a Chrome extension scraper to pull all the data. I scrape the solds, then the actives. I discount active listings by 15% and use the sold price per acre as my basis. Based on the comps, I might determine I can sell this property for $29,750 — call it $30,000. My cash offer at 50% would be around $14,875. Using the back-solve method — subtracting $2,500 in closing costs, $500 for photos, $1,000 miscellaneous, 10% for a realtor, and wanting at least $10,000 in profit — I get to about $15,000. So my cash offer is $15,000. For owner financing, I might offer 75% of market value — around $22,000. The tool also lets you model cash flow scenarios, private investor structures, and generates a ready-to-send letter of intent. I love using a two-option letter: one option is cash at $15,000, and the other is owner financing at $22,000. I don't put all the financing terms in the letter — I just show them the two prices. When I get them on the phone, I negotiate the details.

Secret number three: the exit strategy matters more than the deal. Most beginners ask, can I buy this cheap? But the pros ask, how am I going to sell this before I even buy it? A property is not a good deal just because it's cheap. It's a good deal if you know who the buyer is, what they want, what they can afford, where they go to search for properties, how you're going to market the property, and whether you should sell with cash or owner financing. Buy land because you already know how you're going to sell it and to whom — that is so important. You've got to know who your buyers are. Now I'm not saying you need to go talk to buyers first, but you need to know who they are.

My favorite tool for finding buyers is InvestorBase. Go to getinvestorbase.com — yes, I get a commission, but I use this every single day. Here's how it works: I put in the address of a nearby property and search within a 5- to 10-mile radius for land buyers in the last year. Just like that, I can see 50 different buyers who've been buying land in the area. Some are home builders like Lennar Homes, some are fix-and-flip investors. You can see exactly what they paid and what they sold for. CMH Homes, for example, bought a lot for $60,000, built a house on it, and sold it for $206,000 within six months — and they have 9,700 deals. The greens are buy-and-hold landlords and the blues are fix-and-flippers. I have clients right now getting deals under contract, and I just give them this list. One lady recently got a full-price offer on her vacant lot from the second person she called, making about $7,000. Skip tracing is included in your subscription — you get phone numbers, emails, and mailing addresses. You can also find buyers inside FreedomSoft.

Let me show you one more thing. We'll wrap this up. How do you find the good owner financing markets? How do you go into areas where you know where a lot of people are doing owner financing again? Do not be afraid of competition. I look at competition as collaboration So I like to go to land.com and look at owner financing you could do the same on land watch But let me just show you let's stay in land watch since we're already here.So I'm gonna remove some filters and now we're looking at all the land in the United States that it's available under contract and sold. And I want cheap land. Let's look at anything under 200 grand. Okay, I'm gonna scroll down all the way down here. And I'm just gonna check off owner financing. We have 35,000 vacant land listings that have sold in the last five ten years I don't know or are currently actively listed that are available with owner financing. What are the most popular states Texas, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, California BAM. You see what we're doing here. And if you wanted to just to see the most recent you could say date listed past 60 days. It's gonna show you the most popular states, but I don't for when for owner financing I just like to look at all of them and take a look at this if we go into Arizona. What are the most popular counties for owner financing Mojave County, Apache, Navajo? Of course, there's not a lot of counties in Arizona. Let's look at another state. What about Colorado?Great market for owner financing most popular regions. Here we go Castilla County all let's look at Castilla County. What do we have here? These are investors that have done a lot of owner financing in these areas. Some of these are current active listings. Some of them are sold recently. But do you think if because again these guys David Healy Jeremy the land equity group, these guys are paying thousands of dollars a month for these sponsored listings success leaves clues. I'm telling you these are great markets to go into and do owner financing on what if you went into some of these markets and made that to option letter of intent offers to the sellers, give them cash and give them a higher owner financing price. Buy it on owner financing, sell it on owner financing.So these are some great ways to find the markets where there are people buying land right now.So I just wanted to share that with you these owner finance are these secrets that the pros aren't telling you because you know. There's some secret conspiracy, but number one the money is made before you ever talk to a seller,okay, the pros know you need to pick a market where the land is selling right now. Okay, second pros don't guess offers. They use simple formulas simple predictable formulas to make their offers and the extra strategy matters more than the deal. The pros ask how am I going to sell this and to whom before I buy it? You know what they don't buy it until they know they can sell it and they already have another buyer.So I hope this video is helpful for you. Okay if you want more information, if you want these tools that I'm giving you here,just go to my next free five-day flip dirt challenge at Flipdirtchallenge.com and I'll see you there. Thanks a lot guys. We'll see you