Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to a brand new YouTube video series I'm doing called the New Market Video Series. This is something I haven't done in about three years. We're going to go in and pick a brand new market, one that we've never done a single deal in, and we're starting from zero. On camera, live, we're going to be picking the market, building the list, sending real actual offers, calling sellers and realtors. No theory, just watch what we actually do. It's going to be so exciting. Thanks for tuning in. Let's go into today's video.

Joe:  One of my first places to go when I'm looking for markets is landwatch.com. It's free. Go to LandWatch and just click on the orange button. I'm going to scroll down. I don't want really cheap properties and I don't want really expensive properties. So I'll set minimum $25,000 and maximum $200,000. And then I'll scroll down and do minimum one acre. Now this is totally a preference, up to you. I've already decided for me right now, I don't want to do little quarter-acre infill lots in Benton County, Arkansas or Brunswick County, North Carolina or Lee County, Florida. There's a huge demand for those and they're great for wholesaling. There's nothing wrong with quarter-acre infill lots. But I want to sell with owner financing, and I'm targeting bigger lots, maybe one to two acres-plus. Because ideally I want to sell to a recreational buyer, somebody who wants to buy land to put their motor home out there and go hunting. One property I was talking about, the buyer bought a partial wetland. They didn't want to build a house there. They just wanted a place with no restrictions, no HOA, where they could park an RV, bring out their four-wheelers, go play in the mud, go camping, and drive a quarter mile to the river and go floating. So I'm setting the max at $200,000, then scrolling down and selecting solds. These are sold properties marked as sold on LandWatch, not necessarily from county records. And then I select owner financing.

Joe:  Look at that. These are the most popular states where we have price between $25,000 and $200,000, one-plus acres, with owner financing. Most popular states: Texas, Florida, New York, Oklahoma, Arizona, California, Colorado. Now just because Georgia shows a smaller number doesn't mean Georgia is a bad state. Colorado is a great market for owner financing. I like Colorado a lot. So is California, Arizona, and Oklahoma. But do you think Iowa is a good market to target for owner financing deals? Not necessarily. Although here's the deal: if you find a good piece of land in Iowa near state parks and hunting areas, not agricultural land, and you sell it on owner financing, you will sell it fast. I promise you. Because there's high demand for recreational land in some of those areas, and you'll be the only one advertising your property with owner financing. Kentucky is a great market. Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico. Montana is beautiful but I'm not sure. Michigan, not so much. So let's look at Florida. Click on Florida and you'll see the most popular region is North Central, then Central, then Northwest. There's a lot of cheap, larger recreational land up in the North Central region where a lot of buyers are looking. And a lot of investors are doing owner financing there. Why? Because there's demand for it. We're just going to be like a fly on the elephant's back. We're not going into a new market to create our own demand. We're going where the demand already is. Here are the counties: Suwannee County, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Okeechobee. These are all great counties.

Joe:  I'm going to filter by date listed, past 60 days, to narrow it down even more. Now Okeechobee, Polk, Suwannee are all showing up. Let me look at Suwannee County. Good market. And when you see these bigger sponsored listings, a guy like Jim Jean Real Estate is spending anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 a month to get these sponsored listings on LandWatch. Would an investor be paying $3,000 a month for sponsored listings if it didn't work? No. So that's a good sign. If I go to page four, he's all over. Do you think maybe he knows what he's doing? Am I worried about competing against him? No. There's a lot of land out there. So I'm going to write down some potential counties. One of them is Suwannee. Now let me look at Columbia County and Marion County as well. For Suwannee County, Florida: 151 vacant lots have sold in the last six months. For Columbia County, right next to it, there have been 79 vacant lot solds. More rivers and lakes. And for Marion County, wow, 906 vacant lots sold. So remember: Suwannee County had the most owner financing activity on LandWatch, then Columbia, then Marion. But when you look at actual sold volume, Marion County is huge. Doesn't mean the others are bad counties. There's going to be more owner financing maybe in Suwannee County, but Marion County has serious volume. I like all three of those counties. They're all good. And Suwannee County, looking at the Redfin map, is right there in North Central Florida. These aren't little quarter-acre infill lots. People have horses out here, they put their RVs out there. No restrictions. You can put your mobile home out there, go swimming in the creeks. Does that freak you out? I mean, you live in that area, Gavin. Are there alligators in Suwannee County, Florida?

Gavin:  Mm-hmm.

Joe:  Yeah, alligators live in all 67 counties across the state and are regularly found in the Suwannee River. Whatever. Just because it would freak you out. People go there and they love it. Suwannee County looks like a good county. All I care about are the numbers. A lot of people are buying land here. All right. So I've got my three counties: Suwannee, Columbia, and Marion County. Now that's just the start. That's just me looking at LandWatch. So what I like to do is look at different sources to confirm. One of my new favorites is the Land Portal. Go to getlandportal.com. This is amazing. Go to market research and they have some really cool tools. There's a heat map. I want maybe the last 90 days, and minimum one acre. This is by county, all the land that's sold in the last 90 days, one acre and bigger. Red means low activity, green means high. So you can see at a glance where the hottest markets are. Michigan: go to those green counties. North Carolina: go to these areas. Kentucky: maybe not a great market. Tennessee: better, but focus on the greener areas. And look at Florida. There's Suwannee County, it's green. There's Columbia County. And Marion County is green too. So this is cool. Visually, you can see right away which are the good markets. If you're interested in Texas, stay toward the east, away from the far west. Arkansas: Northwest Arkansas is hot. Missouri is a great market by the way. Newton County, McDonald County, Stone County, Lincoln County, Jefferson County, Cass County south of Kansas City, Benton County, Camden County. All great markets. Wouldn't it be nice to know what the good and bad markets are? This is your depth finder.

Joe:  Now we're going to drill deep into some of these. I'll click on Drill Deep. I'm clearing all my filters since I was playing with this before. Last six months, one acre and more. I'm going to sort by count. In the last six months, these are the most popular states: Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, California, Michigan, South Carolina. If you stay in these top 10, you're going to be fine. Those are all good markets with high demand. Now if I open Florida and sort the counties by count, I can see the most popular counties for one-plus acres: Citrus, Marion, Okeechobee, Santa Rosa, Collier, Polk. I wrote down Marion, and it's showing up right here. Good. Now I can create filters to narrow it down. Sell-through rate is the division of sold versus active listings. The higher the number, the better. Months of supply: the lower the number, the better. Population growth: the more, the better. And there's the median price. So let me filter: count minimum 100, days on market maximum 100, sell-through rate minimum 50%. That takes Florida from 67-something counties down to 7 counties. These are all good counties: Citrus, Santa Rosa, Hendry, Levy, Walton, St. John's. And I can add a minimum median price of $30,000 so I'm not looking at super cheap properties. These are all good markets. I like Citrus a lot. Look at that: high count, low days on market, high sell-through rate, low months of supply, positive population growth, good median price. Not too expensive, not too cheap. Citrus looks like a great county. And I can drill down even further into Citrus County and find the best zip codes. There are 16 zip codes in Citrus County, and the top ones are right here. So I'm going to write down two counties I really like: Suwannee County and Citrus County. I've got a list of five counties altogether. As I'm showing you all of this, jumping from LandWatch to the Land Portal, remember you don't have to have just one county. You should have two or three. We're not putting all our eggs in one basket, but we're also not doing spray-and-pray marketing. We're focusing on one, two, or three good counties.

Gavin:  Yeah, I just want to say as well, guys, hopefully you're picking up what Joe just showed you, because it's genius in terms of going where the activity is. And you don't want to try and narrow it down to the perfect one. We've talked about Marion, Citrus, Okeechobee, Suwannee. You can pick any of them. And here's the thing: after you're in the business a long time, you're going to hit all of them anyway. Over months and years to come, you're going to hit the surrounding counties wherever you pick. So don't try and nail it to the perfect one. Just make sure you're in a top-10 market and there's activity there. That's what Joe's trying to show you: different ways to narrow the data down, because it's easier to fish where you know there's movement happening. That's what we're trying to get across.

Joe:  Sometimes you might find that when you're going after two or three counties, you find the one you like better than the others. And most of these counties, we're going to find more leads than we could actually handle. So don't worry about picking the wrong county. Don't overanalyze this. We could start with Suwannee, Citrus, or Marion. Let's do Marion. Marion County, 960 sold lots, 35 different zip codes. Next video, I'm going to show you where the buyers are hiding, and then we're going to build a list of the 263 best properties in one zip code.