Joe:  Welcome, this is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. What's up guys? Joe McCall, Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. On this episode, we're going to talk about my favorite real estate investing subject, flipping vacant land. And we've got a special guest on today from Charleston, South Carolina, Austin Marvel. We just met a few weeks ago and we were talking about a mutual friend that we're going to do a part two episode with, Jerry Norton. A lot of you guys know Jerry, flipping genius, who claims that he invented virtual wholesaling, which is funny. I always give him a hard time about that, but we're going to be doing a mastermind together, me and Austin and Jerry Norton at Jerry Norton's Farm Ranch in Tennessee in about three months or so. We're going to be talking about that on the episode, but I wanted to get Austin on a podcast talking about how he's doing land. He's been doing this for seven or eight years now and he's done a lot of really cool things and he's become friends with some mutual friends of mine. I just want to talk about what's going on in the business. So Austin, welcome to my little show here. How are you, man?

Austin:  Yeah, man, I am blessed. Thanks for having me on. I'm eager to break bread and basically pick up the conversation where we left it last time. It's always a good time. You've done so much valuable work for the industry. You've helped so many people. Your name is always brought up when people ask where do I learn about land as a whole, and people are always pointed to you. They're like, well, this guy just gives and gives and gives. I think that's why we have certain mutual friends because we tend to give to the industry. You've done amazing, man. You've helped so many people and changed so many lives. Thank you for just doing that.

Joe:  Appreciate it. I feel like I have been doing this a long time, but I remember getting started, especially with my podcast, thinking, oh man, did I miss the podcasting boat? Did I get in too late? But I like this business. I love talking to operators, to people that are actually doing deals. I love talking to people who are heavy in the industry, making a difference, making an impact in people's lives. So Austin, tell us about your story. How did you get into business working for yourself? What got you interested in land?

Austin:  Yeah, man. I tend to be long-winded, so cut me off if anything sounds interesting or you want to dissect it. But originally from the Pacific Northwest is where I started my career. That turned from hobby to career where I loved being outside, loved backpacking, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, snowboarding, dog sledding. I was a guide for years in college. So I loved getting on land and then I started shooting it and photographing it and my whole life changed. I followed this girl that I absolutely adore and now I'm married to her for 10 years. We moved to Charlotte, North Carolina together and I had never been to the Carolinas and I was trying to find my way. I knew I'd read Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Secret, all the books that most of us start with. So I knew there was something more. I wasn't just going to be a corporate executive. It was my dream to merge photography, getting to be outside, and also working for myself with a little bit more freedom. After years of just figuring this out, taking photography assignments up to Alaska, Africa, and a lot of places in between with my camera and drone, I got this client and they were land liquidators. They were basically doing these massive subdivides. Texas was kind of the honey hole where they'd go and they'd do these big exempt ranches where they'd buy a thousand acres, get 10-acre lots, put like a little private road, a big gate, and they would run these massive marketing campaigns and single-day land sales. I got exposed to land development at this event-style marketing. I got to spend a lot of sunrises and sunsets on these rural thousand-plus-acre ranches. The wildlife, the adventures, off-roading vehicles, it was a lot of fun. They figured out that I could sell, so they put me on for these sale events and I started selling properties during these liquidation events. You really have to know your product to sell it and you have to be passionate about it. So that was where I kind of got my start and I was watching these liquidators. It was like they were getting away with murder. I've seen them move like $60 million of inventory in a weekend land sale off a $200,000 to $300,000 marketing campaign. Absolutely mind blowing. I was like, there's something here. I need to get into this. This is like the greatest secret of real estate. Then the world locked down, everyone was wearing masks, nobody was leaving. My whole world had shut down. I had a lot of photography jobs cancel. And these guys came up and said, well, everybody wants to buy land. So I was busier then than ever before. That was 2019, 2020 when I really started dropping into land. I think my first property that I acquired was 2019.

Joe:  Was this like a subdivision with future development plans and a future lake, a future golf course type of thing?

Austin:  Yeah. A lot of it was sold pre-construction but as is. So there's this promise of future amenity centers. There are certain things they kind of have to do, but when you show up, you're getting the wholesale price by buying it as is. They really pitch FOMO. They push the idea that there's going to be these great amenities. And people just buy it because there are 150 other people all looking at the same property. It was crazy. But after a while, like three to four years, there were some that I was like, you know, they never finished what they said they were going to finish. And that's when I started to see behind the curtain and thought, I don't know if I want to have my name tied to this anymore. I probably slowed it down significantly around 2023. I'll still help some of these developers out because I've earned a reputation in that niche from a media perspective. But it became too much. I was having to leave a lot and I have three little kids and a wife. So around 2022, 2023, the focus went more towards our own business and less towards making someone else super wealthy.

Joe:  Okay, cool. And then what did you start doing? Did you quit that business cold turkey and then start flipping land yourself?

Austin:  It sure felt that way, but no, it was kind of a slow phase out. I utilized a lot of the skills that I had developed in that business and it was good to taper off gradually. I have a business partner who's an integrator. I'm very much a visionary. His name is Nick Turnbull, if any of you guys know him, and he's out of Chicago. We started just blasting out campaigns and looking into data and just taking action, uncomfortable action. It took us a lot to get that first deal done, man. I wish we would have met you. We passed on so many deals that we just didn't know were good deals.

Joe:  So were you sending postcards, letters, blind offers? What were you sending them?

Austin:  Yeah, man, we started with blind offers. We started in Moore County, Pinehurst, North Carolina area. And this was before we really knew that you could do data stacking. We didn't know much. So we got a lot of wet properties, landlocked properties, properties that just would never work. And they were all small, less than an acre. I had no experience working on really small lots like that. So we finally, after a couple of campaigns targeting that area, we upped the ante, went up to like 10-acre lots and put our back against the wall. We went towards the Carolinas because I'm there. And it helped being able to show the property in person and utilize my drone and photography skills. I didn't start virtual. It was big 15 to 20-acre lots where we started to see success. It's exhausting, as you know, managing like 300 relationships. A lot of times it takes 12 to 15 touches. Even with AI and outsourcing, it takes a lot to get these relationships across the board. So we're still doing it, but at a much slower pace. We're not doing 50 deals a month. We've got our people, we've identified our properties in the counties that we want, and we check in on them through automations and AI. We'll text them, we'll do RVM, we'll do the whole nine. I love to subdivide. In South Carolina, there's a five-acre exemption. So as long as you have the road frontage and your new lots are five acres and up, all you really need is a survey. No soil test or anything. I love that. Every now and then you get someone who's like, sure, I'll take a hundred grand for my 50 acres. Highly unlikely, but it does happen when you check in. Relationships matter. Being top of mind and being the guy that's actually here in the Carolinas makes a difference. I'm not based out of Texas or California mailing these people. Ours look a little different. I've built such a relationship with one woman over years. She has a very complex title issue. I went into the attorney's office with her and her brother and we sat there for about an hour and a half, something that most out-of-state virtual wholesalers can't do. And she signed and he signed a purchase contract that has no expiration date. Basically it says we'll go figure out our title issue, and when we do, you can come in and buy it at this price. A genuine relationship and in-person presence goes a long ways.

Joe:  So are a majority of your deals in South Carolina then?

Austin:  Yeah, the Carolinas, that's the pocket that we like to fish in. We can do it anywhere, and we have done it out of state, but South Carolina is what we know. Being able to drive there or call these people and say, I know exactly what you're talking about, it just keeps it very simple. And I have very little kids, so I've got time on my side. This is one of several businesses that we've got.

Joe:  Are you building any modular homes on them or bringing in utilities or are you just parceling them out?

Austin:  Yeah, we are mainly parceling them out. We exit before it goes vertical. I've got one project that's very interesting, kind of in between the Casita area, and we're working with an ecologist on a sustainable resort. That's a long-term process, especially with protected wetlands. But that's going to be our first attempt at that. I usually sell to guys who will go and put the product on top of the lot and sell it.

Joe:  I've always just wholesaled land without doing anything to it or sold it with owner financing. Just buy it as is, sell it as is. I like simplicity. I've always been intimidated by subdividing and adding utilities and all of that stuff. But I love it. I see the power. What I'm really interested in someday is buying land, maybe 20 acres, subdividing it into four lots and putting in four modular homes on a foundation, getting them approved for FHA financing. And what's interesting is when they are building them, they don't do the normal paneling that you might see in a modular home. It's all sheetrock, taped and mudded, and it looks really, really nice. Some guys are just crushing it with that approach. I've always thought that would be cool to do someday. But I've got mad respect for guys like you that have the patience and are willing to subdivide and do entitlements. In some ways it seems more risky to me.

Austin:  No, you're right. When you hold on for a long time, you're putting yourself at exposure. What if it doesn't work out? The best way to do it is if they give you a long runway and they're not asking for 10 to 20 percent in the first 30 days. You just tell them this is where I need to be from a timeline and money standpoint. But Joe, you've got kids, right? How old are your kids? I would be curious to figure out how you navigated young kids and running a land business, because it requires a lot.

Joe:  Yeah. So I quit my job in 2009 when my oldest was five years old, because I was already making more money in real estate than in my full-time job. I'd been doing that for about three or four months so I felt really consistent about it. I was just wholesaling. I had a lot of buy and holds that I lost when the market crashed. It wasn't that hard for me to make the jump because I already had the proof of concept. I knew that if I could make 10 to 12 grand a month wholesaling houses part-time, I could do so much better full-time. I was also doing something really unique, what I call wholesaling lease options. And I knew a lot of people wanted to know how to do that. I was getting invitations to speak at local real estate clubs. So I got interested on the education side of the business right when I quit my job. Fast forward to five or six years ago. I have four kids total. My two boys are now 22 and 21, and my girls are 18 and 15. When my boys were maybe 13 and 15 years old, they wanted to make some extra money. We were homeschooling them all the way through high school and we traveled a lot. We went to Europe twice for 10 to 12 weeks each time, and then we took a three-month RV trip around the Northwestern corner of the U.S. We'd just bring all their school books with us.

Joe:  And I would do deals virtually while traveling around Europe and all those national parks. I got really frustrated with houses around 2018, 2019, 2020. I started interviewing people who were doing land. In fact, I had a coaching client who was doing houses and getting frustrated with all the competition because at the time a lot of the hedge funds were coming in and buying up everything. I told him he should learn how to do land. He called me back a year later. His name was Phil. He was already at $12,000 a month in passive recurring income from selling his land on owner financing in maybe two or three different states, using private money to buy. That's really when I started thinking, what if I took all of these systems and processes I'm doing with houses and put them into land? So I started teaching my boys how to do land deals. Our approach was to send out ugly-looking postcards that said just text or call this voicemail. And that voicemail was about 30 to 45 seconds long, explaining what we do. It just said, if you want an offer on your property, leave your name and number and the reference ID on that postcard and we'll send you an offer. So instead of sending blind offers or neutral letters with a QR code, a website, and a fax number, I just gave them one phone number to text or call to listen to a 24-hour recorded voicemail. I was shocked at the response rates. I was getting 8 to 10, even 12 percent response rates on these postcards. With houses, I was lucky to get 1 percent. My boys would listen to the voicemails a couple times a week. If somebody hung up, they would just send the seller a text back. A lot of them texted us the reference ID. We would go to Zillow and Redfin, find out what properties were selling for, and send them an offer at about 35 to 45 cents on the dollar. Two weeks later, they would send a ringless voicemail and a text. If we hadn't heard back, two weeks after that we would send the same offer again. And then 30 days after the previous offer, send the same offer again. Doing that very part-time, my boys did about $153,000 in net profits. A lot of them were in North Carolina, Oregon, and California.

Austin:  That's amazing, man. And how old were they at the time? Remind me.

Joe:  They were 13 and 15 years old when we got the deals under contract. It was doing it part-time over about two and a half years. Now they didn't keep all that profit. I paid them 15% of the profits, but I also paid them an hourly rate, maybe 10 bucks an hour, because I didn't want them to get discouraged doing all this work and then waiting three months to get paid. So I would pay them a little bit, then claw it back out of the profits. If we made 10 grand in profits, their portion was $1,500. If I'd already paid them $500, I'd give them $1,000. They both made about $11,500 in profits each. For a 15-year-old kid, that was amazing. They were both able to buy a car. That's why I'm a big fan of the land business. It's so much better than houses. It's so easy a teenager could do it. There's no reason why anybody can't. You send out 500 to 1,000 postcards a month, get 5 to 10 percent response rates, half of them leave a voicemail, you send them an offer. You don't have to talk to them until after they get your offer. And the follow-up is simple. Once you get it under contract, I just partner with people on deals. I find realtors who are already doing deals there, find investors who are already doing deals. I say, hey, I got this thing here, do you want to partner with me on it? You go find the buyer and we'll split the profits 50-50. I'm literally doing nothing. It's just a great business.

Austin:  Setting up the campaign, you're really a marketing manager. That's why I love the land business too. And that's why I love homeschooling. You're able to teach your boys lessons that they'll have for the rest of their lives. You're just not learning that in school. Those systems you set up, that's not going to make me a better employee, so why would I learn that in a public or private high school? Being able to homeschool your children, if you have skills like this, you're able to teach them real-world lessons. If they ever get in a bind 10, 15, 20 years from now, they can always come back to this. I think that's such an underrated thing. People are like, oh, you homeschool, your kids are probably weird. That's not the case at all. My kids talk to adults and older people. They've traveled the world and they've done real deals with real people. That's an incredible outlook.

Joe:  Yeah, I guarantee it. I think my kids have been to 15 or 16 different countries. We were so active. We always went to a big church, they were busy with sports, club volleyball, gymnastics, basketball. We were just always busy. And I made them get jobs as soon as they could. It's interesting too, because as they've been growing up, they don't necessarily want to do what dad's doing. They're all going to college, and my perspective on college has changed. At first I was anti-college and now I'm more like, yeah, it's a good idea as long as you're not getting a stupid degree. Just get something, meet some people, network, learn some basic business things. But I'm a big fan of homeschooling, and I guess you do as well, right?

Austin:  Yes. This weekend's lesson, I entered my son into a fly fishing tournament for bass called the Bankmaster Classic. You couldn't use any boats or stand-up paddleboards. I didn't realize it was going off of total length. We just reported our biggest fish, like 12 inches, but the other people that were winning had like 49 total inches of bass. And then it clicked and I realized we were reporting it wrong. But from the kid's perspective, we won the youth division. I have three kids. That was my seven-year-old boy that I took. He's my little adventure buddy, my sidekick right now. It's a lot of fun. Boys are chaotic, as you know. They know so much more than mom and dad and they're just trying to control a miniature you. I have a little girl, boy, girl, boy. But you know, Joe, the happiest people I know have four kids. You must be pretty happy.

Joe:  We're going to be talking to Jerry Norton here soon, hopefully if my internet's working. He's got 10 kids. So it'll be interesting how that conversation goes. But I've been out to his place in Puerto Rico and he's a good guy. I like Jerry a lot. I like his family. His wife's amazing. The reason I love this business is because you can do it from anywhere. You don't need an office, you don't need a ton of overhead. You just need a laptop and a cell phone.

Austin:  It's amazing. You can really build a business that supports your lifestyle. It doesn't take anything from it, doesn't take a bunch of your money. You can run a pretty simple campaign and if you're smart, responsive, and quick, you can get deals done fairly simply. It's about action, man. I think a lot of people get held up by lack of action. There's this mental hurdle of what if this doesn't work, I'd never be able to get past that. But once you take the action to get to that little roadblock, you realize it's just a speed bump, it's easy to go over. A lot of people psych themselves out at the beginning of this business.

Joe:  Let's talk about what your advice would be to somebody who wants to get started flipping land. Should they start doing large subdivides like you are? Should they send blind offers? What would your advice be to them?

Austin:  Man, I think this is probably not said enough, but getting around other people that are doing it. It just makes those little speed bumps and roadblocks seem so much smaller, because you get around people who have done really big deals and you're like, wait, that's possible? Oh, that's all you got to do, just get a survey, just file a form. When you get around that frequency of people who are actually doing deals, it makes it all seem so much more achievable. That's my number one thing. Go to events, meet people, find the people in your town who are doing it, listen to podcasts. You can get really technical with marketing too. There are a hundred different ways to skin this cat. You can go door to door, look at tax records, so many different things. But getting around people who are doing the thing, you can't really buy what you'll get there unless you're buying admission to a mastermind or a free meetup. You just get so much by being in the room.

Joe:  So let's say you live in Des Moines, Iowa. I used to live there. There are real estate investing clubs that meet to talk about houses, but I don't know if people still even go to them anymore. Where does somebody hang out with other land investors if they're just getting started?

Austin:  Yeah, man. Sometimes you've got to get on a plane. I met a guy a couple of weeks ago at an event that I flew to, just an hour flight, and I brought my whole family. This guy drove 13 hours to be there. He was sleeping in his truck. And it made me realize, man, this guy wants it more than me. He drove 13 hours, so he should be winning more than me. So if you're looking, information is not really what you're seeking. You're seeking that frequency of being around other people, belly to belly, shoulder to shoulder. You can get into a lot of these things without paying 10 to 20 grand. Sometimes there is a price filter for a reason and it's a good thing. But if you don't have a bunch of capital, go find these people and do whatever it takes to be around them. Hop on the phone, hop on a podcast or a Zoom like this. You'll realize these are just normal people running incredible businesses.

Joe:  You know, I was at a land investing conference and the speaker was supposed to be teaching how to flip land, but it was just a giant pitch fest for his coaching program. Standing in the back talking to somebody who looked just as bored as I was, I was asking him what he was doing. He said he and his wife just flip land, work about 10 to 20 hours a week, and send letters. They don't send blind offers. They send letters that send people to a voicemail with a reference ID. They listen to the voicemails, send them an offer, send ringless voicemails, and just keep on following up and sending offers every 30 days. I didn't invent this. I learned it from some guy in the back of the room. He said, this is all we do. And I thought, oh my gosh, that's what I do with houses. But with houses you actually have to talk to the sellers, negotiate, maybe go visit the house, look at it, estimate repairs, talk to contractors. With land, no. That's really simple. And I often say we're not in the real estate investing business. We're in the marketing business. If you can learn how to do marketing the right way, with consistency and follow-up, you're going to do a lot of deals. That was a huge light bulb for me. That was my big pivot point. And I use a CRM called FreedomSoft. I could do 99% of all of that in that one software. You don't need all this other fancy stuff. I totally believe in that networking idea, which is what we're going to be talking about here soon with Jerry Norton.

Austin:  Yeah, man. There are so many good things in what you just said. One of them is that there are too many people teaching about things that they're not doing or have never done. I kind of have a problem with that. A couple of my friends, including Jerry, were like, man, you're a subject matter expert because of your perspective. You have a degree in marketing, you've been marketing land, and now you're learning the wholesale acquisition development flipping business. You should talk about that. So I actually stayed at Jerry Norton's house in Montana and filmed a course. I had a guy just ask me questions as if he was learning from scratch, and I filmed for about two hours on this epic back porch with the mountains. There was no pitch. I wasn't selling anything. I just gave it away for free. You'll hear birds chirping and see the scenery of Montana while I ramble on about land. I felt called to go film more content and teach people more. I really don't like the slime behind gurus who inflate their numbers and say it's so easy. They're not authentic or genuine. What we did at Jerry's was different than most masterminds. It wasn't a big pitch fest. You can't buy anything. You go there and you're in the room with the people who paid, including the speakers, and nobody is allowed to pitch. They're literally just allowed to collaborate and get to know you personally. So when you mentioned wanting to come talk about educating authentically, I was like, yes. Because so many people need to hear from the guy in the back of the room who told you that little life hack. That person should have a 20-minute YouTube video deep diving into exactly how they did it. We built this retreat with Jerry in mind of just making it an epic experience. A lot of the people who are buying from us are trying to do exactly what Jerry and Amory are doing. We interview everybody for 20 minutes to make sure they're the right fit. And what we noticed last time, a lot of unexpected breakthroughs came. It was very spiritual, very emotional. Something that we didn't have a very strict curriculum for. It was just, let's be together and talk. There's an open room. We're really excited to do it again in the fall. It's going to be incredible.

Joe:  And I forgot to mention that when I go and speak, I talk about the strategies of flipping land or flipping houses. I just teach what I do. But this is going to be different. I'm going to be teaching from the education side of things. It's easy to bash the guru industry. But I thank God for it. Because if it wasn't for the people who bought Carlton Sheets' course, Robert Allen's course, learned this stuff, did it, then taught it and sold it, I wouldn't have been able to get where I am. Where do you learn to wholesale houses? Where do you learn how to wholesale land? You learn it from other people that are doing it. Now there is a completely unethical and wrong way to do it. You have to operate in integrity. Everybody I know that did not operate in integrity is not in business anymore. I've seen so many people leave the business in disgrace because they just weren't honest, weren't truthful. There is a way to sell services, software, data, education, coaching, consulting that can make you a lot of money but also help and serve people at the same time. Jerry Norton is going to be talking about this too. He's built the most influential YouTube channel in the real estate investing space, made a lot of money doing deals, and also made a lot of money selling software, data, and education. The industry needs people that are willing to do it the right way.

Austin:  You're right. I've been around people who are really givers at heart. They try to just give, give, give, and you feel that when you're with them. They're not trying to sell you. They're actively trying to collaborate. And you're totally right. Thank God for the people that actually took action and went out and intentionally educated people, because they should get paid for it. They have changed so many lives. My life has been absolutely dramatically changed by just learning the value of paying to get into a room, paying to get into a community, taking a course. There is no book out there to teach some of the stuff I've learned. The house that I'm sitting in right now is a creative finance deal that is going to bring a lot of wealth to my family, and I didn't even know this was possible before I took a course that taught me exactly how seller finance works with an on-market property.

Joe:  It's the trajectory. I bought my house here as a lease option too, the one I'm in now on five acres. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who have a really hard time getting mortgages because you're not a W-2 employee. You try to report the lowest income you can ethically so you don't have to pay tons in taxes. Well, this house here, I was not in a place where I could get a mortgage. I just messaged the guy and said, hey, can I lease your property for a couple of years and then buy it? He said yeah, sure. We did that for a couple of years, then changed it to owner financing, and then eventually got a traditional 30-year fixed rate mortgage. I bought a book by a guy named Robert Sherman. He had a book called The Secrets of a Millionaire Landlord, and that's where he introduced me to the concept of lease options. All right, where can we go to get information about this mastermind, Austin?

Austin:  Okay, yeah, I would like to invite people. It's mastermind.land. It'll show you some details, a little video recap, and there's an option to apply for the October retreat. The last one moved pretty quickly. We've been collecting applicants for about a month or two, and in the next 10 days or so, we're going to open it up and start actually taking registrations. We're only going to allow 33 operators in the room. So it's a pretty tight-knit thing. I don't know if we're ever going to do another one at Jerry Norton's farm, so I'm treating it like it's the last one. We've got some awesome guests. You included. I haven't announced that yet, but I'm going to announce it this week. It's going to be awesome, man. Do you like shoot guns? Because we're definitely going to shoot guns and blow stuff up. I hope you're okay with that.

Joe:  That's awesome. I might drive from St. Louis, which means I'll bring some firepower with me.

Austin:  Yes. Anything from modern warfare, suppressors, all the way to civil war era guns. There's some really cool stuff that we had.

Joe:  So mastermind.land, it'll be at Jerry Norton's ranch, October 23rd through 25th. You're only letting 33 people there. Ron Apke will be there from the Land Portal, which will be really cool. Of course, Austin Marvel, Jerry Norton, and we'll get Amory to teach too. And Joe McCall. Anne-Marie is pretty cool. All right, cool. I'm looking forward to doing that. We're going to come back for a part two podcast with our one and only Jerry Norton. Good talking to you, man. We'll talk in a minute.

Austin:  Yes sir. Thank you, brother. Talk to you soon.