Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. On this video, I'm going to show you how I pick my vacant land markets. I love wholesaling vacant land. It's way easier than houses for a million reasons. In my opinion right now, the fastest, easiest way to make money in real estate is by flipping vacant land. But it's really important: rule number one is that you pick the right markets. If you're in the wrong markets, you're going to be wasting a bunch of time and money on bad marketing. And if and when you do get a deal under contract, there's not going to be anybody that wants to buy it. So it's important that you only find land in good markets where there's good demand. One of the principles of this is that success leaves clues. We're going to be following the money. We want to know where the money is going right now. This doesn't matter if the market is hot or cold or flat. It doesn't matter where you are. What we're looking at is: in the last six months, where has there been a lot of activity? I'm going to show you how to do that right now in this video.

The first place I like to go is landwatch.com. Click the orange search button. I like cheap vacant land. Anything under $150,000. And let's say you don't want to deal with small infill lots in Florida and you only want bigger lots. So let's do two plus acres minimum. LandWatch, by the way, is owned by the land.com family of websites. It's the number one place that people go to search for vacant land. Anybody in the business of buying and selling land and doing a lot of deals will list their properties on land.com or LandWatch. So what we're doing here is looking to see where people are advertising for land right now and where people are buying land. I'm going to look at available and under contract listings, not solds, because solds on LandWatch could be from five years ago. This just tells us right now, where are people listing properties? Texas, California, Arizona, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia. You notice Florida is not on this list. Why? Because I did two plus acres. If I remove that filter, Florida is number one. But I don't want to wholesale little quarter-acre infill lots right now. My sweet spot is properties around $50,000 to $150,000. I want to buy land and sell it on owner financing. I'm looking for monthly recurring income, so I want bigger lots. So Florida is not on this list. Texas, California, Arizona, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Missouri. Now Texas and Missouri are nondisclosure states, so it's a little harder to get comps there. North Carolina is a good market, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee. Let's just look at California. I click on California and now I can see the most popular counties: Los Angeles County, San Bernardino, Kern County, Riverside, Siskiyou. I've done deals in Siskiyou County before. There's a lot of activity in Los Angeles County and San Bernardino County. Let's look at Los Angeles County. Why are people buying land out here in the middle of the desert? I don't know, but they are.

Let me narrow things down a bit. I'm going to set a minimum price of $50,000 and a maximum of $150,000, and look at the entire country with two plus acres. Texas is number one, California is now number two, then North Carolina. Let's look at California again. Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County, same as before, just not as many listings. Let me take one of these counties over to Redfin. I'm going to go to Redfin, type in Los Angeles County, California, and look at where in that county in the last six months is all the property being bought and sold. I set price to $50,000 to $150,000, lot size minimum two acres, and look at land only. There are 84 lots that have sold in the last six months in Los Angeles County at that criteria. And where are they? They're all clustered up in one area. Would it make any sense to do a bunch of marketing for people that own land in other parts of the county? No. We want to target where that activity is happening. So how do you find those properties? Sort this list by most recently sold, and in Redfin there's usually a button right here where you can download the top 84. I just downloaded them. Now I'm going to open that spreadsheet up in Google Sheets and show you something cool.

I've got a spreadsheet here with all of the solds from the last six months at that acreage size. The lot size is in square feet. I'm going to click on the Gemini button. You've heard of Ask Gemini? It's Google's version of ChatGPT. I'm going to ask it to take column M, which is the lot size in square feet, and convert it into acres. There are 43,560 square feet in one acre. Google did it for me right there. Now why am I doing that? Because I want help from the spreadsheet to tell me what are the most popular zip codes where these deals are happening, and what is the average acreage size, price, and price per acre for each. I'm going to tell Gemini: give me a separate table with the most active zip codes, the median price, the median acreage size, and the median price per acre for each of those zip codes. I'm also going to do the same thing in ChatGPT. I'll upload that same spreadsheet I downloaded from Redfin and ask for the same information. ChatGPT finishes way faster than Gemini. Sometimes I'm just frustrated with Google Gemini, it's real slow and clunky. ChatGPT gave me the top zip codes, the number of transactions, the median price, the median acreage, and the median price per acre. That's what I need.

So what does this tell you? Well, Los Angeles County is a great market where a lot of transactions are happening right now, and you can see which zip codes have the most activity. Am I going to do spray-and-pray marketing over the entire state of California? No. I'm going to target a county. I'm going to target the zip codes in that county. And I know if I'm going to target zip code 93536, I'm probably targeting a median-size property of around five acres. Not little quarter-acre lots, not 500-acre lots. Maybe two to 20 acres. And I know that people are buying them for a median of about $14,000 an acre. So I know I can buy a five-acre lot and sell it for about $14,000 an acre, which means I'm going to make an offer at half of that, maybe $7,000 or $8,000 an acre. We're going from the country to the state, to the county, to the zip. This little exercise of going to LandWatch, seeing the most active states, seeing the most active counties in that state, going to Redfin and looking up your criteria, seeing where the clusters of those little dots are, knowing which areas to target. Now, you don't even have to do the fancy spreadsheet stuff I just showed you. You could just look at the clusters. There's a bunch of clusters here and you just click on one of them and you can see the zip code right there. Just write all the zip codes down.

I'm also going to look at Zillow. This is kind of like, when you're fishing, this is your depth finder. You can see where all the fish are and you go around here and you don't want to fish over here or over there. You want to fish where the clusters are. Let's look in Los Angeles County. I'm going to do land, no maximum price, minimum two acres, solds in the last six months. Oh, look at this beautiful thing right here. I can set the minimum price to 50 grand and maximum 150 grand. There are 116 results. The results from Redfin and Zillow never match exactly, but that's all right. I'm going to scroll in and look at where the clusters are. There's a bunch of clusters right here in this area, and these are the pockets where I want to be fishing. If you want more clusters, go back 12 months and you can see it even more clearly. Then just click on individual properties and you can get the zip codes right there: 93353, 93536. Just write a bunch of them down. You might be thinking, Joe, who in their right mind buys land like this in the middle of nowhere? I don't know, and you know what, I kind of don't care. I just know that people are buying a lot of them there. So guess what? I'm going to go find what they want and sell it to them.

Now I'm going to show you another tool I like to use that makes this kind of a shortcut. It's called the Land Portal. You can find it at getlandportal.com. Go to Market Research and then down to Drill Deep. This is beautiful. I want the last six months. I'm interested in California. I'm going to go to Filters and just select California. Now you can see all of the counties in California. I'm going to sort by count and the most popular counties are right here. If I set minimum acres to two, so we're looking at two-plus acres sold in the last six months, the most popular counties are San Bernardino and Los Angeles County. When we looked at LandWatch earlier, Los Angeles County was number one, which confirms what we're seeing here. Now let me walk you through this data. You can see in San Bernardino there are 115 zip codes. LA County has 309. These are big markets, so we're going to be narrowly focused on the hottest areas. The average days on market: the lower the number, the better. The sell-through rate: the higher the number, the better. Sell-through rate is solds divided by active listings, so the more solds relative to actives, the higher the number, the better. Months of supply: this means if not one more property came on the market, it would take 20 to 28 months for all the current inventory to sell. Obviously the lower the number the better. There's also population density, growth, and median price.

Let me open up Los Angeles County. I'm going to create a little filter for just Los Angeles County and look at all of the zip codes, sorted by count. These are all two-plus acres sold in the last six months. These are the most popular zip codes, and you'll recognize some of them. They're the same ones we saw in Redfin and Zillow. So I can see which are the hot zip codes. Look at the days on market in these areas. Lots of activity. Now the sell-through rate here is kind of low, which is a little concerning. That just means I need to make sure when I'm selling my properties I'm the cheapest on the market, and then I should be able to sell fast. The median price in zip code 93536 is about 25 grand. It's a little low. Let's click on 93536 and see all of the solds in the last six months. Median acreage: 2.51 acres. Median price: about $25,000. And here's 93535: median acreage 3.4 acres. This is telling me that if I'm going to target California, I'm probably going to target Los Angeles County and these zip codes where the most activity is happening. Now the sell-through rate, the higher the better. I wonder if it'd be better to target zip code 93510 or 93553 because the sell-through rate is higher and months of supply is lower. And look at the population growth in 93510: huge. But sometimes you can overanalyze this and get frozen in analysis paralysis. What if instead of overthinking it, we just start with 93536? It's sorted from high to low and it's right at the top.

I'm going to build a list in 93536. Let me first check Zillow for this zip code. Looking at all vacant land sold in 93536, two-plus acres, sold in the last 12 months. That's where the activity is happening. Now let me remove the price filter and acreage size filter and look at all solds in the last six months: 151 solds in that one zip code. That's pretty solid. But some of these are little tiny $5,000 properties. So if I go to for sale and sort by price low to high, I don't want to be competing against $7,000 or $9,000 properties. What if I set my filter to five-plus acres? Now my cheapest competition is 15 grand. There's a lot more room for me to make profit here. So let's go back to the Land Portal, zip code 93536, two-plus acres based on the median acreage of 2.51 that we saw. Exclude active listings, exclude sold listings from the last five years, out-of-county owner only, last sale date before five years ago so they've owned it at least five years, at least 25% of the property buildable, no landlocked properties, zero wetlands and floodplains, and no corporate-owned properties. We're going from 17,425 different vacant lots in that zip code down to 863. That's quite a drop. And all of these 863 properties have road access, none of them are landlocked.

Now, there are two different ways I like to make offers. My favorite way is to download a list and send an ugly postcard that says, hey, if you want to sell your land, text or call this 24-hour recorded voicemail. The voicemail says: thanks for calling, if you want to sell your land, we'd like to make you an offer to buy it. It's about 35 to 45 seconds long. But sometimes people don't have a huge budget to send a lot of mail. I like sending neutral letters or neutral postcards that send them to a voicemail. We listen to the voicemail or look at their texts and then we send them an offer. We only talk to them after they get our offer. But sometimes I will send blind offers, as long as they are intelligent offers. I don't want to just download 863 records and send 863 dumb blind offers because sometimes a property might be on the water, have a beautiful view, be in a good area. If I'm going to send blind offers, they're going to be intelligent offers and I'm going to give the sellers options. A cash offer and a higher owner-financing offer if they're willing to finance it. Does that make sense?

Let's look at a specific property. There are two ways I like to figure out how much a property is worth. One of them is a free Zillow Chrome extension that scrapes all nearby properties and tells me about what they're worth. I need an address, so I'm going to zoom out on the map until I can find a parcel with an address. I find one right across the intersection, copy that address, and put it into Zillow. It takes me right to that specific property, and my target property is right next door. Now I set up my filters in Zillow: my property is 2.52 acres, so I'm going to look at solds, property type land, one to 10 acres, solds in the last 12 months. I zoom out until I get maybe 10 to 20 comps. I got 50 comps right there and my property is in the center of the map. I click Analyze Current Page and it scrapes all those listings. Then I scrape page two. The scraper shows me the median price of all those solds was $13,250. I want to narrow it down: show me the lowest 50% under 4.9 acres. Now I have 15 comps. The median price is $10,000 and about $3,200 per acre. So based on sold comps this is going to be a cheap property, but I'm always going to make an offer. I've got $3,200 an acre, maybe I can sell it for eight grand.

Now let's look at actives. I switch to for sale, add backups and pendings, and set days on Zillow to any. I zoom in to get to about 42 results and scrape them all. Looking at the lowest 10% by price per acre, I'm seeing about $5,009 per acre. The cheapest property in my comp set is $89.95 per square foot. I need to be cheaper than that. So based on sold comps the value is maybe worth eight grand, based on active comps discounted 15% maybe ten grand. I'm going to list mine for $97.50 per square foot. I want to make at least five grand on this deal. I'm going to pay a realtor a thousand bucks, maybe $500 for photos, and $2,000 for closing costs. So I have to buy it for about $1,275. I'm going to send the seller an offer for $1,500 cash. Now what if I could send the seller a higher-priced offer if they were willing to do owner financing? In my spreadsheet I have another way to make an offer. If I'm making a cash offer on this property, it's going to be around $1,500. But I can make a much higher offer if they accept seller financing. What if I offered them $5,000 with 500 down and 5% interest over 10 years? I'm paying about $48 a month to the seller. When I sell it, I can list it for about $15,000, get $700 down, charge 9.9% interest over 10 years, and receive about $183 a month. So I could offer the seller $1,500 cash or $5,000 with seller financing. If you wholesale this deal, maybe you'd make $3,000 to $4,000. But if you bought it on seller financing and sold it on owner financing, you could make about $15,000 on this deal with a 70% cash-on-cash return. My total cash invested is about $4,000, my cash received in the first year is about $2,900. So I'm really out of pocket about $1,200 in that first year. What are you averaging right now in the stock market, on crypto, on money market funds? Even with a little deal like this. What if you were making 130 bucks a month cash flow and you had 10, 20, 30 of those? If your goal is to make $75,000 a year and you did two of those little deals a month, in two years you'd be making $75,000 a year in passive income without using any of your own money.

So I'm going to send the seller an offer right now: $1,500 cash or $5,000 with seller financing. You can do that right here in the Land Portal. I'm going to click Start Mailing. I have a letter I like to use. These are handwritten letters with a real robot that draws ink on them, and it looks like a real handwritten letter. You can send it as first class for $1.97 or market mail for a bulk rate of $1.70. I pick my blind offer design with two options: a cash offer and a seller-financing offer. I'm going to send it to the owner of that property. The front of the card says, still paying taxes on land you never use? I put in my cash offer of $1,500 and my seller-financing offer of $5,000. Now it doesn't look like real handwriting on the preview, but it is. I put my Google Voice number and my name. Lancaster area. Harold. First class mail, continue, send now, place order. Boom. Just like that I've sent an intelligent offer. A cash offer of $1,500, I know it's pretty ridiculous, but I'm in this business to make a profit. And I'm also offering them what I think is a genuinely generous offer of $5,000 with 500 down, 10 years, 5% interest. I like giving sellers options. Here's a cash offer, here's an owner-financing offer. Those are intelligent offers.

I know I covered a lot. But the whole point I wanted you to understand is this: you can only sell things people want, not what you have. So find where the fish are biting right now, go find properties that people want, and go get it for them. That's how you can make a lot of money in this business by picking the right markets. Hope that's helpful for you. Let me know in the comments what you think. And if you want to join my five-day challenge where I teach this in excruciatingly detailed detail, join me at flipdirtchallenge.com. The link should be in the video or in the description down below. I appreciate you guys. We'll see you there.