Investing in Raw Land

I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could just find some land somewhere and build an actual storage set because one of the other things that my wife’s been pressing me on is she wants to get an RV eventually and travel around a bit. That’s something else you got to store. I start going out there looking for land and it’s tough to find raw land. Because right now in this market, there are so many people out there, developers that are scrambling trying to buy property to build houses.

Where do you find those niches so you can find the riches there by getting in front of people and scooping this up? I didn’t see a lot of people talking about it until I came across Seth Williams at REtipster. I had them on before. We talked about writing blind offers. If you guys listened to that, or if you didn’t listen to it, go back and listen to it. There are some great strategies there, tips for you as far as how to find motivated sellers.

He talked a lot about land and it just really piqued my interest in that. We got to get him back. We got to do a segment just on raw land investing. He agreed to do a segment on that so here we go. Seth, how are you doing?

Seth: Hey Clint, good to be here again.

Clint: All right. We’re back here talking about raw land. After we cut that last segment, it really motivated me to want to delve into this. I know we haven’t had a lot of time to talk about it in general. But what I’ve seen on your site and what you’ve been telling me, this is really your expertise, is it not?

Seth: Yes, it is. This is what I’ve spent most of my time doing as a real estate investor.

Clint: All right. Real estate investors always go to the properties. What made you say, I’m going to go for raw land? There had to be some point in your investing career when you realized land’s probably the better way to go.

Seth: Yeah. That’s a very common thing. When people hear land, it’s just like a lot of blank stares. People don’t get it like, I don’t get it, how’s that going to make me money, where’s the cash flow—those kinds of things. I had those same thoughts until I found that apparently, you can buy land for very cheap, like, crazy cheap.

Finding deals on land is quite a bit easier than finding deals on houses. The reason it works is that the way I make offers on vacant land properties. Let’s say if there’s a property with $10,000, for example, my offer is going to be a small fraction of that, maybe $1,000, maybe $2,000, depending on how confident I am about that property’s value. But it’s going to be very cheap. Because it’s so cheap, it’s very easy to pay out cash. I never have to take out loans for this stuff. It’s just vacant land, liability is pretty low. Things are not going to blow up on me. There are no tenants there, nothing breaks down, or gets destroyed. Property taxes are super cheap.

For a lot of reasons, it’s a much lower risk type of investment, not risk-free. When you compare it with houses and other improved properties, it is just really easy to work with. This is something that actually took me a few years to realize. It’s actually a lot easier to buy vacant land properties remotely, like in a whole other state that you’ve never even been to before. It’s fairly easy to do that with land because there are so many tools out there—Google Earth, Data Tree, County websites. You can find local inspectors to go check out your land for you. With houses, you can do that too, but there are more variables involved. You got to get into that property. You can’t just look at it from the road, all kinds of things that could have problems with them. Whereas again with land, it’s just dirt, that’s why it’s not that complicated.

Clint: I mean, you make it seem like it’s simple. But, it’s just like anything. I can find some swampland in Florida. I get it for $1,000 and say, it’s worth more than  $1,000 but nobody wants it. How do you determine investing in land—what’s worth buying, what’s not worth buying. There’s got to be some parameter that you’ve built.

Seth: Yes, absolutely. I’m glad you’re bringing that up. Because vacant land is simple, but it is not easy. It’s not a wrinkle-free process. There are some things about vacant land that can be a big issue, that you don’t even have to think about with a house, like what you just said there—wetlands, or is the property on a cliff, or is it zoned right in the first place, or are there any restrictions on what I can build here, what are the setbacks, all this stuff.

With a house or a building, these questions have already been answered. You don’t have to think about them. With land, there’s a lot of question marks that have to be addressed. I’ve actually got a blog post that outlines 15 of the most common problem areas that come up. There’s probably even more beyond that.

Depending on the geographical location where you’re buying land, most of these don’t need to be worried about but there are always a few, sort of, hot button issues that you really need to look into. For example, if you’re in Florida, wetlands are definitely one of those, or flood zones. A lot of states on the East Coast can have water issues, just things that West Coast properties don’t have quite as much of. For example, if you’re buying land in the middle of New Mexico, you don’t have to worry about wetlands. It’s just not a thing there. So to understand the state or the county where you’re working and what issues are most likely to come up and other issues that can affect certain types of properties but not others like if you’re going after commercial properties, environmental due diligence is a pretty big deal, but it’s not such a big deal with residential properties.

We sort of whittle it down once you understand the geographic location, the property type, that kind of thing. It’s funny, I’m actually buying a pretty big vacant lot right now, and my intent with this property is to develop it myself. I’m seeing firsthand just how much money you can spend on doing this due diligence before you buy a property. I’m probably going to be spending close to $15,000 just doing research on it. I’m not even paying for the thing. Things like geotechnical investigations, and topographic surveys—

Clint: —environmental study.

Seth: Yes, exactly. I got a phase-one going on right now. You can absolutely spend a fortune on this stuff. Sometimes that’s well warranted if you have huge plans for it, and tons of money is hanging in the balance. When you’re going after a smaller residential lot that’s worth say $10,000, $20,000, or even $50,000, especially if you’re paying 20% of market value for it, a lot of this stuff is, you can get most of the information you need without spending a fortune.

For example, a survey. Most lenders, most attorneys will say, you need to get a survey. In a lot of cases that may be true, but again, if you’re paying a couple of thousand bucks for a property, a GIS parcel map—it’s not guaranteed to be accurate, sometimes there are issues with them—but it’ll get you most of the way there. It’s a fairly educated look at where the property is, what the dimensions are, things like that. You can usually look at the GIS maps from more than one source. Ultimately, if you don’t really get the answer, it is some risk you’re taking on. For me personally, it’s been very rare that those GIS maps have been just wildly inaccurate.

Clint: Where do you find those?

Seth: DataTree’s one place. DataTree’s not free. The reason I say DataTree is because there are lots of things you can do with it. Everything from pulling lists to properly researching, even finding title documents, that kind of thing. If you’re looking for a free option most counties have a GIS parcel mapping system. If you know how to Google for it and find it. It’s just like open to the public. If you have the property’s parcel address, or parcel number, or property address, or even the owner’s name, you can find it. It’s usually overlaid on some kind of satellite map, you can see where it is.

The idea is just to verify like, yes, it’s there. I understand the dimensions. When it comes down to selling a property like this, there are different disclosures. You can have your buyer sign so that they understand like, hey, it’s up to them to get a survey. This is all from the GIS system and it’s subject to flaws now and then. The point being, you can’t spend a fortune on due diligence and research, but usually, you can get most of the way there. Not a 100% accuracy but most of it is, just the free resources available online.

Clint: If I wanted to start investing in land then how does one get started? What do you look for? What are the criteria, because I wouldn’t even know how to? Other than just being local in my area, I kind of have some semblance. Can you give some tips on what someone should do if they want to go down this road?

Seth: Yes, it’s to start figuring out what market you want to work in. What a lot of people will do, and this is what I did, is they’ll just start looking for land near where they live, in their own state. That can work, I don’t want to say that’s a problem. Not every state is created equal in terms of the desirability of land.

I spent my first three years or so exclusively buying land deals in Michigan, where I live. Michigan is one of those in-between states. It’s like, it’s okay, but it’s not amazing. I found that I was just kind of sitting on properties for a long time. When I say a long time, maybe six to nine months for these things to sell. I wanted them to sell faster and they wouldn’t. I would just sit on them until a buyer came along.

There are other states out there where maybe the weather is nicer, maybe there’s more tourism there, maybe the tax laws are more favorable, or there’s job growth, people are just flocking to certain states over others. That’s generally a good sign for a real estate investor. That’s kind of what you want to see. Some states just make it a lot easier or even state laws. If you do get into seller financing, that’s kind of a whole other subject attached to land. If you are selling properties with owner financing, some states will make it fairly easy to foreclose and get your property back. The other states are judicial foreclosure states, where you have to go through court, and it takes more time and it takes money. It’s not quite as seamless to make it happen. Just understanding like, is this state going to make life easy for me or is it going to make life hard?

Clint: That’s a different area though. What you’re talking about is, I don’t think we’re going to make that connection, what the seller financing is. Just to put a finer point on it. I believe what I hear you saying is that if you buy a piece of land then you’re going to sell it to a developer, somebody who’s going to build on it. The issue that a lot of the developers have is finding some things like that. You’re going to sell them on seller financing so they could develop it and then pay you off when it’s sold.

Seth: That’s one option. But a lot of times what you can do is sell the property to a retail end-buyer. Somebody who wants to build their own house there and offer seller financing for them. Seller financing when it comes to land, the reason that’s significant is that with vacant land properties unless you have an immediate plan to develop that property or make money from it in some way, most banks want nothing to do with that because vacant land, as a collateral item, is hard to verify the value of it. Even a lot of appraisers don’t really understand how to value land because a lot of the data you need to value it just isn’t there.

Because of that a lot of banks, financing is not an option on the table. That means that if a land buyer wants to buy land and just sits on it, they need to have the cash to do that. Or you as a land investor can offer them seller financing. If you’re following this model, and if you’re buying it for almost nothing in the first place, and it’s actually a pretty viable thing you could do. Because of the down payment you get from them, you could pretty much get most, if not all of the money you need to pay yourself back, just in the down payment or shortly thereafter. Then for months or years after that, every payment you get is pure profit. You’ve already got all your money back and you don’t have a mortgage down in the first place.

Seller financing, the downside of it, there are a few downsides is that, first of all, you don’t get all your profit back until years into the future. It’s kind of a slow drip. Seller financing laws vary quite a bit from state to state. Even the type of loan instrument you’re supposed to use and what is said in those loan instruments, it’s just different. There’s not a clear-cut template that works everywhere.

Clint: Get an attorney, let them draw it up for you.

Seth: Exactly. I think anytime you start doing seller financing in a new state, definitely get an attorney. The textbook advice is to always give an attorney every time, or at least the first time. Make sure you’re getting somebody who knows what they’re doing to get that thing with all the right language in there.

There’s also the payment collection. You have to have an efficient way to collect payments, preferably on autopilot. If a person stops paying, you have to understand what now, how do I get my money, or how do I get my property back? All this stuff, you don’t have to think about if you’re just selling properties in cash. It’s very simple that way.

But on the same coin, when you’re using seller financing you can usually charge a higher price, you can charge interest. If you do want a more passive stream of income, it brings that to the table as well. Whereas with the cash deals, your revenue tends to be a little spikier in nature because of this huge influx of cash rather than this slow trickle from a bunch of different properties.

Clint: To find the raw land that you want to buy. We talked about that in the blind offer segment. If somebody is listening and watching this, they should go back and watch to listen to that. You’re sending out blind offers and using a company like DataTree to find and identify what you want. Then once you have the parameters in there, you’re just sending out the same old blind offer letters to these individuals?

Seth: Yes, for the most part. In terms of who you’re sending these to, and how you price your blind offers, again, that’s kind of a separate segment. Whenever you get into a new market, there are certain unique attributes of each one. In DataTree or whatever data service you’re using, it’s about figuring out how to narrow this list down so that it’s only people in a certain county, or maybe even certain zip codes with property sizes, say 5 to 20 acres or whatever, whatever parameters you want.

The nice thing about DataTree is that it gives you a lot of different ways. You can filter these lists down. You can say you only want the people, the property owners who do not live in the same county or don’t live in the same state. You can specify the zoning type, and other attributes, that kind of thing. The more specific you can get about it, the better off you’re going to be. It’s also going to make your list smaller. It’s what you want. You don’t necessarily want to just send that gobs and gobs of mail to everybody who isn’t going to do business with you. You want to send it to the people who are most likely to be motivated or have exactly what you want.

It’s ultimately kind of a numbers game. With direct mail, there’s really no way to escape waste that’s going to happen, where you’ll send lots of emails to people who don’t want to do a deal. But depending on the type of mail you’re sending out, it’s more scalable. You don’t have to spend tons and tons of your time talking to these people. You can let the direct mail do its thing. If you’re saying the right thing, and delivering the right message, with the right kind of offer, people will respond and raise their hand when they want to sell the property to them.

Clint: It seemed to me like it’s more of a strategy for your local market. Buying land remotely, land is so much different than buying a house because, with the house, all the work has been done. You know what you’d get. Whereas with raw land, if I was buying raw land in Michigan, hey, how am I to know where it should be working? What are the typical issues associated with raw land in that area that I should be able to look out for? I’ve seen the stuff before.

As I was talking about earlier in the segment, where I’m looking to buy some property to build some storage and you see this thing, wow, this can be a great deal. When you go out and you look at the property, there’s a friggin’ pit in the middle of it that you’re going to need to fill, just to get it up to level grades. You can actually put something on it. You got wetlands issues on a portion of it. Then you have access issues as well that you have to deal with. Then it’s going to take a developer, someone that really wants that type of deal and knows how to maximize the profit to sell it. How are you able to do that in a different state?

Seth: I do think some states are actually a little bit simpler than others.

Clint: Where? Name them. I’m sorry.

Seth: New Mexico, for example. For the longest time, I didn’t understand why so many Atlanta investors are working in New Mexico or just in the southwestern US, in general. I think a lot of what that has to do with, is that when you get these states with just huge areas of desert land, there’s just like 40 acres squared, just parcel after parcel, the nice thing about that is that it’s easier to understand. It’s just flat. It’s a desert. There’s not a whole lot of complexity to it. When you get into states like Michigan, for example, there are a lot more variables. There are different sizes. They don’t fit into these nice cookie cutters’ rose. Wetlands are going to be an issue. Also, the closer you get to a densely populated area, the more different restrictions, zoning issues, and oversight are required.

That’s one of the things you just have to be aware of. For example, when I started in Michigan, I think you’re right, I was aware of a lot of this stuff. I understood my own home base. I knew what to watch out for. If I was going to start doing this in Florida or whatever, I basically just spend a bit of time trying to understand what’s going on there, what do I need to watch out for.

Part of that reveals itself when you just start doing it. You’ll start getting calls back from people and you start researching properties, and realizing, okay, that’s an issue I need to watch out for here. When you sort of commit to one or two different states and get pretty intimately familiar with how things work there, you get a lot smarter about what you need to watch out for. If you’re trying to do this in all 50 states at the same time, it’s going to be very hard. You’re totally going to miss things. That’s why I think it’s usually smart to pick a state or two, try to understand those areas first before you branch out.

Clint: Okay. The idea then with buying raw land is if I’m going to invest in it, I’m investing in this to sell to a homeowner, somebody who wants to build a house on it, or possibly a developer. Once you’ve acquired the property, how are you marketing it?

Seth: There are three big outlets that I’ve used for a long time. This is what a lot of land investors use. There’s Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Zillow For Sale by Owner. They’re all free, and they all get exposure to a lot of eyeballs. They’ll kind of check different boxes. There are people looking on Zillow who won’t look on Facebook, and vice versa. The same thing with Craigslist. It is an option to actually pay for your listings on a website like LandWatch, Land and Farm, or something like that. I’ve tried that and I haven’t had a ton of success with it but I know there are some people that swear by it. I think the benefit of those audiences is that they’re very targeted. That’s why everybody is there, is to look specifically for land. But it’s obviously the cost that’s associated with it, too.

What it comes down to is if you have a good deal, like a good property that is desirable and usable for one solid purpose, maybe multiple purposes. It’s not that hard to find a buyer, it will always sell eventually. It’s kind of a matter of, can you get exposure? Are you asking a price that makes it really compelling? If you’re offering seller financing, that will usually help us sell faster, but it’s not a requirement. It just means you’re sort of limiting the pool of buyers who can buy from you.

Clint: Right now, were you investing in raw land, or looking?

Seth: Yeah. I’ve been looking in California as of late.

Clint: Really?

Seth: Yes. I’ve currently got a deal right in the county where I live. I wasn’t even following the direct mail approach. I literally found the thing on MLS, of all places, which I never thought I would do. But the interesting thing about that one, the reason it’s still a compelling deal is because I’m actually planning to do something with it, which is rare. Usually, I’m just buying land, doing nothing, and selling it again. This is a much more involved long-term, sort of buy-and-hold project.

Clint: Got it. How about last year, while we’re in COVID, what were you buying?

Seth: During COVID, I had some stuff going on in Washington and Colorado. Those are kind of the two states where I’m doing the most.

Clint: What part of Washington?

Seth: Benton County.

Clint: Where is it? Is that on the Eastern side?

Seth: I think it is.

Clint: Yeah.

Seth: Yes. It’s actually an interesting thing, which we haven’t gotten into, I have a buying website, where people organically find my website and they submit their properties for me so that I can make a cash offer to them. There’s no direct mail involved with this at all. It’s kind of a totally different stream. I’ve just been able to build up some kind of organic following over the years. The cool thing is, these leads come in for free. I’m not paying for them, but the bad news is, and I guess not a good thing is that I’ve got an automated offer thing where when people submit their property, one of the questions I ask is, what do you think the market value is? They put in a number, whatever that number is, whether it’s accurate or not, my website will turn around and send them an automated email with an offer for 9% of what that number was. A lot of people say, no, as you can imagine but occasionally people say, yes. That’s actually helped us, how some of this stuff in Benton County happened.

But the downside of getting leads this way is that I don’t get to choose where they come from. They just happen randomly. That means I need to learn a lot more about every market, every time I start going down these roads with people. It’s kind of a pain. It’s the drawback that wouldn’t be there if I was doing direct mail and targeting a county or state because I can really commit to that state, understand it, and know where my leads were coming from. There are pros and cons to it.

Clint: What are those particular types of seller or owner that people should focus on that you found, from doing this over the years, that seemed to pay off better as far as getting the deal done?

Seth: Some commonalities that I see a lot are people who have inherited their property. That’s a pretty normal thing or people who live out of state or even just out of the county. They don’t see the property on a regular basis. It’s kind of out of sight, out of mind. The delinquent taxes, we talked a little bit about that in our other conversation. That can be an effective way to do it.

There are some annoyances about that approach. The list is usually hard to get. It’s usually a mess to sort through, but it has a very good response rate. People have a problem and you can solve it. Anyway, that’s another way to do it. Ultimately, what it boils down to is once you have one, or two, or three of these common boxes checked in terms of specifically what you’re looking for, is this doing volume and sending out lots of mail.

Clint: You just wait for them to respond back. They should go back and listen to that blind offer discussion we have about putting those agreements together, what should be in there, how to get those people to commit to saying yes. We’ve touched on this but again when you’ve written this offer since you’re going pretty darn low on land […] and that numbers are just, say what, 10%, 20%, 30% of what you think it’s maybe worth.

Seth: Yes, that’s always my approach. I’ve always stayed pretty conservative. Thirty percent for me, I’ll do it, but it’s pretty rare that I’ll go that high. Usually, it’s that 10-20% range. I’ve talked to other people who are working in markets that are a little bit more competitive. Florida and Texas right now are getting more competitive. They’re making blind offers of sometimes 40%, maybe even 50%, which I don’t think I’ll ever do that much. That’s just too much for me.

Some people are doing that. What makes that okay in their situation is that they’re going after properties that are much bigger. Even though it’s a higher percentage, there’s still a lot more money on the line to be made. They’re also pretty high-demand markets where lots of people are going there, the land is super high demand. It’s not going to be hard to sell those. That rule may be made to be broken, but I usually don’t go there. I have heard of people who have done it. They’re okay.

Clint: What do you think is better? Going after smaller parcels of land or larger?

Seth: It depends where you are. If you’re just getting started and you’re trying to figure out how this business works, it’s probably better to go with the smaller stuff because there are a lot more of those smaller deals to go around. They’re pretty easy to find for the most part. If you make a mistake, it’s not going to be a very painful mistake. It’s something you can very easily recover from and you’ll learn a ton of those.

But if you’re somebody who’s trying to waste the minimum amount of time, like me for example, and if you have enough experience, as you get it. You don’t need to learn anymore. You understand how the business works, then I think bigger deals are probably just a better use of your time, in general. But the downside with those is that they’re harder to come by. Those are the kinds we have to send out a lot more mail to get them and be willing to offer a higher percentage for them.

Clint: If I was getting started in land investing, how much would I need? Let’s say, to be able to put deals together. Let’s say, on average. If someone is considering investing in raw land.

Seth: Obviously, the more you have the better. A healthy number to have would be like $5,000. Personally, I had $3,000 and that was enough for me to go very slow and really not make a whole lot of errors, and get my first, second, third deal, and build up a bigger cash reserve. But $5000 will give you a little bit more buffer to, again, going after the super cheap stuff. I’m not talking about big deals yet. It’ll give you enough to cut your teeth on some direct mail, and find some deals, and just see the process work. See yourself make money on the process and figure out, okay, this is what I have to watch out for, and this is what’s hard. There’s a lot of learning you can do with that.

Clint: What was your worst mistake you’ve ever made in doing this?

Seth: The worst deal I ever did was I bought a tiny triangular parcel for like $327. I found out, months after I owned the thing that I was looking at the wrong parcel the whole time. There was another one, that was also the same shape on the other side of the highway. I was looking at the map upside down this whole time. Basically, the parcel was useless. You couldn’t do anything with it. I sent a letter to the neighboring property owner and you just said, hey, you want this land? I’ll give it to you for free. I just gave him a quick claim deed and we’re done.

Clint: Alright, wow.

Seth: If I had taken out a $50,000 loan on a house and screwed something up that would be harder to recover from than $327.

Clint: I see opportunities for individuals that want to start investing in real estate and don’t have a lot of cash to get started. You said $5,000 and I hate to tell people to ever do this.  But it’s not a lot. Let’s say you went out there, you got a no-interest-a-year credit card, and took a cash advance against it. They won’t charge you on the cash advance if you could take out $3,000 doing a deal and let’s assume that it takes nine months as you mentioned in the past to sell that property. Then you bring back $8,000, $,10,000, $15,000. It’s a great way to get started.

Seth: Yeah. Just when you look at the mass of that, it totally makes sense. Where people might get stung is if they’re the type who gets bored, or demotivated, and like, I don’t want to do it anymore. Now they’re in the whole $3,000 or something. I mean if you stuck to it, that can totally work.

Clint: That’s the thing about real estate investing is that you have to stick to it. I see a lot of investors, they want to get started in real estate, but they just want to put in the time and the effort needed. Even though we’re talking about lands here, I haven’t heard you say it’s easy, that you don’t have to do any work.

Great. On your site, REtipster.com, you mentioned that you had a blog post. I’m going to put that in the show notes. But is there anything else on there that people should be paying attention to if they go to your site and they would want to learn more about investing in raw land?

Seth: Yes, we got a ton of stuff and I’m not exaggerating. I’ve spent years, thousands, and thousands of hours putting together a world-class, better than most courses you’ll find out there, free stuff about all this. There are a couple of key blog posts that I reference a lot that link out a lot of other stuff on the site. One of them is actually just the URL, landflippinglifecycle.com, that’ll take you to one blog post. Another one is called, The Truth About Land Investing. It’s 15 warning signs to watch for when buying vacant land, that’s the one I mentioned earlier about due diligence stuff, just to be aware of. There’s really a whole category on the site dedicated to just land stuff. If you go to the homepage and scroll down a way to still see a few categories, just click on land, you’ll find a bunch of stuff out there.

Clint: Great, send me those links and I’ll get them posted in the show notes. Everyone who’s watching this, be sure to check it out. If you’re thinking about investing in raw land, Seth’s been doing it for 13 years now. You’re going to be learning from someone who was actually doing the deals. I think that’s so important in real estate investing. You’ll learn from people who are actually still investors, not people who used to invest 10, 15 years ago. Do you want to leave them parting stuff?

Seth: No, I think we kind of covered all the basics. It’s a great business. I think part of what drew me to it, in part of what made my wife okay with it, is that she doesn’t like me doing a lot of this stuff. But the fact that it was comparatively low risk. I didn’t have to take out loans. I didn’t have to do stuff I don’t know how to do, deal with contractors a ton. Again, simple but not easy. It takes plenty of work. But a lot of the complexity that was just wasn’t there. It’s been a great business from that standpoint. If somebody out there who’s maybe thought about real estate in the past, or maybe if you have tried it and gotten burned on other types of investing strategies, it’s a pretty good one to cut your teeth on and learn more about the business.

Clint: Thanks for taking the time again to talk about this interesting subject. I wish you the very best.

Seth: All right. Thanks, Clint.

Clint: All right, no problem.

Seth: See you.

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