In this episode, Clint Coons, Esq. speaks with Seth Williams and Neil Clements, experienced real estate investors who are joining us to discuss land investment deals that may be a little off the beaten path. From sending out blind offers by mail, to water and mineral rights, to subdividing parcels, Seth and Neil give you the inside track on challenges and opportunities within this lucrative space in real estate investing.
Seth Williams is the founder of REtipster.com; an online community that offers real-world guidance for real estate investors.
Neil Clements is an avid real estate investor who builds his wealth by capitalizing on investment opportunities no one else pays attention to. He is passionate about teaching wealth-building strategies through real estate and how to find opportunities off the beaten path.
Highlights/Topics:
- What’s the state of land deals today?
- Make sure you have a ‘pivot’ once you purchase
- Parent and child land parcels
- Sending offers by mail, text, and ringless voicemail
- Perc tests, subdividing, water and using AI
- Mineral rights in TX land deals
- Some typical numbers on recent deals
- Time frames on turning deals
- Explaining ‘entitlements’
- Due diligence
- Doing land deals remotely, Land ID mapping software
- Blind offers, how to find the right agent
- How Neil and Seth started working together
Resources:
Tax and Asset Protection Events
Full Episode Transcript:
Clint: Welcome, guys. Hey, it’s Clint Coons here with Anderson Business Advisors. In this episode, we’re going to be talking to someone who I’ve interviewed in the past. His name is Seth Williams from REtipster.com.
He’s a phenomenal land flipper, but more importantly, what we decided to do as well is not only talk about the flipping side, we’re going to bring on one of his top students, Neil Clements, who is a land developer and he finds opportunities there. You’re going to get the best of both worlds when we’re going to be discussing land investing, how to find the deals, but more importantly, how to maximize those deals as well.
If you haven’t yet checked out Seth’s website, I highly encourage you to go to retipster.com. There’s a wealth of information on there. Although I do take umbrage with a few of the things he says about LLCs doing it yourself. But we will give him a pass for that on this episode. Other than that, Seth, thanks for coming on.
Seth: Hey, Clint.
Clint: Nice. And Neil, I’m glad you’re here as well. Seth, why don’t we start off? Why don’t you tell us a little bit about where land is at right now? Because in this market, with prices and interest rates, what are you seeing right there as far as opportunities are concerned? Where are your students looking for deals?
Seth: The land business has changed quite a bit since the pandemic hit. Back when I started in this business, it was a very simple, one track approach. You would get a list of landowners in whatever state and county that you’re working in. You would send them a piece of direct mail asking them to call you back and talk more if they wanted to sell. Or you could just send them an offer, we call them blind offers in our space. We could make these offers super low and it worked super well. A lot of people would sell their land at these bargain basement prices.
It’s not that that can’t be done, but it’s getting harder and harder to find that thing without coming to the table with something else to sweeten the deal, whether that’s a higher offer price or some a creative strategy to rather than just making an offer for like 10%–30% of market value, make an offer of like 40%, 50%, 60% of market value, maybe even higher than that. You can do that if you have some kind of a pivot once you own the property.
One of those pivots, for example, that I’ve explored over this past couple of years is building a self storage facility. That’s one way you could do it if you wanted to build something. Or you could get the land entitlements so that you don’t actually do any of the work yourself, but you set it up for the next guy, the next person that you sell it to, so they can just basically shovel-ready and get right into the property. They know exactly what they can do with it. They don’t have to rezone it. They don’t have to figure out what they have to do next. It’s just ready to go.
Or you could do what guys like Neil are doing, where they buy a larger tract of land and they do what’s called a minor subdivide. The benefit with a minor subdivide—I won’t get too far into this because Neil is really the expert at that—in certain states and certain counties is that if the child parcel—the final product that you end up with—is a certain size—oftentimes it’s over 10 acres in a lot of areas—then there’s not a whole lot of red tape.
You don’t have to get the county’s permission to do this. You can just do it. It’s super simple. In order to do that, the original parent parcel has to be large enough for this to make sense. That’s one strategy where people are able to offer a lot, close to its full market value, and that’s okay because when they’re done with it, they’re going to sell it for a whole lot more than that original parent parcel cost.
Clint: All right, last time we talked, you were buying land discounts and then turning around, holding it, banking it and then selling it. What I’m hearing now is those opportunities, the discount opportunities, have dried up so you’ve shifted and it’s more about value add, just like you would with a real estate investing. Is that…?
Seth: I wouldn’t say they’ve dried up. Those opportunities are definitely still out there. It’s what we call the lowest hanging fruit so it’s getting more and more competitive to get those deals. You have to send out a lot more mail or do some other marketing strategy to find those. Rather than offering 10% of market value and getting it, it would be more like 40% of market value, give or take.
It also depends a lot on the size of it, where it is in the market and all kinds of stuff, as I’m sure you know. Basically, it’s just because more land investors are doing this now, a lot of house flippers and wholesalers have started moving into land because they see the opportunity. It’s frankly much more fertile ground than houses, no pun intended.
You can’t just do direct mail with low offers. You can, but if you want to get a lot more deals under your belt, it helps to be able to offer more with some value add strategy if you want to do that extra work, or hit it with some other type of marketing strategy, whether that’s cold calling, ringless voicemail, or text messaging, which is stuff that no land investor did 5 or 10 years ago, but a lot of them are doing it now.
If you just send mail like everybody else is doing, some people don’t read their mail. Some people just throw their mail away before they even open it. If you hit them with a text or a ringless voicemail or a phone call, maybe you’ll get a captive audience there.
People just have to be more creative. I think the world of land investors is slowly starting to look more like the world of household sellers. We’re having to do a lot of the same things that household sellers have been doing for years.
Clint: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like. Is there any particular avatar that you think is an ideal candidate or a land seller that you should target? Or is it just across the board they got property.
Seth: I think everybody’s got property, but typically you’ll see a lot of older owners, people who are maybe in their 40s, 50s, and 60s up there a little bit. It does actually help to understand that because demographically speaking, depending on the age, they may be more likely to answer mail versus a text message versus an email versus a ringless voicemail.
As with any marketing, a lot of this stuff is theory. It’s hard to really know it definitively. Another point on that is when you start switching your marketing to something else, even if it’s just one other channel, like texting for example, there’s a different person that you’ll reach that you’ll never hit if you just stick with mail all the time.
What a lot of people are doing is multiple channels, which is frankly something that a lot of household sellers do too, because they have to, but land investors, I don’t want to say they have to yet, but they’ll probably get a lot more opportunities if they’re willing to go there and deal with a more complex marketing machine like that.
Clint: Then with this value add approach, Neil, this is where you come in, because as I understand it, you went through his course and you absorbed all that information. It sounds like you said hey, this flipping stuff, there’s probably another way to make money at it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit what you started doing and how you’re finding success now?
Neil: Like Seth said, a lot of people are transitioning from house flipping to land flipping. I’m one of those who started house flipping, got pretty successful at it, and then realized there was this whole blue ocean of untapped potential in land investing. I’m a realtor and then also do house flips and also do land flips. Out of all of those, I found land flips, especially minor land subdivisions to be by far the most lucrative for dollar per hour return and the whole nine yards, time invested, money invested, et cetera, leverage.
With land subdivisions, we’re essentially just operating off the basic premise that as you increase the amount of acres, your price per acre drops. As you decrease the amount of acres, your price per acre skyrockets up. There’s so much demand at the lower acreage points, whether that be half acre, one acre, two acre, even up to ten acres, so much so that, for example, you might find you’re selling one acre for $50,000–$100,000, where you would only sell ten acres at maybe $20,000 an acre to get up to $200,000.
Literally, there’s such a discrepancy in demand, such a discrepancy in affordability, that it’s a very unique scenario that can be targeted with land investors like us to go after properties that you can literally just add the value by doing the subdivide. That is you talk about other industries like apartments or other categories where you add value by raising the rents or other forced depreciation strategies. The forced depreciation strategy with land that I do is land subdivisions and adding value by appealing to a new demographic with smaller pieces of land.
Clint: Okay, that assumes a few things though, right? That the land itself is zoned so you can subdivide it, correct? Then you have to have people there that want to buy that because you’re not going to be near or you’re going to be outside of the city, right? And you’re typically in the county when you’re doing these types of deals.
Neil: That’s correct. Whenever you get outside of the city, you’re outside of city limits, you don’t have any zoning. Whenever you get outside of city limits, you don’t have to necessarily deal with the city’s and the city’s regulations, and in most circumstances, you’re dealing with the county’s regulations.
Where I am at in Texas—Seth mentioned it earlier—you have an exemption to any county interference—said nicely, interference—in the subdividing process as long as you have at least 10 acres.
A few examples of what we’re doing is we’ll go out and buy (say) 30 acres, and we’ll make three 10-acre pieces. All we have to do is just have our surveyor survey that out, and we’re free to sell it. We have no county intervention, no city jurisdiction on it. We don’t have to rezone. We don’t even have to do entitlements. That is one opportunity to do what’s called a minor subdivision.
A minor subdivision is essentially just saying that you’re not installing a road, you’re not really installing many utilities. You’re not necessarily improving the land by doing anything else other than just doing paperwork, meaning a survey.
Clint: You’re not even doing a perc test on the property because it’s a county.
Neil: No. In areas I work in Texas—North and East Texas—we don’t even we don’t even do perc test. They’re not a necessity. The soil here is fine for that. The one issue that we have, though, was water accessibility.
On almost every single property, we’re doing a hydraulic analysis. That’s probably the most risk that we take on is a $500–$3000 hydraulic analysis to make sure we can get water. Other than that, we can install septic systems without having to do a perc test.
Electricity is actually pretty good in the areas that I work in so rarely are we having to run electric lines. It’s more often that water is the limiting factor.
Clint: Got it.
Seth: I had a very similar question the first time I talked to Neil about this is the perc test issue. Isn’t that important? Does that matter? I was shocked just to learn that in different parts of the country, these big things that hold up land deals and more water-laden parts of the country are non-issues in areas where there is no water.
Another big thing that I took away from it is that a lot of the stuff that you would have to learn to do these minor subdivisions in one part of the country, I don’t want to say it doesn’t apply at all to other places, but a lot of it is very geographic-specific to that area.
One big takeaway I learned from Neil was this idea of looking for exemptions to subdividing. Actually, when I learned this whole trick about in Texas, how if it’s over 10 acres and there’s no county approval required.
I took that and I started looking in Michigan to figure out, well, I wonder if counties here are similar to that. I just type in the name of the county and then subdivide exceptions and you’ll find a big, long, boring PDF with tons of stuff in it.
There’s another little cool AI tool called Claude. It’s like ChatGPT, but it’s even better for this particular thing. You can take an entire 200 page PDF and dump it into Claude, I just did this earlier today, and say I’m trying to do a minor subdivision in this county, and I’m trying to figure out if I’m allowed to do that. Can you review this and look for any exemptions and let me know what I should be paying attention to? It’ll do a beautiful job of summarizing everything you need to know based on the PDF you upload. Anyway, it’s a cool thing I learned after talking with Neil using Claude.
Clint: I just came across that. It’s phenomenal.
Neil: Like Seth said, we look for those exemptions. Just for example, just in a radius of maybe 100 or 200 miles in North Texas, you can go from counties, maybe in the West that have no subdivision standards at all, meaning you’re in the Wild West. You can do whatever you want. You can do half an acre, one acre. It does not matter as long as you can fit a septic.
On the other hand, you go to some countries that are highly restricted, where if you’re anything below 10 acres, any properties below 10 acres, you’re going to have to do entitlements. You have to plat, hydraulics, drainage studies, topography, the whole nine yards.
There’s one level of that exemption you need to look at because there’s also in some counties you can do five acre lots. Like Seth said, make sure whatever county you’re looking in, you could literally go five miles being a different county and it would be completely different regulations, or you could split counties.
The next level to this beyond an exempt subdivision is actually, like I said, in a subdivision you have to plat, and you can still do that. I’ve done it several times. It’s just a lot more headache, it’s a lot more work, and it’s a lot more expensive.
Clint: When you’re going in there—let’s say we’re not finding those deals that it’s just free to go in, cut them up and it’s okay, but you have to actually do the entitlement work—what’s the ability to flip that? You’re finding a developer, of course that you create your buyer’s pool and then you reach out to them. Hey, I’ve got this deal over here. It’s a two acre parcel and it’s got all the entitlements done. How far do you go with that as far as making that build-ready?
Neil: Most of my projects to date, I would still consider minor. If we start getting into properties that, for instance, major subdivides, so entitlements, maybe 22 acre lots or something like that, once you really get above 10 lots, you’re talking more about major subdivisions. That’s, I guess, step three as a land flipper.
Step one is just buy low market, flip it. Step two is to do a minor step. Three is to do a major. My specialty right now and what I’ve done is minor subdivisions. The people that were marketing those anywhere from two to ten lots, a lot of times we just try to get top market value and sell them off individually. Sometimes we care about the note, sometimes we’ll sell them off and they’ll get a bank loan. It just depends on the circumstance.
We’ve also done deals where we’ve sold it directly to builders, especially one acre lots or in demand for that purpose. There’s a pretty broad buyer pool and there are a lot of exit strategies. Really, the neat thing is like saying that with the diminishing properties that say 20% of market value.
That’s not necessarily anything to brag about, of course. It’s more risky for me. Yet at the same time, when my competition is buying in my area, probably 50%–75% of market value and I can call an owner—we can do cold calling—and offer them full market value, it’s pretty easy to stand out on that.
Clint: In your area, in Texas mineral deeds, huge things down there. Do you sell everything—surface and mineral rights? Or do you hold back the mineral rights and maybe try to or lay that into some more money on your deals?
Neil: We haven’t had any properties yet that had any lucrative mineral opportunities. As of yet, we have not kept the minerals. I could have probably in every single deal that we’ve ever done, so that could be a point of improvement on my part. Yet I haven’t seen any lucrative mineral rights to this point, but maybe that comes in the future as far as the opportunity.
Clint: Have either of you seen people now that are buying land or you’ve done it yourselves, and then you harvest the timber before you turn around and flip the property and make more profit that way?
Seth: Yeah, for sure. I can’t say I know a ton of examples of this, but it absolutely happens. The reason I don’t have a lot of examples is because it’s not just about having timber. It’s about what timber is it? How mature is it? How close is it to a sawmill?
There are a lot of different factors that go into this. But if all the stars align, absolutely. You can get timber that is worth more than the land itself. You harvest that, and then you sell the land on top of it. It’s one of those cool opportunities that is amazing if you can find one in the right location and everything comes together like that.
Neil, I was actually curious. You should share some of the numbers on some of these subdivide deals. What would be a typical acquisition price, then the cost of doing these things to chop it up, and then your sale price? How many of these a year are you doing? Just to give people an idea for how big this is.
Neil: I’ll give you maybe a home run example and then I’ll give you an average deal. A home run example would be to buy 8 acres for $200,000, $25,000 an acre or so. Then sell seven one-acre lots off that—because it was platted and you got to dedicate some of the county—at $75,000 a piece. That’s about $550,000 approximately. Buy for $200,000, sell for $550,000 with less than $50,000 improvements, so net profit of $300,000. That’s an example of a home run deal that we’ve completed a handful of times in the past year or so.
An average deal for us probably looks more like a purchase of say $150, divided in half, maybe a 10-acre piece divided into two 5-acre pieces, again go through platting, and then sell the resulting ones for $260,000, a $110,000 spread with about $10,000 of platting cost, so net profit somewhere around $90,000–$100,000. That’s an average deal and we’re turning one or two of those.
Clint: That was going to be my next question. How long is your money tied up in the deal before you’re turning it?
Neil: That’s the other thing. If we do an exempt subdivision, meaning we don’t have to plat, we don’t have to do entitlements, our money’s really only tied up for four months. If we do platting, the platting process itself, just from the counties’ review of everything, takes 4–5 months for approval. It’s pretty darn slow. Total hold time for that’s probably closer to a year.
Whenever we have the opportunity not to plat, you better bet we don’t. However, we’re not going to give up an additional six figures of income just to do an exempt subdivision versus not.
My toughest part of my business is obviously the cash outlay, which you pointed to, Clint. If you’re doing one or two of these a month and you’re buying (say) $200,000–$500,000 purchase price, and then I’m getting bank loans, I’m not partnering with anybody on these, obviously, you can see the cash outlay gets pretty high pretty quick.
Clint: Okay, you’ve been mentioning a few terms here. I think we should go back just a bit and define for people. When you’re talking about entitlements, can you explain what that means, for someone who’s watching this and listening in, and has never been through that process before?
Neil: Entitlement is just simply approval from a jurisdiction—a city, a county, whoever it is—to do what you want to do. You’re entitled to be able to put your mobile home park here. You’re entitled to be able to subdivide this and get a building permit for it. That is the major reason to get entitlements, in my opinion. In Texas, what I’m doing is if we don’t get our entitlements, then nobody can build there.
Entitlements are simply just going through the city or county’s processes to get approved for what you’re trying to do so that you can actually execute on that. But the beauty of entitlements is you’re doing paperwork.
A lot of things that we’re talking about here today, we’re not necessarily talking about doing the dirt work. We’re not necessarily talking about building a road. We’re not talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of improvements to these properties.
We’re talking about partnering with other vendors such as a surveyor, an engineer in a city and other partners to literally just do paper subdivisions. That’s the power in this, it’s having the knowledge.
That’s why it’s so important for us to have this podcast today and get this knowledge out because, like Seth was saying, you start looking at your county’s guidelines, and your lend investing strategy can just blow up once you see the opportunity.
Clint: When you’re talking about entitlements, still it’s making my head spin. I’m thinking, all right, you make it sound easy, but it’s not that easy. How does someone get up to speed to figure all this stuff out with the county?
Seth: In my experience, I had to do this with my self storage facility. The situation was I bought this vacant lot for $69,000 and it was zoned residential. I wanted to change it to commercial. I also wanted to get my plan for my civil engineer approved so I could build what I wanted to build there.
There are basically two hurdles, there was changing the zoning and then there was getting my specific plan approved. Either one of those things they could have said no to and my plans would have been totally ruined and I couldn’t do it. Luckily they said yes to both.
The trouble with entitlements, the reason why people are willing to pay so much more for a property that has entitlements is because it gives them certainty about what they can do. They don’t have to do what I did where you put all this money down on a property and you’re like, I don’t know if I can actually use this for anything. I’ll have to find out.
Just putting together my plans for my civil engineer was $20,000. It’s actually not even that much compared to some plans. But I had to spend $20,000 just to see if they would say yes to it. They could have said no and then I would have just wasted all that money.
Anybody who buys land without entitlements, they’re rolling the dice a little bit because they don’t really know what they can do. If you can get those questions answered for somebody else, for the next guy, you better believe that’s worth a lot because they don’t have to wonder. They don’t have to gamble on whether or not they can actually do this.
The reason I was able to get comfortable with it is because before I bought it, I called up the township clerk, the person who was in charge of getting this stuff approved, and I just asked him, like here’s what I’m trying to do. Am I crazy? Can you think of any reason why this wouldn’t happen? What would you say is the percentage likelihood of this being done realizing that it’s not really up to him, but he still knows generally what to expect.
If he says, Seth, I think there’s probably a 60% chance this will get done. Then my question is, okay, why isn’t it a hundred percent? What is the uncertainty there? What else do I need to figure out? And what are the questions I have to answer to really be confident in this?
At the end of the day, I can’t be 100% confident, but I can at least understand what I’m up against, what hurdles I have to get over, and what the chances of failure are. There’s a lot of that stuff you can ask before you even buy a property just by making some phone calls.
Clint: That’s a great point, what he just said and Neil, you’re hitting on, is don’t buy it first. Have an idea for the land you want to make the offer on, figure out what you can do with it, make sure you can do what you want to do or you got a good sense for it, then you go and buy. Is that where you’re going, Neil?
Neil: Absolutely. Give yourself a good option, a termination period, or due diligence period because if you don’t have that, then you could get stuck with a bad property. That is what I consider crucial.
If you’re going to be subdividing, you have to have a hefty due diligence period. We typically do at least 60 days because by the time we get our hydraulics done, which is our water studies, by the time we get any preliminary review for platting with the county, if we’re doing entitlements, we get our drainage studies, our topography studies, we’ve eaten up that whole 60 days.
If we’re buying land at (say) 100% of market value, we don’t want to be stuck with a piece of land that we can’t sell and at least break even with. If you give me the opportunity to say maybe make $2000 or $3000 on a land flip by doing a subdivision and the county’s already preliminary said yes from preliminary meetings, and my worst case scenario is break even or maybe make a little bit of money, I’ll take that 9 times out of 10, maybe 10 times out of 10.
Like you said, Seth, you have to go through those processes. The good counties will have a Department of Development, the big counties to where you can do these preliminary meetings. The smaller counties, they won’t and it really is the wild west and you’re really just biting the bullet until it actually gets approved or denied.
Clint: The question I was going to ask to both of you is remote investing. Buying properties remotely, it’s a house. There’s not that much that goes into it compared to (I imagine) land investing, such as you don’t know (for example) here in Washington state, wetlands, huge issue. You could look at a piece of property and say this property has no issues with wetlands, but the county will say oh, no, there’s a wetland issue here. You’re like, where? I don’t see any standing water. How do you do that remotely? Or is it even possible you recommend it guys?
Neil: I’ll give my brief thoughts. My brief thoughts is land ID mapping software. That’s going to get you 90% of the way there to be able to see all that. Second would be the local county Department of Development and such like that. That’s my two cents on it.
Seth: I would agree the Land id has a nice wetlands mapper, which is ultimately just taken from the National Wetlands Mapper. It’s the same data. Land id just makes it look prettier and easier to use.
The problem though—I hate this about wetlands—is that that map is not that accurate. It’s wrong all the time, where it’ll tell you certain things about wetlands when they’re not and vice-versa. The only way to really know for sure is to get a wetland delineation—get somebody to go out there, walk the property, and test the soil. It’s very cumbersome.
When you’re doing something like land flipping, there’s a calculated risk to it. You have to decide is it worth it to waste the time? Could I have a plan B if there are wetlands there? How much am I putting into this thing and how much do I stand to make? I know with something like what Neil’s doing, when you’re paying 90%–100% of market value, I would totally get a wetland delineation on that because you want to be very sure that there’s not going to be some got you at the end of there.
Given the amount of money you’re putting into that and also the option period or the due diligence period that you have before you buy it, that’s an easy cost to justify. Even the time it takes to do it is easy to justify.
On the flip side, if you’re just flipping the thing and if you’re buying it for 30% of market value, you have to decide, is it worth it? Can I still have speed and agility here? Is there something else I could do on the back end?
Usually looking at the wetlands mapper, looking at surrounding properties, even going into the USDA Soil Map and understanding what is the soil type in this area. Is it likely to be a wetlands or not? And understanding that kind of stuff. You can usually get pretty darn accurate without actually having it spelled out right in front of you.
If you just understand, did the neighbors have wetlands? Is there a house next door? It doesn’t necessarily mean your house is clear, but it’s a clue that the area is probably okay. That’s probably been one of my biggest dilemmas in general when I’m working in states with wetlands is that issue right there, because I want to be totally certain. The only way to do that is to go the slow, expensive way to find out.
Clint: As remote, would you say investing in land, is it possible for people?
Seth: Oh yeah. For me to figure out if there’s a wetland, I do not need to be there to do that. There are wetland delineation consultants all over the country. You just call them up, tell them what your property is, and have them go do it. It’s better for them than me anyway, even if I live next door to it.
Clint: Okay.
Neil: To give you a perspective, Seth set up a mastermind group with his community, and I’m a part of that, obviously. Two of the guys in my mastermind group, one is in South America, lives there permanently, and invests remotely. The other one lives in London and invests all in the United States for land.
To answer your question very simply, yes, and I know guys doing it at a really high level who live in other countries who are even doing this.
Clint: How are they finding the deals or the opportunities?
Neil: Mailing. They’re both primarily doing mailing. I’m primarily doing cold calling, but I’ve seen other people do SMS. I do think what Seth said earlier at the beginning of the call as far as land flipping is getting more competitive. If you follow what wholesalers are doing, which is significantly more competitive than land flipping. Ultimately, land flippers are going to essentially look almost like wholesalers as far as the strategies that we’re going to have to take on to find these properties and the strategies that we’re going to have to do to stay competitive.
Clint: For sure. I’m curious for both of you, what your response is going to be here. What are the top three things, if I wanted to start doing this, that I need to be aware of so I don’t lose my ass.
Neil: You need to know your stuff. It all starts with the deal. First off, you need to find a deal to even do it with because if you spend a ton of effort up front, researching all these guidelines, making all these phone calls, you can be the smartest person, but also the stupidest because you don’t have a deal to some extent.
Find a deal, meet with your local counties, you’re going to be doing deals and ask them what it takes.What are you going to need? What does the reviews process look like? Then partner with good people, whether that’s a real estate agent, whether that’s a surveyor. Build your team around yourself while you’re searching for the deals and you do those three things well plus give yourself a good due diligence period.
Worst case scenario, you lock up a bad property, you lose $100 in due diligence, and then you learn a ton. My recommendation would be there’s no substitute for actually putting a deal on a contract and then figuring it all out.
Seth: Totally. I’m actually working with another guy in Arizona who’s doing a similar thing to what Neil’s doing in Texas. Interestingly, he and I are looking in a new county right now, a county he’s never worked in, and we’re basing the entire decision on whether or not we even work in that county, on whether or not we can find a good surveyor.
If we can’t find a good one who is reasonably priced, who can do this in a reasonable amount of time, then we’re not going to go there. We spent a bunch of time trying to find, we called probably three or four of them, and not surprisingly some of them don’t even exist. They don’t answer their phones. Well that’s not going to work, so we keep calling other ones.
We finally found one with a really grumpy old lady who answered the phone and yelled at both of us. But she seemed pretty competent. They knew what they were doing, so everything else looks good. We don’t love her as a person, but it’s probably going to be fine, so we’re moving forward based on the fact that we could find that professional. Certain key players are extremely important. This does not work if you can’t find them.
Then also just your ability to understand land values. Neil’s in a great position because he’s a licensed agent in Texas. He can see comp data that nobody else can see if they don’t have MLS access because Texas is a non-disclosure state. That plays a lot into understanding the land value today, and then what it’s going to look like after it’s all split up and sold. He’s got a fierce competitive advantage there that a lot of other land investors don’t have.
As you mentioned, if you don’t have a license or a good realtor on your side who understands land, find them. They’re a big component, similar to the surveyor thing.
Clint: How much could a realtor help me as a land investor? If I was investing in Arizona, Pima County, for example. I said I’m going to try to buy some property down there. I don’t know if there is much land, but do I find a realtor? Because I’m in Washington state, do I look for an agent? Are there certain things that I need, questions I should be asking of an agent? If you think that’s a smart way to go, maybe get started?
Seth: Yeah. I know Arizona, I believe, is a disclosure state. Unlike Texas, you can actually see past sales and what property is sold for, so that’s helpful. But even so, having a good agent who can just take that selling process off your hands and also give you a lot of feedback on are you on the right track? Do you really understand the different local issues or benefits of the property in this area?
There’s a lot of stuff when you’re looking at Google Earth from across the country that you just don’t know because you’re not in that market. Having a person or two or three who really understands those issues and can even visit the property and see stuff that you’re not going to see through a computer screen is super helpful.
I would always try to get an agent if you can. It’s just that in places like Texas, there’s even more of a reason because they can see behind the scenes in a way that the average civilian can’t.
Clint: Neil, would you want to add anything to that as far as approaching an agent? If I was to approach you and say you weren’t doing it yourself, what would you be looking for from an agent standpoint?
Neil: I’m definitely looking for somebody who does land and who does land on a daily basis. I can’t overstate that enough because I work at a pretty big market center in South Dallas. The amount of agents who do residential real estate versus who do land, you’re talking about a very slim amount of agents who actually know how to do land. As a land investor, you will get in a lot of trouble for hiring a real estate agent who only does houses to try to sell your land.
Some of the best flipping opportunities that I have ever seen as a land investor hit the MLS were from residential agents who did not know land and did not know exactly what we’re talking about on this call. Those are some of the best deals that I’ve ever bought. You want to talk about a missed opportunity that an investor could have had or an owner could have had to maybe double the sales price. You better make sure you hire the right agent.
How do you find them? Well, there are several different sources, several different search criterias, whether that’s Realtors Land Institute, whether that’s several of the resources. I know Seth has on his website searching for agents but especially in Texas where it’s a non-disclosure state, you’re essentially just guessing if you don’t have a realtor on your side or access to MLS.
Clint: All right, since you’re on here, I’d like to know how you got in contact with Seth? What brought that together?
Neil: At the point that I contacted Seth and did his program, I had already been pretty decently successful at this strategy. I had already done it for at least a year or so. What I was looking for in Seth’s program is I was looking to learn how to do mailing. That’s ultimately the reason I decided to sign up for it.
He essentially gave me the bare bones, the templates, and everything that I needed to do a successful mailer campaign, just the stuff you don’t know, especially if you’re going to spend (say) $10,000 on a mailer campaign to purchase his course, a fraction of that, is a no brainer.
Him and I got to talk a little bit further through one of his chats that he has through his program. Ultimately, he was wanting to know a little bit more about land subdivisions and that’s pretty much all that I do at this point. There are maybe only one or two properties ever that I’ve not subdivided. We got connected that way and that’s how I ended up here today. So grateful to know him.
Clint: Now you’re part of his mastermind?
Neil: Yeah, he’s got a mastermind for people who have gone through his program. I am a part of that mastermind and happy to be doing that with the group.
Clint: That’s awesome, Seth. You bring a testimonial with you.
Seth: I’ll pay you for this afterwards. Don’t worry.
Clint: In all seriousness, though, you and I have known each other for probably four or five years now and you deliver solid content. I think that people that do take the opportunity to go to your site and see what you have to offer and go through your course, it’s only going to benefit them. If I’m watching this right now, listening to it, and I want to get a hold of you, what do I need to do?
Seth: You go to retipster.com or just search for retipster anywhere on social media. You’ll probably find me there. On retipster. com, if you scroll to the bottom, there’s a little contact button in the footer, it’s almost hidden by design, but you can click on that and send me an email there.
If you’re looking for land investing stuff, the Land Investing Masterclass, that’s like the flagship course that Neil went through and that has been out there for years now. Spent a lot of time updating that as the business changes and as new things come into the industry. Happy to talk to anybody who wants to learn more about it.
Clint: What you just said there, talking to people, that’s one thing I think where you are at, you’ve built up this following, but you’re still personable and you’re approachable. A lot of people, to get to where you’re at, they’re pushing everyone off on other individuals and you don’t do that. You always respond to my emails. If I need to call you, you’ll pick up the phone.
That’s one of the reasons why I wanted you on here again, and I think people should definitely reach out to you and check out what you have to offer if they’re thinking about land flipping.
Seth: Thanks Clint. Appreciate that very much. It’s great to be back.
Clint: Guys, thanks for coming on. I truly appreciate this. All the best with that investing, and I hope people definitely hit your site.
Seth: Thanks.
