Seth: Hey folks, this is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 207.

Today I'm talking with my friend Andy Rouse. Andy is a full-time land investor who left his W2 job a little over a year ago, I think. We're going to talk about how his business works, how he made it to that point of breaking free from the corporate world, and what it's like for him to be out on his own.

So I've talked with a lot of people like Andy over the years who found freedom in the land business. And everyone who goes through that process brings a unique set of lessons and experiences to the table. So we're going to get a fascinating look at what Andy's journey looked like.

But in this conversation, it's about more than just Andy's business. The original reason that he and I wanted to do this was because of a problem that we've both seen brewing instead of getting worse in the land business, and that is title fraud. So about a few years ago, I started hearing about people who were posing as sellers and trying to sell properties that they didn't own. And even though title fraud is a crime, it's turned into like this full-scale business for some people. And it's surprisingly not that hard to do for those who understand how to manipulate the antiquated way that property title transfers work in the U.S.

I've been troubled by this. I know Andy has been too. And Andy, I guess maybe we're similar minds in that when we see problems like this, we want to get to the bottom of it. What is the solution? How do you make sure this doesn't happen and can't happen? Is there a way to do that? And if so, what is that?

In terms of how to fight this and protect yourself against it, one solution is to close with the title company and order title insurance on every property you buy. And I think if you're buying any property over 10K or even 5K, depending on what the thing is worth and what you can sell it for, I think it's kind of a no-brainer to do this just because it'll make your life a lot easier and make sure you're buying the property from the actual owner. That's what the title company should be doing.

Title insurance policy is just like a typical title insurance owner's policy that you buy. It's supposed to cover all title issues in the past and upon transfer, but it doesn't necessarily cover any new issues going forward. And that's a whole other thing to think about. For those who are closing smaller deals, you know, vacant lots worth 5K and below, which is, you know, honestly where a lot of us get started because they're so cheap and they're just easier to go after without such a huge investment. And it just doesn't make economic sense to pay an additional 500 to 1,000 bucks just to close the thing when you buy, and then maybe again when you sell it, because the profit margin isn't there.

So when you're in this situation, when you're trying to self-close, what are you supposed to do to verify that you're buying from the actual seller? Make sure you don't get taken like this. Are there any bulletproof or even halfway reliable methods we can use to ensure we're not getting scammed by some property owner pretending to be somebody that they aren't? Neither Andy nor I are attorneys, so we're not offering any legal advice here, but we can talk about some of the ideas that we've dug up to possibly help with this.

So, Andy, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Andy: Well, thank you, Seth. I'm excited to be here.

Seth: Yeah, I'm happy you're here too. It's going to be good. So let's start from the very beginning. What's your land investing story? When did you hear about this? How did you hear about it? What made you decide to jump in and give it a shot?

Andy: So in 2012, we had our first child, my wife and I. And I think becoming a dad, I started to, for some reason, just really get interested in things like the outdoors and hunting. And when I have an interest, I go deep, like super deep, like obsessively deep. And I decided that I wanted to find a place to hunt. And in Texas, almost, I think it's something like 99 point something percent of the land in Texas is private. And so I decided I wanted to buy a piece of land.

So in 2017, we and another family bought a 30-acre tract northwest of Austin. It's been a blast having it. We get to hunt on it. We camp with family and do work out there to help manage the wildlife habitat. We have a tax exemption that helps. We maintain it through doing some of those activities.

And so I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I've had my own business a while back that was a services business. It was really more of a consultant-type business for a few years. I've been in technology most of my career—a very long career—but I really wanted to start a real business. And in 2020, I heard a podcast. I was listening; I believe it was a Side Hustle podcast. And somebody was on there talking about land and how he bought and sold land.

When I heard this podcast, it was this light bulb moment for me. I was like, I cannot believe I had never thought of this before. And it was the business that I had been basically searching for all this time. So I dove in.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome. I remember the first time I heard about it and it clicked for me too. It was just this beautiful thing. I've only experienced that kind of thing a few times in my life where everything just lined up. And it was awesome.

Andy: Even more awesome when I tried it and it actually worked.

Seth: Yeah. So tell us how you got started. Like, did you start right then in 2020 or give me a recap on your first year or so? Like, did you just get a list from somewhere and start selling dark mail like most people did at the time? Or what did your beginnings look like?

Andy: Yeah. So I took some courses and pretty quickly started taking action. I tend to be on that ready, fire, aim mentality side of the spectrum. him.

So I took some courses and started sending mail. And then in a group, I saw a guy named Matt Nunn, who now I'm good friends with. He was posting that he was selling some properties. He was wholesaling some properties. And so I got in touch with him. And I remember talking with him and thinking and being skeptical. I was like, “Why is he selling this for less than what he could?” And it's funny because he's like the most trustworthy person you'll ever meet. But I was wondering if he was legitimate.

He helped me quite a bit, even just getting started there. And over the years, we've stayed in touch. We've been good friends. And he helped me out a lot when I was first getting started. I mailed out some blind offers and some rural residential lots in Texas, and I picked up a couple and then ended up picking up more than that.

And it's funny because the first property that I bought was not a great property. And I had sent a drone photographer out there. But it turned out after I put it on the market that there was actually a creek running through it. You couldn't see it from any drone photography, anything like that. And so I started working with this drone photographer and got to be friends with him. And I was like, “Hey, I need a little bit more than just the drone photography. I actually need you to walk the property and give me a report on it and tell me what's going on.”

And so it was an interesting, again, light bulb moment that you've got to have a deep network. You've got to have people, boots on the ground, people that you can trust to help identify some of those gotchas in there. And so that was my first year where I was buying those types of lots. Those are smaller, half-acre, maybe one acre. I think the largest was three acres. And at the end of that year, I started going more toward larger lots, 10-plus-acre lots. And that's really where I enjoy that aspect of it. I look for properties that I want; I myself want to buy and would want to own and try to build and develop those types of properties.

Seth: Yeah, I gotcha. So in terms of how your business has evolved over the past year, I know we've all had to evolve at least a little bit because the business has changed quite a bit since 2020. It sounds like you've sort of gravitated towards the larger properties. Do you ever do small ones anymore? Like, do you have boundaries for yourself? Like if it's worth less than this amount, I'm not going to do it or anything like that?

Andy: Yeah, we'll typically look at it. We have a minimum threshold usually of around 15,000 to 25,000 on the profit side. We will do some smaller ones occasionally if we have kind of an opportunistic, you know, call it not even a single, but a bunt.

So this year, we've had a lot more of a focus on properties that hit a specific margin or size. In many of the areas, you can even buy a 40-acre or 100-acre and not be at that threshold. So a lot of it comes down to where our attention is. We have a limited amount of attention and a limited amount of resources. And so every single deal takes a significant amount of work. And so we want to make sure that we're focusing on those properties that are actually going to move the needle.

This year has really been scaling up quite a bit as far as acquisitions go. I had an acquisitions person, a woman part-time that had worked for me and she was awesome and helped me to really kind of, a couple of years ago, start to scale as I had my full-time job. And I was working on the edges of the nights and weekends and was getting burnt out with that. And so we've made some staffing changes, some hard decisions as a team, but we've now got a team of four and then a part-time data scientist and have really amped up and increased our acquisitions into what is ultimately a slowing market.

Yeah, it's been good. It's turning into an okay year and 2025 is looking like it'll be a really great year.

Seth: Good. That's awesome. Interesting. So you've got a data scientist. What exactly do they do?

Andy: So she built an algorithm that identifies properties that we want. So we look at a large number of properties and basically all properties within a county. We look at sellers and try to understand who's going to be more likely to sell. And so we look at different attributes on the property. Do we want this property? Is it going to make us and deliver a certain number that we need? And then we look on the seller side and say, yeah, who is going to be more likely to sell?

And so it was something where I was spending a lot of time on the data side and I became an expert in Excel. But I was so perfectionist, you know, just overly attuned to every single detail. And I had done some data work on in my old career in product management, working with some different algorithms. And I'm not a developer. I'm not a data scientist, but I worked with them a lot and done kind of what you call the product management side, figuring out what products we need to build.

And so we started doing a lot of that. And that's really helped to help us scale. We have somebody who runs our campaigns as well, meaning where are we going? Who are we targeting? Which locations, which states, which counties, and kind of managing that data pipeline. It's been something that has really helped us to accelerate and scale with a smaller team.

Seth: On the data scientist thing you were talking about, just that whole process, you were trying to filter for properties based on who you think will be most motivated or is it based on the properties that you want or is it both? Because those are two separate things, right?

Andy: It's both. And it's something like looking at somebody from the perspective of who this person is, not just how this person is related to that individual property. So trying to look at their portfolio.

Seth: Does that work? I understand filtering for the properties that you know you want. But when it comes to really understanding the seller without talking to them, without having a real conversation and understanding all the nuance that comes with that, how much improvement can you really make when you're just kind of looking at information on a screen? Is it like a notable difference that you find?

Andy: It's almost like a Venn diagram when you're looking at things. And these have been talked about from a long time ago: how long have they owned the property? I don't want somebody who's just bought the property in 2022. They're not going to be the right person. We also look at things like how much do we expect they have outstanding on a loan? And so how much is their equity? What was their buy price? So looking at those types of things. Where do they live relative to the property? Are they next door to it?

We haven't gone to the point of looking at things like demographics. That's something that I'm a little bit hesitant to get too much into some of the demographics. I don't know what the potential legalities of that are. We're sticking with kind of some of those basics, but there's also the other aspect there too of it just takes numbers. It just takes action. And so I have bought properties that many times have not fit my algorithm and have been counter to it. When we looked at things historically, it was something like 30% of the properties that we bought did not fit into; they would have been filtered out.

Seth: I think there's a Mark Twain quote. I forget what it is. But when everybody's doing one thing, you need to look and see. It's time to pause and reflect when you find yourself on the side of the majority. Is that what it is?

Andy: Yes. And so there's always that aspect of, hey, maybe there's some logic to looking at that contrarian view and saying, well, maybe nobody's going after these.

Seth: Yeah. And I guess just to verify, based on what I hear you saying, all of this stuff can be controlled from within whatever your data service is, right? Whether it's PropStream or DataTree or whatever. So it's not like you have to like do anything crazy fancy. You just have to understand really clearly who you're going for and be able to articulate that in the filters, right?

Andy: Exactly. We're also taking all of the data from a county. We're actually trying to look at alternative data sources as well, going directly to counties and things of that nature to be able to get that. But all of that data is included in there. Now, I think some different systems, Swee's Land Vision. There's many other systems out there that do append data to it.

Meaning I think you can likely get loan data from the counties in some cases, but that's part of the other challenge: none of that data is normalized, right? So County A has their data in one column, you know, structure, and then County B has it in a completely different one. And so that's the value of going to a real estate-type company like that. There's a lot of different providers, right? Like PropStream and you know all of these, right? That have some of those types of things of like, hey, this person's likely to sell, right? You're likely to sell list.

We're just doing a lot of that more organically and then saying, you know, because we can kind of tweak our algorithms a little bit to say, all right, listen, we want to potentially, in some cases, buy a house on a piece of land. We've actually had some success with that. And so that's, again, potentially an underserved population.

Seth: The thing you're saying, and I appreciate you saying it about how I think you said like 30% of the properties you buy don't fit your algorithm or something like that. Right. Like when I think about like the delinquent tax list, for example, like you will find lots of motivation on that list, but you will also lose opportunities if you go with that list.

Andy: Absolutely. And you can say that with anything. It's that art of finding like, where is the line where you're filtering it so that you're certainly not going to get the stuff you don't want, but you're not getting rid of so much stuff that you're walking away from potentially awesome deals. And that's kind of this mysterious thing. I don't know what the line is. I don't know that anybody really does. You don't really know until you just try stuff and see what happens. And the line's always changing. Too, because you start to kind of get these learnings, right? And that learning becomes public.

It's kind of like the efficient stock market, where, again, once somebody has an edge, then that edge pretty quickly can get closed, and people are exploiting that edge. And so I have this saying of, you know, what worked yesterday isn't going to work today. And what What isn't working today will start working tomorrow. And so it's this aspect of it that is such a complex, dynamic, adaptive system, meaning you've got all these different variables coming into it and all these different factors.

And so it's always changing. Based on what's happening in the market, what's happening in the economy. And so we have to kind of keep our ability to have that mental agility to be able to be willing to change based on new data, new information.

Seth: Aside from moving on to bigger deals and, you know, getting more complex with your data analysis and you're growing your team and that kind of thing, have you been getting into like anything beyond just straight-up flips where you take title and then you sell it without or anything? Like, are you doing subdivides or are you doing assignments or double closings or anything fancy like that?

Andy: Yeah. So we actually just put our first, most likely double close purchase under contract. And that was something where if we were going to do it, we wanted to make sure that we were 110% transparent as to what we were going to do. Hey, we're going to be marketing your property. We got agreement and I never want somebody to come back to me and say, “I had no idea that you were doing this. You were disingenuous. You didn't show this.”

And so we just got our first there. I have not gone that route historically because, again, I didn't want to be disingenuous. I want to make sure that we're transparent, but also there's added complexity there too and that you have to make sure that you get it sold at a certain time and if not, the risk of what you're going to do. So that's one thing we typically do—we almost always take down our deals when we have a really strong capital partner. A strategic capital partner that's allowed us to go after larger deals as well.

And so we have done different things early on. I started doing some subdivides. we had in my second year, like 35 acres we put into 10-acre a little over 10-acre residential lots, so I've done a few different subdivides, and then we actually built some off-grid hunting cabins and did some different experimentation on a small scale.

And then we actually just had our largest property that we have been under contract for almost a month. That's a much larger subdivide. It's much larger than our typical contract price. So our first million-dollar purchase, it would be, assuming we're able to make it happen.

Seth: Sounds like you have a land funder that you're working with, like the same one every time you said strategic capital partner. Does that just mean there's one shop that continually funds your deals?

Andy: That's right. So it's a good friend of mine. And there's actually a group of us that we meet every week. We do a lot of deals together. I've known them for 20 years. And so they have some depth of capital, which has made that kind of strategic partner in that we're doing a lot of deals. We have been able to go after some of these larger deals as well.

Seth: So is this somebody who was never really a land flipper? They're just a friend of yours that has money and they're happy to fund your deals?

Andy: That's right.

Seth: Cool. The cabin thing—I've heard people talk about this idea a lot over the years. I'm sure, like anything, there's all kinds of different variables that can influence whether it's worth it or not, or how much the value goes up, if at all, after a cabin is there.

But just tell me about that. How did you decide to do that? What does it cost to get these cabins on there? What is the resulting value of the property after the cabin is there? Is it worth it? Or is it easier to just sell the land as is?

Andy: I would say the jury is still out on if it's worth it. It does extend your hold times. The higher the price, the more you have on there, the more finicky your buyers are, right? It's kind of like if you build a million-dollar luxury home, you're going to have very specific buyers with very specific tastes.

So it adds complexities to a deal. And we haven't done enough of them with enough to be able to actually truly see A-B test type thing, but the numbers do pan out. And what we were looking at was call it about a $25,000 cost, adding about $50,000 in total value, right? So 25 profit. So not bad.

Andy: It adds complexity on the builder side, depending on what you do. You can also do something more simple, like buy something prefabricated and move it on there. We're still in the testing phase and working through getting the results. I much prefer doing something where we can add value, be it a cabin or having something where we're putting in a nice driveway, adding a culvert, or building a road through a property. That can add so much value, though it's expensive.

Seth: It is expensive. But even on some of those smaller properties that I had...

Andy: We were doing hydro mulching out front, and somebody recently said it makes it look park-like. I thought that was the perfect word for it. You can put in just a little bit of money and get massive ROI.

Seth: When you say hydro mulching—I should probably look this up...

Andy: I've heard people use that word.

Seth: Do you grind up trees and put it everywhere?

Andy: Especially the brush. So doing bush hogging, but turning it into wood chips that end up making a nice floor on the ground. Especially when you're talking about an acre property or a half-acre property, it makes it walkable. You can kind of see the whole thing.

Seth: It seems like that would add more value, or at least perceived value, than just bush hogging it, right? Where you just end up with dirt when it's all done. You're actually putting a surface down.

Andy: And it looks beautiful—that nice wood-chipped surface. I mean, you think about how much work it takes to mulch something, to spread that mulch. But when you're getting it like that, it's amazing.

Seth: How much more does it cost to do that?

Andy: Oh gosh, I haven't done it on a smaller property in a while, but I think we had one that was a quarter acre and it cost something like $1,300.

Seth: Just for that part of it or for the whole job?

Andy: For everything—the brush cutting and doing the mulching.
Word of warning with that: always have a survey on a smaller property, or if it's a larger property, stay away from the borders. You want to make sure that you do not have any risk of a boundary question that can come back on you.

Seth: And back to the cabin thing—so it sounds like these were not prefabricated cabins. You had a contractor build them custom or something?

Andy: Exactly. We had some plans and modified them a little bit. I had a good realtor friend—we had been talking about the idea for about a year. These properties back up to hunting land, so it's something where you can buy 10 acres and you all of a sudden own 2,010 acres. That's kind of the hypothesis there.

Seth: Are there any specific tools or resources you've found particularly helpful over the past year or two? What would you say are your one or two or three go-to pieces of software that you use again and again because they're just so helpful?

Andy: I'm a big fan of AI, leveraging AI in my business, as I know you are. ChatGPT and Claude are two really solid tools, really solid services. We get premium. I've added ChatGPT for my team as well, and we're really trying to leverage that as much as possible.

We are using API in some cases for data cleanup. We were calling it and asking questions like, "What is the most likely first name for this person?" Because I've seen systems like LandVision or DataTree, when they try to parse that out, they sometimes can get it very, very wrong.

Seth: Wait, so you get a list where the first name is not there?

Andy: Where what they perceive as the first name is incorrect. For example, there was a Blueberry Farms LLC, and it said the first name was Blueberry. I always like to personalize our letters, and that would have been "Hi, Blueberry." We have an API where we ask the question of looking at this name, what is the most logical first name? And if you don't know, I want it blank.

Seth: Does it have a connection to property owner records or something? How does it know the first name?

Andy: No, it's actually just pulling our full owner name. So if it's Seth Williams, then it's going to say it's most likely Seth. Now, if it was Seth William, then it might say, "I'm not really sure," because William could be a first name or Seth could be a first name. It's looking at the whole thing and saying, "Is Seth a logical last name?" Because so many times you see where it's just not a comma, right? It's William Seth. And so it's trying to parse that type of thing out.

A lot of the power with ChatGPT and Claude is in things like their APIs. Claude's API is from Anthropic. You can program to talk directly to those and leverage them in your systems. I've used it a lot for things like reviewing contracts, asking "Is there anything I'm missing? What clauses do I need to add in this?" I'm trying to build a custom one that will actually build a contract for me based on our historical contracts.

Sometimes it's much better at different tests than others. It's always getting better. But it's been helpful to even be a conversation partner. Like, "Hey, I've got this situation. I've got this seller that I don't want to make mad, but I really need to get them to do this. How would you recommend going about it?"

Seth: I actually just did that a couple of days ago with something involving two people. I won't name names or anything, but it was an awkward, weird thing that I had to say—something that had to be dealt with. It's delicate. I don't want to make anybody mad. I just explained the whole context. My initial prompt was pretty long, telling the whole story of why this is an issue. But the response I got was perfect. I mean, it was way better than anything I ever could have thought up on my own.

Andy: It does make a huge difference. Sometimes it can even save a relationship. So many times we're just stuck in our heads and our own thought processes, right? We talk about getting advice from a friend—having somebody else's perspective is always tremendously valuable. Sometimes you can't do that, and so when you can have something like AI to bounce ideas off of, that can be tremendously helpful.

Seth: If anybody out there is an AI nerd like Andy and me, you might want to consider checking out the Pulse Inner Circle at pulseinnercircle.com. It's a new thing that Mike Balcom and I have been working on. A couple times a month, we get together and have calls kind of like what we're doing right now, where we just talk about what we're using and what's working, and answer questions and stuff like that. There is just so much to know about it.

The more you know, the more powerful you become. A lot of the questions that I see people asking everywhere, I just keep wondering, "Why aren't you asking ChatGPT?" You can get probably the best answer or a very good answer from that, unless it's an experiential-based issue where you need firsthand experience. I don't think it can do that. But for general, broad stuff, you'll get a very solid direct response. It's super helpful.

Andy: Yeah. In many cases, it's almost like if you ask your question of "Has somebody ever posted this question on Reddit?" And if the answer to that is yes, ask ChatGPT—they can likely give you an answer there.

Replit is another product that I've been using lately. It's a little bit more technical—R-E-P-L-I-T. It's something where you can build applications using natural language. It takes a little bit more of a technical skill set. It codes it up and you can actually deploy the system. I built a prototype, and again, this is kind of some of my background too, in something called product management, where it's exactly what you do. You say, "Here is what I want the product to do and why."

You build these things called user stories. And so it allowed me to build this prototype, saying, "Here's what I want to do." It came up with the prototype—it wasn't perfect, but it created an interface where I could upload a file, a CSV, and then I could either automatically map those columns to different specific fields, or I could choose those. And then it placed the actual properties on a map that it created. It's a fascinating thing and it's only going to get better.

Seth: Do you have a background in building software?

Andy: Yes, I do, but on the product management side. I started out as a developer long, long time ago, and I was not good at it. I pretty quickly realized that I'm really good at knowing what technology can do and understanding that, but not so much on the coding side.

Product management is where you're defining what our customers need, having lots of interviews with people and understanding not even just what they're saying they need, but what do they actually need? What problems do they need to solve? That's what I did in that world.

So I've got a decent technical background. I don't code a lot—I can sometimes edit it. But this is a tool that is only going to get better and more user-friendly. That's the thing with AI, and where Pulse is probably such a huge value. I heard somebody describe it—it's not like this finite point in time, here's what AI is. It's more like looking at information as a stream, as a river, because every day something new is coming out that is a game changer. And it's going to continue to be that way.

Seth: Yeah, I know. I just saw this thing—you know, we're recording this in late 2024—but I saw this thing about how Claude can now take control of your computer and just do stuff on your computer for you. That kind of blows my mind. I was just trying to get it to work a couple of days ago and found it's not like the most user-friendly thing to get set up, but I have to imagine that's going to get easier.

It just makes you wonder, like, a year from now or two years from now, somebody listening to this in the future is probably going to be like, "Yeah, that's old hat stuff. That's been around for a long time now. The new thing is this," and that will just continue. It's kind of scary, but kind of exciting too.

Andy: It is. I mean, Replit had something, basically a repo, which is like a code setup where you could use the computer. I was trying it and had it going out to Redfin to pull some comps. It's fascinating—you watch it actually working with a browser and the cursor and all that kind of stuff. It got tripped up, so it wasn't the easiest thing to use. I got throttled because of too many calls in the background.

Again, not the easiest thing to use, but it only gets better from here. It's amazing. And it's one of those things too, where the innovations are being built on the innovations that are being built on the innovations. That's why it's so difficult to predict the future, especially right now where it's changing so quickly.

Seth: This just happened yesterday on our Facebook group. Somebody had posted this picture of a pipe sticking up out of the ground, and they're like, "What is this?" I looked at it and thought, "I don't know exactly, but I bet ChatGPT could figure it out."

So I uploaded the picture to ChatGPT and it gave what seemed like a very accurate, valid description of what it probably was. I think it was like a well cap or something like that, or a monitoring thing, which could either be used for getting water or monitoring contaminants in the ground. So that's a really good question to ask the seller, by the way.

But just the fact that it can look at pictures like that, that the average human doesn't understand, but it does understand—that leads me to think that things like comping land, for example... A very common thing is, especially if you use the comp report tool from Prycd, for example—I've had this where I've got a property that's on the beach, and it's maybe a half acre in size, and I'm looking for comps just like that. It'll pull in other half-acre properties within the vicinity, but most of them are not on the beach because it can't see that.

But something like AI probably could. Maybe it can now, I don't know. If it can analyze pictures like that, it can probably identify, "Oh, this was not a good comp because it's not on the beach." Really getting granular to the point that it sees stuff that humans can't see or would very easily miss. And there's a lot of that in land—lots of stuff that can very easily fly under the radar if you're not looking for it.

Andy: Absolutely. Or even reading the text in something, right? Like "This property doesn't have legal access." Stuff that's not in structured data that comes through for a comp, but being able to interpret that. It's something where it's like, what if I get to a point where I can upload my recordings of me comping and I need you to start being able to do this? We're not far from that.

Seth: Have you tried doing any title searches on ChatGPT, like getting documents, just uploading the actual scans from the county and having it read that? I tried this a couple of months ago and it did not work. But at the rate these things are moving, I wouldn't be surprised if it works today.

Andy: I can't believe I didn't think about that. I had a property that I bought with very bad records and we were looking to find out if there was an easement. That would have actually been a perfect use case for it. This was prior to ChatGPT. But I have been using it for PDFs, for example, where they're not in readable format—you can't highlight it or copy it—and so it's needing to use optical character recognition. Uploading that into ChatGPT and having it parse that and spit that out is a great method.

Seth: I've got to try this when we're done with this call because I know it can do that. When I was just in Italy, I took a picture of this plaque that was in all Latin in this church we were in. I uploaded that and it translated it, and I knew exactly what it was saying, and it made perfect sense based on where we were. If we can do that, it can probably at least look at images, whether it's a JPEG or something.

Andy: Absolutely. And you have to make sure you've got your different plugins sometimes because it's not always defaulted on, but the use cases are endless. I think that's the exciting thing—it comes down to your creativity.

Seth: It's fascinating. With all the things that you are good at—you mentioned this developer background. I mean, you clearly have more technical know-how than the average person. Just your ability to even use the OpenAI API at all puts you ahead of a lot of people. You're good at certain things that not everybody is good at.

Do you have a good awareness of what those things are? Or are you the kind of person like most people where you're like, "Well, it's natural to me, so I don't see it"? I'm just curious—do you have any unfair advantages, you think, in this business?

Andy: First off, having good friends in the community has been crucial. There's no way I would be where we are now without having friends who have helped me. I think of Matt Nunn, Dave Denniston, Ajay, Jason Wollbrink, and countless other people who have been tremendously valuable. I've had such solid relationships with them, and I think that has really been an unfair advantage.

I think God has gifted me with a knack for figuring things out. I call it resourcefulness, or I've heard it called resourcefulness. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I can usually figure out something. I've got this endless supply of determination to figure out problems through brute force. I like to make a joke that if you have me solve a problem, I can solve it ten times, and I'd solve it a different way each time. That's good and bad. I've just figured out ways to get around things, learn things, and figure it out.

One of the other things is that I've had a lot of industry experience in technology across different industries. I enjoy investing, and I've lost a decent amount of money trying to invest. I've learned a lot of lessons from that, which have been tremendously valuable in helping me make better business decisions and run better teams.

Being able to avoid some of those pitfalls on the technology side, especially having experience in product management, has really helped me understand more about what problems people are trying to solve. So many times people would tell you, "I need your product to do this," and you start asking questions and realize that's just a symptom. They're trying to solve a symptom of a completely different problem. If you can bring it back to that core problem and offer a different solution, that's valuable. We would see that so often in that process.

This has helped me understand how to blend technology with business problems. I think that's been really effective and helpful in our business.

Seth: Yeah, being able to figure out different problems and come up with unique solutions. Do you think you have an Achilles' heel or anything where your brain works in a way that's like, "Man, this is hurting me, I would be a lot further if I didn't work this way"?

Andy: Solving the problem ten times a different way each time is definitely one of those. I don't have great rote memory. I don't always follow processes, and I oftentimes do things a little bit differently. That's something where I've got a really solid team that has helped cover some of those gaps.

That's one of the big problems I have—I do things differently from day to day. Yeah, Achilles' heel—I have both heels and all tendons are Achilles in my body.

Seth: I think for me, one of the issues is like, it's great that you can solve problems, but is the problem even worth solving? Are there other things that should be prioritized way ahead of this? I feel like I get caught in that so many times. I'll see a little thing that I just want to nail and waste half a day on it, but it's like, what did you give up in the meantime?

Andy: I've had to stop myself mid-problem and say, "Listen, you've gotten too deep already and spent too much time." They call it the sunk cost fallacy. It's like, okay, stop, pivot, get away from that, just call it a loss.

Seth: What has been the hardest part of this business for you? Is there anything that you just kind of dread doing? If you could change one thing or make one thing go away so you never had to deal with that again, what would that be?

Andy: The future and figuring out the future. It's hard. Having gone full-time almost a year ago, it puts a different level of stress on me and on somebody who runs a business. My wife is at home and helps with the books, but this is our income. I struggle with anxiety around what the future holds. Am I going to be able to continue to be competitive and find an edge here? Is the opportunity going to get edged out? Is the opportunity going to go away? Where is the next deal going to come from?

I'm sure everybody deals with this, and I know everybody does. I'm a Christian, and I believe that God is sovereign and is in control of everything. I think without knowing and believing that truth, I'd be completely stressed all the time. But I know that things will work out, most likely not the way I expect them to, but they will work out for good. God has provided for my needs time and time again. He always has and He always will, so much more than I could ever expect.

The other really hard thing is growing this into a real business. When I first left my job, I loved doing land. I thought, "This is great, I'm just going to be able to do more of this." I started doing that, and pretty quickly, I was hitting a wall. So I started making some key hires, and that was kind of the game-changer—the second game-changer that really helped us start scaling and making changes on the data side and the campaign side, automating some of the processes there. Yeah, turning it from that kind of one-to-two-person show into a real business has been challenging, but it's been good. I'm loving it.

Seth: Have you taken the Enneagram test before?

Andy: I have not, but my wife tells me about it many times. I forget which number I am... I want to say it's like a three. I tell her I'm a 10. But I don't think there actually is a 10.

I think I'm the helper in an Enneagram, whichever one that is. I think maybe a two.

Seth: I ask that because what you're saying about anxiety about the future sounds like a type six thing. I do that all the time, and sometimes it actually hits me—I've been on my own for many years now, and I have to pinch myself like, "Oh my gosh, I don't have a boss right now. This is crazy. How am I doing this? Surely this is gonna fall apart in a day now." But it just keeps going and going.

I remember the days when being able to work for yourself was just such a far-off, distant dream. It felt impossible, like unicorns—that stuff doesn't really exist; that's just a fun thing to think about. It is crazy we're here now. The dream has been realized, and even if it doesn't last forever, the fact that we could ever live like this is an amazing thing. I forget that sometimes.

Andy: And you're willing to take that step too. One of the things is we're fluid as far as our personalities go. We're always growing—it's kind of that dynamic, that growth mindset. So yeah, in some ways I have that too, but I also have a lot of other attributes. It's just a sliding scale.

Seth: Why don't we switch gears a little bit and start talking about this title fraud thing? I mentioned it in the intro—the ongoing issue.

I was talking to somebody earlier this year who works in Florida and has a buying website. They said about 10% of all the submissions that come through their buying website are from fake sellers, which is a ton of people. If you didn't know any better and didn't know to look, that's a lot of people who are just constantly trying to scam you.

From what I've heard anecdotally, I feel like this is a bigger issue in Florida than most places for whatever reason. But in terms of safeguarding against this, closing with the title company and getting a title insurance policy should cover everything in the past and up to the present transaction. But that does not cover the future. There is a policy you can get that does cover the future, right?

Andy: That's correct. What you want to look at is the covered risks section in your title policy. That will typically include fraud. To your point, it covers that current transaction. If you're buying from a fraudulent seller or if fraud happened in the past, it's going to cover you for that.

Now, there's also a homeowner's policy that exists—an ALTA homeowner's policy. One of the covered risks is fraud that happens after you purchase.

Seth: And actually, just to clarify, when you say homeowners, my brain goes to homeowners insurance, which is like a hazard insurance policy for my house. That's not what we're talking about here.

Andy: No, no. This is basically analogous to the owner's policy. You have an owner's policy, which is what we typically see, and then there's a homeowner's policy. It's an ALTA policy that you can request. I believe it's a little bit more expensive.

But the key is it's for a home. My understanding after all the research is it does not need to be a primary residence—it could be a rental or anything like that, but it's a home. That will cover fraud that happens if somebody tries to sell it out from under you.

Now, my understanding is that policy is not available for land, at least at this point. And we were talking about why that's the case. It's very likely because land is probably harder to protect. I think it's just not something that I've seen be offered yet. I imagine we will soon see something like that because I think that's also the highest risk, and insurance typically likes to make money off of risk.

Seth: When we're talking about squatting, I totally understand how land is a higher risk for that because nobody's there to even see if a squatter's there. But the title thing, I don't get that.

Andy: Well, because they're not there. They're not around. With vacant land, an owner isn't around.

Seth: But an owner's not around their rental property necessarily either.

Andry: Right, but usually you're going to have at least some level of occupation in a house, in a building. And if not, you're likely going to have a lot of neighbors around.

Seth: What does that have to do with the title, though? I mean, just because there's people around...

Andy: So if somebody puts a for-sale sign up, that's oftentimes been the thing that tips people off. You have people coming to visit, and a neighbor's like, "Hey, what's up with that?"

Vacant land is oftentimes adjacent to other vacant land. I think it’s probably easier to protect that. I've got a Google alert that pops up around land scams, and a lot of the scamming we've seen is around vacant land. Many of the people we talk to haven't ever been to their land—they inherited it. So even if there is a for-sale sign, people are like, "Oh yeah, I guess the neighbor's selling it. We've never talked to them."

Seth: The fact that there's title insurance to cover past and present stuff and potential for future if it's a home or residence of some kind, the presupposition is that the title companies know something about how to verify this stuff. They wouldn't offer insurance if they weren't doing something to be pretty darn sure that this is not an actual risk for them.

So what are they doing? And how could we do that if we were going to self-close?

Andy: There are different tools we have access to, different software tools. For example, DocuSign and PandaDoc have something called knowledge-based authentication—you'll see that as KBA. It's stuff that can be identified off of a credit report. It's an added step that makes it a little more difficult to impersonate somebody. Probably everybody listening has experienced those questions like "What kind of car did you have a loan for?"

After a lot of research and a lot of dead ends, except for certain much more expensive, probably government-type level things, there's no actual ID verification that's running through a database saying, "This is Seth Williams's license," kind of like what you see in TSA when you're flying and they're checking a government database. To my knowledge, commercially available, no one has that that would be easily accessible to us.

What it does, though, is check for the typical things you'd look for on a fraudulent ID. It's looking for the holograms, the different watermarks, what the picture looks like, all those kinds of things. It also scans something called the machine-readable zone—the barcode—and interprets it, saying, does the information match up with what we're expecting it to be coming off of that machine-readable zone?

Seth: Are you talking about biometric ID verification?

Andy: No, that's a third option. I believe DocuSign also has biometric identification. I don't know as much about that. I think that might be a newer option they're offering.

Seth: I was just looking at this—I don't know if this is available for people like you and me or if it's limited to huge companies, but Plaid (P-L-A-I-D.com) is used by Mercury bank account or Relay bank account. Part of the process is using Plaid. I think that's where this is coming from in that signup process of getting a bank account. You have to take a picture of your driver's license and then take a picture of your face. I guess it matches them up and makes sure it's the same face. I feel like that's still not totally bulletproof because people can fake IDs. You can just put your picture on a fake ID that you make. It's easier than ever to do right now with AI, right?

Andy: Yeah, we saw that example of, I think it was in China, where someone was on a Zoom call—I think a CFO was on a Zoom call with six other people, and all of them were deep fakes. He ended up sending a million-dollar wire transfer because the CEO asked him to do it on the call. We're gonna continue to see them get more and more advanced.

You have those different types of verifications. Biometric—I had seen something that DocuSign might offer something like that. I think we'll see more of, if you've ever logged into IRS, they have the ID service, id.me, I think is what it is. That's a service they offer for different software solutions. So theoretically, you could use that for another kind of online notary saying, "Yeah, Seth logged into ID.me, he's got all the two-factor authentication, we verified him."

We've got a pretty rudimentary system of notaries today, right? It's reliant on the notary. How good is a notary? And what if the notary is fraudulent? What if they're part of the scam? We're going to start seeing places catch up, and title companies—you would argue that they should be the ones on the forefront of this because they're the ones who stand to lose the most money.

Seth: Yeah, I was just talking to somebody earlier this year who lost like seventy or eighty grand—they got scammed out of title fraud, but they had title insurance and their title insurance just paid up. That's expensive. They can't do a whole lot of those. They've got to figure that out and make that not happen anymore.

Andy: The other thing is those other red flags that come along with different scammers. Soon after we started talking about this, we got a person who was very clearly a scammer in the conversation and very clearly not the seller they claimed to be.

Seth: When you were talking to this seller, what were these red flags or yellow flags? What tipped you off and made you realize it was a scammer?

Andy: There were a lot of them. First off, he was talking about needing to sell very quickly and was talking about his son's medical bills and needing to take care of those very quickly. We called and were talking with him, and there were actually a couple of different things. He had incorrect data about the property—it was something like half an acre, 0.5 acres, but he was saying it was five acres.

He didn't know much about the property, and his answers were very short, very curt. He was almost too confident in what he was answering but didn't want to deviate from anything. I checked his IP address, which came in through the form. I checked this other tool we've talked about called Seon—S-E-O-N dot I-O. That's free. You can get a free version where you can put in the IP address, phone number, and email address and start getting some scoring for the person or for the different attributes they have.

The IP address was showing that it was coming through a data center ISP, meaning likely they're using a VPN. That's just one thing—I use a VPN often. The phone number showed as a Voice over IP phone number. I actually looked up the phone number and saw it was associated with a guy who had like a mail oral campaign, completely different.

Then I looked at the email. It has basically these different little flag ratings on the different things. It said, "Hey, this is coming from an ISP IP, so that's something you should be cautious about." All these different factors made it pretty apparent he was a scammer. Two weeks later, we got another lead come in—different name, same phone number. It was just one of those things where you don't expect somebody to be missing those little things as a criminal, but they often do.

Seth: One quick question: When you talk about the IP address, that was an important component of this. You got that because they fill out a form. I was actually looking into this a little bit. Google Forms, for example, won't give you the IP address. If you use Typeform, which I use, that won't give it to you either. Or if you use Ninja Forms, that won't give it to you. But I know Gravity Forms will, JotForm will.

So basically, you have to use the right kind of form tool that will collect that information, right?

Andy: Right.

Seth: Which one were you using?

Andy: Gravity.

Seth: Yeah. And that's a WordPress plugin, by the way. It's super solid. I've used it for a long time.

Andy: Yeah. It's not cheap, but it's worth it not only just for that. That was a nice benefit. But yeah, that was something that I had to custom add.

Seth: Really interesting stuff because I had posted trying to figure out if people out there in our Facebook community have been scammed before. And if so, what happened? How did you know? What did you figure out?

A couple of people chimed in. Steve Sharp is one of them. He gave a lot of really good information. He was talking about how it wasn't like one thing that gave it all away. It was just a bunch of different yellow flags that came up. Once two or three of them come up, it turns into a red flag.

He was saying similar stuff where the IP address didn't match where they supposedly live. Something that I saw a few people saying is that a lot of times these people don't want to talk on the phone or they have excuses not to talk. They only want to talk through text or email. When they pick up, maybe they have a foreign accent or something. It just doesn't line up.

If you just look at it with a critical eye and are aware of this stuff and aware of what the yellow flags might be, you probably catch a lot of it. It's kind of funny because it takes some smarts to know how to defraud somebody through title. And yet they still kind of leave these holes in terms of giving themselves away.

Andy: Yeah, I think it's almost like having the hypothesis that this person is trying to scam me. And you need to disprove that hypothesis.

Seth: Another one that was mentioned is that the email address of the seller doesn't match up with their name or their company.

I get this all the time, actually. I got one this morning. Somebody said they were emailing me from Sony Corporation and their address was like "hotguy95@gmail.com" or some weird thing like that. It's just like, seriously, at least make something kind of believable.

Andy: Well, so Seon also has this thing in emails where it identifies how many times the email address has been involved in a data breach.

And so it's a question, why is that important? Well, it shows you the age. So if you have an email address that has never been involved in a data breach, that's somewhat of a red flag, right? It's a newer email. It also shows if it's tied to any social profiles, social media profiles. So it can be a helpful thing.

And it's just one tool of many that we have to have. Again, stuff like DocuSign or PandaDoc, the KBA is another one, especially if somebody's closing. That is a must-have.

Seth: I know another thing that I've heard title companies will do is they'll mail a letter to the owner's address, asking them to verify if they're selling their property, because chances are the scammer is not living at the address of that owner. So just kind of a notification that way. Other title companies will require sellers to use one of their approved notaries, like just to make sure it's a real person that they know and is a legit notary.

Andy: Sometimes the mobile notaries have even been in on the scam. So they can pick up basically the request for the mobile notary. And so you've got to be careful at every turn. And then your earlier point too about the address. Sometimes that can even be risky. Again, depending on how advanced the scam is, people can change the address at the tax office pretty easily.

And so, doing things like skip tracing a person is everything lining up. And when you're doing outbound marketing, it's also much lower risk when it comes to scamming versus inbound marketing. Somebody finds you off the web.

Seth: I think another concern I have is that when I think about the people who are most likely to be doing a self-closing, I don't know if this is true or not, but like when I got started, I was going after super cheap stuff. And so I had to do a self-closing. And that was when I was most vulnerable. Because I knew the least about this business. I was just getting started. And now this is this added layer of stuff I have to think through just to get the deal closed.

I'm trying to think of, like, what would be like the minimum viable thing that a person should do? Like if you could only add one thing to your process to check the stuff, would it just be like ordering a $2 KBA assessment from PandaDoc or something? What do you think that would catch most things?

Andy: I mean, honestly, I think just like what we're talking about—Seon, I think it's a free subscription. And if anybody needs help using it...

Seth: But you have to have the IP address in order to use that, right?

Andy: It can check a phone number, email, or IP. And ideally, you're checking all three. But all you need is the phone number and the email and it helps to check against those. So that's one piece.

Also skip tracing—so a lot of people, even early in the business, are skip tracing and checking that, looking up their email, Google their email, look to see if you can find out a little bit more detail about them.

Then, to your point, the KBA—so either DocuSign or PandaDoc, having that and adding that in there can be a useful thing. For DocuSign, I believe the numbers that I've seen are, I think, $3 per KBA verification, but you need the monthly subscription as well for that.

Have a Zoom call with somebody as well, right? Have a video conference with them and talk to them in person. Now, the thing about KBA too is that it usually requires a social security number. I myself would be a little bit more apprehensive. If I were a seller, I'm hesitant to give out my social security number. I would to a title company, but if I'm trying to sell you land and you're asking for my social security number, that might freak people out.

Seth: This Seon website you mentioned, is it S-E-O-N dot I-O?

Andy: S-E-O-N dot I-O.

Seth: I'll include links to all of this stuff in the show notes, as I always do, retipster.com forward slash 207. That's where you can find links to all the stuff if everybody wants to check it out. We do have an affiliate link to PandaDoc as well. If somebody wants to sign up and they're not already, be sure to click through that link. With Seon, again, you can sign up for a free trial and no credit card required.

Andy: Then you would want to switch over to the free plan and they just have that where you can sign up for the free plan and use a certain number of those.

Seth: Do you ever do self-closings anymore? Or is it just always through a title company?

Andy: Yeah, I stopped doing those after about a year. There's so much logistics involved in that that make it difficult and not worth the amount of effort.

Seth: Yeah, it is a lot of extra stuff to go through. Even when you know what you're doing, it's still just a lot of monkeying around with stuff. It seems like a pretty narrow window when I think about the deals that are profitable enough to be worth doing, but not doing title insurance. It's just like, man, they exist, but there's not many of them.

Andy: Yeah, I think having a business that is structured that way for volume can absolutely work. When you have a business that is kind of your bread and butter is volume, you can, I think, make a killing. Because honestly, I mean, that's the killer with those deals that are a $12,000 sale price, right?

If I'm buying a property for what might look good at $3,000 and I'm able to sell it for $12,000, I'm not making any money on it because I've got closing costs on both sides, and that just kills it. So if you can do that and not have to pay escrow fee, not have to pay title insurance, all of those things can do really well. So if you have the right processes in place, you can do really well, but you need to make sure that you are protecting yourself against that fraudulent seller.

Seth: Well, Andy, it was awesome to talk to you. Appreciate you coming on the show. It's great to hear about your business. Thanks for sharing your wisdom about everything you've learned about title fraud defense stuff. I'm sure we'll continue to see that evolve in the years ahead because it has to.

Any last closing remarks? If anybody's listening to this and they want to be where Andy is someday, anything you want to tell those people?

Andy: No, I appreciate you having me. I love this business. It is not easy. I mean, it takes a lot of work, but if you're willing to put in a lot of work and really are committed to it, it can be a great, great business.

Seth: So, Andy, we've talked about a lot here. As you think back about your journey and how you've gotten this far, I know you've mentioned like Matt Nunn. You've mentioned Dave Denniston, Ajay in passing. Has anybody else been particularly helpful to you in this journey?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely. First off, you, Seth, have been tremendous with the resources you provide, your podcast, your blogs. I have several go-to articles that I pull up at least once a week. You have been a tremendous asset for this industry.

Callan Faulkner is somebody else as well who has been tremendously helpful for me. She has given me so much help and assistance throughout the years. Jason Wollbrink, again, I think I mentioned him previously. And Justin Sliva as well has been a tremendous influence on me.

Seth: I agree. They're all huge resources and I consider them all friends. That's kind of what you get from being connected and going to events and just not living as an island. I don't think I even really realized that until a few years ago, when I started doing these things. There's a ton of value to unlock once you're willing to actually go to stuff and meet people in person.

Andy: Absolutely. Learning ideas, learning different ways of doing things. You have to stay involved and learn some of the new techniques. And it's just good to also bounce ideas off of people. Here's what I'm doing and learning from them.

Seth: If people want to get a hold of you or communicate with you in any way, you don't have to offer anything up. But if you do, is there a place they should contact you at?

Andy: Sure, andy@haystackland.com is probably the best place.

Seth: Is that your website? Haystackland.com?

Andy: That's my website.

Seth: Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks again, Andy. Great to talk to you and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Andy: All right. Thanks, Seth.