Seth: Hey everyone, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 218. If you want to check out the show notes for today, head over to retipster.com/218.

Today I'm talking with Vernon Henry. I met Vernon for the first time about a year ago at a conference in St. Louis. From the first time I heard him talk, I thought, "Man, this guy is sharp. I've got to get him on the podcast at some point."

Vernon has a fascinating background. He started in the oil and gas industry, where he managed over $12 billion in acquisitions and divestitures. Then he transitioned into land investing, where he specializes in high-value vacant land acquisitions and joint venture deals. He's built an impressive business by leveraging data-driven marketing strategies, creative financing, and partnerships.

Today, we're diving into his journey, how he went from the energy sector to land investing, how he structures his deals, and why he believes going bigger is the key to success. Plus, he's got some kind of wild stories, including the time he bought a foreclosure with an ostrich farm on it. So you're not going to want to miss this one. Let's get into it.

Vernon, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Vernon: Great, Seth. Really appreciate you having me here today. You've been a big inspiration for me getting into this business, and I've always loved hearing your content. So I appreciate what you do for this community, and glad to be here today.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for following along all this time. Glad I could help. Let's start from the very beginning, like usual. What's your background? When and how did you discover the land business?

Vernon: Funny enough, my first career out of college was as a landman. I don't know if you've heard of a landman. A lot of people haven't.

Seth: I've heard of that TV show. I don't know if it's the same thing or not.

Vernon: Yeah, now a lot of people have obviously heard of it because of the TV show, although the TV show doesn't really show at all what a landman does. I think maybe season two, we'll get into it a little bit more, but...

Seth: Is it an accurate depiction? Like, is it over-dramatized at all? Or is that pretty much the exact life you were living?

Vernon: Oh, yeah, that was the exact life that I was living. After college, I didn't really have too much of a direction. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. My grandfather had been in the oil and gas business and I thought, "Man, I want to do that."

Throughout my life growing up, my dad was always an entrepreneur. He was always sort of putting this bug in my ear, like, you don't have to work for somebody else. Or like some people spend their whole careers trying to climb a corporate ladder, putting their fate in other people's hands.

And I remember him saying to me when I was a little kid, "I don't want to have to climb to the top. I want to start at the top. And I can do that all by myself by creating my own company." I was a pretty rebellious little kid. And I was like, "You know what? Yeah, I don't want to have a boss. I don't want somebody to tell me that I can't own my own company." So I always sort of had this in the back of my mind, like, yeah, okay, one day I'm going to do this myself and start out in the oil business.

I didn't have an engineering degree or a geology degree. And this is back before all the horizontal drilling and the latest evolutions of the oil and gas business, but this is where people would find prospects. Geologists would identify prospects. We'd go out there and shoot seismic and lease up an area, you know, 600 acres.

Seth: What does it mean to shoot seismic?

Vernon: Well, seismic is a way to get a picture of what's underneath the ground by shooting sound waves down through the ground. And when they reflect back up.

Seth: So it's like sonar?

Vernon: Yeah, almost like sonar. For rocks, like thousands and thousands of feet. So geologists will shoot seismic and create basically a picture of this underground structure. Then they'll say, okay, well, this is where I think we should drill. And so what a landman does is landman goes to the courthouse and runs title on the mineral rights underneath those parcels that the company wants to drill under.

And they will run mineral title, which is separate from surface title. Mostly what we deal with is surface title. And the rights underneath the ground in most states are severed and they are a totally separate estate from the surface estate, even though it is actually real property. It's just a separate estate of what you can own.

And so a lot of times under a single track, there may be a hundred owners, several hundred owners, just depending on how many splits that have occurred over the chain of titles. Somebody dies, he gives it to his three kids. One guy sells half of it. One guy dies and has three more kids and so on and so on. And it chains out into like a tree, a title chain.

Seth: This is specifically in Texas where you were doing this, right?

Vernon: Yeah, well, I was doing this in Texas, but this is basically everywhere, anywhere where the state or the government doesn't actually own the minerals, it's typically divided up in a lot of different ways, especially in really active oil and gas producing areas.

Seth: Do you figure this out by looking at the same title documents that you would for surface rights? It's just that mineral rights are fewer and further between, like there's more specific things in those documents you're looking for?

Vernon: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're looking at mineral deeds instead of warranty deeds. But if I own the minerals and I give somebody a warranty deed that doesn't reserve anything, I've given that person the minerals that I own or everything that I own. You can't convey anything you don't own, but if you own it and you convey everything, well, then it goes to the next person.

And so we would go back and we'd start at patent when the state gave over that property to the first owner in the mid 1800s. And we would run that chain of title all the way down to current to figure out who all the current mineral owners were. And then we'd go approach them to get an oil and gas lease. We'd negotiate oil and gas leases, pay them a bonus payment, and then hand that over to the oil company so that they can go drill the wells.

Seth: When you say a mineral deed, is that basically a warranty deed that specifies, I'm transferring this to you except for the mineral rights?

Vernon: It's actually the other way around. It's a mineral-only conveyance. So it's a deed that only addresses the minerals and nothing else.

Seth: Okay. And when we say minerals, do we mean literally everything beneath the surface or are there specific minerals you can?

Vernon: Everything beneath the surface. Now, with the way we talk about it, it's like a bundle of sticks. You can separate out individual sticks. Typically, they all sort of come in one big bundle. But, you know, if I wanted to peel out the coal rights or the lignite rights or the lithium rights, I can do that, but typically they're all sort of bundled together. Oil, gas, and other minerals basically.

Seth: And is this like going all the way down to the center of the earth or does it go down like a hundred feet?

Vernon: Center of the earth. What happens over time is there's more productive zones in the subsurface area. So, you know, 5,000 to 6,000 feet may be super productive and then there's nothing until 10,000 feet to 11,000 feet. And then somebody goes out and tries to drill something at 15,000 feet.

As those strata start getting explored more and more, people can reserve and trade those horizontal rights also. So I can be like, I'm going to give you 20% of what I own between 5,000 feet and 5,250 feet. It gets chopped up horizontally as you go down as well as vertically.

Seth: That is fascinating. I've not known about any of this stuff. So you got into the land business understanding title really well, like better than even a lot of title professionals probably do, right? Because you just look at stuff that the vast majority of people never look at and don't really understand. Has that been a pretty significant thing for you? Like, has that helped you do things that other land investors can't typically do?

Vernon: Yeah, absolutely. My career really started out digging into title. My goal was to learn how the business of oil and gas works. In fact, there's a saying in the landman community, it's "no lease, no grease." So it all starts with that lease and understanding the ownership and leasing the right mineral owners and making sure that you have the rights to go down there and drill the wells.

My first goal was really just, I want to understand the contracts that make up the business so that ultimately, I can negotiate those contracts and I can start my own company, run my own business, having that deep knowledge of the contractual side of the business.

That was a huge piece of how I got started in the land business. My whole first year, I was running title on every one of my deals. I was running my own title and I was selling my own parcels outside of title. I created a title report and I could prove up title on every one of my deals. And it saved me a lot of money when I was doing small deals at the beginning.

I was able to leverage my title and curative. I mean, because a lot of it's curative, right? Like if somebody got a divorce and then when they conveyed their property to the next person in prior title, their wife didn't sign, right? There's little things like this where you just have to get it figured out. I worked my own affidavits of heirship with potential sellers to try to get them to cure the title so that we understood who the current sellers were.

Seth: So you actually know how to cure a lot of these title issues? And did you spend a lot of your time doing that? Or was it more like, I spot this issue, I don't want to deal with it, I'm going somewhere else?

Vernon: It was a little bit of both. The first year, I was doing a lot of the curative myself. I didn't want to have to pay for title. Long story short, I got almost burned on a couple of title deals when I was turning around and selling the property. Luckily, we were able to get through the curative. The buyer required to go through a title company. And luckily, we were able to get through the curative on the sell side.

Seth: Just to clarify, when we say curative, are we talking about fixing the title problem?

Vernon: Fixing the title problem.

Seth: Okay. Just in case anybody doesn't know what that means.

Vernon: Yeah, fixing the title problem. And so I got to the point where I was so busy doing so many deals that I realized I have to start using title companies because it was too much of a burden to have to run title on every single one of the deals myself. But it definitely did help me get started.

Seth: Of those curative title issues, which ones do you think are the easiest ones to fix? Do you ever come across probably like, oh, I can nail that. Or does it just depend on the situation? Like say, if somebody's wife didn't sign, depends if you can find their wife, right? So they can sign off.

Vernon: Yeah, that's a lot of it is going back and figuring out, did everybody sign in the right capacity. The divorce issue happens quite a bit. Somebody and his wife, they get a divorce. He sells the property. The next guy buys it. The next guy buys it. Well, how far back can you really go before you can go find that person that didn't sign?

I've had to terminate a bunch of deals because of title issues. I remember I did a deal last year where the curative was needed from title issues that happened in the 1940s and 1950s. You go, well, how am I going to find somebody to sign an affidavit of heirship to cure some of these title issues where nobody's still alive to attest to those facts? So you can't go too far back and you just say, well, it's too big of a risk from a title perspective for us to take that on.

Seth: Is that not something a quiet title action can fix? Because would you have to find that person's heirs to get them to do it and that's too hard?

Vernon: I think you can do a quiet title action. I will say I've never gone through a quiet title action suit. I've always thought about it and then just sort of never gone all the way through it.

Seth: Interesting. I know one of the things that you advocate for is doing bigger deals, probably ones that can justify the use of a title company pretty easily. When did you come to that realization? And when that happened, did you basically swear off smaller deals? Like, I don't have time for it, I'm not doing it anymore. Tell me how you came to that conclusion and when and how you decided to go in that direction.

Vernon: It was definitely an evolution. I mean, my whole land investing career seems like it's an evolution. It's constantly evolving into what's the next phase of my business. And so when I first got started, like I said, I mean, I was running title. I was kind of doing everything myself. I was sending mailers. I had a couple of close calls where I was like, "Ooh, I didn't catch that in title because I was running too fast."

So the first probably year of my business, I'm in Houston. So I was doing everything in the outskirts of Houston, in all the sort of ring fence kind of counties around Houston. And I like the idea because just Houston is such a big population. There's always people that wanted to get out to the country. There's just demand for almost all of the surrounding counties.

So I thought I really liked the idea of being able to drive to the property and get my feet on the property, even work the property. Like I had a chainsaw, I'd go out to the properties and cut down limbs and trim things up and just to kind of get out there, I'd go find stakes and measure off corners. And I wanted to really have a good understanding of the property, which was a great way to get started. It really helped me get a good understanding of what it is that I was buying.

I can't remember. I think I got a deal in North Texas or East Texas somewhere that was like four or five hours away. And it was very clearly a deal that I wanted to do. I was like, this is a good deal. I don't care. And I don't have time to drive up there. But I called a realtor and they went out and looked at the property. And I thought, yeah, okay, this is a good deal. And we ended up buying it and selling it for what I thought it was going to sell for. And I thought, well, man, if I did it three or four hours away, I can do it anywhere.

And then I also realized I can't keep running title on all of them. What I was doing to sell the properties is I would go put a sign on the property. I had a for sale sign. I had my 1-800 number. They'd call me. A lot of times they'd call me. I'd be on my way driving back home. I'd get a call and get an offer on a piece of property, which was really a lot of fun. I just love that. But I realized I can't drive to every single one of my properties. And if I'm going to expand beyond this ring fence around Houston, I've got to start using realtors.

So using realtors and using title companies, you have to go up in value. A lot of the first deals that I was doing, I was buying for $10,000, selling for $20,000. And I was realizing that whole margin because I was doing all the title. But if you've got a realtor and you've got title costs, you've got to go $15,000 to $30,000, $20,000 to $40,000 pretty quick.

Seth: So in order to avoid those smaller ones, are you just filtering your list so that certain smaller size ranges aren't included? Or how do you make sure you're not wasting your time with those?

Vernon: I'll back up just a little bit and tell you a little bit about how I've kind of gotten to where I am. Interestingly enough, I'm not really doing any marketing right now. Mail, I was somewhat consistent with early on. This was 2022, but I wasn't getting the response rates that I really wanted. Probably wasn't mailing enough, to be honest, but I was still getting deals and decided, look, texting. I figured out how to do the texting.

This was maybe fairly early days before texting was getting super popular. I started running all these texts on my own. And so I was using a platform called REI Reply, which is based on a platform called Go High Level which is just generalist marketing platform but they had a pretty good way of sending texts and so, I created all these workflows and started sending texts and was getting deals. But I was running pretty ragged. I was having to respond to all these texts and was having to juggle all these different sellers.

So I realized I needed to start building a team to help me handle all that volume. And so really, 2023 was starting to grow that team. And then early 2024 was really expanding the marketing. I ended up adding cold calling onto it and then going back to mailing. So we were cold calling, we were texting and we were mailing.

I'm trying to remember the volume that we were doing. It wasn't massive volume, but we were getting four or five, six leads a day and just trying to process through them and make as many offers as we could. But got to a point really where I put a team together of five people that were handling just about everything for me.

And the issue that I started seeing was that, you know, this was back last year when texting was, they made everybody register.

Seth: A2P compliance.

Vernon: Yeah, A2P compliance. And I started thinking, man, okay, like most of these leads are coming through text. I've got to diversify my lead source a bit. And if texting just gets completely eliminated for some regulatory reason, we've got to have a different diversified set of leads.

And so I realized my strength. I love working with people. I love building relationships with people and really just decided to start joint venturing with some other land investors. I went to a couple of land conferences and I realized that there's a lot of guys out there that don't have the capital to do the deals. And I love working with people. So I just said, well, here, look, let me just fund your deal and we can work together on it. And if it's a good deal, then we're both going to do well. And we build that relationship at the same time.

And so started doing that as a way to build relationships, but also diversify away from just one way of marketing that could potentially be at risk.

Seth: Gotcha. So are you primarily doing the deal funding now?

Vernon: Yep.

Seth: Is that like your main thing?

Vernon: That's the main thing right now. Last year was a good year. It was a fantastic year. But the team's effectiveness of being able to get good deals and close on those good deals became less and less. And I was spending more and more of my time developing the relationships and doing joint venture deals that I kind of came to a point kind of middle end of last year. And I said, OK, I'm spending too much money on marketing. We're not getting the deals.

I probably could have doubled down my efforts on the marketing and figured out what was going wrong. But I was getting so many deals through the joint venture that I just said, look, you know, I'm going to cut down on the expenses and really just try to diversify through my relationships that I'm building with a lot of these other land investors who are, by the way, out there marketing and sending out, you know, 10, 15, 20,000 mailers a month. They're getting consistent leads in the door. And if I can be there to lend my expertise and help them through those deals, then I think it's a win-win for everybody.

Seth: Yeah. It's interesting because I know some funders who kind of struggle to find these operators to bring them deals, like just the networking, the making the connections, like they got the money and the will, but they don't know the people and can't find the people. It's basically a marketing problem, but it doesn't sound like that's been too hard for you.

So I'm curious, do you have some secrets in terms of where you find these people? Or maybe it's more a matter of the amount of flexibility you have. I know some funders have a pretty small box. It's like your deal needs to look exactly like this in this size range, in this market, this big laundry list of stuff. And surprise, surprise, there's not that many deals exactly like that out there. So they turn a lot of stuff down.

What would you say has been your secret sauce to being able to find people and be able to fund so many deals?

Vernon: Like I said, this is all an evolution. And one of the groups that I found in the land investing community is Sumner Healy's group. Found his podcast, was really listening to a lot of his stuff. This was early 23. And I knew that I wanted to grow a business. And I've been just so impressed with the community that he's built.

And in that community, there are funding opportunities that people post. And I've just started talking to people. Hey, send me your deal. Let me take a look at it, see if I can help. And I've got 11 or 12 pretty consistent partners that bring me deals, great guys and gals. I love getting on the phone with them. And it's been a great thing for me just to build these relationships. I mean, I just get so much out of having these relationships.

I went to Sumner's event in Vegas the first year, and I just kind of kicked it off with a bunch of guys and thought, man, this is awesome. Like, and was able to stay in touch with them and have continued to go to more events. Like I saw you at the event last year. And I think just being on the ground has really helped start to build those relationships and sort of carry those through into deals.

And like you said, yeah, I mean, I am not a "you have to fit the box for the deal for me to look at the deal." I have a pretty flexible way of looking at deals, but I use a lot of the history of my own underwriting in those deals. And I work through a lot of those problems, identify the problems with the deals and work through those problems with the investor. And the idea is for both of us to make the best decision possible. We don't always agree on them, but, you know, if I can say, hey, did you look at this? Did you look at that? Have you noticed this? And point out some things that they may not have seen as part of the deal.

The deal may still work, but I may just need a bigger piece of it. Or if it's a slam dunk deal, that's like just a surefire winner, then I can give up more. You know, every deal is a little bit different. So I try to kind of, we have some baseline hurdles that we have to get over to make sure that it's a deal that I want to do. But beyond that, we've got a lot of flexibility.

Seth: Interesting. So maybe just to get some ideas, what would it take for you to say no to a deal? Like are there certain markets you want to work in or like... How small is too small? How big is too big? What does your box look like?

Vernon: The fundamentals of the parcel are still so important to me. And every time I've got a couple of deals that I just sold that I've had for almost a year and I look back on those deals and I go, I had my doubts about that deal and I should have listened to my doubts about that deal. And so still worked out fine, but just held them a lot longer than I thought. Had some sort of positive assumptions that I thought, oh, it'll be fine.

But ultimately, I mean, market selection, access, topography, utilities, and wetlands. Those are the things that just ring true. And the more of those boxes that I can check, the better I feel about the deal and better I feel that it's going to sell for what we think it is. But it's easy to sort of make these assumptions like, oh, utilities isn't important or the topography is not too important or, yeah, don't worry about those wetlands right there.

And ultimately, it does end up affecting the ability to sell that parcel. And so I start from, I want to see a parcel that's a perfect parcel and then kind of work my way back from there. And I don't have a formula, but it's more like the more of those things that I'm seeing that are ticking those boxes, the more I start to think, this is adding more and more risk. And it's harder for me to assume that we're going to get the exit that we need to get for that deal.

Seth: I am curious, of those different things you mentioned, topography, wetlands, utilities, access, all this stuff, is there any one of those things that strikes you as the least important? Which of those are you most willing to compromise on to get the deal done? Or maybe examples of times when you're like, yeah, let that go and it turned out fine.

Vernon: You know, topography can be super important and it can be not as big of a deal. If you're in an area where everybody's dealing with the same topography, can I get to the property? Is it a straight line up to try to get to a flat area? Do I even have a flat area to where I can build a house or put a camper or something like that on it?

It's hard to say one is more important. It's like a snowflake. I feel like I have to look at it on its own and understand. I try to put myself in the buyer's shoes. I'm a buyer. I want to do X, Y, Z to this property. How am I going to do that? What are the obstacles that I'm going to have to overcome in order to get that? And so hard to single one out.

Seth: And I realized my question was a bit oversimplified because you're right. I mean, topography, I mean, that can mean so many different things and it does matter about the market and what else is around there.

I bought a property last year that had pretty good topography, pretty good access, but it was on an interstate. And in my mind, I thought it was maybe a 13-acre property in Virginia. And I thought, eh, it's fine. It's a nice piece of property. I would want to be on that piece of property.

But I didn't put enough weight into the noise that comes off the freeway. And typically, those interstate properties are going to be commercial properties where noise doesn't matter as much. And this was a residential property. There was no direct entrance from the interstate. There was an overpass without an entrance to the interstate. And it's a nice piece of property. It just took a lot longer to sell than I wanted because of that interstate noise and had to eventually find the buyer who was willing to take it.

Seth: It stinks when things like noise or like smells, stuff like that stuff, you can't really see or smell on a computer screen, but it still does matter.

Vernon: Yeah.

Seth: Take it a couple of steps back to what you're talking about with finding operators who need funding. You talked about Sumner's group. You talked about going to different networking events. It sounds like a combination of you enjoying networking. Like it's not something you hate. It's not painful for you to do it. And I know some people who it is painful for them, but it's the last thing they want to do.

So you kind of like it, but it's also maybe finding the right places to plug into because there are places where you can find tons of operators who need money and they have horrible deals and have no idea how to evaluate it. And they just throw junk your way. Right. Do you have to deal with much junk or are you able to find people where it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I already know you're at a certain level, like you get certain aspects of this. It's going to keep me from wasting a lot of time.

Vernon: Yep. No. And that's the beauty of working with guys who have gone through land coaching programs. They've got a basis of understanding of how to pick a good market. So, you know, if I'm working with guys that have gone through your coaching program, through Travis's coaching program, through Sumner's coaching program, like first thing you learn is market selection, right? You got to start with a good market. And so I'm always checking the market, but it's usually guys are bringing me deals in good markets.

A lot of the deals that we're doing right now are subdivide deals, minor subdivide deals. We're able to deploy more capital that way. And we're able to pay a little bit more for the deals in order to get them. And that seems to be a pretty good formula as long as we can not have to go through a long drawn out subdivide process.

I don't like putting my economic fate in the hands of somebody at a local government that says, yeah, I don't like this guy, whatever, not approved. So I really like simple subdivides where it's an administrative process. Basically, as long as we fit in the rules, we can enact what our plan is. And then it's really just about getting a survey and getting it done.

That obviously creates a lot more value and allows us to have inventory so that we're able to get it on the market. And it does increase the capital turnaround time a little bit, but it's a way for us to deploy more capital and get that inventory.

And guys that I've been working with, I've actually had to kind of not coach them, but say, I was doing a lot of flips last year, smaller flips, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 flips. And I just realized, look, we've got to deploy more capital in order to grow this business. I don't necessarily want to try to do 50, 60, 70 deals in a year. I don't have the bandwidth for that.

And since I've cut down my staff, I've got one person working for me right now. I don't want to go back into the high volume game. I'd like to deploy more capital on fewer deals and get bigger margins on those deals. And so that's been the direction that we're headed. And so I'm working with my current partners to say, "Hey, look, go find those bigger deals. Go bring those bigger deals. If you don't know who to fund, who's going to fund them, bring them to me. I can help you fund them." And so that's really been the shift in focus of the last call it six or eight months of just trying to kind of push to bigger deals.

Seth: Yeah. What is your limit? Like how big is too big for you to fund?

Vernon: You know, I think for a single deal, probably million, million and a half is really where we start looking and going, hmm, how long is this capital going to be tied up?

Seth: You're saying that's the acquisition price?

Vernon: Acquisition price. Yeah.

Seth: So is that money all coming from you or do you have other sources you're pulling it from?

Vernon: I have a business partner and we're 50-50. We've recently joined businesses towards the end of last year. And so we pooled our capital together. We're deploying all of our own capital right now. It's been good. Good business so far.

Seth: Nice. How small is too small for you to bother with?

Vernon: I don't really like to do any deals under $100,000 anymore acquisition price. I mean, I will. I have some partners that will bring me a deal that are bigger than some of their other guys that they're working with on funding like to do, and I'll do them. But typically, I like to see deals over $100,000.

Seth: You ever have times when you're just tapped out? It's like, I'm just out of money. Can't fund anything else. We're in a holding pattern until something sells.

Vernon: Haven't been there yet.

Seth: Nice. Man, you must have nice deep pockets then. A lot of funders I know, they have that. You know, like a stretch of months where it's like they just got to wait. Kind of like a land operator does, but just maybe bigger numbers.

Vernon: Yeah, we'll see. We're not there yet. It's interesting. We'll see kind of where the market's going. Like we've built up some inventory from the end of last year and things seem a little slow right now. I'm not sure if it's just the winter or we're sort of in a strange economic place right now.

Seth: Slow on the sell side or the buy side?

Vernon: On the sell side. We've got some inventory right now, but we've still got plenty of dry powder to get into more deals. I think really where my partner and I have been talking about is we've really got to make sure that we're getting deals with a lot of equity upside in that deal.

Because if we're going into a time potentially where the market slows down a little bit, we've got potentially these tariffs that are coming in, inflation stays kind of where it is, could be entering a time where maybe it's tough to sell for a little while. Economic downturn could be on the horizon. I don't know. I'm not an economist, but just trying to stay looking forward on where we're going.

It's really hard to read sometimes where the whole economy is going, but our theory is, look, we still want to be in land. We still want to keep investing in land. We want to keep investing in big deals with plenty of equity, but we also have to make sure that we have enough dry powder for if there is a downturn, we can either lower our prices in order to get the liquidity back and be able to jump on some really, really good deals that are going to be coming down the line.

Seth: Another possibly grossly oversimplified question, but is it easier to make a lot of money on the bigger deals? Bigger meaning like a million plus or like five or two million or a hundred thousand to five hundred thousand? Like what are the kinds where it's like, it's easier to find the ones with a giant margin where you can just make a ton of money? Or is it just kind of all over the map? It just depends on the deal.

Vernon: Yeah. I mean, you know, how much capital do you want to tie up at once? I think is a big question. The formula that I've really enjoyed is like buying for 250,000, 300,000, cutting into four or five pieces, and then selling each one of those pieces off individually and doubling your money that way. And I like taking a product that most people can't buy and then creating new products out of it and selling it to people at a price point where they can afford it. So a lot of these subdivisions were selling, you know, their sale prices, $100,000 to $150,000. And so there's just a much bigger pool of buyers that can afford $100,000 to $150,000 property. And then there is somebody who, let's just say we buy something at a million and cut it into, you know, $400,000 chunks. Well, you got to assume that there's a bunch of people that are going to be able to afford $400,000 for a piece of property. And whenever I've tried to sell into that market, it's taken longer to find that buyer.

Not to say that there aren't markets that are hot that have plenty of those types of buyers, but just typically in rural properties, $100,000 to $150,000 sale price seems to work out pretty well.

Seth: Yeah. With these deals that you're funding, who is in charge of the selling process, meaning finding the realtor or listing and selling yourself, deciding what the sale price is going to be at the listing price. Is all of that up to you as the funder or are certain parts of that on the operator to get the property sold? How do you divvy up that responsibility?

Vernon: It's usually the operator. I call it the manager, manager's responsibility. But in all honesty, I mean, the way that it ends up working out is very much partnership. We work together on it. They'll usually be the one that go out and find the realtor. But once we have a deal that's on the market, we're both talking with the realtor, both getting updates. I want to be in the mix. I want to know what's actually happening, what we're hearing from the market. And so I like to have that direct connection.

And price drops are usually the result of a discussion. Hey, what are we seeing right now? Are we getting any action? With that, we decide together that, hey, look, yeah, I think it's time to drop the price or not right now, let's hold. We've held a lot of our prices steady through the winter because we think just the market in general is slow right now.

Seth: And rather than trying to lower the price, you're yelling into the wind or whatever, right? Like you're yelling and nobody's listening. So I can drop the price all I want. And if it's not an active time when people are buying, then I'm just kind of shooting myself in the foot.

Vernon: Sometimes I feel like that when I make YouTube videos, it's like I'm yelling and nobody's listening.

Seth: So you mentioned subdividing. So if a subdivide is happening. Who is doing that work? Is that you or your manager?

Vernon: A lot of it's a collaboration. I like using my creativity and coming up with how are we going to shape these tracks? How are we going to lay this thing out?

A lot of times my partners may not have done a subdivide before. And so I can add a lot of my expertise from the deals that I have done. It's sort of a creative outlet for me to be able to sort of play with the shapes and figure out what the best way that we're going to configure the parcels with topography and access and all of that together. So I do like to be a part of that. And then we're really just working with the surveyor to get it done. And so we kind of tag team it.

Some partners are a little less proactive and some partners are very proactive. And so the ones that are very proactive, I kind of just have a few conversations with once a week or once every other week and say, hey, all right, get after it. And they're off running the ship and, you know, I'll obviously give the input that I want to give. And then some of them I can tell are a little less proactive and I'll notice that, okay, I've got to take the reins if I want this thing to close or if I want to get this thing on the market here real quick.

Seth: What is your typical profit split with that manager? Does it depend how proactive they are? Or is it the same regardless of how much they pick up the slack and help?

Vernon: I like to think that it's more deal related. I just realized that, look, I don't want to spend all my time on a deal and not get a great return, but it's also really how good is the deal.

And so profit splits are very much kind of a deal by deal basis. We're looking at if it's let's call it a subdivide. What is the sort of percentage of after subdivided value that we're buying into? How much margin is in the deal? That usually dictates how much of an after payout profit we're able to take as a percentage of the total profit. So typically ranges 60 to 40, 40 to 60, somewhere in there. Sometimes we go, you know, we don't usually dig too much further after that, but if it's a marginal deal, then, you know, in order for us to meet just our minimum hurdle, we'll want to take a bigger chunk of the deal.

Seth: Is there ever a point in time at which the manager would get cut out of the deal, like after a year or something like that, or no?

Vernon: Yeah. In our agreement, we do typically put it about a year in there. I've never had to cut a manager out of the deal, not looking to do that. I think it'd be great if we could both get it sold early, but I think that's going to be part of any joint venture deal.

Seth: So does your agreement with them specify anything about whose responsibility it is to get the thing sold? Or is it kind of just like, I don't know, we'll just see what happens. Maybe I'll jump in, maybe not.

Vernon: It's technically the manager's responsibility, but it's my prerogative to change the price. I have the ability to change the price if I want to, but it's technically their responsibility to do all the footwork but in practice, I can't help myself. I jump in there. We work together. I like working with people.

Seth: Well, that's probably a good quality. I mean, somebody with your knowledge, not every funder is like this. Not all of them have the kind of expertise and background and all that that you have. So that's a huge service you can bring to whoever you're working with is like the benefit of that knowledge and wisdom.

Vernon: Sure. Yeah. More power to you.

Seth: Yeah. Thanks. So with these deals that you fund, when you're selling them, do you ever sell them with seller financing?

Vernon: I sold a bunch of deals early on with seller financing.

Seth: That was before you were funding it, right?

Vernon: Before I was funding deals. But we haven't done any seller financing with partnerships. I've almost pulled the trigger on a couple that I didn't think. In fact, the one in Virginia that was taking forever to sell on the interstate almost did a seller finance deal on that one.

It gets a little tough when you have partners though. The approach that we've looked at before is, look, I'm going to buy out the partner on their after-profit, after-payout share of the deal. That obviously increases the amount of time that I have to spend in order to recoup my capital. And you have closing and realtor costs that come into it. And so it extends everything out.

So it's not as attractive to do seller finance deals, but can definitely do it. I've done it before. If it's the last resort for getting a deal sold, then we'll do it.

Seth: Yeah. Somebody had emailed me a few weeks back asking me how to handle the whole funding arrangement when there's a funded deal like that and you're selling it with seller financing. And I was like, I don't know. And I don't know any funders that will even do that for the same reasons you're talking about. That is an interesting solution to the problem, but it still kind of stinks because you got to sink even more money into it and wait even longer.

I wonder if there's some, like if that's plan B, is there a plan C or plan D? Like, are there other ways to handle that situation if you had to go there? Like maybe you could each equally take your chunk for the next five years, but that would be kind of annoying and a lot of stuff to track.

Vernon: That's a lot of tracking. I went down that rabbit hole and just thought, man, somebody's collecting this, splitting it off every single month, tracking. Like I would, of course, want to get all of my money back first because as the investor, I want to recoup my investment. And then 10 years from now, my partner starts getting half of my check. It's pretty tough to figure out how to do that.

Seth: Yeah. I remember when I was using Del Toro loan servicing years ago and other loan servicing companies probably do a similar thing. There was an option to set up for every payment that comes in, I want you to split it off in these percentages and send it to these different bank accounts every time. So there is more complexity, but they deal with it.

Vernon: They deal with it, yeah. But still, it's not the preferred way.

Seth: Before we even got on this call, you mentioned that you like to leverage data to identify and target potential sellers and undervalued properties and just data driven marketing and decision making in the first place. So what do you mean by that? How do you use data to do things and what difference does it make for you?

Vernon: Again, we've shifted a little bit to where a lot of our deals are coming from joint venture partners. So we're being a little bit more reactive right now in this evolution of the business. But most of my career was really looking at markets. We're looking at sell-through rates on markets, how quickly those inventories are turning over in the markets, really looking at pulling data from, I think we were using LandVision to pull all of our data.

And then I had a couple of guys that were really working with me on trying to identify parcels that were high value parcels that we could target and pulling those out of the list and marketing those separately. Sending separate mailers to those. And then we were trying to get kind of anything that could stick against the wall. We were trying to see what would stick.

Seth: That is a thing I've noticed with a lot of the funders that I know now. That's kind of part of why they're funders now is because they're used to a certain result from spending a certain amount on certain types of marketing that just isn't happening anymore. So they're kind of like, you know what? I'm done with that. I'm just going to fund deals. It's easier. I don't have to deal with that. And I have the money to do it.

But like somebody is still out there finding the deals. Are they just willing to tolerate the worst acceptance rate or like worse response rate? Or do they have some secret sauce that the rest of us don't know? Or they're like, I don't know, maybe just spending a lot more money or... I mean, the deals are clearly out there. They're just kind of harder to find.

Vernon: I think it's a skill set. You look at what Ajay is doing. I mean, he's really, really honed in on that sales skill set. And it's a muscle that you have to use to get better, to make stronger. And the more you use it, the better you get at it. And the more in tune you are with sellers.

Rejection is a natural part of the process of buying land, and every land investor has to get past that. But I think some people are just really good at refining that process and understanding the nuance of how to guide a potential seller through the thought process of selling their property. And whether you do it through text or through phone calls, it's a very specific set of things that you have to do in order to get that property.

There's always going to be sellers that just say, I don't care here. Give me my number. But the vast majority of them require quite a bit of relationship building. And the guys that I'm working with are constantly trying to evolve that and to get better at it.

I didn't want to juggle all those leads. It was too much for me. And I had a tough time teaching other people to do it the way that I wanted them to do it. And to sort of continue to work on that skill set with them became just the thing that I just said, this is not my strong suit here. Much better working one-on-one with people.

Seth: That whole team you had when sending out texts and that kind of thing, are they all gone now? Or are you still using some of them for anything?

Vernon: I've got one person remaining, and she's my sort of generalist VA in the Philippines. And she helps input all my deals, run economics, do research on the properties for me. But then from there, I mean, I'm handling everything. I'm working with my partners. I'm working with title companies, making sure that they've got everything, that everything's ready to go for closing, funding.

I tried to have a transaction coordinator do a lot of this stuff for me, but I just realized like, maybe I'm just too much of a control freak. Like if I'm about to spend $300,000 on a deal, I want to know everything about that deal. And it's really hard for me to sort of give that up and say, is everything good to go? Okay. Yeah. Here you go. Here's the money. Right. I just have to know. I have to go through everything and really understand it.

Seth: Yeah. Have you ever hired somebody and found that they did a better job at that thing than you could?

Vernon: One of the guys that I hired when I was going through a lot of data was a data analyst. And I went through years of spreadsheet work in my previous businesses. So I mean, I've got, I can whip an Excel sheet into order pretty quick, but pulling and organizing and managing data sets, I realized like there are people out there that are way better than me at creating macros and creating dashboards and pulling together data in a way that I can analyze it.

I can do it, but I hired somebody last year when we were just going through tons and tons of counties and it was a huge help. I kind of held onto that for a lot longer than I realized I should have. Once I gave it up, I was like, oh man, I'm so glad I'm not having to pull these spreadsheets.

Seth: You mentioned that you're a fan of creative financing and how that's played a role. Creative finance can mean many different things. What does that mean to you? Like, what are some examples of creative financing deals you've done and what do they look like exactly?

Vernon: I've always been attracted to the debt side of the business.

Seth: Meaning that you are owed the money or you owe the money to somebody else?

Vernon: I like to be the collector of the debt. I like to be the one that people owe the money to.

Seth: Yeah, me too.

Vernon: I love the idea of being the bank. So really, you know, did quite a few seller finance deals, creative finance, you know, I kind of played around with like, do I get into sub two, but never really sort of got far enough into it to where I thought that it was something that I wanted to do. Most of the deals that we do are not related to, I mean, most of the deals are equity-only deals.

This last year, I have a business partner who we joined together, both of our businesses. And so we're now 50-50 on our equity business. It's called Acre Equity. We're funding these deals together.

The other business that we run together is a debt business. So we have a hard money lending business. He was doing a lot of these hard money deals. And I thought, man, I really love being on the debt side of the equation. A lot of our deals are much bigger than the land deals that we're doing. We're funding typically $3 to $5 million in loan value and with an asset value of double that in order to have enough collateral on that deal.

A lot of commercial deals looked at quite a few land deals. In fact, we've got one loan as a land deal right now, looking at some other kind of interesting-looking assets. Like looked at a house in Beaver Creek, looked at a veterans facility in North Carolina. It's sort of a different type of asset class.

But, you know, the thing that I love about it is it's really, at the end of the day, the same concept of what we're doing with land. I mean, we're buying at 50% of market value. And on the loan side, we're lending at 50% of market value, and the protection that we have as investors is the remaining equity in the deal in case something goes wrong. We've got the ability to withstand either a market downturn or a price correction to where we can get that property sold if we need to and still be okay.

Seth: How are these borrowers finding you? If they're not all land deals, where are these people coming from?

Vernon: My partner is the one that gets most of these deals, but we get them through banks, through brokers that bring him the deals and just through references, relationships of people saying, "Hey, look, I know this guy that needs to refinance."

A lot of the deals that we're doing are refis. So we'll take a loan that's about to be at the end of its term and we'll refi it. And usually, you know, one year term and interest only, and we'll hold on to it, usually the guy's trying to sell it or he needs enough time to go find some other financing and has kind of run out of time.

And so we're there, we're able to quickly do those loans in a week or less if we need to, as long as we can get comfortable that the asset is worth double, at least what we're lending on.

Seth: If you're getting these from banks, I mean, it sounds like a good deal. Is there something wrong with the deal or something wrong with the property or the borrower or why would they send them to you?

Vernon: So a lot of times the banks have lending requirements and they have covenants in their loans that require them to only be able to lend to certain kinds of borrowers. And in fact, I was talking with a banker the other day and he said, "Yeah, I've got a loan that is performing, but the borrower's income has gone down."

And banks usually lend on personal financials. And so they're really looking at how much income are you making on a quarterly basis? And is your debt service coverage ratio strong enough to meet our internal requirements? And so a lot of times banks get people who don't quite do as well over time and they have some income ratios that go down and ultimately the bank decides "Hey look, we need to get this this loan even though it's performing we need to get it off of our books" and so that's where we can step in we can step in when a borrower has stopped paying and we can buy it we can take the loan over before foreclosure work with the borrower to get back into payment there's a number of different ways to do it.

Seth: Yeah, it's interesting a lot of those banks have these like big corporate policies and that kind of thing where it's like they're there for a reason but like when you look at it on a loan by loan basis like just use some critical thinking like it's fine they're gonna make the money but with their inability to think on a deal-by-deal basis like that, that's where you can step in and have an opportunity that's cool.

Vernon: Well they also have regulators that are watching the makeup of their loan portfolio.

Seth: Oh, I see.

Vernon: I think they get dinged when, you know, their loan portfolio gets deemed too risky.

Seth: Are those like federal regulators? Like people outside of the...

Vernon: Yeah, I think they're federal regulators. I don't know who these people are, but I think, you know, each bank is judged on how well those loans are performing. And there's some negative effect that comes along with having too many poorly performing loans.

Seth: Yeah, totally. So we can't end this conversation without you telling me about this foreclosure property that came with an ostrich farm. Tell me the story about that.

Vernon: So we haven't done too many deals recently, but I have a partner where we only do tax foreclosure acquisitions. And this was one of them. We bought this property before a tax foreclosure in Waller County, Texas. And this is kind of a deal of a lifetime. This was just such a great deal, but it had a few twists and turns.

So this guy had lived on this piece of property, this 10 acre piece of property, just northwest of Houston. And he lived on it in the late 80s, early 90s, had raised the ostriches and had a little farm there and had his little operation. He lived in a mobile home out there, and at one point his wife divorced him and he literally got up and left and never came back, quit paying the taxes on it and everything just started growing and everything just grew up.

And by the time we talked to him, he was facing foreclosure and the way that we've been successful in the past and the way that we still do deals this way is we'll find the owner before the foreclosure. And the discussion is generally, "Hey, you owe X amount in taxes and you probably don't have the money to pay it, which you probably would have paid it if you had it, but we can help you by paying the taxes, clearing all that up, put some money in your pocket because you're about to lose it anyways."

Seth: Is this like a straight up delinquent tax list? Is that where you're finding these people?

Vernon: Delinquent tax list. Yeah. And then it's really finding the right properties and finding those people before the foreclosure sale so we can get title to the property and get clear title to the property, go through the title process rather than trying to get it all sorted out after the foreclosure.

Seth: Yeah. And this was one of those, but like a big version of one of those?

Vernon: Yeah. This was a good version of it. We ended up buying the whole thing for $150,000 and thought, yeah, we'll just clean this thing up, be fine. I don't even think I'd gone out to the property. And when I remember going out to the property and looking at it and there were all sorts of heavy equipment that were just buried in trees.

There was a backhoe that had a tree going through it. There was a truck. There were several trucks with just trees growing through them. There was a box truck, like an 18-wheeler big box truck that was out there. And we thought, okay, well, that's kind of the extent of it.

And then we had a mulcher come out there, a mulching crew to come out there to cut through a big area of overgrowth. But we hadn't noticed that woven within those trees were all chain link fences. And so the mulcher was like, I can't even get in there.

And we realized that there were these pins that they had set up. And it all just looked like a big forest, basically. But there were all these pins that were set up and they were raising emus on this property. And so we ended up having to just get a bulldozer and just bulldoze all of it down and burn a lot of those chain link fences up because we couldn't pull the chain link fences out from the trees.

And so, wow, crazy. It was a wild deal. We had burn piles everywhere. We had hired a couple of guys that were local and expensive to do all that. I think we ended up spending about thirty thousand dollars cleaning the whole thing up.

Seth: How many acres did you say it was?

Vernon: Ten acres.

Seth: Ten acres. I ended up selling the first one for $315,000. We cut it in half basically and sold five acres and five acres. Sold the other one for $375,000.

Seth: Dude, that is insane. That's amazing.

Vernon: It looked really good after we were done with it, but it took a lot of work.

Seth: That's beautiful, man. That's a great story. I love that. You know, it's crazy. You'll find this a lot, I think in a lot of places, but on the delinquent tax list, especially you really see how much humans are emotional creatures and they do crazy illogical things like walking away from a property like that based on emotion, you know?

Vernon: We looked in the mobile home and there were still VHS tapes that were on the ground from like the 80s.

Seth: So how long had it been?

Vernon: I think it had been like 30 years since he'd been out there.

Seth: Wait, so you found this guy who had walked away? You found him and bought it from him?

Vernon: Yep.

Seth: Wow. Did he tell you all kinds of crazy stories about why he walked away and all this stuff?

Vernon: He said his wife left him and he said, that's it, I'm out of here. And just packed his bag and left and left the whole house the way that it was.

Seth: Wow, man. That's amazing. Like there were still clothes in the closet. There were like magazines on the floor. It was wild.

Vernon: Yeah.

Seth: The delinquent tax list. I haven't used many of them in recent years, but like when I got started, it was a gold mine.

Vernon: Yeah. They were usually a pain to deal with, to get them and to sort through them and stuff. But like, there's just insane opportunity that you'll come across from time to time when you're doing that. There's a lot of junk too, but like you'll find that kind of stuff. Like, you know, I remember buying a $50,000 property for like 4,000 bucks, just like insane stuff like that. When like the seller could very well do it themselves and they know it, but they're like emotionally ruined from whatever happened there.

Vernon: And they just want to get rid of it. So it's a big source of motivation, right? It's like, you're about to lose this property that you're going to get nothing from. Let me help you out. I'll put some money in your pocket. We'll pay off the taxes. You won't have to go through the foreclosure and you know, we'll get the property and we'll put it in the hands of somebody that can really use it.

Seth: Yeah. I've had it where, you know, I'm buying property super cheap like that. And when that person is at the title company, the title company is telling them like, you realize this is worth way more than you're selling it for, right? Which I don't even know if they're supposed to get involved and say that stuff, but they'll say that. And the seller's like, yeah, I know, but I'm done. I'm done. It's not a logical thing. It's just purely emotional. They're just moving on and you just got to be in the right place to catch that stuff when it falls.

Vernon: Yep.

Seth: So do you have any good advice for people who are thinking about getting into the land business today, given everything you've seen? You've kind of seen the land business change a little bit in the few years you've been doing it. What would you say to people who are trying to get started now?

Vernon: Yeah, I'd say, first of all, get a good coach. My first coach was Travis King. He really set me off in the right spot, really gave me some critical information that I needed to get on how to look at investing in land and valuable. I mean, it really sort of set me off in the right spot.

So I think having a coach, first and foremost, is definitely the way to go get a process in place. But then don't be so rigid that you think that that's the only way to do it. My land business has evolved so much over the last few years that I feel like part of my journey is always going to be evolving. What's the next phase of the business? What's working? What isn't? Try to do the thing that I'm working, that I'm doing well at, do the thing that I'm good at and try to eliminate the things that aren't working.

And I know that the way that my business works, looks right now and works right now is not going to be the way that it looks and works a year from now. It's just going to change. So like kind of be okay with that evolution and be okay with, you don't quite have to follow the script the exact same way as everybody else, because what works for you is not necessarily going to work for everybody else. And you're going to find value in places that other people aren't seeing. And when you see that, those are the things that you really have to jump on.

Seth: Yeah, definitely. So your comment there about working with Travis King, you're not the first person I've heard say that on this podcast. Curious, do you remember any light bulb moments from working with him? Any key critical pieces of information like, oh, that changes everything now that I know that.

Vernon: It was really, honestly, how to analyze a market. I mean, that was the most important thing that I learned early on. I remember when I was sort of trying to do it on my own and trying to kind of figure it out. I was sort of thinking about like, well, population changes and really trying to look at where housing starts were and really trying to sort of take a more analytical approach from a type of approach that other real estate marketers take.

And when I realized that it's really about supply and demand of parcels in the market and how quickly those parcels are selling through. It allowed me to look at a market in a totally different way, especially markets that I never thought about from a logical perspective.

I would say, okay, well, there's all these people in Houston, so those people from Houston are going to want to move somewhere out to the country. But there's markets in the middle of the country that aren't near any big cities that are fantastic markets. And so when I started really understanding sell-through rates and understanding how to look at a market, it made all the difference to me.

Seth: Yeah. The sell-through rate or the sold-to-for-sale ratio is really an important thing that honestly, like, I don't even know if any land investors out there had this figured out until about four or five years ago, because I never heard anybody talking about it until around then. Prior to that, I kept hearing people say stuff like, yeah, just look for a market where there's a lot of properties for sale. I mean, that's part of it, but that's not everything. Like that's not the full picture, but that sell-through rate really does help you see, again, not everything, but like supply and demand, how much is out there versus what's selling.

Vernon: Well, parcels on the market ratio. I mean, their pending ratio is also very important, how much of the current supply is actually being transacted on right now. There are a lot of different metrics. This was back, you know, Priced was relatively new at the time. And Travis kind of put me onto Priced. And I remember being able to like slice and dice all those markets and thought, man, this is so cool being able to compare these markets to each other very quickly. It's the most important thing. Start with a good market.

Seth: I do have links to, in the show notes, again, retipster.com/218, a pretty detailed blog post explaining how to get the delinquent tax list. And also another video explaining the whole sell-through rate or the sold-to-for-sale ratio, why it's important, how to find it. Lots of stuff we're covering here that's super helpful. Stuff that I wish I knew back when I was getting started.

So do you have any predictions on where you think the land market is going to evolve in the next five to 10 years? And if so, what are you doing to prepare yourself for that? Are you ready to pivot in any particular direction?

Vernon: No, I think it's obviously gotten more competitive. I think new land investors are entering the space because they've seen the success that others have had. And I think that's part of every market. I don't see the market getting overly consolidated. I mean, it's a fragmented market, which is still good for just about anybody that wants to make it as a solo investor.

There's always opportunities out there. Now, I think it has gotten more competitive. And just like the single family market, more people chasing after the same deals does drive the prices up. But to me, I don't see any big institutional funds coming in that have hundreds of billions of dollars that are out there sweeping up these land deals. I think the business model, it just doesn't quite work for them the same way that it works for small operators like me.

There may be a contraction in guys that come in, they try to work it. If they're not able to get enough traction on deals fast enough and build up enough cash, then it can be hard because you have to do deals in order to make money. If we have a period of time where things are a little slow, I mean, 2023 was a pretty slow time there in the middle of the year. And I think you do end up losing some guys, which, you know, I think it's just part of any natural market evolution. There's going to be new people coming in and some of those people are going to make it and some of them aren't.

And so for me, what I've tried to do is position myself as a leader in capital and say, look, I want to leverage the capital that I've got and make good investments, not just flip land deals. Right. And so I really, really look at what I'm doing as an investment and I'm making a return on my investment. I think it's a great way to make a return on investment.

I believe in the assets that we're buying. And I think it's as long as the deals are still continuing to happen and the market continues to move, then it's going to continue to be a good business. I know we will have economic swings, maybe even coming up. We may have some economic swings and we're always sort of trying to think about, okay, well, how aggressive do we want to get in our acquisitions.

But at the end of the day, as long as we're still buying in good markets and we're buying assets that are deep in equity, I know that we've got enough wiggle room to get out of those assets if we need to. And really, it's easy to sort of convince yourself that, hey, like this is a marginal deal, but it should be fine. Right. And that's where you can sort of get hurt. And so I really still just try to be as disciplined as I can and making sure that we're buying good assets at the end of the day.

Seth: I'm curious. You said you guys started in 2022?

Vernon: Yeah, late. I really started like trying to figure all of this out in late 2021. My first deal was in like December of 2021.

Seth: Okay. So knowing what you know now, if you could travel back in time and start this all over from scratch, would you start the same way you did? Like, would you just double down on being a conventional land flipper and do that? Or would you be like, no, I'm going to do funding from day one. That's where it's at.

Vernon: I think I definitely learned a lot from flipping my own deals. And the one thing I do is go bigger, faster, but I did spend some time sort of proving the whole model to myself. Right. And I needed to go through that evolution of like, okay, like if I fail, it's not a big deal. You know, it's a few thousand bucks and I don't think that I'm going to fail. And I don't, I think the values are there, but I need to really live that. Maybe I spent too much time doing my own deals and instead of trying to move up market faster.

But, you know, I think we can always second guess ourselves. I think it was an evolution for me. It was just part of the learning process for me and that I still look back on those days and I realized, well, this is why I don't do my own title anymore. And this is why I use realtors to sell all my deals. And, you know, it did great those first years. It wasn't, it was a lot of work and could have probably done better. But again, I learned a lot of great lessons that way.

Seth: Awesome. Well, Vernon, thanks again for sharing your experience and your wisdom and everything you've learned. It's been awesome to talk to you. Awesome to know you over the past year. If people want to connect with you or find out more about you, you don't have to share anything, but it's up to you. Now's your chance.

Vernon: You can email me at vhenry@upliftland.com. That's U-P-L-I-F-T land.com. We also have a website for funding called acreequityfunding.com. So you can go on there and reach out to us. There's a place to put your deal in and it'll pop up on my email and I'll be happy to hop on a call and talk to anybody about a deal, even if it's just giving some advice. I love talking to people. I love working with people and, you know, always looking to work with more great people.

Seth: Yeah. I'll include that stuff in the show notes again, retipster.com/218. Vernon, thanks again. And we'll talk to y'all next time.

Vernon: All right, Seth. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.