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My name is Seth Williams. Today, I have a unique opportunity to interview Alex Reese of AcreWell, which is an amazing YouTube channel. This guy has some super solid videos that I've been watching for the past couple months.

When I saw what he was talking about and just the job he was doing, just making amazing content, I was like, you know, do you want to come on the podcast? And he didn't just say yes. He said, Seth, I want to fly out to Grand Rapids and do this thing in person.

And I was like, really? Huh? Nobody's ever done that before, but okay, let's do it.

And so we're sitting in my backyard right now. He flew here from Philadelphia yesterday. And we're just going to have a little fireside chat, literally.

We're just going to hang out and talk land, and talk YouTube, talk about business, life, whatever comes up. So welcome, Alex. Welcome.

Alex: Well, Seth, good to be on with you. Thanks for this opportunity. Seriously, it's an incredible opportunity for me.

As you know, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I've been watching your videos for years. And that's why with YouTube, it's so powerful.

And we were talking about this a little bit, which is you feel like you know someone, even though technically, you've never met. But I feel like I know Seth. I'm sure a lot of the viewers of REtipster feel the same way, because you do spend a lot of time with someone in a way when you watch their videos. And so that's why, you know, I felt like when we were talking last night at dinner, I just felt like this was going to happen.

And so that's why when you had reached out to me to come on the podcast, you know, my first response was like, hey, we're doing it in person, man. Hope that's cool. And you're like, yeah, absolutely.

Might not have been that forward. But the idea was like, in my head, I kind of felt like this was coming around. And if you hadn't reached out to me to be on your channel, I probably would have reached out to you to be on my channel, because I've been a big fan for a long time.

And you're incredibly generous to have me on. So thank you for hosting me.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think the only other time I've done this kind of thing was with Luke Smith back in 2019, when he happened to be in Michigan, and he drove down to see me. And Alex was referencing that interview.

He said, Luke did it. How about I do it?

Alex: So also, I want to ask you, Seth, yeah, I feel like, does anyone tell you that you look taller in person? I hear that. Guys, most of the time, guys, I just want to say for the audience, because it's my first time meeting Seth.

So for anybody that hasn't met him in person, Seth is taller in person. And I think he's also a little bit more jacked, too. I think have you been working out?

I've been known to work out from time to time. See, I met Seth at the hotel in my hotel lobby. We were going to dinner last night. He walks in, and I'm 5'10". I'm like, I'm like average height, or maybe even above average.

And I was like, damn. So Seth, I don't know if you get that from anybody else. But how tall are you?

Like six foot, six one, six. Well, six two. Six two. See. See. Yeah, thrilled to be here. We can kind of go in any number of different ways. I just want to say, first of all, if you guys haven't been to Grand Rapids, wow, I don't know what to tell you. We're going to put, I took a video from the plane as we were landing, because we were coming under the clouds.

And as I could see through the sections of the clouds, I could start to see the countryside. If you've never been to Grand Rapids, I can assure you that you've never seen anything like it. When you're flying into Grand Rapids, it is one of the most beautiful rural areas I've ever seen.

It was the perfect time of year too. The trees. I mean, the trees around here, they're changing color, they're red, they're yellow. It's like the nicest farmland in the world. And I was coming from a flight of people from Philly and the people behind me in the flight were like, wow, we thought that like Chester County was nice, you know. It's like this is like something else.

And so that was what everyone was saying. So I have a little video. We'll be looping it on this part of the interview so that you guys can see it. But yeah, it's an incredible place.

And I just feel like, you know, this was a long time coming. So again, thanks for having me on. Yeah, man, of course.

Seth: Maybe we start this from the very beginning. Tell me about who you are, where you're from, like, when you got into the land business, how did you discover it? What were you doing before that?

A lot of questions I just threw at you actually.

Alex: But let's hear about the history of Alex. Yeah, well, so I'll look fast forward to about 10 years ago. I'd always wanted to do my own business. But, you know, when you're in your 20s, and you haven't really been tested in your career, you have confidence, but it's sort of like a schoolyard confidence, because you haven't really been tested.

And so the realities of starting your own business are a little bit different from what you've been told on the internet, because you think that you start your company, you get this like, you get your LLC on legal zoom, and there's a bunch of confetti and streamers and like some big cardboard check like, yeah, man, you made it. But really, it's quite the opposite. The work really begins at that point.

And a lot of people that get into land, myself included, come from a place of they just want to make it. They want to be able to build something for themselves. Maybe they're working a corporate job, and they make good money, like I did, but it's sort of like golden handcuffs, where the further you get into that opportunity, the more dependent you are on it. And so you want to build something for yourself, and you want to replicate or even exceed hopefully your the income that you made before. So that was the case for me in 2017. I started a business that was like a 1099 distributor for medical devices.

So I was a medical device rep, and I had worked, I worked with a couple manufacturers. I was trying to sell these tissue graphs, these expensive surgical tools and stuff like that. And I just thought if I worked hard, that eventually, something would break on the other side, and that I'd get momentum, and I had some commissions coming in, but not really enough to live off of it. And so I figured if I just keep my head down and work, that it would work out.

But I didn't have a plan. I had no sense of the timeline. I was living off of credit cards. And by 2017, I was flat broke.

So I was commission only sales agent, my own company, but I wasn't making enough money to even pay rent on a small one bedroom in Philly. So what ended up happening is I was about 40k deep in credit card debt. I remember at that time, I was so broke that I did a lot of my grocery shopping at CVS, because I'd buy those tins of cocktail peanuts.

And because it's like the most calories that you can get for if you're broke, for like $7 you have, you can get like 3000 calories. And I liked, I still to this day, occasionally buy those at the market. But I remember I would be at the CVS counter to check out.

And I'd have like cocktail peanuts and like water literally. And there would be, I would kind of have that poker face. I'd be bluffing. It's like, yeah, like I definitely have room on my credit card, right? And like, I'd wait like for it to go through. It's like, okay, you're good. Like chichi, chichi, and then it would print out the extra bucks.

And I'd play it cool then too, because I'd be like, okay, extra bucks. And I'd look. It's like, oh, $4. Whoa.

What was funny is like, I was at that time, I was like, as far as my career, I was like a six figure sales talent. I had made 100k on a sales job prior to that. But I just went into the 1099 thing early without a plan, a couple months of living off credit cards, you know, and you don't have the money to support that. You're kind of on your ass like I was.

So then at that point, I started, I got a W-2 job. I was back in medical device sales. And then I started selling life insurance in the evenings. That's a whole separate conversation, too.

But eventually fast forward, I get into land. There's a lot of prologue here that's interesting. But when I got into land, it was in 2020, probably largely as a result of your content. I used to watch you every day. I still watch your podcast, listen to your podcast, at least once a week, including on the plane on the plane ride over. And 2020, flipping desert squares in Mojave County.

And I'll pause there, because that's a starting point that's familiar for a lot of people. But, but yeah, I mean, I got started and five years later, we flipped multiple hundred properties. We have a business now that is more focused on media and education. We can talk about that pivot, but I still do land deals. I have land deals in the pipeline now.

And so our business has evolved more in terms of education, online education, media, but the land thing that I started five years ago was instrumental in building my skill set to where I am today.

Seth: Talk about the transition from doing desert squares in Mojave to what you're doing now. So at some point, the idea popped into your head. I'll start a YouTube channel.

Yeah, so like, when and why did that happen? Because most people who do YouTube, and especially those who succeed at it, like, it doesn't just happen by accident. Like you really want it and you've got to run after it and takes months, sometimes years of just like, you know, floundering and not getting anywhere before you actually kind of hit traction. Yeah, and you actually hit traction pretty soon. Like you've got some, what I would call viral videos within less than a year starting your channel.

Alex: So yeah, tell me how the YouTube thing came about. Well, when you're a small business owner, as you know, and in land investing is no exception. In fact, it's really, it's the best example of it where you do a good deal, you get paid. And at the beginning of your time in land investing, what will happen is you get started, you know, it'll be hard work, but you'll get lucky once or twice. You probably had an experience like that, where you'll hit like a $40,000 deal.

And the money comes in, and it's like, okay, I'm good at this, right? And then maybe you are, maybe you're not, but then reality sets in. And then when you are, when you have a couple thin months of slow months, if you have payroll, if you're running direct mail, I mean, you could have like, you could easily have 20k in overhead without even thinking about it.

And when the money doesn't come in, if you're not selling property that month, like you could lose 15, 20 grand quickly, you know, either or months. And guys, this is any business. It's not like a land thing. This is like a, this is just like a real world small business thing.

And every small business owner knows this. People come into this thing about land where it's like, oh, I want to make a bunch of money. And that's great.

But the thing is, when you get into business, whether it's land, or if you're, if you set up a private practice as a dentist, or if you sell firewood by the side of the road, you have a skill set, or you have a business plan, and you get started. But the majority of businesses won't break even for at least the first year. And I mean, that's typical for, if you're lucky, you'll, if you're lucky, you'll lose money for the first six months of any business.

And then the next six months after that, you're like kind of breaking even or there's some positive months. And then on the end of the year, if you break even, I mean, you're killing it. And so at the end of that first year, second year, you're like making less money than all your friends.

And so you go through a period of time where you are working harder than all your friends who have corporate jobs that work less hard than you and they work for the weekends and they go out, they party. And you're just eating dirt. And you're eating dirt for multiple years.

And so if you're doing this thing for money and 10 months in, you're working 65 hours a week and losing money or breaking even and not even enough, you're draining your savings to support the business. The interesting question is, do you really love it? Do you really love what you do?

Because do you love what you do enough to stick through that period of time, the valley of despair, which you will encounter? Because it's a psychological phenomenon that happens when you start a business and you have a certain expectation. But like I was saying, the confidence that I had was sort of schoolyard confidence. I had not really been tested.

Because as an adult, as a kid, I like abstractly, I was like, oh, I have a degree or all I know this or oh, they paid me this much last year in my sales job. But any gaps in your skill set will be exploited immediately. In the world of business, it's like a mirror in front of you.

You will see your flaws up close and personal and high and tight at a level of resolution that you can't possibly ignore. Because if you have holes in your game, if you have holes in your marketing, you'll just lose 18k. And no one cares.

So you get through that. And to answer your question about the YouTube thing, you get through that. Actually, most people don't, honestly, because they don't love it enough or because they don't understand the dynamics of it.

So they'll quit that opportunity, even though they were six months away from a profitable business. And then they'll just go to the next opportunity and they start the timer over.

Seth: So that's maybe, I mean, it's an interesting point you're talking about, like, how do you know when you're ready to go out on your own? Because I look at my story, I actually hung onto my job probably a lot longer than I needed to. And when I finally cut the cord, I was more than ready.

I never had super thin months when I was starving or anything. But at the same time, I was just very scared to make the leap. So I think there's that too.

And honestly, it kind of stunted my business's growth because my job was the bottleneck. And I was just clinging to that for dear life because I felt a sense of safety. But I'm curious, knowing what you know now and the experience you had, like, what would you tell yourself if you could go back to those years?

Like, when would you be ready? Do you need to totally replace your income and some with your business before you jump into that full time?

Alex: It's such a good question. There's a lot of angles to it. 10 years ago, I was, I guess, 24.

And let's just even less distant in the past. Eight years ago, I was 26. 2017, this is when I was eating the cocktail peanuts and the living off of extra bucks on the end of a 35k credit card balance, literally.

Any business I started at that time would have failed and did fail. So there's a skill set that you can develop in certain types of jobs at the beginning of your career, which will cut your teeth and give you a well-rounded skill set to start a business. Some of those types of jobs are anything in like, sort of like private equity, finance, banking, those like high pressure finance jobs, where they just beat you to sleep with work, and you like sleep under your desk, and you make good money, but you have no life, or you're like living in New York or Chicago, that type of thing.

Another one is management consulting, because you kind of learn about how a business works and the mechanics of business. And your 24, 25 year old management consultants that have two years, three years work experience, those are actually pretty well-rounded professionals at that age. The other thing is to work at a startup, to work as an early employee at a company that maybe gets venture capital funding or to work for a local entrepreneur.

I think an untapped opportunity is for someone to figure out like, where do I live? And then who are the players in that market? And then how do I link up with one of those players in that market and just like do what they say?

And you'll just by osmosis learn all that type of stuff that you need. Now, most people don't have one of those experiences early in their career. And so I think the best way to start is how you started and then really how I started too, which is you started on your evenings and weekends hours and you just start the business while you have a corporate income that's coming in.

You use that income to de-risk the business and to make you emotionally insulated from the success and failure of that company. Because there's going to be a lot of failure and there's going to be a lot of times that the biweekly direct deposit is going to be a really critical lifeline for you when the business is started. It also helps to get credit cards and get some credit facilities at local banks.

And it gives you that energy of I'm good either way. It gives you that I'm good either way energy. That I'm good either way energy is the energy that you need to be successful anyway in business.

And so what happens is that your schedule, your lack of time constrains the time that you can put in the business. But your income and your corporate job is the fuel that allows the business to be viable while you're figuring your stuff out. So I think that's kind of the main idea that I would say.

Seth: Yeah, totally. So tell me about your first 12 months in the land business. It sounds like you were doing desert squares.

It sounds like you were making not as much from land as you were from your job. No, not at all. So when did you start exceeding your income and how did you do that?

Was it just doing more volume of the little stuff or did you fundamentally switch to different types of properties?

Alex: Yeah, so I started with the desert squares and then I did several of them. I still have a land contract. We were talking about that last night.

That was back in the day where it's all about passive income. Remember that? That was one of the eras of land investing when I got started.

And basically, I was working at a startup and I was living with the early employees and even the co-founders of this healthcare startup that I was working at. We had raised a Series A or Series B financing. And so the company had a ton of money.

And so I had sort of gone without a salary during the beginning of the pandemic in exchange for stock options in a company where we just had to survive. All the other businesses at that time, it was unclear what was going to happen after, when this thing was going to end. I had lived in a house with five other people.

And at that house, we were just working all the time. It wasn't a 40-hour a week thing. At a startup, you're working 50, 55, 60 hours.

We didn't really have a life. It was the pandemic. So the land thing started for me.

I was sending mail. I didn't have traveling mailboxes even. I didn't have one of the remote mailboxes.

I would send mail campaigns for desert squares in Arizona for like in Meadview in Mojave County. Meadview, right? Have you ever done deals there?

Seth: No.

Alex: Okay. So it's right up the road from like Lake Havasu City, kind of right near the Colorado River, not far from the road that might be like 83 that goes into Las Vegas. Very rural, like desert, just the epitome of desert squares. But there is a community there.

And so I was sending mail campaigns where the actual mail responses would come back into the shared mailbox of this suburban home in California that I was living in with five roommates who I was also working 60 hours a week in a company with. And I would just get these handwritten letters from people I didn't even know. They were signed purchase agreements.

So I would weirdly go out and check the mail every morning. I was like, hey, I got a new mail. I was like, Alex, you're really interested in this mail.

It's like I'm expecting some correspondence. So I did that and did some flips, self-closed on a couple of those early flips. And then really the first cash deal, the cash flip that I did, I sent mail into a subdivision in a town called Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina.

Do you know that town? It's in Brunswick County, and it's not far from the coast. It's right outside Wilmington.

That's a town where I saw these big subdivisions. I would send mail back and I got these responses from my letter campaign in these subdivisions where it was all empty. There was roads and there might've been power lines, but it was like being reclaimed by nature.

And yet, quarter mile down the road in the same town, there were these booming subdivisions where like you couldn't buy and sell property fast enough. You couldn't build homes fast enough. And then I saw these big blank grids in the edge of the town and I was like, why are there no homes here?

There's so much land here. And that's when I learned about soil, because that town had promised or made a commitment to install an underground sewer line. They wanted to have municipal sewer.

They never did that. And so a lot of those lots that came back into that first mail campaign were property that had an assessed value of 20 grand. I'm looking at a signed purchase agreement for like $4,200.

And I'm thinking, damn, how is this not going to work out? And so what I found was that it didn't perk. You couldn't build.

There's no sewer and there's no septic either. It's basically wetlands. But then a better property on a better road in the town, I finally got my first septic permit done on that property.

I bought it for, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it would have been something like bought it for $4,500. I probably had $6k in it by the time I closed it.

Then I sold it at like $16,500 or $17,500, where on a cash flip I made like $9,000. And then I was off to the races. And then I realized it's these cash flips where you're going to make your margin.

Your payback period is going to be better. And so I started in that section in North Carolina. And a lot of people think I live down there because I've done so many deals there that everyone's like, oh, you're local or where are you?

I live in North Carolina too. And it was this arbitrary thing of I just started sending mail in nearby local areas. And as I started doing that more, it reinforced that pattern because you get certain economies with local.

If you invest in a local market, it's like real estate agents, soil scientists, surveyors, all these types of professionals that you're going to need on a recurring basis. If you can market in the same local areas, it ends up helping you. And to be able to do these deals at volume, because the specialized vendors that you need for due diligence that have the skillset or the local market expertise are there and you know who they are.

And they pick up when you call because they know that there's business there.

Seth: Let's talk a little about limiting beliefs. Okay. Have you ever had limiting beliefs?

Yeah, I'm sure I still do. Yeah. So how do you overcome those?

Because I know this is a thing because I certainly have them as well, probably more than the average person does. And I hear this whole thing about like, that's a limiting belief. You just need to overcome it.

Anything's possible. But the truth is not everything is possible. There is truth to some limiting beliefs.

And I never really know where the line is, but I probably do draw it way too low. But tell me about your experience with that. What limiting beliefs did you have?

How were you punished for those? How did you overcome those? Let's get into that.

Alex: The biggest thing when you start with land is why would anyone sell their property for less than it's truly worth? That's the biggest thing. A lot of our audience on our main channel, on YouTube, they stay like they're not necessarily land investors.

Now we probably have 20 or 30% that are. But a lot of people don't get it is how if your land is worth $50,000, why in the world would you ever sell it for less than that? And that's one of the things that they don't understand.

And so one of the limiting beliefs is that you can't buy land for much lower than the property would sell on the open market. And you absolutely can. We do it all the time.

And it's a very well-documented fact that you can. Understanding why enables you to be confident when you talk to these sellers. Because when I was talking a little bit earlier about the sort of I'm good either way energy, when you have the income coming in and you start this land business or a business on the side as you get started, you know that you don't need that deal.

You don't need that deal to work for you to pay the rent. And so what started to happen with me is I started to really be open and honest with the seller. Because when I would have these sellers, I would be busy with work.

I'd be getting paid a salary. I'd have other deals, other real estate deals coming in. And I started talking to these sellers from a place of total ambivalence.

They were like, hey, how do I know it's this? Or how do I know it's that? Or whatever.

And my whole thing was like, look, the land is worth more than I can afford to pay you. Because if I buy it, I have to make a profit. And maybe I do, maybe I don't.

But if you wanted to get top dollar, I can connect you to the local agent that can help you. And to get it marketed, you'll need aerial photos. You'll want to get the soil work done.

It'll cost about $1,000. You want to pull a septic permit. That way the buyer doesn't negotiate on that and you can sell it faster.

Then you want to list it. When you list it, you're going to have to pay 10% commission to get the right agent on the listing. And then when you do that, you're going to have to wait like four or five months or more to sell it.

And then if it sells, maybe it sells at that price, maybe it sells lower than whatever price it sells at. Then take 10% off of that and then wait six months to a year. And then you might sell for more.

Or I'll give you $60,000 today. And so when you talk to people and you're just clear, it's like, here's the fork in the road. I'm good either way.

I don't need this. Here's what your option is, is option A, option B. And knowing that you can't control what they say.

You cannot control the seller because a motivated seller is going to want to sell that land to you at whatever your highest and best offer is that's actually real. And if a seller wants to get a good cash number on a piece of land that's worth $120,000, if they want to sell it to you at $65,000 cash, they will. You can't control that.

All you can do is tell them, here's the best offer I can make. And then if that doesn't work, I totally understand. And let the chips fall.

And when you're ambivalent, that's when they trust you. That's when the best deals come in.

Seth: It kind of reminds me of Logan Fulmer in some of the messy title deals that he does. It's a similar negotiating thing where when he's talking with people and it makes a really low offer, he talks about, yeah, if you want to go clean this title up yourself, what I'm going to have to do is I got to do this, this, going to talk to this attorney, it's going to take me this amount of time. Got to contact all seven relatives, just really laying out what a huge hassle this is.

And they're probably not going to want to do it anyway. It almost kind of like they make their own decision at that point, but they have to be informed about the laundry list of items, the reality check of what it really takes to sell this thing for what they want.

Alex: Exactly.

Seth: So doing that. And also, it's really in powerful words, I might tattoo this on my forehead. It's just the words, I don't need this.

I don't need it. Just taking that stance and actually believing it. Oh, knowing it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's a similar thing when you're, we talked about before we started recording, you're like negotiation to buy a car at a discount or something.

You have to be ready to walk away and start walking away. Start walking away. Walk out the door if you have to.

I've heard Dave Ramsey talk about this kind of a different thing, but he was talking to somebody who they were interviewing for a job and they didn't know if they should take it. And he was saying, in any negotiation, the three things you want are time, information, and options. Yeah.

Like just, if you have that, you are definitely in a position of power. And as a land investor or any business person working out a deal, just remember that. Like give yourself time, information, and options, and you can have super leverage in a negotiation.

Alex: And whenever you need something from someone, they feel it. And what happens is there's a psychological dynamic of this where even with your friends and family, when you're trying to get your spouse, your significant other, your friend to do something and you're forcing it, see, people know, we know that we're free to do whatever we want. And so what happens is that when the counterparty, the person you're talking to is trying to enforce a decision on your part, you can feel it.

And it's constraining your freedom of choice and your ability to do what's best for you. And so when you feel that pressure coming in, you naturally push back against it. And that's why when people are attached to an outcome, a seller making a decision, a property, a deal going well, this thing or that thing, when that attachment starts to stick and you feel it and you're chasing it, you naturally create resistance to the things that you actually want to have happen.

Seth: So tell me about what your land business looks like today versus what it looked like a year ago or two years ago. What direction has it gone and why has it gone in that direction?

Alex: Yeah, so basically a good question. As I was getting better at flipping property, at flipping land, I was making less money. We talked about this at dinner last night.

And my skills were going like this and my income was going like that. And it's a marketplace dynamic. And guys, understand all businesses work like this.

All industries work like this. There's always ebbs and flows in a business. But I want to go back to the, and I'm going to answer that and tie it back to a question that you asked.

I didn't answer like a couple minutes back, which is how I got into YouTube. And so what happens is as a business owner, you're on this hamster wheel of money in, money out on the ads, on your ad spend. And so you're spending money to generate leads, to close deals, to buy properties, sell property. But then it's like, how well did that campaign do? And so everybody knows the experience of dropping $10,000 on a mail campaign and being like, well, I hope that goes well. You know, let's see, we'll have to find out. So you're on that hamster wheel, but the best companies in the world have brand. And what brand is, is people come to you. And so the question is, if you're a small business owner and you're not Nike and you can't spend a bunch of money for TV campaigns, ad campaigns, how do you build brand as a small business? The answer is social media. And then it's like, well, how does that work? And then what about platform? What about content, type of content? You play to your strengths there. So I just picked YouTube.

I think and still believe that it is the most powerful media platform. I think objectively, YouTube used to be a slur. Like 10 years ago, you're a YouTuber. It's like, oh, you're just a YouTuber. It is now the biggest media operation on the planet. And it's only getting bigger. It's getting bigger at an accelerating rate.

And Mr. Beast in an interview was like, in 10 years, YouTube's going to be bigger than TV ever was. And I think that might be true. But I started creating content because I wanted to build brand because I didn't want to be reliant on ad spend. And so my thought was how can I generate the same activity in my business but with no ad budget. Because if you take out the ad budget, all of a sudden you unlock all this profitability. I was thinking that we would get sellers and deals from YouTube, which is not really where the YouTube audience is. But in any case, I started making these videos and some started working a little bit. And then you start seeing what works and why. And then you start following that. And then once I started seeing what was working, it just took on a life of its own. And then it naturally is sort of like my energy was going into it.

Like you just get obsessed on this next project or whatever the thing is that you think you can bring a lot to the equation, or you think you can build something and you get wrapped up and caught up into it. And a lot of my energy and focus was going into YouTube. And meanwhile, my income on the land business, like I was making money, but not the way I wanted. And if you're three or four years into a business, you want to see the income go up into the right, not down into the right. And so my thought was like, I feel like I proved the case on land. And actually even this year, we stopped sending mail. A lot of deals came through. We sold through a ton of inventory and we had a lot of revenue come in on the land deals.

My thought was like, I like the idea of a consumer product. That's why when I was broke and I went back into medical device, I had my W-2 job again, had an income stream. And then I started selling life insurance just to try to make any money I could make, you know, make a name or make a buck or do anything to get momentum and pay down credit cards and try to make it happen.

So in a similar way, I wanted to create a consumer product, an education product for land buyers. And I realized that there was really a gap in some of the online education space because a lot of the great educators like Seth at REtipster and what he's done with his team and his platform is great. And actually, I don't even know the totality of your education and the courses you have and the programs you have. And so, but what I do know, and I haven't taken your, I probably should, by the way, but the land investing courses on the business side of starting a land investing business, they're really deep in detail on the actual business mechanics of the land business. How to send mail, how to target zip codes, how to know what property is going to sell for, how to basically power the actual business. But where I saw a gap and a lot of stuff that I had to teach myself over the years of flipping all these properties was the actual transaction itself, the actual due diligence itself, how to analyze land in detail, how to analyze online maps, little shorthand systems for knowing what land is worth, how to analyze property quickly to make sure you're not spending time on bad property, how to negotiate land deals, how to make sure you have a pre-closing checklist so you're not gonna miss anything expensive. So having sold life insurance, I like this sort of high margin consumer product, this sort of information or services product.

And so I just started the online course, Land Purchase Navigator. It's growing pretty well. The reviews have been really positive. The idea that I can help someone across the country learn the things that I never was taught, that has the benefit of information that I never had, is something special. And so I've really seen that happen with the channel. And so I wanted to be able to diversify the land business with a consumer product that solves a specific problem for a specific person at a very deep level. And to do it at a price point where I can tap into a bigger market and have just a product that ultimately creates a revenue stream that's more detached from my time. Because the land market is slow now compared to when I started and probably when you started. It might've been slow, but it was, there's less people in it. So it was a little different. But all industries have, they have like points of saturation and ebbs and flows. And so honestly, today, as I sit here, is probably a good time to get into land because you can come in with the right expectations. You can build a really lean business. And so I think that when you come in with that expectation, you can really make a lot of money in land and you can do it pretty quickly. One or two deals will change your life as it did for me and probably for you.

So that's there. But when I think about where my future is, the problems I had in my land business was never about the real estate. It was always about the operations. It was always about the training, making sure I could get the knowledge out of my mind and to train the team. And so really all the problems I had were solved by education. And I realized that something the universe was trying to tell me was that you need to be an educator and you need to really get out from behind your desk and start to show people how to do this thing. And so that's really where all the subliminal messaging was in my mind.

And so that's really where my energy went into YouTube and then the course and the education. So this Land Purchase Navigator course, is it mostly centered around due diligence and then the closing process? It's all phases of the transaction. So it's going to be, like to buy and sell or just to acquire? Well, to buy. But when you understand how to buy, you understand how to sell.

Because when people don't know how to sell land, it's because they don't know how to buy land. So they're reciprocal aspects of the same thing. So it's really what we found out over the years is that all, no matter what land you're buying, there's really six steps that happen in every land transaction. And that every one of those steps has a certain number of requirements of like little sub steps of like you have to complete before you advance to the next thing. So when you're stuck in the process of buying land, or you're not sure if it's the right land, or you're not sure you have the right due diligence checklist, and you figure out kind of where you are in those steps, you can actually identify specifically, okay, here's where my problem is. So the first three steps happen before you even begin the process of buying land. Like step one is like, you have to know how to read maps, you know? And then step two is you have to know what land is worth. So like literally before you even get started, there's foundational education that if you don't have it, you're going to get stuck at a later step. So it's everything from accessing and analyzing online mapping systems, knowing what land is worth, knowing how to evaluate property, knowing how to plan for your purchase, identifying how to read anything environmental, the physical property itself, reading local markets, knowing how much you can pay, what that land is going to sell for, working with agents, negotiating with sellers, all the way through running thorough due diligence and closing the deal and buying the right property at the right price.

Seth: I'm curious, because I know what you're talking about in terms of there were things you just had to learn for yourself and no course was going to teach you. I had plenty of things. That's actually a big part of why I started REtipster. Yeah. Because I knew there were a lot of things that, like, you just learn from the school of hard knocks and there's no course that teaches you that stuff. But are there, like, one or two or three things that come to mind for you where it's like, oh, man, this was the thing I needed to know about and nobody explained this to me. Like what are the big hot button issues where people get the most stuck and the most hurt if they don't know about it?

Alex: Like price per acre being irrelevant for residential land. Like this whole thing of price per acre. It's like, well, you know, land's going for about 10,000 an acre around here. How many times have you heard that from sellers? Like, if I had $10 for every time a seller told me about price per acre, I would never have to work again for the rest of my life. I could just retire on that. I just put it in like a low yield savings account and I would just live off the income from that principle.

Guys, the majority of land in America, 97% of America is undeveloped, rural undeveloped land. And in that, in that mix, in that percentage of the land in America, the majority of that property, it's not going to be good for a major subdivision. The economics aren't there. The utilities aren't there. The housing demand is not there. So in that mix of property, I mean, you have like a lot of timberland, forests, you have a lot of agricultural land, farmland, you have a lot of like residential land. But all of that fundamentally, in terms of the highest and best use from a zoning standpoint, it's all residential land, farmland, agricultural land. The actual value of a piece of farmland is going to be when you measure it as farm property. It's a lower dollar value. If you can put one house on that farmland, it just transforms the market value of an individual property. So when you know how to look at property, what you realize is that the actual marketplace, the value it's going to put on a piece of land in terms of the actual, the most you can get when you sell a property, it's going to be looking through the lens of using that property for a single home. And so the acreage on a property, the size of a property, has very little to do with the value of a property.

Almost nothing because, and everyone acts like it does. Everyone's like, oh, it's a price per acre. Does it depend on the zoning and the property and the market and where it is? Zoning, yeah.

Like, let's say the reason you know that acreage is not the driver is you could have a one acre home site just like this in a nice subdivision with high value homes, flat, cleared, open, surrounded by mature hardwood trees, nice forest, nice privacy, a private community. Whether this is your backyard here, this could be a half acre, the lot could be an acre, it could be two acres, but it doesn't change the value because it's the quality of the land. It's the quality and location of the property that drives it. Versus if you drive a quarter mile in any direction and there's a 14 acre swamp, it's less valuable. And the reason it's less valuable has nothing to do with the acreage. It has to do with the quality of the land and how the market assigns value based on what you can do on a property.

For example, the idea is that from a marketplace and economic perspective, if you look in Manhattan, if you look at like a 4,000 square foot building lot in Manhattan versus a 4,000-acre property, attractive farmland, rural land north of Albany in upstate New York, the small building lot in Manhattan is going to be more valuable because you can generate more rent at that location. You can build a structure that gives you an exclusive claim on that location. And that's what land is. People talk about land in terms of size and that's only one aspect of it. What land is, is location. The first three rules, as you know, real estate are location, location, location, but the market for location is the land market. So it's always going to be about the quality and location of a property and what the value will be of the finished construction at that location.

Have you ever seen like a legit appraisal on vacant land from a licensed appraiser?

Seth: Of course. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what your experience, how many you've seen or anything, but like what were your thoughts when you saw it? Like did it seem right?

Alex: No, totally off. Yes.

Seth: Yeah. I mean that was my experience too. A few times I've seen, I mean it's, but like it's funny because the bank treats it like the gospel truth. They use price per acre. It's like their core methodology.

Alex: Yeah. And it's, guys, and so when I hear a seller talk about price per acre, let me ask you this, Seth. When a seller talks to you about price per acre, are they a cash seller? Is there a deal there? Or are they a retail seller, if you had to guess?

Seth: I mean you used a retail one. They're a retail seller.

Alex: Yeah, they're not, they're not your seller. It's like, well, you know, price per acre, if I can get 10 an acre. Here's how the conversation goes. They have like a 14.73 acre property and you talk to them and it's like, you know, if you had to guess, you know, how much you would need for that land. He said, well, you know, if I could get 12 an acre. And it's like, so 12 times 14, so this is what? 168,750. And they're like, I don't know. They don't even know what they're asking. They just think about per acre. They don't even know what the price is. All they think about is per acre. That is never going to be a cash seller. There's always and forever going to be not only a retail seller, but one of those retail sellers that you see on Zillow, if you go on Zillow, that overprices their listing and it never sells. Because they're not even a retail seller.

Because a retail seller is going to sell at the market price. But I don't think that a lot of those people will because they have this idea of how they're not, I don't need to sell it, you know. It's price per acre, this and that and the other. But they're just not sellers. And that's the reality.

Seth: Yeah. I was just talking with Luis a couple episodes ago. He got this property, I forget how many acres it was, like 400 something acres, I think, in Texas that they bought and ended up subdividing and making millions on it. But like the reason they made so much was because there was a giant aquifer right underneath it. Yeah. And they had water access, which is like key in most of Texas. If that wasn't true, that land would be worth who knows how little. But it's one of the things to your point, like acreage, I mean I don't want to say it's nothing, but like without the other components in there, yeah, like it doesn't really tell you that much.

Alex: It's, acreage is significant, but it's not the most significant thing. And it's not even like top three or top five. And just to challenge myself, I would say location, I would say neighborhood home values, I would say zoning, I would say topography, I would say soil. You can quickly think of a half dozen or so or more things that will drive the market price of a property more than acreage.

Seth: So actually before we get into the YouTube stuff, do you want to talk anything about like, are you still buying stuff right now or not really?

Alex: Not, I just, it's a time thing.

Seth: Okay, so not really. Okay. Let's see here. Maybe we could talk about any specific deals if you want to talk about examples of like great or terrible ones?

Alex: Let's get into that.

Seth: Okay. Sure. The great or the terrible ones?

Alex: Both.

Seth: Okay. So let's talk about some real life examples here. Tell me about one of your best deals. Yeah. Like what's a great deal? What made it so great? How'd you find it? Tell me the whole story.

Alex: So the thing is on my best deal and all my best deals, I negotiate price with the seller on the phone on the first call. And after I walk away from the phone call, I don't know if I got a good price. I don't know if I overpaid. I don't know if I'm paying too much. For whatever reason, as I was starting out, the common thread with all the best deals I did was a lack of certainty. It was like, is that good? Is that going to be okay?

The most we made on a flip was there's a property in Broadway, North Carolina. It's in, I believe, Harnett County. I sent a mailer on a 46-acre piece of farmland and talked to the seller that really, he lived in South Carolina, he was retired. He had moved away from that location and he was trying to simplify his finances and everything. And the property was like really nice, but it was landlocked because it had a highway to the north, but it was a limited access highway. So you couldn't actually get into the interior of the property. But what he told me, he's like, hey, I have another 46 acres to the south and it connects up to the main road on the other side on the south. And I looked at that property and I was like, oh, my God. And I saw it like from Street View. I saw some of the photos. I'll give you some of the media on this property so you can see it.

Seth: Yeah, let's show some B-roll.

Alex: Yeah. And so I was, but for 96 acres, I didn't really know my comps because on the 46, I had, I think I priced it at like 138 or something on a blind offer. And I was looking at comps on like between 50 to 100 acre property that had sold in that nearby area. And like the highest one I saw was like 415 or 420 money. And the problem when you negotiate with sellers, like you can't be indecisive. You're never going to have the full information on what that land is worth and what you can pay. So you have to have a system for quickly identifying and estimating value.

So I saw a price signal into the 400s, and I also saw that this guy was inclined to accept the offer on the 46 acres at 138. So he's got the other 46 acres. The one I priced at 138, I couldn't even buy for that because it was landlocked and he knew it. He knew he had to sell them both together. So I was looking at it like, well, if he's a player at 138 on the first 46 acres, if we buy the 92 acres, then maybe he would take 240. And I'm just like kind of feeling like 138 times two, that's like 276 or something. It's like it feels high, but maybe I get a volume discount. And that's how I explained it to him. It's like, look, we'd be thrilled to buy both, but the one's landlocked so it needs the other one. And the access on the one to the south, it kind of comes in, it's like bottleneck, so it's probably not going to be a big development property. But it's a great large tract rural home site, is some of the best farmland in the world on the northern field, the landlocked field. My soil scientist, when he later went out there, he was like, Alex, I don't know how you found this. And he's like, he was literally like, the less I know the better. I don't want to know. But on that call, I was like, hey, you know, I'd be happy to buy both together, but I probably have to be at like 240,000. And I pause and he was like, okay.

So the letter, I told him to annotate, put the second, kind of annotate and mark up the letter because you don't want to have to send the second letter out or whatever. Some of these old school sellers, you tell them to grab a pen and you tell them how to annotate the purchase agreement to indicate strikethrough, initial, put the new price in, put the other, the property in, whatever. And it came back about a week later in the mail.

And the agent that sold it was this guy at National Land Realty named Paul Goins, who some people who watch this video that have done deals in eastern North Carolina will know Paul. And he's helped us a lot. But when he walked it, he went out on like an ATV and like he actually met the seller out there before we bought it and he knew how to kind of play it cool with the seller and stuff. And what Paul was great at was he understood that sometimes when you market property, expectations are self-fulfilling. Sometimes agents are too scientific about value and they're like, well, you know, the comps are like low 400s. Maybe we start at like 425. If we have to drop price, we could start at 399. I just don't want to overprice it. But Paul's whole thing is like, we're going to list it at $499. He's like, and they can offer $480, but that's not going to get it. He's like, this property is $499. And I was like, really? And so I got it funded and you don't know. You don't know. All you can do is say, here's the evidence we have, here's the due diligence that we have, et cetera. And so on that whole thing, you don't know.

Seth: Totally agree with that. If you don't know, how do you confidently comp properties in the first place when you really don't know what it's going to sell for?

Alex: Yeah, well, so there I had an idea of value. My thought was like 400 to 450. But when I say I don't know, you just, you got to roll the dice. The buyer sets the price. That's all I mean by that. We had an idea of the value of it. Paul supported our price estimate even higher than we thought. And he has credibility. So he had sold tracts of land like that. He had swagger. He had buyers. And so you always want to triangulate with multiple sources. And we teach that in our program where when you have an idea of how to estimate land values, you can really read the tea leaves and make qualitative comparisons between property. But it's so helpful to triangulate with other local experts, local market experts. So we brought it to market.

And at $499, and then that was a Friday. And then on that Saturday, we had an offer at $500,000.

Seth: Nice.

Alex: So I think that property sold at $500,000. It was, in terms of gross profit, it was over $200,000. And it was like basically a 50-50 split with a partner, something like that. Yeah. So that's the best. And we had a couple in the high five figures, like, you know, $60,000, $80,000, $75,000.

Seth: Meaning your split? Because a lot of these were funded by partners?

Alex: So some of these there's other properties that had pretty big spreads too. What was happening at that time is like it was, it was an interesting time in the market because it was really, it was a seller's market, but the sellers didn't really know it, you know? The market was really, and the buyers didn't know it, you know? It was just all happening. And so I think for every one of those, you have maybe one or two that don't go as well.

The commonality with the great deals is great property, the special property.

Seth: When you say great or special, what makes it special?

Alex: There's certain attributes of certain properties. On that one, we call it, it was on Rosser-Pittman Road. So on the Rosser-Pittman Road property, it was a large track rural home site, like nothing you could find in the area. In terms of acreage, in terms of the cleared cropland, in terms of the location, in terms of the privacy, because the access on the southern part of that property was something like, it was something like 30 feet or 40 feet. But if it were 60, you'd have sufficient width to have a two-lane driveway, one lane coming in, one lane going out. But without that width, you don't have, you don't have the makings of a major subdivision because you have a certain traffic count with the major subdivision, which means that you need certain traffic counts. And then that has to do with like the driveway standards and you didn't have that.

So Paul was trying to at one point, he had door knocked the church to the south because he was like really getting into this project. He had door knocked, I guess like the pastor at the church, because he was trying to get 20 feet of width on that driveway to see if we could trade 20 feet for like a couple acres behind the church. But it was just too slow moving or it was like it would have been, we had closing coming up and we kind of knew what we had.

And when I asked Paul, I was like, well, so if we don't get that driveway, you say it's gonna sell for $499. What happens if we don't get that driveway and our buyer's not a developer? It's like a farmer or single family home builder, home buyer. And he's like, still $499, you know? And because it's the same land, it's qualitatively the same property. And it's just the property is what it is. And it wouldn't have been a perfect development tract because you could probably only put like 40 or 50 homes. And sometimes, according to Paul, in that market, a lot of the builders, they wanted to build like 65 homes because they know their metrics and their economies and they want to build a certain volume to be able to break even and make money. And so there's all those metrics that go into that.

But as a single home site, it was just privacy, location, farmland. And they had a bunch of timberland, too. So it was, it was something like not, it was 92 acres and then there was 40 or 50 acres of cleared farmland and like 30 or 40 acres in a timber program. So it was like a state park in your backyard. It was unbelievable.

Seth: Well, tell me about a deal that didn't go well. Yeah.

Alex: So we had one, a recent one that we made a mistake on. Thinking of this is the best example. I think it is. We bought a portfolio of building lots from an attorney in Bladen County, North Carolina. I don't think that he, there was no ill will on his part. Basically, they were non-conforming lots because they were smaller than the current minimum zoning standards for that zoning ordinance, that zoning district. You probably bought lots like that, too, right?

The thing with non-conforming lots is that they might be 0.4 acres, but the minimum dimensional standard is 0.6 acres now that the new zoning ordinance was updated. And so that was the case on these properties. It was something like seven contiguous properties. And in the zoning ordinance, we called the zoning director. What we found out was that for most legal non-conforming property, as long as you meet the current setbacks, you can still build. So the fact that it's non-compliant doesn't really get in the way of home construction because we knew that they're nice little square lots, they have great sandy soil, you could put a septic anywhere. And we knew that we had seven home sites. But we bought them thinking that we would sell them piecemeal or as a portfolio to a local builder, because there's demand for housing in that area. It's a good location, good property, cheap property. So you can build manufactured. And so you have an ability to build there.

I got a call because the agent that was listing it, he actually was with his dad, the guy that ended up buying it. And it was funny because we didn't anticipate it because his dad is hooked up with a local builder down there. And he called me and he was like, hey, there's this issue with zoning where they say we can only build three homes. And I was like, what? No, it's seven lots. He's like, no, no, but it's nonconforming. And I said, yeah, I know, but you have the setbacks.

And what he told me was you have the setbacks, but the problem is that when the two nonconforming lots are contiguous, there's a clause in the zoning ordinance that says that when you have nonconforming lots next to each other, you have to treat them as one contiguous property until you meet the setbacks. So in other words, we didn't have seven home sites. We had three. And so we made, I mean really we broke even. We might have made like 300 bucks after everything on that. I've never lost money on a flip because when you buy right, even if you miss stuff or make mistakes, if you buy right and you do thorough due diligence, you at least know that your capital is safe. Where the issues would lose, like where you take a haircut on your capital, it's going to be an issue of access or can you build, meaning soil or wetlands or septic. Like if you don't know how to run due diligence, you can miss stuff like that. So we had some close calls, but that was probably the worst deal at the highest. We bought it at like 36K, we were into it at like 40K, we sold it at like 47K, and then like we just broke even. Yeah.

Seth: Do you have any thoughts on like the moral or ethical dilemma of offering people so much less than what the property is actually worth? Like knowing that, buying it, doing maybe nothing, maybe a little bit of work to make it better, and then selling it for way more. How do you think through that? Like does it ever bother you, or yeah, just walk you through your thought process. How do you sleep well at night?

Alex: Well, so the thing is there's a reason you get those discounts on land. There's a reason you can buy at discounts. The reason is it's in a liquid market. There's not that many buyers for any one property in the market.

And for that reason, there's really uncertainty on the actual price of the property. What that land is going to sell for is never fully known. Even if it is known, you have to get the property listed on the market.

You have to pay a little bit of money to get it marketable. You got to hire the agent. You got to pay the agent commission and roll the dice. And you got to take market risk.

You got to have your capital tied up. You've got to put the effort in. You've got to supervise the agent. Most agents don't know how to sell land, by the way. So there's that.

And some listing agents won't sell land. Meaning even if they sign the listing agreement, they have self-limiting beliefs about the property or about the value of the property where they have self-limiting habits.

Like they don't pick the phone up or a combination where it just like won't sell. Like on any timeline with certain agents, they like won't allow it to sell. So there's issues.

It's not a stock where when you buy or sell on E-Trade, it's like priced out to the market. So there's always that illiquidity. So the buyer that makes an offer below market.

The seller knows the game and the buyer and buyers should say that, like you should tell people that you're an investor. You should tell people that you're trying to do some light improvements on the land and then turn it around and find a home buyer or a long-term buyer who's going to want to build a home there.

That's what we would always say. It's like, what are you going to do with the land? That's a big thing you get from sellers. What are you going to do with the land? Is something happening? What are you going to do with land?

What I tell them is, look, our job is to acquire the property from you. The first thing we're going to do from what the first thing we're going to do with the land is buy it from you for $26,000.

And you're not going to have to do any work because this is what we do. And we're going to cover all the closing costs and we're going to make it happen. So you don't have to worry about all that.

Now, down the line, what we're going to do is we're going to get that land permitted. We're going to make sure we complete a research on that property to make sure we have an understanding of what you can do with the property, how you can build the property.

We're going to take photos of the property. We're going to market the property with the intention of finding an end buyer that's going to want to buy it probably to build a home.

So I always tell the seller, look, what the land that you own is always, in my view, worth more than what I can afford to pay you, sometimes significantly more. But it's not it's not all that. It's not a cakewalk and it's not some like poker chip at Atlantic City that you can just walk it up to the window. It just doesn't work like that.

And when you explain here's option A, here's option B, and you just give them you paint the option for them. And like option B is, you know, I'll pay you $26,000 cash. Three weeks and that's it.

A lot of sellers are going to want to work with you. And when they know that you're making money and they know that you're running a business, they trust you more because it's, even if it's less than they want to accept to sell that property, it's real.

The constraint that you have and the business and the profit incentive that you have makes it real for the seller and that they trust you.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it makes sense to me.

Yeah I remember there was I have mine didn't start I'm not gonna get into it I want to hear it maybe later maybe later well we have a lot to cover yeah that's true okay.

But what about you I want to I want to get in what was your best deal was it that yeah your best deal yeah was it you told a story and I want to I want to hear from you I don't want to step on the on on your answer, but you told a story of a landlocked property you bought once. Can you tell that story?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was that was my best deal in terms of like ROI. Right. And it was just easy.

So there was a I think it was a five acre parcel in Benton County, Washington. And the property owner had submitted their property to me on my website. It's totally organic. I didn't pay for an ad or anything. Just showed up in my inbox one day and I saw that it was landlocked and in a pretty rural area.

And I was just honest with the guy like this is landlocked. I'm like I can't get to it so it's not that useful. I'll give you 500 bucks for it and he's like okay let's do it and it was super simple.

He signed the deed. We were done. It's like one of the easiest closings ever and I just kind of sat on the property for probably like eight or nine months I think it was because I was just busy. Didn't have a whole lot of time to do it.

When I finally got around to listing the thing, I put it on Craigslist. And within 23 hours of me putting out there, the neighboring property owner reached out to me and offered me $25,000 for this property.

And it was one of those things where, like, he was, like, one of the only people in the world who would have paid that. But, like, he would have paid that and maybe even more because it was, like, right there.

It's kind of like this land behind me here I only own about 30 feet into the woods and beyond that is my neighbor and they own most of the woods there and I've actually talked with them before, like if you ever want to like sell that or develop it like talk to me first like I'll I'll pay whatever you need to make sure it doesn't get developed like I want that land.

But I'm like the only person in the world who would care about it right. It's in my backyard but otherwise it's landlocked. So it's just one of those unique situations.

But I guess it highlights the importance of talking to the neighbors. And by that particular deal, I think it was like 4,900% ROI. And it wasn't just that. It was like, it was just how easy it was.

It was weird, the lack of obstacles, the lack of problems, how fast it was. Like everybody just did what they were supposed to do. I don't know. But it was awesome.

Seth: And probably if you had sold it to any other buyer on the market, what do you think it would have sold for?

Alex: Man, I don't know. It's a good question.

Seth: If you had to guess. I mean, if it was just a random person, I mean, maybe. Any other person besides a neighbor who had adjoining land?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, who did not have a joining land? Yeah. Like, what would be the market price to anyone who's not an adjacent neighbor?

Man, I got to think $5,000 would be overpaying for it. But maybe somebody would have done that. That's it.

And so, it's probably a little luck that the neighbor was in the market. And I would say there's a little luck that I was able to sell Ross or Pittman at 500 grand.

But sometimes you get bad luck. It's not all good luck. Not everything works out. And so sometimes little things work out. And that probably put a lot of wind in your sails in terms of marketing, in terms of the actual business or operating expenses at that time. It's like, man, we can really use that money in the business.

Seth: Yeah, it was awesome. It was amazing. I wish there was a way to just reverse engineer that and make that exact deal happen again and again. But I don't know.

I think it is, like you said, there's a little bit of luck to it. But if you're in the market doing deals, stuff like that will fall into your life from time to time. But you've got to be out there.

There was a I don't know if you do you watch any of the household sellers? Like Jerry Norton, Brent Daniels.

Alex: Yeah. So Jameel Damji, Pace Morby. I've been watching those guys for a while.

Seth: And there was this great like podcast debate that they had about like on-market versus off-market, which is better for house deals and for real estate deals.

And I think it was like Jerry and Jameel were on-market and then it was Brent and maybe Pace were off-market. But Brent told this incredible story about how someone on his team in Arizona, because he's down there in Phoenix, called him.

This was like recent. He's like he's like made it. He's one of the big house wholesalers and one of the one of the big markets for real estate investment, home renovation in Phoenix.

And one of his people that works under him, they just called him one day. He's like, I just got a property under contract on a full six-figure deal in like 12 hours from a walk.

And Brent was just kind of like, really? Like tell me about it. And I was like, okay. So I went to like go get lunch at the spot that I normally go get lunch at. And I was like, there was like a long line. So I parked outside and I went and I got my sandwich.

And when I came out, I walked the long way around back to my car. And as I was walking back to the block, there was this property that looked like it was vacant. And on a whim, I decided to just knock on the neighbor's door to see if they knew who lived next door.

They like knew the neighbor next to them. They didn't really talk much, but they had their phone number. And then the long story short, within 12 hours, he called the property owner. They talked for a couple hours.

Seth: He got the thing under contract.

Alex: That story's ridiculous. And like I'm not saying that like that's going to happen to everyone. That's also luck. But that guy was in a place where he could walk up to a seller and get the property under contract on a six-figure deal.

And so I don't know when the luck is going to hit. But as long as you prepare yourself to be a buyer and to be that person in the market that can get these deals done, when those opportunities drop in your lap.

And they'll drop in your lap ten times before you're even done with this thing. You'll have an opportunity. It'll come knocking on your door. And I think if you're involved in the deal flow and you know what you're doing, you're like building your skill set in understanding how to close a deal.

You'll be able to take advantage of it when the opportunity presents itself. And if you can't, you know, you can maybe network somebody and wholesale it and get paid on it. That's the thing I really love about this community.

It's like it's a growing space. There's so many different players like in the land industry. And a lot of them, they're like, they're not all great. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to say they're all perfect.

Seth: But we're all working together and like moving together. And so it's a really cool time. It's really a cool moment. So right now I'm really grateful to be a part of that. And it's fun, man.

Alex: It's like it's fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ultimately it comes down to preparing yourself to take advantage of an opportunity when it comes along.

And like you have to kind of lay the groundwork and prepare yourself so that you're ready for that. But if you never do that and you just sit around trying to get lucky, you're never going to get lucky because you're not going to be ready for it when it actually arrives. Right.

Seth: So along those lines, I'm curious, you know, you work pretty hard to make all this stuff.

You've got your land school. You've got your YouTube channel. Like you've got a lot of stuff that you're pumping out into the world and you've seen how much effort it takes to produce some of that content and put it out there.

What is the end goal for you? Is it to like, I think I may have you say this in a video somewhere, but is it just to get people to take you seriously as a real player in the space and buy land from you and call you first?

Or do you want to, you know, make revenue from the educational products themselves? Like what's the end goal in all this? Like if everything you wanted to have happen happened, what would that mean for you?

Alex: Man, that's a that's a great question. And I think in some ways I don't even fully know what I'm doing or like what I want out of this.

I think primarily what I will tell you is that I got so much joy out of creating a course that was valuable and that I put real effort in and that I tried to basically build a product that I wished existed when I first got started.

The first course that I made, I didn't do that. The second course that I made, I said, I'm going to make the Land Investing 101 that I wish existed when I got started. I want it to be comprehensive. I want it to be start to finish.

I want it to really introduce someone to land and I want it to be like priced right. I don't want it to be thousands of dollars because that's not necessarily what I can offer just yet. And I think landing on that and knowing that it was valuable.

And then opening up my inbox and like looking at testimonials that were coming in and seeing the success that other people were having from that information has been like the most like gratifying thing.

Like there's no question that flipping land is fun. And there's no question you can make money land investing and you can build a business that's like real. I did that. I feel like I proved that to myself.

But what I can't prove to myself is that people would actually benefit from what I'm doing to the extent where it becomes and they can actually really do it and be successful.

So when you get those messages and you get those people that actually subscribe to your channel, they watch the videos, they send you messages, they call you, they want to work with you.

Like I would say getting involved in education has been something that I've enjoyed more than just investing. And so I'm kind of at this turning point where I'm like rethinking, you know, how I operate and how I run this business.

But I think what I've really liked about what I'm doing currently is I'm building a YouTube channel that is about sharing everything that I'm doing in the business.

And I don't put anything off limits. I mean, there's some stuff I can't talk about that's personal to other people. But there's no like sacred cow where I'm like hiding anything and trying to box that information. So the idea is to like just share what I'm doing.

And then as a result of that, people are seeing what I'm doing, being interested in it, and watching my content. And there are people who come across the YouTube channel and then go watch the course. So that's great.

But it's still, there's terms. And so the terminology, the connective tissue of how these ideas intersect, how to go from A to B to C to D on your first land purchase successfully, there's a little bit of a language that you have to learn.

And so creating an education product that's like a closed loop product that you can put in front of anybody that's willing to learn and that they can be successful, that's really what we're doing now.

And then you really see a lot of demand for community, a lot of demand for people that they want you to hold their hand. And right now, the only reason I don't have time to do that is because I'm focused on getting the YouTube channel up and running.

It's a lot of my bandwidth to do these videos. We're still we're remastering the course or recording and remastering that product. So there's like some product development work that's that's even happening. So I don't even really have the bandwidth.

But I think in the near term, really building community and going deeper with people on problem solving and coaching and mentorship is going to be something that I'll want to explore.

It could be events and masterminds. It could be an ongoing sort of a group coaching, a small group coaching platform. So that's something that I think is going to be in the cards for the next 12 months. We'll start doing something like that.

But I want to do cool stuff and I want to show people how to do cool stuff. And not always from the standpoint of being an investor and making money. Because anybody can make $20,000.

In fact, your first 12 months as an entrepreneur, you may as well be a barista at Starbucks. You're going to make more money. And that's not throwing shade at people that work in Starbucks. It's like a good job. $32,000 is a lot of money.

Like I'm not trivializing that at all. I'm just telling you that they're going to out earn you because as an entrepreneur, it's long periods of time with no reward, long periods of time with no security or guarantees.

All the while, you only have so much in your bank account. And the floor is coming up at you and you're like, this might not work out.

So the business side of all of this, I have a lot to offer. I have a lot of ideas and opinions, but there's a lot of people in the real estate market that they just wanna buy their first property. They wanna build a home.

Or they want to buy a property, invest, and build a home in five years. And they just need a flashlight to do that, a toolkit to understand how to really do that.

And so unlocking that ability for people so that they can live in a more intentional way, that they can acquire property and design their life, their design, their physical environment, build a home just like this beautiful home here on acreage, and live close to nature and live on a property in an environment that inspires them.

I think that's really what I'm interested in in the short term.

Seth: Yeah. Well, I think you definitely have space for a community. I mean, the number of comments this guy gets on his videos is crazy. Like, it's just awesome to see the engagement.

And I haven't even really read through them. I don't know what they're talking about. If they're arguing with each other or just like saying awesome or what. But it just shows me like people want community. Like they have things to say. They want to be heard. They want to talk to each other.

So I think there's definitely something there. Let's pause there. Yeah. take a bathroom and then we could probably wrap it. Sure. Yeah.

This is great. We're probably like two and a half hours in there. Maybe more. Yeah, we've got plenty of content here. We're probably, probably like two and change. Yeah.

And we can maybe, we can honestly just land the plane here on this next one. Unless you have anything else you want to cover.

Alex: No, no, I'm good.

Seth: Burn through some good wood too.

Alex: Mm-hmm, we did. I'm actually shocked that these batteries have not died after all this. It's good karma.

Seth: Yeah. You got any plans the rest of the day or do you want to go for lunch or?

Alex: I'd love to go to lunch. I mean, I don't want to impose, but I would go grab a late lunch or something, whatever you want to do.

Seth: Sure. Yeah, if you want, I mean, take it into downtown Grand Rapids or something just to see what the city is like.

Alex: Let's do it.

Seth: Yeah. Let's do that. It's probably nothing like Philly, but...

Alex: Probably better. You can at least say, hey, I've been to Grand Rapids.

Seth: Exactly. See what that's like. Exactly.

Yeah I nerd out on gear way more than I should.

Alex: No I I need to as well I need to get hold like basically I need to get a new camera and new mics you know.

Seth: I don't I mean you certainly can but I don't know that you really need to like your thing is working.

Alex: Yeah no for sure YouTube is rewarding. The audio's a little bit, it's gotten better, but it's a little rough. And then shooting off the iPhone's not ideal really.

Seth: So you're using the selfie camera for most of your videos?

Alex: All. That's crazy. All. If I had mounted on a tripod and you know.

Seth: It just goes to show.

Alex: It can work.

Seth: Mm-hmm. Okay. So that's recording. That battery's dead, so that's off. I'll cut back in now.

Well, Alex, it has been a pleasure to have you over and to have this fireside chat. I've learned a lot. It's been great to get to know you over the past few weeks.

And yeah, man. Anything you want to close with? If there's a land investor out there or somebody who's even, you know, a consumer looking to buy land. They don't want to be a land flipper. They're just looking for property. Any closing thoughts? Anything like that?

Alex: Well, I would suggest to them to do what I did, which is, and I'm not kidding, I would watch REtipster. If you're watching this and you want to understand how to buy land, you've got to look at the top land buyers in the country.

And so Seth is a guy that I've learned a lot from. I've learned a lot from a lot of the educators, Steve and Jill, Ron and Dan, and a lot of other people I don't want to leave out. But, I mean, it's a very small world.

So if we can be a part of that and we can contribute to the education and the knowledge base out there I'd be grateful to to even be counted next to someone like Seth who's really paved the way for a lot of us.

So watch these videos watch REtipster. If you are interested in learning more about our information go on our channel it's Acrewell Land Company on YouTube that's my only social media I think I might have an old Facebook if you know where to find it but basically that's where you find me.

Seth thanks so much for having me over and hosting me it's been a beautiful day and I hope that this interview has gone over well with the audience I hope you guys have taken some value from it I certainly enjoyed being here.

Seth: Absolutely and thank you for flying all the way out here I was not expecting that but hey you know I don't often get this opportunity I will be sure to link to Alex's YouTube channel beneath this video also.

So if you want to check out the show notes. Retipster.com/244, because this is episode 244. Alex, thank you again. Wish you all the best in your continued success. And I look forward to seeing where the business takes you.

Alex: Thank you, Seth. Appreciate it.

Seth: Yeah, you bet. Bam, done. It's enough work for one day, right?

Alex: Yeah, totally.