Seth: Hey everybody, welcome back to the REtipster podcast. This is a special episode because instead of doing a one-on-one interview, we're bringing together a small group of active land investors for a roundtable conversation about what's really happening in the land business right now. Mike Balcom, the co-founder of Stride, is joining me as the co-host today. And the timing for this is also a little unique because as of this month, it's been about one year since we first launched Stride CRM. Over that time, we've had the chance to work with a lot of land investors across the country. And one of the things that's become really clear is that the market has changed quite a bit. Some things that used to work don't work the same way anymore. And at the same time, there's new opportunities starting to emerge for people who are willing to adapt. So for this episode, I wanted to bring together a handful of investors who are actively in the trenches right now. They're also conveniently all using Stride CRM to run their businesses.

Seth: And these folks are doing deals, testing things and adjusting their strategies and figuring out what works right now. So the goal here is not to create a highlight reel. It's to have an honest conversation about what's working and what's not and what people are doing to stay competitive. And since we've got several voices in the room here, we're going to keep things moving around in kind of a consistent order. The investors we've got on the call today are Katie Desmarais, JT Olmstead, Shelby Wengreen, and Arturo Paturzo. So to start this off, I'd love to just go around the room and have each of you briefly explain what your land business looks like right now. What kinds of deals are you focused on and how would you describe your current niche today? And we'll start with you, Katie.

Katie: All right. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Seth and Mike, for having us all on. Super excited to be here. My husband, Brian, and I, we started our land business back in September of 2023 with the help of Mike, of course, our original mentor and strategist to help us get off and running. Always super appreciative for that. But as of today, our land business, we have a team of 10, including Brian and myself. We primarily focus on flips where we can add value as well as subdivides. So that's currently what we've really been tackling, but also looking to expand over the next couple of months into a more robust double close strategy as well.

Seth: Awesome. JT, what about you?

JT: Yeah, I think right now, as far as what my business looks like today, it's evolved a lot over the years. And so currently we are around a team of 10 as well, kind of mix of sales and operations. And we're primarily focused on kind of the same thing we've been done from the beginning. And it's been a lot of things have changed in the last year quite a bit. But we've kind of circled all kind of full circle and come back to primarily focusing on flips when they make sense and really looking for just standard, easy to execute, like minor land divisions. We fund those are kind of the two bread and butter repeal[?] processes we can do across the country.

Seth: Great. Shelby, what about you?

Shelby: Yeah, I'm Shelby. I primarily focus on flipping rural vacant land as well as some light value adds and minor subdivides when it makes sense. I come from a much smaller team. It's me, an acquisitions manager and a VA, but overall still using Stride and love it. Awesome. All right. How about you? What's your business look like right now? Hi, Seth. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. So I've been doing this since 2021. I'm Italian. You can spot from my I pretend to have an Italian accent. Right. And I also have a day job. I'm an active duty Navy officer in Italy. So my business is, I would say 70% flips.

Arturo: And 20% minor and the plot[?] exempted subdivide and the 10% entitlements, even if, as you said, I am not in love with entitlements, but I think that that's why there is not a lot of people doing that.

Seth: Yeah. So I know change is a common theme that I've been hearing from a lot of land investors over the past year or two. So I'm curious, how has your businesses all changed over the past year? And if the answer is it hasn't, that's fine, too. I'm just curious, have you found it necessary to, you know, change the deal types you're going after or the markets or strategy or team size or anything like that? Start with you, Katie. Sure. No, that's a great question. So I would say a little more than a year ago, we were much more flip heavy and reactive at times. Today, we are much more structured as a team, running multiple strategies in parallel, much more intentional with like our lead routing and the deal types. What we've really built out is dedicated acquisition roles sort of all throughout the process from first conversation to closing and added in a lot more support around disposition because we were so acquisition heavy and we had so many different deals under contracts and getting through because we do a ton of value ads, getting through all of the due diligence.

JT: Getting the right title company, the right agency. Place, getting the engineer actually completed, engineering actually completed, and getting it resold and across the finish line became sort of a bottleneck for us. So we really started to expand on our Dispo support and then certainly our marketing infrastructure and how we're utilizing our CRM, right, to do a lot of the work for us from an automation and an AI standpoint. So we're we're no longer really looking at something as like, is this a deal? We're really asking ourselves like, what type of deal is this going to be best suited for between our multifaceted marketing and our multifaceted dispo? Oh, very interesting.

Seth: Uh, JT, I know we were talking offline a little bit about how your business has changed over the past year. What would you say are some of the biggest changes for you?

JT: Yeah. And honestly, it feels like we entered 2025, uh, doing the same thing we've done forever. And by the time we got to mid 2025, we realized that it wasn't working. It just had stopped working. And so when that realization came, I feel like I've rebuilt my business every 60 days since that point, uh, basically trying to figure out what is going to work. Like if the previous strategy like no longer is executing like it needs to and things just aren't working as they have, then what is it going to look like now? And just, you know, transparently, that has changed a lot for us. We just keep testing new versions, new marketing strategies, new like lead funnels, where we want to go. So at the moment, we've kind of circled, gone full circle, as I mentioned earlier, all the way back to what we've been doing since the beginning, which was when a flip makes sense, we will do it. But we are then consistently looking at, OK, how do we make this deal? Or does the steel[?] fit our box, I should say, for a minor land division? Because we've done enough of those that we know what a good MLD looks like. And so they just make for easy plays to force appreciation. And I think that's the big shift for us is we've kind of, especially recently been, and think more along those veins, instead of just attempting to find value, as I would describe it in the past, we're moving more towards plays that are focused on adding value, right? We're forcing that value. Shelby, how about you? Yeah, great question. A year ago, I was kind of casting a wide net and mailing a lot of different areas, kind of being broad with my approach. And most deals I was getting back were somewhere in like the $9,000 to $12,000 profit range.

Seth: I started realizing that I really like making more money per deal. So I got more intentional with my market selection and what kind of deals I go after. So now we're kind of targeting like $20,000 plus deals. And we start looking at every deal as if it were a flip. And if it doesn't fit that buy box, then we expand into other avenues like double close, subdivide or a value add to force appreciation or just get it at a price that makes sense.

Seth: Awesome. Art, what about you?

Arturo: Well, for us, the change is continuous. It's very tough to, you know, I mean, you change something and you already need to change it because things go so fast. And so to assess, adapt and win, we try to take decisions in the fast way, the fastest way, even if it's not the perfect decision. So before we were a little more careful about what we have to do here. We were thinking we're losing time. Now we try to decide the start. We have changed the deal size. Now for our standard flips, we go from 50,000 market value and up for we had like we were starting from a 30,000. Market value. The team has grown up one year ago, actually February, 2025, I hired my first acquisition manager. It was me and was my generalist VA. Now it's me, two acquisition managers, the VA that works now into Dispo, a disposition manager and transaction coordinator, and an office manager for the physical office that I have in the US. And this, of course, This includes also, you need to train the people. So you need to change also regarding how you manage these people. It's not just like the operations per se.

Seth: Another thing that we changed, and I think really, I suggest everyone to do it because even if we started just actually one month ago and we didn't buy anything with owner financing, to use owner financing to buy is really a game changer. I mean, we have a lot of people. Normally, it's like Shelby, we start with a cash offer and then double close. If it doesn't go, we go with the owner financing. And the reason why it's so effective, I believe, is because it's always a solution for someone who is not in a rush to sell. The difference with double closing is that you have skin in the game.

JT: So the seller sees that you are putting money. And if you don't, you know, if something happens, you default. He's keeping the down payment. He's keeping the installments that you've paid. So we found it to be very appealing. Besides, it's also a good strategy to buy a minor subdivide and, you know, partial release and this kind of stuff. Underwriting has become extremely important. I also have an underwriter, actually, I forgot to mention. He's Egyptian that is doing quite a good job. And we are in the process to hire a project manager for our minor subdivide. So I would like to take myself a little bit out of the business, stay on the business and see the other working. I don't know if it will be possible, but that's the goal. With that buying with seller financing, is that usually a solution in the end because you're like paying them full market value? Or like, why is that such an effective thing when other things don't work? Not normally. I mean, we are pretty successful with our double closings because you can offer a higher offer compared to the cash price. We generally, depending on the price point.

Seth: We can arrive offer like, you know, if you have a piece of land that is $600,000, I can arrive to offer $450,000. I mean, I'm happy with $150,000 profit on double closing. The problem is that when you go there, sometimes we also offer non-refundable EMD on the double closing. The problem is always when they ask, what if you don't close? I mean, what is your skin in the game?

Seth: And there is a lot of people that has been burned by wholesalers. I don't want to talk bad about wholesalers. So I think that you buy on your financing, you gave them a down payment and you pay like a monthly installment of that and you explain, hey, this stays with you if it happens that I don't sell because I'm very open. Whether it is a double closer and financing, I'm very open. I don't hide anything. They know exactly how it works. So they know that I'm going to market the property. They know that I'm going to sell. Parts of the property in case it's subdivided. And so I found this to be quite appealing on a seller that could be a little bit skeptical on double closings. We're kind of getting into it, Artis, telling us something that is working for him right now, but for the rest of you, what is actually working for you right now, in 2026, to generate deals? Like which marketing channels are working for you, which lead types, which markets or strategies are really producing results, Katie?

JT: So I would say, and this kind of goes in with the like what has changed, what's working for us is that we were previously focusing externally a lot from a marketing perspective and multifaceted. So sending out messages, having folks calling. And a big shift that we did this past year was we actually brought all of those folks internally into our CRM to focus on all of the leads that did say yes at some point. Because if a business owner is very defined on what qualifies a lead for their company, those should only be what is entering into your CRM. And so what's working is a really, really strong and intentional follow-up cadence. Because if we think about the amount of touches that we were able to do two, three, four, five years ago, we are doing exponentially more today.

Seth: And so by really reworking those old leads, you know, sellers who were previously maybe too high, people who didn't convert the first time, people who, yes, then ghosted us and putting a lot of our power into people who at least gave us positivity at one point and entered our CRM. We have now created a hybrid follow-up between automations within stride, whether it's texting, emails, call reminders for tasks, plus the human touch. And that has allowed us to, yes, increase our marketing over time because we have had to to really stay current. But by coupling that, we're taking advantage of leads that we essentially have already paid for and nurtured so far. So would you say, like compared to a few years ago, you're just hitting them a lot more frequently to get a deal?

Seth: Correct. Yes. So the amount of follow-up has increased, whether you're triple dialing them for two days and then double dialing them for two weeks. But then coupling that with some of the automations in the AI technology that we have has allowed us to still focus on the human touch, but also support us in that follow-up because it's taking way more follow-up today to get people back on the hook. Yeah. What percentage of those touches would you say are human versus just automated? So it depends on where they're at within Stride. So if they're in our seller leads, they're receiving, I would say, 90% communication from a human, somebody on our team. But once they move to our cold leads, they are essentially receiving almost almost pretty much everything is coming from an automation of some sort until we get a favorable response. And then we go back to them as a team. Yeah. I'll just mention Mike Balcom is also a master at this. He's taught me a lot about how to think about this the right way and like when to automate it versus like a human touch. We actually put together a blog post a few months back, really trying to crystallize this. And pretty much all that came from Mike is he's the genius in that realm more so than me, but...

JT: I am real quick on this, Katie, out of curiosity. So you have 10 new leads in your pipeline. Okay. How many of those 10 leads, assuming all these 10 leads are eventually going to become a contract, how many of those are becoming a contract the week that they come into your pipeline? And what percentage is actually done on the follow-up side of things, would you say? I would say out of 10, you may convert zero to one in the same lead. Let's just be real.

Seth: That's only 10 leads. So it could be none in theory, right? So the majority of the people that we close are not necessarily going to be on the week that they're coming into the CRM. And for that first 30 days, they're only receiving a human touch. Thereafter, if we don't hear for them or they say they're not interested, we determine that they want over market value, then they'll move to our cold leads where we can use systems to support us on leads that are not top, top priority.

JT: Well, I can't believe it. It's been a whole year of Stride. We've come a long way to celebrate our one-year anniversary. We've got some pretty awesome new things to talk about, right, Mike? Absolutely. I can't believe it's been a whole year already. Yeah, no kidding. So one of the huge things we've been working on is mail. So you can now send direct mail from right within Stride. All the mail you want to send, it's right there. What else we got going on? Oh, wait, there's more. I also heard you got one of the best masterminds in town and you're actually opening that up to all of our stride users, as well as even putting them in little pods, like their own miniature masterminds, which I actually heard rumors that you've done this before with some people from our tipster and they're still meeting to this day, even though it's been years and years. Yeah, it's true. Done it before and don't do this a lot, but I'm doing it again. That's unbelievable. I know too. We also got some stride perks going on there. So we started to actually build relationships with some of our biggest service providers out there to actually just offer bigger discounts to our users, things you won't really be able to find anywhere else. And we got a brand new affiliate program going on where if you're a Stride user and you refer someone, we'll give you your next month free in Stride. Well, hang on, hang on. That's like 300 bucks we're giving them, right? I mean, yeah, it pretty much is. I meant to run that by you first. Can we afford this? Let's talk about the stuff where we just go public with it, Mike. Come on.

Seth: We're here now. So, and let's not forget either about our project management. We also built this out. This is something you won't be able to find anywhere else. It's almost like having Notion within your CRM. So it's actually a really good way to just manage all these deals, whether you're doing subdivides, value adds, or you need to do things that aren't in the everyday business, like updating your LLC docs or anything like that. It's incredible how far we've come. That's amazing. So 2026 is going to be an amazing year for Stride. If you're not already a member, probably want to check it out. There's a lot going on and it's going to get even better. Be sure to check out stridecrm.co and let's get back into the episode. JT, anything working for you particularly well this year? Yeah, I wish I would definitely echo everything that's said by Katie and there, y'all. It's like, why? Follow-up is the end of the game for sure. I would say that I wish I had a clear answer right now on what is the best marketing channel that seems to be delivering for us. Transparency, I have no idea. That's what we're actually trying to figure out for us, is what is the best marketing channel that's going to deliver? We've tried several things.

JT: Obviously historically we've done a lot of mail a lot of blind offers as we saw the yield on that get worse and worse. We kind of cycled through various different types of strategies we thought would fit well with our team dynamics and our sales funnels that we hat at the time. Right now, we are currently doing a lot of cold calling and kind of have a lot of our leads are almost 100% cold call right now, kind of funneled through our sales system. I would say the thing that is for sure working for us is really understanding our sales numbers, right? Our marketing numbers, what is our cost per lead, right? What is our cost to acquire a contract, Right. Like really dialing that in and tracking that well has like brought to the surface a lot of things that we thought we knew and then clarified things were like, oh, it turns out we had no idea what that actually cost or, you know, how long it actually takes to get this lead. So we're still working on that actively. Right. Like the higher fidelity we have, the more data we have on our sales funnel, all the way from lead generation to close, like the better we are at being able to understand what where we're failing at different parts in the process and how we can shore them up. That's huge. I think that's something that as things work less and less, you start to realize more and more the importance of that, of actually understanding, like, where is it breaking?

Seth: It's nice when everything just kind of works. You don't have to pay that much attention, but yeah, the importance of clarity goes up and up. Yeah, the level of sloppiness is a lot more acceptable when things are great. The harder they get, the less sloppiness is acceptable. Shelby, what about you? What's working particularly well for you this year? Yeah, I'd say what's working and what I've changed the most in my business is just being intentional, like Katie said. Treating this more like a business and less like a side hustle and upgrading my tools, investing in tools that make my life easier, or surrounding myself with people who are doing bigger, better things than me has made a huge difference. And not only the way I think about this business and I view it, but also my consistency. And Shelby, did this used to be a side hustle for you? And then it became full-time or? Yeah, it kind of started as a side hustle back in 2023. I quit my job in 2024 and like I did it, but I just kept doing, like I joined a course, the course said do this. So I just was like, well, they say do this, let's do this. And I didn't really think much more outside of that. But this year has really been like, let's strip it down. Let's figure out what's working, what I enjoy about this business, what I don't, hire out what I don't, and really figure out how I can take this and make it a business that I not only make money from, but enjoy doing. All right. What about you? Anything working particularly well for you right now? Well, I can tell you what didn't work for me, for sure. That's our next question. We can get right into that if you want to.

JT: No, that was because I didn't do it the right way. So shame on me. At the beginning of the last year, I was doing mailers in big volume. I was pretty close. I mean, I was talking with Pete Rees and was fascinated by his volume, his approach. Made sense to me, you know, big number game. Everyone said that. And actually it didn't work. So I made a, I mean, my revenue was great this year, but profit wise, because of the marketing cost that I paid the first four months of the last year has been like severely badly affected. So I started to do cold calling and it's going pretty well. I use land caller. Now this last month they underperformed, but you know, it can happen. They're working on it. So cold calling is doing pretty well. I do only cold calling. I try not to mix too many channels. I try to keep it stupid simple. The next question on the list is what has stopped working for you, if anything? Like, is there anything that was going fine in 2025, working great and just boom, it's just broken or it's significantly underperforming compared to the way that it used to be last year? Anything come to mind? What about you, Katie?

Seth: The easy deals. Yeah. Like, they're just so, they're fewer and far between. Like, you really have to work the deal more now. You know, the, like, one-touch marketing, you cast a net, people respond, you jump on the phone, you walk them through the contract, they sign, and you're off to the sunset. It's just not happening. So really, you know, expecting those, like, immediate volume conversions. For us, we are really focused on how can we make more money but do less? Like that is really our goal. And so the amount of contracts that we are getting signed, we're just being more specific and pickier in what we want those margins to look like. So we're doing a lot more project management than we were like your traditional flip process. Us really trying to rely previously on those like deep discount deals we just don't see those as much as we did and we get them but we work for them like follow up is queen jt what uh stands out in your mind is like this used to work doesn't work anymore yeah i would say the easy tip of the tongue answer for me on that is just blind offers so i i love blind offers frankly and i i've loved them since 2018 when we started doing them and um and i still love blind offers if i'm being honest but the yield just wasn't there. And I think there's still a yield to be had with blind offers. It's the strategy just has to change. And for us, we started to step away, trust mother avenues before we circle back and do it again.

JT: But I think that the, I would say if I summarize that even further, I would say it's just blasting out marketing and praying that it works is not going to even, no matter what the volume you're willing to send or spend the yield, if you're not tracking it, you're not, you're stacking it. It's just not going to happen. The thought I had the other the days I was kind of mulling this scenario over was that, More and more, we are looking more like houses, right? Whereas in houses, you can't just send mail to every house and hope that they will sell you their house. You will go instantly bankrupt. So, but they are very intentional about their list stacking and strategies to make sure they get high yield out of the market they spend. In the past, that didn't matter for us. You could just send anything with any price on it and you would make money and it was insane.

Seth: It feels like that error has passed. And so we are now at the point where with the level of marketing fatigue that's happening in the market, you have to be intentional. You have to know who you're talking to, exactly what you're trying to buy, the strategy on how you're going to exit. If you don't have that level of intentionality around what you're doing, then you're just going to have to do it differently or go out of business. Yeah. It's interesting that idea of just blasting out marketing and praying. Isn't that always a thing to some degree? Maybe like less so when you've filtered your list further enough and you're more confident about something, but can you ever get away from them? Or is that always just part of how this works? Yeah. Like in my opinion, I think that there is a certain level of statistical probability, right? And when you're trying to touch everyone and hope that any of them will work out with very little intentionality, then you're just saying, Hey, I hope the math works at some level, but the more you stack things in your favor, the more you strategically cut out the lower yielding portions of the marketing, then the higher you're going to get a response. Now, I mean, you can take it to the nth degree and say, hey, I'm just going to pick like five people and spend all my time getting those five people, but you better make like $5 million in each of them where it's going to be a tough business, right?

JT: But you can go tighten it all the way up or all the way out. And I think the all the way out used to work pretty much. As long as they had landed, it was okay, you'd buy it. But now you've got to be more and more intentional about, hey, are these people motivated enough to sell, right? And do they have the right kind of property and have I pre-filtered it all? Does anything come to mind for you in terms of like, these are the things to stack, like this information specifically. The thing that has to be done now that didn't have to be done even three, four years ago was that you have to understand the property you're trying to buy before you market to them. It used to be that you say, hey, mail every five acre in this county and you'll be fine. But now you need to look even more intentionally to use the data that exists that didn't exist. It was not publicly available years ago, but now you can use platforms like Land Insights that say like, hey.

Seth: You know what? You could just instantly filter all the things that you don't want. And then every single click, you're intentionally cutting out more properties you don't ever really want to buy anyways, and therefore reducing your marketing spend and focusing that yield, right? Because it's really coming down to that. What is the yield on your marketing spend? And if your yield is not high enough, like the business doesn't function. Like if you're operating on 1.2X yield on your marketing, you will run out of money, right? You have to market in much higher yields. And that doesn't happen with broad marketing today. Yeah. I mean, do you think it's possible to overfilter to the point where it's like, you got nothing anymore? And like, how do you know where that line is? Like when you've done it enough, but not too much. I think over filtering is not actually a thing unless you, I think it's not a problem unless you are capping the size of your business, right? Because you can super over filter, but you're just limiting how large your business can realistically be. If you're only marketing to the same six people, you're just accepting the fact that one of them hopefully will get to you. They'll accept your deal that you follow up with after three years of follow-ups. But if your goal is just to have a side hustle where you spend very little time and very little money and just have super high yield in what you do, then hyperfilter is great for that.

JT: People ask me like, hey, I just want to do this very little time. I'm like, yeah, then you need to super focus your list. You need a super, super focused list and just work the most motivated, the most qualified leads. Don't spend time on the edges, just to super focus, super qualified leads. But that will limit you. The total adjustable market of that group is so small that you can only get gay dick without focus. But if you're like, yeah, I want the business to be larger. I want to have larger gross profits, whatever, larger profits, then you have to expand your view. And that's where the expansion comes in. It just has to be strategic. So when you think of like qualified lead and then motivated seller, those things are almost kind of opposed to each other in some ways. Like you can get all the motivated sales in the world if you're looking to just buy a bunch of garbage property everywhere. But if you want like the good stuff, it's like, well, the motivation is probably gonna be a lot lower for that. So when you're trying to filter this stuff, which one are you leaning towards? Is it more quality property or is it more motivation? I think the thing that we have data for is the quality of the property. The data is readily available to identify how good the property is that you are attempting to purchase, right? That is where the level of data allows you to say, just don't try and mail the stuff or call them or whatever for properties you don't want, right? So that's where we can get much, much, much more focused.

Seth: On the motivated seller side, there are signals you can apply. And that's where you start saying, okay, how many of these lists do I stack? Every single one shrinks my market, shrinks my market. And is that okay? And, you know, depending on what your goal is, it's totally fine, right? You'll go to a hyper-focused list. But every time you cut out a group, you're cutting out people who wouldn't have sold to you. Right. But they're just, but you're making a value exchange. You're saying like, Hey, I know that only whatever, making up numbers, 5% of these people would consider my offer if with this quality, but with this quality, it's 10%. So do I drop the 5% and then cut that out of my marketing and only focus on the 10%? Maybe you do, or maybe you don't. It just defines them how big you want your focus to be is from a business perspective. I guess it leads me to a new question just off the cuff. I guess the whole group can chime in of this, but when it comes to like finding these deals.

JT: Like how much of it do you think is how well you've filtered your list versus just like how good you are on the phone? Every time you cut out a group of properties, like you're totally cutting out opportunities if you're good on the phone with them, like if you can actually address their issues. But if you're terrible on the phone and you just say, here's my offer, that's it. Then yeah, you're probably not going to get them anyway. But any thoughts on that? Yeah, that makes my short thought with that and to the rest of the group on that. But my short thought is like, the answer is yes to all of the above. Like every single part of the funnel matters. You can have the most qualified leads coming into you and you have great follow-up, but if your sales process is absolutely terrible, then you will not close any of those leads. So you do have to pay attention to each point in the funnel. If you were like a master at sales, could you send mail to everybody and get a lot more deals? Yeah, I think it's solely possible. It's just, I mean, yeah, maybe that's the part of the funnel that's amazing for you and you're just really kind of not so good at the other parts. So. So I mean, to your point, JT, if you just got really good at sales and maybe you are, I don't But is there an argument to be made for that? I don't think anybody I know would call me good at sales. But the reality is that you can have the part you focus on. I don't know a single person who's got like the perfect business, right? They're like perfect data execution, perfect follow-up execution, perfect sales process.

Seth: Typically, it's a mix of like imperfect humans and execution. So some people are just killing it on the sales process. And then that makes up for the fact that their follow-up is a little bit weak and they don't do as good as the data scrubbing. Some people are like, I got it. The data is fully dialed, right? So we have super qualified leads coming in the door. so our sales rest is kind of weak and you know and the follow-up's okay you know so or but the best of obviously you can get really good at all of them it's fantastic but that's that's kind of the gold standard, Yeah. Part of me wonders, do I just accept that like, there's always going to be some gap. Something's going to be kind of limping along in my business. I just have to decide which battles to fight or like, it's like, no, get good at everything. Like be a master at all of it. Or is that just unrealistic? I don't know. What do you think?

JT: Anybody can chime in on that. I don't think it's necessarily unrealistic. I just think you have to be realistic at how excellent you are in what areas. Same thing I tell my team members because we do a ton of cross-training. So I'm like, OK, listen, you need to be excellent at this, but you need to be good at X, Y, Z. Right. And so I think that just to be reasonable within your business and eventually delegate out those responsibilities to people that you expect to be the experts in those areas, I think that that is a reasonable way to accept that you're able to get to that highest level. But as maybe a solopreneur or solopreneur with, you know, two global talent, three global talent, It is very difficult to keep all those plates spinning at all times without yo-yoing back and forth and sacrificing one part of your business for another.

Seth: So I think a lot of that has to go into your org chart, how you delegate, how you train your employees. We focus heavily on sales within our business with automations and follow up and what the touch looks like and what we're qualifying, due diligence, how like that is really a major focus in our business. But to JT's point, what he was talking about, so we cast a wider net. We don't filter our lists much because we're relying on the fact that we're going to do a solid enough job to get them on the phones, get them hooked.

JT: Do our thing, loop a bunch of times, negotiate them, anchor them, and get those contracts signed. So we're giving ourselves the opportunity to be amazing and excellent at the sales piece while relying on the data to give us enough leads to do that. We'll filter out. Obviously, we don't want something on the side of a cliff. So we look at slope percentage, want to make sure it's not covered in wetlands. Sometimes we'll look at access, but sometimes we don't. Maybe that's part of our strategy on a list that we're pulling. So we try to be as intentional as possible without overlooking things that may honestly just be too complicated for other folks that we'll tackle because we like the value add, the project management, figuring out variances with the counties. Those are all solutioning things that Brian's great at within our business. So that creates opportunity for us that otherwise we wouldn't have if we did narrow our filters. So I think you can kind of look at it both ways, depending upon, like JT said, like your team size, what your goals are within your business and what you truly have bandwidth to support and execute effectively. So Shelby, I don't think we got to you yet about what has stopped working in your business. Is anything like broken that was working well a year ago, but it's not so much anymore?

Seth: Yeah, I would just echo what Katie and JT said. It really comes down to being intentional. Like I have a very small team and like what Katie was just saying, you have to figure out what works for you and the lifestyle you want inside of this business. And so for me, I want a small team. I still want to be a mom. I want to live my life. So having automations that can go out and fill that communication gap that I don't have a full-time employee for is super helpful right now because when a new lead comes in, they get a message, Hey, we got it. We're going to review it. We review it. Hey, you, we want to talk more or Hey, this property didn't fit. Our buy box or stuff like that. So I think really just being good at all the areas you're realizing, hey, you can't just slap something together and have people run to you with purchase agreements anymore. You have to be way more intentional and finding ways that fit you and your lifestyle and your business that fit that mold. And Art, I know you were kind of in the middle of talking about things I think that weren't working for you. Is there any last things you wanted to finish on that? Well, it's just the, I mean, I echo JT and Katie. So essentially you must be very intentional.

JT: Spray and pray doesn't work anymore. It was easy when I started. And also like a couple of years ago, you know, you made an offer 50% of market value and, you know, you get it accepted. Now you have to do something different, which means you need to have the right tools. So you need to have the right people. And especially I am also very, very, I mean, I prefer to have like a killing sales team on the acquisition side instead of a killing like underwriting team or a killing. Even if we are very, very careful about underwriting. But if I have to pick one, sales are way more important. And also about marketing. You know, I can have like marketing not perfectly tuned in. But if there is a size person that jumped on the phone and can.

Seth: Can talk with the sellers and create empathy and work with them to close the deal.

JT: That is great. And also, this is connected to what I was mentioning before.

Seth: The BBB was not like something that I did just because. It's because there was people that wrote, is D&D an investment scam on internet? And when you have the name of your company and scam that starts to go on internet it's bad because people start to look at your name and so now we've worked and the things should be now at the bottom but is I had many deals I think that died for that reason so the sales approach to the seller I think doesn't work anymore it's more a consultative approach that you have to have with the seller now I've known a couple people that that happened to them in different businesses the word scam got associated with them and they dealt with it just by making a youtube video saying is xyz business a scam and it's just a video of them saying here's my business is a scam not really this is what we do and they just kind of talk about themselves and make themselves look real and relatable and kind of just addresses that right off the bat anybody looking for that mail is super easy because they have the name of your company the address they they can write everything cold calling is more difficult because there is a cold caller most of the time. They don't even pronounce correctly the name of my company, but that is another problem, which plays well in this case. But with mailers, I think it's a big risk. I know one of the things that is making things harder for a lot of people is kind of just like the overall lead quality.

JT: Have you all noticed any changes in the quality or behavior of sellers compared to a few years ago? Like, are they more educated? Are they more skeptical? Are they harder to convert? Like, do you sense that there is a lot more competition and they're getting hit by a lot more people or is it something different that's making them respond differently to these offers?

Seth: Katie, what are you seeing? I think that there's like three key things that we've seen change over the last year or so. Price awareness is certainly one. I feel like sellers are much more educated on what their property may be worth. And it's not just because they, you know, talked to a neighbor who sold a couple of months ago or they got an appraisal. Now it's, you know, they asked chat GPT.

JT: They went on Claude, right? They use some type of, there's just so much more access to information today. So I think that price awareness is certainly one. I'm noticing that we are seeing a lot more shopping between who they're going to go with from a buyer perspective. So a lot of times we're not now just negotiating with the seller. We're negotiating with multiple entities and we don't know who they are and we don't have all the facts at that point. Which is why sales, as I mentioned, is so important in order to understand, like, what is their main objection? How do we isolate and overcome that? And I'm also sensing more hesitation. I think with the amount of content available, what people are seeing from people, AI perspective, there is a little bit more hesitation of like, are you a real person? Is this real? Et cetera. We've really been very specific about how we use our tools and resources and how we add that human touch so that we are ensuring that we are coming across as authentic as possible. Is it kind of boiled down to just being like a likable person or like, is it specific questions you're asking? And like, how do you overcome that whole thing when you're fighting against entities that you don't know what's going on.

Seth: Yes. It's through questioning, right, from a sales perspective. So a lot of folks here in different, you know, sales groups that are teaching, you know, how you isolate and overcome some of those objections, but really being able to ask them specifically, you know, do you have other offers at this time? Getting in and understanding, like, what is the price on that? What is the timing on that offer? And then you need to think about, you know, how trustworthy are you coming across? Are you giving them the feeling that they are going to be certain that you're going to be able to get them across the finish line? Are your terms good enough to beat out the competition? And I think a lot of that is going to come from that rapport building and that trust. The Better Business Bureau, great idea. I was on a group call last week and somebody else brought that up and said, hey, this has been a game changer for me. You know, I was able to get accredited. I'm using that, not just my website, because anybody can build a website today. You can build it in Claude on a weekend, right? So how do you set yourself up in a way that it's not just you saying, hey, I'm credible. Someone else is adding credibility to you.

JT: Referrals of folks that you have worked with. You really got to go deep to overcome that trust objection that a lot of people are running into. I wonder of all the different boxes you could check.

Seth: BBB, making a video of yourself, just being good on the phone. Offering a video call so that they can see you face-to-face, screen-to-screen, and match that with your website. Sending them a FaceTime, like a recording to them. Hey, you know, it's for you. Just check it in. Wanted to make sure you could put a face to the website. Right. So some of those things, taking those next level intentional steps will help you overcome some of that. But I think that there is some, is this real? Is this a scam? And so overcoming that just takes a little bit more effort these days. So Katie, with somebody like yourself that has a big team, like are you expecting your team members to do that stuff? Like get on a video call? Or is it you that's having them do that? No, not typically. It is myself. So anytime that I do not have a seller sign over the phone during the offer presentation from one of my team members, I will reach out to them myself and ensure that they have that additional layer of support and that they feel as though. I just want to make sure that you understand who you're working with. I understand just as well as you do that this is a very serious and professional real estate transaction. It is important to me that you understand and are comfortable with who you are going through this process with so that I can support you and we can get to the finish line together. And so taking that extra step is, I feel like people are very receptive and appreciative towards it. It's not going to work every time, but I think that'll set you apart.

JT: Very cool. I'm curious on this, Katie. I know you talked about before, you talked about like the easy deals aren't here as much anymore. You used to do a lot more standard flips. Now you're doing more project management. Do you feel like some of those project management deals are easier for you to get under contract for your team to source? I know your team definitely specializes in sales as a whole, but do you feel like those are less competitive deals people are going after? Because some of the numbers you guys do are very large. Yes. You know, where I feel like there might be a lot more competition in that buy for 20 to 30, sell for 50 to 80 range. What do you think on that? Sure. And I think this goes back to like the list pulling and how you are, you know, using your filters. So ideally for us, I mean, we are looking for a market value at at least 50 to 60K in order to give us room to be able to do improvements, but still offer a healthy number. I think when you have a plan for a property and you're able to articulate that to the seller and they understand the amount of work that's going to go into making their property not just buildable, but have a vision for it so it can actually become something, they start to realize, wow, that is a lot of work. Those are a lot of funds. I don't tell them, hey, the perk test is going to be, you know, $800.

Seth: Then we're going to bring in some gravel and that's going to be another $3,000. You don't need to sell with logic, but we have to put them in a place where they go, that sounds like a lot of work. I'm not even using this property. Please, here. You can take on the stress, the risk, take on those funds and they'll work with us because we understand that, you know, for the most part, as of how our business sits today, we take title to all of our properties. So they've got a bird in hand with a buyer and we've articulated what we're going to create here. There's no surprises. I love it. That's gold.

JT: So JT, what about you? Have you seen any specific changes in the behavior of sellers or what's your read on the market right now? Yeah, obviously I would echo a lot of the sentiment that Lekay just expressed. I think that in general, we have definitely seen that the conversion process is becoming a lot more challenging for a myriad of reasons, many of which have already been named. I would summarize some of the additional ones is a little bit differently, just saying like, you know, sellers are highly opinionated. About their property. And that's always kind of been the case, but it seems like it just keeps going up and up about their opinion on value, their opinion on the state of the markets.

Seth: Additionally, we've seen this kind of cyclically over the years, but we've seen that recently, there's a lot of hesitation, like at a macro economic level, right? People are just like, well, I'm hesitant to make the decision now because I'm not sure about this or that or what's going on around me.

JT: And so we see a little bit of that kind of like gun-shy nature to actually pull the trade or sign contract and move forward. So as, you know, as Katie was mentioned, good sales process helps to overcome that. Um, but it's just another thing we got to fight in the process of the conversion. Is there some like trick phrase you're supposed to use for people like that? Like to, to get them to move or, uh, anything come to mind the sales wizards in the room?

Seth: Yeah. I wish there was a magic, magic phrase. Please tell me what the magic phrase is. I think if you can lead on the uncertainty of the future versus what we know to be true today, you can create some doubt. Shelby, what about you? Have you seen any notable changes in just the way sellers are behaving? Like do they seem more educated or more skeptical or anything? Yeah, I would say all of the above. They are definitely a little bit more skeptical, but you also have to think about it as if you're in their shoes, at least for people that I'm marketing to. We do cold calling. They're getting a phone call from someone they've never met, they say, yeah, I get a million of these phone calls. How do we stand out and be different from everybody else and build that personal relationship? Also, some of these sellers have been burned before in the past and they have that nasty taste in their mouth from something somebody else did that you have to overcome. So I think that's where sales steps in. And if you become good at sales and you try to master some of those skills, you can really set yourself apart from the competition. Yeah. Are you pretty good at sales, Shelby? I was not, but I've joined Ajay's community and I feel like I've gotten pretty good, not to toot my own horn or anything. You probably have. It wouldn't surprise me.

JT: Thank you. Art, what do you think about that? I mean, I don't know how often you are on the phone yourself with sellers, but is this ever an issue that you encounter and like having an Italian accent and that kind of thing? Does that ever like make things harder or does it not really influence anything? Nowadays, I don't talk to sellers, although I always, like Katie, I have actually, I have all the leads that are worked by my two acquisition managers. They are in a stage into the CRM. I don't know if I told you, but I use Stride as CRM. And there is this stage that is called work in progress. And so they essentially work As long as they are inside here, they receive a drip campaign, it's automated email, if they provide email, of course, where they receive four kind of newsletters. I spent some time doing it, so I made them nice. One is roadmap to closing, so you know what to expect from now on. And in the meantime, in the time that they are there, they also talk to their acquisition manager, which is one person. I have one person associated to each seller.

Seth: The roadmap to closing the seven questions to ask to a buyer and the one of the question is would you be open to a video call and if they say you know yes it's like i have my guys jumping in but they give myself available in case the seller wants to talk to me directly another email is the types of offer that we make so they know exactly what to expect so cash offer double close offer, owner financing offer, everything is explained in detail and how we evaluate land. So we say how we determine the market value. We are not going to say that, of course, how we generate our offer, but how we determine the market value, everything is explained. So the absorption rate and the explaining in very simple way, you know, like a fifth grade kind of guy and the days of market and the wetlands and the access and all these.

JT: By the end of the time that they receive these four emails, that do not arrive to everyone, because not everyone provides email, but it's one of the things that the call caller asks. They have a clear understanding generally of how we work, how we operate. It builds trust because the seven questions are, for example, one of the things is that I suggest them to ask, are you accredited to the BBB? Are you open to do a video call? Do you always use title companies, things like that. And of course we say, yes, we are accredited to the BBB. We always use title companies and we're open to video calls and so on and so forth. So essentially, follow-ups is a big, big thing when it comes to create credibility with these sellers. Because as the other three were saying, they are more and more skeptical and educated on that property. So then it's all about relationship with them and create the right environment. Since we're all using Stride here, is there anything that stands out to all of you in particular that has helped you run your business more efficiently? This could be like organization or follow-up or lead management or automation, any of these things. And if the answer is nothing, that's fine. Just be honest about it. But does anything stand out as like, this has been particularly helpful about Stride. Katie, anything come to mind for you? For us, it's the automations, for sure.

Seth: Being able to, for example, when a lead comes in to Stride, it's going to get assigned to a certain person just by where it's going. That assignment then automatically is going to trigger the type of communication method that we want the frequency that we want whether we want them to get notified emailed texted whatever it may be um something that has been super helpful for brian and i and this is to shelby's point talking about like what do you want your like actual life to look like like how you create your business to support your lifestyle we're on the go we are always working but sometimes it looks like we're never working, but we are always working. And the CRM has given us the ability to be in the know at any given time without having to be sitting in an office staring at our computer to get stuff done. For example, is anytime that a lead is cleared for review, I get a text message. This lead's cleared for review. That means, okay, well, let's pull it up on our app. Let's take a look at it. Let's keep things moving here. One of us might have to step away for a couple of minutes. It's having automations where a lead comes in, it goes through our call sales funnel. We decided at this point.

JT: It's a cooler lead. But now we've got text automations that go out. We've got voice memos that go out. We'll have an email that goes out. And you can set all of the different cadences from a time frame perspective, pick your templates, personalize them, et cetera. So that's just a tiny bit of the support that you can get from the system for like real life examples. There's just so much more that you have the opportunity to take advantage of, whether it's the internal calendar, which we love having the calendar settings. And it's similar to Callandly. So like block the time for everybody and whatnot. Like that has been amazing to have. And so much more. The smart list. Oh my gosh, I can't believe I almost forgot about the smart list. Amazing. So being able to set up your list and quickly auto dial through them with the manual dialer, the amount of time that we're saving is amazing without having to have an external system to dial from. So those smart lists have been like a big, big game changer from a time perspective as well. I could keep going on and on. But yeah, some of that stuff kind of crazy. Like if you set it up right, it can serve you for years to come. It's amazing.

Seth: It's just a matter of like setting it up, turn the automation on. Exactly. Yeah. You definitely have to be, I feel like today's key word has been intentional. So you definitely have to be intentional about how you want the system to support you, for sure. But if you are and you take the time to do it.

JT: You will reap the benefits in the long run. And don't try and eat the elephant all in one day. Do it in bite sizes and add layers over time. JT, what about you? Has Stride been helpful to you in any particular way? You know, I think there's obviously several things I enjoy about Stride, but I think the thing that comes top to mind for me is really centers around data aggregation. The ability for us to take originally what was like several disparate systems and then consolidate all of the information into one centralized system has been huge. It was kind of the goal from the beginning was like, hey, we've got all these different things. We're already like not only like organizing, keeping track of the bank for like, let's just consolidate everything into one. So we have one central system that has all of our all of our data, all the calls, all the texts, everything all in one spot. And so we love having that. And the thing that I undervalued until the last couple of weeks was the fact that the API accessibility in the platform to that data is bananas. Like it's not, the API is not perfect, but the fact that we have such a high level of API integration for the system that lets us access our data has made the orchestration layer of AI that we're building around it, like incredible. Like it is without that level of access directly into the centralized data, we would not be able to accomplish half of the things we're accomplishing right now with AI. Yeah. I know what you mean with the API thing. I don't know how many of you are using cloud cowork, but you can get the API and hook it up to that. And it can basically like be an employee that just like pokes around your system and does whatever you need it to do. It's pretty awesome. Shelby, what about you? Anything come to mind how Stride has been helpful for you?

Seth: Yeah, of course. I'd say the top of mind is probably organization and automation. Before using Stride, I was using Airtable and a million other systems and a Frankenstein patched together Zapier. And now everything lives in one place. It's easy to keep track of. I don't have to go track things down. It just all lives exactly where I need it to be and makes my life simpler by just having one place to look for things. It's great to hear.

JT: What about you, Art? Anything come to mind? Yeah. So I come from another go high level CRM that was not specific for land. And I can tell you by my own experience that the learning curve can be pretty steep with high level CRMs because essentially what you can do on GoHighLevel CRMs is actually there is nothing that you can do, in my opinion. I mean, it's it's really incredible. You just need to know how to do it. So the first thing, besides the flexibility, the possibility to do everything virtually is the support. I mean, the support that you have is unmatched. And I talk about Lucy. I talk about the guys that jump 24-7 on a Zoom call, the support from you guys. So everything is great from a support perspective, which is what I was missing the most. It was not the only thing, but what I was missing the most with the other system that I had before. Automations are a good.

Seth: Great thing that allows you to save a lot of time. I have four automations. One is for when the people talk to the call caller, but then my acquisition manager is not able to reach out to them. Then they go into a drip and for two months until they respond, they receive an SMS, emails every week, like a bunch of them. And when they respond, they go automatically in the work in progress stage and they start to be worked by my acquisition manager is notified and they start to work the lead. Another one is the one that I was mentioning before, the automation into the work in progress stage, the four emails that I sent. And I have another automation for the cancellation of contracts. So when a contract is canceled, it moves into a stage is contract canceled, automatically they receive the email and also the SMS in case they don't have an email.

JT: And also I have the last automation that I have is to ask a review. So once that we close, there is always an email and there's an SMS going out asking them for a review into the BBB. And the last thing is phone numbers. I mean, you can buy phone numbers that are super cheap. You can buy local phone numbers. That is a great thing. I call my sellers only from local numbers. I mean, not just in the state.

Seth: So each acquisition manager has three phone numbers, and I love that. That's it. It's a great idea. I don't know why I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, you're right. Numbers are super cheap. It's almost disposable. Like you could just do it right now. So I work in Ohio. They call from the higher number. And once they just start to use that number, that number is attached to the profit, to the lead, to the opportunity. So always call from that number. Great ideas from this. I think it's so fascinating to hear this because you have Art over here bragging about his four automations he has in his platform.

JT: Katie was one of our original members of Stride. And I remember working with her way back in the day, like a few weeks after we launched. She probably has close to 400 automations in hers. And then you have JT over here, probably with no automation, just because he's connected the API to Claude Code or something. He's using the MCP on that side of it and running everything that way. It's just, it's so fascinating to hear how different so many people are using this platform in such a variety of ways. It's cool. It's cool to hear. and seth unfortunately we probably need to make a video on connecting the api to Claude Code and the power of the mcp that can go on it because it really is amazing and intimidating to a lot it's a huge unlock though when you realize what you can do i wouldn't say it's like idiot proof but like once you get past that it's like holy cow this is like a whole new world now well i'm curious if somebody's listening right now and they feel like the land business has gotten harder lately what advice would you give to them is there anything lately that you've learned or any realization or maybe if somebody's even looking at this from the outside and they're like thinking about getting into land investing, any advice you'd have for them?

Seth: Katie? I have two. I would say the first one, this is a writer downer. So I would start making decisions. And this is something that we changed drastically this past year from an owner operator perspective is we started making decisions based upon facts and not feelings. And what I mean by that, and I think somebody mentioned it earlier about, you know, let's just not, you know, put it all out there. Let's really understand the ROAS, the marketing that is working or that's not working. And we have really nailed that down so that when we decide what markets to go into or what type of marketing channel or how much marketing, where do we want to pour gasoline, where do we want to pull back? We're making those business decisions based upon the facts. So if you don't know your numbers, you're going to be making decisions just based upon how you feel. And if your business is struggling, you're probably not feeling that great.

JT: So as you try to get over a hurdle, Really understand your business's financials. Get a bookkeeper. Work with somebody. Learn how to do it. Do something. Use Claude. Do something so that you can make those decisions based upon facts, not feelings. And the other piece of advice that I would be is, you know, if your team is struggling, train on sales.

Seth: There's a lot of really great groups out there. Land Closers Academy with Ajay. There are resources available to support that. At the end of the day, you have to be able to talk to sellers, build rapport, overcome objections, and have enough dials and enough talk time in order to even be able to talk to a motivated buyer to try and get a contract signed. So if you're going to invest, invest there, but make sure that you understand your business from a high-level perspective first. First. That will be my advice. What about you, JT? The advice I give to someone who's struggling, frankly, like you've struggled a lot this last year, so I've been thinking about it a lot. I think the thing that's kind of carried me through and I think is helpful in general is like kind of the word of the day we already identified, it's like intentionality. You have to know what is it that you actually want from the land business? Do you actually know what you want your business to be? Do you want it to look like, to act? What do you want your role to be? And how much are you willing to sacrifice to make that happen. Because if you're not clear on that and you keep burying your head in the sand and hoping that it works out, that's when disaster, like in a tidal wave, comes up from behind you, right? So as long as you have radical levels of honesty with yourself and candor with your team and the people around you.

JT: Then you can get the feedback to understand what isn't, it really isn't, isn't working and really understand where you Want it to be long-term. And that should hopefully help clarify what steps you need to take now to get to that goal. But if you don't have that clear vision, you don't have a true understanding of your current state, then you're just going to keep wandering around blind and then hopefully not fall off a cliff. How many months of bad performance do you think it takes before you can identify, here's your problem, something needs to be addressed? Is it one month or three months or six months? When can you actually say, okay, something's got to change? From my perspective, it's hard to answer carte blanche because if you have a business that only does five deals a year you might just have a bad quarter you know what i'm saying like and that's just how it goes and you have a great quarter next quarter if you have a business does 25 deals a month then you'll know when something went bad because you have a high level of fidelity because it's just like continually changing you're like oh we only did 10 something happened but in general i would say that understanding your business business cadence will answer that question right? Like how far is, is too far when you're like, well, either because historical loans change, uh, seasons change, right? Like your focus change or your marketing cadence changes. Like there's so many knobs and dials happening at the same time.

Seth: It's difficult to just point to one single thing. Cause it's very unlikely, especially in the businesses, size of businesses that we run that we're holding, like all other things are steady. And we're just turning one knob to see what happens. Like that's just not just how it works. We're usually like flipping dials non-stop and like turning everything like did that work no can't try to get like we just keep changing stuff and so yeah did it work i don't have to tell sometimes um but i back to my last answer which is like if you know where you want to go what the goal is like you're just going to either keep working through it uh or decide that maybe it's not the right fit you know you find something something a better version of it or a different opportunity person yeah something comes to mind i remember when i was talking to kieran shiel about this how many variables do you change at once to like see if something is working? And I was saying like, do you just change it all? He's like, no, no. Like you don't want to change too much because if you change too much at once, like you're not going to actually know what's broken. I was like, oh yeah, that's true. But that kind of stinks too because like, what if a lot of stuff needs to change? Like I got to hurry up and get through this testing because that's the frustrating thing when stuff stops working. It's like understanding which levers to pull and it's a tricky thing. JT, I'm curious on this. You've been in this space for a very, very long time. You're someone actually I really look up to in the space. And I'm going to pose this question to everyone here.

JT: What do you think your unfair advantage is? While you talk about giving advice for investors struggling, I think Katie's would be the gift of sales, of course, and training her team on that. But if I'm wrong, Katie, correct me. But I'm curious for you, JT, something I was really looked up to and admired about you. I know you have a background in software.

Seth: I stole one of your ideas about manually scrubbing every single property. A while back, you built out something amazing on that. You know, and just did it for your team. So now as I think some things have been a little more even with new tech and software coming out there, what do you feel is your unfair advantage in the space? That's a question for me to answer right now, given the state of my business. I think that for me personally, and therefore like the business collectively, I think our unfair advantage still comes in our ability to leverage technology intelligently. And we tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve before, you know, Land Insights or when all these other platforms came out and had all this data, we have like built our own platform to do that. We're like, you know, we, we've like built these, we're look ahead, we see the problem. We're like, yeah, let's get ahead of it. And let's, and to build our own systems to do that. So we're kind of always ahead on the tech edge. I think that still continues for us. Like right now with the drop of Opus 4.6 at the beginning of February and its ability to understand secondary and tertiary effects and changes, it basically was a massive unlock for its ability to do intelligent coding and development correctly at like kind of at scale, you know, not like a big scale, but like a small to medium scale like we're talking about.

JT: That unlock was so substantial that I have been working 14 to 16 hour days for like the last three weeks because there's so much opportunity right now with that unlock that it just blew the gates open, right? And I think that taking advantage of those kinds of opportunities is something that we're particularly good at and I'm personally suited to, to be able to like build out platforms. Like, I mean, in the last two days, I built an underwriter that collects 75% of our underwriting data in detail for all of our properties that come, we pull on a contract. Like my, I've taken basically the underwriting time for my underwriter for our due diligence process from probably three to four hours to like 20 to 30 minutes. Right. And like doing that kind of stuff is what helps us stay ahead on competitively. And I think that is something that everyone will have within their grasp soon, which I love. Right. But I think that that's still riding that front edge of that wave is something that, that we have. Shelby, what do you think? Any advice for investors who are struggling right now? What would you say to them or anybody even getting started? What should they know? Yeah. I love what Katie said. You can't improve on what you don't track. So keeping track of numbers is awesome. And Stride is a great way to do that and automate a lot of those number tracking. What I always tell people is there's literally nothing special about me. I just never give up. I'm brutally honest with myself and I surround myself with people who inspire me.

Seth: Anybody can do it. That's the formula. That's a powerful combination. A lot of people can't do one or all of those things. There's a lot to be said about that. Art, what do you think? Any advice you'd have for people who are struggling right now? I would like to say to people like, you know, coming into this wonderful niche that is all the rainbows and unicorn, but it's not. I mean, frankly speaking, now it's not. So I wouldn't suggest them not to enter this niche because it's still a lot of things can be done. As I think it was discussed in the last roundtable, the fact is that those that are still operating today are very smart operators. So they need to know who their competition is and they need to be laser focused on one thing. I would suggest one marketing channel, probably not even that, probably, you know, just try connections and something like in the line of what the JB said in the last podcast. You know, create connection and start to work with someone, get familiar with the environment of the space, and then do your first offer. And there is a lot of noise. When I started this, I started with $5,000. I bought like the REtipster masterclass and also my first campaign. And I got 10 properties in Arizona from that.

JT: You cannot start with $5,000 nowadays. So it's very, very difficult that you can do that. So you need to set the right expectations, be very, very focused and just roll up your sleeve because you are competing with people who knows what they do. I'm curious, Art, on this. If we could jump ahead five years, do you think right now you would be saying, wow, this business is so easy.

Arturo: You know, if I could go back five years I would be blasting out so much more mailers or cold calls. You know, in retrospective I could say a lot of stuff. Of course. So I don't know, probably, probably yes. It's possible. And it's also — and this is again what JT said in the last podcast — you know, we are spoiled. I mean, we're spoiled in the sense — no, the — we know how it was, we know how it is now. People that jump into this business now, they don't have any idea of how it was like four years ago. So they start at this starting point. But, you know, because you see, you know, people doing this minor subdivide and there is this tendency in our space. And I understand the reason why a lot of us do it — to, you know, share our victories, share our victories in the land space. But nobody sees like the bad and the ugly of it. So set the right expectations is the right thing. I would probably suggest them to look at the Mike Ferreira podcast. But yeah, not to just kill the spirit, just for them to be ready to work.

Seth: Well, thanks again, everybody, for being here. Appreciate you taking the time to meet with us and share your wisdom to the whole REtipster community. If you want to check out the show notes for this episode, go to retipster.com/264. I have links to everybody's stuff in the show notes there. We will talk to you next time.