Hey, everybody. How's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster Podcast. Today, I'm talking with my good friend, Dave Denniston.

So Dave is someone who's been deeply involved in the land investing space for many years now, working on deals across the spectrum, everything from smaller flips to much larger opportunities and constantly experimenting with new ideas in the business. But what really makes Dave stand out is the way he brings people together. He's the guy behind the Land on Conference, which has become one of the most unique and talked about events in the land investing world, not because of like big stages or big speakers, but because of the conversations that happen in the room. Dave and I have also worked together on some unique mastermind experiences. We went to Italy in 2024 with an awesome group of land investors, and we went to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming this past fall for another great adventure. Dave has been an amazing partner to work with. I've been very blessed to be involved in his projects over the years. And he's also stepping into something new right now as a host of a new podcast under the REtipster podcast network. It's called Leadership Inland, which is launching in April, 2026. So probably as you're listening to this now, you can go check it out. I'll be sure to have a link to it in the show notes for this episode, retipster.com forward slash 265. This podcast is focused on the people side of this business, leadership, and what it takes to actually grow and sustain something long-term. So we've got a lot to talk about. I'm going to jump right into it. Dave, welcome to the show. How's it going? Yeah, thanks for having me. This is what, time four or something? Yeah, I think it is. I just turned them up before we got on it. It's the fourth time. Great to have you back. So I know you've been working on all kinds of stuff, as always.

Tell me about this curative title thing. Is that a new part of the business you've been getting into? And how's that going? Yeah, so we've moved our way over time here. I started out doing a lot of small desert square type stuff, as many of us do. went through Podolsky's program and got to the point where it was like.

Man, this is getting more and more difficult. There's not as much. I loved it when we were able to buy something, send out 300 letters and you could buy something for $2,000, sell it for six or 7,000 bucks. But the margins became thinner and it became more work and dealing with defaults and that whole thing. And so we started moving into medium-sized type properties, which I define as market value of 20,000 or greater, mostly just finding existing value, right? Rather than trying to add to it for the most part. And as we got to having everything be more and more expensive, like if you look at last year, where we sent out hundreds of thousands of letters, when we were sending out letters, it was like 50 to 60,000 letters a month, right? So it's a lot of capital going out for that. And the margins there, just like before with the small stuff, has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. Can you still make money?

Absolutely. But like for us, the cost per acquisition was something like $6,000 per acquisition, about 10,000 letters to get the properties we're acquiring. And it was hard and not fun and difficult. And so I got into Curative Title and also have other people on my team really leading the way on looking at on market stuff in order to save money on all of this. So I'm new, you know, I am learning as we go. You know, you've had some other people come on and talk about messy title, like I think Clint Turner came on in an episode. I think you had some other people come and talk about it. And so I do not pretend to be the expert here whatsoever. I'm a rookie. I'm learning. The whole idea that attracted it to me was it takes labor, but not the same amount of money investment. For us, we add a big enough team. Hey, how can we utilize some of our current members or add to the team?

And so I personally have been doing everything just as though I started a new business, right? I'm doing everything. I'm doing the research. I'm making calls. And it ain't easy, but I am definitely seeing some possibilities there. So I started blocking out whole days of my schedule to try this and see what it's like. And it's definitely, I think, much like land. You know, things are becoming more competitive in that space as people come into it. And we started out in Harris County, Texas. So we started out in Texas where a lot of people do like Logan Fulmer and other folks. Our good friend Ajay started there. Ajay really inspired me to do this. As a matter of fact, last June.

We were all together at the supercars event that Drew and Peter had had. And Ajay and I had an Airbnb together. And so we went for a walk and I was asking him about, tell me about this whole messy title thing. And he's been doing a lot of land deals, but he's also been doing more houses. And I thought to myself, man, if I get houses, I think we could actually sell those quicker than we could with land that is selling, but it's taking a lot longer to sell than it used too. And when he talked about the margins of, yeah, we're buying stuff for 1,000, 2,000 bucks and pay lawyers a bunch of money, but then I'd be all in 30, 40, $50,000 on a property and we sell it for 200,000 or something like that. I was like, man, that sounds amazing. How many of these things have you done so far? Are you in the middle of your first few or how far along are you? Like I said, I'm brand new into this space.

So we've probably made something like 800 phone calls at this point, just cold calling. Lots and lots of people, which are lots of bad numbers, by the way, to actually get a hold of somebody. So it is a lot of hard work. We did complete literally just last Friday. We're recording this on Tuesday, March 24th.

And just last Friday, we finished doing 13 errors on a deal. So Ajay and I actually worked on it together because me not knowing what the heck I'm doing, I wanted someone to kind of help me out. So Ajay being a good buddy and someone that I can lean on, which of course I had to do a good deal of work. I found the lead. Then I basically said, Hey, Ajay, I have this. What do you think? It was like with a couple, he said, Nope, nope, nope. And this one was, ah, this one looks good because this one, the house is abandoned. There's nobody living in it right now. Then they want to get cashed out. They don't have the cash to pay for probate and some of that kind of a thing. So we worked out a deal. Normally you kind of look at these deals and it's like, okay, you'll pay $500 to $1,000 per heir. But in this case, there were three of them that were primary heirs. And there are all these out of the 13, there are like another seven that controlled very small fractional percentages of the deal. Cause you had this person died and then these people are alive, but this person died and their kids are here and then their kid died. And, you know, so you deal with this messy tree. And so the fractional interest kind of floats out there. So we ended up offering $7,000 to three primary heirs and then $100 to everybody else.

So all in, we ended up being all in here for about $25,000. And we think it's worth $150K, but we're planning on it probably sells for $120K or something like that. So $100,000 spread on our first one potentially. It hasn't sold yet, but we do own it. And everything's been filed with the county and that kind of stuff at this point. And this is a house, right? This is a house. So how does that work when you own part of it, but not all of it? If there's like a liability issue, if like pipes burst, if somebody gets hurt on the property, who gets sued? Like does everybody get sued who's on title or like just you because you're the primary owner? Do you know how that works? I have no idea. I don't want to speak to something that I don't know. It's just a random question that pops in my head as usual.

Well, I'm wondering, so messy title can look like a bunch of different things. What we're talking about here is just multiple airship, right? Where there's multiple owners and you've got to get them all to sign off. Is that specifically the type of messy title that you want to specialize in? Is there other kinds of weird title situations that you also are trying to learn how to fix? Well, I think right now I'm just trying to focus more or less on dead people. And so the idea being someone's behind on their taxes. So there's some financial thing going on. And what that is, we don't know.

And then that the person's died. So in some cases, in a lot of cases, you have heirs living in properties that I've seen some cases where people are $100,000, $30,000, $40,000 in back taxes, and they will lose that property eventually. When? We don't know. It depends on when the county puts it up for auction. But certainly, if they don't have the money to pay the back taxes, there's no way they have the money to pay for probate and some of the stuff that you'd have to do and work with the lawyer to get it done. So we're coming in there to hopefully solve a problem, but you have to find the right situation. And number one, getting ahold of people. And then number two, finding the right situation where someone's not living in the house, ideally, which maybe you could deal with someone living in the house, but those are less likely to occur than someone who's not. Much in the same way with land, right? Someone's not using it. They've inherited it. They don't care about it. They just want to get rid of it. When you said you've made 800 calls, was that 800 calls just to find this one deal? Yep.

Yep. Up to this point. I have other prospects, right, that I'm following up with that maybe those could turn into something. But at this point, it's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of calls to get to this one person. Yeah. It's really interesting talking to you about this because I actually appreciate that you're not super expert who has a course to sell on a service and all this stuff. Because you're basically several steps ahead of me, but not like all the way there. So you can kind of give me a pretty honest take on like, is it worth it? Like, is it hard? Is it easy? Like, how does this compare to land?

I'm wondering, like, is it worth it? Like, do you prefer the difficulty of this or the difficulty of what the current business is in land right now? Like, which battle do you prefer to fight, Now that you've gotten a good look at both. Yeah, it's a good question, Seth. I think the jury is out on that answer. In the case of my land business, I have a lot of people working in it that take a lot of the load off me. You know, the same way I hired lead managers, acquisition manager, sales staff, stuff like that. So when it comes for me personally with messy title, like I'm, you and I are both naturally more introverted. We kind of give off you know nerdy energy if people meet us like it's kind of awkward right and we try and be nice and friendly and kind but you know that's pretty much so for me picking up the phone is like a big deal you know i'm making hundreds and hundreds of calls obviously can i do it yes but do i love doing it no so the end game is that okay i prove the model which we're doing now at this point to then hire people that love doing that kind of thing, or at least they're more comfortable and like doing it better than I do. But obviously, I'm getting an appreciation for how difficult it is.

And as I look at that, much in the same way I look at my land business, you and I over the years, as people listen to my podcast, I very much don't want to have a a dependency, solo dependency on one thing, right? So in my land business, we've done an awful lot of mailing over the years, but then we got into tax liens and tax lien foreclosures and tax deed auctions. And I've done cold calling, not personally, but we hired people to do cold calling. We hired a PPC firm last year just to make sure besides mailing, hey, let's try and find something else that works. And I look at messy title much the same way, right? Cold calling is one way. Did we get a deal that way? Yes. Is it profitable?

Yes. If I wasn't JVing with someone, I mean, gosh, you know, that's hopefully $100,000 a profit, right? I mean, that pays for a lot of time for someone, just that one deal, right? And so, and I'm only doing this.

Like less than one day a week. So I figure, hey, if we can get someone doing it five days a week, then there's good reason to think someone could uncover a lot more deals. Like we have open phone currently right now about to switch the stride here in the next month-ish or so. But it's definitely, you look at all of the ways to get it. PPC is another method that some people are saying for messy title. You could certainly, and we've been working on mailing and doing small targeted mailers. It's much more of a sniper approach rather than our shotgun blast with normal. So I think you could find ways to make this a lot cheaper, particularly as we get better at figuring out, okay, who's our avatar of who's likely to sell. Right now, I don't have enough experience to be able to understand that, but as we continue to go along, I think we'll get that more and more honed in. So long story short, the jury's out. I like the possibility of it. I like the idea of houses, but I sure as heck don't like making all these phone calls. And I hope to hire someone here starting in Q3 that then could do the phone calls, do it full time and really see what this business could do without me actually doing all the calls and prospecting and stuff like that. Yeah. So when you say you're doing all of this stuff yourself, you mean you were the one who made those 800 phone calls? That's me.

But you said you have a team as well that's helping with this. So like, what is your team doing and what are you doing? At this point, not much. The team is not doing much. As I'm starting to understand, right? So like, for example, we have one guy from our team that does a lot of Facebook stuff for land for us.

And so I said, okay, I want to focus my time on calling as much as possible. So I've been working with him on training him how I've been doing the research up to this point. So he's helping me do some basic research. At this point, I'm still closely reviewing over it to make sure that he's doing all the stuff I've been doing. So I've had to catch errors, make sure that I'm still closely involved with it. But we're getting farther and farther away from that initial point, just in the same way I was, right? So for the most part, I've done everything. And I'm just starting now after I've been doing it since November. number. So we're almost five months in, six months in to the process that I'm just starting to train in someone now. Given all that you've done yourself, which of those things would you say have been the most valuable parts to get firsthand experience with? Like making all these phone calls, like, is that really helpful? Or like, is it more looking at the title stuff? Or, you know, if I'm trying to do this and I'm trying to build my expertise as quickly and efficiently as possible, where do you think I should be doing this myself? And what parts should I outsource to somebody else. Certainly, you have to start with research in messy title, because you have nobody to call. How are you going to get lists? What does that look like?

Just like in LAN, there's so many different ways to do it. But I feel like in messy title, it's much more not well-defined yet. You know, like, for example, now, hey, with LAN portal, you have all these filters of things that you could do with AI. There's not that in the messy title space at this particular point. I'm sure it's probably coming. Someone's going to invent something that, you know, is really good. You might have something like PropStream that says some deceased owners, but I found that some of that was really lacking in some of the places that I had been looking, which maybe I don't know the right places to look yet. But so far in talking to various other people doing it, I feel like Messy Tidal, what's interesting is that I feel like more people feel like they have a secret sauce. And so they're keeping it a lot closer to the vest. Whereas in the land community, people have been much more freeing and sharing and stuff like that. So I think that's an interesting difference between the two but I will say too.

You can do too much research. Because if you're never reaching out to people, then you're never going to get a deal, right? So the most of the time, in my opinion, should be spent on finding the deal. Whether you're spending money on PPC, whether you're cold calling, whether you're sending out letters, that should be where most of your time is spent. And then, of course, once you have leads and stuff, following up with those folks and getting a deal done. When you say finding the deal, what you actually mean is finding a situation like the motivated seller who's like, yeah, I own part of this. I don't want it. Like, is that what you mean? Or do you mean like a property that you want to go after?

No, I mean the situation more than anything. And to find that situation, how do you do that? Like what kind of list are you pulling? Like when you're calling these 800 people, who are these people and why are they on your list? So what I've found so far up to this point for, this is just the cold calling side of it. So I've done enough research to know somebody's died at this particular point. And I know that there's back taxes of X, Y, Z. Texas, you have affidavits of airship and stuff like that, which make things easier. In different states, like here in Minnesota, it's a probate state. So it's a lot more difficult to do a deal here in Minnesota to get past some of that stuff. At least that's what I hear. I haven't actually tried to get through it, but that's what I understand. So it's longer timelines here in the state of Minnesota versus the state of Texas, which is why I started in Texas. And plus, there's a bunch of resources and people already doing it that I could lean on.

I think that initial piece, though, like there's information that you get, OK, this is enough for me to explore it and make a call. And then once you skip trace someone, then you'll end up having two or three or 10 or 15 phone numbers that you could possibly call.

And one of the hard parts is you don't know what number is a good number. What does that look like? And so a lot of those phone calls, there's almost no conversations. Like I'll do a whole day of calling, which will look something like six hours of calling for me. And I'll end up making 75 to 100 phone calls in that one day. And I might actually talk with like three or four people, maybe. That's like a good day for me when I actually talk to three or four people. Those conversations might be three minutes long, four minutes long, might be 10 if I'm lucky. But there are a lot of very short conversations to try and identify people. So I'm calling, I'm texting, I'm leaving voicemails, all this stuff to try and get a hold of people. And not knowing in a lot of cases, is this even a right number? When someone actually identifies themselves, oh, this is Susie, please leave a message at home. I was like, oh my gosh, this actually is a human that's behind this phone number. So there's a lot of not knowing. And absolutely, I found texting.

Is a wonderful thing to do on top of the phone call. Like I have gotten the deal that I got because I texted and they texted back, right? But I both called and texted because you never know. Is someone gonna pick up? Are they a texting person? Are they someone that likes to talk on the phone? That's hard to know. You mentioned in passing maybe 10 minutes ago, I think you said something like it's getting more competitive in this space. So help me understand what you mean by that. Like, are you talking to people who are saying they're talking to other people? Or how do you know it's getting more competitive?

Yeah, other people I've talked to said that, just in the same way you think of land, right? With mailers that I mentioned earlier, hey, I used to be able to send out 300 mailers and we could get a deal from it. Well, now for that same kind of property, you might have to send out a thousand mailers. Same idea with the calls. So people are telling me that before, oh, they could do 100, 150 calls and they could get a deal out of it. Well, you can tell from my experience, I'm making that many calls practically in a day, right? And we're not getting a deal out of it. And so obviously, as you have more people reaching out, because it's a small subset of people here, right? This is not a list of tens of thousands of people that are good prospects. And so certainly there's some sifting there that people can do, but it becomes in the much the same way as land portal. You know, you have properties with good access relative to all the properties. That's a smaller subset. And so if people are focusing on that, you have more context.

So there's more competition relatively. And I would imagine as more people get into the space, there's going to be more competition coming, which means then people start spreading outside of Texas. People do, maybe they're just doing larger counties. Like first we tried Harris County and we, it was so hard, Harris County. But then we started looking at, okay, what are the biggest counties in Texas? Started working our way down the list. And that's when I started having success was moving to smaller relative counties that still had enough population.

But that's how I found this particular deal, because I got nothing out of Harris, you know, out of hundreds of phone calls. But then as I switch counties, hey, this one is actually working. So I think you'll have much that same of that kind of thing happening in the future. Perhaps the smaller you go, the easier it is to find or you explore different states. People start doing Minnesota, Colorado, wherever they live, there could be opportunity there still right now that hasn't been tapped. So I think there is a lot of opportunity for us just getting our feet wet, you know, wanting to play in Texas first. Is it kind of the opposite of the land business where most land investors are looking in rural counties and areas? With this, are you intentionally looking in the more densely populated ones because there's just more property and value and people or am I off? That's not how it works.

Yeah, no, I think that that was my idea to begin with, Seth, just the not, hey, there's so many more houses and property like in Harris County, where Houston is at, versus Fort Bend, which is a lot smaller of a county, but still has a sizable population. And so because at the end of the day, only so much of a percentage of a population will die, right, and then have these situations. So that was my thesis coming into it. But maybe just because you have so many people calling the biggest metropolitan areas, I believe there's more opportunity in some of these other ones. Maybe some of these rural ones that are mostly land for land investors like us, maybe that's a better opportunity because no one's living on a piece of land mostly, right? And so there might be better opportunity, for example, in land and messy title than there is in houses. I haven't gotten that far yet to know.

Again, just a thesis that I'm exploring that I guess in a future episode, I'll have to give an update on what happened. Do you know if AI can be used for any of this or have you experimented with any of that? Like whether it's the title searching or just looking people up online or anything like that?

I'm sure there probably is. At this particular point, my use of AI has mostly been in SOPs, phone conversations, right? So coaching me on what to say. So I uploaded a whole bunch of training stuff in a special project in ChatGPT. So that way it became a knowledge base for me. And then running through conversations as I've been doing them. That's been my number one use of AI as a coach and developing SOPs and trying to figure out, hey, where should I target? What does that look like? So I'm sure there's so many ways it could be done, but that's my current use for it. You and I were texting the other day about Manus, which I have played around with a little bit, but not that deeply. The other thing I've been spending more time with is Claude Cowork. And dude, it is insane what that can do. Have you used Claude Cowork at all? No, I have not used either. Callan would be ashamed of me. I understand. I think a lot of people still have not even realized what it can do yet. I'm still figuring it out myself, but it's basically just an app you can download to your computer and then you can install an extension on your browser, like a Chrome extension that Claude can connect to.

And it can basically just like search the internet and do whatever you want it to do. And I have yet to find something that it can't do. Blows my mind to say that. Sometimes you have to like reiterate and tell it like, no, no, that's not what I mean. Do this instead. But then it like gets it right. It's amazing. So I got to think there's tons of applications for this in what you're doing. So it might be worth checking that out, see what it could do. We got to free up the time. We got to hire some people to take the load off of it so that I can explore that kind of stuff. No, like honestly, don't hire people. That's kind of like what this allows you to not do because it's basically an employee. Well, do you think like cold calling, for example, that's what's taking up my time with the messy title. And I think there's laws against AI, cold calling. I'm not saying that per se. You might have to hire somebody for that if you want to actually abide by the law, but, But in terms of like research or looking people up or just a lot of the busy work that like, it's not really hard, but it takes a little bit of critical thought. And currently a human has to do it like you can do a lot of that stuff. I do think the air research side of that I've currently been kind of training someone. And from what you're describing, I think that's a possibility that it could do that. Something like it scares me a bit to give access to my email, especially with me having the financial advisor side of it, because like there's all kinds of security concerns and stuff like that. But if I had a separate computer, it couldn't possibly access my email.

Then like that would be cool with me just because I don't want to get sued by the SEC or the states or something. Totally. Yeah. I'm not saying you should do anything like you're using your own critical thought right now, which is good. Like you're deciding that's probably not a good thing to give it access to and everybody should do that but it is a cool thing because like any of these doubts you have if you're not sure it can do it or if you can trust it with certain things just ask it say here's what i'm like can you do this like realistically can you really do it and like prove it to me how do you think you can do it i've had it before right i had to get like an api key to hook up something and i gave it to it and it was like you shouldn't have done that that's a security concern you're going to want to delete that as soon as we're done and then generate a new one and don't give it to me Instead, put it in a folder in a text file and I can get it that way. So it's like, if you tell it something you shouldn't have told it, like it'll tell you that, which is interesting as well. Very cool. Love it, man. Sorry to spend so much time on this curative title thing. I know you're not the expert yet. Maybe you're uncomfortable answering some of the stuff, but that's, I actually think your perspective is super viable right now for a lot of people who maybe have been thinking about doing this. If they're not sure if they're cut out for the workload or if it's really better than what they're doing. And it sounds like you're still not really sure about that yet either. Yeah.

Totally cool. But it's good to hear your perspective so far. Absolutely. We've been doing the other thing the team has mostly been working on is on-market subdivides rather than mailing or whatever. That's the other thing we've been exploring and doing, which other people have been doing for years, but I never really have gotten into till now, really. So I'm a little bit late in the game here with doing that. But that's it. Again, you know, I think people talk about stuff and it sounds so easy. But when you're actually doing it, like we've looked through hundreds and hundreds of on-market subdivides to get to the one that we bought. And then we have another two under contract, which one might fall out of contract.

But I think in all of this, I don't want to paint a picture that any of it is easy. It's possible to do. And I think most anyone could do it. But it does take a lot of time, all this stuff. I want to talk about the land unconference really quick. because I know that's a thing you've been running for years. You started this event. It's very well known. A lot of people have been to it or at least heard about it. And for good reason. I mean, it's an amazing event. It's a really great way to deeply understand a small group of other land investors, what they're going through, what they're winning at, and vice versa. You can get a lot of insight on your own situation. And I know you're on hiatus right now, right? In 2026, that event is not happening. What made you decide to go on hiatus and when is it coming back? Yeah. So you and I had the pleasure. You mentioned the beginning, you know, doing a lot of really cool stuff together. And I think it was 2024.

I did four or five events that year and which were great. And we had a wonderful time. And then last year we did. Two. And I went through a time personally, where it was, I spent a lot of money to try and fill, fill the event. At least for me, it was a lot of money. When I first started it out, you know, like we put it out there, it was 2023, 2022. I don't know. I'm losing track of the years now, Seth, but it like took no effort to fill the first time around. And it was like, man, this is fun. This is easy. This is great. And I charged a pretty low ticket charge and everything was fine. But then I realized the work going into it. So we started raising the price some because I was like, this is no longer just a one-time thing. I want to do this more often. I don't need to make it sustainable. And then I did it a whole bunch of times.

And I just got burned out because people would be canceling. And then we're trying to fill seats and trying to match people to moderators. It's one thing when you hold an event and you have 150 or 200 people in a room together. And you have a few speakers, but there's not a lot of organization around how do you group people together? How do you facilitate conversations?

And something like the Unconference is so much work behind the scenes. When I'm running my land business, I'm running my financial planning business, I'm doing some hard money lending on the side. The land and comfort stuff, frankly, is a labor of love. I want to make a little bit of money, but I'm not monetizing it at all. I have no coaching program to sell or anything like that. And so I was just so tired and worn out. I was like, I need a year off. And so what I've been doing as I've been traveling around the country, which I do, is I've been holding some meetups. So I had a meetup in Orlando, had a meetup in Seattle and had having one coming up here in Austin, Texas here recently, which are like super easy to organize. And people don't come. It's not a big deal. I didn't have to arrange moderators. It's been great.

Hey, whoever shows up, shows up and been able to connect with some people I've known for years, but actually never met in person. So that it's been super fun and it's been great having that break but I kind of miss you know having the big group of people together so we are planning on 2027 about a year from now in May doing another big event which before I was hoping to get like 100 people I'm kind of scaling down my expectations to hopefully we can just get 50 of us together pretty easily and then you and I are talking about doing a trip across the pond and doing something over there, maybe later summer or something next year. No definite plans have been set yet. It's just been talked about. So I'm looking forward to doing those kind of trips. And I think I'll probably switch those off, you know, where every two years I'll do some stuff and then take a year off. So I think that cadence has been.

Really, really good for me personally. After kind of watching what you have been through, and I don't know all the work that goes on behind the scenes, but I have a pretty darn good idea because I've done some alternate forms of what you're talking about, grouping people together. It is a lot. And when I look at how a typical conference works, I kind of realize why most conferences are structured the way that they are is because they're kind of like sales machines.

I mean, you've got people who pay to come and show up. Then you have sponsors that pay to be there. And then when people show up, they get pitched to all day by different speakers. Like everybody's there to make money. Land-out conference is very different. The money you have to pay is like just to like keep the thing running. But like you're not getting pitched at all day. Like that's not the whole point of the thing. It's very organic. It just feels a lot like a breath of fresh air. Like much healthier version of the way a conference and networking event should be. I've never not walked out of that thing with just tons of notes. Just amazing, highly relevant things that I need to know about. But unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to do that. And it's not something that you necessarily get rich off of. And on that note, actually, I'll just mention this because of the timing of it. I've done this a couple of times in the past where I organize a bunch of mastermind groups for people who are in the Land Investing Masterclass. It's been a couple of years since I've done this, but I'm actually doing it right now. This is going to be going through April, probably starting in early May. If you're a member of the Land Investing Masterclass or Stride Sierra, I'm either one of those things, you will get an invite to throw your name in the hat to be put into a mastermind group if you want to, so that you can basically learn from another small group of land investors on your own time. And I'll organize that for you. Because of that, I'm very familiar, Dave, with the work that goes into those things. So it's kind of annoying when you do the work and people just blow it off. Like, I cancel. I can't do it. I don't want to do it. Super annoying. If anybody ever signs up for this kind of thing, please take it seriously for everybody's sake.

Yeah, for sure. And for people that don't know what we're talking about, basically, what we do is we have a bunch of small masterminds running at the same time at the big unconference. So we'll have five, six, seven different rooms of 10 people, plus a moderator, which we bring in some great people like Seth, like Justin Sleva, like Chris Duff. Drew Haney was there this last time. Ajay, our good friend, helped to lead a mastermind. So these are people that are experienced, that have been to events like ours and running masterminds. And so it's expensive, right, to get people to come and then arrange the room to find the right fit. And as you said, hey, people drop out, like now we have to fill that spot with someone else. And then you're rearranging it and then someone else drops off and then you're rearranging it again and then someone else drops off and then you're rearranging it again. because you're trying to get that. And it's, it's, and you want to build that camaraderie beforehand of getting the group together. So anyhow, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot more work than it sounds of just getting a conference, you know, kind of together. But I think, like you said, it's so rewarding for me. You know, I've met so many great friends and see so many friends I've built over the years at these things. And for many of us who are working by ourselves, you know, You're in a room by yourself at your house, and this gives you the opportunity to network with a lot of different people and do it meaningfully.

Where you're working on each other's businesses rather than just having someone talk to you from a stage. And everyone gets involved in these conversations. So that's what I love about it, interactivity, community building, all that kind of stuff. When you think about it, especially something like the land business, it's actually a fairly small playing field when you whittle it down to people who are active in the business and they're successful at the business. They're not just toying around with it or they're thinking about getting into it. Like they're a proven entity. They've been doing it and they're willing to travel somewhere to be in person and pay the money to be there. Like that actually whittles it down. Like there's only so many people who are even willing to do that. So to actually be in the same room with those people and you can ask them any question you want and learn from them firsthand, like that's a huge deal. Like it's a huge opportunity. So if anybody ever out there ever has a chance to do the on-conference.

Like you'd be crazy not to do it. I think a lot of people don't understand what a big deal it is to be able to learn in that environment from those kinds of people, but it's a very unique, super rewarding experience. I am curious, Dave, where did you ever get the motivation to do this? I mean, especially being like an introvert and going back to what was it 2022 or 23, whenever the first time was that you did this, why did you even think to do this in the first place? So long story short, I've talked about this before, but basically I got kicked out of the Land Geek program. And so shout out to Amy Breezell and Joe Schmidt. You know, they welcomed me into like an online mastermind. And so those guys were so kind, they were running it for free. As a matter of fact, they still do.

And amazing people. And I told Joe, because I had an office, being, like I said, an introvert, hey, I like small groups, you know, doing a big conference wasn't my thing. But I said to Joe, hey, what if we invited people, Joe's here in Minnesota, what if we invited people to come to my office? You know, we have space for like, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 people, no problem. So this was in 2019, when that happened. So now seven years ago, where we got that first group together in my office.

And some of those people aren't in the business anymore. Others are kind of been flying under the radar for a while, but it's, it was really fun. And so then I did it every single year, COVID year, we ended up doing it virtually, because of obviously everything that was going on at that time. But then we did it again in 2021. And then 2022, there was Drew Haney, Callan Faulkner, Ajay Sharma, Joe Schmidt, Yassir Lillingston, Andy Rouse. I have a picture over here behind me. Oh, Greg and Brian. They were at that fourth iteration of just this thing. And so I got in a hot seat and I was like, hey, guys, what if I wanted to expand this? And that's where the idea came from of what if we had two or three or four or five different rooms all going at the same time to do that. And of course, all those times that was completely free. You know, like I was just doing it just because I wanted to connect with other land investors and hear what other people are doing. And because I loved that small, intimate conversation where me being an introvert.

Hey, I could get to know people on a totally different level and talk about something I'm interested in rather than trying to make a bunch of small chat that I don't really care about and I get quickly bored with. Well, I know that we've sort of theorized, and it's probably true, that the reason it's been harder to get people to show up to the unconference and just like any land event is because a lot of people are getting out of the industry or they're just having a hard time. And this is nothing new. Like this has been going on for a couple of years now, I think. What do you sense is happening in the industry right now? And how have you been able to do as well as you have? Because I feel like the last several times I've talked to you, it seems like things are going kind of good for you. What do you attribute that success to in the midst of a lot of other people having a really hard time? I would characterize our business as doing okay. It's not great. It's not horrible. It's okay. So I don't want to. That's worth something. I mean, it's better than a lot of folks.

Yeah. Yeah. I think if I'm going to look at my business, what I've done well is when I do something, I tend to do a lot of it. So for example, in 2017, 2018, as I got into this business, people will be like, oh, I'm sending 200 letters a month. And that was like a big deal back then. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to send 2000 letters a month, 10,000 letters a month, you know, do way more than other people were willing to do, take more risk than they were willing to take. And that allowed me to really reinvest in my business and allow it to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And I've been blessed and lucky to have my financial planning business this whole time, which of course I can set my own schedule. So I'm not subject to someone else's deal. I can set my schedule the way that I want it to. I have a lot of commitments. I'm an extremely busy guy, but I can fit in the land businesses as I want. And thank goodness to my wife who has been very gracious to me, you know, as I've been building all this stuff together and taking away some time from the family in order to get to the point where we are now. Another example of huge, massive action in 2021. There was a Mojave County tax deed auction and there was 10,000 properties up for auction.

And I was on vacation with my family when the auction happened. And like a madman, I was sitting there typing, typing, typing. We ended up buying 350. I know other investors that bought 20, 10, five lots. So we bought way more than other people would do. Now, it wasn't like it was more money than I had. Right. So then I had to scramble then to find the money in order to make all of the deals work. So I was willing to extend myself out of my comfort zone and do things in a massive way in order to make it happen because I saw the opportunity and I went for it. You know, plenty of land investors would be comfortable sending five or 10,000 letters a month. I said, I'm going to send 50 or 60,000, which meant I had a crapload of expenses, but, you know, I was willing to do that. Here, as we look at messy title or on-market subdivides, we're looking probably at more markets, more states, spending more time hiring staff to specialize in that stuff than other land investors are willing to spend the money on. So I would say that that massive action has been a huge part of my success. And I think I would tell anyone, especially now, hey, you got to go big or go home in this business. And it means as well, when I go big, sometimes I make big mistakes.

It happens. As a matter of fact, we had a deal in Maine that we got through PPC that we had gotten a survey ordered, but we went ahead and closed on the property because it was taking freaking forever for the survey to happen. And so we bought the property in October. Survey just finished last week. And unfortunately, we own a lot less property than we thought we did. Oh, man. And so it's literally like a hundred thousand dollar mistake. So sometimes it bites me in the butt. But, you know, overall, that willingness to take risk and spend time and try and figure stuff out, I would say is kind of my besides being organized, I think is another one of my superpowers, if you will. You know, I'm very organized and I'm not like crazy detailed, but I'm more detailed than plenty of other people. And then follow up, follow up, follow up, you know, I'd say are how I've been successful, really.

How many times do you think it has come back to bite you? Like being willing to take massive action. Like you got that survey example there, but like, it doesn't sound like it happens that frequently, right? So is there some like stress test you put something through before you take massive action to make sure it's not going to like sink you if it goes bad or, or just statistically, you've just kind of been lucky. I think certainly the time in the business has helped, right? So, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, I built up a huge note portfolio. So I had a lot of recurring revenue. Like I wouldn't have done 50 or 60,000 mailers in those first couple of years, right? I built up to that point to be able to do that. So certainly there's, I have to look at what are my assets? What are my resources that I have available? Last year, I took out two massive credit lines, each for about 250,000 bucks, right? So that's $500,000 worth of debt. That's coming due here in the next six months. And so I knew I had the resources that.

If we sold these properties for nothing, right? Like we didn't sell a single one. I had the ability to pay off those credit lines if I had to, right? So I took risk, but it was risk that I knew I could mitigate or get close to mitigating if possible. Because I, for example, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars of hard money loans. So I said, okay, hey, those come back. I could help use those to pay it off. We got money in the bank we could use to pay those off. I have brokerage account money I could use to pay those off. So it was a risk, but it was a risk that I knew I could handle, you know, like with that Mojave County auction. I knew people that who had money because I had a track record with them that they would be willing, they would more than likely be willing to provide the capital necessary to help get those done beyond what I had available.

I looked at something like early on, I used a 0% interest rate credit card debt. I got a credit line at Wells Fargo, and then I used that credit line to buy tax liens. Well, I knew that, hey, that credit line's costing me 5% at the time, and the tax liens are paying me at a minimum 15%, 16%. And then if I go and have some of these redeem, I could make a few hundred percent on what I see the current market price. So I think it was smart arbitrage type things. But in the last couple of years, as things have slowed down, right, things are harder. We're seeing a lot of shrinking property values. What we think we could sell something for isn't actually what we can sell it for, despite looking at market comps and making sense at the time. Well, it didn't necessarily turn out that way. So we've had more deals we've lost money on in the last year because of assumptions. We have a number of properties in inventory we're going to lose money on because of those assumptions. We have plenty of properties that we've made money on. You know, we had our most profitable property last year. We bought for 60 grand in Fulton County, Georgia.

You actually looked at that for me, possibly as a storage play. The realtor thought it was worth 600 grand. So we were like super excited about it, bought for 60. Oh, gosh, we're going to make a killing. Well, we ended up selling it for 180,000, right? So it still turned out pretty darn good, but it took a year and two months for that to sell. Took a long time, right? It wasn't, we're done in three months kind of a deal. So even though I have some stuff I'm losing money on, I have plenty of things that we're making money on as well too, as well as obviously our note portfolio and other things we got going on. I may be misremembering this, but I feel like when we talked about that Fulton County, Georgia property, there were moments in that disposition process where you had it listed, we're trying going to sell the thing or just figure out what to do with it. When it almost seemed a little frustrating, like why isn't this thing selling? Like we thought it was going to be this and it's not, and it's taken forever. Like what is going on? And then you finally get to the finish line and like it sells. It's fine.

Happy ending. No problem. This is something I think any experienced land investor can totally relate to. It's just a terrible feeling when you have something listed and it just seems like it's never going to sell. It just, you're going nuts in your head. Like all this doubt creeps in. Given this one experience, I know you've probably had many like this, but But what would you say to yourself, your past self, as you're waiting for the thing to sell? How would you comfort yourself and say, it's going to be okay, Dave. It's going to be fine. They always sell eventually. It's going to be all right. Or is there ever a time when it's like, Yeah, you should have doubt. You did screw up. Like you should be punching yourself in the face for this.

I don't know. What are your thoughts on that as you have these different experiences and look back on them? Well, like this main property, I'm definitely punching myself in the face for that one. It's not we're going to lose $100,000, but we're accounting on it selling for $200,000. And now we're probably going to have to sell it at $80,000 and take a $5,000 or $10,000 loss or something like that. So it's not like we're actually losing $100,000, but compared to what we thought it was going to do, like, so some of that kind of stuff, you know, it's kind of like, okay, Hey, you knew there was a difference here. You cannot buy this property until that stupid survey gets done. Even if they walk away from the deal and you know, you have to call it because it's not worth it. Right. So that that's a punch in the face kind of moment that, you know, I really should have learned from that. We have other properties that we bought it and we knew it was a little hairy. So those ones don't bother me. But it's the ones like, we got one in Pinal County, Arizona. We bought for 80,000. Realer says, oh yeah, it should sell for 160,000.

Well, here we are almost two years later and the thing has gone and our own comps bore it out too. Yeah, it should go. Maybe it goes for $120,000 or $130,000. Well, here we are today now trying to sell it for $75,000, right? It just ain't moving. And I think a lot of that, like in that particular case, that one has restrictive covenants on it and stuff like that. So it just seems like in today's world, I think something like the databases that we have, that land portal or others.

You know, like, hey, if there was something that could tell us if there's restrictions on this or not, to me, that's like the next level of due diligence. Because in this world right now today, unrestricted land generally sells well. But if you start having restrictions and stuff on it, that stuff is moving slow. So if I could tell myself that back then, hey, don't buy this stuff because of the restrictions on it, you're going to have a hard time selling it. I absolutely would. But, you know, you tell yourself, hey, there's enough of a spread here. Hey, if I sell it at one hundred and ten thousand, one hundred twenty thousand, we're still making money. But the market for a lot of those things has just dried the heck up. So here we are. Hey, I can actually review stuff for restrictions pretty well. I just did that a couple of weeks ago on a parcel I was looking at for a mobile home. and it turned out the restrictions said you could put a modular home there, but not a manufactured home. Big difference between those two. Granted, I still had to get the document. That's kind of like the hard part is knowing that the document exists and then getting it. But once you get it, you can review it pretty well. So... Yeah, it'd be nice if there was like a filter or some box you could check in land portal or something to say, hey, are there restrictions? Yes or no. But that's kind of like next level research to figure that out.

Totally next level. And I think that's where the money is, right? You know, I think if someone has that kind of research and ability, because then you could save yourself thousands and thousands of dollars in mailing or the effort of phone calling if you're cold calling or texting or whatever. You don't even want to text those people, right? I think that kind of snipering is probably where we're at in the land business, which if someone can really know counties and areas well and be like, oh, yeah.

These things don't sell, right? But these other things do. I think that's where the opportunity and knowledge arbitrage is right now. The devil really is in the details. Nine times out of 10, when I hear about a land investor losing money or something going horribly wrong or when I've had that, that's usually what's going on. If it's easy to see, then like, you're going to see it by clicking a few buttons and just doing your basic research. But like that stuff that isn't readily apparent that you got to like order some kind of survey or report or something to do it. Like that's where most people get lazy and don't do it. So it would be nice if there was a easy button to make that stuff just readily apparent. We were trying to hit some other easy buttons in the last year that have backfired on us too. Like we said, Hey, we're doing so many properties across the country. It'd be nice to have one title company rather than dealing with 50 different title companies. Right. So we tried Fidelity. We tried First American. We tried Presidential. And man, like the idea was a good idea, but the actual application and execution sucked. Like we ran into title mistakes on some of these. Now we're selling some of these properties and it's like they insured it.

I've never ran into so many problems with Tidal on the other side. Any deal we have that we bought through a national title company, we're now cringing at selling it. Because every single time a mistake came up in the chain of Tidal that another local title company is finding over the national one. Wow, man. I guess when you say that, it kind of makes sense. The local ones are probably smarter about knowing which rocks to look under, that kind of thing. But still, it's like, if they're going to insure it, you'd think they would have higher quality. That's going to be super expensive for them to just have like bogus title searches that they're insuring over. But I think to your point, though, like it usually comes down to a people problem, you know, like why was their mistake? Because that person was in charge. And unless it's that exact same person doing everything and they know everything, someone's going to drop the ball at some point.

Yep. So if someone has a national title company that works awesome, I would love to hear about it. But man, we had bad experiences. So we're back to using local title companies again. And not only that, what was really surprising was the lack of service at the national level. Like getting anyone to respond to an email or a phone call was like pulling teeth, man. Like it was such a horrible experience. And we knew another land investor that used the same people and he wasn't having the same issues. And it was like, what the heck? I don't understand what's happening. So yeah. Huh. Well, that's a good word of warning. to keep that in mind if I ever try to go down that road. So I know you have tried to let it different things in this business, Dave, everything from the tax liens and tax auctions to just straight up land flipping and not curative title and unconference, all this stuff. How do you decide what's worth pursuing versus what's just a distraction?

Well, I think last year, right, I was like, we're spending $20,000 to $30,000 a month on mailing costs. And we weren't getting the response back like we wanted. We weren't acquiring as many properties as we wanted. And so I was like, okay, what could help me with this?

And so it became pretty obvious to me when we were in Wyoming, we were sitting there with with Neil and I was already thinking about doing that kind of stuff. And it just confirmed for me, you know, as we looked at Neil's business, that, man, his his overhead is so low. Things are pretty simple. I would like to take a step back from some of the complexity and get something a little more simpler. And so that became the main forces behind these two with hopefully, you know, margins that are still great and very low overhead really were the primary things. Obviously, there's risks in all of these things. You have more concentration risk and subdivides. You have legal risk and messy title if you miss stuff, right? Like, oh, shoot, you forgot. Hey, there's another three or four errors over here. You never got to sign off on something. you know, that that can bite you in the butt later. I'm still so new at it. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I'm sure it will at some point. And so that's how I've decided to shift recently was more based on trying to run lean and mean. I know plenty of people that do great with double closings and they seem to do great with texting and cold calling. And that just hasn't been the case for us. And mailing was just getting so, so doggone expensive. Does that answer the question? I feel like I'm rabbit trailing. Yeah, I think so. When you look at the next few years of growth for yourself. What do you think that looks like? Is it more deals or better deals or something else entirely?

So we, pretty quickly, because I've scaled, right? We hit 1 million in revenue, 2 million in revenue, 3 million in revenue. And we've really been kind of stalling out around the 3 million revenue. We've had newer highs every year, but it's felt like it's taken so much more effort.

To get there. Certainly when you're selling properties that are $1,000 down and $200 a month, it takes a lot of those in order to get to it. Because the question I've been asking myself is, what would it take to build a $6 million revenue company or a $10 million revenue company? I'm still at the point, I'm 45 this year, that, hey, I'm still relatively young. By the time I'm 50, I can see myself slowing down and not wanting to spend as much time. But right now, I still want to grow. And I want to be able to try and climb that new mountain, if you will, because I feel like I conquered what I could do within reason on the small properties, conquered within reason what we could do on the medium sized properties in our current environment. So it's like, hey, here's also two new mountains to climb. And because I have the staff, hey, we're having the team mostly pursue the one, while myself and Eric mostly pursuing messy title. So we have the ability to do it. So I'm hoping we quickly move, maybe not this year, this year is kind of a changing year. But by next year, you know, we really moved to being a $6 million revenue company. And then in the next couple of years, going to be a $10 million revenue company, which obviously we're going to have to be agile. Whatever I'm saying today could change a year, year or two from now, depending upon what's happening in the market.

And we'll see what happens. But that's my vision and my hope. And I want to keep about the same staff. We went from a staff of about 25 at our height. And some of these AI tools and stuff have come about. Now we're down to about 12. So I've definitely cut down on staff a lot. I like the size of staff we have. And I think it's a nice size team. Maybe that could be cut another couple of people as you're talking about some of the co-work stuff with Claude and whatnot. But it's nice working with other people. It's nice seeing other people grow, nice blessing other people with promotions and raises and bonuses and seeing them step into their greatness. And so I hope we can do that with the company and provide awesome opportunities for people and bless them and their families in the process. So let's talk really quick before we wrap this up about the new podcast, Leadership in Land. So what is the idea behind this podcast?

Yeah. So in this journey I've been on, in my past, I've had other podcasts. So you were a guest on a podcast I had had, the Freedom Formula for Physicians. I started a sell-side podcast called Land Stories, which I kind of gave over to other staff and it kind of died a death not long after I stepped away from it. And I really thought, man, I just love talking to other land investors I enjoy sharing my journey because I'm on a journey. As you can tell, I don't have everything figured out. I am working towards being the best Dave I can be, you know, in the process.

And the leadership in land is really about interviewing other land investors. You were on there about a year ago. So we've had on all kinds of great people and some people that haven't been on other podcasts. And some of them have been as well, too. But then I'm also throwing in what's happening in our business behind the scenes. So this year, for example, I'm doing a quarterly cash flow report. To let people know, hey, here's how I'm managing cash flow. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Here's what's happening in our business and just being raw and vulnerable and open about the good stuff and the bad stuff. We're going to do a quarterly deal report to highlighting a few different deals, ones that went bad, like we've been talking about, and ones that went well, which I think some people have been done in the past, like Pete Reese, that I thought were really super cool. So I want to add that into the podcast and throw that in the world with the hope that, Hey, it inspires and helps other people. And we've slowly been building out a free course, Leadership in Land, which I'm sharing, hey, here's how I'm dealing with stuff in my business. Here's how I'm running a meeting.

Here's the tools I'm using. Here's where I go to hire people. All those different kinds of things that hopefully are helpful to people. We're planning on rolling out a transaction coordinator training later this year, which it's a labor of love. Like there's really no money in it. You know, I'm doing it just to help the community and hopefully make a difference and an impact in other land investors' lives and a couple of things, but also being a student, right? Other people, I can learn from them. So as a community, bringing people together and hearing what's working for other people, how are they thinking about something and encouraging and just growing with one another. And if you want to check this out, what date is this launching, Dave?

April 1st is when when the podcast is launching, we have a community on school. So if you go to school dot com slash, I think it's leadership and land, you know, you can be able to certainly find us there as well, too. And that's S.K.O.O.L. School. Yeah. So we're also going to have the R.S.S. feed to this podcast on the R.E. Tipster YouTube channel. We'll have a link to it in the R.E. Tipster navigation bar if you want to check that out. So yeah, as Ari Tipster continues to expand throughout the world, it's good to have another solid podcast in the network. I knew Dave is a great guy. He has a lot of good things to say. Great presence in the land space. As we wrap this up, where do you think a lot of land investors are getting it wrong right now? Like, what's the uncomfortable truth that people don't want to hear? Anything come to mind? Well, I've certainly been meeting with people even without having events throughout the country.

And I think where people are getting it wrong, I think newer people, it's the amount of time and capital it takes in today's world. You know, it used to be, hey, you could come in with 2000 bucks and you could start getting yourself going. And that's just not the case in today's world. You know, you need a lot more capital. I think you had another guest that came on recently that talked about, hey, working for another land investor.

Is a great way to go in much the same way in the financial advisor industry. Working under somebody today is probably super important to understand how the business works without putting your own capital at risk and really understanding how things are happening. So I think if anyone can, you know, I think that's a great way to go, whether you're an intern, or you become a full time staff for somebody or whatever for our younger people, especially, you know, you're coming fresh out of college. Can you do this business on your own? Yes, you absolutely can. But the cost of making mistakes is so much higher today. So that's one thing I would put out there in the world. The other mistake is some of the stuff I was mentioning earlier on the podcast, I think is really due diligence right now is so, so important. Due diligence on your selection of counties and making sure that properties are moving in the area. Due diligence on the properties themselves to understand the restrictions and not being afraid to kill a deal, Because you find something out you didn't know before, which is hard because you go and spend all this time and money marketing.

Like you want to get a rate of return on that investment. And that's part of what's driven me sometimes to buy stuff is like, man, we haven't been able to buy squat. So I'm going to buy this thing and try and make the best of it. And sometimes that turns out great. But other times it has turned out to be a drag in the last two years. So I think being very, very careful about where you're buying and what you're buying today is key. Like we're even looking at using engineers in some cases now to determine buildability because we've had realtors check out properties. We've had photographers check out properties and the stuff pops out later that nobody ever told us. It's like, why didn't you tell us that? So it's like getting more specific and spending more money on the front side to make sure you're buying the right property that is a good, marketable, sellable property right now in today's environment is so, so important. Yeah, that is a super disappointing thing. When you do all the work to find a good deal or what you think is a good deal, and then you find out something terrible about it, you basically have to make the hard decision to say no. Or worse yet, when you find out after you bought the thing, it's just like, it's terrible. Very demoralizing when that happens, but you got to do it. It's part of the business, right?

So Dave, appreciate your time. It's great to talk to you again. Super excited about your new podcast. People want to check out Dave's podcast or check out the show notes for this episode, go to retipster.com forward slash 265. Dave, as always, great to talk to you. Thanks everybody for being here and we will talk to you next time. Bye everybody.