Seth Drehle-Ewan started with $500 desert squares. Today he and his brother buy at 80 to 100 cents on the dollar and make their money on minor subdivides. And a year ago, he woke up with half his face paralyzed, and everything about how he runs his business and his life changed. This one goes deeper than land.

Links and Resources

• DebrosLand.com
• RamsayHuntSyndrome.com
• Breath by James Nestor
• Crucial Conversations by Joseph Grenny
• 009: How to Scale and Manage a High-Volume Land Investing Business (Without Going Crazy)

Who is Seth Drehle-Ewan?

Seth first appeared on this podcast way back in episode 9 in 2018, as one of the sharpest young land investors people were starting to notice. He found the land business in 2016, fresh out of Colorado State, bought a course teaching the classic “buy for $500, sell for $2,000” desert square model, and set up an LLC in 2017 with his brother Bryce, who was 16 years old at the time and still in high school.

Eight years later, the two of them are running a completely different business. And the story of how they got from there to here says a lot about where the land industry has gone.

From 15 states to one: why they stopped doing what everyone else does

In the early days, Seth and Bryce worked “an inch deep and a mile wide.” They did deals in 15 different states, taking whatever came in the door. It sounds impressive until you realize what it means in practice: every property is a different widget, in a market you know nothing about, with no compounding knowledge from one deal to the next.

Since about 2020, they've flipped that completely: one market, worked a mile deep. Flips and minor subdivides, concentrated where they actually understand the local economy. Seth's example of why this matters: manufactured homes are the bread and butter of the Mississippi land market, while Colorado has regulated them nearly out of existence. Same country, opposite economics. The “spray and pray” mailer approach treats those markets as identical, and they're not even close.

The numbers on mail tell the same story about the industry's evolution. When they started, a thousand mailers could produce four or five deals. Today, ten thousand might produce one, or none. Mail still works, but the era when volume alone carried you is over.

Why he sends neutral letters instead of blind offers

Seth could send blind offers. After years in one market, he can look at a property for 30 seconds and know his range. He sends neutral letters anyway, and his reasoning is worth hearing: a blind offer closes doors before the conversation starts.

Because they subdivide, Seth's team can often pay 80, 90, even 100 cents on the dollar for the right property, since the value gets created by splitting it. A seller who sees a lowball blind offer at 50 cents on the dollar just throws it away, and the conversation where the real deal would have happened never occurs. The neutral letter keeps every exit open: a cash flip, an owner-finance deal, or a subdivide at a number that would shock most land flippers.

Then he woke up with half his face paralyzed

At the end of June 2025, Seth woke up with the entire left side of his face paralyzed and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. The diagnosis was Ramsay-Hunt syndrome, a shingles infection that attacks the facial nerves through the ear. Unlike Bell's palsy, which usually resolves in weeks, RHS has no cure and no protocol. The specialist he saw spent five minutes with him and said there was nothing to be done.

It didn't stop at his face. His whole nervous system was affected. This is a guy who was lifting 200 pounds and taking 15-mile walks days before it happened. Afterward, he couldn't lift an empty coffee cup or walk 10 feet without a cane. For roughly six months, Bryce ran the entire company while Seth's contribution was sitting on the couch.

His recovery has been largely self-built: chiropractic, acupuncture, physiotherapy for the nervous system, facial exercises that at one point took two hours a day, a complete overhaul of his diet, and, on his doctor's orders, learning how to breathe correctly (that's where the book Breath by James Nestor comes in, linked above). He's back in the office every day now, though a single afternoon at the family cabin can still wipe him out for two days.

What this actually teaches about business

Two things from this conversation stuck with me.

First, the partnership. The only reason this business survived is that Bryce could take over everything for six months. If you're a solo operator, it's worth sitting with Seth's question honestly: if you disappeared tomorrow, what breaks? For them, the honest answer was “quality control slipped, but the business lived.” For a lot of one-person land operations, the honest answer is “everything.”

Second, his definition of success changed. His version now: if you can do what you want, where you want, with the people you want, without worrying about time, that's ultimate freedom. He'd rather build enough and have his time than send 100,000 mailers to buy more work. Whatever you think about that trade, it hits different coming from someone who spent six months unable to carry a glass of water.

If life has punched you in the face recently, physically, financially, or otherwise, this conversation is worth your time. It's honest about the parts that don't wrap up neatly, including the fact that Seth is still in the middle of it.

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