What I'm thinking about: Unprecedented (and shaky) macro conditions and the elite decision-making and resilience needed to win in this environment.

Job postings have plummeted 30%, according to Indeed, from their peak during the last rate adjustment period. ADP reported the U.S. lost 32,000 private sector jobs in September. Hiring rates hit 2008-2009 levels.

Yet the stock market keeps climbing, GDP growth looks solid, and corporate earnings are at an all-time high. Most of this is driven by AI, which is almost impossible to reduce or eliminate investment exposure from, no matter which sector you focus on.

It’s worth mentioning that about 90% of the stock market is owned by the top 10% of U.S. households, and around 50% by the top 1% of U.S. households.

If you hadn’t heard that before, it makes you do a double-take, right?

RELATED: 236: Callan Faulkner 5X’ed Her Revenue with AI. Here’s How You Can Too

These numbers get thrown around often, but I try to remind myself of this routinely, given the implications for the population at large and overall consumer spending. So I put more weight on the macro factors that are impacting a much larger portion of the population (~300 million people).

Let’s start there.

(BTW, for a smooth reading experience, I’m not overloading you with links for the stats. Feel free to confirm on your own, of course.)

Early Indicators of Market Opportunity

I've noticed a clear shift in the ~2x margin deals making it to the closing table for acquisition. Financial distress is ruling the roost again (e.g., troublesome mortgages/liens/taxes, healthcare bills, family heirship situations usually accompanied with money trouble, etc.)

The “I had plans to build, but I'm not moving back to the area” sellers? They still exist, but they're less common, or they have that rationale but also have a finance issue.

Macro-wise, we're seeing early indicators of increased distress. FHA mortgage (first-time or lower-income home buyers) delinquencies are at 12%, as high as they were during the GFC. Google search volume for “help with mortgage” is nearly as high as during the GFC. One-third of U.S. adults skipped needed healthcare due to cost over the last year. Cardboard box production is down 9% in 8 months (double the GFC decline). Pet shelter intakes are surging.

Economic cracks are widening. More sellers will need exits (and land is first to go compared to homes). Patient capital wins.

Understanding the Shrinking Affluent Buyer Pool

While distressed sellers create opportunity, the buyer pool is shrinking simultaneously. This is the tightrope we're walking.

For instance, job market bifurcation is extreme. Healthcare job postings are up 38% from pre-pandemic, and job openings for therapists and physicians are up roughly 85% each (my wife, who’s a clinical therapist, loved this news). Software development is down 37%; media and communications are down 36%; marketing is down 23%.

While layoffs have not yet caught up with the decrease in hiring, investing in deals in heavily tech and media-exposed markets like California can be risky. Conversely, markets near major hospital systems and healthcare hubs (e.g., Boston, Cleveland, and Houston) show more resilience.

Critically, jobs data alone doesn't determine housing markets (as always, real estate is hyper-local, and bottom-up data always trumps top-down), you need to pair employment trends with days-on-market, inventory levels, and pricing pressure. For example, Illinois is net losing jobs, but homes move in 38 days on average, with the lowest available inventory in the U.S.

Another key stat that should be imprinted in your mind: The top 10% of US earners now drive 50% of all consumer spending. This is up from 36% three decades ago, per WSJ.

Think about what that means for land: We're not selling to the average American. We're selling a luxury product to roughly ~30-35 million people who can actually afford it. Everyone else is barely hanging on.

And make sure to reframe what “luxury” actually means. When the median U.S. household can only cover a ~$500 unplanned expense, even an “inexpensive” $5-10K land parcel is out of reach for most buyers outside of owner financing.

Why Aggressive Sales Teams Can't Force Market Demand

I've seen some land operators recently looking to hire a VP of Sales or build aggressive dispo teams. And I keep wondering… how cost-effective is that really?

We consider ourselves to be dispo experts (with millions in sales to back that up), and you can exhaust most reliable buyer channels pretty quickly:

• MLS (~80-90%+ of real estate transactions)
• Land.com, FB, and similar platforms
• Targeted cold call/text/mail to area residents and recent acreage buyers
• Signs and local marketing
• Builder/developer outreach
• Auctions (break in case of emergency)

We’ve tried all of those, with varying results. Once you've hit those channels, what's left? Mailing every household in the township? Calling/texting every person in the county? Door-to-door sales?

The cost explodes when the net margin is already tight from an acquisition cost perspective. The targeting deteriorates. You're reaching for increasingly unqualified buyers.

As the above section notes, land is a luxury good. Think about Burberry or Louis Vuitton. They don't send door-to-door salespeople. Their killer brands do a lot of the heavy lifting for them, but even they don’t have infinite margin to push sales.

In a buyers' market with a constrained 10% affluent buyer pool, you can't force sales through sheer sales horsepower. You need the right product, the right price, the right location, the right buyer channels, and then patience.

Fortunately, land generally has low holding costs. So if you need to wait out a market (and price cuts aren’t effective), then wait it out.

If I'm missing something here, I'm genuinely open to feedback. But I've talked to some of the best operators in the space, and no one's cracked the code on cost-effective hyper-aggressive dispo in this environment that can inevitably get any piece of inventory to move in the face of a tough market.

Selective Underwriting and Market Adaptation

We continue to approach this market with extreme caution paired with opportunistic action. Still funding deals, but only the obvious 2X gross margin plays with bulletproof downside protection.

We (continue) to tighten up underwriting: Bottom 25% of characteristics? Won't touch them, regardless of price.

We're hunting distressed sellers in markets where the top 10% buyer pool remains stable. Following job growth/loss data. Watching days-on-market like a hawk.

The opportunities exist. They're just harder to find and require more discipline to underwrite correctly. And we do so well because no one on our team is “above” the work required to win. Everyone gets their hands dirty. There are no shortcuts.

It's hard to make macro-level economic predictions, but I expect an overall more difficult dispo market for at least the foreseeable future. I would LOVE to be wrong, obviously, and for a bull market to come back around sooner. As an aside, a lot of folks are still grasping for the expectation that lowering interest rates will enable another real estate boom. I'm far more cautious about that. It will certainly be helpful, but I think the effect will be minimal to modest at best, especially when we saw significant rate cuts during the last rate adjustment period and real estate demand continued to decline.

Many operators will struggle or crash out of the industry.

The ones who adjust — those who pair distressed seller sourcing with maniacal buyer pool analysis and maintain strict underwriting even when capital is burning a hole in their pocket — will feast.

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Looking for funding from a team that understands both sides of this buyer-seller equation? Serious Land Capital is actively seeking deals with genuine 2X margins and downside protection. We're not sitting on the sidelines, but we're also not pretending the macro doesn't matter.

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Originally published on https://seriousland.capital/newsletter/ on October 6, 2025