What I'm thinking about: How does your land business actually create value?
The answer to that question is the difference between successfully transforming your business with AI and failing to do so.
I’ve been digesting this article from Section (my favorite AI strategy newsletter), about the three AI strategy investments leaders should make in 2026.
But before you even think about AI investments, you need to answer two foundational questions:
- How does our company actually create value?
- What are we NOT going to invest in anymore so we can fund the future?
The majority of operators skip straight to “let's throw AI at this problem” (raises hand) without doing the careful work of understanding their business mechanics first.
Let me break down how I'm thinking about this for our business as inspiration for you to think about yours.
Where Land Businesses Actually Create Value
This was harder to answer than I expected.
When I was building out our ACQ AI system (the AI built upon Claude from Acquisition.com, trained on proprietary data from small-business strategist, Alex Hormozi), I had to get crystal clear: Are we a service business or a physical products business?
You'd think real estate is obviously physical products. I mean, what's more physical than land?
The reality for most land businesses (including ours as a capital partner) is this: We're a service business.
The entire model is oriented around a unique, repeatable strategy for the acquisition of land.
The disposition side gets tons of attention (especially in this brutal buyer's market we're navigating), and yes, it's probably the most difficult part of the business right now, on average.
But that’s NOT where you’re creating (or capturing) value.
You can be aggressive with pricing. You can utilize creative disposition strategies that may be amplified with AI. You can work with the best realtors in your market.
But if your buy price is wrong… none of that matters.
You make your profit on the buy. Every single time.
(Inclusive of subdivisions and value-add plays. If you misprice the cost of those tactics, your project falls apart. Again, all of the value is reliant on the acquisition.)
So when you’re thinking about AI transformation, you need to start here: What’s the true value creation within your business model?
That's your North Star. That's where AI needs to make you more effective, faster, and more reliable.
The Reallocation Question No One Wants to Answer
Next: What are you not going to invest in anymore so you can fund the future?
This one hurts. We all want AI to add capability without taking anything away. We want to keep the entire 2025 plan intact, sprinkle in some “AI initiatives,” and plan for transformation.
That's not how this works. Nothing can change if nothing gets cut.
A few painful cuts over the past year:
- Let go of operating Land Pricer (incurred a huge time and money investment, but now my focus on Serious Land Capital is razor-sharp, and we can implement the AI initiatives that have been sidelined for months.)
- Pulled back significantly from Land Daily Diligence (we still show up when convenient for batched deal reviews, but it's not a routine priority as we focus on upmarket, complex deals)
- Punted on a handful of AI projects we had high expectations for after significant investment (see example below)
- Various SaaS products that no longer kept pace with our standards or use cases (Check your overhead monthly with an executioner's mentality.)
No sacred cows. Well, except your reputation and staying out of jail! Those are the only two ways to ruin yourself, according to the famed statistician and Skin In The Game author, Nassim Taleb. Everything else can be sacrificed or overcome.
My Biggest AI Dead End (And What I Learned)
There was a 2- to 3-week period in the middle of 2025 when I spent large chunks of my best work hours building out a “Chief of Staff” AI project.
It was super in-depth, incorporating over 100 free-response questions that interviewed me about my entire life and business.
As the name of the project implies, the goal was to supercharge our day-to-day operations, oriented around my ideal self’s decision-making, key advice from masterminds and mentors, plus copious internal business data.
It was illuminating… and practically useless.
It never fit into our workflow. The underlying data was tricky to use for actual breakthrough insights.
Now, as noted, we’re heavily invested in the ACQ AI, which continues to improve every week. It forced us to calculate metrics we should have known YEARS ago but never bothered to track.
Now we know precisely which levers we need to solve our core constraint and get to the next level. It’s informed by data from business owners many steps ahead of us.
It's better than our Chief of Staff project in every way, AND it can still incorporate the 100+ questions I answered.
Salvage what you can from any failed project or dead end, and move on.
What a $1M Subdivision Taught Me About AI vs. SaaS
Here's a recent example that crystallized a lesson from the above Section article for me.
We were reviewing a minor subdivision deal outside a major metropolitan area in the Northeast (one of the most macro-bullish areas of the country from a real estate perspective, something I've been tracking for much of last year).
As a non-exhaustive list, it requires an in-depth understanding of:
- Recent development trends
- Engineering requirements
- Local ordinances for subdivision (typically much more stringent in the Northeast and Midwest)
- Variable comparable sales in an area where vacant land is uncommon
- Recent new-build home sales values
- Local income growth and demographic trends
This isn't a standard land comparable sales analysis. This is multivariate underwriting that requires pulling together data sets that don’t normally talk to each other.
And here's what hit me: No SaaS product can handle ALL of this currently (nor can any out-of-the-box LLM).
This is why many SaaS tools are going to get hit hard over the coming months and years (this has been playing out in the markets recently).
The future isn't rigid (or even flexible) software with limited features. The future is AI tools that adapt to your specific needs (such as Seth and Mike's Stride CRM), just as LLMs can be precisely customized to each company's unique workflows.
The Framework: Incremental vs. Transformative AI
The Section article breaks down AI opportunities into two categories:
- Incremental: AI makes existing workflows faster and/or cheaper.
- Transformative: AI enables workflows you literally couldn't run before.
Almost every company has been focusing on incremental shifts.
It's far more difficult (and frightening) to ask, “What can we do that was literally impossible before?” (and with the acceleration of tools like Claude Cowork, what was “impossible” is diminishing by the day.)
For example, we are hurtling into a world where it will be plausible to have alerts set up for any potential subdivision in the US, the moment they arrive on market, having initial underwriting automated, and offers sent out on your behalf within a matter of minutes to hours.
That's the new bar, thinking beyond what even the most sophisticated team of humans could accomplish pre-AI. The opportunities are only limited by your creativity and execution.
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Long-Term Games
Our AI push in 2026 is our #1 investment.
That means accepting tradeoffs:
- Team bandwidth reallocated to learning and implementation (expect some output dips during re-skilling)
- Capital redirected from “safe” investments to AI infrastructure and experimentation
- Short-term inefficiency for long-term capability building (the trend across all industries will be to build, instead of buying…as building becomes simpler and cheaper.)
If you can't lead through that discomfort, your company will never reach its full potential.
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Your Assignment (If You Want It)
Take 30 minutes this weekend and answer these two questions honestly:
- How does my business actually create value? (Not what you or your team does day-to-day, but where the actual profit mechanics live.)
- What am I going to stop investing in so I can fund the AI transformation my business needs?
Be specific. Share the answers with your team if you have one.
Then ask the follow-up:
What can I do with AI that was impossible before?
Not faster. Not cheaper. Couldn't do at all.
That's your transformative opportunity. That's where the ultimate leverage is.
2026 is going to separate the operators who understand this from the ones who don't.
Let me know what you come up with. I'm all ears.
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Looking for a funding partner who’s investing in the long game instead of chasing quarterly wins? We’ve funded over $6M in land deals with industry-leading 41% operating margins, and we close 100% of deals we commit to. $50K to $1M+ check sizes. National underwriting experience on every transaction. Full-time land operators preferred.
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Originally published at https://seriousland.capital on December 22, 2025.
