Seth: Hey everybody, welcome to the REtipster podcast. This is a special episode because this marks the 250th episode of this show. So I wanted to do something a little bit different. Instead of a one-on-one interview, I brought together several past guests who are pretty well-known in the land investing world.

We have Dave Denniston. He runs Generation Family Properties and the Land UnConference and the Leadership in Land community. You may have heard him on episodes 20, 144, and 209.

We have Justin Piche from Scout Land Group. He joined us in episode 200. We have Mike Balcom, my friend and co-founder of Stride CRM. He's been on episodes 190 and 241.

We have Neil Clements from The Clem Group and The Real Deal with Neil podcast. He was most recently on episode 245, but he's been on several other shows prior to that.

And we have Ron Apke from Land Investing Online and The Land Portal. He appeared on episode 240.

And I wanted to bring these guys together to talk about the state of the land business right now, what is working and what's not working and where they think things are headed and what they're all doing today to stay competitive.

And since there are a lot of voices in the room, these answers are going to be a little bit shorter than usual, but I think that will give us a sharp view of what's really happening in the market right now.

So the first question, and we'll go around the room in this order just so that listeners can keep track of who's talking. We're going to start with Dave, and then Justin, and Mike, and then Neil, and then Ron.

So Dave, you get to answer first. What is your primary niche right now in the land business if you had to distill it down to one or two unique things that you do? And how does the land market feel right now? Is it good or bad or hot or cold or otherwise?

Dave: One or two niches. So we're primarily doing small and medium size flips is primarily what we're doing. And then the other question, Seth, was what's working right now?

Seth: And the other question is, and this is kind of open-ended by design, how does the land market feel right now? Does it feel like good or bad, or is this the best or the worst it's ever been, or what are your thoughts?

Dave: It's Goldilocks. It's not too hot, it's not too cold. It's kind of in the middle, in my opinion, of where we're at right now.

Seth: Justin Piche, you want to go next?

Justin: Sure thing. I guess I would say right now, primarily working on medium to larger subdivisions, thinking like the $1 to $5 million kind of buy range. That's what's taking up most of my time.

I still have the flipping company that's doing deals and looking for minor subdivides, but that's what I'm working on. How's the market doing right now? It feels a little cool. It feels a little cool on both acquisitions and sales. I think at least that's what I'm seeing in my business.

Seth: Am I just saying, do you have two separate companies? One does flips and one does the subdivides?

Justin: I have a few companies, but yes, I have a Triune Capital Partners is my GP kind of larger development partnership. Scoutland Group is the primary land company. And then I have some other companies that are working on other deals, got the Ground Game podcast.

Seth: You know, Mike, how about you?

Mike: Yeah, market right now, our team's seeing acquisitions are going well. Dispo has slowed down in the marketplace, but we're still sticking to our bread and butter deals. Still doing RVMs and an okay amount of texting and RVMs, so we're having a good time with it.

Yeah, just trying to stay in our lane, but definitely running it more and more and more like a business every day because you have to right now. It's no longer a side hustle.

Any thoughts on how the market feels right now? It feels like you can get contracts, but you can't sell them anywhere at times. Yeah, unless it's just a beautiful property.

Oh, we're noticing that, but that's okay. Just try to get longer contract periods or buy them cash and everything, and you're good. Just make sure you have enough cash reserves since your dispo process is going to take longer right now.

Seth: Neil, how about you?

Neil: So we do subdivisions and entitlements and starting to get into manufactured housing. And North Texas, specifically DFW area. And as far as the market, dispositions have slowed drastically.

And it's been that way really for us the whole year, maybe even year and a half. But in this market, my opinion is that it's the best properties for the best prices sell. Buyers are being incredibly picky. And so us as investors, we have to be picky as well.

And how do things feel in general? Just like Mike said, it is easy to acquire. It is difficult to sell. And so it is, I don't think anybody on this call would disagree with that.

Seth: Cool. Ron, how about you?

Ron: Yeah, we focus on minor subdivides, rural America for the most part. Splitting anywhere between like three to 10 times is very normal for us. We don't get into the major stuff currently, but yeah, focusing on that buy price anywhere from like $300,000 to a million dollars typically.

How do things feel for you relatively speaking? Yeah, very similar to everyone else. You got to be particular with what you sell.

We're spending a lot of time right now on different disposition strategies because I think it's just like it is the harder side of things right now. It's harder to dispose of a property than acquiring a property right now.

Seth: Now Dave, you're the only person who did not say that things are hard to sell. I guess Justin, maybe you didn't say it either, but you mentioned the Goldilocks terminology. So I'm curious, why do you think it's that way for you? Why do you think that part is going a little bit better than average?

Dave: Well, I would say it's relative, right? So like compared to like 2022, like yeah, it sucks on the dispo side. But I would say we're not in post 2008, 2009, where everything has gone down 50 or 60 or 70% in price and you're just having to fire sell stuff.

So that's the context for me saying that. Is it hard to sell stuff right now? Yes, but things are still moving. It's not like the market's frozen. And we're still buying, we're still selling, but it's hard on both the buy side and sell side.

So make no mistake about it. But I think this month, I think we have seven or eight under contract to sell. So things are moving, but we've been having to reduce price in order to get stuff to move. But it is happening. So that's the context for that.

Seth: Yeah, I know you and I have talked to a lot of different land investors this year between the Unconference and the Wyoming trip. And maybe it's one of those things like relatively speaking, just kind of seeing how the rest of the world is doing, it feels more like that Goldilocks zone to you.

The next question is, what marketing channel is finding you the best deals today? So what kind of marketing are you doing and how well is it working?

Dave, you want to start? So we're talking buy side here, Seth, not sell side.

Seth: I guess I was thinking acquisition, but we could talk about both.

Dave: Yeah, let's talk about both. Let's do that. So buy side for us this year, we've done PPC, which was an experiment for this year for us. And it went okay. I wouldn't say it's like gangbusters, but we found some really good deals we're excited about.

And then we've been doing mail forever. So we continue to do mail. I like to think of mail, well, hey, you get lots of singles and doubles, but it's kind of harder to get home runs, at least for us on the mail side.

Seth: When you say PPC, are you talking like Google specifically?

Dave: Yeah, yeah. So we had hired a PPC agency who ran a bunch of stuff for us and we did nationwide on that. It's kind of the opposite of what I was saying with mail where you strike out a lot and there's a lot of time spent, but you hit some home runs in there as well as getting some singles every now and then.

So some of the stuff we've gotten from that, like dang, this is pretty sweet. Wish mail would do some more of those big home runs.

And on the disposition side, selling stuff, what's working for you there? I would say dispo for us has never ever been one thing. It's always do a lot of everything.

So we've done a lot of different paid land sites, lands.com, everyone's favorite company, CoStar that bumps up rates on us every year. LandFlip, LandCentury, all of those kinds of things.

We've done plenty of flat MLS and realtors and have YouTube, some of our own SEO type stuff to help us get going. It all adds up to sales. So I can't say it's one particular thing. It's just a lot of different activities for us that's leading to sales.

And lately we've gotten back into insourcing Facebook for us, which has been pretty good. We've gotten two or three good sales from that just in the last month as we've gotten much more serious about training in-house and me personally getting my hands back in it, which I haven't done in a long long time.

Seth: Justin, how about you? What's your primary marketing niche on the buy and sell side and how's it working for you?

Justin: Yeah, similar to Dave, we did a PPC experiment and we didn't have great results. So we kind of killed it. You know, three month trial, got a few deals, but nothing spectacular.

We found it hard to target the types of property that we actually want to buy and found that we got a lot of things that we just don't typically buy, smaller deals.

Right now, cold calling is working the best for me. We have an in-house team of cold callers. I think I find that for us, that's finding the most consistent quality deals that we're closing on the acquisition side.

And then for dispo, like Dave, we do a lot of different marketing on the sales side. About 40% of our sales are through realtors listed on the MLS.

But alongside those realtors, we're also running lands.com ads, running a lot of Facebook, Facebook Marketplace. So Facebook Marketplace is probably the best bang for the buck, I guess, if we can find a buyer without bringing on a broker partner.

And it really depends on the type of property too. I mean, if you have a property you're selling for a quarter million dollars, it's a nice beautiful property, typically those are going to go on the MLS.

If it's a $50,000 owner finance deal in rural America, those are typically going on Facebook. If you have a big rec track that's somewhere in the 50 to 200K range, a lot of times lands.com is pretty effective for those types of deals. So we kind of do them all.

Seth: Mike, how about you?

Mike: Yeah, for us right now, best channel we're seeing in our acquisitions is texting. And then followed by cold calling, we're still getting okay amounts of leads through mail and RVMs are still decent. But we're really doubling down hard on cold calling and especially texting to acquire stuff.

Yeah, for dispo, I'd say nothing's changed. It's just been MLS, lands.com, other sites like that. Facebook Marketplace has been pretty good. We're not really relying on Facebook Marketplace. It's been hit or miss, but when it does hit, it's been pretty good for us to get deals out quick.

Seth: Neil, what about you?

Neil: For us, we've used so much in the past. We've done texting, cold calling, we've done mail, TV, radio ads, all that stuff. But two years ago, I wrote out our values and at the bottom, I put something called ROI over ego.

And what I meant by that is, hey, you might think that that TV spot is really cool and it is, and it does convert sometimes, but overall, it's just not great. And so I'm looking at each of these marketing channels and which are generating the best ROI, not lowest cost per lead, best ROI.

And so the best strategies for us have been cold calling and then data stacking where we're calling people that we have mailed prior, right? So we're doing some version of multiple touches with like mailing in advance and then doing the calling after that and really using that data effectively.

As far as dispo goes, I would say the best strategy and I think all of us on this call would agree with this, is to be as targeted as you possibly can. The better you buy a property, the easier it is to sell a property.

Seth: Yeah, Ron, what about you?

Ron: Yeah, it's funny when like all these guys are running like cold callers for their dispositions and stuff like that. We're completely hands off from like acquisition and dispo on that end.

All of our acquisitions, it's mail. Like we still just mail heavy. Probably 50, 60% of our acquisitions are through mail. We're not like doing anything crazy with mail. We're not doing like 50,000 units or anything like that.

But like we're very targeted with mail. We send nice pieces. It's a nice three fold piece, nice images. We send it to super small list. That's our main acquisition.

And then as far as dispo goes, it's super boring. It's like MLS, lands.com, and occasionally we'll post on Facebook Marketplace. So yeah, nothing crazy, but it's working well.

Seth: Yeah. The next question is similar to this actually. What are some of the biggest changes you've made this past year, if any? Maybe it's like hiring people, firing people, implementing systems, anything like that. Dave, what about you? What big changes have you made?

Dave: I would say that AI was definitely a big shift that we made. So I mean, I personally have learned a bunch of AI to really help our business and then obviously taught everybody on the team how to do more with AI.

And the other major change we made, and there's probably a few smaller ones I'm not mentioning, is offshoring. So we've hired some overseas VAs that have really gotten a lot better over this past year with understanding cultural differences, understanding how to hire them, all that sort of stuff.

So that's been a really big change for us as well, all in the pursuit of trying to run a more efficient business and make sure everybody's firing on all cylinders and all the KPIs are met. So yeah, AI and offshoring.

Seth: Yeah. Justin, what about you?

Justin: I mentioned earlier on the subdivision deals, we brought on a guy, an underwriter project manager. I guess there's a lot of different words you could use for that. Just like underwriting project management, I spent a lot of time, I was a bottleneck in the business doing that.

But every property that comes across on the acquisition side, we're looking at it through what's the highest and best use that we can reasonably accomplish for this property. And it just takes a lot of time.

It's a level of expertise above what your typical maybe acquisitions manager or certainly cold outreach team member would be able to do.

And so having somebody in-house on staff that can look at all those and know that they're going to do a good job to try to look into the subdivision regulations, look into the road requirements, look into the demand for child parcels, look into the arbitrage for acreage, that's been probably the biggest game changer.

So we can just handle more of those types of deals through our acquisitions team.

Seth: Mike, what about you? Any big changes you've made this past year?

Mike: Well yeah, there's this incredible software out there, Seth. I got my whole team on. No. So obviously I moved my whole team into Stride CRM where Seth and I co-founded. So we had a lot of fun with that.

One thing that was bogging down a ton of our time was actually just doing call reviews with our team. We ran a lot of our team through Ajay's Land Closers Academy. That was amazing for them, but it's still meeting with them just to get that extra push.

And then you and I worked with some developers and developed an AI sales coach that I think has really helped things. So that way our team can just plug in those calls and see where they can improve automatically.

And then it helps me as the owner of the company just meeting with them and seeing, okay, these are some of our weak points. Let's touch on this and role playing.

So I think just really looking over those KPIs, treating it more like a business, making sure people are improving. And then one I don't hear people talk about that much is actually teaching your team how to use AI properly.

So we actually have some SOPs on that, on how to do proper prompt engineering and different things like that when somebody joins the team because most people, as a lot of us know, think they know how to use AI well, and they're horrible at prompting it or doing anything else.

So I think making those changes just to kind of make many CEOs in the business has really helped push us forward and continue to grow that way. So now we can operate like a 50 person team when we are a 10 person team in reality.

Seth: Great ideas. Neil, what about you? Any big changes you've made this past year?

Neil: Yeah, the biggest change for us just came in the form of focusing. And so we were doing a lot of different things, everything from house flipping to mobile home flipping to small lots to medium lots to big lots.

But we found that 80% of our profit was coming from these very large subdivide deals, 500 plus, a million plus, even 3 million plus in some circumstances.

And so we pulled a list from the Land Portal, used their AR filters, which are great, and did a road frontage. And we're able to pull a list of top 1,000. And we're just hitting on those people over and over and over and over again.

Any one of those thousand deals hit, it's instantly a high six figure, if not low seven figure profit for us. And then we're also taking it a step further because we realized that in doing the house flips, they were still moving incredibly fast. We were doing them really well.

It's just house flips aren't very much profit per se. And so we wanted to find a way to combine our land subdivisions with housing. And so that's what kind of stumbled us into and me becoming a manufactured housing retailer.

So that now if we go out and create say like 10 one acre lots, we can actually go vertical. We can put the housing on there.

People can come to the table with zero down like a VA or a USDA program versus having to do an adjustable mortgage from a bank or give them seller financing and 20, 25% down.

So we're essentially just taking what the market has given us and shown us in trying to capitalize on affordable housing instead of affordable land.

Seth: Ron, what about you?

Ron: Yeah, a couple things. And maybe it's going back to like 24 months is one thing, kind of like Justin said, it's like trying to maximize value on every deal.

Obviously within reason, like we're not building skyscrapers or anything like that, but maximizing value on land deals has been a big focus of us, which is turns into less deals, more money per deal essentially.

And we used to be like sacrifice like, okay yeah, it's going to take another 12 months, and we would just like, okay, sell it today instead of waiting that. Now it's kind of the opposite. Like okay, that's fine. If it takes another 12 months, we're making X more dollars there.

And then also just a focus, kind of like Mike said, talking to sellers, a focus on problem solving for sellers in general. Because I think that's kind of something that's so important when you're trying to get deals, like problem solving, whether you're buying it on seller financing or whatever, however you're doing it, really try to solve problems for sellers.

You're going to get more deals this way. And we're able to pay a higher price when we are doing subdivides, doing improvements on the land. So that's been probably two of our biggest focuses over the last 24 months or so.

Seth: Now along these same lines of changes that you've made, maybe getting more specific, what is something that used to work two years ago that is either very weak today or just doesn't work anymore in your opinion? Dave, you want to start?

Dave: Well, I mentioned the access scrubbing stuff we used to do before. So that comes to mind. I think really in this thing right now, which Justin and Clay talk a lot about, you know, the Ground Game podcast is really kind of a smaller team is much more manageable today.

You know, I think just the need for people with AI, like Mike was talking about, I think that's been a major change in our business where there were people that we had to have before to do things that we don't need now.

That would be what I would throw up there. It's not an exact because it's not like mail doesn't work, for example. Mail still works for us. Does it work as well as it did a few years ago? No, but it still works. So I wouldn't throw out any marketing or anything like that.

It all works. It's just some of the changes have been more around people and systems and stuff like that for us.

Seth: Justin, what about you? What are you not doing anymore? What doesn't work as well as it used to?

Justin: We did the same thing, Dave, with scrubbing manually properties. And thankfully there's tools out there like the Land Portal that you don't need to do that anymore, which is great. You know, the thing that popped into my mind was shotgun approach marketing.

We used to be able to just send whatever marketing out to the entire state, every property above five acres and just hit after hit after hit a couple years ago, and even to some extent last year. And this year we've just seen that strategy not working great, failing.

And looking back at the data and analyzing what markets we've been successful in, where are we getting the most profit per deal? It's always in high demand areas.

People talk about sell-through rate being like a primary driver for where you should market to because that's going to show you demand in that area.

And I think there's a lot of truth to that. But it's not necessarily backwards looking, what's the sell-through rate been over the past 12 months? It's almost like you need to anticipate where trends are moving to, what are the markets people are going to and focus your marketing dollars much more efficiently on those areas.

Yeah, that's what's not working. What is working better now.

Seth: When you say shotgun approach, do you mean that with regard to property types or what you're saying in your marketing or in what way did you not?

Justin: An example would be we would literally just pull lists of every property in an entire state across five, six, seven, eight states, five acres and not scrub like a very minimal scrubbing of any kind, maybe some wetlands type stuff when those filters finally popped up on some of the data platforms, but that's about it.

A lot of those more rural markets where sell-through rates are low, or you may not even be able to find a sell-through rate because maybe there's been no transactions of that acreage size in that county in the last six months.

But being able to get them at a good price and find a buyer for them and actually sell through those properties. Some of my best or highest returning deals have been in those type of counties. But that was a year ago.

Today those same types of deals, they're just not selling. They're just so slow to sell. And I think you can get to a point in your business when you're allocated, especially we don't do a lot of double closes.

We primarily are buy, take title, and then sell. And so when you've got millions of dollars allocated to land inventory and you need those properties to sell to release those funds to both purchase new properties and realize that profit so you can pay your team and make some money, you can run into a wall if they're not turning over fast enough.

So I don't want to run into walls. I'd like to be in areas where we can turn the property more quickly and get that money back in our bank account.

Seth: Mike, how about you?

Mike: Yeah, everything Justin said.

Seth: Neil, how about you?

Neil: I will say you used to be able to just spray and pray back in the day and you'd have massive success. And I think things that have really changed over the years. Dave, you've actually been pretty instrumental in this because you're such a KPI guy.

Is before I used to just motivate the team. It's just come on guys, you can do it, we got this, let's make money. Now it's like no, we need to be hitting this metric and this metric and this metric. Oh, you didn't hit it this week, what's going on?

Do we need to put you on an improvement plan? You know, it's just it's really, which I know we keep saying this, but it's running it like a real business now because there is more competition here. And it's not necessarily there's more competition. It's just more people have found out about what's going on.

There's still so much money to be had, so many deals to buy, but now you need to make sure you are targeting things that make sense. You need to be using Land Portal to see like does this make sense? What's this sell-through rate? What are people buying in this county?

Is there high demand? Low demand? Do I need to be there? Do I not need to be there? And so it's not just like close your eyes, just throw darts and they will stick anymore like in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. They used to stick pretty easy, but not as easy anymore.

Seth: Ron, what about you?

Ron: Yeah, I mean everyone kind of hit on it, but I think the biggest thing for us is like spray and pray on the acquisition side is a big thing that just doesn't work as well anymore. Like we would just send mail out to a ton of things and we would just buy whatever, it doesn't matter. Like we would buy a five acre property for 50 grand. We would buy a 500 acre property for 500 grand.

But now it's like hey, we're still mailing similar amounts of mail. We've actually like mailed less actually this year than we have the last few years in general. And then we're just being super specific on what we acquire, super specific.

And I think that's huge, the spray and pray. And I think that's huge because this is a harder market to dispose of properties.

Seth: So when you say spray and pray, in what way? You mean the types of properties you go after or just the volume?

Ron: Yeah, I would say both. It's like going after a lot of different property types, going after a lot more volume. And then maybe just sending out offers to properties that we shouldn't have even been sending offers to in the first place because like the demand was low or something like that.

Seth: Yeah. So you guys are probably somewhat familiar with what's been going on in the housing world. It's kind of an interesting time in that world right now where there's a lot of concern out there.

And I'm wondering, given your expertise in land, how crowded does the land investing space feel to you right now? Like is the sky falling? Is it like, oh man, we're just totally saturated. There's nowhere to go. Or does it still feel pretty good or safe in your opinion?

Dave, you want to start?

Dave: So my context here is I've been doing this since 2017, so about eight years. And I would say it's as tough as I've ever seen it in the eight years I've been doing it. Absolutely. But that's also within the context of like compared to 2017, like, oh my gosh, every deal used to work. That was so easy back then.

And I think there's all sorts of factors that are at play right now with land investors and just people in general. But I will say there is truth also, as you and Neil have talked about prior podcasts, that there's a lot of people leaving the industry at the same time.

And kind of a follow-up question to that, I probably should have included it earlier, but how are you staying competitive as more people enter the business?

And you may have already answered this in some of the other things you've said, but is there anything that comes to mind where you're able to make yourself feel safer because you're doing this that nobody else is doing?

I think for our business, part of the good thing we have going on is we have a lot of owner financing notes. And so we eat up a lot of that in our, if not all of it, in our operational costs. But at least I know I have that covered on a monthly basis.

So for me, that helps us. I also think that anybody can enter inland. So anyone that's brand new, you absolutely can do it. But I think the moat around the castle is wider than it used to be. You can't start off with $2,000 or $3,000 bucks.

Now you really need probably 10 to 20 to 30,000 bucks to really do well in this business because your marketing may fail the first few times. And so you need to have that margin to get into it.

So I think those of us that are already in the business have some advantage over someone being brand new, but anyone brand new can succeed too. So I mean, there's plenty of brand new people. I'm like, what the heck, where did you come from? And they're crushing it. So even though that's true, there's still people crushing it today.

Seth: Justin, so how crowded is the land space feel to you? And then what are you doing to stay competitive?

Justin: At Drew's Denver event this summer, and some of you guys were there, Sumner Healy was talking about this. And then also on one of your podcasts, you had maybe Steve Hokanson? Yeah, I think so.

He was talking about it as well, that they're both seeing in their business less clients, like a drop off in the number of investors they're serving with their businesses. So it sounds like there's less people in the business.

However, I think the operators that are in the business are just getting better, like all of us are doing more. And so the competition for the types of parcels that we want to target, just like Dave said, is I think going up in general.

And we're also competing against information that sellers have more of today than they have in the past. It's easier with tools like Zillow and Redfin and all those to see what your neighbor's properties have sold for and get an idea for what you want to sell your property for.

Newer investors who start out often send a bunch of blind offers. They're commonly overpriced. And so sellers, you're competing against sellers who have received an offer, aka a letter, from someone offering to pay X amount for their property, even though it's not quite worth that much.

I don't know. There's a lot of forces kind of working against you. But at the same time, there's a lot of opportunity. I agree with Dave. The moat is bigger. I think you need a lot more money to start today than you ever did before.

You could always start by just calling, but you need to be going after big deals to do it. And you could be calling for six months before you find a single deal that can make some money for you.

How are we separating ourselves? I think what I'm doing is just targeting deals that maybe are just harder for people to target. There's not a lot of competition from new investors when you're buying a property for $1 to $5 million, frankly.

It's hard to buy those properties. You need capital partners, you need lenders, and it takes a while to build up both the track record to stand in front of those people and say, look, I've done this before, I can do it again. Give me your money. Have trust in me.

That's kind of what we're working on. It's just the bigger deals. Fewer of them, but more opportunity.

Seth: So Mike, what are your thoughts? Is the land space crowded in your opinion or what are you doing to stay competitive?

Mike: Yeah, I don't think the land space is more crowded nowadays than it was in the past. I think we had a small section there just a little after COVID where a lot more people got into this space. And I think we all felt it at that moment.

But I think since then, it's kind of just leveled back out where I think things have really changed. And Justin touched on this a little bit. I don't think there's more competition in the space. I think the operators have gotten better.

The reason I think the operators have gotten better is honestly, I think the operators have gotten younger. So I think the big difference on that is they're just way more tech savvy and things like that coming right into it.

So you see some of these graybeards that used to run their whole business, you know, sending out 50,000 mailers a month or things like that on an Excel sheet, but they don't understand what Zapier and Make things like that are, you know, an AI caller having these extensive follow up campaigns.

I think that's what really started separating a lot of this and what made it seem like we have so much more competition. It's not that there's more competition. It's just your competition's improved. This isn't Little League anymore. You're playing with the majors now because they're just that much better at it.

And then I think the way to just stay on top of that is constantly be innovating. I think the reason we started to see a dip in the space is I think as AI started to emerge, we had some new training programs coming out and people, I mean, Ron's one of them too.

Thanks a lot, Ron. Way to make our lives harder. You know, he does an amazing job teaching people how to run an amazing business and how to run it as a business. And I was hoping Ron and I would just keep that to ourselves, but he didn't. But now you have these great competitors against you.

So I think just to stay on top of that is the same thing people that have gone through Ron's course, same thing that go through your course, Seth, you know, people that work with Justin.

It's how can you constantly be innovating? You know, are you listening to Dave's Leadership in Land podcast? You listen to Neil's podcast. Are you trying the latest and greatest things?

You know, have you changed up your talk tracks? Have you changed up your mailers? Have you changed up your follow-up campaigns? Are you constantly moving forward?

And I think if you were in this space more than three years ago, the same thing worked year after year after year after year. And the solution to everything was just send more mail.

Now the solution to everything is innovate so much more in every direction possible. And that's your only way to stay ahead. But still tons of money to be made in the space, tons of opportunities in the space.

I think it's kind of like if you got into dropshipping right now too. Tons of money to be made in dropshipping, but it's not like it was 10, 15 years ago in that space either. And I think those are the changes we keep seeing.

Seth: Neil, what do you think?

Neil: So Batch Leads commissioned a study. This was done a few months ago. They paid 50 grand, their lead provider. They commissioned a study on how many wholesalers were active in the real estate investing space. Now this is housing, this is land, this is everything.

And they found that in 2021, there were 90,000 wholesalers. They found in 2025, there were 12,000 wholesalers. And this was a full commission study that they paid for. And that means 90% of wholesalers dropped within the past four years.

And whether you believe that number is true, there have been other people come on Seth's podcast who have lost 40% to 50% of their clients, specifically land investors. And so yes, I think we can confidently say that there is less competition in the land space than there was a few years ago.

Now I think we can also confidently say that the operators who are still here are getting substantially better and are getting AI enhanced. And so I think that that's something that we're dealing with is that the people who are still in it are better business owners.

Also, I think the people who are still in it have money because we socked away hopefully some amount of money for the past three or four years. That's a continuing theme I'm hearing with people talking here is that we have money, we have capital to deploy.

And I think a strategy to win in 25 and 26 is to have money. And I think we're going through a great reshuffling of our industry right now.

And I do believe that the top 20%, like 20, 80 rule are going to come out with 80% of the business, maybe even the top 5% come out with 80% or more of the business, just based upon what I'm seeing.

What I'm doing in my business to compete, to thrive, is just doing things that nobody else is willing to do. Nobody else wants to go out and do entitlements and go through all the accounting process to do that. Nobody wants to go vertical and actually take the risk of building.

And nobody wants to actually renovate properties. Land investors historically want the easy way out, the quick flip. And I think there's versions of that success doing things that nobody else is willing to do that all of us on this call are doing and have made us successful.

Seth: Thanks Neil. Ron, what are your thoughts?

Ron: Yes, that's a crazy study, Neil. And I'm going to kind of ignore that when I answer this, but that's wild to hear for sure. I think kind of the preface this question, like naturally, like when five years ago, six years ago, when we started this business, spending $1,000 on mail and getting $50,000 back like wasn't a crazy thing.

And then like naturally when you're getting those ROIs, people are going to come into the business. The way I look at it, like if I was coming into a business, looking into a business with not the knowledge that I have, nothing like would I still pick land today? And my answer is yes.

Because there's still so much opportunity in niches and becoming an expertise in something. It's about learning. It's about adjusting your business model. Yes, the buy for $40,000 and sell for $100,000 are much fewer and farther between today.

But the buy for $500,000, do a little bit of improvement and sell for 1.2, whatever it is, those opportunities are all over the place. So I think there's still a ton of opportunity.

It is different, I guess, Seth, when, and that's what you got, you got to separate yourself a little bit, just like any business. And like Neil said, whether it's going vertical or whether it's like getting a little bit bigger deals. I think the smaller deals are still there.

There's still money to be made in the small stuff. A lot of money to be made in the small stuff, but like a lot of people are comfortable doing those deals, whether they're doing three, four deals a month or whether they're doing eight, 10, 12 deals a month.

So like there's still a ton of opportunity, but I think the number of people, like the number of people in the industry definitely is a different situation than a few years ago. But again, this is a industry, this is a niche market that so many people don't know about in general.

And so the opportunity is tremendous. And I just think you got to separate yourself a little bit. You got to use technology, you got to try to innovate in your marketing strategies, your acquisition strategies, like what Mike said, your disposition. Like you got to continue to get better constantly. You can't stay the same for five straight years. You can't stay the same for one year.

Seth: So kind of a tangent from that, but along the same line of being competitive and so on. What is the biggest mistake you see land investors making today? So maybe you see lots of people doing this thing and you're just like, oh man, that's a mistake, you shouldn't be doing that. Dave, you want to start?

Dave: Yeah, I would say, you know, the thing that I see a lot of people doing is I think some people, and I think everybody on the call here that's on this podcast right now has been to an event or knows somebody that has had a lot of success in real estate or land for a sustained long period of time. And so this is very anecdotal, but I think I have a somewhat decent sample size.

And every single one of those people, without exception that I can think of, has a CRM where they're tracking everything. They have a system for literally every part of their business. They have a system for everything that they're doing, how they get off the phone call, the notes they're putting, everything.

And I would say a lot of people in the land space coming in brand new don't think about systems. They're trying to do it all in their head. They don't realize that they should have the CRM, they should be tracking things, they should have a process, they should have a checklist for everything.

And I think that's the biggest thing. I think it's just like they need to be tracking things from day one and making sure they're building that system from day one, even though they feel like, oh, I'll do that later. Later is really dang hard to do. You got to do it from day one.

Seth: Yeah. Justin, what about you? What are some common mistakes you see?

Justin: The one that I'm going to give, I heard it on your podcast, Seth, or in a forum one time. I think Mike Boyer might have said this, but it really resonated with me which is like everyone's trying to buy $50,000 properties.

What about the $500,000 or $1 million properties? If you want to make $100,000 a deal, then you got to be buying $500,000 or $1 million properties to have that kind of spread. So the mistake I see is people not focusing on the best value properties.

I use this word a lot, arbitrage. The best properties where you can create value in the marketplace and capture that value. And it's probably because they don't know the nuances of those types of properties. Maybe it requires some subdivision expertise or some entitlement expertise or some type of skill.

Maybe it requires capital partnerships and they haven't figured out how to get into that game yet. But I think they're all available to scale to that point. They just don't. And so they're just competing in this smaller $20,000 to $100,000 property buy range.

And maybe they're wholesaling those or maybe they have capital to acquire them. But so often I'll see people complaining about how competitive it is in that space. And I see how competitive it is in that space and I'll send out a text to someone with a huge property asking them if they're interested in selling. And I'm like the first person ever to contact them.

So I think kind of what you just alluded to is for people to grow into that next level, there's a fear to overcome, whether it's the complexity fear or the capital fear or something like that. But it feels like people are not even trying to get to that next level. And I think that's a big mistake.

Like I said earlier, you could call for six months before you find your first good deal, especially if you're trying to find those bigger deals. But if you're not out there doing that, you're just leaving a lot of money on the table and also putting your head in the sand with all of this competition that we're talking about.

Seth: Yeah. Mike, what are some common mistakes you see?

Mike: Yeah, I think a big mistake I see is people get so fixated on the contract and closing the deal that they don't think about, well, how am I going to sell this thing? You know, is there demand for it? Can I sell it for enough to actually make money?

And they end up tying up their capital in deals that take a year, year and a half to sell and they're just kind of barely breaking even on them. So I think just really understanding the market and thinking about dispo at the same time you're thinking about acquisitions is really important.

And then the other thing I would say is people not being careful about their expenses. You know, I think it's really easy to just keep adding team members, keep adding software subscriptions, keep adding all this stuff.

And before you know it, your overhead is $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a month. And you need a certain volume or at least gross profit every month to keep paying the team, keep the lights on.

And so when you have a month or two months or three months in a row where dispo's kind of dried up, contracts are getting pushed, a lot of owner finance deals where you're not getting your base investment back, those things can add up.

You need to have a pretty big war chest to be able to survive through those periods, those slow periods without drastic cuts.

And we've seen it. I mean, everybody here can probably name a person that they know in the land investment space that scaled their team up, had some slow months and had to do a complete reshuffling, lay off a bunch of people and totally redesign their business. And that sometimes is just a natural part of your business evolving.

And in probably all those cases, it was probably a good thing. I mean, I'm sure everyone who had to go through that would argue it was painful and they would not want to do it if they could have avoided it.

But taking those thoughtful cuts and thoughtful OPEX cuts to protect your net and not necessarily chase gross right now is what you want to do rather than waiting until it gets to such a big problem that you're forced to do non-optimum cuts to your business.

Seth: Mike, what about you?

Mike: Yeah, I think a big mistake I see a lot of investors doing is trying to do everything. You know, we've all seen it. And once a podcast comes out, they learn about distress deals, they learn about subdivides, they learn about putting mobile homes on property, anything else. It's like okay, I'm going to do that now.

Where they haven't even mastered the traditional buy and sell or double close or whatever, you know, their bread and butter is. They just go after every shiny object in every direction. And then you become a master of none. And then they struggle the whole way through.

And then also too, I think it's just KPI tracking. I know it sucks to do. And when newer investors are starting out and I tell them like, oh, are you keeping track of your KPIs? They're like no, no, I'll do that in the future.

It's like well, in the future it's too late. Because how are you going to be able to double your business based on your data if you're not tracking it today?

So I think those are just really common mistakes we see, shiny object especially, which I think we're all guilty of because that's probably what got us in the space to begin with. But that's not to say that that's what we should continue now that we're in this space. Master one and then you can add another one on there.

I think it's good to innovate, but don't innovate everything all at once and not actually understand how anything's working.

Seth: Neil, what are you thinking?

Neil: I would say, and this answer is going to be so simple, yet it's not necessarily easy. And a lot of people don't do it. And that is if you are prioritizing anything over lead generation and lead conversion on acquisitions and dispositions in your business, especially as a newer investor, you're failing.

I think there are a lot of shiny objects. There are a lot of AI businesses, don't crucify me for this, but there are a lot of AI businesses that are incredibly powerful and work incredibly well and are super super cool.

But you spend all this time learning it, you spend all this money paying for it, and then you don't ever get the marketing out or you don't hire the cold caller or you don't make any calls yourself or you don't follow up with your leads.

You don't do lead generation and you don't do lead conversion. You don't have a business. We run a marketing business. And if you don't do marketing of some kind, you don't have a business. It doesn't matter if you're in land investing or something else.

And I think that a lot of people prioritize shiny objects over actually running a marketing based business, which is what we all have.

Seth: Ron, what do you think?

Ron: I'm going to talk from a newer investor and what I see from a lot of people struggling who are trying to get into this business. I think people in general are very quick to say something doesn't work and opposed to saying what could I have done better on that mailing campaign?

They're quick to say mail doesn't work or texting doesn't, whatever it is. And they jump from thing to thing and then they throw $7,000, $10,000, $15,000 at this business. And I look at their business like what did you even do?

You really did nothing. You just kind of threw money and like you're looking for a reason for this not to work. So for me, I think people don't really give strategies time to actually work. People don't look inward. They look outward in terms of why something didn't work.

And on the contrary, like Justin and I were just down in Savannah, Georgia for a conference and like high level people other than you for the highest level people in this game. And like you talk to them, they're so niche. They're so like it's so hard to convince them.

Dave talking about switching CRMs, it's really hard to convince like a high level person to like change something that is working right now or that's going to take time to implement. It's an actual thought process.

I think that's the biggest thing. It's like too many distractions, jumping from thing to thing, too quick to say something doesn't work. And like from the mindset thing is like blaming something else instead of taking accountability for what you just did.

Seth: So I know not surprisingly, the AI topic has come up here and there in this conversation so far. I am curious, how are you all using AI in your business? If at all, any creative ideas or anything that's made a big difference for you or allowed you to have a smaller team or run a leaner business, anything like this? Show you, Dave.

Dave: Yeah, we could probably talk about this for a long time with all the stuff we have going on. I would say the latest thing that I've done that I'm really proud of and happy with is one of the things I was still personally doing in the business was reviewing over all of our inventory and manually updating prices.

And so I recorded myself every month for four months of hey, here's how we need to change prices and then feeding that into ChatGPT, working with it on a custom GPT that finished out.

And it's now working pretty darn smoothly, got a few kinks to work out, but that probably saved me personally, I don't know, six, seven hours a month because we have you know, like a hundred in inventory. So it definitely saved me an awful lot of time. I was super stoked about that guy.

Seth: What about you, Justin? Any creative AI uses you've got going on?

Justin: One of my favorite AI tools is Abacus. I don't know if any guys use Abacus.ai, but it is, it's a paid subscription, but it has access to all of the pro-level LLMs.

So for those of you who are still paying $20 a month for ChatGPT and $20 a month for Claude and $20 a month for Perplexity, you could pay $10 a month to Abacus and get access to all those pro-level AI things.

So maybe I just saved you guys and some of the listeners some money. But one of the cooler features of it is that you can create your own custom AI bots in there. So give it databases, data, et cetera.

You can create LLMs if you know how to Python code, which I do not, or you have money to hire somebody who does, you can build out a lot more stuff as well.

I mean, you can build out an agent that ties into every aspect of your business, all of your Google Drives, all of your SOPs, all of your transaction data to help you look stuff up a lot faster. So we use Abacus a lot to do a lot of those things.

I build out custom bots for team members who, especially if you have overseas employees that are doing outreach to sellers, they may have great English. They may have great spoken English, hopefully they do.

But there are certain ways that we speak in this country and there's certain idioms and certain idiosyncrasies of language that are just impossible to pick up on if you weren't born here and didn't grow up here.

And so the chat bot that we build out for maybe a texter, for example, helped them get a conversation a lot better than they would be able to do with just some quick replies and them thinking about what to say. So there's just a couple examples. Here's one quick example.

I need to find all of the expenses that I had on my personal accounts, personal credit cards, personal bank accounts that are unreimbursed business expenses because I need to somehow reduce my income.

And there's tons of things that out of convenience, I use the wrong card or, you know, whatever, a hook to a different account.

And so I use Abacus. It has this feature called Deep Agent. I uploaded like 30 different CSV files and PDF files of every single transaction personally that I have had for 2024, which is obviously thousands of transactions.

And then I had it evaluate every expense based on the likelihood that it was a business expense or not and break it down into like 15 different worksheets in one workbook for my review of what categories of transactions these were.

And it was awesome. It's been out this great workbook that I just finished today going through and selecting everyone that was business or if it was split, if it was personal so that I can get just a quick, I mean, that would take me so much longer just to set up the workbook, but throwing it into that program was fantastic.

Seth: It's a great idea. Thanks for sharing that. It's abacus.ai. I'm going to check that thing out.

Justin: Abacus.ai. You can put a little referral link for yourself on REtipster. I think you get a little referral every time somebody subscribes.

Seth: Of course. Mike, you're not using AI at all, right? It's not like we taught a course on this last year or anything.

Mike: No, AI is just a fad right now. It'll be gone in a week or two, I'm sure. No, I mean, our team's extremely AI driven with almost everything they do. Big ways we've been doing it.

For a long time, when sellers used to call us, we used to run them through an IVR, interactive voice response. So that's one of those we've all heard it before. Press one if you're interested in selling your land, press two if you're not interested. So that was nice too just to start screening those calls.

Now we just have a voice AI agent take it right off the bat. So that way too, we just immediately 24 seven have someone there to answer the phone. It's prompted the way we want to.

I remember back in the day getting in a big fight with one of the main answering services that we used to use because they said they could help us and they couldn't. They just were causing more problems. So now being able to have an actual agent there is great.

And then also too, a lot of our lead follow up. So anybody that calls in or texts in, we have a lot of things automatically responding to them via text based off of AI. So that way they're getting an immediate answer, they feel like somebody's speaking to them.

And then we use Stride's AI coach, which Seth and I worked with some developers to build out. Where our team just plugs their calls in after they're done with the phone call and they get instant feedback on the phone call.

So they can keep improving without me having to spend hours upon hours reviewing calls with them. So I think those are probably the three main ways we're using AI right now.

Seth: Neil, what about you? What are you doing with AI?

Neil: So one of the things that we're using AI for is actually in our marketing. We're creating all of our property listing descriptions, all of our social media copy, all that stuff is being created by AI now. We have a custom GPT that we built that knows our brand voice, knows our tone, knows what we're trying to accomplish.

And so we can just feed it property information and it spits out really good copy for us. We're also using AI for a lot of our underwriting. So when we're looking at properties, we're using AI to help us analyze comps, to help us figure out what the highest and best use is, to help us figure out what we should be paying for properties.

And then the third way that we're using it is for follow up. So we have AI that's helping us with our text follow up, our email follow up, making sure that we're staying top of mind with sellers and buyers.

And all of that stuff has just made us way more efficient. Like we're doing probably three times the work with the same size team that we had a year ago.

Seth: Ron, what about you?

Ron: Yeah, I mean we use AI pretty heavily. I think the biggest use cases for us is like follow up sequences. Like we have AI that's writing a lot of our follow up sequences for us. We have AI that's helping us with like property descriptions, all that kind of stuff.

But I think the biggest thing that AI has done for us is just like speed. Like we can do things so much faster than we could a year ago, two years ago. And I think that's the biggest advantage that AI gives you is just you can move quicker, you can do more with less people, and you can just be more efficient in general.

So yeah, I think those are probably the main ways we're using it. But it's pretty much integrated into everything we do at this point.

Seth: So thinking forward into 2025, what are you most excited about? What are some new things you're going to try or things you're particularly optimistic about? Dave, you want to start?

Dave: Yeah, I would say for us, we're really excited about continuing to use AI to make our business more efficient. We're also excited about the Land UnConference that we're doing in May. We're going to have a really great group of people there.

And then just continuing to build out our systems and processes so that we can scale the business without having to add a bunch of people. I think that's really the key for us is how do we do more with less people and AI is a big part of that.

Seth: Justin, what about you? What are you excited about for 2025?

Justin: I'm excited about continuing to go after bigger deals. Like I mentioned earlier, we're really focusing on those million dollar plus type acquisitions. And I think there's just so much opportunity there.

And as we continue to build relationships with capital partners and lenders, it just opens up more and more opportunities. So I'm excited about that. I'm also excited about just continuing to improve our systems and our team.

You know, we've got a really good team now, but I think there's always room for improvement. So continuing to train them, continuing to give them better tools, continuing to make the processes better. That's what I'm excited about.

Seth: Mike, what about you?

Mike: Yeah, I'm excited about Stride. I think Stride is going to be a game changer for a lot of land investors. We've put a ton of work into it, and I think it's going to really help people run their businesses better. So I'm excited to see how that grows and how it helps people.

And then also just continuing to push the boundaries with AI. I think we're just scratching the surface of what's possible with AI in this business. And I'm excited to continue experimenting and figuring out new ways to use it to make our business better.

Seth: Neil, what about you?

Neil: I'm excited about the manufactured housing side of things. I think combining land with housing is going to be a really big opportunity for us. And I think there's just a lot of demand for affordable housing right now. And I think we're positioned really well to capitalize on that.

So I'm excited about that. And then also just continuing to focus on those big subdivision deals. I think there's still a lot of opportunity there. And as we continue to get better at underwriting them and executing on them, I think we're going to continue to see good results.

Seth: Ron, what about you? What are you excited about?

Ron: Yeah, I'm excited about just continuing to improve our processes and systems. I think we've got a really good foundation now, but I think there's always room for improvement.

And I think as we continue to refine our processes, we're going to be able to do more deals with less effort, which is always the goal.

And then also just continuing to educate people. You know, we do a lot of content on YouTube and Instagram and stuff like that. And I think there's just so much misinformation out there about land investing. And I think we can help clear that up and help people succeed. So I'm excited about that.

Seth: This is the last question here. If you're talking to someone who's working a full-time job and they're new to land investing, what advice would you give them in today's market about how to stand out and succeed? And we'll start with Dave again.

Dave: Yeah, I would say find a community of people, find a mentor, find somebody that's doing what you want to do and learn from them. I think one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on was trying to do everything myself and figure it all out myself.

And I wasted so much time and money doing that. And so I would say find somebody who's already doing what you want to do, learn from them, join a community, go to events, network with people.

And then the second thing I would say is just take action. Like don't get stuck in analysis paralysis. You know, you can watch all the YouTube videos, you can read all the books, you can listen to all the podcasts, but until you actually send out mail or make phone calls or whatever your marketing strategy is, you're not going to learn anything.

So just take action and then iterate based on what you learn.

Seth: Mike, what about you?

Mike: Yeah, I think for me it's like pick one strategy and really master it. Don't try to do mail and cold calling and texting and PPC all at the same time when you're brand new. Just pick one thing, get really good at it, understand the metrics behind it, understand how to make it work, and then once you've mastered that, you can add another strategy.

But I think a lot of newer investors try to do too much at once and they end up not being good at anything. So just pick one thing, master it, and then move on to the next thing.

And then also too, I think it's really important to just talk to sellers. Like get on the phone, have conversations with people. You're going to learn so much just from talking to sellers and understanding what they want, what their motivations are, what their pain points are.

And that's going to help you so much in your business. So don't be afraid to get on the phone and talk to people. Or do I need all these filters or just like mumbo jumbo?

Like talk to those people around you because they're going to help you cross these barriers that you're just putting in your own head. And I think those newer investors, they still get so caught up in that analysis paralysis.

So just talk to your network, listen to what other people are doing. And then once you find your way, stay on that path for a while.

Seth: Justin, what are you thinking?

Justin: I think the biggest thing for new investors is to not get distracted by all the shiny objects that are out there. There's so many different strategies, so many different tools, so many different things that you could be doing.

And I think the key is to just pick one thing and really focus on it. Like Mike said, master that one thing before you move on to something else.

And I think the other thing is to not be afraid to start small. You don't need to go out and buy a million dollar property on your first deal. Start with smaller deals, learn the process, understand how everything works, and then as you get more experience and more capital, you can start going after bigger deals.

But I think a lot of new investors feel like they need to hit a home run on their first deal and that's just not realistic. So start small, learn the process, and then scale up from there.

And then the last thing I would say is just don't give up. Like this business is hard, especially in today's market. But if you stick with it and you're consistent and you keep learning and improving, you will succeed.

Seth: Dave, anything else you want to add?

Dave: Yeah, I think one thing that I would add is just make sure you're surrounding yourself with the right people. Like if you're hanging out with people who are negative and don't believe in what you're doing, that's going to drag you down.

So make sure you're surrounding yourself with people who are positive, who are supportive, who are also trying to do what you're trying to do. And I think that makes a huge difference in your success. So just be intentional about who you're spending time with.

Seth: Ron, what about you?

Ron: I think for me it's like don't overthink it. Like a lot of people get stuck in this analysis paralysis where they're trying to figure out every single detail before they take action. And I think the key is to just start. Like send out your first mailer, make your first phone call, whatever it is, just take that first step.

And then as you start taking action, you're going to learn things and you're going to be able to iterate and improve. But if you just sit there and try to plan everything out perfectly before you start, you're never going to start.

So just take action, learn from your mistakes, and keep moving forward. And then the other thing I would say is like make sure you're tracking your numbers from day one.

Like even if you're just doing a couple deals a month, make sure you're tracking your cost per lead, your conversion rates, all that stuff. Because that's going to help you make better decisions as you scale your business. So don't wait until later to start tracking your numbers. Start from day one.

Seth: Neil, what are you thinking?

Neil: My best advice for anybody listening to this, you're probably not suffering from a lack of knowledge. You're suffering from a lack of doing and specifically from a lack of going out there and having no other focus in your business other than one thing, which is getting your next deal in the door.

And until that deal comes in the door, nothing else matters.

The other encouragement that I would give anybody, especially with a full-time job somewhere else, is that this is not a passive business. This used to be a business where you could send out mailers, do everything via email, never talked to a prospect on the phone.

And even though we said earlier, or I said earlier, that maybe the competition's a little bit less, at the same time, it's substantially higher than it was eight years ago, which Dave said earlier.

And so if you're not ready to talk to people on the phone, you're probably not ready to have land business. That's my personal opinion. And you need to be ready to be a salesperson. And if you're not ready to do those things, evaluate whether this is the right opportunity for you.

Seth: Ron, what would you say?

Ron: So full-time job and they're looking to get in this business. I think first off is like doing research on the business. The people who don't do well in this business don't have conviction when they're coming in. They don't believe in the business model. They're just trying to try something just to try something.

So I think having conviction. And one thing I see a lot of people doing, or we all I'm sure have people reaching out to us, asking for help, asking for free help.

Instead of reaching out to someone who's been in this business for eight years, reach out to someone who's been in this business successfully for six months, 12 months, who's only six or 12 months ahead of you instead of someone who's a decade ahead of you in this business. Because they can relate.

They'll be able to give more time, try to provide some value to them. And I'm sure they will give back. A lot of people in this industry want to give back and help people.

But research, conviction, try to connect with people, and then choosing a marketing strategy. Don't try to do 100 different marketing strategies.

Like Mike said, commit to one strategy, acquisition strategy, be really good on the phones, train yourself, improve on the phones, and you'll get deals. But yeah, really good input from everybody here.

Seth: Man, I feel like I just heard so much genius over the past hour. Seriously, you guys gave great advice. I'm really glad we could do this. To close this out, let's go around the room again, starting with Dave.

If people want to connect with you or check out your website or whatever it is that you want to put out there for people, where should they go to do that?

Dave: Absolutely. Dave at genfamland.com is my email. Certainly if you want to connect with our land investors, go to future events, it's landonconference.com is a great place to find me as well as if you look on school leadership and land is where we have our little growing community.

Seth: Awesome. Justin, what about you?

Justin: You can, so I put out a weekly podcast, the Ground Game podcast with Clay Hepler. So you could find us on Apple, Spotify, wherever you find your podcasts.

We usually have links in the show notes, so there's a lot of links there. I'm not going to give a bunch of links right now, but in other ways you could go to justinpiche.com. Although there's a lot of like coaching stuff on there.

I'm not really coaching right now, but I do have calendar links. If somebody has a deal they want me to look at or has some advice they want to get from me for some reason or another, who knows?

You can book a calendar link there and I'm happy to get on the phone. I love talking to people, meeting people in the space. And I especially love looking at big deals.

Seth: Great. Mike, what about you?

Mike: Yeah, you can find me at mikebalcom.com or you can email me meet, M-E-E-T at landbh.com. So happy to talk to you all.

Seth: Great. What about you, Neil?

Neil: You can find me on the REtipster platform anywhere that happens. The Real Deal with Neil is my podcast. And then my email is neil, N-E-I-L at theclemgroup.com.

Seth: Great. What about you, Ron?

Ron: Apke Brothers YouTube channel or Instagram's good, Ron Apke on Instagram.

Seth: Great. And I'm going to include links to all this stuff in case you couldn't catch up with it. Just go to retipster.com/250. This is episode 250.

Thanks again to everybody for listening. Thanks to all you guys for being part of this. It was a lot of fun. And we will talk to you all in the next episode.