Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? Welcome to the REtipster podcast. This is Seth Williams. Today I'm talking with Clint Turner. Clint is a well-established educator in the land space. He runs learn.land. Today we're going to talk to Clint about how he has shifted his strategy, what he's doing differently to stay sharp, keep his competitive edge. It's going to be a great conversation.

Clint, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Clint: Doing good, Seth. And hey, I wanted to tell you one thing right as we started. I did your podcast, I think, in 2020 or 2021.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. It was a while back.

Clint: Since then, I've had two people recognize me from the REtipster podcast.

Seth: Really? You mean like just walking out on the street?

Clint: Both times I was on the golf course. And they were both people who had done a little bit of land investing. Like they probably took your course and did a couple of deals, but I've gotten recognized twice from the REtipster podcast.

Seth: That's awesome. That's great.

Clint: Those are the only two times I've ever been recognized. I was hoping one of them would have been from something I did, but it was both from your podcast. So congrats.

Seth: Well, thanks for letting me know. I'm honored. I'm glad I could help.

So when we're talking about land investing, this space has changed a lot over the past two, three, four years. When you look at how this used to work, like back when you first got into this, do you think that old model still works anymore? Or what kinds of people getting into the land space shouldn't be doing it because they're sort of misunderstanding how the world works now versus the way that it used to work?

Clint: Complex question. I love it to get started. You know, there's a couple of things playing. You hear about the competition, right? You hear people talk about that. I think there's also this dynamic in the market where landowners are generally, unlike other asset classes, they don't have mortgages. They don't have a lot of selling pressure on their property. Even some of the properties I own, when I get calls about them, I'm like, "I'll sell them for the right price." I'm not even trying to be an old landowner, but it just is kind of what comes out sometimes.

I think there was like a lag in the market where prices really increased and sellers slowly caught up to it. And then the market kind of went back to normal as it does. And sellers thought that their properties were super valuable. So the last couple of years have been challenging, just like a misalignment of pricing, I think.

And so that's what I think a lot of people are feeling. I run an education business as well. We haven't really sold a lot of coaching over the last year because, frankly, I haven't been super confident in what is and isn't working in the market.

And so, to answer your question clearly, I don't think the old model is dead. I just think it either requires a lot of time or a lot of money. And most people fall somewhere in between having a lot of time or money, right? Back when I started, I'm sure when you were doing this back in, I don't know when you started, but I started in 2016.

You send out a thousand pieces of mail and you get a deal; let's double your money-ish, right? That's how I started. And for better or worse, that is how my investment thesis has just been for the last decade or eight years.

I feel like I have access and you have access to a lot of the information out there, like the best, most current strategies and tactics and deploying all those in my business. It was very hard to continue manufacturing those returns where you send out a low-risk amount of money—$500, $1,000 of marketing. You get a deal where you can put 10,000 in and get 20,000 back. Very simplified example, but those are the metrics I'd like to work towards in the business.

And no matter what we did—texting, voicemails, mail, subdivides, development, large flips, small flips—it was just getting hard to continue to hit those numbers. So yeah, if that answers your question, it's not dead. It just wasn't making as much money and it was harder than it used to be.

Seth: So how has your strategy changed? What kinds of properties and owners are you going after now that you didn't before? And when did you decide to start changing this?

Clint: Yeah, it was probably about two years ago. We just kind of started getting a rush of feedback from everybody, whether it was a client of ours, a client of somebody else's, just general commentary in the space that, "Man, I'm trying this, I'm trying that, and that's not working." And so I started to scale my marketing back just for the traditional land flipping business, probably close to two years ago. It didn't go down to zero, but we were spending $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 a month on marketing.

That's a big spend if you're not seeing results, right? And it's really easy to run through an operational budget for a company, which I have done, by sending marketing for something that wasn't producing results, or at least wasn't meeting the cash flow needs of the business.

So we're starting to feel that pressure and frankly, we just kind of decided to slow things down. So over the past two or three years, we've been very focused on our subdivide and development business. And then we kind of just stopped land flipping, trying to figure out what was working. I wouldn't say we stopped, but it definitely wasn't the primary focus of the business. And it wasn't until about a year, a little over a year ago, that we really started targeting a much more niche subset, right?

Because I think the biggest risk a lot of land investors run is the marketing budget. I don't know what you hear on your show, but a lot of people that I trust and respect these days say they're spending five figures to get a good deal. That's a lot of money. Not a lot of people have that. That's kind of like a gamble. Because if you spend $10,000 and you need to spend $12,000, you don't get a deal. We lost $10,000 and you didn't get it.

So it's a big risk, I think. And I think a lot of people don't have the runway to do that for a year if they don't see a couple of good deals, right? Or probably a lot more than a couple of good deals. And so I wanted to find something that had a little bit less of the marketing risk. And that's kind of how we jumped into doing some more distressed and messy title type properties.

Seth: Tell me more about these messy title type properties. So it sounds like you're still land-specific or are you just going after any property that has a big enough profit margin and a messy title? And then what do we mean by messy title? Sorry, another complex question, but I'll let you start working on answering that.

Clint: This is becoming a more popular niche. And I would like to say, I started land flipping in 2016. The biggest deal I did for a long time was a deal I did in 2018, where I accidentally bought a one-third undivided interest in a property. I bought it for nine grand and thought I was hitting a home run. That was a $100,000-plus property. And I go to title and get it sold, and they're like, "Hey, you own one-third of this." And I didn't understand how that worked. I didn't understand anything. I just was like, I need to fix this.

And so me and my team, luckily, found the other two divided interests. We ended up paying about the same. We ended up buying the property for about $30,000. And we sold that thing for like $200,000. And so it was a really good deal, especially early in your career.

I've always thought about that deal since then. And we had a couple of other similar ones to that one, but I just never have really had the time or really needed to change the business up in a way that went to target those, but I've always wanted to target them. And so whenever we shut our flipping business down or really scaled it back to more of a funding business, I saw some other people in the space talking about this and I was like, hey, how can I go out and target? Because I have a few ideas of deal types that we're looking for, those undivided interests, really a lot of it comes down to messy ownership, fractured ownership in properties.

And we can talk about a few different niches of this. But at the end of the day, I'm looking for something that has simply put in a little more challenge to get it to the finish line. Where your traditional investor is going to look at it and probably have been taught to just pass on it and go to the next deal. And I like to say the things that create it are death and taxes. So often it's death, death at the wrong time with the wrong instruments and taxes that have accumulated.

And so something interesting we've been able to do is more or less, like I said, we spent over half a million dollars in 2022 on marketing. In 2024, we spent, depending on how you calculate different people's time, sub $30,000 in marketing. And we were able to do a million dollars plus, which is kind of back to how we used to run the flipping business. We're able to do over a million dollars in net profit to the business through distress deals.

And so it was kind of an experiment for us. I took my flipping team and turned them towards these types of deals. And it turned out to kind of hit all the boxes of why the traditional land investing model was becoming more challenging for me. The returns were higher. The marketing spend was lower. I didn't need 20 people on my team. We're doing it with a really sharp team of four.

Seth: So are you still going after land specifically, or is it just like any type of property that has these title issues that you can work through?

Clint: Yeah, so you got to start by finding the problems. And I just gave a couple, but there's a bunch of different problems you can have, right? You can have messy ownership, you can have back taxes, and you can have all sorts of different encumbrances among judgments and liens and landlocked access issues, things to that effect.

Clint: And so you kind of have to choose one, I say when you're starting, right? And the one that we started with and have really developed over the last year is a combination of people who are in tax distress. So most times it's tax foreclosure and have a complicated ownership structure.

Seth: Both of those things at the same time or just one or the other?

Clint: I like both of them. I like all the problems mixed together, right? If you got a bunch of debt against the property and a fractured ownership table where most people own a small piece and aren't that interested in the property, there's a lot of value to be created. And to answer your question directly, is it houses or is it land? It's like 50-50. I never had flipped a house other than a couple that had come on a piece of land that I purchased.

I've never flipped a house to anything to that effect. We've probably bought and sold like 15 or 20 houses this year. But with the caveat that it's the same as the land business. We didn't go to the houses, didn't step foot on the houses, and didn't fix the houses. I think we cut, we mowed a few yards type thing. But past that, it's kind of a mix. It's houses and land.

And for that niche I just told you about, you run into a lot of houses because it's hard to accumulate a bunch of tax debt on a piece of land, right? And so, yeah, we're kind of flipping both at this point. But it starts by finding the problems. And the problem is generally going to be that situation. And then there's going to be an asset under it. And if it's house, if it's land, if it's a combo, it just depends on what comes up.

Seth: Does that add much more complexity or liability to your business by throwing houses into the mix? Or it sounds like maybe not necessarily?

Clint: Really? You know, liability and complexity are two things. I don't know about liability. I'm sure lawyers would tell you that we have more liability than buying everything traditionally through title. But, you know, it's the same thesis, like, I want to buy an asset at 50% on the dollar. I want to buy it at 30 cents on the dollar.

Clint: The same way I look at land is if I'm going to do a land deal right now, it's where I feel like I'm buying it on a basis where there was a massive market correction; I couldn't lose, right? I could cut even-ish. It's the same thing if it's a house that I get three opinions of value at $200,000; I want to make sure I'm all in for $100,000 or less.

And a lot of time that actually looks different. It's like there's $100,000 in taxes. And so now there's $100,000 in equity left and there's so many interest holders. There's little, and I'm happy to dig into some examples with you too. But at the end of the day, I want to buy an asset. And this is another reason I like this is land traditionally and right now is very slow on the market. A house in Houston that's priced below every other house around it is going to sell that, you know, you're going to have it under contract within a week.

And so I've really grown to like the houses that we've been doing, or sometimes we're buying land and we're cutting the house off and then we're cutting the land off. The houses just sell quick because if they're priced properly, it's, you know, a roof over your head and running water and there's a lot more utility value to it. And so land and houses—a good mixture right now, for sure.

Seth: With these houses that you're getting, how much of a mess are they? I mean, I'm sure it's probably all over the board, but is it at all common that you would buy a property that's just a disaster and you got to clean up a bunch of stuff or is it not necessarily that bad? Because I know one of the big benefits people see with land is usually they're not that bad because it's just a simpler situation where just nobody is there. Is there a different dynamic when you're dealing with houses in that regard?

Clint: Yeah, I would say it's 50-50. We've bought a lot of really nasty houses, but we've bought them at such a low basis that kind of how I think about it is a flipper wants to buy a house with... They have a few sets of margin. I couldn't ramble it off the top of my head, but we have it in a spreadsheet. I want to buy it at a value where I could sell it to a flipper. And the flipper then has plenty of margin in order to fix it up and list it and make money on the deal.

And so if I'm buying a house that looks like that, very simply, it's just like, how can I buy it so cheap that it would be nearly impossible to lose money? And so again, there are houses and no tenants and toilets and all that great stuff with land. Even if there are tenants and toilets and termites or whatever's out there in the house, I'm just trying to get in at such a low basis that either if the deal doesn't work, I have to walk away; it's not a big deal. Or I bought it at such a good value that someone's going to buy it to fix up and sell.

Well, one thing I've found very interesting, just a little dynamic in the market, is when we've done that a few times, probably over half the time, the property sells to an owner, who's getting a great deal on the property. Somebody who maybe can't go buy the $300,000 house, but they can buy the $170,000 fixer-upper, live in it while they're rehabbing it. And they're paying a lot closer to market value for it.

Seth: What does the competition look like, I guess, in this strategy when you're going after properties with some kind of tax delinquent or delinquent loan or title issue? Is there any competition? I mean, from what I've seen of this kind of thing, properties with title issues, a lot of investors just want nothing to do with, like they just run from it. So it seems like it would be fairly low competition. And if that's true, why not offer even less than 50%? Do you think you could get away with that?

Clint: So as far as competition goes, there is a general set of like pre-foreclosure lists that you can find in the state. It's going to be things that have a notice of default filed, or it's going to be something that's been posted for sale or future sale through one of the, basically, the law offices that handle the foreclosures for the large cities and counties.

And so this is a pretty easy list. Like, you can go to linebargerlgbs.com or you can go to mvba.com. That's like 80% of the tax sales in the state. And they're going to tell you properties that, as they've gone through the civil lawsuit procedure, they have an order of sale judgment from a judge.

Once they get that judgment, it goes on these two basically main websites for the state of Texas. And it says, "Hey, these are going to be sold either this month or within the coming months." So the general pre-foreclosure list you find, it's those lists. And it's also notice of defaults, which have to be filed in public record. Pretty easy to pull those. So those are two lists you can find. Those are going to have competition, mostly because they're easily accessible. Like you can go to PropStream or BatchData or whatever and buy that list. And it's probably going to be pretty accurate.

There's another set of lists that we've been targeting that we think is—I haven't seen anything like it in a long time. It's pre, so if you just think about what I just said, everything there required a legal proceeding in order for there to be an online notification that this is a distressed property owner, right? You, me, and anybody listening to this can easily go and find that information.

What's really messy and hard is that before you get to those judgments, there's a 12- to 18-month legal proceeding. It happens in the civil court and whatever district you're in. And there's 18 months generally of time when there's a lot of indicators that say, "Hey, there's properties that are distressed, there's people that are distressed," but the problem is it's stuck behind just a nasty mess of data.

Right? And we found a few deals that were in this; they had these characteristics. They were pre-foreclosure, pre-tax foreclosure. And why tax foreclosure is really interesting is because a property rarely gets to tax foreclosure if it has a mortgage on it, because the mortgage company pays the taxes if you get behind, and then they foreclose on you. But with the tax foreclosure, it often means there's no major first lien position. And that generally creates a lot more room for negotiation, right?

Unless you're stuck behind the bank, the bank's going to get paid first. If there's no bank, there's a lot more room to do deals. So we've been really looking at these pre-tax foreclosures. So the city and the county say, "Hey, we're suing you for your back taxes." They file it in the district court or wherever they are.

Clint: And then it takes about 12 to 18 months, but this is all public data. It's just very, very messy. And so we have gone; currently we're at nine of the largest markets in Texas. We've been able to format that data in a way. And then AI has really been like crazy useful for us. I don't think you could have done this without AI. AI has been very, very useful for us.

And once we have that data formalized, doing some analysis on it and saying, "Hey, I'm looking for properties with tax distress and with dead people," like a very easy way to say it, right? Tax distress and dead people equals probably 25% of the time. There's an opportunity to do a deal. Pretty simple.

Seth: Just kind of recap some of what I think I'm hearing in terms of the different situations properties can fall into at which you would start looking for them. So we've got preforeclosures. Is that the same thing as a notice of default or are those two separate things?

Clint: So a notice of default is what gets filed by the mortgage company, by the mortgage trustee, whenever you have defaulted on your mortgage. So that's the start of a mortgage foreclosure process. There's a ton of deals to be done on that side of the table, but it's like a state UCC; through like UCC lending laws, you have to file a notice of default and public record in order to start the foreclosure process. So it's a very easy thing, generally in all counties.

Like something will pop up on the assessor site. And therefore the DataTrees and the PropStreams, everybody can grab it and say, that's a pre-foreclosure. That's on the mortgage side of stuff. We've only done a few things in the mortgage sphere. We've really been focusing on tax foreclosures so far. So that's just the difference in a pre-foreclosure list versus what kind of list we're really excited about, if that answers your question.

Seth: So, okay. So preforeclosures and notice of defaults are the same thing or they're not? And that's not what you're going after?

Clint: Yeah. So there's two kinds of foreclosures. There's going to be a tax foreclosure where the city and the county's taxing authorities are foreclosing on your property and they're going to sell it so that they can get the owed taxes, right? And then there's, I think the actual name is like a trustee's foreclosure, but it's what happens whenever you default on your mortgage. So two different kinds of foreclosures.

Seth: So the notice of default, I mean, could that be issued in both the mortgage situation and the property tax situation? It's just the notice that is sent to the people saying, hey, you owe money, pay up?

Clint: Yeah. So I think they're different. A notice of default is generally done by the trustee at a mortgage. Trustee of the mortgage to say, "Hey, you're in default. We're going to start the foreclosure process." The county sends you a ton of different notices that you're behind on your taxes. And eventually one day you're going to get a lawsuit that shows up, like a citation in a lawsuit that says, "We are suing you to force the sale of your property to pay your taxes."

And so in Texas, it's a hard state to do large analysis on data sets of mortgages because it's a non-disclosure state. And so it's hard to get private mortgagee information, whereas in disclosure states, generally almost all mortgage information is public. So that's one of the reasons we don't really focus on mortgages here in Texas, because if there's a mortgage behind it, you just know there's a foreclosure, but there's a lot of extra research you need to do that is really not available with public data.

Seth: So is it like the delinquent tax list from the county? Is that the main thing you're trying to get to start this process to, I guess, find the initial leads that you want to go after? Or is there some other different list from a different place that you're getting to start going after these people?

Clint: Yeah, I think the delinquent tax list is great. I found that not a lot of places easily give out the delinquent tax list and it's getting harder to get. So there's like a few areas that make it really easy. But what we're doing, what I think is very unique about what we're doing is we've formalized the court dockets.

So the data within the court dockets for the county, like at the 142nd District Court of Texas, right? Where the mortgage foreclosures are happening for Montgomery County. There are thousands of lawsuits in there with all the documentation about why they're being sued, how much they're being sued, and who's being sued. And so we're going directly into the court dockets.

We're pulling the information out and we're formalizing it in a way where we can say, "Hey, this property's in the process of being foreclosed on." There's so much in taxes owed. And then we're doing some integrations to find out how much the property's worth. Say, hey, the property's worth this. And then you can look at all the documents in a lawsuit and say, here's who's being sued, person one, two, three, and four.

And oftentimes there's indicators in there on: is somebody dead, right? It could just say deceased. It could say the estate of so-and-so. There's a couple other little, like, tagline indicators that can show parties are deceased in a lawsuit.

And so a delinquent tax list is good. The problem is that a lot of time with a delinquent tax list is if it's a true piece of land that's an agricultural exemption, it's only going to accumulate taxes at a few hundred dollars a year. And so there's not a lot of pressure when you do reach the right person.

If you reach somebody that's 10 years behind on a piece of land with an ag exemption with $300 a year in taxes, they owe $3,000 in taxes. And you call them and say, "Hey, you own 25% of your aunt's property" or whatever it is. "Let me buy it for you for 25 cents on the dollar." They're like, "No, I'll just pay the taxes and take care of this myself."

Versus when a process server comes to your house and hands you an envelope with a thick lawsuit in it, says your assets are at risk of being seized and we're going to take your property on that kind of stuff. Significantly more selling pressure there.

And this is what I was trying to tell you: I wanted to just buy this. I was like, we did a few deals where these were the indicators of the deals. Who can just sell me this list? And I went on a mad dash for months trying to find somebody who could aggregate this data for me. And outside of hiring a bunch of people to do random web scrapers and just a big, nasty tech project, outside of that, we had to just go very wide and basically go into the back end of the legal system and find out how they pull court data. How do they aggregate court data?

And so that's where we're getting the source data for our list, which is actually from the county court dockets.

Seth: So it sounds like you've got some kind of, I guess, proprietary software or something that can access the data from the court docket. And from that, do you use AI to figure out which ones have a tax-delinquent situation and/or a dead person and/or some kind of heirship issue? Am I following you right so far?

Clint: Correct. Yeah, we contracted this group, which has four or 500 developers out of India. I don't know how they get this, and this is something I want to look up, but they have contracts with local government authorities to get API access into their data.

Clint: I don't know how you get that contract, and I want to find out because it seems very lucrative. But we found a very niche group who has access to these, and we paid them and told them, "Hey, this is the data set I want to start aggregating." They charged us a ton of money, but I was like, if I can do one or two deals out of this massive set of data, I'll have the data stream, and it'll pay for itself.

So we paid them a bunch of money and pretty quickly they were able to start aggregating and formatting this data in a way where now what we had was we had hundreds of thousands of pages of PDFs. Like, literally, that's what it was. So if I did this before AI, I don't really know what I would have done next because now I've got all these lawsuits, but how do I read through all of them and make decisions on them in a bulk manner? You pretty much can't, right? Or you hire a bunch of low-dollar, low-dollar-an-hour people where who knows, right?

So what we did is we used the ChatGPT API, pulled it in, and we just started feeding it thousands and thousands and thousands of PDFs at a time, asking it certain questions. Can you pull out the account numbers for the property? Can you pull out all the people that are being sued? Can you pull out the total taxes? And I think there's a few other things contextually that we're using to pull out.

And it's able to extract from those hundreds of thousands of documents, the pieces of data you really need—back taxes, who's being sued, and does it seem like there's an indicator of distress? Probably 10 or 15 of those indicators of distress that we have laid out. But a very simple one is the primary person that's being sued; is it some sort of trust? Is it some sort of estate? Or is it somebody that's labeled deceased? And once you have those two pieces of information, we call it an algorithm internally. I think it's very light. It's a light algorithm, but it basically just scores it.

How many dead people are there? How much taxes are owed? How much margin is there? All that kind of stuff. And it scores it between, I think, one and 30 right now. And then we can rank that list and see, "Hey, where are there opportunities where all of our indicators are being met?"

Seth: When you're talking about identifying the lawsuits in a court docket, does it happen often where there's a lawsuit, but it has nothing to do with delinquent taxes? Like there was some, I don't know, some other problem and they're getting sued for that. Do you have to sift through a lot of that kind of stuff that's not relevant or does your algorithm have a way of saying, "No, no, that's not the lawsuit we're looking for. We're looking for this kind of lawsuit."

Clint: My partner in this side of the business is an attorney and he was a federal class action litigator. So he's familiar with the nooks and crannies of how the court systems work. And there's a specific court and there's a specific case type that these fall under. It's like, it changes a little bit based on where you go, but it's more or less something to the effect of taxing entity foreclosure, something like that.

There's tax deed and there's tax lien states. And there's a lot of controversy around this whole topic right now. But in general, there's a few states, Texas, I think there's nine, I should have pulled the list up, but there's nine states that are tax deed states. And those are the states in which the county can basically get an order of sale, the constable can sell your property and they can give you a deed, right? It's something like a sheriff's deed or a treasurer's deed or something to that effect that gives you title. And in some areas, it's marketable title. In some areas, it's not. In Texas, the constable can sell your property. They can give you a sheriff's deed and it's marketable title.

Seth: I was actually just going to mention this subject for anyone else to see the list of states and which one is which. I've got a blog post I will include in the show notes for this episode, but keep going, Clint.

Clint: It was probably your list that I was looking at.

Seth: Oh, sure. There you go.

Clint: Seth always has a resource. Yeah. It can really depend from area to area. I know there was a big case out of, I want to say, Minnesota, where they foreclosed on some old lady's property and basically it was like a constitutional taking. And so there's a lot of debate just around the legality of tax foreclosures and tax liens right now.

I know in Colorado, I don't know if you know this, Costilla County or a lot of people, land investors have done a lot of deals. I've bought a lot of properties in Costilla County. I believe they stopped doing tax lien sales. I believe as of this year, they're not doing them anymore because of the up in the air, like, what's the Supreme Court decision going to be on this? Can we keep doing liens?

Because I had a property taken from me in Costilla County, Colorado, because the county misindexed, they misindexed our name and our mailing address. And we had transition systems; property didn't make it from system one to two. I never got the tax bill. I didn't have it in my system and it went unpaid for five years and they took it and gave it to somebody who had the tax lien on it. Like a $40,000 property, I lost it for 1500 bucks.

And there's a real question on, like, cause I didn't get a notice. I don't think you can take people's property without giving them notice. So I haven't had the spare time to go investigate that extremely closely and hired an attorney for it because the property is only worth 30 or 40 grand, but there's a lot of big questions about it.

And so that's why I like the state of Texas is it's going through a judicial foreclosure. The 12- to 18-month process, everyone's getting noticed. They're going through the state civil requirements in order to do a straight judicial foreclosure and the excess proceeds are available to the owners.

Seth: So it sounds like you're doing this exclusively in Texas. Does this system you put together? Is it mainly set up for Texas or does it work in other states?

Clint: So we started proof of concept with this in Harris County, Texas. Harris County had good data. It was pretty easy to build our MVP proof of concept. We are doing most of our deals in Harris County. Unless I go hire a bunch more people, it's going to be very hard for us to expand just because of the amount of time... I find one good little team can work three or four deals a month, depending on the complexity of it.

I think Harris County has 10,000 of these potential lawsuits and a few thousand of them rank as interesting for us. Anyway, my eyes were a little big when I started this project. I was like, we're going to do the whole state and we're going to do this. And then we're pretty much just stuck in Harris County right now.

Seth: You know, I could just set up your thing and set up for Harris County. Somebody wants to do this somewhere else in Texas or in some other state. Would they follow a totally different process? Would they be able to use this system that you put together or a similar system? Or how would this work in any other part of the country?

Clint: We've got the nine largest metropolitan areas in Texas into our system at this point. There's 30 or 40 more we're working to add in. There's a few other states. One I know specifically is North Carolina that has a very similar judicial process to the one in the state of Texas. There's a couple other states, but like I said, we've been so focused in the state of Texas, we haven't really been able to expand outside of it.

Clint: That's a good question. I would say there's an opportunity with half the deals you call. It's probably more of a question of, is the opportunity make sense from a foundational perspective—can we make enough money on the deal, right? How complex is the deal?

And I would say with these deals, the reason I'm so excited about this is because I just haven't run into somebody who said, "Well, the other investor said they were gonna give me this much." And every time I do, I say with like so much hope and excitement for them, "Go take it, right? Take that offer." And they come back whenever the other people can't close.

I mean, this is just a very one-on-one outreach kind of deal, right? I told you earlier, I don't love having a large variable line item expense for a business that's outside of employees and the actual cost of land. Your marketing is your biggest expense in your business, right? When the business isn't working, you got to figure out how do I cut back on the marketing expense? How do I cut back on my largest expense?

And for us, adding in people and time and data, it's a few thousand bucks a month for what we're spending to go out and find these people. But at the end of the day, the mechanism is just cold call. And man, oftentimes, when you find a fractured ownership stuck behind some sort of tax foreclosure, almost every time you call somebody, you're going to find somebody in the tree who says, "Yes, I would love to sell my 10 or 15 or 20% of this property." The question is just, how do we get the other three or four or 10 people? And what's it going to be worth for us in time to go and do that?

Seth: If cold calling is the main way you reach out to these people, are you saying anything differently to start the conversation since you already know there's an existing issue? And like, how much salesmanship or negotiation skill is needed to help this person see they got a problem and you're the solution? Is it kind of easy because they already know they have a problem? I guess what I'm getting at is, can you hire any idiot off the street to do these cold calls? Or does this person need to be like a trained salesman who really gets the business, understands the situation, and knows what to say?

Clint: I think a little bit of both. A little bit of both. Most good sales processes have an inbound person and then an account manager or the expert behind the scenes. I've seen that it works really well with that combo. This took us a while to figure out. But having somebody able to go outbound with general knowledge to explain a bit about what's going on. I think you get a call and somebody mentions a few people in your family, a property you might know or somebody you might know, and you say, "Your aunt told me to call you." And even better if you're talking to the aunt and you can say, "Hey, can you text so-and-so and tell him I'm going to call him?"

That is the salesmanship it takes to win at these deals. It's getting someone to come in, getting them to trust that you understand somewhat of what you're talking about. And as far as being solution aware or even problem aware, it's like 75-25. 75% of the time, they know that there's a problem, but most of them are doing nothing about it, probably because it doesn't impact them in a meaningful way.

And I'd say 25% of the time, we're the first time that they found out about what's going on. And so you find those two sides of it. But I don't think you need crazy salesmanship. I think when you figure out who is the important person to talk to, we call them the ringleader generally, right? Who's the ringleader? Knowing your stuff and being able to say, "Hey, here's what's happening. Here's probably why is so-and-so. And here's why it's going to be tough for you to sell the property because nobody's filled out a new vesting deed since 1960 and your parents are dead and we're going to have these affidavits."

There's going to be legal work. Being able to explain that is definitely an added benefit, but it's much more about letting people, giving them all the facts, letting them become aware because, man, the taxing and the lawyers that represent the taxing authorities are remarkably bad. It just blows my mind.

Now they probably have a lot of work to do, but they are just very, very bad at communicating what's going on to people. Over half the time, not finding the right people that are actually being... So the lawsuit says three people and we go build a family tree and there's 10 people. And they're like, "I didn't even know this was going on because they never got noticed." And how would they know?

And so you really just need to be able to present the facts to people. And we have a very clear buy box now. And we tell them this is what we do. And this is why our strategy has been very consultive in nature because it's pretty easy. It's like, if you don't want to hire me, you need to go pay the taxes and you go hire a lawyer, right? If you don't want to sell your property to me, these are the things you need to do. You can change a little per person, but when somebody has a problem and you say, "I'll tell you how to fix it," it builds a lot of trust pretty quickly.

Seth: Have you noticed that these property owners or whoever it is that you're contacting, whether they're an owner or not, have you noticed anything notably different compared to looking at land deals that are not taxed and like when don't have title issues? Are these people more apathetic or unaware of situations? Is it easier to deal with them or is it harder in any way to deal with them?

Clint: We've got a lot of stories, I can say for sure. We are talking a lot less about property specifics and dealing with a lot more personalities and family dynamics of this side of the family like that side and does this person like that person. So very different, I would say. I want to say very different, but I still believe that a lot of the opportunity and the traditional send-to-mail, send text, do land deal comes from being in the right place at the right time. Because the only value you're adding there is buying the property at a discount to market value quickly. Quick cash, quick liquidity for an otherwise illiquid asset. Right. That is the value you're adding to the land business.

On this side, you're adding true value. You're able to unstuck a property. You're able to... I have the amount of thousand-word texts that we've received of how thankful... I'm not kidding. It's crazy. The amount of thankful texts we've received, we just started a really intentional testimonial capture campaign because people are so thrilled whenever we get this done for them that they're asking us, "How can we give you a testimonial? How can we do something?"

So it's a very different conversation that's a lot more oriented around who is the family member? What happened? How can we help you solve your problem? How can we make you aware of what the problem is? Generally, the tone is a lot more like we're trying to help you and if it doesn't work out, it's no problem. And that's probably a great tone for any sales call. But when you're talking to somebody who's owned the property and knows the property and I'm not taking a no-lowball offer, very, very different conversations.

Seth: Why don't you take me through an example or two of one of these deals? What did it look like? How did you find it? What was the property itself? What was the ownership situation? How much did you offer for it? How long did you hold it? What did you sell it for? Just all the details. I'm just curious to see how one or two of these things work.

Clint: So I'm going to do a podcast trick for you. I'm going to save the best one for the end. So everyone's got to listen to the end of the episode. I should have mentioned that earlier on this episode. I am going to start with one that we shouldn't have done.

Okay. This was a small deal, I guess, smallish deal in Houston, Texas. We find it. We found it through the same means I was just telling you about. It was a property. It was delinquent in taxes, with a lot of ownership issues. Had a couple homeless guys living on the property who were half of the rightful heirs on the property.

So we find this property through the traditional method and we call one of the first people in the family tree. And when I say traditional method, it's everything we just talked about. All the stuff we pulled from the Harris County docket and the AI research we did and, "Hey, it looks like there's an opportunity here." It was a one-acre infill lot in Houston, with about 40K in taxes owed worth 150 to 200. That's just setting the stage.

Okay. And so we call somebody; it was a brother and the brother says, "Man, if you can make a deal with my knucklehead brothers, then you can buy the property and you can have my interest. I just don't want to deal with them anymore." And this guy owned a third of the property. I'm looking at it. It's a $150,000 property. He owns a third of it. So I can go pick up 50,000 bucks just getting his deed.

And he said, "I'll give it to you as long as you can help me get this done," because he's been helping them live there. He's paid some of the taxes over time. He just doesn't want to deal with it. So we send somebody out the next day to his house to get a deed. And he meets him. The person tries to give him a check. He doesn't take the check. He signs all the paperwork and says, "Give me a call if you need to get in touch with my brothers." And that's it.

We picked up the first third of this property and we were like, "Hey, home run." He didn't take the check. So I said that intentionally because we sent a private investigator back to his house and said, "Hey, you have to take this check" because we wanted the consideration for the contract to be legit. And so anyway, we sent that back out, got that done.

And now we just need to go strike a deal with his other two brothers. And the reason we picked that up is because we paid him 250 or 500 bucks or something like that for his deed. Worst-case scenario, we hire a lawyer who could just force a partition sale of this property. It's pretty much an unalienable right. You can force a sale of property if you own a piece of it. It can get nasty and there's legal proceedings.

But anyway, so we just want to go make a deal with his other two brothers and tell them, "Hey, you got this property." We even were like, let's go to market with them. If they want to just get this thing off, get the taxes paid, because it was supposed to be foreclosed on a couple of weeks later.

And so we told them, "Hey, if we can get this..." This was our first pitch. Well, actually our first pitch was, "Hey, let's give you some money for it." And our second pitch was going to be, let's go to market together. But all that went out the window when we found out they were homeless, recently came into a small settlement, and they lived on the property.

So many huge issues with that. One of them was people living on the property; that's just a huge thing to tackle. And the second is like knowing your opponent, like knowing who's on the other side of the table. And if it's somebody who's homeless, has a little bit of money, and doesn't care, that's going to be a deal that's very challenging, right?

And they called us back like three or four hours later. We're like, "All right, let's do a deal." And so we ended up buying, I think we bought their deeds for something to the tune of $10,000 now and $10,000 later, like $10,000 now and $10,000 more after we sell the property. We got quick claim deeds from them. We had somebody record them signing it.

And you got to keep in mind that this is a vacant one-acre parcel. There's a trashed-out house, no windows, no doors, and a tent. That's what's on this property. So we had to get pictures of these guys holding the cash because they have no bank accounts. They have no IDs. We had to get pictures of them holding the cash as a receipt so that they knew that they got this first payment. Our private investigator is walking around with 20 grand in his pocket to get this done.

And so we finally get the deal inked. We get it listed. We sell it. Then we get an offer to sell, probably within like 45 days. And we were closing within like 45 days. And it comes down to it. And then these guys don't want to leave again. And they're stuck on the property. And so I thought we're going to have to go back through the whole thing. They ended up luckily moving off the property. We sold the property. I think we made about 40 or 50 grand on it at the end of the day because we had about $5,000 in private investigators. We had about $8,000 in lawyers, and we ended up paying them like 15, 20 grand each, or something like that.

So that was one of our first deals. And we really wanted to... We saw a lot of margin. We saw the opportunity. We really wanted to get it done. We wanted to figure out if we could do this thing and start to learn some of the skill sets. Probably wouldn't do that deal again, and we pretty much won't do a deal if somebody lives in the house or lives on the property at this point and doesn't want to voluntarily leave.

Seth: I mean, it sounds like there's some really good lessons there. In hindsight, is there something you could have done before you paid off this first brother to know that the other two brothers are living there? Is there a new part of your process now to make sure you never encounter one of those situations again? And what is that exactly?

Clint: We were told by the first brother that the other two were there sometimes. That's all he told us. And so we asked him, we wanted to know if there was anybody that was going to be challenging. And here's the backstop: the foreclosure of the property was going to happen, right? If we for auto-less pendants in, we could potentially stop that foreclosure with our legal action in order to force the sale of the property because we're a co-owner. And there's some nuances. I'm jumping over there.

But we basically... There was an impending doom day. There was a foreclosure coming up. And so it was either they're going to foreclose it and get nothing, or they could do a deal with us and get something. Or worst-case scenario, we are going to sue them and they're going to get nothing. So there were a lot of they get nothing scenarios that were forcing this.

And so when someone's going to lose it, at the end of the day, and this title is super messy, and we owned a piece of it, we had to actually—I didn't tell this in the story—stop the tax sale during this process. And that's why we were going to sue them—we went as long as we could, and we already had that 30% of the property that we owned.

We had to make a decision one day as, "Hey, do we want to pay this tax bill off to finish this deal?" That was another really important point. We probably should not have done that. But we ended up paying the tax bill as 30 or $40,000. Got a payment plan, $20,000 now, a few thousand a month.

We were locked in at that point. That's why we got to our level of having to sue and foreclose on the property. But as far as what we learned, we really just learned that if somebody lives on the property and they don't want to leave, there's a lot of things the state gives them, a lot of ways that make it challenging to get them off the property. But B, it's just not a situation we want to be in—forcing people out of the house, trying to negotiate with them like that.

These guys were living in a tent and bouncing around from place to place. So I don't feel as bad about it. But one of the very next deals that we got in our pipeline was a really nice-looking deal. And I was like a single mother with some issues that had happened and a couple of kids. And I was like, "I'm not going to try and force this lady out of her house."

And so one big thing that we look for now is, like, is there an occupant who says they're not going to leave or says they don't want to leave? Right. And for us, that's something that, unless it's like a crazy big margin deal and there's a win-win we can find for them, we're probably just going to leave that deal alone until they call us back.

Seth: Some of the listeners out there might be familiar with Logan Fullmer. I interviewed him back in episode 177, I think it was. It sounds like there's some overlap, possibly with what you're talking about here and what he's doing. Although I think there's some differences too.

How similar or different is this from what Logan is doing? Are you going after a more specific niche of people and situations or what would be the key differences?

Clint: Yeah, Logan, a good friend of mine as well. I've worked with Logan, very, very sharp guy. From what I understand with Logan is they focus mostly on tax foreclosures. So you know how I said later in the process after the lawsuit's done, they're going to go and when it pops up on the website, when it pops up on mvba.com or pops up on linebargerlgbs.com, man, that dude is a wizard at finding those deals early, getting in, getting his claws in them and finding good opportunities out of them.

And that's how we cut our teeth at it at first. The problem is that whenever somebody posts something on all those websites, there's a lot of competition. And if you're not Logan Fulmer and really, really good at it, it can be challenging. I mean, we are competing against people who are knocking on the doors, going to the doors, knocking on the doors, leaving a very nice handwritten note, a business card, here's how we can help you. That's what you're competing against in local markets.

When something goes on the foreclosure list, often it's the first person to build some trust with the ringleader. And when I worked with Logan, that's what they were really, really good at. And that's what was challenging for us—we weren't quick to it. They were already talking to somebody else or they say, "Hey, we've gotten a hundred calls about this."

The deals that we were able to do were the ones that were pre-foreclosure. They were before the alert went out to everybody in the public. And again, I don't want to speak for Logan. Logan's done a ton of really unique deals and I'm sure he's got a ton of different strategies. But the one that I know from Logan is very focused on the tax foreclosures. And it's, and you know, it's a great strategy because, as that date approaches, you have less and less and less options.

And we've done a ton of deals that way too, right? But there's also this long period of when somebody gets served a lawsuit and it's sitting heavy on them for a while. What am I going to do with this? How are we going to solve this problem? And I just found that nobody was addressing these. And I'm sure people are. I'm probably not the first person to think of this, but we really found with AI that we were able to target them better, right? And so I think that may be the difference in what we're doing. But I don't want to speak for Logan specifically.

Seth: It sounds like a good attorney is a pretty darn important team member in this process. I don't know if it's for every deal, but certainly some of them. Do you have any tricks for finding the best attorneys and how do you know when you're dealing with an A player who can really do what you need them to do and have the specialty and expertise to know how to get through some of these situations?

Clint: That is a great question. To fast forward through what did and didn't work, what's worked well for us is going to a big law firm in whatever area you're working in and asking for an attorney that does this specific thing.

Seth: What specific thing are you asking for? Like, how would you word that question?

Clint: It's going to be some sort of probate, foreclosure, or real estate attorney. Generally somebody who has a bunch of those things. This really is not a super complex process for somebody who's familiar with real estate foreclosures. But that's what we tell them. And often we're going to go in the front door, at least when we were starting, go in the front door of the law firm, tell them exactly what you're looking for, interview a few of the attorneys there and just ask them specifically how they would solve the problem.

For us, one thing that we are very communicative about is what our timeline is. We're very, very clear. This is when we need this done by. When we send a task, we need it done with X amount of hours of turnaround or X amount of days of turnaround. And if you can't meet that need, no problem. We just can't work with you.

On the other end, we're going to be your best client. You're going to get opportunities from us. You're going to have a lot of hours to bill us. We're going to pay you on time, quick.

But I found that when you search for... One of our attorneys is with... Oh gosh, I forgot the law firm. But you search the law firm and it comes up and it says, "We have 200 offices worldwide, 60 offices in the state," whatever it is. It's a big firm. Whenever people start getting outreach from a big law firm that has a ton of credibility... It's like, well, this is probably legitimate.

To answer your question specifically about, do you need a really good attorney? You do and you don't. We haven't had to take anything... Well, we have one in action right now, but we have only had to take this one property through a legal process. And once you've done all these things once or twice, and you have the templates and you have the strategy of what needs to be done, at the end of the day, it's just getting interest. Either getting a settlement where everybody goes and sells a property or buying an interest from somebody—that's pretty much what you're solving for at the end of the day. It's just what strategy do you use?

And having a good attorney is great, especially if you need advice or if you need letters drafted and minor things handled. But we haven't taken property all the way through. We have one that we have to right now. But through that process, we've been able to get closer to a settlement with them. So that's how we've started: going and finding a big law firm, finding somebody who has demonstrated experience doing what we're doing.

And it's not like your first phone call either, right? You interviewed and we've worked with a few attorneys who were not very good as well until you find the one that works. But most of the deals we do, we just really don't need an attorney most of the time.

Now sometimes it's good to have them there. If you have a, like, where I found it to be very, very helpful is when you have somebody who just doesn't trust you, doesn't believe you, doesn't want to do business with you, having a, "Hey, my attorney is going to call you." And they Google the attorney and they Google the law firm. It's, you know, "I don't really want to deal with these guys," right? That has been when it's been the most helpful, I would say, is to build some credibility and let people know that we're serious about what we're talking about.

But past that, a lot of the legal work is like affidavits and doing deeds and closing disclosures. We have a specific closing packet we use that has a few disclosures in it. But a lot of the stuff is just like a pretty simple contract. And I don't know if we talked about this, but we are buying a lot of deeds outside of title. So that is definitely a risk that we're taking.

Seth: You're not closing with a title company. It's like a self-closing situation?

Clint: Yeah. So if somebody… like the story we just talked about, if that brother told me he wanted to sell me a third of his property for $500 or whatever, he said he was going to give it to me. I told him I gave him $500. We can't go to title to close that. They're going to be like, "Okay, well, I know you got a contract for this, but we need to get everybody else in their dad's estate. We got to get the affidavits done." It's going to be a traditional closing.

I went and got a deed from that guy the same day or the next day because it's vested ownership. As long as I can prove that, or as long as I'm confident so-and-so died and this is the flow of the estate, that deed's just as valuable as if I bought it through title.

And one thing I think is funny is that when I started in land, I was buying a lot of desert square-type properties in the middle of nowhere. And boy, I was talking to a friend the other day. I don't know. I'm sure I bought a ton of properties with title issues. I just never... never had any clue. It was like, "Oh, look at the last deed. It's in that person's name, or maybe it's in their child's name. Good enough. Sign it. We move on. Buy and sell the property. Off we go." Did that a ton.

So I built a weird muscle in my head where that's okay. Whereas if the traditional person may be like, "What are you doing? You've bought hundreds of properties, no title insurance." And so I wasn't too worried about that when we started just because I guess I had done it so much before.

But at the end of the day, and to your point, a good lawyer can help you say, "Hey, if the facts you're giving me are correct, this is the family tree. These are the people you need title insurance from." Sorry, "These are the people you need to buy deeds from."

And on the other side, if you can get a contract from one of those people and you have a title company that you like and you don't want to burn bridges with, you can go to them and say, "Hey, I'm trying to buy all these interests. I have this one. Can you run title on it? Let me make sure I'm going down the right path." This is something we've started doing a lot more lately is once we get a vested interest in the property, opening title with that piece and having them come back and kind of confirm for us, "Yes, you need the other two brothers for us to issue title insurance." That's been a good strategy for us. That's helped us kind of cut through some of the noise.

Seth: A lot of the stuff I've heard you say here sort of demonstrates you have some pretty specialized knowledge that the average person and even the average land investor doesn't know or doesn't understand because they don't deal with these kinds of title issues. How much learning did you have to do to learn all this stuff? I mean, it sounds like you have like a fairly decent working legal knowledge so that you can get through some of these deals without an attorney because you kind of know what a lot of attorneys know anyway.

But for somebody who's never dealt with any of this stuff, how long did it take you to do that? Or how difficult is it? Is there a certain type of land investor or a real estate investor who shouldn't be doing this because you're not willing to learn all this stuff?

Clint: That's a great question. To answer that one directly, I think this is a pretty challenge. Unless this is what you want to learn and you want to come in blind of everything else, yeah, you can come in. But if you aren't fully set to do these kinds of deals, I came into this with a team of four people. I had taken them off major land-flipping roles. And I was kind of in the middle of what am I going to do with them before we started looking at these deals, looking at tax foreclosures, looking at all these different situations.

And so the amount of learning—I really just feel a lot comes from doing the deals—because if you want to... the real reading material is what is the civil legal process in the area you live? That's what all the doctrine is that this works off of, right? All the backstops, all the pressure points that make somebody want to sell—it's based on a civil legal process. And that's going to be outlined in the civil statutes of your state, right?

And so in the state of Texas, with a tax foreclosure and the ability to do affidavits of heirship to clean up title without probate, there's a civil process through the legal system that allows us to do what we're doing. And it's different in Michigan; it's different in North Carolina; pretty similar in North Carolina though. But a lot of the opportunity comes through understanding that.

And I've gone in blind, like the deal we just talked about, I didn't know what I needed to do by the end of it. What I have learned is there's pretty much always an answer, right? There's pretty much always something. If it requires you to go to an attorney, file a lawsuit and get something done, there's almost always, if you are a co-owner of a property, a route to solve the problem.

And in general, for almost every problem, there is almost always a solution for it. There are a ton of other problems we didn't talk about today, right? And I have one other deal I want to share with you in just a minute, but there's a ton of other issues.

We've recently, again, kind of accidentally stumbled into some deals with liens and mortgages, all of which have their unique ability to add more value to a deal. But the deals we've really started with are the tax foreclosure ones. And there's only a few sets of things that are really going to catch you on those. And a lot of it's understanding who is the rightful owner of a property. Attorneys can help you with that. Understanding if you can get marketable title, title companies can help you with that. Finding people, private investigators can help.

For everything you need to do, at least that I found, there's a professional service provider that has that outcome as one of their offerings, which I really like. Because sometimes on land, you're just flying blind. Whereas if I need to go and get an opinion on something, I can ask somebody who's done it a bunch of times and is familiar with the laws with it.

And so there are a ton of niches. And if you want to get really wide, of course, yeah, you're going to need a lot of knowledge. But we learned everything a lot by doing it, a lot by getting in there, understanding some of the stuff Logan Fulmer is talking about with tax foreclosures and tax issues, tapping back into all the deals I've done over the last eight years and thinking about what stopped some of the deals and really just kind of pinpointing. I got kind of obsessed with it, really pinpointed a lot of the little triggers that we find and wanted to reverse engineer it. And it's worked pretty well so far.

Seth: What I like about this whole kind of thing is that I feel like it's really doing a great service for the real estate world in general. Like you're not just looking for apathetic sellers. You're taking properties that are not usable because of their title problems and like fixing the problems and bringing it back on the market. And there's got to be something kind of fulfilling about that to know, like I worked through a very tough thing that most people weren't willing to figure out. And I made this thing useful again.

Clint: Yeah, it really is. And I ask people, "How many thank-you notes? How many handwritten cards have you gotten from people that you sold, that you bought properties from?" It's typically not very many, right? Every single time we do a deal, we're helping someone have a sticky situation or a situation that's just been weighing on them that they don't... Because often the answer is legitimately, go hire a lawyer, pay a $20,000 retainer, and work through the issues. And it's going to take six months to a year, and you got a 50-50 chance at winning.

Seth: Is there a certain situation that you think most beginners to this strategy should start with? Like, as you mentioned, there's tons of different situations, title problems, scenarios, all this stuff that can exist that can be found and solved. But if somebody was to go after like the lowest hanging fruit, like I've just started this, I don't want to get too overwhelmed. Which problems should I focus on and how do I find those people?

Clint: I would say off the cuff, it's probably a tie between tax distress and fractional ownership. It's one of the two. Tax distress, like I said, there's a bunch of different ways: tax foreclosures, pre-tax foreclosures, going super, super deep into county court dockets. I can go to harriscounty.com, go to the tax foreclosure court docket, and you can just scroll through and see the thousands of lawsuits there. You can start with that.

If I were to start, I would go with fractional ownership just because I've accidentally done a few land deals where I bought the undivided interest and had to go hunt people down. That often creates opportunity in itself, just a fractured ownership.

So I would probably start with those. And the ways you can find it—I mean, you could go to any county assessor's website. And if you see something that's in like a state of Charlie Brown or so-and-so's trust, another cool thing that we've done is you can take a list from DataTree or whatever, and you can run it through one of the main skip tracers, like IDI or direct skip, and they have a deceased filter, right?

So if there is a person who is deceased, that property likely has an opportunity where ownership was fractured. And hey, look, 75% of the time, it's just going to turn out to be, "Yeah, grandpa died and we're going to get the estate taken care of." That's what it really is, 75% of the time.

When nobody's taking care of the estate or paying the taxes on the property, that's when it flows to a tax foreclosure or just some sort of back tax issue. And so that's why I like the one-two punch of them. But very, very simple. You could literally just pull a list off DataTree, look for "estate of so-and-so" and look for people who are deceased. And you could just start finding their obituaries, finding whoever their children or spouse, whoever it is, and just start calling those people.

Seth: When you're looking at a property with X and Y and Z problem, don't link with taxes, there's three owners, you can only contact one of them, you kind of take inventory of the problems you're going to have to sort through to get the issues fixed and resell that property. How much of that goes into formulating what your offer is going to be? Do you say, "Okay, well, that's going to take me 20 hours to fix, 10 grand in legal fees, the likelihood is about this." So that makes my offer this. Or is it more just like 50%? That's kind of just what I offer on this stuff. Like how much thought goes into understanding the situation before making the offer versus like, I just want a huge discount one way or the other?

Clint: Yeah, you definitely got to understand the situation within our buy box. Like a lot of it is brain damage. That's kind of like an ownership decision. That's the one that's a little tougher to formulate. But it's like, hey, if I've gathered all the information and I know there's going to be one or two holdouts, how much is that worth? How much time is it going to take? How much money can we make on this deal?

So there is a good amount that goes into understanding the opportunity up front. And on the opposite side, nowadays, I'm looking more for the deals. We're doing a deal right now. And if I could just do one or two of these a month, instead of doing four or five of the deals I just told you about, I'd rather do the latter.

And this isn't even the last deal I wanted to tell you about. But we just bought a house in El Paso, Texas, $150,000 under value because it was in tax foreclosure. There was an heirship issue and there was a divorce. And the two people in the divorce were the interest holders. They needed to get it off the balance sheet for the divorce proceedings because it was very hard to split the assets. And so they sold it to us for 30 grand a piece for their two 50% deeds. We were able to clean the title up with taxes and everything. We'll make like $100,000 on that deal.

That's a simple one where there was two people. They were both somewhat ready to play ball, took a few calls, but we got them there. We were able to make a good amount of money on it. There are other deals, like I said, where I think there's an infinity amount of deals, like the first one I told you, right? Where there's $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 margin, and there's a lot of headache to go with it.

For us, we want a large return on our cash. I want to see my money back in six months. I want a deal we can make more than $50,000 on. And how much time it's going to take us is very dependent. What we'll accept is very dependent on the current pipeline. If we're really busy with a lot of other deals, probably not going to take on that opportunity right now. But if it's super lucrative, then we'll fit it in.

Seth: Tell me about this other deal that you've been teasing, but when we're going to get to near the end, what is that?

Clint: Yeah. So I bought a six acre piece of industrial land in a Dallas, Texas zip code. So it had a Dallas, Texas address. It was in a planned development about five miles south of downtown. You got Amazon, you got Best Buy, you got all the local grocery stores. It was just a huge industrial district. Millions of class A and class B industrial square footage around.

Through this process, through the process of buying this deal, I found out that it used to be a residential area and that somebody bought up most of the land and rezoned it all to industrial, but there were always a few residential holdouts. And that's what happened. The six-acre piece was owned by a lady and she got it from her parents and her parents' parents actually acquired the property.

And she died childless. She died. She'd never been married, didn't have a spouse, and she had no will. And she owned the house and the property by right. Not on title, but she owned it by right. And so when she died, and what I mean by right is her parents died and there was a will and a probated estate that showed that she was the owner of the property. She died. Nobody knows where the property goes. So it goes back up to her parents, siblings, and living children, basically this is what happened.

And we found this through the method I told you about, where we're looking through court dockets and saw this property had a large market value and a lot of taxes owed. I think it was 120,000 in taxes or 100,000, somewhere right in there, is how much the tax bill was. The property, by my assessment, was worth... At the time, I was like, hey, 500,000 seems very, very generous. So let's go see what we can do.

And so I started calling on this deal in October of 2024. It's 2025 now. I started calling it October 2024. I'm going in circles around different cousins and nieces and nephews. And I finally find a ringleader who told me they had already been contacted by somebody else and they were already under contract with somebody else.

And this was right when I started doing these deals. This is right when I put a team and a business unit together and started working on them. And so my mind was very fixated on it. And I get talking to this woman and I, long story short, figure out that it's a wholesaler that's trying to get the property through a traditional sale process.

And there are two and a half different sides of the family. There were 19 different heirs, nine different little sets of people we had to work through and get deeds from. It was a huge mess. And so I stayed in touch with this lady for months and months and months and months, so much so that she actually blocked me. I had followed up so many times.

And she was so confident in these other people that she kept telling me that they were going to get the deal done. They were going to get it done. After five months, there was this woman, a private investigator, notary that was helping the wholesaler out, trying to get the deal closed. And their contract had way lapsed and they were not going to get the deal closed.

And this woman had gotten so connected with this ringleader lady... The ringleader's mom was needed to go to hospice but they didn't have the money for it so she was really trying to get this deal done. And I had told her many times, "I would buy your 30%... buy it by Friday like no questions, I'll send you cash and we'll be done with it."

And the wholesalers had them anchored at a super high price point so it's really hard but eventually it's 10 p.m. I get a text message. I'm never out past 10 PM, but this one night I was for some reason. And I sat in my car for an hour and talked to this woman and this notary, a private investigator, about what was going on. And fast forward, we got the deal done about two weeks later.

I bought that lady's share and I bought it for $30,000, I think. So I paid her 30 grand for her 33% interest in this property outside of title, a lot of risk with it. It was a huge gamble, but I felt pretty confident in that. So word started getting around after we bought that lady's deed that, "Hey, he's legit. He is buying deeds. We got the money."

And so there's a lot of little stories along the way. But the summary is we got everyone's deed. So we go to title, getting ready to sell the thing, go to title. The title company tells us we're missing a life estate. And a life estate is like, for anybody who doesn't know, my best explanation is you have some percentage of the right to use the property during your natural life, but you have no ownership value in the property.

And it was a real corner case on if this life estate was needed, like if we needed to get this life estate or not. And so we start trying to negotiate for this life estate. I start offering this guy a bunch of money. I get him on the phone. He's a knucklehead. He doesn't want to deal with me. Eventually, I'm up to the point where I think I'm offering him like $75,000 or $100,000 for his potential life estate of the property, just because I was in it for $200,000.

And if I could get it closed and make a little money in a shorter period of time, I would have rather done that. So we can't get the deal done with him. I go back to my lawyer and I say, "What do I do here?" He says, "Let's open a few more title policies and let me get my title attorney."

And so we go get five title opinions; four of them, three of them said, "You don't need this person." One of them said, "Maybe you need him." And one of them said, "You do need him." But we had three people ready to issue title insurance without needing this person. So we said, okay.

So we went; we bought the property. I bought an owner's policy, which means I purchased the policy so that we insured we had a clean title. And we were able to take that property to market after commissions and realtors fees. We net at $750,000 from it. Yeah. Or gross, I guess, gross $750,000 from it.

I bought all the deeds for $120,000. I bought the taxes for $90,000 instead of another $20,000 and here and there. And so we made like 550, almost $600,000 on that deal. So this was the deal that really locked me in to say, "Okay, this is a business model that can work."

Seth: In that kind of deal, you need the cash, right? You can't be waiting on financing, funders or any of that stuff. You got to be ready to go.

Clint: Yeah. And I just knew this area so well. I was very convicted about that specific piece of property. I don't know if anybody else would have taken it. I had $120,000 out of my wallet before anything, before we opened the title, before we really did anything other than talk to the taxing authority.

And in hindsight, that was a risky deal. But we had done so much work between a private investigator, a genealogist, and our attorney to ensure that the tree is correct. Assuming this lady has no children and has no will that's buried under the house somewhere, then we were very confident. We had a lot of title opinions that said the same.

But it was just everybody living in different parts of the country. Two people lived out of the country. So getting them all to a closing table just really was not going to be possible. Right, and they had demonstrated over the past year and a half of that wholesaler trying to do it that they couldn't get it done. And so yeah, we started aggregating interest and the reason I ripped that first thirty thousand dollar check is because I saw a path to getting over fifty percent, which really doesn't matter; there's no statistical or like there's nothing that comes into play when you have it; it just feels right but I bought her third and I knew the other third was going to sell to me it was the last third that was really, really messy.

And so I was able to do those two in quick order. And I had 66% of the property, 67%, whatever. And that's what led me to take the gamble on it. But yeah, it was interesting. It had a $100,000 tax bill on it. The lady hadn't paid for 10 or 12 years. And I thought we were going to get a better deal on it, but they made us do half down and then half over six months. So it was like $45,000 and then $6,000, $7,000 a month the next six or seven months.

So to answer your question, it took a lot of cash to get that deal done. And I think otherwise that one probably would have just gone to the tax sale.

Seth: How profitable can a person be if they were to focus solely on this? Like most of the big shot land investors I know might net around like one to a couple million bucks a year or something like that. Like that would be like one of the higher-level land investors, but it's pretty rare. I hear somebody making way more than that with what you're doing.

Is there a similar bottleneck where it's like, this is kind of like the ceiling, or could you make 10 million a year doing this or 50 million or more? What would have to be true for somebody to just make tons and tons of money, like 50 or a hundred million with this? Or is that, is that not really what we're talking about? Is it more in that, you know, sub 10 million a year net kind of business?

Clint: Like I said a little earlier, I think a good team of two people can do four or five deals a month, three to five, depending on the complexity. That's the bottleneck. I think there is so much opportunity in this space. It comes down to just... At that point, it's just going to be traditional business building, right? Marketing, data, internal systems, and people, people, people training a lot of people. These are complex deals.

The reason I like them is because it gives the person with maybe your listener's average skill set a new tool to look through deals that doesn't really cost them a lot of money and can cost you nothing but some time and your phone. And has the ability to, I've always thought that, like a land business, this has always been my thought: you need something that can make you a bunch of money, right? It's subdivides, developments, entitlements, really big land deals.

Like the traditional, highly efficient land business looks like half that, and then half deals that are happening on a consistent basis. So you can pay the bills, pay your employees, keep the lights on, all that kind of stuff. And so when flipping for me, the margins really compressed; I kind of didn't have that other side of the business for a while. And all I had were my subdivide deals where every six months to a year, we got a really big fat check, but we were just spending, spending, spending, spending in between there.

And so I think this is a really good bolt on, or it's something you can do alongside flipping or alongside subdividing that in my opinion, I think there's just a ton of opportunity on. Like I said, we have barely scratched the surface. We're in one county. And the only difference, or what might differ from me to the average person, is I've built a large team and a large business, and I just don't want that. It's just really not what I want for my life and how I like to run things.

I like to have small, smart, really highly capable team. That's what I've learned over the years. And my bottleneck now is I need to solve for better deals. I need to make sure I'm doing the best deals, or I need to hire more people. And I'm really, really happy with where we are right now as far as the people on my team. They're just so smart and so capable. I just feel so confident going out and doing our deals.

You'd have to just hire a bunch more small teams and be able to train them efficiently and get them able to have these conversations. You got to have the data. It's just building a business at any point. You can build a land business as big as you want, but the margins just compress. They just compress a ton once you start adding staff and infrastructure.

So I think this is going to be just like that. I do think that you can be more lean with the amount of people you have, the amount of marketing that you have to spend money on, pretty much just everything, I think, can be a little bit cheaper until you identify the opportunity. So it gives you more runway and more at-bats, if you know, more chances to go find a good deal.

So yeah, you might not be able to make a billion dollars with it. But with what we've done, we've really started just saying, "Hey, how can we do 5 or 10 or 20 deals that resemble the last one I just told you?" And the average deal really is more like 50 to $100,000. But just like land flipping, just like anything else, you're going to find those multi-six figures. We're looking at one deal right now that might push a seven-figure deal through messy and distressed, but you got to go through the other 30, 40, or 50 deals to get to that one.

What I just like is that I can consistently find a deal and like the assets—the assets specifically that we're going for—they move a lot faster, right? They don't sit on my balance sheet. So for me, as somebody who's done a lot of land education, sold a lot of land courses, all the things, it's been like a kind of transformational change for me to say, "Okay, I need to like go into the dungeon and figure out what is working and what isn't." And I'm very simple. Like I want to make good returns, right? And this is what we landed on. This is what I'm building my business around. We have our subdivide and development portion, and then this is what we're doing for our quick flips nowadays.

Seth: On that whole note of comparing this to the land business and what it was and what it is now, I'm wondering if you could go back in time five or ten years when land was easier, would you switch back to land? Or do you wish you would have been doing this back then? In other words, have you shifted to this over time because it's better in today's environment, or has this always been better than land, but you're just becoming more keenly aware of it now?

Clint: That is a great question. That is a really great question. I don't know the answer. Man, if I could go back 10 years, I would tell myself to just buy a lot more of the properties where I was making 300% yield all the time.

You know, one other thing I'll say as we kind of get to the end here is what we're doing with our AI tool and our data aggregation tool is really cool, but we're also recently mixed in paid advertising, right? And we're doing Google, we're doing pay-per-click. Because if you think consumer behavior, I have a problem, Google, Google, Google, that's where they're generally going to go, right?

And so while we've done most of our deals through the docket, that's what we call it internally, through the docket, because it's the court docket, we've recently added another marketing vertical, which is pay-per-click. And I can tell you, it's much easier to have people call you and tell you they want to do a deal than you having to go find them and convince them to do a deal.

So some people are going to listen to this. They're like, "Man, my land flipping business is going amazing." And I'm like, "Dude, that's amazing. Don't do anything I'm telling you. Spend a lot more money on marketing with whatever you're currently doing and like harvest right." But a lot of areas have really constricted and so, I don't know. I wasn't doing this eight years ago. I would probably say there was more opportunity back then for it.

But anytime I can get people to call me or I can easily find opportunities where I can deploy my capital, where I can double my money in a pretty short timeframe—that's what I was trained on. And that's what I'm looking for. So I'm a little more, I guess, agnostic on what the process is. I just want the yield. I want the returns on both ends.

Seth: Well, people that listen to this, if they want to learn more, if they want to see behind the curtain and figure out how you're doing this or use whatever tools you're developing? Is there a way they can do that? Or should they go to check it out?

Clint: Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to our website. It's just learn.land. It's not dot-com. I know it's fancy. It's just learn.land. We're doing a webinar on January 23rd, 23rd and 24th. So if you're listening to this, you can register for it then.

I'm also doing a miniseries with my business partner, who is an attorney right now. You can get it anywhere you listen to podcasts or watch videos. It's called "A Messy Million." It's how we made our first million dollars in profit on these. It's completely free. I think you'll enjoy it. We're going over a lot of different deals, like I just talked about with Seth.

But yeah, we're going to go real deep on January 23rd, try and talk about what I'm really wanting to help people learn: how do you get these leads into your business? I think what I've learned is you can fix most of the problems as long as there's enough margin. The challenging part is: how do you get the leads into your business? And that's what we've spent the last year really, really intentionally focusing on. And it's what I'm really excited to tell people more about.

Seth: Well, I will have links to all that stuff in the show notes and a few other things we mentioned throughout the conversation. If you want to check that out, you can go to retipster.com/Clint, C-L-I-N-T.

And Clint, it's great to talk to you again, man. Glad things are going so well. Thanks for bringing a new package of value to the real estate world. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Clint: Yeah. Thanks everybody for listening.

Seth: We'll talk to you next time.

Clint: Thank you, Seth. Appreciate it.