Podcast Episode 104 Transcript

Episode 104: Investing In Land To Financial Freedom with Clint Turner

Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. And over the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week, I'm meeting with outstanding investors, high performing individuals, and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the prereal podcast. Welcome, everyone, to the Prereal podcast. So everyone's talking about what's happening out in the economy right now. Inflation. Inflation. Inflation. Interest rates. Interest rates. Interest rates. We thought it would be a great idea to have Clint Turner join us today. Clint is the owner of a way land company. He has built two seven figure businesses, and he's in the process of making them two eight figure businesses on the land side. He's got a real interesting model, folks. And for those of you that are thinking about what so many of us have been thinking about kind of turning in that nine to five and looking for a different way to live and build a passive income stream that's resilient recession proof and doesn't require 80 hours a week of your time and attention. I think Clint's onto something here and we're really excited for you to join us today. Clint. Thank you so much, bud. Yeah, James, thanks for the intro. My pleasure. I'm a deal junkie. I love to get into the weeds on the stuff. So anytime we have the opportunity to speak to someone that's doing something a little different, it's exciting for me. So if you could give us, in one or two minutes, just a snapshot of what a way land company does first, and then we'll get into the backstory. Yeah. So the company that's my parent land company has really gone through an evolution over the last six years, as most people have to with shifting markets. But the primary story of a way land company, I started it. I'm 27 right now. I started it when I was 2021 and we got into flipping vacant lots. That's what we were doing, right? So we go and buy lots at that time. We can buy lots for $0.30 on the dollar pretty regularly, and we can bring them to market at $0.70 on the dollar, and we could turn them pretty quickly. Right? And this is just not by, I would say, my necessary expertise. It's just what I learned when I got started the podcast. I was listening to the programs I took, all the things people were talking about financing your own properties, financing your own land. And when you can buy land cheap enough, we can put our own first lien mortgage behind it, and we can act as the bank. And as I like to say, the bank always wins. So it's always going to be in the bank seat, right? So that's what we started doing. We were buying smaller medium sized properties. We were selling probably half of them on owner financing, where we'd hold the note, we make all the interest upside, and then when people default, we can talk about that later, but we like, defaults in our business. We started that, and then over the past three years, we've kind of found the tangential niche where we're subdividing and creating this rule and inventory. Right? And so that's kind of what we're doing right now. We're about 50 50 between buying and flipping lots with owner financing and then buying bigger projects that we're doing that we're putting a little bit of value add into to make into a lot of smaller parts. There's big money in taking these big tracks. We just took down a very large piece of New Mexico, 1700 lots on a golf course. So, like I said, I'm a deal junkie. There's a lot of neat ways to do that. We'll get into that. But you started this at 22 years old. That's young. A lot of us are in our forty's. Fifty's? Sixty's and still struggling to find the courage, get rid of the excuses and actually jump in headfirst. Was there a strong mentor or presence in your life around real estate that motivated you? How did you get into the gig to begin with? Yeah, no strong mentor or family member or anything. I've always been very entrepreneurial, though, from the young age. My best friend also very entrepreneurial, like to tell the story. We met in middle school, I think is what it was. And in middle school I was buying iPhones because you can buy them cheap off Craigslist. You can buy them cheap for people who didn't understand the value. You could sell them for two or three times. When we buy a phone for one, $500 out for 2300. And my buddy was selling a phone, and I bought it for like $80. And at the time they did promotions where it's like $50 for a new phone. So nobody really understood that the phones were being financed. Right, whatever. Anyhow, so my buddy thinks he ripped me off, that I bought his phone, and we come back after the weekend, he's like, so what'd you do with that phone? Kind of like jabbing at me, I sold it. How would you sell for $350? He said, like, what? This guy just like, took me for a ride. So I've always been like that was the spark of a very good friendship. But I've always been very entrepreneurial, and I've had a lot of things that weren't real estate that didn't work as I was going through college and kind of coming up, or some that worked minorly with land, man, it was just something I heard about, I learned about. It kind of clicked with me, and so I was trying it alongside some other things, and we had a couple of big wins, and I was like, Shit, you can make some serious money doing this, right? It's kind of the first real big wins that I've had in the entrepreneurial journey. I just wanted to be a business owner to work for myself. I went to have a background in engineering. I got a four year, four and a half year or whatever degree in mechanical and electrical engineering, and I did that for a couple of years. But just grind into the sales. That's where I went into, naturally, was the sales side of it. That's just the grind, man, it's tough. And I was like, man, there are so many different ways that you can go make 60 or $70,000 a year just to cover that first base, right? And so that's where I was. And I was just in that hungry, trying to do something different stage. And land was the first thing that worked. It was where I was finding a success to where I can do the job and do the things. I've just always loved it and attached it to it. So there's a common theme amongst us serial entrepreneurs, and I've found that many of us have similar backstories, and we all share certain characteristics. You're pursuing this gig and off the hop. The question I'm always asked when I talk about this type of work is, there's got to be a scam. Nobody's selling you that property at $0.25 on the dollar. Can we talk the audience through? Because that, folks, is patently false. That's an excuse not to act. People absolutely are in different stages in life and perceive value very differently than we do. And there is a preponderance of land that's available at significantly discounted rates in the best of markets, in the most competitive of markets. So that is complete hogwash. Can you talk to the audience a little bit clint about that? Specifically, how are you sourcing these deals? What is the average? Is it 20%, 25%, 30% of the comp? What is your sweet spot? Yeah, so I'll definitely say it's change. Right? And that's a great point you make. And I always push back when anybody tells me it's too competitive, where nobody's selling anymore and we're finding deals every month. It might take a different set of skills than you have, but there's definitely deals out there. Why do people sell land cheap? There's a few different reasons. When you think about it logically, the first thing I'll say is, five or six years ago, we really would buy and it's really almost like a measuring stick. However many drive it is to like however many minute drive it is to the major metro, the farther that is, the lower the number is. Both impressive the property and in what percent you can buy it at, if that makes sense. Right. So property 2 hours from the city. I could realistically buy for, say, $0.30 or $0.40 on the dollar. Whereas a property 30 minutes outside of Dallas where I live right now, I probably wouldn't expect to buy most of my deals for any less than $0.70 on the dollar, $0.60 or 50 somewhere in there. So that's the first thing I say is the quality of the land really drives what discount you're going to buy it at, right? First off, if you've ever flown in an airplane, which actually is surprising when people have it, but that's different conversations. If you ever flown an airplane, there's just a vast amount of land that you look out over when you drive in a car long distance, you see vast amounts of land. Every piece of land you've ever looked at is owned by someone, right. It could be the state owns I don't know the exact percentage, but roughly a third. But the other two thirds are owned by Joe down the street or like somebody. Right. And there is just so many I don't know the exact number I've known in the past. I think there's 20 or 30 or 40 million or something like that. Vacant land parcels in the United States that are already plotted, right. Not the fact that we can create more, but there's so much inventory. Right. And people don't have like when you're trying to buy an apartment complex or you're trying to buy someone's house at a discount, there is a legitimate argument to be made where somebody says, I don't want to sell you my house at $0.70 on the dollar. Right. I live here. I'm attached to the house. A lot of that land that you see was Uncle Joe's, and then Uncle Joe died and then it went down to this person and they use it or they've never seen it, they've never been to it. They just know it exists. Right. They don't have the same level of emotional attachment to the piece of land as maybe somebody does to a house or a storage facility or apartment complex, something like that. There's a very little attachment a lot of the time to the piece of land from the person we buy. There's plenty of people that are very attached to their land and tell us to go pound sand, but there are some that don't, right. They don't know much about the property. So I will say there's a lot of reading out there to get into land investment that says you can buy a land of 20 or $0.30 on the dollar. I don't think that's necessarily true anymore. Maybe ten years ago, I would say maybe we're at a level of like, you can buy land at $0.40 on the dollar if it's farther out, and you're probably going to be eating up towards 60, 70, 80% as the quality of the property goes up. But if you can buy a million dollar property at $0.70 on the dollar, there's a lot of money to be made there. Right. So there's a lot of different ways to skin that cap, but there are plenty of people out there that own property that never been to, aren't attached to, and will definitely send. You just got to get in touch with them. And the preferred methodology for you to get in touch is it pounding the phones, is it letters? What's the secret sauce that's worked for you? Yeah. And the past letters have been like I can't even imagine what it was like 15 years ago. I really am only about six years into this, but when I started, letters were extremely, extremely effective. The average demo that we buy from is 50, 55, 60 plus. So the letter works well. They check the mail, they use it. Right. There's been a lot of education and stuff that's come out in the land space, so there's definitely more players now. So there's more letters and there's more things on the desk. So we still use land, we still use mail. That's probably 50% of our deals just come from our letter strategy, and then the other 50% comes through just a variety of different ways. We use text messaging. I feel scared to say that out loud sometimes now because there's a lot of lawsuits and BS going on with that. But we use blast texting, we've used ringless voicemails, we use cold calls, and there's a lot of real ninja ways you can find land, too. Again, Bill down the street might have heard that Craigslist is a great place to sell his property. Right. You may have posted it on Craigslist and you're 150 days old and never sold. You call, Bill thinks the property is never going to sell. All of a sudden you got a lead at $0.60 on the dollar or whatever, right? So, Craigslist, facebook groups, Facebook ads. We've done it all. Our kind of primary right now in 2022, today is about half letters and then the other half is spread out between text, cold call and just my VA is just running a buck in the different Facebook groups and MLS type listing places. So you're talking about the vase. And I want to get to that at some point because I think what's the most attractive part of the land investing for me is, it is very manageable and it is a business where if you have the proper infrastructure in place, you don't have to necessarily create a whole mess of jobs for yourself to do a lot of the work. Believe it or not, folks and Clinton, I'm not sure if it is, but I would suspect it's been your experience that the VA's today are clearing title, they're doing proper diligence, they're handling marketing. I mean, there's a mess of responsibilities that you don't have to handle yourself anymore or have an office with a team of ten in person handling that work. Has that been your experience? Oh, yeah, we've done 600 and something deals in the last six years. And now this has changed a bit because I've started doing a lot bigger deals lately. But let's call it 580 of those deals I never even saw, I never touched, and ever stepped on. Right. It was just definitely paper was the true mechanic at the end of the day. Yeah, man. The way I like to tell people is that everything, just about everything in real estate or in land, really, almost any real estate asset class, it's commoditized about 95% of the way. The only 5% that's not a commodity or has a pretty standard price around it is exactly what you said. As being a deal junkie or like being a deal maker is what I say on my side. That's the only thing. Like, VAS run ten to $40 an hour. Right. Attorneys run two to $600 an hour. Title companies cost just about the same. Depending on where you go, everything is done for you, more or less. There's learning, there's specifics, but where you really make the money is you're the deal maker. Right. That's the only thing that you can't go and just pay somebody and they give you a deal. Right. It's the skill. Yeah. That's really what it is. At the end of the day, is everything else. VA is from first phone call, first lead, first time a person reaches out to close. It can pretty much be done 95% without you. The 5% where you want to play as being the deal maker, right. Closing deals, doing whatever you got to do to get the deal closed. I've done many deals lately on the bed of my truck because I went out and this guy won't he won't sign the contract on DocuSign. It's like, okay, well, I'll fucking drive out and meet you. Sorry, because of this, I'll meet you at the property, and we shake hands and drive around in the truck. And all of a sudden, we got around the bed of the truck signing the document, right? Yeah. That's the 5% that you want to play in and what you want to do. Everything else can be done by other people. So, yeah, we have a pretty lean team. I've been up to 20. I've been alone, obviously, at the beginning. We operate with, like, five or six people right now, and that's about all I do is just play in that final phase of, all right, numbers look good. Let's make this deal happen somehow. Let's get that contract signed. Everything other than that can be done by someone else. Are you focused now more on finding buyers for your product per se only, or are you also offering consulting and coaching to teach people how to do what you do? Yeah, well, we do both. I've done a lot of consulting over the last four or five years. I don't do as much anymore. We have a mastermind group for experienced investors and that's pretty much our main consulting side products right now. But the majority of what we do is we find the deal and then we bring it to the market often. Right. And the market is normally hungry enough to take it. We have some repeat buyers, but most of the time we're taking the deals down, bringing them, listing them, getting them cleaned up a bit. And so that's what we're doing. And we're looking for flips, and we're looking for projects that we can do. Subdivision. Okay. Now, when you're executing the plan, right, are you looking in one market, two markets, 20 markets at a time? What does that scope look like? I lost your audio there. Sorry about that. Yeah, I think it depends on this is kind of a tough one to answer because six years later, what I would tell you from day one is I would just go after the big deals, right? The whales. Because you do one or two of those a year and you make more money than you do on the smaller ones. But also it's very intimidating for someone who's never done a real estate deal to go out and put together a multiple million dollar deal off the back. Right. So I'm also a proponent of people getting started doing smaller properties. And so I think which route you're going changes that answer a little bit, because if you're doing a more rural approach where you're going for cheaper properties, you're going to have a higher hit rate. I like to explain it like we get this dopamine hit when you get a lead and you get a deal, right? Yeah. So sometimes doing five or ten small deals to get going, just get your engines going, right. And then it really gets you motivated. So that's what I think you'll find when you go call it two, three, 4 hours away from a major city. You're going to find a lot of desert, just tree forest, land, completely undeveloped. But people love to buy it because they want land and they can't afford the stuff near the city, so they just buy farther away because it's cheaper. So you can go mail out there. And if you're going to do that. You probably want to choose a handful of areas. Probably five or ten. Just to have the volume of touches of letters or phone calls or whatever it is as you get closer to the city and you maybe start playing a little more on the value add side. I think it serves you very well to get really ingrained in a few markets. Right? Because there are more rules and you need contractors or you need attorneys or you need whatever the hell it is, it makes things go faster for those larger deals. So it kind of depends where you're going. Right? I work in about five submarkets of Dallas and Austin here in Texas for our bigger deals. And then we do a lot of smaller deals in West Texas, southern Colorado, all over Arizona. But for the bigger deals we do it's closer to home and it's in markets I know well. Okay. And when you're executing, especially on the smaller ones, because the bigger ones, I suspect you have time for diligence and you can really kind of get in the weeds and figure it out, right? But the smaller ones, how are you establishing comps? Are you diving into the MLS on a regular basis? What tools are you using to establish your companies? So Costar owns all any site that's Costar owns, lands of Texas, lands in America, land and Farm, Land wash. There's a couple of others. Basically, if you Google land for sale in Texas or something like that, three of the top five results are going to be a poster site. So you can get some good data just by using their front end site for free of just looking at sold comps. It's confusing, actually, because it doesn't give you a lot of data. It just tells you that there is a comp. It doesn't tell you when it sold, how long was on the market or anything. Of course, you got to pay them for that information so you can pay them and then get access to the back end to see their database. So I use that a lot. And then we just combine that with the market. The marketplace is Zillow Realtor.com and we try and find three it's like our process inside the businesses, we want to find three comps that are as light, kind as possible, right? So they have similar features, features being sloping and road access, electricity, utilities, things like that. We want it to be similar and as close as geographically possible. And so we're just going to choose, we're going to find the three best comps, we're going to sort through, we're going to dig like little rats through all the data and find the three best comps. And then that's generally how we're pricing lots for just a flip. And on that note, if we establish that the median price is going to be 50,000 in an area, I'm expecting to sell at $45,000 because I want to turn and burn. I want to get stuff out, right. I don't want to sit. So we're going to want to come in and be the most competitive property for sale in the area. That's how you sell a lot quicker. So that's how we count. So let's use that example. A $50,000 parcel, you're willing to take 45. Where are your offers? Typically when you're targeting a piece that is going to look something like that on the resale for something like that exact deal, I also got to ask myself, is it going to sell on terms or is it going to sell for cash? It's going to take me down two different paths if I think it will sell for cash. I don't want to be much higher than $0.50 on the dollar there. Right. So I'd want to stay as low as I can. Always try and get them to give you a number first. Right. See how low it is sometimes I got no clue. And not that we're trying to take advantage of people, but at the end of the day if somebody needs cash in 20 days and they only want ten grand for the lot and I'll give them ten grand for the lot, right? Yeah. But no, at the end of the day I probably want to be at $0.50 on the dollar. If I thought it was going to sell on terms, I would need to validate that the terms I could sell it for, I'd get my investment back in six to twelve months at a max. Right. So I want to be able to take a down payment and monthly payments to where I made whole in six to twelve months. If I'm not going to be able to feasibly do that in that area, then we either got to adjust the buy price or we just pass on the deal. Right. So when you're selling on terms, are you actually conveying a deed at the closing or are you doing like a contract for deed and at the end of the arrangement that's when the deed is transferred? It depends on the state. It depends on the state. Texas doesn't like contractors eat as much, whereas Colorado and Arizona and New Mexico and Oklahoma, they don't mind it as much. Texas is not a big fan of it. You can do it, but basically you might as well just have a deed of trust. So anywhere that I can get away with the contract for deed, it limits my exposure and liability the most, I believe. And it gives me that mechanism of taking the property back quickly, right. I don't have to wait for a judge, I don't have to wait for anybody. You violated a contract, you're in breach. And the remedy for that in the contract is that I regain possession of the land. Right. So if somebody defaults and they hit all the terms in their contract, which is generally 60 days behind and no contact with us, then the property is back in our possession and six day 61, it's realistic and ready to go again. And if they paid $50,000 property, if they paid $15,000, well, we're going to go sell it again for full value. So it's just a $15,000. It was like free 15 grand we got on the deal, right. We're just going to go sell it again in Texas. Texas likes Data Trust, which is probably smarter for the consumers protection, but they do deed of trust and so anytime before closure situation, it's almost always a cash for keys where I'm going to give them some money back and they're going to beat it over and we're not going to have to deal with any lawyers? Yeah, we've had a few times where we've had to go through the full foreclosure, but 97% of the time we don't have any quotes or anything involved. If someone stops paying, could you spend another minute on the deed of trust? So essentially, what are the rules around that? How does that work? So they can't build typically on the property, because if they're going to build well, this is why I put that a I don't want somebody like making permanent changes to the property that they don't own. So I don't want them to go dig a 40 foot pit, right. Then they default on the property and I get it back with a 40 foot pit. And second is if you can afford to build, you can afford to pay off the landlord or wrap it up and do a construction loan, right. So they can't build, they could use the property, whatever it says, whatever. The local county rules are recreationally. So if they want to take the RV out there or camp on it or whatever, they can hunt on it. They can do all that good stuff and then trying to think what else is in there. It's pretty standard. It's a pretty simple data trust. So the two things, we file a data trust that references a promissory note, and we don't file the promissory note. We keep the promise note on the side, the promissory note. The DDR basically says for value in consideration referencing the promissory note. And then the promissory note says, you owe $800 a month for six years, or whatever it is. Right. Got it. Most of the time they have the deed, they know it's going to be a pain in the butt for us to foreclose on it. And so we go to them and we say, hey, look, you've paid 15 grand. Let me write you a $5,000 check. And like, let's just exchange, which we'll just do a quick claim deed, I'll send you a check and we'll be on the way. Right? And that typically works. The only time that really hasn't worked for us is when the person is just downright disappeared into and you can't find it. It's like, well, you just got to go take it and foreclose on it. They don't show up, but most of the time you have very easy to get the land back and resell it when somebody doesn't pay, that's great. So you're focusing on now some of the larger tracks, which is particularly attractive to me. Are you getting into the entitlements? Are you replanting? How far are you taking it, if at all, on those larger tracks that you're targeting now? Yeah, as I told you before the show started, I don't like red tape. I don't like people being in my way of getting to the finish of a project. In a lot of states have a statutory regulation or a statutory exemption rather, that says. If you're cutting a property, say you're taking 100 acre property, they say as long as the lots are bigger than X and you're outside of a city jurisdiction, you don't have to replace. You're already approved, so the state will basically approve it for you on a level. And as long as you're outside of the city limits, as long as I'm outside of the city of Dallas and I'm just in the county of Peril, right, then I'm good. I already know a base level of what the regulations are going to have to be. Some states have this, some states don't. Texas is ten acres, in some cases five acres, but most of the time ten. So I can reach out to the owner of a 100 acre track. And I can already know pretty darn good and well that I'll get nine tracks out of it. Give or take nine to ten. Because the state says I can do that. Rather than having to go and get the property under contract and then talk to the city council and make sure that they're okay with that or we have to zone it or any of that. That's my favorite kind of project, is to go find a larger tract. Now, sometimes, to answer your question, we do when we have replied, and it's just when it made the most sense, right? It's like the headache was worth the extra yield we would get out of the project, if you will. So sometimes, for example, a project I can think of just had a lot of it had a big 8000 foot corner of road frontage, right? And road frontage is the Holy Grail. And you're subdividing because you don't have to cut roads, which are extremely expensive. And so it made a lot of sense to utilize that road frontage and go lower than ten acres, right? Longer skinnier tracks. Ten acre tracks was kind of funny. One acre tracks were beautiful. And so we went through the process and got one acre tracked out. Again, since it's outside of the city, it's just going to the county regulation. So it's honestly very simple. Normally, the local surveyor almost always knows exactly how to do it. That's the hack there, because you don't got to figure it out. You just got to hire the surveyor that already has done that before. And they're like, oh, we talked to Bill, and we go here and we get it signed, and we'll just take care of that's the survey job. But, yeah, I like to know, for feasibility and financial feasibility, what's the worst case here? I can get this into ten acres, what a ten acre track sell for? And then we can do the math backwards to figure out if the project makes sense. So the road frontage aside, which obviously is, like you said, the Holy Grail, are you just not doing those deals where you don't have a ton of road frontage and you've got to do an internal road network that could get messy and could be a headache. Right. So are you just staying away from those deals altogether? How I like to describe it is we've done variations of all the things. We've done roads, we've done power, we've done water, I guess not all things. We have an extended sewer infrastructure, but we've done them all in different ways. When the properties are rural, you can actually get creative. There's these cool systems where you can drill. So you're getting ten lots. You're making ten lots. Right. And there's not enough road furniture, basically to extend the water lines are expensive. So instead you can drill a well and you can have pressure tanks that are always filled. And it acts in the same way that a waterline would, as long as the wells full. The wells are always full. Typically. There's a lot of cool ways to do it. But to answer your question, we generally don't do much Entitlement. Again, I'm not afraid of doing an Entitlement project, but it's just the use of my time. Right. And I also find that Entitlement projects, they're speculative in nature. And when you're in a market where you don't want to be doing where you want some certainty. Right. Like an Entitlement project is often very speculative because you often have to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars before you're ever backed by any sort of asset to know if you can do your project. Right. And so unless I'm getting into like, I have one property that I'm just holding right now, I don't know what I'll do with it. It's like four and a half acres next to us, a nice neighborhood and a golf course, and it's owned for higher density multifamily. I think we could do a multifamily build on it. I think we could do a storage build on it. The county was pretty open to all of them when I talked to him. Right. So we will do it. But at the end of the day, it's just a lot of red tape paperwork. Like the timeline on that deal is going to be twelve to 18 months minimum, I would think, where I can go through an entire subdivision construction listing, sell everything's closed to the title in six months. Right. So for me, it's just where my momentum is. And I'm like, I'd rather do three of those in the time it would take me to maybe do one of the other ones. But I've also got some friends that have made a bunch of money entitling land and selling to developers. So nothing wrong with it. Our game is just much more on this on the minor subdivision. Got it. So are you looking at timber value and whatnot when you're acquiring these parcels? So funny. I've got to ask this question multiple times in the past few days. On the East Coast, timber value comes a lot more into the equation because there's a lot more real feasible logging operations going on out there, whereas there's not a ton of logging operations in Texas, Oklahoma, et cetera, where we are. And the other thing is with timber, yes, it may have a value, right, but the actual time to harvest, process, get paid by the time you have all the fees associated with it, it's not as lucrative as people think. So if we're flipping a track that has timber on it, I'm never investigating cutting the timber personally, at least. I'm just saying, hey, you can just call the log. Like there's multiple logging companies, you can call them, they'll drive by your property, they'll walk an acre of it, look at the types of trees and wood and they'll give you a rough estimate of how much timber they think they are and what it would cost and what it would go for. So if they say, hey, there's $100,000 of timber on this property, how I calculate it in my head is, all right, I'm just going to treat that as an investment, all right? I will value the surface value of the land and then I will take 20% of that timber value and add it onto the surface value. Right. But in a lot of the areas that we work, you have a very specific, the right kind of timber. And you need to have a lot of it to get a logger to come and set up a big operation to cut for you. So we rarely do much with timber. Sometimes we'll just value it and pay somebody a little bit more if it has timber. And on the sales side, I can say, hey, it's about this timber, blah, blah, blah, but we don't do a ton with it. Yeah, no, you're right, it is an anomaly and there is a lot of logistics. And right now there's a beetle that's eating all the ash trees, right. There's a lot of stuff you have to contend with. That said, we've done well in Pennsylvania with those deals. There is some significant value that we've been able to pull off the land before going through the next steps and subdivising and so on. Yeah, I have a few clients that work and live on the East Coast and they deal a lot more with timber. That's why I say the East Coast is like, I don't know why, it just happens more up there. Because I have a friend, he's been in the, I don't know, the wood industry, the logging industry, or whatever it is, he's been in it for a while and the land was a byproduct of all his logging knowledge. I just call him anytime I have something out there. What is this worth? I don't know. But yeah, we haven't done a ton of it. We did have one in Oklahoma that was like 400 acres, just solidly, full of trees. That one had some real value I think in a timber, we just flipped that track. The buyer was land is just like, in my opinion, gold or silver or anything. It's limited in quantity and it's usable, tangible, which makes it more, which makes it better. That's kind of the same thing with the timber. It's like you're buying the land and you're buying the timber. Right. So I'm coming and said, hey, you're buying because I bought it from somebody who doesn't really care about the timber that much. I can say, hey, this track has $100,000 of timber on it and we're selling the whole track for $150,000. So you're making a really great investment. Right. You still have the land. Temperature grows back. Yadda. Yada. So we've done it a few times, but it just doesn't come into play a lot out here normally. Fair enough. And you're not having the operation in hand for the subdividing and cutting in the roads, because then it does play into it a bit more. But it seems to make sense. You're not vertically integrated for that kind of operation and nor are you focused in those areas. One thing that stood out to me on your site that was different than some of the other folks in the land space was like the customer journey and the customer experience. You've spent what appears to be a lot of time, money and energy focusing on a positive experience for the end buyer that is buying the property for you. Could you spend a minute or two talking about that? Oh, yeah. When you're looking for land, traditionally, you hire a Realtor. You get in the truck and you drive out and look at a property and maybe you like it, maybe you don't, maybe you want to negotiate on it and then you don't get that deal and you move on to the next one and the next one. It's just a long process. And there's fees, realtors are going to take fees which are going to naturally drive up the price of land. When somebody calls our team, in most cases, like, just close a deal over the phone, very simply in a matter of days. Right. And we're very flexible, too. I might sound like a deviant, like from some of the things we talked about saying, I love defaults, but on the other end, during COVID, I worked with probably over 100 individual loan holders to adjust their loan so that they could pay and they were comfortable for that time period. Right. I will do. And I told my team I want to do everything we possibly can to keep somebody paying and keep somebody in the property. They get behind on payments, we'll give them a few strengths. Right. Hey, we'll just add that onto the back end if you can continue paying. I think we're very grace. We give a lot of grace in what we do. Right. Whereas the bank would just slap on the late fees and push it into foreclosure and never like it would just be a nightmare with us. It's like, you just call us and it's the same few people you're always talking to. Right. And we don't have any real incentives for our sales people to sell the properties, which I know sounds crazy, but land sells itself. You don't need heavy sales pressure. It's like the land will just sell. We just need a really nice, friendly person to help them through that. Understand some of the specifics around what do people care about power, water, sewer? Those are the three main things. Right. And then some areas can have their own little logistics. But yeah, man, we sold, I would say, 90% of our properties just from just internal. Right. Whether it was me selling it or it was our team now selling it, people just like to work with us, and about 20% of our buyers buy again. Right. Wow. So that says a lot. Right. They bought ten acres here, and now they want another ten acres, or they want 40 acres. And we also do this weird thing that not a lot of people have heard do, but we will allow people to like, it's almost like used car dealership kind of play. But if you bought 40 acres here right. And we have a listing for 80 acres over here or ten acres over here or whatever, as long as it's more than what you've paid, you can more or less trade in your property to go to buy a different property. Wow. And so we'll do that for people for no fee. Basically, we'll make money because often the property is appreciated, we'll get it back for sell it for more than what we sold them for the first time. And they often take a discount and they pay more for the next property. So kind of exactly what you'd expect when you take your car to a dealership and they say, well, we'll give you $6,800. Same thing we do is we'll more or less just handle all the paperwork, do all the deeds, and allow people to transfer. That's something people like when they buy. It's easier to work with, right. Would take a credit card for up to a certain amount of money. Right. We're very easy. So we've had a lot of people that have bought and then bought again. And I've just been in the ecosystem for a while. And we have a massive buyer's list, too. It definitely stands out again. I've interviewed a number of folks and I've dealt with a lot of folks in the industry. And your customer journey, your testimonials, it definitely stood out. So I just wanted to touch on it. And look, at the end of the day, our customers are our customers. Right. It's the lifeblood of what we do. And sometimes folks forget that without our customers, it doesn't matter how good we are, what we do. You need something? I've been in places, and I don't want to rattle anybody, but I've heard people who are in there in the rental game or during the apartment game or whatever, and they talk negatively about the renters or the people who are paying the fucking rent. Obviously there's quirks and stories, but they're the ones that have created your wealth for you. And on our side, if I'm selling a property on a mortgage and I'm holding that mortgage, I want to make sure that everyone's happy. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, if they wanted to get, they could figure out Clinton and find a phone number and make my life a pain in the ass if they wanted to. No doubt. So we want to keep people happy and pain. That's a pretty common trade in business, I think. Absolutely. So your consulting business, one of the Captions was providing land investors with coaching training tools to scale the business through digital marketing. So on that side again, let's I called you up and I said, hey, Clint, I want to go through a program. I want to learn how to do what you do. Are you offering that kind of level of experience? Are you taking people through the entire process and training more Clints out there? Is that part of what you're doing? We have I started learnland that's the name of our consulting company I started about three years ago, and we've kind of gone through the gambit of what we've done, and we've trained complete newbies who don't know anything about real estate. On the other end, we've trained really high level operators in different niches on how to do land. Right. And that's really kind of where we've landed unintended, I guess, is we work a lot with high level operators, people who own a household selling business or house looking business, or they own a commercial real estate investing business. And they're always and they get land leads from time to time and they think about land, they just don't know land. Right. That's really who we work with. And what we do most now is we help high level operators bring in this vertical of land. Because if you've already got marketing going out, if you've got you or a team hopefully helping you processing stuff coming in. Right. And you know how the general deal cycle, we've got 80% of the way there. You just need the land knowledge. Right, yes. The truth is we play mostly in Texas, so I don't train a ton of people in Texas, but people outside of Texas I train a lot of. Right. So yeah, we're very specific. I'm not going to train ten people in one market. Right. First come, first serve type deal. But that's mostly what we do is we'll help mid to high level operators who have an established history of successfully investing in real estate, typically in a different asset class, and then they want to bring in land. So that's what our consulting offer is these days. And we also have a Mastermind. It's really geared towards high level land investors, specifically people doing a million dollars or more a year in their land investing business. But that's a very niche program. Not a lot of people exist in that realm, but for those that do, that's another product we offer. So as we wrap up here, what are your thoughts on economy as it relates to the land business? Is it a time to pump the brakes? Is it a time to double down? Is it a time to remain consistent? What does your crystal ball tell you? Who's the guy? Is it Buffett or somebody says when everybody is fearful, get greedy or whatever it is. Right, yeah, I think that there's going to be a bit of a shift. My personal as it relates to land, I'll leave the rest of the economy to somebody who knows more about that as it relates to land, where I think we'll see less buyers are in luxury products. So I think we'll see less buyers. And I just closed today and I got the email about an hour before this at the deal funded. I'm just so thankful. But we sold a package of 19. They were luxury lots. We sold them for about a $240,000 price point piece. The developer will probably sell it for three to 350. But I don't want to be in luxury right now. That's not where I think there will still be luxury sales, but where we've made a lot of money and where the biggest buyer pool is right now, I think is $50 to $150,000 properties. So we're trying to find properties near major growth markets where we can create a product at that price point. Right. And then on the back end, we can competitively finance it, especially with the banks. Doing what the banks are doing makes us working with us to finance it versus having, for the most part, if you can make your down payment on a property with us, you're good to go. We don't need a credit check, we don't need any sort of income verification. If you can make the down payment, we're ready to roll with most of the time. Right. So what you just touched on I think, might be the single most powerful thing that you've got going on a go forward basis for you. Because of the price that you're able to acquire and because of the price point you're focusing in, you have the ability to beat the rates. Right. You can go out there and when everyone is crazy as rates are raising and raising and raising, they'll come a point, I believe, when you're going to be able to slip in underneath that and say, hey, by the way, 9% 10%, we're doing deals over here at six and seven, you build it into the price and it is what it is. But I think that's a super powerful tool. And I believe now that we've crossed the Rubicon in the big cities, I believe that the decentralization is real. It's here to stay. And until there are major changes in some of the legislative things that we're seeing come out of the big cities, the secondary markets and these tertiary markets that historically would get annihilated in a market term are going to do the opposite. I think that, of course there are some markets that I'll never understand how the heck they're doing what they're doing, but I believe that the right secondary and tertiary markets have now stabilized and this is the new norm. And Coronavirus shifted a lot of things and work patterns and the ability to do this remote and the ability to step away and kind of launch your own business like the land business is here to stay and I think it's going to support those markets and I think that there's a hell of a future in land investing in the future. Yeah. And the great thing about being able to finance and run that transaction cycle is as banks tighten up too, they're not going to. Land is one of the first assets that they'll stop lending against. Right. Banks don't love to lend on land unless you're going to build on it immediately. Right. Unless you're wrapping up the land into a home construction loan and then they can go sell it to Frenzy or Fetty. Right. They know who's the buyer, but for land, they don't always have the mortgage buyer where they have to shove it themselves. So it's the first asset typically is like rural land that gets the next followed by commercial land. Right. Kind of both at the same time, typically. I think it's powerful. Just one of the fact that I don't think a lot of people will be able to qualify or even just get an asset backed mortgage for the piece of land. Right. Where we do offer asset backed mortgages. I'm not going to sue you to come get the value of your property. I'm just going to take the property back. Right. Whereas a lot of the lenders right now that my buyers were getting approved, they're getting personal loans, not asset loans. Right. So their balance sheet confirms the loan, which is their business. That's great, but not a lot of people can do that. Right. And that's definitely not going to be the majority. And the rates are going up and up. We just had somebody buy that property project I just told you about. The reason I was like this thing, every day I'm waiting for a message for this thing to fall apart or they want some concessions because they engaged us to buy this when rates were a pretty consistent four or four and a half. And I don't know where they locked their rate. Right. I didn't know if they got up to six or up to seven. They said it funded, so I'm feeling better now. But that's something I was legitimately worried about. So I think it's a powerful thing to be able to buy a low and then control the full cycle. I will tell people there's a lot of gurus and people out there that talk about this model as if it's the Holy Grail of investing styles. I'm not the most motivating guru. Sometimes I think, because I tell people that to build the land note business, it takes a lot of time. I didn't really make a lot of money the first couple of years because you're negative after you finish the deal at the beginning. Right. Now, when you're into that game, and now you have 40,000, 50,000, $80,000 a month on mortgages, well, then the game flips, and now you're making plenty of money. Right. But to do the notes right, it takes a year or two of really pounding the pavement for not a ton of upfront reward. And the other thing I tell people is, like, every dollar I make in Land, it goes to commercial assets. I don't keep it, like, unless there's a great opportunity, I'll reinvest, right. But the money that I make that I want to keep forever, I stick into a commercial aspect. I like storage quite a bit. So typically I'll be in a storage development or syndication or building that we own. So there are some downsides. Land isn't perfect. Right. There's no depreciation tax benefits, very high tax, really. First time I got a tax bill is really eye opening. I'm like, how can I make that not happen again? Right? But, yeah, that's what we do. And Holy Grail. But it's where I found my momentum and think it's got a 510 year run until it's in the house wholesaling, kind of. There's a lot of people trying to wholesale houses, and Land is still not really like that. There's definitely more competition, but it's a fun area to play. And I tell people all the time, if I ever go broke oh, I don't, but if I ever do, I can always pick the phone up and I can find a lot for $10,000 less than somebody else would buy for it, because I've learned how to do it. Yeah, it's an invaluable skill. And when you're at the real estate meetup party, whatever, people always want to talk to the Land guy. There's 97% of people aren't the land guys there, and they're like, oh, you do land. Let's talk. Right. So it's a fun skill set to have, and I definitely recommend it. Yeah, no doubt, man. And in that vein, what's the best way for folks to find you and reach out? Clint just find me on social media and follow me wherever you like to Clint Turner on all the platforms, facebook, Instagram, Twitter, wherever you are, also on a YouTube channel. We put out one to two videos a month. Sometimes I don't, but we try our best. We have a podcast. It's called the Happy Land Pod. We talk a lot more about the mindset behind investing, a little less about skills and tactics, because I think when you're winning up here, you also have the fortitude to win out in the market. So those are short episodes. They're about three to seven minutes. So very easy to digest in the morning, whatever. That's how I would say, find me. And then if you're anywhere that you want to learn land, from new to experienced investor, feel free to reach out to us again on social media. There's plenty of ways we can help you get the basics of land. And it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg, right? But if you are an experienced investor, it might be a little more expensive, but anyhow but just to connect with anybody ever close to you, that's perfect. Well, as always, folks, the links to find Clint are below. Clint Turner away land company. Folks, let's get out there and start investing. It's never a better time than now to get things going. Clint, thank you so much for the time today. Thanks, James. I appreciate you having me on. It was an absolute pleasure. Everyone out there, please stay safe.