 They're pretty tame, they want food. This is my horse that I ride. This is Zarr. Those horses are, that one's, all those light ones are super tame. That one over there, I don't know. This is the one I raised right here. This is a female, she's two. One of those with the light mare just came right up to me when I first came in and it's like I was petting it. They want food. Horses you have to give some grain usually. They have stomach kind of where they can eat it. Hey girl. Yeah I have the bigger horses down south at my other farm. I'll bring the big ones. The first podcast in my, one of my barns. A land podcast. Got hay. Straw. Wheat. Okay. This is an interesting episode. We're on my farm and I was like, let's shoot in the barn. So you got the straw here, you got hay here, wheat. But it's appropriate because we're talking about land. So John, we started to partner up buying land. We just closed our first deal in Texas. And so I was like, let's let the world hear what you're doing because a lot of people have been fascinated by this land arbitrage concept. So where are you from, Ursula? From Michigan. From Michigan. I've been in Texas for the last 11 years, like a second home. So you're 29 years old. Yes. And you're already have more than 10 million in real estate deals that you've done. Yeah I'd call it about 10 million. 10 million. You've got positive cash flow from the deals. Have any of the deals, have everyone been profitable so far? Everyone has been profitable. There's been like, I think two times when I first started off where I bought a piece of land where it was like bad title or something wrong. But you got a fix now. How many deals have you done in total? Over 500. Last recent kind was about 525-ish. So let's talk big picture. Listen to this episode if you are someone who realizes, you know, the most millionaires in the world have been made from real estate. Not billionaires. Most billionaires came from people who built and owned, you know, brands. But millionaires come from everyday ordinary people who buy up real estate and know how to do it. It's something they don't teach you in school at all, which is pretty insane. 50 trillion of estimated global net worth is in real estate. Whether it's commercial, raw land. We're going to talk today more about raw land, farmland, a little bit like that, you know. But all the different classes of commercial, residential, multifamily, you know, single family homes, blah, blah, blah. You have every taking land and doing development. And the thing I remember when I remember, you know how I first started getting into real estate? How's that? This is funny. I know you're not. I'm going to make you interview me. Okay. I got some questions. I saw a late night commercial. So I had started a business financial, kind of financial planning company. I was a CFP and I saw this just random commercial Carlton sheets. Have you ever heard of this guy? I have. He's like old school. It's like a rerun of an infomercial and he had all these people that he was showing had created wealth with real estate using his system. He had this system. I forget what it was, but maybe single family homes or something renting out. So I'm watching it and I'm like, huh, this seems weird. I was with the, I remember with this guy named Navon. He was a roommate. This is the first time I started making even a little bit of money. I went from sleeping in a mobile home to this house and they had a TV when I first moved in with two roommates. Anyway, the next week I had a financial planning like meetup with a potential client. I remember his first name was Scott. I remember he was, this is when I was in North Carolina. I go to Greensboro. I meet him, him and his wife and he's like, here's my tax returns. I'm making millions of dollars. I was a car salesman and I got into real estate. I'm making, this is the first time I'd seen a tax return where a guy was making millions and I was like, wow. So here's the crazy thing. I was thinking to myself, I just saw this infomercial on real estate. I drive back home from meeting this Scott guy in Greensboro and I watch it and this Carlton sheets thing would come on at midnight. It was like a late night and it was the client I had just met with with Carlton sheets in Hawaii being like, and Scott is one of my stop, a top students in testimonial and now is when I knew this infomercial is not BS because I called Scott the next day. I was like, I saw you on TV. He's like, yeah, I actually learned my system from a late night infomercial. He's like, I tweaked it myself and that's when I knew, by the way, this is actually for people who follow me or like, why are you into courses? That was the first time I really saw some dude buying a quote unquote get rich quick course because a lot of people made fun of Carlton sheets. I call it teaching you like it's a gimmick. Why do you have to pay? So I bought the Carlton sheet thing. I remember it was $400 and I was like, that is so much money and I bought it and then I started. Yeah. I mean, so let's switch over to you. That's kind of my story of like courses and how I got started and I started buying some houses in Rawling, North Carolina and then I progressed. Now I buy land. That's how we kind of, you know, kind of partnered up on these first deals we're doing together. But for you, what is the back story? Like were you completely broke at some point? I can never say I had a broke to riches story. I was an engineer as I went to school for Texas Tech, graduated petroleum engineering, and I guess I had that point where I was like, man, I'd like this, but I hate going to the office. Right. I was fricking hated like coming in. It was like, it wasn't even nine to five. It was like seven to five, like these grueling hours plus late night call because I was like doing drilling rings and everything. I was like, man, there's got to be another way to make money and like, you know, get some freedom. And so I found out about this land business model actually on a podcast and somebody else's podcast. They're pitching their course and, you know, whatever, talking about land. And I was like, OK, I've always been interested in like flipping stuff, whether it be like garage sale or concert tickets, whatever, like hustling. I was like, maybe I can just do that with real estate and with land. It seems easy enough. So I bought that. What were you at this? 23. 23. OK. Yeah. So I bought that dude's course. It would have been November of 2016. And I bought another course. So I took two courses. How much were they? You remember? They're both. One was a thousand. One was 1500. One of them came with a free piece of land. Really? Yeah. They're like, by the course of 1500, you get a free piece of land. Where was the land like in the Sahara Desert? It was in the desert of Arizona. It was like a one acre piece out in Arizona. It probably worked like 150 months. Funny enough, I ended up selling that for 125 a month for 12 months. So $1,500. And I got the course basically for free. So you sold it with financing. Yeah. Seller financing. Just on a land contract. So the course ended up being free. Yeah. OK. That's cool. Yeah. So I took those two courses. It was November of 2016. I was like, man, I just want to find a deal and start small and kind of jump in. OK. And that's when I found my first deal in Texas. 53 acres for 8,500 bucks. An acre. Or total? Total. 170 per acre. 170. So why was it so cheap? What was wrong with it? Well, it was kind of in the middle of nowhere of West Texas. Again, the desert, no water, no real road access. It was just desert, Mesquite land. And I was like, I was looking. I was like, everything else around here is selling for like 12, 1,300. This dude was asking like 10 grand. I was like, I'm going to try and get it down like 8,500. OK. And I was like in my office working engineering, like haggling with this dude on the phone while I should be working. And we ended up settling on 8,500 bucks. OK. And that was the first deal. I ended up selling it off in five different pieces of like 10 acres. So how much would you make? You put in how much 8,000? 8,500. And how much did you make back from that overall? I pretty much doubled my money. I sold a few of them off on owner financing again and a couple of them for cash. I ended up with like 17 or 18 grand. And then you took that and did you keep snowballing it to bigger? Yes. Well, thankfully, as an engineer, you make a lot of money. So I literally just took all that money plus the success from that first deal and just plowed it into more deals like that. So that was the start of it, like starting with those small pieces in the middle of nowhere, kind of more just like flipping. Right. So that was the beginning of an empire. Beginning of an empire. So, OK. Now, let's fast forward now. You've done over 500 deals. If somebody's watching, like, what's the top three tips for someone to get started? Is it as simple because you'll see people like, you know, I've been doing education stuff around business and entrepreneurship. And some people's like, just do it. But then people are like, I don't know what to just do. Like, let's say you lost everything you had. You had to start all over today. What size piece of land are you going for? What area are you looking at? What price per acre would you say? I mean, obviously that's variable. Like, we're here on the East Coast land. You can't buy any land here for 170 bucks an acre. No. Most of the land here is 8 to 12,000. And land's going up now because there's people worried about the future of the world and food and all that. So farmland's been going up. But how would you, what would be just like, you know, the three simplest ways you get started? Would you find five acres? Yeah, you divide it up. You got to start small for sure. So I would say five to 10 grand, even when I go to work a new area, like we're talking about doing deals in Virginia or whatever now, like I want to start small. Yeah. Like I don't want to just go in for like a $500,000 million deal. You know, you got to start, you know, five figures under 10 grand if you can. So you got to start small. But the thing is, is you got to get super familiar with an area because like the more knowledge you have on that area, the more arbitrage there is because boom, you instantly see a deal and you know it's a deal and you know exactly, okay, I buy this for five, it's instantly worth 10. Gotcha. So if I were to come work Virginia now, like I would just laser focus, find out, you know, what stuff is selling for here, what the county regulations are, you know, the realtors, brokers in the area, who else is working the area? Just pick a county because, you know, landowners have broken up counties. So you think this will work basically anywhere? Oh yeah, it works anywhere. I mean, I have people who I teach and know and stuff. I have a guy who's doing it in Virginia, one acre lots. What about someone in a place like Alaska would this work? Florida. What about outside the U.S.? You know, obviously there's different regulations, but the land arbitrage system, if you don't know what arbitrage is, it's you take something that's worth this and somebody pays you this and you do it relatively quickly. So we just did a deal together, 160 acres. Yes, sir. And we already had three of the lots sold when we closed and bought the land. So we already had money coming in, literally in the first millisecond of ownership, which is pretty cool. And then we've sold now, it's only been two weeks. Two weeks, I got half of it sold. Half of it sold off. So start super small. It's kind of like they say know your customer, you know, know your county. Know your county in this case because land ownership is controlled by the county tax records. Now, number two, what do people need to know about? Like, I don't have, let's say somebody says, I have no money. How do I do this? What are the, what's the basics you would teach them about the financing side? How you get the, in general, getting the owner themselves to finance. Yeah. So if you don't know, by the way, what we're talking about, owner seller finance basically means instead of you having to get a bank loan or pay cash for the property, you get the person selling the property to write up a note that an IOU, that you owe them payments. So if you maybe don't have good credit, that's good. And their security, if you don't pay them back in general, depending on the state, is they own the land, they can take it back from you. So that's, you might think that's scary, but in a sense that's good. Yeah. Because if you don't have great credit or you don't have a track record, in general, bank, especially for raw land, banks are not going to find anything. They're not very friendly. No. If you have a great, if you're a billionaire or a millionaire and you have a great track record, you could convince them, even then you're going to have to put quite a bit down on raw land. One percent. Yeah. It's like the lowest of those. But a lot of banks are going to want 50 if you have no track record and it's a raw piece of land. So how do you get and find people who own land that are willing to sell it to you and take payments on it? Yeah. So one thing I've kind of started doing at scale and it's unlocked a tremendous amount of wealth is the seller financing. And I think I'm the only person I know who's actually sending out an offer letter for seller financing. So I will send them a hard offer, two-page offer letter that I have offering to buy their land on financing. Yeah. And then I'll explicitly say this is how much I'm going to give you down. Yes. And then how much I'm going to give you per month at what percentage interest over whatever rate. And what we do is there's two main ways we can do it. We can just pull the data from the county. Right. And we put it in a spreadsheet and mail them out. Or what I love to do is I actually, hard manual labor or hire someone else to do it, go into the county GIS mapping system. Okay. And start looking at these pieces of land on basically Google Earth and scraping them manually into a spreadsheet. And so I'll go into whatever county, whatever area interests me. And I'll pull up their GIS map and start clicking on pieces of land that don't have anything on them or don't look like they have anything on them. And I transfer their ownership data, their location. I put it in a spreadsheet. And I will individually apply each piece of land with a value that I think it's worth trying to offer like 70 cents on the dollar. Basically. That way you're instantly in the money. Instantly buying it under value. So it's mass messaging a whole bunch of people in a county with a letter like snail mail, old school, in their mailbox. There's still people that use the mail, not many, but, and they get the letter and it's well written out and it's two pages. And it actually has an offer like. Has an offer, yeah. And so what you're looking for is what they call in the industry motivated sellers. Yeah. Meaning they got something else going on. They maybe could sell the piece of land for $50,000. If they had a year because land in general sells much slower than homes. Yes. In this area. It's a big piece especially. Yeah. In the East Coast, there's a lot of, the average big farm takes three to five years to sell. That's crazy. Yeah. Now I was in Europe in Sweden. The average big farm will sell in three to five weeks. It's insane. So it depends what country you're in, you know, you're in, in the state. So you're looking for a motivated seller who basically goes, I don't want to have my house on the market and here's this letter from John and like I can have money right now. That's pretty tempting to people. And it's pretty crazy. The response rate is I've seen like 1%, which is actually pretty insane. Cause you know, you mail out three or 500 of these things and you got three or five acceptances. Yes. For big pieces. Like these are not small pieces. So like how much capital do you have and can you actually. And you can mail three to 500 people is not the cost of marketing. It's like the cheaper than Facebook. A couple hundred bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And so you generate. So basically you got to know the letter. It needs to, you have to know how to compile the important thing for somebody listening or watching is you have to know how to compile the offer. So you don't over offer. Yeah. You don't want to over offer. If it's where the thousand bucks at acre and you offer like, I'll prepare to give you 1500 bucks an acre. And they're like, sure. And then you buy the property and then you're like, wait a second. But here's the thing. You have to make your offer competitive, right? Because no one in the right mind is going to sell their million dollar ranch for four or 500 thousand. It needs to be, you know, 70, 80 cents on a dollar. So boom, you're buying it undervalued. Then if you want to subdivide it or develop it, do whatever you're adding value from there. Exactly. So it's not just complete arbitraging by undercutting people. It's like we actually, and the deal we're doing deals together, that deal we're coming in there and making sure there's water and making sure that there's the ability because on a big piece of property, most people can't handle a big piece of property. Yeah. So you're doing a service to say, all right, here's 20 acres of it. And we're also providing that seller with a pretty good tax advantage too, right? He's getting to pay tax over time. He's getting monthly cash flow. He's not even like some tax burden on a sale of his land. Yeah. Because some, a lot of people, especially people who are older who own farms and they inherited them, their tax basis is super low. So when they sell this thing, maybe they've been sitting on the piece of land for 50 years. When they sell it, they might have a crazy amount of capital gains. And in every country in the world, the government wants their piece. So that's the third part, is you write the letter and then you negotiate a deal where you just pay them off monthly for the land. And then the arbitrage, by the way, and we'll get to that in a second, the arbitrage is where you then take that land, flip it, and have somebody else pay you more payments than you're paying them. And you keep the difference and you own the land. And one thing we talk about letter is, one thing I actually want to mention too, is there's so many of these big pieces just sitting online. Yeah. And they're illiquid. Some of my biggest projects I've actually found online because they're just listed on, you know, land websites. Yes. Like Lands of America because there's just, the realtors suck at selling it. They're un-motivated. The listing sucks. You know, there was one piece I bought. It was like $200,000. It's like one iPhone picture. And the dude's thumb's like covering the camera. I'm like, you're gonna sell a piece of land and not even have like drone photos or anything. So there's actually just so much land just out there right now, just online where there's like so much opportunity to buy it at a great price because it's illiquid, these larger pieces. Yes. A lot of people can't afford them. Yeah. Yeah. So you're really, I mean, here's the thing I tell people about business. Everybody assumes that there's a lot of hardworking people who are working smart and people go, oh, I don't want to buy land because you know, all the good pieces are taken. What you learned in your 20s was like, if you get out there and start taking action, learn from somebody, like I said, you bought a couple of courses, learn from somebody, and then of course you eventually start learning from experience, but you get started off somebody's system and then you kind of tweak it over time. Like, there's not a lot of people doing this. There's no one, I tweaked it to the point where I don't know there's anyone doing this arbitrage, or you buy it on seller financing and then sell it on seller. I'm the only person I know that's really good. And think of this, there's over 300 million Americans. Yeah. There's one 29-year-old doing it. It's like, that just shows you like people are getting lazier, man. We got to make land ownership simple. That's what's so beautiful about selling it with owner financing. Yes. Collecting payments from people because they can, they don't need to use a bank. It's actually affordable. What we're doing, like the deal we're doing is $700 a month. Yeah. Affordable housing for people. Yeah. So it's actually good for the world too. It's not like you're just making money by doing something completely exploitative and destructive. It's like, no, we're like actually taking land that's underutilized. The seller's happy because they make money. The people we resell it to come in and they're happy because they have an affordable place and they didn't need to get a bank loan. So just to make it clear one more time, imagine this is a piece of land right here. Here's the piece of land. It's not on, it's not for sale. The owner of this, let's say, is this water bottle, Mr. Water Bottle. You like these high tech, we're on a farm, man. We're going to use what we have, not have a high tech diagram like they have on YouTube. So this owner right here, he didn't even have this necessarily for sale, this piece of land. Let's say it's 20 acres. You send letters to hundreds of people like this. A few of them reply. Out of 300 letters, you get three replies. This guy replies back, sure, I'll sell to you. You come in, you make an offer, you put a little bit of money down. We didn't put much money down on the deal. 10 to 15%. Yeah. You put a little bit down and then we pay this person monthly for five to 10 years. Now at the same time, you go out, now you own this piece of land, you can divide it up, let's say into four pieces, five acres, five acres, five acres, five acres, five acres. And now we'll talk about how you find buyers. Now this person walks off with their money and now I'm going to use this headset. Now you own this. I'm a headset. John the headset. Now owns this. He goes out, divides it in four, divides it in 10, whatever. And then he sells that to individuals, but they don't have to have a bank loan. They give you a little money down and they make monthly payments. So John here has to make his monthly payments to this old owner, but he's getting all this income in from the current people. And the arbitrage is you resell the land for more than you pay this person. Usually I like to look for it by the way, at least double. Yeah. Double your money. You're getting 10,000 coming in, you're paying him five, like that's bare minimum. So yeah, imagine like you, exactly, you have to pay this guy 5,000 a month for seven years or 10 years. But these people here are paying you 10,000. So basically think about this is what's mind blowing what people don't realize. You get to take and that's, let's say 12,000, let's just do it. So let's say this person, you have to send a check for 6,000. These people are paying you 12, so you get to keep six. So you take six off the table into your own pocket. And the other six is from these people who are buying the land for you. That's what people don't realize about real estate. These other people, because at the end of the day, they're paying off the note for you. Now, of course you transfer the ownership to these people, but the point is you still own the land. That's the key thing. And we'll transfer ownership, then we'll go find another deal. There's so much land out there. And there's so many variations of these because some of this is by state. So you could do the notes, for example, where instantly you transfer title to these people. You can also some states, you would not transfer it till the end of the note payment. Also, you could give people, and this happens sometimes, some people will say, I'll just give you cash for it. Yeah, great. Yeah. Make more money quicker. So yeah, it depends on the state you're in, in certain states like that. Also, there's other ways to make money. There are companies out there. You could take this note that you have from these four people. You could resell it to someone else. Okay. And they give you an instant check for the whole thing. So maybe you paid $100,000. You might get a check for $180,000 literally a couple of months later. Yeah. Or a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks later. Depends how quick you want to do it. Yeah. So there's all kinds with real estate. There's many, you know, before crypto, before all this stuff, there was real estate. And that's how people were doing stuff. Before the stock market, people flipping stocks. We got the wind coming in. This barn here got years ago, tornado came through and blew it away. It's a cool barn. This has to be the first podcast recorded in a barn. That's right. On the land. I've got another barn over there we could do. I'm going to move it around. This one's cool though. We actually have pigs underneath right now, horses underneath, cows, donkeys. So it's good. There's so much. I mean, the cool thing about this opportunity, there's insanity land in this world. There is. I mean, there's so much land. You start flying over the earth and you're like, whoa. And remember, land also changes hand. I guarantee you, there's going to be a piece of property that you bought, sold. One day you might come back and buy it again. I have done that. You've done that. They're like, I don't want it anymore. Yes. I'm like, well, I'm not going to buy it back for what I sold it to you for. Yes. I'm going to buy it back at like 50, 60%. So you make money again. Yeah. I sold again. So land is like, land is very much, I mean, I like the land from like the, I have organic farms. I like rejuvenating the land. You know, I wouldn't want all of the farmland in the world to be subdivided. But at the same time, there's some land that is not that good farmland and humans need a place to live. So you buy that land. I'm more interested in that land. I wouldn't want to go into like prime farmland that's feeding the planet and cut it up for apartments. But there's also other things you can do. Like I was looking at some prime farmland in Illinois. You could buy the farmland and just sell off the road frontage. The farm, if you're growing corn, cows, crops for food, they don't care if they have road frontage, right? So you could sell off the front and then you could keep the back part in organic agriculture or in woods in forest if you want to have trees and you want to do something that's good for the environment. So this way can actually fit in with ecological sustainability at the same time also create financial independence for the person who knows how to do it. For sure. So question for you. You went to college. You got an engineering degree. Don't you think they should have? You know, most people have a minor and people will always pick like a BS minor. I was like, yo, I got an engineering degree. I'm like an art history. Not that art history is not a good thing to learn, but I mean, you can also learn art history by like making money and traveling the world. Go to the Nile, see, you know, Egypt, go to Paris. So wouldn't it be cool if there was like a minor in practical, yeah, or like land, land arbitrage would be cool. Well, I'm blessed because from engineering and some of the stuff I've taken, like I got familiar with like economics and spreadsheets and all that stuff. If there's one thing I wish that there was a minor, they taught you in college is like a minor in like numbers or like economics or like business, but more just like applied, applied finance. Like what I have on my phone is like a yield calculator or like an interest calculator. Like just messing around with like a simple interest calculator, you know, like payments, how much am I getting? How much am I spending? Like keep it and it can be simple. Yeah. They have you do calculus, which is fine. So people need to learn calculus. You know, some people need advanced stuff, but the average person, you don't have to be somebody who memorizes formula. If you can kind of do the math in your head, like I pay $400 an acre and I sell it for 800. Anybody can do that math, but it's great if, what I guess I was saying about school is ideal if you start guiding people. And there's a great book by Richard Taylor who won a Nobel Prize in economics, speaking of economics. He says, you know, it's called a nudge. It's great if you get nudged in the right direction. You know what I'm saying? And when, and I know I'm talking on a different subject now, but the education system in general nudges you in the wrong direction. For example, it forces you to read boring books. And then when people graduate high school or college, they're so burnt out. They've been nudged away from being a book reader. You know, and like you said, you've learned from listening and reading the systems that other people build. And it's very powerful. So anyway, back to, we can talk on that all day, but that's why we're doing this show episode is just so people can learn. Like here's a practical way that somebody, and you didn't inherit a whole bunch of money to start, right? You just started from scratch. I took my engineering money, started from zero. Just from your job. Yeah, now to 10 million. Yeah. Just from my engineer. I was making, I came out of school making 113,000 per year was my first offer. Then, you know, with bonuses and everything probably caught 125 to 150 per year. So I was making a solid amount, but I started with, you know, student debt, like had to move out, do this expenses. And then everything on top that I just piled into buying land. Yeah. Now, what are some of the pitfalls? So let's say somebody just goes out and that's why it's probably good that you took those two courses that you paid for, whatever you paid 2,500 bucks for those two, it kind of can help you from falling in the ditch. What are the biggest pitfalls you've seen when people, what's three pitfalls, mistakes, deadly errors for people trying to do land arbitrage you've seen other people do? Well, the first thing is not knowing your area, not becoming an expert. So they spend all this time and energy mailing out. Their offers are too high or they're way too low. Yes. And you know, they're getting all hate calls and everything back. Is that what people do if you do too low? I got the worst. They're like, I'm going to murder you. I sent one out recently. The envelope, I hand stopped them to put dollar bills in there. And people got so upset. They were like, why are you sending me a dollar bill? They paid for the postage to mail me the dollar bill back. And one guy included the worst hate letter I've ever received. I cannot even come close to mentioning what he said. He wrote it on my offer and sent it back with my dollar bill. So don't insult people by sending them a dollar, even if you just meant it to be kind of cool. So you don't do that anymore, right? Yeah. You got to know your area. It comes down to you got to know your area. Text this man. Text said people. Yeah. They might come be happy. They didn't send you a bullet back in the envelope, my friend. Get a bullet. That's what I'm going to do to you. Yeah. But that comes from knowing your area because you got, if you offer too much, you're going to be screwed on the buy side. If you offer too little, you're not going to get any deals. You're just going to get a bunch. Yeah. Because if you offer too much, even if you say, oh, well actually then backtracking from a high offer is tough to do. You benchmarked in their head. You've set the bar so high. They're like, ah, I could get 3,000 bucks an acre. If you try to be like, no, no, no, I've hit 2,000. They're going to be like, forget it. Your letter says that. And if you go too low, yeah, you probably get a bad reputation. People start talking to each other like this stupid John guy. If he ever writes you a letter. That is very true actually. Yeah. Dude, people who own farms, it's not a big city. They know each other. It's not that many people live out in some of those counties. Yeah. For sure. So yeah, that reputation is important. I think the second thing is outside of knowing your area. You have to, it's funny because I hear you talk about a lot recently not delegating. Yes. And like, you can't delegate what you don't know. I see so many people in the land industry and real estate in general. They're delegating to like VA's. Yeah. All this stuff. There's always be exactly. I saw a post, I think it was yesterday a couple of days ago. Someone's like, who do you hire for a VA to come up with your offer price? On letters for land. I'm like, how about the hire a VA to come up with your offer? That's like a heart surgeon. Being like, all right, what nurse can actually do the heart surgery? I'm like, well, then why are you the heart surgeon? If you want to make, listen, we talked about this. You're in my actual, John's in my advanced mentor program. People pay and kind of do shadowing program. He's been spending time. And that's one of the things that I told him is that there is a myth and it's going around on Instagram and TikTok because it goes viral because it sounds great. Just get something, you know, find a good industry and then hand it off and replace yourself. And I'm like, well, do you think Elon Musk can replace himself to build Tesla? The whole reason he's the richest man in the world and somebody changing technology is because he's the guy. And of course he doesn't necessarily cook his own food or it isn't necessary to do all the accounting for Tesla. But at the core, you're going to have to commit to doing the work yourself. And you use what I always say is, assistants amplify you. They don't replace you. A great story I have because there's a huge problem in the land business. I was trying to buy a piece of land just from another investor and I was like, okay, I'm going to buy this and maybe give it away or do whatever. It's kind of the middle of nowhere. And so the guy sent me the location. I do some further digging and look it up. Like, dude, this piece of land is 50 miles from where you told me it actually was way out in the middle of nowhere in Texas. He's like, oh, well, that's the map my VA gave me. And I'm like, so you didn't actually go look up this piece of land that you're trying to sell. This is one of your students because you got like a... Not my students. Another guy that I was trying to buy a piece of land from. I would never let my students do this. This guy was just another land investor. I was like, you know, can I buy this piece for me? He sends me the GPS location and I do some further digging. And it was actually 50 miles from where he said it was. And this dude was trying to sell that piece of land to people. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, that's where my VA said it was. So you didn't actually go in and figure out where the land was actually located before you bought it. Right. And now you're actually trying to sell it with a wrong location. You're telling me it's here, but it's actually 50 miles away. I was like, you know, that's just a great example of a VA source. I'm like, man, you got someone who's probably not even in the United States trying to figure out where this land is located and just don't even double check it. Like that's crazy. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, that's not just in the land deal, but you can't delegate what you don't know. Over time, as you become a true expert, you've done 500 deals. It'll be a little easier for you to delegate some things. Now, if you need to do your first five deals on your own 100%, for sure, I'll do everything from ground up and probably more than five, but I'm just saying. So what do you think is a third pitfall you see? Probably not knowing how to sell the land. A lot of people. Right. So they buy it, but then they don't have the systems in place or just the knowledge and kind of just the basic marketing and sales knowledge to make it happen. And then it takes them a long time to sell the land or they can't sell it for what they thought they could and then that destroys their economics. So in the land, in the John, your land arbitrage system, what's the secret that helps you sell faster than people who are beginners or people that are in your training program? Yeah. So I do all the ads and everything myself basically, where I touch and make sure everything is the way I want it. And we do a lot of Facebook geotargeting. Yep. And Facebook marketplace. That's our Facebook's perfect. Yes. Geotargeting on Facebook and the Facebook marketplace. I don't know why more people don't use that for all types of real estate. Yes. Like you can actually run an ad on Facebook marketplace. I could post this farm for sale in Virginia, this location on the Facebook marketplace, then run a Facebook boost ad on that. And everyone around there will see that farm for sale. Yes. Everyone uses Facebook. So there's too many people out there just using Zillow or realtor.com or Lands of America, which, you know, you will get sales. But not as, you got that velocity. You can, like I said, we're doing deals together. We resold half of it in the first 10 days of owning it. Yeah. And also, that's also my email list, right? So I've built up an email list using Facebook forums a lot of times or other methods and just build that list. Then, you know, I shoot an email before I even buy it. Like, hey, this piece of land is coming. Yep. You have first dibs. You're on my list. That's how I sold two lots like that out of hours just before. So as you do this more and more and commit to making money this way, you start building up kind of loyal customers. Yes. Who have done other deals and they kind of like to buy land and they like your system. I like to think of it more as like a brand too. Like it's almost personal brand, but, you know, a personal and business land brand. Well, you become like for me, I do a lot in Texas. Like everyone in my area knows like, hey, you have land. Like, do you have land here? Do you have land there? Yep. I've been able to get people coming to me instead of just passively posting my land and waiting for someone to try and buy it. Yeah. That's interesting. And that's taken, of course, you know, tens of thousands. I think it's in the hundreds of thousands. I was looking. I spent well over 100,000 just in Facebook ads and land alone in the last five years. So the deal we're looking at that we did, you projected the rate of return IRR to be over 200%, which is amazing. So that's a deal we did, you know, and you're basically looking over time. You got cash flow, you have profit. There's tax advantages that people, a lot of people don't know and aren't taught of being a real estate owner as well. Some cool things. Of course, you can deduct things like interest. You can deduct the expenses of subdividing and so on and so forth. But we're on track to hit that, by the way. I mean, as long as everything keeps going, I mean, we're actually a little bit ahead. We're ahead of the plan. So you've got a nice, he's got a nice little software system generated, a report you can run your projections out. Of course, like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until I punch them in the face. So projections don't always perfectly line up with reality. In this case, we're doing a little better. Sometimes projections are under optimistic and you end up doing better, which is a great problem to have is when your projections, but of course, as we know in life, over time it averages out, but you really don't want to buy. You need what's called a margin of safety. So your margin of safety is like Warren Buffett's famous saying, you know, the margin of safety, you want to at least see yourself doubling your money. Yeah. That's like a minimum. At least 100% yield is what I like to look at. What's the most you've made on a property? Probably the one I'm doing right now, it's a big subdivision and I gave them 250,000 down and 1.25 million over 10 years. So I'm paying them like 14, 5 a month, I think. Okay. And all of a sudden done, it's going to be about $5 million of notes receivable. So I've turned 250 into... 200, because it's a lever. For those of you don't know, even though overall I have to pay a million bucks, it's leverage over time. You don't have to give that all at once. So you're saying 200,000, the lever, it ends up turning into 5 million. Now you need to subtract the interest that you paid in the 1.2 million. You're talking about making millions. I'm making 4 million from 250,000. That's good. That's game changing for most people. And the cool thing about this system for a lot of people, you're ambitious, we're starting to do bigger and bigger things together. But a lot of people are like, if I could just make a million dollars once, I'll retire on it. You know what I mean? Well, the genius thing about this is that's obviously a bigger deal. But you could buy a $5,000 piece of land and sell it for 15 or 20 on payments. So we talked about the pitfalls. We talked about your story. One of the things that I think people that follow me want to know is like, how big could this thing get? Because we've run some projections. You were estimated just for Texas. You think we can do $100 million worth of deals. I think so. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot. Like I said, the largest portion of the net worth of the world. Everybody talks about GDP and everybody talks about how much Apple's worth and how much Amazon's worth of trillion dollars. But I'm going the most of the wealth. At least, let's say, it's hard to know exactly 60 to 80% of all global wealth is just literally in this earth, dirt, real estate. And so it's a tragedy that more people don't know this. Now, by the way, there's different ways people make money. People make money in multifamily. You hear that a lot. Apartment buildings or duplexes, triplex all this and people make money buying homes. You see it on TV and they renovate and they flip. But people forget like land is a big, that's something that I do. You know, I'm very interested in land from, from the agriculture. I've got farmers cart food business and all that. But I'm glad that this word is getting out there because it's like, it's really accessible for almost everybody lived near a piece of land that if they knew, if they had the know-how, they could acquire it, either improve it and resell it or just sometimes just resell it. Yeah. I mean, the opportunity is, is definitely huge. And one thing I love about it is it's very simple. Yes. Also being in Texas, I've done, you know, deals in Arizona or deals, you know, in Wyoming. Like I've done multiple different states all across the country. Soon I actually have to live near the land in all cases. Now. So you can do it remotely. But you do need to, what we're talking about principle number one, the commitment. You got to commit to know that place. Yes. So you can just pop in and be like, yo, I live in Florida, but you know what? I'm visiting, you know, Ann Arbor, Michigan today. Let me buy a quick piece of land. But at today's day and age, you can live in Florida and study the crap out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. And you can become an expert from Florida and buy a piece. Yes. Up there, you know, I wouldn't recommend buying a large piece without seeing it, but you know, smaller piece for sure. And don't make it your first deal. Your first deal needs to be in an area. No. I agree. I like to tell people, try and start near you. That way you can go out and see the land. You can get the pictures. You can get boots on ground. But you know, that's still a wide radius. You can drive three, four hours. Yes. You know, so there's so much land and opportunity. And the cool thing is this works not just in the United States. There's basically every country in the world for the most part allows, you know, you can sell land and owner financing or seller financing. Like there's also other benefit because you can buy a piece of land and keep a piece for yourself because some people aren't going to do as many, you know, 500 deals, but you could use this technique. Let's say you want to own a piece of land because maybe you've always wanted to put a house on it or have a little place to keep some chickens or a farm or a place to take your kids and family. You can use this technique if you do it right and get effectively a piece of land for free. You probably make some money. You probably have a piece of land. You get paid to have your own piece of land. So if you've ever dreamed about owning real estate, owning a piece of land, owning something in the countryside, and by the way, you can do this in the middle of the city too. This is a cool system for people. Yeah, it is. There is so much opportunity. You can use land for just about anything in a lot of these different areas too. There he is. Livestock, animals. Ziggy. Mobile homes. What's up, bud? Ziggy, do you want to buy some land? If it had bones on it, he'll be happy. He wants some land. He's going to value, he's going to pay in bones. He digs up like dead chicken bones and he digs up deer antlers. He values land by the amount of bones per acre. 500 bones per acre. So if people want to learn more, I'm going to put a link below. John and I are doing actual deals together, but as I got to know John, he came through my mentor program. I was like, we need to build this and really get the word out. So I'm going to put a link below. You can go watch here and see if you qualify to be a student of John's. I'm doing it with him. We're building out kind of a system. I've been doing this and John has what you need. What I like about John too is he's an engineer. So like engineers like build out. How many videos is it so far? It's a lot. I'm very detail orientated, obviously. And there's a lot of real estate and land courses out there. Obviously, I mean, I would like to think that mine is the best, but the humbly think it is because it's just, it's just, it covers everything and the details of everything. It's got templates and it's got everything. So you can go out. There's a lot of information given in this. You can go out and search YouTube and some people just are like, I'm never paying for education, but I'm going to tell you this. I've said this before. People think, oh, it's self-serving that I'm just saying it because I sell courses. No, it's the reason I got into selling courses because courses changed my life. Same here. Same with you. So sometimes people are like, oh, you're just saying that because you sell courses. I'm like, no, I got into courses. I have, you know, I've made money in many different things. The reason I still do courses, it's not the main, it's a small part of my business revenue. But I do it because it's transformative and even when haters, you know, the few haters that say, oh, this is a scam. You and I both get crazy amount of testimonials of people are like, this changed our life. I did my 67 steps course anywhere I go in the world. That's from 2014. Literally, I can go any city and people will be like, 2014, that changed my life. And this real estate. I have numerous students who have built already six figure businesses just buying and selling land in their first year. Yeah. And it's like, this is not some overview. Like I'm actually showing people how to create Facebook ads, you know, how to become an expert. How to do the letters. How to do the letters. How to value the property. If you don't know how to value the property, you can know everything else. That'll be a disaster. So good. We're going to put a link. Go watch. Go read this page. Go see the presentation. See if it's good for you to apply. You know, I wanted to do this free one. Not trying to sell you something, but there's always 20% of people who are like, okay, I need 20 hours of this training and I'm not going to do a 20 hour podcast like you. I'm not going to sit at my barn for 20 hours. How many hours is it so far of the training? 20 plus. Yeah. And my goal is to keep adding as I do stuff or cool. And I'm recording stuff in there on the negotiation. I negotiate big deals. You know, I'm actually training John and some bigger stuff because he wants to keep expanding. So, you know, go there, grab the course. Also, if you're listening, you can just go to tylopez.com slash land podcast. Tylopez.com slash land podcast. L-A-N-D podcast. P-O-D-C-A-S-T. I'm going to have a special page up for those of you watching this on YouTube or listening on Spotify, podcast, wherever you're watching this Facebook, go to tylopez.com slash podcast. See about applying to be trained directly under John. He's done 500 deals. That's pretty insane by age 29. I've done deal with him. So, I actually know that this is legit in the sense that we own a piece. We own a land together. So, I always like to vet deals. He's been through my mentorship program as well. So, and you also investor in some of the deals that we have. So, he's put his money where his mouth is. Go to tylopez.com slash land podcast and see if you should get those 20 hours of training. If not, listen to this again. There's a lot here. There's enough to get you started. There's enough here to make you dangerous. There's a lot of, I tell people the only thing bad about podcasts is like you can't record a podcast long enough unless you want to set a world record for like a 20-hour podcast. You can't do a podcast long enough to really give you everything you need, but podcasts, YouTube's, Facebook's, Instagram stories, these are powerful to just nudge you in the right direction and whether you want to get in John's land arbitrage, you know, system course or if you want to go piece it together on your own take some action this year. I always say I think the minimum is you should have 20% of your net worth in real estate. I don't, I like, I love crypto, NFTs, I buy big companies. I love e-commerce, social media brand, all that. No matter what, I look at my portfolio twice a year of just like where my net worth is and I want it and I want, I'm always looking to at least be at 20%. Why? Because like Mark Twain said, buy land, they're making more of it. They can make it more crypto. They're staking, they make more NFTs out of nowhere. They say you can't make more Bitcoin. Okay. 21 million, but they can make other competitors which dilute, but land, unless you go to Mars, which I'm not that excited about. The earth is not getting bigger. They're not in land. If anything is shrinking, water levels are rising. So that'll actually make land valuable. And it's a skill you should know yourself. You can pass it on to your kids. You can know that if you learn real estate, it's not a fad. It's not a fad. You look back Julius Caesar, Egyptian pharaohs. They were in the real estate business. Moses. They were all in the real estate business. So you want whether you're doing something else and you're just going to do this part of time, you need to be a little bit in the real estate business. You owe it to yourself. Start with something simple. Don't take note of what John said. Like here, I've got over, it's almost 500 acres. I pieced together different land, negotiated deals, just like what John does. Don't start with 450 acres. These are multi-million-dollar deals. Start with as small as you can. One of the 67 steps, my mentor, Joel Salatin, he's like, make your mistakes small. And he called it in the back 40. In the back part of the farm where nobody could make fun of you. So don't bet your whole wealth on this, but own something. By the end of this year, try to own something in the next 12 months. You own a piece of real estate. In addition, by the way, to your own residents. Your own residents is good, but that's not a business. Lots of people so own another place. Look at your net worth. If you're doing crypto, if you're doing e-com, be like, wait a sec, I'm too heavy. All good asset managers know you got to look at your portfolio and not get the weighting wrong. So you can miss weight what you have. So yeah, more about John, John's system, John's training, super detailed. If you want to just lay it out for you, Tylopez.com slash land podcast. Put a link here or just type that in and I'll have a link on Tylopez too, but this will take you directly there. Thank you so much for doing this. Let's go see. I got some pigs down below. Everything is about spring time. So they're going to come out into this, into the suite. I keep everything outside, but they like to be in the barn sometime in the winter. The horses are all out. How many horses do I have? I have a couple farms. Two, four, six, eight. We have 11 here. I have about 30 horses. Got the other 20 somewhere on the other farm. One of them came right up to me. I was cutting it. A lot of those horses I raised from my baby. They're big. They're 2,000 pound Belgians. That's a baby, by the way. She's only two years old. People are worried about weight problems. I'm like, that horse Katrina weighs 2,000 pounds at age two. She doesn't worry about her weight. It makes her stronger. Need a little weight around the farm and move stuff around. You don't want to be too skinny. I don't know if you want to put on 2,000 pounds, Rick probably won't fit your frame too well. You don't have to sell all your clothes. That was a muscle. Rick says you can have 1,000 pounds. I'm going to do a, you know what I'm going to do for a viral video? I'm going to hitch up some of my horses. And I'm going to see how many men does it take to pull against these, even two of my horses is going to take a long. They have four legs. They can stick them in the ground. They roam to do it. Roam weighs 330 pounds. Some of these weigh 2,300 pounds. My theory, what's your theory? How many things is going to be? I think you're going to need about 20 to 30 per horse. I think 10. Oh man. You have it. No way. Can we bet a piece of land? Let's bet a piece of land. Is it 10 roams or like 10 roams? 10 roams. No way. Remember, humans have a disadvantage to things. One grip strength, right? You can't trust for all your strength in it. Number two, we only have two legs. So you put your feet down. Those horses have big feet like that. We shoe them. They put those eight legs down. Imagine if they weren't even trying, if you had to pull them, 4,600 pounds of weight, dead weight to pull around. I think it'll take about 30 to 40 guys to keep up with them. And yeah. Stonehenge, I went to in the UK. And I think they had, my theory, my conspiracy theory is they had elephants. That's what I think. Because elephant, before you had cranes, you had elephants. Now I don't know the only counter argument. I'm not sure an elephant trunk, some of those rocks weigh 20 tons. So you'd have to have elephants that you could train and you'd put a rope around it and put like four elephants grab it. And I think animals are smart, man. You could train them. Elephants and police or aliens. Yeah. Aliens. Aliens. Yeah. Well, if the aliens come, you still want to own land. This is true. I'm going to bring everything back to land for this episode. All right. We'll go walk around. All right.