The REtipster Podcast | Land Investing & Real Estate Strategies

6 Land Investing Experts Share What’s Really Working Now

Seth Williams Episode 250

250: For the 250th episode of the REtipster Podcast, I invited five top land investors back to the show for a roundtable discussion on where the land market is right now.

(Show Notes: REtipster.com/250)

We talked about what's working, what's not, how the game has changed, and what they're doing differently to stay profitable in 2025.

You’ll hear from:
- Dave Denniston (Land UnConference)
- Justin Piche (The Ground Game Podcast)
- Mike Balcom (Stride CRM)
- Neil Clements (The Real Deal w/ Neil Clements Podcast)
- Ron Apke (Land Portal)

We covered marketing strategies, AI tools, land flipping vs. subdividing, investor burnout, and how to stay competitive when the market shifts.

Whether you’re new to land investing or a seasoned operator, this is a must-listen episode.

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the REtipster podcast. This is a special episode because this marks the 250th episode of this show. So I wanted to do something a little bit different. Instead of a one-on-one interview, I brought together several past guests who are pretty well-known in the land investing world. We have Dave Denniston. He runs Generation Family Properties and the Land on Conference and the Leadership in Land community. You may have heard him on episodes 20, 144, and 209. We have Justin Pichet from Scout Land Group. He joined us on episode 200. We have Mike Balkam, my friend and co-founder of Stride CRM. He's been on episodes 190 and 241. We have Neil Clements from The Clem Group and The Real Deal with Neil podcast. He was most recently on episode 245, but he's been on several other shows prior to that. And we have Ron Apke from Land Investing Online and The Land Portal. He appeared on episode 240. And I wanted to bring these guys together to talk about the state of the land business right now, what is working and what's not working and where they think things are headed and what they're all doing today to stay competitive. And since there are a lot of voices in the room, these answers are going to be a little bit shorter than usual, but I think that will give us a sharp view of what's really happening in the market right now. So the first question, and we'll go around the room in this order, just so that listeners can keep track of who's talking. We're going to start with Dave, and then Justin, and Mike, and then Neil, and then Ron. So, Dave, you get the answer first. What is your primary niche right now in the land business if you had to distill it down to one or two unique things that you do? And how does the land market feel right now? Is it good or bad or hot or cold or otherwise? One or two niches. So we're primarily doing small and medium size flips is primarily what we're doing. And then the other question, Seth, was what's working right now? And the other question is, and this is kind of open-ended by design, how does the land market feel right now? Does it feel like good or bad, or is this the best or the worst it's ever been, or what are your thoughts? It's Goldilocks. It's not too hot, it's not too cold. It's kind of in the middle, in my opinion, of where we're at right now. Justin Pichet, you want to go next? Sure thing. I guess I would say right now, primarily working on medium to larger subdivisions, thinking like the $1 to $5 million kind of buy range. That's what's taking up most of my time. I still have the flipping company that's doing deals and looking for minor subdivides, but that's what I'm working on. How's the market doing right now? It feels a little cool. It feels a little cool on both acquisitions and sales. I think at least that's what I'm seeing in my business. Am I just saying, do you have two separate companies? One does flips and one does the sub-divines? I have a few companies, but yes, I have a Triune Capital Partners is my GP kind of larger development partnership. Scoutland Group is the primary land company. And then I have. Some other companies that are working on other deals got the ground game podcast you know mike how about you yeah market right now our team's seeing acquisitions are going well dispo has slowed down in the marketplace but we're still sticking to our bread and butter deals still doing innovations and an okay amount of texting and rvms so we're having a good time with it yeah just trying to stay in our lane but definitely running it more and more and more like a business every day because you have to right now. It's no longer a side hustle. Any thoughts on how the market feels right now? It feels like you can get contracts, but you can't sell them anywhere at times. Yeah. Unless it's just a beautiful property. Oh, we're noticing that, but that's okay. Just try to get longer contract periods or buy them cash and everything. And you're good. Just make sure you have enough cash reserves since your dispo process is going to take longer right now. Neil, how about you? So we do subdivisions and entitlements and starting to get into manufactured housing. And North Texas, specifically DFW area. And as far as the market dispositions have slowed drastically. And it's been that way really for us the whole year, maybe even year and a half. But in this market, my opinion is that it's the best properties for the best prices sell. Buyers are being incredibly picky. And so us as investors, we have to be picky as well. And how do things feel in general? Just like Mike said, it is easy to acquire. It is difficult to sell. And so it is, I don't think anybody on this call would disagree with that. Cool. Ron, how about you? Yeah. We focus on minor subdivides, rural America for the most part. Splitting anywhere between like three to 10 times is very normal for us. We don't get into the major stuff currently, but yeah, focusing on that buy price anywhere from like $300,000 to a million dollars typically. How do things feel for you relatively speaking? Yeah. Very similar to everyone else. You got to be particular with what you sell. We're spending a lot of time right now on different disposition strategies because I think it's just like, it is the harder side of things right now. It's harder to dispose of a property than acquiring a property right now. Now, Dave, you're the only person who did not say that things are hard to sell. I guess, Justin, maybe you didn't say it either, but you mentioned the Goldilocks terminology. So I'm curious, why do you think it's that way for you? Why do you think that part is going a little bit better than average? Well, I would say it's relative, right? So like compared to like 2022. Like, yeah, it sucks on the dispo side. But I would say we're not in post 2008, 2009, where everything has gone down 50 or 60 or 70 percent in price and you're just having to fire sell stuff. So that's the context for me saying that. Is it hard to sell stuff right now? Yes, but things are still moving. It's not like the market's frozen. And we're still buying, we're still selling, but it's hard on both the buy side and sell side. So make no mistake about it. But I think this month, I think we have seven or eight under contract to sell. So things are moving, but we've been having to reduce price in order to get stuff to move. But it is happening. So that's the context for that. Yeah, I know you and I have talked to a lot of different land investors this year between the Unconference and the Wyoming trip. And maybe it's one of those things like, relatively speaking, just kind of seeing how the rest of the world is doing. It feels more like that Goldilocks zone to you. The next question is, what marketing channel is finding you the best deals today? So what kind of marketing are you doing and how well is it working? Dave, you want to start? So we're talking buy side here, Seth, not sell side. I guess I was thinking acquisition, but we could talk about both. Yeah, let's talk about both. Let's do that. So buy side for us this year, we've done PPC, which was an experiment for this year for us. And it went OK. I wouldn't say it's like gangbusters, but we found some some really good deals we're excited about. And then we've been doing mail forever. So we continue to do mail. I like to think of mail. well, hey, you get lots of singles and doubles, but it's kind of harder to get home runs, at least for us on the mail side. When you say PPC, are you talking like Google specifically? Yeah, yeah. So we had hired a PPC agency who ran a bunch of stuff for us and we did nationwide on that. It's kind of the opposite of what I was saying with mail where you strike out a lot and there's a lot of time spent, but you hit some home runs in there as well as getting some singles every now and then. So some of the stuff we've gotten from that, like, dang, this is pretty sweet. Wish mail would do some more of those big home runs. And on the disposition side, selling stuff, what's working for you there? I would say Dispo for us has never, ever been one thing. It's always do a lot of everything. So we've done a lot of different paid land sites, lands.com, everyone's favorite company, CoStar that bumps up rates on us every year. LandFlip, LandCentury, all of those kinds of things. We've done plenty of flat TMLS and realtors and have YouTube, some of our own SEO type stuff to help us get going. It all adds up to sales. So I can't say it's one particular thing. It's just a lot of different activities. For us that's leading to sales. And lately we've gotten back into insourcing Facebook for us, which has been pretty good. We've gotten two or three good sales from that just in the last month as we've gotten much more serious about training in-house and me personally getting my hands back in it, which I haven't done in a long, long time. So. Justin, how about you? What's your primary marketing niche on the buy and sell side and how's it working for you? Yeah. Similar to Dave, we did a PPC experiment and we didn't have great results. So we kind of killed it, you know, three month trial, got a few deals, but nothing spectacular. We found it hard to target the types of property that we actually want to buy and found that we got a lot of things that we just don't typically buy smaller deals. Right now, cold calling is working the best for me. We have an in-house team of cold callers. I think I find that for us, that's finding the most consistent quality deals that we're closing on the acquisition side. And then for Dispo, like Dave, we do a lot of different marketing on the sales side. About 40% of our sales are through Realtors listed on the MLS. But alongside those Realtors, we're also running lands.com ads, running a lot of Facebook, Facebook Marketplace. So Facebook Marketplace is probably the best bang for the buck, I guess, if we can find a buyer without bringing on a broker partner. And it really depends on the type of property too. I mean, if you have a property you're selling for a quarter million dollars. It's a nice, beautiful property. Typically, those are going to go on the MLS. If it's a $50,000 owner finance deal in rural America, those are typically going on Facebook. If you have a big rec track that's somewhere in the 50 to 200K range, a lot of times lands.com is pretty effective for those types of deals. So we kind of do them all. Mike, how about you? Yeah, for us right now, best channel we're seeing in our acquisitions is texting. We love texting. We've been doing it forever and it's just our bread and butter. And then we'll follow those up with our VMs. I think one thing we're not really touching on here that I know everybody on this call is so great at doing is they execute so quickly once they get that warm lead in their system. So Justin has a huge advantage on all of us right now because if he's talking to them on the phone already, it's a lot easier to pre-qualify him. But Dave, if he's mailing them or anybody's doing PPC, it's just how quickly are you getting on the phone with them? You know, we're all good friends with Ajay. He says business is made on the phone. And I think that's really the secret to this business here, because I see so many operators that have leads in their pipeline that they haven't called yet. So I think if you can just execute quickly, you'll still do very well in this game, almost any channel you're in. And then on the dispo side, we like the MLS, sometimes selfless, sometimes with realtors, but we always end up getting the best hits off of the MLS. After that, like Justin said, we like Facebook Marketplace, even though our accounts get taken down too often. We have to find new vendors for that sometimes, which is always a huge fan in the butt. Cool. Neil, how about you? Yeah, since we're targeting bigger properties, kind of like you're doing, Justin, and Ron too, we're specifically looking at MLS, agent referrals as well. And then we do paper lead generate some of our smaller deals in our manufactured housing deals. So that's acquisition side. Disposition side, I am a realtor. And so I list all of our properties on MLS. And we've got a few different like land search, we sponsor and and do a few different paid premium services, but it all comes from MLS and then blasts out from there. And that's what I've seen be most effective. Sounds good. Ron, how about you? Yeah, for us, our bread and butter has always been direct mail. And that's what we've kind of held strong with in terms of the quality of leads we get back. What we've done over the last eight to 12 months is test a lot of different types of direct mail with just different strategies. A-B testing a lot of different strategies with direct mail in itself, because there's so many different ways that you can actually send direct mail in terms of blind offers, neutral offers, range offers, all these different things. So that's what we've really diversified in over the last 12 months or so. Selling properties, we've done a lot of actually neighbor letters to successfully over the last six, 12 months as it's been harder to sell properties. So that's been a big strategy. Marketing. We use realtors on not much, 20% to 30% of our properties. Land.com, Facebook, like everybody else. But the paid marketing on the sell side is neighbor letters for the most part. Something I'm noticing, at least on the acquisition side, is it seems like all the major marketing channels are represented. It's not like there's one that's just dead. It doesn't work. I'm not really hearing that. So, interesting. So, I know the past year or two has been a big year of change for a lot of us who are still active in this business and surviving. So, I'm wondering, again, Dave, we'll start with you. Have you made any big changes over the past 12 months or so that have made a big impact for you in 2025? five? And if so, what changes have you implemented? For sure. I think actually I'll give a shout out to Ron for the land portal software. If you look at, I'll go back two years ago, you know, we had a lot of VAs that were doing access scrubbing. And so to have some of these tools like, like land portal, which I'm not being paid to say this, just saying it because it's absolutely true. You know, we've been able to reduce staff and get more efficient doing a lot of stuff like that. So that's been a big change for us and our business with some of the data and ability to use data. I think the other big changes, we're just continually testing and trying out things. So our goal in 2026, for example, is to do more on-market stuff. Which we've been diving into the last couple of months since we got back from Wyoming and trying to figure out how to do that. And I mentioned earlier too, Facebook is how I started this business on and dispoing and got away from it for a while because things were just so good, didn't really have to. And so really trying to get back on that and get the team going so we can dispo more properties faster. Justin Pichet, how about you? Any big changes you made over the past year that have made a big difference for you? Yeah, I think that the biggest change for me has been hiring a project management team to manage a lot of the smaller developments, minor subdivides that come across. Just like underwriting project management, I spent a lot of time, I was a bottleneck in the business doing that. But every property that comes across on the acquisition side, we're looking at it through what's the highest and best use that we can reasonably accomplish for this property. And it just takes a lot of time. It's a level of expertise above what your typical maybe acquisitions manager or certainly cold outreach team member, be able to do. And so having somebody in-house on staff that can look at all those and know that they're going to do a good job to try to look into the subdivision regulations, look into the road requirements, look into the demand for child parcels, look into the arbitrage for acreage, that's been probably the biggest game changer. So we can just handle more of those types of deals through our acquisitions team. Mike, what about you? Any big changes you've made this past year? Well, yeah, there's this incredible software out there, Seth. I got my whole team on. No. So obviously I moved my whole team into Stride CRM where Seth and I co-founded. So we had a lot of fun with that. One thing that was bogging down a ton of our time was actually just doing call reviews with our team. We ran a lot of our team through Ajay's Land Closers Academy. That was amazing for them, but it's still meeting with them just to get that extra push. And then you and I worked with some developers and developed a AI sales coach that I think has really helped things. So that way our team can just plug in those calls and see where they can improve automatically. And then it helps me as the owner of the company, just meeting with them and seeing, okay, these are some of our weak points. Let's touch on this and role playing. So I think just really looking over those KPIs, treating it more like a business, making sure people are improving. And then one I don't hear people talk about that much is actually teaching your team how to use AI properly. So we actually have some SOPs on that, on how to do proper prompt engineering and different things like that when somebody joins the team because most people. As a lot of us know, think they know how to use AI well, and they're horrible at prompting it or doing anything else. So I think making those changes just to kind of make many CEOs in the business has really helped push us forward and continue to grow that way. So now we can operate like a 50 person team when we are a 10 person team in reality. Great ideas. Neil, what about you? Any big changes you've made this past year? Yeah, the biggest change for us just came in in the form of focusing. And so we were doing a lot of different things, everything from house flipping to mobile home flipping, to small lots, to medium lots, to big lots. But we found that 80% of our profit was coming from these very large subdivide deals, 500 plus, a million plus, even 3 million plus in some circumstances. And so we pulled a list from the LAN portal, used their AR filters, which are great, and did a road frontage. And we're able to pull a list of top 1,000. And we're just hitting on those people over and over and over and over again. Any one of those thousand deals hit, it's instantly a high six figure, if not low seven figure profit for us. And then we're also taking it a step further because we realized that in doing the house flips, they were still moving incredibly fast. We were doing them really well. It's just house flips aren't very much profit per se. And so we wanted to find a way to combine our land subdivisions with housing. And so that's what kind of stumbled us into and me becoming a manufactured housing retailer. So that now if we go out and create say like 10, one acre lots, we can actually go vertical. We can put the housing on there. People can come to the table with zero down like a VA or a USDA program versus having to do an adjustable mortgage from a bank or give them seller financing and 20, 25% down. So we're essentially just taking what the market has given us and shown us in trying to capitalize on affordable housing instead of affordable land. Ron, what about you? Yeah. A couple of things. And maybe it's going back to like 24 months is one thing, kind of like Justin said, it's like trying to maximize value on every deal. Obviously within reason, like we're not building skyscrapers or anything like that, but maximizing value on land deals has been a big focus of us, which is turns into less deals, more money per deal, essentially. And we used to be like sacrifice, like, okay, yeah, it's going to take another 12 months where, and we would just like, okay, sell it today instead of waiting that now it's kind of the opposite. Like, okay, that's fine. If it takes another 12 months, we're making X more dollars there. And then also just a focus, kind of like Mike said, talking to sellers, a focus on problem solving for sellers in general. Because I think that's kind of something that's so important when you're trying to get deals like problem solving, whether you're buying it on seller financing or what, however you're doing it, really try to solve problems for sellers. You're going to get more deals this way. And we're able to pay a higher price when we are doing subdivides, doing improvements on the land. So that's been probably two of our biggest focuses over the last 24 months or so. Now, along these same lines of changes that you've made, maybe getting more specific, what is something that used to work two years ago that is either very weak today or just doesn't work anymore, in your opinion? Dave, you want to start? Well, I mentioned the access scrubbing stuff we used to do before. So that comes to mind. I think really in this thing right now, which Justin and Clay talk a lot about, you know, the Ground Game podcast is really kind of a smaller team is much more manageable today. You know, I think just the need for people with AI, like Mike was talking about, I think that's been a major change in our business where there were people that we had to have before to do things that we don't need now. That would be what I would throw up there. It's not an exact because it's not like mail doesn't work, for example. Mail still works for us. Does it work as well as it did a few years ago? No, but it still works. So I wouldn't throw out any marketing or anything like that. It all works. It's just some of the changes have been more around people and systems and stuff like that for us. Justin, what about you? What are you not doing anymore? What doesn't work as well as it used to? We did the same thing, Dave, with scrubbing manually properties. And thankfully, there's tools out there like the land portal that you don't need to do that anymore, which is great. You know, the thing that popped into my mind was shotgun approach marketing. We used to be able to just send whatever marketing out to the entire state, every property above five acres and just hit after hit after hit a couple of years ago. And even to some extent last year. And this year, we've just seen that strategy not working great. failing. And looking back at the data and analyzing what markets we've been successful in, where are we getting the most profit per deal? It's always in high demand areas. People talk about sell-through rate being like a primary driver for where you should market to, because that's going to show you demand in that area. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. But it's not necessarily backwards looking, what's the sell-through rate been over the past 12 months? It's almost like you need to anticipate where trends are moving to, what are the markets people are going to and focus your marketing dollars much more efficiently on those areas. Yeah, that's what's not working. What is working better now. When you say shotgun approach, do you mean that with regard to property types or what you're saying in your marketing or in what way did you not? An example would be we would literally just pull lists of every property in an entire state across five, six, seven, eight states, five acres and not scrub like a very minimal scrubbing of any kind, maybe some, you know, wetlands type stuff when those filters finally popped up on some of the data platforms, but that's about it. And, and. A lot of those more rural markets where sell-through rates are low, or you may not even be able to find a sell-through rate because maybe there's been no transactions of that acreage size in that county in the last six months. But being able to get them at a good price and find a buyer for them and actually sell through those properties. Some of my best or highest returning deals have been in those type of counties. But that was a year ago. Today, those same types of deals, they're just not selling. They're just so slow to sell. And I think you can get to a point in your business when you're allocated, especially we don't do a lot of double closes. We primarily are buy, take title, and then sell. And so when you've got millions of dollars allocated to land inventory and you need those properties to sell, to release those funds to both purchase new properties and realize that profit so you can pay your team and make some money, you can run into a wall if they're not turning over fast enough. So I don't want to run into walls. I'd like to be in areas where we can turn the property more quickly and get that money back in our bank account. Mike, how about you? Yeah, everything Justin said. Neil, how about you? I will say you used to be able to just spray and pray back in the day, and you'd have massive success. And I think things that have really changed over the years, Dave, you've actually been pretty instrumental in this because you're such a KPI guy. Is before I used to just motivate the team. It's just, come on, guys, you can do it. We got this. let's make money. Now it's like, no, we need to be hitting this metric and this metric and this metric. Oh, you didn't hit it this week. What's going on? Do we need to put you on a improvement plan? You know, it's just, it's really, which I know we keep saying this, but it's running it like a real business now because there is more competition here. And it's not necessarily there's more competition. It's just more people have found out about what's going on. There's still so much money to be had, so many deals to buy, but now you need to make sure you are targeting things that make sense. You need to be using land portal to see like, does this make sense? Does PPA work? Back in the day, you would just scrub everything off of Zillow and try to do it on Excel sheet and then send out 10,000 mailers. I think four or five years ago, all of us were sending out the same exact mailer. You heard Ron just talk about this whole year. He's been working on improving his mailer. So it really is hitting well. So I think that's the big difference now. And then also making sure you have true, good follow-ups here. You're not just hitting your list once every six months or so. It's these people you've talked with, they showed a little bit of interest, maybe now wasn't the time. Do you actually have consistent follow-ups with them? Are you shooting them in emails, texts, calls? I was just thinking about you today, Seth, what's going on? How was your cruise? How was whatever? But I think that's really been a big game changer now because it's not like the good old days where just send out 300 neutral letters and you got five deals. Neil, what about you? I would say that pricing properties like we did back in 2020 through 2022 isn't working anymore. There's no secret to that, right? But listing a property at say 100% of market value and expecting it to move anytime quickly. For me especially, that's just not working expecting a property to sell within 30 days and the markets i'm in that's just not happening it's not working i would say for me two large rural properties especially three to four counties away that can't be subdivided those are moving incredibly slow and i'm talking like you know 500 000 plus 100 acres plus and rural texas some of the losers that we have or that scenario and then i would say the ones that were kind of losers but you could still sell back two or three years ago. So I've had partial floodplain or topography issues or lack of utilities or something that made it generally undesirable. Well, buyers are so incredibly picky nowadays that a small bit of undesirability becomes a big bit of undesirability whenever they have a thousand choices versus say 500 choices they had previously. And so just the types of properties, the prices, it's just not the same as it was. Not saying that it's bad. It's just maybe be back to normal. Money isn't free anymore. Ron, what about you? Yeah, everyone had really good responses. And I'll probably wrap it up a little bit, keep it short, because I agree with everything that everyone said. But I think the one thing going into marketing, when you're putting together a campaign, whatever it is, having a purpose to it versus maybe 24 months ago, people are just putting together a marketing list and whatever comes back, comes back. But now if you're targeting subdividing, you want to make sure you understand what you can do in that county with that list. Obviously, getting the right list, everything else like that is important, but having a real purpose to marketing, which I think then leads to like the business stuff, SOPs, KPIs with your marketing, being more efficient with your stuff. But yeah, for me, like really having a purpose to every marketing campaign that we send out. Now, this next question has to do with something that I've heard land investors complain about since like forever. And that is that there's new people entering the market and that the land space is getting saturated and And there's a lot more competition out there. And I'm just curious, in your opinion, how crowded does the land space feel to you right now? Like, do you feel like there's more people than ever before? Or do you feel like it's getting less crowded as people get out of the business? Or what are your thoughts on that in general? Dave, why don't you start? Yeah, well, I definitely feel from when I first started eight years ago, right, there's more, there was competition then too, don't get me wrong. But I think there's more. And I think part of it is just, you know, you look at RVMs, you look at texting. Back eight years ago, nobody that I knew of did that stuff, right? So it's become cheaper and easier to reach people. Plus, when we talked about some of the pros of using LAN, LAN portal and softwares like that, the con is, well, now we might all be targeting very similar properties, right? Someone could do the opposite of that. But if we all want properties with XYZ road frontage, not having wetlands, well, now you're talking about a much smaller subset of properties, therefore becoming more competitive potentially for those. So maybe there's something to be said of chasing the opposite ones that aren't in some of those filters. But I think all of those reasons to me that there is more competition, but I think there's been an awful lot of churn the last year or two, as you and Neil have talked about prior podcasts, that there's a lot of people leaving the industry at the same time. And kind of a follow-up question to that, I probably should have included it earlier, but how are you staying competitive as more people enter the business? And you may have already answered this in some of the other things you've said, but is there anything that comes to mind where you're able to make yourself feel safer because you're doing this that nobody else is doing? I think for our business, part of the good thing we have going on is we have a lot of owner financing notes. And so we eat up a lot of that in our, if not all of it, in our operational costs. But at least I know I have that covered on a monthly basis. So for me, that helps us. I also think that anybody can enter inland. So anyone that's brand new, you absolutely can do it. But I think the moat around the castle is wider than it used to be. You can't start off with $2,000 or $3,000. bucks. Now you really need probably 10 to 20 to 30,000 bucks to really do well in this business because your marketing may fail the first few times. And so you need to have that margin to get into it. So I think those of us that are already in the business have some advantage over someone being brand new, but anyone brand new can succeed too. So I mean, there's plenty of brand new people. I'm like, what the heck, where did you come from? And they're crushing it. So even though that's true, there's still people crushing it today. Justin, so how crowded is the land space feel to you? And then what are you doing to stay competitive? At Drew's Denver event this summer, and some of you guys were there, Sumner Healy was talking about this. And then also on one of your podcasts, you had maybe Steve... Steve Hokanson? Yeah, I think so. He was talking about it as well, that they're both seeing in their business less clients, like a drop off in the number of investors they're serving with their businesses. So. It sounds like there's less people in the business. However, I think the operators that are in the business are just getting better, like all of us are doing more. And so the competition for the types of parcels that we want to target, just like Dave said, is I think going up in general. And we're also competing against information that sellers have more of today than they have in the past. It's easier with tools like Zillow and Redfin and all those to see what your neighbor's properties have sold for and get an idea for what you want to sell your property for. Newer investors who start out often send a bunch of blind offers. They're commonly overpriced. And so sellers, you're competing against sellers who have received an offer, aka a letter, from someone offering to pay X amount for their property, even though it's not quite worth that much. I don't know. There's a lot of forces kind of working against you. But at the same time, there's a lot of opportunity. I agree with Dave. The mode is bigger. I think you need a lot more money to start today than you ever did before. You could always start by just calling, but you need to be going after big deals to do it. And you could be calling for six months before you find a single deal that can make some money for you. How are we separating ourselves? I think what I'm doing is just targeting deals that maybe are just harder for people to target. There's not a lot of competition from new investors when you're buying a property for $1 to $5 million, frankly. It's hard to buy those properties. You need capital partners, you need lenders, and it takes a while to build up both the track record to stand in front of those people and say, look, I've done this before. I can do it again. Give me your money. Have trust in me. That's kind of what we're working on. It's just the bigger deals. Fewer of them, but more opportunity. So Mike, what are your thoughts? Is the land space crowded in your opinion or what are you doing to stay competitive? Yeah, I don't think the land space is more crowded nowadays than it was in the past. I think we had a small section there just a little after COVID where a lot more people got into this space. And I think we all felt it at that moment. But I think since then, it's kind of just leveled back out where I think things have really changed. And Justin touched on this a little bit. I don't think there's more competition in the space. I think the operators have gotten better. The reason I think the operators have gotten better is honestly, I think the operators have gotten younger. So I think the big difference on that is they're just way more tech savvy and things like that coming right into it. So you see some of these graybeards that used to run their whole business, you know, sending out 50,000 mailers a month or things like that on an Excel sheet, but they don't understand what Zapier in it and make things like that are, you know, an AI caller having these extensive follow up campaigns. I think that's what really started separating a lot of this and what made it seem like we have so much more competition. It's not that there's more competition. It's just your competition's improved. This isn't Little League anymore. You're playing with the majors now because they're just that much better at it. And then I think the way to just stay on top of that is constantly be innovating. I think the reason we started to see a dip in the space is I think as AI started to emerge, we had some new training programs coming out. and people, I mean, Ron's one of them too. Thanks a lot, Ron. Way to make our lives harder. You know, he does an amazing job teaching people how to run an amazing business and how to run it as a business. And I was hoping Ron and I would just keep that to ourselves, but he didn't. But now you have these great competitors against you. So I think just to stay on top of that is the same thing people that have gone through Ron's course, same thing that go through your course, Seth, you know, people that work with Justin. It's how can you constantly be innovating? You know, are you listening to Dave's Leadership in Land podcast? You listen to Neil's podcast. Are you trying the latest and greatest things? You know, have you changed up your talk tracks? Have you changed up your mailers? Have you changed up your follow-up campaigns? Are you constantly moving forward? And I think if you were in this space more than three years ago, the same thing worked year after year after year after year. And the solution to everything was just send more mail. Now the solution to everything is innovate so much more in every direction possible. And that's your only way to stay ahead. But still, tons of money to be made in the space, tons of opportunities in the space. I think it's kind of like if you got into dropshipping right now, too. Tons of money to be made in dropshipping, but it's not like it was 10, 15 years ago. in that space either. And I think those are the changes we keep seeing. Neil, what do you think? So Batch Leads commissioned a study. This was done a few months ago. They paid 50 grand, their lead provider. They commissioned a study on how many wholesalers were active in the real estate investing space. Now this is housing, this is land, this is everything. And they found that in 2021, there were 90,000 wholesalers. They found in 2025, there were 12,000 wholesalers. And this was a full commission study that they paid for. And that means 90% of wholesalers dropped within the past four years. And whether you believe that number is true, there have been other people come on Seth's podcast who have lost 40% to 50% of their clients, specifically land investors. And so, yes, I think we can confidently say that there is less competition in the land space than there was a few years ago. Now, I think we can also confidently say that the operators who are still here are getting substantially better and are getting AI enhanced. And so I think that that's something that we're dealing with is that the people who are still in it. Are better business owners. Also, I think the people who are still in it have money because we socked away, hopefully some amount of money for the past three or four years. That's a continuing theme I'm hearing with people talking here is that we have money, we have capital to deploy. And I think a strategy to win in 25 and 26 is to have money. And I think we're going through a great reshuffling of our industry right now. And I do believe that the top 20%, like 20, 80 rule are going to come out with 80% of the business, maybe even the top 5% come out with 80% or more of the business, just based upon what I'm seeing. What I'm doing in my business to compete, to thrive, is just doing things that nobody else is willing to do. Nobody else wants to go out and do entitlements and go through all the accounting process to do that. Nobody wants to go vertical and actually take the risk of building. And nobody wants to actually renovate properties. Land investors historically want the easy way out, the quick flip. And I think there's versions of that success doing things that nobody else is willing to do that all of us on this call are doing and have made us successful. Thanks, Neil. Ron, what are your thoughts? Yes, that's a crazy study, Neil. And I'm going to kind of ignore that when I answer this because but that's wild to hear for sure. I think kind of the preface this question, like naturally, like when five years ago, six years ago, when we started this business, spending $1,000 on mail and getting $50,000 back, like wasn't a crazy thing. And then like naturally, when you're getting those ROIs, people are going to come into the business. The way I look at it, like if I was coming into a business, looking into a business with not the knowledge that I have? Nothing like, would I still pick land today? And my answer is yes. Because there's still so much opportunity in niches and becoming an expertise in something. It's about learning. It's about adjusting your business model. Yes, the buy for $40,000 and sell for $100,000 are much fewer and farther between today. But the buy for $500,000, do a little bit of improvement and sell for 1.2, whatever it is, those opportunities are all over the place. So I think there's still a ton of opportunity. It is different, I guess, Seth, when, and that's what you got. You got to separate yourself a little bit, just like any business. You got to separate yourself. Like Mike said, with dropshipping, dropshipping is not the same today, but if I was going to pick household selling or land wholesaling or whatever, if I was coming into a business, I'd still pick land every single time, even if I lost all the knowledge. We're all fairly well connected in terms of having regular contact with other land investors, new and experienced alike. And if you don't have an answer to this, that's fine. But I am curious, have you noticed anything when you see other land investors who are wasting time, wasting money, getting stuck, not doing well, like messing things up? What are those things? Like, have you heard of somebody say, yeah, I tried this and it doesn't work? Any common trends you've noticed? What do you think, Dave? Definitely talked to a lot of land investors over the past couple of years. And I think adaptability is a big thing, right? We're used to doing something a certain way. It's been addressed already by a few other people throughout this time. Like I would say, like I'll use myself as an example. We've been on Podio. Which is like an old CRM forever. Well, and here Stride comes around, which frankly is probably a better platform than we have right now. But the cost of switching and trying to figure it out is worth it, right? It's a pain, right? And so we probably will eventually. You guys already know we're testing out the phone system to see how that goes. And so to be willing to make the change to do something else, I think is huge. I think people, there's different hurdles in this business. And I think one of them is getting out the marketing and then dealing with responding. So that hasn't changed, honestly, in all the time that I've been in this business. You know, it's like, yeah, you got to send out the marketing, you got to respond to people. Like, how many times have we all heard people aren't answering their phones? Or we talked to other people selling their property. It's like, yeah, I called someone, they never called me back. Like, it's very, very, very common. and those kinds of very basic one-on-one things that to get off the ground and get it going is definitely something I still see today. And I saw it eight years ago, you know, as a common thing and then not being willing to change. Awesome. Thanks, Dave. Uh, Justin, what about you? Have you seen any common trends where you see others struggling or not doing well? And if so, what are they doing? Yeah. I mean, I think follow-up robust follow-up is probably one of the most lacking skills for folks that aren't seeing results. I mean, we looking at the deals that we've locked up under contract, for example, or closed or whatever, over the last year, oftentimes it's 45, 60 days since we got that first call. And, and, and the whole time we've been following up with them. I mean, sometimes we can't even get ahold of somebody for three weeks or a month after that initial conversation, but you better believe we're calling them every day. Calling them, texting them, following up, they're popping back up, losing opportunity and just not sticking with your leads is probably a big, a big issue that I think people who aren't having a lot of success deal with. And then probably another one, which isn't maybe as common, but I've seen this a lot too, is, is trying to scale too quickly. Uh, it's, it's kind of glamorous, you know, to be like, I have this huge team, but with a huge team comes a ton of overhead, right? And I think today's business is such that being conservative with your spend, your OPEX spend, your fixed cost spend is a better position to be in than trying to scale your team and just pray that you're going to get the results. The team is going to produce the results. And if you had asked me that same question like a year and a half ago, two years ago, I would have said scale to build the team for what you want to achieve. Even now, I would say kind of the exact opposite, which is push the existing team to the absolute limit and only scale as necessary. Protect net profit, right? Don't chase the glory metrics of gross profit or total sales. Those don't matter. Those don't matter, especially when the stress level, when the market turns down, it's just so high when you've got a huge overhead. Ask me how I know. How do you know, Justin? Yeah, I mean, we have a big team, right? We have quite a big team. We have a lot of overhead. And so we need to do significant amounts of transaction volume, or at least gross profit every month to keep paying the team, keep the lights on. And so when you have a month or two months or three months in a row. Where dispos kind of dried up, contracts are getting pushed, a lot of owner finance deals where you're not getting your base investment back. Those things can add up. You need to have a pretty big war chest to be able to survive through those periods, those slow periods without drastic cuts. And we've seen it. I mean, everybody here can probably name a person that they know in the land investment space that scaled their team up, had some slow months and had to do a complete reshuffling, lay off a bunch of people and totally redesign their business. And that sometimes is just a natural part of your business evolving. And in probably all those cases, it was probably a good thing. I mean, I'm sure everyone who had to go through that would argue it was painful and they would not want to do it if they could have avoided it. But taking those thoughtful cuts and thoughtful OPEX cuts to protect your net and not necessarily chase gross right now is what you want to do rather than waiting until it gets to such a big problem that you're forced to do non-optimum cuts to your business. Mike, what about you? Yeah, I think a big mistake I see a lot of investors doing is trying to do everything. You know, we've all seen it. And once a podcast comes out, they learn about distress deals, they learn about subdivides, they learn about putting mobile homes on bright anything else. It's like, okay, I'm going to do that now. Where they haven't even mastered the traditional buy and sell or double close or whatever, you know, their bread and butter is. They just go after every shiny object in every direction. And then you become a master of none. And then they struggle the whole way through. And then also too, I think it's just KPI tracking. I know it sucks to do. And when newer investors are starting out and I tell them like, Oh, are you keeping track of your KPIs? They're like, no, no, I'll do that in the future. It's like, well, in the future, it's too late. Cause how are you going to be able to double your business based on your data if you're not tracking it today? So I think those are just really common mistakes we see, shiny object, especially, which I think we're all guilty of because that's probably what got us in the space to begin with. But that's not to say that that's what we should continue now that we're in this space. Master one, and then you can add another one on there. I think it's good to innovate, but don't innovate everything all at once and not actually understand how anything's working. Neil, what are you thinking? I would say, and this answer is going to be so simple, yet it's not necessarily easy. And a lot of people don't do it. And that is, if you are prioritizing anything over lead generation and lead conversion on acquisitions and dispositions in your business, especially as a newer investor, you're failing. I think there are a lot of shiny objects. There are a lot of AI businesses, don't crucify me for this, but there are a lot of AI businesses that are incredibly powerful and work incredibly well and are super, super cool. But you spend all this time learning it, you spend all this money paying for it, And then you don't ever get the marketing out or you don't hire the cold caller or you don't make any calls yourself or you don't follow up with your leads. You don't do lead generation and you don't do lead conversion. You don't have a business. We run a marketing business. And if you don't do marketing of some kind, you don't have a business. It doesn't matter if you're in land investing or something else. And I think that a lot of people prioritize shiny objects over actually running a marketing based business, which is what we all have. Ron, what do you think? I'm going to talk from a newer investor and what I see from a lot of people struggling who are trying to get into this business. I think people in general are very quick to say something doesn't work and opposed to saying, what could I have done better on that mailing campaign? They're quick to say mail doesn't work or texting doesn't – whatever it is. And they jump from thing to thing and then they throw $7,000,$10,000, $15,000 at this business. And I look at their business like, what did you even do? You really did nothing. You just kind of threw money and like, you're looking for a reason for this not to work. So for me, I think people don't really give strategies time to actually work. People don't look inward. They look outward in terms of why something didn't work. And on the contrary, like Justin and I were just down in Savannah, Georgia for a conference and like high level people other than you for the highest level people in this game. And like you talk to them, they're so niche. They're so like, it's so hard to convince them. Dave talking about switching CRMs. It's really hard to convince like a high level person to like change something that is working right now or that's going to take time to implement. It's an actual thought process. I think that's the biggest thing. It's like too many distractions, jumping from thing to thing, too quick to say something doesn't work. And like from the mindset thing is like blaming something else instead of taking accountability for what you just did. So I know, not surprisingly, the AI topic has come up here and there in this conversation so far. I am curious, how are you all using AI in your business? If at all, any creative ideas or anything that's made a big difference for you or allowed you to have a smaller team or run a leaner business, anything like this? Show you, Dave. Yeah, we could probably talk about this for a long time with all the stuff we have going on. I would say the latest thing that I've done that I'm really proud of and happy with is One of the things I was still personally doing in the business was reviewing over all of our inventory and manually updating prices. And so I recorded myself every month for four months of, hey, here's how we need to change prices and then feeding that into ChatGPT, working with it on a custom GPT that finished out. And it's now working pretty darn smoothly. got a few kinks to work out, but that probably saved me personally, I don't know, six, seven hours a month because we have, you know, like a hundred in inventory. So it definitely saved me an awful lot of time. I was super stoked about, about that guy. What about you, Justin? Any creative AI uses you've got going on? One of my favorite AI tools is Abacus. I don't know if any guys use Abacus.ai, but it is, it's a paid subscription, but it has access to all of the pro-level LLMs. So for those of you who are still paying $20 a month for ChatGPT and $20 a month for Cloud and $20 a month for Perplexity, you could pay $10 a month to Abacus and get access to all those pro-level AI things. So maybe I just saved you guys and some of the listeners some money. But one of the cooler features of it is that you can create your own custom AI bots in there. So give it databases, data, et cetera. You can create LLMs if you know how to Python code, which I do not, or you have money to hire somebody who does, you can build out a lot more stuff as well. I mean, you can build out an agent that ties into every aspect of your business, all of your Google Drives, all of your SOPs, all of your transaction data to help you look stuff up a lot faster. So we use Abacus a lot to do a lot of those things. I build out custom bots for team members who, especially if you have overseas employees that are doing outreach to sellers, they may have great English. They may have great spoken English. Hopefully they do. But there are certain ways that we speak in this country and there's certain idioms and certain idiosyncrasies of language that are just impossible to pick up on if you weren't born here and didn't. Grow up here. And so the chat bot that we build out for maybe a texter, for example, helped them get a conversation a lot better than they would be able to do with just some quick replies and them thinking about what to say. So there's just a couple of examples. Here's one quick example. I need to find all of the expenses that I had on my personal accounts, personal credit cards, personal bank accounts that are unreimbursed business expenses, because I need to somehow reduce my income. And there's tons of things that out of convenience, I use the wrong card or, you know, whatever, a hook to a different account. And so I use Abacus. It has this feature called Deep Agent. I uploaded like 30 different CSV files and PDF files of every single transaction personally that I have had for 2024, which is obviously thousands of transactions. And then I had it evaluate every expense based on the likelihood that it was a business expense or not and break it down into like 15 different worksheets in one workbook for my review of what categories of transactions these were. And it was awesome. It's been out this great workbook that I just finished today going through and selecting everyone that was business or if it was split, if it was personal so that I can get just a quick, I mean, that would take me so much longer just to set up the workbook, but throwing it into that program was fantastic. So. It's a great idea. Thanks for sharing that. It's abacus.ai. I'm going to check that thing out. Abacus.ai. You can put a little referral link for yourself on Aria Tipster. I think you get a little referral every time somebody subscribes. Of course. Mike, you're not using AI at all, right? It's not like we taught a course on this last year or anything. No. AI is just a fad right now. It'll be gone in a week or two, I'm sure. No. I mean, our team's extremely AI driven with almost everything they do. Big ways we've been doing it. For a long time, when sellers used to call us, we used to run them through an IVR, interactive voice response. So that's one of those. We've all heard it before. Press one if you're interested in selling your land, press two if you're not interested. So that was nice too, just to start screening those calls. Now we just have a voice AI agent take it right off the bat. So that way too, we just immediately 24 seven have someone there to answer the phone. It's prompted the way we want to. I remember back in the day getting in a big fight with one of the main answering services because they ended up talking to one to the sellers for two hours and we're just flirting all day long and ran up my bill to over 5k. What all came down to it that month. And I'm like, what's going on here? So it's very nice just to have an AI agent. I can always depend on there. We also use it too is after a phone call as well, take that transcript, throw it in to analyze with the AI sales coach, but also analyze what was important in that call and then put those notes back in our CRM. So that way too, we can touch on that next time we're with the seller. And sometimes sellers will say little things that we may not write down in time, even if it's just something silly like, Rufus, be quiet, I'm on the phone. It's just like, ah, how's the pup doing today? How's Rufus? Just being able to remember those things, they think you're the only person they're talking to. So we do it for that. And then the last thing my team really likes about it is just using AI to help build those workflows. I know we've incorporated that into Stride. That's also with Zapier right now. We can just start telling exactly what do you want this flow to look like, and it'll start building everything for you. So that way, too, we don't have to hire that developer to build this out. My team doesn't have to be Zapier trained or Stride trained. It's just talk to an AI bot and it will build it for you. I mean, really, at this point, all of our teams are filled with software engineers now because they should have access to AI. Yeah, and that voice AI agent stuff, I really don't think most people realize what a huge deal this is. It's amazing how much time and money and just headache it can save you. And I know I've heard some people understandably express apprehension about, sounds like you're talking to a robot or I don't trust it and that kind of thing. And if that's you, I would invite you to give mine a call. You can dial 616-504-6909 and talk to it. Say whatever you want. You can be rude if you want. You can swear at it if you want. You can go off topic. You can say literally anything and listen to how it redirects you and gathers your information. It verifies that spelled everything right and it does a better job than just about any human that i've ever talked to on the phone but be aware if you call that your information will be put into my crm so you got to be okay with that but that's another cool thing it does is it takes every piece of information plugs into your crm you can even set up automations to respond to them after that so it's a beautiful thing neil what about you how are you using ai in your business not really doing anything revolutionary candidly i'm more of the mindset of an ai that people smarter than me like People on this phone call are going to build technology and build systems that I can buy, such as the land portals, there's a stride, other companies we've talked about here doing really, really cool things. And so we've implemented a few of those companies. We haven't necessarily gone out and done any implementation further than that. But I would just rather buy from somebody else who has already done all the homework and already hired the developers than do it myself. So that's what we've done. Ron, how about you? Similar like Justin, as far as like, I'm very project based with it in terms of like, and I'm going to try that new CR or that new advocacy.ai for sure. Use Seth's link for sure, guys. For me, it's a lot of project based stuff. Like throughout the day, like if I get stuck with something, I'm talking to AI or talking to ChatGPT or whatever it is. The one thing that I do every single day is like a calendar management where it sends me updates of what's going on. Like it told me an hour before this meeting, shot me a message. Obviously, you can do that with calendar things, but it'll shoot me an actual summary of what I have going on each day, each hour, whatever that is. So that's the one thing that I have it doing. And then like Neil said, a lot of softwares with like Stride, all these softwares have it built in. AIs everywhere within softwares. So that's kind of naturally being used in different spots. But as far as day-to-day, the calendar, and then a lot of project-based stuff. I think the tricky thing about AI for me is a lot of times I'll get these ideas or dreams of what it might be able to do for me, but I don't really know if I can. So I just go to work trying to build a custom GPT or clawed project or whatever. And I can literally spend hours and hours and hours trying to build the thing. And I can't get it to do what I want, which doesn't mean it can't be done. It just means I haven't figured out how to do it. But I think that's the catch-22 is there are some things that AI still can't really do. And I'm sure that's going to be changing as time goes on. But it's possible, because I know, to waste a ton of time on stuff that is sort of leading nowhere. And those are the moments when it's like, man, maybe I should just do it the old way. But I guess the only way I'll know is to give it a try. Well, as we wrap this up, thanks again, everybody, for being here. It's been awesome having you on one call like this. So if you're talking to somebody right now who is new to the land business, they have a full-time job, where do you think they should start? I know we mentioned a little bit about how it seems that people need a little bit more money in the bank now versus five years ago. But aside from that, is there any specific pointers or directions you would give them? like, don't make this mistake that everybody does, or this is how you stand out. Anything come to mind about you, Dave? Boy, loaded question. I think if someone brand new starting out, you're just getting going in this business. I think I would recommend, you know, certainly do everything yourself. You shouldn't outsource something until you really understood it yourself. Too many people try and hire people on too early when they haven't mastered a skill. So I think that would be you need to do everything yourself. And then once you've mastered a skill, then train someone in to do it. So that would be my my number one thought for for folks out there. Great. Justin, what about you? I think that the advice I would give anyone starting out is make sure you have an OPEX reserve. For six months of running your business. And it's probably more money than you think. I think five to $10,000 a month kind of marketing budget. Maybe if you're doing everything yourself, maybe like five ish, six, $7,000 a month to get started and rolling and planning on spending that for six months while consistently working and honing your skills in every aspect of the business is the expectation you should have. And you should also probably expect not to really make any money for about six months. So if you're not prepared, yeah, if you're not prepared for those things, it's probably not the best business to start. And if you, if you, if you don't have those resources, my suggestion would be to go after maybe one larger deal that you use your time to acquire on market kind of arbitrage, calling yourself without spending all the money on, on all the data, on all of the software, on everything that you need to, to really run a flipping business. Yeah, I think what makes this question kind of harder to answer for all of us is that the land world is different now than it was when we all got started. So like, I can kind of tell you what I think, but like, I can't tell you to do exactly what I did because it was different back then. So it's kind of tricky to figure out what to tell you versus what I did. But Mike, what are your thoughts on it? Yeah, I would definitely say build one acquisition channel and focus on that until you've done a good amount of deals. And by a good amount of deals, I mean at least 10 before you start venturing out into something else, if not more. It could depend on deal size. And also just study successful operators, stay up with the time, see what they're doing. And when you can network with these folks, and now if you're scared to put yourself out there and network with a lot of people, then pay for private mentorship, consulting, things like that. But talk to people because I think we have an interesting viewpoint on it because we've seen it change over the years. But I also think that new person coming in right now, they're scared. It's how do I find a title company? What do I say when I call them up? So I think some of these newer investors, too, are still going to have those hurdles that for us, it's like that's not a hurdle at all. That's just the business. That's no big deal at all. It's a business. They want to work with you. So talk to people like us that's just like, hey, let's just call someone right now. So network all you can talk to people. I mean, if I'm looking at a crazy entitlement deal, I'd give Justin a call and he won't answer because he's too busy closing deals. But then I'll email him later and try to get on a schedule. But just say, take a look at this, man. What's going on? What should I be doing? Dave, where am I missing my KPIs here? Like really talk to those around you. You know, Ron, I cannot figure out this overlay on land portal. What am I missing? You know, or do I need all these filters or just like mumbo jumbo? Like talk to those people around you because they're going to help you cross these barriers that you're just putting in your own head. And I think those newer investors, they still get so caught up in that analysis paralysis. So just talk to your network, listen to what other people are doing. And then once you find your way, stay on that path for a while. Neil, what are you thinking? If you're talking to somebody who's got a full-time job and new to the business today, what's your best advice to them about how to stand out and succeed? My best advice for anybody listening to this, you're probably not suffering from a lack of knowledge. You're suffering from a lack of doing and specifically from a lack of going out there and having no other focus in your business other than one thing, which is getting your next deal in the door. And until that deal comes in the door, nothing else matters. The other encouragement that I would give anybody, especially with a full-time job somewhere else, is that this is not a passive business. This used to be a business where you could send out mailers, do everything via email, never talked to a prospect on the phone. And even though we said earlier, or I said earlier, that maybe the competition's a little bit less, at the same time, it's substantially higher than it was eight years ago, which Dave said earlier. And so if you're not ready to talk to people on the phone, you're probably not ready to have land business. That's my personal opinion. And you need to be ready to be a salesperson. And if you're not ready to do those things, evaluate whether this is the right opportunity for you. Ron, what would you say? So full-time job and they're looking to get in this business. I think first off is like doing research on the business. The people who don't do well in this business don't have conviction when they're coming in. They don't believe in the business model. They're just trying to try something just to try something. So I think having conviction. And one thing I see a lot of people doing, or we all, I'm sure, have people reaching out to us, asking for help, asking for free help. Instead of reaching out to someone who's been in this business for eight years, reach out to someone who's been in this business successfully for six months, 12 months, who's only six or 12 months ahead of you instead of someone who's a decade ahead of you in this business. Because they can relate. They'll be able to give more time, try to provide some value to them. And I'm sure they will give back. A lot of people in this industry want to give back and help people. But research conviction, try to connect with people, and then choosing a marketing strategy. Don't try to do 100 different marketing strategies. Like Mike said, commit to one strategy, acquisition strategy, be really good on the phones, train yourself, improve on the phones, and you'll get deals. But yeah, really good input from everybody here. Man, I feel like I just heard so much genius over the past hour. Seriously, you guys gave great advice. I'm really glad we could do this. To close this out, let's go around the room. Again, starting with Dave. If people want to connect with you or check out your website or whatever it is that you want to put out there for people, where should they go to do that? Absolutely. Dave at G-E-N-F-A-M land.com is my email. Certainly, if you want to connect with our land investors, go to future events, It's landonconference.com is a great place to find me as well as if you look on school leadership and land is where we have our little, little growing community. Awesome. Justin, what about you? You can, so I put out a weekly podcast, the ground game podcast with Clay Hepler. So you could, you could find us on Apple, Spotify, wherever you find your podcasts. We usually have, we have links in the show notes, so there's a lot of links there. I'm not going to give a bunch of links right now, but I, in other ways, you could go to justinpachet.com. Although there's a lot of like coaching stuff on there. I'm not really coaching right now, but I do have calendar links. If somebody has a deal they want me to look at or has some advice they want to get from me for some reason or another, who knows? You can book a calendar link there and I'm happy to get on the phone. I love talking to people, meeting people in the space. And I especially love looking at big deals. Great. Mike, what about you? Yeah, you can find me at mikebalcom.com or you can email me meet, M-E-E-T at landbh.com. So happy to talk to you all. Great. What about you, Neil? You can find me on the REtipster platform anywhere that happens. The Real Deal with Neil is my podcast. And then my email is neil, N-E-I-L, at theclemgroup.com. Great. What about you, Ron? Apke Brothers YouTube channel or Instagram's good, Ron Apke on Instagram. Great. And I'm going to include links to all this stuff in case you couldn't catch up with it. Just go to retipster.com forward slash 250. This is episode 250. Thanks again to everybody for listening. Thanks to all you guys for being part of this. It was a lot of fun. And we will talk to you all in the next episode.