Latest / Financial Survival Network / How to Start Land Flipping with $5K and Scale to 7 Figures - Travis King #5947

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How to Start Land Flipping with $5K and Scale to 7 Figures - Travis King #5947 · Financial Survival Network

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  It's just exit strategies for land flippers and land investors. And that's yeah,
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  that's our model. That's what we do is our own business. That allowed
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  me to escape. My W two job was, you know, essentially marketing
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  to off market landowners who don't have their properties listed. You're listening to Carrie
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  Lutz's Financial Survival Network where you get valuable information. You just can't find anywhere
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  else to thrive in today's trying times. You need the Financial Survival Network now
• 0:31
  more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and get your free newsletter
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  and gift. Financial Survival Network now more than ever, And welcome you are
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  listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz.
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  Hey, it's eleven seven, twenty three years almost over. You're probably
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  looking for side hustles, ways to make money, maybe even your primary way.
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  Well, we've got another one here. You've heard other people investing in
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  land. Travis King's got a book out about it. And basically, Travis,
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  you've been doing this for ten years and you think there's still opportunity left
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  in spite of the market. By the way, if you got a question
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  for Travis or myself. Shoot me an email kl at Carrie lets dot Kyle
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  want to know if you're you've ever invested in land and how it's worked out
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  for you. So Travis book, So you actually wrote the book? No
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  AI needed, No AI inquire within and tell us about your land buying exploits.
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  Yeah, so the book came from after ten years of doing this as
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  a business model. You know, my wife I run a business together and
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  we kind of built our own playbook, I guess you'd say. And it
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  was really kind of exit strategies right for going after off market vacant land and
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  as I would coach clients and students and help them out and kind of share
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  the plays in our playbook, and it became a parent. I needed more
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  than just my chicken scratch notes, you know on a post it note or
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  a Google doc. So I had the idea to put this in a book.
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  And like anything, the first time you step outside your wheelhouse into something
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  else, as a little naive, how much work state to get a conventional
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  book written and published? Right? So, thankfully, you know, two
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  and a half years later, where the books just launching the Land Investors Playbook
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  dot com and it's just exit strategies for land flippers and land investors. And
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  that's yeah, that's our model. That's what we do, is our own
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  business. That allowed me to escape. My W two job was you know,
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  essentially marketing to off market landowners who don't have their properties listed, you
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  know, on the MLS. We just pull these list through essentially through the
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  county assessor websites of off market landowners sort of onned a long time and haven't
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  done anything with it carry, you know, so they haven't improved it.
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  Right, there's not a cabin on it, not a second home, it's
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  just vacant land. And we started, you know, targeting those off market
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  don't wanterers or tired landowners if you will, with with offers, you know,
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  to buy their land at twenty five to fifty percent of market value and
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  then our exit strategy is to turn around and list and resell on the MLS
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  or as close to full market value as we can. All right, So
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  we like that. So you want to buy it cheap and sell it high,
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  We're always in favor of that. So where do you find these properties
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  to buy? How do you do that? Yeah? So the the I
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  feel like kind of the genesis of it all is and I think this is
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  true with any business when you're marketing, right is finding your list, you
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  know what, like where's my data source right for my target audience? And
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  for us that comes with paid subscriptions to download things like you can go to
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  some county assessor sites and you can actually pull some of these excel lists for
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  free, right for all the landowners in the county, or you can pay
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  a small monthly fee which gives you access to kind of like a more uniform
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  database right where it would look the same for every county across the whole US.
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  And you're just pulling a list essentially of the assessor tax roll of people
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  that owned vacant unimproved land, and the higher value leads would be the people
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  that have owned it for a longer period of time and still have not improved
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  it, right, or maybe they live out of state, you know,
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  from the land, so they're even less attached. So that's kind of what
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  we look for, and then we target these individuals with direct mail, cold
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  calling, text messaging. You know, it's really kind of that we by
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  Ugly House's approach to land is what we're doing. Okay, so are the
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  taxes generally in arrears on these things or or doesn't matter. Good question.
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  So that would be like a more motivated list, right, a tax to
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  link it. We don't intentionally target tax delinquencies, but that would you would
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  have a higher response rate if you target those type of individuals. I think
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  anytime you target something like a situation, right, there's there's some urgency or
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  propensity there. Where there's a divorce, there's probate. But honestly, that's
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  not what we do. We tend to just target people that have ten years
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  or more of ownership, and we target welled in state and out of state,
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  but ten years are more of ownership and living out of state of the
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  property is kind of the low hanging fruit. Okay, so these people,
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  if only for ten years, they haven't done anything with it. They probably
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  never will. So how do you approach them? A letter? Direct mail?
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  Is that how it works? Yeah? Just for us, it's it's
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  typically a letter of interest, right, just to gauge their level of motivation.
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  We can either approach them with a letter of interest, which is quick
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  and easy, right, because it looks the same for everybody. We don't
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  have to spend any time valuing their property, right, So we can approach
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  it with a letter of interest and allows us to get the mail out the
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  door quickly. Or we can approach it with an unsolicited blind offer, where
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  we're actually putting in our purchase price, our proposed purchase price, and we're
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  actually sending we're leading with a purchase agreement. If we go that route,
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  it takes some work on the front end right where we kind of need to
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  row by row or at least zip code, you know, figure out the
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  price preakre and estimate the values ahead of time, you know, But we
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  do, Yeah, we do a little bit of bulls and the goal is
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  it's a numbers game like anything you know, real estate is Obviously people aren't
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  lining up to sell their lanhand at a fifty percent discount, you know.
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  So it's very much a numbers game of of knowing what kind of response rate
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  you're going to get and then how many leads it takes to get a deal,
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  you know, and that kind of allows you to to you know,
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  build your marketing plan. Okay, so it's basically an outreach lead generation.
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  Uh, do you get leads from any other sources that you can share right?
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  Direct mail, cold calling and text messaging or so we do like multi
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  channel marketing, We do all three, right with you. Text is always
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  the cheapest, but you always have the highest response rateed it's the cheapest but
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  the least motivated, you know, cold callings and kind of in between.
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  And the direct mail is always the most expensive but actually most effective. Because
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  for our asset class AP people have owned things ten or twenty years or more.
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  It generally puts them kind of in that demographic of being older. Right,
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  Well, most people check their mail, you know, they may not
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  have a mobile, they might not text. So actually direct mail for our
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  asset class of land and longtime land owners, direct mail might sound like archaic
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  or antiquated or expensive to some people. Yeah, but for our asset class,
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  that just flat out works really well well. With me. I want
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  to emphasize about direct mail. It's something I've done my whole life. Way
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  back when twenty thirty years ago, direct mail was a predominant means of marketing
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  to the public. Was you know that and cold calling. You didn't really
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  have email marketing twenty thirty years ago. Then direct mail totally fell out of
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  favor because basically email, text and all that, it's just about free and
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  because there's so few people utilizing it now. The response rates now compared to
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  ten years ago have roughly doubled from direct mail. So it's like this the
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  worst best kept secret important in marketing, right Yeah. And the challenge is
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  that sometimes people look at things like cost per lead and they measure it on
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  that instead of like cost per acquisition. So texting might cost you, you
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  know, might be a tenth in the cost per lead, but is it
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  actually getting you deals? So we really look at like cost perractors, what
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  works for us, So we leverage all three. In the reality of some
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  of these other channels, they're vulnatile, right, Like there's laws with ringless
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  voicemail, With texting and cold calling, they constantly fluctuate and they change state
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  by state. Direct mail is kind of more dependable, you know, as
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  a primary channel in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, Well, you know,
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  there's a real art to writing a direct mail piece. I've written thousands
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  of them over the years. Most people are completely it's the same thing there's
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  a proper way to write a radio or audio ad lost art. So you
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  know, the key to all of this is the writing that direct mail piece
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  in a way that's going to get people to go like, I guess you've
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  got ten years experience, so you kind of know what you're doing with this,
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  right. Well, the interesting thing is sometimes you hire these consultants and
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  these experts to tell you what to do right. And an interesting thing is
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  we would use these these consultants like for direct mail, and they really focused
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  on the outer envelope strategies of hey, we need to get this make sure
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  this piece gets opened, right, this mail gets opened. Yeah. And
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  the reality what we found was after almost a years, about nine months of
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  testing and spending a lot on this direct mail split testing was as soon as
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  we increased our offers five to ten percent, our acceptance rates went through the
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  roof, you know, meaning we offered a little more and all of a
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  sudden, our open rates Carrie went up. Which was interesting because our direct
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  mail consultants were telling us that we had a really low open rate because of
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  our envelopes. And the reality is the mail was getting opened, you know
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  what I mean, nobody knows that the male Yeah, the sports rate wasn't
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  good because their offers were too low ball. So as soon as we increased
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  the offers, they joke that our open rates skyrocket as soon as we increased
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  our offers on the letter hiding inside the outer in the lope. So sometimes
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  we overthink these things. Is it being art? And then I also handed
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  the letter to my demographic, so we found most of our sellers were between
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  sixty five and ninety five because they had owned this land for decades. So
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  we just handed it to like, you know, to my parents, my
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  in laws, my grandparents, and I said, look at this letter,
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  what do you think, right, rather than paying a consultant, right at
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  direct mail and they said, boy, the font's pretty small. Let me
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  get my glasses. Yeah, so Carrie, that told me right away that
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  the direct mail consultant did and tell me I need a larger font size.
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  They said, it's a little wordy. I got to get rid of the
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  words. And then they said what do I do? Because I was saying
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  fax me or text me or call me or email me, and really I
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  needed a better called action to my primary channel. Right, so they kind
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  of wanted to know what's next. So the interesting thing was I actually kind
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  of asking our demographic of the people that are receiving the letters. I got
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  more valuable advice than I did. Somebody you know using a marketing consultant.
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  Gotcha. Hey, One of the one technique I know that really works is
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  you instead of using machine stamps, you use adhesive stamps and you put them
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  on their crooked. That ups your response rate by twenty five or twenty five
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  to thirty percent because it looks like you actually took the time out. And
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  there's actually companies that will do that for you. Hey, So people want
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  to find out more about what you're doing, Travis, want to connect with
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  you on the web and get your book. Where do they find you?
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  Yeah, so they can go to Travis King dot com is the website or
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  if they want to go specifically to the book, The Land Investors Playbook.
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  Dot com is the brick site. And in the book we talk about where
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  it's a little different than a lot of people teach just the simple buy low
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  sell high lip strategy. Kind of the premise of the playbook and what we
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  teach in our education program is we teach additional strategies beyond just buy low,
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  sell high the flip. We teach subdividing. You know, I would say
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  that's kind of you know, the very first play we added to our own
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  playbook or tool to the tool belt. We teach how to intentionally target people
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  that own waterfront properties, Carrie. So we pull lists of just vacant lots
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  on the water or we pull targeted list of just people in the county that
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  own two are more vacant land properties. So with one stamp right, or
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  one call or one mail piece, and we're able to have these value lead
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  Sure. All right, well sounds really interesting. So the links in the
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  show notes to this interview on Financial Survival Network dot com. Make sure you
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  sign up free free newsletter. Questions comments for Travis myself on this or anything
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  else we do here, just email me kl at Carrie LUTs dot com.
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  Travis, thanks for coming on. Been a pleasure, all right, appreciate
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  you, Carrie. Thanks thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network.
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  Your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork
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  dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever