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From Land to Community and Affordable Housing with Brandon Cobb Part III · The Academy Presents podcast

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Did you know that 90 % of the world's millionaires
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You're already taking the first step. just by
1:00
joining us here today. So there's two loops I
1:05
want to kind of go through. The first one is
1:07
like so we started in residential in 2003 and
1:10
so we have a residential portfolio that we love.
1:13
I would love to continue buying single -family
1:16
homes. I think it's a great place to be. I think
1:19
there's demand and I just I really enjoy it.
1:23
After doing harder stuff I would not be afraid
1:26
at all to find a home, go to the bank, get the
1:28
loan and do it all on my own. But I've got 20
1:31
years experience in it, over 20 years experience.
1:33
So we're not like, we're not inexperienced investors.
1:38
But had someone just said, hey, make sure you
1:40
got cash flow before you get in this mess. That
1:43
one sentence, make sure you got cash flow before
1:46
you get in this mess. Like, I think it would
1:48
have changed the way we approached it. So that's
1:52
the one loop. The other loop is I want to talk
1:54
about your investors. So a friend of mine, Dan
1:57
Hanford, told me about this book and I've got
2:00
it here somewhere. Actually, I'm looking at it.
2:02
It's the no BS marketing to the affluent because
2:06
you said something earlier on where you said
2:08
like if you're going to be developing, you've
2:10
got to have liquidity. So you're not marketing
2:13
or you're not raising capital from really retail
2:16
investors. You're really going to people that
2:19
have higher levels of liquidity, right? Not necessarily.
2:25
So we've got conversations we've had with like
2:28
family offices and institutions that write five,
2:31
$10 million checks. I've never taken a single
2:33
one of them. Most of our money is coming from
2:35
retail. It's people that have 50 grand, a hundred
2:38
grand. 200 grand. You know, some of the investors
2:41
have written me a four million dollar check,
2:43
but it took me seven years to earn that four
2:46
or five million dollar check. I had a lot of
2:48
reps with them. I've done a lot of successful
2:49
projects and they slowly built it up with me
2:52
over time. So some of our investors, yeah, they're
2:55
affluent. You know, they're at retirement age
2:57
and they've been saving and investing for 40
3:00
years and they've got a good bit of money to
3:02
show for it. But most of the investors Our target
3:07
demographic is this. So we do a lot of marketing
3:09
for seven -figure business owners. Like I'd say
3:12
40 % of our investors own some sort of business.
3:15
And so a lot of the content that we put out that
3:17
attracts that demographic, they are usually in
3:20
their 50s. They're new, they're about to be empty
3:23
nesters or they are empty nesters. And they are
3:28
maybe a little bit behind on the retirement plan
3:31
and trying to do something there. And that's
3:35
the story that I hear, right? They've got too
3:37
much money in their 401k or their retirement
3:41
accounts that's allocated to stocks and bonds.
3:44
They know they want to invest in real estate.
3:45
They tried doing some single -family rentals,
3:47
realized they're not passive at all. They're
3:50
a headache. They have been on some podcasts and
3:55
exploring and trying to learn about the different
3:57
alternative investments that are out there. And
4:00
they come across real estate private equity,
4:02
which is really great. And then they start learning
4:04
about all the different asset classes, right?
4:07
Mobile homes and single -family residential and
4:10
commercial and multifamily. And they go, okay,
4:12
I'm going to put a little bit in the buckets
4:14
that I understand. Those are the people that
4:18
are our typical investors. You said something
4:22
there too that I think is really important. You
4:25
said that they invest in the asset classes they
4:27
understand. I think that that is super important.
4:31
I don't invest in anything I don't understand.
4:34
And the reason why we invest in the mobile home
4:36
community was because my grandparents had a little
4:39
mobile home community when I was growing up.
4:41
It was four little mobile homes. And I thought
4:45
that that was a good experience. I now know that
4:48
that was not enough experience. But I think,
4:52
actually, I think I understand the, I understand
4:55
both the park owned model, which is what my grandparents
4:57
did and the resident owned model. I understand
4:59
the model of what we're going to put in play.
5:01
I did not understand the development piece of
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it. I did not understand what it took and what
5:06
it takes and everything that goes into it. And
5:10
I, I'm just going to put it out there. If somebody
5:12
wants to develop, get help. Yeah, the entitlement
5:19
piece is just the first piece to, you know, dealing
5:22
with the ceiling and everything. When you, when
5:24
you, when you come to see, cause just be aware
5:26
when you actually do the development, you know,
5:29
that's, that's the whole next phase. And luckily
5:31
it sounds like you're not doing a ton. Like,
5:33
I don't know. I haven't seen your civil drawings.
5:35
I don't know how much grading there is or utilities
5:37
or this and that, but there's some significant
5:40
cost saving. Like we own a supply company. We
5:42
import a lot of our sewer pipe and conduit because
5:46
we save so much money. doing that. So there's
5:50
so many different ways that you can be economical.
5:54
You know, if you've got more cut than you have
5:56
fill and your site doesn't balance, well, there's
5:58
ways of mitigating that. So many different ways
6:02
that you can save on the actual development.
6:05
But again, if you've never developed before,
6:07
you just don't know, right? You got to learn
6:09
by experience. So I'm listening to also you're
6:13
talking about a lot of integrated pieces. So
6:16
like you've got your Your civil drawing guy,
6:18
he's on board now and you've got different people
6:21
that you've reached out to different vendors
6:22
to get like quantity discount. How else have
6:26
y 'all integrated then? Cause I heard you say
6:29
you also have a supply company, which would be
6:30
an integration. Like are there other things that
6:32
y 'all have integrated in? Or is it just relationships
6:35
in the business? It's every tool that you need
6:38
to do the development. Look at it that way. Right?
6:41
So, you know, we've got a supply company, we
6:43
started it because We wanted to save money on
6:47
our projects, right? And 2022 was a very, very
6:53
difficult... 2022, 2023, 2024, those were three
6:55
very difficult years because of the supply chain
6:58
constraints, right? Construction costs went through
7:01
the roof and you couldn't get key materials like
7:04
water meters to finish your developments. I mean,
7:07
it was nuts. We had to start looking outside
7:11
the United States to get some of those materials
7:13
to finish our homes and our developments. And
7:15
that's kind of how the supply business was born.
7:17
Now we sell to other people now, but it was born
7:20
because we needed the cost savings. We needed
7:23
that because we were just getting hit from all
7:26
fronts. So that's a big piece of it. But anything
7:30
that you need to do a development, a relationship,
7:35
a vendor, We've got the whole, um, rolling X
7:42
is the word I was looking for of, you know, people
7:44
that you can tap into that you need and stuff
7:46
like that. That's just, that's amazing to me.
7:50
Like, where were you a year and a half ago? You
7:54
were right there. I just didn't know. Well, you're
7:58
busy. You don't have time, right? You don't have
7:59
time to go find out and figure things out. It's,
8:02
it's tough. So that's the biggest piece of advice
8:04
I would give somebody is either, um, Get a mentor.
8:10
The free way of doing it is try to go get a mentor
8:13
to partner with you on the, if you go find the
8:16
deal, it's hard to do that because for newer
8:20
people that don't know what they're looking for,
8:21
they're gonna bring a bunch of garbage, not knowing
8:24
that it's garbage and then wonder why none of
8:25
the developers call them back and wait because
8:28
they're wasting their time. But if you... Do
8:31
have to have a good deal and you bring it i'm
8:32
sure they probably wouldn't mind partnering with
8:34
you If you can if they got the time to do it
8:37
That's one way you can do it or go pay a coach
8:39
or you know Go join a mastermind community because
8:42
the mistakes that you can make and this are not
8:46
In 20 30 40 50 000 our mistakes, you know, these
8:50
are multi six -figure seven -figure mistakes
8:54
and i've i've done some of them the hard way.
8:58
Some of them have almost put me out of business,
9:00
but I just didn't know. That's your biggest enemy
9:03
with this business is not knowing. The key to
9:06
this business is survival. I would rather miss
9:09
on 10 good deals than get stuck with one bad
9:12
deal. I still own some land to this day. There
9:16
were some bad deals that went through five, six
9:19
years ago that I just didn't know. So that's
9:23
what we don't want to see happen to people. Yeah.
9:26
Well, while you were talking about that, like
9:27
I'm just doing the math on what we're paying
9:28
every month to hold the land and it's a hundred
9:32
thousand a year. Yeah. I mean, that's that's
9:37
a generally high paying salary for someone like
9:40
in a rural part of central Texas, you know, like,
9:43
or even just Texas in general, like to make six
9:45
figures. That's that's a degree person or like
9:49
a mechanic that had specialized training. Like
9:51
I didn't even. think about crunching out those
9:54
dollars that's so if we if something happened
9:56
we would absolutely me and my husband personally
9:59
would lose seven figures yeah yeah it's and that's
10:04
just your sunk cost right yeah yeah because the
10:08
and the more money you have in your your return
10:11
goes down over time so if you got you know 200
10:13
grand stuck in it and you make i don't know whatever
10:17
amount of money you're going to make selling
10:19
the houses versus if you got $500 ,000 stuck
10:22
into it, those are two completely different numbers,
10:24
right? Your ROI goes down significantly. So there's
10:27
the time value of the money that a lot of people
10:31
don't realize, you know, and like the opportunity
10:34
costs. So, you know, if you're doing that deal
10:37
in five years, because that's how long it takes
10:40
you to entitle it, develop it, build the... import,
10:44
ship the mobile homes and put them on and then
10:46
sell it. Okay, well, that's five years. But if
10:49
it only takes you two and a half years, because
10:51
you got the blueprint to do it right the first
10:53
time, well, what's the opportunity cost of what
10:56
you could do with all that profit after two and
10:59
a half years with another two and a half years?
11:02
You know, and that's the that's the real cost
11:05
of it that most people don't weigh. Well, and
11:09
I've I've told this story multiple times, but
11:11
when we first decided that we wanted to get into
11:14
multifamily, we'd been doing residential forever.
11:16
We're like, we understand what we're doing. So
11:18
we start looking for a coach. And at this point
11:20
in time, I was still teaching. So I was making,
11:23
call it 40, 50 ,000 a year. I think I might have
11:27
been 31, but anyway, we'll call it 50. And the
11:29
first coach we met, his program was $12 ,000.
11:32
I was like, that's almost half of my bring home.
11:35
Like we can't afford that. And so instead we
11:39
found That guy's first coach and started his
11:44
program because it was less. And for a year and
11:46
a half, we floundered in the program and we went
11:49
back to our coaches, Joe, friends. When we went
11:51
back to Joe, his program had more than doubled,
11:54
but I didn't just cost us financially. I cost
11:58
us the year and a half of lost time. And now
12:02
I'm hearing you say, you know, if it takes five
12:03
years versus two and a half, and I'm like five
12:05
years versus two and a half, what did I cost
12:08
us this time? And how did I not learn from the
12:11
first time? You know what the biggest thing?
12:16
You know what the biggest thing I see most people
12:19
missing right now with opportunity cost? It has
12:22
nothing to do with development. Building AI agents
12:25
that run your business. This is something that
12:30
we stumbled upon earlier this year and I've been
12:32
absolutely obsessed about it. This is coming
12:35
We're about to enter the agentic economy where
12:37
these AI agents are Transacting and not human
12:40
beings and I've built about 30 of them. Oh Yeah,
12:44
there's just I don't meet very many people that
12:47
are Building these AI agents and so like we put
12:51
together a little curriculum in our community
12:53
taught everybody else how to do it We had one
12:55
guy get rid of his bookkeeper. It does all of
12:57
his bookkeeping. We've got another AI agent we
13:00
built that does all the due diligence on all
13:01
of our land deals. So literally like the four
13:04
hours it takes us to underwrite all the deals
13:06
that come in and look at it and build the pro
13:08
forma, it does all of it. I've got an AI agent
13:12
that does, it's our sales coach, right? It attends
13:14
all the sales calls and gives the sales reps
13:16
reports on their sales calls, including me too
13:19
on my sales calls. literally saying, here's what
13:22
you should have said, like close the deal. It
13:24
is the most amazing technology we've ever invented
13:28
as a species. And most business owners are sleeping
13:32
on it right now, because again, they just don't
13:34
know it exists. Well, my husband used, um, Claude
13:40
code to build a web app. So that's scratching
13:44
the surface. I also believe very strongly in
13:50
AI. I know there's a lot of people that don't,
13:52
but I'm old enough to remember when the internet
13:54
really got popular, like 90s, early 2000s. And
13:59
in a meetup I was in today, there were people
14:01
like, oh, I don't know, I don't know. And I'm
14:03
like, no, it's not I don't know. This is what
14:06
we experienced in the late 90s, 2000s. If you
14:10
don't learn it, you will be left behind, period.
14:13
And then another guy said, It's not just that.
14:16
If you don't learn it, you've already been left
14:18
behind. And I was like, ouch. Yeah, it's, and
14:23
it's crazy. It's a whole different world. It's
14:24
not using chat GPT or Claude or the best of them.
14:28
What people don't realize what I've seen is different
14:31
models are good at different things. And so you've
14:34
got to build your own internal chief of staff
14:37
AI agent. that can then decide which model, maybe
14:41
it wants to tap into Claude's Opus 5 .0 for some
14:44
reasoning and some decision making. Maybe it
14:46
wants to tap into Nano Banana to do some image
14:48
generation. Maybe it needs to be a mix of models
14:51
that work together to create the best result.
14:54
And it's crazy. I mean, it's definitely what
14:57
I spend the majority of my time on is this. And,
15:00
you know, we're trying to get it where it's trained
15:03
to go find this land for us. Cause land development
15:05
is tricky. It is, there's no software that exists
15:08
where you just click a couple of buttons and
15:09
it goes and it finds it for you. And like, there
15:11
you go. We had to hand build all of our lists.
15:15
Well, it's now to the point where it's create,
15:17
you know, you can use Claude code to create the
15:19
software that you need and customize it and build
15:22
it how you want. and then feed that to your agents
15:25
to go run the DD reports as the leads come in.
15:29
But whatever you can dream right now, AI agents
15:32
can actually go and do. And so if you're listening
15:36
to this right now and you've not built an AI
15:38
agent to go and do stuff for you, stop whatever
15:43
it is you're doing and go figure out how to do
15:44
that. Because I think it's the highest ROI you're
15:47
going to get as a, as a would be developer or,
15:50
you know, mobile home park operator or house
15:53
flipper or single family rental buyer. It is
15:56
by far what's moving the dial the most for us
15:59
in our business. Well, and if you're sitting
16:01
out there and you're like, I don't know how to
16:02
do that. Ask the AI. How do you help me make
16:07
an agent? It will tell you what to do. And you
16:10
have. probably built stuff that you don't realize
16:12
as an agent. So I used Claude Cowork and created
16:17
a way where it reaches into a folder on my desktop
16:20
that has like the monthly bank reports for accounts
16:24
that I'm the treasurer of and it generates my
16:27
treasurer reports now. I just only, I go in and
16:30
make sure it reconciles correctly, but the hours
16:33
that it used to take me to go into Excel and
16:35
build those reports, I no longer have to do.
16:37
It should be two weeks to build because again,
16:39
I'm not super proficient. I'm not like my husband
16:41
with this stuff, but I no longer have to spend
16:44
hours upon hours entering stuff into Excel to
16:47
generate these reports and then like copying
16:49
and pasting it and putting into Word, making
16:51
it pretty. I don't have to do any of those things
16:53
anymore. And so, and I didn't know that was an
16:55
agent, but I had someone else meet. You built
16:57
an agent and I was like, oh, I did. I'm like,
17:00
yeah, basically I was like, oh, yeah, it's basically
17:02
an automation that, that So you've got like an
17:05
automation or I would call what that is. What
17:08
do you have it set up where it's self -learning?
17:10
Because to my knowledge, Claude, Claude, co -work
17:12
is not self -learning. I don't know many programs
17:16
that are. And that's like the tip of the pyramid.
17:18
Like if you've if you've gone, if you take any
17:20
AI classes, they talk about like the pyramid
17:22
or the bottom one is you basically use AI to
17:25
just answer questions and give you information.
17:28
And that's like. bottom level and then your next
17:31
level is like you're using it to help you create
17:33
systems or you're using it to do these other
17:35
things and the top level is like it does things
17:37
on its own for you so like it creates a daily
17:40
brief it goes out and scours the internet for
17:43
things that you've told it to scour and it brings
17:44
it back and it presents it to you in a format
17:46
that you can get your daily brief or my husband
17:48
created an email triage for me because i get
17:50
like 100 emails a day and it goes through and
17:53
it triages my my emails and tells me what's important
17:55
and so i look at three or four emails now instead
17:58
of 100. And then you've got the tip top where
18:01
the AI learns from itself and gets better and
18:03
better. And I don't know many people that are
18:05
doing that, but it sounds like. what you're doing
18:08
where like you feed it in and it makes the decision
18:11
of oh well that needs to use chat gpt because
18:13
it needs images or it needs a little more empathy
18:16
oh that's something that's stronger coding let
18:19
me go over here in the clod and use something
18:21
that's stronger on the coding side or oh i need
18:23
an image let me use nano banana or let me use
18:25
you know chat gpt i think they're calling a version
18:27
two last week i was in an event that said that
18:29
that's the best image creator right now or hey
18:31
by the way you can't put in three pictures you
18:33
need to put in 30 pictures make sure you're smiling
18:35
or you're going to get veneer teeth It was things
18:38
that you don't even think about. And so if you've
18:40
created something that can take what you're asking
18:42
it and then delegate it out to the different
18:45
AI platforms that are best suited for that piece,
18:48
that is insane. That could be used in so many
18:53
industries. It's the most cutting edge stuff.
18:59
Doing what you're doing with the, okay, it's
19:01
going to go into a file and it's going to create
19:03
this report. I would argue that that's a skill,
19:06
not an agent, because you're setting it up to
19:08
do a recursive thing over and over again. The
19:12
difference with an agent is, so for example,
19:14
your email triage, that could be an agent if
19:17
it is constantly learning. where the mistakes
19:20
that it's making. So if it's putting the emails
19:23
in the wrong inbox, for example, and you're training
19:25
it and you're going, oh, hey, actually you messed
19:27
up. This is not spam. This needs to go in this
19:29
inbox. And it's go, oh, okay, got it. And then
19:32
going forward, it doesn't make that mistake again.
19:35
That's an agent. It's self -learn, it's a self
19:37
-learning recursive automation. That's what an
19:40
agent is. A skill is different. A skill is like,
19:42
I just need you to do this monkey task over and
19:44
over again. And if there's no learning involved,
19:46
if it's the same thing, just take this document
19:48
when it's up. upload it here and upload it here.
19:50
That's a skill set. And you can teach agent skills.
19:54
You can teach them multiple skills so that they
19:56
have those skills to accomplish the task. But
19:59
like my land due diligence agent, I probably
20:01
spent 50 hours training it. Oh, you got this
20:04
wrong. Oh, you got this wrong. You got this wrong.
20:06
And it's learning how I like things. Oh, when
20:09
Brandon asks for a report, he wants it. Uh, he
20:13
wants it in this format in this way. And if you've
20:16
ever been in Claude or. Chad GPT and you've had
20:21
to ask it the same thing that you asked it a
20:23
month ago and you found that it like keeps making
20:26
the same mistake. That's the difference. Your
20:29
platform, Claude, Chad GPT perplexity, whatever,
20:32
it's not self -learning. So we run everything
20:35
in our own VPS, our own virtual private server,
20:37
and we're building our agents with our own Python
20:40
script using Claude code as a tool to build them.
20:43
And then they own all the data. If you are operating
20:46
and building, let's say you have Claude code
20:49
and you're building everything in Claude, you're
20:51
just one merger and acquisition or restructuring
20:55
or whatever away from losing all of your data
20:58
and everything that you've built in that platform.
21:01
So Chad's GBT just got, they sold some shares
21:04
to the U S government and now you've got ads
21:06
coming out and Chad's GBT and they've kind of
21:10
gone more corporate if you haven't noticed, right?
21:13
And the answers and how it's doing things. Well,
21:16
any data that you have in there, it's not your
21:18
data. Right? And you're just one event away from
21:21
losing everything that you've built in that platform.
21:24
We don't want that. So we, we have all of our
21:27
models. I use ShadGBT, I have Claude, I have
21:30
all, you know, I have them all, but they're plugged
21:32
into my server. So anything that I'm building
21:35
is stored in my server so that ShadGBT, Claude,
21:39
or whatever can go away. But what I've built
21:42
in all of my data is in my own server and I can
21:44
still access it. That's the difference. Wild.
21:51
That's really wild. Yeah. Now, it's crazy. We
21:55
live in some crazy times. It is an exciting time
21:58
to be not just a human being with this whole
22:01
exponential age that we're going on. This change
22:04
we're about to go through is going to be so rapid.
22:06
It's going to make the internet look like a drop
22:07
in the bucket and it's going to happen faster.
22:10
But to be a business owner, It is so exciting
22:14
to be able to use a team of AI agents that do
22:16
things. Like I had a $90 ,000 per year controller
22:20
who used to build proformas for us. And these
22:23
proformas for these developments, there's a lot
22:25
that goes into them. It could take him a couple
22:28
of days to do seven or eight different proformas
22:30
and double check everything and make sure it's
22:32
right. You know how long it takes for my AI agent
22:34
to do it? Five minutes. He's gone. I had a full
22:38
-time bookkeeper. I was paying 40 grand a year.
22:41
Gone. I had a $55 ,000 per year executive assistant.
22:48
Gone. It manages my calendar. It sends text message.
22:51
It goes in my emails. It sends people things.
22:54
It's amazing. It literally is amazing. So it's
22:57
an exciting time to be a business owner. No doubt.
23:01
Well, we're on a whole different topic and I
23:03
could talk about this for like, or hear you talk
23:05
about it because you know what I do right now.
23:07
But I'm going to. Number one, I need to respect
23:10
your time, but thank you so much for being here.
23:12
This was amazing. Yeah. This was, I really enjoyed
23:16
the conversation. It was great connecting. Wow.
23:19
So guys, if you want to know more about what
23:21
he's doing, um, can you give us a way to contact
23:23
you or your, um, the webpage again? Uh, yeah,
23:27
you gotta learn land development. dot com if
23:30
you're interested in uh and just the the land
23:33
stuff again we got a free course on there land
23:35
development 101 you can go grab it and uh it's
23:38
i've got interviews with civil engineers national
23:41
home builders city planning commission member
23:43
like everyone you know everything you need to
23:45
kind of get started be deadly And then we've
23:47
got our own little separate community. If you're
23:49
into all the AI stuff and building AI agents,
23:52
we've got the AI Agent Accelerator. So you can
23:55
go to that website. We just launched it a couple
23:58
of months ago. I think it's aiagentaccelerator
24:03
.com, something like that. But yeah, go Google
24:05
AI Agent Accelerator. It's on Google and you
24:07
can go check that out if you're interested. Awesome.
24:10
Well, again, thank you for being here. Thank
24:12
you for spending this time with us and for everyone
24:15
else. Like, holy moly. Until next time.