Raw Land Investing with Brent Bowers

george grombacher 0:00
Come on one leper, this is Georgie and the time is right welcome. Today’s guest is strong and powerful Brent powers. Brett, are you ready to do this?

Unknown Speaker 0:18
Or Gee, I’m ready. I’m ready. Let’s go. Let’s go.

george grombacher 0:21
Brent is the owner of land sharks. He’s an expert investor and coach focusing on buying and selling vacant land. Brent excited to have you back on tell us a liberal, a personal life smart about your work and why you do what you

Unknown Speaker 0:35
do. No, thanks for having me back on again. It has been a couple years, we’ve moved across the country, you know, away from our 58 acre ranch. We’ve moved now back to Florida. Been out we were out in Colorado for about eight years. Now we’re closer to my parents and my wife’s parents. And, you know, gotta got a few kids got a wild zoo house going on most of the time. And you know, I’m married three kids, and why do I do what I do? You know, I haven’t always been able to do what I I want to do, I was in the military for eight and a half years. And I didn’t always have the choices that I’ve got today. And it just came from a few little sacrifices each day, just putting in the work, you know, getting the plan, getting the education, finding the mentors, and the coaches and the YouTube channels and the right podcast. Just like the while we’re on here, and taking action every single day that I believe was the that the key ingredient like that a lot of people are not taking is they’re not actually taking the same Guided Action each day. So I That’s why I do what I do. I have a great business, great, great wife, great children. And I enjoy you know, getting on these podcasts too. And just getting the kind of talk to other people about, you know, entrepreneurship and business and you can have the life you want as long as you’re willing to take the steps to get it.

george grombacher 2:07
Amen. So how has the industry of investing in in vacant land? How is that changed more have devolved if at all over the past two years? Well, it’s

Unknown Speaker 2:18
been a wild two years, I’ll tell you two years ago, I would say there was not as much demand for land. And then it’s like some like someone turned on the switch. And, you know, developers couldn’t build fast enough builders can’t build fast enough. I was just out in Colorado Springs. And I have that’s where my main operations that have been out there for one year, my team has been running the show, and there is building going on on every street corner. And it’s just unbelievable. It’s just the main major demand for housing. And that’s in the last two years. But here’s what I’ve seen in the last two months. It’s slowing down like I am seeing the buying of vacant raw infill buildable lots and land slowing down. But one thing I haven’t seen slow down was the more rural stuff, we’ve still got the buyers, we’ve still got the buyers wanting it they want to get out of town they want to have a place to someday maybe build that cabin. Another thing I have seen slowdown as well was the last few years was there’s such a demand for land I haven’t been able to get it as cheap as I used to two years ago, but it’s way easier to sell it and it’s also you can get get it you can sell it for more so I know that’s a lot in the last two years it’s like literally like telling someone turn the switch on to the tidal wave and it’s like now someone turn the switch off for the buildable infill lots, but it’s still going steady for our vacant rural land. And none of our buyers have stopped paying and I pray it keeps continue like that. But it’s been a very interesting couple years. Two years. It’s It’s amazing.

george grombacher 4:01
It is it is super interesting. That was because i i Should I can’t remember what what the strategy is for actually acquiring the land. So if I’m buying a vacant piece of rural land, am I coming out of pocket with cash and my financing?

Unknown Speaker 4:19
How there’s the thing is that there’s so many options to do it. And the thing about vacant land is there’s not a lot of financing out there, you know, traditional like I’m gonna walk in the Bank of America and get a loan for a piece of land. So it’s amazing. You know how we can work this out, you know, we can we can get the property under contract and sell the paper assign that contract to a builder or a buyer or a developer or we can we can buy it with financing from the seller which is a really cool thing. I love doing that because it keeps my cash in my pocket. And then I turn around and sell it to another buyer is we call it basically a rap and The other way is, without the traditional financing from like Bank of America, a lot of times land sellers are willing to give this land at like massive major discounts, because they are not being mailed 10 letters in a week, like a lot of houses get there just it’s not as much demand. So when they get our offer letter, or our postcard, they’re willing to negotiate, because I’m probably the first one that that has actually reached out to them. And a lot of times, they’re willing to let it go for way less, because there’s not as much emotion to it. And then I get that, I get that massive discount for the land. And then I turn around and find someone that’s looking for land. It’s almost like one man’s trash and turning into another man’s treasure. And I turn it into a seller financing deal. That gives me passive income.

george grombacher 5:53
So that’s a powerful thing. Is there a way to know how long that process typically takes?

Unknown Speaker 5:58
Yeah, I’ll tell you, when I was just starting out, when I wasn’t buying, like large packages or packages of land when it was just like onesie twosie type stuff. You know, my first couple deals took me a couple of weeks. And he’s for instance, like the first deal, the retired CPA that traded, you know, some tax work for a parcel of land that he purchased. I bought it pretty much within about a week, and had it sold within about a week. But the cool thing is, is I found my buyer first, it was actually a realtor that I call because I had no clue what the land was worth it, her real estate office was right there. And she made me an offer on the spot. And I was like, hey, that works. There was no negotiation with my seller, no negotiation with my buyer, I was like, this is a sweet deal. And I took the money and ran. And then the next one was a purchase that I actually use the cash that I had just made from the previous. And now I sell or finance it. That note actually just paid off. And it was several years later. And looking at it looking back now, I wish I would have went further with the financing and maybe gave the guy less less payments and more interest. Because it’s like, you want to see these things keep building and building and building.

george grombacher 7:15
That was that’s really my next question is what is what is the business plan? There’s probably not a business plan, because there’s so many different ways to do it.

Unknown Speaker 7:26
Yeah, there really is. So if I can get it in this in the the smallest nutshell possible, the plan for me is to find vacant raw land at Crazy discounts, I mean, like less than 50 cents on the dollar, and turn around and find a buyer that can give me the largest downpayment possible that I can get my money back out of the deal as fast as possible. And seller financed them that property, so I get payments for as long as possible. And every one of these that we do, for instance, I have a gentleman he’s not even 21 years old yet. His name is Orlando. He’s just an impeccable human being. He is learning he is growing. And he found my company about a year and a half ago. And it’s like, what can I do with you guys? We started him out in the signs. Now he’s selling land. A week ago, he added I think $500 a month to our gross income coming in because he sold like three, I think two properties actually at 250 each. And that’s not a huge week, it was a really slow week, actually. But if we can continues if he can continuously do that, every single week, that’s if we do 500 a week, that’s two grand a month, two grand a month, let’s just say times 10 months, because I’m like keep simple math. Yeah, that’s one grand additional coming in and 10 months on top of what we’ve already built. So imagine where you could be five years from now doing just one land deal at a time. And off, I finance some of these for 30 years. And my bigger stuff. Because if you look at a 30 year mortgage, it’s unbelievable. What you pay back to the bank. If you borrow 200 grand at 6% interest you pay back over 430,030 years if you never refinance or miss a payment.

george grombacher 9:21
That makes a lot of sense to me. The the folks who come on the show and they talk about making money trading in the stock market. They talk about just making a small percentage every day, just small little little bits and over time. That’s how you make money invest in the stock market. I think that a lot of people are probably turned off by that because they want to come into something and make a lot of money quickly. But that’s not the rescue talk when we were getting started about taking action every day and a few sacrifices each day and then you put your head down and you wake up and all of a sudden you found success.

Unknown Speaker 9:59
Yeah Are there the guys out there that their first land deal they make $30,000 net profit. I’m talking about Chris Meeks, I actually just got to do a podcast with them. And then the second deal, second land deal, he bought 96 parcels of land with someone else’s money. And they $500,000 net profit. And the builder is building him a house, it’s almost finished. And this third land deal, he just got 1000 Lots under contract are there the guys like that, that in two years, they’ve made like, literally a million bucks. And then there’s the guys like me that it took me a little longer. My first one was five grand, my second one’s 400 a month. My third one was about 14 grand. So and then I had a full time job and also a new baby. So it’s just that, that $400 a month, though, was life changing for me. It told me that holy cow, your truck payment is being paid. Let’s do it again. So your wife’s dad gets paid for. And let’s do it again. So the diapers get paid for. And then before I knew it, we were almost pulling in almost nine grand a month in about a 10 month period. And my bills were not that much as as a lieutenant in the army. And we were financially free. And we started making decisions on like, what we wanted to do to do for the rest of our lives. And that was me getting out of the military. And it’s just little changes like that. It’s it wasn’t anything ground earth shattering. I didn’t make 500 grand on my second land deal. But some people do.

george grombacher 11:32
Yeah, I think that that’s an inspiring thing. So talking about somebody who’s listening, they say, Well, this is okay, that that, that sounds pretty good. I’m, I’m interested in doing that. What do I what do I need from my, because it’s going there’s gonna be a learning curve. So I need information and knowledge, I need some money. And I need any time.

Unknown Speaker 11:56
Yeah, I’ll tell you, I didn’t have a lot of money or time. But let me just break it down, you want to break it down, like I can show the listener that’s listen to this exactly how to do this right now. Like, and I can share it with the story that I did it. So I literally went to the tax collector’s office, Florida, we call a tax collector, Colorado is called treasurer’s office, you really want to go to the office of the person that makes sure the property taxes are paid. That’s it. And you want to ask them for a tax delinquent list, you know, the list of people not paying taxes on their land, or their properties. And a lot of these, a lot of these counties, it’s going to be a big massive list of all the properties single family houses, mobile homes, lands, you name it, and you’re gonna have to figure out what is the vacant raw land. Sometimes there’s a three digit code, sometimes there’s a legend, sometimes you just literally have to scrub each one of those, click on each file and see what says vacant roll land or see what says $0 improvement or 0% improvement, because that tells you right there, there’s nothing on the land. And that was the hardest part about this whole thing. I found the virtual assistant in the Philippines. She charged me $5 An hour and she went through every single one. And it took her a weeks. But I couldn’t do that because I was working like 13 hours a day with the army. Plus I had a newborn that wasn’t sleeping at night. And my wife was like, angry at me because like the baby wasn’t sleeping, and I’m gone all the time. So she was a little bit envious. So all that was going on in my life. We got that list. And then I mailed that list a postcard. And it was very simple. And it said, Hey, my name is Brent, I’d like to buy your lands. Please give me a call. If you’re interested in a fair cash offer or text me. God bless you. And I put my phone number on there. And my phone rang. And then I had the first guy that called I already kind of mentioned him, he was a retired CPA, he traded some tax work for the land. And he was so far behind on taxes. And this land was not buildable, because there’s only one ingress and egress. Basically, one entrance to the fire department would not let them build on this on this road. And I’m like, Well, I don’t know what to do with this land. I had no clue what I was doing. But that’s okay. Because like it worked out. So I went to see the land and had no clue what it was worth. But the seller is like just give me $285 It’s yours. And I was like you’re kidding me right? Turn $85 for a piece of land. The land was overlooking the pike National Forest. And this wasn’t long ago. This was 2016. And it was just the most beautiful place and Palmer Lake, Colorado. They’re selling those lots for like 25 grand each right now. So I didn’t know what it was worth. I’m there. I’m leaving. I called the real estate office down the street and I was like, I don’t have any clue what this is worth. I’m in the process of buying it. What could you list it for you because I think you’re probably the most familiar with the land because you’re really close. She was familiar with the street. She said, maybe 10 grand. So the realtor just told me what the land was worth. And I think there for a time, I told her I call her back when I got it under contract, or I’m sorry, I’ll call her back when I purchased it. I already had it under contract to earn $85. So she called me back in five minutes and made me an offer of five grand. I said, Let’s do it. So I called the seller. I said, Hey, I’ll pay you Tuesday. And then I got the quitclaim deed on Tuesday, wrote him the check. didn’t do any title searches, none whatsoever. Bad on my part, I should have had the title company. Check it all out. Thank God, there was no issues. And I got a $5,000 certified check on Friday on Wednesday. I mean, and that was it. Like I just kept going forward. And I just kept growing, the land deals kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And that was it. Like, that’s how to go out and do a deal.

george grombacher 15:59
Amazing. That is an awesome story right there. As has the process, it hasn’t been streamlined. So it still will require me to go and do the research.

Unknown Speaker 16:11
Yeah, I mean, you could streamline it I now have a virtual assistants been with me a couple years. And she does all the due diligence. And the and we have another guy that does the title work for us. And now that we’re in multiple counties, it’s we’ve had some growing pains, there’s been some challenges because every county is just a little bit different, like the names like tax collector, or, you know, the Treasurer, things like that change. But at the end of the day, it’s still vacant role and people can go look at it. No matter what time of the day, you don’t have to schedule an inspection period. Or, you know, Hey, are you gonna be home at this time? Hey, can you leave the key in the lockbox? Where’s the key? It’s not in the lockbox. There is the lockbox. It’s vacant, raw, clean land.

george grombacher 16:54
I love it. All right. So how much if if you’re telling me Okay, George, you’re interested in doing this? How much time will I need to invest to actually learn her is that it, like how you broke it down? It just is that simple.

Unknown Speaker 17:11
The learning part’s easy. It’s just taking the time to find the list of landowners. And I talked about the tax delinquent list. There’s other lists with motivated landowners, like, you know, people that God inherited the land or God urgent probate currently, at the end of the day, we just need to get in front of landowners, and communicate with them and see if they’d consider selling the land. So timewise, I was spending about two to three hours a day, five days a week. And that was, you know, before I would have to get to my military job. Like during my lunch hour, there may have been a few times where I would sneak away and hide in the bathroom and take some calls from from sellers or buyers. But yeah, I mean, I just, I felt I literally looked at my schedule, deleted Facebook, well, actually, that’s not that’s not true. Because I posted a lot of land on Facebook, that’s how I sold it. But I no longer scrolled, you don’t scroll, you create, don’t consume, create, you know, screw Netflix got rid of it. Like there was no time for TV. If I was in the car, I was talking to a seller or a buyer. I was just really trying to be as efficient as possible with my time now I don’t recommend talking on the phone and driving. That’s not I cannot do two things at once. Really. But I would be learning to in listening to podcasts and implementing

george grombacher 18:40
love it. Well, Brett people are ready for that difference making tip even though you give it a slot, what do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 18:46
You know what, just take action. That’s the difference. I keep saying that on this podcast, take direct action, and that’s so you get a little bit of, of instruction. Take the action. And by taking the action a result comes and that’s where the education you know, you got all those books behind you there. You can read every single one of them and not do a darn thing and you’re never gonna you’re not gonna be no, you’re not gonna be any different next year. Your life is not gonna be any different. You in your mind might be different. But it’s like Jim Rowan’s book one of Jim Rose book. He’s like, put this book down and do the 10 push ups now.

george grombacher 19:22
Why think that that is great stuff that definitely gets to come up. Yes. put the book down. Do the push ups. Brent, love it. Well, thanks for coming back on where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you?

Unknown Speaker 19:35
Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a YouTube channel if you search Brent powers, check that out. And then if you I mean, the land sharks.com is a little bit about our course and we provide the instruction of exactly what to do when to do it. And that’s a couple ways right there.

george grombacher 19:52
Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, show your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, find their YouTube channel Brent Bowers PR en t Bower s go to land sharks.com And check out the resources check out the course if this is something that you are serious about doing. Thanks again, Brent. Hey, thanks, Georgie. Until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai