The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - 40 Genius Ways of Making Thousands from Unwanted Land⏐Ep. #258
Episode Date: December 19, 2025Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com�...� and join my community at https://TKOwners.com━beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at beehiiv.com/chris━In this episode, I walk through dozens of real, practical ways to turn unwanted land into cash flow. I talk about how land that looks ugly, rural, or overlooked can actually become a serious income engine if you think about it differently. From renting out raw land for camping, parking equipment, or RVs, to placing sheds, tiny homes, or storage containers, I break down how people are making money without overcomplicating things.I also share ideas around subdividing land, master leases, portable self storage, tree farms, firewood, pallet businesses, sheds, sports courts, and even some weird but surprisingly profitable niches most people never consider. The big theme of this episode is optionality. Once you own land, especially land no one else wants, you suddenly unlock dozens of ways to monetize it.The goal here is to show that you do not need perfect property, massive capital, or years of experience to get started. You just need ideas, creativity, and the willingness to look at unwanted land as an opportunity instead of a problem.Enjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---
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There is a million ways to make a million bucks.
This is a business that nobody talks about.
That's over $10 million in revenue.
Guess what they do?
It rents out for $600 to $950 per night.
With all of these options I'm going over today, there are no more excuses.
So what if I told you that for about $200 a month,
you could find some ugly, unwanted, unloved land and turn it into a cash flowing machine that
makes you over $10,000 a month.
Well, the only thing holding you back from doing that are ideas.
Well, that's what this episode today is for.
So let's go.
If you live in the United States, you need to look into what's called the USDA Rural Development Loan.
This loan has no PMI, no mortgage insurance, as in less fees.
And if your land or property is in a specific area, there's a map online where you can look at all this,
if it's in an area and your credit is not terrible, it doesn't have to be amazing,
but if it's not terrible, you can qualify for zero percent down for a government-backed loan through most legitimate banks.
There are some restrictions.
One of the restrictions is you can only use.
it on raw land if you plan to build a building or a piece of real estate on it.
I believe it does qualify for stick-built homes, modular homes, and manufactured homes.
There are income limits, but the interest rates are even lower than FHA loans.
And if you want only raw land and to never put anything on it, this will unfortunately not work for you.
I paid about $7,200 for the shed all in, including delivery.
It is 8 by 18 feet, and it's not just a shed.
It also doubles as a she shed, or it can double as a tiny home.
Thanks to new reality shows the cost of tiny,
homes are outrageous. You can easily pay over $100,000 for a tiny home, easily $50 to $80,200. Why?
Because of the framing. The fact that the seller positioned it as a shed, which you generally cannot
monetize. If you want to have a tiny home business and buy unwanted or unloved land, put a tiny home
or multiple tiny homes on it and rent it out, you should consider instead buying a shed,
either in a kit or fully built and delivered on site as is. You could put a loft up top
and call it all in $20,000, you can rent it out for $500 to $1,000 a month,
make your money back in a couple of years,
whereas if you go buy a purpose-built tiny home,
you're not going to make your money back for a decade or more.
It's really the same product.
We're talking about four walls, a foundation, and a roof.
It's just a different way of approaching starting a real estate business or a tiny home business.
There are several websites that enable you to take quiet spots and rent it out to tent campers.
Camp spot being the biggest, tenter with two R's.
space, harvest host, there's three to five different peer to peer marketplaces that provide the
opportunity to rent out mere plots of dirt on your property for $10 to $50 a night. You don't need
hookups. They're not expecting hookups. They're not expecting electricity or plumbing or any of that.
They just want to go camping, usually with their kids. I'm a customer of these websites because I live
in Texas and there aren't a lot of state or national parks here, unfortunately. So we go out to other
people's private land and we have a great time camping for about $20 a night. I had an ingrand
trampoline installed recently. I paid way too much for it. The trampoline itself was about
$4,000. But the install cost was outrageous. $4,500 for someone to roll up with an excavator,
spend half a day digging it out. They put some weed barrier down, some landscaping rocks.
They installed a $50 water pump, plugged it into the side of the house. That way when it rains
too much, it'll pump all the water out. Some mosquito larvae don't find a nice place to live.
But there's a huge opportunity for heavy equipment parking, right? If you have unwanted or unloved land,
It doesn't matter how rural it is, there are business owners that need to park their trucks,
their excavators, their skid steers, you name it.
So the company that I hired to dig this thing out, they dig out pools, they dig out trampolines,
they level land for new home construction, they need a place to park their stuff.
And you can charge between $80 and $250 per month per spot, $43,000 square feet in an acre,
and you can make six figures of income with truck parking.
And there are websites that kind of act like the Airbnb for parking lots and truck parking.
and semi-trailer parking, and you can use those to acquire customers.
In the state of Texas, and every state has similar laws to this,
if you buy a parcel that's more than 10 acres,
you can get it split up as long as each parcel is 10.01 acres or more.
You don't have to get it rezoned.
You just need a new survey.
So I have a friend that goes out to West Texas.
He'll buy a 500-acre plot.
As long as it has a lot of road frontage,
he will split that up 50 times into 10 lots.
I'm making these numbers up, but it's directionally correct.
Let's say he buys 500 acres for $500,000.
He splits it up into 50 units.
He sells them for $20,000 each, and he makes a million dollars on his money.
He just pays a few thousand dollars for his surveying costs.
That works all day in every state.
Some states more than others.
In Texas, if it's under 10 acres, then you've got to go through all kinds of approvals.
You got to get septic, all kinds of other things.
But if you keep it at 10.01 acres or more, then you can still subdivide the land without having to go through all that rigumor roll and you can sell it for a profit.
You should also look into master lease.
agreements. It doesn't always apply to only raw land, but I've used this on some RV
park deals where let's say you can't afford to buy the land cash or you can't find a loan
or you can't afford a down payment. You basically make lease payments to the owner, but all of the
cash flow over and above those lease payments go to you. This is very similar to a lease purchase
agreement in that it enables you to lessen your risk before going all in on an asset. And then
later on, one, three, five years down the line, you have the option to purchase the property
and or business on the property at a predetermined price if it has been going well thus far.
Picture this. You buy a piece of land for, let's say, $100,000. You find a used mobile home for $30,000.
You spend $5,000 to get it hooked up and moved. So you're all in the property, $135,000.
Now, when you put the home and the land together, the land's worth over $200,000.
Because you're going through the headache, you're adding value to the property.
Now it's a place where someone can live. You're just putting two parties to
the landowner and the homeowner, you're putting them together and you're adding value.
Now one of my favorite business ideas, period, and not just for raw land, is that of portable
self-storage. I've got this friend on Twitter that did this in Canada. What he did was find
a three or four parcel of land that was on a busy road up in Canada. And then he did a lease
purchase agreement. He said, hey, I want to put portable self-storage on this. I don't know if it's
going to work. Let me rent it for X amount per month. And one year from now, let's sit down and
talk. And if it's working for me, I will buy your property above your house.
asking price. If it's not going well for me, I'll pick up my portable self-storage containers,
I'll take my ball and go home. Guess what? It worked way better than he ever imagined. Now he has a
six-figure business that's largely passive because he didn't have to break ground, lay foundation.
He bought these portable self-storage containers on a flatbed truck. They dropped him off.
He did research on Cube Spot and Square Foot, and he found out that, you know, a 10 by 10 in my
area rents for 130 bucks a month. And he became fully booked within six months. And now he's
copy and pasting this playbook all across the country. I love this idea because, A, you can get
loans on this equipment. B, private investors are willing to finance the portable self-storage
because they can always repo it if it doesn't go well. And C, it's a perfect way to hedge your bets,
minimize your risk, own land, monetize land, without having to come out of pocket six figures for
a down payment. All right, this is probably the least approachable, the least affordable of all of these
ideas, but it's also probably the most profitable. There's a trade-off there. You build a
I've had home on Airbnb before.
It rents out for $600 to $950 per night.
That covers the monthly payment in about six rentals per month,
so I only need 20% occupancy to break even.
You list it on VRBO and Airbnb,
and then you list it on Peer Space,
which is a website that enables photographers
and videographers who rent your space for photo shoots
or for filming movies or commercials.
It's much cheaper for them to rent something like this
for a few hours than to rent a professional studio,
but it's just as good if not better in men.
good if not better in many cases. Yes, it is very expensive to build a custom home. When I had my
house on Airbnb, about 30% of my tenants used it for weddings. And then I thought, how much
do weddings even cost? $3,000 to $6,000 just for the venue for half a day. That would cover the
monthly payment for the property in one wedding. So what's stopping you from listening on Zola,
the knot.com, wedding wire, Airbnb, Verbo, PeerSpace, all the places, what would your monthly occupancy
percentage be when you take all of those platforms and combine them into one close to 100%.
What's a word that didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago that's all the rage today?
Barn Dominiums.
It was like 60 grand today.
They're much more expensive, not trying to oversimplify this, but these metal buildings
in a box are outrageously in demand right now for storage, for stuff like pickleball,
for barn dominiums, for wood shops, cabinetry, metal shops, auto repair, auto body, you name
it.
We have rented hours out to several different types of.
business owners. It's 2,100 square feet, and it rents for about $2,500 to $3,500 a month.
And you have covered air-conditioned space like this, even if not air-conditioned, even out in a rural
area, there is demand for people to store stuff, right? People need to store stuff.
A company is paying us every month to store some old electronics. You can charge by the square
foot, charged by the month. You can store classic cars. We get requests for all kinds of things
to be stored there. One of my favorite businesses that no one ever talks about are tree farms,
nurseries. You can buy seedlings and plant them from seedlings or you can buy seeds and plant the seeds.
I love this business because with patients come profits. A lot of trees just don't do well from a seed or even from a seedling.
They require a lot of babying and they are likely to fail in the first few months. Whereas live oaks,
schumard oaks, pecan, cedar elm and maple trees do really well from a seed. Just consider the unit economics.
If you can basically have free water or close to free water and or rely on rainfall, if you live in
in a rainy area.
If you can wait, then you can sell them for hundreds of dollars each.
You can sell directly to retail through Facebook Marketplace
or through Facebook ads.
Or you can do wholesale.
If you drive around and you see all these wholesalers,
they're not planting from scratch.
They're buying from people like you and I,
generally speaking, people with more land, more scale
than what I'm referring to here.
But you can plant thousands of trees on one acre,
especially since they're just seedlings, they're small.
You can also do the same with blackberry bushes,
grapevines, blueberries, et cetera.
Now you will have some upfront costs to this,
business aside from the seeds or the seedlings. You're going to have to pay for some irrigation,
some tubing. You might have to install a well. Preferably, you can find some unwanted, unloved land
that already has a well dug. But after your upfront costs are in, there's nothing else. You just
wait. You just let Father Time do its magic. Now, this idea also comes with a lot of asterisks,
but if you do have an electrical panel with some empty space, you should consider Bitcoin and
or crypto mining. I've been in this industry for a while. I've had years where I've done well,
and I've had years where I've lost my shirt.
So definitely 100% fire beware.
Do your own research.
You need a professional electrician to hook it up.
Generally speaking, your everyday wall outlet is not going to cut it.
You've got to look into things like hash rate, difficulty rate, the price of Bitcoin.
How many other miners are mining at any given time?
But if certain things can align, you can make really, really good money mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Just beware of noise, heat, and space constraints.
Now you may have seen me post content about this indoor pickleball club that I'm launching.
It's air-conditioned.
We still have to tear out a room.
We've got to clean it.
We've got to paint the floors.
I actually have a portable pickleball court that I'm going to use to get the ball rolling before I spend way too much money to paint these floors.
But even in rural areas, there's demand for indoor, air-conditioned, weatherproof, private pick-a-ball play.
People can come with their nerdy pickleball friends and hang out, drink drinks, and we're actually going to put a golf simulator in here, cold plunge, as sauna, and it's going to be a whole vibe.
Now, of course, if you're too rural, that's just not going to work.
work. I'm not too rural, so that will work for me. So we live in the suburbs of Dallas-Fort Worth.
Youth sports is everything here. And there are not enough places for youth sports coaches to train
their kids. They can't go to the gyms because the gyms just don't want them there. They don't
know what to do with them. They can't go to the schools because the schools are usually practicing.
And so that leaves this gap in the market. These coaches are paid between $40 and $200 an hour
to do private one-on-one and one-to-group tutoring sessions, softball, baseball, baseball, golf, tennis,
pickleball, basketball, especially basketball, football, and baseball, the big three.
So my other project will be a full court pickleball court.
It's 70 by 30 feet.
And it will also be a half court basketball court.
The fixed hoop will go right in the middle.
You're going to pay about $6 to $8 per square foot for concrete.
Five inch concrete.
There's rebar.
It's got a vapor barrier.
It's good to go.
This costs about $14,000.
After the fencing, which you don't have to have.
It's just nicer to have.
And the lighting and the hoop and everything, I'm going to be all in this about $32,000.
If I were to have hired a general contractor to find all the subcontractors, it would have cost about $50,000 to $60,000.
So one business is to be the general contractor, find the subcontractors, and build sport court.
You go look at Google Trends for sport court searches.
They're booming right now.
Or if you have some unwanted or unloved land, you can build your own sport court.
And if you build it, they will come if you use Facebook ads.
They left that part out of the movie.
You can't be too rural for stuff like this.
You need parents that are obsessed with kids sports.
So big asterisk on this one.
But if you live close enough to human civilization, this could be an amazing business that can pay you between $8 and $20,000 a month based on your membership fees or based on your hourly fees that you're charging directly to the tutors.
I paid about 30 bucks for a crate mortal nine years ago.
Planted it.
It's nice and big now.
And this is the gift that keeps on giving because these shoots come up like once every month or so.
You get about a half a dozen new shoots.
Now, as long as they're not connected to the trunk and they're coming from the ground, you can transplant them into a pot.
You can be patient.
You can sell it for $30 to $300 years down the line, depending on how big it gets.
Now, this next idea is pretty random, but hear me out.
So there's this hole-in-one golf challenge in New Zealand.
I posted about it a few times.
They give you $10,000.
If you get a hole-in-one on a floating tea, that's about 80 yards out in a lake.
What I already did is I took $100 to a popular park where kids are playing soccer,
held up a sign that said, hey, for $3, we'll give you one shot from 30 feet to get a hole in one.
for $5, we'll give you three shots.
If you win, you win $100, okay?
Less than 5% of people win.
It's extremely profitable.
It's like a game of challenge.
And I'm not going to lie, I was pretty surprised to see how much money this little hack made.
Now, especially if you have a natural water source like a Doug Well,
what's stopping you from planting a fruit orchard and selling the fruit to farm stands,
individually through e-commerce?
Did you know the peach truck is a $100 million dollar business selling peaches online?
My friend Isaac French planted a 300 tree fruit orchard.
that provides tens of thousands of pounds of fruit
to his community in Central Texas every year.
I think he spent about $75,000 total
for buying the trees, the irrigation, the cement,
because he has sidewalks throughout.
What's stopping you from doing that?
You wanna do your research on the varieties
that work best in your area or in your zone.
You may need to cross-pollinate it sometimes,
so do your own research,
but orchards can actually be a lot more profitable
than you might think.
There are two different websites
that allow peer-to-peer EV charging,
plug share and EV match.
Furthermore, you can contract with Tesla to add supercharging to a property.
Of course, they're only going to want to add it to certain properties that are off of a highway, etc.
Lots of asterisk on this one.
Tesla will pay entirely for all of the transformers and equipment, but they won't allow you to monetize it directly.
As then you can't mark up the electricity.
Now, if you do have a business, you can monetize the foot traffic.
But if you pay Tesla for the transformers and all the equipment, you can mark up the electricity directly.
If you add solar or other renewable energy sources, then letting electric car owners use your charging.
can add up pretty fast.
I love the pallet reclamation business.
So I used to own a third party logistics company called Send Eats.
We would receive massive pallets full of peanut butter
and makeup and you name it.
And we had too many pallets.
We weren't shipping out as many palettes as we received.
So I would post them on Facebook Marketplace
and just give them away.
I would try to sell them, but it was hard.
I needed a reliable way to get rid of them
because we ran out of space every day in the warehouse.
And so if I sold it, then I'd have to negotiate and haggle.
And if I just gave it away, then it was much easier.
So I met all these business owners that owned pallet reclamation businesses.
They go to Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist and to local businesses and warehouses,
and they take pallets for free.
They're providing a valuable service because these businesses that have dumpsters
have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to throw this stuff away.
They would much rather give it away.
It saves them money.
They take the pallets for free.
They'll use a crowbar, a hammer, and they'll take it apart.
They'll disassemble it.
They'll fix the broken boards.
They'll make it look nice.
And then they will turn around and sell them for $5 to $12 each.
So it's 100% gross profit margin.
Of course, you got gas costs, you've got delivery, you've got to put your time into it.
You've got to put boards into the broken ones.
But some businesses need a reliable supply because they are shipping out more pallets than they're getting in.
Some businesses need a reliable way to offload them, and they're usually doing it for free
because they don't want to be spending all their time haggling over a $2 pallet on Facebook marketplace.
So there's a big business in here.
You build a book of business.
You go door to door.
You cold call or your email or your text or you start asking around.
you find a handful of businesses that are consistently getting rid of pallets, or you just go to homeowners that have an extra pallet or two.
You can build stuff out of them.
I posted a video about a couple that built a bar out of pallets and sold it for a lot of money on Facebook marketplace.
They built a bar out of pallets and rented out to weddings for hundreds of dollars per wedding.
There's so many things you can do with pallets, and it's something that you can get for free.
But you need somewhere to store it.
How about on some unwanted or unloved land, knock on wood?
There is actually a portable pickleball court.
It weighs several hundred pounds.
Think of it like a wrestling mat, but a lot thinner.
It rolls out.
It's got lines already on it.
You're going to see another video of me laying it out and basically launching my business because it's impermanent.
I can prove demand for the product before I go all in and spend way too much money renovating.
It's kind of cool that stuff like this exists.
So this photographer that we used rented this old classic VW van.
And she saw her property and she said, I would love to park my van in your yard and have my clients come get their Christmas card pictures taken.
If you let me do that, I'll give you your pictures for free this year.
That sounds like monetization.
We said yes, we got our pictures taken.
I got a bunch of wisecrack jokes from my friend who got the card and said,
hey, you guys doing all right?
Because it looked like we lived in a van.
But my point is there are five different websites that enable you to take your property,
your real estate, your building, your raw land, whatever.
And as long as it's somewhat scenic and you can make it scenic,
you can add a wedding arch, you can add all kinds of things.
As long as it's somewhat scenic, you can rent out that space by the minute,
by the hour, by the day, to photographer and to videographers.
Those five websites are, HereSpace, Gigster, Home Studio List, Scouty, and Avay, Avay, AV-V-A-Y.
Again, much like the side yard car parking, what's stopping you from listing your property
on all of those websites, optimizing with keyword-rich descriptions and professional
pictures, and just waiting for the bookings to come in.
If you buy a parcel of land for $50,000, you can get a 30-year mortgage on that.
Your 30-year payment on that is going to be about $2 to $350 a month.
month less than your car payment. You can't tell me you can't at least cover that payment
with all of these options I'm going over today. There are no more excuses. You know what idea is booming
right now? Backyard restaurant neighborhood pop-up three different types of pop-ups going on.
Pizza oven pop-ups where people will buy this $500 to $1,200 to $1,200, authentic Neapolitan-style pizza
oven. They'll post to their local Instagram, Facebook groups, Facebook Marketplace,
neighborhood, HOA groups, Nextdoor.com,
and they'll get people to place ahead of time
their authentic pizza orders for $10 to $25 per pizza.
And then the owner of the home or property
will make all the pizza in a day.
People will come pick it up, then mull him in advance,
and he'll make a thousand bucks for an afternoon of making pizza.
The same is true with barbecue,
order your brisket ahead of time, your pork butt,
or stuff that you want to cook on a blackstone.
All three of these costs between $5,500 and $1,500.
So with a relatively small investment and the willingness to post online and to be willing to sell things to your friends and family, you can make a really good income cooking food, which is great for foodies like me that love cooking this stuff anyway.
So why not monetize it?
And whoever said never monetize your hobbies, they were wrong because if your hobby is monetizing things, then you can never go wrong.
Multiple ideas in one here.
I reached out to a bunch of tree trimming companies in the area.
One of them is mine.
Whenever they cut down a huge oak tree, they drop them off here.
multiple reasons. Number one, firewood. Remember, firewood sells for between $400 and $700 per
quarter. So during the winter time, we split it all with a hydraulic splitter. We stack it up. I pay
some high schoolers to do it and it helps pay for their college. This is just kind of a passion
project. It's nothing for me to really make a bunch of money on. Right now is actually the perfect
time to start something. And you guys know, I'm always talking about starting local newsletters,
local newsletters for your city, job listings for your field, a weekly roundup for your
hobby, you know, just taking whatever you know and sharing it with people who want to learn.
This is one of the lowest risk ways to build something that pays you over and over.
And Beehive is by far the easiest way to do it.
You can monetize and grow your subscribers with their built-in ad network.
You can sell digital products or paid subscriptions directly to your audience.
And yes, they've even gotten AI website builder and a podcast integration now.
I've been using Beehive for two years and I cannot recommend it.
enough. It is not just a newsletter platform anymore. It is the entire creator infrastructure. So
don't wait for January. Start now. Head to beehive.com slash Chris for 30% off your first three
months. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com slash Chris. The other idea is actually assembling and or
building sheds on site since you need some land to do that and selling them, selling them on
Facebook marketplace. What's the second fastest growing sport in the world right now? Dis-Gall.
Not pickleball, disc golf.
Is disc golf super profitable?
No.
But it's cool.
And here's the thing.
People will donate to you if you have a disc golf course, or you can charge.
Most courses don't charge.
You can.
What's stopping you?
It's cool.
It's fun.
It's unique.
If you build a good reputation for being a good disc golf course, they actually have
disc golf vending machines where you can put a vending machine on your property and sell
discs for 20 to 30 bucks a pop.
Not my favorite business idea, but I think there's a lot to be said for business ideas
that are just fun.
I have four kids between the ages of 9 and 15.
they come out here and play. Not everything has to be a cash cow. Never underestimate the power of a good
hardwood, pecan tree, otherwise known as a hardwood tree. Oak trees are hardwood, maple trees are
hardwood. The deciduous stuff, the pine, that's softwood. Hardwood trees are much more valuable.
You can sell the firewood for $400 to $900 a cord, depending on the time of the year, depending on
where you live. And you can also sell the hardwood to barbecue restaurants or barbecue enthusiasts.
You can fetch even more for it as barbecue wood than you can as firewood. I know this because
I'm a barbecue enthusiast and I own a firewood business. Granted, you can only cut down a tree
once, but my point is a piece of unwanted or unloved land is worth more if it has mature hardwoods on it.
Oftentimes the seller or the realtor don't know that. Is it significantly more? 20, 30%?
No, but it's marginally more and it's something. You've got shade. You've got something desirable.
I like trimming my trees. If I were to trim it, then that would provide a bunch of firewood
and or barbecue smoking wood that I could sell without having to cut the whole thing down.
We hire what's called an Alaskan sawmill or a portable sawmill.
This guy will come in.
There are red oak logs and they're very big.
You can make end tables.
You can make coffee tables.
You can make two to four inch slabs out of them.
You stack them and you let them season for months or years at a time.
Then you can sell them by the board foot to woodworkers, to wood enthusiasts.
They can turn them on a lath or they can make furniture out of them.
I have a bunch of cedar logs in there, white oak, red oak, live oak.
You can actually make a lot of money from this wood if you pay someone about $60 an hour to come slice it.
all up for you and then you just let it sit. Once it's seasoned, there's no bugs in it. It's dried out.
It's done warping. You can sell it for a good bit. And the crazy thing is about all of this.
I'm not paying for that wood. When you have land, unwanted or unloved land, you got space to store stuff
like this. Remember, one acre is 43,000 square feet. It's a total win-win situation because these
tree trimming companies, they have to pay the dump to take this stuff. They don't have to pay me anything.
So they are more than happy to bring it. And I'm very careful to tell them, I don't want
your brush, I don't want your small stuff, I don't want your mulch. I just want the big stuff.
valuable stuff. Once again, you can sell this stuff to barbecue smoking enthusiasts or to barbecue
restaurants as well if you live in a warmer climate like Texas and you're not able to sell it for more
than a few months of the year to people that need to heat their homes. Did you know you can even
make money from that empty unused space on the side of your house? There are six different websites
that will enable you to rent out this otherwise unused space to people that need to park their car,
truck, boat, RV, etc. The six that I know of are truck parking club, neighbor.com,
spacer, stow it, curb flip, and pavement.
What's stopping you from listing any spot on your unwanted, unloved land on all six of those
websites, optimizing it with professional pictures, keyword-rich description, and waiting
for some bookings to come in.
Decomposed granite.
It's literally crushed granite.
It's a little more expensive than gravel because it's red.
It's got a nice color.
It compacts really well, and it also drains, and it also looks good.
So it's a good hybrid of those three qualities.
What I learned in the process of ordering this DG was that if you buy directly from the quarries, you get it at a huge discount.
There's this company called Living Earth.
They have a bunch of locations across Texas.
I think they sell it for like $50 to $70 a yard, a cubic yard.
But if you buy directly from the quarry in Oklahoma, it's about $20 a yard.
So what you can do is you can use Replit or Lindy to make a lead format.
You can push paid ads to it and just play middleman.
Basically, your drop shipping decomposed granite.
or you can buy it, store it on your unwanted, unloved property, and then just resell it.
People can come pick it up.
This is a business that people don't think of, but this is a product that people are using
on a daily basis.
In case you haven't already heard, I have a private community called TK owners, tkowners.com.
There's over 500 people in there, some entrepreneurs, some entrepreneurs, and they're doing
stuff like this.
They're starting businesses on raw, unwanted land.
So if you want some help, some handholding, some support for almost no money, very little,
like the price of a cup of coffee per day, then come join.
at tkowners.com and you can cancel anytime. Now as much as my wife loves watching me split
firewood by hand, I get tired. A man gets tired, right? So I paid 1,500 bucks for the 27-ton
hydraulic splitter. About six months ago, I posted a video all about my firewood business,
and you can see me using this. It's so fun to use. You put the login, you pull the lever,
and it just splits it cleanly in half. This is a great investment. If you can't find enough
customers as a firewood business, you can rent this thing out for about $80 to $90 a day on
Facebook marketplace because people cut down trees, they want to convert it into firewood,
that they have no need to buy a $1,500 splitter, so they'll rent it for you for 80 to 160
bucks and do it themselves. Also, when you have land, you got plenty of space to store stuff
like this. You would not believe the unit economics of the septic tank business.
How many people out there in high school said, I want to grow up and own a septic tank
business? Literally no one's ever said that. They're incredibly profitable. It's dirty,
it's unsexy. Nobody wants to get into it. But the net profit margins are 20,
to 40% because no one wants to get into it.
All I wanted to do was add a simple bathroom to my shop,
and they all said, nope, you need a new system,
$15,000, $15,000.
Why are they telling me that?
Because they can, because they're in the driver's seat,
because there's much more demand than supply.
So the takeaway here, start or buy a septic tank repair
or installation business.
All over Texas and the United States and the world,
there are properties that need to be mulched,
that need to be raised because they're building things
or they're clearing land.
There is a big business between playing
middleman between the forestry mulchers, the land clears, the tree trimming companies, and the people
that own what's called a tree spade. A tree spade is either an attachment to a skid steer, or it's a
standalone machine that has these four hydraulic spades, these blades, sticks into the ground,
pulls out the tree, put it in a pot, put it on a truck, transport it, sell it. So instead of
the homeowner that needs trees cleared, paying someone thousands of dollars to shamefully just
cut it down, they can instead get it removed for free. They don't have to pay anyone.
and that middleman can find the homeowner or the landowner.
It can find the person that wants a mature tree.
Maybe they don't want to pay $2,500 for it.
Maybe they want to pay $1,000 for it.
And you can take the spread between those two parties.
You could actually own the spade.
They cost about $4,000.
Or you could just find a guy that has one.
You play middleman.
He does all the work.
You or him deliver it.
And we don't have to cut down as many trees.
You just transplant it.
All right, fiber optic cables.
The road, which is closer to my house, does not have fiber.
I wanted fiber, so I paid some guys $500 to come in with a ditch,
which dig a trench, and lay fiber optic cable.
Now I have fiber internet.
That is an entire industry, laying fiber optic cable, finding customers that almost never leave.
When they sell the house, the new homeowners become your customers.
This guy's making six figures a year with very little overhead.
It does have upfront costs.
Of course, it's not cheap to lay the fiber, but once it's laid, it's going to be there for decades.
then you just go find homeowners that want faster internet.
People think that the big companies like AT&T and Spectrum own that market.
No, there's so much left for the taking, especially in rural areas.
So you can use your unwanted unloved land to store fiber optic cable to buy and rent out ditch witches
to just run your business out of if you own the ditch witch and you want to big trenches
for fiber optic cable or for fiber optic cable companies.
There's a million ways to make a million bucks.
Now this business is less something that you can do with unwanted land,
more something that you can monetize with someone else's unwanted land.
About a year ago, I interviewed these college students.
They're up in Chicago, and they were at this lake,
and they were just doing landscaping stuff for this woman.
She lived on a lake.
This lake she lived on had yucky seaweed and weeds growing all around her dock,
and she said, listen, my grandkids want to swim in this water, but they can't.
It's disgusting.
Can you clean this out?
Their first gut instinct was to say, no.
How do you clean a lake?
But then, they're like me, they say yes to everything.
And they said, yeah, we'll see what we can do.
So they literally drove to Home Depot, bought $20 rakes, and they just stood way steep in the water,
and they just started raking the bed of this lake.
And it floated to the top, and then they would grab it all up and throw it up on the shore.
It took hours, but they made like $500.
And then guess what happened?
The neighbor came out.
And then the other neighbor came.
Hey, can you do mine?
I didn't even know this was possible.
I didn't even know this is the thing.
And their whole sales pitch was, we don't use chemicals.
It's all natural.
They started J&D Lake Services.
They're making six figures a year.
And they're college students.
Now they're thriving.
and this one guy saw what they were doing and said, hey, I have this $200,000 lake cleaning machine.
It's like a skid steer that floats. And he said, I'll lease it to you. Don't pay me anything down. He was just a good guy that wanted to help out some young entrepreneurs.
Now they're making a ton of money and they're going all in on this business. This is something that almost is no one is doing. This is a brand new industry. And I love it because you can fish where the fish are. You can use third party tools to find all the homes that have ponds or that live on lakes. You don't have to do that manually. There's other things.
third-party websites and databases out there that will give you the information of these people.
Then you just reach out to them and say, hey, I bet you no one's ever offered to clean your
pond or your lake before.
I'll do that.
You can charge hundreds of dollars per hour.
You don't need any expensive heavy equipment to start.
Is it easy?
Of course not.
It's sweaty.
It's hard.
You're going to get leeches on your legs.
I'm not saying this is easy or even fun, but it's entrepreneurship and you pick your battles.
You're going to have problems and hardships and icebergs to get around in every business.
And this one is one that is brand new.
This industry is brand new.
So if someone knocked on my door and say, hey, I'll clean out your pond.
I would say yes.
I would pay them because I'm not about to get in there.
So go clean some lakes and ponds.
There will soon be a pool on my property.
Why?
A, so my family can enjoy a pool.
B, because you can monetize a pool in several different ways.
First of all, have you heard of Swimply, Swimmy, or Resort Pass?
Those are businesses, much like Airbnb that allow people to monetize their pools
by renting them out to other individuals by the hour or by the day.
Some people, especially in warmer climates like Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles,
they will rent a house that has a pool, not even live in the house,
and only use it to rent out the pool in the backyard on Swimply and Swimming.
Some of them are making six figures a year.
You can charge extra for catering and drinks and for a lifeguard, toys.
And this industry is booming right now as the sharing economy continues to boom.
A little bonus idea for you.
I have a friend in North Carolina that has a $650,000 a year business.
Over half of that is profit.
And all he does is he set up a tracker that looks at Craigslist and Facebook marketplace for people getting
rid of sheds. Generally speaking, they're giving them away for free because no one wants a shed.
No one even thinks to take a used shed. Or they will pay to get rid of it because they're selling the house
and the new buyer has said, I'm not closing until that shed is gone. So they go to Facebook marketplace,
they post it. What he does is he says, hey, either I'll come get it for free or pay me and I'll come get it.
And he has a little machine where he goes and puts the forks underneath the shed, lifts it up, puts it on the back,
of his flatbed truck, and by the time he puts it on his truck, it's already sold.
He gets pictures of it from the seller before he even goes and sees it in person.
Then he will list it on Facebook Marketplace with free delivery included, because that's the big
hangup.
Who has a massive flatbed truck?
No one.
And then he'll sell it for $400 to $2,000.
And he gets it for free.
It's just his time.
Yes, those flatbed trucks can be expensive.
You can rent them to prove out the business model before going all in on it.
But this is a business, the shed flipping or shed delivery business that nobody talks about.
He supplements about 30% of his income by going to.
through shed companies. Every time they sell a shed, they need someone to deliver it. They're not in the
delivery business. They'll call him up, pay him $400 to $500 to go pick up the shed from the lot and deliver
it. So multiple business ideas all in this one shed. You can assemble them and build them,
get some plans online, learn how to do it, get a table saw, get a chop saw, sell them on Facebook
marketplace for a slight profit. You can upgrade to more custom jobs. You can build sheds on site.
You can move sheds. You can store sheds. You can convert sheds into tiny homes, rent them out per month,
or just sell it as an actual tiny home.
Buy a shed, finish it out, resell it as an actual tiny house.
I just love this.
Also, fun fact, there's a business called shedramps.com
that does over $10 million in revenue.
Guess what they do?
They make and they build and they sell shed ramps.
Some of them imported from China.
Some of them built on site from their factory.
There are a million ways to make a million bucks.
The thing about living in the city is you don't know what problems
that rural folk like myself have a 30-inch diameter,
20-foot culvert that I had cut in half and delivered to my property
was $900.
And I bought it from a company
that does seven figures a year
and guess what they do?
They sell culverts.
That's it.
Most people will go their whole lives
never hearing or saying the word
culvert because it doesn't apply to them.
Well, I have this property
and it's split in half by this ditch
and I wanted to drive from the front
to the back of it and I couldn't.
So I had to put in these massive culverts.
I started by putting in these smaller ones
and they quickly got washed out.
Now I got two 30 inch diameter culverts.
I rented an excavator.
$600. I spent the day having a blast, putting dirt on it, and it taught me that there is a big
market for culverts. I looked at the Google keyword tool. I looked at Google trends. People are
searching for culverts. They're hard to find. With the increase of people buying rural properties and
trying to live that farm lifestyle post-COVID, there is a big demand for culverts large and small.
PVC, corrugated metal, corrugated plastic, ribbed ones. And so oftentimes when a municipality
widens a road or improves or lays fiber or improves their culverts, they just get rid of it. They pay
someone to take it away. I actually found my culverts just driving around and the city was throwing
them away and I said, hey, can I take these? They said, sure. Took them, listed them on Facebook marketplace
and they're gone. I sold them. Hundreds and thousands of dollars for all of them combined. There is a
market for finding and or buying and or selling used and new culverts. You buy directly from the
manufacturer, you store it on your land, you listen on Facebook marketplace. If your organic listings
don't get enough traction, you boost it. You pay for some boost and people come pick it up or for
extra $2 to $300, you throw it on a trailer and deliver it to them. I'm calling this business
Colvert City, California. When I list my land from Facebook marketplace, the vast majority of the
demand is from people that want to park their equipment. Not like someone that owns a rents
out one or two skid steers or excavators. I'm talking about an industrial company or a general
contractor that has three flatbed trailers, four box trailers, a cement truck. These guys have
all kinds of different equipment. They always want it fenced and I don't want them to do that. So I
usually say no. They don't even want what's in the building. They just want to rent the land and
they prefer for it to be fenced. That's also a big business. Would you believe that a little 30-amp
plug has the ability to make me more money than the entire building that it's attached to? And no,
of course, you don't need a building for a 30-a-plug. I can now list out the space to RV campers
on websites like Camp Spot, the Dirt, Boondockers Welcome, Campendium, Harvest Hosts, and I think
a couple more. Better yet, if you have your own RV, you can of course rent it out for even more
because people don't have to bring their own RV.
It's basically an RV park, but just with one pad.
If you have more demand than you can fulfill,
add in more plugs, more pads, septic system,
connected to the city sewer,
and you've got yourself an RV park,
which I've been buying those for the last seven years.
It's a great business.
I paid $160,000 for my lot.
At the time, it was worth about $300,000.
And the reasons were twofold.
Number one, traffic.
Traffic was bad even back then.
I live within 30 minutes of four of the fastest-growing cities
in the country.
The second reason I got a good deal for my property is because of the shape.
It's very, very narrow.
It's a weird shape.
People didn't like it.
It was unloved.
It was unwanted.
Today, this same lot, despite its location on a busy road, despite its awkward shape that it still has, is worth $750,000.
It's far outpaced, the appreciation of the other homes and lots around here because I was willing to take that bet.
How can you monetize 22,000 cars driving by a day?
Where do I even begin?
For my tree trimming business, I wrap my truck.
I can park it out here.
Every time we have a car that we need to sell, I park it out here.
If a car's worth $20,000, according to Kelly Blue Book value, I can sell it for $22,000 because
more eyeballs equals more money.
Think of it this way.
If I was selling a widget and I tweeted about it to my 1,000 followers, that widget is worth
$100, I could sell it for $100.
If Elon Musk, the most followed person on Twitter, tweets about that same object for sale,
what could he sell it for?
$1,000, $300?
No matter what it is, he could sell it for much more.
because he's Elon Musk, but because of that many more eyeballs, millions of eyeballs seeing it.
That's more demand.
Fix supply plus increasing demand equals increasing price.
That's economics 101.
So I used to have a business called Presto Cars.
It was a concierge car buying service.
We would go to the Mannheim and Odessa Auctions, and we would buy cars at wholesale.
At the exact same price, the wholesale price that used auto dealerships get their cars for,
then I would bring that car home.
I'd pay $13,000 for it.
I would park it right there with it for.
sale sign and I would sell it for $17,000. You do that once a week, that's $16,000 a month of net
profit. Are there headaches? Of course. I ran out of gas. They would break down. It was a pain,
but it was profitable and it was all made possible because of this lot that gets 22,000 cars,
22,000 eyeballs driving by it every single day. So that's why this is my number one favorite
idea because of the optionality. If you buy a lot, especially if it's zoned residential,
residential buyers do not value this. In fact, they don't like traffic. But if you're willing
to look at it from a capitalistic perspective, a monetization perspective, then you can sell anything
you want. Billboard, cars, signage, wrapped vehicles, farm stand, lemonade, waters, it doesn't matter,
best and highest use. So every time I see these cars out front, I smile to myself and think
capitalism. If you know someone or think of someone that likes real estate or raw land or wants
to get out or wants to start a business, an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, it doesn't matter,
it would mean a ton if you share this episode with them because maybe it could change their life.