The Science of Flipping - Flip Dirt, Print Money: The Land Flipping Blueprint | Joe McCall

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

👇 Want to learn the system step-by-step?Join Joe's 5-Day Flip Dirt Challenge:👉 https://www.flipdirtchallenge.com -- In this episode, I’m joined by my longtime friend and land flipping expert, Joe McCall. We dive deep into the often-overlooked world of flipping land—why it’s simpler, less competitive, and often more profitable than traditional house flipping. Joe breaks down how he builds lean businesses without the overhead, how he uses data to target high-demand counties, and how he’s taught even his teenage sons to generate six-figure profits flipping dirt. If you’ve ever come across land leads and didn’t know what to do with them, this episode gives you the exact system Joe uses to identify buyers first, comp land in five minutes, and get 3–5% response rates with low-cost direct mail. You’ll also learn about Joe’s free Chrome extension for Zillow, and how to join his 5-day Flip Dirt Challenge to put everything into action.   --   About Joe: Joe McCall is a seasoned real estate investor, coach, and host of the long-running Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast, which has garnered over 20 million downloads since 2011. Known for his simple, systems-driven approach, Joe specializes in land flipping—buying and selling vacant land nationwide without renovations, contractors, or heavy overhead. A former civil engineer, Joe has taught thousands of investors how to build scalable, location-independent businesses using automation, direct mail, and smart market targeting. His methods are so streamlined that even his teenage sons have earned six figures flipping land. 🔗 Connect with Joe McCall: Instagram: @jvmccall Facebook: Simple Lease Options YouTube: Joe McCall - Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast: Real Estate Investing Mastery -- -- Thank you to Mando for supporting today's podcast! Stay Fresh, Stay Confident with Mando! Tired of body odor? Mando Whole Body Deodorant keeps you fresh for up to 72 hours—pits, feet, and everywhere in between. Grab the Starter Pack and get $5 off (over 40% off!) with code [COLBY] at ShopMando.com. Smell fresher, stay drier, and boost your confidence. Get yours today! -- About Justin: After investing in real estate for over 18 years and almost 3000 deals done, Justin has created a business that generates 7 figures in active income through wholesaling and fix and flipping as well as accumulating millions of dollars of rental properties including 5 apartment buildings, 50+ single family homes, and 1 storage facility Justins longevity in real estate is due to his ability to look around the corners, adapt to changing markets, perfecting Raising private capital, and focusing on lead generation which allows him to not just wholesale and fix & flip, but also accumulate wealth through long term holds. His success in real estate led him to start The Entrepreneur DNA podcast and The Science Of Flipping podcast and education company, and REI LIVE where he’s actively doing deals with members. He has coached and mentored thousands of aspiring and active investors over the last decade. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby  

The Science of Flipping Family, welcome back to another incredible podcast. I have a very longtime friend. We're usually the old guys in the room, so we know a thing or two. We call it wisdom. And a good friend of mine, he teaches all things how to flip land, how to deal with land. We all get land deals. How do we handle them? Joe McCall is here, everybody.

What's up, Justin? Good to see you. Good to see you. Yeah. So we were just talking off camera. So you had me on your podcast. 10 years ago and one week, it was episode 105. 10 years ago, man. Are you still ripping and running on your podcast?

I've been doing it since 2011. Isn't that great? Yeah, and I thought I missed the boat when I started. I thought I was too late into the podcast game. Our mutual friend, Jason Hartman, for sure did. He should have kept going. Well, he's still going. He's going, but there was a phase

where I think he broke his chain. Really? And he was like, that was a big mistake on my end. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so- Well, when I started the podcast,

there was only three other real estate podcasts. So Sean forced me to do it. Yeah. I think that's how we met was through Sean Terry. Is that right? Through Sean, that would- Maybe can't close here? One or two of them, right?

So I started mine in 2013. You started in 2011? Yeah, I think Sean started his in 2010. Yep. And at that time there was maybe two or three other podcasts. That's right. And Sean, because I was a big fix and flipper at the time,

Sean was like, I teach wholesale. No one is podcasting about fix and flipping, shocker, scientific flipping, right? And so I was like, all right, I'll do it. Well, he told me you should interview people. And he said, you know, there was a popular book at the time called Stock Market Wizards, maybe back 10 years earlier.

But he said, you should do something like real estate wizards. And I thought, I don't like wizards, but how about real estate investing masters? And so that's when I chose real estate investing mastery as the name of my podcast. And I started interviewing people, which nobody was really doing at the time.

And then a couple of years later, John Lee Dumas comes in the scene, Entrepreneurs on Fire. And he interviews people like every single day and that just took off. And he sometimes takes credit for being the guy who started the interviewing trend, or the idea of interviewing people for podcasts.

Yeah. But it was Sean Terry's idea, gave it to me. Yeah. Well, I would tell you just because John Lee Dumas, my model, which you're familiar with my podcast model, started because he gave me that idea. He was like, you have the leverage in the audience. He's a good created business out of your podcast versus just having a podcast.

Is he still doing it? Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, to my knowledge, I was on his maybe two years ago. So, okay, I believe so good for him. Well, for him, that's his revenue generating business is the podcast. And he was like, Colby, why don't you do that? I'm like, okay.

Anyways, let's talk land. Cool. So, you know, most people think real estate transactions and single family assets, especially in the transactional, right? The wholesaling, the flipping. They think single family homes mostly, right? You've been able to find an avenue that all of us, including myself, right, would like to understand more of.

What happens when you're direct mail, coal calling, buying leads, whatever the case may be, and you come across a piece of land, maybe it's a subdivision or a infill lot, and then maybe it's acreage. We all come across them. What's the first thing you're thinking about, like when you see land? Well, I'm a simple guy and I like to keep it small, keep it all. There we go. When I build businesses I don't want a lot of overhead, I don't want a lot of complexity, I like to keep things really really simple. So I've done a lot of wholesaling houses and you know as we were talking about Ken Clothier, he taught me something once. He said, you need to stop selling what you have

and start selling what people want. Mm. I thought that was interesting. What do you mean by that? That might have been the smartest thing he's ever said. Maybe. Yeah. Not too many things, but that was one of them.

That's it. I'm just kidding. So, like, I started thinking about that, and he, at the time, was teaching me, and I'd already done a lot of deals, but he was like, you need to start going to the buyers first. And he had a book, I think, he that. And he, at the time, was teaching me. And I'd already done a lot of deals. But he was like, you need to start going to the buyers first. And he had a book, I think, he's still out there,

called Reverse Wholesaling. And so I read the book, and I had been wholesaling for five or 10 years already. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is so simple, but so brilliant. And so that was 13 years ago about. Yeah, so ever since then, I've always been thinking about where are the buyers?

Where are they buying? So it's like, if you're a fisherman, you know, where are the fish in the water? What are they biting? So I really started studying what the buyers are buying. So when I look at land, I don't care where in the country it is. I'm just looking for where are the buyers buying land right now.

So I don't suggest, if you're wholesaling houses in Miami or Des Moines, Iowa, I don't suggest adding land to your marketing in those markets because how do you know if people are buying land there, right? Right. And so I look at the whole country and I look at, okay, well, and there's websites like landwatch.com is a good place to start. And you can narrow down, okay, well, these counties, there's a lot of activity, these states, there's a lot of activity.

Okay. Florida's a big one right now, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, believe it or not, a lot of people are buying land in southwest Missouri right now. Okay. And then you look at, okay, which counties are people buying land in southwest Missouri right now. And then you look at, okay, which counties are people buying land in? And I like going after cheap land, right? Because there's a bigger pool of buyers looking to buy cheap land. So in Nebraska or Iowa, there's not a lot of cheap land being sold there.

Why? Because it's mostly agricultural land. That's right. Montana, it's beautiful, but there's not a lot of cheap land there, so there's not that many transactions there. You know, I'd love to own land in Montana, but that's not where the fish are biting. The same with, you know, states like Vermont or,

you know, Idaho, beautiful states, but there's not a lot of land activity there. So I'm pretty agnostic. I don't want to go in my backyard. I want to go where the fish are biting,. I don't want to go in my backyard. I want to go where the fish are biting. And I have the whole United States in my backyard. So I start with looking at what states are active with buyers recent and current.

And I'm looking to see where are the investors right now playing. So where can someone right now go see that? Landwatch.com. Landwatch. OK. Landwatch.com. And that's like it's owned by land.com.

It's a family of websites. That's the number one website. Looks like Zillow for houses. Okay. A free land. It's easy to see where buyers are buying or where transactions are at least happening. Okay.

And that gets you started. That gets you like, okay, I pick out like two or three states and then you can dive in there and you can see which counties are the most active. I was just doing this yesterday in California, looking at California with one of my clients and we were looking at San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County.

Well, Los Angeles County is huge, right? And you don't want, we like cheap land because there's a bigger pool of buyers in the buying cheap land. But if you look at Los Angeles County, for example, there's a lot of wealthy areas there, very expensive real estate. And then you go further out towards the hills,

a lot of cheaper land out there. So then what we do is we look at, when we pick out our list of counties, maybe in each state, we get a list of 10 counties, what are the zip codes in each of those counties? So to dive into those kinds of details, I just go to Redfin and Zillow. So on LandWatch, I get a list of two, three, four states.

And then in each of those states, I just write down the 10 or 20 counties. And LandWatch allows you to sort them. So you can sort them from most active to least active. Okay, that's great. And then in each of those counties, you just go to Redfin or Zillow and you say, show me the number of solds in the last six months of land.

Yeah. So land is one of the houses, you know, there's houses, multifamilies, condos, right? Yeah. So you just do land and I like to look for cheap land. So I'll typically look for land under a hundred grand or something like that. Oh, really cheap. Yeah.

And, um, cause those are the fastest and easiest to sell. Okay. And now we've drilled it down from the entire country to states, to counties, to zip codes. And one of my favorite tools is Freedomsoft. And Freedomsoft has a tool in there called Zipfinder. And that just makes it a whole lot easier. You can go right there and find the top zip codes.

And then when we find those top zip codes, sometimes in most of the counties in the US the redfin allows you to download Whatever you filter. Oh, no, so it redfin Zillow doesn't there's tools on Chrome where you their extensions where you can scrape what's is in your filtered view in Zillow But redfin has a way where you can if you scroll down to the bottom you filter out Okay last six months land only under a grand. And you'll see at the bottom, I'll usually a little button called download all and you download all of those transactions into a spreadsheet. Well, you can take that spreadsheet and you can either on your own or

just upload it to chat GPT and say, hey, what are the most popular zip codes in this area? load it to chat GPT and say, hey, what are the most popular zip codes in this area? What is the median acreage that people are buying? And what's the median sale price that they're buying them at? And what's the median price per acre? Now, I don't want to get too technical here, but there's a difference between average and median, right? Yes, there is. So median ignores the outliers because there's going to be properties that they're selling for a million dollars an acre. So median ignores the outliers, because there's going to be properties that they're selling for a million dollars an acre. So median takes that number right in the middle.

And so now I know, OK, cool. These zip codes are the hot areas where a lot of buyers are buying. And now I'm looking at what Kent Clothier said. Sell what buyers want, not what you have. And then I know, OK, well, they want properties in this. And this is recent. Somebody I know, OK, well, they want properties in this. And this is recent. Somebody was just asking me, well,

I've heard that in this area of Texas, land is really slowing down, some land investors are getting out of the business. And they were wondering why. And I was like, well, maybe it's not in a good area, right? And since I'm a wholesaling, I'm only going to areas where I'm going to be in and out of the deal really fast. So now I know the top zip codes.

I know what top zip codes. I know what they're buying, and I know what they're paying for. And with some simple tools, there's a lot of them out there where you can find buyers. I know who the buyers are. And so 90% of my job is already done. I know now what the buyers want, how much they're paying for it,

where they're buying it, and who they are. And I can then drill in with real simple, there's a lot of tools to do this. Freedom Soft again is my favorite. I can see which buyers have bought the most land in the last six months. And a lot of them are out of state. These are guys, these people buying these lots,

they're just investors like us. They're just wanting to diversify a lot of times. They're wanting to take their money out of the stock market, out of crypto, and put it into real estate. Or maybe it's an area where there's a lot of recreational activities going on. So it's cheap land. People are buying it to maybe build a house someday

or maybe just to put there's no restrictions. So they want to put their RV out there and just shoot their guns, go hide their guns. And then the government comes to take them away. It just depends on who's in office. So it's like, I don't care. I don't care where, but I'm going to where the activity is.

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claim your territory and get your first leads flowing today. Motivatedsellers.com. For so, functionally, the transaction's the same. Yeah, it's just like, so I used to do this with houses. I'd go to list source, and there's a way in list source where you can like, before you buy the list, you can say, all right, show me all the zip codes where the absentee owners are buying rental properties

or buying properties right now. And it's really easy to find those pockets. And I just now am doing it for land instead of houses. Because I found, you know, land is way easier. There's less competition. I think the key for me is the less competition. We're all, me, you, and however many other educators are teaching people how to transact in the single family space.

The multi-family space can be tricky because there's less of them. So even though there's less people focusing on them because there's less of them anyways, it's still very crowded. People just don't know what you know about land. I feel like to some extent it's a blue ocean. Well, it's crazy because I used to do a lot of direct mail for houses. I've always loved direct mail. It's how I did my first deal. And I'm lucky if in a market that I'm doing deals in, like I used to do wholesaling houses in maybe four different states. I was lucky if I got half of 1% response rate on a letter, right?

Or a postcard. With land, we're averaging three to 5%. That's crazy. Response rate. Now some competitive markets were maybe 2%, but it's still still four times greater than what I was getting with houses. And you already know what the buyers are paying for,

so it's such an easy conversation. What do you want for your land? They say X, You look at, okay, the median purchase price is this. Can't quite get that. Like you literally just reverse engineer it. And this is so cool because sellers with houses, owners of homes, they're more attached to the property, right? They've lived there for 20 years or they put hundreds of thousands of dollars into it. And home ownership pride. Yeah. And but with land, there's so much more removed. They're like, yeah, I just don't care anymore. And people ask me, why would somebody sell their land so cheap?

Because we're buying it on average at about 40 cents on the dollar. And we sell it on average to a cash buyer at maybe 80 cents on the dollar. So, but people say, why would somebody sell their land so cheap? It's just, they just don't care about it anymore. It's like the same reason why I say somebody bought

a treadmill for $2,500 and two or three years later, they sell it for $250 at the garage sale. That's right. They've never used it and it's just collecting laundry and they just want to get rid of it. It's the same thing with land. Maybe they inherited it, they just don't want it anymore. I got so many stories of people that I've talked to,

they're just like, I just need the cash, you know? We haven't been there in seven years. We don't do anything with it. It literally just sits there. It's just like the money's not working. So I hate negotiating with sellers, right? I just never enjoyed it. I can do it, I can get on the phone,

but I just never liked it. And so with land, I started doing this where I would send out marketing, like postcards, the ugly, remember the third notice postcards that we used to do back in the day, right? I'm doing those now with land. And I'm getting huge response rates. But the basic, the postcard says,

hey, we need to talk to you about your 2.6 acre lot in City County. I recorded a brief message. Just text or call this number, and I'll tell you all about it. Nobody will answer. 24-hour recorded voicemails. It doesn't even tell them why, you know, we're sending this postcard.

And I have softened the language a little bit because it used to be really obnoxious. That won't get into the details, but I've softened the language a little bit on this postcard. Sure. And so I get a lot of calls. And at the time when I started doing this,

I would just before they, and there would be a reference number on the postcard. So they would leave a voicemail and I would just send them an offer before even ever calling them or talking to them. I'd look at the property, I figure, all right, well, it's worth 10 grand. I'd send them an offer for four.

That was it. And I would get one out of 30 accepted, like clockwork. And they would sign it and send it back to me without me even talking to them. Sometimes they would call back and say, hey, I can't take four, but could you do five? And I'd say, well, I don't know, let me look at it. And maybe I would.

Or sometimes they'd say, I can't do 90 days because I do 90 days of clothes. I can't do 90, can you do 30? Maybe it depends. I don't have any inspection contingencies. I have 90 days of clothes and 90 days of due diligence. And I can cancel it for any reason. I was just gonna say the big key for us

in the real single family home, we always have this inspection period. Yeah. But there's an asset, right? That makes sense. So there is no inspection. I mean, it's bland. Like what do you-

Right, but my contract is contingent on due diligence. Okay, that's it. That's it, that's all I put on there. I don't do any earnest money deposits. Maybe you're supposed to, but I don't. And so, you know, as soon as I get it under contract, that's when I start doing my research, my due diligence. I call a bunch of realtors.

I call other buyers to see if there's any interest, to see if I actually have a good deal. We send somebody to go take a picture of it, like drone footage. And then typically now we just close on it, we take it down, we buy it, and then we list it with a realtor and sell it. It used to be, I just did assignments

and maybe some double closes. But now you make more money if you can take it down. And we're buying these things, you can put them on a credit card. You're buying them for five or 10 grand and you're selling them for a five to $10,000 profit. But in a while we get a big $10,000 profit. Love that. Once in a while we get a big $20,000 deal, but yeah.

So for someone getting into the space of land, limited funds or just getting going, you and I know the newer side, they don't tend to have a big marketing budget. Where would you tell them to spend their money or time? Where would you tell the newbie to go focus? Yeah, two things. Cold calling works great.

Okay. It's funny because the land- Zinc process, you kind of reverse engineer it and then you go find all the land and then you just... You download lists from the same resources you get lists for houses, right? You get the list, you skip trace it and you could just start cold-calling them. I would suggest starting with that. The second thing that I love is working with realtors. So we go find vacant lots that have been on the market for over six months, and there's tons of them.

Why haven't they sold yet? They're just overpriced. And so I love to call, and I do this all the time on my YouTube channel, I'll call realtors live and say, hey, I'm looking at this property. It looks like a nice property. What's going on? Can I ask you some questions about it? And most of the time they've forgotten all about it. Like, oh, like a nice property. You know, what's going on? Can you, can I ask you some questions about it? And most of the time they've forgotten all about it.

Like, oh, well, oh yeah. So I said, it looks like a nice property. How long has it been on the market? And I know, cause it's like, oh, it looks like it's been six months. Hmm, man, something wrong with it. What's going on? Why isn't this sold yet?

And nine times out of 10, it's like, well, it's just overpriced, you know. But I started to build a relationship with the realtor. I don't necessarily think I'm going to get that deal under contract, but I want to build a relationship with that realtor because I want them to know, number one, I don't have an agent representing me so they can get both sides of the commission. And number two, if they ever bring me another vacant lot like this one, and they have a client who just wants an offer, a cash offer, I'll pay them 10% commissions. Yeah. And they're all of a sudden like, oh.

Well, and that's huge, right? That's so different than residential real estate. So, you know, with tools like Redfin, I just, I can show them, I can say, dang, you know, it's listed for 25, but I'm looking right now, did you know there's like another property a mile away that's listed right now for 15? So, I don't know, like how negotiable is your client

on their price? Like, and then I look at solds, I just, it's really easy in Redfin to switch to solds and I say, oh man, there's some solds here that sold six months ago, similar size for five grand. So how negotiable is your, your client's not in a hurry to sell this thing, right? I mean, in a perfect world, I would need to be at around five grand to buy this thing. I know it's not going to work, is it? Usually the realtors, because this time I've already told them, I want to pay you a bunch of money if you bring me deals. And I live in St. Louis.

They know I don't live in Florida. And they're like, well, listen, just email me an offer and I'll send it to the client. And so at that point, I'm getting their name and number. I'm getting their email address. And I'm saying, listen, if you ever find another property out like an off market vacant lot that I can buy at a good discount, I'll give you 10% commissions, which is big. You know, I tell my students all the time, it's about the realtor, not the listing. Yeah. And it's funny,

us old schoolers understand the relationships more impactful than the actual listing itself. As many of you know, I'm constantly on the move, juggling multiple businesses, traveling and ensuring I get my morning workouts in. Staying fresh isn't just a preference, it's a necessity. But let's face it, after back to back meetings, juggling two kids at home and the hustle and bustle of everyday life, body odor can become an issue. But here's the deal. Mando has revolutionized how I stay

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you're talking to a homeowner, what type of questions are you asking? Because in our world, as you know, like, we're talking about condition of the home, we're talking about the neighborhood, is it owner occupied neighborhood, is it tenant ridden neighborhood, that kind of stuff, right? So land can be different.

Like what are the typical questions you want to ask a realtor or a homeowner in that case? Yeah, the main one is access. Okay. Like can you get to the property, is it landlocked? Because sometimes if it's landlocked, I'll still make an offer, but it's going to be like $500 or $1,000 or something.

Just really, really. People buy landlocked land. I've sold lots of landlocked land to neighbors, to other people that know how to get access, legal access to it. There's some states that where you're required by law to have access to whatever land you own, but you have to go through a legal process to do it, and that may cost money, but...

There. So that's why, you know, I many times, when I'm making an offer on a landlocked property, I'll tell the seller, I'm not gonna be the guy to buy this, but I might be able to find somebody else who can buy it. Yeah. So I need, you know, I need three to six months.

So I'm honest with them. I'm telling them, I'm a wholesaler, and I'm honest with them. I'm telling them, I'm a wholesaler and I'm going to try to find somebody else that will buy this from me. And if I do, then I close on it. But to answer the question, what are you looking for? Road access is the main one, right? Either actual road access or legal access. Because sometimes there won't be a road, but it'll be plotted. You'll see the road. The other thing is wetlands and floodplains. Is it wetlands or floodplains? Now, I have wholesale a lot of land that is three months out of the year underwater.

And people still buy that land because it's close to... There's an area up northern Florida where there's a lot of spring-fed rivers. And people buy land up there just to bring their motor home and then go drive a half mile down to the river to go floating down the river with the alligators or something, right? So I don't know why people do that. Does that sound enjoyable?

No, but people do it. Yeah. So, but they don't care. They're not gonna build a house on there. So anyway, access, floodplain wetlands. The other one is like the terrain, the slope. You know, is it super steep? Is it pretty flat?

So that's important to know. And that's, all these things aren't deal killers. But like, it's crazy. There's a saying in land, there's a pig for every barn. Cause you may think who on earth would wanna buy this property. But you know, a neighbor might. I've heard stories of where like somebody bought,

they got a property under contract, not realizing it was on the side of a mountain. But they sold it like that to a bunch of rock climbers that wanted their own property where they could go rock climbing, mountain climbing up the side of this mountain. So in our world, in real estate, I try to always help people understand, don't prejudge your buyer.

So the deal that you think isn't a deal, a lot of times there's one call that will come into that they're going to say, I want it. So I'll give you a perfect example. My world, you're familiar with it, but a property in a great neighborhood, but it seems like it's a little overpriced, like there's not a big margin to it, but it needs updating. In our world, the mail formula won't work for that. It seems like you're gonna be paying too much,

but you go and say, you know what, I don't wanna prejudge a buyer who might remodel the home themselves. There's a buyer out there that can't get a property in this hot neighborhood, it's under value for the neighborhood neighborhood and they'll do the work. And I can't tell you how many, I'm sure you've done the same thing in the residential space. Like you find one buyer, you have one call, you sell the one call

and you make a money because you're not prejudging your buyer. Same thing with land is what you're saying is like you have cliff climbers that want this land because now they have their private access to these rocks and whatever. Don't prejudge the buyer and kind of what you learned from Kent, which is like, don't sell what you have, sell what they want. I think that's a major thread of information people need to understand, both in land and in real estate.

Well, it makes everything so much easier. Right. Cause you know, they're buying land out of here and, and anything will sell at the right price. Yeah. You can sell anything at the right price. And so that's the cool thing about land, because there's not so much competition, there's not a bunch of other YouTube university wholesalers chasing these few homeowners here. Let me plug you real quick. Go to Joe's YouTube, by the way. Go to anything he has, because

if you want to get more information on this, you need to go follow Joe. This is why he is here. So what's Instagram, YouTube? Let me plug you so people know where to find you. Well just go and search for Joe McCall. Okay, Joe McCall, MCC-ALL. Yes, thanks. Yes. Okay, so I have a question regarding that. What about infrastructure? Like does that, do you care really? Obviously a cliff ridden thing doesn't have any infrastructure. There's no... No, I don't care. I really don't.

Sometimes you can go too deep into analyzing a property. And here's again why I do 90 days. Because I let the mark, sometimes, you know, land is harder to comp than houses. Sure. Because there's fewer of it and you can't filter by square foot or number of beds or how when it was built or whatever. But with land, you just got to take your best guess sometimes. So it never takes me longer than five minutes to analyze a property.

And I'm always conservative. And I'm like, all right, well, conservatively, I think I could sell it for this in one or two months. I want to be in and out real quick. And then I subtract my numbers. and I never offer more than 50% of what I think I can sell it quickly for in one or two months. And in speed, for sake of speed, remind everyone, I bring you 123 Main Street or the address.

What's the fastest way for them to find that value again? Redfin? Redfin and Zillow. Zillow. And just go look for like kind land properties in a general area? Yeah. Yeah, so I've got a bunch of YouTube videos that teach that. I also just, in the last week, you've heard of Manus.

I am. It's a, you've heard of agentic AI? Yeah. OK. That's where you use AI as like an agent to do stuff for you. Manus.im, M-A-N-U-S.im is one of those agentic AI tools. Yeah.

I started geeking out over it one night and I had it build a Chrome extension for me for Zillow. So you go to Zillow and you search for your property, right? And you get it in the center of that map and you set your filters for land and solds in the last 12 months and between one and five acres or whatever. And you zoom out until you get like 20 comps and you click my extension. It'll scrape all of the comps and you do that for solds and actives and pendings. Right.

And it'll scrape all of these and then give you a median price, an average price per acre, a median price per acre and all of that. And then you can say, all right, only show me the cheapest, the lowest 50%. And it filters out and shows you the lowest 50%. And then you say, all right, so based on,

and you'll see a median price per acre for actives and a median price per acre for solds, right? So I just choose the lower of the two. Then it calculates based, if my property is two acres, it tells me what that property might be worth. Then I subtract all my profit, 10 grand profit, 2,500 in closing costs, $1,000 for unknown and 500 bucks for photos. And it gives me a number to offer. And it tells me if that number is more or less than 50%.

And then if, so it's cool. I don't know anything about code, nothing. And I started with, hey, this is what I wanna do. And I was typing this to Manus. How do I do it? And at first it said, well, that's against Zillow's terms and conditions, you can't just go

and scrape stuff off their website. I said, well, but is there another way to do it? And then it said, well, yeah, you could create a Chrome extension. You know what a Chrome extension is, right? I said, okay, well, how do I do that? And it walked me through and like 57 versions later, I got this thing that's actually works

and you can export it into a spreadsheet. It's really cool. I'm going to be using it pretty soon on my YouTube channel. I'm going to be showing how to use it and giving it away for free. So I use tools like that when I'm evaluating properties. So I put in the address or address of a similar property nearby. I get it in the center of my Zillow map.

And then I set my parameters. And I zoom in or zoom out until I get 10 or the center of my Zillow map. And then I set my parameters and I zoom in or zoom out until I get 10 or 20 comps. And then I just look at price per acres. So they're gonna be properties all different sizes. And I get like an average or a median price per acre. And that's how I determine the value of my property. See, the reason why I love this is because I wanted

something I could do with my teenager boys. I got four kids. Right now, my oldest are 21 and 20, and then I have girls that are 17, geez, and 14. But my boys, when they were 14 and 15 years old, they wanted some extra money to get a car. And we were traveling a lot at the time, so they couldn't get jobs. Like, we were traveling to Europe for months at a time and whatever. So I said, well, let's do land together. And this is really one of the main reasons why I got into land, because I wanted to do something with my boys. And my boys at the time, they're good kids, they're smart. But I didn't want to train a 14-year-old kid how to talk to some 80-year-old lady who has been living in this house for 30 years and try to get them to

understand how to estimate repairs and the ARV of a property and then learn how to negotiate with sellers. I just said, let's figure out a way to do this where it's just transactional. It's just systems and automation. So that's when I developed a system of, let's find out where the buyers are. Let's send them postcards. Let's send them to a voicemail. So my boys started listening to the voicemails a couple of times a week, would listen to the voicemails.

And then they would go to Zillow to find all of these comps. And I gave them a spreadsheet. And they would figure out what the property is worth. And without my supervision, eventually, they would just send offers. They would send the offers themselves to the sellers and we get one out of 30, one out of 40 accepted.

And with my boys, because I was doing deals on my own as well at the time, they did over $151,000, $151,000 in profits on these deals. I only paid them 15% profit, right? But yeah, they both were able, not nice cars, but they were able to get, you know, good 10 year old. No, no, no.

No, not at all. Okay, how rich you are. They don't deserve it. Yeah. So it's so easy. My teen year old. Yeah. Now that's great. And so the, the thing that I want everyone to really hear is you take genuinely, if you're just doing redfin, less than five minutes comping a property. Yeah. And you just do like kind acreage and you zoom out until you have 20 comps or so. Yeah.

You say, okay, this is what we're selling at. And you take the bottom third and say, okay, I need to be closer into this bottom third. I mean, that's the simplicity. I mean, that's, man, you're making me really want to get in the land. Um, just cause it is simple. So I have a kind of interesting question. I have a really good friend that does a lot of mineral rights and oil rights in Texas. And so he-

And so Ember probably too. And he crushes it. Yeah. So if you come across that, or when you come across that, how do you handle it? I don't. Because like that's, I don't, I like to keep things simple. So what I do though is I find the guys

that are doing those and I bring the deal to them. I say, hey, I got a deal here, do you wanna partner on it? So if you had a deal in Texas, you would call my buddy, which I'm happy to actually make this introduction. He is a student of mine and he has a whole mineral and oil company. That's complicated. It is. But that's why he's killing it mineral and oil company. That's complicated. It is.

That's why he's killing it because it's intimidating everybody else like me. That's right. So we're just bringing our deals to him. And you know what's interesting is he reverse engineered this company. He said he came to me because he was like, I already have the baseline mineral oil company.

I need more access to more land and opportunity, blah, blah, and so let me hire you as a coach so I can get into the real estate side of it. And so now he's crushing it because he runs this wholesaling transactional and anything he comes across that has this, right? So he's like, dude, it's a feeder funnel to the bigger business, which is the mineral and oil, right? So let's talk offline. I just wrote him a number.

But so that happens all the time, right? You come across every area has kind of these things that are unique to it. But I join as many different real estate investing Facebook groups as I can. Every market has their own little Florida, South Florida, real estate investors, whatever, right? Right. So I'll join all of those that I can. And there's also a lot of local buy-sell trades groups,

Facebook groups in areas by county or by city. And so a lot of times I'll put something on those Facebook groups. Hey, I got this five acre lot. Has anybody ever done a deal in this area? Yeah. Four. And you'll find people there that

are doing deals in that area. And I'll tell them, I say, hey, listen, I don't have time to mess with this. You want to partner with me on it. I already got it under contract. And yeah, I'll do some kind of JV agreement with them on the side. So even if you guys make 10 grand, you give them five, same as everything, and it just reduces your friction. You don't have to work as hard. You give away half, but who cares? So the other thing I'm thinking about is I'm literally contemplating how I put this into my business.

Acreage. Do you care? Right? So I have a student that does land entitlement. So he wants, when he goes after land, he wants certain acreage. Like he doesn't want to have a two acre thing, right? He wants 20 plus. That's his model.

Do you care? Do you try to? There's a really cool tool called the land portal. And there's some other tools that do this. But the Appkey brothers, I've met them once or twice, really nice guys. They have a tool called land portal. And the cool thing about that tool is you can go into a county if you want to do entitlements or subdivise, you have to have a certain minimum road frontage to do that with white, right? So you can have one or two entrances, you know. So what they do with their, they've used AI to, instead of just trusting the categorization from the county that this is vacant land, they use AI to look at the satellite image

and to see if there's a structure on it or not. Then that will tell it it's a vacant lot, right? Then you'd also, you can say, only give me properties that have road access, that have at least 100 feet of road access, that is 10 acres, 20 acres or bigger, that is no more than 25% wetland that has at least 85% of the property below a certain slope percentage slope and so it's pretty crazy you could really narrow down and you don't really target anything like that you just kind of go simple is better more is better yeah yeah so like I feel or acreage you just kind of go after yeah so that's important to really think about that

though because if I'm targeting Charlotte or Lee County in Florida, for example, right? Because I see there's a ton of activity there. I just go to Redfin and I say, well, what are the people buying? And remember, I talked about you download that list. And you can see most people are buying quarter-acre little infill lots. Infill. So that's what I'm going to target, people who own quarter-acre infill lots.

I'm just going to say, give me all of the landowners that have owned it for over 10 years between this acreage size and this acreage size and don't live in the area. So I can say out of zip code. And that's the only filtering that I do. So easy. I get as many as I can and I just mail 500, a thousand postcards a week. Or call them, you know. So the other thing I was thinking about, so when I was doing a lot of infill lots in Phoenix,

we were getting like, our buyer typically was either a spec home builder of some sort. And so they would usually buy it around anywhere from 10% or 25% of value of finished product, right? Is that still a 10 to 25% of value of finished products of the homes, 500 grand, they're willing to buy the land for give or take 100 grand. No more than, yeah, between 50 to 100 grand. And it's the same kind of thing.

And so when I get a deal under contract, or when I'm making an offer, I kind of look to see, all right, well, what are similar transactions in the last six months? What are they selling for? And when I get under contract, the first thing I do to see, all right, well, what are similar transactions in the last six months? What are they selling for? And when I get under contract, the first thing I do is I call at least 10 or 20 realtors that have sold land there before recently and realtors who have new home construction. And I asked them, I said, is your client who built this house,

are they looking for more land? And and those I love working with realtors They make your job so much easier to the newbies that it's okay I don't know if I used to be afraid of working with realtors Yeah, but they're amazing and you know with all these new wholesaling regulations coming around right it's getting harder It's illegal immoral and fattening to wholesale anymore So just take the deal down work with realtors and and have them do the work of selling for you All right. So you have a challenge you do Regarding because there's a lot of content

There's a lot of questions that I wasn't able to ask right here on this episode If someone wants to know more they can do your challenge flip dirt challenge comm crack. Yes. Thank you Yeah, every week we run this challenge. Okay, and I dive deep so I talked a lot of like Technical stuff here, but I show how to do it. And I show how to do it with free tools, premium paid tools. I show free marketing and cheap marketing. You know, that Chrome extension thing I talked about, I give it away in the challenge. That's great.

So it's, it's fun. We go in and we just teach you how to pick a market, how to do marketing, how to make offers, how to find the buyers. And it blows people away how simple it really is. And I love doing it. Yeah. So if you don't get everything you want from this episode, go to flipdirtchallenge.com, take to a challenge.

Yeah. Hey dude, thank you very much for showing up. This was incredible. Appreciate it, Justin. Thank you. All right. So this is pretty cool. And you think there's a couple people that want to be able to flip some dirt, then I

would tell you to share this episode with at least two of your friends who think this is a pretty cool episode We'll see you on the next episode. Peace