Episode 8: The Super Power of an In-House Sales Team

🎙️ Welcome Back to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️

In Episode 8, hosts Clay Hepler and Justin Piche explore the transformative power of having an in-house sales team, focusing on the disposition process in land investing. Joined by special guest Brian DeSirey, Justin's sales manager, they discuss strategies to maximize sales potential and streamline operations.

Key Highlights:

1. Quarterly Goals Update: Clay and Justin share their progress, revealing successes and challenges in reaching their ambitious financial targets.
2. The Importance of Disposition: The hosts address common excuses for slow sales, emphasizing the need for a structured process to ensure properties are sold quickly and efficiently.
3. Meet Brian DeSirey: Brian shares his journey from the early days of Justin's business to becoming a key player in the disposition process, detailing the skills and strategies that have contributed to his success.
4. Building a Buyer’s List: Discover effective strategies for creating and maintaining a robust buyer’s list, including how to engage potential buyers and tailor marketing efforts to attract the right audience.
5. Negotiating with Realtors: Brian provides insights on the dynamics of working with realtors, including how to negotiate commissions effectively and the advantages of having an in-house sales team.
6. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): The hosts outline essential metrics for tracking the performance of the disposition team, such as lead response times and the effectiveness of various marketing strategies.
7. Real-World Examples: Justin shares insights from his current projects, illustrating the importance of adaptability and strategic decision-making in navigating challenges.
8. Actionable Takeaways: The episode concludes with practical advice on when to hire a disposition manager and how to structure their compensation for long-term growth.

This episode is filled with valuable insights and actionable strategies to help you leverage an in-house sales team for your land investing business. Whether you're starting out or refining your processes, this conversation is a must-listen!

Hosts:

• Clay Hepler: A seasoned real estate entrepreneur focused on building an eight-figure land flipping and development business.

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Transcript

Clay Hepler (00:00)
incredibly facetious as you know. Welcome to the Ground Game Podcast. This is your host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:05)
And this is Justin Piche, and we're here to show you how to win the ground game.

Clay Hepler (00:24)
Beautiful man, well I know we got some really cool stuff to talk about today. We're gonna do a little bit of goal updates for the quarter for our top goals. We have a special guest today, which we're gonna dive deep into Dispo. It's really interesting man, I've been hearing lately the excuse of, the reason why deals aren't selling is the election, or the reason why deals aren't selling.

is my specific market. And I think that a lot of times, land investors, me included, want to stuff the top of the funnel, when in reality the middle and the end, in terms of selling the deals quickly, and also making sure that they get the closing in the fastest way possible. Those are some really big constraints. And so we're going actually address one of the constraints, which is putting together a process to reliably and consistently get Dispo.

Justin Piche (01:11)
you

you

Clay Hepler (01:22)
and deals dispo quickly and then you're going to take away a part of the team building corner this week, which I'm super pumped little deal review as we always do every single week. Do you have anything to add brother before we hop right into our goals?

Justin Piche (01:37)
This now this is golden, let me maybe introduce our guest today. So we have Brian to Siri Brian and works on my team. He is my sales manager. So when it comes to this positions, I quite literally don't do anything.

Now that's not to say I don't have some input, but Brian has taken the team from, we've worked together now for more than two years and he's taken the entire Dispo process and developed it essentially from the early fledgling stage of my business to where it is now. And so, you know, we're talking about these Dispo, we're talking about Dispo today and know, Clay was messaging me or texting me earlier in the week and I like, let's just get Brian on here, hear it straight from the horse's mouth. And I think that'll be a more valuable, more valuable information for our audience.

Clay Hepler (02:22)
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, so I'm really pumped to get into that. Justin, mean, dude, tell me where you're at with your goals for Realize Rev so far.

Justin Piche (02:30)
Yeah, so last week we closed on a couple of properties in one of our larger developments. it's a 22 properties in a 24 lot subdivide that we sold. And so we've now sold 23 out of the 24 lots. We have one lot left. The biggest and most expensive lot of all is still remaining. But all those lots were 100 % profit, which is really exciting. total, we'll just

I what I generally do is kind of keep each lot with its own cost basis and then calculate gross profit based on reducing the cost basis for my development costs and purchase costs. So added about 200 K gross profit to the bottom line, which pushes us right above a half million so far this quarter, which is pretty good because we're a third of the way through the quarter and my goal is 800 K.

Clay Hepler (03:23)
That's freaking awesome, man. That's really, really great. And again, this is going to destroy all those excuses, including mine, on why deals aren't selling. Because I know that we have probably a similar amount in pipeline rev right now that's just sitting on the market. A little bit more than that. And we're just sort of looking at ourselves and saying, some deals are selling, but the deals that are a little bit harder to get off the shelf.

you know, what are the things that we can actually do to speed those up, incentivize buyers, put them in the right place and find the qualified buyers actually move these things quickly. That is a key to scale, right? So for me, we started yesterday, we had 359,000 under contract and projected profit. And today, we...

We have about 270,000 because we got some feedback from some brokers. This is just for the month of October. We got some feedback from brokers and they're like, some of these deals are just, they're not what you thought they were gonna be or there's some sloping issues or, and there's some floodplain issues. So, know, naturally, as we've talked about in past episodes,

the industry standard is about 70 % close rate. And so we're anticipating the 70 % of our deals to close and the 30 % to fall off. Unfortunately, sometimes the 30 % to fall off are your six figure deals. And the ones that stay are your $10,000, $20,000 deals. I wish it was like always the opposite, like the crappy deals always don't close, but.

Justin Piche (04:55)
you

I know.

Clay Hepler (05:11)
As we're all laughing, it kind of happens that way. So, you know, back to the drawing board, we're getting a lot of new leads in this week and we think we're hoping to end this week with, you know, $350, $350 in projected, under maybe $400 in leads. So that's exciting for our goal of $720 under contract

Justin Piche (05:36)
Awesome. All right. Let's jump into team building tactics, which are hard hitting actionable tactics that we actually use every week to enhance, manage and scale our teams. And this week I'm to talk about something that nobody likes and that's firing an employee. The real question is, know, when is it the right time to let an employee go?

So I have a couple of kind of works for how I like to kind of, well, I don't like to do this, but how I go about doing this. And the first is when you're deciding to fire an employee, you really have to look at your yourself.

Okay. You need to make sure that you are not the reason why this person failed. And so there's a, maybe a framework that anybody can use. I like to call it the build framework. And this is what this is before deciding to terminate an employee. So first is bringing expectations in writing. This employee needs to clearly understand what their objectives are and what the minimum expectations are for them to be successful at their job. And if they don't have that information, if you haven't provided that to them, then you are failing.

The second is to understand their barriers or issues. Right? If they, if there's a reason why they can't meet this, meet these expectations, you've got to understand that and either adjust the expectations or very quickly, maybe not hire that person for the role. That's more something that you do on the front end, even when you're considering hiring somebody. you know, last week, Clay went through some exceptional framework on get it, want it and capacity to do it. And that piece of it is really the capacity to do it. Right? What are their.

their barriers and issues. If they don't have the capacity to do it, ideally you find that on the front end, you know, but oftentimes roles change, you give people new roles and you gotta figure out and understand their barriers and issues. So that's the you. The I is identify improvement needs clearly. And the only way you're going to do that is by continuously giving your employees feedback, right? If you're not giving them feedback on what they're doing on a regular basis, and you just decide to fire somebody,

you're going to blindside them and that's really not fair to them. There may be an, there may have been an opportunity for them to improve and reach that standard that you have set. But if you haven't, if you haven't done, if you actually haven't set that standard with them and given them what they need to do to improve, to meet it, you're kind of failing them as the manager, right? the L is log performance issues. So you don't, you want to have, if people are failing to meet expectations, you want to have a record of it.

You want to be able to say, these are the times where we had this expectation, you didn't meet the expectation, we communicated it to you, we gave you that feedback, and then you continue to not meet that expectation. And then the last is to discuss and document that feedback. So kind of along with logging the performance issues is really bringing it back to them and discussing that feedback with them. So that's the build framework.

You know, if you get through that, you look introspective and you say, you know, I have done everything I need to to set expectations, help give feedback to my employee and communicate what those expectations are and where they're not meeting them, giving them the opportunity to then meet them. And now it's time to let that person go because it just didn't work out right. You've made the decision. They're not the right fit. They couldn't meet expectations. That brings us to the next part, which is the close framework. Now there's a lot of different opinions of when is the right time to have

the meeting to let somebody go. My personal opinion is Friday afternoon, kind of end of the week, have them roll into the weekend, you know, kind of roll out of the team and into the weekend. I've seen other information from other people of different times, like beginning of the week, beginning of the day, but I like to do it right at the end of the week. After the week's been worked, you know, they'll get paid for that week and then let them go off into the weekend. So I say choose Friday afternoon. That's the C L is location must be private. You're not going to, you know,

For us, a lot of us have virtual teams, so it's pretty easy to have a private Zoom session with this person to let them go. If you have an in-person team, you're not gonna hold this meeting and fire them in front of a bunch of people, right? You're gonna wanna do this in a private place where they can have some dignity, and it's not embarrassing, right? You're not trying to humiliate this person, you're trying to let them clearly communicate what the issue was and state what your decision was. So the next is outline the documented issues, right? You have to give this person a reason why you're firing them.

Otherwise, they're just going to have this unknown hovering over them of like, what did I do? Like, I don't understand. So if you in the previous build phase, you were documenting these issues. Now you've got to communicate what those issues are clearly. Ideally, you've already been communicating them. If you haven't, that's not good. But outline those documented issues. The S is state the decision firmly. This is really hard. This is really hard to just state your decision. Hey,

because of these issues, we have to let you go and be final on it because it's so hard when you're in a conversation with real people. And this employee that I had a discussion with on Friday that I had to let go, I mean, it was really hard. You know, she had a lot of things on her plate that were contributing to her performance issues that were really out of her control. And like as a human being, like I feel for her. I really do. I genuinely felt incredibly bad and sad that I had to make this decision.

But I can't waffle on it, right? Once the decision has been made, I've got to be confident and I've got to be very clearly and firmly state the decision, all right? Because people will pull at your heartstrings and I mean, it's a natural human reaction to have empathy for those people and question your decisions. But there's a reason why you made that decision. And then the last is exit details provided clearly. That's kind of like, hey, what is gonna happen next? And so maybe just to tell a little bit of the anecdote of how I kind of handled this, we had an employee

that had a lot going on and frankly wasn't able to get enough sleep. And this is a cold caller position. And so this employee routinely would be late to work. She would take breaks and not basically sleep through the time when she was supposed to come back to work. And so my cold calling manager had multiple meetings with her, eight documented meetings to discuss these performance issues.

and provide clear feedback of, like this is unacceptable, right? We have an entire team of folks that are meeting these expectations and you're the one employee that isn't. And even went so far as to get a commitment of saying, do you admit or not admit, but you recognize that these are some performance issues that you've had and you're gonna sign this document that commits to not having these issues in the future. And if these issues continue to happen, then we aren't really gonna have much of a choice but to terminate you or to fire you.

And so even after signing that, we still had the same issues. And so my co-calling manager brought it up to me and said, Hey, Justin, you we really need to let this person go for these reasons. And then as the owner of the business, I took the responsibility on to hold and lead that conversation. And, know,

One of the things I did for this employee is I gave her an extra month's pay, which, you know, I don't necessarily think that is the appropriate response to a lot of folks. You know, if you're, you're firing somebody for cause or for, for doing something quite bad, that's kind of more of the empathetic part of me that was like, I want this person to land on their feet. I genuinely care about this person. but it's not fair to the rest of the team to have different standards for different people. It is not fair. Okay. And it will lead to an,

discontent team. And maybe just a quick note, I was talking to another friend of mine about this because you know, this it's tough, it's tough. And I want to talk to somebody about this challenging thing I had to do in my business. And he said, Hey, you know, was talking to a friend who had went through huge layoffs with their corporation, and the corporation, big oil company, they did deep cuts, one really deep cut.

And people were thinking, man, morale is going to be so poor after these cuts and like everybody's going to be like really sad. All these people are leaving. But actually the exact opposite was true. The people that were remaining were the high performing people. The people that were left were the people that were putting in the work and producing most of the results. And the general morale was actually higher because they felt like it was equitable. All the folks that were not providing as much value were now.

not at the company anymore and the high performers were and they felt like, my company cares about me and not only cares about me, but recognizes that I am meeting these expectations and exceeding the expectations. And I feel like that generally is what happens. We think it's going to be the opposite, but that's generally what happens is that people appreciate maybe cutting the chaff out.

Clay Hepler (14:26)
Yeah, yeah, dude, what I really like about this process, the build close process is the majority of it is you taking responsibility for the outcome. Not, not I'm going to pawn, you know, pawn this off on one of my cold calling managers or as the business owner, it's your responsibility to set the right expectations on the front end.

honor those expectations, hold this person accountable to those expectations, and then still be respectful when that person leaves. The way that they react, a lot of times we think that someone's going to be, you know, maybe they're going to get very emotional or they're going to be angry or frustrated. But the reason why a lot of times that you feel that is because you didn't do what Justin just said. Right? The reason why we feel emotions in our business

is a lot of times because deep down subconsciously, we know that we didn't do what it took to actually document the best practices or to execute on the best practices that helping someone get back on their feet would take. Right? A lot of times we know that we're just going to say, they're not doing well. My copy calling manager told me this. I'm, you know, I'm just going to fire them. Right? Instead, you go through this systematic approach. So in your heart,

when you have that conversation, you state that decision firmly, like Justin just said. It comes from a place of truth. And so that's a very different conversation. the person that you're letting go understands that, and you understand that too. So the actual way that you're approaching that conversation, and the rest of the team also understands the way that you approach the conversation. So in order to not create upheaval or...

You know, create a culture of, don't know when I'm gonna get fired. If you do everything that Justin just said, you're really isolating yourself from any of the negative consequences of not actually setting someone up in this

Justin Piche (16:39)
Yeah, well said.

Clay Hepler (16:42)
So, I mean, I would like to call on our special guest today. It's like, feel like we're in like, you know, like, who wants to be a millionaire, right? And we're about to phone a friend, but this friend, you know, we're going to phone this guy and he's going to be talking for the next 30, 40 minutes. Brian, welcome a millionaire.

Bryan DeSirey (16:59)
Thanks for having me on the show. Can't wait to test my knowledge.

Clay Hepler (17:04)
Right, man. So what we're going to do here today is we're going to go through a very basic level. We're going to go through 101. And as we ask more and more questions, we're going to go to 201. So we're going to start from someone who doesn't know anything about land investing to, hey, I'm running a really successful team, which is the majority of our audience. And I want to actually just get better at Dispo. So I'd to start, Brian, from when you Justin.

two years ago. Can you explain what the role was then and sort of how it's evolved from when you started to where you are today?

Bryan DeSirey (17:45)
Yeah, well, obviously, yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to being here and just kind of sharing my experience. I'd say when I first started, was...

You know, I think one of the things that Justin definitely does a good job of and is a good quality of leadership that I'm trying to continue to do better job myself is just empowering people to make decisions on their own. When I first came into the sales, there was kind of a very loose structure of how we wanted to market properties, what the goal was. So there was a little bit of a place for me to kind of come in and just kind of just take over right from the beginning and just start responding to leads to handling the process that was already existent. But then very quickly realized that there needs to be, there needs to be a way to scale. You know, there needs to be an actual

process that gets built so we can move a lead through the buy process, whether that actually leads to a conversion and a close or whether or not we're just building a buyer's list for future. So, you know, the very beginning, it was just kind of like just jump in and try to sell the properties that we had in inventory as we were just trying to get the business going. But very quickly it became, you know, what I need to sit down and build a process and think through what I want lead flow to look like and what kind of tools do I want to use and what is it going to be like in a year or two from now? Because starting out, we had what, 10 properties?

in inventory and within a year, you that had more than tripled. So that's kind of where I first started.

Clay Hepler (19:03)
And when you were starting out, mean you're talking about building out buyers list There are sort of two camps right there is in the land world there. There's the That we plan right there's of course there's other Parts of entitlement and development, but a lot of times there's the people that hey, I'm buying desert squares, right? And and I'm doing all the dispo by myself because I can't actually afford a real estate broker and then there are the people that say

Hey, I'm just gonna rely on a real estate broker to be my primary listing partner and they're gonna be my Brian. So can you kind of explain to me like what role you play in between that and how you actually help? would someone not that's starting out just have their own agent that would be the person that's actually listing these properties and selling them?

Justin Piche (19:40)
you

Bryan DeSirey (19:54)
Yeah, well,

I'd be willing to bet that Justin would agree with me that the one word would be scaling. When Justin hired me on, it was 100 % with the idea of his vision for three to five years from now. And it wasn't necessarily, this something that I maybe need someone today, but knowing that I was gonna need somebody in the future. I think first coming on that I totally can understand why some people may not see the value right away. And to be honest, there are several ways to skin a cat. So I don't necessarily say like you have to have a a disco manager in order to be successful,

It's like, what is it that you want to accomplish in your business? Like what goals do you have? And then how do you see yourself achieving those goals? So when we first came on, like everything that we were selling was without a realtor. So there was a lot of responsibility taken on by myself to not only market properties, but actually negotiate with buyers, answer calls. So in the first six months to a year, mean, 80 % of conversations with all buyers was being done directly with myself. So if you're someone that's trying to scale a business or grow a business, I think

You very quickly will realize that once you start getting to having you know half a dozen to a dozen properties on the market it gets harder to be available on a regular basis to Put the amount of time or attention you need to and every person who calls Because you have no idea when you pick up that phone if that person is just you got five ten minutes that they're just saw something on the internet they're curious about or if it's something that they're like I got cash in hand and I want to buy so you have to take every buyer seriously and you have to give everyone a few minutes of your time and that becomes harder and harder to do the more properties that

you have. And I'd say if you rely on a realtor to market properties for you, there's a lot of risk that you're taking in that regard because you can't control that process. Probably one of the benefits of having someone like myself on board is you can get involved and you can kind of help control what you want that process to look like. So, you know, if we have a target or a goal that we want to hit on how fast we want to move a property, like that's an objective. That's something that Justin can control just by having that conversation with myself and not having to have half a dozen or a dozen conversations with

various different realtors to achieve. And each one of them may pursue that goal differently and they may interpret that goal differently. So having someone in-house allows you to have more control over the process, allows you to scale quicker, and allows you to put more time and detail into individual properties to make sure that you're hitting the objectives and goals that you've set.

Clay Hepler (22:15)
That's awesome and it's funny. I remember when I got into this business, all the older people in my life were sort of like saying, wait a second, you're telling me that you've never been to a single one of your properties, right? And I've always said, yeah, I I've always relied on local brokers, local partners to actually get the feet on the parcel.

Justin Piche (22:35)
you

Clay Hepler (22:45)
What I'm hearing you say is, I'm actually the driver, the engine behind the speed to sale, and I'm actually the guy that's listing these properties, the majority of the properties. My first question is, is that the same today? And the second question is, if I'm a listener and I want to bring a disposition manager in-house, or I want to start to focus on that and take the responsibility off of...

my brokers, how am I reducing my risk by having the broker walk the parcel? That's pretty valuable. So do those two questions make sense?

Bryan DeSirey (23:27)
Yeah, they do. And honestly, they're really great questions because I can completely understand why someone might have a concern about doing something like that because there is a good amount that you pay a realtor. So you're adding kind an additional expense. So it's like, what value am I going to get out of it? Is it, you know, is my dollar going to achieve the goals that I want? So, you know, I think when it.

As far as like your first part of the question, you know, in the last year or so, and even the last six months, my focus and my priority on speed to sale has become far more of a objective of my job than it was even a year ago. And I think when you are looking at an investment and you're someone that's trying to grow a business, like your return on capital is as valuable as how much capital you're returning. You know, obviously you need to be able to turn that capital out of profit, but speed is a huge portion of the game as well. And one of the big learning curves

that had when I first started working with realtors was realizing that we have a very different mindset on what that means. A lot of realtors will not necessarily, when you tell them, like I try to set really good expectations with people. And when I tell a realtor that I'm aggressive and that I want to sell a property quickly, it's not until I'm in the relationship with them that they realize what I actually mean by that. It doesn't matter what side of an expectation I set. It's just 99 % of the people that sell property do not have the mindset that I have.

Clay Hepler (24:24)
Mm.

Bryan DeSirey (24:46)
When I have the time to really build those relationships with those realtors and I find the ones that just click and they understand what our objective is and what our goal is, things start to move a little bit quicker and they start to move a little bit easier, but you still have to stay on top of these realtors because...

they often have a very different opinion on what speed means or what market value might mean. They're willing to be more patient. so having someone like myself in the driver's seat does help just continue to push that speed, push that agenda, make sure everything is staying on top. Because when you start growing lots of inventory, I can't imagine how hard it would be to keep track of the, don't know, 20 plus realtors that we work with across like five or six different states. It's very time. It takes a lot of time. And then when I want to actually

understand properties and I'm sure we'll talk about this a little bit later too, but there's a lot of value that comes from being able to, you know, the realtor's walk the property and they'll tell you things about the property that you may not previously realize. Here's a great actual example. We have a subdivide in Alabama, it's, you know, over a million dollars with all the lots combined. A realtor went out and walked it a couple months ago, took some photos in addition to the drone photos that we took. It wasn't until I asked a question last week that I realized that we took several photos of a creek that was flowing through the property. So I had a buyer that

wanted to buy the property, but they wanted to adjust the property lines to include a creek. And then when I was like, when I heard that in my brain, I just go, okay, well, this must be a marketable feature. Having not walked the property myself, it's hard to know if it's a creek or a stream or a, you know, just a dry creek bed. Right, so this tells me that this property, this value...

Justin Piche (26:15)
Mud pit or something. Yeah, it's hard to know

Bryan DeSirey (26:21)
This marketing value of a creek is going to be something I can use on other lots. When I reached out to my Realtor, I said, Hey, can you send me some photos of the creek? They had already taken photos and they'd already sent it to me. And I went and looked at the website listing. They never included it on any of their listings. So like, you know, the general assumption, like I thought this was a huge selling feature and I didn't have the photos myself and they weren't even using the photos that they themselves took. And by simply just asking the question, like, Hey, do we have any photos of the creek? Can we get any within less than 30 minutes? I got multiple photos of the creek sent to me.

I realized we weren't using them anywhere and like that's just a clear lapse of marketing that just takes you know an extra 10 to 15 minutes out of my day to think about the property think about the things people are telling me think about how I can sell it and then Honestly double checking the work that everyone says that they're doing I put a lot of trust in realtor sometimes and Sometimes it's deserving and sometimes it's not and I have to come back and be like hey Did they are they using this is this gonna help sell the property and then that was just an opportunity for me to improve our

that I would have hoped that they would have taken that upon themselves, but maybe it was something that they had missed, but that's a chance for me to make sure that we're all on the same page and we're trying to move this as fast as possible and use the features that we know are gonna sell it.

Clay Hepler (27:35)
Yeah, so are you saying that the majority of your deals, you're like the... You're the jet fuel in the Realtors engine? you doing mostly Realtor listings? Or are you listing stuff internally? And how do you think about, if you're doing a little bit of both, how do you think about what I should list internally, me, Brian, versus Realtors?

Bryan DeSirey (28:02)
about 90 % of properties that we probably list with realtors and then the remaining 10 % or so are going to be properties that we list ourselves off market or we'll do like a flat fee listing. A lot of times it comes down to just properties that are more unique, lower dollar value. If I have a property that's in a really rural area where it's I'm having not not having a lot of success because here's the thing like you don't want to just hire a realtor and just hope that they're going to list the property for you like you want to hire the right realtor and you want to make

You want to make sure that this person is going to be able to, you know, do the property justice and, you know, sell it quickly. So in a really rural area, you may not have as many options of who you can go to, to work with you on that property. And you may have smaller margins. So giving up, you know, six or 8 % on a property to try to motivate that realtor to go out there and sell it. You know, you're giving up a lot of commission on that front on that side as well. And also a property that, let's just say you've got a property that's like worth 30,000. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere. There's.

really nothing that's built around it. If the realtor is not incentivized to go out there and spend time in the property, then they're probably just putting it on the MLS and waiting until someone serious enough comes by for them to go out. Like I wouldn't, I'm maybe making some assumptions here that, you know, I could totally be proven wrong. But my general assumption is if it's a low dollar value in the middle of nowhere, unless the realtor is within 30 minutes, I have no reason to believe that they're going to go there on a regular basis because it's just not worth that much money to them. And the amount of money that I'd have to pay them to get the results that I would want.

It may not be worth it and I could probably take that off of the purchase price or offer some sort of really creative owner financing That's going to sell that property or move that property quicker than just listing it on the MLS. So location Price and margin would probably be the three questions. I asked myself if I'm not going to list it with a realtor

Clay Hepler (29:52)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That makes a lot of sense and and so I want to take a little bit of a turn stay in the 101 territory, but If I understand you correctly your core Position as a disposition manager is holding finding brokers holding them accountable to results In a way to accelerate the speed of sale

Bryan DeSirey (30:18)
If I had a realtor on the phone with me right now, I'd tell them my main priority with partnering with you is to ensure that every time I have someone even remotely interested in being at the property that you're able to meet them there. Maybe not every time, but the reasonable expectation should be that either you can meet them when they ask to or you reschedule a time that you can. That's the biggest priority that I could ask for a realtor is just be there because I can't be there. And I have confidence in myself as a salesperson. If I was there, I'd be able to sell these properties. Well, I can't be there. So I need someone there. That's honestly the most important.

thing for me is just be local and be willing to go to the property. And then the second thing would be like take initiative. Be willing to you know think outside the box and come to me for suggestions on how to market the property. Don't necessarily rely on me to come to you and say hey why isn't this moving? You know a good realtor is somebody who would come to me and be like hey I had a buyer who walked the property last week and they told me that blah blah blah maybe we should put in a gate or maybe we should do this or maybe we should offer this.

Justin Piche (31:14)
Yeah, we had a, I'm developing a hundred acre property in kind of middle Tennessee right now. And I just had an exceptional realtor experience. one of the things, obviously the sales side is one thing, but when you're working on a project and you're identifying a good realtor, there's a few things that I personally look for as well. One of them,

They have to be willing to go out to the property and not just willing, but say, I need to go out to this property and I'm going to do it very quickly to get you good feedback on it. Like that's a, for me, that's almost like a disqualifier. If somebody's like, I'm not going to the property. Here's your value. Then I'm like, yeah, I don't really want to work for you, work with you. Another is actually providing a CMA or market comps when backing up the value of the property, because that's a big thing that, you know, we'll talk to the local brokers and they'll say, I think, you know, we'll get a broker price opinion. And they'll say something like, either you get

you know, five to six gain acre with no supporting data whatsoever. It's like I could probably do a better job of figuring out the actual sales value based on my gut feeling and the data that I have. But what I'm looking for from you is a CMA, like a specific market analysis showing the for sale and sold comps in this local MLS that you have access to to prove to me why you think the price is what it is. And so I just had a great interaction with a realtor that was recommended to me by my friend, Larry.

who is doing all hitting those things. So Brian will end up working with them to sell and move that development. I think a lot of the stuff that Brian, the real value of the dispositions manager is gonna come when we start, when we get into the 201, because there's just, you're just limited when you only use realtors to display your properties. And I think that's probably where he can talk a lot about.

Clay Hepler (33:00)
So I would love to go into 201 in a second, but my final question to wrap up is, imagine I'm a real estate land investor, right? And Brian, I come to a guy as capable as you, and I'm doing five deals a month, right?

I'm doing five deals consistently a month, I'm a CEO, I have a lead manager, I'm maybe doing 500, I have a lead manager, I have an acquisition manager, TC, I'm maybe doing 500k a year, right? Maybe 700, right? When does it make sense, and Justin, this could also be you, you know, this is gonna bridge 101 to 201, when does it make sense to bring a Dispo manager in

to the business and why.

Bryan DeSirey (33:55)
I from my opinion, if someone were to ask me that question, I'd ask you a question and I'd say...

You know, are your goals for your business? And you know, if you tell me that your goal is to grow in like whatever that growth means to you, I'd say, if you find me the properties, I will sell the properties for you. How much time do you spend trying to market properties? How much time do you spend selling properties? If you didn't have to spend that time, what would you do with that time instead? And what value does that bring to your business? Don't look at it as what you lose by hiring someone like myself. Think about what you gain with your time. Because I think what Justin would probably say is there's a lot of things that I can do that I need to do.

And I can't if I'm stuck doing all these other things so it's very it's very one It's very easy to look at I'm losing something, but that's totally fair like you that's fair You are losing something, but what are the pros and what are you gaining and what it didn't ask yourself serious questions? Like what is what are the details what the specifics and what does that mean like a day day to day basis?

Justin Piche (34:50)
Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I would say. And I'd kind of tie it into the book, buy back your time by Dan Martel, right? What is it in your business that you enjoy doing and that brings value? And what are the things that maybe you don't enjoy doing that bring value? Right? Because if you're a person that loves the disposition side, you're CEO, but you love the sales and you love like the creative ways you can finance and sell properties. And that's where you want to spend them like your operations time, whatever operations time you allocate to your business, then

maybe you should be hiring an ops manager for the acquisition side to be your counterpart. Right. In my case, I prefer the land development. I prefer the thinking about the growth of the acquisition side. And so for me, I needed a partner on the sales side that could take the dispo. Right. And that was the decision that I came to is, man, I do not have enough time to do both of these things. I want they both are value driving. They're both revenue drivers.

They're both vitally important to the success of my business, but I prefer to work in this one. And so I need somebody who can work on the other one.

Justin Piche (35:55)
Hello. To interrupt the middle of your podcast, I have to ask you something. As we say in the middle of every podcast, if you're getting benefit from this, please

rate, review, and subscribe, or share with friends, and leave comments of what exactly you're liking, and what things that we can add to the podcast so that you can get more benefit every single week. Thanks again for listening to the Ground Game. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clay Hepler (36:27)
That makes perfect sense. I hope that that was helpful to the listeners. It's never a one size fits all prescription, unfortunately. A lot of times it's who you are in your business, exactly what you want to do like Justin pointed out. So Justin, do you want to bring us into 201 or would you like me to?

Justin Piche (36:47)
Yeah, no, let me maybe start out here because I think this is like this is where this is where you get more value by having somebody managing dispositions in house as opposed to a really common strategy in the land investing business, which is focused on the acquisitions and sell all your all your listings with brokers or sell your properties with brokers. So, Brian, from your perspective, you you have the MLS, right? That's usually the tool that most properties are sold on. In addition to MLS,

you know, getting things up on Zillow, Realtor, et cetera. What are some of the other listing channels that maybe somebody with an in-house dispositions manager can take advantage of that are effective that maybe you don't get that performance when you're working with just Realtors?

Bryan DeSirey (37:32)
Yep.

There's probably a ton that I'm not even fully utilizing yet, but the biggest ones that we use, mean, land.com or LOA network, Lands of America network, a lot of people are familiar with that, being able to list on several different places at once like land.com. I think one of the values of that company is just the domain name. If you're searching for land and you just say, want to buy land, that's going to be one of the very first places that pops up. So obviously we list our properties there. We also list our properties on Facebook.

the group page that we've been growing and enlisting on Facebook Marketplace is a huge channel that allows us to market on a very personal level within a geographical area where we join groups or people looking in that specific area. Maybe run like boost posts in keeping it to a geographical area. I'd say about 50 % of our leads come from Facebook. Most of that being Facebook Marketplace. And then the other 50 % come from a combination of all the other channels, whether that be Realtor, whether that be land.com network.

I'm trying to think of some other ones. We do some Instagram and YouTube, but they're not really great lead generators right now. Originally, if you were to ask me six months ago, I would have told you I don't think that those places will be good lead generators, but I do have a different opinion on that now. I've seen people have success. My opinion right now is that we're building our Instagram and probably start building a TikTok. I think those can be really valuable platforms for low dollar properties for people that are looking for owner financing. I'm not expecting to sell $100,000 property on Instagram.

but I do think that I could realistically get some really good buyers from Instagram if I was offering really low down payments on properties like two, three thousand something that's super affordable. yeah, right now 50 % coming from Facebook.

Justin Piche (39:17)
Yeah, Facebook is probably the honestly is like the primary value at I think when you have an in-house dispositions team that can manage those listings and manage the conversations and capture buyer information. It also allows you to capture like specifics about what people are looking for. So maybe the property that they're interested in that they're reaching out to you about is not the right property for them, which happens all the time. But now you have somebody who is engaged with you that whose information you have.

who you can specifically market to when you find properties that do meet their characteristics. And that's the challenge with using realtors only is that the leads that you generate on your properties, they're really not your leads. The realtor has those leads and they'll forge you the offers, but they're not fording you everybody's phone number and email address and like what they're looking for. Like that's not part of the, I mean, maybe you could work out a deal with them to give you all that information, but that's not part of the service that most realtors offer.

Clay Hepler (40:16)
So when I hear this guys, a couple of things pop into my head. Right? The first thing is a lot of land investors go from county to county. Right? And so they're going from, I'm in New York, next week I'm in Las Vegas, next week I'm in, you know, Arizona, next week I'm in Wyoming. And so if we're talking about building a set of buyers, I want to talk about like the core philosophy behind like, why are we building buyers? And then the second question is,

If you're driving 50 % of your leads through a channel that you're spending your time, energy, and effort on, number one, why do we need real estate brokers? Number two, is there a decreased commission that you negotiate with them if you bring a buyer? And so the first question to remember is,

buyer leads if you're going to a bunch of different markets. Number two is if you're controlling the leads, why are we using brokers?

Bryan DeSirey (41:19)
Yeah, so a buyer leads in different markets, you know, from New York to Las Vegas, obviously, that's going to be a pretty substantial difference. But at least for us, you know, how we usually market properties is we do go almost like state by state. So building a buyer's list in a particular state makes a lot of sense for us because a lot of, you know, it's amazing. I'll have people tell me that they're, it's like, I'm looking in Northern Alabama. But and I will personally, I will not recommend certain properties to them because I think it's outside their location. And then the

it may turn out that they're actually more price motivated than they are location motivated. And we try to do as best job as we can is asking good questions and try to qualify. I'd say we probably have about 1500 buyers right now that we've more or less have answered most of the questions that we want to know. Where are you looking? What's your budget?

What's your timeline to purchase? What do you want to do on the property? We asked like five to seven questions to try to build a background, but even once people answer those questions, sometimes you don't really realize what they're, which one of those might be really the big priority. And, know, I've had people reach out to me about properties that I didn't even think was in the state they wanted to be in. But because it was the right type of property, you know, it still works. So being able to be a little bit loose with some of our email marketing allows us to, you know, try to be tailored to people based on what they tell us.

but also giving them a little bit of flexibility. So if I've got a property that's like seven acres and someone tells me I'm looking between one to five, I'll probably still send them that property. I'm kind of just kind of going off of loose parameters of what they tell me. And then the second question, can you remind me what the second question was? Commission?

Clay Hepler (42:52)
Yeah, yeah, so the second question is we're getting 50 % of our leads. Realtors are... We all know what realtors are. We don't have to go on a tangent about freaking realtors. Asking for 10%. I talked to a guy today, he wanted 10%. He said, it's $2,000 difference between 8 to 10 % and 6 % or whatever. He's like, so why is it a big difference to you?

Justin Piche (42:53)
Buy realtors.

Clay Hepler (43:22)
and I said to him, you're saying why is it a big difference to me? Why is it a big difference to you? And so I'm just kind of a sidetrack there.

Justin Piche (43:32)
Yeah, and let's be clear, you know, real quick, because maybe some realtors are listening to this. I love good realtors. I love good realtors. They absolutely will move land faster than we can because they have built up a reputation in the area they're working. the good realtors have a bunch of buyer contacts. They know people who are looking for parcels like yours and can close deals really quick. I think, Clay, I think I can relate that your frustration comes from

There's a lot of not good realtors out there. And so it can be really frustrating, you know, and, and, and April, a 10 % commission. Sure. It's 10%, but that might be 20 or 25 % of your margin on a deal. You know, like if you think about it that way, you're giving away a quarter of your deal. I that's not, it's, that's approaching more than hard money or more than a deal funder or close to a deal funders rate on a profit split just for somebody to listen on the MLS. So anyway,

Clay Hepler (44:30)
That's what I do.

Bryan DeSirey (44:31)
Yeah. you want, you want, nothing's worse than paying a commission on a property where you know that you did most of the work to sell it. That is, that is the worst feeling. And yeah, we've been there before. But I agree. There are great realtors out there. And like in any industry, you just kind of have to work through, you know, like just like contractors or surveyors, like you, you've got good ones and you've got bad ones. But I do negotiate on all of our realtors. Again, it's one of those things when I start the conversation and I kind of just give them an expectation about who we are and how fast we want to sell property and

Justin Piche (44:36)
know, yeah, which we have done.

Bryan DeSirey (45:01)
Being investors and and like I hope that they would look at this one perspective of I'm trying to build a relationship with you I want if you fulfill the goals that I've that I'm looking for which I don't think they're crazy to ask for and if you can't if you can't fulfill all the goals and like just be honest with me because I maybe it's not the right property for you, but maybe there's another one that is But I want to build a relationship with that realtor knowing that you know getting 3 % commission on one property, but getting 10 properties I mean we have a realtor and a property in Alabama

The realtor had a client that was asking about a property, ended up buying the property herself and the client wasn't interested. And I enjoyed just working with her in that brief exchange as she was representing her client that I've given her several properties since then. It hasn't even been a month and we haven't even closed on the property she's in a contract with. And I'm under contract on three properties that she just got a listing agreement for. And I've got two or three more properties and I'm going to throw her away. And so it's like, you know, that is, I'm building a relationship with this realtor.

She's done a great job and she's going to make 3%. So I typically will negotiate. say, Hey, I'll do a 6 % commission. If I bring the buyer and there's no buyer's agent, then your commission will be 3%. It's basically like we split the commission. if, if I bring the buyer, but the buyer has a buyer's agent, I'll still pay that 3 % for the buyer's commission. obviously just rewarding both people, but typically, you know, and I'll have rewriters tell me all the time. They're like, I don't even know where you get these buyers from. I mean, I've, I've had several, I've had at least five realtors tell me in the last.

couple months that they're like I don't even know how you find buyers because you find buyers faster than I do.

Clay Hepler (46:38)
Okay, so if I get that right for the listeners, Brian's on the phone with them. If they say 10%, he hangs up the phone. Okay?

Justin Piche (46:44)
you

Bryan DeSirey (46:47)
They don't even tell you 10%. They'll usually ask me and I'll...

Clay Hepler (46:49)
I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding, I'm just... I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding.

Justin Piche (46:49)
Yeah.

Bryan DeSirey (46:53)
try to have that conversation on the phone and try to educate, just let them, maybe not educate, I don't want to sound like condescending, but let them know that like, you know, we have, we're a company with big goals and we want to find people in these areas that we can trust to work with in the future. So if we do a great job together, I'm not even going to think about calling somebody else because I already know I have someone I can trust. And that saves me time to not have to, I mean, the amount of work that it takes to find just a realtor in general, I don't want to go through that process every time I list a property.

Clay Hepler (47:22)
Right, so on the non-comical front, so you're going for 6 % every time, okay? And you're giving them 3%. Whether it's a 250, we're going to talk about price range, by the way. I think this is really relevant, right? Because you were talking about lower dollar properties that you're listing in the house. But we're going to talk about bigger dollar properties in a second here. 3 % to the buyer, to this listing broker. If you bring a buyer,

It's they get paid their 3%, no problem. If you bring a listing or a buyer's agent, then you will still pay the 3%, in other words.

Bryan DeSirey (48:02)
Yes, I would pay both the buyer and the seller's commission in that case.

Justin Piche (48:05)
Yeah, and if they bring the buyer as well, like if our selling agent brings the buyer, then they get both sides of the commission.

Clay Hepler (48:07)
Okay.

Justin Piche (48:13)
And it's one of the pitches too, when we're working with a realtor, right? Is that it's not just you marketing this property. Like we are spending money. We have employees working to list these in multiple other places. We're putting ad dollars behind a lot of these properties that we're listing. We are generating a buyer's funnel for you as well. Like that's the value is like we're spending a good bit of money and time and expertise in finding these buyers.

Clay Hepler (48:14)
Okay, okay. So here

Justin Piche (48:39)
and you're still going to get the sales, the seller's agent commission no matter what, just for taking the deal. Anyway.

Bryan DeSirey (48:47)
And I will even pre-qualify those buyers just a little bit too. So normally when they're reaching out to a realtor, they usually have a few questions that are answers and they are just looking at time to get out there and meet somebody.

Clay Hepler (48:48)
Yeah.

Okay, okay. So one thing I think is in 201, which is really important is a lot of new land investors will get a deal under contract. They'll say, you know what, I looked at the Zillow, the nearest Zillow listing, right? And this

And so they say two days before the closing, hey, I need to call a broker. And so they call the broker up two days before closing. And the broker says, I'm sorry, it's not going to be 10,000 acres, it's actually going be six. Right? Those new investors can know about this and our old time investors, we remember when we were just starting out and we were on the five yard line and we're like,

I guess I have to call my funder up and tell him that this is not going to be a deal, right? So, where do you enter the process as the disposition manager? So, acquisition team gets the deal under contract. know, normally the broker is the person like the CEO, Justin or our listeners. They're saying, okay, we have this new deal. Sometimes people do it ahead of time.

Justin and I do it when we get the deal under contract. That's when we verify values. Brian, when do you get into the process and what are your initial steps from start to finish?

Bryan DeSirey (50:30)
Yeah, so that's actually something I'm trying to continue to get better at now.

I'd say in the past, I typically would get involved in the process right around the time, maybe a week or two before we were starting to either pre-market or market. typically the process of the property had already been purchased. We've already done any due diligence and any clearing work. A lot of that's kind of already been worked out. Now what I'm trying to starting to do is get involved in the process almost around the same time that we go on a contract. So we're having weekly meetings and getting involved right when the property comes in. that there's a lot of value in being able to be

Justin Piche (50:37)
you

Bryan DeSirey (51:05)
of what's coming because half of my inventory is not even available yet. Now granted, I can't necessarily mention that to people in the way that's gonna sell it, but having a awareness of what is coming in the pipeline, there's value to be able to market and pre-market properties to like your pre-built buyers list that you have internally or in-house. But then there's also a lot of value that comes to like, am gonna market and sell this? Where previously in the past, we might put a property on the market and not realize for a month or two that, you maybe I need to put some clearing in or maybe I need to

put in a gate because I'm having a hard time for people to find it. Now I've been doing this for a few years now that I've kind of started to identify those issues ahead of time. So getting involved in the process before, before the property ever even gets to the market allows us to make sure that before it's even on the market and available, it's pretty much ready to be listed. You know, we're starting to do advertisements for properties like coming soon. So people are aware that there will be a new listing before we even list it. So I want to get involved.

in the process, ideally in a perfect world, I would get involved in the process like a week or two after we put it on our contract. And I would be involved all the way through the closing and then obviously marketing and sales.

Justin Piche (52:10)
Yeah. I think one of the things that makes that such a good idea is also balancing the workload. know, Brian has developed quite a robust process now for listing properties. There's a whole series of email automations that are built out for buyers that come in.

Clay Hepler (52:12)
Okay.

Justin Piche (52:32)
that tell them all the information they need to know about the property. A ton of different automations, Zapier automations that get made to make sure and follow up on automations and follow up plans that get made to make sure all that stuff flows. so if I surprise him, for example, last week, we bought three properties last week, bought one this week, and we have like two others that were kind of hanging out in the pipeline ready to get listed. That's a lot. Like six, seven properties all at once to try to list when we're trying to

We're targeting really hard focus on minimizing the amount of time cash is deployed until it comes back in as profit. That's just a lot of work and things will just continue to push. So Brian gets involved, you know, week two, we're in our transaction coordination meetings and we're looking at each property coming down the pipeline, seeing when the close date is, doing all the prep work and verifying all the prep work that we need to effectively pre-market and then fully market once we take title to the property. He can balance that workload over time.

and get things listed more efficiently and not basically feel completely overwhelmed when we have a bunch of properties closing at once.

Bryan DeSirey (53:38)
Yep. And also to answer the other part of your question, Clay, like what is it that we actually do when we're listing a property? I try to, I try to build everything so that, the people on my team are capable of finding the answers without having to ask me like 99 % of the time. So, you know, I'll build, I'll make sure that we have all the answers. Like what are the most common questions I'm going to get about like zoning or how does owner financing work or like, what are my price ranges or like, what's my flexibility on, you know, price, where exactly is it located? How do I access?

I mean, there's there's a hundred questions that you might get and I want to make sure that I have the answers to all of these ahead of time and put them in a place that's really easy for people on my team to find so when they're talking to somebody on the phone or talking to somebody on Facebook They're able to answer those questions without having to come to me And then there's automated processes that Justin was mentioning that they don't even have to do all the conversation themselves You know, they just kind of they do the beginning conversation and they put them in the CRM follow boss and then they'll trigger those automated action plans

maybe fill in a few custom fields and 80 % 90 % of their communication is basically automated and they only have to focus their time on the people that get back to them. So I'd say over half of my work when it comes to listening to property is making sure that everyone on my team has the information that they need so that I don't you know because in the past like I said I used to take all these calls myself and now I only get on the call to close so if someone's wanting to put in an offer they want to negotiate that's usually when I'll get involved but most of that conversation happens with my team members or VA.

Thanks

Clay Hepler (55:10)
Coffee's for closers, baby. I love it. So, Brian, you've gone through a lot of evolutions in your role. What is the current biggest constraint in your process that prevents you from selling deals faster?

Bryan DeSirey (55:31)
time and what we were just talking about getting involved in the sales side earlier.

If I could, yeah, for sure. Right now, I mean, as Justin just said, I there is handful of properties right now that we are wanting to pre-market and start gaining interest on it. And a property that we had just closed on on Friday that needs to get put up on the market. And I've been so busy this week. I got a team member that's out, so I'm having to answer their calls. And I also have a ton of offers that have come in over the weekend, which is great. But it has made it harder for me to list that property. So if this was something that, you

Clay Hepler (55:38)
That's the biggest constraint.

Bryan DeSirey (56:06)
I'll just say I just need to do a better job myself of finding the time ahead of time so that weeks before it becomes on the market Ideally most of the work is done so that it's not such a rush at the last minute to try to get it on the market because every day That it doesn't do anything. It's just money sitting there so

Clay Hepler (56:25)
That's right. So I want to transition to, we've talked a lot of about theoreticals, right? We've talked about, you know, what's the 101 beginning of the 201, but I'd to get a little bit more rooted in data, right? As you are looking at the performance of your dispositions department, right? Let's think about your KPIs that you're really tracking. Let's talk about your KPIs that you're really tracking.

I want to focus on department-wide, Brian, and then want to talk a little bit about Facebook KPIs and maybe general KPIs, like what you can expect from a Facebook post. Let me just round this out here. Justin and I a couple weeks ago talked about if you get X amount of cold calls, you can expect Y lead. If you get X amount of mailers, you can expect...

this response. I want to talk about those KPIs on the disposition side. Does that make sense?

Bryan DeSirey (57:30)
Yep.

This came to my mind just a few minutes ago. We were talking about commissions and we were going to talk about price ranges on commissions and we of forgot to finish that last point. But I will say that on larger value properties, I do tend to ask for, we haven't done this as much, but it is something I'm doing more now, is negotiating on a slightly lower commission. So we had a property in Alabama that it's going to be like a $400,000 purchase price. And instead of doing like 6 % and splitting the commission, know, we're doing like 5%. So on larger value properties, we will...

negotiate on price and that's one of the benefits of building a relationship with a realtor as well because they understand the business that you do with them is greater than just a one-off deal so it's it's they're more willing to work with you on commission price on larger value property simply because they understand that you know you give them a lot of business so but as far as KPIs like what are the KPIs for our department gosh I wish I had like an amazing answer for you guys because it sales

You know, it's so hard because you're not, A, you're not there in person and B, if anyone has sold anything, people almost never tell you exactly what they're thinking when they tell you no. You know, they don't want to offend you or hurt your feelings and you don't know what you don't know. So we tend to draw a lot of assumptions. Like when things are slow right now, it's like, maybe it's the election or maybe it's the interest rates or, you know, we're trying to draw conclusions based off of the limited data we get. One of the most important metrics that I look at every week is I look at how many

Justin Piche (58:40)
You

Bryan DeSirey (59:00)
unique contacts have we communicated to and have communicated back to us? So how many people, how many unique people have I or our team emailed or text or called over a seven-day period? And then how many unique emails or texts or phone calls do we get back? That to me is just like a general idea of like how many people do we talk to in a week? How many people do we reach out to and how many people reach back to us? And not necessarily looking at that as a percentage.

of like, 70 % of the people we reach out to. Because I may get people that reach out to me that are just running an automated action plan from months ago. But I will basically try to figure out how many people do we talk to in a given week? How many offers am I getting in a week? And then I'll try to have regular conversations with my realtor. I used to do it every week, but with the amount of properties that have an inventory, it's like almost every two weeks now. But I'll just ask them very basic questions. Like, how many people have you had to ask about this? Have you had any general feedback?

I don't really write the individual things that they say, but I kind of just put it in my head and then I'll go pull up Follow Up Boss, I'll go pull up our website, I'll go pull up Land.com or Property Control Center and Facebook, and I kind of just aggregate all this information in my head and I have this thing I call stale properties, and every week I just count how many properties are stale, which just means how many properties are not getting at least two people a day asking about it.

And not just like someone kicking the can but somebody who was actually wanting to have a conversation about the property So if I'm not getting at least one to two people every day asking about that property I consider it stale and then I just try to keep the number of stale properties as low as possible and The three things that I feel like I can control our price marketing and responsiveness So I either need to drop the price I need to continue I need to market it harder just whether that be relisting or remarketing it in other places that it's not currently or that's gonna be

you know, are we not responding to people fast enough? know, how many people have reached out to us that we're not getting back to? And, you know, luckily we do a good job of that. So that's usually not the answer, but I feel like those are the three things I can control. And I just try to aggregate as much information as possible to figure out like what's not moving and then list those properties out and then try to come up with a strategy on what I can do to move them.

Clay Hepler (1:01:20)
And you know when I hear this I think about the front end just and I did a deep dive in the acquisition process And we were talking about some that tricks core metrics that were critical and the thing that I talked about is speed delete It is everything it is everything and so we just did a subdivision in an undisclosed location and We had a couple of buyers that were coming out to these tracks we had a bunch of tracks and two of the buyers

We were listing these five acres for about 45k a pop. Two of the buyers, guys, said, I would have bought it for 39. But there was another track down the road that was 39 or 38, similar acreage, that we would have sold it for. But it was probably because a real estate broker did not do a good enough job having that conversation. And so these are the little nuances like Brian was talking about earlier about

the creek, right? Or these little nuances that when you have your hand on the wheel, you can make that turn and you can, you can change what seems like calling the broker up every single week and saying, Hey, what's going on? How many showings do we have? And it becomes a more data filled conversation because you have the context, you have the unique context.

the unique connections, the conversations, right? Those KPIs that really, really move the needle. So Brian, if I'm a land investor and I'm starting out here, right? And I'm trying to build out my disposition department, I don't have a Brian. What are the maybe one or two metrics, two or three metrics that I need to track?

in order to start to get some traction here on my end.

Bryan DeSirey (1:03:21)
Well, the first thing is you should especially if you're listing properties on the MLS you really should be aggressive with your price drops. I Think that's one of the few things that you can control. don't I guess as far as like a metric It's hard to really calculate that but I do keep track of how often I drop prices on properties and how many prices I've dropped in a given week Probably I mean what metrics would be really bad with?

I mean, if you have a CRM, I mean, I really would keep track of how many people you are talking to. Cause then if anything, even if you don't know what a baseline normal is for you, can at least acknowledge when things are slow and you'll be able to identify like, wow. I only talked to like 50 people last week. And the week prior I talked to a hundred people and like that will maybe just ask you to think in your head, like what was I doing with my time last week where I was only able to talk to have as many people. And if the answer is nothing different, then maybe there's not as many people ask about property. So like then that's maybe your next metric needs to be.

you know, how often do I relist a property? So, you when it comes to like our Facebook Marketplace, our goal is to relist a property like every two weeks. Delete it and just completely relist it. I find that most of the traction I get on Marketplace is when it's newly listed, not when it's been sitting there for a few days. But how many leaves do you talk to? How often do you list the properties? How aggressive are you are with your price drops?

Those are the three biggest things that would come to my mind. And again, I wish I had better answers on this, but I do find it hard to figure out exactly, because there's so much that's out of my control. You know, I can't just call more people and that leads to more sales. Like if they're going to ignore me, they're going to ignore me. If anything, probably just going to, you know, make them frustrated.

Justin Piche (1:04:45)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (1:05:02)
Yeah, so Brian, I'm gonna do a fire round here at the end. So we're running out of time here. We're do our deal review and then sign off here. Thank you so much for your time. I'm just gonna hit you with a couple of fire rounds. So it sounds like the majority of what you're doing is having conversations with sellers. Do you have someone underneath you that maybe is a transaction coordinator and what exactly do they do?

Bryan DeSirey (1:05:26)
I have two people on my team. One of them is kind of like a setter. Any other one is, I'm trying to think of the good volleyball analogy where it's like, I'm the closer, you've got a setter, then you've got the receiver, I guess, the first person that gets the first bump. But I got one person that kind of does a very early conversation, gets the ball rolling, gets them added into the system. I got a second person who is a very good native English speaker who's able to answer on the phone, can talk about the properties in more detail, try to get them out to the property. And then once they've been to the property and they want to talk about next steps,

where I come in.

Justin Piche (1:05:57)
Yeah, so the first person, maybe her main KPI is like buyer's list growth. She has some like baseline KPI she needs to meet in terms of how often properties are listed, and the quality of those listings. But her main objective really is growing the buyer's list. So capturing buyer's information on property, being quick to respond, speed to lead on Facebook, getting their email, getting their phone number, getting them into the automated response system, CRM, follow up boss that can then answer a lot more of their questions that they might have.

And then number two, like Brian said, her job is setting appointments, getting people out to see the property because if people don't see it, they're not going to buy it. They need to see it and feel it and see how it's going to fit into their future and the life that they want to build. So they have to get boots on the ground. And that's a super important metric is how many showings do you have?

Bryan DeSirey (1:06:47)
I yeah, do keep track of how many showings, but that is a harder metric to track too, because often people will say, I'm gonna go to the property and then they may never get back to you again. So.

Clay Hepler (1:06:58)
That's never happened to me, so I don't know what you're talking about. So, so, so keeping with the theme of the fire round, what is the salary for receiver, setter, and Brian's position? And what is the salary range that we can expect if we're hiring someone on for these positions?

Bryan DeSirey (1:06:58)
Ha!

Justin Piche (1:07:19)
Yeah, that's a good question. I'll take this one. So I think the the setter and the and the buyers list builder, so to speak. think that's really just market dependent of where you're hiring these people from. Both of our team members are from Latin America, and so they're making anywhere from like eleven hundred to fourteen hundred dollars a month salary somewhere in that range for quality, really quality people, especially the the

the center just as a native English speaker. grew up in the United States, but lives in South America now. And then, so for Brian, which this is really kind of an interesting thing, Brian really took a leap of faith with me because when I hired him, I mean, we, that was year one of the business. And I think we did somewhere around 700 K gross that first year, which is obviously substantially less than where we are today.

And so when I hired Brian, we agreed on a base that was quite small and really not a lot of money and then a much larger commission share. And I think through our conversations, he saw my vision for the growth of the company and was willing to put in the time and energy to help me build it to where it is now so that he could make a lot more money than he was the first year. I mean, frankly. and, and so I think maybe some thoughts on that commission split. It's gotta be worth it. Right. I see Brian really as a partner in growing this business, right?

The way we have it structured is not technically like a partnership, but it's a profit share for a reason, right? As the company scales, Brian directly will benefit from the additional profit that the business makes. And there's no limit to it, right? If we scale this thing to $20 million a year, Brian would make a ton of money, right? And that's, I want that because I want him to be invested in the growth of the company.

Clay Hepler (1:09:09)
So, you know, maybe not disclose Brian's salary in particular, but a current disposition manager, unless Brian, you want to show us some paychecks, which, you know, that's, no, I'm just kidding. Right, right. No, we're going to have to, you're going to have to pay you next time to be on the show. disposition manager, small base, you know, let's just not say Brian's If you're just, hey, I'm not thinking partnership route, I'm thinking more of US-based employee route.

Justin Piche (1:09:16)
Yeah.

Bryan DeSirey (1:09:18)
Maybe next time when the IRS isn't listening. No, I'm just kidding.

Clay Hepler (1:09:38)
and not Brian's route, what would be your recommendation Justin for the listeners to do?

Justin Piche (1:09:41)
Yeah, I firmly believe in providing a profit incentive or profit share for every role in my business. I do that with every single role on my business. is a profit share because I want every single person rowing in the same direction and focused on growing the company and recognizing that if they do, they will make more money. And so I think a reasonable base is something that's enough to pay the bills and slow months, you know, enough to get by, but maybe nothing to be too comfortable.

you know, it really is smart area dependent, a couple thousand a month, 2000, 2000, 3000, 4000, somewhere in that as a base. And then from a commission split, it really is a negotiation between you and the Dispo manager. If you're really overseeing this person and they're maybe not as skilled as Brian is, and you're having to build them into this, right? Brian came with a ton of sales experience, like a ton, much more than I had. Right. But if you're building, if you're building somebody into this role,

a 3 % 4 % profit share is probably more than acceptable. But again, it really depends on your business size. But that's probably where I would target is maybe a maybe a two maybe a 2500 or $3,000 a month base guaranteed with a 4 % profit share on the backside.

Clay Hepler (1:11:01)
on the deals that this person is directly involved in or on.

Justin Piche (1:11:02)
on a company all deals, all deals. depending on how you define their role, right? If you define their role in a different way where it's like, they're going to take properties internal to the company and not list with brokers and you're kind of saving on broker commission in that way and that's all the commission they're going to get, that's okay. But then they're only incentivized to self list, right? And I think that works against your interests as the business owner. Your interest is the business owner.

Clay Hepler (1:11:07)
All deals.

Justin Piche (1:11:30)
are to turn your cash as quickly as possible. Maybe, I mean, also make as much money as possible in the deal, but if you're utilizing every Dispo strategy, both MLS and all these other like kind of off-market listing strategies, you're going to turn that cash faster. That is going to make you more money than just saving a couple percent on the backside by going with a broker over Brian or going with Brian over a broker or your Dispo manager.

Clay Hepler (1:11:56)
Justin, I know that you had something that you want to just briefly touch on for our deal deep dive this week. Do you want to take it away here? 

Justin Piche (1:12:04)
Yeah, I think yours is a little probably a little more involved. So maybe I could touch on mine real quick. So I am I kind of mentioned earlier, but I'm working on a 100 acre subdivide in kind of middle Tennessee. And when I underwrote the deal, it's really quite a nice deal. Beautiful, beautiful property with road frontage all along the east side in the north side. And in this particular county,

A subdivide exemption is five acres or more. So if you have properties that are five acres or more, you don't have to build any new county roads and you don't have to extend utilities in any way, then it's exempt from the subdivision regulations. So one of my first calls always is water, right? Call the water utility district. They have an outside engineering firm that had to verify flow rates. Then they had to have like this board meeting. And then one of their maintenance managers had to go out and actually like verify where the line terminated and what size it was. And so he went out.

He verified a four inch line on the east side, which is enough to supply the kind of three or four lots were putting, or mean seven or so lots I'm putting on the east side. And there's a three inch line on the north, which is also enough. It was originally a 14 lot split, which is also enough to supply all the lots on the north side. However, I needed about 1500 feet of line extension, which is not a lot 1500 feet of a three inch line, you know, obviously varied.

It's very cost. don't know what it exactly would be. My estimate is somewhere in the 25 to $30 a linear foot range. I've done at least one other waterline extension and that's kind of where we ended up landing. However, by doing that, it kicks me into a major subdivide. It kicks me into the full process approved by the county. And so I, you know, I have my underwriter, I plug in, plugged in the numbers for what it would take to do that development work and the increased value that I would get from cutting those lots.

acreages and supplying water and weighed that against the uncertainty, the additional capital required upfront, and the timeline it would take to actually build out that waterline extension. And ended up evaluating that versus combining four of the lots on the southwest side into one larger lot that does have water and cutting the number of lots down from 14 to 11 lots.

And what that actually did is give me a greater return on cash than doing the water line because of the saved upfront development capital that I would have to do. And I think maybe the lesson to be learned for anybody is that, you know, sometimes things don't go your way, but you need to look at each project and figure out what is the best option for it, right? What is the best financial option? And also what is the, what is the thing you always say return on hassle or return like

What is the return on hassle? It would be a lot more hassle to go through the county process for developing that property in full. so anyway, I'm excited. It's a hundred percent ago now. So I've got my bank lined up. We're hiring a survey crew to get started on that work. I've got my realtor, the exceptional realtor I talked about earlier, who's out there going to walk it tomorrow. And we're off to the races. Super exciting, man. And congratulations on that pivot. lot of times in this business, what happens is we'll get hit by something that

we weren't anticipating. And really the mark of someone that takes their business from, this is just a side hobby, besides the people component, besides people like Brian, that really add a lot to the business, add a lot of dynamics. The second thing is when we hit a problem, we don't just say, my gosh, I can't handle this. This is an opportunity for me to continue to learn and for me to expand my ability and my capacity. And a lot of times if we have that posture,

it enables us to get through things and get higher returns on capital when maybe that could have been a deal killer. 

Clay Hepler (1:15:49)
So awesome job, Justin. guys, you know the drill here. If you've listened this far and you've gotten benefited from this podcast, please, the gentleman's agreement here is rate, review, and subscribe. If you have any questions specifically about disposition strategies or anything that Brian talked about today,

leave it in the comments and Justin and I will comb over those things so that we can make sure in future Q &A episodes that we can really bring that on or we can bring Brian on to do a little segment in the future as well. So please rate, review, subscribe and share with the people that in your life that are other land investors that really could benefit from this. And until next time, Justin, you have anything to add before we sign off here? 

Justin Piche (1:16:36)
I mean, this was fantastic. think we've got a couple of comments.

that wanted us to dive deep into dispositions and the KPIs. We are not perfect by any stretch. one of the things that I really, we did a podcast episode two, we talked about Sharma's land scaling summit. And Brian went with me to that and we got to listen to the panel of people who are really selling land exceptionally fast and get a lot of takeaways from that. I think we have an exceptional process. I really do. It's very robust. It's very repeatable. It's very scalable.

There's always things to improve on though. So maybe the encouragement for the listeners is wherever you are, you still need to keep driving towards that improvement. Incremental improvements every day. Incremental improvements every day. 

Clay Hepler (1:17:21)
Beautiful. Well, thanks again, guys, for listening. And until next week, we'll see you then.