The Ground Game Podcast

Episode 11: What the Gurus Don't Tell You About Land Investing

• Justin Piche and Clay Hepler • Season 1 • Episode 11

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🎙️ Welcome Back to The Ground Game Podcast! 🎙️

In Episode 11, hosts Clay Hepler and Justin Piche tackle the often unspoken realities of land investing in "What the Gurus Don't Tell You About Land Investing." They aim to provide transparency and share their personal experiences, highlighting the challenges and struggles that come with building a successful land investing business.

Key Highlights:

  1. The Reality of Land Investing: Justin and Clay discuss the misleading marketing tactics often used by land investing gurus, emphasizing that the journey is not always as easy as it seems.
  2. Quarterly Goals Update: Clay shares his recent successes in locking up significant revenue, while Justin reflects on his own achievements and the positive impact of a new hire on his team.
  3. Team Building Tactics: The hosts explore the importance of employee praise and recognition, discussing how different team members prefer to receive feedback and the impact it has on morale and productivity.
  4. Entrepreneurial Therapy: Justin opens up about his personal struggles with balancing work and family life, while Clay shares insights on managing business challenges and the importance of setting boundaries.
  5. Deal Deep Dive: Clay presents a new opportunity involving a 34-lot subdivision, discussing the potential strategies for maximizing profit and the importance of following up with leads.

This episode is packed with candid discussions, actionable insights, and real-world examples that can help you navigate the complexities of land investing. Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your existing 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.
  • Justin Piche: A former US Navy submarine officer turned real estate entrepreneur, dedicated to building high-performing teams.

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Justin Piche (00:00)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Ground Game Podcast. This is Justin Piche, one of your hosts.

Clay Hepler (00:06)
and Clay Hepler, your second host, and we are here to talk about how to win the ground game.

Justin Piche (00:27)
you know, when we started this podcast, one of the things, one of the visions that Clay and I shared was we wanted to be transparent, right? We wanted to share with other folks in the industry and folks that are thinking about getting into the industry that, you know, it is not all rainbows and butterflies and sunshine. It is not exactly like how the gurus pitch it. And, know, earlier this week,

I was kind of scrolling through my Facebook, looking at updates on some of our listings and just other random things. You know, you get sucked into that like Facebook media scroll sometimes. And I have so many ads for land courses or how to get rich on land or how to, you know, how you can turn land investing into your, you know, six figure side hustle and all these different things. And it just struck me again at how

there's just this sales pitch that comes from folks in the industry to try to get you into kind of a coaching program or some sort of like course. And I just think a lot of that marketing is disingenuous. this episode, we're going to talk. The main topic here is we're to talk about the things that are struggles in our business. You know, what are we dealing with? There's a lot of things. There's a of things on my mind. I'm sure there's a lot of things on Clay's mind. We're probably not going to get to everything, but we're to talk about that.

And we're going talk about how we think about overcoming those challenges and those problems. Obviously we'll get to our team building tactics. Clay's got a good one on how to praise your employees, which I think will be really good, good discussion. And then a deal review at the end. So with that, Clay, you want to give a update on your quarterly goals?

Clay Hepler (02:08)
Yeah, and let me just add really quickly to what you just said, Justin. I actually was scrolling on Facebook too. They got me too. They're good. And I saw in a a land group that I'm a part of, which I'm not really active in, like some guys like scamming some other guy who's scamming some other guy. And really, it becomes

Justin Piche (02:16)
They got me.

Clay Hepler (02:37)
to me very interesting as an educator, and I know you're an educator too, how many educators are full of crap and they're not actually, know, like they get into the business and they're like, it's very hard. And you know, you can make a lot of money in this business. You can build a multiple seven figure business

set your family up for financial freedom or an eight figure business, which is what Justin and I are both really aspiring to go towards. But there are so many people that are not transparent about the HUDs that they're doing. And I don't know many other people. There's a couple other people in the space that are actually transparent about what's going on in their business in terms of profit, HUDs, things like that. But there's a lot of people that hide behind really good marketing that

are not gonna be honest and so we're gonna break open the business, both of our businesses today and really talk about it. So talking about breaking open businesses, where we are at with our goal for 720 right now in this quarter, which it's a hard quarter to get a lot of deals done, it's our last quarter, right? We locked up 250K in revenue over the last seven days. So my sales guys went absolutely,

Justin Piche (03:56)
Thank

Clay Hepler (04:01)
monster and after a period of drought if you're a long time listener, you know that we went through a period of drought and then it just comes right and that is the nature of this business, but we just locked up some big big contracts and we're gonna talk about one of those today, but so that brings us up to For our quarter that brings us up to like four hundred and twenty something

Justin Piche (04:08)
you

you

Clay Hepler (04:32)
for our quarterly profits, quarterly projected profits. And we still have a month and a half left at this point with the filming of the podcast. So I'm very optimistic that we're gonna get to 720, maybe 800K in projected profit by the end of the quarter. And if my sales guys are listening to this, turn it off right now and go back to calling people. I'm just kidding.

Justin Piche (04:59)
Dude, that's awesome. Congrats, man. there's always slow weeks and fast weeks and slow months and fast months. And it's good that you got a bunch of stuff under contract here. For me, yeah, this last week we sold one property, because mine is not pipeline. My target this quarter is not pipeline revenue, but realized gross profit on the sales side. And so we made 20 grand.

Twenty grand, four hundred and seventeen dollars and eleven cents in the last in the last week on a on a sale of a property. Actually, that's not true. We made 20 grand and we also sold another one that might it's just not updated on my sales tracking sheet where you made 19,000. So 40,000 of realized pipeline gross profit over the last week since we recorded the last episode. So that's great. Another couple of other things. So I hired about

maybe a month ago or so, a US based sales or acquisitions closer. And she's just awesome. Like she's awesome. You know, she hadn't she's sent out a few offers, but her first few weeks have been primarily I had her audit our acquisitions team audit our sales processes. She comes from a much deeper sales background than anyone else on our team. And

she found a ton of things to just like improve on, which has been fantastic. We had a meeting and she's like, Hey, I think this needs to be done differently. This can be better. This could be better. And then I gave her the, the, the mandate to improve those processes. And so one of things I did when I hired her was tie some of her commission. She's commissioned only she gets a large portion of commission for the deals she negotiates, but she also gets gross profit commission for the whole company. And that the purpose of that was to have her improve the existing processes that bring leads into her.

to negotiate and close. And so she's taken that mantle. She started offering sales training for the team. She's having one-on-one sales training with the team. She's focusing on our follow-up boss, or automations and action plans of what we do with the leads when they maybe aren't ready to sell right now or they're price motivated, et cetera. And I've just been super encouraged by hiring and finding somebody who's really good, who's motivated, and then giving them the power to make change in the business. And we actually just had a discussion

Yesterday and we both share a vision for what her role will morph into over the course of the next six months So it's just it's just really encouraging to have to hire somebody who's truly bought in at this point so that's another kind of win towards that quarterly goal was to was really onboarding and Training her up. But anyway

Clay Hepler (07:34)
Dude, I'm so, I'm so.

I'm so pumped man, that's really great. You really see the who, not how is real.

And when you find the right people in your organization, everything takes care of itself. And there's a lot of, especially when you're early on in this business, like you have the, can do it if it is to be, up to me. And we have to shed that identity to empower the people that are in the positions. And I'm a sales and marketing guy through and through, like, you know, I sell my wife on, you know, where we're going for dinner and night, except it doesn't really work with my wife to be fair. But.

Justin Piche (08:13)
Ha

Clay Hepler (08:17)
But I'm a sales and marketing guy and I have a sales guy right now that's closing deals and he's crushing it. And so I could be in that role and I could be saving probably 200K a year or I could be doing other things which is growing the business in different ways focusing on more strategic decisions or building on a different department. And so that's the...

You know, that's a lesson right there for all of us. So I would like to bring that in the right to team building tactics, which is the TB, TMT or TBT. it used to be TMT, but now it's TBT, TBT. These are hard hitting actionable tactics that we are actually using every week to enhance, manage and scale our teams. And this week we're going to talk about praising employees. So, you know, the,

Justin Piche (08:51)
I like TBT, TB, team building tactics.

Clay Hepler (09:11)
Employee praise is actually a sensitive topic. So whenever employees come into my organization, I ask them, how do you receive feedback? How do you receive praise most specifically?

There is a book called the five love languages and and so everyone receives praise or appreciation or love which praise is a form of love in very different ways some people like bonus checks commission checks some people like words of affirmation quality time and Other other things the other two are escaping me at this point, but the people Yeah, yeah words of affirmation quality time

Justin Piche (09:50)
Words of affirmation.

Clay Hepler (09:55)
Physical touch I'm not touching any of my employees guys, okay

Justin Piche (09:58)
Yeah, yeah, there's I think there's actually a there's another book of the five languages of the workplace. I think there's like a like a different one, but it's along the same lines.

Clay Hepler (10:03)
Okay.

Got it, yeah. So long story short, with my employees, I always ask them, how do you actually receive praise? Some people really wanna be pumped up, like salespeople, are you kidding me? This guy just came back and he crushed it, he's been killing it this week. And other people maybe in a different role, a more introverted role, have one-on-one feedback. Hey, you really did a good job, right? You really did a good job here and these are the reasons why. And so what I wanna focus on today is external versus

Internal intimate feedback what I consider internal intimate is one-on-one feedback external is in front of other people and some people Don't like the external feedback, right? And so I always like to ask permission for my employees to say hey, know Where do where do you really receive feedback and do you like to be praised in front of other people? Most people do right, but I always like to ask permission. So when you're

going to praise your employee in the future, make sure that you ask their permission, whether they like prefer internal one on one feedback or external feedback. And if they prefer both, you can do it to them as both in both ways.

Justin Piche (11:13)
Yeah, I think that's really good. think, you know, I think it's really important for just company and team morale to celebrate wins, right? On another episode for the team building tactics, we talked about how I run my internal meeting and how I end it every time is with four wins, just sharing wins that are happening in everybody's in everybody's life. The praise aspect is, is, is another aspect, right? Highlighting what team members are doing things really well and giving them credit for that. It builds.

It just builds like pride in your organization. builds trust in the relationship. And yeah, I, I totally agree. I think both are important. I, know, I actually have that's told me explicitly. I don't like external praise. You know, some people maybe are a little bit shy, but I think even the people that maybe are a little uncomfortable with external praise still appreciate being praised in front of others. know, I, yeah, that's it. That's a good one. That's a good one.

Clay Hepler (12:10)
I agree with that, but I'm also a borderline narcissist, so aren't we all? So yeah.

Justin Piche (12:17)
You know, went, went a quick, quick anecdote, just quick, quick story. So my birthday was this weekend on Saturday. Yep. Happy birthday to me. 35, 35 years old. I finally closer to 40 than I am 30 at this point. I don't necessarily feel it, but you know, I still see myself in my late twenties. just, I, maybe that's just some, something that people, people do as they, as they get older, but they think of themselves as younger.

Clay Hepler (12:39)
Ha!

Justin Piche (12:46)
But I, you know, we celebrate everyone's birthday on our team. We'll buy them a cake. We'll have somebody who's one of their employees that lives in the same country deliver it, or we'll figure out a way to get it to them so that they can, we can celebrate their birthday. And so my team did that to me this weekend. I probably paid for it. I'm sure I paid for it, but they did that to me. They sent me a cake and a little gift, a little mug that says, I should have brought it, it's just for the video. Tears of my staff. It was pretty funny. But one thing they did,

Clay Hepler (13:04)
Hahaha

Justin Piche (13:16)
that really surprised me was they filmed a video. It was like nine minutes long. And basically everybody on the team filmed a video of them kind of wishing me happy birthday. And it was really moving. Like it was just like, really, like I almost choked up a little bit. I didn't expect it. And, you know, I think what I took out of that was just how incredible the culture we've built on this team is and how people really like,

feel valued and care for one another and praise and recognizing where your team members are contributing value to your organization is a key part of that, right? I was at dinner last night with one of my son's friends, his parents, so we're becoming friends with them. So they invited us over for a play date. We had pizza hanging out. And the dad, his name's Steven.

works in IT and he was just talking about his boss. His boss is kind of an old school. He's the CIO at this company and he does not give praise. Like he doesn't give a word of encouragement or anything like that. He's quick to tear you down but he will never build anybody up. And I just felt so grateful that I'm a part of an organization where that is not how things work.

Clay Hepler (14:36)
It starts by the example of leader man. That's a reflection of you.

Yeah. So I want to shift into a new segment of our podcast. So we're going to talk about challenges and the structure of this is basically like entrepreneurial therapy, right? And so we're going to talk through, what's the core challenges or constraints in our business? And we're going to ask each other questions to really help each other out.

and come to a solution. Now, if there's already a solution in place, we're gonna challenge the solution that exists, right? Because a lot of times, we think that we're really smart in our own little worlds. And just having one outside perspective of someone else who's been through it.

We talked about the payroll, the monthly payroll that 35, 45, 55, 75K a month, that changes you, right? It changes you. And so the same feeling that we have and we're in the same boat. So Justin, would you like to go first?

Justin Piche (15:46)
Yeah, this is, yeah, I was trying to think what is my, biggest struggles. And the first one that I want to talk through is, don't know if I have a good solution yet. So this might be a good one to start talking through. This is more of like a personal related to business struggle, which is, you know, I have been building this company now for more than three years. and it has given me a ton of freedom, right? I was able to go to Europe.

earlier this year for two months with my whole family and the business just kept humming. I worked in the evenings for a few hours on the business, but it wasn't maybe like three hours a day on average of work and things just kept rolling. And I would consider that kind of a maybe a relaxed season by necessity. I just couldn't put in a ton of time because I was in this other place with my family and we had all these things we were doing and it just, wasn't possible without staying up.

the middle of the night or something like that. And so when I got back in the summer, there's a lot of chaos and of moving or building all kinds of stuff. But I've kind of like, felt a little behind maybe of where my goals were. And so I entered into what I would call a push season. And I've kind of been in that push season from essentially August through now. still in it.

I personally don't think I'm really working all that much compared to many people who work, you know, are gone at 7 a.m. and they don't get back till 6 p.m. Like I'm much more available. But one of the things I'm struggling with right now is just conversations with my wife about, you know, how focused I am on this business and how present I am with my family when I'm not working. And just trying to, sometimes it feels like...

Like I'm, I, I'm carrying all these burdens of the financial success of my family, my team, the company, and I don't really, you know, I don't offload really any of that to my wife. That's, that's all my burden to carry. And so when things come up, you know, where it's like, Hey, like, can you, can you end that call early? Can you, can you do this? Can you do that other thing? I am, I am starting to feel in myself, not necessarily anger, but maybe a little bit of just being misunderstood of like,

wanting to communicate to her that of course her and my children are by far the most important thing compared to my business. They're far more important than my business is to me, but I still have these obligations that if I thought I could skip them or push them off or not do them now, then I would, I would do that. And I would, you know, focus on the family at that point in time. It's just, I don't know, it's just kind of more of a personal struggle. And I think anybody who's married can, probably relate to that type of a feeling.

So I don't know if you felt that, Clay. I'm sure you have. Maybe you have some, yeah. What do you think?

Clay Hepler (18:46)
I mean, I appreciate your vulnerability, man. It's really, I think, a universal struggle for a lot of people that are in the position that you are. So I have a couple of questions for you off the bat. So how do you define a push season? What are your kind of hours that you're actually working? So we can clarify sort of the...

Justin Piche (19:07)
Yeah, I mean, they're not really crazy hours. I generally start my day at nine on the computer. I might answer some emails in the morning before my kids get up or sometimes I'm on my phone looking at the things I need to do for the day while we're having breakfast or something like that. But really at nine, it starts and it goes to about five of just straight work.

Clay Hepler (19:33)
Okay.

Justin Piche (19:33)
That's kind of, that's the hours I'm working. The problem is it doesn't stop. like when the kids go to bed, I'm already, I'm back to like thinking, maybe I'm back on the computer from like eight to 10 or I'm doing something, you know, and I would define a push season less of like hours worked in more of like mental energy.

Clay Hepler (19:47)
Okay.

Okay, so are you saying between five and eight you're present, and then usually around eight to 10, you're kind of getting back into it.

Justin Piche (20:04)
Yes, yes, yes. But I think my wife's frustration or what she sees is that even though I'm there, I will still like my team is still working. Right. And so I'm still responding to things. I see something I'm like, I've got to send this email. And I catch myself sometimes. And I just I'm like, OK, this can wait. But I don't want to wait. I want it to I want to do it right then and there. And I don't. Yeah, I want to do it right then and there.

Clay Hepler (20:35)
I get that on a spiritual level. How many other entrepreneurs are you close friends with and how many other entrepreneurial wives is your wife close friends with?

Justin Piche (20:48)
golly.

Not that close like we hang out with and spend time with We have one Really really close friend in Washington whose company I'm actually in the sweatshirt. I'm wearing joy Inc. Is his company who? Did him and his wife definitely relate very much to these these struggles? But that my wife is really really good friends with with his wife. They think best they're made of honor at her wedding

And I know they talk at some frequency and share in those struggles. That's pretty, pretty much it. Nobody else that are of our close

an entrepreneur.

guys, this is Justin Piche, one of your hosts of the Ground Game Podcast, interrupting your podcast to just say, if you're getting value out of this, if anything Clay and I are talking about is resonating with you, if you're struggling and you want to vent, know, let us know in the comments, let us know what you're struggling with. We would love to address that topic in a future podcast episode. So we appreciate all the listeners. We appreciate the reviews and now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clay Hepler (21:55)
So I would say for, know, we all kind of know the answers here, having a very clear shutoff time is the antidote to this, right? And so, you know, at least for me, I work six to 630 every night, right? And, but when I'm done, I'm done. And my wife actually knows that, right? And I actually work

Like, my push season is like, I'm up at five, right? and I'm working five, five 30 and I'm working. and then, you know, I don't have kids your age though, to be fair, like, you know, your kids, you know, there's sort of a different men. Like you have to be six, seven or six 30 to eight, right. Or nine or whatever. so it's kind of, I'm in a little bit of a different, I was seventh month old and you have a lot of different people, you know, ages, but,

I think that that's probably the biggest thing. Like when you're there, you're there and when you're not, you're not. sort of there's, there's this meant, let me tell you a perfect analogy that what I use, okay? So when I go into the gym or when I go into my office, you know, you see this office behind, you know, there's this little door behind me. I have this mental barrier. call, you know, I learned about this from Andrew Huberman who had this like performance coach.

on his podcast and he calls it The Line. When I step into the gym, I'm working out. I'm going there and I'm killing myself. I'm working out hard. I don't have to be there for an extraordinary period of time, but I look around and I see people on their phones texting. I sneak a text every once in a while. Someone calls me whatever. I have a line. And so I have a line in my office.

And so when I cross in here, I'm focused on my work or the gym, I'm focused on my work. And so you could maybe have this like hypothetical line that you say, whether it's like time bound line or actual physical location line that you're like, dude, this is where I'm at. And I know that you're in a new space right now. So that could maybe throw off your schedule a little bit, but having those like physical.

Justin Piche (24:08)
Yeah, you can see my bed behind me, right? I am in this rental as our house is being constructed. But I'm tracking with what you're saying.

Clay Hepler (24:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. Is that helpful?

Justin Piche (24:22)
Yeah, it is. And maybe we just need to be clear on communication of like, are those lines? But then the alternative is like, need to actually, I personally probably need to respect those lines more the timelines, I think than anything like, when I'm with my kids, like I need to just put my phone on, do not disturb or something like that. That's probably the key, you know, because yeah, I feel like I do a pretty good job.

It's not like this is like a constant thing. I'm not like sitting on my phone all the time with my kids. We're playing, et cetera. But I have my Apple watch, know, like an email comes across and I'm like, gosh, that needs attention right now. And I, you know, jump into it type of thing.

Clay Hepler (25:02)
Yeah, dude, I've heard people go as far as like having Tupperware with timers that they put their phone in Tupperware overnight and they like have a timer. It's like eight hours. They don't use their phone or the Apple watch or whatever. And so they can be present with their family. And sometimes we need that type of, even though we think we're these awesome entrepreneurs with crazy discipline, sometimes we actually need that external pressure.

from something like that, putting the phone in the other room that we do, the habit or whatever it is.

Justin Piche (25:36)
Yeah, that's good advice. And it's not anything I haven't heard or considered. It's more of just like actually doing it. You know, like there's a difference between knowing what to do and then actually doing it. So I think that's encouraging to just maybe be more. It's really just it's really about discipline. That's really what it is. It's a lack of discipline with not setting clear boundaries and actually adhering to them. Right. We said I boundaries with my kids all the time and they break them, but they're kids.

I'm an adult man. should be able to set and adhere to a boundary that I set for myself.

Clay Hepler (26:09)
you

doesn't make it any easier, man. And that's why a lot of times these conversations and you and I talked about this, you know, one of the reasons why we started a ground game was actually because these conversations are not being had. And everyone can talk about consistency in their business. Everyone could talk about executing on the tasks in their business, but sometimes they don't actually need the intervention in their business. They need it somewhere else in order for them to succeed in their business, right? Maybe the restrictions of time that you have will enable you to be more focused on the time

that you have in your business.

Justin Piche (26:43)
Yeah. Yeah, man. How about you? What's, what's coppin' in mind? Big struggle.

Clay Hepler (26:50)
I would say I have two struggles that are present with me. One of them is getting a problem-based struggle and the other one's an opportunity-based struggle. I think of in my business there are sort of questions that need to be answered at all times in our business.

A lot of times we get distracted by the opportunity question. Should I add subdividing to my list? Should I add entitlement deals to my list? Should I become the biggest wholesaler in Florida? All these are opportunity based questions and this is why people fail. And so there's the problem based question which is fix the system as it sits. And so.

That was just me procrastinating to, you know, I was just saying that to procrastinate to go to the actual problems. I'm just kidding. So, by the way, the podcast is over now. No, so I think the biggest problem for me now in my business is actually the dispositions. And I don't know if it's a time-based thing or a...

Justin Piche (27:40)
Yeah, no, I totally get it.

Clay Hepler (27:59)
You know, just the structure of the disposition strategy. This is a recent thing for me. Recent being a month or two old. And we're still struggling with selling our deals. And we've done a lot of different things like implementing owner financing and selling notes. actually just sold $50,000 worth of note. So.

Justin Piche (28:09)
so

Clay Hepler (28:24)
That'll be a nice little check for us here in the next one or two weeks that we owner financed. But there's a lot of other deals. mean, we probably have $450,500,000 of actual straight profit deals that could close within the next one to two months.

and they're just have been sitting on the market for a very long period of time. So there's a couple of things sort of like it's price bound or

Justin Piche (28:47)
Okay.

Clay Hepler (28:56)
Also, is it the agent? But that's why we brought the internal disposition process. So there's a lot of questions that I think the experience will lend to me, right? Doing this, building up the system and process. I'm like, okay, we can actually review this. What's working? What's not working? But I want to get there faster, right? And so the dispositions thing, the problem is how do I know what's working? How do I know what people I should hire in order to fulfill this role?

Justin Piche (29:01)
you

Clay Hepler (29:26)
And is it my highest and best use of my time to focus on this? So don't know if I gave you enough context to really work talk talk through this with you But that's something that it's like I got a lot of profit that just ain't selling as quickly as I'd like

Justin Piche (29:40)
Yep. Yeah. Are these deal a couple questions? Are these deals that are owned in inventory? Like you've taken title. They're yours or they are many of them double. OK.

Clay Hepler (29:51)
yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean there's a couple that are double closed, but a lot of them are like subdivisions that, you know, I bought a parcel and subdivided three or four or five parcels and the last one isn't selling and it hasn't sold for months. A lot of them is like buying a, you know, I bought a...

subdivide or you know, five lots and combine them into two lots and now they're not selling as quickly because they're on kind of a slope and so there's a lot of stuff there that is Yeah

Justin Piche (30:24)
Yeah. Okay. First, maybe things that I like to think about, you know, this is, you know, probably a lot of these things, but sometimes it just helps to have somebody else say them to you. The first is when I have parcels that are struggling to sell, I try to figure out, is there anything else I can do to them for as low a cost as I can make it to make them more marketable? That's kind of like my first thought is like,

Is are these properties nicely accessible? Is there a cleared home site? Like what are the barriers? And a lot of that comes from like, what are the barriers based on the feedback you've got from your agent? And to be fair, you already said it, right? The internal sales process. did episode eight that we just launched and we're getting some really good feedback on where we interviewed Brian and talked about the power or the superpower of an internal sales team. I really truly believe in it. And I think it is one of the best ways.

to know why your properties aren't selling. In my experience, it's really hard to get good feedback from realtors. Like they are generally not the most organized folks. And if there's realtors listening, this is not everyone. So you might be the most organized person that can get incredibly good feedback to all of your clients and tell them all the listings that are showings that you've seen and all the texts that you've had and give feedback on the property. But my experience is that a lot of agents don't do that very well. And so it's hard as a...

the owner of the property who's selling the property to know what are the struggles of the buyers that are coming and checking out these properties and how do I overcome them. So maybe the first step is, hey, talk to the agent and help figure out what are the are the you know, what are the pitfalls or what are the things that people are giving feedback on that are preventing them from actually buying these properties and then try to fix them for the lowest cost. And it might be just clearing work. It might be clean up. It might be a new drone drone shoot.

You're already doing owner financing, I think is super, that is one of the better ways to move properties quickly and move inventory quickly is make the barrier to entry much lower for people. Instead of coming up with $70,000, they can come up with 15 to get the property down. And then, yeah, man, think the other marketing channels, right? Facebook, that's a huge one, generating a buyer's list and actually being able to market to those folks.

taking a lick on price to move the cash quicker. You sometimes we want to protect our margins, but I mean, it's worth making 30 % or 40 % of the deal if it releases that capital for other opportunities that are coming in the pipeline. Just realize some profit now. think they are the Justin Sleva and Adam Southey on their podcast, probably a year ago or so, they did one that was called, I think it's just like, just take the dang deal.

I think is what they called it. And it was all about like when you're, when the markets are slow or properties are moving slow, if you get, if you get an offer that's, that is even remotely workable for you, just take the deal. And you know, sometimes I don't take that advice. And here's a perfect example. had a deal, that we bought at like 70 all in listed at one 50, had a cash offer relatively quickly at one 20. And so we were like, and it was workable. mean, that was

that would have been maybe a $45,000 profit on a $70,000 investment, not stellar, but still a pretty good profit on a deal. And we were like, no, you we've only had this listed for three weeks. Let's just wait. Well, now it's been three months and we basically got the same offer and we've accepted it now, but that's three months of, waiting on a deal to sell to just accept an offer that we could have had three months ago. That's less turns on that cash. That's less opportunity with that cash. do you think you, do you feel like you struggle with accepting

I mean, do you get lowball offers that you can still make money on? And then you're like, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take that.

Clay Hepler (34:19)
I think that that's definitely a good, like I just got a deal, we just bought a deal for 400 and I have investors in the deal. We were all in, we were all in probably like 425 and we got an offer for like 540. And I'm like, I'm not taking it. I'm not taking it, right? And you know.

You know, you make maybe 70, you get the, you know, after all the fees and stuff, maybe less, and then you have to split the profit. All of a sudden, you're like, dude, I'm like, I'm selling this thing for 500 something thousand, I'm gonna make 30 K on it. And so that was for me, I turned that offer down because it's listed for like 680, right? Because we're like, we think we can probably get at least 600 for it, right?

But I think that I definitely struggle with that. At this point, would take the dang deal, right? Let it go and drop price precipitously to recycle that cash quicker. But I think for the longest time, I just kept the numbers high. And what I realized is like real estate brokers aren't gonna be the one to tell you to drop it.

Justin Piche (35:21)
Yeah.

They're not gonna drop it no they because yeah, they don't want to drop it they don't want to hurt their other comps they don't want I I asked Brian the other day about He's brought me a property. He's like, I don't know if we you know, this one's not moving What do you want to do? And I literally said I was like, what does our realtor think about the price drop and he he messaged me back And he goes I can already tell you what she thinks

she's not gonna wanna drop the price. And it's a perfect example. No broker wants to drop the price of properties. They just don't want to. But yeah, man, sometimes you just gotta take the deal.

Clay Hepler (36:07)
Do you have a protocol for how you drop prices, how quickly you drop prices?

Justin Piche (36:15)
Yeah, so we pre-market before we take title. We're marketing these deals. We don't drop price during pre-marketing. right, so if you're double closing, obviously you're in a drop price to try to bring your buyer in. We will set a price and we'll hold it there through pre-marketing and gather feedback from folks. And then when we list on the MLS, if we've got a lot of showings and views and good feedback, when we go to list, we'll keep the same price. But if we've got feedback or not very many views or people are like, it's too high, we will.

list on the MLS at a reduced price right off the bat. when you list something high on the MLS, it does scare people off. I mean, I still feel, even though I know that everything's negotiable, I will see an on market deal that is a potential subdivide and I'll see the price they're asking and I'll know that it's a good subdivide, but I'm going to have to offer 40 % less than what that is. And honestly, most of time I just am like, Nope, I don't even make the offer. And if I'm doing that and I know that these deals are negotiable and I've done, I've made offers at

40 % off of asking and had them accepted and I still struggle with getting over that mental burden of like I don't want to insult them and deal with that conversation be told to go, you know, go get lost or whatever. The layman who's buying your land, they feel that way more acutely, way more acutely.

Clay Hepler (37:28)
Yeah, how do you define pre-market? Let's just clarify that. So are you...

Justin Piche (37:33)
Yeah, for us, pre-marketing is like we get a property under contract. We get our drone videos, we do our due diligence, we get our title commitment and we make sure we're gonna be able to transfer title and sell this property. We determine, can we list this places and start to market it without, you know, maybe pissing off the seller or something. Like we have in our contract that we can market and like we can get people out there and all that kind of stuff. But.

a lot of times we're not explicitly communicating like we're going to market and sell this property exactly to somebody else and that's all we're going to do with it. And so we don't listen on the MLS because that's like a sure fire. We don't put paid ads behind it, but we'll put we'll put the properties on marketplace and Facebook groups on land.com and start generating buyers. So that for us, that's pre marketing before it's before it's actually like hours to sell. I call that phase pre marketing. And then once we own it, now we're actually marketing to sell.

It's everywhere. At that point, I don't really care if we, know, something I don't care if we piss off the seller, but it's like it's my property now and I can do whatever I want with it at that point in time.

Clay Hepler (38:36)
Sure, for sure, for sure. OK. I interrupted you. You were going to add some additional stuff to that.

Justin Piche (38:40)
But price drops, yeah, you're asking we have a framework for price drops. This is something we have struggled with. I think we've also struggled with holding prices too high for too long. so on our sales side now, we have a process where we basically just, we're gonna drop every two weeks, depending on interest. It's really like an interest base, right? If we're having three, four showings a week on our property, we're not gonna drop price. But as soon as the inquiries and showing start to drop off, every two weeks we're dropping the price by some amount.

And sometimes it's not much. Sometimes it's thousand bucks, know, to a hundred and fifty thousand dollar property, a drop to one forty nine, one forty seven. But but regular drops so that people can infer that we're motivated to sell. it'll pop the listing back up in all the realtors, kind of like cues of properties in the area. They'll see, this is just recent price drops. It just gets more visibility on the property. And so regular price drops is a key part of our sales strategy.

Clay Hepler (39:38)
Okay, so you basically drop it every two weeks, but there's not like a percentage drop that you do.

Justin Piche (39:43)
No, yeah, it's more of a I don't have hard and fast rules because we're in such disparate markets that are so different from one another that I can't I can't use a blanket rule. You know, if we have a high sell through a market, a high demand market and we're up at market price or, you know, on the high end of where we really think we can sell it and we're getting a ton of interest. You know, we give our realtors pretty clear guidance of like, hey, we are we have no attachment to this property. We just want to make money like we just want to make a revenue or return on this deal.

Any offer that anyone wants to submit, submit it. Like we'll counter, we'll negotiate. Like that's what I would encourage any person that comes to see this property. We tell us explicitly to our realtors, make an offer if you like it, even if you think it's going to be low or whatever, make your offer. Like you're not going to frustrate or make the sellers angry. They don't care. They're going to look at it and they're going to counter and they're going to tell you what they can take. And if you guys can come to an agreement, great. But yeah, we definitely, definitely tell them all that.

Clay Hepler (40:41)
Okay, is there anything else you think that I'm missing here that is besides the...

Justin Piche (40:45)
I mean, I think you know, I think you know it. I really think an in-house marketing and sales team that is listing those properties in places that are not the MLS, primarily Facebook. It's a lot of work. We all know it's a lot of work. It takes somebody to actually do the work. But I really think your business is certainly of the size where you should probably do that. If nothing else to grow that buyer's list. mean, just quick anecdote. We just sold a property to a guy on our buyer's list.

that we didn't even have to market. Cause we had him in our list from he reached out. He's been in our buyers list for over a year. He's reached out on seven properties that we've listed and we finally got one for him to get. We just marketed directly to him cause we knew he wanted this area of this acreage size. We don't have, we didn't have to hire a realtor. We didn't have to pay realtor commissions, but just bringing it almost all it's like within a week of us taking title or we're getting, we got it under contract to sell to this guy.

And that happens more often than not. mean, it's not more often than not. Let's be clear. We sell most of our properties on the MLS. That's the majority, maybe 55%, something like that. The other 45 % is in-house from our efforts alone. No realtor efforts.

Clay Hepler (42:01)
Yeah, okay, okay. So I mean that was that's a big one for me just like you know when you have that much profit sitting on the books dude, you know for a long period of time You know, it's I'm gonna call all my brokers after this and say let's let's rip it. Let's rip off this band-aid

Justin Piche (42:12)
Yeah, man.

Yeah, I did that. I did that too with the property. My last lot in a big subdivide. I texted him. like, I'm ready to auction this thing off. I want it gone. Like it's all profit. We've already paid the, paid the bank back, paid all the investors back. Everybody's profited about 80, 90 % on their cash return already. The investors is the last lot. It's all profit. Let's go, man. What are we waiting on? You know, but yeah.

Clay Hepler (42:45)
Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. Okay, so mean, the next thing is an opportunity. And I think this is, to be fair, like, this is not an immediate thing, but I actually am bringing this to your attention, really for the listeners, because I understand sort of the approach and have a very clear plan to do this.

But it is when you are starting to get opportunities regularly in a specific marketing channel, what is the pivot moment, right? The pivot to going to, whether it's, I'm to, from rural recreational tracks to infill, because I want to bring up more volume and wholesale more deals. I want to go from rural to subdivide.

Justin Piche (43:35)
Okay.

Clay Hepler (43:37)
or rural to entitlement, right, which is a completely different beast. And so what I'd like to just talk to you about is how you think about the adding additional marketing channels to your business, specifically longer term marketing channels. And I know you and I have something going on in the background right now that, you know, we're working on together.

But how did you think about transitioning to larger opportunities in your business or another opportunity into your business? And when did you know financially that it was the right decision?

Justin Piche (44:08)
you

Yeah.

That's a great question. You know, I.

I have always been on the mindset that this type of business is kind of like steps in stages. But I've never thought that I should get rid of anything we are already doing well. So when I think of adding new kind of opportunities, and maybe like a good example is going from flips to subdivides as one that's probably like accessible and reasonable to our audience.

You know, another one might be from like regular style subdivides up to entitlements or major development type stuff. That might be another really big kind of step change in somebody's business. For example, do not I don't I do not think it is a wise decision to completely pivot the business. I think what is a much better goal.

is to work yourself or hire yourself and put the processes in place to move yourself out of that first part into the next part. So for me and my business, what it looked like was, we primarily were doing flipping and I was very involved in comping and giving final approval to purchase deals and very involved in setting sales prices and things like that. And then we started subdividing and we just started getting way more inventory and getting more opportunities.

And so I just, didn't have the bandwidth to advise on those prices for the flips anymore, comping them, verifying them. And so I had to make sure I empowered my team and had the process in place for them to make those decisions and get things under contract and move them through the pipeline without my direct involvement in all of those decisions. And then the same thing has kind of happened in subdivise where we have so many of them working. I can't be the project manager anymore on all these deals.

If I was, I would be doing nothing but calling contractors and surveyors and following up on things. And I just don't have the time to do all of that. And so I had to hire somebody who could manage projects and who can know I'm teaching to underwrite so that I'm kind of working my way out of that part of the business as well. So I can continue to focus on maybe this, you know, this next opportunity that you and I are discussing or, you know, or building out the coaching business and helping other land investors scale their businesses or.

this podcast, is a passion project of sorts. I very much look forward to our conversations each week. And this takes time, right? This takes energies, takes mental focus. This takes money. And all those things are time that are taking me away from the inner workings of the business. And so I need to make sure that the people and processes are in place to work without me in them. And I think for you, it's probably going to be the same type of thing is look where you are still

involved in those existing processes. Do not kill the golden goose. Implement the other things. Put your time, more of your time and energy in that other opportunity when you've got the people and process in place to handle the current workload or the current kind of trajectory of the business.

Clay Hepler (47:32)
So my one question that I have and then we can move on to the deal deep dive and wrap up the podcast For the listeners like just from moving from one thing to another Are you were you? consciously Targeting subdivide opportunities As they came to you because now you're overwhelmed with subdued opportunities or were you like hey, I'm casting this very wide net

And that organically brought it to, because I see a lot of people that are like, as you say, they don't focus on the problem, they focus on the opportunity like I mentioned earlier. And so they're like, okay, I'm just gonna add this opportunity. And then it takes so much mental energy for them to add the additional channel, which is subdividing versus what they should have done, which was just focus on the main thing, the golden goose. Does my question make sense?

Justin Piche (48:27)
Yeah, it does. It does. So when we so when I started implementing subdivides, it was it was both of those things. I was both seeking them out like only so spending time and energy mainly under underwriting on market deals and also with that skill set, evaluating every property that came in through our normal marketing channels as a subdivide. So we were taking advantage of the opportunities that we were already generating in our existing pipeline.

and seeking out new opportunities. And as that's morphed now, we've now we're going to, we've, we've gone to mailing and marketing specifically to subdivide opportunities. We're, and we're still doing, you know, co-calling for general flips and as subdivides come across our desk, but we're not targeting co-calling specifically to subdivide opportunities. We're targeting co-calling to any, essentially any property. The mail marketing now has shifted to almost solely focused on developable opportunities.

And so that's a whole different kind of analysis of what data you're pulling, what properties you're targeting. It's different marketing. It's different conversations. whole part, you know, part of that is bringing on the U S space closer, who's fantastic, who can talk to these more sophisticated owners about their property and work to negotiate those, those contracts. Right. That's kind of a, but it didn't, I, it's not like I let go of my existing team. They're all still working and they've all scaled, scaled up the, flipping side as well. Right. And they've scaled up the off market lead gen as well. But now.

We just have introduced this other portion of the business to take on specifically subdivides.

Clay Hepler (50:02)
Yeah, I think that's important for the listeners to know. was writing this morning. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Justin Piche (50:07)
Because, yeah, I was just gonna say, the problem, for me, I think it was a bit of a problem discussion, or a problem that we were dealing with, which is we are not taking advantage of all of our opportunities. Right, we're not taking advantage of all of our opportunities because we have one tool and it's a flip. That's our only tool.

So that was the problem is we're spending a lot of marketing. We're generating what could be good opportunities, but we're not taking advantage of them because we only have one tool. So I kind of approached it from that perspective, not necessarily, I'm going to chase after the subdivide opportunity, but more like how do I solve this problem, which is I'm spending money on marketing and generating leads, but not able to convert them.

Clay Hepler (50:51)
Yeah, yeah, I think that's that is how it should be versus I heard these guys talking on a podcast about so divides, you know, it's like meme that I that I made the other day. It's like, you remember the Halloween meme, right? The Halloween meme. And it was like month one learns about land investing month two commits to commercial land investing development. And that's how most people do it. And that's why most people aren't successful. Right. And

Justin Piche (51:01)
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Clay Hepler (51:20)
You and I have had the privilege of getting beat up a little bit, and so we've been able to see what strategies actually work. And the measure of an entrepreneur is not that this person necessarily works harder than you or smarter than you. In a lot of cases, it's just that they are focusing on their limited resources better. They're allocating them better to...

their outcomes and a lot of people I think just focus on the work component. They don't focus on the leverage. So that was really, really helpful. And I hope this section was helpful for our listeners. Guys, if you got benefit from this section, please leave us a comment below. Make sure that when you rate, review and subscribe, you just add that comment there. And so we're going to transition to the end here, which is the deal deep dive. So

The deal deep dive for us this week is I'm purchasing a 34 lot subdivision. So it's a pre-existing subdivision. We've been negotiating with this seller for quite a while. Essentially, we're purchasing these lots for about 9,500 per lot. And the lots range from three quarter acre to like three acre lots. Basically, this guy developed a subdivision, really nice subdivision years ago. And you know, our...

We can approach it in two ways, right? We can finance it, which we're currently under due diligence by the We can finance it.

and sell off the lots one by one, that would probably be the way for us to make the most amount of money. We think we could sell the lots between 20 to 30 per lot. So it gets really exciting, right? It's anywhere between a 300 to $500,000 profit deal. But it's gonna take longer, right? So the absorption rate in this market is not massive. And we were talking about this earlier, like, you know.

Two birds are in one hand, I don't know. I don't know what the saying is, I forget the saying. But selling these prices quickly, that one bird in hand worth two in the bush. There you go, there you go. And so for this deal, we're actually contacting local builders and developers.

Justin Piche (53:24)
One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Clay Hepler (53:38)
By the way, you know anyone in Montgomery, Alabama that is a builder and developer or Sheboygan County, Washington, Wisconsin, let me know. We got Developable Track up there too. 25 acres, Montgomery.

Justin Piche (53:50)
this one in Montgomery? This David? Yeah, I actually have a deal that I bought in Montgomery County that is was obviously the next extension of a small lot subdivision, but never got developed that we picked up that we're just starting to market as well.

Clay Hepler (54:06)
cool, cool. So what we're doing now is approaching builders and saying, we'll give this to you piecemeal, we'll sell it to you 15 a lot, right? And kind of get it off our books and you still make 150, 180K, but we get it off our books before we actually close. And so that's kind of how we're approaching it.

I'll keep you guys posted on exactly what the end result is for that, but we might just go to a local bank, finance it, and then owner finance it to people, sell some lots cash, owner finance over time. There's so many different things that we can do with it, but we got it for a really, really attractive price, and it's a great lot subdivision, so we're really excited about it.

Justin Piche (54:56)
I've got a question for you on that deal. How many total lots are in the whole subdivision? Is this every single lot that's in the development?

Clay Hepler (54:57)
Yeah.

no,

probably like 70 lots, 75 lots in the subdivision. Last year, three lots sold. A builder came in and built them. This has just been basically this guy developed the subdivision and he's been holding on to this for a long period of time. He's trying to divest of all of his properties and he's gotten offers over the years. He's just never sold them. So yeah.

Justin Piche (55:33)
Okay, the only this was the only genesis of that question was like, what are the restrictions on it? And if you're buying a meaningful percentage, you may be able to amend if there's an HOA or restrictions, you may be able to amend the restrictions or HOA to make your lots more marketable. That was just a quick thought that came across my mind. But if it's less than half, it's probably not something that you're to be able to do.

Clay Hepler (55:57)
Okay, that's a great thought, So that's a deal, deep dive. so again, the way that we can exit it is sell it to a builder, developer.

sell it on the market piecemeal or you know, every each individual lot, but there's a lot of different things. And what this this always kind of shows you is it's just as much effort to get a big deal than it to get a little deal. And you know, when there's six figure, multiple six figures potential profit, and if we really hit the cover off the ball, half a million dollars of potential profit, it you know,

That's massive. And this guy, we followed up with him for two, three months and he finally worked with us. It wasn't like he came in and we closed it. those deals, sometimes the hardest deals are the ones that really yield the biggest profits.

Justin Piche (56:48)
Yeah. Well, that's cool, man. I've never bought that many lots at once out of a subdivision. I'm usually the one creating lots like that. I've never done 36 or 35 though. I've done 20, 25 is the most I've done in a subdivide.

Clay Hepler (57:04)
if you're an active listener of the podcast, you know, at the end here, the gentleman's agreement is if you've gotten benefit from this podcast, we've been seeing some really great actual Q &A questions, which we're going to be hitting a Q &A here in a couple of weeks. And so those YouTube comments, the reviews, the reviews in our Apple podcast, Spotify really give us that Q &A that we need to bring that value and focus on future episodes.

comment below. Of course, hit the subscribe button on YouTube, like it. And we'll bring all the value of what you guys are specifically looking for to future Q &A episodes. Justin, anything to add before you sign off here?

Justin Piche (57:49)
Nothing to add, nothing to add. Just maybe, you know what? One thing, just encourage the listeners, be like, hey guys, I just want to say to everybody, guys and gals, whoever's listening.

There are other people that are struggling with the same things in your business that you are. There's whole communities of them. So if you're not a part of some sort of group, a group of investors, if you're not part of any kind of investing community, go out and seek some other folks out. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely business, land investing specifically, and it makes it a whole lot better when Clay and I can come together each week and give each other advice on the struggles we have in our business and then.

just working with other land investors that are struggling with similar things. Collectively, I think there's already been a solution. Like somebody's already thought about that solution. You just need to find out who it is and get that advice from them.

Clay Hepler (58:40)
Love that man. On that note, thanks for listening as always guys and we'll see you next week.