Episode 67: AI, Job Loss & The $15M Question

Welcome to The Ground Game Podcast

where hosts Clayton Hepler and Justin Piche dive deep into the world of land investing and real estate development. Join us each week as we explore the latest trends, strategies, and insights that can help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of real estate.

In this episode, we tackle pressing topics such as the recent national job losses and their implications for land investors, the impact of AI on the real estate market, and the financial strategies necessary for long-term success. We discuss how much liquid cash you might need to secure your financial future, share personal anecdotes from our own investing journeys, and provide actionable advice on building a sustainable land business.

Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting out, our candid conversations and expert insights will equip you with the knowledge and tools to thrive in the competitive world of land investing. We believe that every opportunity is what you make it, and we’re here to inspire you to take ownership of your journey.

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Transcript

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the ground game podcast. This is your co host Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:06)
And this is Justin Piche and we're here to show you how to win the ground

Well, Clay, good afternoon. It's Friday. ⁓ We're here to record another episode of the ground game. What's been going on with you this last?

Clayton Hepler (00:34)
Well dude, it's interesting. I've been looking at the job losses in Jan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, national level. National level. And they're the worst since 2009.

Justin Piche (00:43)
like federal, like the national job losses, okay?

Clayton Hepler (00:53)
and

Justin Piche (00:53)
What's causing that?

AI?

Clayton Hepler (00:57)
Speculation,

I think it's speculation at this point, but it's definitely AI, I think, right? Or at least part of it is AI. And what's interesting is there's no backfilling of the jobs.

So how do we react as land investors to this? How do we ⁓ continue to build and develop our businesses? It was interesting, man, I wrote this article this week of like, let me ask you this question. How much money do you think someone needs, liquid? ⁓ Liquid cash, right?

to be basically set up for the rest of their life.

Justin Piche (01:46)
Well, I mean, that's like a really hard question because it all depends on where you live and your lifestyle and your stage of life, how old you are, et cetera. So like, me an avatar and I'll give you a number.

Clayton Hepler (01:57)
Yeah, I think like, like the average American, right, like someone that's like, in a mid tier city, or outside of a mid tier city. ⁓ And like what they need to what they need to have invested to make every year in order to live.

Justin Piche (02:20)
⁓ I think you got probably like a scraping by number and then you got like a

Clayton Hepler (02:24)
Yeah,

let's say let's say what's the scraping by number? And then what is the ⁓ like, I'm pretty okay. I'm obviously, you know, if you have as many kids as you do, it's a different number.

Justin Piche (02:36)
Yeah. And if you live in like a

⁓ reasonably high cost of living area, like downtown major city. Yeah. You know, think somebody in there, like, let's just use like an average American, they're considering retiring or like being done. They've probably got kids that are grown. One and a half to two million could probably like bridge the gap between where they are in their like late forties and Social Security, if they live in like a really modest, moderate place and know.

Clayton Hepler (02:39)
Yeah, right, right.

Justin Piche (03:05)
feel pretty confidently. They're not going to run out of money as long as those assets are invested well, ⁓ or they own properties producing cashflow or something like that. I think they'd be fine.

Clayton Hepler (03:15)
Right, okay. like, ⁓ but someone that's younger, right? Like what's the, so the, the, yeah, you, you, you, you, How much liquid?

Justin Piche (03:21)
So how about me? How much would I need? Like 20 billion liquid.

don't like a lot of money. Like if we're going to maintain the lifestyle with that, you and continue to have kids and live in a really high cost of living. Yeah. I think I'd feel comfortable at like very comfortable if I had 20 million liquid. Yeah. Yeah. I would feel pretty, pretty, pretty set.

Clayton Hepler (03:33)
How many you said 20 20.

Okay. All right.

Justin Piche (03:44)
I mean, because you think about that, just like even conservative investments, cash flowing investments, you know, you could you could buy your own, like you could just buy mortgages, for example, just buy mortgages, even like a low rate, like a low yield in like the high tens to 15 % with, you know, 50 % of your assets. And you could be producing half a million dollars a year in interest cash flow.

Clayton Hepler (03:44)
So.

Justin Piche (04:12)
And then reinvesting that principle that or that amortization that's getting paid down on those notes and buy and do like, that's a lot of money. You could be really, really comfortable with that amount of money. I probably, that's probably too much. I probably don't actually like, I probably wouldn't need that much honestly, to like, to, I wouldn't feel particularly comfortable because I'm ambitious and I have like a lot of things I'm doing and working on. ⁓ but if I wanted to like shut things down and like optimize my costs for this area that I'm living in and like stop spending a lot of money on the things that

Clayton Hepler (04:23)
Sorry, I'm just a guy.

Justin Piche (04:42)
you know, that I don't necessarily need or business things, then it would probably be less than that.

Clayton Hepler (04:47)
Okay, so actually did, I ran this number ⁓ and it kind of relates to the article that I wrote, by the way, if you don't follow me on Twitter, which I'm sure we have, I don't know how many listeners we have, but most people probably follow you me. Yeah, right. That's the biggest podcast in the world. So I would say for most people, ⁓ you can assume a conservative number. Let's just say a 6 %

Justin Piche (04:50)
Okay.

All 10 of them. They're all 10 of them. I don't post on Twitter anymore. I'm, yeah.

Clayton Hepler (05:17)
return on your money. All right, let's just say that, right? You need about $15 million to invest it in different credit scores to get about 600K. I think it was like 600K, 15 million, right, per year, which is good, right? It's good, right? So you're like 50K a month, right? ⁓ After taxes, you know, depending on the investment, you might be at like 45K a month, 40K a month, which for most people, that's like, you're good, right?

Justin Piche (05:45)
Dude, that's golden

for like 99.9 % of people.

Clayton Hepler (05:47)
Right, right, Right, it's cool. Yeah, yeah, right,

right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right,

Justin Piche (06:04)
Yeah, can't live in like, you can't live in like excessive like luxury and spending, but you can go and travel anywhere you want. You can have a very, very nice home. You can have nice vehicles. You can go out to eat however often you want. Like, yeah, at that level for sure.

Clayton Hepler (06:12)
Literally.

Got

it. That's the kind of the number, the 15, okay, so 15 liquid, got it. So then I kind of like created this kind of ⁓ step-by-step process of how someone over a period of five years, just five years, can be...

Justin Piche (06:36)
I did read this

by the way. I think it was in the land letter I read. Yeah, I did like it. I like the theory behind it. I think the execution part is really hard. It's really not a hard thing to do.

Clayton Hepler (06:40)
Did you like it?

Okay. Okay.

Yeah. I hope that, yeah, yeah. Well, I would love your feedback,

but basically the premise is in five years, you can get five to seven K or million liquid.

Right? Provided you don't overspend, provided you scale responsibly, you can get to five to 7K, a million. Right? And so that's like a really interesting thought. Right? So, you know, if we're looking at opportunity vehicles, and we're talking about job loss, and I don't mean to hijack the conversation, Justin, it's just kind of top of mind. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, okay, ⁓ so how do I do that in a way?

Justin Piche (07:22)
No, this is interesting. We're going to talk about AI too, so.

Clayton Hepler (07:30)
that I'm able to build a business that sustains.

And that's the question that I'm asking myself, right? Because one of the things that I'm seeing as well is so I'm in, you know, I have the landmine community, people are doing really well. There are people that are also, they're also, you know, hey, I'm struggling, right? Why are you struggling, right? Because some, know, one of, one of, actually got off a call with someone screaming and yelling, a 200k wire today, profit from someone in the community, which is amazing, right?

I'd take that, you'd take that shit, right? Like, turn it over, right? But what's the difference and how do you actually build this machine? I'm fascinated by that, right? Because we have this avenue, this change. How does a ground game change over time? Because the ground game, dude, is as old as time. People have been playing the ground game since years, thousands of years.

Justin Piche (08:30)
Millennia,

millennia.

Clayton Hepler (08:31)
People have been playing

the ground game forever. So how are we adapting? How are we changing? And what's interesting is like, if I'm thinking about bridging the gap from AI to all this stuff, like where are the things that are interesting and how do I create a sustainable business that allows me to continue to profit, continue to provide value to the marketplace in an era of uncertainty? Who do I need to serve with the off market land that will continue to be a buyer?

because I'm arbitraging sellers and buyers. And so what skill set do I need to arbitrage between sellers and buyers in order to continue to stay solvent and make money? And so that's an interesting thing. So I have a couple more thoughts here, but I'm going to get off my, I'd love to hear if you have anything to add. I got a couple more kind of high level things to touch on, but I think that that article is kind of pretty interesting. I mean, it says the guy that wrote it.

You know what mean? It's kind of like, he's... ⁓

Justin Piche (09:33)
Yeah, but no, it's an interesting thought.

No, no, it's an interesting.

Yeah, I think so this last week there's been this rage on X about ⁓ Claude bot and you know, we're not an AI podcast. We're land investing podcast, but we are people that like to use technology in our business and I use AI heavily like a lot and I've talked to people about abacus.ai is which is which is the primary like ⁓ AI interface that I use because the tokens are way cheaper.

way cheaper than going direct through like Anthropic or OpenAI or any of those type of things for queries and requests. And you get access to like a bunch of different models. You get access to a deep research model that is exceptional, can build apps, can do all kinds. I mean, it's done some pretty incredible things for me, but it's, it has limited control over your systems and computer and your, like just your business in general. Can't integrate well with like everything you do, but it's really useful.

And so this, this model came out or this, this agent programming, whatever it's called, came out called open claw and open claw is something you can just like run on a VPS. can run it on a virtual server, which is what did. I, I, I bought a virtual server for like six bucks a month and I installed this open claw and I, I like did a ton of research on like security features and I, know,

because I don't want to get hacked and have it, like have somebody get access to all of my like API keys and start spending crazy amounts of money on whatever they can spend money on. I set up a bunch of security features, put like encrypted key lockers, things like that on the model, turn it off to open internet or like it can access the internet, but it can't be seen on the internet. And I'm sure there's a million ways to hack this thing that nobody knows about.

super advanced computer programmer and hackers could totally screw me. But like it doesn't have access to anything financial right now. It doesn't have access to a whole bunch of different stuff and it's run on its own system that's separate from my computer and where I mostly interface. ⁓ But it is crazy because it can do so much stuff. It just like a couple days of playing with it. I've racked a crazy like anthropic bill because it works best with Claude.

But I finally got off that. I'm actually using Abacus API calls where my credits are way cheaper and I already have a subscription with a ton of credits because I have a bunch of my team using it. the way Abacus works is you get all these credits based on how many users you have in Abacus. And so I just have like a ton of them and they're cheaper than going direct. And so I finally switched the model over. it's not costing nearly as much. But just quick like set up stuff, getting it plugged into my Google Workspace account and being able to.

⁓ like, Hey, I want to edit my signature. Here's like some files and it just boom, like updates my signature. Like it's not that big of a deal. Right. I could have gone to some HTML coding thing and like put my picture in and put my logo in and put my phone number and, and it would have outputted like HTML code that I could have updated right into my email client. But I did it just by prompting it with like, for like five seconds type of thing. Instead of having to like do all that other stuff to change something so simple and how to, I could have it send emails.

I had to my dad, and I was talking to my dad on the phone. I was like, I've been building this cool thing. And I was like, check this out. I literally typed in, send this email and give an explanation of kind of what we've been working on over the last two days. And it just, boom, popped out this massive email about all these things we're setting up and working on. And I can proofread it and have it send it. It's super cool to do those type of things. It's integrated with Zoom. today I had somebody, I was telling you this earlier, but I had somebody.

I was like, hey, are we meeting? Can we meet at 10 or whatever? And I just messaged, hey, just refer to the person as their first name. And it went into my email, looked up who it was, and then found their email, scheduled a Zoom meeting right then for the time that I had prompted it to. And those are tiny little things, but those are things that a lot of people have their assistants doing, or they're doing them themselves. And these are things that take 30 seconds, a minute. Extrapolate that times 1,000 tasks that you do every day. You get a lot of time back.

And the other thing it has capability of doing is running cron jobs. So like every so often it can do a certain thing. So think about KPI tracking. We do a lot of different things in a lot of different systems. And we spent, I've spent a ton of money and time trying to figure out how to use Zapier and make and integrate all these things. So they show up on the right dashboard and I can monitor it. Well, I had it, I had this thing like reviewing, I plugged in a notion. It built databases and dashboards for me that I described. Like it's crazy. It's crazy.

It and it it it yeah, I mean it's next level and it I had it review all my SOPs that my team is working on or as it works off of and I said hey make me a list of like what are the what are these tasks that are repeatable that were the team is working on that we can automate and it gave me like a list of like 40 things that's like hey I could do this I could do this and then I then I had said hey look at all my zaps like what can we take off of Zapier for example like Zapier is gonna get cooked I think by this.

Clayton Hepler (14:24)
Wow.

Justin Piche (14:53)
because people use Zapier as like a program list, API kind of call back and forth thing where if this happens, this web hook, this, that populates here, et cetera, this AI can program all that for you. If you give it, if it has the API keys to the different software you use, it can do all of that. So I literally had to look at like Zapier and it's like, I can replace all of these apps. It's like, whoa, well, I don't want to do it now because I'm spending a lot of money on API calls, but if I run this on a local machine and I run,

Clayton Hepler (14:58)
Yeah.

They're cucked, man.

Justin Piche (15:22)
A model on a local machine. So I ended up buying a Mac studio, which is an expensive computer. It's like six plus grand to buy this thing, but I'm going to run a local model on this Mac studio and then have it have that have the most of the work be routed to that quantized model on this computer itself. So instead of pulling API calls to all these different places and spending money constantly, it'll route most hats directly to the studio. And then for more advanced reasoning things, obviously these huge models.

like Claude Opus, they just released 4.6 today. You got the Grok, you got these high end other models. Those ones, they're too big to run on a machine. In the Mac Studio, they have a 512 gigabyte of memory, ⁓ RAM, CPU, or CPU and GPU RAM ⁓ version, which is like almost 10,000 after tax. I did not buy that. just felt like too much money on something I'm kind of experimenting with. ⁓

Clayton Hepler (15:58)
Yep.

Yep.

Justin Piche (16:23)
But you don't need to because as these API calls get cheaper, you only have to outsource certain things. And as some of these more capable open source models get compressed and more efficient, you can run better open source models on the machine. And then they have this way of quantizing these models, which is essentially like compressing a model. You might have like a full model that requires 500 gigabytes of memory. So you couldn't even run it on the highest level Mac Studio because

⁓ You need some amount of bandwidth for just the Mac running its own operating system and just like functioning as a computer. You need some headroom. But if you take that 500 gigabyte version and you compress it just a little bit down to like 300 gigabytes, it essentially loses almost no functionality, no reasoning and no to very little speed. But you can run the whole thing locally and you're literally just paying for your electricity to power your computer. It's crazy. It's crazy.

So I would, obviously like I almost feel like I'm giving away like a secret. People are going to find out about this, but remember you heard it on the ground game first. Like we, I think this is a game changer for solopreneurs and for small business owners. There's so many tasks and things that you need to happen in your business that you want to happen. And you're struggling with figuring out who to hire and how to train them and all this different stuff. Like you might not need to for a lot of these things. Like I I can, I don't, this is not where we're at right now.

but I can envision a world in the future where my team is made up of super high performing salespeople and like managers to run the team and me and like that's it. You know, like no.

Clayton Hepler (18:05)
I have some thoughts around that, but how would that change? What do mean by super high performing salespeople?

Justin Piche (18:09)
Like

all you need is that you need still need people on the phone. Like they have AI agents that you can talk to people, but like it's just not it's not the same. Okay. So you need you need closers. You need people that can get deals done. I can build relationships, etc. But do you need that for cold outreach? Right?

Clayton Hepler (18:28)
Well, you can't code outreach with an AI agent right now.

Justin Piche (18:33)
True, there are rules and laws against that. I totally get it. totally get it. So there's a kind of so like there's a lot of things that are going to change in the next. The capability is exceptional. It's pretty crazy. ⁓ Anyway, I'll stop there. I'll stop there. I'll stop there.

Clayton Hepler (18:36)
So, so like...

Yeah, so I,

yeah, I think that, no, no, mean, I, you know, it's kind of, it's certainly calling into question a lot of things. Like one of the things that it's really relevant is like, I've been talking about, as you know, like the path, like we talked about it in the fall, like what's the ideal land business. It's going to get smaller guys. The ideal land business is going to get smaller. It's going to become more localized.

Justin Piche (19:09)
Yeah, I think so. I agree.

Clayton Hepler (19:15)
it's gonna become stacking like you as a CEO, becoming more lethal with each of these kind of tools, right? And accruing more profit for the owner. Now what's really interesting is it does break a paradigm. So the paradigm that we were talking about in the fall, that I know Justin, you broke last year and I, you know,

I also kind of broke in the fall was like, ⁓ Mo volume, Mo problems, right? And so like the question is like, how do you actually create this business? it's this ideal kind of structure, right? And you need to mix, this is at least what we're kind of thinking of like, you need to mix this, ⁓

capability of being able to scale with lean, a very lean business. So you don't need that many people anymore to make it work. Right. So you need to have like one person that's exceptionally good at sales. What like literally one person, right? Maybe two, right? The problem if you have one person, and I was talking to a private client about this today is like, if you have one person,

like a one salesperson and they're like it's first of all managing salespeople is the worst job in the world. Second of all, like, you know, all salespeople know it right? Like you don't put the notes in CRM. And this is where AI can help. But you have two salespeople, it's a competitive environment. So that's that's good. But you don't really need all the people that you have that the calls the calling teams, right? Well, you know, maybe if you want to be, you do high volume, but I think the land investing business of 2026 is like,

Justin Piche (20:47)
You

Clayton Hepler (21:12)
Again, finding the right buyer, ⁓ you know, and staying super lean because, you know, a lot of people would take a million, 2 million bucks a year. Like I talked about in that, you know, the ⁓ growth to 5 million or 5 to 7 million and take that home and have low overhead and lower stress. ⁓ And they can allocate their time to kind of something else. I don't know.

Justin Piche (21:42)
I that's like the dream for sure. That's the dream. I mean, I don't necessarily think I'm going to try to use it to completely destroy my team or anything like that. My current goal is to use it to make everybody who needs it on the team better, more efficient, better at finding opportunities, and can spend more time looking at the higher order stuff. And I was talking to Brian, my sales manager, who you know, about this.

Yesterday because I'm just experimenting and it's really cool the stuff that I'm able to build with this agent framework and go through the possibilities of what this would look like for like the sales team and you know more volume more problems we got a ton of ton of properties in inventory and with that comes a lot of friction for price drops and relisting and how are our realtors doing on those properties and how are our property increase and what feedback are we getting and what issues are popping up in title with these

properties that our initial title company didn't catch. And it's just like compounds, right? And then you have the accuracy of the data and the accuracy of your marketing and the accuracy of your posts and like, are you conveying the right thing to your buyers? Are you telling them the right thing all the time? And there's just so much that goes into it that can go these little steps and things that can go wrong. Well, what if you could eliminate 99 % of...

Clayton Hepler (22:45)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (23:05)
that friction because you have automated tasks, you have verification checks on data, you have like an agent in the background running to clean up your data across all of your systems. Like that stuff, that stuff removes friction and helps people not worry about those little things that they currently have to worry about. And now you have hours a day back to think about this, the growing of the business and the better way to execute it and the building of relationships that you need to do. Like, I like,

Another example of some way this tool could be used is identifying opportunities. Like I think there's a way to ⁓ essentially automate viewing listed properties and running them through a process of determining what is the best way to subdivide and divide these up and preliminarily underwriting these properties for you so that you have a CRM full of on-market opportunities. And if you can get that built up as a business,

where you can execute. Yeah, you still need to do the capital side. You still need the bank lending side. There's all these pieces that AI is not going to replace for you because you have to be able to like execute on these projects. It can help you. But in the end, your dirt excavation guy is not going to talk to your AI on the phone. Like you've got to coordinate that project or hire a GC and manage that project. The AI is not going to be able to bankroll you, right? You're going to have to pitch to partners, investors, lenders.

Clayton Hepler (24:26)
you

Justin Piche (24:30)
and show them that you can do this thing. It's just a tool to help maybe identify opportunities. It's a tool to make less mistakes. It's a tool to get some more of your time back. Kind of the time I'm viewing it right now is like building customized specialized agents for different functions of the business, for different people to specifically use to enhance them substantially.

Clayton Hepler (24:48)
Yep,

yes, I completely agree. And it's, it kind of becomes like, ⁓ it just didn't a way to enhance your business. And it's no longer like, I think what it does is it gives the CEO the opportunity to be more strategic. And so the mundane administrative tasks become

Justin Piche (25:10)
Right, I agree.

Clayton Hepler (25:16)
automated or ⁓ obsolete, right? ⁓ You know, because that's the whole thing. think the evolution is like, the maturity of the business has been, and I know you and I both experienced this is ⁓ new people come into the space. ⁓ Then, you know, you get a the ability to target more people. There's a massive opportunity. This happens in every business, by the way.

Right? ⁓ Business gets consolidated and margins over time compress relative to where they were. ⁓ And then it just requires better operations, a better team. ⁓ And the way that you increase margins is you decrease cost of labor, reduce expenses and increase profit per transaction or do more transactions, right? Like an Amazon, right?

⁓ and what we've done historically has been through global talent, right? And now what we can do through ⁓ AI, ⁓ and automation is the, you know, like we're pushing labor costs down even more. ⁓ and so that, think that'll create more smaller businesses that are founder led founder sales led. and.

More kind of like in intrapreneurs. I was speaking with someone today. It was like dude I want to make 150k next year 200k next year, and that's what I care about and I don't want any overhead I want to be pure net I'm like alright, man like that's cool, right?

Justin Piche (27:02)
all right, let's take a break from AI for a second. I'm going to tell a little crazy land story. This can happen to anybody. And and I don't think it's going to necessarily hurt me personally or my company, but is a real thing that's going on. So we we bought a property in Alabama in twenty twenty three, December of twenty twenty three.

from a guy who had the last name Smith. And when we brought it to title, title found the original deed back from like 1942. And this guy was apparently the heir of Smith. And so they went through their kind of search. They needed affidavits of heirship for this guy, which is a very normal process. And so he got affidavits of heirship signed, notarized, et cetera, sent. It satisfied the title requirements. We closed on the property.

Now the property was landlocked, which I knew.

But it was a pretty good price. I I almost canceled it. I wouldn't I wouldn't call it like a crazy good price for a landlocked piece of land, but a good price. And it was worth the risk, in my opinion, to take to buy it and try to see if we could get access. So after I bought it or actually before I bought it, I tried to reach out to the people that I needed to get this easement from. And I was able to talk to one and I was able to talk to the other. But then I couldn't get a hold of him for like six months. And we tried every day, sent mail sent like

explanations of what we're trying to do like all this stuff. So finally I have my assistant hire an attorney and use the attorney to try to get these people to the table to get an easement. So end of 2024 actually it was like March of 2025. So this is almost a year and a half later. I finally got my easements like $10,000 of attorney bills. And then when I got these inside, I get them survey a couple grand and then I had to build

like a thousand foot long clay road and clear through to the property to get access to it and which costs 40 something 50 K whatever. So I mean I'm in it for a good a good chunk now at this point. I've hold it for a long time. I listed I get under contract for I got a contract for like three three thirty or three forty or something like that. So it's a good deal like I'm in it for like one all in like 120 130. Great deal.

Clayton Hepler (29:21)
I'm going to you all in.

Dude monster

Justin Piche (29:28)
I had to hold it for a long time. I had to do a lot of work to get it done, but monster great deal. Comes back appraisal comes back low appraisal came back at like 270 or something like that guy was getting a loan and so we ended up we ended up deciding to do is is we bumped up the price from the appraisal to what his down payment would have been had he paid the 330 or whatever. So I ended up selling for 290. I didn't want to go back to market. It was still a good deal. You know double basically a double.

on a big deal, which is great, sold it in June. Two or three days ago, I got a text from the broker that sold it that just said, emergency, need to talk now. I was like, this is a weird text. Real estate brokers don't typically text you emergency. So I answer the phone, or I call them whatever, and he's like, hey, the guy who bought the property from you just got a letter, like a certified letter, a cease and desist from an attorney.

Clayton Hepler (30:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin Piche (30:27)
It basically says that the deed that you had was invalid and all those affidavits were invalid and his day deed is invalid. It orders him to immediately stop using the property in any way, shape or form and provided some like ⁓ proof apparently of like the guy who we bought it from is not actually the heir even though they have the same name of the guy who had the deed back in 1942. So this guy is not really the heir.

And so what the attorney is alleging is that there's a family that has been paying taxes on this property and they didn't know it sold until 2025. They didn't know it with the deed of transferred until 2025. And so they found out, went to this attorney and like drafted all this stuff. So essentially it alleges that it was all fraudulent. The transfer to me was fraudulent and then my transfer obviously is null because the transfer to me was fraudulent in the first place. And I'm not party to a lawsuit. I haven't been served by anything.

I'm kind of like once removed at this point. It looks pretty compelling, frankly. So I'm like, I don't know what the heck to do here. So my broker was like, you need a call? You need to call the seller. He really needs to talk to you. So I call him, I mean the buyer, sorry, your buyer. So I call him, he's a young guy, probably our age or late 30s or whatever. He wanted a hunting property, saving a bunch. So he's put probably an extra 40 grand into the property and clearing.

hunting trails, green fields, like hunting blinds, et cetera. And he's been hunting it all season. He was about to go out there this, like the day that he called me to go hunt when he got that cease and desist letter. So he's freaking out. He went to the attorney that closed us in Alabama. I haven't heard anything back from him yet, that attorney. And that's kind of like where it sits.

Clayton Hepler (31:57)
Yeah.

So would your

title insurance be able to... ⁓

Justin Piche (32:22)
Well,

so I called my title company that I purchased it with and they'd already archived all these files. So they had to go into their storage unit to get the files and pull out my title insurance policy. And I have a title insurance policy for the original purchase price that I bought it for, which is about 60K. And then when I sold it to him, he has a title insurance policy for whatever he bought it for, like 280 or whatever his 290, I can't remember exact number.

Clayton Hepler (32:38)
my god

Justin Piche (32:50)
And then he is a lender and they obviously have a lender's title insurance policy for whatever the loan amount was. And so I was talking to the title company and they're like, Hey, we can't reply to him because he wasn't our client. We can't reply to Al because we haven't been like served by anything. You know, our legal counsel said, you know, not to do anything, but I'm calling you just to like, let you know, like kind of what we, so I asked her like, what's the process? Like what is going to happen, et cetera. And I mean, what she said is, and this is not legal advice by any stretch or she's not a lawyer. She's the, she's a title agent who runs a title company.

⁓ But her thought is that the title insurance policy that the buyer that bought it from me has is what's going to kick in an effect. And he's probably going to have to basically exercise that policy and only get the money back for the amount of the title insurance policy. The lender will be made whole from their lender insurance policy. He'll be made whole from his, except for all the extra money that he put in it is forfeit.

Clayton Hepler (33:43)
Could he go after you? Yeah, he probably could.

Justin Piche (33:45)
Maybe.

Yeah, you probably could. You probably could. And I mean, obviously, there's no there's no malice, ill will. There's nothing I could have possibly done. went through title. got title insurance. We obviously thought we were buying from the right person. They passed it through. like, you know, my heart kind of goes out to the guy if this is if this is real. I don't know if this is real or not. You know, like I think it looks pretty legit, but it's going to be I have no way I have no way of proving anything. I don't know. I bought the property. I got title insurance. I sold the property, put a lot of money into it. He put a lot of money into it.

Clayton Hepler (33:55)
They passed it, they passed it through, they passed it through.

Whoa, dude.

Justin Piche (34:15)
But like worst case scenario for him is that he loses all the money he put into it. He gets the money back from the purchase. His lender gets made whole by their lender's title insurance policy. these people who this guy tried to fraud by selling it to or fraud it by selling it to us and us selling it on, they get a property with an easement and about $100,000 of road and clearing work on it.

Clayton Hepler (34:39)
Oh my gosh. I'll tell you another example. So some guy submitted a deal to me today. Like he sends me a text. He's like, urgent, urgent, me a Similar situation. It's like 400, 500 acre track. Seller wants, seller wants apparently 750 an acre.

Justin Piche (34:41)
which is crazy.

Clayton Hepler (35:07)
to 800 acre. I looked at prompts, it's like 3000 acre. I'm like, dude, I will fly to this city and personally meet with the seller. It's like 400 acres, So 400 acres times 3000 acre.

Justin Piche (35:24)
a lot. Yeah, 1.2 million. 1.2 million out of Yeah, for sure.

Clayton Hepler (35:25)
That's a 700k profit deal. That's a 700k profit

deal. ⁓ I would fly to the city. So he calls me this afternoon, I talked to him. He's looking for funding. He's like, dude, I want you to come in on me, help me funding, whatever. And so, okay, I'm like, yeah, man, I mean, looks like a great deal. Do you want me to fly there? Right? ⁓ And he's like, I think I heard the seller say this, I'm not sure. Right? Good guy. This guy's a good guy.

⁓ that sent me the deal. He's like, I think I heard the seller, maybe, I'm not sure. And so I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. ⁓ Give him a call back, talk to him, get clear on the number, right? And if you're good, like, let's get this thing locked up, right? He's like, but the guy wants it closed by next Friday.

When you hear that, what do you think?

Justin Piche (36:19)
yeah, I think desperate, think like, I mean, yeah, I scammer type thing or fraud. No, you can't close. mean, you know, just to be clear and I hope everybody who's listening knows this. I'm sure they do because anybody who's listening to this probably isn't an operator who's actually like done deals. People can't, you can't close in a freaking week. Like it's just not going to happen. There's no way. The only way to do it is to write, not run title and do the deed yourself. And it's just like, does. This is not how it works anymore.

Clayton Hepler (36:24)
or fraud

Exactly so either way right either way He calls a guy back and the guy Says I'm not gonna sell it to you anymore because you're from out of state, which is actually good I'm not gonna tell you the state, but because it's private information. I don't feel comfortable sharing it. He didn't give me But so I'm trying to find a guy in this state

Justin Piche (37:11)
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.

Clayton Hepler (37:16)
And I know a couple guys in the state that are operators and I'm going to call them and be like, yo, drive to this guy's house and close this deal and you'll get a percentage of the profit. Now here's the question, Justin.

What do you pay this guy? If they're local to the area, okay, so someone brings me a deal, they'll bring me a deal as a funder. This is an interesting thing. I'd like the listeners to think this way. Okay, so I'm funding the deal like it's a bigger deal, right? It's quick turnaround, so I gotta make sure my risk is protected. But then I need someone else to come into the deal to make the deal work. That's an interesting conundrum. How do you pay this guy?

that makes the deal work, because it wouldn't work without this person, like, what's a fair percentage? Acquisition fee of closing, equity rep, like, if you're buying something for 300 to selling it for 400, selling it for 1.2, you know?

Justin Piche (38:05)
Equity rep.

Yeah, I mean, it's tough though. If you bring somebody in and they're the one that gets it under contract with their own company name and they have to assign it to you to do the deal, know, hopefully you're not. mean, if I was going to call somebody to make this deal work, they'd be somebody I know and trust and we'd work out a fair deal. Like nobody's going to screw, know, nobody that I like that is a friend of mine is going to screw me on a deal like that.

Clayton Hepler (38:30)
That's right. That's what I'm thinking.

Justin Piche (38:40)
I don't know, I'd be generous. like, dude, 10%, all you gotta do is drive here and you can make 70K. Get the signature, 10 % is yours. I'll take care of all the funding, I'll run the deal. You don't have to do anything. I'd be generous.

Clayton Hepler (38:41)
Yeah, you got to be generous.

Heck yeah, man. Exactly. And I think that this is the lesson I want to talk about, right?

One insight, one relationship, one moment can literally change your land business. And I think that we talked about in this episode a lot of interesting things. AI is changing things. You know, how do you get to five to seven million dollars? ⁓ You know, I think the competitive advantage has been and will continue to be the relationships that you build with other people.

And that is so trite, but it's so true, man. And being the person that when the buck stops, you can be the person. You can stand up. And that goes for you in your business. That goes for you in adopting new technology. That goes for you in shifting the market. People that really crush it are not victims. Their heroes are their own story. And so ⁓ that's something I want to leave our listeners with here today as we sign off the ground game.

You know, in 2026, you you might be hearing a lot of stuff. We talked about jobs in January, just plummeting down and you're asking yourself, is this the right opportunity for me? You know, I think the opportunity is what you make it. And there's still a ton of opportunity in this space. But it's about taking ownership and about being a hero of your own story. And look, if you're listening to this podcast, I believe in you. I believe in you, man. I'm sure Justin, you you feel the same way, man.

There's a lot of opportunity to go around and I think this community is amazing. And so that's what I'd like to leave this podcast with as we sign off here today.

Justin Piche (40:41)
Well said.

Well said. Maybe I'd like to leave them, users or listeners with a word of caution of like, don't get left behind. Things are changing really fast. You we've dealt with a lot of like business changes in this industry, maturing, et cetera. And I think things are going to get thrown in their head again, right? What is, what is job loss from AI mean for people's ability to purchase land? Where do people want to go? What do they do to make money?

Like there's so many things that could be thrown off by this. And like, I'm not a doomer to say like, my God, all these jobs are gonna go away. They might transition, they might change, there'll be some growing pains, et cetera. But after using this tool for the last few days, I think we're a lot closer to a lot of things being replaced than we think, than most people think. I think it's coming quicker than we ever thought.

Clayton Hepler (41:38)
On that note guys, if you got benefit from this podcast, we appreciate you listening. Leave a rate, review, and subscribe. I'm sure all the people that are listening have done that before. I don't even feel like I need to ask anymore. Yeah, right, all, yeah. But we appreciate you guys catching in every single week. Look, if you wanna reach out to us, there's still a lot of ways we can collaborate together, Justin and I are on social media, Instagram.

Justin Piche (41:50)
All 210 or whatever.

Clayton Hepler (42:07)
We'll put our bios linked down below. We always love to connect with fellow investors and you know here to help out and you know buy America back ⁓ one acre at a time.

Justin Piche (42:21)
All right. I'm pretty bad actually at social media, just so everybody knows. I don't really post much. I do consume a good bit of it on X because there's so much good information there. A better way of reaching me is by email. you can, yeah. Justin at scotlandgroup.com is my primer.

Clayton Hepler (42:30)
This tone looks good.

We'll put all those links down below.

Justin Piche (42:39)
Clay's way better. If you want to get in touch with me, message Clay and he'll be like, yeah, yeah, here. Just kidding, don't do that, don't do that. Don't make him do menial tasks.

Clayton Hepler (42:39)
It's Clyde bottle check. It's Clyde bottle check.

Cool guys.

Justin Piche (42:49)
Let's sign off. ⁓

Clayton Hepler (42:50)
Awesome. Yeah, we'll sign off.