E43: Land Investing That Prints Money (With Brent Bowers)

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Brent Bowers (thelandsharks.com) joins Joshua and Lauryn to break down how he went from broke Army officer, deployments, and debt to building freedom through vacant land investing. Brent shares the exact moment land “clicked” for him, why land beats rentals for simplicity, and how seller financing turned one small deal into predictable monthly cashflow. If you’ve ever thought land investing sounds fake, this episode will challenge that.

In This Episode, We Cover:
• Brent’s origin story: military life, family strain, and needing a way out
• Why rentals didn’t “cashflow” like promised (repairs killed profits)
• The first land deal: paying $285 in back taxes and turning it into $5,000
• Why “boring” land can be a money printer with seller finance
• How Brent uses postcards/letters to reach tax-delinquent landowners
• Seller financing: down payments, 8–12% interest, and long-term cashflow
• The biggest lie: “You can’t make money with land”
• Why beginners fail: inconsistency, perfectionism, and quitting too early
• The fastest way to lose money: skipping due diligence (call the county!)
• Tax mistakes: the painful IRS bill, and why depreciation assets matter
• Passive vs active: it’s active while building, passive once stabilized
• Long-term plan: keep taxes low, buy rentals annually (mobile parks/industrial)
• Golden rule: “Never buy on emotion”

Book recommendation: Who Not How (Benjamin Hardy + Dan Sullivan)

Brent’s Most Memorable Lessons:
• Consistency beats perfection. Send the offers, follow up, repeat.
• Due diligence is non-negotiable. “Call the county and see if it’s buildable.”
• Cash chunks + cashflow matters. Big flips are great, but monthly payments protect you in downturns.
• Land has fewer headaches. No tenants, no toilets, no HVAC repairs.

Resources + Links:
• Brent’s site: thelandsharks.com
• Land owner/data tool: landsharksdata.com
• Brent on YouTube: Brent Bowers (https://www.youtube.com/@brentlbowers)
• Postcard resource mentioned: thelandsharks.com/postcard

Connect + Support:

If you got value from this episode, share it with a friend and leave a review. Questions or guest recommendations? DM Joshua + Lauryn.

Learn how we made over $2M in equity in 5 years. FREE download of the ALLLL Method™ blueprint. https://bit.ly/4pUFBMD

Want to learn more about our mastermind community? Send us a DM or visit https://bmlegacywealthbuilder.com

Instagram: @thebrokemillionaires_

This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not financial, tax, or legal advice.

#LandInvesting #CreativeFinance #SellerFinancing #WealthBuilding #RealEstateInvesting #BrokeMillionaires

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And I was like, deal! Um, I didn't even make five grand in a month and a half back then in the military. So to make that in like a day or a couple hours of time was heck yeah for me. Easy as conversation, sweet gentleman. He wasn't in need for money. He was a little motivated. He basically wanted to just get what he owed on the back Texas, like $285. And he told me the address, and I was like, huh. Okay, what am I missing here? So I went and looked at the land. It was beautiful. It looked to overlook the Pike National Forest. It was actually two parcels, but not buildable because there's only one ingress, one egress. The firefighters could only get in, they can get pinned down and not get out. So they would not let them build on the street bummer, right? Uh so no clue what it was worth, and I surely wasn't spending $285 because I was like paying for diapers and formula. We just moved across the country. I was a brand new army officer. So $285 is like telling me to come up with like a million right now. I'd be like, oh geez, like I'm not like telling that. Like that's a little tough. I didn't have the money. And so I called the real estate office right next to this land bill. And the agent was very nice. Saturday morning, I said, what's the blowout price for this land? What can I sell it for? She's like, maybe $10,000. And I was like, what? I'm about to trade $285 for $10,000. I was like, I'll call you as soon as I own it. Well, she's like, well, hey, I'd buy it from me, maybe. Uh can I make an offer? I was like, please, yeah. So she offered me five grand. She thought it's too low ball. I was like jumping through. Like, I was so excited. Um, my wife was with me, my newborn baby was with me, one of my omniofficer friends uh was with me.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Welcome back to The Broke Billionaires, where we document our daily struggles and building wealth while raising a young family. Join us as we talk creative wealth building for everyday people and couples that are struggling in a down economy. I'm Lauren.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

And I'm Joshua Masari, and we'll be your host.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Today's guest is Brent Bowers, a land investor and coach. After eight years as an army officer and too much time away from his family, Brent turned to vacant land investing to create freedom. He scaled fast, built a team, and now helps others do the same. Welcome back to The Broke Millionaires. We have Brent Bowers today, and we are so excited to welcome you to the show. How are you doing today, Brent?

SPEAKER_02 2:19

I'm good, Lauren. Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Nice to meet you too. Wow. Should we just jump right into the questions?

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Yeah, let's go. We're excited to hear what you have to talk about. This is kind of a new, a new topic for us and our audience. So I'm just as excited as everybody else is to learn more about this.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

I am too. We don't, I personally don't know a lot about land investing, so I'm really excited for today. So, Brent, for people that don't know you yet, what problem did land investing solve for you personally?

SPEAKER_02 2:45

I was broke. That was it. No, it solved my broke problem. Um, yeah, so yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Joshua Lauren, nice to meet you both. Um, I I can't even believe that uh I get to be on these podcasts now because 20 um 16, 2015, I was preparing for my second or my actually my third combat deployment. Uh we had just had our first baby uh in 2016, and I was about to be gone again for another year. Uh also the train up uh is like six months for that. So I was in the military. So the problem I was facing was I was tired of being away from home. Um I had already been divorced once. I actually thought it was coming again, uh, this time with children involved, and that was like my worst nightmare. Uh so I was looking for ways to get out of the military. And I was, I had wholesale some houses, I had six rentals at the time, and I wasn't making money. I was absolutely flat broke, and even worse, I was in debt. Um, and if I would have left my military job, there's no way I could have lived off those rentals. I would have lost all of them because they weren't producing. They were like, it's like the reverse opposite of what they teach you in, you know, investment school. And I had a real estate license in 2007. They never trained me to do investing. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to sell real estate for other people, but uh I found land investing and I took a lot of massive, very imperfect, hasty action um, and ended up making some money pretty quickly. Um, so that's kind of the story back in 2016 when the land investing started. I actually started learning real estate in probably 2005, 2004. I was going to seminars and reading the books. So it took me longer than most, I feel like. Um I was reading Donald Trump books in middle school.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

I've read those. Yeah, I know which ones you're talking about. Um part of the deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. That was a pretty good one. Um, okay, so what made you choose land investing over other real estate? Obviously, you've got other other background in it. What what kind of pushed you towards going all in on the land investing versus the other things that you were doing or all the other things out there?

SPEAKER_02 5:00

Man, oh my gosh. I'm so happy you asked me that, Joshua. Uh um that brings passion inside of my heart to even answer that question. But is it okay if I ask a question? Why is it called the broke millionaires?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

The exact reason you just explained why you got into this in the first place. So we, I mean, we invest, uh we have a lot of different investments that we do, but personally or locally, we are in California and it's very expensive here. So the properties that we buy, they're fixer-uppers, they're over a million dollars as a, you know, basically almost a teardown, and they take a lot of money to put in. And so we have a lot of money tied up in our deals. And even though we're multi-millionaires on paper, we're cash broke. So that's kind of where the name comes from is just we're making these sacrifices now, we're building up wealth, but you know, we're millionaires who just gosh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

I really thought that was it. I really did. And it's like, you know, I try and explain to my children, I was like, you guys have no clue how well you are set up. You know, all this property will be paid off in like 12 years, all these rentals, all these industrial buildings, these commercial buildings, a lot of land we have. Um, but there's days when I'm just like, oh my goodness, like I'm gonna pay this contractor. I don't know where I'm gonna find the money. Um, there have been many days like that, and that's kind of fewer and further in the past now, but ah, some sleepless nights. Uh, this is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure. But what you can build with it is absolutely incredible. Thanks for explaining that. Um, why land? Okay, so I bought my first rental property in 2007, just before the crash happened in eight. And I bought it for $123,000, ended up getting a home equity line of credit for $12,000 to do some fix up. So I'm like in it for like $130 something thousand dollars now at this point. My mortgage payment's like $750,000 a month. I get a renter in there for $950,000. I think I'm smart, right? That's $200 a month net. Uh, that's $2,400 a year. I was making on paper. Well, something always happens. Uh, it seems like every six months, a water heater goes out, uh, a boiler, an air conditioner, a roof leaks, or a septic system. And it's like, here we are, six years later, still haven't turned to profit on this, on this property. Well, let me tell you about my first land deal. Um, I sent out a bunch of letters to people that I got off of the tax delinquent list from El Paso County, Colorado. I just called the, I called the El Paso County treasurer. I said, hey, I want everyone that's behind on their taxes. I want to send them a letter and buy their land and pay these back taxes. Well, that lady, her name is Cindy, she didn't understand what I meant. She thought I wanted to pay all the back taxes. So she sent me everything that was not bought, that was not bought on the county tax record. So this is like raw land, inefficient, not buildable, non-developable, not accessible, not large enough to build them. Like you name it, almost like 800 of these records. Well, it came in like a uh a scanned version. So I had to pay a Filipino virtual assistant like $5 an hour to get everything transferred into schedule numbers. And we got the mailing addresses. And like a month and a half later, I could finally mail these people a postcard that said, Hey, my name's Brent. I'd like to buy your land. Uh, I'll pay all cash at a fair price, offer, call me, text me, God bless you. And if anybody wants a copy of that, um, I still buy properties to this day with that simple handwritten postcard. They can get it at the landsharks.com forward slash postcard. Well, my phone started ringing. I was actually the first guy that called me was a retired CPA. Easy as conversation, sweet gentleman. He wasn't in need for money. Uh, he was a little motivated. He basically wanted to just get what he owed on the back taxes. This was like $285. And he told me the address, and I was like, huh. Okay, what am I missing here? So I went and looked at the land. It was beautiful. It looked to overlook the Pike National Forest. It was actually two parcels, but not buildable because there's only one ingress, one egress. The firefighters could only get in, they can get pinned down and not get out. So they would not let them build on the street. Bummer, right? Uh so I had no clue what it was worth, and I surely wasn't spending $285 because I was like paying for diapers and formula, and we just moved across the country. I was a brand new army officer. So $285 is like telling me to come up with like a million right now. I'd be like, oh geez, like I'm not like that. That's a little tough. Um, I didn't have the money. And so I called the real estate office right next to this land deal. And the agent was very nice Saturday morning. I said, What's the blowout price for this land? What can I sell it for? She's like, Maybe $10,000. And I was like, What? I'm about to trade $285 for $10,000. I was like, I'll call you as soon as I own it. Well, she's like, Well, hey, I'd buy it from you. Maybe uh, can I make an offer? And I was like, please, yeah. So she offered me five grand. She thought she was low balling me. I was like jumping through, like, I was so excited. Uh, my wife was with me, my newborn baby was with me, and one of my army officer friends uh was with me. And I was like, deal. Um, I didn't even make five grand in a month and a half back then in the military. So to make that in like a day or a couple hours of time was heck, yeah, for me. Um, so long story short, got paid on Wednesday the following week, cashier's check. I went and paid the seller. He trusted me to sell it ahead of time, basically. He gave me a quick claim deed and I can't came back and paid him later. Um, and then the next one was even easier. I sold the next one for $500 down, which was what I paid for it, and $400 a month. And that's the one that changed my life. Because all those years I had been renting this house out for $200 a month. And by that time I had like six rentals, and I'm now getting $400 a month, and I'll never have to fix anything on this land. And it was paying my truck payment. And I was like, if I do that 10 more times, I'm financially free and I can leave the military. I just needed to make almost almost $4,500 a month back then to cover everything. Um, a couple years later, 2018, I'm I'm netting 12 grand a month uh in land, got out of the military, and then started doing bigger deals. And here we are. I get to talk on these famous podcasts like the Broken Millionaire. Nice.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Just a quick disclaimer: the information shared on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Your individual circumstances may differ and require specific strategies not discussed here. Now let's get back to the show. All right. So that brings up another question. And this is something that I was kind of curious before we talked to you. Um, what is your strategy? How are you making money out of this? Are you doing seller finance for the most part? Are you flipping these right away? How are you turning these and how are you making that profit?

SPEAKER_02 11:54

Yes, and yes. Um, everything you just mentioned, I feel like I'm a little bit shiny object. I'll do any kind of land deal that makes profit. Now, I've I've got, I'm actually doing less and less land deals now. Um, I only want to do like one a month. We just sold, we just went under contract for one yesterday. It was a subdivide. Uh, we paid the lender back on subdivide two out of six. So I had six of these to sell. We're selling the sixth one uh right now, but that one I went under contract yesterday for 120 grand. Uh so I like to do a little bit bigger, nicer land deals now that take less work. Uh, but in the beginning, I would do anything that would turn a profit. I really, really like the seller finance side because it pays me for a long time. Um, it pays me for years. At one time, we're up to 44,000 a month in net income coming in from seller finance land. Um, and I charge interest. I really do what the banks do. I really just copy their system. Because a 30-year mortgage, like the first seven years is all interest. So I do that. I charge anywhere from 8 to 12% interest. A lot of times people will pay me off, or they'll stop paying, or they'll sell the land in two years, or they'll build on it and get a construction loan to pay me off. Um, but yeah, seller finance was my preferred method. And how does the strategy look now? I don't really go after those inefficient properties. You can still make a pile of cash with it. I don't recommend, I don't turn my nose up from it, but I think there's smarter uses of time now uh because it's just as easy to make 50,000 as it is 5,000.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Makes sense. What would you say the biggest lie people believe about land investing is?

SPEAKER_02 13:39

Oh, great question, Lauren. Oh my gosh. Um this is the biggest lie I believed myself. Um I come from Okeechobee, Florida. It's a small town in Florida. We have more cows than people. Our biggest uh income producer is cattle. And I always thought you had to be rich to own land, or a cattle farmer to own land, or a dairy farmer to own land. And I was none of those three. And I didn't know how to make money with land. Um, thank God the guy uh I heard a guy on a podcast one day talking about how he was like doubling his money overnight or over a couple week time period with land. And I had never heard anybody talking about that before. This guy was actually driving to the tax auctions all over the country, and I was like, I don't have time for that. I'm working 14-hour days in the military, I have a newborn baby, I got a wife I want to see. I was like, but I bet you maybe I can catch that land before it gets to that tax sale. Um, so that's how I started it out. But the biggest lie is you can't make money from land. And I'm here to prove that that's that's like printing money. When I s when I buy a piece of land for 10,000, it's worth 30, and I sell it for 30 with 10,000 down and a couple hundred dollars a month for for for a long time, that's a lot of interest I collect. It's like printing money.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah. Uh our next question was gonna be why, why does uh land investing sound fake to people? But I think you just answered it. Like, you know, people think you have to have money, or they they see that you can buy something for $285 and turn around and sell it for five, $10,000. It it sounds too good to be true, but it's it's a realistic endeavor.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

It does. I still think it's too good to be true. I'm just I have a hard time believing this. Um, that one area I talked about in Palmer Lake, Colorado, I have an investor that bought 18 of those lots from me, and we kept charging more and more and more. I was like, what is this guy gonna do with these? I almost started feeling bad. I was like, am I ripping him off? Well, I just talked to him a couple months ago. He took them all and purchased something called like green tax credits. I have no clue how that works. I think he made like a million bucks. So where I thought I was making money, where the builder will eventually make money, and it's just it's so many ways to make money in land. This guy just made money out of a theory I've never even heard of, like just selling tax credits to major corporations.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

So what I'm hearing is we need to start land investing.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Maybe.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

That's why we're here learning, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Yeah, absolutely. Why do you think or what makes most people quit early on with land investing? Is there like one thing that it's I see it?

SPEAKER_02 16:19

Yeah. I've actually helped quite a few people how to basically make an absolute fortune in land investing. Um I always wanted to be the teacher of this. I when I went to um uh No Money Down Real Estate Investing by Robert Allen, I went to a seminar. I thought Robert Allen was gonna be guy the guy teaching it. I actually finally got to meet him a couple years ago. Uh but I went when I was 18 years old, and this guy standing up there was fit, he was older than me. He looked like a million bucks, and I was like, one day I'm gonna be him. I'm gonna teach people how to do this. Um, and I here I am, I get to do it. Uh not exactly the fashion and the form I thought it would be in. A lot of it's over Zoom now, but um I see people quit too too soon. Like I talk to so many people, they call me, they see me on my YouTube channel. I go through everything. I share the good, the bad, the ugly with this business. But people come to me like, ah, Brent, I need to make 50,000 a month. And they come in, they try it for 30 days and they make nothing. And they they quit. They stop sending the letters, they stop sending the offers, they stop following up. And it's like I've learned it's better to ask people, hey, you want to make 50,000 a month? What's the most you've ever made? 3,500 or 4,000 or 6,000. Hey, what if we just get you there consistently for the next couple months, you know, 6,000 a month, and then you work up from that. Um, but I think people have too big a goal too quick, and it doesn't happen as fast as they want it to happen.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Yeah, we see that a lot in in a lot of things, really. Everyone has the shiny object and they want this right now, and if they can't get there immediately, they just kind of give up and go to the next thing and never actually get anywhere because they're just constantly jumping ship before they even get momentum.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

Yeah, and I've done that a lot. I am so guilty of that. I'm not up here like preaching because I haven't done it. Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how many times I've started and stopped my land business. I mined Bitcoin for a while. I like I bought an Amazon store, I bought this, I I I got into apartment complexes, but I always come back to the thing that makes me the most funny.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Well, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the the ugly because there's always there's always an ugly side, or I would think there's always an ugly side. So, what's the fastest way to lose money in land investing? Big mistake that you see people make.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Oh boy. Yeah, I'll give you an example, my own personal example. I still am sitting on this land, and unfortunately, I'm paying this rent, this um this amazing lender, uh, my private lender, a higher interest rate on it because I thought it was going to be a no-brainer, just quick in-out type thing. I didn't care what the interest rate was. Um and I and I suppose I could refinance it or pay it off, but you know, part of me is just like, you know what, making money in all these other places, don't focus on the one that's that you're losing money on. Um, I think I learned that from Tim Ferris. He's like, if you got a house sitting over here, don't just focus on that. But focus on what you're actually making money on. Um But yeah, I bought this land from a wholesaler actually. And I looked at the numbers, I was like, oh, that's a no-brainer, buy it type thing. Um told my acquisition manager. And no one called the county to see if it was even buildable. I saw that lots were going for 55 an acre. I'm getting them at 22 an acre. I bought four of them. Why not just take, why not I'll take all of them? Um and I just bought them and I called my lender. He's like, oh, I was just about to lend to this guy. Um, he's gonna pay me, you know, 13%. I was like, I'll give you $14. It's like all right, deal. That was two years ago. Um, you know, but you know, you can't just look at the numbers. Sometimes you you've got to do all your due diligence. And here I am teaching people how to do this. I felt like a fraud there for a little while. And now I just share it with people. Like, you know, I you get hasty, you get cocky, you get arrogant. Because when you're making a lot of money, you make mistakes. Um, so I'd been pushing this due diligence checklist for years. Go to the landsharks.com forward slash DD as in due diligence. And one of the things on that 14-item list of land buying roadmap I offer there is call the county and see if it's buildable. Well, it wasn't buildable because I they wanted me to put the asphalt roads, the curbs, gutters. That would cost more than four houses. So that's one example right there.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

Yeah, we see something similar in our market. So we do uh in our local market, we do midterm rentals, red furnished rentals. And a lot of the cities around here have outlawed short-term rentals. So we get calls from people and we do co-hosting, so we help other owners with this strategy, but we get people that will buy a house before they even check what the local laws are. They'll buy a house with the intention of Airbnb, like you know, doing short-term Airbnb. They've got a 7% interest rate because that's what rates are right now. They get locked in, they buy the house. After they close, they find out, oh, it's illegal. I can't do this here. Now what do I do? So they'll call us and be like, hey, can we midterm rental? I'm like, well, you can, but you're not gonna make much money because you're your your carrying costs are so high. Like you're pretty, you should probably just sell it. So a lot of them end up selling because they're just so deep in this, and and you know, didn't matter what the interest was, didn't matter the carrying cost, because they were gonna, you know, rent this for $800 a night and make a killing and didn't even do the due diligence that you're talking about. So we see that in a lot of different areas, but yeah, that's that's huge.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

That's a bummer.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Absolutely. What fear do you see with most beginners? Like what's what's something they wouldn't admit out loud that they're scared of?

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Yeah, a lot of them uh don't send the offer letters, you know. They Are too caught up in finding the perfect market, the perfect offer, making sure the math is perfect, and they they just never get around to sending the offer letters. And if they might send it once and they don't send them again, um, it's just the perfection. I I say done is good enough. You know, we also say massive and perfect action. You know, it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

That's so good. Like taking action is way more important. That's something that I that that we're learning in in our our business as well, and just different things. Like taking action is a lot better at 80% perfection is a lot better than waiting and waiting and waiting until you have perfection and then you miss the boat. So just taking action is is so so important in so many different aspects of real estate investing.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

That first step is the hardest, regardless, right? That it like you said, that initial offer, that initial like step forward.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

Yeah, I'll tell you, and I I I actually ended up hiring coach after I did like multiple land deals. I found the guy doing this at a higher level. And I actually went to a county he was in, followed him step by step, and he called me out on one of the live coaching calls. He's like, Brent, and he had like this stack of envelopes. And I was like, Oh, that looks like mine. He's like, Brent, you only need to send me one letter, not 200. So I had sent him a letter every single parcel he owned in that area. And I ended up buying like 123 lots from him in another county, uh, another, another state, actually. But it was a kick in the pants for a minute there because I was like, gosh, like he's probably not gonna sell to me, obviously. Um and that just shows you I wasn't a perfectionist about it. I was getting the dad gum letters out and I was getting results. And then there's a person that never would have made that stupid mistake that I made, but they also weren't making money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:57

Uh okay, so let's say someone So I say be about middle of the road. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's let's say someone uh is interested in getting into this. They they get into your program and they they're following your strategy for for 90 days and they they don't get their first deal. What what are they missing? What what happens?

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Yeah, it's usually something very simple. Um they're not being consistent or they sent out one time and that's it. Um it's usually a numbers, a KPI issue or a key performance indicator issue. Um, and everyone has a budget, you know. Some people can only send like $50, $50 a week, like my dad. Like he only sends about $50 of letters out a week. And that's okay. Like he's not doing a ton of land deals. Like I had three kids at home, so I have to do more than $50 a week type thing. Um, so I tell people, you know, when you have a budget, I do as well. You want to get that land deal off the ground a little quicker, we got to do some things called like force multipliers. I got this from the military. A force multiplier could be like, okay, uh, you're making the offers, you're spending $25 a week on the offer letters. Well, do 25 dials a day in addition. Call that list as well. It's a force multiplier. A third force multiplier could be you could text those people. A fourth could be you could show up on their doorstep and knock on their door, which it's a little harder with land investing than knock on the door because a lot of times the landowner is in a different state. They've never even seen the land. That's also a reason why they're less emotional and they're willing to sell it to us at a discount. Like we're told our entire life your house is your biggest investment. Unless you're reading Robert Kiyosaki's books, your house is your biggest investment. And what do investments do? They they increase in value. So people think that they live in a house for 18 years, never change the carpets, never paint the walls, but it should go up in value. But a piece of land, they almost don't have that same thought.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

That's good. Yeah. And it's the land that's actually increasing in value, not the actual house that's falling apart. That's so brilliant, actually.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

Yes, you're right. Because we depreciate, we depreciate the buildings. That's why I have lowered my tax bill substantially. Because I learned what cost segregation is.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah, yeah. A lot of people don't have anything segregation. It's not yeah, it's not the it's not the house. It's the land that that increases in value and actually has the value.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

That's right. That's right. Well, well, land goes up and down. Yes, it does. You're right, it does. Just depends what the market. But here's the thing there's like 18-year cycles. It's been happening for 300 years. We're coming towards the end of it. You know, there's books written on this. The secret life of real estate and banking. Everyone should read it. It's long as heck, but I'll give it everyone the short story. It's 18 years, cycle every 18 years. I haven't heard that. That's good. Yeah, have you read that book? I haven't. I gotta look into that. Oh my god, it's huge. I'm not even finished with it. I'm acting like I read it, but it needs more pictures and bigger font for me, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I love it. Okay, this is always one of my favorite questions. But what is the unsexy part of land investing that is actually making you wealthy?

SPEAKER_02 27:09

Oh, the unsexy that's making me wealthy? Um, well, I I have a happy customer guarantee policy in my head. Like, I don't want anybody unhappy with me. I've been doing this now for years. I've done 300 parcels and only had one person uh want their money back. And I gave it to them. Um and basically people um will stop paying for the land. But there's there's no reason for that to happen. They could sell it, they can um, you know, real I don't need to take it back from I'd rather them sell it and get their money back, uh, but people will just give it back to me. That's kind of like the the part of this business I don't like is, you know, which they're paying their cell phone bill, like land's gonna come last for them. Um, but I've had parcels I've sold six times. I was already profitable in the first sale. So it almost doesn't seem right type thing. Um, but yeah, I did have one person. Uh I I helped her to sell it. I thought we had sold it to her friend. She was taking over the payments, and I kind of forgot about it. A year went by and I get a letter from her attorney, her volunteer attorney in Colorado Springs, and it said she wants $8,000 plus interest plus attorney fees. And I was like, what? What is this? And I was getting mad because it was like the principal of it. I was like, I remember helping this lady. What the heck? So I ignored it, which you shouldn't do with legal correspondence. And I was like, she's bluffing me. Volunteer attorney, give me a break. And uh so I called my attorney and I was like, what do I do with this? She goes, Oh my gosh, she's got you. I was like, what do you mean she's got me? So it was like this Colorado statute that I was collecting the monthly uh tax payments from her. She was paying us monthly, which she wasn't paying us, but in the contract for deeds, she was paying us monthly for the taxes. And then I would pay it twice a year. Um while I had been paying the taxes, she wasn't paying us anything, but apparently I was supposed to have an escrow agent collect those funds. Um so my attorney that wrote me the contract for deeds said, yeah, we you need to pay her. So I was like, listen, I'll give her $6,000. That's all she's getting. And they agreed. I wired her the money, then I called my attorney. I was like, hey, don't you have like a errors and omissions insurance? Like, I want my six thousand dollars back. Because I was still aggravated at the principal of this thing. And she was like, Yeah, I'll check with the insurance. And then finally she's like, I'll just pay you out of my own pocket. And then I was like, listen, if you're willing to do that, I'll split it with you. I appreciate you so much. So she gave me 3,000. Um, I'll never use her again because this is the second time that attorney is kind of giving me a hard time. But um, anyhow, that's probably the unsexy part of this business, but it's happened once and out of 300 and something loans that I've done, I think I've done very very well. I've only had to pay $6,000.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Yeah, not bad.

SPEAKER_02 30:19

Or $3,000. Actually, $3,000.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Oh, yeah, they split it. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yeah, because our attorney gave me the money.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Nice. So let me ask you this. Is this a passive or is this more active income? And at what point, if it is passive, at what point do you kind of get to that point where hey, now it's passive?

SPEAKER_02 30:36

Yeah. I like to say it's passive because you can ramp this up and take a couple years off. Uh, but it's really active when you're building it. You know, I was active for I told myself in 2016 I'm I'm not gonna touch this money for three years. Uh actually two years until I got out of the military in 2018. Um so I I put a lot of time into it at first. And now, I mean, it's Tuesday. I haven't spent a single minute on my land business this week. And the money comes in every day. Uh so there's active and passive times. You know, you really want to be passive. You just sit on a bank account and lend me the money at, you know, at interest rate, and I'll take care of the rest. But uh I'm not there yet. I don't lend my money. I'm too, I think I'm too greedy as a real estate investor. I'm still an active investor.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Makes sense. I mean, I think pretty much everything in real estate is unless you're just the bank, everything has some sort of active component to it. Whether you're even even in a you know, a property, you got a single family home with a property management company, you're still making decisions because you got CapEx, things are happening, you gotta buy a roof, buy a water heater, you're you're still having to get involved a lot of times, or you're just losing money paying somebody else to handle everything. But I don't think there's really a fully passive investment in real estate until unless you're on the bank side and you're just you're doing seller finance or you're just completely, you know, syndication or something where you're not actually making those decisions, at least from what we've found.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

I think you're dead, dead right on that. Like you're not wrong because you know, it's like even when I have partners handling projects, it's still got an active part of my my part. Um I think this business is always going to be active, you know, again, unless you're the bank, but eventually the bank's got to get active too when they foreclose and have hard times.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Yeah, it's very true. What would you say is more important early on? And this may change like person to person, but would you say cash chunks or monthly cash flow?

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Oh man. Yeah, I think both. Uh, because I see so many land investors, they make big fat chunks of money for a year, two years, and that that little downturn in the cycle happens that we just saw. And they're like, oh crap, I haven't had a deal in three months, where I'm still getting monthly payments. Like COVID? Oh my gosh. I was scared. I had just bought a lake house, uh put a $65,000 down payment on it. Um, and oh yeah, I ended up having to buy borrow money from my in-laws as well. Um and this was in 2019. No, when it was COVID. Anyhow, I don't know, right before COVID, before I knew what it was, uh, come home and find out about this coronavirus thing. And I thought like all my land buyers were gonna stop paying. And thank God they didn't. Now, all my tenants, on the other hand, they stopped paying. And then all my I I was Airbnb in that lake house too. We had gotten a lot of bookings. I had booked it out for like six months. I was like, I'm brilliant. I'm gonna buy the whole street. Well, all those canceled as well. Um, but thank God all the land buyers kept paying. I actually sold more land during that time uh at that one-year period because people just wanted to spread out.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Well, okay, so I've got a question because the what little education or what what I research I've done, I did read a book um on this. And the way that this this author had structured his deals, because he did seller finance as well, but he would pay for a property and he had like a formula, whatever he paid for it, that was what he wanted his down payment to be from the buyers. And so that way he had no money in the deal and it was just seller finance. Do you have something similar that you do?

SPEAKER_02 34:27

Heck yeah, that happens from time to time. Um, it doesn't always happen, uh, especially when you get into more expensive land. But yeah, it's happened for me many a time. But um, you know, if people sometimes people put less down than what I had into it, so I can call one of my private lenders, um, or I just had money into the project for longer, that's where those monthly payments came in. So yeah, if if I can get that, uh I go for that for sure.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yeah, it makes sense because you're just recycling that money and just keep reusing it. Um one of the big things that we talk about is is uh creative tax planning and just how taxes come into real estate investing. What's the most painful tax mistake that you see land investors make?

SPEAKER_02 35:11

Yeah, I mean, for me, 2021, I got like a $157,000 bill from the IRS. Um, and it was right after I lost some money in a couple house deals on large acreage, and I had a bunch of cash involved in that. So it was almost like the perfect storm. Um I had made so much money that year, the IRS wanted their share, but I didn't have it. It was all in land as well as the deals I just lost on the house side, which I short sold that with a hard money lender. I had to walk that mortgage to my office building that I owned. Um, so I had basically just lost like almost a quarter million dollars, and then I just owed another $100 and something thousand dollars to the IRS. So I didn't tax plan. I didn't tax plan at all. Uh it was in the active flipping game when I should have been looking at, okay, uh, for every dollar I make and we have to pay, let's just say 40 cents to the IRS. Well, if I go and buy like this mobile home park for 500 grand, I could pretty much wipe out 250,000 owed by doing something called a cost segregation. Um, because the mobiles are highly depreciated depreciated assets. Um, or like, and I'm I might not be explaining that very well. I'm obviously not a CPA here, um, but I also do the same thing with light industrial buildings. If you buy a, you can almost like write off like 20% of that. So if you buy a 500k building, what's that? 100 grand? So that's uh actually no, 20, 40, 60. Yeah, that's 20 that's 100 grand. So it's it's all about talking to an accountant and a CPA throughout the year as you're making these income uh jumps. Because if you go like I was, go from making $4,000 a month to like almost $500K in your first year, you're you don't have your WTU job, you owe the IRS a lot of money. And that's I don't really wish what I went through on anybody. Um, so now I'm uh I learned a lot of strategies to lower my tax bill. I'm not cheating the government, I'm just doing exactly what they allow me to do.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Yeah, it's just staying with it. I mean, we had we went through the same thing a few years ago. I we have a a business that took off and made a bunch of money in one year, didn't it was going so fast that we didn't have time to think about how are we going to offset the gains. And then same thing, we had a six-figure tax bill at the end of the year, like, well, let's not let that happen again. It's an expensive lesson.

SPEAKER_02 37:38

And you're reinvesting. You're reinvesting back in, back in. And IRS doesn't see it that way. They don't care if you got all that cash locked up into another piece of real estate. Yeah, they don't see unless you do cost segregation.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Yeah, no, it makes sense. And you so you're doing other investments that have depreciable assets because land is obviously not something you can depreciate. So where, you know, with with property that has buildings on it, you can depreciate that. So you're doing both to offset those gains.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

Yep. Yep. So I have an active business and then I have my passive side of it, where it's like we take our land money and we put it into another investment that will keep spinning out money, but also give us the tax benefit as well as the mortgage pay down, as well as the appreciation, as well as letting a tenant pay that mortgage off. So 15 years from now, it's paid for.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Yep, makes sense. That's a great start.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

I love that. That was actually gonna kind of go into my next question of like how early people should start planning for taxes. But like you said, just working with the CPA all year and kind of staying on top of it makes sense, right? Instead of getting to the end and have that big tax bill.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

It's a hard balance. Like, you know, it's um as a W-2 income earner, like you are used to getting a tax return and money back most of the time. Um, but when you go from, you know, making in one land deal the same amount as your salary for the whole year, and I've seen it happen many times, it's like, oh crap. I just invested, reinvested that money or spent it on other things. I don't have the, you know, the 20 grand that the IRS wants. And thankfully they'll take payments, but they're pretty darn high interest. It's like the highest interest you'll ever pay.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Yeah, and they're not uh they're stingy with that, but they're gonna get their money one way or another, so you got to pay it.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

What would you say is the the first system you would build today if you were starting at zero again, ground zero?

SPEAKER_02 39:37

Yeah. Yeah, I would um if I was starting over, I would I would do it in a couple steps. One, I see where the land's selling. Two, I'd call those buyers um and see if they want more of that. Three, I would contact those landowners in that area and see if they're ready to sell today and make the difference. Uh yeah, it's it's that simple. Um, and I even have uh a program that you can do all that uh with. It's it's amazing. Um the landsharksdata.com. You can look up those landowners. You can see where you can see where the land's selling. Um it's it doesn't have to be complicated.

unknown 40:23

Cool.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes for sure. That's that's super helpful.

SPEAKER_00 40:27

I love that. Do you are you at the point now where you have a team in place or are you still doing this all by yourself?

SPEAKER_02 40:33

Yeah, so I've expanded and I've contracted so many times. Um at one time I had 15 team members, uh, had the office, the whole thing, and I have contracted again. It's just me and my office manager right now. And I I think I like that the most. Um, I pay now, I have partners now rather than employees um on specific projects and deals. And it's just easier because these partners act like owners, and that's what they are. They've got their skin in the game, um, to where the employees, you know, nothing against employees. I I made a lot more when I had employees, but I also had more stress. So I I just I do more deals now, but I'm I get just more pieces of the pie. I shouldn't say I made more back then. It was just a different share. Um, so I'm I like a small team. Um I have my office manager. She pretty much knows, actually, she does. She knows way more about me than my wife and children combined, um, and the dog. The dog sees me naked from time to time too. But I guess my my office managers never see me naked that. But uh, she knows a lot about me.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Uh all right. Um, okay, so how does someone know if land investing is for them or not just, you know, shiny object syndrome? There's so many different ways to make money in real estate. Like people jump around. How do you know that this is something for that person?

SPEAKER_02 42:01

You know, most multimilliards, most wealthy people have made their fortune in something they're passionate about. So you know when you're passionate in something. Um, you know, if you're just jumping in this to make money, you'll make money, but you know, how long do you want to do it? Type thing. So I was always drawn to the land. I liked it a lot more than dirty old stinky cat pee houses. Um something right now I'm really enjoying, uh, that's making us piles of money. We're selling two a month, is putting brand new mobile homes on land. I'm enjoying it. Like we're sharing God's love through affordable housing. Um, and as the interest rates are 7%, like my brand new mobile home, three-bedroom, two bath, 1,500 square foot, same uh, same property, same one-acre property, same 1,500 square foot, three-bedroom, two-bath, concrete block construction house is $100,000 more, or a wood frame home is $100,000 more. So these people are paying $700 a month less for my brand new mobile home on land. Um, and they also get warranty with that, a year warranty. Uh these they're mine are selling on a weekend type thing. Um, so that's that's been enjoyable. So it's because land kind of gets boring after a while. It's the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. But it's very easy to scale it as well.

SPEAKER_01 43:32

Yeah, and I like how you're kind of incorporating other, you know, the mobile homes and incorporating other aspects into into the land. So that's that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

That was it kind of leads into my other question too. Cause I always like to know like, what is do you have like a long term goal with this? Or are you just kind of because it's it seems like it's kind of taken these, you know, little routes, these changes and added things, but what would you say your long term goal or plan is with the land investing?

SPEAKER_02 43:57

Yeah. A long long term goal is. Um pay as keep the tax bill as low as possible. Buy a rental property every year, either a mobile home park or a light industrial building. Those are my two I've I've done well with. And do that for the next 15 years. And you know, a lot of these will be paid off. I've got several that'll be paid off in 12 years or less actually now at this point. I think that'll be more money than what I need 15 years from now. So it'll it'll free up time for, you know, what you know, okay, now it's like I don't have to earn money anymore. Um now I can focus on how I can be of service type thing.

SPEAKER_01 44:47

Yeah, it's awesome. All right, we got one final question for you here. Uh if you could give beginners one rule that would save them from making most mistakes, what would that be?

SPEAKER_02 44:58

One rule, never buy on a motion. Um, we bought a lot of homes we've lived in. They were all purchased on emotion and we usually paid top dollar for them. Now we've been blessed in this real estate cycle on all of them appreciating um that we bought since 2013. Um but just never buy on emotion. If it's gonna be for investing. If it's something you're gonna live in, that's a different story.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

Yeah, that makes sense. We see we see little we see people that buy on emotion on houses they're living in and spend way more than they should by just bidding it up and they just get yeah, the emotion takes over. So you definitely gotta be careful, especially when you get into investing, that will just kill your returns. So you you really gotta remove the emotion.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

We've talked about that a lot because oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 45:50

Yeah, if you ever find yourself in a bidding war, get out of it. Just just end it. Go find something else, go rent. Uh like that's crazy. I can't tell you how many times I've been the person creating that bidding war. I've made lots of money doing it.

unknown 46:07

I love that.

SPEAKER_02 46:07

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Laura.

SPEAKER_00 46:09

No, no, you're fine. I was gonna say we talk a lot about that buying on emotion because we, you know, buy houses and we we live in them while we're fixing them up. And that's one of the questions we get asked all the time. It's like, how can you do this? And how can you finish this beautiful home and then move to something a complete construction site and start it all over again? And, you know, we had to decide more so I had to realize early on not to do. He was has always been kind of, you know, not to ever buy on emotion. Um, but he's been able to kind of transform my outlook on not buying these homes on emotion and just see being able to see the vision at the end and know what we're doing with it and not see the numbers. See the number. See the see the numbers, not get too emotionally attached to it. But yeah, that's I think that's a really important piece.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

Yeah. All right, Brent. Hey, we always ask everybody, what's uh what's a book that you read that that maybe was a a pivot point chain, you know, mindset change or something that made a difference in your life that you've read?

SPEAKER_02 47:07

I I mean, I'm looking at Who Not How by Dr. Benjamin Hardy um and Dan Sullivan. Um I don't ever think I'm the smartest guy, but there's always someone that's done it, and I can have them help me or consult me or pay them for an hour of their time and something like that. I mean, you got these these the Broke Millionaire podcasts, like you guys have the who's on every every episode.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Yeah, that's great. I've not heard that, and I'm gonna add that to my list as well. So check that out. You got some good books.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

What? I gave you two books today you've not heard. I know.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

Usually they're the same ones as like Rich Dead, Poor Dead or like something that I've already read. I mean, I've read you know 52 books a year a couple times, and I I read a lot of books, but yeah, that's wow. I gotta check that out for sure.

SPEAKER_00 47:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah, that's impressive.

unknown 47:56

All right.

SPEAKER_01 47:56

Well, hey, Brent, really appreciate being on the show today. It's been eye-opening. Um, how can people get a hold of you if they want to reach out and see what you got going on or learn about your program?

SPEAKER_02 48:06

Yeah, I guess the easiest is go to thelandsharks.com. And then I really made a push with my YouTube channel. We're trying to come out with better and better content uh on Brent Bowers, uh, the YouTube channel. So um thank you guys for having me. And uh I hope uh your audience has got some value from this. And uh that's a pretty sweet strategy you guys have going on. I'm sure you probably sell those uh those homes if you live in it two out of the last five years, tax-free income. So that's just that strategy alone right there can make someone a millionaire in in uh maybe 10 years or less, actually.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Plus if you're in California. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's like one house, right? Not really appreciate you being on. Uh we'll uh we'll put this uh your your website and the and YouTube in the show notes for everybody. Um thanks again for coming on today. Thank you. All right, guys, get out there and look at it.

SPEAKER_02 48:57

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Thanks for listening. This has been a production of Rebuilding the Dream Studios.