4 Case Studies in Q1 2026

Bonus episode: I’m breaking down four real land investing deals we’ve completed across different markets and sharing exactly what happened, both good and bad.

I walk through the numbers on each deal, including purchase price, resale value, holding costs, and final profit. Some deals performed as expected, others didn’t, but all of them offer valuable lessons for land investors trying to adapt to today’s market. If you’re involved in land investing, land flipping, or building a real estate portfolio, this is a realistic look at what deals actually look like right now.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:27

You're listening to the R.E. Tipster Podcast Network. Okay, so quick question for you. Have you heard of our school community? I just want to make sure to invite you to check that out. If you're listening to this episode, it's actually kind of old to be honest with you. And so if you want our latest, if you want our greatest content, we're putting out, real conversations around leadership, decision making, building a land business that actually works in the real world, get inside our school community where you get access to the free leadership course, plus bonus episodes, discussions, and insights that honestly just don't make it onto the podcast. So if you're serious about this, you want to learn more about leadership, get in the community, check it out, leadershipinland.com or school.com slash leadership inland. All right, let's get in the episode. Hey there, everybody. Hope you're doing great. Welcome back to Leadership in Land. I'm your host, Dave Dennison of Generation Family Properties and the Land and Conference. Well, I was inspired and I'm going to reach toward quarterly trying to let you know what have been five, uh three or four, five or six recent sales that have happened for us. And what I intend these to be are case studies, different places across the country that selling land in. And I I really was inspired by Pete, who did the whole partner with Pete thing and land conquest. And I thought they did awesome. And I thought it was so interesting always to look what are other people doing? What do things look like? And I want to talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, and um what what it looks like along the way for me and my journey and what we have going on. So that's that's kind of the purpose of this particular podcast today. So let me share with you my screen. Those of you that are listening on audio, I will try my best to uh to uh walk you through what we're doing here. So we're gonna walk you through one, two, three, four properties today that we had together. And this first one was a property in Celine County, Arkansas, 1.9 acres. This particular one, if we look back at history here, we had a hard money loan on it uh when we got it. We bought it for about 21K in change. We bought this in October of 2025. So here we are. I'm recording this on April 1st. So this is six months ago. Uh we originally had it, I think, for probably 45, 46, 47k, something like that. We ended up selling it for uh for cash in this particular case, which um after realtor and title fees, I think we had it under for 37, if I remember correctly, but then there were a bunch of title fees and realtor fees and stuff like that. So our net was 32k on it, interest that we paid was about 1700, cost of the property was 21k, our cost of our perk was about 900 bucks. So, really, in terms of what we netted before staff costs or mailing costs or other things like that, was about 8,600 bucks from this property. So we didn't sell it for quite a double. Uh again, we we sold it for about 36k, 37k, something like that. But then there were various fees subtracted from that off the top. It turned out okay. You know, I would say in in this world, this is very typical of what I've seen. We we think we can sell something at XYZ price, and we feel that's a competitive price. Uh, we sold this, I think it was March 17th. So this sold a couple of weeks ago. So we held it for about five months, which is pretty typical for a lot of our deals that you'll see here. Five, six months, seven months, something like that is pretty typical for us right now. Some sell faster, some take longer, much longer in some cases. So we found a good market here. Saline County, I would say, as we started to look at this property, um, we knew that there was power, we got it perk tested, obviously, a pass perk test. So it was a good property. Um, it perk tested for a four-bedroom home altogether. There was no zoning restrictions. You know, it really checked off all of the boxes of the kinds of things that we see. But even with that, we it didn't sell within three months. You know, it's taken longer to sell, and and we had to cut the price two or three times in order to um make it happen. We can see a nice green property, nice looking trees out here, good road access. It's kind of on the V here. The property is right here on the V. So good property, glad it sold. Gosh, I wish I would have sold for more, but here we are. So that was property one. Property two here is in Walker County, Georgia, one-acre property. Uh, this property, I believe we actually got through PPC, the first property we got through mail, I think. Uh, this one we bought it for about$8,600 here. You can see we bought it in September. So you can see uh September, October purchases. Uh, we had it listed, I think, for 24K, 25K to start. So initially it was like, ah, shoot, this could be a 200% margin type property. But guess what? We had to drop the price a couple of times. And by the time everything was said and done on this guy, we had sales price after title cost again. I think it sold for 18k, something like that. Uh, we ended up selling at 16. We had a little bit of interest uh as we borrowed on this. You'll notice in both cases here we didn't have any equity partners. We borrowed money to make it happen. The cost of property was the 8,600 I mentioned earlier, and we grossed um 6,700. So again, it's okay. You know, it's it's not bad, it's not great. It's it's okay. Both of these I'd call small little singles. You know, they're they're they're keeping the lights on, allowing us to keep doing what we're doing, but it certainly ain't making us rich. This property, again, we had it checked out. It had power available, had city water available, nice lot, good area, nice intrigued. Also in the southeast, obviously, being in Georgia, uh, mobile homes being allowed on this one. So a lot of um good things on here. The camping's not allowed. So it definitely had some zoning restrictions, but it wasn't like in an HOA or something crazy bad. So another solid particular property. The next one here, Galveston County, Texas. We acquired this one via PPC, by the way, too. Less than an acre. So it was a small guy. Uh, what was interesting about this particular one was actually bordering a cemetery. So it was a little little hairy. Um, we again had a hard money loan on this guy. We originally uh bought this for about 30k. We had it listed for like 55 60 initially, so we knew it wasn't quite a double. We knew it had a lot of little bit of hair on it with the cemetery. Um, but we were hopeful you know it'd sell pretty quickly. Uh with this one, we bought August 1st. We ended up selling it March 17th. So um eight months or so, again, in that kind of range, six to eight months-ish, six, five, six, seven months. Um, you can see here, here's our sale price: 38, 39 grand. We had interest of about three. Cost of the property was 30 grand, again, making about six grand. So we thought we could make 20, 25, maybe 30k on it. And uh, we ended up selling for a profit. It's just it's not a big profit, you know. It just keeps on moving, which with this property, like I said, it was a little bit kind of weird, but it had utilities, it has water, sewer, power, all this stuff. So nice lot with that. We it is single family, right? So it has some restrictions on it. RVs not allowed, mobile homes not allowed. So, not not the most ideal lot, but it wasn't NHOA or something like that that had a lot of costs associated with it. So, yeah, that one uh turned out okay, made a little bit of dough on it. Now, this next one is interesting. So Maricopa, Arizona. So you'll notice, and this is very typically where we have been, right? We have one property here in Saline County, we have another property here in Walker, Georgia, we have another property here in Galveston, which by the way, these last three sold for cash. This one in Maricopa had a um some flood zone on it. So we'll we'll take a look a little deeper at that one. We bought this originally in May of 2024 and we sold it, right? We bought it for 13K. I think we originally sold it 30k owner financing with 3,000 bucks down or something like that. Uh the person paid on it for close to a year, um, probably I think it was nine months or something like that, they returned it to us. And so we got it back in April of 2025. And so we've held it for about 11 months. So for me, if we ever get a return or something like that, which we we will do with unrecorded land contracts, the time and inventory I don't consider 2024. I consider it from when it came back. So it was on the market for about 11 months till it sold. This one, though ironically, looks to be potentially the most profitable of the bunch. So sales price was 27K, 13K was the cost of the property. So obviously that's that's a double. Although it is owner financed. You'll notice here, here's what um we got. Here's our actual closing statement. So selling price of 27K, initial deposit of$1,000. We're carrying$21,000 on the note, and it was about um$5,700, uh,$6,700 between the two was the deposit they made. So well over a um 20% uh initial deposit into the property, which was great. So definitely a qualified person, which is something I've been emphasizing as we do own our financing. Certainly not concerned with it at all. This one, by the way, one of the things we've been transitioning to is doing more and more deeds of trust. So this is a a deed of trust type situation where everything's recorded with the county, and um, we'd have to go through those processes in order to unwind it if that ever happened. But obviously, with a much more solid down payment, this person is is likely to be someone that um sticks around for a while and doesn't default. So we'll see where it goes. A little bit more about this property. You can see on the the uh Google map here. Let's see. Pull out the GIS actually. So here um was the property. So there was this kind of area on this northern end. Here was that legal and physical access, but there's a wash coming through both sides. And I think this was was typical of um some of the properties I bought in 2024. What I noticed was our mailing costs were going up and up and up, and um it was hard to acquire properties. And so in some cases, we bought some stuff that wasn't the best possible product. The last three we looked at are all good products. This one, frankly, probably not the best product we've we've bought to put on the market. With this wash going through the property that looks like a why, you know, it takes up a big part of it. And we had a lot of interest in this because we priced it pretty low. If you look at other comps that don't have washes going through them, they're probably sell for 32, 34, 35 in this particular subdivision in Maricopa County, Maricopa County being where Phoenix is at. So, you know, this is not far from Phoenix. It's a it's a good good area, just not that well developed compared to places closer to Phoenix. But this person saw enough value in it that, hey, they they would buy it. So this just shows you even something that kind of sucks uh can sell. You know, I probably wouldn't buy it today just because we're getting so much more stricter on it, knowing that we don't want to be holding something for a year or two years or whatever. We need it to move faster. Ironically, our most um profitable property on a gross profit basis, but that's kind of what I would look at today. So, overall, I think the the theme of what um we've been talking about here is the business still works. We're still making a profit, but that margin is getting squeezed. You know, something that we thought we could double. We ain't doubling on. You know, we're making 6,000, 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 a deal when you take into account perk test, interest, uh the cost basis, but not staff costs or things like that. I know gross profit normally is calculated a little bit differently, but I like looking at that all in cost in terms of the basic raw inputs into a property. So uh we're gonna continue to push, we're gonna continue to stretch ourselves in finding the right products. Right now, in this season, I'm recording this on April 1st. Hopefully, this gets released in in the next um week or two. I really think the the lessons to be learned is be careful of the products you are buying, be very careful of your margins in today's environment. But there's plenty of opportunity in the business. Just be careful what you're getting. I would love to hear a case study from you. Share a property, uh, whether it's good or bad, long hold, short hold. I would love to hear from you on what's working and not working for you today. I think we can learn from both scenarios and how you're approaching this business and what you're up to. Thank you so much, and I look forward to talking to you soon. See ya.