Our 100k Mistake

Bonus episode: I sit down with Cameron from our team at Generation Family Properties to pull back the curtain on the land investing mistakes we’ve made recently and the lessons we’re taking from them.

We talk through a 6-figure land mistake in Maine, painful easement and legal access issues in South Carolina and Arizona, and why national title companies didn’t work out the way we hoped. 

If you’re a land investor, land flipper, or trying to build a smarter real estate strategy, this episode is packed with practical due diligence lessons.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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 about 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. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Leadership in Land. I am your host of uh Generation Family Profities and the Land Unconference. Today I've got a fun one. I want to bring in people from my team, and I am pleased to have Cameron with us. If you've been following what we've building, you probably have heard Cameron's name before. He was on a video with me back a year and a half ago where we went over what we found in some of the differences between the data providers. And he's been a huge part of the day-to-day operations. He's taken on a variety of roles and continues to evolve as we evolved. And I want to pull back the curtain a little bit. First, talking through his journey with GFP, some of the lessons he's learned along the way, a few deals that maybe didn't go according to plan. We'll talk some leadership in there, I'm sure. And then we'll we'll get to some case studies here, which I think are really fascinating. We're going to talk here today about our six-figure mistake on a property in Maine, some real-world headaches with easements and access and title companies in Aiken County, South Carolina, and Maricopa County, Arizona. And then we we may include somewhere in here and towards the podcast a rant about national title companies and why they they aren't as good as we hoped that they would be. So I hope this one will just be honest, transparent, practical, a little painful for him and I reliving some of these moments. But I hope that more than anything, that this episode helps you. Cameron, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Gosh, I'm really not looking forward to reliving some of these files that I've blocked out of the memory. But uh yeah, it's uh great, great to be here. Love to be a part of it. And you know, I think that what Dave does with this Leadership in Lamb podcast is pretty fantastic. Really open the book on how we how we operate. Everything he says is actually how it is in our business. So for any of you guys who might doubt that, he's being completely transparent, good and bad. Yeah, a little bit of an intro. I've been with Dave as or in a couple different roles for the last just under two years now. Uh, this is my first job after college, graduated from University of St. Thomas in Minnesota back in 2024. And degrees in finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, kind of the whole load, data analytics a little bit. Uh was also a Division I track and field athlete, specializing in the decathlon, which was pretty cool. Uh, you know, athletics is really founded who I am as a person and both personally and professionally. So I'm sure we'll talk about that later on.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

You're fresh out of college, right? You're you're getting getting going in in this business world, and and you happen to help me out in both financial planning and in um generation family properties, our land business. And what why don't you tell us about what did you think it was gonna be like? And why don't you walk us through a little bit what surprised you once you actually got behind the scenes of this land flipping thing?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Yeah, totally. So I guess the first one, and this is real funny, is you know, I told my parents about I I applied for the job, I had the first interview with uh Dave's executive assistant, Kara. And my parents are like, oh, so how'd it go? Like, I told them about, oh yeah, he does this whole land flipping thing. And they're like, You sure he's not working for the cartel? I'm like, I I don't know. I hope not. But uh it was it was a funny story of you know, there's a lot of people who don't really understand what this business is. But uh, you know, there is value creation on both sides for all parties, and that's something that, you know, I was a little like, so we're buying land at a fraction of market value and reselling it for hire. Well, is this is this 100% ethical? But you know, I do have realized through about the time at GFP that really it is. We are helping the sellers and we are also helping the buyers, even if they're not necessarily realizing top dollar value for their properties. But uh yeah, in terms of financial planning and land stuff, uh connected with Dave through uh recruiter. And this recruiter was more so focused on financial planning. So that's kind of the way everything was kind of positioned on the job post. Financial planning was not really something I really intended to be super big into going out of college. I was intending to be working on a small team and like an entrepreneurial environment, which is actually what it is, but uh, or actually what GFP and Centurion Financial are. But uh yeah, it's a it was a very interesting journey into everything. Kind of started with pricing and offer analysis and preparing mailers, and you know, I've eventually evolved into this position where uh you know we're I'm handling and overseeing a lot of the day-to-day operations.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Love it, love it. Well, I think um I know for me and my journey, my my thinking has changed over time, right? What are some of the biggest ways for you that what you thought would happen versus how you conduct yourself or how you go about things has changed since your early days.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

So there's been a lot of changes through GFP while I've been gone or while I've while I've been here. And you know, some of them have been things that I've led, some of them have been things that have happened externally. And so within within GFP, the one thing that is really great about how our leadership team, which I am a part of, operates is we allow a lot of we allow our people who work under us to have a lot of flexibility and to bring us ideas. And you know, that was one of the things that you know, right away Dave and I were talking about mail, and we're like, hey, we could save like $20,000 to $40,000 in data costs by switching over to LAN Portal. And so that was one of the first projects that you know I looked into on behalf of GFP. And it's one of those things where we were like, hey, this is a change that we can make in our business that would make it so that you know we can go from here to here, be able to go from sending 20,000 mailers a month to at one point we were sending 60. And that would never would have been possible on the uh old formats of where we of how the processes were working. Personally, you know, I think there's been a lot of growth for me since joining GFP, uh mainly in terms of leadership. As somebody who's fresh out of college, you know, I'd led through sports, like you know, the whole lead by example. I'd been a captain on multiple sports teams over the years. And, you know, it's a hey, you show up every day, you do your stuff, and you contribute back to the team by scoring points and attract meet, right? And you know, I think that a lot of those skills of how to be successful as an athlete and how to be part of a team as an athlete really do transfer over into the business world as well. It's just figuring out how to apply those things in a slightly different manner. And so I guess in the business world, it's really, hey, contributing to the team and athletics is easy because you go out there and you run your times. But in the business world, it's like, hey, we got to go out there and hit this KPI, and this KPI might be based on a bunch of different things that are slightly in my control, slightly out of my control, versus, you know, athletics is very much more in your control, especially in an individual support sport. So it's a really interesting balance. But you know, in terms of personal growth, I think that oh, I've you know, learned a lot of lessons the hard way. And uh, you know, that's a really great thing because now there's some mistakes, and the mistakes that I'll show you today that we are never gonna make again under my watch. Yeah, I think that kind of sums that up.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Love it, love it. Why why don't you talk certainly here in this podcast? I've we talk about leadership and whatnot, and you you mentioned, you know, a couple of lessons for you personally. You know, you you kind of interned for different companies and you know, you had some exposure there. Obviously, this being your first you know job out of college, it's different. But I I would I think it'd be interesting for people to hear from the inside, which let's be transparent, you know, and and honest about what what you've experienced like. How would you describe our business in terms of leadership? Like what do we do well? What are things that we could be better at, you know, whether it's it's myself or just in general, you know, the the team.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Yeah, and that's a that's a tricky one because a lot of leadership things are driven by seeing examples of what other people are doing. And it's kind of hard because you're so close to a business that you're operating to be able to kind of pick out a lot of what you do well versus what aren't you doing well, because you're just you're just too close a lot of the times, which is why a lot of people bring in business consultants and all of that. But you know, I think that what GFP does really well, and Dave, through his leadership and uh me through my leadership to my teams, uh, are you know, we try to we we we work on building trust. And that is such an important part in being able to lead a team. Dave trusts me to be able to oversee the transaction coordinators, would be an example. I trust the transaction coordinators to do their best work bringing me the right data on these properties to hopefully not screw them up. But obviously, we're not we're not perfect, nobody's perfect, and we we don't know what we don't know. So it's kind of one of those things of we're not we're always learning together. But uh I think that that's also another kind of phase of leadership, but we can leave that can of worms unopened. But uh in terms of another kind of sphere, I think that the really big value that GFP kind of focuses on is a drive to serve others. And how do we serve the rest of our team? How do we serve our community? Because when we're serving our community, that uh really helps us be able to have a mission behind our product as well, which is a fantastic thing. When we're talking about serving others, we're talking about hey, we just helped this seller out through being able to take this property that was gonna go up for tax lien auction and you know give him some cash for it before he lost the whole thing. Or we could you can name a million examples, but that's one of the one of the things that I think that we do really well. Things that we could improve on. I think that trust is definitely a two-edged sword. And while trust can amplify the success of a business, it can also take away from it. Because what slips through the cracks, how do we manage? And because obviously management has to come first before leadership, and it's a big thing that we're talking about in our uh monthly leadership calls ran by Eric. And you know, it's a it's a really interesting thing because what does a specific person need at a specific time? And you know, us as leaders, we have to be able to identify what that's gonna be. So it's a really abstract concept, but uh maybe you should get you should get Eric on here to talk through some of that. That would be pretty good as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

Absolutely. No, I think what um I think all that is true. I think one of one of the things that as a company that is hard for people working for us is number one, change. Like what we have been doing isn't what we're trying to do in the future. And because of that, we have a whole variety of kind of legacy stuff that pays the bills, keeps the lights on, you know, keeps things going for the company without a bunch of undue stress or someone worrying about losing their job. But on the other hand, we're kind of like chickens with our heads cut off, I think some of the time in terms of trying to keep the plate spinning as as we're we're going with the company. And so I've heard from people in the past, well, why can't we just keep on doing the cheapo properties? And it was like the game changed from my perspective, as well as I felt like we kind of climbed that mountain and we got to the top of it relative to what I thought made sense. And um those two things combined, it was like, hey, we got to explore different stuff. And the time you've been here, we were doing a lot of medium-sized properties, and we we scaled up doing tens of thousands of mailers, 50,000, 60,000 mailers a month as we were mailing. And unfortunately, you know, the the game changed again in that time period since you've been here. And I was like, okay, gosh, things aren't going the way we wanted to. We got to pivot the sucker again and look towards other stuff, which just leads us to where we are right now in this moment, where you're leading the way on on-market subdivides, and I'm leading the way on messy title-related stuff. And of course, we're all working together to say, okay, we want, we've had this great $3 million company. How do we make it a $6 million company, a $10 million company? Talk through that a little bit in terms of seeing an inside perspective to let people know what's what's it like.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Totally. And so I guess the way I kind of think about a lot of it is, you know, GFP has got from zero to three million dollars on desert squares and a couple other things, but mostly desert squares, right? And so, you know, we have these $4,000 properties in Costilla County. Those are great, those sell eventually, but uh that's not how you make an eight-figure business. Or at least that would be a pain in the butt of an eight-figure business, is uh, you know, we talk about a lot on a monthly basis. We talk about default letters and returns and owner financing and all of that, which kind of comes with the territory of these small properties, right? And hey, it's would you rather have less deals and more margin per deal? Or would you rather have more deals and less margin per deal and have to deal with the headache of people who probably are not qualified? And so it's a kind of a it's a really hard juggling point because you know we have a balance of what is GFP already built to do versus what should GFP be doing in the future. And you know, we're kind of caught in this middle point where we're waiting and seeing right now. And you know, I think we've seen a lot of great success in a lot of in different places. Like, hey, we have a Door County project that we found on Zillow, we bought for $550 on owner financing. We are expecting to sell for somewhere between 900 and a million. Great deal. Minimal costs into it. Is it a perfect double? No, but it's pretty dang close. And you know, it's kind of like where do we find those deals? Is finding a couple of those a quarter more beneficial for us than finding 100 people who want to sell us their desert square? Could be. But uh it's it's a really tricky battle of, you know, you have this historical success. We know what we're good at, but what we're good at is not going to bring us from being in a seven or three million dollar revenue business to 10, 20, 30 million dollar revenue business. And so it's kind of a tricky position where you had to look up, hey, what brings the margins? And that's kind of what we're trying to figure out right now.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah, love it, love it. I think that's all great context for people to understand some of what we're gonna talk about next, which certainly we have a lot of things that go well. You know, we've uh last year we sold a property we had for about a year, we had bought it for 60,000 in Fulton County, Georgia, we sold it for like 200 and something thousand. We had bought a property in um Door County, Wisconsin that we had bought for 80,000 and sold for 210,000 or something like that in the past. We had um good success last year in acquiring properties on PPC, while mailers were kind of tough. So there's plenty of great wins that we have had. Lots and lots of owner financing. I think we have around 350 to 400 notes that we currently have. We had as high as like 500 at one point, but we've come down a little bit, and we have larger notes now on average, I'd say, than we did before. So all those are good things and good wins. Um, but along the way, we have plenty of mistakes, and everything we're about to talk about is in the last six months to a year. So these are all very recent and painful. So I want to talk a little bit first about this one that you were highly, highly involved in, which is this this property in Maine. So let's let's talk about it. It was uh let's talk a little bit about just the acquisition a little bit. Where this one I think was was PPC, wasn't it, Cameron? If I remember. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

This was this was a PPC property. So the seller of this property, uh, this was a this was a really sticky situation because there was a deceased ex-husband and who was on title. So the property was owned, uh tenants in common between an ex-wife and a widow. And these people did not get along for obvious reasons. And so throughout the whole negotiation process, you know, we were talking about, hey, maybe we just buy, we we pay for a survey, we get this thing split, and we buy half of it. And then we ended up actually being able to get in contact with the widow, and now we're now we're on the trying to buy the whole thing. And you know, it's a it was a really tricky spot. This is in Warren, Maine, which is god, just royal crap show of uh GIS and recorders and zoning and you know, all of that.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Nothing happens in a way that makes any sense, but that's why you show the property real quick so people can see the the GIS map. So Cameron's gonna bring up the GIS map. You'll try and talk through it. Obviously, now this is one part which would be good for you to watch. So make sure if you're listening to this on audio, you might want to check it out on school, where so we have that.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

So this is what the property looks like on land ID.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Why don't you describe it a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 19:44

And so you can see this property here, it has this creek running through the middle of it, has like nine acres up here on the north port, and then roughly 23 on the south part, according to the GIS map that is provided by the county. Uh, this matches up right with Knox County as well. Uh, and so, you know, this property has a little bit of wetlands right here on this little stem, which is sub or around this area where this house was subdivided off. And then there was allegedly supposed to be a little branch of land that goes all the way back to get to this deep part of this 23-acre parcel. And, you know, our original idea was hey, let's just split this thing on the creek and we can force some appreciation that way. And so that was the original plan that we'd gone into. We'd contracted a surveyor, which this was the most expensive boundary survey that we've ever paid for at 7,000 bucks. But uh yeah, uh that's kind of a super quick version of the process.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

So this property. You can if you look here on land ID, 20 acres, 29. When you look on the boundary that Cameron had it was 32. So we we had a difference in the acreage size. And dealing with these two ladies, there was like so much being stalled on this. Like the survey was ordered and it wasn't done, it wasn't done. Um, the the title company was having to dig up stuff, and I think there were various things they had to sign along the way, and so they were they were getting more and more impatient, and one was kind of wanting to get more money than the other, and there was a lot of questions of is this deal gonna get killed? Not because of due diligence, we had it perk tested, right, Cameron, and the perk test came back fine. No, the perk test was fine. And so we're like, okay, this looks good, right? And so we're like the survey was ordered what in August? August September?

SPEAKER_01 21:49

And we and we got it back a month ago, so March of twenty twenty six. So like literally six months later.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

We ended up saying, screw it, and bought it, I believe. Even October, if I remember correctly, off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

It was like September or October-ish.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

We did buy it, you know, it took a while, but it did get done. So then we're we're go ahead and start marketing it. And then what happened?

SPEAKER_01 22:14

So we started marketing this one, and our sales lady, uh Christy, she got a call from the neighbor. And the neighbor says, Why are you marketing my property? And we're like, uh, we're not. Here's our deed, like all that stuff. And you know, in the meantime, we're we still don't have a survey back. The surveyors are, you know, digging through county records, trying to make all this stuff line up, figure out what we actually what we actually own versus what we don't. And it turns out this is what our property looks like. It's not 29 acres, it's 21.2. And you can see here's the creek, nothing up north of the creek. And so this is a whole meets and bounds survey where we ended up having significantly less than what we thought. Actually, what we ended up owning looks more like this than anything else. And this is a tricky thing because you know, this little portion where there is this legal access here is in what's called shoreland zoning in this property. And so we're still questioning to this day is this property even legally buildable? And so, you know, we bought this for all in, including survey cost and everything. Our basis on this is roughly roughly 100k. We were expecting to be about 250 or so on it in terms of sale price. And now, now that we're at 21 acres with questionable ability to access, we're looking at it and we're saying, hey, is this property even usable for like anything besides hunting? And so it's a tricky thing. You know, we had realtor opinions, we did everything by the books other than other than a survey. But, you know, it's what you don't know about an area, you don't know. And you know, this was the first property we'd ever done in in this area of Maine. We'd had expertise from locals, but uh, you know, at this point it just didn't it didn't cut out. So it's part of the risk of what you take on in in this business, especially in a meets and bounds state. It's a lessons learned either way. We will be having a survey prior to close on in an area of this property size.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

I'd love to know how have you personally processed this? Is it frustration, self-doubt, problem solving mode, all of these things? Like how how how have you processed this literally hundred thousand dollar error that we've had?

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Yeah. And you know, it's a it's a very tricky type of scenario because you know, as an operations manager, as somebody overseeing the transaction coordinators, the buck stops with me. My job is to protect GFP from buying bad properties. And you know, all these cases that we're gonna talk about here are times where we've screwed up. And you know, that definitely does take some on me a little bit because I'm like, oh shoot, I should have known that. But like I wouldn't have had any way to know that. So it's like a kind of a tricky thing. But you know, at the at the end of the day, yeah, you say that sucks. But you know, our goal from the on in these situations is to be able to minimize the damage and be able to walk away and not make this mistake again. And so, you know, I think while we've made these mistakes, this you know, we're probably gonna lose money on this property when it eventually sells. Actually, we're definitely gonna lose money on this property when it eventually sells. But it's it's something where, hey, we've made this mistake now, and you know, we're gonna be losing, let's just say, $10,000 to $40,000 on this property versus what we bought it for, versus, hey, we were looking at a subdivide down in Oklahoma the other day where we were gonna be buying for $675. And, you know, if there were a problem with that property that we didn't catch, that's a whole all of a sudden, much, much, much bigger loss opportunity we're opening ourselves up to. And so, hey, while it sucks now, I'm glad that we learned the mistakes that we did. And now we get to figure out how to not let them happen again. So at the end of the day, it's it's a little tricky because yeah, it does come back on me. I'm the one who approved it. Really, what we can do now is that's already done. We just have to learn how to how to take it and move forward.

SPEAKER_00 26:39

So, what do you think that looks like? Like, what do you take away that's like, okay, we are gonna do this differently in due diligence or our buying process or whatever?

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah, so with this case in particular, you know, we noticed this bound, the difference boundary on land ID, right? And we saw 29 acres versus you know, versus 32. And, you know, that should have been the first sign that something was wrong. And, you know, I think the the really big fatal mistake that we made on this property is having that discomfort and still closing the deal. This should have been a deal that, you know, we said, hey, we need to wait for the survey to get back or we need to not do this deal. And I think that, you know, the environment that and kind of the way that GFP was looking at at properties back, you know, six months to a year ago was, hey, we spent this marketing money, it's not performing the way that we were expecting it to, we're getting less results than we were expecting. We need to close deals so that our our marketing numbers look better. And, you know, in reality, we probably weren't looking at this from a risk management standpoint that would make sense, saying, hey, this doesn't line up. I'm not sure we should wait until we know. Because we'd already drugged these ladies out for like six months. Because uh this was a or we were we were working with national title companies that were just not being able to draw title commitments correctly and get the legal descriptions and all of that, but that's a whole nother story we can get into uh in an isolated time. We can finish up talking about this property first. But I guess there were enough questions and we still push it through anyways. And so I think what we've really learned is if we have questions, we don't close. We we're not going to take risks that seem unnecessary at the time. And you know, it's kind of it also it's also a really big learning experience because you know, hey, we can't trust GIS maps. We need to we need to see plats uh and we need to be able to have have surveys if we have just if we have a doubt.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Well, I think it's such a fine line, right, between risk mitigation versus in order to be in business, you have to take some degree of risk, right? And so it's it's balancing those two uh things. And in this environment right now, it seems like the risk mitigation is a bigger issue just because the market ain't moving like it used to. And something like this might have already sold four years ago for like way more profit than it did, than it will with losing money now. It's just the environment that that we're having to navigate right now. Now, one of the things that that I've talked about for years among the team is hey, gotta have access to our properties, legal and physical access. And we have two properties where everything looked fine, right? And and the first one, Aiken County, South Carolina. I remember looking at it, and and I'm sure you'll you'll share the GIS map here shortly, and I was like, ooh, we gotta make sure this thing has an easement. And so, because it had physical access, you can see a road going right to the property. It's like, okay, that seems pretty obvious. Uh, that looks fine. Um, it there was even evidence someone had had been on the property in like an RV or something. So there's good reason to think, okay, this this seems to be a good property. Cameron has the um the property up now. So this was one we didn't do through a national title company. This was a local title company in South Carolina. So why don't you walk us through this one a little bit, Cameron, and take it, take it from there.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Yeah, I know I've got a bunch of lines on this one drawn. But uh basically, this property here has a 911 address, 1327 Charlie's Loop, which is this road right here. What ended up happening with this property in particular is in South Carolina there's a funky law where if you own a if you own the property that has an easement drawn back to it, and you own a property the easement's going through, it nullifies that easement. Our title company did not catch up on that, that the ownership was at one point the same. And so therefore, it nullified the legal access for all of these properties back here. And we bought this property with had title insurance, all of that stuff. As type, as you know, title insurance does ensure legal and marketable title, uh, which includes legal access. And so, you know, this one has a physical road to it, named road on land ID, named road on Google Maps, a 911 address. But we had this property in closing with I think two or three different closing attorneys, and every single one of them said, Hey guys, there's no legal access here. And we're like on the sell side. What do you on the sell side? On the sell side, on the sell side. And we're like, What are you what are you talking about? There's a 911 address for the property. There's a plu the road has a name right to it. It's physically there, it's been used for a long time. This property used to have a mobile home on it, but now there's no legal access. That doesn't make any sense. And so now we've been in uh back and forth with the heirs of this Randy Simmons down here trying to uh re-establish legal access through uh Charlie Zoop Road here. That's the one our title company originally. Go for it, Dave.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

So I can say what the the attorneys slash title company, um they they have been very difficult to work with. And this was back in January. So we are three months later, because we had it under contract not once, not twice, but now three times to sell, right?

SPEAKER_01 32:50

This is number four, actually.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

Number four. It's uh so we clearly have demand for this property, right? And so it's it's um we have margin on this. We would make good money by selling this property. We have an equity partner on this property that we want to treat well. So um the everything points to this this should be workable. And so we we first, the the the title company in September, when we first had it under contract to sell, which would have been like a two-month turn, which would have been awesome, said, Oh, yeah, no, it has the legal access. And so we go and say, Okay, prove it to us. And they don't ever like get back to it. It's like, oh, don't worry about it. There's legal access. And at that point, that is when we should have pressed it, because we should have said, show us proof, keep working on it to resolve it. But then we got it under contract again in January or something, and the same thing happens yet again. And so we started really pressing them after that time. And and they didn't want to reveal to us as they had done some error research or whatever, they didn't want to give us phone numbers, names, addresses, squat. They didn't want to give us anything. I was like, hey, let's work as a team and get this done together. And so that was really frustrating for me in that why why do you not want our help? You know, like we we are in this together. And so finally, about a month ago, maybe six weeks ago, here we are in early April, they they finally opened the kimono and kind of showed us some stuff. And they hadn't sent out a letter for that first month. And so here we are now, we have it under contract yet again, trying to sell it. And the person is willing to go through our title company, which the first two weren't willing to do, in order to ensure um the access. So we're we're we're trying to solve it. Why don't you tell people, Cameron, how we're trying to solve this problem right now, which is a current time issue where we're we're trying to get this done.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

Yeah, well, this one's a fresh cut. But uh basically, uh what we're trying to do here to solve this issue is we have a list of five errors, and you know, we need to go, we need to get in contact with these people through any means necessary to be able to get there. Skip trace has not worked, uh, but we have five physical addresses. And so we've looked in, we looked into two options to uh get some get information to these people. Say, hey, please call us. First one was looking at pizza delivery. So basically I called up every every shop that looks like they would deliver in a couple mile radius and you know, tried to get them, hey, would you be able to write a note on like a pizza and deliver it to this person's house? I'll give you a nice big tip. But uh wasn't able to find somebody who'd who'd be willing to do that for me, mostly because everybody's using DoorDash, and they said I can't consider I can't guarantee the DoorDash driver's not gonna like take the note off or something, whatever. But uh the only restaurant I could find that would DoorDash service to these five houses was uh Hardy's, and I guess that fast food restaurant probably wasn't going to uh put notes on there for me, but who knows? And then what we ended up actually doing was we uh ordered a couple boxes of cookies with a note on them, and now those are getting delivered probably tomorrow. And uh hopefully they're gonna be calling up our acquisition manager and having a having a discussion and hopefully we can get this thing done for uh for this lady who's buying the property from us, because you know, she would she would love to be able to, she'd love to be able to have it, but we have to make there be legal access at any means. And the tricky thing is, is you know, while a title claim is is gonna cover legal access or our original purchase price, a title claim and title policies don't protect our margin. We bought this thing at, oh gosh, I want to say it was like 30k. The first time we had it under contract, we had it under contract at about 80. Now we're under contract to sell it at like a little under 50, I think. Maybe somewhere in the high 40s-ish. But uh, and that shows, I mean, you see the MLS history and you see listed, contingent, listed, contingent, listed, contingent. And that's not a good look. That makes people ask questions. Yeah, there is a problem with it, but that makes our offers go down. Whereas, you know, if the title company was able to catch this on our buy side, then all of a sudden we're able to have realized that super that nice margin real quick. And so it's a tricky situation.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Absolutely. Well, let's let's talk about the Maricopa now, which is similar but different situation. So tell us about that. What was the difference between the Maricopa and this this Aiken one?

SPEAKER_01 37:51

So the difference with our Maricopa property here, which I don't have up on land ID, but I do have a plat map for. Where is it? This one. Cool. So here's our plat map from when uh split was recorded. So there's a road down here with one parcel going to the street, and then one parcel back behind with a 20-foot ingress and public utility, ingress, egress, public utility, and irrigation easement. This one, this plat here, was recorded based on a or it was it was surveyed based on a unrecorded survey. And so basically that invalidates every that invalidates this survey and that invalidates the legal access established by this plat. And so if you see down here in the reference materials, you can see, let me zoom in. Come on, there we go. You can see sideways, but uh nonetheless, reference materials, unrecorded results of survey by West Valley Engineering, blah blah blah blah, and unrecorded Ulta ACSM survey in minor land division by Anazi land surveying. Because neither of those two reference materials were recorded. Now all of a sudden, this plat, even though it's recorded in the county of Maricopa, is not valid. So basically now we're going back to our title company. We're saying, hey, what the heck? We should have caught this one prior. Uh this is this is a big deal for us. This was a buy for about 125 or so, with the expectation of selling for about 300. The the realtor we had there, you know, was a little questionable. So I don't think it got really pushed out the way that it should have. But uh, you know, we had we had plenty of offers, and but nothing, nothing ever really stuck. And, you know, it's a it's a tricky, tricky situation because now all of a sudden we get one, a solid offer that was gonna that was gonna sign, and we're like, hey, she got back in contact with our title officer we closed with and is like, hey, is there legal access to this property? And all of a sudden our title company says, there should be, but let me investigate into that further. They come back and they say, No, that plat is not eligible to create the legal access because it's based on unrecorded surveys. And so now all of a sudden we had insured legal access, they showed us the plats at closing, and now all of a sudden there's no legal access. So what do we do? And so it's a it's a really tricky thing of you know, our when when we close through a title company, we're supposed to be able to trust that title company to be able to perform, be able to protect us. That because that is what they're supposed to do, is they are our layer of protection. For somebody who's buying a piece of land with the intent of holding or building, you know, that title policy really does protect them. But for us with the intent of flipping and, you know, knowing that we need a margin, we're running a business, that title policy doesn't really protect us the way that a lot of people think it does. Could we get our basis back? Yeah. But over that time, we've had hard money interest at 18% accruing and accruing and accruing, you know, that we're still on the hook for. And so at the end of the day, is it going to kill our business? No. But uh it's a really tricky thing because it's like, hey, that should have been caught on our closing, but it wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Now, in both of these cases, neither of these were national title companies, Pioneer Title and Maricopa, which that they're pretty good. You know, I think generally we're happy with the office. I wasn't gonna expose them. And then Aiken, that were very unhappy with that title company that we've done several deals through. You know, it wasn't like it was just a one-off even. Like, we've dealt with Hail and Hale attorney.

SPEAKER_01 41:45

Don't use.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

I don't have no problem shaming them. So, like, I guess as you reflect on this, are these things we should have caught? These two in particular. Maine, there's no doubt that is on us a hundred percent. Like, reflect on these two a little bit. Is it just something that's like, hey, this just happened, it's totally random, and we just happen to get two within like a six-month time period. Like, how do you process those two in particular?

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Yeah, and I think really the two of them are very different scenarios. And the Aiken one, I don't think that that was our burden to catch because you know, we can see all these things. We have a 911 address, we have a road, there was a plat at one point or another that we did have. And, you know, access looked like it should have been there for many means. But, you know, kind of goes back to the closing team. And hey, the closing team missed that. And because the closing team missed that, then you know, we're out margin. And I think that for the Aiken deal in particular, I think that that is just a risk of risk of running a flipping business. For this Maricopa deal and the Galveston deal, which I'm sure we'll talk about next, you know, these are these are things where I would hold the title company accountable for for this property and say, hey, you guys screwed up. This did cost us money. At the end of the day, if we can walk away with this at a break even, we're gonna be happy. That is something that should have been, should have been caught. Just because it's a that's a that's a pretty obvious rule versus the Aiken was a little bit more of a niche rule. And so it's a tricky thing, but at the end of the day, I do think that nobody's perfect. I don't hold both of these title companies uh, you know, have done work for us in the past. This has been one of the times we're screwed up. I think this is more so a risk of running a flipping business than it is a reflection of our processes.

SPEAKER_00 43:45

Now let's let's talk about national title companies a little bit. I was listening uh back a year plus ish ago, maybe it was a year ago, to uh our good friend Justin Pichet, amazing guy, runs an incredible Land flipping business. And he mentioned on there, oh yeah, we're going through a national title company, and um they're they treat us great. We get everything in one spot. You know, it's it's fantastic and wonderful. So I say, Cameron, you're you're managing the TC department now. Why don't you go look into this and see what you can find out and talk to them and talk to a couple couple other national title companies? And you let me know who who you think we should work work with. Because you you thought, oh, this seems like a good idea. This would make my life so much easier. Tell us, tell us what happened after that point.

SPEAKER_01 44:37

Oh my god. There's scars from this one too. But uh no, so I guess first, you know, I reached out to Justin. I'm like, hey Justin, what title company are you using? Just out of curiosity. I want to talk with them. And so, you know, I ended up chatting with this title company. Uh, and you know, we you know, everything, everything seemed great. You know, they we opened up a file with them right away. We got a title commitment back in like 48 business hours. I was super happy. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be great, awesome. And you know, we'd closed closed a deal with them pretty quickly, right out the gate. But uh they were Texas-based. This first property we closed with them also happened to be in Texas. And so maybe that was the reason why it went so well is because it was the area they know. But uh kind of as we got further into things, we realized that uh, you know, maybe they don't know some of these other areas that they say they do to the point that uh they think. And, you know, it's it's tricky because the idea have of having a single point of contact for an escrow officer is great. Hey, I can run all 30 of the files I've got open right now all through the same person and not have to go deal with, you know, juggling the contacts of a couple dozen different people and kept following up on them. I can just say, hey, give me an update on file, blank, blank, blank, blank, and blank. Great idea in print near in uh in thoughts. But what we kind of learned is that the title companies that are doing like that's national, they miss things. And they miss things that a local title company would have caught. So I guess what we're what we're doing in GFP's decision is, you know, we've tried it, we, but we're gonna be going back to using all of our locals. And I guess do we do we want to name names, Dave?

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Or yeah, let's well, let's let's let me color it a little bit further beyond what what you've talked about. So Fidelity National title was the one that that Pichet had recommended. We we Cameron shopped it out if he had talked to American National, I believe, as well. Yep, we talked to uh First American, we talked to Chicago, and we talked to Stuart. Stewart. So all the big the big boys, right? And when it came down to costs, and obviously we had a friend who had a good experience, we said, okay, we'll we'll give them a shot and see how it goes. And my initial thought was, hey, let's use two different ones, but there were like minimum requirements that they required for business, which I want to say was was it 10 a month or it was a lot of files.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

For it was Fidelity, Fidelity wasn't that way, but uh First American and Chicago and all of the other and Stuart all had a minimum number of files per month. And so it was like, hey, if you don't close this number of files a month, you still have to pay certain amount of fees in exchange. I'm like, well, I I can't I can't say that I'm gonna be able to close 20 files in a month. That's just not realistic for where our business was at that given time. And you know, when the realtor offer comes in, maybe they're gonna want to close to their title company or whatever, right? We can't produce 20 files. 10? We can pretty confidently produce at the time. But 20, not so much. But uh, it was a it was a it was a really challenging chant time, I guess. Do you want to continue?

SPEAKER_00 48:02

So, what what um from my perspective, which you were in it more so than I was, we we talked about it a good bit, but what was so frustrating was it was like punching a brick wall trying to deal with these companies where Cameron would reach out or Alicia would reach out, leaving multiple emails, voicemails, trying to check in. Hey, we gave them, I want to say it was up to 15 files or something like that. Because, you know, they said, oh, they had their minimums. Like, okay, we'll meet that, right? So we started feeding them everything. And and they they basically didn't open the files, closings got delayed, they're not returning our calls to let us know any sort of update, just customer service was some of the worst customer service I've heard of. Like, it was like pulling teeth to get them to talk. And then when they did talk, it was like they were doing us a favor rather than having that attitude of, hey, let's work together, let's get through this, and letting us know where they were at, right? Oh, we're overwhelmed with files. Here's where we're gonna be able to get to it. And instead, they just like hid under a rock and didn't want to, you know, stick their neck out to communicate at all.

SPEAKER_01 49:16

At least that was my take on it. That was right or wrong on that. 100% right there is you know, it's it's tricky, right? Because if you if you say to me, hey, we can't get you this back on a certain day because we just have a lot of files. Like, you know, we're really busy right now. I get that. Communication is great. And you know, if those issues were communicated, we wouldn't have had a problem. But uh, you know, it was a tricky thing because you know, communication is obviously so important to keeping a deal alive. Is hey, if I can't hear back from you and I don't know what's going on, I get nervous as somebody who's buying properties and selling properties, right? Is I need to know, I need to know what's going on. I need to know, hey, are we gonna close on on this day? Hey, I need to hear back from you about X requirement on a title commitment or whatever it is, right? And so, you know, it got to the point where you know we ended up having to severtize on a uh a really short, a really short window. They we basically uh they said, Hey, we're not doing any more work for you guys. You ask us too many questions, was how I read it in between the lines. I'm like, okay, whatever. But uh so then I went back to one of the other national title companies. I'm like, hey, I'm really in a crunch. I have 15 files that in all these different states that really just need to be opened up and closed. And can you help me? And they're like, oh heck yeah, we can, we can help you. They get all the files opened. You know, I try to follow up, silence. And this was this was First Americans uh national commercial services team now. And you know, just the the tricky thing is is you know, now you hear about you get title commitments back. I'm like, hey, that's just not the right legal description. Like, that's not what was on the purchase agreement. What's going on here, guys? Or something like, oh, we've never been able to get in contact with this seller. The seller's like, they've never called me. Like that type of that type of stuff, right? And just not the not the customer service that you know we try to give off as a company or we would expect to receive from a client that we're working with.

SPEAKER_00 51:23

And so And then on top of that, they were charging like another $1,000-ish dollars for the pleasure of doing the title work through them. So it was no longer $1,500 to $2,000. Now we're pushing three grand on every single transaction. And it's like, what the heck is wrong with you people?

SPEAKER_01 51:44

Like, which was not what we negotiated to add. And so, you know, when I talked with them, I'm like, hey, I need to have you know limited runway, these are cheap properties. We need like a max of like $2K of title costs total. They're like, okay, yeah, we can do that, not a problem. They said, yeah, we had that in writing, and then we got title commitments back that had closing costs at okay, 5k, 6k. I'm like, huh? That's just not what we agreed on. Hey, I I was told this by blah blah blah, and here's the email proof. I never heard that. I can't do that. Let me go talk to my manager. Manager comes back. Well, I know we said that, but we can't actually do that, but I can give you 3,000 instead for this file in particular, and then we can figure it out for the rest of them. I'm like, no, I can't do that. I can go to a local and get charged $1,500 max. But uh, no, it's a really, really tricky thing because it's like, yeah, I w I still wanted it to work.

SPEAKER_00 52:48

We go from them from Fidelity National to American National to now presidential, which was, I think it'd be fair to say it was a better experience than the prior two, but still had an awful lot of some similarities. Like getting a hold of people was just like a royal pain in the butt. Um, they they didn't, they didn't, I felt like they didn't drop the ball necessarily in some of the same ways of just not even opening up files that the other people did. Clearly, they did some work on it. So I'll give them kudos for some stuff. But then the the customer service, yet again, in terms of responsiveness. Like we we have a rule around here, you try as best as you possibly can to get back to someone within one business day. And yes, we slip up every so often, but that is the company protocol. Don't wait, be proactive. You know, you don't want pissed off people because you end up getting horrible online reviews and get blasted, like in podcasts like this, because you suck for not even trying, right? So I'll give them some kudos, but even them, Cameron, you want to talk through some of the issues with Presidential?

SPEAKER_01 54:01

Yeah, totally. So we made this move to Presidential, and we're like, okay, I just did these other two. I've learned my lesson. I'm gonna open up like two files and just see how it goes. Pretty low-stakes files, they'd be deals that I'd, you know, if they disappeared off the end off the face of the earth, that'd be fine, whatever. But uh basically the the tricky thing with presidential is there's no accountability for for a file. It's all handled in like a team. And so you don't know who's responsible for your file. You can't call them up on the phone. They don't have a phone number that goes directly to the person you need to talk to. And so it was, it had become really challenging for us because we're like, hey, if you're not responding to our emails, how do we get in contact with you? How do we know if things are working? And then, you know, the whole problem also came across with, hey, you guys are missing things in a title commitment. Like we had a property in Ohio that probably didn't or doesn't have legal access, but technically you can get a road permit to it, but that should have been identified in closing, but it wasn't. And so uh, you know, it's a it's a really tricky thing. We had these and we had these insurances, we had everything, we had documents getting getting missed on county scrubs that we didn't know about. Like, hey, if it if if you if you can't find it, how are we supposed to know it's there? And so it's really just kind of a a sloppy process all all across the board.

SPEAKER_00 55:31

Which now on the sell side, every time uh a file gets open and that was done by one of these things, there's there's cringing going on of being like, oh crap. Oh my god. There's another problem coming almost every single time they miss something that another title company catches that is more local or whatever, that then we have to fix. Which again, you've seen by our podcast today, they aren't perfect either, but it's less uh of an issue. They seem to catch more of them. Any final thoughts on that exam as we wrap up this portion?

SPEAKER_01 56:08

Right now we have a property in Lexington County where there was a quick claim deed that should have been filed two by two owners ago because they misid a legal description or whatever. And that wasn't caught when the person bought the property because they bought it at a tax lien auction. And so it kind of came down to that. Now we have this in closing. We're like, thank goodness the guy is willing to sign a quick claim deed. We were able to get in contact with them. Because if not, we wouldn't be able to offer this person an insurable title. So really tricky set. Even though we have title insurance, all of that, you know, this quit claim deed that was missed like a couple transactions ago, you can't hold us accountable for being able to find that and know that. That's the title company's job, not ours. But it's a tricky, tricky scenario. What do you do?

SPEAKER_00 57:02

It is, it is. Well, I think um I think that certainly leadership, you know, as it applies to to all of these things we've talked about. What do you think that that should look like and and how have we done when leading the team when these mistakes and kind of things happen?

SPEAKER_01 57:23

Yeah, and I think the trickiest thing with leading a team through mistakes that cause losses for a business or screw ups for a business is, you know, the team, you have to you have to do your best to make sure that the team doesn't feel like it was done, like it's like a personal attack on them. Because, you know, as a as a transaction coordinator, your job is to be is to be the guard of the guard of the bank account, right? It's hey, we're not gonna buy any properties that are bad, and we're gonna do everything that we can to mitigate as much risk as possible. And so, you know, we do that through zoning checks and relayer pricing comps and you know, all that good stuff, right? But at the end of the day, you there's there are things that our team is not capable of doing because we are not title abstractors. And, you know, we we can do our best to mitigate those risks, but it's not going to be perfect. So as a leader, it's really important to make sure that they know, hey, this we we messed up here. This is our problem clear together. This is not just your problem, it's not on you. Because, you know, we it's not it was it wouldn't have been reasonable for us to catch this in some of these cases. And you know, the past is the past, let's work, let's work to fix it. And so I think that's that's the mentality that we've taken as to how to come across a bunch of these title-related problems. And kind of as as we go through, we've been good about saying, hey, let's figure out, let's get proactive, let's make this thing work, and let's figure out how to get these get these.

SPEAKER_00 59:03

Absolutely. And I think um how I've tried to lead the team to is uh, hey, let me help. You know, let me get in there and I get involved on not all of these, but some of them, so that they know, hey, I'm on the front lines with you, right? Like I am willing to take on some some of this myself. I'm not just gonna put it on on you, particularly when it's a a a bigger deal kind of a thing. And certainly you do that too, you know, with trying to help out the transaction coordinators. Like, hey, we're we're in this fight together, you know, so let me help you, let me take this off your your shoulders, and I will personally, you know, oversee this and help help the best I can, you know, to try and and push this forward. Any any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 59:52

Yeah, well, because these scenarios suck. Nobody wants to be in these type of scenarios where we're dealing with title problems and title commitments. The title company doesn't want to deal with it, we don't want to deal with it. And, you know, it's a it's a fine line of, hey, we need to, we need to be able to resolve this and part as friends. And, you know, I think that that's kind of one of the one of one of the one of the tricky things is you know, as a transaction coordinator, you're like that you're not the type of person who's very good at dealing with confrontation, but that's what has to happen in a case like this. So that's when I think it's especially important for somebody who's in their oversight position, whether that be me or Dave, to really step in and kind of help take the rings, reins, because you know, we we want them to try, we want them to try and do their best. But at the end, at the end of the day, we also need to keep these people happy and we need to be able to keep our team culture good. If somebody resents me for making them go and talk to a title company and be confrontational, and that's not something that they're good at or comfortable doing, that's a problem on me, and I've lost as a leader. And so it's a it's a tricky catch 22 of what needs to happen. So, you know, these various issues, some of them are being handled by me as the direct supervisor, some of them are being handled by Dave as the CEO. And, you know, it's just a it's a crappy situation. Nobody wants to be in it, but we're in it, so we got to figure out how to get out of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:18

Well, and as the leaders, you know, I think that what we bring to it is creativity, right? Like, okay, let's try and think outside the box and find ways to reach people, which is why, you know, I came up with, oh, let's try the pizza and cookies thing with these people to try and get reach out to them, which then I assign to Cameron, hey, can you go look into this and try and get that done? Right. So that's some of some of the ways as leaders that thinking outside the box that someone that is more on the front lines, that's not necessarily what they are great at or their skill set. I do think too that sometimes we have to push people as well to be like, hey, you might be uncomfortable with this, but I believe in you and I think you can do it. Go for it. Let us know what you find out, right? And then as best as you can, coach them through it and figure out what they're capable of. And I think that that's part of being a leader too, is sometimes forcing people to do things that they may not like to do, but trying to encourage them to work towards that, which obviously you don't want to do that all the time, which is why it's important to take things on yourself too. So I think the combination of the two is the good sweet spot. Any final thoughts on on that, Cameron?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:32

No, I think that that makes a lot of sense. Well, because I mean the tricky, the tricky thing is, you know, as a leader, obviously we are trying to grow, grow the people under us, but at the same time, we're also trying to protect them. So there has to be a balance of a balance of both, right? And you don't want to you don't want to put your transaction coordinator to the coals trying to fight against a title company all the time. Because if you have that, then and you know, we're expecting them to be able to resolve that, you know, that might not just be something that goes well and now all of a sudden they're burnt out and they're gone. So there is definitely there's a time and place for both. What we encourage is that our subordinates always try first. And then, you know, if if there's no success at first, then we have to step in a little bit and try to take on the reins.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:22

Absolutely. Any um any final thoughts as you think about leadership, as you think about these title issues, your role, any any final thoughts you want to share with everybody?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:34

Gosh. I mean, I think we've we've talked about a lot of things today, but I think the the big overarching uh kind of story that we've heard through all of every everything is you know, continually pursuing growth, right? And that is the the most important thing for somebody who's young like me, working in a business, trying to grow their way up. Started off of a off of, you know, like, hey, I just graduated college, and you know, I'm I'm in this position where you know I don't have any real world work experience. I have like an internship, but that's not not really the same. And uh it's what don't I know? How do I learn it? Who do I learn it from? And those are the questions that you have to be able to answer for yourself and then eventually implement. And so we talk about continually pursuing growth in terms of, you know, not only business practices, learning about land, but we talk about how do we, how do we grow the business, how do we implement AI, how do we find on-market opportunities for subdivides or entitlement projects or whatever, right? And you know, that's really the most important thing for somebody who's young and early into their career. And as a leader of somebody who's young and early into their career, I think that the most important thing taking away from you know Dave and I and kind of how we've grown over the last two years is to allow for that and say, hey, I know you're learning, but go figure, go figure this out. Go figure this out and see, come back to me, let me know what you find. Instead of, you know, saying, hey, here's this super well-built-out process, implement it. And so there's a time and a place for both, but continually working on encouraging a team to pursue growth is overall, I think, probably one of the most important uh position or responsibility or tasks, objectives for coaching somebody who's who's young.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely great, great advice. Uh, I think it's it's great how far you've come along and the time that you have. You know, many friends have said that, gosh, he's he's learned a lot. You know, he's he talks like he he knows the business, like an operator. So I think that speaks to how far you've you've come along and continue to come along and looking forward to seeing you continue involved, man. So proud of you. Keep at it. And let's go get some hogs. Let's get some hogs. We're going hog hunting tomorrow on the mastermind. All right, Cameron, thanks for being here, everybody. Thank you so much so much for joining. We're obviously, hey, we're being transparent, we're being real about what's happening in our business, and we'll look forward to hearing from you. Let us know. Make a comment, send us an email or something. Let us know what some some stories you have that hopefully we all could learn from too. Appreciate it. Leadership and land. This is Dave Denniston and Cameron Schultz. We'll talk to you later. See ya. Bye bye.