From Corporate Life to Land Deals: Andy Rouse's Journey

207: In this episode, I sit down with Andy Rouse, a full-time Texas land buyer who left his corporate job to build a thriving land-buying company.

(Show Notes: REtipster.com/207)

Andy shares his journey, from his first land purchase to scaling operations with a data-driven approach and a growing team.

We also dive into a pressing issue in the land business: title fraud. Learn how to protect yourself from scammers, the tools to verify sellers, and the role of title insurance. Plus, Andy reveals how AI and value-add projects like cabins can transform your land deals. Don’t miss this insightful conversation!

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Transcript

1:19

Hey folks, this is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 207. Today I'm talking with my friend Andy Rouse. Andy is a full-time land investor who left his W2 job a little over a year ago, I think. We're going to talk about how his business works, how he made it to that point of breaking free from the corporate world, and what it's like for him to be out on his own. So I've talked with a lot of people like Andy over the years who found freedom in the land business. And everyone who goes through that process brings a unique set of lessons and experiences to the table. So we're going to get a fascinating look at what Andy's journey looked like. But in this conversation, it's about more than just Andy's business. The original reason that he and I wanted to do this was because of a problem that we've both seen brewing instead of getting worse in the land business, and that is title fraud. So about a few years ago, I started hearing about people who were posing as sellers and trying to sell properties that they didn't own. And even though title fraud is a crime, it's turned into like this full scale business for some people. And it's surprisingly not that hard to do for those who understand how to manipulate the antiquated way that property title transfers work in the US. I've been troubled by this. I know Andy has been too. And Andy, I guess maybe we're similar minds in that when we see problems like this, like we want to get to the bottom of it. Like what is the solution? How do you make sure this doesn't happen and can't happen? Is there a way to do that? And if so, what is that? In terms of how to fight this and protect yourself against it, one solution is to close with the title company and order title insurance on every property you buy. And I think if you're buying any property over 10K or even 5K, depending on what the thing is worth and what you can sell it for, I think it's kind of a no-brainer to do this just because it'll make your life a lot easier and make sure you're buying the property from the actual owner. That's what the title company should be doing. Title insurance policy is just like a typical title insurance owner's policy that you buy. It's supposed to cover all title issues in the past and upon transfer, but it doesn't necessarily cover any new issues going forward. And that's a whole other thing to think about. For those who are closing smaller deals, you know, vacant lots worth 5K and below, which is, you know, honestly where a lot of us get started because they're so cheap and they're just easier to go after without such a huge investment. And it just doesn't make economic makes sense to pay an additional 500 to 1,000 bucks just to close the thing when you buy, and then maybe again when you sell it, because the profit margin isn't there. So when you're in this situation, when you're trying to self-close, what are you supposed to do to verify that you're buying from the actual seller? Make sure you don't get taken like this. Are there any bulletproof or even halfway reliable methods we can use to ensure we're not getting scammed by some property owner pretending to be somebody that they aren't? Neither Andy or I are attorneys, so we're not offering any legal advice here, but we can talk about some of the ideas that we've dug up to possibly help with this. So, Andy, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Well, thank you, Seth. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I'm happy you're here too. It's going to be good. So let's start from the very beginning. What's your land investing story? When did you hear about this? How did you hear about it? What made you decide to jump in and give it a shot? So in 2012, we had our first child, my wife and I. And I think becoming a dad, I started to, for some reason, just really get interested in things like the outdoors and hunting. And when I have an interest, I go deep, like super deep, like obsessively deep. And I decided that I wanted to find a place to hunt. And in Texas, almost, I think it's something like 99 point something percent of the land in Texas is private. And so I decided I want to buy a piece of land. So in 2017, we and another family bought 30 acre track northwest of Austin. It's been a blast having it. We get to hunt on it. We camp with family and do work out there to help manage the wildlife habitat. We have a tax exemption that it helps. We maintain it through doing some of those activities. And so I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I've had my own business a while back that was a services business. It was really more of a consultant type business for a few years. I've been in technology most of my career, a very long career, but I really wanted to start a real business. And in 2020, I heard a podcast, I was listening, I believe it was a Side Hustle podcast. And somebody was on there talking about land and how he bought and sold land. When I heard this podcast, it was this light bulb moment for me. I was like, I cannot believe I had never thought of this before. And it was the business that I had been basically searching for all this time. So I dove in. Yeah, that's awesome. I remember the first time I heard about it and it clicked for me too. It was just this beautiful thing. I've only experienced that kind of thing a few times in my life where everything just lined up. And it was awesome. Even more awesome when I tried it and it actually worked. Yeah. So tell us how you got started. Like, did you start right then in 2020 or give me a recap on your first year or so? Like, did you just get a list from somewhere and start selling dark mail like most people did at the time? Or what did your beginnings look like? Yeah. So I took, I took some courses and pretty quickly started taking action. I tend to be on that ready, fire, aim mentality side of the spectrum. him. So took some courses, started sending mail. And then in a group, I saw a guy named Matt Nunn, who now I'm good friends with Matt. He was posting that he was selling some properties. He was wholesaling some properties. And so I got in touch with him. And I remember talking with him and thinking and being skeptical. I was like, why is he selling this for less than what he could actually beginning. And it's funny because he's like the most trustworthy person you'll ever meet. But I was wondering if he was legitimate. He helped me quite a bit, even just getting started there. And over the years, we've stayed in touch. We've been good friends. And he helped me out a lot when I was first getting started. I mailed out some blind offers and some rural residential lots in Texas, and I picked up a couple and then ended up picking up more than that. And it's funny because the first property that I bought was not a great property. And I had sent a drone photographer out there. But it turned out after I put it on the market that there was actually a creek running through it. You couldn't see it from any drone photography, anything like that. And so I started working with this drone photographer, got to be friends with him. And I was like, hey, I need a little bit more than just the drone photography. I actually need you to walk the property and give me a report on it and tell me what's going on. And so it was an interesting, again, light bulb moment of, hey, you've got to have a deep network. You've got to have people, boots on the ground, people that you can trust to help identify some of those gotchas in there. And so that was my first year where I was buying those types of lots. Those are smaller, half acre, maybe one acre. I think the largest was three acres. And at the end of that year, I started going more toward larger lots, 10 plus acre lots. And that's really where I enjoy that aspect of it. I look for properties that I want, I myself want to buy and would want to own and try to build, develop those types of properties. Yeah, I gotcha. So in terms of how your business has evolved over the past year, I know we've all had to evolve at least a little bit because the business has changed quite a bit since 2020. It sounds like you've sort of gravitated towards the larger properties. Do you ever do small ones anymore? Like, do you have boundaries for yourself? Like if it's worth less than this amount, I'm not going to do it or anything like that? Yeah, we'll typically look at it. We have a minimum threshold usually of around 15 to 25,000 on the profit side. We will do some some smaller ones occasionally if we have kind of an opportunistic, you know. Call it not even a single, but a bunt. So this year, we've had a lot more of a focus on properties that hit a specific margin or size. In many of the areas, you can even buy a 40-acre, 100-acre and not be at that threshold. So a lot of it comes down to where our attention is. We have a limited amount of attention, limited amount of resources. And so every single deal takes a significant amount of work. And so we want to make sure that we're focusing on those properties that are actually going to move the needle. This year has really, we've been scaling up quite a bit as far as acquisitions go. I had an acquisitions person, a woman part-time that had worked for me and she was awesome and helped me to really kind of a couple of years ago, start to scale as I had my full-time job. And I was working on the edges of the nights and weekends and was getting burnt out with that. And so we've made some staffing changes, some hard decisions as a team, but we've now have a team of four and then a part-time data scientist and have really amped up and increased our acquisitions into what is ultimately a slowing market. Yeah, it's been good. It's turning into an okay year and 2025 is looking like it'll be a really great year. Good. That's awesome. Interesting. So you've got a data scientist. What exactly do they do? So she built an algorithm that identifies properties that we want. So we look at a large number of properties and basically all properties within a county. We look at sellers and try to understand who's going to be more likely to sell. And so we look at different attributes on the property. Do we want this property? Is it going to make us and deliver a certain number that we need? And then we look on the seller side and say, yeah, who is going to be more likely to sell? And so it was something where I was spending a lot of time on the data side and I became an expert in Excel. But I was so perfectionalist, you know, just overly attuned to every single detail. And I had done some data work on in my old career in product management, working with some different algorithms. And I'm not a, I'm not a developer. I'm not a data scientist, but I worked with them a lot and done kind of what you call the product management side, figuring out what products we need to build. And so we started doing a lot of that. And that's really helped to help us scale. We have somebody who runs our campaigns as well, meaning where are we going? Who are we targeting? Which locations, which states, which counties, and kind of managing that data pipeline. It's been something that has really helped us to accelerate and scale with a smaller team. On that, the data scientist thing you were talking about, just that whole process, you were trying to filter for properties based on who you think will be most motivated or is it based on the properties that you want or is it both? Because those are two separate things, right? It's both. And it's something where looking at somebody from a perspective of who is this person. Not just who is this person related to that individual property. So looking at trying to look at their portfolio. Does that work? I understand filtering for the properties that you know you want. Right. But when it comes to like really understanding the seller without talking to them, without having a real conversation and understanding all the nuance that comes with that, how much improvement can you really make when you're just kind of looking at information on a screen? Is it like a notable difference that you find? It's almost like a Venn diagram when you're looking at things. And these have been talked about from a long time ago of how long have they owned the property? I don't want somebody who's just bought the property in 2022. They're not going to be the right person. We also look at things like how much do we expect they have outstanding on a loan? And so how much is their equity? What was their buy price? So looking at those types of things, where do they live relative to the property? Are they next door to it. We haven't gone to the point of looking at things like demographics. That's something that I'm a little bit hesitant to get too much into some of the demographics. I don't know what the potential legalities of that are. We're sticking with kind of some of those basics, but there's also the other aspect there too of it just takes numbers. It just takes action. And so I have bought properties that many times have not fit my algorithm and have been counter to it. When we looked at things historically, it was something like 30% of the properties that we bought did not fit into, they would have been filtered out. I think there's a Mark Twain quote. I forget what it is. But when everybody's doing one thing, you need to look and see. It's time to pause and reflect when you find yourself on the side of the majority. Is that what it is? Yes. Yes. And so there's always that aspect of, hey, maybe there's some logic to looking at that contrarian view and saying, well, maybe nobody's going after these. Yeah. And I guess just to verify, based on what I hear you saying, all of this stuff can be controlled from within whatever your data service is, right? Whether it's PropStream or DataTree or whatever. So it's not like you have to like do anything crazy fancy. You just have to understand really clearly who you're going for and being able to articulate that in the filters, right? Exactly. We're also taking all of the data from a county. We're actually trying to look at alternative data sources as well, going directly to counties and things of that nature to be able to get that. But all of that data is included in there. Now, I think some different systems, Swee's Land Vision. There's many other systems out there that do append data to it. Meaning I think you can likely get loan data from the counties in some cases, but that's part of the other challenge is none of that data is normalized, right? So County A has their data in one column, you know, structure, and then County B has it in a completely different one. And so that's a value of going to a real estate type company like that. There's a lot of different providers, right? Like PropStream and you know all of these, right? That have some of those types of things of like, hey, this person's likely to sell, right? You're likely to sell list. We're just doing a lot of that more organically and then saying, you know, because we can kind of tweak our algorithms a little bit to say, all right, listen, we want to potentially, in some cases, buy a house on a piece of land. We've actually had some success with that. And so that's, again, potentially an underserved population. The thing you're saying, and I appreciate you saying it about how I think you said like 30% of the properties you buy don't fit your algorithm or something like that. Right. Like when I think about like the delinquent tax list, for example, like you will find lots of motivation on that list, but you will also lose opportunities if you go with that list. Absolutely. And you can say that with anything. It's that art of finding like, where is the line where you're filtering it so that you're certainly not going to get the stuff you don't want, but you're not getting rid of so much stuff that you're walking away from potentially awesome deals. And that's kind of this mysterious thing. I don't know what the line is. I don't know that anybody really does. You don't really know until you just try stuff and see what happens. And the line's always changing. Too, because you start to kind of get these learnings, right? And that learning becomes public. It's kind of like the efficient stock market, where, again, once somebody has an edge, then that edge pretty quickly can get closed, and people are exploiting that edge. And so I have this saying of, you know, what worked yesterday isn't going to work today. And what What isn't working today will start working tomorrow. And so it's this aspect of it is such a complex, dynamic, adaptive system, meaning you've got all these different variables coming into it and all these different factors. And so it's always changing. Based on what's happening in the market, what's happening in the economy. And so we have to kind of keep our ability to have kind of that mental agility to be able to be willing to change based on new data, new information. Aside from moving on to bigger deals and, you know, getting more complex with your data analysis and you're growing your team and that kind of thing, have you been getting into like anything beyond just straight up flips where you take title and then you sell it without or anything? Like are you doing subdivides or are you doing assignments or double closings or anything fancy like that? Yeah. So we actually just put our first most likely double close purchase under contract. And that was something where if we were going to do it, we wanted to make sure that we were 110% transparent as to what we were going to do that, Hey, we're going to be marketing your property. We got agreement and I never want somebody to come back to me and say, I had no idea that you were doing this. You were disingenuous. You didn't show this. And so we just got our first there. I have not gone that route historically because again, I didn't want to be disingenuous. I want to make sure that we're transparent, but also there's added complexity there too and that you have to make sure that you get it sold at a certain time and if not the risk of what are you going to do so that's that's one thing we typically we almost always take down our deals we we have a really strong capital partner. A strategic capital partner that's allowed us to go after larger deals as well and so we have done different things early on i i started doing some subdivides we had a i think in my. Second year had like 35 acres we we put into 10 acre a little over 10 acre residential lots, so i've done i've done a few different subdivides and then we actually built cabins um recently some off-grid hunting cabins and doing some different experimentation on small scale. So some different tests and some small scales. And then we actually just had our largest property that we have been under contract for almost a month. That's a much larger subdivide. It's much larger than our typical contract price. So our first million dollar purchase, it would be, assuming we're able to make it happen. Sounds like you have like a land funder that you're working with, like the same one every time when you said strategic capital partner that you said. Does that just mean like there's one shop that continually funds your deals? That's right. So it's a good friend of mine. And there's actually a group of us that we meet every week. We do a lot of deals together. I've known them for 20 years. And so they have some depth of capital, which has made that kind of a strategic partner in that we're doing a lot of deals. We have been able to go after some of these larger deals as well. So is this somebody who they were never really a land flipper? They're just a friend of yours that has money and they're happy to fund your deals? That's right. Cool. The cabin thing. I've heard people talk about this idea a lot over the years. I'm sure, like anything, there's all kinds of different variables that can influence whether it's worth it or not, or how much the value goes up, if at all, after a cabin is there. But just tell me about that. How did you decide to do that? What does it cost to get these cabins on there? What is the resulting value of the property after the cabin is there? Is it worth it? Or is it easier to just sell the land as is? I would say the jury is still out on if it's worth it. It's worth it. it does extend your hold times. The more, the higher the price, the more you have on there, the more finicky your buyers are, right? It's kind of like if you build a million dollar luxury home, you're going to have very specific buyers with very specific tastes. So it adds complexities to a deal. And we haven't done enough of them with enough to be able to actually truly see A-B test type thing, but the numbers do pan out. And what we were looking at was call it about a $25,000 cost, adding about $50,000 in total value, right? So 25 profit. So not bad. It adds complexity on the builder side, depending on what you do. Now you can also do more simple, buy something prefabricated, move it on there, things of that nature. And so it's, again, we're still in the testing phase and working through getting the results on it. But it's something that I much prefer doing something where we can add some value and be it a cabin or having something where we're putting in, cutting in a nice driveway. A culvert, building a road through a property, that can add so much value. It's expensive too, though. It is. It is. But also, even on some of those smaller properties that I had. We were doing hydro mulching mulch out the the front and um somebody recently said uh it makes it look park-like and i was like that's the perfect word for it those those kind of things so you can you can put in just a little bit of money and get massive roi when you see a hydro mulching i should probably look this up i've heard people use that word mulching you like grind up trees and put it everywhere? Especially the brush. So doing bush hogging, but turning it into the wood chips that end up nice little floor on the ground. So it makes something, especially when you're talking about like an acre property or a half acre property, it makes it lockable. You can kind of see the whole thing. It seems like that would add more value or at least perceived value than just bush hogging it, right? Where you just, it's dirt when it's all done. You're actually like putting a surface down. And it looks beautiful. That nice wood chipped. I mean, you think about how much work it takes to mulch something, to spread that mulch. But when you're getting it like that, it's amazing. How much more does it cost to do that? Oh, gosh. I haven't done it on a smaller property in a while, but I think we had one that was a quarter acre and it cost something like $1,300. Just for that part of it or for the whole job? For everything. So brush cutting and doing the molting. Word of warning with that, always have a survey on a smaller property, or if it's a larger property, stay away from the borders. You want to make sure that you do not have any risk of a bordering question that can come back on you. And back to the cabin thing. So it sounds like these were not prefabricated cabins we got. You had like a contractor, like build them custom or something? Exactly. So we had some plans. We modified a little bit. I had a good realtor friend. We had been talking about the idea for about a year and these properties back up to hunting land. And so it's something where you can buy 10 acres and you all of a sudden own 2010 acres. That's kind of the hypothesis there. Are there any specific tools or resources you found particularly helpful over the past year or two? What would you say is your one or two or three go-to pieces of software that you use again and again? Because it's just so helpful. I'm a big fan of AI, leveraging AI in my business, as I know you are. And ChatGPT and Cloud are two really solid tools, really solid services. So we get premium. I've added ChatGPT for my team as well, and we're really trying to leverage that as much as possible. We are using API in some cases in doing some data cleanup. So we were calling it and asking it some questions. For example, what is the most likely first name for this person? Because I've seen systems like LandVision or DataTree, when they try to parse that out, they sometimes can get it very, very wrong. Wait, so you get a list where the first name is not there? Where the first name, what they perceive as what the first name is, is incorrect. So there was a Blueberry Farms LLC. And so it said first name was Blueberry. And so I always like to personalize our letters. And so that would have been, hi, Blueberry. It's something that we then have an API where we ask that question to it of looking at this name, what is the most logical first name? And if you don't know, I want it blank. Like has the connection to property owner records or something? Or how does it know the first name? No. So it's actually just pulling our full owner name. So the full owner name. So if it's Seth Williams, then it's going to say it's most likely Seth. Now, if it was Seth William, then it might say, I'm not really sure because William could be a first name or Seth could be a first name. But looking at the whole thing and saying, is Seth a logical last name? Because so many times you see where it's just not a comma, right? It's William Seth. And so it's trying to kind of parse that type of thing out. And so a lot of the power with ChatGPT and Claude is in things like their APIs. And Claude, their API, it's Anthropic is the company. So you can program to talk directly to those and leverage those in your systems. I've used it a lot for things like, and actually just those, the chatbot piece of it for things like reviewing contracts. Is there anything I'm missing? What clauses do I need to add in this? I'm trying to build a custom one that will actually build a contract for me based on our historical contracts. Again, sometimes it's much better at different tests than others. It's always getting better. But it's been a helpful thing to bounce, even be a conversation partner. Hey, I've got this situation. I've got this seller that I don't want to make mad, but I really need to get them to do this. How would you recommend going about it? I actually just did that a couple of days ago, some involving two people. I won't name names or anything, but a awkward, weird thing that I had to say, but it had to be said. I couldn't just not say it. Like it has to be dealt with. It's delicate. I don't want to make anybody mad. Just explain the whole context. My initial prompt was pretty long, like telling the whole story of like why this is an issue and all this stuff. But the response I got was perfect. I mean, it was like way better than anything I ever could have thought up of on my own. It does make a huge difference. I mean, sometimes it can like save a relationship. So many times we just are stuck in our head and our own thought processes, right? And we will talk about talking to a friend to get advice. Having somebody else's perspective is always tremendously valuable. Sometimes you can't do that. And so when you can have somebody like AI to bounce that off of, that can be tremendously helpful. If anybody out there is an AI nerd like Andy and I, you might want to consider checking out the Pulse Inner Circle, pulseinnercircle.com. It's a new thing that Mike Belcom and I have been working on. A couple times a month, we get together and have calls kind of like what we're doing right now, where we just talk about what we're using and what's working and answer questions and stuff like that. There is just so much to know about it. And the more you know, the more powerful you become. And a lot of the questions that I see people asking like everywhere, I just keep wondering like, why aren't you asking ChatGPT? Like you can get probably the best answer or a very good answer from that, Unless it's like an experiential based issue where like you need firsthand experience. I don't think it can do that. But general broad stuff, you'll get a very solid direct response. And it's super helpful. Yeah. In many cases, it's almost like if you ask your question of has somebody ever posted this question on Reddit? And if the answer to that is yes, ask ChatGPT. They can likely give you an answer there. Replit is another product that I've been using lately. It's a little bit more technical. R-E-P-L-I-T. It is something where you can build applications using natural language. So again, it takes a little bit more of a technical skill set. It codes it up and you can actually deploy the system. So I built a prototype. And again, this is kind of some of my background too, in something called product management, where it's exactly what you do. You say, here is what I want the product to do and why. And you build these things called user stories. And so it's something that allowed me to build this prototype saying, here's what I want to do. And it came up in it, the prototype, it wasn't perfect, but it came up, it created an interface where I could actually, I could upload a file, a CSV, and then I could, it would either automatically map those columns to different specific fields, or I could choose those. And then it placed the actual properties on a map that it created. And so it's a fascinating thing and it's only going to get better. Do you have like a background in like building software? Yes, I do. But on the what you call product management side. So I started out as a developer long, long time ago and I was not good at it. And so I pretty quickly realized that, hey, I'm really good at like knowing what technology can do. And understanding that, but not so much on the coding side. So product management is where you're defining what do our customers need, having lots of interviews with people and understanding not even just what they're saying they need, but what do they actually need? What problems do they need to solve and figuring out all of that. And so that's what I did in that world. So I've got a decent technical background. I don't code a lot. I can sometimes edit it, But but this this is a tool which, again, it's only going to get better and it's only going to get more user friendly. That's the thing with AI is it is and where Pulse is probably such a huge value is. I heard somebody describe it. It's not like this finite kind of point in time. Here's what AI is. It's a look at the information as a stream, as a river. Because every day, something new is coming out that is a game changer. And it's going to continue to be that way. Yeah, I know. I just saw this thing, you know, we're recording this in late 2024. But I saw this thing about how Claude can now like take control of your computer and just like do stuff on your computer for you without you. And it's like, that kind of blows my mind. And I was just trying to get it to work a couple of days ago and found, it's not like the most user-friendly thing to get set up, but I have to imagine that's going to get easier. It just makes you wonder like a year from now or two years from now, somebody listening to this in the future, they're probably gonna be like, yeah, that's old hat stuff. Like that's been around for a long time now. Like the new thing is this, and that will just continue. And it's kind of scary, but kind of exciting too. It is. And I mean, so Replit had something, basically a repo, which is like kind of a code setup where you could use the computer use. And so I was trying it and had it going out to Redfin to pull some comps. And it's fascinating. You watch it actually working with a browser and the cursor and all that kind of stuff. It got tripped up. So it wasn't the easiest thing to use. I got throttled because too many calls on the background. So again, not the easiest thing to use, but it only gets better from here. It's amazing. And it's one of those things too, where the innovations are then being built on the innovations. That are being built on the innovations. And so it's like, that's why it's so difficult to predict the future. And especially right now, where it's changing so quickly. This just happened yesterday on our Facebook group. Somebody had posted this picture of like a pipe sticking up out of the ground. And they're like, what is this? And I looked at it, I'm like, I don't know exactly, but I bet ChatGPT got figured out. So I uploaded the picture to ChatGPT and it gave a, what seemed like a very accurate, valid description of what it probably was. I think it was like a well cap or something like that, our monitoring thing, which could either be used for getting water or monitoring contaminants in the ground, one or the other. So, hey, that's a really good question to ask the seller, by the way. But just the fact that it can look at pictures like that, that the average human doesn't understand, but it does understand it, that leads me to think that things like comping land, for example, a very common thing is, especially if you use the comp report tool from Price, for example. I've had this where I've got a property that's on the beach, and it's maybe a half acre in size, and I'm looking for comps just like that. And it'll pull in other half acre properties within the vicinity, but like most of them are not on the beach because like it can't see that. But something like AI probably could. Maybe it can now, I don't know. If it can analyze pictures like that, it can probably identify, oh, this was not a good comp because it's not on the beach. Like really getting granular to the point that like it sees stuff that humans can't see or would very easily miss. And there's a lot of that in land. Lots of stuff that can very easily fly into the radar if you're not looking for it. Absolutely. Or even reading the text in something, right? This property doesn't have legal access. So stuff that's not in structured data that comes through for a comp, but being able to interpret that. And it's something where it's like, what if I get to a point where I can upload my recordings of me comping and I need you to start being able to do this? We're not far from that. Have you tried doing any title searches on ChagipD, like getting documents, just uploading like the actual scans from the county and having to read that? I tried this a couple of months ago and it did not work. But at the rate these things are moving, I wouldn't be surprised if it works today. I can't believe I didn't think about that. I had a property that I bought with very bad records and we were looking to find if there was an easement. And that would have actually been a perfect use case for it. This was prior to ChatGPT. But I have been using it for even like, you know, some of the PDFs, for example, where they're not. In readable format right you can't highlight it copy it and so it's needing to use optical character recognition and so uploading that into chat gpt and having it post that and and spit that out is a great method i gotta try this when we're done with this call because i know it can do that when i was just in italy i took a picture of this plaque that was in all latin in this church we were in i uploaded that and it translated it and i knew exactly what it was saying and it made perfect sense based on where we were and but if we can do that it can probably at least look at images whether it's a jpeg or something absolutely and and ask it to interpret exactly that you have to make sure you've got your different uh plugins sometimes because it's not always defaulted on but yeah no it's the use cases are are endless and i think that's the exciting thing is it comes down to your creativity. And it's fascinating. With all the things that you are good at, you know, you mentioned this developer background. I just, I mean, you clearly have more technical know-how than the average person. Just your ability to even use the OpenAI API at all. Like that puts you ahead of a lot of people. You're good at certain things that not everybody is good at. Do you have a good awareness for what those things are? Or are you the kind of person like most people where you're like, well, it's natural to me, so I don't see it. So I'm not good at anything. But I'm just curious, Like, do you have any unfair advantages, you think, in this business? First off, having good friends in the community. There's no way I would be where we are now without having the friends who have helped me. You know, and I think of Matt Nunn and Dave Dennison and Ajay, Jason Woolbrink. And I mean, there's there's countless other people that have been just so tremendously valuable people. And I've had such solid relationships with, I think that has really been an unfair advantage. I think God has gifted me also with a knack for figuring things out. I call it resourcefulness, or I've heard it called resourcefulness, but I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I can usually figure out something. And I've got this endless supply of determination to figure out the problems through brute force. And I like to make a joke that if you have me solve a problem, I can solve it 10 times and I'd solve it a different way each time. That's good and bad. I've just figured out ways to kind of get around things and learn things and figure it out. One of the other things too is I've had a lot of industry experience in technology in some different industries. And just I've really I enjoy investing and I've, I've lost a decent amount of money trying to invest. And so I've learned a lot of lessons from that, that I think have been tremendously valuable in helping me to make better business decisions and to run better teams and just being able to avoid some of those pitfalls on the technology side, especially having that experience in product management, it really helped me to understand more about what problems people are trying to solve and needing to solve and how can we solve those. So, so many times people would tell you, I need your product to do this. And you start asking some questions and that's a symptom. They're trying to solve a symptom of a completely different problem. And so if you can kind of bring it to that problem, well, what about this and offer different solution? And so many times we would see that in that process. And so it was something that. Helped me to kind of understand, all right, here's then maybe a different solution and a way that we could blend technology to a business problem. So I think that's been really effective and helpful in our business. Yeah, being able to figure out different problems and come up with some unique solutions. Do you think you have an Achilles heel or anything that does your brain work in a way that's like, man, this is hurting me? I would be a lot further if I didn't work this way. So solving the problem 10 times a different way each time is definitely one of those. I don't have great rote memory is what they call it. I don't always follow processes and I oftentimes do things a little bit differently. And so that's something that I've got a really solid team that has helped to kind of cover some of those gaps. That's one of the big problems that I have is, again, I do things differently from day to day. But yeah, Achilles heel, I have both heels and all tendons are Achilles in my body. And I think for me, one of the issues is like, it's great that you can solve the problem stuff, but is the problem even worth solving? Like, is it even that important? Like, are there other things that should be prioritized way ahead of this? I feel like I get caught in that so many times. It's like, I see a little thing that I just want to nail that issue and I'll waste a half a day and I do it, but it's like, what did you give up in the meantime? I've had to stop myself mid problem and say, listen, you've gotten too deep already and spent too much time. They call it the sunk cost fallacy. And it's like, okay, stop, pivot, get away from that. Just call it a loss. What has been like the hardest part of this business for you? Like, is there anything that you just kind of dread doing? Like if you could change one thing or make one thing go away so you never had to deal with that again, what would that be? The future and figuring out the future. It's hard. So having gone full-time. Almost a year ago. It puts a different level of stress on me and on somebody who runs a business and that my wife is at home and she, like I said, helps with the books, but this is our income. And so I struggle with anxiety around what does the future hold? Am I going to be able to continue to be competitive and find an edge here and is the opportunity going to get edged out is the opportunity going to go away where is the next deal going to come from and so this is a struggle i i'm sure everybody and i know everybody deals with and it's been something that i'm i'm a christian and i believe that god is sovereign and and is in control of of everything and it has I think without knowing that truth, without believing that truth, I'd be completely stressful all the time. But I know that things will work out, most likely not the way I expect them to, but they will work out for the good. God has provided for my needs time and time again. He always has and he always will so much more than I could ever expect. The other really hard thing is growing this into a real business. When I first left my job, I love doing land. And when I first left, I was like, this is great. I'm just going to be able to do more of this. And I started doing that. And pretty quickly, I was like, I'm hitting a wall. And so I started making some key hires. And that was kind of the game changer and like the second game changer that really helped us to start scaling and making the changes on the data side and then on the campaign side. And so automating some of the processes there. And so, yeah, having this, turning it from that kind of one to two-person show to a real business. But it's been good. I'm loving it. Have you taken the Enneagram test before? I have not, but my wife tells me... Many times um about it and i forget which number i am i want to say it's like a three you forget what the number that she thinks you are if you've ever taken it yeah yeah i tell her i'm a 10. But i don't think there actually is a 10 i just yeah no i i think i'm i'm the helper in an enneagram, whichever one that is i think maybe a two i ask that because just what you're saying there about anxiety about the future that sounds like a type six thing to do to think about that because i do that all the time and sometimes it actually hits me like i've been on my own for many years now and like i gotta pinch myself i'm like oh my gosh i don't have a boss right now like this is crazy like how am i doing this surely this is gonna fall apart in a day now right but it just keeps going and going and it's i remember the days when like being able to work for yourself was just such a far off distant dream like it felt like i can't possibly be real that's like unicorns and stuff like that doesn't really exist that's just a fun thing to think about it is crazy we're here now like the dream has been realized even if it doesn't last forever it's like the fact that we could ever live like this is an amazing thing no i forget that sometimes and then you're willing to take that step too one of the things too is is we're fluid right as far as like our personalities ease. We're always growing. It's kind of that dynamic, you know, that growth mindset. And so it's like, yeah, in some ways I have that too, but I also have a lot of other attributes and it's just a sliding scale. So why don't we switch gears a little bit, start talking a little bit about this title fraud thing. You know, I kind of mentioned it in the intro, just the ongoing issue that's been going on. And so I was talking to somebody earlier this year who works in Florida and they have a buying website. And they said that about 10% of all the submissions that come through their buying website are from fake sellers, which has a ton of people. If you didn't know any better and didn't know to look like that, that's a lot of people who are just constantly trying to scam you. I do think. From what I've just heard anecdotally, I feel like this is a bigger issue in Florida than most places for whatever reason. But in terms of safeguarding against this, so closing with the title company, getting a title insurance policy should cover everything in the past and then up to the present, like that transaction. But that does not cover the future. But there is a policy you can get that does cover the future, right? That's correct. And so what you want to look at is a covered risks section in your title policy. And that will typically and it should include fraud. And again, to your point, it's that current transaction, right? If you're buying from a fraudulent seller or if one in the past has happened, then it's going to cover you for that. Now, there's also a homeowner's policy that exists. It's an Alta homeowner's policy that exists. One of the covered risks is fraud that happens after you purchase. And actually, just to clarify, when you say homeowners, so my brain goes to the company homeowners insurance, which is like a hazard insurance policy for my house. That's not what we're talking about here. No, no. This is basically analogous to the owner's policy. So you have an owner's policy, which is what we typically see. And then there's a homeowner's policy. It's an ALTA policy that you can, I think, request. I believe it's a little bit more. But the key is it's for a home. My understanding after all the research is it does not need to be a primary residence. It could be a rental or anything like that, but it's a home. And so that will, that covers fraud that happens. If somebody tries to sell it out from under you, it covers that. Now, my understanding is that that policy is not available for land, at least at this point. And we were talking about why is that the case? It's very likely that it's because land is probably harder to protect. I think also it's just not something that I've seen be offered yet. I imagine we will soon see something like that because I think that's also the highest risk. And insurance typically likes to make money off of risk. So when we're talking about squatting, I totally understand how land is a higher risk for that because like nobody's there. to even see if a squatter's there. So that makes sense to me. But the title thing, I don't get that. Well, because they're not there. They're not around. So an owner isn't around with vacant land. But an owner's not around their rental property necessarily. Right. But usually you're going to have at least some level of occupation in a house, in a building. And if not, you're likely going to have a lot of neighbors around that. What does that have to do with the title though? I mean, just because there's people around. So if somebody puts a for sale sign, that's oftentimes been the the thing that tips people off. You have people coming to visit and a neighbor's like, hey, what's up with that? And so vacant land oftentimes, you know, is vacant land. And it's it's oftentimes adjacent to other vacant land. And so I think it's it's probably easier to protect against that with with homes. I've got a Google alert that pops up around land scams. And a lot of the scamming that we've seen and that people have seen is around vacant land. Many of the people we talked to haven't ever been to their land, right? They inherited it. And so that's something where it's like, well, you know, even if there is a for sale sign, people are like, oh, yeah, I guess the neighbor's selling it. We've never talked to them. The fact that there's title insurance to cover past and present stuff and potential for future if it's a home or a residence of some kind, the presupposition to that is that the title companies know something about how to verify this stuff. Like they wouldn't offer insurance if they weren't doing something to be pretty darn sure that this is not an actual risk for them. So what are they doing? And how could we do that if we were going to self-close? Yeah. So there's some different tools that we have access to as well, different software tools. So for example, DocuSign has, and also PandaDoc have something called knowledge-based authentication. You'll see that as KBA. It's stuff that can be identified off of a credit report. So it's an added step that makes it a little bit more difficult to impersonate somebody. Probably everybody who's listening has experienced those questions. What kind of car did you have a loan for? And so things of that nature. So that's one of the options. They have ID verification. And so after a lot of research and a lot of dead ends, except for certain much more expensive, I think probably government type level things, there's no actual ID verification that's running through a database saying, this is Seth Williams's license, kind of like what you see in TSA when you're flying in there, they're checking a government database. And so to my knowledge, commercially available, no one has that, that would be easily accessible to us. What it does do though, is it checks for the typical things that you'd look for on a fraudulent ID. So it's looking for the holograms, the different watermarks, the what does a picture look like, all of those kind of things. And it also scans something called the machine readable zone. So the barcode and that then is interpreting it saying, does the information on this match up with the information that we're expecting it to be coming off of that machine readable zone? And so it's doing those different checks in order to make sure that there is no evidence of tampering. And, you know, is it consistent with the municipality, the state that issued that? Are you talking about like biometric ID verification? No, that's that's a third that I believe DocuSign also has a biometric identification as well. I don't know as much on that. I think that that might be a newer option that they are offering. I was just looking at this. I don't know if this is available for people like you and me or if it's limited to huge companies, but Plaid, so P-L-A-I-D.com, it's used by, if you sign up for a Mercury bank account or a Relay bank account, part of the process is using Plaid. I think that's where this is coming from in that signup process of getting a bank account. You got to take a picture of your driver's license and then take a picture of your face. I guess it matches them up and makes sure that it's the same face. I feel like that's still not totally bulletproof because people can fake IDs. You can just put your picture on a fake ID that you make. It's like easier than ever to do right now with AI, right? Yeah. I mean, we saw that example of, I think it was in China where someone was on a Zoom call. I think a CFO was on a Zoom call and with six other people and all of them were deep fakes. and he ended up sending a million dollar wire transfer because the CEO asked him to do it on the call. And so we're gonna continue to see them get more and more advanced. You have those different types of verifications. Biometric, I had seen something that DocuSign might offer something like that. I think we'll see more of, if you've ever logged into IRS, they have the ID service, id.me, I think is what it is. And that's a service also that they offer for different software solutions. So theoretically you could. Use that for another kind of online notary saying, yeah, Seth logged into ID me. He's got all the two-factor authentication. We verified him. Yes. So Seth's good to go. We've got a pretty rudimentary system of notaries today, right? In that it's reliant on the notary. How good is a notary? And what if the notary is fraudulent, right? What if they're part of the scam? And so we're going to start seeing places catch up and title companies. You would argue that they should be the one on the forefront of this because they're the ones who stand to lose the most amount of money. Yeah. Yeah. I was just talking to somebody earlier this year who like seven or 80 grand, they got scammed out of title fraud, but they had title insurance and their title insurance just paid up. That's expensive. Like they can't do a whole lot of those. They've got to figure that out. And make that not happen anymore. The other thing too is those other red flags, right? They come along with different scammers. I mean, soon after we had started talking about this, we got a couple, we got a person actually that came in and he was very clearly a scammer in the conversation and very clearly not the seller that he said he was. When you were talking to this seller, like what were these red flags or yellow flags? Like what was it that tipped you off and made you realize it was a scammer? Yeah, there were a lot of them. So first off, he was talking about needing to sell very quickly and was talking about his son's medical bills and needing to take care of those very quickly. And so we called and we're talking with him and there were actually a couple of different things. he had incorrect data about the property, It was something like half an acre, 0.5 acres, but he was saying it was five acres. And he didn't know much about the property. And his answers were very, very short. They were very curt. He was almost too confident in what he was answering, but didn't want to deviate from anything, didn't know much about the property. So I checked then his IP address, which came in through the form. I checked this other tool that we have talked about. It's called Sion, S-E-O-N dot I-O. That is free. You can get a free version of it where you can put the IP address, you can put phone number, you can put email address and start getting some scoring for the person and so or for the different attributes that they have. So the IP address was showing that it was coming through a data center ISP. Meaning likely they're using a VPN. That's just one thing, right? I use a VPN often. The phone number showed as a voice over IP phone number. I actually looked up the phone number and saw that it was associated with a guy who had like a mail oral campaign, completely different. So then looked at the email. And so it has basically these different little flag ratings on the different things, it said, Hey, this is coming from an ISP IP. And so that's something that you should be cautious about. So all of these different factors, it became pretty, pretty apparent that he was a scammer. Two weeks later, we get another lead come in, different name, same phone number. Of this person. And it was just one of those things where it's like, you don't expect somebody to be missing those little things as a criminal, but they often do. One quick question. When you talk about the IP address, it sounds like that was an important component of this. And you got that because they fill out a form. And I was actually looking into this a little bit. Google Forms, for example, that won't give you the IP address. Or if you use Typeform, which I use, that won't give it to you either. Or if you use Ninja Forms, That won't give it to you. But I know Gravity Forms will, JotForm will. So basically, you have to use the right kind of form tool that will collect that information, right? Right. Which one were you using? Gravity. Yeah. And that's a WordPress plugin, by the way. It's super solid. I've used it for a long time. Yeah. It's not cheap, but it's worth it in order to not only just for that. That was a nice benefit. But yeah, that was something that I had to custom add. Really interesting stuff because I had posted a trying to figure out if people out there in our Facebook community have been scammed before. And if so, like what happened? How did you know? Like, what did you figure out? And a couple of people chimed in. Steve Sharp is one of them. He gave a lot of really good information. He was talking about, it wasn't like one thing that gave it all away. It was just a bunch of different yellow flags that came up. And once like two or three of them come up, it turns into a red flag. And he was saying similar stuff where like the IP address didn't match where they supposedly live. Something that I saw a few people saying is that a lot of times these people don't want to talk on the phone or they have excuses not to talk. They only want to talk through text or email when they pick up. Maybe they have like a foreign accent or something. It just doesn't line up. If you just look at it with a critical eye and are just aware of this stuff and aware of what the yellow flags might be, you probably catch a lot of it. It's kind of funny because it takes some smarts to know how to defraud somebody through title. And yet they still kind of leave these holes in terms of given themselves away. Yeah, I think it's almost like having the hypothesis that this person is trying to scam me. And you need to disprove that hypothesis. Another one that was mentioned is like the email address of the seller doesn't match up with their name or their company. I get this all the time, actually. I got one this morning. Somebody said they were emailing me from Sony Corporation and their address is like hotguy95 at gmail.com or some weird thing like that. It's just like, seriously, like at least make something kind of believable. Well, so that that Sion also has this thing in emails where it identifies how many times the email address has been involved in a data breach. And so it's a question, why is that important? Well, it shows you the age. So if you have an email address that has never been involved in a data breach, that's somewhat of a red flag, right? It's a newer email. It also shows if it's tied to any social profiles, social media profiles. So it can be a helpful thing. And it's just, it's one tool of many, right? That we have to have. Again, stuff like the DocuSign or the PandaDoc, the KBA is another one, especially if somebody's closing. That is a must have. I know another thing that I've heard title companies will do is they'll mail a letter to the owner's address, asking them to verify if they're selling their property, because chances are the scammer is not living at the address of that owner. So just kind of a notification that way. Other title companies will require sellers to use one of their approved notaries, like just to make sure it's a real person that they know and is a legit notary. Sometimes the mobile notaries have even been in on the scam. So they can pick up basically the request for the mobile notary. And so you've got to be careful at every turn. And then your earlier point too about the address. Sometimes that can even be risky. Again, depending on how advanced the scam is, people can change the address at the tax office pretty easily. And so, you know, doing things like skip tracing a person is everything lining up. And when you're doing outbound marketing, it's also much lower risk when it comes to scamming versus inbound marketing. Somebody finds you off the web. I think the thing that another concern I have is that when I think about the people who are most likely to be doing a self-closing, I don't know if this is true or not, but like when I got started, I was going after super cheap stuff. And so I had to do a self-closing. And that was when I was most vulnerable. Because I knew the least about this business. I was just getting started. And now this is this added layer of stuff I have to think through just to get the deal closed. I'm trying to think of like, what would be like the minimum viable thing that a person should do? Like if you could only add one thing to your process to check the stuff, would it just be like. Ordering a $2 KBA assessment from PandaDoc or something like what do you think that would catch most things or? I mean, honestly, I think the just like what we're talking about. So the Sion, I think it's a free subscription. And if anybody needs help using it. But you have to have the IP address in order to use that, right? It can check a phone number, email or IP. I got you. And ideally, you're checking all three. but all you need is phone number and the email and it helps to check against those so that's one piece also skip tracing so a lot of people are even early in the business or skip tracing and checking that looking up their email google their email look to see if you can find out a little bit more detail about them then to your point the kba so either docusign or panda sign or PandaDocs, having that and adding that in there can be a useful thing. For DocuSign, I believe that the numbers that I've seen are, I think, $3 per KBA verification, but it does, you need the monthly subscription as well for that. But have a Zoom call with somebody as well, right? Have a video conference with them and talk to them in person. Now, the thing about KBA too is that it requires usually a social security number. I myself would be a little bit more apprehensive. If I was a seller, I'm hesitant to give out my social security number. I would to a title company, but if I'm trying to sell you land and you're asking for my social security number, that might freak people out. This Sion website you mentioned, is it S-E-O-N dot I-O? S-E-O-N dot I-O. I'll include links to all of this stuff in the show notes, as I always do, retipster.com forward slash 207. That's where you can find links to all the stuff if everybody wants to check it out. We do have an affiliate link to PandaDoc as well. If somebody wants to sign up and they're not already, be sure to click through that link. With Sion, again, you can sign up for a free trial and no credit card required. Then you would want to switch over to the free plan and they just have that where you can sign up for the free plan and use a certain number of those. Do you ever do self-closings anymore? Or is it just always through a title company? Yeah, I stopped doing those after about a year. There's so much logistics involved in that that make it difficult and not worth the amount of effort. Yeah, it is a lot of extra stuff to go through. Even when you know what you're doing, it's still just a lot of monkeying around with stuff. It seems like a pretty narrow window when I think about the deals that are profitable enough to be worth doing, but not doing title insurance, it's just like, man, They exist, but there's not many of them. Yeah, I think having, though, a business that is structured that way for volume, it can absolutely work. When you have a business that that is kind of your bread and butter is volume, you can, I think, make a killing. Because honestly, I mean, that's the killer with those deals that are a $12,000 sale price. right? If I'm buying a property for what might look good at $3,000 and I'm able to sell it for $12,000, I'm not making any money on it because I've got closing costs on both sides and that just kills it. So if you can do that and not have to pay escrow fee, not have to pay title insurance, all of those things that can do really well. So if you have the right processes in place, you can do really well, but you need to make sure that you are protecting yourself against that fraudulent seller. Well, Andy, it was awesome to talk to you. Appreciate you coming on the show. It's great to hear about your business. Thanks for sharing your wisdom about everything you've learned about title fraud. Defense stuff. I'm sure we'll continue to see that evolve in the years ahead because it has to. Any last closing remarks? If anybody's listening to this and they want to be where Andy is someday, anything you want to tell those people? No, I appreciate you having me. I love this business. It is not easy. I mean, it takes a lot of work, But if you're willing to put in a lot of work and really are committed to it, it can be a great, great business. So, Andy, we've talked about a lot here. As you think back about your journey and how you've gotten this far, I know you've mentioned like Matt Nunn. You've mentioned Dave Denniston, Ajay in passing. Has anybody else been particularly helpful to you in this journey? Yeah, absolutely. First off, you, Seth, have been tremendous with the resources you provide, your podcast, your blogs. I have several go-to articles that I pull up. At least once a week. You have been a tremendous asset for this industry. Callan Faulkner is somebody else as well who has been tremendously helpful for me. She has given me so much help and assistance throughout the years. Jason Wolbrink, again, I think I mentioned him previously. And Justin Sleva as well has been a tremendous influence on me. I agree. They're all huge resources and I consider them all friends and it's great to know. that's kind of what you get from being connected and going to events and just not living as an island. I don't think I even really realized that until a few years ago when I started doing these things. There's a ton of value to unlock once you're willing to actually go to stuff and meet people in person. Absolutely. Learning ideas, learning different ways of doing things. You have to stay involved and learn some of the new techniques. And it's just good to also bounce ideas off of people. Here's what I'm doing and learning from them. If people want to get a hold of you or communicate with you in any way, you don't have to offer anything up. But if you do, is there a place they should contact you at? Sure. Andy at haystackland.com is probably the best place. Is that your website? Haystackland.com? That's my website. Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks again, Andy. Great to talk to you and hopefully we'll talk again soon. All right. Thanks, Seth.