Jesse Bibbee is a real estate entrepreneur with a knack for turning vacant land into lucrative investments. Starting with house flips, Jesse quickly transitioned to focusing exclusively on vacant land. From flipping land to savvy seller financing for consistent cash flow, Jesse's expertise extends to handling entitlement deals and subdivisions.
Jesse Bibbee is a real estate entrepreneur with a knack for turning vacant land into lucrative investments. Starting with house flips, Jesse quickly transitioned to focusing exclusively on vacant land. From flipping land to savvy seller financing for consistent cash flow, Jesse's expertise extends to handling entitlement deals and subdivisions.
All right, everyone welcome to the real estate game changers show. I'm your host, Mike McKay, based in the Jacksonville, Florida market. And each and every week we do this show of people who are changing the game of real estate all over the country. So guys, this is a live show. So if you have any questions, please put them in the comments for our guests to answer. Also, if anyone is in the Jacksonville area, we are actively hiring acquisitions people. If you have sales experience. Feel free to reach out to us. You don't need real estate experience, but if you do have experience in sales, we can teach you everything you need to know about real estate. So this week on the show, we have Jesse Bibbee. Jesse, welcome to the show.
Jesse:Appreciate you having me on excited.
Mike:Absolutely, man. So for the people who don't know you, could you share a little bit about how you got started in real estate and how that's led you to where you are today?
Jesse:Yeah, totally. That's a long story, but I'll try to, I'll try to keep it concise. So I had learned about real estate probably, three or four years ago. I always known about it, known that I wanted to be in it, but two or three years ago read the whole rich dad, poor dad thing, got into it, started following all the influencers on social media that were flipping a bunch of houses. Then I actually found Collective Genius because they were all in Tampa at the same time I'm in Tampa, right? And so it just sparked my hair. I'm like, why are all the biggest people that I know that are flipping houses all here in Tampa? So I looked at this Collective Genius thing and long story short I found Jason Medley, who's the founder and CEO of Collective Genius. I reached out to him, essentially just wanted to provide value to his group, do anything that I can to be, become involved. We went back and forth a little bit. He invited me to one of the events. And a couple of members liked me. He asked me to come on board. As just like on the team. And so that's what opened my eyes to real estate. Again, long answer to your short question, but it's necessary in order to get to the bridge, the gap of where, to where I am now. And yeah, I just learned about it through that and really just dove. All in from there, right? Six months, six to 12 months of just learning and things like that, doing a couple of house flips, a couple of wholesale deals. Then this past about just about 14 months ago is when I transitioned to just being focused on vacant land.
Mike:Yeah, when we were talking about that a bit offline what made you decide to make that transition from, trying a couple of flips, trying some wholesale deals and then saying, no, I'm going to really focus on vacant land.
Jesse:Yeah, that's a good question. So for me I just was spinning my wheels a bit, right? Like I was doing a lot to different, a lot of different approaches, right? Like I was reaching out to agents. I was doing all these different things to generate leads for houses and really like I was getting deals, but I wasn't, Like when I thought about scaling what I was doing, really, it just didn't seem fulfilling to me or it wasn't like a business model that supported what I want my life to look like. And so I took a step back from everything. I'm like, all right, before I do anything else, let me take into account like what I want my life to look like, what I want my business to look like, and then like craft something based on that. And so I took a look at the, the best deals that I did that were the least amount of work and it was land. And That's what started it out, right? I'm like, there's 10 times the amount of supply of land. There's 10 times or 10 times less competition, right? And so it's, even when you compare a house transaction to a land transaction, the amount of variables associated with the house transaction Versa land transaction are significantly higher, which means you need more complex systems to manage everything and more employees overhead and things like that. So I just wanted to decrease as many variable variables as possible from like soup to nuts.
Mike:And yeah, that's interesting. And starting with the end of mine, which I think is awesome. I'm curious, what was the end that you had in mind?
Jesse:Man, at the time it was like, I just wanted to be able to build a business that allowed me to live anywhere and still continue to build. So like my vision at the time was that I wanted to be over in, Portugal. Being able to surf on the weekends and in the mornings and things like that, or Costa Rica, just surfing, having a good time, but at the same time, being able to build something significant. And, it was like, man, if I'm flipping houses and things like that, it's going to be a lot more difficult. You still can't do it. I know people that do it. It's just. At my stage I felt like the land business would support that much, much better.
Mike:Yeah, gotcha. You decided to dive into the land business and I'm assuming you decided on a path of how you would go about getting the deals in the land business.
Jesse:Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. I, there's a couple of folks in CG that were running the type of business that I wanted to run remotely, like one gentleman specifically lives in Spain, but he's doing land here in Florida. And I just got some feedback on what they were doing, what courses they got into to get started or at least what they would recommend for me. I just. Started doing the thing, right? Just feed, feed the machine and staying in my lane and actually staying focused. Whereas like before, there was zero focus. I was just doing as many activities as possible, but it wasn't like operating within a framework that I knew would be successful, if that makes sense,
Mike:yeah, no, it does. Yeah. And then I guess when you, what you took away from those courses what did you decide that was like the right path for you to find the deals?
Jesse:So for me, it was important, like, let me take a step back. So there's a lot of different approaches that you can take with land. Just same thing with houses, right? Like you can flip infill lots. You can flip rural recreational properties. You can do subdivisions, you can do entitlements, you can do seller finance for cheap land, like you can do so many different things. And so for me, it was like, what can. Generate what can be like my cash cow, right? What can give me quick hits every month? Number one, and number two, how do I make sure that every marketing dollar that I spend is going to be, get me a good return, right? Cause the issue with land is if you're not marketing to properties that are able to turn quickly, then you're going to be sitting on, you're going to be sitting on that land for a very long time. And for me, I just wanted certainty that I would be able to, number one, Move that property quickly. And number two, if I was sending out mail, I want to make sure that the properties that I was sending it to were something that I actually wanted to buy, right? Cause that's, again, that's a big thing with land is, there's a lot of land out there, even in Florida. That's just junkie. And not worth
Mike:What did you decide that target. Target was, I guess what I don't know much about land. We've done a few deals, but I guess what moves quickly in. In the land business, or what do you look for?
Jesse:sure. So I would essentially just go when I, and this was when I started, third, I would just go to specific subdivisions that didn't have much variability, right? If I can, if I know that these, this subdivision, Everything is selling between 40 and 55, 000. That's not a ton of variability, right? So I know that, okay, in the last 12 months, there's been 50 of those properties that have sold in that subdivision. There's only 20 up for sale. Okay. That will lead, that leads me to believe that if I bring inventory reasonably priced inventory to the market, it will sell relatively quickly, right? If there's a market where there's 50, 50 that has sold in the past 12 months, but there's 200 up for sale. That leads me to believe I'm not doing the market a favor by bringing even more inventory to the market. So I would just go out and find as many markets like that as possible all across the country and just hit them with mail with direct mail. And because I knew that even though like I could do it nationwide I was still operating within a very strict buy box. Like as long as it met the criteria, I would hit it. So that's how I started.
Mike:and was there like a certain like formula you were looking for like X percentage sold or a certain number of parcels sold and X percentage on the market? Was there a number to that? Or?
Jesse:It was typically like a one to one is what I wanted to see. If there's 50 that have sold, I want less than 50 of for sale.
Mike:Yeah.
Jesse:So that's a inventory,
Mike:okay. And then like, how were you going about finding these? What kind of tools were using? Or are you just like going on Zillow and looking or?
Jesse:man. I was literally just going on Zillow.
Mike:Okay.
Jesse:I wish I could tell you some sexy process, but it was literally just pulling up Zillow looking at, 30 to 150, 000 land and then just scrolling, right? Scrolling, pulling the data from the areas that I found and then just hitting them. So
Mike:Gotcha. And would you, were you starting in any specific areas of the country or like areas with certain characteristics? The country is huge, right? Like, where do you start?
Jesse:yeah, so I would start, I started in Florida, right? And with that criteria, like there's tons of land everywhere, right? But with that, like there's not like in, Arkansas. There's not like, if you look at what's selling for 30 to 150, 000, like they're not info loss, right? Cause when I started, it was, it was mainly info lots. Right. And so that would filter out most of the country. So I would just find the areas where, Lots, there's subdivisions that are selling for 30 to 150, 000 for the lots and start with that. That cut out, the majority of the U S but. Yeah. I was doing deals and from all the way from Florida to Oregon to Colorado to South Carolina, like literally all over the place. So
Mike:Yeah, and just for the maybe people who are new or listening who don't know, can you explain what an infill lot is?
Jesse:yeah, it's just like a buildable lot. So if you are in just like your neighborhood there's a house, a vacant lot, a house, like that vacant lot would be an infill lot.
Mike:Gotcha. So you started there, you started mailing these and I assume you were just making offers over the phone or were you doing these offers that go out on a piece of mail? I know that's a big thing in land.
Jesse:Yeah, yes. I started with blind offers, so I would essentially like, you know, price out the area beforehand, you know, and I would be hitting these, these folks with, with the offers just from that. So I'd have, like, I remember when I first, when I was first starting I'd be, I'd just get a letter back in the mail with a signed purchase agreement for the price that I knew I wanted to buy it at. And we'd just do the deal.
Mike:Really? That actually, like some of those converted?
Jesse:yeah. Oh yeah. yeah. Yeah. I can
Mike:Okay. I believe you. That's crazy, though.
Jesse:even with that, though, like a lot of times I would either overprice it by accident. So I'd have to call him up and be like, Hey, sorry about that, but I didn't take into account XYZ. I gave you this offer. I actually need to be at this offer. So that wasn't perfect with pricing, nor is anyone, but I shifted away from that just because it was a huge. Bottleneck for me, like finding certain areas that had that like very specific criteria and things like that. So I veered away from that, but it was good while I was getting started. Cause I didn't get a ton of phone calls, but every time I did get a phone call, like it was a pretty good sign.
Mike:Yeah, so then you switched over to just like a more general mail piece or.
Jesse:Pulling these very specific subdivisions and there's only in a lot of cases, there's only sometimes 50, sometimes 150 records within that specific subdivision, sometimes 20, right? I got a deal subdivision that I, when I pulled the records, there was like, I think less than 10 records. And I thought to myself, I'm like, man, I'm probably killing off a ton of deals just because I'm giving these really low offers that are a lot of times I'm pricing them wrong even. So I'm going to get away from these because. I feel like they're inhibiting people from reaching out to me. And so I shifted cause I'm like, okay, if I'm only, if I'm only sending these out to a very specific amount of people and very small amount of records, I want to make sure I speak to as many of them as possible. And the easiest way to make that happen is more of a neutral type letter.
Mike:Gotcha. And then what's the plan with these once you contract them? Or, what was the plan back then?
Jesse:It's still just to purchase it and then resell it.
Mike:Got it. So just buy it and put it on the MLS.
Jesse:Just buy it and put it on MLS.
Mike:then do you get, do if you start doing a lot of these, I know you've in the past just over a year, you've done about 40. Are you able to borrow money on the land? I know that can sometimes. Maybe that's just. A myth in my head, but I've heard it's a little more difficult to borrow money on the raw land versus, a house.
Jesse:Yeah it's much more difficult because there's no like hard money for land, right? There's really a few options. There's funders, right? Like JV funders, but they take 50 percent of your deal. And you have to have it at 50 percent of market value in order to make it work. Or you've got your own capital or private money. So for me, I was able to leverage private money. To do it. So I did the first couple with my own money. But after that I was able to raise private money and that's what's helped me be able to just increase the volume because most other people are just wholesaling them or using JV funders. So they need steep discounts for them to make anything. But for man, I can make 15, 15 or 20 grand quickly. But still offer, I can still offer 65, 70%, if it's a hundred thousand dollar property and I can get it for 65, I'll do it. But most other people touch it unless they can get it at 50 percent because of a funder won't fund it. And so helps me be able to do more deals when you have access to good capital.
Mike:Yeah. How did you go about building up that network of private capital?
Jesse:So to be honest My main source was someone not in my immediate family, but in the family realm,
Mike:Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesse:he had he had loaned me some money on some houses that I'd done in my past, in the past And so I just approached him with this, but if I was starting again and what I do now is anytime I bring on someone new for private money, like if it's for a specific deal, I just make it so I make it a no brainer, right? In the sense where this deal really, unless some black swan event happens, like this deal can't lose. If I pull all of the comps that have happened in the past year, all these 50, let's say to the original example, these 50 lots in the last year that sold for, 50, 000. Let's call it roughly 50, 000. And I have this 20, 000 or 25, 000, and it's the identical lots. There's only this amount up for sale. If you really mitigate your risk, make sure you look for wetlands and environmental risks and things like that. I feel like it might be a lot easier to attract private lenders because there's not much that can go wrong within a span of a couple months if you're just flipping it. So
Mike:Sure, and that's an interesting point. Actually, I was going to ask next what are the things that you have to look for? I guess let's start with infill lots. What are the things that people should look out for? If they are buying these to just flip them.
Jesse:yeah, you want to make sure they have access. I've been shocked to see that there's been people that have bought and fill lots that don't have road access. So they're landlocked. They're like find other properties. I guess whatever course or person that taught them didn't teach them to scrub that out. But yeah, you just got to make sure, you're getting a property that has legal access to it. You want to look wetlands. Flood zone is, as long as you take that into account with comps and stuff like that, I still buy wetlands and flood zone properties. You just want to make sure you take that into account. Go for tortoises, right? Scrub jays, environmental, things like that. You always have to look out for, especially here in Florida.
Mike:How do you figure out, like those last things you said there? I've never heard of that before.
Jesse:So typically when I'm comping things out I don't know, I feel like. Once you do it enough, you just know to look out for those things. But I've got an environmental guy here in Florida that pretty much will help me with the whole state. And I'll just shoot it over to him and be like, Hey, are there any concerns that I need to know about? Number that's, so that's step number one. And then step number two is, I use real estate agents for all of my dispositions. And Whenever I reach out, cause what I do again, going back to, if I'm going to these specific subdivisions, let's say there's 50 that was sold in the past 12 months, when you pull all of the comps for this 50, typically right with the, with at least the thing that I use, it shows who the agent was for it. And so nine times out of 10, there's one or two dominant agents within that specific subdivision that sold like. 75 percent of the lots or 25 or 35 percent of the lots. So I just, I'm like, all right they probably already have buyers. They know the area. Like, why would I not use them for it? And so I'll call them up and be like, Hey, here's the deal. Closing on this, just looking to resell it. Is there anything that I need to look out for within specific area? So I try to have at least two or three checks and balances because sometimes like I miss things, right? There's one property right now here in Florida. Turns out like even with some of my checks and balances, I missed it. It has wetlands. And it came about as the buyer on the back end was doing their due diligence. I didn't catch it. The national wetlands inventory didn't catch it. And yeah, it'll still make money. It's just going to go from being an incredible deal to a very mediocre deal. Awesome. No, I'm not mad at it, but disappointing a little bit.
Mike:So what is, so you have an environmental guy you sent it over to. So what kind of stuff is he checking this stuff like wetlands? Or are you looking at a national database for that? What does he look into for you?
Jesse:Things like that to scrub just like the initial scrub. But that doesn't get it a lot of times, right? Like even with national wetlands inventory, like I'll look at it and it'll say it doesn't have wetlands, but if I look at it just from Google maps, you can see that the trees are a little bit grayed. Like it'll be all like beautiful green trees and then one specific area that's gray and there's not a lot of leaves on it. And that's like a easy indicator that it has wetlands. And so what I'll do is I'll, if I have any sort of like concerns about it, I'll just shoot it over to him and say, Hey, can you take like a, do a desktop survey on this to give me an idea of what you think and nine times out of 10, he can spot it just on his computer because especially like these environmental guys, surveyors, wetland delineator guys, they've got very complex softwares like LIDAR data that can look at the soil types and all these like really In depth types of things just on their computer so they can give you a pretty good idea without even having to go out to it. I've sent him enough business just on reports that I've had him go out to that he's happy to do it.
Mike:And then if there's any concerns then you send him out during your inspection period or is that. And what is that? Is that like a phase what they call phase 1 environmental or is that something else? If he goes out to the property.
Jesse:So he would be just doing a wetlands delineation report. Yeah. And then I don't, for infill lots, like it's rare for me to get that. It's typically on more of the subdivide deals or entitlements or like a bigger acreage deal. One deal up in your neck of the woods, Nassau County that I did, it was 11 acres, but a lot of it was wetlands. And I just wanted to make sure that there was enough uplands that they could put, someone could put a home on it. And so like in that case, I sent him out just to make sure he surveyed it and that there was enough. space for a home. But like in the lots, that's more of like a desktop type of thing.
Mike:Yeah, gotcha. And then you mentioned something about I'm about tortoises or something. How do you check that stuff?
Jesse:Go for tortoises. If you have to, if you find one of those like in, where would be a great example of that Hendry County, South, Southeast Florida over by Fort Myers just East of Fort Myers, that place is riddled. With gopher tortoises, right? And you have to essentially pay impact fees to relocate those gopher tortoises. And it's it can be like eight grand to move a gopher to relocate a gopher tortoise, right? And so if you're buying a 20, 000 or 30, 000 lot 8, 000, that's significant, you gotta be on the lookout. I just spoke to someone the other day that he closed on a deal without doing any due diligence on it. And. Sure. And in fact, had a gopher tortoise on it. So you got to keep keep your eyes out and different places have all across the country, like there's different unique little things that you have to look for, right? Like I almost bought a deal two weeks ago in Tennessee. Everything looked completely normal. I'm used to Florida being flat. Tennessee is not flat and it was an infill type deal, but, and it looked just standard. But it turned out that it had like a massive slope. It was like on the edge of a cliff. But I didn't check that at first. Because it, it didn't pass. I had someone on my team do it and it didn't catch it in the beginning. And so I caught it towards the end.
Mike:Yeah, wow. Um, I'm still curious and he's go for tours is do you send someone out just to walk the property? Is that hey, and to see a huge turtle or what's the way to find out if you've got 1 of these.
Jesse:Yeah, so the local agent that I use, I just have them go out and walk it first.
Mike:And are these things so big that it would just be so obvious that there's 1 there, or
Jesse:they're not huge. They're just like a normal normal goat just a normal tortoise. They're not huge, but you just go out there, and you can just see, Big holes in the ground and they're typically in there.
Mike:Okay, gotcha.
Jesse:Yeah. So they'll burrow in there.
Mike:So at this point are you still doing stuff all over the country? Or are you more or do you focus mostly on Florida?
Jesse:So I have, I'm still like finding these little pockets areas. But in the beginning it was great because like that was my only focus, right? Like I always tell people, especially when you're getting started, like you don't have any other problems in the business until you have a leads problem, right? That's what I've heard over the years and that's like what I would give out. So I didn't want to waste my time doing. Anything else aside from finding incredible areas that I knew I really wanted to get land, and sending out as much, like it, that was like the only thing that I did when I first started. Because it wasn't like I could just pull a whole County, hit them with mail and just keep doing that. Cause that takes a big budget or a big ER budget. And there's also you're going to be processing a lot of data that you don't want. And so in the beginning it was great because, All the reasons I said earlier. But now it's fitted to doing that, but also going more County wide, going after some bigger deals as well for subdivides. And also doing a little bit more some inbound marketing as well. So like I'll run my own Facebook ads and stuff like that to get leads all over the place. So
Mike:Interesting. So you run Facebook ads to buy land,
Jesse:yeah, I bought, I just bought a subdivide in South Carolina from it. It wasn't a big one, but it was a six acres and I chopped it up into five. Yeah. Five lots were simple. It didn't have to go through a big planning process or anything like that. I just got a survey on it, recorded it with the County, cut it up and sold. They sold to within 45 days. And I've got two of them that are selling right now. So yeah, it was But that came from a Facebook ad.
Mike:So are you targeting the areas you like, or is it just one of those nationwide things where the leads are so cheap that you just filter them as they come in?
Jesse:So you've got to do nationwide regardless. At least this is my opinion, right? Because when you, especially when you think about it, like most of the people that you're buying this land from are out of state owners, most people, right? Not everybody. But most are, so if you're targeting Florida, right? Like the people that have the land that you want to buy from are in New York, right? Or California, really all of those people. You get super cheap leads, like I'm getting leads for 20, 30 bucks. But with that said, like a lot of them are junk but it's still profitable. So it's all good,
Mike:yeah. And like, how many of those leads do you need to convert to 1 actual contract from a Facebook?
Jesse:I wish I had metrics.
Mike:Fair enough.
Jesse:a lot,
Mike:But you're making more than you're spending. You have that metric, right? Yeah.
Jesse:Yeah, and I've paused. I was doing a more last year. Like I paused it because I wanted to focus more on like hyper targeting on like the areas and properties that I wanted. So I put a pause to it because it was great because I was getting cheap leads. I got some good deals from it and things like that. But for me, like I didn't have a team to support like processing all of the shitty leads that would come in. And so I just was It's, this is a good, but let me put a pause on it and focus on what's great, which has been direct mail and targeting specific properties. So
Mike:Yeah. What other criteria outside of it being in like the areas where people are transacting, and obviously the ratio you mentioned before, what other criteria are you looking for to decide if you're going to mail an owner of a piece of land?
Jesse:that's, I mean, that's like mainly what I'm looking for. Right. Cause like, again, this is, this is me personally, but like, I don't care as much about like the demographics, the median household. Like if, if I see that there's enough demand in an area within the last year, that stuff is moving. And then on the flip side, that there's not a lot of supply for these folks to continue purchasing. I don't care if that's in the hottest area in Florida or if that's in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, right? If I bring in to that market, that's what I'm so does that answer your question that may not be a great answer, but
Mike:Yeah. Yeah. No, it does. I guess so you guys don't, and you don't look at things like distress or anything like that at, I don't know. I, we do that a lot on the home, home buying and mobile, home buying side, looking for foreclosures and stuff. But I guess maybe that doesn't make as much sense in the land
Jesse:you know I went, I didn't go deep. I spent some time really looking into that and having conversations with other people, a lot of time, like these people aren't super distressed, right? They've just owned this land for a lot of time. There's not as much emotional attachment to this land as well. And so they're, you build a good relationship with them and yeah. Like a lot of times there's just not a ton of distress, right? There is still sometimes and there's also a lot of title issues and things like that. But in terms of like foreclosures or tax delinquents and things like that I've hit those lists pretty hard. And to be honest, like I haven't had much success with it. So that could be me and the way that I'm processing that data or getting that data and things like that. But man, I, I'd rather just cast a wider net. And just have more conversations with people than narrow it specifically down.
Mike:yeah, are you only like mailing people who've owned it for a certain period of time or bought it for less than a certain price or you just don't care or you just if it hits the other criteria, you just hit them.
Jesse:Yeah. I'll typically mail folks over that have owned it for over five years.
Mike:Okay.
Jesse:Yeah. That's like the main thing.
Mike:What, I guess what is the reason that a lot of people are selling this? I know on the home buying side, we have our list of probably nine, 10 standard things, right? When you call people and what's their reason for selling it.
Jesse:Yeah. So a lot of times, they are in New York and they bought this land decades ago cause they were going to move to Florida and build a home and retire here and things like that and plans changed. And when the plans changed, like they'd just been sitting on it, paying taxes for forever, and they just don't want to do that anymore. And so when we get a call and have a conversation about that, then. They're happy to. And then on the flip side, it's a lot of folks that have inherited that land. And don't really know much about it. Like I, yeah. Inherited out of state owners. Yeah. I'd say those are like really the main two, at least that I deal with. The main reasons.
Mike:Gotcha. That makes sense. And then, you got into land 13, 14 months ago. You've already done about 40 or so deals. What do you think allowed you to do that many deals in that period of time? Sure.
Jesse:So again, going back before land, there was many activities that were being done, but it wasn't done within a framework that I knew would be successful. And I also didn't have a disciplined vision of what I wanted to do. But when I had the framework of what I know, Was successful based on the other folks that have done it and proven that model number one, and then number two, my discipline vision of okay, this is I'm putting blinders on this is what I am doing. And then I just re every single day, I just felt like I told people, I'm like, this is a business of sales and marketing and inputs and outputs. And literally all I cared about was just feeding inputs, like just feeding feeding. It's doing as many inputs as I could because like in the beginning I didn't even believe that someone would return a phone call from a piece of mail that they got. Like I've never done that. And so there was a limiting belief on that side of what I thought was possible with that. And so just all these people say you got to outwork whatever self doubt that you have. And like Hermosi says, you have to do Do so many activities that it would be unreasonable that you'd be successful, right? Do it so many times that would be unreasonable that it would be successful, right? And so like you look at each point of the funnel, right? If they're telling me that it takes 3000 or 5000 millers to get a deal if I read, if I send mail out to 20, 000 people, it'd be unreasonable that I wouldn't get a phone call. And if I speak to, 500 people, I'm exaggerating. These are random numbers. But if I put 500 people, it'd be unreasonable that I wouldn't find one. That would sell me a property. And so I was just obsessed with just like feeding the machine to just make it to where I couldn't even think about things not working because I'd just be processing if that makes sense.
Mike:yeah, no, it does. Absolutely. Um, and then you said you built, silence. You mentioned earlier you had a team member bring something in, so at what point did you decide to start building out your team?
Jesse:recently, literally three weeks ago, I brought on my first person. Yeah.
Mike:What was it, what was their role? What was that first hire?
Jesse:So it was originally going to be an executive assistant, but. The person that came in came from another land business and she had experience doing a lot of different things. So it's more of an ops manager, like operations manager type of role. Like she does a lot of different things. From sending out mail, sending out voicemails, sending out. Pulling data, scrubbing data, things like that. So she stayed sad too.
Mike:Gotcha. Okay, and then you've you said earlier, you look for these subdivisions and I guess at the time you were doing it on Zillow and then looking on the and county stuff. Is that still the process? Or if you have you changed that?
Jesse:Yeah. So now it's a little bit different. So, um, yeah, now it's a little bit different. Now I'll pull like the metrics for entire States and entire, like within that, like I'll look at all of Florida, for example, and then scrub all the counties against each other to find the best performing counties based on sell through rate, based on the amount of parcels available, based on. Parcels available that are on market versus off market and really just hone down on specific areas that I know are great But that aren't like these super hyper competitive areas, right? So like looking for also is to be able to get out of these even more competitive states like Florida, right? If I can, if I know the framework of which I'm looking to operate within in terms of the market, right? Like the market data points shoot, if I can find the type of market over in, Arkansas, or over in Missouri, somewhere just completely. Just less competitive than Florida, right? If I can find those same data points, find markets that have that same type of profile in much less competitive states, then I'd love to be able to continue to move around to different areas that, um, will require less effort and mailers per deal.
Mike:Sure
Jesse:It's like when everyone starts, they're like, all right, I'm going to pick up infill lots in Florida, right? Just like I did. And most people that I talked to. Like most of the people that call me, they're like, yeah, I get like 20 of these things a month. And so there's talk. Yeah, there's talk tracks around that, there's definitely talk tracks on that, but there's, it's no one that I talked to in Florida hasn't received. Dozens and dozens of phone calls and mailers and texts and all the things. So you want to really be able to set yourself apart and have a good sales process to, to filter your way through that crowd. So I want to continue doing that cause it's worked right. But still be able to fire some bullets, if you will, at these other types of markets.
Mike:What tools are you using to pull that kind of data to be able to analyze that in a relatively quick way.
Jesse:So I'll still use. Zillow or Redfin or things like that. Or just not things like that, but that,
Mike:Yeah,
Jesse:but
Mike:Yeah.
Jesse:I'll, uh, I'll just put it into spreadsheets really. So it takes a bit of time and like I could have a VA do it, but I find. Again, this is me still being new ish. Like I still like having my hands on everything because every time I do something, I find something new about the process that like changes the way I think about things and it like evolves the process. And so if I just would have done it a couple of times, handed it off to someone else, like my process would be nowhere near where it is today. Because like I said, every time I'm like learning something new and I'm like, I don't want to hand this off until I've got like a real, like until I feel great. About what I'm doing. So it's because it's so important.
Mike:yeah, what's something new that maybe you've learned in the last, a couple months we're doing it.
Jesse:I've been Getting into subdivides, right? Like you can break Markets, like it's not just looking at one big market now. It's looking at okay. Yes There's 200 that have sold in this county in the last year, but how many of those were You know, zero to five acre or zero to one acre, one to two and a half acres, two and a half to five acres, five to 10, 10 to 20, 20 to 40, plus. What does that look like? What does that breakdown look like? And then how can I look at markets that have, right? If I'm looking at, cause I want to get more into the subdivides, right? And so if I can see that huge price discrepancy between 40 acres and five acres, in terms of like price per acre. Then that's where the arbitrage play is, right? If I see that the 40 acre lots are going for, 7, 500 per acre, right? And the five acre lots are going for 15 K an acre. I can just go market and pay full market value for these 40 acre deals and then chop it up into, into eight, five acre lots, right? Or however many five acre lots. And then sell them for double it's worth. And again, I'm oversimplifying. There's definitely things that you want to look out for versus minor versus major subdivisions. A lot of different things, platting exemptions, like a lot of different things, but like at a high level, like that's something new that I've put in the process is okay, Let's take this big market and then chop it down even smaller and see if see where the inventory is moving. And if I bring more inventory to market in the form of sub dividing, will that be beneficial or will I be bringing inventory to a market that doesn't want it right? Or
Mike:Yeah.
Jesse:are the 40 acres going for seven and a half? Seven or 7, 500 per acre and 15 or the five acres are going for 7, 500 an acre. If there's no differential or a difference there, like not a big difference, then you'd be wasting your money and time. So
Mike:Why would you do the work of subdividing it?
Jesse:Right.
Mike:Is there anything that you look out for in terms of due diligence when you're at subdividing deals?
Jesse:Yes. Yes. Really just calling counties and like figuring out what their subprime process looks like. That deal I did in South Carolina, all I did there's again I'm newer at this game, so I may not know all like the terms and stuff like that, but there's like different Ways there's minor subdivides, right? Where you're exempt from like the plotting process where you can literally just go and get a survey on it, submit it with the County and that's all right. You don't have to get any approvals or things like that from the County in order to do it. And so that makes it very seamless. You can be, you can buy that thing, list it. Already chopped up within just like that, right? But in other markets, right? Like you have to go through the County. You've got to get approvals and that takes time. That takes money. And so you just want to make sure when you're going to a new market, like you got to understand that. What their process looks like. And if if you want to operate that way, so typically, red states are typically easy states, your easier states to work with when it comes to subdivides subdivide friendly, but even state level, you want to go county level and make sure that the counties that you're working in they've got the right requirements for The types of deals that you want to be doing because minor subdivides look completely different than major subdivides and major subdivides are completely different than entitlement deals, right?
Mike:and then on the mail side I've heard this and I'm curious if this is even true that when you're mailing vacant land, the response rates are much higher than houses and, that's market to market, but people, a few people have told me that I was curious what your experience is on response rates Mail.
Jesse:I don't really believe that to be honest. I guess it depends market to market and the type of land that you're going after, but for me, it's like a 0. 35 response rate.
Mike:Okay. Yeah. So it's only slightly higher than I think we're like point to something. So it's not okay. Nothing crazy. Yeah,
Jesse:it depends on how much you're sending out,
Mike:to market. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Jesse:for sure.
Mike:Um, what other stuff? Would you think that someone who might be considering getting into flipping land should know?
Jesse:It, if you don't, someone should just know that in, in houses, right? People always say you make your money when you buy it, right? You make your money on the buy, and that's very true, right? But with land you can't rent out land if things go wrong, right? You can't it's dirt. And so I always say you make your money when someone puts money in your pocket, when you sell that thing. And so just that if you're getting into land, like I see so many people that go after these terrible areas that, their inventory just sits for six to 12 months. And like, when you're in the beginning stages, like cash is your best friend. Just generating cash quickly is your best friend. And if you go after markets where you're going to be just sitting on that dirt for six to 12 months, then you're never going to really be able to build a big business unless you've got a ton of private money behind you. That's willing to be at high risk, right? Because their stuff is sitting for a while, right? And I think the biggest thing is just make sure you find great properties and great locations. And just generate cash as quickly as possible.
Mike:Yeah, and I know you said you use the agents who are doing most of the sales in the subdivisions. I actually don't know the answer is how are agents compensated on a land sale? Is it the same percentage or is it maybe more? Because it's you're selling a 30 K piece of land. If you're only, if you're making 2%,
Jesse:Yeah.
Mike:know is that appealing to someone? I don't know the answer.
Jesse:If. So it depends. I'll say most people, especially for land deals under 75 K. Most of them will take eight to 10%. I would offer it like if I found a great agent, I'd be happy to pay them eight to 10%. If they're doing what they need to be doing they bring me buyers quickly and things like that, because a lot of times, especially if they've done a lot of business in the area, they're the dominant force within that subdivision and buyers are calling them. So I'm willing to pay a little bit of a premium for that. But once I establish a good relationship and we do repeat business, like I've got one agent here in Florida that does like, Oh man, I've probably done like 15 or 20 of those 40 deals just with him. In the last year. So he'll do like multiple markets across Florida for me. I pay him 7%, right? It was a little bit skinny. He'll sometimes even waive his commission, or make it just like super minimal just to make the, make sure the deal works. So we've got a great relationship. But if you're first starting out, yeah, just expect to pay to 10 percent for these smaller parts.
Mike:gotcha. So you definitely have to factor that in when I'm purchasing it.
Jesse:Yeah, for sure. For sure. But 10 percent on a, 30, 000 lot is three grand. So just make sure you factor it in, but it's not huge.
Mike:Yeah, got to make sure you have a bigger margin.
Jesse:And that thing less than 50 percent of what it's worth. You're going to be buying it at 45, right? If it's worth 30 grand, you better be getting it for 10. So
Mike:Gotcha. Let's talk about something different. Maybe we're talking a little bit offline about your impossible list. Do you want to share with everyone what that is?
Jesse:sure. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to. Yeah. The impossible list. It's a something that it was like an exercise that I did. maybe like three years ago. Right. And it was like, at the time I just felt like, I was like coming up with things that I wanted to do. I'm like, I feel like I need to cast a vision of what I want, like just all of like my goals. But more of a bucket list, but it's like a bucket list mix with like more immediate type of goals because I feel like a bucket list is like a, go do these things in the next 30 years. But I wanted more of a, more of an urgent bucket list. And so I got this idea from someone else that I follow that does a lot of crazy cool things. And so I just ripped his idea off and came up with my bucket for fitness, for giving back, for adventures, for travel, like for all the different Buckets of my life. And just put all the goals that I wanted to accomplish within it. And then I can just go in and add things, take things off, cross them off. Like when I first started, it was like, I want to do a sprint triathlon. And then I cross that out and then I did it. And then I did an Olympic and then a half Ironman and then an Ironman and then an Ultraman. So it's like you constantly are like slashing it off. But when she slashed off, do you have to put the next one? So
Mike:Okay. Yeah.
Jesse:So you do, like when I was learning how to climb, it was like, okay, do a, do a five, seven, and climbing then do a cross off, do a five, eight and do a five, nine or a V2, V3, V4, V5, V6. And then you're just like, I don't know. It's just I like it because it brings your goals into the present. And then once you like, I like crossing things off a list, cause then it's like, all right, now it's the next thing. Right.
Mike:Yeah. Very cool. We're getting close to the end here and there's always two questions I like to ask at the end. And the first one is what is the craziest or most uncomfortable situation that you have ever experienced in a real estate deal?
Jesse:crazy situation. I will I guess the craziest, it's not like a crazy bad thing, but one of my deals, the, they gave me two mobile homes on five acres here in Florida. So that was like, that was pretty cool. That was super unusual. The reason why it was because, I'd bought some other land from them and other land from their family members as well. And there was like, Oh, I was like, do you have anything else? And they're like, yeah, we've got like these two rundown mobile homes down in, Southeast Florida. You probably wouldn't want them and things like that. I'm like, tell me more. And so I looked into them and they're worth it probably a quarter million dollars. And so I was going to, they were like, I was like, how much you want for them? They're like, I don't know, 20 grand. So I was like, sure. But then, we went through title, all these things happened. And that turned out there was like a 208, 000 mortgage. That wasn't, that hasn't been paid. It's just been accruing interest for 20 plus years. And there was also like a ton of other title issues. Like her ex husband was on title, but he was like completely missing. There was, a bunch of other things that were wrong with title. And so I pretty much just. Told him, I was like, look, I can work this out, but realistically, like you probably won't be able to get anything out of this. If I, on the back end of this, once I get everything cleaned up, if I'm able to turn a profit on it, I'll give you a, I'll give you money, but all I can do at this point, and this was after we, we were talking like, I know their family, like we, we were very close at this point. But it was more of like me taking this burden off of them. Cause they were getting closed on and all this kind of stuff, me taking the burden off them and then solving all the problems. So anyway, I was able to quiet title, get everyone off title. I was able to fix all the other title issues. And then I also with the mortgage it was with like a mom and pop. It was like a mom and pop type of thing. And so I just struck a deal with them. And it was a long story, but long story short, I was able to get it down all the way from 280 or whatever it was all the way down to 130. So literally just paid that off. Yesterday And now we'll be able to clean it up and put it to market. So technically it wasn't free, but I felt that's the only crazy
Mike:a pretty good one. The second question I always ask is if you could go back in time, give yourself one piece of advice when you were looking for your first deal, knowing what, now, what would you tell yourself? Yeah. Yeah.
Jesse:kind of mentioned it before, but typically it's like a a limiting belief type of thing. For most people. They see people doing it, but they're just like, oh, they are like this, or they're like that, or they're doing this or they're doing that. And. What really brought me some peace is hearing folks like Hermosi say the result doesn't care. Like at the end of the day, it's like I was saying before, it's inputs and outputs. And if you do enough inputs to where it's unreasonable that you won't get the output, then like the result doesn't care who you are, if you're black, white, yellow, orange, or whatever the case is, if you do the things that you need to do at scale, right? It'd be unreasonable that you wouldn't succeed in whatever that is, right? And that initial result could be just a phone call, like I said before. But I would just say, if you're getting started, make the goal not to get a deal, make the goal to do so many activities that'd be unreasonable for you to not get a deal, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Mike:Yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice.
Jesse:Yeah,
Mike:Yeah, people often underestimate the amount of activities that need to be done. To get a deal.
Jesse:because I hear people like you and everyone else on podcast talk about how they are crushing it, but they don't realize like the effort and the inputs that need to go into that equation to get the output, right? Because it's oversimplified, but I would just commit to it and make it a non negotiable that you won't get the out that you won't succeed in it, right? And just continue to stay consistent, right?
Mike:Yeah, definitely. For sure. This is awesome, Jesse. Thanks for being on the show. If people want to reach out to you afterwards, if they have questions or, maybe they have some land deals that, you can buy off them and put on the market and sell how can they go about doing that?
Jesse:Yeah, if you have land deals, I also like bigger acreage. Like I said I've done more subdivides now doing my first bigger entitlement deal here in Florida as well. So if you've got bigger acreage that you'd like someone to take a look at, or if I can even just help you with whatever deal, I don't need a cut of it or anything. I'm just more than happy to help. Cause there's been plenty of people that have done so for me, but yeah, you can just hit me up on Instagram. It's just, Jesse underscore baby. And yeah, be happy to chat and see if I can help.
Mike:Cool. Awesome, man. Thanks for being on the show.
Jesse:Yeah, absolutely.