Happy 2020!

Happy new year – and new decade!

We hope you’re off to a strong start to year – we sure are. We have some huge releases coming very soon, we officially hit our Land Academy member cap, and we’ve completed some incredible deals (more on that below!)

If you haven’t experienced as strong of a January – don’t fret! It’s never too late get involved in real estate or ramp up your business. Join us in continuing to set the tone for 2020.

Don’t forget to check out our Facebook Groups (LAND) (HOUSES) to connect with like-minded investors, ask questions, create partnerships, and more!

As always, this newsletter is for you. Read it, bookmark it, share it, and feel free to let us know if you have any feedback, content suggestions, or questions!

As always, this newsletter is for you. Read it, bookmark it, share it, and feel free to let us know if you have any feedback, content suggestions, or questions!

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I’ll cut to the chase so you don’t have to read this whole post (unless you really want to know how we do this every week):

The owner did not want this property any longer.

Here’s the steps:

1. Send a ton of letters to landowners who don’t want their property any longer.
2. Sift through the ones you get back and pick the best.
3. Buy the properties.

I chose this blog topic today because we just completed the acquisition of this property in South Eastern California. Before I wrote the post, I checked our acquisition file and there are more than 500 properties under review that are very similar to this one.

For fifteen years I’ve been answering these two most frequent questions when this business model comes up:

1. What’s the catch? I don’t believe this is possible. Please explain how you do this because I really don’t believe you.
2. If
   this is true (or even half true), then why are you sharing it with
   everyone? Why wouldn’t you keep this to yourself and take it to the
   bank?

Answer 1)

Rural vacant land is very difficult for land owners who are not in the real estate business to sell (or so they think). You can’t put a for-sale sign on it. Every MLS I’ve seen in the county has tens or hundreds of thousands of vacant land parcels available for purchase that have been on the market for years –literally.

Every year about once a year (sometimes way more often) landowners get a tax bill from the county where the property is located. If we do our job, they open the tax bill and hold it in one hand and in the other hand they are holding our offer for $500.00.

They have a choice: “Write” a check or “get” a check. That’s write a check to the county for taxes owed or get a check from us to buy the property and stop the county from asking for money forever.

Lots of land owners choose to get a check.

If you had a car in your garage that you are sure you are never going to
use again and you were being charged $300 a year to keep it there, you
would probably sell it to the first person who would make the whole
“problem” disappear. That is how most of our
sellers see this situation. They see liability. We see opportunity.

This is how you buy land for super cheap.

Answer 2)

The people we share this information with, end up being our business partners and we do more transactions.

I kept this to myself for the first 12 years of my land career. I
realized that the opportunity in this area is just about limitless. So I
decided to publicly share all the details of buying and selling
unwanted rural land. In the end it has created at least
ten times the acquisition opportunity we experienced on our own.

The key to success is sending the right mailers out to the right land owners at the right time of the year.

• Send a purchase agreement, not a yellow letter or a post card.
• Send
  the mailer to vacant land owners who show signs of not wanting the
  property any longer (back taxes, out of state ownership, etc)..
• Send the mailer out at the same time the county sends the tax bills out.

Read the rest here.

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Forget that Smart Pricing Service (SPS) is now just $0.10/line!

With more and more mail going out, we are also seeing more mistakes in mailings. Luckily these are easily fixed, but we want to take a look into the Offers2Owners blog archives to bring you some information on the most common mistakes we see.

“… Most of the common misconceptions about direct mail derive from the lack of knowledge about setting up a successful campaign, the data, the numbers, the templates, and more. There are certain steps that need to be taken and also a certain amount of knowledge possessed in order to receive a good response rate.

Some of the most common mistakes we see in submitted mailers include spelling errors, spacing errors, and reoccurring or incorrect numbers. These can occur at any stage of the campaign, starting from the initial editing of your letter template to an issue occurring post merging.

If you are using a well–written template, you are less likely to have spelling mistakes, specifically when you double check all your additions and changes made to the template itself. The spacing errors can occur due to long lines of data being picked up and these could include long Legal Descriptions, Assessor Parcel Numbers etc. The spacing can sometimes add an extra page and move important information you may have to places that are not easily visible to your recipient. You can avoid this error by making sure all your information is on the same page(s) as when you first started setting it up and shortening some of this data in your data spreadsheet.” (Read More)

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Land Academy Enrollment is Officially CLOSED

(but you can still get involved!)

You heard it here first!

We have successfully created an impressive group of extremely intelligent investors and we are together growing our businesses. We are all funding other members’ deals, working together to take down large transactions, and creating sub-groups to specialize in other profitable niches – and we capped it at 500.

What does that mean to you?

We have opened up a waitlist for anyone eager to join. As spots open up (people do move on at times) we will first make the spots available to the waitlist.

Join the waitlist HERE.

Other ways to get involved –

Join LandInvestors.com, our free online forum.

Request an invite to join one of our closed member calls.

Join our
Facebook Group.

If you have questions about membership, you can schedule a call with us or email support@landacademy.com for more information.

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Member Announcements

For the FIRST TIME EVER – ACCESS to DATATREE is now included in Land Academy membership!

DataTree nationwide access is now included in membership (effective January 1st) – which means through Land Academy you now get access to all THREE top assessor’s data sources (RealQuest, TitlePRO, and DataTree).

What do you need to do if you haven’t already accessed your new account?

1. Check your email for one from DataTree sent the first week of January.
2. Follow the prompts and links to set up your account and password.
3. That’s it – you have unlimited nationwide access to DataTree. Have fun!

If you think you didn’t receive an email, please first check your spam/junk because DataTree account emails tend to go there. If it isn’t there, please email support@landacademy.com for assistance.

Don’t forget – record downloads are charged at the rate of $0.10/record + 3.5% processing fee – the same as they are with RealQuest

Consulting

You can now schedule 30 min consulting calls with our very own moderator – Kevin Farrell!

You can schedule a 30 min call with Kevin by going to Land Academy under “tools” or looking on the right-hand side of LandInvestors (look for the box like the one to the right here!)

You can pick Kevin’s brain – he’s here for anything from deal reviews to where to start with your land business. We love Kevin, and we’re sure you will too.

Just click the link and schedule your call today!

Funding Partners List Coming Soon

Thank you to everyone who submitted information to be added to our funding partners list! We are currently compiling all submissions and will be releasing the list to members this month (hint hint – you might want to check out Jill’s live announcement on the 29th!)

This will just be another way to create partnerships and secure funding – because money should never stand in the way of a good deal.

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Using Your Facebook Ad Account for Land

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NeighborScoop is coming!

If you haven’t heard us slowly leaking more information, I think we’re about to blow your mind a bit. Built as a HUGE step up from ParcelFact, NeighborScoop is our latest site development – and it’s a game changer.

Imagine being able to draw a polygon around any area big or small and instantly pull all of the information on that property – and we mean ALL – including PHONE NUMBERS.

Now imagine bing able to type in a property and click around to all neighboring properties and instantly get all of the phone numbers for those properties.

These are just a few of the things that NeighborScoop is capable of. I’m sure you’re already just as excited as we are about this, and we can’t wait to share it with you! Watch for announcements in January.

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Watch and listen to our podcast!

We currently have TWO podcasts so you can catch us every week day. Our land podcast airs Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Our housing podcast airs Tuesdays and Thursdays. While they’re separate podcasts, there is a TON of overlap on information so make sure you check them both out!

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