EP 158: Secrets to Turning Dirt into Gold with Travis King

Land investing expert, Travis King, shares his journey from flipping single-family homes to becoming a successful land investor. Travis is well known for his innovative strategies in the real estate sector. He highlights the unique advantages of land investment, such as lower entry barriers and the potential for significant returns. He delves into his approach to subdividing land, creating seller-financed notes, and leveraging specific tools and systems to streamline operations.

Travis also discusses the importance of diversifying investments and the benefits of building a second income stream through land flipping. Don't miss the full episode to learn more about Travis's "Triple Play" strategy and how to get started in land investing.

Key takeaways to listen to:

• The value of subdividing land to maximize profits.
• Leveraging seller-financed notes for steady cash flow.
• Why it’s beneficial to invest in rural vacant land.
• Mastering the “Triple Play” strategy for land investments.
• Systems and Processes - Using CRM systems for efficient land deals.
• Building a second income stream through land flipping.
• The importance of diversifying real estate investment portfolios.

About Travis King
Travis King is the pioneering mind behind Land Investing Mastery and has made his mark in the real estate sector by flipping land across 29 states, executing hundreds of personal and joint venture flips alongside his wife, Becca. His extensive experience is further highlighted through over 1,000 one-on-one coaching calls and leading a mastermind group, accumulating well over seven figures in earnings from land investing. Travis is also the author of “The Land Investors Playbook,” where he shares his wealth of knowledge and strategies in land investment.

Connect with Travis King

• Website - https://www.travisking.com & thelandinvestorsplaybook.com
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/landeducator/ (2.7k Followers)
• Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/_travisaking/
• Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwy3Qf-W46misdV-4DR9dQA
• TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@_travisaking

Get 10% discount on your offering 

To connect with Randal and learn more about passive investing, visit www.ridgelineig.com and follow our social media pages below!

• LinkedIn: Ridgeline Investment Group
• LinkedIn: Agents Building Cashflow
• Agents Building Cashflow on Facebook: Agents Building Cashflow
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel: @agentsbuildingcashflow
• TikTok: Agents Building Cashflow
• Instagram: Randal_McLeaird
• Send us an email: podcast@agentsbuildingcashflow.com

Transcript

[00:00:00] Travis King: My son says, so I got 3 boys and a 4th coming here in a couple of weeks. And 1 of my boys says, uh, well, how much are you selling the book for dad? And I said, well, right now, we've got it. It's 99 cents. And You're a terrible businessman, . He said, yeah, 99 cents. How much did it cost you to make this? And he did.

[00:00:19] Travis King: You know, he is just laughing at me. Right. Yeah. So the kids got a good kick out of it anyway. Yeah. Nice. It's, it makes for a good pay weight, but I think it's helped a lot of people. 

[00:00:27] Intro: If you're a real estate agent earning $200,000 a year and you wanna grow your passive income. This show is for you learn secrets other agents use and hear from experts in our field who will guide you on your journey to investing in assets like apartment communities so you can take your commissions and turn them into cash flow.

[00:00:47] Intro: Here's your host, Randall. Let's dive in. 

[00:00:49] Randal McLeaird: Welcome back. I have Travis King on today and I love this conversation because we're talking about land, subdividing land, writing notes on land. You've been following along with me. [00:01:00] You know that we have launched our crowdfund and we're doing single family fix and flip with note sales on the back end where we're actually seller financing those houses.

[00:01:07] Randal McLeaird: Travis is doing that with land and I've always seen this as a thing, I've done it, one of the first deals that I ever did was I bought a property and then across the street the same owner sold me her land and she had a single family lot, she sold it to me for a thousand, I found a buyer for three thousand that I owner financed it too, I took it, 1, 000 down payment from him, paid the seller and I own this lot free and clear and now I had a 2, 000 income generating piece of dirt, right?

[00:01:31] Randal McLeaird: Love that. Travis does that at scale. His last name's King. I call him King of Dirt. You know, it's, it's, uh, it's awesome talking to him, seeing the infrastructure that he's built. He's got a CRM that he has just for land investors. So we go over and we talk about some of the strategies that he employs, how he's doing it.

[00:01:48] Randal McLeaird: He wrote a book on this and if you, uh, listen through to the end, he can tell you how to actually get that for free. So love the conversation again, I appreciate him jumping on and sharing his information with us. If you're getting value out of the show, please [00:02:00] go on rate and review helps us a ton. And um, let's jump in.

[00:02:03] Randal McLeaird: Let's talk to Travis. Here we go. Travis, welcome to the show. Travis King, the King of Land. Let's talk about land today, man. I'm excited. I'm excited too. Thanks for having me. For sure. For sure. All right. So let's start with a little bit of your background. We were just talking offline just now, like you got into land flipping because of bigger podcasts, listening to podcasts and that sort of thing.

[00:02:20] Randal McLeaird: So pre land, what got you into it? How'd you even get into real estate? Were you flipping houses, doing something else? So you get a corporate gig? What's the story? 

[00:02:26] Travis King: Well, ironically, like, so I'm from Montana. I grew up in pretty rural Montana. And so it's funny to end up in land because my dad and my aunt have, since the eighties have been buying land and subdividing it and seller financing it.

[00:02:41] Travis King: Right. So like, it was always right there kind of hidden in plain sight. But I wasn't that interested, you know, having walked a lot of land and marked off a lot of corners with rocks and coffee cans and, you know, the land did not excite me. Right. So I was, I was going after houses. And, um, so early twenties, that's what I got into.

[00:02:58] Travis King: It was single family [00:03:00] houses and the whole plan was kind of buy one a year or sorry, buy one every two years, long term plan, you know, and then I started in the 2004, Okay. Ish, right? So a couple of years went good. And then we all know 2008, right? Probably similar story to a lot of folks. So I'm got into real estate.

[00:03:15] Travis King: It's been, I guess, 20 years, you know, now, but, um, at first it was a focus on single family and felt like in my 20s, I had some really strong traction early. And then the 08, you know, recession happened and it just, uh, I wouldn't say it just like set me back. It also like deflated me, you know, took the, kind of the wind out of the sails or looking ahead, like with that awareness of what could happen.

[00:03:37] Travis King: I mean, at the time also being young and ambitious, but not that wise. Right. I wasn't amazing at analyzing or underwriting. I just had, you know, a lot of ambition and action. 

[00:03:46] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:03:46] Travis King: Right. So some of my buys weren't that great. So it kind of got exposed, I guess you'd say, right. With the 08 recession. What I was doing got exposed and my lack of knowledge got exposed.

[00:03:56] Travis King: So it took me a minute to kind of regroup. And when I [00:04:00] did, you know, I was exploring other asset classes and trying to look for stuff with maybe lower barriers to entry less risk. And then also something that when I kind of put pen to paper and said, Hey, you know, like, you know, buy a house every 2 years.

[00:04:14] Travis King: That's fantastic. In 20 years, I've got 10 houses. The challenge was I had to have a W2 for 20 years to get those 10 houses. And that was not a trade off I was comfortable with. That wasn't an alignment. So I'm kind of like, okay, we've got to go a different route. And so just, I think like a lot of people.

[00:04:30] Travis King: Kind of, you know, searching for an asset class or a niche or a strategy. I was, you know, avid follower of bigger pockets. And one day on my commute to work, I was listening to a podcast and this guy came on and was talking about how he flips land as a business model. And I was, I mean, I was like, say I was really well aware of land.

[00:04:47] Travis King: I had actually done a subdivide at 19 years old. So like I knew land, but like not as a business model, I knew it as kind of a longer term play. Right. A long term investment. And I think that's how most people think of dirt, but this guy [00:05:00] kind of presented it as like a machine, like building like a flipping machine, right, in a high volume, kind of make what you do on a lot of small fix and flips, and that piqued my interest.

[00:05:09] Travis King: And then from there, it just kind of became diving in and consuming every bit Education and course and content out there and taking action. And then after, after we got, after we, we kind of got things figured out, you know, we kind of just looked at, you know, how can we scale this? Right. Yeah. But at first, yeah, it was that awareness, right?

[00:05:27] Travis King: Like anything, somebody's listening to your podcast today, first we're presented, like we become aware of it. And then we start to investigate and research poke holes in the idea. You know what I mean? Poke holes in it. And for me, it was something that I felt like. I started with a really cheap lots and buying these lots off of auction sites.

[00:05:43] Travis King: I'm buying 500 lots and selling them for 2, 500 or 5, 000. Right. So like really low risk, you know, really low barrier to entry is kind of how I started, got my proof of concept. And then from there, that was about 10 or 11 years ago. Yeah. I was going to ask. Obviously, yeah, [00:06:00] we've evolved a lot since then. And it's a whole different business model now.

[00:06:03] Travis King: And fortunately I was able to go full time and leave my job several years ago. You know, from land flipping, but yeah, that's kind of how I got to start was driving to the W2, listening to podcasts. Like a lot of people, I 

[00:06:14] Randal McLeaird: mean that you're an early adopter than a podcast that's back in, uh, like bigger pockets was, I remember going to one of their first meetups and it was in Denver in 2012 or some 2009, maybe.

[00:06:26] Randal McLeaird: So yeah, you're an early adopter on the podcast front, for sure. 

[00:06:28] Travis King: Oh, that was like, that was 2013. Yeah. And at the time, the neat thing is, yeah, some of the podcasts I listened to, you're, you're right. Like that was early in the podcast game. And like one of the guys, John Lee Dumas that I used, you know, entrepreneurs on fire, I used to listen to one of the guys.

[00:06:41] Travis King: It was kind of neat because it's come full circle a couple of years ago, I was able to be interviewed on his show. And I remember listening to him. He was like one of the first seven day a week shows, right? So if you're a podcast binger, you know, having a show, you know, The number of shows that are put out, you're always waiting for your next one.

[00:06:56] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. Right. 

[00:06:56] Travis King: So yeah, early adopter, love podcast, felt like there was [00:07:00] more long term value in listening to podcasts than, you know, uh, talk radio or music or something silly, right on your drive. That's kind of repetitive. So learned a lot from podcasts and have earned a lot from being a podcast listener.

[00:07:13] Randal McLeaird: For sure. So, all right, let's talk then about the strategy, find out about land and you're like, okay, this is the thing I'm going to go all in. And that was around 2013, you said, when you first heard about it? 

[00:07:23] Travis King: Yeah, about 2013, and then probably like, and of course, at the time, the other part of BiggerPockets is, at the time, it's changed a lot, BiggerPockets, it's changed a lot, but, um, back then, they used to be very, like, anti course and anti educator, and, you know, it was kind of like, hey, we're a forum, like, it's like, let's all learn from each other, well.

[00:07:40] Travis King: That's a slow process, like filled with a lot of biases and opinions that you might not know how to filter early on. Right. So for me, I took a long time kind of trying to learn things off YouTube and forums, and then ultimately when I started, you know, buying some courses, it's like, bang, everything was curated in one package.

[00:07:58] Randal McLeaird: Yeah, 

[00:07:58] Travis King: for sure. So for [00:08:00] me, that was kind of like the education was like a, you know, Almost like nine months of YouTube, university and forums and stuff to kind of feel like, okay, I'm ready to go. But then once we went, we just snowballed a lot of small deals, a lot of small bets, small risk until we kind of snowballed up our, our income.

[00:08:16] Travis King: And then I started to recognize like we either needed to add team to continue to, to do this many transactions or more transactions a year, or we kind of needed to add a zero, you know, to the transactions we were doing. And do the same number of deals, but bigger deals, right. Or bigger deals, less transactions with.

[00:08:34] Travis King: So that's kind of, as, as we evolved, we had more capital, we had more resources. We felt comfortable doing bigger deals. So we inched into bigger deals and that led to like agents, right? A lot of stuff before we were selling ourselves. We're buying outright, closing ourselves, selling ourselves, note servicing everything ourselves.

[00:08:52] Travis King: And then we'll kind of, when we moved into bigger deals, it came from the pain of my wife and I, she works the business with me and we've [00:09:00] generated over a hundred notes. I think we're at like 109 or something self serviced seller finance notes. And it was terrible. Like we own a note servicing company, not a land flipping company.

[00:09:12] Travis King: And we hated it chasing borrowers, buyers, and, and the cheaper the properties that lower down payments, the more delinquencies you had. And so we, we kind of like. We decided to reinvent our business model and that's where we decided like, um, okay, we want to pay for title on both sides of the transaction, which, you know, homebuyers and realtors agents are, yeah, that's the norm, but kind of for the land flipping communities and courses, it's kind of all this like, Hey, let's play in a sandbox that agents don't want to list in.

[00:09:41] Travis King: So that's really the, how the opportunities presented by most educators when, like when I got into land anyway, 10 years ago was. Agents don't want to list anything that's with the value of under 30, 000 because there's not enough commission. So we have this huge opportunity of all this rural vacant land the agents won't list.

[00:09:58] Travis King: But there's not enough margin in it. So [00:10:00] we kind of have to self close it on both sides. Right. And then we have to self list it because we can't use an agent. So being about two, three years into the business, we realized like, man, this is going to be a long, painful journey. If we stick with this business model.

[00:10:14] Travis King: So I said, okay, if we've got a budget in a closing on the bookends on each side of the transaction to buy it, to flip it, we want to build in an agent commission. So we don't have to talk to these Craigslist and Facebook buyer leads, right? 

[00:10:26] Randal McLeaird: It's the best. 

[00:10:27] Travis King: Oh, it's the worst. Um, yeah, I'd rather have a root canal than talk to another, like, is this still available?

[00:10:34] Travis King: You know, on Craigslist, like, Terrible, but, um, but having felt that pain, you know, so we kind of, once I did that math on paying the agent commission, paying title on each side of the transaction, maybe paying for a survey or some due diligence, I realized like, hey, I need to be north of that 30, 40, 000 mark, right?

[00:10:53] Travis King: It just put me there to kind of do the backwards math. And then when we moved in to start working with agents, this was not just an epiphany. [00:11:00] This was, I mean, a milestone. This was massive because as I encountered specialized land agents that understood land, you know, they helped me with valuations. I was starting to list properties way higher.

[00:11:13] Travis King: Then I previously was on the land flipping, like for sale by owner platforms because MLS buyers, you know, they're just used to paying a little higher rate and I was also selling properties with like 10 percent down because that's what I had learned, like in these courses. Right. But when I get on the MLS, it's like the agents are like, Oh, you know, like, how are you going to pay me commission?

[00:11:31] Travis King: If you're only taking 10 percent down, right? Like you're going to be upside down. And then you bought the property. So I kind of learned on the MLS, it was, you know, 30 to 50 percent down payment on land, not house, right. But on land, it's just par for the course. So for me, all of a sudden I go, Oh my goodness.

[00:11:48] Travis King: As soon as we start getting 30 to 50 percent down payment, we almost have no delinquencies on our seller financed properties. Right. So when we're, when people are putting 30 to 50 percent down, [00:12:00] they just don't walk away. And you also get a lot of your money back from what you bought the properties for.

[00:12:05] Travis King: So yeah, bringing agents into the business model was huge for us. And it also like, when we started doing these deals, we started making, you know, 20, 000 or 25, 000 a deal instead of like, you know, 2000 or 5, 000. Right. So that was a big, like epiphany and milestone, like in reinventing the business about years.

[00:12:25] Travis King: Two and a half or three years in. 

[00:12:27] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. Let's go back then. Let's break it down a little bit, just so the people understand what you're doing. Because buying land, like you and I could talk about this and I understand what you're driving at you're buying and your creating notes and doing all this stuff.

[00:12:37] Randal McLeaird: So go back and break it down. Like is your main strategy purchase land, subdivide, sell off smaller parcels on owner finance or is it some version of that? What are the avenues that you, you explore? 

[00:12:47] Travis King: Yeah. So I started out with a complete focus on the rural vacant land. Okay. And one because of the price point of it and two it that was initially my strategy was 100 percent seller financing [00:13:00] because I wanted to build up enough.

[00:13:01] Travis King: I'm not going to call it passive income because you got to chase some people, but recurring revenue, right? Like note income. I wanted to create enough note income that it replaced my salary. So at first, That was the goal. What we do is kind of to compress it or symbolize it is, um, everybody's tax, whether you have a house or land, everybody's generally taxed at the county level.

[00:13:21] Travis King: So there's an assessor, right? So we're essentially taking the assessor's tax role of vacant land, you know, hey, give me everybody that owns land that there's not a structure or house on. And then we're doing some outbound marketing because we're going after off market landowners. Much like if there was a savvy agent, right?

[00:13:41] Travis King: Maybe that's how they would find listings. You could do the same thing, right? Reach out and say, hey, list your land with me, right? So we're going after these off market landowners. And then when they respond, we're generally targeting people that have a long length of ownership. You know, so that's kind of the common pattern is they bought it with an intention to do something, [00:14:00] build a home, build a cabin, do something, and it's just underutilized, underused, plans change, right?

[00:14:07] Travis King: So that's kind of who we're going after is the don't wanters of the rural vacant land after we pull that data set from the assessor tax roll. And then we just do outbound marketing, right? That could be direct mail to start, was a big piece of it. You know, it could be cold calling, text messaging, you know, Pick your channel, right?

[00:14:24] Travis King: We have our list of off market landowners, and then we reach out to them to see if they're interested in selling their land. We started focusing on rural vacant land because it was more affordable and it sells really well on payments. But as the business grew and we had more capital and more resources, we're able to kind of go into these Metro markets and target more like urban infill lots, waterfront lots.

[00:14:50] Travis King: You know, more like things that would, the end buyers building a home on it, you know, within a year or two. So we added residential lots to our like large acreage, rural [00:15:00] vacant land product type. As soon as we had their resources. All right. Do you still 

[00:15:04] Randal McLeaird: run both congruently? I 

[00:15:07] Travis King: do absolutely and it was more out of like being diversified years ago I just thought it seemed wise to do but I didn't I really didn't know how wise Until interest rates changed, you know about I don't know a year and a half Let's say two years now.

[00:15:20] Travis King: All right ago when interest rates went up You know, we were riding that high wave like everybody else is selling a lot of infill lots like in florida texas Like, you know, um because everybody was building with them And, and, you know, homes interest rates had a massive impact on obviously the spec home builders.

[00:15:37] Travis King: Right. So when they pumped their brakes, that product line, right. I've kind of selling these infill lots slowed down. So we're really happy to still have that. That wasn't our only model. Cause that's some people's only model is like source infill lots to builders. Right. Well, that's right up. Yeah. So for us to be able to, through the last couple of years of high rates, [00:16:00] large acreage recreational and residential land has continued to perform really well.

[00:16:05] Travis King: The other piece of it is, you know, from, you know, I've heard you talk about, you know, 15 year mortgages, 30 year mortgages and stuff like when we're not the borrower, when we're the lender, high interest rates are a good thing. Okay. So instead of people beating us up for a low interest rate, we're originating some of the best notes we ever had in the last two years.

[00:16:25] Travis King: You know what I mean? I'm talking like 10. 9%, 11 percent plus, because the banks have raised their rates. And this is land, you know, this is normal for, for banks anyway, for land, you know, they're pretty high. A lot of banks want 40, 50 percent down. And they generally have like an 11 to 14 percent interest rate.

[00:16:43] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. So when 

[00:16:44] Travis King: we come in at like 10. 9 and less than 50 percent down, we're, we're beating the bank, right? We're beating the bank with our terms, but. You know, like on a 15 year note, the interest paid on 10. 9 percent interest is beautiful, right? 

[00:16:58] Randal McLeaird: Let me ask you this then. Okay, [00:17:00] so, let's take a rural piece of land.

[00:17:01] Randal McLeaird: One, on your, on the strategy, right? Okay, so you're, you're marketing. Two, say you pull a list from the county. Are you limiting how, and I know you bought in what, over 29 states? So this is gonna obviously vary. We, we, 

[00:17:16] Travis King: um, so we co-own a capital or funding company where I partner with land investors, land flippers, and students.

[00:17:23] Travis King: And that's where like, we're in 29 states. Got it. You know, I personally invest in like about three to four myself. Got it. So that was kind of the beauty of when we started like. Funding and partnering is I gained that exposure and I was able to learn all these new markets that I never would have been in on my own because there's just no need to be in on a couple of seats yourself.

[00:17:43] Randal McLeaird: Okay. So then let's take the ones that you're in when you are marketing, are you. Limiting that search or the parameters of the return data to frontage on streets to because like in certain counties that I've looked at, you cannot some you can. And so what are the other parameters that [00:18:00] you look for when you're looking for land?

[00:18:01] Randal McLeaird: And then once we have that, I'm going to dive into something else. 

[00:18:04] Travis King: Yeah, so what I look, it depends with the exit strategy, the intent. So we can build specialized lists. And that's something like, uh, we'll talk sure later about the book. But I, one of the plays I created was we bought, like we sent out these countywide campaigns.

[00:18:20] Travis King: And then we, we ended up with a couple like waterfront lots. It just happened to be on the list. We didn't target them. Um, and we did really well right on them and low days on market, tons of leads sold quick top dollar. And then I go, wow, like maybe I should start building lists, you know, County wide of just waterfront vacant lots.

[00:18:39] Travis King: And you know what I mean? And so we could intentionally replicate these deals. So there's ways to build very specific specialized lists, much like people would go after like probate or tax delinquent, you can do that. But yeah, so we like to subdivide. That's one of our biggest plays in the playbook is doing what I call minor land [00:19:00] subdivisions, which means just, we're not putting in jogging trails.

[00:19:03] Travis King: We're not putting in roads infrastructure. Like we're just splitting the parcel, the dirt and a minor land subdivide is usually. You can take one parcel and create it into four or five children parcels. So that's a play we run all the time, Randall. So when we do that, like you're saying, maybe we pull that whole list County wide and we say, Hey, I don't want to look at anything.

[00:19:24] Travis King: I'm going to eliminate everything under 10 acres or under five acres. Cause I can't split it into, you know, five. So I'd get rid of all those acreages and that removes a lot of properties. And then I might, like you're saying, I have this list now. I can now pay a virtual assistant to go through and check road access on everything and you know, note which ones have two roads or two boundaries, a lot of road frontage, because then now we have more options for how we, we subdivide, right?

[00:19:52] Travis King: The more road frontage we have. So yeah, we can run very specific lists if we're going after subdivide. Campaigns or waterfront [00:20:00] properties, or we can kind of just pull at the county level and target a value range that we want to operate in it and see what comes back. Right? 

[00:20:08] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. Okay. So knowing that, right.

[00:20:11] Randal McLeaird: So let's take a rural subdivide that you're looking at and doing. So current strategy, you go say, what's the maximum acreage you'll buy? Is it all driven by price? Like you'll buy anything as long as it makes sense. Right. 

[00:20:24] Travis King: It's all driven by price. So, like, to break out, things are subdivided down. The largest, like, that we would work in, or that most land people work in is, is, uh, like, a square mile.

[00:20:33] Travis King: It's called a section, 640 acres, and they take a section, and they usually break a section up from 640 into 40 acre parcels, and it's generally halved all the way down, like, 40s become 20s, 20s becomes 10s, 10 become 5 acres, and we go all the way down, we know, to, like, a quarter acre lot. That's generally what we're doing when we're subdividing.

[00:20:55] Travis King: We take that parent parcel and we say, okay, how can we carve this up [00:21:00] in such a way that we're not creating five of the same thing, and we've got a whole bunch of inventory and we're competing against ourselves, but we kind of right size them, we might split it down the middle and sell off the large piece and then size the others accordingly.

[00:21:14] Travis King: So we have a little bit of variety in our inventory. And that's where we work with an agent. Like, when I'm talking to an agent, I'd say like, hey, I've got this 15 acre property, you know, like, um, here, take a look at it. Here's the road access. Like, what's the market like? Like, what would move? Should I do like a 5 acres, some 2 and a half, some 1 and a quarters?

[00:21:34] Travis King: You know what I mean, or should I do like, you know, for 1 acres and then 1 large 10 or 11 acre. So we work with specialized land agents and lean on them to tell us what the market will absorb. Right and also so we can get at a price point where. There's a buyer pool. 

[00:21:52] Randal McLeaird: All right. So any tips on finding a specialized land agent in your area?

[00:21:57] Travis King: Yeah, absolutely. So when we're on any of the platforms, [00:22:00] Redfin, Zillow, anything, you know, so we grab our immediate area. It could be zip code or within two, three miles of the subject property. You're looking at, I like to go to sold, not for sale, right? A lot of agents are good at getting listings and then they don't know how to get them sold.

[00:22:17] Travis King: So I like to look at sold listings. And then I, when I'm looking for land, it's a different animal. It's a different asset class. You know, and it's all in good fun, but we call, we know immediately when we start talking to an agent on the phone, if they know anything about land or we call them house jockeys, the ones that don't know anything about land, right?

[00:22:34] Travis King: You get on the phone and you go like, Hey, is this how to perk test? Or like, what's the zoning? You know, what's the slope? Like, has it, is it be currently being farmed? If it's like a large eight or, you know, and we immediately know if they somehow the listing fell in their lap and it's just land, right? So when we look for sold listings, we want to see like, we don't want to see a whole bunch of houses in one or two parcels of land.

[00:22:56] Travis King: We want to see that they're familiar with land, you know, lands, a [00:23:00] big part of what they do. And sometimes the cowboy hats, the big giveaway, right. And the covered photo of the agent, but a lot of times, you know, more in metro areas, you'll have people that in that brokerage, there's like one land person, right.

[00:23:12] Travis King: And everybody else looks on houses. So we really try to find those agents that understand land and we reach out to them for opinion of values, CMAs. Is we're evaluating a deal and let them know what we're doing. And we also let them know, like, Hey, like, you know, we might have several opinion of value requests and we don't close the deal because we're trying to buy for way under market value, right.

[00:23:35] Travis King: And capture a lot of equity. So here's what I do. This is our handle. This, this is a tip where that's a completely untapped lead gen source. Okay. A lot of agents, when they get an email from like an investor and you go, Hey, can I get an opinion of value on this piece of vacant land? I'm a land investor, you know, and they reply back, do you own it?

[00:23:54] Travis King: And you go, no, not yet, but I'm buying it. And the agent says, well, I can't work with you. Well, I'll charge you this for an [00:24:00] OPV. What they don't understand is we might have 10 plus, or even more OPVs for every one we actually get and list with them. Now, the problem is there's this huge by product of people that, yes, they want to sell, but they don't want to sell to Travis, the investor for 50%.

[00:24:19] Travis King: And. Of the retail value, but they want to list it. They actually want to sell the property. So I've just identified these potential listings. So if you're cooperative, and we work together, I just say to you, Hey, Randall, you know, why don't the 9 out of every 10 people are realistically the 25 right out of 26 that say no, because they don't like my lowball investor price.

[00:24:43] Travis King: Why don't I just spoon feed you those leads? And you see if they're interested in listing it for your price. And then the ones I buy, you list for me. And in return, you're cooperative and providing me CMAs or opinion of values, right? So that's something that a lot of, [00:25:00] one, a lot of investors, they just look at it as a dead lead and they don't offer that to the seller.

[00:25:05] Travis King: Whereas like, we'll say, Hey, you know, like, I'm sorry. We couldn't make it work. Understandably. Like I'm an investor. I've got to insulate myself from risk. I can't pay top dollar, but through you reaching out to me, I know you're motivated to sell, or you have some interest in selling, if you reached out to me.

[00:25:20] Travis King: I've got a great agent, Randall on this market. Like, you know, Can I introduce you to this agent and perhaps get you top dollar, right? That way, this wasn't a waste of time for both of us. Like I solve your problem and you get top dollar and then I do an email intro and it's this, it just becomes this incredible win win relationship of me handing you all my by product of things I can't buy, and then I'm also bringing you the listing on the ones I get.

[00:25:46] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. Huge value add for both your potential customer and for any agent you want to work with. 

[00:25:52] Travis King: It really is the triple win, right? Because the person's, they wanted to sell the property. There's some motivation there, but understandably, you know, like I [00:26:00] say, the numbers game, you know, 25 out of 26 or whatever, right.

[00:26:03] Travis King: Might not want to sell to me for 50 percent of market value, but they have some interest in selling. So what do we do with all those people that weren't actively going to reach out. And Reach out to an agent and say, Hey, will you list it? But we've identified them through our marketing efforts, right? And they're receptive and prime to list.

[00:26:22] Randal McLeaird: I have to admit like back in the day, cause I'm an agent as well. We always have this struggle because all the direct mail we were doing, we'd have sellers, invariably not want our offer price, just like you just described. Buying it deep, trying to get it in deep. And then I would have these leads. The struggle was teaching my acquisitions team how to convert that into a listing.

[00:26:40] Randal McLeaird: It's like, Hey, we'll give you 50 grand, but. We'll list it for a hundred. It's like, it was such a hard, and we never really put it together to just refer that out and take a part of commission and just give that lead to someone else local to the market. That's like very low hanging fruit that I just missed out on.

[00:26:56] Travis King: Oh, absolutely. And that's been probably more like 20, 25. [00:27:00] You know, but this next year, that's a bridge I want to build and connect. You know, my wife and I have a huge community of land investors, right? And we have so many no's or no, not at that price that could be listings. Right. So it's definitely hanging.

[00:27:15] Randal McLeaird: It's like, it's right there. Yeah, great idea. Let me ask you about this. Okay, so let's go back to rural land, like structuring notes, and I want to get into some of this other stuff in a second, but, um, when you are subdividing off, if you bought a whole section, are you going that big? Are you going buying 640?

[00:27:32] Travis King: No, we, most of, almost everything we do is under a hundred acres. We're doing like an 85 acre right now up in Montana. 

[00:27:39] Randal McLeaird: Okay. 

[00:27:39] Travis King: Most of that is, uh, a lot of like some of my clients and you get in states like texas right where you've got these massive these sections 140 acres most of what we do it's already been that section's been cut down into four or eight At some point and we're, we're working within that.

[00:27:57] Travis King: So most of what we personally do is under a hundred [00:28:00] acres. 

[00:28:00] Randal McLeaird: Got it. Okay. That's what I was driving at. So is your play to acquire it and just let's use round numbers here. Simple math. Maybe you're paying 5, 000 an acre and you want to sell it for 10. Is there some metric that you're looking at just again, for a high level, if somebody's looking to do this, Every market is going to be different, but I know in Texas, I'm in San Antonio and around the counties, like I can buy some things for three to six an acre, and I can sell it for double that.

[00:28:23] Randal McLeaird: And so on a note, when you look at your returns on those notes that you're creating for the actual dollars invested, I mean, it's a crazy return. 

[00:28:29] Travis King: So, yeah, I'll, I'll introduce you to like what I call my triple play. Right. 

[00:28:33] Randal McLeaird: Let's do it. 

[00:28:34] Travis King: So when we evaluate counties, I'll stack counties side by side and we look at what I would call like my.

[00:28:41] Travis King: Perspective acreage range of like the parent parcel, the one we're going after to subdivide, right? And let's say we're looking at like 40 acre parcels. Okay. I would go across, you know, adjoining counties or three, four counties nearby each other and I'd say, okay, what is a 40 acre go for price per acre?

[00:28:59] Travis King: Yep. [00:29:00] And I would throw that in my spreadsheet, my Google sheet, and then I would go through and I'd say, okay, like, Let's identify the child parcels if we're splitting this up. Okay. What does a 20 acre go for half of that? Okay across each county and then we plug that value in what we start to see on some counties is like we almost Double the value price per acre as we half size the property others We don't the interesting thing is like When we kind of look at on a map of the Midwest, right?

[00:29:29] Travis King: Like a lot of times you're just splitting farmland. Like there's no value add or forced depreciation to subdivide, meaning the price per acre is almost identical, whether it's a 40 acre, a 20 or a 10. 

[00:29:42] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:29:42] Travis King: You're not adding any value. So in that case, That becomes revealed, you know, on the spreadsheet there where you go.

[00:29:48] Travis King: Okay. Well, I'm just splitting parcels to split parcels, right? There's no value add. So we look for kind of that waterfall effect where as we have size it down, we continue to see like value [00:30:00] added or forced appreciation. And that's where we could evaluate looking at 3, 4 counties side by side and go, yeah, there's some over here.

[00:30:08] Travis King: But we're doubling over here. Like, 

[00:30:09] Randal McLeaird: yeah, 

[00:30:10] Travis King: that allows us if I'm talking to a seller and most land flippers, the play is, Hey, I just want to flip this property. I'd say kind of a threshold. A lot of land flippers go after is, and this is hard for people who have no exposure experience to it. Cause it sounds crazy to even like, most people are skeptical that you can buy land for 50 percent of its value.

[00:30:29] Travis King: But honestly, that's the cutoff for most investors. Is 50%. 

[00:30:34] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:30:35] Travis King: Because one, they want to capture all that equity to a lot of investors. If they're not well capitalized enough themselves, they're bringing the deal to a capital partner. Right. And then they're going to split profits. Right. And the capital partner to underwrite it because it's land, not a house.

[00:30:50] Travis King: Right. Like if our house, they might say, Hey, don't go over 70% of rv. Right? Yeah. Same thing with land. They'd go, don't go over 50%. So if you start to offer over 50%, [00:31:00] you gonna have to self-fund it. Yeah. You won't have the capital partners to work with you. So you have a lot of land investors that are doing the same marketing as I'm doing, but they're gonna stop at 50% because they don't have the resources or the capital partner.

[00:31:14] Travis King: But when I look at that and I go. Wow. If we subdivide it, we double its value like immediately. And when I say subdivide, like these surveys, you know, like the environmental assessment, a survey and recording the survey. We're talking like 12 to 18, 12 to 20, 000 to subdivide. It's not like when people hear subdivide, everybody pictures, you know, gated communities and stuff.

[00:31:38] Travis King: Like I'm not talking subdivision, just splitting parcels. Right. So it's really cheap. So there's situations where you can spend 12, 000 on a subdivide and it might add 120, 000 in value to the property. So that's what we do. So that allows me though, to come in and say, Hey, Mr. Seller, like, of course, we're never speaking percentages with them.

[00:31:57] Travis King: I'm like, Hey, I'll give you a 50 percent of your value. You know, [00:32:00] we're just, we're, we're sharing numbers, but it allows me to raise my offer to maybe 70 or 

[00:32:05] Randal McLeaird: 80%. 

[00:32:05] Travis King: Yeah, because. I'm going to double the value when I do a subdivide and I'm still in fantastic shape after that. So I can offer more than others that the strategy is just to flip.

[00:32:16] Travis King: So the triple play to finish out the triple play is we capture equity on the buy side, we subdivide and we add value. Usually we force a hundred percent appreciation is what we go after that or more. And then we sell on payments at like 10 percent plus interest. So we capture equity, we add value for depreciation, and then we get that interest income and we create five to 15 year notes.

[00:32:41] Travis King: So if you, you know, run the math on that, right. It's absolutely incredible. Return. 

[00:32:47] Randal McLeaird: I like the triple play. It's very good. There's multiple ways that you're making money. Are you targeting again? I bet this is a deal by deal case, but are you targeting, if you say, take 40 and you divide it up, are you trying to recapture?

[00:32:58] Randal McLeaird: Your equity, [00:33:00] your capital outlay by selling off for cash, actual cash, like half of it, and then making free and clear notes on the other. 

[00:33:07] Travis King: Exactly. That's exactly what I like to do. So ideally, if I could split it down the middle or close the largest child parcel, if I could sell that cash, even if I, you know, have a really good list price and aggressive list price, just to get my money back or close.

[00:33:23] Travis King: Close, right? Because between that one cash and then the down payment on the others, I'm flush, right? As soon as possible. So yeah, it's a hybrid early on. As I was, when I was learning and we didn't know, like my wife and I, like we tried to push, cause I just wanted to build up all this recurring revenue, right?

[00:33:40] Travis King: This note income, we sold a hundred percent on payments, but we were buying at like, 30, 40 percent of market value on this real vacant land. And then we were selling with like 10 or 20 percent down. And then you end up, you end up upside down. And that's where we were like a couple of years in without, without having that, like that knowledge or business acumen, [00:34:00] you know, um, like we just ended up in this situation where like, Hey, we've got like, you know, like 14 grand a month coming in and payments.

[00:34:07] Travis King: Right. But we've only got 14 grand in the bank and half a million and no, I mean, so you got this note portfolio. That's not liquid. It's not solvent. And you've got all this recurring revenue, but you're broke. 

[00:34:18] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:34:18] Travis King: Right. So we realized there has to be a harmony, a balance of like cash sales. And note sales.

[00:34:24] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. To be clear for anyone listening, you were not upside down. You created a hell of a lot of value in there. You just were not upside 

[00:34:33] Travis King: down, but we were in a predicament, right? Where I go, okay, I've spent everything I have. And I now have that I've bought that income stream, but either I got to sit back and let it stack up to buy more.

[00:34:43] Travis King: So that's where we learned there has to be like, just a balance of cash sales and note sales versus all in on, on one, right? Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:34:52] Randal McLeaird: So, yeah, I mean, I've been looking at a bunch of land. So, in most of those cases too, you kind of, you touched on it briefly, but you're just going to an engineer and the engineer is doing a survey [00:35:00] and drawing those overlay, essentially, on the property, right?

[00:35:04] Randal McLeaird: You're not actually going out there putting fences in, you're not putting any of the infrastructure in. So, it's like 

[00:35:08] Travis King: Most of the time, no. The one we're doing right now up in Montana, it's actually like considered a major subdivision. So we will do like, we will add some roads, right? We will do that because when we cross that like, five children parcel mark.

[00:35:21] Travis King: You know, it becomes a major subdivision and it's going to take a little bit longer to approve. There's going to be those road costs, but 90 plus percent of what we do, we're not doing any improvements. Is that one 

[00:35:33] Randal McLeaird: inside the city limits or is that 

[00:35:35] Travis King: it's on the fringes actually up in Yellowstone County, which is, uh, people think like Bozeman or Yellowstone, the movie, right.

[00:35:41] Travis King: But it's in Billings, Montana is where it is. And it's on the fringe. It's, I mean, we're talking like minutes from city limits. Fortunately, we're on that fringe. So zonings and on issue, like we could literally create 85 1 acre parcels. If we, we wanted to build out all that infrastructure, right? 

[00:35:59] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:35:59] Travis King: Um, we could [00:36:00] about do anything we want because it's not in the city limits, right?

[00:36:04] Travis King: But there's, there would be that infrastructure, you know, Obviously cost associated with that. And then we'll, you could split up parcels all day long, but this is a good point. What you have to look ahead at is like, is there a buyer pool? Is there a market for what I'm trying to do? Right? Like, will the market absorb what I'm creating?

[00:36:22] Travis King: So if I go and create 85, one acre parcels. I don't know, right? You know what I mean? Like, I need some data to tell me that that's going to get absorbed, but if I do some 20s, some 10s, some fives, I have some variety, you know, that there's a higher chance that there's fires for each size. But most of what we do, Randall, is called like an administrative survey.

[00:36:41] Travis King: So, we send the surveyors out there, they go out there, they perform the survey, they present us the map, right, that shows, The footages right of each potential parcel the boundary they do the boundary survey We record that with the county. Okay, the county then issues [00:37:00] New parcel numbers for each child parcel.

[00:37:02] Travis King: It might be the same parcel number as it was before, and then have an A, a B, a C, a D next to the other ones. Yeah, but it's called an administrative like survey. So we just record that. And through recording that we now have new legal descriptions and new parcels that we can sell. And that's, I think that's the best way to like ease into subdividing, right?

[00:37:24] Travis King: That's where you want to start is with minor land divisions. No improvements, four or five or less with administrative. There's all these exemptions in these places where like, If your child parcel is over a certain size, then you just record it with the county and they'll give you a new parcel number, right?

[00:37:40] Travis King: That's not going to happen in like downtown Dallas, right. Or San Antonio, but like you get farther out, more rural in the county. You don't have to go through this process. There's not a town meeting. You're not like posting, like putting up a poster board of what it's going to look like. You know, they just record your map from the surveyors, give you new parcel numbers and you sell them.

[00:37:58] Travis King: That's what you want to go after. And [00:38:00] that's what we started with. And still it's one of our favorites and it's not nationwide, but there's a lot of States allow minor land divisions. And you can get away with just that administrative recording without having town hall meetings and all of this. If you follow their exemption and ordinances and stuff.

[00:38:17] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. I mean, that's what I've been looking for. That sort of thing. And then just recording with the county commissioners or going through the county commissioners courts. But I think it's mostly over 10 acres in all the surrounding counties here where I'm at. Yeah. 

[00:38:28] Travis King: Yeah, that's really common, 

[00:38:29] Randal McLeaird: but once you go below it, it's still not overly challenging.

[00:38:33] Randal McLeaird: If you go below it, we did a seven acre deal where we cut it up into one acre tracks and it was an art. It's just another little step in the process. 

[00:38:40] Travis King: And for us, it took a three month process to a six month is all we did in our markets, right? It's just, there was some Things we had to do and added to the timeline, but it wasn't substantially more expensive or daunting or anything.

[00:38:52] Travis King: It just adds to the timeline. 

[00:38:54] Randal McLeaird: All right. So one of the things that they say are buying land may say is, all right, you're just buying a thing. There's no [00:39:00] cashflow there. You've already talked about creating notes, which is a stream of cash flows. You and I were talking offline a minute ago about how you.

[00:39:07] Randal McLeaird: Promote a strategy, I guess, of creating a second income. So why don't you talk about that a little bit, kind of explain that to us and how somebody trying to get into this might use it. 

[00:39:16] Travis King: Yeah. Well, I think that usually people, when you're, when you're in your current profession, right, we're, we're either trying to scratch like an entrepreneurial itch, because we, we want to do something.

[00:39:26] Travis King: We want to build something outside of whether it's a profit driven, or it's just to scratch that itch and know that we can, right? Like. I'm great at what I do, right? But I have an interest in real estate. You know what I mean? I want to do that. And for others, it's more like. Hey, I want to build, you know, like I'm getting by, but I want to build some wells right on the side, or I want to build a safety net right on the side.

[00:39:50] Travis King: And that's what I try to help people with is through land flipping is build a six figure second income stream. And that can be like focused on cash flips [00:40:00] only, right? Or you can focus on payments. It's really whatever you're more interested in, right? When we do payments, I say you're kind of buying time, right?

[00:40:09] Travis King: Cause I can teach people how to create a whole bunch of five to 15 year notes. And you literally bought yourself a decade where, you know, if you wanted to step away and do nothing for 10, 15 years, you could, because you have that note income. Other people it's like, Hey, they want to generate, you know, just lump sums or piles of cash.

[00:40:26] Travis King: And then they go, okay, I'm going to take that and I want to put that. I don't want to be like a land flipper on a land company. They go, but I need to generate cash. Like houses won't do for me. Right. A lot of time houses are a fantastic play, like long term, you know, um, net worth building, right?

[00:40:43] Travis King: Generational wealth, um, cash flow eventually, right? But depending on interest rates, you know, cash flow can get compressed, but fantastic, you know, multi family, single family, long term are incredible plays. But a lot of people don't have the capital to put into that. So like if you build a land flipping company [00:41:00] where you're creating cash, You can either redeploy that.

[00:41:03] Travis King: And if you absolutely fall in love with land, you can run a land company and scale that. But at the same time, you could take that cash, turn around and put it in a single family or multifamily, something you can depreciate has better tax benefits and is like long term wealth versus just being a flipper.

[00:41:20] Travis King: But either way, what I really like to teach people is that there's a different. Swag, a different demeanor, a different confidence. You feel when you have, in addition to your job, you have a six figure income stream, right? On the side, you're going to walk into a work meeting different. Everything feels different.

[00:41:38] Travis King: You're not as stressed. Nothing works you up near as much. I know because I've been there. Right. And as I transitioned into that at the workplace, people were like, boy, you got such a high EQ, such a high emotional intelligence. Nothing seems to rattle you. And I would laugh internally because inside I'm thinking, no, I've just built this.

[00:41:54] Travis King: Like, I just built this machine on the side and if things go sideways here, this does not [00:42:00] concern me at all. You know what I mean? So you could kind of just operate from a different place of calmness. And so I really like having that safety net. Things can happen with the economy. You can lose your job and you weren't planning on it.

[00:42:13] Travis King: Or maybe you're just unhappy and you want to step away from it, but, uh, you're married and you got kids and you don't want it to be like this, you know, really like worrisome situation where you can go leave. You try this to try to be an entrepreneur. It doesn't work. And you got to return to the workforce a year or two later.

[00:42:29] Travis King: And it's creates a lot of stress on your marriage or your home life, right? I would never want people to do that. So I'm a big fan of teaching people like overlap. Let's build this income stream on the side. And now we've got options. Okay, those options could be leave your job and grow that single income stream or just enjoy.

[00:42:49] Travis King: I've got a lot of clients that work remote jobs, six figure jobs for their W 2 and then they build a land company on the side and they're happy to stay at both. Right, because they can kind of take care of all [00:43:00] the bills with the W 2 income and use all the other money to invest. You know, so I'm just a huge fan of, um, not being dependent on one employer, one income stream.

[00:43:11] Travis King: And that sounds like, you know, real in alignment with what you're doing with, you know, agents building cashflow, obviously. 

[00:43:16] Randal McLeaird: Yeah, for sure. It is. Something that I look back on my investing and buying and flipping when I first got into it, it was all flips. I mean, I would buy rental properties here and there, but the deals that I still have, the notes that I created early on in my career, I still have guys paying me payments on them.

[00:43:31] Randal McLeaird: And I just think back and I'm like, man, if I just stacked 50 of those every single year. And those are single family houses, arguably more difficult to manage and you're doing consumer loans at that point rather than, you know, land loans, it seems, or land loans. Let me clarify. Are land loans consumer considered regulated by SAFE Act?

[00:43:49] Randal McLeaird: No, 

[00:43:49] Travis King: the nice thing is it's not owner occupied. There's not a tenant, right? So it's quite often, it's not always, the buyer's not even in the same state. Right. So [00:44:00] we still, we close your title and we still use, if title doesn't service the note, we still use a third party note servicer to originate the note.

[00:44:08] Travis King: So we know that all the paperwork's done right and legal. And then also so that our borrower has a dashboard login. We have a dashboard log in, you know, and they can chase him down if there's late payments or they stop paying and it's not us. So we still recommend and use the 3rd party note servicer on that.

[00:44:25] Travis King: But no, it's not like there's like, uh, there's not like this foreclosure and we need to keep victim from the house from the vacant piece of land. Right? Like, generally, we're not allowing them. To, uh, make substantial improvements or live on the property till it's paid off. 

[00:44:40] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:44:40] Travis King: That removes a lot of the complexity, right?

[00:44:42] Travis King: Right there. Yeah. 

[00:44:43] Randal McLeaird: So I'd be curious how you do it on the back end. Look, I want to ask still about some of the systems that you have in place. That one is a servicer, title company, that sort of thing. But how are you managing the process? From maybe start to close or just maybe one or two tips. [00:45:00] And then obviously I haven't mentioned this yet.

[00:45:02] Randal McLeaird: Travis has a book, 

[00:45:03] Travis King: the land investors playbook. Yeah, 

[00:45:05] Randal McLeaird: that's right. So maybe high level, a few of the specific tools that you use that help you really run your business. 

[00:45:12] Travis King: Yeah, absolutely. So we early on, we realized like either we could leverage software and tools and automation, or we could like. Just have to continue to add team and head count.

[00:45:25] Travis King: And it's great. We're, you know, a lot of people focus on building team and growing the company and they point to like the org chart and how many, how many employees they have is like a metric for success. You know, like I might feel that way in my twenties at this age, like I understand like revenue per head count is what matters, right?

[00:45:41] Travis King: Like I don't buy into vanity metrics. I also understand there's opportunity costs and like the more employees you have to manage, right? The more headache, you know, that is. So if you can stay lean, grow, but stay lean, right? It's kind of same concept of like adding lean muscle versus adding a whole bunch of weight, right?

[00:45:58] Travis King: In bulk. So [00:46:00] we try to operate really lean and I call it like a micro team. So like seven people or less, and none of our businesses have more than seven people. Some of them only have four or five. Okay. So kind of a micro team and it's kind of like a seal team, six situation where there's no dead weight, there's no extras, like everybody.

[00:46:19] Travis King: You know what I mean? Everybody has to be really good. And what they do and be compensated well above what the norm is, is so that we don't need extras, right? So we kind of get away with things by having like a virtual team, remote virtual team, and then leveraging softwares and automations. And that was something that, you know, years into it, there's just not a lot of software specific to LAN, right?

[00:46:42] Travis King: There's a whole bunch of, You know, house investors and gurus that, you know, have their CRMs and things like that, but they're not built for land for our workflow. Right. And what we do. So I kind of had to, you know, my wife and I had to Frankenstein via Zapier and web hooks and all, you know, we had to Frankenstein all these softwares together.

[00:46:58] Travis King: You, you're dialed in, you got a [00:47:00] great system. I got all sorts of texts and emails alerted me that I was coming on the show. So you, you know what I'm talking about here, right? Yeah. But, um, a lot of people don't, when they're investors, it's just like, they're on the phone, they're working the phone. Right. But you realize as you increase your marketing and you have this bottleneck of all these leads coming in, you have to figure out where systems and processes.

[00:47:19] Travis King: So the very first thing we did was. We started building, you know, just simple checklists of like, what is our process so that we can create consistency that allowed us to hire. Okay. We can now outsource and delegate to a team member. Like most of our teams in the Philippines, we can now hand them like a, a standard operating procedure, which is.

[00:47:39] Travis King: Fancy word for a Google doc and a loom video, right? On how to do this and create a consistent result. So after we documented our processes, we could then delegate and hand these things out. And then we go, okay, we've delegated, we've systemized things now let's optimize and that's where we go. Okay. Let's bring in software and figure out how, if this is a [00:48:00] subdivide lead, how do we tag it as a subdivide lead?

[00:48:02] Travis King: If this is a waterfront property, how do we tag it there? If this person says, Not right now, but reach back out in six months. How do I do that? So through software, we have to have softwares to pull data. Then we have to have softwares to market, to send letters, to text, to do this outbound marketing. And then when things come in internally, we have a CRM and that's something probably a little early now, but yeah, we started a CRM this last year, a specific CRM, that's a new business, a new company, and it's built on our workflow.

[00:48:33] Travis King: We built up through about five years into this journey, which was about five, six years ago. We decided, you know, I was just, I kind of got to the point where I had, I read that for our workweek book and I really tried to build a company off that. See Ferris, let's go, baby. I naively bought into the fact that you could do that.

[00:48:50] Travis King: And honestly, though, Randall, I got it to the point where we're working 12. To 14 hours a week and the rest of the business was totally automated. So after I left my job, there's like the first [00:49:00] year was like working 12 hours a week. 

[00:49:02] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:49:02] Travis King: And I was just answering all these questions on the forums, like just for fun, right?

[00:49:06] Travis King: Helping people cause I had all this time. And that led to like people like, Hey, can I just jump on the phone? And so I started just helping people out with marketing campaigns. And then I'd help him get deals. And then people would come back to me and go, Hey, do you want to, like, I got this great contract, thanks for helping me.

[00:49:20] Travis King: But like, I don't have the capital. Do you want a JV? Right. 

[00:49:23] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:49:24] Travis King: And we, at the time there was no agenda intent. Like we were tearing through our acquisitions budget ourselves, but then this, all these JV opportunities came up and that's kind of when I started getting into coaching and consulting and training and fast forward five years.

[00:49:40] Travis King: We've got a pretty large community and we needed to build the tool for ourselves. So we decided to just to build out a tool that, um, it's a CRM for land investors with the website. What is it? 

[00:49:51] Randal McLeaird: What's the name of it? 

[00:49:52] Travis King: Lead Boss CRM. Yeah. That's what it is. Actually, we'll be launching the agent's version next year after we iron out all the wrinkles with the land [00:50:00] investors, right?

[00:50:00] Travis King: Yeah. Nice. Uh, but yeah, so software is a big part of it, just being organized when you start out as a person of one, it's just, it's just having a, you know, a checklist and being consistent with your followup, you know, with agents, right? There's a big variety in what happens when an agent's phone rings, you know, they ignore it, respond to it.

[00:50:18] Travis King: How quick do they get back? Right. That's kind of the fork in the road for investors or agents. What happens after your phone rings, you know, and how consistent are you? So that's really through our systems processes and software, we can kind of. Building consistency, which leads to consistent acquisitions, consistent deal flow, and more consistent predictable revenue, which is what everybody likes.

[00:50:41] Randal McLeaird: Yeah, for sure. Awesome. All right. So you got the CRM then coming. I mean, you're obviously steeped in the, in the land world. It's been awesome for me talking to you about this because I've done some land deals, I haven't gotten big into it, but I love the, I love acquisition subdivide owner finance, which is awesome.

[00:50:58] Randal McLeaird: Because I come from the owner finance [00:51:00] world and I've been creating notes for a long time. Would you, before we go, because again, I want to know this. Do you have a servicing company that is really good at land notes? 

[00:51:08] Travis King: They're regional. You'll find that it's not like housing where it's national. And I feel that question so many times, but generally they're very regional.

[00:51:16] Travis King: Sometimes they only cover that state you're in, like in the Southwest. Weststar is one that we use like in Arizona and you know, they'll cover three states. There's a company called Del Toro that will cover more states, you know, but it's very regional. I default first to the title company because a lot of times the title company will service.

[00:51:36] Travis King: The note, they might not have as good of like a login or dashboard as, as these actual borrowers or note servicers. But a lot of the time, you know, they'll service the note, the title company. 

[00:51:47] Randal McLeaird: Have you experienced that in Texas where the title company will service or do you not buy in Texas? 

[00:51:52] Travis King: In Arizona?

[00:51:52] Travis King: Yeah. So almost all of our seller financing I do in Arizona, right. In Montana and the [00:52:00] other States, the States I would call like a really hot markets, like Texas, Florida, Carolinas. It's like cash. You know what I mean? There's such a massive buyer pool that it just goes cash that we don't have to do seller 

[00:52:11] Randal McLeaird: financing.

[00:52:12] Randal McLeaird: Good to know. All right, man. Look again, ton of information. I've got all your links here. We've got website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all kinds of stuff. Ton of content that you're putting out. I love your content. I'm putting it all in the show notes. So if you want to talk to Travis, click through directly to him, his contact info is in the show notes.

[00:52:29] Randal McLeaird: You mentioned something about a book. What's the, what's the story there? 

[00:52:32] Travis King: So the book, and this is something that took me, you know, we get overly ambitious, right. And we have no idea, you know, knowing how much work there's going to be. So anytime you step into something that's outside your wheelhouse, right.

[00:52:43] Travis King: Like a very good at acquisitions and flipping land, no idea how to write and publish a book, right. But we decided to go the traditional route. And after years of kind of. Running our own business. I talked to you like about how land would come back and we'd have these incredible deals that were just exceptions and by products of [00:53:00] countywide campaigns.

[00:53:01] Travis King: Oversized acreage that we could subdivide waterfront lots that came back as these countywide You know these countywide campaigns and sometimes another one is the portfolios where like the owner we would mail them and then they go Well, I actually own like five other lots in the subdivision So I I then learned how to pull data where I could target only people that own more than two Right, and we bought one that was a 20 parcel portfolio You know, economies of scale here, right?

[00:53:30] Travis King: Like one seller, one escrow, one closing, 20 properties. So some of those things I started to look at them instead of going, Hey, these were just got lucky events. Like I go, how do I get intentional about this and replicate this success? And that's the playbook over the years I built was it just started with a yellow note pad.

[00:53:50] Travis King: I'm going, okay, let's set a minimum acreage of this size. And then once we pull that list, let's look it up on the map and only target the ones with enough road access to [00:54:00] subdivide. And then the next 1 was, hey, let's build these lists of only waterfront loss. Our whole list, everybody on our list is, it has huge, like asymmetric outsize return, potential profits, right?

[00:54:11] Travis King: On these waterfront lots and low days on market. And then the portfolios where we go, let's build these lists of people that own two or more or five or more, 10 or more and only go after them. So these are kind of like, they started out as just plays in the playbook on a notepad. I threw them into Google doc.

[00:54:26] Travis King: And then when I was coaching people, that was just like, I would share that with them. And then it became kind of like this frequently asked question. And I'm like, you know, I had a couple people go, you should just put it in a book and I'm like, oh yeah, I should just put it in a book, right? Whatever. And it's like, one it's land, like there's not near as many people interested in land as houses and multifamily.

[00:54:44] Travis King: It's kind of this overlooked. Smaller, lesser known niche. So when I'm like, who would read it, who would want a book on land? Right. So that was the first thing, but then I'm like, you know, what actually doesn't sound so comical, the idea of it. And then eventually, yeah, I put it together. We worked with the publisher and we [00:55:00] got it after about two and a half years and we finally got it launched.

[00:55:03] Travis King: So it's on Amazon. It's called the land investors playbook. If you go to travisking. com, you can get it for free, you know, I'll give everybody a free copy. If you go to our site, travisking. com, or you can shell out a whopping 99 cents at Amazon. If you want to go that route, support, 

[00:55:19] Randal McLeaird: support Travis, go to, you can buy it on Amazon.

[00:55:22] Randal McLeaird: Yeah. 

[00:55:23] Travis King: I'll tell you this. I appreciate this. Randall, our kids. When I, we published the book and we got the first hardcover where my son says, so I got three boys and a fourth coming here in a couple of weeks. And, and one of, um, my voice says, uh, Well, how much are you selling the book for dad? And I said, well, right now we've got it.

[00:55:39] Travis King: Yeah, that's 99 cents. And he said, you're a terrible businessman. 99 cents. How much did it cost you to make this? And he did, you know, he was just laughing at me. Right. So the kid's got a good kick out of it anyway. Yeah, nice. It makes for a good paperweight, but I think it's helped a lot of people. 

[00:55:57] Randal McLeaird: It's the main profit center right now.

[00:55:59] Randal McLeaird: It sounds like that's [00:56:00] all you're, you're, you're, you're banking on the book. No, I love it. Like I was telling you, man, kudos on getting it out there. I know that's not an easy task to do. So again, if you want to catch up with Travis, you can follow him on a number of the links we'll put in the show notes and, or just reach out direct to them.

[00:56:14] Randal McLeaird: It's been great having you on the show. Really appreciate you jumping on and sharing your experience and knowledge. So yeah, we'll catch up soon. I'm sure. Cause I got some land deals that I want to do. 

[00:56:23] Travis King: Thanks for, I know. I appreciate it. Yeah. And I would just tell agents to like, you know, Land listings is such an overlooked thing, adding that, understanding that, like, you can, I'm not going to say you're going to 2x, right, your commission, but you could at least add 20 percent there, right?

[00:56:37] Travis King: So, if you kind of become aware and familiar with land plus houses, you know, there's agents that have incredible years when they add in those additional listings, right? For sure. For sure. All right. Thanks. Hey, man, good catching 

[00:56:50] Randal McLeaird: up. Did you know that 80 percent of the agents we speak with got into real estate in order to gain passive income so they could obtain financial freedom and become work optional?

[00:56:58] Randal McLeaird: If you want to stay up to date, [00:57:00] the best way is to make sure you're subscribed. So if you haven't done that, go ahead and do it now. We'll catch you on the next episode.