The Art of Subdividing Land in Southeast U.S.

Brandon Parker00:00What is software that you can't live without in your business, and maybe what's some software that you're testing out that's a little bit newer?

Justin Piche00:08Software I cannot live without.

Brandon Parker00:10I think they answered both of those questions for me right now. Is Hello, legends of land. Justin's the owner and driving force behind Scout Land Group. His team offers premium plots often below market value. Justin knows land just isn't about acres. It's about aspirations. Let's back up a second. Before land, Justin honed his discipline as a submarine veteran. Those deep waters taught him resilience, a trait that he seamlessly transitioned to the terrain of real estate. Justin believes in balance. He switches gears from land into his personal life.

Brandon Parker00:40When he's not navigating the world of real estate, you might find him trekking nature trails or on a Kindle reading spree. So gear up legends and let's hop into the show with Justin Pichet. How are doing today, Justin? Doing good Friday. Tell us a little bit about your niche and what people can learn about the way that you approach land.

Justin Piche00:58Yeah. Right now, I'm primarily focused on minor subdivides, small value add land plays across the Southeast United States. My team does a lot of marketing for off market deals. Typically, we're looking at properties to do a flip. However, with a small subdivide value add play, you can have another tool in your tool belt to dispose of the land and find some profit. It's nice being able to pay closer to market value for a property and still be able to make a profit and do deals that way.

Justin Piche01:31We also do a lot of owner finance properties. Generating owner finance notes from vacant land that otherwise would just be sitting there turning money into cash flow to focus on as well.

Brandon Parker01:42And you mentioned that you do smaller value add

Justin Piche01:47subdivides. What would you consider a smaller subdivision? Yes, I do big ones and small ones. Small ones are really nice. Let's say you're looking for land, you find a 20 acre parcel with great roof, energy utilities. And it's well shaped where the lot's not too deep, maybe it's wide, and so the road frontage covers a large portion of the parcel. Taking a piece of land like that and getting a survey and then splitting it into maybe four or five acres, two 10s, maybe something even smaller depending on how the roadways and then selling those lots individually.

Justin Piche02:19That's what I would call them a small subdivide.

Brandon Parker02:22Okay.

Justin Piche02:22And so part of being small is you're looking for the simplicity of the subdivide as well? That's right. Capital costs are high for things like roads or people bringing in underground utilities, water, etcetera. Those costs are quite high and vary greatly depending on where you are located in the country. So doing a subdivide where you don't have to bring in those capital improvements allows you to obviously pay a little bit more for the property, get it done quicker, there's less unknowns in terms of approvals, permitting, etcetera.

Justin Piche02:54I just thought of a flat actually denied, and that we can get to that story if you're interested for, yeah, a little bit of oversight on those types of things. Tell us about the things that you're looking for in due diligence that makes the deal simple. You mentioned some of the utilities and things like that. Yeah, so if you have a property that has great road frontage, typically not highway frontage, typically you want like a county road, small public road, something like that, go down Google Street View and just look at the road and see if it makes sense to be able to put driveways off of it.

Justin Piche03:25If there's a lot of elevation changes or a lot of curves to it, you may have some issues with the county approving driveway locations. A lot of the counties that I work in Alabama have things like sight line distance requirements. And so that's something we look into before, like in the due diligence phase of a property. Power lines running on either side of the road is something we look for as well. Typically water, so you can see fire hydrants, or you can call them municipality and see where their water lines run and if they're allowing lots to tap in, any more lots along that road, like they have the water pressure to support.

Justin Piche04:01Yeah, those are some of the key kind of due diligence things that we're looking for. And then what I'll also do is I'll go through the county subdivision regulations and highway department regulations to see what kind of roads are you allowed to subdivide off of. For example, if it's not a county maintained road, a lot of times you have to bring the road up to county specs to be able to actually subdivide off of it, county specs could be a four foot wide asphalt road. You gotta put base down, get the asphalt down, and now you're talking $150 $200 a foot for the road, just destroys projects.

Brandon Parker04:35And so those are things that you just don't even deal with those. If you find a due diligence or something like that, you move on. Is that right? Yeah, you can always underwrite it into the project. I've done a couple or looked at a couple of projects to putting in roads,

Justin Piche04:49and sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. A lot of times the answer is just, Hey, if you're going to have to raise all of that capital for the road improvements outside bank financing, for example, then it's gonna be really hard to get the cash on cash return that you're looking for in a project. And did you start in more traditional land flipping or did you go straight into subdividing and value add? Yeah, so if you want to hear the origin story, I was in the 'eighty, worked for ExxonMobil and I was just looking to do something else within corporate life.

Justin Piche05:24I'd done a couple of houses wholesaling, bought some small houses in Kansas City and flipped them for profit without doing anything, kind of like a, not really wholesome, I actually took title and then I sold the properties to somebody else. But at the same time, a friend of mine, Kyle Bryant, he has a company called Crockett Capital right now. And he was doing land flipping, asked me to finance a deal for him. And within a couple months, I essentially doubled my money. And I was like, wow, there's something here. This is interesting.

Justin Piche05:54And so I asked him to be my coach. So, hey, would you coach me? And he said, hey, I will. But I'm a part of a program called Learn Land, which is a guy named Clint Turner runs Learn Land. And so I paid for paper coaching through Learn Land, and that's where I got started. It was a land flipping model showing you how to building a business from the ground up, missing on more, I don't know, higher dollar deals, not necessarily desert squares, but more buy for $20, buy for $50, and then sell for whatever multiple of that you need to make your profits. So that's how I started with following Fred Turner's model, the LearnLand model.

Justin Piche06:29And is Fred Turner still active with the LearnLand program? Yeah, Clint Turner, got a good team behind him. Ajay Sharma, another buddy of mine is on the LearnLand team. But yeah, they still do coaching to my knowledge. They have mastermind as well. And then on top of your subdividing value add, you also

Brandon Parker06:48have a website where you're offering properties for sale. Do you sell a lot of the properties off your website and how do you go about marketing them when you're ready to turn them over? Yeah, good question. I don't think we sell a lot of properties off of the website. The website, at least for me, is not

Justin Piche07:06necessarily like a marketing tool per se, but more of a repository to direct people to. And just real quick on how I got into subdividing, I joined the Casual Fridays REI subdividing masterclass. Justin Sleva, Trevor Progrant, Adam Southey, those guys put that master class on. It's just a great group of guys. We all are doing kind of these larger subdivision tracks around the country. I got a couple of 150, 170 acre subdivides in Alabama that I'm working on, another 50 acre in Georgia, and a few other around, and that's what that group focuses on.

Justin Piche07:43Larger tracks and cutting them up in a more

Brandon Parker07:46attainable. And is that group still active in somewhere you'd recommend someone going from into the subdividing realm?

Justin Piche07:52Yeah, they don't. It's like a application program. They only do it every so often. Not like the masterclass isn't something necessarily you can just join. With the REI Casual Fridays guys, Justin Sliver, Adam Southey, they have a training program course kind of thing that you can buy. And I think you can, they'll do consulting work for you as well. I know some guys that have done this where you've had some challenging deals and trying to figure out what the right move forward is and book some consulting time with Justin Sileva and he'll give you his honest thoughts on him. He's a really smart guy.

Justin Piche08:23I've been doing it for a while. Wonderful. That's a great connection for people because I know that sometimes people may be doing land flips and then they get into something where they're like, Oh, this is a perfect subdivide, but they're not real sure. They don't want to jump in over their heads. If with a tool like that's a great resource. Yeah, exactly. What is software that you can't live without in your business? And maybe what's some software that you're testing out that's a little bit newer? Yeah, okay. Software I cannot live without. I think the answer to both of those questions for me right now is Follow-up Boss.

Justin Piche08:54Follow-up Boss is typically a realtor, a real estate broker type software, you can track all of your leads, incoming leads and put them on action plans where you send follow-up emails, follow-up texts, etcetera, task lists, deal flow, it's an all in one CRM, but the priority focus is on lead management. And so I've used Follow-up Boss on the sales side of my business to track buyer leads for properties that were selling basically since I started the business.

Justin Piche09:24But just recently, I've moved my acquisitions contact management over to Follow-up Boss as well. And so I have experience with it on the sales side. It's really exceptionally powerful software. And because we're already using it for sales, we're actually saving a little bit of money each month by implementing like a pro plan. Don't know what the plan is, but essentially $500 a month covers all of my phone, all of my intake and sales kind of CRM. It's not necessarily my deal flow CRM. I use a program called Notion with a custom workflow that actually Kyle Bryant helped develop for my deal flow pipeline and some other tracking.

Justin Piche10:02When it comes to just pure contacts, phone numbers, emails, tracking the contact, like what we've sent to them, what texts we've sent, what emails we sent, when the last time we contacted them was, whether they opened our emails or not. All that type of stuff is in follow-up boss. Great information there. And

Brandon Parker10:18you use your due diligence and your deal flow purchase or excuse me, purchasing and then selling the property? Or how do you use Notion as far as your processes So

Justin Piche10:29Notion is like all of our track. So we have a lead pipeline or a deal pipeline built in Notion where probably we get a prop, let's say we get a lead. Okay, so let's start from the beginning. You get a contact, you upload somebody into Follow-up Boss, and then you start to market to that person. So you might send them mail, you might send them texts, you might drop, bring those voicemails, etcetera, to them, whatever your marketing, you might cold call them, whatever your marketing tactic is. But until that person replies and also has some interest or motivation to sell, they're not really unique.

Justin Piche11:05And so we don't wanna muddle our system, our primary monitoring system up with all of those people. So that's why they go and follow-up boss. We follow-up with them, we market to them, etcetera. And then once they reply and there's some sort of interest, we're interested in both buying a property and they're interested in selling, that person then becomes a lead. And once a lead is created, that's where we start tracking a Notion. And so a Notion is, it's like databases and dashboards. So databases are just essentially Excel spreadsheets built in and then the dashboard is a way of visually displaying that information.

Justin Piche11:37So each new lead becomes aligned in a spreadsheet and we have all this information about that lead that we put in, what the APN is, what the acreage is, whether there's utilities or not, where it is, where they live, what their age, all these different pieces of information that are useful to us. And then we can take all of that information and put it into a nice visual format so that my lead manager, for example, can go in, pull up a property card, see like the land ID kind of shape of everything, see what our priced comps are, see what I don't see a bunch of information, our price per acre offer price should be, whether we mailed them, how much it will be mailing, what we offer on the mailing, what type of marketing they've been exposed to, have we texted, have we dropped the voicemail, have we called them, what have we done with them?

Justin Piche12:24All that's in one spot visually. And then we can move those tiles through the deal process versus, hey, we need to comp this person. So they do a bunch of work, enter in all that information, sticks with the card. And then once it's comped, seem to contact them. So if you call them and then once we've called them, we can decide, oh, no, this is a discard. Like they're not going to sell to us or we're close, we're in negotiation, right? And then you have the negotiation phase. Oh, we've sent a contract, I could turn it to the next stage. And then we can follow-up trying to get that contract signed. Once it's been signed, now it's under contract.

Justin Piche12:55We consider that inventory almost not quite, it's an escrow. And then that once it's an escrow, that's a whole nother series of actions that my transaction coordinator then takes on, right? Reaching out to the title company, following up on due diligence or earnest money, keeping communication with the seller and the title company, scheduling closing, keeping me informed of when I need to have money ready to go to buy these properties,

Brandon Parker13:18all that kind of stuff. At the beginning, you mentioned that the Notion template was developed by someone.

Justin Piche13:25Could you repeat that part? Is that something that people can find online somewhere? What's that? Yeah, so I've mentioned it a couple of times. I've to give credit where credit is new. A friend of mine, Kyle Bryant, he's on Twitter as TKyle. He's been land investing since 2019. He's worked with the Learn Land team. I I think now he's doing a fund looking to do conservation developments in Tennessee. I think he does some consulting stuff as well, but he got really into Notion as a software and developed his own pipeline CRM templates, and then I worked with him to get those templates.

Justin Piche13:59And and I've modified them to my own designs, but the base was from Kyle.

Brandon Parker14:04Okay. Great. Is that something that Kyle offers? Does he have a Twitter thread about it, or is it something that he offers out there? Think somebody would just have to shoot him a DM on Twitter and ask him. Honestly, that's probably the best way to get ahold of him. Yeah. That's a great follow. Another great resource. Thank you. Speaking of Twitter, if you could send one message that everyone on the Internet would see a tweet, what would you say to everyone about the business, the game?

Justin Piche14:28Oh my god. I don't think I would say anything about it, honestly. I think a lot of us do work so that we can have the lifestyles we want. My primary purpose in working is being able to spend as much time with my kids as possible really while they're young especially. Pretty much the reason why I started this business in the first place to have agency over my time, have control over how I spend my mornings and my evenings and not miss riding my bike with my daughter to school or bringing my son to school.

Justin Piche15:00I have an e bike so I typically pop them on the e bike and ride them to school each of them. I'm dropping off every this morning, then grab a coffee and walk my dog and start work around nine, 09:30. So I'd say something in line with that. Figure out where your priorities are. If work is your priority, then I don't know if you have, I don't know if your purpose is the right purpose. It's not for me. That is a beautiful take right there. Thank you. Yeah, I've actually found that

Brandon Parker15:28a lot of the land investors that I've talked to have said something similar. It's a lifestyle business. A lot of people do it because they want to be with their family. They want to build something that they can build processes and systems and so that they can live their own life. And yeah, so that's fantastic. Great answer. If that's not inspiring, I don't know what is. So, good answer. Yeah,

Justin Piche15:55I'd just like to add on to that a little bit. I think that this business takes so many different shapes and sizes. And I think a lot of people, especially when they're starting to get hear about how well somebody is doing or what they're doing, they, oh, I need to do that. I need to do that thing. Need to do that thing. There's a million ways to do it. There's people wholesaling, people who never close on a property, and double close everything or they assign notes, that's fine. It's totally fine. If somebody wants to do it, that's great. That's a great way to get started with really low cash, you're gonna have to work real hard to get those deals done.

Justin Piche16:26A lot more might fall apart because you have a limited timeline, etc. But that's a great way to get started. Some people only buy huge tracks and subdivide, and they do one deal a year, two deals a year. That's great. That's a lot of eggs in one basket. For me personally, I'd like to spread the risk out a little bit, maybe do a little more smaller deals, but you're one deal and you make $500 from it a year. It's good life. And there's people that just flip high dollars, people flip low dollars, find what works for you and design the team and processes around how much you're interested in working and how much time you're interested in spending in the business.

Justin Piche17:01And for me, I'm not interested in spending more than forty hours a week doing this. If it takes more than that, then I'm gonna obviously hire somebody to bring them on to get me out of that portion of the business. In that same vein of thinking there, there's

Brandon Parker17:16a thousand ways that you can go when you first get into land investing. If you were giving advice to someone newer into land investing and saying, here's a spot for you to focus and grab on, here's a buy box to start with to get you rolling. What is a simple entry point into land that you'd recommend? First,

Justin Piche17:37I would say either start in your backyard or start in a market that you're familiar with. I think if you're starting, it's a lot easier to do deals when you know what you're talking about. So, live in, I don't know, Missouri, for example, and you live near Kansas City, Missouri, I would start looking for land tracks in the counties surrounding Kansas City, Missouri, because I'm there. And I know the area, I know what area is hot. It's easier for me to form relationships with the team on the ground with surveyors with realtors that can help me value the property.

Justin Piche18:14It's easy to find investors from family and friends where I can say, hey, I just picked up this 50 acres for $3,000 an acre in this county right next to Kansas City. I think it's worth whatever $6,000 an acre. Are you interested in investing in this deal? They can see the numbers, they're familiar with it too. There's a lot of barriers that aren't there if you're starting backyard. And then probably the other thing I would say is don't be afraid to hire quickly. I think that people, if you're trying to do everything, it may be challenging to scale at the level you want to.

Justin Piche18:46I'm an advocate of hiring folks to replace some of the administrative and like monotonous tasks that are just inherent to this type of business quickly. And just knowing from the get go, from the onset, Hey, I need to bring somebody in to help me get to that next level quickly. What positions would you hire for

Brandon Parker19:04as your first, let's say three hires?

Justin Piche19:07Yeah, okay. So if I was starting a business from scratch right now, let's just go with that. If I just boom, I'm starting. There's a couple of things I would do. The first thing I would do is I would get a LaunchControl subscription. Launch Control is another software that I use for my business every day. It's a texting software that allows you to text off market leads. And it may be the lowest cost per lead. If it's not the lowest cost per lead, it's one of the lowest cost per leads. And then I would hire somebody to run that texting system.

Justin Piche19:40So that would be the first hire. Would be like an acquisitions assistant, somebody who can send out texts and reply to people as they're replying real time and ask questions to try to qualify leads so that anybody who is reasonably interested in selling that we were reasonably interested in buying, they could forward to me. And then I would spend my time kind of comping, calling, negotiating, and buying whatever for the first hire. And then second hire would probably be someone on the...

Justin Piche20:13Honestly, you don't even have to hire anybody on sales, but you could just list something with realtors for all these properties. I don't know if I would hire that person second. I could hire another acquisitions person to do the same thing to scale to even more leads, number two, and then probably a transaction coordinator, somebody who can help me just do all the administrative work. Transaction coordinator, executive assistant, somewhere in that realm that basically takes off your plate a lot of the day to day grind.

Brandon Parker20:38And where would you hire them?

Justin Piche20:40Have, let's see, my team is structured. I used to have 13 on my team, we scaled back a little bit. We have seven right now I have four employees based in The Philippines. I have two employees based in Latin America, one in Colombia and one in Uruguay. And then I have a US, guess I technically have two, actually technically two US based folks. One's part time marketing manager and the other one is full time sales manager. I think for those first hires, would hire OCs. I'd probably post a job on remoteco.com.

Justin Piche21:11That's my preferred online hiring board. It's basically Latin American applicants to your jobs. Any country really in Latin America can apply to these remote positions and it's relatively cheap. It's like $200 for a month of multiple job postings. And I think you can get 50 or 60 applicants, which is plenty honestly for this. And that's, I would hire overseas. Just because just the lower cost of acquisitions, have incredible talent overseas that just by nature of where they live have a significantly lower cost of living.

Justin Piche21:43And so for somebody in The US, maybe necessarily survive very well on $15 a year or $20 a year, somebody living in Latin America, that's a fantastic salary for what they pay in rent and what they pay in food, etcetera. Yeah, I think global talent is

Brandon Parker21:57just a wave that's not slowing down at this point because they're such great talent, and it's a great way to build a team. Is there positions

Justin Piche22:06that you would only hire in The US? Yeah, I think I would only hire an executive. So that's probably going to be my next hire, personally. Actually, that's not true. I have a sales associate position I'm hiring for right now. But after that, the next hire is gonna be an admin executive assistant and that person will be US based. And the reason why they're gonna be US based is because I spend now that I've gone up in transaction volume, I spend hours each week just going to title company or maybe not going to title companies going to like the UPS store and overnighting documents or going to a notary and getting things notarized or whatever other random administrative tasks that needs to be done.

Justin Piche22:47I don't wanna do those things anymore. I don't wanna have to go to the middle of the day and leave for an hour and a half and go get something notarized just to send it off, an executive assistant that's US based, that is the task that I could offload to them. Okay. And so that's specifically because they need to be US based for physical transactions, paperwork and things like that. Yeah. That's probably the only reason why I think I would hire that. What's some of the bad advice that you see tossed around often in the land world? Yeah, I think there's been a pull away from it.

Justin Piche23:17But I think that some of the bad advice is just lock things up under contract forever and just try to flip the contract. I think that's disingenuous. It puts the seller in a really tough position. And if you never have the intent of buying it, it's borderline unethical. Locks something up with no intent of buying it for a super long time. Think, I don't know how I actually don't, I'm not really exposed to a lot of bad advice in the land space. I try to focus in on folks that I like that people that I'm following or people that I'm learning from that are giving good advice.

Brandon Parker23:53Don't know. And the whole land wholesaling thing never really resonated with me. And I think it's because of how you put it. It's almost like you're in that business, you're getting over on someone. And I like the idea of being able to add value. This person, you're out of value because they want cash quickly. They've got a wedding to pay for. They're not worried about. They know that you're not offering a market value, but they just want cash. It's worth it for them to have the value of cash in hand and not deal with the transaction.

Justin Piche24:22I much like that approach better than we're locking you into a contract. Similar to let's say you're going to buy a new car. You're going to a dealer and you had a car you were going to trade in. Similar when you go to trading your car, they're not going to give you the best dollar for your car. They don't. But because it's easy, that's what most people do. I mean, you're doing the same thing when you're offering some of these off market deals. You're saying, Hey, I'm coming with cash and closing relatively quick, and you don't really have to do anything or worry about anything. It's like an easy button. Yeah, I love that take.

Brandon Parker24:52What's an unusual habit or something absurd that you love, either in land or just in general? That's an absurd thing that I love. It's not absurd, but I

Justin Piche25:02really love getting checks in the mail. I do a lot of wiring and stuff, but wiring is in your account is great, but there's just something about opening up an envelope and getting a check from a piece of land that you finally sold. That's not obscure. Think that's pretty normal. Think most people enjoy that part of the business, but I've been thinking about that about that recently. It's just... It's fun. It's... Wow. I can't believe... Especially on bigger deals. You're like, wow. Can't believe this is my check from this deal that I just... It probably does make it feel more real. You have actually something physical in your hands and just, wow, it's actually, it's all, it all is, it worked.

Justin Piche25:37It worked. I usually take a picture and send it to my team on Slack and just be like, Woo hoo guys, like congrats. Because everybody just the way my team compensation is everybody has a base salary essentially. And the expectation is they work forty hours a week. We don't really track hours, the team works forty hours a week. And then there's incentives. They get commissions for every team, everybody on the team gets a commission for every property that we sell. And then based on quarterly profits, we'll do like a profit distribution for the team.

Justin Piche26:08I like that compensation model because everybody is aligned with it. The more deals and the higher quality deals we do, the better all of us do. There's no pitting the team against each other. Like there's no, hey, you're the acquisitions associate that got this under contract. So you get the bonus for these properties and you're the acquisition associate that this one, so you get the bonus for it. No, everybody gets a piece of everything that we do and it just fosters a lot of teamwork, good handoffs, the team working really hard not to drop any of the systems that we're running with. It's complicated when you're dropping thousands of texts and thousands of ringless voicemails a day and you're sending mail.

Brandon Parker26:44You're incentivized for the whole thing to work, not just for your silo to work. What type of overall percentage do you put towards incentives? And that could be just ballpark. You don't have to give exact. Yeah, really.

Justin Piche26:57It's a great question. So I don't earmark a certain percent. Everybody had rate. So for maybe it's $100 or maybe it's $150 or whatever it is per property sold commission that they get. It's a dollar amount. So like I some deals I don't make that great. Like I did, like I finally got rid of a property I've been holding for ten months, but I bought $24 I sold it for I think after realtor commission, got $27. It was one of my worst deals. That's okay. Whatever. Was happy to get rid of it. Public service announcement.

Justin Piche27:29Maybe don't buy HOA properties and work for one. Nice. But anyway, I've learned that lesson a couple times over now. But I saw a small profit like for $3, $4, whatever. I think half of it went to my team, just went to my team and commissions. But then we have a great profit, we're gonna make $100 on a property. And then say they get the same commissions for the property, but then the bonus at the end of the quarter discretionary, it really is like a it's not necessarily a set percentage. It's just based on where how much capital we have, what our cash commitments are for the next quarter that are already allocated interest payments, etcetera.

Justin Piche28:03It's not really a set formula, more of a feeling.

Brandon Parker28:07Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. It sounds like you have a good culture with what you do. And I think that's probably something to build towards as I think about how to build my team. Yeah, I think that people work for people, right? I think

Justin Piche28:21they work for people they like, and they're loyal to people they like. And so, I treat them well. And if I expect my team to be really engaged in the process and take ownership, we don't have to take care of them. I have to make it worth their while. I have to let them know that I have their back and show that through both compensation and just through the way that we interact from day to day. What's your interaction channels look like?

Brandon Parker28:43Is everyone in Slack? What's your main way to stay

Justin Piche28:46abreast of everything happening? Yeah, Slack. Slack is fantastic. Everybody's in Slack. We obviously have all have emails as well, company emails. There's a couple of different brands underneath my umbrella. So there's some different emails back and forth and we'll send documents and stuff email every once in a while. But Slack is just a really versatile tool, setting up different rooms or threads or whatever for each topic. Certain people can go in certain groups. You can drop files, you can make Zoom, link room videos. We do all kinds of things with Slack integration. That's, yeah, that's what we do.

Justin Piche29:18Zapier automations, alerts on channels when people have, I don't know, inquired about property or put deposits down or paid their monthly payment for their mortgage, whatever it might be, all that can be set up. Outside of

Brandon Parker29:30the subdividing value add in the business you're running there, do you offer any other tools or coaching or kind of any other things? Do you have any other businesses surrounding

Justin Piche29:40the direct land business that you do? I think it's a long term strategy for a lot of folks is to take some of this active cash flow and turn it into real estate assets, depreciable cash flow in real estate. So, there's that whole side of the business, which is a separate business, which is just looking for commercial property, looking for luxury short term rentals, looking for experiential hospitality type businesses that is ancillary to the land business. The purpose of the land business is really to generate cash and generate mortgages.

Brandon Parker30:13You mentioned an interesting niche there. Said luxury short term rentals. So is that I like that because you have a depreciating asset, but you also have somewhere you can go on vacation. Sounds like you'll deal with that angle. No, that's exactly it. Back in 2021,

Justin Piche30:29right before I decided, Hey, I'm moving the corporate world. And I saw the writing on the wall for interest rates going up with just the incredible amount of money that the government printed or created. My wife and I decided to buy a 10 bedroom house in North Carolina, we thought, man, we should try to get essentially as big of a loan at as low of an interest rate as we possibly can right now and make sure the asset is cash flowing. And before AI quit a W-two job, and for those of you who haven't, those listeners or whatever that have quit their W-two job, if you want to get lending, don't quit it yet.

Justin Piche31:05Because banks typically don't care about your business for the first two years, they won't really consider much of anything in business for the first two years until it's been consistently operating at a higher level. And even then they'll give you a lot of scrutiny for what your real income is. They really just care can you pay that monthly payment? So anyway, we saw it right on the wall, we bought a big Airbnb and did a large renovation on it and it's a great investment. It sleeps 30 people, it's in North Carolina, it cash flows quite a bit of money and it's just been a really big investment for us.

Justin Piche31:38And my goal honestly is just buy more things like that. I think the larger homes when you're going after short term rentals are probably better. There's a dime a dozen three bedrooms and four bedroom homes, once you get up to five, six, seven, eight bedrooms, your options are significantly limited. Between a group of 20 people, where can you all stay together? There's just not that many places.

Brandon Parker31:59You're a little bit insulated. Airbnb bust. Yeah. Two great strategies there with the hedging against inflation by taking on debt at low interest before it happened. That was a slick move. What's a new belief or behavior or habit that you've taken up in the last year that's improved your life significantly?

Justin Piche32:18Man, this one I actually do have an answer for. Honestly, daily exercise. I was always been like a relatively athletic person, but I got hurt right around the time my son was born, my second child, doing something really dumb, and I stopped working out for a period of time. And I wasn't getting a lot of sleep. I had a newborn and a toddler and just things weren't going well. I just got really demoted and I was starting this business. So like a lot of stress, not sleeping much, just really demotivated.

Justin Piche32:50I love my weight. I'm six'one and so I love my weight got up to two ten to twelve somewhere in that range and just did not feel good. So in January, I started working out essentially daily even better and lost 30 pounds and that has just drastically improved my life over the last six months. Just being in shape, more energy, getting better sleep, all of those things. Was like falling asleep, trying to work during the day, just sluggish, not feeling good at all.

Justin Piche33:22Then

Brandon Parker33:22I feel fantastic. Good for you for taking control and building a structure to your life that works so well. I think that's coming full circle. The thing that's great about the land business is stories like yours, where you've built the lifestyle, you're putting your family first, being able to spend time with them. You're building a business that's going to take care of them and doing it your own way, staying fit along the way. That's great. That's great. Justin, where can people find you online? Where would you point people to

Justin Piche33:53see you, get in touch with you? What's your online presence? Limited to say the least. I'm not a very big online person. Although I have recently started with Twitter. That's where we got connected. And so you can find me at Twitter at scouting the number four land. That's probably the best place. I try to put out like some sort of deal deep dive weekly. I missed last week because I'm on vacation. I'll put out to this week, but just like breaking down real deals that I've done a lot of... I think in the space, a lot of people talk about how amazing this deal was or amazing that deal was.

Justin Piche34:28Not every deal is amazing. Maybe it is, I don't know for you, who knows? But I find that not every deal is amazing. Sometimes you're wrong. And it's okay to be wrong. Hopefully other people can learn from my mistakes and my wins. Wonderful.

Brandon Parker34:42Thank you for coming on the show today, Justin. I appreciate your time. Learned a lot from you. And yeah, it's great to meet you. Thanks, Brandon. I appreciate it. It's been fun.