Dan Caradonna: I Fund Land

Brandon Parker00:00The Legends of Land Show with Brandon Parker. Deconstruct the tactics of world class land investors and learn tools to build a 7 figure land business. The Legends of Land Show This is Brandon Parker. Welcome to another episode of the Legends of Land Show where it's my job to deconstruct world class land investors, how they think about business and approach strategy as a land investor. My guest today is Dan Caradona.

Brandon Parker00:31Dan is a seasoned land investor with over twelve years of experience specializing in land flipping, funding deals, and buying land notes. He's navigated the land investing landscape, leveraged techniques and strategies, and built a diverse portfolio. In this conversation, we cover Dan's journey into land investing, his unique strategies for flipping, funding, and buying notes, and his insights into the current land market. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Dan Cardona. Dan Cardona, welcome to the show today. Dan, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit how you got started in land?

Dan Caradonna01:05Sure. So back in 2012, I actually was looking to get in some type of real estate. And so, took a Jack Bosch course down here in South Florida and weekend course and then ended up buying this whole course and then started flipping land. And did that for about a year and a half with my brother and then took a hiatus from it until 2018 and then got back into it, started flipping again. And then that same year actually I started funding deals, work groups I was in and masterminds, they started needing money.

Dan Caradonna01:38So I knew the land business and it made sense to start doing that. I got into funding there, been doing that ever since. And then April 2023, I actually started getting into buying land notes. So that's what I've been doing as well for the last, fifteen months and to keep my capital a little more passive. But I'm still doing the land flipping and land funding. You were looking on the MLS? What... Are you always looking on the MLS? Is that part of your process, or did you do that randomly? What was that? No. So it wasn't me looking on the MLS.

Dan Caradonna02:09It was actually him. And he's a coach actually for one of the land gurus out there. And even when he has, like, spare time, he'll be calling, looking at land deals online and on Zillow or whatever, and basically just looking for deals that have been around a little while. And then I'll contact the realtors and make an offer. And then, basically, it's a follow-up thing, and it's time consuming. I mean, I think it took him, like, six months to get this deal, but that's how he ended up getting it.

Brandon Parker02:36Yeah. I've seen the Hivemind guys doing MLS deals. Actually, he hit me up on Twitter the other day and said he's doing... All of his deals are coming from the MLS. And that's... I'm wondering if that's a function of the current real estate market where it's a little bit softer and so the savvy land investors are poaching stuff offline that's been sitting for a while or if that's just always been the case. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. It's definitely where they're poaching them, and it's also a good way if you wanna save money on marketing where let's say you don't have, $10,000

Dan Caradonna03:08to throw in some letters, you can start making phone calls and defining on market deals.

Brandon Parker03:15Yeah. That's actually a good angle because that's a common question people DM me in Twitter. What advice would you give to a noob? And a lot of times, I'm... My go to is find a market with good sell through rates, scrub your data really well, send it to an area that has uniform pricing, and send a small blind offer. That's how you can get the best likelihood of getting a deal for the lowest output of cash. But that kind of beats that. Just calling MLS listings is that's free. So that's actually even a better one. So I...

Brandon Parker03:45I'll add that to my add that to my repertoire. What's the, best thing about living in Pompano Beach? Have you ever ridden your bike down to the end of The Keys and seen the six toed cats, Hemingway's six toed cats?

Dan Caradonna03:57No. I I go biking probably every day, and I just started playing pickleball. But, mean, it's great living down here. Just the weather is always usually great except for the hurricanes. But haven't been down to The Keys in a while. We're actually planning on going down there, like, within the next few months. Okay.

Brandon Parker04:13Nice. Is pickleball as fun as everyone says?

Dan Caradonna04:16It is. Yeah. Is it? It's actually good. Yeah. I know. Yeah. It definitely is. My dad was trying to get me to play it for a year, and I find... I was like, oh, I gotta learn the game. And then I finally just was up there visiting, and I jumped in and played, and now I'm addicted. So the biking has stopped, and the pickleball has... I picked up pickleball, except I biked a pickleball, but, you know, but it's so addicting and fun. I love ping pong and play a little bit of tennis, so I think pickleball's, like, it's in the cards for me at some point, for sure. Yeah. For sure. So when you think about your land business, you've got the flipping, buying notes, lending.

Dan Caradonna04:49What are you most focused on? How do you divide up your time between those, and how do you think about

Brandon Parker04:54how you spend your time effectively?

Dan Caradonna04:56Sure. Honestly, with the notes, most of that is handled by my partner and my wife. She's the one looking at all of the properties and deciding on which ones we want. And so I'm not really dealing with that that much. I'm more focused on the land flipping and sending out the mail and kind of managing everything and all that and just dealing with some of the calls that I have to take. She doesn't have anything to do with that. The land funding, I handle probably 75% of that, But really where she only steps in on that is to review the deals.

Dan Caradonna05:31If I vet, I'll vet the deal and then if it feels, if it looks good or we're interested in it, then I'll send it over to her and then she'll review it and then we'll make a mutual decision on if we want to move forward with it or not. Honestly, I'm not like grinding day by day. Most of our stuff is pretty passive. I have a lot of the notes. I don't send that much mail and then because I did that years ago and just the funding took over and we're doing more just like funding deals now and I used to try to market for those deals more often, meaning maybe getting in Facebook groups and just try to see people that need money or whatever but to be honest with you, most of this stuff that's comes across my plate, they come across organically and they're from people that I meet at events or from masterminds or a friend of a friend or someone I've worked with before.

Brandon Parker06:20Mhmm. Yeah. So it sounds like you're doing land. The flipping is the... A secondary part of your business. You've focused more on the the lending at this point. Why'd you make that change? What's more interesting? And do you see better opportunity? Or is it a lifestyle

Dan Caradonna06:35because it's different workload? Or what is that? Yeah. So it's a lifestyle. We travel a lot. We go on a lot of cruises. Ironically, I was talking to a friend yesterday and a friend of ours, he does like around two fifty deals a year. And I was talking with another friend this morning and he was saying, why don't you like try to do that? And I'm like, but you know what? I'm just, if I was 30, I could, I'd be doing that now. But if you're doing two fifty deals a year, it's going to be very, very hard to be hands free and hands off. We travel a lot.

Dan Caradonna07:05To manage all that, it's just be very hard to do remote or not being around all the time. That's why, my wife, she really likes just the land... The funding deals because we were involved, but we're not kinda handling the day to day operations of it.

Brandon Parker07:22And so how involved do you get? I know that some funders are underwriting deals, and they're looking real closely at them. Are you like to work with a handful of people you trust and just throw money towards their deals, or are you getting in the weeds and

Dan Caradonna07:35vetting deals really heavy? What's that look like? We vet them, but most of the people that we're dealing with, that I've known them and I've done deals with them. If I haven't done deals with them, then we will definitely get in the weeds more and look at the property harder. But yeah, we don't get like super involved. Probably the biggest major thing is I definitely like them to have at least one realtor given a given opinion on it and a realtor that is with that specializes in land.

Dan Caradonna08:06That's and most of these people I deal with they have a track record that I've known. I know they've been in the land business for a long time. And I know that the deals they're picking are probably going to be pretty solid. What are your favorite types of deals or which are the ones that feel like they pencil more often than others? One of the things I didn't mention earlier, actually I was ironically just writing it down, was the transactional funding deals where they're a short term deal one to two days. Sometimes they've gone two weeks, they've even gone as some thirty days. Those are the ones we love where it's a double close but for whatever reason you can't do a double close, you need the funds and the investor doesn't have the funds.

Dan Caradonna08:46They reach out to us and they say, hey, I need this money for a day, can you do it? And we're like, sure. They obviously pay less than the other JV funding deals that we do, but those are great ones because they're guaranteed money. Pretty much make it where we're guaranteed we're not going to be held with our money and our money's going to be sitting there. We check with the title companies to see like that the funds are going to be there on the B2C side before they sell it on the A2B side and then we're safeguarded that way.

Brandon Parker09:17Could you maybe run through, like, a spectrum of deals from maybe the cheapest money that people end up getting towards the most expensive money people end up getting. And it could be outside what you do as well, just to give... Paint a picture of types of ways that people get money and how much it costs them.

Dan Caradonna09:37Sure. It's gonna be a case by case basis because if you've never done a deal, then it might be a little more expensive than if you've been a land investor for ten years just because we don't have a track record with you and we need a little proof that you know how to handle it. But a deal I did recently, I think we bought it for 13 and we ended up selling it for 40 and this was somebody I knew. So, I think we had a straight kind of fiftyfifty deal where 50% profit to us and 50% profit to him.

Dan Caradonna10:10What we started recently was a waterfall effect where it's going to start off at 35% and then it's going to go up after thirty or sixty days and it'll go to 40% and then it'll go to 45%, etc, etc. Some people I've dealt with before, they're just used to the fiftyfifty or even sometimes if there's a big enough profit, they might say, hey, can we start a can we do thirtyseventy? And I know they know what they're doing. I know they get it sold. And so we have a big long track record and so I may able to do that with them.

Dan Caradonna10:44I don't know if that answered your question.

Brandon Parker10:46Yeah that does it. Do you put timelines on there? Is there a sliding scale for how long it takes for dispo?

Dan Caradonna10:54Sure. So we have a clause in there that if it goes over one year that we're actually going to we would take 100% of the profit, but that really never happens. That's just they're the safeguard for that one deal that might come where if the investor fell off the face of the earth and just stopped doing land investing, we had to take over and we had to do everything and we had to try to sell it. And even at that point, we would probably still give them something. I've never had to utilize that.

Dan Caradonna11:24That's where that is. But I've had a couple deals go with some people that are pretty well known in the land business and that are going on for a couple of years. It's sometimes, so we're used to it. It's part of the business and sometimes you're just going to get a bad egg and there's really not much you can do, especially with we signed it. This was when I, before we started doing the waterfall and all that where it was just a straight fiftyfifty deal. So that the time has went on and I'm gonna get the same amount of money that I would have got it if it would have sold a week later.

Dan Caradonna11:55But you learn from things like that and so then that's why we do the waterfall effect.

Brandon Parker12:00Have you seen people get, it feels like the most logical way for people to get funding is through other savvy land investors like yourself. So you can get eyes on a deal, and you know how to underwrite it pretty quickly. What other ways have you seen people get funding outside of... Through people like yourself?

Dan Caradonna12:20Sure. Friends and family. That would probably be the number one way. And most of the time, they're not coming to me because they've already found somebody else. I just know this from people that I talk to and they're they tell them like hey Brandon we haven't done a deal lately. It's all my brother's funding. So I know it from that way. The other way is hard money lenders are starting to step in and low money on the land like at 10 to 15%. And I know people that have those contacts, but I don't even know.

Dan Caradonna12:53I'm sure they're few and far between and they don't want to give out their contact because when they need the money, they want to be able to go to them and they don't want them to be tapped. So that would be the major way. And I'm trying to think if there's any way else. I mean, you definitely can hit credit cards if you wanted to do that way, but ultimately those are the two major ways that I've seen.

Brandon Parker13:14Yeah. And how do you look at selling your land flips? Like, when you buy a piece of property and then you go to sell them, what's your go to method to do that? What do you list specifically? Do you do off market MLS? Do you use realtors, Facebook, land.com?

Dan Caradonna13:31So that... Good question. That is... That's definitely changed throughout the years. I used to have a lands account. Now all I do is pretty much the business plan is I find a realtor and have them deal with everything. Whereas before I was managing everything, putting it on my website, putting it on lands, putting it on on those other sites and a plan flipping whatever. And now I just hand the ball off and they take it and they do everything. And I make sure I... One state I'm dealing in right now, he's just... He really knows the state and says everything.

Brandon Parker14:03Do you find it beneficial to target a specific area and get to know it, or you like the idea of branching out nationwide just finding hot markets?

Dan Caradonna14:14Yeah, think it's good to just stay in one area and just go around the whole state and just go round around and just keep making the rounds. Send mail like every three or four months if if let's say you're you hit them all and then you're like you read out you're like oh I just mailed there. After three or four months send it there again. Get to know that area because I've learned from funding deals. There's I've run into problems in Delaware And... But if you get to know Delaware, you could probably make a killing up there if, you know, you really know what you were doing.

Brandon Parker14:45Yeah. Interesting. So what other things have you learned from... Because you probably see a lot of deals from different styles of land investors come through. What are what are some big lessons that you think you... Or big takeaways from land investors that are successful?

Dan Caradonna15:03Sure. That's one of them. Staying in their areas. They're generally like not all over the place. They're very, very organized and you can just tell. I know people that are in my MASH Minds and I'm like those guys they got it going on like they know what they're doing And it's just from A to Z they're using VA's most likely to do everything that they shouldn't be doing and they have good systems and processes and they're just managing things and that's the big thing that I see. The other kind of answer to your question is I've been seeing within the last few years is definitely more people bringing like subdivides to the table.

Brandon Parker15:41Yeah. Those value ads are getting big. It seems that the land investing community has shifted a little bit, and there's such good information on the Internet that a lot of people have come in and made good money sending 500 mailers to specific counties and doing these flips. And that to... It's still blue ocean, but it seems like people need to pull themselves above the fray a little bit to be more more successful now, and that's coming through, I think, some of those value adds, some different ways of scaling VAs like you were mentioning.

Brandon Parker16:14Right. Yeah. And you mentioned Delaware. Are there any states or counties that have interesting nuances that that you think there's opportunity in, or where do you see opportunity just in general if you were someone to ask you about land?

Dan Caradonna16:31I don't know. I think ever since COVID, there's so many more people mailing now. The state I'm mailing now, like, I've mailed them years ago, and they weren't... Nobody really said anything about getting letters. And now they every time I talk to somebody, they're saying, I get a lot of letters like what's going on in this area. So I think ever since COVID, really areas not getting a lot of mail are kind of done and over with. But you know that being said, it's still definitely better than in my opinion than any other kind of real estate niche you're going to get into.

Dan Caradonna17:05But yeah, I think you just need to differentiate yourself and look at maybe if you see a property and they want retail value for it maybe you can subdivide it and now you can make that deal work. Maybe you can do a JV with the seller and he doesn't you don't have to come out of pocket. He doesn't have to do anything and you can tell him like at the end of the day like we're gonna both walk away with 500,000. That would be a good way to strategize it or if you find a lot that where you can do mobile homes, figure something out with that.

Dan Caradonna17:37Just trying to think outside the box, and you still can do the straight land flips and buy something for 30 and sell it for 70, but you just have to sell... You just you just have to send more mail.

Brandon Parker17:50Yeah. Yeah. Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned Jack Bosch and his weekend course, think you said. Was that in person? And can you talk about what that was like?

Dan Caradonna18:00Sure. So it was a weekend event down here in South Florida. We're talking, like, probably over twelve years ago, so I don't remember much of it. Mean there weren't, it wasn't like there were a lot of people there. I'm sure like maybe only five people signed up, maybe there were like 50 people in there. But it basically was just an introduction to his real, I think we paid $97 to be there. And then he tried us to sell you on the course, which ended up buying that day for a thousand dollars.

Dan Caradonna18:31And that was pretty much it. It didn't give us any kind of access to him or coaching. After that, then the next step is coaching, but I've never done any of that with him. And then the good thing, one of the really good things about with signing up for that too is he still does some, is these conferences he has and I went to those in the very beginning and he did a lot. He did a couple of those down in South Florida when I... Way back when. He hasn't been down here in years, but those were good things to do and he's still doing those like he just did one in Las Vegas.

Dan Caradonna19:02He does a lot in Phoenix or Scottsdale because that's where he lives. Those are definitely good events to go to because you're gonna meet a lot of the people in the industry and you're also gonna meet even people if you're looking for money, that would be another place you might go to to find people to help you out.

Brandon Parker19:21Yeah. I just went to a fun event. That's why I was asking. I went to the milk and honey supercars and land event in Colorado. It was Drew Haney. I think that you might have said you knew where I was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That was a blast. It was fun. Adding race cars to anything, it makes it a little bit better, I think. So For sure. Yeah. I think it was just just the standard event, like, two day Saturday and Sunday, and we were... Nothing like that nowadays where it may... They're like that. But it was just a straight two day event just showing what he does, and I'm like, this looks interesting.

Brandon Parker19:51This looks out of the box. I don't want to be flipping homes. And then that's why I did it. Were you flipping homes? Obviously, you were before or were you just looking what to get into? Okay. No. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I flipped homes for a stint. I was a real estate agent. I forgot out of college, I started flipping homes. And I tell the story. One time I had the house jacked up in the air to fix the foundation, and I just had this realization that this is so much work for the amount of profit. I literally just lifted a house into the air. We need to find something different to do here.

Brandon Parker20:21Wow. Yeah. Yeah. But... So talking about coaches, what coaches do you... What's... Who are some people you like out there you learn from or you interact with and that you might wanna give some airtime to?

Dan Caradonna20:35Sure. So I've been through a lot of the courses. I've been through Jack Bosch's Land Profit Generator. I've been through Seth's course. I've been through Land Academy, Casual Fridays, Pete Reese's. I've been coaching with Casual Fridays. I've been coaching with Kevin Farrell with the Land Academy. There's probably a couple other courses in there that I'm forgetting, but all of them all of them are good. I get great stuff out of all of them.

Brandon Parker21:02Yeah. It seems like there's this base amount of knowledge, and then at some point, they break off and they have a little bit different take. I think I've been through a few of those. Are there any of those systems or strategies that stick out to you more than others or things that... Concepts that stick out that are maybe a little bit unique that come

Dan Caradonna21:22from those? A big thing for me was way back when I started Jack Bosch's training course. They were... We're doing a lot of options where we put the property under contract and then we hold it, we try to sell it within three to six months and I kept getting burned with that where I'd sell a property and then they would get the title and then the title was clouded. So then I found the land academy where they did the blind offers and basically those come back, the deal looks good, I talked to a realtor about it or we vet it and then we ended up buying it.

Dan Caradonna21:53So that's one major thing I learned from the two of those. The Jack Bosch's was good because you're not putting the capital up but you could get you know burned in the end because the property might not be sellable. And then but the other side of the coin is with the Land Academy where I would buy... Do the blind offers. I would be purchasing the properties and then I wouldn't have to worry about that. But then if you make a bad buy, then you're stuck with the property.

Brandon Parker22:20Yeah. A little bit of risk analysis there. What do you think... I mean, what do you do today? What's your method that you go to now?

Dan Caradonna22:29I do both, honestly. It just depends on the deal. I found one recently that it's it's on a lake, but there was a flood there. And so there's a big assessment that's going to be for like the next thirty or forty years. And because of that, I ended up just doing an option on it. And if it wasn't for that, then I would have heard cause we're buying it for 11 itch. If it didn't have that assessment, I think it'd be worth like 75, but we started off at 50 and now we're dropping the price.

Dan Caradonna22:59We're around forties. If it wasn't that case with the assessment, then I would have definitely bought it outright. So it's a case by case basis.

Brandon Parker23:07Yeah. That makes sense. If there's some sort of

Dan Caradonna23:10unknown that you're trying to hedge your risk for, then you go for that option. How do you talk to... Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say I actually talked to a real... I was about to pull the trigger on that one, and I talked to a realtor. I got lucky, and I called the the the right realtor on that property, and she actually lives... I don't know if she lived on the lake, but she lives in that neighborhood, and she's... I told her that number at eleven, and she... In the beginning, I didn't tell her that number, and then she's like, how much are you getting from? Like eleven. She's, I don't know. It's so hard. So, I'm like, okay. Let me see if I can sell this without buying it.

Brandon Parker23:41Good move. How do you approach that conversation with the seller?

Dan Caradonna23:47I just tell them that, hey, I have a list of buyers. I have a buyers list of over 10,000 people. And so I'm gonna send it out to them and see what happens and then go from there. You'll see it on the MLS. Kind of just most of the time they're just done with it. They don't want to deal with it and so they don't care. Some of them will definitely say no, I'm going list it myself. So just on that particular one, were like, with it. And do you go

Brandon Parker24:15deep into explaining exactly what option is to them? I mean, because some people... I've talked to land investors. They say, yeah. Just show it to them, and a lot of them don't care, don't notice, and just say, yeah. Go for it. Do you find that's the case or? Yeah, I try to keep it as simple as possible because if you start running the waters then it's just gonna get too complicated for them and then they're gonna think you're maybe scamming them. Just try to keep it simple

Dan Caradonna24:39and tell them I ask them outright like do you wanna get rid of your property? Do you wanna sell it? Okay. And then just explain. Alright. If you wanna sell it, then I can probably get your property sold and you're gonna get what you want. So does it really matter? That's a... And that's not

Brandon Parker24:54your go to strategy. That's just when the property pops up that it makes sense for. Correct.

Dan Caradonna25:00Exactly. I I don't like doing that, but when it calls for it, I do it. The other way we do that, and I don't do this as as much as other people, but where it's a thinner margin. They're like, okay, a lot of my friends do that where if there's not a lot of meat on the bone, they'll do an option because they don't want to buy it and then make $5,000 off of it and wait for a year for it to close.

Brandon Parker25:24Those thinner margins almost start to feel more like a JV type deal or you're just partnering up with them like, I'll help you get this sold and take a percentage type of thing. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Mhmm. Interesting. Yeah. I've learned some interesting stuff about some states along the way. Like Tennessee, I've heard that it's a great state, but you need to know it really well because there's a bunch of micro communities, basically. If you break that state up into, like, maybe eight pieces, and each one's a little bit different if you get to know each piece. So it's it's cool how there is almost some opportunity in getting to know a state that isn't Arizona, Texas, Florida, or just even getting to know those.

Brandon Parker26:00Well, I mean, there's a reason people are really successful there. But...

Dan Caradonna26:04Yeah. Exactly.

Brandon Parker26:05Yeah and where are you heading on your next cruise? We're actually going out

Dan Caradonna26:11flying out to Rome and going to it's nine days Malta, Barcelona and I forget how you pronounce those other places, Nice, France, and there's a couple more, Slovakia or something like that. But yeah, so we're flying into Rome and we're actually landing Barcelona and then fly back from Barcelona in the beginning of September.

Brandon Parker26:32That's wonderful. Did you, so did you get to the point where you could travel around and cruise and everything from the land business, or were you doing something else previously? What was your other part of your career look like? Good question. We

Dan Caradonna26:48actually were full time Amazon sellers from 2015 to 2022 and did very well with that. I saw the writing on the wall 2018 or so that we weren't going to be wanting to sell on Amazon for the rest of our lives just because they're very hard to deal with as sellers. And so I got back in the land business And then the Amazon, it was definitely harder to travel more because just the kind of business we had and shipping and products and everything, it just was harder to get away.

Dan Caradonna27:22And I got back into the land and then that's then we found notes and we found that's how we organically got into the funding too because I think I said this earlier, if you're doing a lot of land flipping, it's harder to travel just because if you want to put out fires and you can't get on a phone on a cruise ship, you can't do that. So that's why we fell into the funding and then the notes fell into our lap too, learned about that and we're like, these two sound great.

Brandon Parker27:48When

Dan Caradonna27:49Starlink starts hitting cruise ships and you have full internet access, are you ever gonna stay back in Florida or are just hitting the ship forever? I think our max is about twelve to fifteen days on a ship. Once we're on there that long, it just is like time to get off. I do see these people where they're living on the ships. I met the guy that's been on Royal Caribbean ship the longest. He's been like cruising on them like twenty years straight and I was standing next to him in the port. And, yeah, and I met him. So you can Google him and... But, yeah, so we're not we're not looking to do any of these long time cruises.

Dan Caradonna28:21We live down here in South Florida, it's very easy to get out.

Brandon Parker28:25Yeah. It's nice. With managing notes, how are you managing

Dan Caradonna28:29the... How are you managing them? Are you meaning... Are we using Madison or like one of those companies that are making like you? What software do you use? Like how do you keep track and how do you? Yeah, we're old school. We're basically doing everything through Google Docs. The person that is we're buying the notes from, they manage the notes like they're the ones that are keeping track of everything as far as contacting people that are default and things like that. And he's a local guy that I know personally. I think I can trust him with everything.

Dan Caradonna28:59But yeah, we really don't have any software or any tools or anything because they're managing everything. That is really super free hands off. And what we really love about the notes is some of these sellers will offer where they'll do a buyback where if they default within a year or even a lifetime of the note, they'll buy it back. So we really love that. We trade it back in and then move on to another one. Oh interesting, okay. So you're buying notes on the secondary market. I was under the impression you were selling land and getting notes that you're been clear on that.

Dan Caradonna29:31But, yeah, I have done some of those notes in the past. But right now, we're pretty much just buying seasoned ones.

Brandon Parker29:37Yeah. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Maybe give an overview of what that looks like and your risk analysis, the returns. Sure.

Dan Caradonna29:45So the returns generally we're getting like 15 to 18% returns and they're usually probably about seven or eight years left on the note. As far as risk analysis, I'm not really sure exactly what you mean by that, but like most of these, they've been paying for at least a year. I don't know if you had any other particular

Brandon Parker30:08questions on that. If you hold $250,000 worth of notes at 18% paying off over eight years and economy crashes and all 18 of them stop paying, like what what happens?

Dan Caradonna30:22Sure. That's definitely been discussed before. If that does happen, then we definitely will have to deal with it. We have a lot of our money in that. But what happens is I would take them back and I would sell them myself. I have friends that I tell about the notes and whatnot, but then I tell them, once I tell them, I tell them the returns and I tell them, oh, if they defaulted then you would have to sell it, then usually after that they're not interested. But I've been in this business twelve years. So if we, they defaulted and I got them back, it won't be that big of a deal.

Dan Caradonna30:53I would have to just try to sell them and then get my money back. And so we just wouldn't have that nice monthly payment coming in.

Brandon Parker31:01And by taking them back, you mean the physical property you foreclose on the property?

Dan Caradonna31:06Correct. Exactly. Yes. We would take them back. Yeah.

Brandon Parker31:10So do you... When you buy a note, do you take into account what the property is, or do you buy a bundle of notes? That's packaged? What's that look like?

Dan Caradonna31:18No, they're all singles. Really, they're just nothing really too crazy or special about them. I mean, it's just people that want to buy land will be at Florida, Colorado, California. They just want the dream of owning land, and they may have a piece of land that they're never gonna see in their lifetime, but they're... They want it and they're paying it off, that's where we step in to be the bank.

Brandon Parker31:42Yeah. Makes sense. And why do note sellers sell notes? Is that purely a cash flow play so they can get into their next... They gotta do a million dollar purchase, they sell off some of their notes to make that happen? What is that? Exactly.

Dan Caradonna31:54Yeah. Generally, that's the case. In fact, the main guy that I buy them from, I've asked them that, and you never know if you're getting, like, the right answer because does he know something I don't know. Yeah. But you know, I guess it's just to deploy more capital and they... I I... One of the one of the of the reasons I do know is because if you try to go to the bank, it's gonna be very hard for them to like give finance that money or do anything with it. It's just cheaper and a better business decision to offer 18% on your notes because if we try to do it with the bank it's gonna be very, it's gonna be probably more money and more difficult.

Dan Caradonna32:29Well that makes sense. They're basically taking a... They're almost taking a loan out at cheaper money and easier money. Sense. Yeah. Okay.

Brandon Parker32:37Some of them say they're getting 20%, 25% on the notes and they sell them at 18% and take a hedge, like a difference there. Is that a tactic?

Dan Caradonna32:46Yeah. So the note brokers will do that, but that's not what these guys are doing or that's not what I'm doing. So, yeah, there are people there that do that. I'm just not... That's just not my world.

Brandon Parker32:57Okay. Interesting. I'm all... I'm always interested in the little nuances of how the money moves around this stuff. So that's a Yeah. Cool. Learned a little bit there. Thank you. Sure. And I'm just curious about the Amazon business. I... Were you a drop shipping, or did you manufacture

Dan Caradonna33:13a product or what? So we've done like everything. So most of it was fulfillment by Amazon. We buy products and we ship them into Amazon and then we and then the Amazon holds them in their warehouses and then they ship them out. So we're never dealing with anybody ever shipping it to an individual house. Basically it's shipped to Amazon and then while you're sleeping in the middle of the night, gets shipped out. And we would buy, we were doing like a couple million dollars in sales a year. Definitely could have even scaled it more if my partner would have wanted to, but we were happy where we were.

Dan Caradonna33:48And that involved a lot of shopping too. So, we would shop around the country and it's called a retail arbitrage. So, we go to a lot of the Nike outlets and Marshalls and Bed Bath and Beyonds and TJ Maxx's and buy out Nike and not buy out Nike but we'd spend. They actually cap you off at $5,000 a person. So, you buy them, you ship them in the Amazon, and then they ship them out for you. Interesting.

Brandon Parker34:12Okay. And that was a lot of fun. That's a hard business. I I had an Amazon... Fulfillment by Amazon business. I invented a VR mat and had it manufactured in China, did the customs and stuff to get it over, got it to Amazon, and, the hardest business I've ever run-in my entire life. Since you were successful doing that, that's impressive. Yeah. We did try private label and that didn't really work out. I know we could have made it work, but it's a it's a whole different ballgame. It's like doing it's like doing subdivides versus

Dan Caradonna34:41doing owner financing. Two different worlds.

Brandon Parker34:44Yeah. Yeah. How'd you manage your inventory during like the Christmas season? When you... And your cash flow to bring in whatever sometimes Yeah. A

Dan Caradonna34:54It was just we would hit lines of credit if we needed to and also max out 0% credit cards and and things like that. Honestly, though, like, you just run you run out of time at the end of the day and people, I had, we call them runners but like people that shop for us and there were only like two or three but I have friends that they had ten, fifteen shoppers. And so when you have ten, fifteen shoppers that's when you really need to start worrying about running out of money. But you know, with two or three, it wasn't that bad because there was only so many places you could go because it was time consuming because you're driving around and you're looking for deals.

Dan Caradonna35:28But it was definitely busy during that season. How'd you survive the COVID shutdown with the shipping and the transportation and stuff? That's when we pretty much got out of it. Yeah. So, yeah. And then we actually, I had a store too, like a physical store, I could get wholesale accounts with some of these shoe companies. And at the same time our shoe store was, the lease was up. So it just worked out where everything was just what. We're having these issues with Amazon. The lease is coming up on the store. We can't shop because we could shop, but yeah, just like things like that, it was all the major things that kind of, okay, we need to go

Brandon Parker36:06full time in the land now. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, our factory in China shut down and just stopped. Then the ships were backed up and I was like, okay. This this is this is... This makes it tougher to run a business where we're selling stuff. That was my natural exit point too. For sure. But interesting. Interesting. So as we get towards the end here, I generally asked a a couple questions. Before the last question, what what are your kind of final thoughts or anything we missed on the land business, buying notes, lending on land deals, and and talk...

Brandon Parker36:40Let's actually... Let's hit one more topic as we wind down here. Let's talk about lending, the capital on land deals, like exactly what you offer, what maybe you're... You'd want people that are listening to this to hear about that.

Dan Caradonna36:52Sure. So if you have a deal that you need funded, I can just send you all the criteria. You can email me at danifundland dot com but other, like I said there's a waterfall effect that starts off at 35% and it just goes up from there. If you want to do transactional funding, standard rates for that is like 3% for a couple days. And then generally what I don't, when you do send me some information, I can send you what the criteria is. We'd assign contract on the property and just other things like for instance, it has a 40% terrain, unless it's like a super anomaly, we're probably going to skip out on that.

Dan Caradonna37:31So, there's other things on our criteria sheet that would let you know if we'd be interested in it or not. And my email is danifundland dot com. You can also go to our website too, ifundland.com.

Brandon Parker37:44Nice. And curious about the 40% terrain. Is that 40% unusable terrain? And then why'd you pick that number? Is that just like number? So what's actually like 25 or 30%,

Dan Caradonna37:57but like 40, it's like a definite no. But you never say never. Like I just funded a deal in Idaho. We paid 225,000 for it. And at the very end, like the terrain is like way more than four. It's on the water and it like breaks off like a cliff. So, and that was actually the, somebody just looked at it and they're like, yeah, I like it. But the, just the drop off at the end just doesn't work for me. Anytime you get over 25 or 30% though, you're at the point where people are not gonna spend the money to build and that's where we're at as far as the train.

Brandon Parker38:33If there's... Let's say there's a two acre property and half of it has 40% train. It's basically an unusable. Do you see... How do you comp that? Do you just look at it like, okay. This is one acre of property basically and comp it that way?

Dan Caradonna38:47Correct. Exactly. And then we definitely would do our due diligence to make sure that the property is buildable and that we're gonna be able to do whatever we wanted to do with that. But we will comp it as one acre of land instead of two. And definitely talk to some realtors in the area and just make sure we're not missing anything.

Brandon Parker39:04Any other interesting... I'm I'm sure there's all kinds of criteria, but any other kind of interesting criteria like the terrain that sticks out that you look for?

Dan Caradonna39:13No. But, like, one that came across was, like, HOAs. If it has an HOA, just depends. If the HOA is, you know, $25 a year, then that's not gonna be a problem. If we think the deal is gonna sell in forty days, then that won't... That shouldn't be a problem. Anything else as far as criteria, I think it just depends. There's some states like New York, it's very, if you've got any type of wetlands, then you're gonna probably be dealing with an issue where like in Florida, have wetlands, you might just be fine.

Brandon Parker39:46The last question I generally ask people is, a lot of us are on Twitter, if you could put one message onto Twitter that everyone in the world would see, what would you write?

Dan Caradonna39:57So Twitter is how many characters? I'm not a big Twitter guy. I mean, I'm 140.

Brandon Parker40:03So it's like a short paragraph. Like a

Dan Caradonna40:06Okay. So this is in, like, regards to land, or is this in

Brandon Parker40:11This is in regards to anything you'd wanna say. And, actually, since you're in Florida, and I know there's, like, decent billboards in Florida. If you could put a billboard up in Florida and everyone in Florida would see it, what would you say? Okay. And so what was the question again? What you said? Just any message to the world. You got to throw a message out to the world. You just throw one message out to the world. Oh, brother. You're throwing me on the spot here. Yeah. Trying to think here if I want to make it like business or if I want to make it like You should do one of both.

Brandon Parker40:43Can have a one going north on the what's it? A Federal Highway 1 in Florida and one going south. One business and one life goals.

Dan Caradonna40:52Gotcha. Basically, one thing I would just say is don't stress out over things. The reason I kind of jumped in my head was I was playing pickleball yesterday and this lady, she was, we were talking about losing weight and she's so, proven that that if you stress out you actually like in the brain it puts on more calories on you which makes sense like a lot of times when you're stressing you want to eat more and things like that so that would be one thing there. And then as far as I think business I would say what pops in my mind is stay away from MWA which MWA is stay away from minimum wage activities.

Dan Caradonna41:28You shouldn't be writing like I have a lady that can write copyright for me for $25. Like I shouldn't be spending two or three hours writing copyright for something. And now even better, you can use ChatGPT and that might get it done for free. So, you shouldn't be doing things like that. And then also, if you're really trying to start a business or whatever, and you're trying to grind or whatever, trying to hustle, you you shouldn't be doing things like maybe mowing your lawn, pay somebody to do that. If it costs them $50, take the two hours and work on your business instead.

Brandon Parker41:59It's wonderful advice. I like it. Can people find you online? You've got the iFundLand. Is that right? And is that the best place for people to find you?

Dan Caradonna42:09Yeah. The... It's ifundland.com, also easytransactionalfunding.com, and then also elite360res.com. They all lead to the same link. So ifundland.com is the easiest one. You can also find me on Facebook and just my name Dan Caradonna. And then I am on I'm on Twitter but I don't really do too much on there. Best thing to do is just hit me up on on Facebook or email me.

Brandon Parker42:37Wonderful. Thank you for coming on the show today Dan. Learned a lot about the lending and capital and notes business and it was great to meet you. Yeah, good to have you on today. Yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yep.

Dan Caradonna42:50Have a nice day. Thanks. The legends of land show