Ryan Doucet and Max Edson : PRYCD LAND

Brandon Parker00:00This is Brandon Parker. Welcome to the Legends of Land Show where it's my job to deconstruct the tactics of elite land investors, how they think about their business and strategies that drive their success. Today, we have the founders of PRICED. Ryan Doucette and Max Edson are former air force members. They founded PRICED in July 2020, a data analytics platform for land investors. Ryan's a software engineer who's pursuing AI focused computer science master's degree. He's complemented by Max. He's got six years in real estate, does program management economics.

Brandon Parker00:32So you can find them online at prycd.com, on Twitter at prycd underscore in. And in this conversation, we cover a lot about the future of the land business, where it is now, how technology is integrating, how it's becoming very process and business oriented, a little bit of professionalization of the industry coming, how they think about the tools that they're building to build on top of that. And I think you'll find some interesting insights in their approach to how their land business operates as well. This was a wonderful wide ranging conversation.

Brandon Parker01:05And without further ado,

Ryan Doucet01:07welcome to the show. The 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. Legends of Land Show is

Brandon Parker01:27Max Edson and Ryan Doucette, welcome to the show, the founders of PRYCD, and total pleasure to have you guys here. Let's start with the core features of PRYCD. What What are the things that people use most often? Then what are the core features that people overlook, but are there and you think are really useful?

Ryan Doucet01:47Yep. Thanks for having us. Yeah. So I would say that we have probably three pillars of core features that we offer. The first one being our data research. So we compile comps from numerous listing sources. We put them all into a single database. We do metrics analytics for those. We create heat maps. We create, a whole page actually for you to kind of go and explore, different markets broken out by county. You can also break those down even further by acreage and sort of see, you know, what, what counties are doing well performance wise based on, you know, XYZ metric.

Ryan Doucet02:21We also break apart things like agent metrics from those comp data sets. And so you can look at, you know, what agents are doing what in certain counties. So that's sort of our main market research pillar. The next one is obviously our main one, which is our exporting data, right? So we integrate with First American Data Tree. You're able to pull property data from us. And then we merge that with our pricing analytics, obviously has the name, take that comp dataset for every property and we create pricing models of against that data. And then finally we have our due diligence, which is sort of our final stage of the investing process.

Ryan Doucet02:55That's going be primarily our comp reporting tool. So that's where you can go in and for any given property, say you have a prospective buyer or seller, you can go in and do a full breakdown of the property pricing, comp overview, nearby comp overview. We do historical pricing trends, property insights, such as topography, road access, analysis. We even do subdivision analysis. We can talk about that. But yeah, so those are kind of the three main core offerings that we have.

Brandon Parker03:24And you think people just roll in because the name's priced and think it's just all about comp reports? What do people use it for when they just come in and they, what's the most commonly used for? And then what would be the number one thing you think that people should leverage it for?

Ryan Doucet03:38Yeah. I think the common one is the export. I think people come in expecting almost a flat data source. I think that's sort of like the... When when you look at a lot of the the sites out there in the space, a lot of them are property data sources with, you know, some intriguing features. So they're looking at it as this is where I wanna get my property data from. The pricing portion is sort of our unique add on because we have that comp database. We have all the historical pricing data that we can create. And so we're sort of able to, on the fly, add in that pricing information for a given property.

Ryan Doucet04:13I think Overlooked is ironic. They're probably the CompreCourt tool, which has been one of our oldest features. I think we launched that 2021, early twenty twenty one. And we still see folks that just, you know, they come in, they ask us, it doesn't seem like you guys have an offering to do a single property analysis and maybe the comp report is not the best name or something, but yeah, it's definitely one that I think people don't realize that we do. And it's personally one of my favorite features just because it's such an in-depth analysis of a single property. There's so much we can do with it.

Ryan Doucet04:44Yeah. And our goal at Price is to really be an all in one acquisition tool. So you have your research where you can figure out where to target if you don't have that location

Max Edson04:51in mind already. You can obviously export the data with all the different filtering and formatting that you'd like, so you have a ready to use list. And then however you're trying to target those properties and get them out. And then the comp report really finalizes that by the due diligence on an individualized basis, so you really can make sure that it's a good property to move forward with and purchase. So that was our goal from day one to just make it really efficient, but still effective. And to basically, a space where competition is increasing, to be able to have the speed and accuracy to still look at data and act on that information, it goes a long way.

Brandon Parker05:28How do you see people using that most effectively? Do you see people using that most effectively on the front end, like sending out blind offers or

Max Edson05:37the comping specifically, sending out blind offers or maybe giving their acquisitions manager like a ballpark price they should be going on before they do their their first call? Or like, where do you see that most effectively fitting in with how accurate it is? Yeah, that's a great question. And so I can tell you from our personal experience, we do blind offers. So we send out letters with the prices and offer prices in there already, but we'll be the first ones to tell you that there's no right approach to do it. So people I know prefer to do the neutral letters.

Max Edson06:08Some people do the blind offers. And then they have the ranged offers too, right? Where they give a range of what that price is. And what the beauty of our platform is, it allows you to do either, you know, any one of those options, right? So we can give you the singular offer price to send out as many offers as you want in a list. But we also give you that ranged offer option too. So you can basically say, Hey, I want to basically select this option. We'll give you basically increments of 5% from zero to 100% of market value. And then you can choose if you want 2545% or any of those options to use to send out a ranged offer.

Max Edson06:45And then obviously, if you want just the neutral letters, you don't have to use the pricing in there, but you have that information when you start getting replies back. But I'd say downloading a list with us, sending it out however you prefer. And then once you start getting those leads back to then use the comp report tool to really focus and dial in on those properties, that seems to be a really good approach that we've found so far because you kind of want to start a little bigger, get the leads back, and then you can drill down to make sure that it's exactly what you were looking at before. And or if it's maybe it's not a good flip.

Max Edson07:19With our comp report, we can really kind of analyze and see maybe there's other options on the table for you. So if you can't get it at the lower price that makes sense, maybe you can get it at a higher price, but then you can subdivide that property up, which we provide you with the information to see where you can force appreciation on it. So that's the beauty of the comp report is that it allows you to take a secondary look at it, check, make sure that what we sent out first was good. Or if maybe they're pushing back on certain things, there's other options that you can still capitalize on.

Max Edson07:49So that was our goal is basically to start kind of a broader look when you send out the letters. And then with the COP report, you can focus in to really drill down those decisions. And then just maybe it's not just flipping, maybe it's the subdivider, maybe it's wholesale or some other option that you can view closer up in the comp report.

Brandon Parker08:10Yeah, we've had some people who will use the used price. We started using price because some of our clients were using price, then we looked at it and we're like, oh, that's actually so useful as far as, like, quickly pricing stuff, getting a a close ballpark. I think that what pops up in most people's minds is like, okay. We're algorithmically pricing land, which is... Seems like a hard thing to do. I know you can't necessarily give away the secret sauce as far as how you do it, but maybe what are the things that people should look out for that are going to skew the pricing?

Brandon Parker08:47What things do they catch and what are maybe the outliers that it doesn't catch where it's going to be like, okay, this is priced wrong basically. How do you tell people to think about that when they're looking at the reports?

Ryan Doucet08:57Yeah, so there's a couple of things I think we, we see common. The big one, or certainly one that early on ones is when we started doing our pricing, when we started our website, really, we did it holistically at a county level. So we didn't really have a, a drilled down pricing model. We just sort of did a county wide analysis. Say you wanted to price a five acre parcel. We would say, okay, from let's say three to eight ish acres, let's get all the comps and let's just do sort of a generalized model for that, which was fine sort of for the intent that we were going for when we first launched, which is sort of just ballpark an idea.

Ryan Doucet09:30Obviously, some counties are are pretty large and have a wide array of costs. So we then moved to city pricing and then from city pricing moved into sort of what, where it was now called our geo pricing, which is sort of what you would conceptually think as you have a single property, you find all the comps in the immediate vicinity, and then you're able to price that. And so that's the one we typically recommend. That's the default one in our platform now, although we still have the county and city pricing as an offering because those have custom available where you could come in and you could say, Hey, I'm already gonna set that price per acre.

Ryan Doucet10:01I just want through like those to be applied across my data list. But with the geo pricing model that you're looking for, I think that might trip you up. I think one of the big ones we've seen is when you get properties that are really close between rural and vacant areas where you have, say, I always use the example of right on the outstretch of Maricopa County within maybe say a five or 10 mile radius, might have, you know, fully built structure houses, industrialized area, commercial zone, everything.

Ryan Doucet10:32And then just a few miles to the east, have just the desert wasteland. And so when you're pricing that, when you're looking at it just from like a data or a numbers perspective, it's hard to really see that divide. And so sometimes you'll see the comps that you're getting with your property. You have some for 200,000 an acre and some for 5,000 an acre in a very short area. And so there's a challenge for us to kind of come up with that number for you, just because it's hard to know where your property falls into that spectrum. And so one of the metrics that we use pretty frequently is this idea of this coefficient of variation.

Ryan Doucet11:06So we're basically looking at a statistical measure of how far apart are the comps in this model. If I pull in 50 comps to do a mock to analyze your property and they are hugely dispersed. So like in that example, 200,000 an acre and $10,000 an acre, I'm going have a little less confidence in creating that model because I just don't know, or me, the price doesn't know where in the spectrum it lies. Conversely, if we have every comp within a 10 mile radius is at $20,000 an acre, we have a pretty high degree of confidence, you know, where your property is going to sit.

Ryan Doucet11:40So we're able to sort of do an analysis that way as part of our internal modeling.

Brandon Parker11:45Interesting.

Ryan Doucet11:46Is that called the Gini coefficient or something like that? Is that similar? I don't think so. The coefficient variation just sort of is a raw, non... So it kind of factors out acreage. Should we look at it just as a... At a at a price per acre level, it's just sort of normalized from zero to one essentially.

Brandon Parker12:04What do you think is gonna happen? Like what's next with AI as far as trying to solve problems like that? Do you see it being able to come in and start making those decisions? How long do you think that'll remain a problem to solve?

Ryan Doucet12:17Yeah, it's a good question. I think one of the benefits, and we started to look into this in our platform and our business is sort of like, not maybe AI from that problem, but from like, if we took a step back and looked at basic image recognition software for AI, one of the challenges we found is that a lot of times with vacant land, it's all, it's not always vacant. Right? And so you end up with this problem where you have data that is saying, Hey, it's worth this amount of money. It's a vacant lot. And you say, great. So I'm going to use that, whether it's as a con or as the property I'm trying to price.

Ryan Doucet12:47And you kind of go with what that information is, but then it turns out there's a barn or a house built on it. And obviously that completely changes the value of the property. I think with things like image recognition, where you have Google earth, who is constantly imaging everywhere across The US or really the world, but for what we're doing for The US, you can maybe make some more decisions and have some more information that is not readily available to you through say like a listing site, because you know, you're able to now add another layer of information to your pricing model, whether that be structures on the property, whether that be, hey, what kind of land, what kind of land is this?

Ryan Doucet13:20Is it farmland? Is it just dirt? Is it XYZ? You know, we've looked at it for things like road access too. Can you physically see a road moving through the property or around the property? So I think that kind of unlocks another layer of analysis when you're looking at, you know, pricing these properties and just analyzing these properties in general when they're especially in some of these remote locations that a lot of folks that are in this space are not physically going out to every property that they're they're looking to purchase.

Brandon Parker13:48Yeah. That's... There's so much there. Image recognition is quite some really... That's gonna be some big developments, and it'll be exciting to see. Because you could also, I guess, hypothetically be looking at stuff like the layout of the property or the trees that are on it. Are you already looking at the topography pretty thoroughly? And is that part of your pricing?

Ryan Doucet14:10We we do. We look at the topography and we analyze basically the the slope profile. So what we're mostly looking for, and this is one of the the features we have in our comp, both in our comp port, we have a a filter tool on our export where we can say, Hey, did you go into the export workflow? You can only return the properties that have at least 50% flat slope. So if I'm looking for a property that can build a home on, and I'm looking for between three and five acres, I want properties that had at least, you know, X amount of acres that are considered flat, where I can build a structure on. And so what we're able to do is look at all the contours of the property and then filter out all those extreme slopes where it's just constantly going in and out.

Max Edson14:47And with that, it's also you want to be cognizant with AI is so awesome, but it can also make mistakes in certain degrees, or maybe just the underlying data from a certain dataset can actually be more accurate than using it. Certain examples of that is so for image recognition, right? When you have road access information, if you have that underlying information available and it's it's already checked out, that may be accurate, more accurate than image recognition because there could be clouds, there could be trees, there could be something in the way that actually doesn't show you that there's a road right there, where the underlying data may just already have that information that you don't need to be able to see through anything and the data is just there.

Max Edson15:24Similar with topography, right? So you always have to be... It's cool, but you have to be careful with when to use it. Or if you do use it, understand that there could be like drawbacks because of that and maybe workarounds to kind of overcome those situations. But that's what's kind of a mix between the underlying data that can help plus adding AI on top of that is really kind of the layering that is starting to get pretty cool.

Brandon Parker15:49Yeah, that's really interesting. Talking about data, and you probably see so much information come through and so many data pulls and things like that. Are there any interesting patterns you'd see in the land business? Any interesting shifts in the market or what type of cool stuff you see just being

Max Edson16:08in the position you're in? Yeah. So I will say we don't really look at the specific lists that come through here. From the beginning, we wanted to make sure that privacy was really front and center with who was using our site. So we don't typically, or actually, no, we don't at all, as far as look at the data and analyze that and find trends. We want that stuff to be private based on what people are doing. But with that, I will say that one of the cool things with our site is we've seen people use it in so many different ways, just through support channels and reaching out and saying, Hey, how do I do this?

Max Edson16:43How do I do that? And whether it's a super finite approach where they're targeting certain little locations all over a certain area or they're just doing the shotgun approach and pulling certain counties or certain states even. It's been pretty amazing to see the different approaches about that and with different levels of success in all of those approaches too. So probably the one trend that is really most apparent is that there really isn't one right approach. And that's really a beautiful thing, right?

Max Edson17:13So often you see, you know, these land education gurus, the quote unquote, or whoever saying this is the only way to do it, or this is how you should get this done, how the best way to go about it. But I mean, from our standpoint, it's personal preference, what works best with your certain process flow. And then I'd say probably the number one thing over and above that is just being consistent, right? Consistently sending out mail or calling sellers or just getting the marketing out there, the material out there has really been probably the biggest driver of any success that we've seen.

Max Edson17:45So the approach can be any sort of way you want it, whether that's certain levels, blind offers, neutral letters, ranged offers. It's really just the consistent approach of sending out mail or calling or texting owners is really what's driving deals.

Brandon Parker18:01Yeah. Well, that's actually mirrors what I see a lot. One of the things I tell people is the first bottleneck for most people is just leads coming in consistently week after week without giant gaps. And if you get that going, then I mean, I've seen everything work. I've seen people that are pulling little like target markets, rich houses that are right on the coastline all across The US to just, want to mail everything in the state that's between one and five acres. It's like people do all kinds of stuff, and then they're all successful.

Brandon Parker18:35Or they're not all successful. That's not what I mean. I mean, there's some people who aren't successful too, but I've seen different methods, like such a wide range. So definitely true. It feels like it comes down to how the person operates, like what their style is. Some people like putting in a bunch of work on the front end, a bunch of data analytics on the front end. They want to get real narrow and just go after this real target, and then some people want to just shoot me a bunch of leads, and then I'm going to talk through them and sort them with my mouth, basically.

Brandon Parker19:05So it's like you have the both ends of the spectrum. So if you guys were building a land business, what would your type of style be?

Max Edson19:15So I'll say just because we do have a a land business that we use, I mean, it it was really the the primary reason why we built Presto is for our own business, and it just happened to push it public. But I will say from our standpoint, we like to reduce risk as much as possible. And the way we see that happening and the way we do it is we like to target a bunch of different counties at one time. And we like to target properties that are a little larger in acreage, anything 20 acres and up. And the reason why we go with that approach, and I do want preface, this is just our approach that we go with.

Max Edson19:47It's not the right one, the best one, just what we're comfortable with, is that if we can target multiple different counties, then if one county happens to strike out, we have other counties that can work, right? And then to that, if we target 20 acres up, now we're not just pigeonholed into one certain land use. So we don't just have to build on it if it's a half acre lot, right? So now we can build on it. We can subdivide it. We can use it for recreational use. So our goal is to basically minimize the risk and allow us to have as many different opportunities as possible, to sell the land to an end buyer.

Max Edson20:21And so that's the way we kind of go about it. Now we jump around and basically find metropolitan hubs that we find that are growing areas. And so we'll shoot for counties around there. But that's kind of our approach right now. And so we go about that way. And again, like I said, it's all about mitigating risk and that's kind of our approach at the moment at least.

Brandon Parker20:42Yeah. I love that way of thinking about it. That's why I love the land business in general is because people

Max Edson20:49have an angle and every time I hear an angle, I'm like, Oh, shit, that makes a lot of sense. I love it. Yeah. And then there's another one. Yeah. Yeah. And always on top of that, you know, you have your certain filtering for the list. So that can change based on any way you go about it. Right now, we're focusing on, because we have the road access filter, focusing on properties that have road access, and because we have the topography filter, making sure that the properties that we do, going back to the risk mitigation, right, we wanna make sure that there's areas to build in case that's the right option.

Max Edson21:21So making sure that there's access to properties and also that there's enough topography and buildable topography for the buyer to build on. And so again, I know some people actually make a living on properties that don't have road access or certain weird cliff properties. That's not our approach at the moment, but that's kind of how we go about it. And then obviously, if you're sending mail and then following up with text messages or cold calling, As many different touches as you can get on the potential seller, the more the merrier.

Brandon Parker21:52And so do you guys send out blind offers or range offers or neutral letters or what do you... Right now we're sending out blind offers.

Max Edson22:00From our standpoint, we like to go in there with the owner understanding exactly where we're kind of our standpoint, right? Just from an expectation management. Again, just because we don't want as much back and forth as someone that may like to talk with the owners and negotiate a little bit more. So we like to add those blind offers in there to get kind of our starting point. And then from there, we can negotiate up or down accordingly, obviously, but that's kind of been our approach right now.

Brandon Parker22:27And so you're using priced, obviously, and you're pricing an entire dataset at once, sending out the mailer, getting responses, and then I don't know if I want to call it retrading, but how often are you going with the price that you offered versus doing underwriting and then coming in with an exact number? What's that look like? Yeah, no, that's a great question too. I will say the properties that we buy

Max Edson22:51are pretty close to what we have as the suggested market price. But yeah, you're right with the approach. We'll we'll... Again, we we built this site for our own specific use, and that was basically the take, you know, the information and our control out of it. So we wanted our algorithm basically to create the prices for us. And so that's exactly what we do. We basically go through the search filtering process just like everyone else. We have our own account and we go through that, pick our areas, select geo pricing for us, choose our offer price, go through the rest of the filtering, and download our list.

Max Edson23:27And then we send that out immediately afterwards. And so that was really, you know, the core reason why we do it. So we use it as such with that. And then when we get those offer prices or those leads back, then we go through the comp report and verify, did our price make sense? Is it a little off? And I, again, like I was saying, pretty much it, the properties that we buy are very close to what our suggested market prices are. Where we do see differences, if kind of like what Ryan mentioned earlier, if there's some sort of different topography change, maybe it's right next to a lake.

Max Edson24:00Certain characteristics that are going to alter it a little bit. But with that being said, we do choose counties. We do choose areas with the coefficient of variation a little lower. So they should... The comps should mirror what our prices are going for and the land should kind of make sense what our valuations are showing. So we go with that.

Brandon Parker24:22There's like a sliding scale that I picture in my mind because I'm an econ major, so I've always got like a graph of things in my head. But I think one of them Max, were you an econ major also? I was. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, you know, they got the graphs in your heads. Oh, yeah. But I have this, like, scale of, you know, as pricing be cut... So the blind offers is the most expensive, but it's the most targeted. You're gonna get a higher conversion rate, higher cost per lead, and that scaling up to text being on the other end where it's the most lowest conversion rate, but the cheapest contact per lead.

Brandon Parker24:55And then the cold calling following a little bit below text neutral offers below that, etcetera. I'm having this thought of like, what if you were to take the blind offer model and apply it to, and I guess people do this texting or even cold calling. Have you seen people do that with cold calling, specifically calling and making an offer on thousands of properties verbally instead of in the mail? We have. We've seen that or heard of people doing that with blind offers with our

Max Edson25:23price points and then ranged offers as well. And just to give them just a little bit of expectation of what that price is. Now, I don't know the results of that, how how that's worked out or anything, but it should be probably pretty similar to sending direct mail as well. I mean, obviously the the conversion rates may be different, like you mentioned, but giving them a price point that may make sense to them or roughly in the ballpark of what they're thinking, may help them push them to selling. So it's just another strategy to use.

Max Edson25:54Right? It's been pretty dominant in just saying, Hey, are you looking to sell your land? I think early on, but I've seen this more and more of a trend where they're going to like the blind offers, the ranged offers, just trying different things to see if that kind of moves the needle on some of these sellers. And yeah, we've seen some people say to you, but I don't know the full results of it yet.

Brandon Parker26:15I might have to test that. We have like... So we go back and forth on, okay, we bring in all these leads from cold calling, and then how do we qualify them from, okay, tire kicker to maybe they're worth talking to. And I've been doing that with motivation, trying to have our acquisition manager, like talk to them, not our acquisition manager for our people, but to talk to them and say, Hey, why are you selling this property? Asking some leading questions or some open ended questions to figure out if they have some sort of motivation. If they moved out of state or something, okay, they got a motivation, that's a qualified lead, let's follow-up with them more.

Brandon Parker26:50But there's an angle where we use priced. We just price thousands of properties. And then even on the cold call, we're just like, hey, you are interested in selling your property. We might be in about this range. Do you want to talk to someone about it? And maybe just like starting that process really early, almost like a blind offer in a letter. It could be interesting. I might have to test that.

Ryan Doucet27:13And then some people will do neutral offers, but still price the list so that when they get those leads back, they have like a generalized starting point. So they'd say like, know, where are you thinking? And they already have like that range of information so that they're not doing like due diligence on the fly based on what the owner might be saying, but they don't necessarily tell the owner upfront, Hey, this is what we're thinking. It's sort of whether that's a good negotiation tactic or not. They try to maintain that their price range that they're thinking and use our data as sort of that jumping off point.

Brandon Parker27:41Yeah. I heard a line from AJ Sharma that I like. He said, I've seen land investors in your area offering this. It's like passing the buck. Like, I heard someone else is offering this. What do you think? So like that tactic.

Max Edson27:53Yeah. So always new tactics out there. They're always interesting to see. Yeah. It's... I mean, most of this is all about marketing. So coming up with new novel marketing ideas is half the battle.

Brandon Parker28:04Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. I saw the land lawyer post something about that, we're a marketing agency basically. And what that means is that we almost have to be consistently shifting our approach. It's always gotta be tweaking and improving and staying a little bit ahead of what's going on because that's what it is. Guess it's basically a marketing competition. You guys are doing interesting stuff because you got a land business and priced, which is a SaaS company, basically. How do you direct that?

Brandon Parker28:39How much time do spend you on each, and, like, what's a day look like for you two? It's another good question. So

Max Edson28:44really right now, you know, Ryan's gonna be along the the coding side, I'll do a lot of the front end facing stuff in management. But really, how... We just split it out depending on where we have flows in the business as far as our price and everything. And so we'll send out cyclical email or cyclical letters as far as our our land business goes. And so we split up our time pretty much. We're all focused a lot more on the front end of the land business. Ryan focuses a lot on price. And then we kind of, as we start getting leads back, you know, we'll we'll kinda go over them together to figure out which properties are right, what we can do with these properties, and then obviously help out on price as well when I'm not busy with the acquisition stuff.

Max Edson29:27So we just kind of take it really one day at a time and, you know, and we have some sort of, or fell into this, this kind of rhythm that's worked out so far with everything. The good thing about Christ is that a lot of it is self usage, right? So the user can go through the whole platform without needing to touch base with us or anything, right? We give them all the tools, all the information to be able to research, download the list and do the comp reports on their own. And a lot of them take that and use that autonomously.

Max Edson29:58So it's really a pretty smooth engine. It goes pretty autonomously right now. And so with that, we can really focus a lot with land business, figuring out certain things, again, whether it's flipping, subdividing, or investing in other projects.

Ryan Doucet30:12Yeah, I think one of the findings is we built what we call Price Now, but at the end, the underlying engine to support our land business, we were like, we wanna make this an automated system. We wanna scale it up. And when it became public, we were like, oh, this is really cool. And then we didn't do any land flipping for probably like two years because we were trying to keep up with the demand of price, you know, add features, handle the poor, all the stuff that kind of goes around building a SaaS service or a SaaS website. And then we finally got to a stable coin, would say $20.22 ish, you know, a couple of years after the launch.

Ryan Doucet30:43Thought, okay, I think everything has kind of matured a little bit. Now we can actually go back and use it for its intended purpose, which is for our own land flipping business. But there was definitely a long stretch where we didn't have the time to do both because we were trying to keep up with demand that Price was when was first launching.

Brandon Parker31:02Well, congrats getting there. That's a nice little win for you guys. I know that never really

Max Edson31:07stop on building and doing all that, but yeah, it's nice to look back on that and see I that will say at that same time too, we we both were in the Air Force at that time. So it was pretty hectic trying to do basically our full time Air Force jobs and then running price and then also a land flipping business at the same time. But we got through it now, and so it's been a fun ride.

Brandon Parker31:29Yeah. You guys are legends. I know. You went to the, Air Force Academy. You were out of the academy office, obviously. Right? You're, like, talking about finishing up your

Max Edson31:37Yes. Yeah. We were out of the academy at times, so we were in offices in the Air Force when What'd we started

Ryan Doucet31:43you guys do?

Max Edson31:44So I did acquisitions, which is essentially program management. So I worked on GPS satellite systems.

Ryan Doucet31:50Yeah. And I I did cyber, so I I was just doing software engineering basically. So same thing, different location.

Brandon Parker31:56That's cool. You know, there's actually a decent amount of military people in the LEN business. Why do think that is?

Ryan Doucet32:05Yeah, I think it's probably because it's pretty straightforward, if you want call it a side hustle or side business, right? There is a little bit of a capital requirement to get involved, but it's a somewhat easy learning curve to understand the model. And then you can sort of do it asynchronously, right? Like I mentioned earlier, it doesn't require you necessarily to be in the location where you're purchasing the land. If you set up the correct funnel, it doesn't necessarily require you to take every lead. So you can kind of say you have a nine to five job on the military, you can kind of do that throughout the day and then come home and process your leads and care of business that way.

Ryan Doucet32:38I think, you know, given the high upside that there is in the land business, a lot of military folks, you aren't making massive salaries like you would maybe in the normal workforce, but want to look at it as a way to, you know, their, their annual

Max Edson32:49income. So it's probably a good driver there. Probably another thing too, is that, I mean, it takes a lot of discipline to just run any business as a whole, whether it's a side hustle side hustle or not. And so the military obviously teaches you to have really good discipline in anything you do. And then just all process flow, right? So in the military, there's tons of processes in place. So creating those processes in this business is really important as well. And then just leading teams. So I know some people and sole person in their whole team, but then other people have large, like, VA teams that go along with it.

Max Edson33:24And so being able to usually lead a team in the military translates really well to leading a team in a company or any other approach. And so having those three is probably just... Those are really good characteristics to have in anything you do, and specifically this land business, because you need all three of them to have success.

Brandon Parker33:46Yeah, great call. That definitely resonated. I think processes, discipline, and team. I mean, yeah, there it is. So probably... There's probably military people end up doing a lot of entrepreneurship in general, not just and it sounds like. I mean, just guessing, but cool. And speaking of teams, you guys both played hockey? We did. Yes. Yes. Did he play together? Was that in the Air Force Academy? Was that in in

Ryan Doucet34:10Canada? What... What's up? What's all that? We played together. So funny enough, so Max and I are both in California, and we're the same age. So we never played on the same team except at the Air Force Academy, honestly, but we kind of had the same story or journey to get there. In hockey, California, we both played juniors in random towns in the middle Of The US. And then we both ended up at the at the academy. We actually never, you know, his match was match was hurt when we when I got the academy. So the... We actually never had to play... Got a chance to play together, but it's just kind of funny when we tell our our story.

Ryan Doucet34:41We've been out of a very similar, and we, we even got out of the military in the exact same day. Very unthinkable.

Max Edson34:47We both joined. We're both at the academy graduate academy same day and got out on the same day. So, it's been a fun ride together. Yeah. Another unique thing is that we've actually never been in the same place since this since the beginning either. So once you graduate from the academy, Ryan went hopping from base to base, and I went hopping to base to base, and we're... We've still never really been in the same city for more than just meeting up or anything. So I don't think we've even been in the same time zone. It's been, yeah, I mean, time I've moved, Matt has moved and we've like crisscrossed across The U S yeah. So it's been funny being able to honestly create a couple businesses without really being together the whole time either.

Max Edson35:23So it's been amazing what the digital era can provide nowadays with everything. And obviously COVID's helped out with that a little bit. But what you can do without being in the same location and being remote, it's been amazing.

Brandon Parker35:38Yeah. The the whole global talent and being able to build with all these tools and work online. I mean, working from a computer in your your office or house. There's a lot there. I wonder where do you see the land business going? Like, what do you think big picture, like five years for the land business? What do you think the trends end up being, and who do you think becomes winners and losers as things develop with all the technology and asynchronous work?

Max Edson36:07Yeah. You know, you never know what's gonna happen in the future, but I definitely see the space growing first and foremost. It just seems to be more apparent to those, especially as just normal, when it's real estate housing starts to just get more and more saturated. People are looking for other types of real estate plays to make in land flipping and developing seems to be one of those. And so as this space gets to... Or starts to be more mature with all the platforms and softwares coming out, you're gonna see more players in this space.

Max Edson36:38And with that, more competition. You're gonna probably need to find new ways to market or really hone in on your specific approach and process. Right? So I don't think the new thing always wins. I think just really working on your specific process and seeing what works for you and maybe adapting within that specific niche is going to be what helps the most. It's always funny. You see this progression happen in the land space all the time where you start in lane flipping and then you start to do that for a little bit and you want to figure out what else to do and then people move to subdividing and then they potentially move to more, you know, maybe more unique some divides and then more developing, and maybe they wanna put a house on it.

Max Edson37:21And it's always kind of a... It seems to, like, continuously add on itself when maybe just strictly land flipping is, is the thing to do as people start to move away from that. That could be the thing that is actually the, the best thing to do at the time. So you always see like something that starts over. And so I, I think with that in mind, just really honing on, your specific niche and what you think works best for you. Again, picking up new potential technologies that helps or aids in that process and then growing and potentially if you can't do one certain thing, then you always had an option.

Max Edson37:58But I I don't think doing all of it is really going to be where that helps. And and honestly, that may be the thing that hurts the most is not really picking your specific niche within the land niche. And so when you have too wide of a spread, sometimes you're spread too thin and you can't really hone in and perfect what makes things right.

Brandon Parker38:20Yeah, that's intuitive. It's almost like the archetype of a land investor leads to wanting or needing to change and develop. It's like, I've seen that same thing too. It's like, okay, now on to subdivides. Now we're gonna start doing something really unique with subdivides. And then, yeah, I wonder how often they circle back and just be like, I should just flip flip land again.

Ryan Doucet38:42But just being there is hard. And like, I think the data is improving too, you know, the quality of the day, the amount of information you're able to, to glean from, you know, some of these data sources. Like when we first started, you know, the first couple of years, I remember people talk about whether or not a property had road access as a huge qualifier for, you know, whether they were a good lead or not. And the only ways you could figure that out was to manually do that. You know, there was, there was maybe a service or two that would take your list and they would manually go in and analyze it and then they'd give it back to you, you know, a couple of days later.

Ryan Doucet39:13And that was sort of the standard. And now it seems, you know, obviously we have a filter for it. I know there's a couple of other services that are building filters and and insights for it. And it seems like now that's more commonplace, right? And so as the data gets better and as folks are sort of in this space trying to figure out how to get ahead and get more and more information about the properties they're purchasing, I think the data for those properties is going become more robust and then that's just going to lead to unlock more insights and more opportunity to whether it's honing in a specific list or whether it's actually understanding a property or purchasing or selling and sort of enhancing the entire industry.

Brandon Parker39:51You guys may actually be the perfect people to ask this question too. How much land is out there that's available to flip? How much room to run is there in the land industry? What are your thoughts on land being Blue Ocean versus it starting to get crowded?

Max Edson40:09I don't think that it's gonna be... It's getting crowded. I mean, there's definitely more competition in this space. I don't know the exact number of parcels, off the top of my head. I know there's, like, 95 or 97,000,000 parcels in total, something roughly like that in The United States, but I don't know how much of that is just land. I I will say that, I mean, there... There's just so much land out there. It really just depends on the strategy that that you're you're going for. Right? And what people are targeting too. So although there's that many parcels out there, it's possible that only 50% of them or some percentage is really only being targeted, right?

Max Edson40:44And so I always look at it as there's opportunities in anything out there. And whether technology presents itself or going somewhere else, there's opportunities out there depending on what's going on. And so just really kind of understanding what's out there, how you can position yourself in a way, whether it's flipping, subdividing, or certain areas and understanding a certain area, that's really going to be the thing that gives you success. So I'm a big proponent. Like, there's always research metrics out there that may tell you the best place, quote unquote, whether it's data specific driven areas to target.

Max Edson41:21But I'm pretty confident that no matter where you go, there's always opportunities out there. It's really just understanding that market and then, you know, going forward as such as as you know that you could do it. And maybe it's not a flipping area. Maybe it's a subdivided area. Maybe it's something else. But as long as you understand the market, I think there's always an opportunity that presents itself. And so just knowing that instead of taking a blanket approach maybe, help you in those certain scenarios, I guess.

Brandon Parker41:53Yeah. Just be good at what you're doing, and there's always room for making money. So I think that's decent take there. There seems to be 10 states where everyone just flips land. What do you think about states that aren't in there and the opportunity possibly in other places?

Max Edson42:13Yeah. And it just depends. So, like, I'm I'm sure... I mean, like, Arizona is obviously up there, Florida, Texas. It's lot of the... Usually the Sunbelt warmer states where South, you know, just the Southern states in general. But I mean, there's a lot of other places that are good or, like I said, present opportunity. And so I guess as an example, there's a lot of people that don't like to do Northern states because half the time it's snow. And then with that, it's harder to either show the property or take pictures of the property or get to the property.

Max Edson42:45And so people shy away from that. And so that itself presents an opportunity to go to those states and potentially pick up ones that maybe they're not getting as many offers to or getting offers at all. And so, it could take longer, or if you have the right approach, it may take the same time. But certain things like that are ways you can go about strategies and kind of go away from what maybe the mainstream herd is doing, right? So that's one thing. Or if you have a specific niche, you're understanding the market and maybe that there's certain places that have, whether it's oil or minerals, you know, there's a lot of states that are rich in that stuff.

Max Edson43:22And so that could help you buy land and sell land and make a profit on it. So it just... It really depends on the area. But with that, again, it's not... I don't... I won't say that there's there's any states off limits. I'm, again, like I said, I'm a proponent of you can make, you know, profit and make a living in in any state. It just depends on the strategy that you use and how well you you know that market.

Brandon Parker43:45I think that you do You probably have real estate wholesalers on your site also. Is that right? Yeah, we have wholesalers, investors, realtors, you name it. Do you see anything that big real estate wholesalers are doing that's different from land investors or like any key differences in maybe a more professionalized industry?

Max Edson44:08Usually the wholesalers have a very targeted approach. They usually have an idea in mind of who their end buyer is, which is whether it could be a developer, you know, a builder, just an individual builder, or just a single person that said, hey, I want, you know, a property in this area. So they usually have a very defined approach. Now that defined approach can be in multiple different places at the same time, but that's usually how we see it. With land investing, you kind of get that time, but then you also get larger places that people are targeting as well.

Max Edson44:39So that's probably one of the main differences that we see. Other than that, nothing too crazy. Sometimes they will have higher offer prices in there just because they're wholesale. They don't need the massive profit margin that you would if you're flipping it. So whether that has its own challenges against land flippers in the same area, It's hard to say, but I mean, that's something that you're up against in really anywhere that you try to go to though. So it's just a matter of what works, what doesn't, and understanding who's kind of in that same area targeting.

Brandon Parker45:14Yeah. Cool. So we talked a lot about what PRYCD offers, how it kind of starts with the full acquisitions to the due diligence at the end. Is there any things that you want to add in you feel like we glossed over? Anything you want to go back and touch on a little bit more as we start to get towards the end here? Yeah,

Ryan Doucet45:35think that a couple of things that we have that might be on the tail end of our X4 flow, which might not be as readily apparent, we kind of talked about them, just kind of revisited them as our road access features are so you can sort of drill down the properties that have road access, because for a lot of use cases, physical access to the property is going to be paramount. So being able to analyze, get those access points and sort of sweep the properties that don't have those to the side, at least for the time being is important. Obviously Max has talked about the topography feature, making sure they, if I'm any kind of developer or have any desire to do any kind of development, you know, making sure that the property has some flat surface that I can I can build on is gonna be important in conjunction with that road access?

Ryan Doucet46:18So we've talked about the text message and cold calling campaigns. Like, you know, one of the nice features we have is just a checkbox that says, hey, if I wanna pull this property data and do all the pricing, we can also skip trace that data for you so that you can have the owner emails, the owner phone numbers that you can then run that campaign on. And that's all sort of done, you know, automatically in the backend. So you don't have to take it to another service to then add that on. It's all sort of done in house for us. Some of those end state features that we have are maybe like when you're looking at it from the front aren't quite as obvious. We talk about exporting data.

Ryan Doucet46:48We always talk about the property data list. Some of those other insights are available there at the end.

Brandon Parker46:55Nice. And what's next on your roadmap? Like, what are the things you're working on and thinking about that we could see in the next quarter or two?

Ryan Doucet47:03Yeah. Always trying to find more insights. I think right now we're looking for more ways to sort of break down that land. When I mentioned road access, talking about, we have septic, we have flood zone, we have, you know, we just add our risk to our comp recording points of interest. So you can sort of look at where the nearest grocery store, where the nearest landmarks, wherever that may be, of get a feel for the area without actually physically seeing it. We actually have talked a lot about, I've been doing a lot of API stuff for our services, so it's sort of branching out into sort of having more programmatic approach to pulling data so that talking about automating this process and getting a more scale up business, that programmatic approach might lend itself to that.

Ryan Doucet47:43And then we kind of touched on it earlier, but this is sort of the long term roadmap is having that image recognition concept where for us, what we want to do is be able to confidently look at a parcel and know every characteristic about it, right? And we want to know every little detail because every piece of information we have allows us to not just price it better, but also provide that to the end user without them having to go source it from maybe reading the D, you're calling the county, or XYZ to figure out where is this, where is that? Utilities is a huge one that we've talked about.

Ryan Doucet48:15We're working on trying to get a national utility database, although that's proving to be harder than it sounds. But understanding how close is my parcel to the nearest city waterline would be a huge win to understand what kind of costs would go into building. So things like that are sort of what we're looking for. So it's really just finding those new data sources and then sort of plugging them into or creating that data source if we have to.

Brandon Parker48:43Yeah. And I guess you hear a lot feedback from clients on price, and then you have your own land business and you're just taking ideas and implementing them as fast as possible. I liked your roadmap on your website, seeing all the stuff that you've built over the years as a cool visualization.

Ryan Doucet48:58It's Yeah. And we always tell folks that use us to give us that feedback. Price was built on the feedback of our users. One of the lessons Max and I had to learn the hard way in our entrepreneurship was don't just build things for yourself only, and because you might not be the smartest person in the room or in the space. And so when we launched Price, obviously we had concepts in mind of what we wanted for our land business, but every time we got feedback from a customer saying, Hey, it'd be really great if you could do this, or I'm not able to do this, I really want to do that.

Ryan Doucet49:30We took that internally and said, okay, how can we provide that? Because if someone's asking for it, I'm sure there's multiple other people that would benefit from that kind of feature. So I would say 80 to 90 of the features available on Crysta, whether it's filters or otherwise are sourced from feedback from customers.

Max Edson49:46And we do it quickly.

Ryan Doucet49:49We do it quickly or try to.

Brandon Parker49:51Yeah. That's fantastic. Any parting thoughts for the Legends of Land listeners here?

Max Edson49:58No, just thanks for having us. I think just in summary, our goal is to really have price being all in one acquisition tool. So the the research, the exporting data for lead generation and due diligence, we want that all in one place so you don't have multiple different subscriptions or need to go to multiple different sites to do the same thing. So that's our goal. Like Ryan said, we love feedback, how we can improve on that and really make it truly an all in one service. So that's what we're trying to do moving forward. So we appreciate you having us on.

Brandon Parker50:27Yeah. Absolutely. Well, pleasure to talk to you both. Max, Ryan, you guys are awesome. Until next time, my friends. See you later. The legends of land show.