Introduction:

“So I offered her 7000, and she was happy about that. I sold it for 45,000. That was an email. And right away I realized it was an opportunity in email, because emails is free. Like, you don't have to pay anybody, just an email.”

That's Meir Shemtov, a land investor who is absolutely crushing it in the land business right now. He has a team of 14 people and he does 10 to 15 deals per month. How does he do it?

“I have this radical idea that bills are paid with dollars and not with percentages. We make money when there's like 20 to 30 grand on the deal.”

In this episode, you'll learn Meir's framework for when and why he can make higher offers than anyone else.

“Why I think we get a lot of the deals that other investors don't is because [beep].”

You'll also learn how Meir uses email to find land deals all over the country, including his four tricks of email marketing.

“You want to have a domain that isn't your actual domain, and you also want to use multiple. Instead of putting an unsubscribe button at the end of your email, you should write [beep].”

You'll also learn how you can take the same $20,000 and instead of doubling your money, you can 10x your money without any additional risk.

“Buy a property for 20 grand and flip it for 40. Sound advice, but how about buy a property for a million, put 20 down, the same 20 grand that you have, and then flip that for 1.5. Now instead of making 20,000 now, you just made $500,000 with your 20 grand!”

And an unexpected twist that you probably won't expect.

How effective is this? Like, is it worthwhile to do this? The answer to that is we're about to dive into all of that and much more right now.

Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 170. And today, we're talking with Meir Shemtov. So, born and raised in Uruguay, Meir moved to the U.S. at 13 years old.

He started his first ecommerce business at 23 and became a partner in a creative retail company and then sold it to WeWork at 25 years old. And then, he launched a co-living startup and then exited that in 2020. And then he launched LotofLand Inc. shortly after that and got into the land business. And Meir has about nine people on his team and he does a lot of double closings and assignments, about ten contracts per month.

And he is passionate about charity and mindfulness. And he turns off all devices for 25 hours per week with no TV or social media at home. And he lives on a farm. And there's a lot of unique things about Meir that we're going to talk about. The way his business works, the volume that he's doing, the sizes of the assignments in, the double closings that he's doing. It's pretty cool stuff. So I think this is going to be a great one.

Meir, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Meir: Thank you, Seth, so much. Thanks for having me, really. This podcast and this community are probably responsible for a lot of my growth, personal growth also, but mainly in the business. I definitely wouldn't have been here without you, without the content that you put out. And I just wanted to say thank you.

And when I started out, it was more about taking as much information as I possibly can. And I think I'm at a point now where I would like to share some of the different tips and tricks with everybody else. So, so excited to be here. I'm so grateful to be in this position and to be here with you guys.

Seth: That's awesome, man. I appreciate the kind words. And, yeah, I'm really glad you decided to do this with us. Looking forward to it.

Meir: Yeah. And shout out to Ajay. Ajay's been good friend, also on the land space, and thanks for the intro as well, and always connecting me with the right people. So thanks, Ajay.

Ajay: I appreciate it, man. I do my best, but you're an easy person to connect with.

Meir: Thanks, man.

Seth: How did you guys get connected, the two of you?

Meir: So I think we first met... So there are some episodes from the REtipster podcast that I've listened to multiple times. Doug Smith's episode was amazing. The episode with Callan Faulkner was really good.

And through Callan, we kind of met with Ajay, and then we flew to Texas. We had a little meetup there, and then Ajay introduced me to a few other, you know, the land community is so amazing. You get to know everyone. Everyone's so giving. Everyone's always sharing resources, and it's not that big. So it's just so much fun to have this community to be a part of, and that's really special.

Seth: Yeah. That is a striking thing about the small size of the land community is that everybody does kind of know each other. Like, if you're at all vocal anywhere about anything, there's a good chance that you're connected to somebody else through at least one or two degrees of separation. So it's kind of cool.

Meir: Yeah.

Seth: So let's start from the very beginning. So when did you first hear about land investing, and what made you decide to give it a shot?

Meir: It's a pretty unique story. A little unconventional, like everything else about me.

So we started, like you mentioned, co-living. That was kind of my foray into real estate. Margins were very thin. The concept was super cool, but it was very much a city, New York, kind of thing. And the time came that we just didn't like living in New York, in the city.

So we moved to the West Coast, and I'm very passionate about hospitality. I love real estate also. Real estate has really good hospitality. Real estate, like short-term rentals, they have really good margins. It's also fun. It's not the typical landlord tenant kind of thing.

So in California, I started looking for land to build a lot of short-term rentals and create, like, an experience. And very quickly, I realized that California is not the place to get permits to do things. It's just a little bit difficult to get anything done, especially in 2020. Things were just closed, and it was just so hard.

And incidentally, I had a brother, my brother Levi, he was buying and selling land. He was just getting started. I think he saw it from his friend was doing it or something. And I'm like, hey, you know how to send mailers, right? He's like, yeah. I’m like, why don't you show me how to send mailers? Because I want to just start buying land to do this thing. So he's like, sure, let's get on the zoom. And he showed me how to do it. And then he's like, I got one request for you. I'm like, yeah, what? He's like, just drop your Airbnb thing and start flipping.

I was like, why? He's like, what do you mean? Because it's so much easier. It's so much fun. The margins are there. You don't need permits. It's just like, why don't you just, let's do one together. And really, credit goes to him. He guided me through it. He was super instrumental at the beginning.

And then I started doing a little bit more reading, more watching, more listening to everything. And I actually remember because he didn't know about the REtipster community. He just kind of started through his friend. And then one day he sends me a link to your website or to your podcast, and he's like, oh, my God, I think I found the OG. His brain was like, oh, my God, I found the guy.

And ever since then, I obviously started listening to every episode, and it was uphill from there. And then slowly, gradually, we started building up the team, and then, thank God, where we are today.

Seth: So when was that, like, what year did this all start for you?

Meir: That was, I think, 2021.

Seth: What did your first year look like? Did you just start sending out mail like everybody else does, or, I guess, what was your volume that first year? Your typical deal size? And when did things start changing for you? Because I know you do things a bit differently than the average course teaches how to do this stuff.

Meir: I would say most courses say to send mail, and I think it's for a good reason. If you're new and you don't have a team, texting is very difficult, and mail is just kind of especially blind offers. They kind of qualify the sellers for you, so there's a lot less work.

So I started with mailers. I started in Joshua Tree, which is kind of where I wanted to do these hospitality retreats. And I was living in LA, so it wasn't so far. And I speak Spanish, my first language, actually. So a lot of the phone calls that were coming in were Spanish-speaking people, and a lot of them lived in LA, so it was just answering the phones I sent out. I don't remember how much mail, but I would go to people's houses to meet with them.

So this one guy was like, I don't know who you are. And it was a good deal. There was like $20,000 profit. So I was like, okay, I know where you live. Why don't we just meet? All this is in Spanish. And he's like, I'm not signing any purchase agreement. I'll just sign the deed. This is when I was at his house, and I didn't know the difference between a purchase agreement and a deed. I'm like, okay, I just need to FaceTime my partner real quick. I just called my brother and, hey, Levi, what should we do here?

So it was very much like that, the first few deals. And then right away, I realized it was an opportunity in email, because I guess I'm a millennial. And this whole concept of sending letters was weird. So I started sending emails from the skip trace that I would get. And they got also in California, and they got this woman whose grandparents left them a parcel. She knew it was worth a lot, but she said, every land investor calls me, they know that it has to go through probate, which means that my grandparents died without a will or without putting it in my name. And they all just leave. And I really want to monetize this property.

So I offered her $7,000 and she was happy about that. And I paid for all the legal fees. I sold it for $45,000. And that was an email. It was straight-up email. This is before I got fancy with emails. This is literally mail merge emails. I was jeopardizing my personal email. This is stupid rookie mistakes. But it worked.

And I started doing a lot of these very time-intensive, personalized deals with people and I really learned the ins-and-out of the business that way. And that's how slowly I started scaling. First brought someone to help me in general, then brought in a texter, then another one, then a comp person, then a data person.

We could talk about the team later, but that was kind of my early beginnings was very deal by deal. I still miss that. Talking to sellers and negotiating, but deal by deal, paying attention to what their needs are, bringing value to them, and then learning the process and scaling from there.

Seth: We got to get into this email stuff because you're right, this is not something that I hear often. I mean, I've heard it a handful of times, but this is definitely not the norm.

Of the dozens of questions I can think of, the first one would be like, what software are you using? What are you saying in your email? What kind of response rate do you get? Just tell us how that works.

Meir: Yeah. Okay, so if I were to break down my whole business into four pillars, the first pillar will be marketing channels. The second one would be markets. Which markets do I go to? The third one would be employees, and then the fourth one would be inventory.

Okay, now each one of those pillars have metrics tied to them. So how well is this particular channel performing? How well is this market? How well is this employee performing? And then the inventory that we have, how many views, how many saves, how many offers.

So everything has a number and everything is trackable. So right now let's talk about acquisition channels. Well, let's say we skip trace 130,000 people per month. Okay, so we start with texting and we text everybody. Then we take the people who never replied and we send them emails, we send them ringless voicemails, we send them mailers, and we also cold call.

Now, cold calling is still not fully our strength because the other four that we do, it's always range offers. So when we're texting somebody and they're like, oh, well, how much you want to pay for my property? Everybody wants to know how much you're going to pay. We throw them a range offer and if they say yes, then we take the time to comp it and we take the time to qualify them further.

Ajay: And how big is your range?

Meir: The range? We usually tell them like let's say $2,500 to $3,500 an acre because we think it's worth around from 45 to 65. So it's kind of just to keep the conversation going because everybody wants to know the number and we don't have time to give everybody a number. So we give them like a low ball range. And if they say, sorry, I want whatever, then it's not a good deal. And if they're cool with it, then we look into it further.

We do the same thing with email. We do the same thing with mailers. And with mailers, we do more of a blind offer. And if the property is too expensive, like if we're dealing with like a million-dollar property, we'll just give them a range. So also it's very hard to comp and to send blind offers for properties that are 100 acres plus at volume. So for those we just do a range. We just want to get on the phone with people. But anything smaller than 100 acres, we'll send a blind offer.

And RVMs is very similar where we don't give a range at the voicemail, but it's a voicemail.

The problem with cold call is that you're calling a guy, and he's at Whole Foods, and he's getting a phone call from you. He's not down to start discussing numbers with you. A text or voicemail, an email or letter, you send the piece and then they have time to think for a second and then they get back to you. But a phone call is very instant and very intruding, so we haven't been able to do range offers on a cold call. The problem with that is that it has generated tremendous amount of leads that aren't very qualified. They're just people who said, yes, I want to sell my property. So then we have to still perfect that.

So in this business, my role as a CEO is optimize scale. Optimize the process, optimize the four pillars of the business the way I see them, and then scale. More texting, more channels, more markets, more employees. But to your point, before I tend to scale and to do things before optimizing. And that's kind of my blind spot where I'm very eager to hire more people and scale and do TV ads or whatever without first optimizing everything else that we do have going on.

And to answer your question specifically about email, since I know that was something that was interesting to you, I started doing simple mail merge. Mail merge is, for those that don't know is you have a spreadsheet, let's say Google Sheet of let's say a thousand emails and then there's a Google Chrome add-on called mail merge. There's thousands of them and you create an email, simple email, say “Hey, your name came up because we're buying property in your county and let me know if you're interested in selling your land.” Very simple. And then it kind of sends like 50 a day or something, I think. I didn't have money then to pay for the pro account or something, so I was literally going out of my personal inbox and that's like highly risky.

Let's just say what's right about that was that I took action. And what was wrong about that is that I almost jeopardized my entire email and server and website because obviously too many people report spam and then everything just goes into spam. And then buyers are trying to get a hold of you, title, selling you, sending you like closing documents. Everything's just going, it's just a terrible idea.

So what you should do is a few things. So there's a lot of email platforms out there. We use Mailshake but there's a bunch. And what you do is you first want to qualify all the email addresses. So there's a lot of tools out there. There's one called DeBounce, DeBounce.io. There's so many of them that basically you pay like very little. But you upload your laundry list of thousands of emails that you got back from skip tracing.

Because a lot of investors don't realize. But when you skip trace list you get emails that nobody does anything with them and you get them for free. So a lot of them are garbage. Most of them are garbage. But still there is enough, especially if you're doing the kind of volume that we're doing. You can be sending 1,000 emails a day, verified, qualified emails per day. And email is free. You don't have to pay anybody to send emails, right? And emails as opposed to texting, you don't have to sit there sending email by email. You can actually just send a bulk email.

Now there's a few tricks of the trade. First of all, the whole objective with email marketing is deliverability, because everybody can send thousands of emails a day, but if they all land in spam or promotions, no one's going to see them.

Now, if you check your promotions tab, you'll see there are some billion-dollar companies that are still landing in promotions and they couldn't figure it out how to land in your inbox. So if they couldn't figure out, chances are I cannot figure it out either. So I don't pretend to know better than these humongous companies that are still landing in my promotions and spam. That being said, they don't have the luxury to do smaller batch testing or to do the little tricks that we do.

So first of all, you want to avoid bad emails, so you want to clean those lists.

Second, you want to avoid spam words. You can Google what are some spam words.

Third, instead of putting an unsubscribe button at the end of your email, you should write “Reply ‘unsubscribe’ if you'd like to opt out.” What that does is people reply “unsubscribe,” but that tricks the system into thinking that you're having engagement. That's actually good for you. When somebody replies unsubscribe, we obviously delete them, right, because we do what they say we should do. But that's good engagement.

The problem with that is on the flip side, if you're trying to track engagement, every unsubscribe is considered an engagement as far as the platform is concerned because you had all these people that replied to you, but it still works. There's some backend stuff that you could do, like emails going back and forth. You can schedule emails between two accounts just to show that there's some sort of activity.

And another tip is that you want to have a domain that isn't your actual domain.

So our domain is LotofLand.com. We have “MyLotofLand,” “TheLotofland,” LotofLand with hyphens. Use a bunch of stuff that look like your company but aren't actually your domain because you want to keep your domain safe and clean. So if anything happens, your domain doesn't go down.

And you also want to use multiple aliases. So let's say “sethwilliams at lotofland,” “seth.williams at lotofland,”, or “swilliams,” “williamsseth,” so multiple variations. So if one of them gets also, there's a recovery period till you come back.

We actually have a deliverability team outsourced, but they're in our Slack and they're basically in our payroll at this point. And their whole job is to ensure that our emails are landing in inboxes.

Seth: Yeah, I will say that whole unsubscribe button thing. So I've got like a filter set up in my Gmail where if you even say the word “unsubscribe” anywhere in the email, it sends you to a separate folder where I will most likely just delete your email and block.

I kind of hate those people who don't put the word unsubscribe in there because they're doing exactly what you say and it kind of gets past that filter I set up. And it's annoying to have to reply to them, but I guess it works.

Meir: What if someone sends you like a love letter? “Hey, Seth, I love your content and I'm never going to unsubscribe.”

Seth: Oh, man. That would be very unfortunate for them..

So with email, there's obviously a huge benefit in that it doesn't really cost hardly anything other than whatever you're paying to insure deliverability. But what kind of response rate or close rate or how effective is this? Is it worthwhile to do this? Is it like one in 1,000 or one in 100 or how well does it work?

Meir: That is a very good question. And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot. Let's talk about the other marketing channels, like mailers. Mailers are expensive but super effective. Texting, they work. So sometimes I ask myself, like, why reinvent the wheel? Why not just scale my texting team? Or why not scale the mailer team? So the answer to that is, you never know what will change with the texting regulations, the minute they change something or they stop something. I'm an expert in email marketing. I can just ramp that up. I already have the team for it. There's no wasted time. The same with mailers. Some states are banning or not. It's always good to have that.

I would say it's a different kind of person. So if I identify a market that really works for me, that there's super high demand, anything we get works. And you mail that place already. You've texted it and you still didn't get a hold of the owners. Like this woman in California. The mail was going to her grandparents’ house. No one's checking that her phone number wasn't associated with anything. But somehow her email was because maybe she was paying the taxes or somehow her email was associated with that property and she got the email.

The kind of leads that we get with email are actually very good leads. There are people who have email. You could imagine there are people who are doing business with you as if you're a businessman, it's a different conversation than a spam text.

So I don't know the exact number. I know we've closed a bunch of email deals. The ratio, I don't know how good it is compared to the other ones. But here's the thing. The margins are so good in this business that one deal pays for the time of the people, the deliverability team. It pays for the software. Like, just one deal. So you do one deal, and then everything else is paid.

And obviously the goal is to automate all of this as much as possible, so it doesn't take up much of my time. And then it's kind of just extra funnel, if you will, of cash flow.

To answer your question, not great, but still profitable, and I still keep it. There's a saying, what is it? Don't kill a cow that gives milk or something. If it's giving milk, just let the cow be.

Seth: Yeah, that makes sense.

So of all those different marketing channel pillars that you mentioned, we got texting, email, ringless voicemail, direct mail, cold calling. Which one is most important? Like, what is the one that you live and die by? Like, you're in huge trouble if that one disappears? Or does that even exist? Like, maybe it's not a big deal because you have these other four.

Meir: I've built my team around texting. Texting is very labor-intensive, so everyone on the team has a scorecard. So we meet every week with the team, and everyone, every day logs in. The texters have how many texts you send, how many people answer, how many leads. So everyone's got a number, which is great for them because they know what they're doing and they have goals they can aspire to. It's great for us because I see what's going on, what's not going on.

And texting is so labor-intensive. There are so many people sending those texts, qualifying those texts, that if texting goes down, a lot of my team won't know what to do. So that's why texting is, I think, the most important. Just because of the amount of families that it's supporting currently, if you will.

Mailers don't take that much time. But mailers are super effective because, like we mentioned before, especially blind offers, they do the qualifying for you. So if texting goes away, I would definitely do mailers. It's more expensive, let's just say, but it's more effective.

And then the rest, RVM and email and cold calling, those are kind of the alternative methods, we should call them.

Seth: Is direct mail, is that something where you may not ever send a mail to somebody? Like, if they just reply to the text, maybe that's all that will ever happen. Is mail like one of the last resorts? Like, if they don't respond to this and this and this, then I'll send the mail? Or is it one of the first resorts?

Meir: No, we scrub out the people who already answered us in the other channels because mail is expensive. We also send, nice mail, color, with questions and answers, you know. We do it proper. And I wouldn't want to send a blind offer to someone who already agreed to sell us via text for cheaper, and that would be a disaster.

But also, I wouldn't want to spend money or waste money on people who said unsubscribe or people who said we sold it or whatever. So we obviously scrub for those. But mail comes after.

Ajay: Yeah. I think it's worth noting that I heard this recently from, can't remember this house wholesaler's name. He's the guy that owns InvestorLift. You know, that big house wholesaling platform that helps wholesalers get buyers, basically.

He was in this interview talking about how anybody in real estate's goal, whose primary objective in acquisitions, in terms of metrics, is to track cost per acquisition and your cash conversion cycle in terms of when you spend money versus when you make money. And your goal is to drive down those two things as much as possible. You want the cheapest cost of acquisition and the fastest cash conversion cycle.

And so with regards to the marketing, I think it's really interesting because with texting, for example, my team's addicted to it because of how fast that feedback loop is. We send out texting in a new market, and we might get a deal that day. And if we do, we can buy it in two to three weeks.

We had one recently down in Florida. It's in North Florida. And we bought this property for $150,000, which is exactly what the seller asked for. So sometimes when people ask for things, and I know I can do it, I don't, and try to negotiate, I'm like, don't rock the boat. We can make money on this. We cut it up into two 20-acre parcels and listed each at 150. And we've been getting good traction.

So that was one we sent out the texting, and it was like, within, I think, two or three days we had this guy, and then a day later we had a contract. Whereas with direct mail, it can be a lot slower, but at the same time, and I think what Meir is talking about, is your leads are so much more qualified.

So maybe, depending on how your team is designed, you get to it quicker, or it's a lot less follow up-intensive. And that's why a majority of investors that try to go from direct mail to text messaging fail. That's the biggest issue I see is, like, our team will follow up usually 24 times before we put them back on a drip manually. We'll double-dial twice a day for a couple of days, and then every day, 24 times.

Meir: Whoa, 24 times?

Ajay: Yeah, we are ruthless, but we get the seller's permission to contact them, and typically that 24. So we have two layers of follow-up. And I'm sorry, Meir, you're supposed to be the one talking here, but we have two layers of follow-up.

The first one is to do that first intro phone call, basically. So we don't talk numbers until our lead manager goes through the basic script. And then that 24 is actually after that phone call. So we may follow up a lot more than that, but it's, hey, we're ready for an offer. We want to get an offer to this person, and that's when we'll go really aggressive because we've done a lot of work. Our cost for that lead is probably around $50 at that point.

And I don't like throwing $50 in the trash and lighting it on fire very often. So I tell my team to go really aggressively to get in contact. But we had a guy who lived in Alaska and does this thing every year where he goes to a remote cabin in Alaska and disconnects from all of his devices. And he said to me, he said, “Ajay, your acquisitions manager left over 17 voicemails on my phone over the past. Did you give her a raise?”

We actually ended up paying her for some maternity leave because she had a baby. So she was gone for a bit. But I think we did give her a raise a little bit after that, too. I can't remember, but I know we did at one point, but it was hilarious and was like, “Sir, that's what we pay her to do.” So I'm glad to hear it.

And he was like, “Well, tell you what. I'm a business person. Anybody that's willing to follow up with me this much clearly is going to follow through. So I'll give you guys my business. Let's go.”

And so that's a double closing. We did. We got under contract at 160, and we've got an offer right now at 230, and we're taking it. So we haven't closed on it yet, but it's a good double closing with good margins. But follow-up wins in this world.

But I'm sorry, I just needed to go through that quick.

Seth: That's worth going on a little tangent about, because a lot of people don't know how to do that. A lot of new people, I feel like they just kind of feel like I just take this first step, but they don't respond to people, or they don't respond multiple times. And it's like, why are you doing anything if you're not going to follow up? It seems like kind of a no-brainer, but a lot of people don't get that.

Well, we've kind of hit the marketing pieces quite a bit. There's a lot more we could talk about, but there are other things I want to move on to.

So tell us about what your average deal looks like. I know you do a lot of assignments and double closings, so what size are we talking about? How big are these deals? And I guess we talked a little bit about how you're finding them through texting and that kind of stuff, but maybe just walk us through a typical deal.

Meir: Sure. So I have this radical idea that many people in the land business don't seem to agree that bills are paid with dollars and not with percentages.

As a company, we make money when there's, like, 20 to 30 grand on the deal, and that's kind of like my sweet spot. I want to do a deal less than that just because of the time and energy. They say that a lion doesn't chase a rat or a mouse because the energy that it uses to catch that mouse is more than the energy that it gets from the mouse. You know what I mean?

So there are so many low-hanging fruit. There are so many amazing, juicy deals to do. Like, why bother with the small ones? So we try to kind of 20 to 30 also work well, because the minute you start doing more than that, there's a lot of earnest money that needs to go down, and it's just more complicated. So that's kind of the sweet spot for us.

And then we work our way backward from there. So if a seller wants 200 grand for a property, and we think it's worth 250, and we'll list it for 240, and we'll get somebody for 230, I'm never going to buy that outright, but if I can make 30 grand in that deal, why not? And sometimes they'll want earnest money, and that's fine. If it's a good enough deal, we'll do that.

So that's kind of why I think we get a lot of the deals that other investors don't end up getting from the sellers is because we'll pay more. And I'm okay paying more because I'm okay with the margin that is left for me. Whereas some investors won't do it because if I'm not doubling my money or if I'm not pieing it $0.40 on the dollar, I'm not going to do it, even though it's just not the way it works.

So we try to do a lot of volume. It's a numbers game, it's just a volumes game for us at this point. And that's kind of one part of the business that's run mostly by the team. And there's already processes in place, and everybody knows how to do it.

But then there are the bigger deals. And there is a housing shortage in America, and there are plenty of developers out there. The developers don't necessarily like buying, finding land, having this million or $2 million land sitting on their balance sheet for a full year until they figure out how to do the entitlements and how to get the permits and all that. So there are people actually that we work with who are kind of the bridge between us and the big developers. So they'll get the property under contract from us, and they will entitle it, and they'll make millions of dollars on these deals because they'll sell it. They'll sell the paper lots. They'll sell the parcel already parceled out to the developers, shovel ready, so they can come and start building. So they go through the entitlement process.

I know there are a lot of land investors who do this themselves. I could technically do it myself. It's just very time-consuming. And right now, I'm kind of super focused on the team and on the company that we have now. So it's hard for me to do that. That being said, I can flip a contract from a seller to an entitler, who then goes and entitles it and sells it to a developer. Now, those deals are more complicated.

Those deals require a lot of money down and require a seller who's willing to work with you. So a deal like that, I will, let's say, put in $20,000 earnest money every 60 to 90 days. I'll explain to the seller that we're going to entitle it, we have to develop it, and we're not going to buy it until everything's ready to go.

Best case scenario, everything's good. We buy the property. Worst case scenario, they keep all of our earnest money, so it's really a win-win for them. And then I go and shop. By now, I have contacts, but we still have to shop for somebody who's willing to buy that off from us with the same kind of time frame and sort of the same earnest money that we put down.

So what's interesting about this is that a lot of courses will tell you, like land courses, or people who are early in the land business will say, hey, you want to double your money, buy a property for 20 grand and flip it for 40. Sound advice, but how about, buy a property for a million, put 20 down, the same 20 grand that you have, and then flip that for 1.5. Now, instead of making 20,000 with your 20 grand, now, you just made $500,000 with your 20 grand.

Seth: It's assuming you can find that buyer in the back end. If you don't, then you just waste the 20 grand, right?

Meir: No, because you could have a 60-day due diligence period for those 20 grand.

Seth: Ah. And then you get your deposit back.

Meir: Then, yeah, you put it in there. But all this with utmost honesty and integrity with the seller, you say, “Hey, listen, I deal with developers. This is an interesting property. It's an interesting opportunity. I need 60 days. I'm giving you 20 grand. I just need 60 days so I can see if this is even feasible.”

And part of feasibility is finding an end buyer who's going to do it. And you're dealing at that level. You're dealing with people who understand business, people who understand what you're doing, and they're okay with it, and they're okay with making their million dollars. So it's just a little more sophisticated, but it's actually a lot more enjoyable and, of course, a lot more profitable.

So that's sort of one of our key hires for the last quarter of this year is going to be someone focused solely on finding. And you don't even have to do a lot of marketing to get these. They don't have to be off-deal. You could just find them on Land.com. The margins are so good that you don't have to go crazy. You literally have to go to markets where you see a lot of development. You see land that just looks like it's sitting there waiting to be developed, reach out to the owner, say, “Hey, what's the story?”

And sometimes there is no story, just nobody has come to them yet. But sometimes there is, there are wetlands, or there's this, there's that. But just a matter of finding these things. You do one deal a year and you're doing better than flipping a bunch of these other ones.

Seth: You're going after a lot of these deals with the intent to assign or double-close them. And that is a big part of the reason why you were able to offer so much more money, correct?

Meir: That's right.

Seth: Okay. And that is another distinction to make compared to those who are not willing to offer so much more money and they're more concerned about percentages is because that thought process is more of, I'm going to buy this thing and take title to it, and then just hang out for however long it takes to sell the thing. So there's kind of more skin that they're sinking into the deal, although it doesn't have to be that way, as you've proven, you could just go into it with the intent of never really owning it long-term at all, or even short-term.

I'm wondering, of all these different deals that you pursue, where you get them under contract with the intent to assign it or double close it. I mean, in my experience with that, the main risk on the table, if I'm not putting any earnest money down, is just that I might be wasting my time. Like, I could be putting all this effort into trying to find another buyer to assign this thing to. Maybe I can't, and then this contract will time out. And I just wasted a lot of effort.

How often does it not pan out for you? Like, what percentage of the time do you successfully find an end buyer in the time frame that you need to?

Meir: Most of the properties pan out because if it doesn't sell within the first 10 to 15 days, we don't get any traction. We keep lowering the price. Now, if we lower the price till we barely making any money and it still doesn't sell, then it's a problem with the property, and then it's a conversation with the seller.

So if a property doesn't sell, there's one of two issues that could be wrong with it: the price or the property. Either your price is too high, or the property has an issue. If the property is good and the price is good, it will sell. So if a property is not moving, there must be a reason, must be something that we didn't know when we signed the contract.

And it's always a conversation with the seller saying, “Hey, we didn't know that the first half of this property is fully wetlands. It didn't show up on the wetland map, or we didn't know that the easement wasn't a recorded easement. We thought you had access to the property.” So a lot of times, we have issues that we have a conversation.

Now, here's the thing. We try to provide value for the sellers. Okay? So somebody who has land in the middle of nowhere, there are two issues, two things that they do not know that we do, and that is why we're in business.

Number one, they don't know how much it's worth. They don't know data. So we're essentially a data company.

Number two, they don't know how to market land. We know how to market. So we're a marketing company. So that's why we have data analysts in the team and we have marketers in the team, because we know how to price land and we know how to sell land.

We also know how to do a lot of the due diligence, a lot of the investigations. We'll find out about the wetland. We'll find out about all these issues that come up. So the conversation with the seller is always, we are the best chance you will ever get to selling this property. You give it to a Realtor, they're not going to hustle it the way we do.

Our dispo team is pushing these properties everywhere, like, we're talking so many platforms, not just the MLS, and we send drones out there, and we literally do our 110% best to get this property sold. If it doesn't sell after a little while, we'll go back to the seller, we'll explain to him the issues. We'll give him everything that we have for free. Right? Here are the pictures. If we had a survey, we'll do a survey, all this stuff, and then it's a win-win. So they either sell it through us or they don't.

But now they have all this information that they didn't otherwise had, and they had somebody who, for free, hustled it to try to get it sold and still couldn't get it sold, which means they have to lower the price, or maybe they have to fix something and then they can sell it whenever they want. So it's really a value that we bring to the sellers, and we also bring value to the buyers. A lot of the time, buyers are so happy with the properties and the price that we bring, especially when we do splits, because we also do some subdivide projects.

We haven't spoken about those, but I do some minor splits all the time. And what's interesting about my minor splits is that lately, I've been double-closing subdivisions. And it's a pretty crazy concept, but it's a very simple conversation with the seller saying, “Hey, dude, you got 80 acres. Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to start selling these off in chunks, okay? We'll sell them off at 10 acres, 15 acres.”

Every time somebody wants to buy a chunk of the property—so we market it as if it's already 10 or 15 acres, and we write that we haven't yet subdivided the property—but somebody calls me up and says, “Hey, I want 15 acres. I want this.” I literally go in Photoshop, and we do a Zoom, and we're like, “Okay, which ten acres do you want?” And we draw it together. We send over a surveyor.

This is assuming that you could do a minor subdivision with the exemptions, and you don't have to go through the platting process, but in counties that allow for that, then we just do that, and then we create a new survey, a new metes-and-bounds. It's called when you draw the new area that the person is buying. The seller signs and notarizes the A to B, then we do the B to C.

And we started doing a lot of those. And then that's another way of doing subdivisions without fronting all of the money. Obviously, the seller has to be cool with it. And this 80-acre one in Texas was little bit complicated because there were so many parcels that we got out of that one.

But sometimes it's as simple as somebody like Ajay was saying. He had the 150, he split it into two, and now he's selling at 150 at a time. You don't necessarily have to buy it yet. You just market it as two separate parcels. And if somebody wants the whole thing, great. If somebody wants half of it, then you're on the hook for the other half if you don't find the buyer by the time you got to close, then you got to front the money. But that's another way of subdividing these tracts.

Seth: You had said something a while back about, if a property doesn't sell in the time frame you have in mind, it's either a problem with the price or a problem with the property. And the thought that came to my mind when you said that is, what if it's a marketing problem? Like, what if the price and the property are good, but the right pair of eyes just hasn't seen it yet?

And as I know from my experience, I'm probably not as good of a marketer as you are. But sometimes, it takes many months for a deal to come to fruition. So I guess what that leads me to believe is that you are very, very good at marketing these things. Like you're able to consistently sell these things quickly. And maybe that's a function of just getting really good properties under contract, I don't know.

But where the question is going is, how are you so good at this? Like when you say that we're going to do 110% best to get the property sold, what does that look like? Where are you advertising these things? How does a person get as good as you are at doing this?

Meir: Yeah, I don't think I'm really good at it. I just only go to markets where there's a lot more demand than supply. So I won't touch a market that doesn't have an insane amount of demand.

So it really begins from there. Choose a market that you have at least 100% more demand than supply in the last six months. If you're not seeing that kind of activity, I won't even go there. I'm dealing in a market that works well, that sells quick, that people are looking to buy property, that I'm seeing stuff sell. And if this particular parcel doesn't say, yeah, there's always bad luck and there's always just the right people didn't see it yet, and if it's a good enough deal, I'll buy it, I won't let it go.

But to answer your question more specifically, where do we advertise? So most of our deals come from the MLS. We actually don't really use agents. We feel like when we list properties ourselves, we have more of a finger on the pulse of what's going on. Every lead comes to us, every negotiation, every conversation works with us. We can move very quickly, right? We can send a drone guy there tomorrow, and then, in two days, we can have it listed. We can change the price on a whim if we want to drop it a little bit. We feel like we have more control sometimes.

If it's a bigger property or a property that doesn't have easy access, then we will work with a Realtor. Or, if in the process of comping this property, we asked an agent for their opinion, they gave us their opinion, they were good, and they took the time to go to see it, then I would actually give them the listing just out of goodwill. I wouldn't want them to work for free. So there are cases where we use agents, but most of the time, we list them ourselves.

We also list on Land.com, we have a signature account. Although I wish I could say we have a lot of deal flow from there, we don't. We have a lot of eyeballs. We have a lot of people who want seller financing, but we do know we sell a little bit there.

Facebook Marketplace, a lot of tire kickers there, a lot of time wasters. But we do list there as well.

And we put a sign on every property. We actually asked the drone photographers to go and buy a sign and put it there. That's a nice little tip. You can just give them $50, they'll do it. And we call neighbors, next-door neighbors say, hey, we're selling the property.

Also, because we don't buy property from people who live near their properties, we don't run the risk of them being, “Hey, why'd you put it for sale? Selling my property?” Or, “Oh, you're selling Timmy's property. Why are you selling it?” People don't really know who these people are.

And it's also more value to the seller. I don't want to steal someone's backyard. I just want to give someone money for property that's across the country that they don't even use, that their great-grandmother left them. That's kind of where I'm at.

So, yeah, we really push it. We really try marketing it. We could do better. I think as we scale the dispo team, we're going to start hiring some people to literally do cold calling to agents and say, hey, we have this in this property. Just to kind of give them a pocket listing, as we call it, an industry so they can always sell that if they have an interested buyer. So we could do a lot more outreach that we currently do.

But again, optimize scale. It's hard to be scaling constantly before optimizing what we currently have.

Seth: It's kind of a chicken and egg thing. It's like, how do you optimize until you scale to some point?

I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about, like, I don't really know what the right point is, but it's hard to nail that perfectly for sure.

Ajay: I was just going to say, to chime in, really quick, one of my really good buddies, that's a multi-seven-figure house wholesaler. His name is Chandler Sane. He built out a really pretty framework for people to evaluate whether you just need to spend more money, a.k.a., scale, versus optimize, your current process. And he boiled it down to a couple of key inputs.

So just like, high level, just for everybody here, I want to make sure people leave with something actionable out of this, is typically metrics we're tracking in our business. That model is number one, like net leads. So out of every single lead that comes into your pipeline, what percentage of those can you actually do business with?

For example, let's say like, 40% of your leads are all landlocked properties. Okay. And then it's a question of like, well, what if I filled my pipeline with just properties that weren't landlocked? Is there a way to filter that out on the front end? And now your pipeline is filled with people you can actually do business with.

And I always say people you can do business with, that's two things. It has to be the right property—the type of property I would buy—and the right seller, the type of seller I can work with. Because if it's some type of undivided interest that I can't find the other heirs for, if it's something messy like that, I can't really work with that.

There are a lot of different angles people hit in this business. But the point being, those are the two main variables. So we track net leads, and then you want to see out of those leads, how many can you actually get on the phone? So we track both calls and connection rate, and then it's how many offers you make out of that, then how many people accept, and then how many contracts you get signed.

And that's kind of like the whole flow there. I would love to put something together and share it with the audience if that's something you want, Seth. But that's something we've been working on, kind of, in the background.

And recently, we found a huge gap. We found out a few months ago only 50% of our contracts were getting signed, which is a huge issue, because if you're just looking at verbals, it's like, “Oh, man, we're doing a great job. We're getting all these contracts signed,” but where's the money, right? Or where are the properties? Or where's the inventory, whatever metric you want to look through that at? And we realized, okay, where's the gap? And looked through our KPIs and realized, for every six contracts we send out, we're only getting three signed back.

So something we did to optimize versus scale here was, we don't need to spend more money on ads or marketing. We don't need to send out more texts or send out more mail to get to basically double our business. For us to double our business, we needed to fill a very small process gap. And so what we have our team doing now is we actually on our offer call, our acquisitions manager will preface at the beginning and say, “Hey, Seth, our objective on this call is, if we come to terms on price, to get an agreement signed today.”

And so, as part of the process, if we come to terms on a price, our acquisition manager is trained to put them on a brief hold and draft up the contract. After that hold, walk them through it, so you can work through any contract objections live. Because how many times do you send out a contract and then it either takes three weeks to come back, or they just ghost you? And sometimes people ghost you because they're lazy, not because they don't actually want to do business with you. So we'll follow up aggressively.

But we have found if we just talk them through it live, we are able to get so many more signed contracts, and now we're closer to 80% to 85% if you don't screen for that front-end husband-wife objection. Or are you in a place to sign an agreement that'll screw that up a little bit, but you want to make sure, like, “So you're the only person on the deed. Are you the only person that has to make a decision on whether this is sold that way?” Later on, if they hit you with like, “I have to talk to my wife,” I’ll be, “Oh okay, obviously, please go talk to your wife, man. But just out of curiosity, is this something she would, like, divorce you over? Is this something, like, you mentioned you were the only person on, so I'm trying to get a feel for…”

I train my team to always make it funny. We like keeping things light-hearted and funny.

But anyways, we're putting together a framework on how to optimize versus scale based on what things look like. So it's a fun topic, something you can tell. I get a lot of energy from this stuff, so I just wanted to chime in. Those are kind of the key metrics we run through. I could put together something prettier, but I'll stop there.

Meir: That's great. That's really good. When we meet on Thursdays, everyone's got a number, like I mentioned, but then we also do a check-in.

One is like, your head and your heart, basically. So we do a check-in of clarity, one to ten, where are you? And everybody has to check-in. And also, how are you feeling? How are you feeling your life? How are you feeling at work? And those two numbers are so telling because if someone gives me clarity from one to ten, I'm a five, then you ask, why? Like, why are you a five? Well, because we just went in the new market, and whatever it is, and then I start realizing issues before they become bigger issues. And that's one way to optimize. Literally, just ask the team what's going on. What are you overwhelmed with?

And that's also a way to scale, because if somebody's at capacity, then we hire somebody else to help them out. And then let's say the texter is at capacity, we'll hire another texter, and then there's too many leads for the comper. We'll hire another comper.

So that's kind of how we optimize and scale at the same time. Just getting the feedback there. Yeah.

Seth: A few clarifying questions from what you said earlier, Meir. So first of all, we were talking about you're not really that good of a marketer. You just pick markets where there's 100% more demand than there is supply. So how specifically are you measuring and verifying this? Like, what stats are you looking at, and where is this information coming from?

Meir: We've tried with many different sources of information. We tried with Land.com. Now we basically follow Zillow. Just go to Zillow, just click land, click past six months, there's a lot of yellow dots, which means a lot of sold. And then you toggle over to For Sale and you don't see that much. Then you know that's a good market. Could you verify it with Land.com and with other platforms? Yes, but you're just going to get more confused.

And also, we don't really do counties anymore. I know a lot of people are very, like, “I'm going to mail counties.” I think counties are very big in some cases. And counties could have a city that's super expensive, or the suburbs. Or demand could vary within the county.

So we don't really do counties anymore. We do areas. So if there's a specific city that we think is great, we'll do something like northeast of that city. I don't care what county or city it is. I'm going after trying to stay very objective and very focused into where are we going, what are we doing, where we're going, how can we maximize what we're doing.

Seth: So just to verify. So on Zillow—and I like Zillow, too, think it's an awesome tool to use for this in terms of verifying that there's 100% more demand than supply. What I'm hearing is that you're basically just looking at Sold comps and comparing that to For Sale comps.

And if there's, what is it? Twice as many sold comps than there are for sale comps? And you're just kind of eyeballing it, right? You're not like, literally counting them up.

Meir: No, I am. In the past six months. So let's just pick one. So go. Just look at Austin. Last six months, land sold. If you're seeing 700 and then go For Sale and you see 350, that's 100% more demand than supply. So obviously, I wouldn't recommend you go after Austin. It's a city, but you can go an hour away from Austin in any direction as long as there is more demand than supply.

So yeah, we do count. We do want to hit at least that.

There's also a number that you don't want to go above, which is you don't want to go above too hot of a county, too hot of a market. So if it's too hot and there's nothing for sale and everything's selling, it's going to be hard to get a deal. It's just not necessarily a good place to go. So you kind of want to be somewhere in between.

Seth: And what do you consider too hot?

Meir: 800%. You go to these places where there's nothing for sale and anything that's for sale is already sold within a day. Sellers know that it's a hot market and they'll want market price. So if there's nothing for sale and so many things sold, it's kind of a rule of thumb.

Seth: And on that, the sold comps thing. So are you getting granular at all about the size of the vacant land or, like, any specifics, or is it literally just vacant land? I don't care if it's a half-acre or 50 acres, just vacant land.

Meir: Yeah, we do a minimum of five acres. it's just a random number, but it's very hard to, because we want a minimum of, let's say, 30,000 profit. So it's hard to kind of filter out the cheap properties.

So the sort of way to filter them out is by size. If you use Prycd, then you can technically do that, but that is not that accurate. So if you're just using any data provider, the best way to eliminate the cheap properties that I know of is just the smaller ones. Granted, half an acre in Times Square will cost you a billion dollars, even though it's a half an acre. So not necessarily does size equal price, but that's kind of why we weed out the smaller ones.

Now there are people that do infill lots, and infill lots are very profitable. It's just a completely different business. We're more after the rural recreational rural infills. Infill lots are very good. If you're in that business, then it's a completely different strategy.

Seth: And of all those different selling platforms that you mentioned, it sounds like you're on land, you've got the signature account, but it doesn't do a whole lot for you. You're on Facebook, but you get a lot of tire kickers. So it sounds like there are, understandably, problems with all of them.

But I'm wondering what is the most effective one? What is the one you're actually impressed with? Like, man, we need this thing. We sell lots of stuff on this platform.

Meir: For me, it's the MLS, hands down. If I get a call from an agent who has a buyer who saw the property, wants to submit an offer, there's a 95% chance that we're going to close on it. If I get a call from somebody on Land.com or on Facebook, there's like a 3% chance that they're not even going to go see the property, let alone close on it.

So the MLS is just where the most serious buyers are in the market to buy property with an agent.

And yeah, we give 2% to agents. Depends on the market. It's expensive because, don't forget, they get a percentage of the gross. So if we're buying for 200 and selling for just 230, they're getting 3%, that adds up. That's $7,000 or something, plus closing costs. So that's big.

So we have to kind of be careful also with the seller agent commissions, with the buyer agent commissions. And that's also another reason why we don't always use sellers is because seller agents, sorry for ourselves, is because they also take a chunk. And if we're dealing with very thin margins, relatively, to the price of the property, then it's hard to do that. Unless you work out a deal with the agent and be like, I'll give you a percentage of profits. Which we do.

By the way, I forgot to mention another time that we use agents. I've used this in the past. If in my mind this property is worth, let's say, 450, and an agent tells me, hey, dude, it's worth 550. And he's right. And he's very confident. I'll go with him out of gratitude, basically because it's because of him that I can make another 100 grand. I'll give him the business. So if an agent really was able to show me something that I did not see before, they definitely earned my business.

Seth: But you don't typically list your deals with agents, right? So you're just posting it for sale by owner on Zillow, but an agent happens to come across it. Is that what you mean when it says comes from the MLS? So it's not actually on the MLS, but that's how it's found?

Meir: Yeah, it's on the MLS. It's for sale by owner on the MLS. Flat fee services we use to list our properties. And then it goes through, like, a flat fee service listing provider, and then they forward me the leads. It's a little complicated, but it works.

Seth: Yeah. Which flat fee service are you using?

Meir: Every market has a different one. Flatfee.com is a good one. Beycome is a good one. I've tried others, but some are more annoying. Some are archaic, some are good.

Seth: I know you talked about buying these big, maybe 80-acre properties or something and then selling it to somebody, and then they will put the land entitlements on there, and then they will sell it to a developer and make a lot of money.

So question number one, is there some repeatable formula to find these deals? Is it just like a big old parcel of land and that's all you need to see? Or do you go to markets where you know it's easy to subdivide, or you know it's easy to get these entitlements? Or you're just kind of looking for large parcels where there's subdividing potential there.

Meir: There are two types of subdivisions. There are minor subdivisions, which is what we were talking about, the 10 acres, 15 acres, or what Ajay was doing with the splits.

Then there are the big entitlement deals for major developments. Those are actually super easy. We have LandVision, which is instead of DataTree, it's a different data provider. But they have a filter there where you can have a layer where you can see all the developments and developers with their logos and everything. So if you see a place that's super hot and there are so many developers and you see like a 50-acre tract just sitting there, and it's flat, and there are no wetlands, I mean, this is gold. And it's just a matter of seeing if the seller wants to sell and if they want to sell at a bit of a discount.

Now, you don't have to get fancy with LandVision or anything. Just go to markets where you know it's hot. You know, there are a lot of developments. You can see the developments in Google Earth, even in DataTree. You see the developments in DataTree. You see all these little, small, little parcels being built, and you see the dirt and all that. You know, there's development. They're usually near an interstate highway. They're usually near big cities.

And try to find those big parcels and see if the seller, like Ajay was saying, if the seller wants to sell and if the property is a good property, those are the two ingredients. And then, if you can strike a deal, then go to the developers and call them up. Go to D.R. Horton and just speak to the real estate person in charge there. Or go to LinkedIn. It's not that complicated. It's just finding the people who are developing and pitching it to them.

And by the way, many times, they're okay with you flipping it. Nothing's secret. They'll send you an LOI. And if there's a good enough margin for you to make the deal work, you kind of negotiate the terms of the earnest money deposit, the trenches, the timing, and you want to try to line as much as possible so you're not out of pocket so much. But those are amazing deals.

Seth: So let's talk a little bit about your team. So when did you hire your first team member? Why did you find it necessary to hire them? What role were they doing? Who are some of the other roles that you've hired for? And given that your team is the size that it is now at nine people, what is your role in the business?

Meir: I love talking about my team because it's like a family and it's amazing when we get together on the chat on Zoom, it's so much fun to have a team. They're actually getting together now. Some of them who are in the Philippines, they're having like a meetup. And if I wasn't married with three little kids, I would totally go there. But yeah, I love my team.

So the first hire was actually another new land investor who was kind know, testing the land investing waters. And he's trying to do a deal and he asked me if we can partner up, and I said, sure. And we did a deal together. And then I said, hey, why don't you come join? And he was doing, initially, a lot of the texting, a lot of the outreach. I was traveling at the time. So it was kind of good timing because I wanted to keep the machine running. And ever since, his name is also Meir, like me, and he's amazing. He really hustles it, really knows the land business in and out by now.

And as Meir was getting very busy comping and making offers, we had to hire somebody to do the texting. So now we have, our acquisitions team, made up of six people. There are two on the front lines, as we call them, doing texting, doing the RVMs, doing the emails. Then there's, well, it really starts up from the top. It starts with one person.

His name is Dean. And Dean does the finding new markets, downloading the data, scrubbing the data, uploading it to all of our platforms so we can do the marketing. So it all starts with Dean. Meir, he approves what Dean does, his markets, and then it goes down to the actual marketing.

Ron and Angela, they are the ones who are frontline, and their job is to qualify the seller and qualify the property. Right. Make sure the seller wants to sell, make sure he agrees to arrange and make sure the property is not landlocked, make sure the property doesn't have a ton of wetlands, make sure the property is relatively flat. And if the seller is cool, the property's cool, boom. They go into our CRM.

Now, in our CRM, we have Randy and we have Chantel. Those two are the acquisition managers. I would say they get the leads that are somewhat qualified. Now they have to call the sellers and just kind of chat them up a little bit, make sure they're actually interested in selling, because before it was a texting conversation.

Now it's actually like a human interaction, and they comp the property. Eventually, I'm going to get somebody just for comping so they can focus more on negotiating deals and talking to sellers and not, but they speak to the seller, they qualify them, they comp the properties, and then they put all the comps and their opinion of value on the CRM. Meir approves every deal, and then I approve every deal.

And once it's all approved, sometimes we have questions. I'm mostly looking at the property, not so much the comps, but mostly, like, looking at things they might have overlooked. Like, hey, there's this trailer park next door. And it doesn't look very well kept. This might be an issue. So that's something that sometimes Dean and Chantel don't really see that I kind of see those things. That's sort of more what I'm looking for.

And then they go back to the seller, back and forth, and then they send a purchase agreement, and then we're off to the races. Once they get the purchase agreement signed, we have John, on our dispo team, and John orders the due diligence. We don't do it in-house. It just doesn't pay. So we get the due diligence back.

We order a drone photographer, we write the copy, we start listing the property everywhere, and start pushing really hard. Also, once we get the purchase agreement signed from the seller, we have a transaction coordinator who has made my life incredibly better. It was like that one hire that was like, what took me solo… You have no idea. You're dealing with ten contracts a month. That's ten sellers. That's buyers, that's title issues. You don't even know. I don't know why it took me this long.

And also, I've given her power of attorney to notarize everything for me to sign, everything for. You know, these things were huge time wasters. So she really is like the oil of the engine that keeps everything just moving. So she contacts the seller, “Congratulations!” And explains to the seller the process.

And then John looks for buyers. And when we get a buyer, we send it to title, and then we schedule a closing. It's very difficult. There are a lot of moving pieces for double closing. It’s not for everybody. Double closings. You have to make sure the buyer and the seller are both at the same time. If I had unlimited money, I wouldn't do double closings. It's just because I have to sort of rather use the money that I have for earnest money on bigger deals. I'd rather use it to scale the team. That's why I do it. But if you had the money, do it. But that's a side note.

What do I do right now? I'm actually, like I said, I'm in the market for an operations manager or COO, someone to oversee the four pillars of the business, make sure everything runs smoothly, make sure we scale the things that work, and we optimize the things that don't really. So my job is really finding the talent, training the talent, creating the systems, the operations. I try to be in as many of the weekly one one-on-ones that I can. I try to review the team and the process and really working on the business, not so much in the business, and eventually just scaling and optimizing.

I think that would be my role also, like I said, I have a three-year-old, a two-year-old, I have a newborn, and the time that I have for work is very focused time, but it's not a lot of hours, so I really try to optimize the time as well.

Ajay: Meir, man, you dive into so much. I love that you don't hold back here. I feel like you've dropped like a trillion nuggets throughout this. I'm really curious. Thank you.

I think you said his name was Dean? He’s your data guy, is that right?

Meir: Yes.

Ajay: What's his background? Where'd you find him? Because if this guy's pulling 130,000 records a month and then dealing with the flow through all five of your marketing channels, I assume he's got to be pretty advanced and organized to handle all that data.

So if you don't mind sharing, where'd you find him? What's his background? And then maybe what's his pay band, if you don't care.

Meir: Sure. Totally not what you think. He's just a regular guy who follows the process that we set in place. He has to look for markets who are more demand than supply. He has to pull the data more like a data entry job. It's a very entry-level position. Yeah.

And it's more Meir and me who oversee the work and just kind of make sure that it's done properly. And there's definitely a lot of holes that we need to patch, and we're working on that. But again, it's kind of like a spray-and-pray at this point. It's just like a volumes game. It's just text and market to as many people as you can, and try to lowest-hanging fruit, the most motivated sellers, and just get deals.

And it's kind of working. So sometimes I get complacent, so it's hard for me to optimize his work, but he's really just following the process.

Ajay: Got it. And is he overseas?

Meir: Yeah.

Ajay: Okay, cool.

Seth: With these double closings that you're doing, are you using single-source funding, like using the end buyer's cash to fund everything, or do you have to get transactional funding to make this stuff work? And if so, where's that money coming from?

Meir: Yeah, so it all depends on the title company that we use. It also depends on who the title company that the buyer wants to use. And again, I make things seem super easy. And simple. It's kind of a tendency that I have, but things are very complicated the minute you're doing, also the volume that we're doing. But like I said, if you have the money, don't do double closing. It's more if you want to scale at this level and go crazy, then do it.

So depends on the title company. If I manage to convince the end buyer to use my title company, then I vet the title companies that I use very carefully, and I'm very picky because I need them to: A, be okay with this; B, allow for me to use the end buyer to pay for the seller to pay the seller; and C, I don't want title insurance on the A to B on the first transaction because I'm only holding the property for ten minutes. I'm okay not having insurance for ten minutes, especially when my margins aren't amazing and I'm paying everybody out. So I'm very picky with the title companies that I use.

Now, sometimes we need to put up the cash. So I'll put up the cash, or I'll get a transactional funder for the day, and I'll pay them whatever it is to put up the cash for a day. So that answers your question.

Seth: So looking back at your team right now, what would you say is your biggest challenge in managing this many people, or even with your business in general? It kind of seems like you have things going really good and you know what you're doing. But what is difficult, what do you kind of hate about your business at this point?

Meir: I hate that I've become a manager. I'm not a manager. The EOS, the visionary and the integrator, definitely the visionary. There's a leader and the manager are two completely separate things. I'm more of a leader, and I've become a manager. I've become a people manager that I'm just not good at it. I don't like doing it.

I actually like talking to sellers. So whenever there's, like, a complicated situation with a seller, I call him up. There was this seller who wanted to FaceTime. He wanted to FaceTime me. And so Chantel texted me, hey, this guy wants to FaceTime you. And it was before he signed. So I FaceTimed him. I'm like, “Hey, what's up? He's like, oh, it's you. You're real. You're actually a human being!”

He saw my face on the website and on the mailer and everything. He's like, “I just wanted to make sure that you're a person and that I'm selling it to you.” I'm like, yeah, exists. With AI, you got to be a little wary, I guess, these days, but I like that. And every time we close, I call the sellers every single time and I ask them for a video review of their process.

I just want to see their face. I want to see what they say. Sometimes they say, yeah, sometimes they say, we love it and we had a great time. We just don't want to do a video. But I really miss talking to people, doing deals. Maybe I'm a deal junkie. I don't think so. But I really like conversations with people and I've become so far away from that and essentially just managing spreadsheets. And it's also stopping me from growing the team, which is why I think an operator or an integrator running this size team will enable me to scale this to 20, 30, 40 employees, even more.

Seth: Yeah, I've actually found that whole thing about being able to show your face and your voice and all this stuff and show people that you're real. That goes a long way. One way that I have done that is through just, like, video emails, like Loom or BombBomb. And the nice thing is I've actually closed some pretty big deals based solely on that.

Like, I played a major role in getting the deal done, just that they could see that I was a real person and I say their name in the video so it's not somewhere.

Meir: Yeah, but that's also because you're a good-looking guy, Seth. Not everyone can pull that off.

Seth: It is an unfair advantage, I'll admit that. Yeah.

Meir: Yeah.

Seth: No, thank you. But anyway, the struggle that I have with my schedule, is I would get on the phone with people all the time, but for them and me to be available at the exact same time can be kind of hard. So if I can just put a message together and send it, and then whenever they get around to seeing it, they can see it. But it kind of fixes that scheduling issue, I guess.

Meir: I like that. It's actually a good idea, Seth. I think every contract we send, if it hasn't been signed within seven days, I'm going to get on Loom and record a video and say, “Hey, Jonathan, we sent you a contract. This is Meir. I'm just wondering what's up.” Literally a ten-second video to the acquisition managers to have them email. That's a great idea. I'm going to write that down.

Seth: Now and it can be like 30 seconds, it doesn't have to take a ton of time, just something to show that you're real and you took time to actually talk to them directly.

Meir: Yeah. I could also do an AI impersonation of myself.

Seth: Yeah, I would strongly encourage you to do that. See how it goes!

So you seem really passionate about giving money away to charity. Like, that's almost like a core value of your business. And I'm just curious, why? What is your motivation for wanting to do that?

Meir: So if we zoom out a little bit, I believe that it's clear that there was a world before I came and there will be a world here after I leave. Right. So the world doesn't revolve around me. I showed up to this world, and there is a higher purpose. I'm here for a reason. This is not just some sort of accident that the world came into being. It doesn't really matter what you believe in, but it's clearly not just some random accident. Obviously, there is a reason why we're here and the reason why I'm here, and I think that reason is simply to leave the world a little bit better than how I found it.

So land investing and just this business that we're in, it's a very good vehicle for change. So every time we sell a property, we have many different buckets in our bank account. And the first bucket, which is actually a separate bank account, just for the money to be completely gone, is charity.

And we're very passionate about three things, and these are three things that ancient sages tell us that are very basic to humanity. Number one is procreation, having children, infertility treatments, anything that can help a couple who's struggling to have a baby and they can't. We want to back that. We're living in times now where it's amazing how literally, with money, you can solve infertility in some cases, but obviously not all of it.

So that's children. Children are a source of great joy, and this could also be a source of great pain. But that's the biggest one. It's literally making more humans.

The second one is health. Right. If somebody doesn't have good health, they could have a hell of a life. Health is very important, and some people are struggling, whether it's mental, physical health. So we really want to solve as much of that as we can.

And then the last one is putting food on the table or anything that has to do with people making ends meet, whether it's soup kitchens, whether it's just supporting people, helping people get married, helping people through school, whatever it is, just really helping people with their livelihood. And it's a completely different way of doing business because when I go to… I take my scooter every day to work and listen to REtipster. Sometimes there are no episodes to listen to, so I just space out or think about crazy things.

Seth: Not REtipster? Silence. We are the only voice worth listening to.

Meir: That's it. Dude. You got to put them out more often.

No, but it turns my work into something not just meaningful for me. I'm not saying that I'm doing it because it makes me feel good, but it really does. Ultimately, it does make it super meaningful because, obviously, there's supporting my wife and kids, which in itself is also my responsibility. And I don't do it just because I love them, because if I didn't love them, then I would stop doing it. But I do it because it's my duty, it's my responsibility, it's my privilege. So they're supporting those people, which is my family, but then they're supporting and helping the world at large.

And I really encourage everyone to see this as a pillar of their business and as a core thing of their business. And I'll tell you even more. I decide how much money I want to give away that particular year. I do this at the beginning of the year, and I basically tell God, “I want you to give me 10x whatever I'm giving.” But I pledge that money, and I give that money, and if a deal doesn't work out and it's not working out, I'll give money for that deal to work out.

In other words, I'll give the percentage as if that deal already happened. And now it's really up to God, up to the universe, to make that deal happen. So it's kind of very powerful, and it works. I've heard this concept many times. I never thought it worked. At the beginning of last year, I set myself an insane goal. I only had one employee. But I said, I'm going to give this tremendous amount of money away. And I mean, fast forward a year. This has been an incredible year.

So I look forward to New Year. I look forward to doing bigger pledges and to, I guess, educating as much people as possible about this phenomenon of just doing it, but doing it for a much higher purpose, not just flipping dirt and making money. So that's why I'm passionate about it.

Seth: That's a fascinating approach. I don't think I've ever met anybody who kind of goes at it backwards like that in terms of like, “I'm going to give this much away, and, God, I want you to give me ten times more than that.”

It just makes you wonder, has that ever not worked out where you've given the money away and you didn't make ten times more than that? Or do you make more than ten times more than that? Or how does that pan out for you?

Meir: It's been my first year, and so far, I'm happy to report that it worked. Now, don't send me an invoice. If you pledge a million bucks and you didn't make 10 million, and then I got to float that bill. You got to be somewhat responsible, and it has to be a plan. You have to put in the work. That's how God created the world, in my opinion. People need to work for it, so they deserve it, so they appreciate it. And it's not just free, but, yeah, it works.

And even if you don't do it that way, just 10%, 20%. My wife and I just started the 20% Foundation, we call it. It's a nonprofit where we're going to put all the money in, and then from there, it's going to go to all the causes. It gives me so much, even just from a selfish perspective, it gives me so much happiness to be able to support causes that before I couldn't, I didn't have the vehicle to do it. Sometimes we have these humongous deals that we're doing with developers, these subdivisions, and, like, what am I going to do with all that money?

So there's real causes, real people who need treatments, who need food, who need whatever it is that they need. And every week, somebody from our team picks another nonprofit where we give money away, so they get to choose also where a lot of the money goes to. And these are regular people who work at other companies, and they've never been able to give that much money away, and it's going to whatever cause they care about in their communities, and that's also very special.

Ajay: I actually want to jump in here real quick and reinforce this idea of inverse tithing, in a way. Reverse tithing. I Don't know what you want to call it, I don't know if you want to coin a term here, but I actually had a similar situation, I think, two months ago where I had, like, five grand that was supposed to come in, not a significant amount of money, but enough that. I don't know, it was just, like, know where I was.

The moving, shuffling money around sometimes between business and personal stuff, and I just moved recently, so I'm down in Texas now. So it was just like moving money around, and all of a sudden, I didn't have this five grand. It was slightly inconvenient, and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to trust God here. As if I had gotten this $5,000, and I went ahead and tied 10% of it, even though it was the opposite that had happened. Like, didn't come in, and I went ahead and just gave away $500. And it was really funny because I didn't know what to give it away to. And then some things were revealed to me, and I ended up giving it to this orphanage that supports Nepalese women. So really cool. My family's from Nepal. Women just aren't treated as well there socioeconomically, don't have as many opportunities and privileges.

Got this beautiful, beautiful email, this blessing that they were able to use this money for. And I found that God just has this way of turning on the faucet, right, and no way that you can predict it. We had a bunch of inventory that had gone stale. We had a couple of deals fall through. I turned that on. I got a full-priced offer on my one rental property that I owned that I decided to sell for five grand over asking. So immediately He replaced it.

And then I had $60,000 of gross profits in my land business that all came in over the next week. Like, it was like, contract, contract, contract, contract. I just want to reinforce, and again, don't send me the invoice. There's an element of faith component, and it's not in your control. But anytime I have done this on a much smaller scale, I'm sure Meir, I've seen it reinforced. Like, I've seen the money come in 10x over. So it's actually a really cool concept.

And honestly, a reminder for me, I'm sharing this with everybody, but it's not something I do regularly. And I think this is maybe a sign that I need to be, but just really cool. And I appreciate you sharing that.

Seth: I've said this before, but I'll read it again. This is Malachi 3:10-12: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of Hosts. See if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

Let's kind of get into the essence of this. I think for most people having that courage to actually put God to the test, or even if you're not, like, doing it because you expect something more, like just giving until it hurts because it's the right thing to do. Is that difficult for you guys? When you do this thing where you go out on a limb, it's like, okay, I don't know if the money is coming in or not, but I'm just going to do it. Is that a hard decision for you, or do you have this gift of giving?

Meir: It is. There's no way to sugarcoat it. It's not easy. It's not easy. But thank God, worst case, it went to a good cause. So with crypto and the stock market, with 2020, I made a ton of money lost a ton of money, made, lost. The money that was lost, was lost. But the money that I gave away, a bottle of water, is worth a dollar. But if you give it to someone who's about to die in the desert, that's infinite value.

So you're transforming something material into something finite, and you're turning into something infinite. And we have the power to do that. That's like, super powerful stuff. So, yeah, a couple of grand here or there, but it's really the fact that we could do that is amazing.

Seth: There is a book by a guy I know named Clare De Graaf. It's called the “10 Second Rule,” and it's kind of an interesting concept where he talks about this idea of when you see a chance to do something good or be helpful to somebody, like offering assistance, whether it's financially or whatever, just any good, act. Like, if you just have the thought, do it within 10 seconds. Like, don't wait because you can rationalize and explain your way out of it.

Or just, like, daydream about doing something good and give yourself a pat on the back, but you never actually do it. This idea is like, don't think about it. Just do it immediately. Because a lot of times, it could be God prompting you to do that. But even if it's not, even if it's just you having the thought and you do it, worst case scenario is you just did something good to help somebody.

It's like, there's not really a loss to that situation. And especially if you do have the viewpoint of everything that I have isn't really mine. These are resources that God has entrusted me with. So it's not like it's mine to claim or say that “It’'s my own. I earned it. And me, me, me.” it's just like, no, I'm the steward over this. So what's the wisest way to do that. Is it to get the new Tesla, or is it to save somebody's life and build an orphanage or something like that?

Meir: Yeah, we're exactly right. We're bankers. We deal with a lot of money. But it's not my money, it's the bank's money. I'm just here to distribute it accordingly. And, yeah, it's not easy always to have that perspective, but it gets easier as I see what it does. And as it reinforced that pattern in my brain, then it definitely gets a lot easier.

Also, like you said, about the 10 seconds, I get a wire into my account, I don't wait 10 seconds, right away, boom, chunk of it away, gone, done. And it's also very good, by the way, if you give a lot of charity to have an account, whether it's nonprofit or a donor advisory fund or even just a bank account specially for it, then you get a debit card, and then all the charity you give just goes through that account. And then you could also look at the account, see how much money you have left there, how much money you have. All of a sudden, there's like, oh, my God, there's a bunch of money in there, and you can give it away without feeling guilt.

Before I had this, I was always giving and always like, could I afford to give? Can I not? Did I give too much? Did I give too little? Is this showing up? And it was all, like, intermingled in my credit card with all my bills. This is, like, super clean. This is great. Just make an account, transfer money to it. You can Zelle to it, even. It won't cost you anything. And it's really made my life amazing.

We also have different buckets. We could talk about that later. But we have a bucket for taxes, where we put money away every single time. We don't touch it. So taxes can come around. It doesn't hurt as much because the money's already there. We have another one for profits, which is good. It kind of builds up like a profit chest, and then we can do different things with that.

So I advise you to do that as well. If you don't already do that.

Seth: What bank do you use for your business banking?

Meir: I've been using Bank of America since I was little, so I kind of stuck with them. They do have wire fees, which I don't like, especially the volume that we do. So I got a new bank called Rho, R-H-O. It's like an online bank, similar to, like, Ally or Mercury. They have free wires incoming, outgoing. They're like an internet bank. They're super easy to use. They don't have Zelle, which is annoying. But yeah, we also have Ally for the charity bank. Always playing around with different ones.

Seth: Yeah, I was just asking that because I know some banks, like I think it's Relay is the one I know of. I haven't used it, but I've heard it's set up specifically for this purpose to make it super easy to create new accounts and just make it seamless.

Meir: Yeah, they all really work well.

Meir. I totally appreciate your time. I know we've gone a little bit over, but appreciate you sharing your wealth of experience and information with us.

If people want to check in with you or reach out to you, you don't have to share anything. But if you do want to, is there a way they should do that?

Meir: Sure. My email is meir@lotofland.com. And if you want to chat or if you have a deal that it's more than you can chew or you want to partner, I love JV partnering with people as long as, like I said, if there's enough meat on the bone and you need help, whether it's a double-closing or subdivision, whatever it is, you can always feel free to send me an email and we'll review it.

And once again, I really want to thank you, Seth and Ajay, for all the content that you put out. And I wouldn't be here for sure without everything that you've done for the community. And I speak for myself, but also for all the land investors out there. So thank you so, so much.

Seth: Yeah, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it very much and thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing the awesome information.

And the student has become the teacher, it appears.

If people want to check out the show notes for this episode, again, it's retipster.com/170. And thanks again, Meir, and we'll talk to you again soon.

Meir: My pleasure.

Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? This is Seth and Ajay Sharma and you're listening to the REtipster Podcast, episode 163.

So today we're talking with my good friend Michael Quan. So Michael has done a lot in his life. He ran a successful technology company for over a decade and then sold it to prioritize his family. Since then, Michael has been blogging at FinanciallyAlert.com. Michael is also a published author of The FIRE Planner through Simon and Schuster. And this guy just recently got featured on Good Morning America. I'll go ahead and link to that in the show notes, if you want to check it out.

But the bottom line is, Michael has a deep passion for personal finance and he empowers others to take charge of their financial well-being. And this past May, Michael and I were both at a conference called REWBCON. And at this conference, I sat in on Michael's presentation, where he talked about how real estate investors can use AI—artificial intelligence—to run their businesses.

And, as we all know, AI has been an absolutely huge topic over the past year with the explosion of all kinds of innovative new tools and websites that can be used in many different ways to make life easier and more efficient than ever before. And I've been racking my brain ever since all these things started coming out, trying to think of all the different ways that real estate investors can use AI because I know there is huge potential and opportunity here.

But when I saw Michael's presentation at REWBCON—and I only sat in on the first half of it because I had to run—but just in the glimpse that I saw, I realized he had already done most of the heavy lifting for me. So rather than me trying to teach you what can be done, Michael is going to teach us what can be done. And we'll talk about some of the cutting-edge tools available to you right now.

And AI, I think, is one of those things where your biggest limitation is kind of your own imagination and recognizing what can be done with the different tools and capabilities out there, which is still rapidly changing. Like every single day, new things are becoming possible. But with any luck, after hearing what Michael has to say, you may develop some ideas of your own. And if you do, I hope you'll share them with the REtipster community, either in our forum or our Facebook group.

So with all that said, Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Michael: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me, guys. It's a real pleasure and honor to be on REtipster. And Seth and Ajay, I'm super excited to talk about this topic, because artificial intelligence is really the future of the next technology boom. And I've been blessed to watch and actually, in some ways, profit from the dot-com era back when the internet started taking off in the beginning. And so we're at this new phase where things are just really taking off. And so there are some similarities between how this technology is growing and how the internet first launched.

And so, yeah, today I'd love to just kind of share some ideas that we can talk about relative specifically to real estate investors because this is so new and this technology is so quickly growing, there's a lot of things happening that people aren't even aware of or they're just trying to figure it out on their own. And again, your community is great because I think they're going to get the chance to tinker with it, and there's a lot of just ideas out there that are not necessarily completely hashed out. So we'll talk about some of those. And I'd love to hear the experience of the REtipster community, specifically as well as what you guys are doing. But I'll definitely share some ideas.

I think, first and foremost, artificial intelligence is like any other technology tool. It's a tool. And the great thing about this tool is that it's able to, in some ways, think on its own, which is interesting to think about. Because, in the past, you had these tools that could use very specific things. Maybe it could help you to customize something or cut down time by making your time and tasks more efficient. But with artificial intelligence, we're starting to really use machine learning and create these models that can actually mimic human interaction. And so all of a sudden, we're in this space where sometimes you can't even tell if you're actually interacting with the machine.

And that's actually, I think, a really interesting concept and idea. And people have been talking about this for some time, right? We see it in the movies. We saw it in Terminator 2. We're seeing it with newer movies where AI is going to take over the Earth. So there are a lot of implications beyond what we're going to talk about today.

But for today's sake, in just terms of real estate investors, how can we use this tool to get a better understanding of our markets, to get insights on potentially creating value adds or whatever it may be. We can use these tools to really enhance our ability to become better investors.

Seth: Yeah, and when we say AI, I mean, that's kind of a loaded term. There are lots of different things that qualify as that. We've got ChatGPT, I feel like that's kind of like the big boy that everybody talks about. That's sort of when things started to change really rapidly back in November of 2022. But that's just like talking back and forth to a computer, which is a huge deal given how smart it is and how many things it can do.

But there's also AI for creating music and creating images and fake voices and fake videos. It's just like it goes on and on and on. And I feel like as it continues to develop and as people think of new ways you can harness this technology, it's kind of mind-boggling when you think of how fast that's growing and where it can go.

But when you think of AI, Michael, for real estate investors specifically, what is the number one thing they should be thinking about? Should they be going to ChatGPT and trying to make that do the work for them? Or is there some other website or tool out there where's the opportunity here for real estate investors and even businesspeople in general?

Michael: Absolutely great question. And yeah, obviously it's very far-reaching, so we'll talk about all of them to a certain degree today.

But first and foremost, AI can really help with a lot of automation. And so ChatGPT does a great job of helping us to just refine things, create outlines, parse through data, help us analyze things. It's a great deal analyzer. I don't know if you've tried it yet, but even if you go on to ChatGPT and you start feeding it information that you would have otherwise put into a real estate analysis tool, you can actually just feed it to ChatGPT and it'll start figuring out all of the specifics. And if you're missing some variables, and you want to find out the IRR on a specific investment that you're valuating, it's going to be able to calculate that for you as well as ask you the questions if you're missing some of that information.

So the nice thing about that is all of a sudden, the back-of-the-napkin analysis, I mean, you can do it in the same amount of time to do it on the back of a napkin and get precise information and precise numbers. So you don't really need to any longer go to these websites that have these long forms; you can just put it into ChatGPT and it's going to spit out in terms of like a deal analyzer quickly and relatively accurately.

I would say take all of this with a grain of salt because AI is so new, there are certain things that actually come out that maybe aren't 100% accurate. So you do want to trust but verify, I would say, in these early stages, but for the most part, it's pretty accurate and spot on.

The second part of AI, though, as investors, a lot of times we're driven by the numbers, right? We want to understand what's the risk relative to the potential of a return. And so a lot of times, we're looking at numbers to analyze a deal. And so AI, because it can analyze a lot of information quickly, can help us to make decisions. And so one of the things that I've been digging into a little bit is actually just going straight onto sites like Zillow or Redfin. And there are these little AI plugins that you can use to actually parse all the search results from Zillow. And so, for example, if you get all this information and it gets put into a spreadsheet, what's happening is ChatGPT is going to have a new—I think it's called a plugin, but it's called code interpreter—which allows you to to upload, basically, an entire spreadsheet or some sort of a data set. And so all of a sudden, when you're able to do that, it can basically analyze and find trends for you, right?

And so, before, people had to do this a little bit more manually. Of course, they're using spreadsheets and databases and all these different things. But if you can parse the data specific to an area that maybe you're targeting and you're like, you know what? Find me all the single-family homes that meet this criteria: three-bedroom, two-bath, and meet the 1% rule and have whatever other variables that you're looking at. And you can just have it spit back out the information. I mean, the speed at which you can react over someone else that's not using this technology is going to be incredible. So you're able to make decisions much faster.

So I think that's a really big opportunity. And then even as a business owner, as a real estate entrepreneur, or if you're just building a portfolio, a lot of times we're building a business as investors. And so AI can also help you really build that business. So it can help with content creation, it can help you with branding if you're going out there sourcing your own deals off-market, you can create communications to reach out to people and do it in very creative ways.

I mean, for anyone that hasn't played with ChatGPT, go in there and just have it write something for you, and your mind will be blown. Because it's able to write things that we could never think of because it's pulling data and using machine learning to come up with so-called new things, but in a way that our human brains can do in that kind of, I guess, flexibility and variety.

So, yeah, when it comes to AI, the sky's the limit.

Seth: ChatGPT, I've got the pro version. I think it's $20 a month I'm paying and it's hands down, like by hundreds of miles, the most valuable $20 a month that I'm paying for anything right now. Just given everything you can do with that, it's like having the most brilliant employee in the world, right there even more than that because it's smarter than any human.

Going back to the whole idea of deal analysis or using plugins and that kind of thing. So I guess in order to analyze a deal, it first needs to understand, “What is a deal? What do you want? Are you analyzing vacant land? Are you analyzing multifamily apartment building? What are you trying to do?”

So I think my understanding is that it's really important to understand how to prompt it right. That's really the key to everything. It's like telling it what you want and being really specific, and when it gives you a result that isn't really what you want, tell it that. Tell it that it's not right and why it's not right and what you're actually looking for. Or if it gives you general instructions on how to do something, but it's missing a lot of specifics, ask it for more specifics: “Explain this for me. Give me step-by-step instructions on how to do this one thing that you mentioned in your response.”

So in terms of analyzing a deal, do you have any premade prompts or anything? Say, if you're trying to analyze a rental property to see if it's, I don't know, like, figuring out if it has sufficient cash flow or something? How do you adequately explain that to ChatGPT? Like, is there some kind of copy-and-paste formula? Like, boom, you put that in, then you paste in the numbers, tell me if it's a good deal or not.

I don't know if you thought through it that much or if you have that much organization to how you do it, but any thoughts on that?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great question, Seth. For me, I haven't necessarily come up with a specific prompt, and the reason why is that ChatGPT will fill in the blanks to a certain extent. If you tell it explicitly what you want as an outcome—you're like, “All right, I'm looking for an investment property that has three bedrooms, two baths. I want to put down 20%, and I want to be able to cash flow at least $300 to $400 every single month after principal interest and tax”— then it's going to spit out something very specific based on what you ask.

Now, if you don't know how to ask it that specifically, maybe you're a new investor and you don't even know to think about principal interest payments and debt service and taxes or insurance, then it's going to say, “All right, well, here's the general numbers, but have you considered the principal payments and the interest and the taxes and all those things?” And then you're like, “Okay, let me go find that.”

Or if you're not familiar with the term, you can be like, “What's this principal and interest thing?” And then it’s like, “Okay, well, this is your mortgage, right? And this is what you're going to have to pay on a monthly basis. And so you want to factor this into your monthly cash flow.”

So that's why the great thing about ChatGPT is that it will prompt you if you're asking the right things, if you're thinking about what your outcome is, and then you're asking it more and more questions, it'll interact with you in that regard. And so that's why it's so powerful. This is why the AI is so powerful because it's able to interact with you dynamically versus us having to just program it explicitly.

And so there are certain times, though, where you want to be very specific. And yes, if you had the prompt set up from the get-go and said, “Here are all the variables” and you feed it all at once, then, of course, you're going to get a better output quicker and faster. However, it's a great learning tool just as an investor, just to go in and just start learning by doing, and it's going to just fill in those gaps.

Back in the day, Ajay, I think you're pretty young, but back in the day, we had to actually read books, right? And we had to actually get on our pencils and paper and fill in the deal numbers and figure it out with the calculator. But then, of course, the internet came along and we got web applications and so this is the next step—to use AI to interact directly.

One of the other cool things on a related note that I just did actually yesterday was I'm looking at a syndicated deal, and so they do this prospectus and they do this pro forma or whatever, and so they put it into PDF format. And with ChatGPT, there are these different plugins that you can use to actually go in and analyze the PDF. So, for example, I said, “Okay, here's the link to the PDF. I want you to give me the summary of this entire deal and explain it to me on a very basic level.” So it goes in, it gives me the highlights of the deal. Everything I'm looking at shows me the equity split. But the great thing about that is if some of that is not very familiar to you, you can be like, well, explain to me the equity split, right, and it starts educating you on what that looks like and how it usually is broken out and different things.

And so, again, as an investor, the more information we have, the better educated decisions we can make and the more likelihood that we're going to get a decent return over time. Being able to use this AI is just really changing the game in terms of educating ourselves, of getting back quality information, and then ultimately being able to get to a decision faster so that we can execute quicker than everyone else.

Seth: Ajay, what's been your experience with AI so far? Have you done anything in particular? Have you found it useful in any way?

Ajay: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not going to lie, we use ChatGPT as a glorified copywriter, right? So a majority of what we've done thus far has been we'll use it to script Launch Control templates sometimes. And for those that don't know, Launch Control is a texting SMS blast software, so you can send out a bunch of messages, cold SMS, to prospective sellers. But we'll use it to actually help us generate scripts. And we'll use it for property listings more often than not because, as land flippers, we're always going through inventory. And so rather than spending 15 or 20 minutes drafting this up, now we just say, “Hey, ChatGPT, write a property listing for a piece of land on a 40-acre parcel in Trinidad, Colorado,” and it whips up this articulate, beautiful message.

But I bring that all up to say thus far, we've only used it as a glorified copywriter. But as I'm listening to Michael speak, I'm recognizing two things, okay? Number one, the power of communication. Because frankly, I don't want to say can't, but you are limited in how you can leverage AI if you can't communicate and articulate to the AI what your objective is, right? And I think sometimes, as investors and people, we have this gap between what our goals are, what the objective is, and it actually stops us from achieving what we think we want because we haven't actually clearly defined what we do. So that's, number one, is even with AI as a tool, we as people, and especially as investors, really need to be able to articulate what it is we're trying to accomplish in order to leverage those tools.

But number two, again, as Michael's speaking, I'm recognizing our job as investors is to gather information and make a decision to the best of our ability. And so I think as we all sit down and think about, okay, what can this do for my business, I would almost sit down and plot out what are all the regular decisions that we are making, right? And where can we leverage AI to help us gather information to make those decisions. And you may be surprised what frameworks end up coming out of that.

Like, I know for us right now in my business, we've got four on staff. I have a COO and partner, Ben. And Ben and I were chatting the other day about how every time we have a deal that gets basically a contract signed, it's like, okay, are we double closing? If we're double closing, are we self-listing? Are we listing with a realtor versus? Are we funding versus? Are we getting a funder versus? And there's all these different options, and it's like, okay, hang on. What information do we need to make these decisions? And then how do we feed it through?

Anyway, I bring that all up to say, number one, we're only using this as a glorified copywriter. But number two, I'm recognizing every time there's a decision point we can really leverage AI as long as we can effectively communicate our objective in order to extract that information to make the decision how we're supposed to as executives of our business. Right?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point.

Seth: On that whole thing about communicating effectively. So I got really into this for about a month or so back in, I don't know, when I first heard about it, I learned a bunch of different prompts. There's this website called PromptBase where back before it was commonly known how to do prompts and all this stuff, people were trying to come up with all these fancy ways to give it prompts and stuff, which actually is not that necessary. Like, just think of what do you want and just communicate that that's what I got to do.

But I collected a bunch of these different prompts, and one of the ones that I found was just getting general business advice from ChatGPT and I found it was actually pretty fascinating what it would come up with. I haven't done this yet as we're talking, but I'm going to try to come up with a handful of prompts that I've found useful because I've been collecting these things just in case I ever want to use them again. But one of them, you can just type this into ChatGPT, say I have a business where and then describe your business, and then state what the challenge is to your business, what is the problem, and then ask it, “What are some creative ideas I can do to solve this problem?”

So, for example, in a land business, I could say I have a business where I buy and sell vacant land around the United States. However, there are many other land investors popping up around the country that are copying the exact same ideas and trying to buy the same properties I'm going after, which drives up my acquisition cost significantly. What are some creative ideas that I can do to make my land investing business more unique and build a moat around myself and differentiate myself from my competition? So you can see there in the way that I worded that I got really specific about what the problem was. I didn't just lob this broad issue out there, I really stated what the problem was and then what I want to do to fix it. And I can copy and paste what ChatGPT told me, but it's kind of profound just in the fact some of the ideas may be things that you've thought of before, but some of them you probably haven't thought of before and it's like, oh wow, maybe I could try that, maybe I could totally do that.

And some of the ideas it tosses out there are like: specialization, choose to focus on a specific niche that you know well or that others have overlooked; provide additional services rather than just buying and selling land yourself; considering value-added services like consultation on land development; or connecting buyers with architects or builders or local authorities. You can build a brand, you can build relationships, you can develop a technological advantage.

It goes on and on and on and on from that one little prompt, it's like the tip of the iceberg. There is so much you can do if you can just think of what do I want? What is the problem? And have I even thought through that problem that, well, can I articulate what the problem is? Because if I can't, I can't expect anybody to help me. But the more specific I can get, the more likely you can get help from something like ChatGPT.

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point, Seth, and I think you're right in that the more articulate you are on the outcome that you want is the place that you want to start. And so I was saying that it'll ask you questions back, but unless you're able to articulate the full outcome, then it's going to be a little bit hard because if you give it garbage in, you're going to get garbage out.

So sometimes people are like, oh, this doesn't really work, this is so generic. And the reason why is because, yes, you're not prompting at the specific level that Seth just gave, an example that was very specific. And so that's fantastic.

One of the things, Seth, I don't even know if you know, at the Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, I launched a wealth builders mastermind group. And so one of the things that I was doing prior to getting there was I launched this business essentially in a matter of weeks, just because I was using AI to help me to create all the content and come up with the ideas, give me the framework, even gave me legal elements that would have taken forever before.

And so the nice thing is that you can also prompt ChatGPT to write in someone's specific style. So, for example, there are very good copywriters out there, people like Ray Edwards or Donald Miller, that have a framework that is called story brand, and so you can actually tell ChatGPT, “Hey, can you write my copy such that it follows the structure of Donald Miller's story brand?” And it'll actually create the structure. So if you guys are curious, if you go to WBMM.org—that's the wealth builders mastermind website—you can see the copy that it's created because literally the majority of that is all created through ChatGPT. But with that said, you do have to add in your own personal elements, right? So it's going to do, I think, a lot of heavy lifting, but you still want to obviously have that human element that you're going in and tweaking things so that it sounds more like yourself.

Now, on the other side of things, one of the things that we haven't talked about yet with AI is in terms of we talked about content creation. We talked about just analysis and acquisition research. Another thing that AI does really well is creation. And this is the part that's kind of freaky to some degree, because not only able to create images out of thin air that didn't exist before, that are photorealistic high resolution. Now it's getting to the point where it's able to create video on top of that, and then it's going to be able to create virtual environments as well.

But one of the cool things is if you're a real estate investor and you're creating a brand, you can go into websites like Looka.com, and they use AI to help you generate a brand presence. And so if you go back again to look at this website that I created for the real estate wealth builders mastermind, the logo is all AI-generated. And it's something that I was able to create really quickly. And I said, okay, let's try all these different things. And it gave me different things that I could tweak, but I found something that I liked, and then I'm like, all right, I want to buy it. And it was only $100.

And then all of a sudden, they're giving me full, high-res images, vector files for Illustrator, basically the entire image package, which before you would have to go direct to a designer, you would have to actually go back and forth. And you'd have to rely on that designer to kind of read your mind in terms of what you want versus if you're just specifically telling AI, okay, this is what I want. And if you don't know what you want, they're giving you ideas, and then you're just tweaking it. I think it's the best of both worlds. And so I think AI is also really at the forefront of just being able to create things and help us to imagine things that didn't exist before.

So one of the things that, I guess back during COVID, I was selling a property in San Diego, and I wanted to sell it by myself. So I did a for sale by owner. And so I'm listing it, and I didn't have it furnished. And so I was like, do I want to actually go out there and furnish this thing and stage it? And it was going to be another, like, four or five grand. And I was like, “Well, yeah, I should probably do that, because you potentially get a much better return,” but then I was like, “Well, maybe not. Let me see what technologies are out there.”

And this was before AI, so they had designers that would actually go in and virtually stage. So some of you have likely seen this at this point, right? But you're basically sending them a picture of an empty room, and then they're actually putting in furniture with the right perspective and elements and whatnot. And so they would get back to me and with a day of me asking them to put together a specific picture and it was amazing and I used it and it did well and I didn't have to actually stage it and people could conceptualize what that looked like and sell the dream, so to speak, right?

But today, with AI, there's sites where you can literally just send a picture and you get it back in like seconds, like 30 seconds or a minute or whatever, and it's doing more or less the same thing, except now it's AI-generated. And so again, the speed.

Seth: What are some of those sites?

Michael: Okay, so if you want to play around with this AI-powered interior design, you can go to VirtualStagingAI.app. And that's where you can just take a picture and upload it to them and tell them, hey, I want something in a contemporary style. And they're going to just come up with different ideas.

And then there's another one called InteriorAI.com, and this is a similar idea. This one's a little bit more robust. It'll give you more ideas, knock down walls, and really create a different look in the space. And those are just two, but there's a ton of them, so they're constantly coming out.

One of the things that you should be aware of, just that this artificial intelligence space is so dynamic and there are tools that are constantly coming out and some of them are going as well. One of the greatest websites out there is called There’s An AI For That.

Seth: Interesting.

Michael: And if you go there, you can see there's literally probably like 4,000 different AI apps that have basically come to fruition after ChatGPT came out, Midjourney, and all these major platforms that really are kind of pushing the envelope of AI development and they're building on top of that.

So, yeah, There’s An AI For That, and it'll show you all the trending programs. It'll also show you the trending plugins and different things that are related to AI and you can get a good sense of what's popular and what's actually working, or the brand new ones that just came out out, literally zero day. So you can see what just came out today and there's usually several, if not dozens coming out every single day. So it's moving quickly and certain ones are better than others for sure. Part of it is just playing with it and seeing if it works for you and your goals.

Seth: That was going to be one of my questions for you, is like, do you know of many places that list all the best AI websites out there right now? It sounds like you just gave that to us.

So that's one of the things that's kind of been blowing my mind because I follow this guy on YouTube named Matt Wolfe, who does a really good job of talking about all the new stuff going on in the past week in the AI world, and there's just tons of stuff happening. And he rattles off all these websites and it's like, man, I mean, just learning how to use one of them is like its own little job, like you said. Some of them just probably just disappear overnight because they become obsolete or something.

And even between the time that we're recording this and the time that it goes live, honestly, one of my concerns is that what we talk about today is not relevant anymore. It's changing that quickly. But hopefully there's general advice people can take away from this nevertheless.

Michael: Well, one of the interesting things as well, Seth and Ajay, and one of the areas that I think is going to be still definitely relevant (whenever this does ultimately air) is the video creation and the audio enhancement. So, for example, there are tools like Descript. Have you heard of Descript, Seth? It's basically video and audio editing, but they're integrating AI to the point where you're able to edit videos by just deleting text, like a Word document. And then you're able to enhance the sound and remove all the background noise by just clicking a button. And on top of that, you can actually clone your own voice.

And so there's real, I think, positive implications as well as negative implications with that, right? But you can clone someone's voice. And so, for example, I have a podcast called Breakthrough Millionaire where there are a lot of times where I'm in there and I might have missed something in my intro or I forgot to say something, or maybe it didn't sound exactly as I wanted to say. I can go into Descript and I can literally highlight the words that I said and then I can overlay—let's call it “overdub.” And I can change it to whatever I wanted it to say. And because it knows my voice, it can fill in those words and the majority of people will never know that that wasn't me.

Now, is it perfect? Not yet, but it's getting there. And that's the scary thing. You're not going to necessarily know what's real or not real because along with the audio is also coming video where you can have these avatars that are actually speaking as you, can have the likeness of you, or you can look totally different.

And so the reason why I bring this up is because, as real estate investors, consider the power of being able to go out and prospect virtually. Ajay, you're talking about doing the text blast, right? But it's a personalized message to the person. And all of a sudden, Seth's coming up on their phones like, “Hey, I just want to drop you a quick message. I see you got this property out there. Any interest in selling it? I'm a real estate investor. I can give you full cash offer. Let me know.” And it's literally a video talking to that person, and they're like, “Oh, that's different than just a text.” And all of a sudden they're able to respond back, right? And then Seth could literally send something back.

And the crazy thing is that it doesn't even need to be Seth. It could literally be Ajay, like sitting there behind the computer, replying as Seth in his voice and his avatar, and people wouldn't know, and people will not know going forward in the future.

Now, of course, there are some moral implications with this, right? What you can do with this technology and this power or whatnot. Unfortunately, there are people here that are getting scammed already. People are cloning voices and saying, “Hey, I need you to send me money.” I think I saw on 48 Hours someone cloned the voice of parents' daughter, right? And she said, oh, I just got in this huge accident. I need money right now, or whatever. She sent her like 20 or 30 grand, and it wasn't even her, right? She was off at a camp somewhere during the summer.

So, again, with any technology, there's going to be good and bad, right? And so we got to have to navigate that. But as investors, if we can use these tools to our advantage and do it in a way that, I think, is a value-add and in a way that's morally intact, I think why not, right? Why not create a better experience? Why not create win-wins for everyone across the board and be much more efficient?

Seth: Yeah. On that note, I mean, I've heard a lot of doom and gloom about AI and how it's going to outsmart us in the near future. Its IQ was already kind of at a genius level, and it's getting to the point where it's so smart that it can speak in words that we don't even understand. It's just so far beyond us. We're talking in the next couple of years kind of thing.

And it makes me wonder, are you scared at all, or are you having any concerns about this or what are your thoughts? Should we be more excited or should we be terrified? Or a little bit of both? How do you think through that?

Michael: A little bit of both. I definitely do have some concerns because having a technology background, part of the reason why I play with this so much is because I just love technology and kind of seeing how things work and how it will impact society, for good or for bad.

And as I listen to the people that are at the forefront of AI and the developers and the people that are pushing the envelope in this space, there was one guy that basically shared that about 50% of the people, the main developers that are actually building these models out, feel like there's a 10% chance that AI is going to destroy humanity in some form or sense. And I was like, well, that's not good because if you had 50% of the engineers that worked on your airplane think that there's a 10% chance that the plane is going to go down over the Atlantic Ocean, then I think I'd be a little wary of getting on that plane. So definitely, I think, as a community, we have to be aware of what's happening and we have to vote with our thoughts and our dollars and whatever else. Just be aware of kind of like what's happening in this space because it's moving so quickly.

Like you said, Seth, a lot of times regulators and government entities, they can't keep up, right? I mean, it's seriously to that point. No different than with a lot of the stuff with crypto and all that stuff. I mean, they were so far behind and now they're finally trying to play some catch-up. Same thing with AI. And so that becomes a real question in terms of what our responsibility is as citizens, right? How do we voice our opinion? I think we vote with our dollars. And we also vote with how we share ideas with other people.

And yes, I do think it can be a little scary because if you think about this technology, AI is doing things that the original developers never intended and it's essentially learning on its own. I think one of the first things was it started understanding Farsi before they even told it to figure out and understand different languages. And so they're like, that's interesting. And so we're going to see a lot more of these what's called emergent qualities of AI. And because we can't predict that, then I think we do have a responsibility to kind of figure out how do you put certain guardrails in place, or can you? And if you can't, then should you be pushing this out as quickly as you are?

And so the main debate right now is OpenAI, which is the one that released ChatGPT, their idea is that we just kind of push it out and we'll kind of tweak it as is after we see how the public reacts versus other companies like Google. They're more of the thought that, okay, let's kind of slowly trickle this out.

So who's right or wrong? I'm not sure. But what I do know is that there are going to be major implications, positively as well as negatively in medicine. There's going to be huge leaps forward with just being able to sequence genomes faster, better, being able to identify things that we couldn't do before. And so that's going to be fantastic. And then, of course, on the other side of things, people are going to get scammed in ways that you could never have ever dreamed of, which is just so sad.

And as well as one of the things, Seth, I don't know if you thought about, but if we're talking like 20or 30 years from now, what if AI is so good and it automates all of our processes such that we all physically don't have to really work in the traditional sense? There's no more manual labor, there's no more thought, and we have a certain just level of, I don't know, sustenance of food and shelter. And we're just sitting there and I kind of think about that. I'm like, our minds are just going to melt. We're going to become this devolved humanoid. But hopefully…

Ajay: Can I jump in here? There are a lot of good thoughts going on here. Michael, I think just to loop back really quickly with Seth's initial question kind of around the doom and gloom that some folks talk about, I see that through two perspectives. Number one is I heard this quote once, and regardless of how you feel about it, gives me a lot of peace. And it goes something like, evil only wins if the good sit idle.

Michael: Right?

Ajay: And so I just think there are more good than bad out there and there's seasons of more one than the other, and we don't need to dive into that. But I do think there is a lot of good here, and there's a risk with AI. But I think the good will ultimately win. In the event that it doesn't, it is so far out of my control that I am not going to sit around and think about it truly, right?

Because let's say, I mean, let's just be honest in your metaphor about the plane. We're on the plane. The engineers are tinkering, but we're on the plane. So if it's going down, I'm going to enjoy the rest of my time on it, more or less, right? But those two thoughts give me peace in the sense of like, I'm going to focus on what I can control and continue trekking forward.

Now, I had an interesting thought, actually, as you were speaking about. Let's say AI does solve all our problems. There's this really interesting podcast. It's a Joe Rogan episode with Naval Ravikant. If anybody's followed any of his stuff. Naval has a book published about him by, I think it's Ryan Holiday and somebody else called The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. And it's absolutely phenomenal for anyone that hasn't.

But anyways, to circle back in that interview with Joe Rogan, Naval speaks about how he believes everyone can be rich. So it's not a matter of one versus another or how some may need to have it all in maybe a regular capitalistic society, for example, but how there are abundant resources on Earth and we do have the ability for everybody to be wealthy. And so, as we talk about that, his descriptor of the world was our job would actually be to entertain one another.

So rather than, maybe we become docile—I mean, there are always some folks that just have an inherent drive and personality to push things forward and others that do not. And in his hypothetical utopia that he laid out on this podcast, it ended us with us all entertaining one another.

So, Seth, you would be the man. Everybody would, “Seth, can you juggle yet, by the way?”

Seth: No, not really.

Ajay: You've got time.

Seth: Did you guys happen to catch the thing earlier this year where the founder of TikTok went before Congress and testified and the Congress people were, like, questioning him and all this stuff?

I just caught random clips of it. Maybe it was the clips that I saw, but it struck me I remember thinking the same thing when Mark Zuckerberg got grilled by Congress. Same kind of thing. It struck me how clueless the people in Congress seemed like. It was like a bunch of our grandparents were trying to lecture this owner of one of the most highly advanced companies in the world about the right way to run their company. And these people don't even understand what social media is, hardly.

I mean, they're good at sounding mad in giving their speeches on their soapboxes, but they don't really understand anything. It felt like, yeah, I just almost kind of just felt embarrassed watching it. Not that they're wrong to be concerned, but it was just very evident that these are not the experts in the room. And it's kind of laughable that they're trying to tell this person how to run the company, but it makes me think about this AI stuff. So these are the same people in charge of regulating this technology that they absolutely do not understand. There's just no question about it. So that's a little concerning to me.

And also, I didn't actually see this interview, but I heard a commentary about it. Apparently, the CEO of Google was talking about how they don't actually want to be pushing this stuff out at such a fast rate, but they have to. They can't stop because the future of their company depends on it. And all these other companies are marching forward with huge progress very quickly, so they can't just put the brakes on and stop it. So there's kind of like this thing where everyone was just pushing so hard to be on the cutting edge. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is miles behind in terms of figuring out how to regulate it.

I guess, Ajay, you kind of addressed it as best as we can in terms of, like, we don't really have control over this. So it's like, what's the point of losing sleep over it? But it will be very interesting to see how this gets figured out in the years to come because I'm positive that the advances will outpace regulation. I mean, it already kind of has.

Ajay: Right? And I think, to Michael's point, I can't remember how you worded this, Michael, but you said it beautifully, that our dollars have a vote or something to that effect. Right.

And I do think, and I don't want to turn this anywhere near political, but there is an element worth noting that government was formed, like how we know it today, during times when innovation was not nearly as rapid as it was. Like, I remember in government classes, studying what you need for civilization had six core things. We don't need to get into those, but one of them was government.

And the way the government was designed, more or less as we know it today, has all happened in the past, most recently, like a couple hundred years ago. And there are some changes and amendments, but overall the structure was more or less formed a couple hundred years ago. Back then, riding horses was innovative, right? Corn was considered an innovation back then. And that was considered innovative for three generations, mind you.

So there's something worth noting here that, at some level, our dollars do need to signify change. I have no idea what that means, but Seth, I think it's a very valid thing to point out.

Seth: Corn was considered innovative.

Ajay: That's the soundbite for the beginning of this.

Seth: In terms of like, what we should expect from AI—and again, this is changing rapidly, so we're not going to hold you to this—but as of summer of 2023, what should a person expect from artificial intelligence? I guess in the case of, say, if you're using ChatGPT, you're trying to analyze a deal or any of these other previous real estate uses we mentioned earlier, at what point should they say, “No, AI should be able to do more?”

For me, I'm going to keep pushing it and see what it can do versus “Let's just not go there. It's unreasonable to expect a computer to solve my problems here. I need to step in and do this myself.” Any ideas on where that line currently is or where it ought to be?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great question. I think we're going to just continually see AI evolve. And we're going to see it in the workplace, we're going to see it in investing. And essentially, the companies that are able to make use of the technology to actually get a customer or client or a specific outcome are going to be able to perform well and they're going to be able to grow their businesses.

So we're seeing a ton of innovation in this space and quickly. And like anything else, the cream is going to rise to the top. Right? And so those companies that are pushing the envelope, that are creating a quality product, are going to win and help people, help investors. And the great thing about, I think, for us as real estate investors, is we haven't really seen anything very specific yet.

So REtipster community, hey, if you have some great idea of how to leverage AI and really build on top of a platform. You could go out there right now. I think it's the Wild West in terms of being able to stake your claim and be able to build something that could be massively successful over the next few years. And so it's a very unique opportunity for entrepreneurs, I think, specifically in real estate.

But of course, across the board as well, going forward in the future, what I see and where I kind of get excited is the integration of AI and virtual environments. So I don't know if you guys saw it, but Apple just released their headset. And, of course, it's way too expensive to buy right now. It's like $3,500 or whatever it is. But the implication of that is that we're still moving in this direction.

And so AR is augmented reality, which means that you're not necessarily in a complete virtual environment. You're in augmented reality, meaning that you could wear a headset or, in the future, ideally just a pair of glasses where you're observing your physical world, but you're getting digital elements integrated.

So imagine if you're a real estate investor, you're going to walk a property or walk a piece of land, right? And it's giving you all the specifics, like the tax history, all the different elements of the build, and it's telling you, Grandma Josephine died here. It has everything that you could think of, right? And it just is just feeding it to you through visual cues and it's pointing it out to you, and you're not even having to ask it. It's just information at your fingertips. That's where we're going.

The technology is such where there are things like LiDAR and NeRF (neural radiance field) technologies where you can just literally look at things, and it's going to be mapping things, 3D, and then you're going to be able to go back and record those and then go back and re-walk it later so you don't have to. Already we're at the point where you can go in and view properties and, I think, zoom around, right? There are some 3D technologies that are interesting. They're not perfect, but there's going to come a point very soon where you can literally just walk a property, and it's almost like you're there. And so that's where I think it's pretty exciting, where AI is going to push the envelope for VR and AR.

And then, as investors, I think we're going to really get, again, access to more data quicker, better, and faster. The people that adopt this and that see this coming, I think, are going to be the ones that are going to ultimately do better. One of the things that I really learned early on as a real estate investor was that you have to execute and execute quickly. And for good or for bad, things are going to even accelerate, even quicker now, and so you're going to have to be on the ball. But if you're using this technology and you're at the forefront, then you're going to be able to execute quicker than everyone else.

And I think that's really the key of keeping AI in the back of your head, just seeing what's going on, going to There’s An AI For That occasionally and just kind of seeing what's out there and being like, all right, let me do a search for real estate, and then seeing what's available. And again, if you don't see something, you can piece together different things, like we were talking about using ChatGPT with the PDF prompts. You can use different AI plugins to parse MLS data. Ajay was talking about using the text to create creative content or this very specific content. We're going to be seeing the avatars, you're going to be seeing the text or voice come out, and just have a much, I think, more engaging interaction with our prospects.

And the cool thing here is that what if you have a deal and you feed the information about, let's say, Grandpa Joe. He wants to exit a property, but he also wants to have a little cash flow. So maybe you're going to have him hold a note, right? You can actually have ChatGPT structure a deal for you and say, “Hey, these are all the requirements. How can I structure this so that Grandpa Joe feels taken care of? I'm making out decently as an investor, and it's creative enough that it can actually create that structure.”

So to your point, Seth, I think the sky is the limit in terms of what we can do with this technology, but we have to also have some creativity and then be very specific on what the outcome is that we want to create. And then from there, yeah, I think it's fun and I think it's a value-add in the long term.

Seth: I really like that idea of trying to make this deal work because a lot of times, there are ways to make a deal work that you just haven't thought of because you're not familiar with how it can work. Or maybe your brain just isn't working right that day. Or maybe it's something you've never tried before. And to that point, like, say if one of the suggestions is, have you considered an option or something like that or something that you don't really fully understand, you can then ask it, “Please explain further, how does this work? How would you suggest I proceed with making this type of offer?” and keep going until you get it and it'll keep explaining it to you?

I know since we're kind of on the subject of different uses for AI, so I've noticed a lot of these AI websites that are popping up, like There’s An AI For That, a lot of these specialized websites. What they seem to be doing is just taking what's already there, like ChatGPT, and just kind of like packaging it in a certain way for a specific purpose and putting it on a different platform and making it feel like a different product, but it's kind of just pulling from the same thing. Like you could probably do it for free or for a cheaper subscription through ChatGPT.

In some of my own playing around with it over the past few months, I've used ChatGPT to create legal language for contracts. There was an option contract that I had my attorney put together and my goal was to keep this thing as short and concise as possible. And the way that he was wording things was just like really wordy and just rambling. And I would get to the end of a clause and not even understand what I just read. I was just like, “What?”

And I think he was doing that because he's an attorney and he wants to look smart and all this stuff but that was totally contrary to what I was trying to do. So I took the sections that I thought were too wordy and I put them in ChatGPT and I just said please make this more concise, like limit it to one or two sentences and make it easy enough for a ten-year-old to understand. And I did that and I sent it back to my attorney without telling him that ChatGPT did it. And I said hey, would this work? And he's like, yeah, that would work.

So I mean, right there, he was acting as my lawyer. I mean, that's literally what I just did. I'm not suggesting people do that, but I'm just saying it worked for me.

Another thing you can do, kind of like what Ajay was talking about, is copywriting. That's a huge use case for a lot of different types of businesses. It takes a lot of thought to do good sales copy and it can do it in the snap of a finger, and it's good. You might need to tweak some things but the hardest stuff can really be done for you.

I've also used it to sort messy lists sometimes. Like if you've ever gotten a delinquent tax list in the land business, the county's format will just be all jumbled up. Like the information is put out horizontally instead of vertically. If you had to manually sort that, I mean, I've literally spent like 8 hours reformatting these lists. You can paste that kind of thing into ChatGPT and tell it to reorganize it and put it in the table and it'll do it for you.

There's also the business advice thing we talked about earlier. You can summarize long text if you have just this huge block of text and it's too long to read or if you don't understand what it's saying, you can just tell it to summarize it for you and explain it like you're five years old and it'll make it super concise and clear.

I had an electrician send me something in an email where he's like, yeah, we're going to take this thing and we're going to home run it and do a series thing and stuff that makes tons of sense to an electrician, but I'm not an electrician, I don't know what he's talking about. And so I pasted that on ChatGPT and I said, please translate this for me for my electrician, and it cleared it up instantly.

So, again, just basically anytime you encounter any problem related to communication of some kind, ChatGPT can probably help with that. Or content creation of some kind. I mean, the use cases just go on and on and on.

Ajay: Including Farsi, apparently. Right, Michael?

Seth: Yes.

Ajay: Now that's really cool. Seth and as we've been chatting, actually, I'm curious, I might test a couple of things here soon in our business. Like something I've been—I don't use the word preaching—but preaching at people recently is how we don't do enough to build trust in this business or walk people through their customer journey. So, like, in our business, we have attached to every e-contract, we send out the customer journey that somebody's going to go through. And that way, it assigns roles and responsibilities, and you have general timelines of, “Hey, seller, if you sign this document, in three weeks, this thing happens.” And then here's the trigger for that. And then it goes through, and it's this pretty little graphic with a road going through it. But we're spinning stuff up like that all the time to build trust and credibility with sellers.

But I usually just get on Fiverr or Upwork and pay some graphic designer to do it. And now I'm curious, could I have AI do something like this? Aside from that, you mentioned video. Could I record a base video? Because another acquisition strategy we use is we actually send Loom videos to sellers sometimes, so if we can't get in touch with them again, this is a marketing and sales business in real estate, right? And so, I need to market in a way to invoke responses with my sellers. And so we'll do all kinds of funky stuff to try to get “Hey, they said they were interested in selling. We can't get a hold of them or we sent a contract to them and they haven't signed yet. Let's figure out what we need to do.”

But sending video has been really, really successful for us. But it always takes time and you need to craft the message and you want to make it personal. And now I'm like, could we have AI just sort of scrub out the name and some of the details and use our voice to rewrite it?

So I'm really curious. Seth, I'll be sure to test things to be posted in the REtipster community and the Facebook group in the least as well, just so I can share my lessons with everybody as we're doing this.

Seth: And I do know one, I just mentioned this because I was using this a couple of days ago. There is a mobile app called DealMachine that's been around for a number of years now. It's like the best app ever if you are into driving for dollars where you drive around and specifically see a property with your own eyes and you want to contact the seller and you can do a lot of other stuff with it too. But that was sort of the original purpose for the app.

But they've just recently integrated a bunch of really good AI right into the app. Like when you add a lead, it'll give you a bunch of different ways you can use AI right there. And I thought it was worth mentioning just because some of these things I had never really thought of before. So one of them right at the very top is “Help me analyze this property,” whatever that means, that Michael had mentioned that earlier. But another way is like “Help me write an SMS message to send to the owner,” or “Help me write a cold call script,” “Help me calculate the offer price,” “Help me find a title company,” ‘Help me to calculate repairs on the property,” “Help me to practice negotiating,” “How do I find cash buyers,” “How do I find renters.”

Like it shows you all this stuff specific to that deal in that location based on the numbers that you have. Maybe you're in a conversation with somebody who has emailed you about selling their property and they don't sound particularly motivated, or maybe they're demanding a price that's way higher than you want and you're just trying to figure like, what do I say? How do I even respond to this in a way that's going to not mess everything up? I have this dilemma all the time, like how do I just keep this going and not destroy the deal right there?

ChatGPT. I mean, you can paste that person's response in there and help me generate a response that will keep the conversation going, that will make them feel validated, and help me to continue negotiating a lower price.

And again, it kind of comes back to your ability to communicate and understand in the first place what you even want and how to use ChatGPT to help you out with that.

Michael: There's an interesting thing that's happening as well. Have you seen AutoGPT? So essentially what this is, is they're called AI agents. And so AI agents are the idea that you can use ChatGPT or some sort of AI model to do multiple tasks based off of a larger outcome.

So let's just say, for example, as an investor, right, it's like I want to acquire a property. Let's go back to our example. Three bedroom, two bath house with $300 to $400 of cash flow after 20% down. And in theory, it can start to kind of piece together the overall puzzle and say, okay, well, you want this? How can I execute this for you?

First it's going to go parse the MLS and figure out, okay, what are the potential prospects? Then it's going to potentially find the listing agents. And then it's going to reach out to them and send them a message. And then it's going to interact with them and negotiate based off of a parameter that you may have already set forth.

And then let's just say you get a verbal confirmation. So you make the offer and ChatGPT is analyzing the offer, and then ultimately, it can negotiate the entire escrow process, theoretically.

And so this is, I think, where it's going to go. We're not there yet, but they're starting to work on these things. And I think, again, it's important to kind of know where the AI is going. Right now we're getting excited about these individual tasks that it can do. However, as we go forward in the future, a lot of this is going to automate the entire process. And so if we think about the ramifications of that and all of a sudden you're just like, all right, go find me a house with these parameters. And if you find it, execute on it. And it's doing everything in the background, I think that's where your mind really starts to kind of open up to the power of AI.

And this is something that we've never seen this technology before in human history, of course. So this is where it's kind of really leapfrogging where we were. It's been around for a while, but it's really come to the forefront in the last year. But just leapfrogging from last year to this year. And going forward, we're going to see things that we couldn't have even imagined just like a few years ago.

Seth: I think the devil is in the details. Usually when things fall apart and go wrong, it's when there's some little thing in the fine print or the code that somebody just overlooked. And this is very true in the finance and accounting world. That's usually where a lot of the worst things are hidden. And it's when people kind of get a little lazy in their thinking and it goes back to this whole automation thing and the belief that I can just push this button and this machine will go in motion and do it all for me.

And I think the challenge is that's becoming more and more true, it doesn't require nearly as much human involvement, but it still takes some. And I think that bar is kind of moving to a more sophisticated level where you really can get away with doing less and less work, but there still needs to be some involvement. So what is that? Where do you need to be involved? And where can you truly let go of the wheel and trust a computer to handle it for you?

And sometimes it varies. Like, I've seen this different times with ChatGPT where I prompt it and it gives me a perfect outcome and then other times I try to do a similar thing and it's not at all where it needs to be. I need to really hold its hand and keep guiding it.

But I guess I would encourage everybody. This whole idea behind automation is just recognizing that your involvement isn't completely done. Like you need to do something to make sure it's on the right track. And some people do not have a problem with this. I don't think I have a huge problem with it. If anything, I'm too involved. I overthink stuff. But I know several people who have the opposite issue where it's like they don't want to do anything and they'll just let go and deal with whatever consequences.

Ajay: Well, that's why it's called passive income, Seth, as all good real estate investors know.

Michael: Yeah, that's a really good point, Seth. I think especially currently, we definitely do still have to have involvement. I think when we're talking about full automation, we're still looking quite a ways out. And I think sometimes even I get excited about some of the things that can happen further out.

But a lot of times with technology, even like the internet, people are like, oh my gosh, it's going to revolutionize how we do business. And people are thinking within like two or three years, right? And then we're like 30 years later and it's like, oh, these things are actually coming to the forefront now. And they're actually as we thought they were going to be, but there was a much longer lag time, I think, than we anticipated. We'll see with AI, obviously, I think this has the potential to be exponential growth, so we'll have to see.

But sometimes, yeah, I think, like you said, Seth, we really want to make sure that we're dotting the I's and crossing the T's, especially in the beginning with technology because, yeah, it's not perfect by any means yet. We want to trust but verify and take everything with a grain of salt to a certain extent.

Seth: Yeah, for sure.

Well, Michael, I appreciate you coming on and sharing with us your wealth of knowledge and everything you know about AI. If people want to follow up with you or check out your stuff, is there a place they should go to see what you got going on?

Michael: Absolutely. Well, if you want to check out the Real Estate Wealth Builders Mastermind, we just launched that and that's been going really well. It's literally built by AI and it's functioned and it's attracted people and people have signed up. So it actually works. So if you want to see a live example of that, definitely go there.

And if you're interested in joining as well, just as an investor that wants to collaborate with other high-level investors, that's a place you can join us as well. And then, on the personal finance side of things, my site is called FinanciallyAlert.com, and you can go there if you want to learn about financial freedom and different ways to create passive income or side hustles and things of that nature.

And then I've got a podcast called Breakthrough Millionaire as well that talks a lot about mindset and being able to kind of break through lots of personal development and things of that nature.

So, yeah, thank you so much, Seth and Ajay. It's been really fun talking about this topic. I get I kind of geek out when we talk about anything technology-wise. And you've got a great community here, so I'm really fascinated to kind of see, in the Facebook group and what people are using it for, because it's really the individual, I think it's really the community that comes up with the best ideas out there. People that are doing things that we don't realize that they're doing. And so I have a feeling they're going to come up with some amazing ideas and applications.

Seth: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Michael. Appreciate it. And I'll talk to you soon.

Michael: Thanks, guys.