Making $10M Land Flipping, Subdivision Deals, Owning a Town & Being a Mayor | Jon Jasniak DSH #326

Do you own a town in Texas?

Technically I do own a town.

I am the mayor of the town of Cornutas, Texas.

So it's right next to Guadalupe Mountain National Park, which is an awesome tourist destination for people who want to go hiking and whatnot.

So it's going to be kind of a mix between like a rest stop and a tourist destination.

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All right, John Jasniak here today.

We're talking land, we're talking subdivisions, and you are a petroleum engineer as well, right?

I was, yeah.

Technically, I guess still by trade.

What was that like?

Dude, that was, I tell people, that's kind of kind of what got me started into real estate is like, I was a petroleum engineer.

I didn't dislike engineering.

I was drilling oil wells.

So making a bunch of money, drilling oil wells.

I was in West Texas, working the rigs,

but just kind of knew that the nine-to-five grind wasn't for me.

And so that's kind of what transitioned me to real estate.

I wanted to do something without a ceiling, be my own

business owner, and have the freedom that comes with that.

So that's kind of what got me into the game, I would say, of land.

Right.

And out there in Texas, there's tons of land.

Yeah, there is so much land in Texas.

I don't know how many millions of acres there are,

but it's vast.

And when it comes to like purchasing it, do you go on a website?

How does that work?

Yeah, so actually my first land purchase was on a website.

It would have been back in late 2016.

I bought 53 acres in Hudspeth County, Texas, which I still do a lot of work in today.

And I bought 53 acres for $8,500.

Wow.

So it was like $1,500 an acre.

I bought it from some guy in Florida who was selling Texas land.

And you get a lot of that in a land investing, land flipping niche, like people out of state selling random pieces of land.

So I'm negotiating with this guy and buying 53 acres for 8,500 bucks.

And I found it on landwatch.com.

I buy this thing and it already came subdivided, this piece, into 10 acre lots, five of them.

And I sold them off within like three months

and doubled my money and, you know, 8,500 into 17 Gs.

And that's kind of the very beginning of jazz land and my whole land journey.

And it just snowballed from there.

have since ramped it up and now doing a lot bigger projects, obviously.

Yeah, you've done over 10 million, right?

$10 million.

I've done well over $10 million.

It's close to 1,000 transactions now in the land space, probably close to 10,000 acres.

I'm pretty excited actually.

Yesterday, I just signed a contract for 640 acres in Gaines County, Texas.

We're buying it for $736,000, so it's like $1,150,000 per acre.

I'm going to subdivide it into 10-acre lots and sell it off.

Wow.

So what exactly is subdivision?

What's the process for that?

Why does it make it more valuable?

Yeah, so in the land space, there's really two main niches, I would say.

You got your land flipping, which is, you know, buying a random piece of land like my first deal in the middle of nowhere and flipping it for double or triple your money.

And then you got the subdividing game, which is what I love because you can do it at scale.

It's going in, buying, it could only be 20 or 30 acres, but oftentimes what I do is I go in and buy 100, 200, 500 acres and subdivide it.

down into smaller lots and just that simple breaking down of the acreage allows it to become a lot more affordable for people and it's a huge value add.

So, you know, I'm buying this land, for example, for $1,150, $1,150 per acre.

When I subdivide it to 10 acre lots, it'll probably be worth $3,000 an acre,

close to triple just from breaking it down into smaller acres.

Now, when you're breaking it down, sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not.

That's the whole art and the whole game of subdividing what I do and what I teach and help others with, but that's.

That's really the crux of it, just adding value to more lots.

And when you're looking for land to buy, is there anything specific in in terms of area or like type of land you're looking for?

Yeah, I love outside of city limits.

So I think you've had maybe like Cole or some other guests on before, where they're attacking these large development projects like inside of a major city.

And what you run into is it becomes extremely difficult to get approvals, get permits, the amount of time, the amount of engineering that is involved with something like that.

So I'm a huge proponent of keeping it simple.

I love outside of city limits zero to little restrictions most of my work is in Texas but we have people doing it all over Tennessee Virginia Michigan you can basically do this any part of the country anywhere but outside of city limits a large chunk of land where the county shout out to today's sponsor factor factor's got delicious ready-to-eat meals that make eating better every single day wherever tomorrow takes you be ready with pre-prepared chef crafted and dietitian approved meals guys they got over 35 different options a week so you could definitely find something you like they got vegan they got keto they got veggie they got a lot of meat whatever you guys are in the mood for they got two minute meals fuel up fast they're restaurant quality all you got to do is heat them up you don't got to do anything else no cooking none of that they also got snacks smoothies and more and they got a wide variety of easy options for the day like breakfast midday bites and more they've done the math guys this is actually less expensive than takeout and all their meals like i said earlier are dietitian approved so they're nutritious and delicious it's the perfect solution if you're looking for fast meals it's flexible for your schedule you could choose between six to 18 meals per week no prep guys definitely check it out factormeals.com slash dsh 50 for 50 off your order that's a big discount guys factormeals.com slash dsh 50 check them out and the states make it easy for you to subdivide it and there's a lot of loopholes actually uh that allow this to take place such as texas is a there's a good 10 acre loophole where if you break it down into acreage and keep it 10 plus acres, you're what they call plaid exempt.

And basically all I need to do, like on this deal, for example, is run a surveyor out there, say, hey, this is how I want to break it out.

I just pull up Google Earth, do a little screenshot, little polygons on how I want the land to look, send it to him or her, run out there.

This one will probably cost me 10, 20 Gs.

They'll stake off all the lots, create a nice little map.

Every lot gets its own map, and it's basically ready to sell.

Wow.

And some people hear that, they're like, no rezoning, no entitlements, no engineering, and this deal, you know, it'll be probably a $2 million deal.

We've done them as high as four or five million bucks.

Dang.

And you don't have to go through any city approvals, any town halls, any crazy engineers, like getting permits or rezoned, none of that.

So this is, I think, probably the next like blue ocean strategy in real estate just because

it's stupid easy right now.

I don't, if you're asking me, I don't think it's going to be like that forever.

As things get kind of too good to be true, so to to speak, governments, regulatory agencies, all that type of stuff kind of start to step in and try and get their hand in the pot.

Absolutely.

So is land similar to real estate where there's like a few big players or is it kind of more even?

I'd say it's more even.

Land is very much a niche still.

There's a lot more people entering the space because you got coaches and quote-unquote gurus out there teaching and coming on podcasts like this.

Funny story, I actually found out about land investing on a podcast like yours.

Some guy like me came on, started talking about buying a lot for five five grand and selling it off on owner financing, which I am a huge proponent of.

Like a big thing that people think about land is like it can't cash flow.

But when you sell it off to a customer like I do for 500 a month or 1,000 a month for five or 10 years, like I got a lot of cash flow coming in every month.

Interesting.

And so it's created this niche where you don't have any institutional players like your BlackRocks or anything like that.

hedge funds dabbling in this space yet, but you got a lot of people like myself and a lot of beginners and intermediate people coming in because it's simple.

You can start with little to no capital, and there's so much land all over.

The barrier to entry is so small.

So it's getting more saturated, but it's very much still a niche in a very unique sense.

And that no other form of real estate is quite like land.

I don't think it's so easy and such a niche.

Will banks let you take a loan out against it?

They will, but it's hard

because they're going to want 20, 30, 40% down.

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And they're not going to really want to lend against like that first deal I bought like a $8,500 piece, $8,500 piece in the desert.

Like a bank's not really going to want to mess with that.

You can probably go get a personal loan on it.

But they're not going to really be interested in taking that as collateral.

Now, the bigger subdivide projects, I don't use bank funding personally.

I use a lot of private money and seller financing, a lot of creative finance,

which is, I think, unique in a sense of what I do there.

But the banks will lend on the larger pieces, but they make it hard for you to subdivide it and do what you need to do.

Because when you start selling it off to people, like what happens to the bank?

You need to get a partial release from them, a special documentation that says you can sell one lot, two lot, three lots.

You need to get them paid off.

Most of the times they're going to have like what's called a due on sale clause in there.

And so when you start selling off the land, boom, it's going to trigger the note do, and you're going to owe your 500,000 or million bucks.

There's not a lot of lenders who are friendly to the subdivision aspect of like got it.

When it comes to finding buyers for land, how difficult is that?

Dude, the buyer part, I think, to me, it's the most exciting and maybe the easiest part of the business.

Wow.

Which is crazy.

I mean, the demand for land right now, if you ask me, is sky high.

Like, I urge anyone out there just to go to like a Google keyword search and just, you know, how to buy land, buy land, like, you know, land investing.

You're going to see over time, especially with the pandemic and the economic situation and kind of political unrest that we're in now today, especially in a large part of the country and different parts of the world, people want to own land because they want something that's theirs.

They can, you know, preferably, no restrictions, go out there, have livestock, store stuff, affordable housing on it.

And so the demand is skyrocketing.

Personally, I like to use Facebook.

We do, oh gosh, probably hundreds of thousands in ads on Facebook, certainly tens of thousands a year on Facebook Marketplace.

Real estate and Facebook Marketplace is extremely underrated.

I don't know why more people are not using the marketplace and boosting their ads on the marketplace and just geotargeting to wherever their land or their house or apartment, whatever they're trying to sell or lease to that geotargeted market.

The marketplace is just absolutely crushing it on Facebook.

Wow, people are buying houses on Facebook Marketplace?

Houses, land, all sorts of junk.

Like the marketplace, the arbitrage on marketplace is insane.

That is interesting.

I thought they were just buying like $50 items you throw out.

No, that's 95% of my buyers come from Marketplace.

And what's crazy, a little gold nugget for the audience is what people don't know is Marketplace actually has like a built-in CRM where you can see everyone who messaged you on a marketplace listing, and you can go back a month or two months later and just hit view messages, view buyers, select all the people who messaged you on a piece of land or whatever it is, and just boom, ping them and say, hey, I got another 10 acres coming in this area.

Are you interested?

And it instantly shooted out to 100, 200 people.

Dang, that's actually fire.

Yep.

That's like an email blast, but messengers, open rates are like, probably.

That's what I tell people when you have a marketplace or your real estate listing, especially with land, never take it down.

Leave your land listing up, even if you've already sold it, because I have leads trickling in every single day.

Smart.

Do you still have land in Andrews, Texas?

Do you still have land in Abilene, Texas?

You know, I'm interested in this.

I'm like, no, it's sold.

Sorry.

I have more coming soon.

But boom, now they go into the pre-built in Facebook CRM.

I'm just messaging them later when I get another project in the area.

I love that.

Do you own a town in Texas?

Technically, I do own a town.

I am the mayor of the town of Cornutas, Texas, which is about 50 miles east of El Paso.

Nice.

In the middle of the West Texas desert, Hudspeth County, which is where I did my first land deal and my first subdivision, actually.

So I guess that's like a second home to me.

That's cool.

How did that deal happen?

Cornutis came about in 2022.

I saw a listing on Facebook.

Someone sent it to me and it was like, hey, there's a town for sale in Hudsbeth County, Texas.

I'm looking at this listing.

It's got like thousands of comments and like a thousand shares just from a random Facebook post.

I'm like, okay, that's a lot of shares.

A lot of people are interested.

They're asking like 500,000 for it on Facebook.

And so I'm like, you know, this is early 2022.

I'm running my land business, plugging it away.

I'm in Fort Worth.

So Cornutis is an eight and a half hour drive into the desert of Texas.

Nothing out there.

Man, this is really interesting.

If I want to become the known person in land, like the go-to land guru, so to speak, like what better opportunity than to own a town?

And so I'm looking at this thing.

I'm like, how can I actually pull this off?

It's in the middle of nowhere.

In the 20 to 30 mile radius, you probably got 100 or 200 people who live out there in Hudsbeth County.

It's very cheap land.

You know, you're talking $400 or $500 an acre, 900 foot to water.

You can't really drill a well, hard to get power,

nothing around.

And so I'm like, how am I actually going to get people to work at this town, manage it?

How can I actually pull this off?

So it kind of lingered until late 2022.

I'm like, you know, let's go out and check this thing out.

And so I took my dad out there.

We went just round trips straight out from Fort Worth.

And we go out there.

And I show up and it's like a ghost town.

There's no one there.

I walk in.

There's a cafe, a convenience store, a motel, a six-spot RV park, and a few mobile homes on the property.

It's 28 acres.

And I walk into a cafe, and the owner and his mom are there.

They manage it and run it.

And, you know, I'm looking around.

I don't see anyone in there.

I'm like, okay, you know, I'm John.

I want to hit you up.

I want to see the property.

So we go for a whole ride around the property.

And this guy wanted me to do like a handshake, meet at the courthouse.

I'm bringing him a cashier's check, like sight unseen, no inspections.

I'll never forget.

I was asking him, can I get a water sample?

from the water well?

Yeah.

Make sure it's like not

contaminated with like radon or environmental waste or anything.

And he's like, you can, but I'll shoot you.

And I was like, holy crap.

What the heck?

Yeah, yeah.

So me and my dad leave this place.

I'm like, you know, I really want to buy this sucker.

And he was telling me, like, this guy, he's crazy.

Like, there's no way you're going to buy this.

Like, there could be so many problems.

And it lingers on for a month or so.

We're going back and forth.

Turns out he was behind in back taxes.

And he was going to be foreclosed in the property.

And we did all the research on that.

I almost bought the tax lien on it.

But we ended up working it out.

And it ended up being a purchase of the town,

site unseen basically, except for my one tour of the property.

No inspections, no nothing, a straight cash deal.

I've never disclosed the price, but it was less than the original asking of 500.

I hope so with the water store.

Yeah, yeah.

And the well is it's a 900-foot well and it does two gallons per minute.

And it wasn't contaminated?

It wasn't contaminated.

The water actually is pretty good.

It's a little hard, a lot of dissolved solids, but it runs into a 2,000-gallon tank, 900-foot from the ground, ground, and it services the whole property, which is pretty crazy.

So we'll eventually probably have to drill another well out there.

But right now,

it's holding up pretty well, and we ended up getting the transaction closed.

And since then, it's been a year now since I bought it in January 2023, and it's been me and my small team out there every other week just about roofing, concrete jobs, cleaning the cafe.

We just got done repairing the entire kitchen, new drywall, new walling.

It was rotted out from, they used to have old swamp coolers in there, and there was water damage in the roof and we had to i mean i think i'm 500 000 into it right now

just straight out of pocket trying to put it back together so what's your goal with it so it's it's right next to guadalupe mountain national park which is an awesome tourist destination uh for people want to go hiking and whatnot so it's going to be kind of a mix between like a rest stop and a tourist uh destination i really want to make it like the spot on the map like worldwide world known they're famous for their burgers their cornutis burger which was a green chili burger.

So we're bringing that back.

And, you know, it has so much potential, short-term rentals out there for folks at the park, folks who want to just get away from the city, and then passerbys and even locals who want to come eat at the cafe.

We're going to be flipping burgers and kind of revamp menu.

And, you know,

it has a ceiling to it for sure because it's only so big unless I start buying land around it.

Right.

But I think it could be a 500,000 to a million a year property.

Nice.

You know, with pretty high margins.

So that's kind of the goal for it.

Interesting.

So you're technically a mayor right now.

I'm technically a mayor.

My ops manager wants to be the sheriff.

Shout out to Brian.

He's like, if we ever do a sheriff, I'm going to be the sheriff.

But we had a guy who's, it's funny because we get the politicians and stuff coming through.

I had a congressman's office out there.

There's a new sheriff,

there's a sheriff election, and a guy who's running to be new sheriff in Hudspeth County stopped by the other day.

He's like, hey, can I put up my sign and whatnot on the fence?

It's like, yeah, sure.

So it's kind of, you know, it has a good following.

Wow.

People are interested in what's going on out there.

Yeah, because you made it go viral on your YouTube.

I saw a lot of the videos, some of them had 100,000 views.

Yeah, YouTube, Instagram had a massive reel that went viral.

We almost got kind of like a little TV deal out of it.

We were going back and forth with like TV networks and stuff, trying to figure out how and if we can do it.

It didn't really pan out.

Turned out that the TV business is a lot harder and weirder and more complicated to get into than people might realize.

But yeah, it's got a lot of attention.

Long story short.

Wow.

I thought it was so did they want money or something?

It was just too complicated, the TV network.

They wanted money.

They wanted me to sign some things that were very kind of what we thought were kind of restrictive as far as like I want to do my own stuff, which you have seen on YouTube, Instagram, all this.

So it just turned into way too much legal back and forth.

Could we have gotten it done?

Probably, but it was just like, this is at this point too much time and energy than I can put into it.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my own choice.

That's that's a concern with the podcast.

I never want sponsors to like tell me what to do.

Yeah, and'cause I mean, sh you know this, like YouTube and just social media nowadays, like you don't need TV.

Just go straight to the end consumer and you can build a massive following, massive audience, massive monetization.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I just got my first strike on YouTube actually, though.

Dang.

Yeah, so I got to be careful the next three months.

You only get three strikes and you're out.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just starting my YouTube.

That's one thing that I wish I could go back.

I've always been kind of focused on Instagram.

But if I could redo it for sure, YouTube, I mean, now I'm growing at like 1,500 followers a month, and I've only been doing it like three months.

I'm like, you know, if I would have been doing this the entire two, three years I was doing Instagram, like, who knows, the sky's the limit.

Yeah.

I mean, YouTube is just so massive.

That's how I feel, too.

YouTube's the most important one, in my opinion, especially for long-form videos.

So I'm going all in on YouTube.

I'm spending the most there, actually, right now.

Yeah, it's a good platform.

And I saw some statistic not too long ago.

It was like users, I don't know how accurate it was.

It was users for Instagram and YouTube.

YouTube was like double the users of Instagram, actually, which I don't know how accurate that is,

but it's kind of crazy to think about it because we all use both platforms, but to actually conceptualize that YouTube is substantially bigger than Instagram and some of the other platforms is crazy.

And the audience is more,

I don't know the word, but I just feel like there's more value in the audience there.

Yeah, they're more interested in learning.

They're more interested in long forms, staying connected, following you, seeing what you got going on.

Yeah, there's some straight degeneracy on Instagram.

I mean, there's a lot of negativity.

Like, I'll post the same exact clip on both.

And Instagram, all negative comments.

interesting youtube it's all positive interesting yeah it's super weird i don't know tick tock's kind of negative too i noticed that's one thing i've not gotten into yet is is tick tock but from the land investing and real estate space uh youtube is super powerful obviously because i can fire up you know a how-to video on youtube and absolutely crush it uh and what we're getting into now with real estate is there's so many people entering the space that having a personal brand and building a personal brand is becoming more and more important than ever.

Yeah.

Because you get more realtors, brokers, whoever entering, and they don't know how to use social media.

If you do know how to use social media and do simple ads and content, you're just going to blow them away.

Absolutely.

It gives you a huge edge.

Look at Grant Cardone.

He raised, what, two, three billion from social media?

That's why I always tell people I want to be the Grant Cardone of land.

Just because that dude's so inspiring to be able to raise money like that, just imagine if I could do that from the land side with those returns.

It'd be absolutely crazy.

It's wide open.

I mean, you got to be already top of the field for land, right?

i'm trying i'm getting there i i would like to think so but i don't know there's a few of us uh players doing it and doing it big we're helping uh a lot of people and it's gotten a lot of attention the land niche just because i think it has the highest returns in real estate it is certainly the simplest uh form of real estate i think to do just flipping a piece of land yeah and uh you know from a pure irr return on your money perspective i think it is far none this the top of the line in real estate yeah because you mentioned some of your deals you doubled up in a few months with with houses.

You're not doing that for years.

Yeah, exactly.

A double is bare minimum.

Wow.

Like usually three to five X

is what we're looking at, especially when you get into subdividing this because the amount of arbitrage there, man, is insane because this Gaines County piece is a great example.

The one I just signed a contract for.

There's no telling how long that thing was on the market.

Certainly over six months.

You can get these larger pieces of land that are very illiquid, and it takes a very specific person like myself or some other investor subdivider to come in, purchase this piece, and then do the subdivision and sell it all off and actually manage the business.

So we're running into a giant arbitrage where a liquid land, you can lowball them.

A lot of my deals actually come from the MLS, which is crazy.

You know, a lot of real estate folks, I'm sure you know, you talk to them, they're sending direct mail, cold calling, SMS texting, et cetera.

The MLS has so much opportunity for large pieces of land, but not as much so for the smaller pieces.

Because when you list a small piece of land on the MLS, 8,500 bucks, 10 grand, if it's a deal, most people can afford that.

And so it moves quick.

The velocity is high.

But the larger pieces, who's going to come out of pocket, six, 700, a million bucks.

Right.

And then they got to work with a bank.

Is a bank going to lend on it?

It's just, there's a huge opportunity there.

Yes, you're playing at the six, seven figure level now.

Yeah,

six figure minimum usually.

Just because it does take time, energy.

I have a team, a small team, and I want to have hyper focus on what works and what generates the highest returns and is able uh to scale me my goal is a hundred million dollar land business so to get there i need to do multi-million dollar deals that's you know the path forward i think so the next step is raising money then it is yeah i've started raising some money what i'm fascinated with creative finance you know pace morby talks a lot about it from the housing side obviously and some others I'm super fascinated by it from the land side.

A lot of our stuff we do with seller financing.

We'll go to owners and say, hey, we're going to give you 10, 15% down, and we're going to use a creative deed of trust or mortgage that removes the due on sale clause and allows me to subdivide it and sell it off while I'm paying you.

So I'll get a seller on a five to 10-year note, and then I'll arbitrage this and subdivide it down.

And while I'm paying the seller, I'm finding my own buyers, whether they're cash or a lot of owner financing, and I'm selling it off to my people, and I'm just scraping the net

in between.

And so that's how you can get to the massive returns.

Yeah, you're just facilitating at that point.

Pretty much.

And we have a special clause in there where, okay, someone gives me cash.

I need to go to the seller and get 10 out of 100 acres, free and clear.

We just write the seller a prorated check for whatever is left on their note and deliver a deed to our buyers, basically.

And then when a seller is like, no, man, I want to be cashed out, which a lot of sellers do, they want cash for their land today, which is understandable.

Sometimes it creates a tax situation for them.

Sometimes I'm thinking, like, what else are they going to be doing with that money?

I'm about to give this guy 500K cash.

Why would he not finance it to me and earn 7%, 8, 10% interest?

But people want their money.

So when that happens, we find, I've started raising private money to your point.

We find private investors to come in and step into the seller's shoes and basically seller finance it back to me.

And I just pay that private money guy.

It's usually 16 to 18%.

Damn.

Which is a hefty return for an investor.

Yeah, that's right.

That's insane.

And they're collateralized by the land.

which then allows me to go do my thing.

But the returns that I'm seeing are so significant that I can afford to

give a private person 16 to 18%.

That's like unheard of, dude.

That's higher than hard money.

Yes.

Hard money is like what, 12%, 15%.

Yeah.

And for those out there, if you're trying to raise money or private, hard, whatever it is, like just Facebook groups are a great resource.

I mean, you got to find those three, four, five folks who can really understand your business and help you out with money, raising funds, lending, et cetera.

But Facebook groups, just search private money lending, hard money lending.

Like some of these nationwide groups are 40, 50K

people.

And there's people, you know, I always tell people, finding the deal is the hard part.

Raising the money is a lot easier actually than you expect.

In real estate, if you have a good deal and you can explain that to a potential investor, the money is actually easier to find than you think.

I mean, yeah, if you're giving people 18%, it's not that hard to close them, I think, especially in this economy.

Yeah, yeah.

So

there's so much opportunity out there.

in the subdividing space and even just the land flipping spaces continuing to blow up.

I mean, owner financing and creating passive income.

I mean, I'm sure you know this.

I'm not sure there's actual true passive income nowadays.

Yeah, it's subjective, right?

Yeah, because no one's really just sitting on their butt and collecting a check or wires without any work.

You still need to manage.

You still need to account for things.

And so I'm a huge passive income guy.

Like I love monthly payments when I sell land, but I wouldn't call it passive.

Like it's still an active business.

Like managing those customers.

What if someone stops paying me?

How do I get the land back?

Do I need to resell it?

All that stuff.

Yeah, it's funny.

I used to structure my investments around passive income, but it's not passive no matter what you do.

What's the most passive income you've I used to have this AI?

We'll talk about AI that was like an auto trader.

Okay.

And it was doing amazing for like 10 months, like making 10% a month.

And then it just got wrecked one day because it broke some news in the market.

It couldn't predict.

But are you using any AI with your stuff right now?

A little bit, especially for my coaching stuff from a CRM perspective, you know, automation, simple AI.

AI.

AI is good.

It's powerful.

Real estate, I think it's still in the very beginning stages, at least from what I've seen.

I see a future where AI comes in and is handling paperwork, handling transactions, handling title search, like just completely

seamlessly streamlining all this stuff from a real estate perspective, but it's not there yet.

And I've actually found huge power and people are fascinated by AI, obviously, for good reason.

But as more and more people go towards towards the AI niche and space and focused on AI,

I've actually kind of transitioned to more human focused, more human touch.

People, you know, messaging me, I'm interacting with them personally.

We've experimented with AI with customers and stuff, and they were pretty easily able to pick up that it was a bot, you know, after.

So

I don't think it's there yet, but it has a lot of potential.

But I do think you need to learn AI because if you don't learn it and get familiar with it, like you're just going to get blown away.

Like when it does hit its, you know, exponential ramp, if you're not there, it's just going to pass you by.

Yeah, I agree with all that.

Do you plan on launching a course or community for this?

Because you could run that up for sure.

Oh, yeah, we already have it.

We have the course, we have the community, and there's some big-time deals being done in there, which is crazy.

Like, when I first started, I was not envisioning students doing seven-figure deals.

Seven-figure deals?

Seven-figure, six-figure subdivides.

Like, we've had some real successes in there.

Um, so it's kind of humbling.

Uh, sometimes I get like imposter syndrome.

I'm like, you know, I've been able to do it in Texas, but now we got people doing it like Virginia,

Colorado, Michigan, like kind of nationwide.

So yeah, there's a lot of good information out there.

Any sort of real estate, man, YouTube, university, or paid courses, like you can make so much money.

There's so many different ways to make money in real estate right now.

It's insane.

Dude, I know someone doing, I get his land courses every day.

I forget his name.

Who is it?

I probably know him.

If you said it, I would know it.

I don't know like the name, but I get it every day.

Yeah.

It's like land flipping mastery or something.

Okay.

Yeah.

There's a few OGs out there, like your jack bosses, bosses, your land academies, your

land profit generator.

Yeah.

He's big, man.

He must be doing tens of millions off the bus.

Yeah.

Some of these guys have huge education programs, but

what I found is they're still very much focused on the flipping aspect of land, which is becoming extremely saturated.

It's not quite to the house wholesaling level yet.

Yeah.

But I hear it all the time, like the amount of direct mail you need to send out now.

It used to be like two, three, 400 pieces of direct mail.

You got a deal in land.

It was insane.

It was like printing money.

nowadays i think the average going statistic is probably one in three thousand damn so it's like 10x competition on direct mail so now you got people setting up crms going to sms cold calling texting these landowners saying hey i want to buy your land and so as more and more people come into that i'm like nope screw that like i'm going to where there's no competition bigger deals you got to scale yeah wow so people actually mailed letters and it worked oh yeah we still mail letters today not as much but you you will still have success Like just direct to landowners, straight blind offers.

I want to buy your land 10 acres for 20,000 bucks, and it's worth, you know, 40 or 50.

Damn, that's impressive.

SMS must be doing well because the open rates are like 95.

It is, yeah.

And using them in tandem to like sending a mailer and then following up with, you know, hey, did you get my direct mail?

I'm interested in buying your land.

Yeah.

That is a good method.

And it's pretty cheap to send those texts too, right?

It is, yeah.

Less than a penny at least is what we pay for our stuff and our CRM CRM for our course.

That's cool.

And you've closed some deals through text?

I actually don't use text.

I've gotten to the point where brokers and stuff will bring deals to me, which is pretty unique, just because I'm pretty well known in Texas.

So they'll bring me deals, and landowners sometimes will hit me up, usually asking way too much for their land.

Like, hey, you know, I got this piece.

Can we work together?

Can you subdivide this?

And it's like, well, I want to, but I usually buy this at like 60, 70 cents on the dollar, and you want 90 to 100 cents on the dollar.

So there's, you know, there's working through that issue, but

direct mail, it's all good.

I'm actually a big proponent of MLS, just finding stuff, bigger projects on the MLS because people have become way too obsessed with SMS, direct mail, and they don't even look on the MLS anymore.

It's like land.com, Zillow, realtor.com.

Those are kind of the three main ones.

I'm on there every single day looking for deals.

I met some solid people on Zillow.

I was house shopping.

I met LeBron James' old teammate out here.

You never know you're going to meet off these sites, to be honest.

They were selling on Zillow?

Yeah, he was selling his house.

Yeah, it was pretty wild.

His high school teammate, they're still super close.

Okay.

But yeah, I met some cool people there.

We got to wrap up, but anything you want to promote, close off with?

Man, you know, I just want to help as many people buy a piece of land.

So johnjasnak.com forward slash land.

All my stuff is there free, John Jay Aznack on all social media.

I'm obsessed with looking at deals.

So if anyone has a land deal and wants a free look, free opinion, send it my way.

I don't know.

Like, that's literally what I do at night when I can't sleep.

I'm just on my phone.

This is a deal.

This isn't a deal, like underwriting in my head.

So, I'm obsessed with that.

That's why you're successful, man.

Thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely.

Thanks for watching, guys, and I'll see you next time.