Ed MathewsHost00:01
So the big question is this how do real estate investors who don't have a ton of free time, don't have access to off-market deals and didn't start life on third base, how do we conservatively grow our real estate business to support our families, finally leave the corporate rat race and build a legacy? That is the question. In this podcast we'll give you the answers. I'm Ed Matthews and this is Real Estate Underground. Greetings and salutations, real Estate Undergrounders. It is Ed Matthews, again with the Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us today.
00:37
Today is an interesting conversation because we're getting, Clark St, we’re getting into the development business and obviously the first place you start is the land. And so I came across this gentleman a while ago and I stalked him for several months and begged him profusely, and he's finally accepted my invitation of kidding. The whole idea here is that we want to give you access to other asset classes and, as I was just telling our guests, when I get wind that Gary Keller of Keller Williams is walking around at a company meeting with a t-shirt that says buy land, pay attention Brent Bowers from Land Shark. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's good to see you, my friend.
Brent BowersGuest01:15
Yeah, you too Ed, yeah, absolutely yeah. I didn't know Gary Keller wore that shirt. I sent him, so I'm really happy to hear.
Ed MathewsHost01:22
Oh absolutely, that's great. Yeah, that's fantastic. I actually probably have a picture of it. Somebody sent it to me. So, Brent, for those of us out there who don't know who you are, I want you to tell us a little bit about you and your business, and then we'll get into it.
Brent BowersGuest01:33
Yeah, my name is Brent Bowers. I run the Land Sharks. I started the land business about 2016 timeframe, if you wanted to call it a business. When I started it, I was buying land and selling it. Really that was it. I didn't look at it as a business. I was looking at it as how do I get out of my day job, which was I was in the military trying I was actually preparing for my third combat deployment trying to get the heck out of the military and I just needed to make like $4,500 a month consistently so I can get out of the military.
02:03
And I heard a guy on the podcast flipping land and he was doubling his money overnight and I was like half of what he said is true. Like I can do this. So I immediately started taking massive, violent, dirty, imperfect, scary action and that started mailing the people that were on the tax delinquent list and started getting their land under contract and buying it and flipping it and turn that into a seller financing business. So I was getting passive income every single month, nice and, before I knew it, within about a year, we're at $9,000 a month in payments and it got me out of the military. I haven't had a real job since 2018. And we just do bigger land deals today. Still do some small ones from time to time as well, but now I teach people how to do it. That's really fun, and here we are awesome.
Ed MathewsHost02:50
Welcome and thank you. What branch did you serve in? I was in the army. Oh, thank you for your service. Appreciate it. Sincerely. I've got a nephew down in North Carolina We'll just say that and he does a whole bunch of stuff that he's not allowed to tell me about. But so thank you for that. And so obviously you're accomplished, you spent. One of the reasons that I love hiring military veterans and athletes are the other category I look for is because they're extremely well trained, they tend to be highly disciplined and they're OK with telling truth to power most times, and all of those things are things I value in the corporate world. I'm curious, though. You could take your skill set and go anywhere, and you chose entrepreneurship. One in real estate. Two, and I'm curious, what led you down that path?
Brent BowersGuest03:35
I've always been an entrepreneur growing up. We remember the creepy crawler machines. We'd make these little bugs. I would sell those on the side of the road when I was like seven or eight years old. Then I started a lawn business that I borrowed the neighbor's lawn mower and started mowing the other neighbor's lawns with it. And then my grandpa gave me a broke down riding lawn mower. We fixed that and before I knew it we're grossing over $100,000 a year as soon as I graduate high school and my dad came out with me in that business and then I got a real estate license in 2007, bought that first rental property in 2007 and got crushed by about 2009. I was broken homeless so I had to reset.
04:16
I joined the military so I can go back to school and learn a skill set, but I always had that entrepreneurship calling and I always wanted to be in real estate because I read Donald Trump books when I was younger. You know The Art of the Deal, things like that, and you know, even when I was in the military I still was an entrepreneur. I was always finding ways to make money. I would leave. I would take the humvee like literally and drive off of my fob in Afghanistan, stupid. I don't recommend this for anybody and go and buy cigarettes cartons of cigarettes from the Afghans and then come back and sell them to my friends on base. Don't recommend that
Ed MathewsHost04:49
Yeah so we're getting shout out over, you know, a few bucks for the, for the cigs. But you know it's interesting, the. You know there are so many different asset classes within the real estate world. You know what's drew you to land.
Brent BowersGuest05:01
You know what. I'm from Okeechobee, Florida, and we have cattle. That's our biggest producer of income and I know a lot about the herds. You know when a herd gets slaughtered and cows are raised to be slaughtered and I didn't want to go with the herd mentality. I've always done things a little bit different. I tried to be anyways. Like when all my buddies were out partying and having fun, I was mowing grass you know making money and they were going to the Lake Placid or Lake Placid, Florida, and skiing and tubing. I bought a house in Lake Placid. You know things like that. Or now I did in 2019, right before COVID, by the way.
05:36
So, a lot of my things I do like sometimes blow up in my face, but you know, I don't know what question you asked, actually.
Ed MathewsHost05:41
So why land?
Brent BowersGuest05:42
Why land? Okay, so the herd mentality Everyone's talking about houses and flipping houses and renting out houses and oh, multi-family is hot, this is great. And there's TV shows making house flipping sexy. I did some of that too and I learned that it's not sexy. You see these gray hairs on this beard. Part of that came from that. But I heard a podcast one day like the like I love podcasts, The Real Estate Underground podcast, like things like that. You guys provide so much value. But I heard a guy on a podcast talking about flipping vacant raw land and doubling and tripling his money overnight and I was like that is the answer for me.
06:17
I just finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss and I was looking for my way out of the military because I was tired of being away from my family. I had a huge why and we don't have time for that on this podcast why I needed to stop deploying. I was going for my third combat deployment and I didn't want to, you know, have another marriage fail. This time children were involved and so I immediately took action. Why land? No one else was talking about it and I was like this must be the answer. .
Ed Mathews
And it is true, they ain't making any more of it.
Brent Bowers
Actually, some of my land sharks that are subdividing we're making more part enough. I'm just kidding, yeah.
Ed MathewsHost06:51
So, in terms of the land and you know how you operate you know you mentioned tax folks that are behind other taxes what else are you looking for when you're looking for land? I mean, how can you figure out if something is worth buying? Or it's just a, you know, a field full of rocks that no one can yeah?
Brent BowersGuest07:07
Yeah, I'll tell you what I would buy. That too. I would buy any piece of land that I can sell for more, unless it's, like you know, environmental issues that.
07:14
I'll run from that. So my strategy has changed quite a bit now. I now look for areas where land is selling, where there's demand for land. How do you know where there's demand? You go on Zillow and Redfin and you put in, you know your city and put in land and sold in the last month and see where the pockets of land are selling. I then go after those pockets. I have a program called PropStream. Anybody listening to this can get a seven-day free trial.
07:37
If they go to thelandsharkslist.com and start pulling lists of landowners in that area where that land's selling, you know exactly what to offer them to build in your profit, obviously. What do you offer them? If you look on Zillow and Redfin and they're all selling for $10,000 an acre, then offer $5,000 an acre and then there's your profit right there and you can send them what I call the LOL. You know I have triple split tested this marketing piece. It's a direct letter. It's a letter that would go to you, Ed. You sign it and send it back. I have a purchase agreement basically, where I take this thing and buy this land. So we call it the LOL, the land offer letter, and it's doing better than postcards, it's doing better than envelopes that look like checks, and if anybody wants a copy of that so you can start taking action tonight and do a land deal, go to thelandsharks.com/.lol, you know, that's those. I just gave you like all the keys of finding land. Now how do we sell it?
Ed MathewsHost08:34
So let's talk about that. You know when you're looking. You bought a plot of land. You bought it for $5,000 an acre. You know the market is $10,000 an acre. What?
Brent BowersGuest08:41
happens next? So the next thing you want to do is, while you're under contract, you know, talk to the seller. And I used to say listen, ed, thanks for trusting me to buy this land. I'm in the military. I am not going to hold on to this piece of land. I'm not going to build on or anything like that. This is my side gig. This is how I support my three children and my wife, and I have a 75 pound dog. Are you cool with me selling this and making a little bit of profit? And 99% of the time they're like yeah, absolutely. Great, here's what I do.
09:10
I market the land. Usually, I try and have my buyer lined up before I even run out of my inspection period. So you're gonna see signs and ads on Craigslist and Facebook and your friends are gonna tell you about it. There's gonna people walking across this land. The neighbors are probably gonna hear about it. So I just want you to know that's what I do. I'm like guerilla marketer. Great. So whenever they see people on the land or a Facebook ad, I just I literally kept my promise.
09:32
So I find the buyer, and a lot of times I was doing a lot of work to find the buyers for this land when you move up to that more expensive land and high demand realtors will do all that work for you. So how do you find the realtors? So you click on the parcels of land that sold and you scroll down. You see how much is sold for, how big it is and the realtor that it was listed by and bought by. Those are your land specialist realtors. I'm looking for patterns. I want to see you know Larry, the land realtor on all these listings. Okay, Larry obviously knows this area pretty well.
Ed MathewsHost10:01
And it's simple, right? I mean it's. We're not talking about rocket science here. We're talking about just just a little bit of grunt work that's right To be able to figure out. You know how to nail down these potential deals and then how to dispel, right? So, on average, how long are you holding on to a piece of property?
Brent BowersGuest10:16
You know, for the summertime I had one. I just held off for three months but I generally have, you know, the land sold within about 30 to 60 days. One I just bought I actually just bought six lots in Florida. We were under contract in the first two weeks so we'll hold that one about 45 days. We bought it all for 132,000, sold them all for 250,000. And I maybe have one hour of work involved in that and that included time to go to the UPS store to notarize my documents, things like that.
Ed MathewsHost10:47
So, as far as you know the property itself and the process right, when you put something under contract, is this seller financing or are you buying it whole? You know the property hypothetically you bought and kept for 90 days Right, do you own that free and clear or are you? Are you financing it or something in between?
Brent BowersGuest11:05
All the above, everything you just mentioned. Every deal is different. It depends what how much money I have in my account. It depends if I've used my private lender, because you start do this long enough, you're going to have lenders that will lend you money. So, for instance, one of my lenders is my my mother-in-law. We pay her 9% interest. We never touch her money. It goes to the title insurance company. We get her a lenders insurance policy. She gets a. She puts a lien on the property. So if I don't pay for the payer back, she takes the property and also the buyer that's paying the payment each month. That would make a weird Thanksgiving dinner. The seller sometimes will finance us the land.
11:40
I was negotiating with the O yesterday. We had an agreement and he hadn't signed yet, that I was going to put $50,000 down. The purchase price was $550,000. And he was going to finance me for one year at 8.4% interest. He came back and goes no, my wife didn't like that. After we agreed and there's a tip right there Ask him how are the decisions made in your household?
12:02
Is this unilateral? Is your wife okay with this? Let's cause. I was like, oh man, I hope the wife's cool with this and I, you know, hoped and prayed. I was like sure enough. But he said listen, we'll give it to you for cash $375,000.
12:13
So I started calling land specialist realtors yesterday. I'm sitting here thinking I'm stealing this land. I feel bad, like I'm going to have to give this guy more money, but I want to have a big enough buffer just in case. You know, I can always give him more money when I sell it. So, my land specialist realtors said Brent, I've got bad news for you. On the other side, like literally a rocks throw away, the land sells for double the land what you've got. So yours should sell for about 500 on literally a rocks throw away sells for a million.
12:41
Golly, of course I got the wrong one. So guess what? I had to have a hard conversation with that gentleman this morning. Say, listen, I can only pay $325. Got bad. And I forwarded him what the Realtor said and he said okay, how about $335? So deal, we're going to do it.
12:57
But there was, that was like that was the first seller financing deal. Then it's a cash deal. So I'm going to reach out to a lender and get that, those funds, because I've got a lot of money tied up in land that's paying me seller financing, because I want to 3x my money, 3x your money with each deal. Yeah, so it's, for instance, if I buy the land for a hundred thousand, I want it to be worth 300,000. So I'll try and get a 50 or 60 or $100,000 down payment for that land and finance the rest Because I sell it for what it's worth, because I sell it on payments. It's like the F-150. Like my friend bought a brand new F-150 the other day. I was like dude, how much did that cost? He was, I don't know, $750 a month.
Ed MathewsHost13:35
Americans think on payments, yeah, and in fact you know it's the first question they ask when you sit down at the desk of a sales guy. An auto sales guy is what payment can you afford? What payment you're looking for? Right, Just play with the numbers, yeah, they just it just rates in terms right.
Brent BowersGuest13:49
Five years later you pay that Right.
Ed MathewsHost13:51
Yes, when that truck is you know it's where, a piece of metal somewhere. So as far as the you know, one of the things she said that was really interesting to me was the silver financing on the back end as well. So talk to me about that. So when you let's say, let's use the example you use just now, so you buy the land for $335, you go out to a lender, let's say you put 10% down, so Mathematics and Placity will say you owe $300,000, right?
Brent BowersGuest14:19
Yeah.
Ed MathewsHost14:19
Now what happens next? Ed Mathews, who's come along, says hey, I want to buy that land. What happens next?
Brent BowersGuest14:24
Yeah, Ed, I'm looking for $550,000 for this land, and I'll even finance it to you for up to 30 years if you come up with $335,000 down. So technically, you're coming up with almost enough for me to get my payment out, because I want to pay my lender off, right, or my lender is going to have to allow me to do what's called a mortgage wrap. The lender is going to be in the first position, I'll be in the second position and you've got to find the right title company. Here's the key word investor-friendly title agent. How do you find those guys? Sell my house fast Salt Lake City, Utah, wherever you're at and call the top three title companies. I no longer just shoot in the dark when I'm looking for a title agent. I contact a player in the game because they're not going to give me some.
15:06
Yeah, john Smith, he doesn't know what he's doing, but you can have him type thing, and most of the time these guys that are players will help you. But yeah, so I'll sell to you, ed, I'll finance to you for up to 30 years at 12% interest. You're probably going to get a bank loan eventually to build your huge mountain home. So in three years I'll be paid off and I'll get roughly 36 months of interest.
Ed MathewsHost15:29
That's phenomenal. And you're going to your private lender's happy because they're getting their money back quick, or you're doing a wrap around which is genius. So, in terms of how many of these transactions, just curious, have you?
Brent BowersGuest15:39
done yeah, we've done a little over 350 parcels of land. We've got 69 notes paying us every month on payments, and that's the one that excites me. So I would rather make an extra $369 a month for the next 30 years than $36,000 cash payday, because you stack enough of them up and you have amazing cash flow coming in every month. Now, granted, sometimes we'll flip and we'll assign contracts, because those are the big bumps that keep the lights on type thing. But I'm also thinking what if I want to take a year off and just live off that cash flow for a year and reset or whatever? Or we take a lot of mini vacations. It's a huge day in America today, like our kids went back to school.
Ed MathewsHost16:25
Oh, big yeah. So you're back to reality now.
Brent Bowers
Three, five and seven
Ed Mathews
oh man, Great yeah. Wait till they get to be teenagers, They'll run even harder.
You'll just be everywhere.
Ed MathewsHost16:40
Best thing you'll ever do so in terms of now. I know you have a coaching program. Tell me about that. How does that work?
Brent BowersGuest16:45
Yeah. So we created the Land Sharks back in 2019 and we've got Sharks crushing it. One of my old bosses from Afghanistan, captain Drew, just did his first land deal. It took him 23 days from the time he joined. He made a $9,000 net profit on a land deal. So we're giving the whole entire playbook. We give you everything the support, the exact step, the instruction to get the result really quickly.
17:12
I've got an assistant coach that's been through five real estate crashes, answering questions all day long. They get my cell phone. We do multiple support calls a week. But here's, I think, the secret weapon too One of the many. The cherry on top is we have other Land Sharks that do support calls. We're almost to six support calls a week, but these are guys that literally, they just did their first deal six months ago. So they still talk the language of a brand new person that's getting started, or a dreamer, or a newbie whatever you want to call that person, I don't care. But Captain Drew, he was a dreamer, a newbie, 23, almost 28 days ago, he's getting out of the military and he just did his first real estate deal. A lot of people quit because it takes too long to make money.
Ed MathewsHost17:53
Yeah, I mean traditional real estate transactions. This is not a get rich quick kind of deal, right. But if you can move quickly and do a deal like what you're just talking about where you're flipping a parcel and you're only owning it for a better part of three weeks, that's an awfully nice way to pay the bills, especially if you can start to. And the genius of what you do is the seller financing piece on the back end. I spoke with friend Chris Prefontaine, Scott Jelinek and others that do the exact same thing with houses right when they'll buy a house, they'll fix it up, they'll sell it down, payment covers what they owe on the property and then they spread it out for 25 to 40 years and let somebody else enjoy it Right?
Brent BowersGuest18:42
I love Chris Prefontaine’s system. I actually bought his course a while back and I did five houses at least with option to buy. I'm still holding on all five.
Ed Mathews
I regret every property. I ever sold man
Brent Bowers
Exactly, but we got option payments and I've extended it. None of these guys are close. Actually, one of them did close, so one out of six actually. But I love his course and, yeah, it's the same thing with land, but I don't have to deal with. Nothing ever breaks.
Ed MathewsHost19:09
Right? Yeah. And that is so interesting, right? Because you know there's no improvement. You're simply you're not going for entitlements, you're not doing plot plans, you're simply acquiring a parcel and then having somebody that's going to go develop it in some way, shape or form. Simple, I love simple. So let me ask you something. I always am interested in finding out how people navigated and got to where they are, and almost everybody will tell me I had, you know, a mentor here, a leader there, you know, in your case, commanding officer, that kind of shaped my thinking in one particular way. So I'm just curious you know, in terms of mentorship and advice, you know what's the best advice you ever got and who gave it to you?
Brent BowersGuest19:50
Yeah, I would say I'll go back to Jimmy Witton, my first wife's grandpa. He introduced me to Jim Rohn, not physically but through cassette tape, and he told me you know, go back to the military, go into the military, go back to school, reset your life. And the reason why I credit him is because he told me about that first. You know, he was really one of my first mentors I've had so many mentors actually but then he told me about Jim Rohn and Jim Rohn brought other mentors. So I went down that self development path and I've got a mentor for everything. I feel like I, you know, like you can get a coach for almost anything. If they're six months ahead of where you want to be, or they've been doing something for a year, and I can take their program and it takes eight weeks. I just downloaded one year and eight weeks.
Ed MathewsHost20:37
Without a doubt. Yeah, I mean, I always tell people we're all reading the same book right In this space, you know, but you may be five or six chapters ahead of me and, like you said, that could be you know three years of your life. That I just compressed in 60 pages, that I just learned and it's invaluable. So that's interesting. Let's talk about books, then. I'm always interested to learn. You know leaders or readers, and so I'm always interested to learn from you. Know guys like you in terms of you know these days it's not necessarily even a physical book, it could be an audio book or podcasts or YouTube videos or conferences or whatever. I'm just curious how do you intake information and sharpen that song? And also, who are you paying attention to these days?
Brent BowersGuest21:16
Yeah, I love reading. I listen to Audible. I usually finish the Audible before my next credit comes. You know one book I'm reading right now that is really awesome is the CEO's Secret Weapon, by Jan Jones talking about. You know the power of a good executive assistant. So you know who discovered Elvis Presley. It wasn't the owner of the record studio, it was the assistant.
Ed MathewsHost21:37
That's a great book. I haven't read it, but it's just made the list. Thanks for that. So let me ask you, I mean, and if you had to start all over again, right, you know, some guy from Connecticut, Waves of Magic, wand and says you can take back, you can go back in time, be you know, pick an age and and, but you get to take back what you learned, what you know now, right, what would you do different?
Brent BowersGuest21:57
I would have started by. I would have. So there's a five by five mile track of land. It's not one track, it's a bunch of 1.25 acre tracks. When I graduated high school they were $1,000 a piece. I just sold one of those parcels for $30,000. I would have bought the entire five by five square mile with other people's money, Yup, and I just had them hold on with me until 2023. Yeah, and then sell our finance to all of it and then we would all be multi-millionaires.
Ed MathewsHost22:31
You know, and that part is just so interesting to me. So let me ask you you know if you, when you are not hunting for land you mentioned, you have three kids and your wife. What do you like to do for fun? What do you guys do?
Brent BowersGuest22:41
Yeah, we like camping, we like fishing. We have our lake house. My son's biggest thing is fishing. You know we love the outdoors, love going to the beach, traveling, all kinds of stuff, family time yeah, yeah, I love going to restaurants. Love, that's probably my. You asked me what I waste more money on is probably food. Honest, I probably waste more money on food,
Ed MathewsHost23:03
You and me both, brother. Yeah, I mean, and you know the thing is you only get your kids for 18 years and that's a finite amount of time. Because I'm learning this now. My oldest is 20, and still loves us, but hanging out with mom and dad is nowhere near as cool as I was when she was six.
Brent BowersGuest23:16
Nope.
Ed MathewsHost23:17
Yeah, enjoy. But if somebody wants to learn about your business, wants to become a lender, wants to, you know, join your coaching curriculum. You know what's the best way to get a hold of you.
Brent BowersGuest23:27
Yeah, I'll give you my cell phone, 863-801-6959,. Just send a text or leave a voicemail. I'm still an active land investor so I'll try and get back to ASAP or go to thelandsharks.com if you want to schedule a call or fill out an application for the Landsharks course. But I can only take about five people on a month and you got to be 100% committed. You know it's gonna cost money for me to coach you, but I guarantee you I can. You know what it costs. I can have your earn. That you know every week. But you know, and then I'm on all the socials as well. brentlbowersland and yes, the L stands for land. brentlbowersland your middle name is Land.
Ed MathewsHost24:07
I love it. Yes, it's that. So not danger, just land.
Brent BowersGuest24:10
No, I got rid of that.
Ed MathewsHost24:10
Brent, thank you so much for your time today. It's good to see you, my friend, and continued good fortune. Thanks, ed. All right, good to see you. This has been the Real Estate Underground Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It helps us grow. Until next time, happy investing.