Mastering Land Sales: Tips and Tricks for Success

Hey folks, welcome back to the Land Fixer Podcast. I'm your host, Logan Swanson, and I am excited to talk to you today about, you guessed it, land. Here we talk about all things land, because we love land. And my topic today, after my last video, which was all about my mistakes, is something I'm actually decently good at, and that is selling land.

How to sell land, obviously, it could be its own masterclass. Maybe I wouldn't be qualified for a masterclass, but I can give you probably a lot of helpful hints. I'm going to try to cover the gamut here in about 15, 20 minutes of how to market and sell land in today's age. So some of it's very high level and some of it's very basic, and we're going to start high level.

But before we do, if you are a land investor and you need to sell land, you need to reach out to me. I have the best land selling website ever at primelandexchange.com, where we're marketing directly to real estate investor minded folks, okay, folks that see land as an asset class, something that they can invest in. And if you are interested in buying land, and you're listening to this podcast, it might be because you're one of those people that are real estate minded and look to buy land as an asset class that you can use and have a lot of fun with.

So either way, if you're selling or buying, go to primelandexchange.com and check it out. If you're a land investor, and you need funding for a development or a land flip or anything along those lines, please check us out at landpartnerfunding.com. And if you're a landowner who's looking to subdivide, sell, do anything with your project property that you currently own, and you're looking for a partner, reach out to me at thelandfixer@gmail.com. I'm happy to partner with you and man, I'm going to get you the best ROI possible for your property, whether I buy it cash or I partner with you to develop it.

So we're going to start talking about how to buy and sell land. First, we're going to talk about it as a professional. So if you're a land investor like myself, there's a few key things to do to make yourself successful in the long term and especially to build upon your marketing dollars. So instead of spending $100 in marketing for a single property and then it disappears, when that property sells, you can actually invest in your brand and have those dollars stack. So we're going to talk about branding.

Branding is a big deal when you are a land seller, because in this day and age, when people are buying and selling on land, it's really not just about the property. It's about legitimacy. It's about people seeing you as a professional, someone who they'd be excited to do business with. The ways to do that are obviously maybe a great website, a good social media presence, things like that really help. I think the most important thing is a very clear sales process. And this is where most people really struggle. So when people are buying land from me, they know exactly what to do because I'm always telling them every step of the way, or if one of my salespeople, which I don't have many anymore, are managing it, they're gonna be telling them exactly what to do, what the next step is, so that every moment of their land buying journey, it's very clear to them where they're going. And I think this is not the case with a lot of people.

So having a decent brand is important. That's your, again, website, social media. But even more importantly is a fully underlined, detailed list of expectations for the land buyers that they are never lost. They never are sitting there wondering what's the next step because that's where distrust begins to rear its ugly head. If they think that they're being taken advantage of in any way, that's really easy in real estate because they might feel like maybe it's the right property, but are they overpaying? Or maybe it's the right property, but are they asking the right questions? Or maybe it looks like the right property, but can I actually build on it in the future? Whatever it is, anytime there's an opportunity for those seeds of distrust to be sown and nurtured and grown, you really want to avoid that so you can get them to the closing table.

So that, if you're focusing and developing your brand, then your marketing spend, so where you are spending your money to drive traffic to a property, property if it's hosted properly in a good website, like the website templates that we build for you on Shopify, then that conversion to your website allows you to remarket to those people very affordably, either through email marketing or through social media marketing or any of the other retargeting channels that are out there. I mean, that allows you to more affordably reach out to people who have already expressed interest in buying land, but also is sending people to your website so they get to know your brand, your identity, who you are, if there's a picture of your family on the website. So it's not just them buying the parcel but it's kind of them buying into this brand identity. So it allows that ad spend to travel more economically.

If you want a more of a detailed breakdown of how to do that, just let me know. Send me an email and we can set something up. All right, so if you've done that, you have a good brand, you have a good website, you're driving traffic the right way, well, then you probably wonder, how do I spend my ad money? And actually, more high level, how do you budget ad money? Well, if you're budgeting money for marketing your land properties, there's a number of ways to do it. The most common way is haphazard. So a real estate investor is going to come in and they're going to say, hey, I have five properties, so I'm going to try to get subscriptions to two listing services. And that's the way they do it. And then they go on Facebook and they ask the groups, which ones do you like? And some will say, I really like this one. And then the next comment will say, I hate that one. And then the next time I'll say, this is the best one. And the comment reply to that's going to be like, that's the worst one ever. It's going to be very confusing.

So what you really need to do is you need to look at how many deals you have in inventory. So say you have five properties in inventory, then you're going to take a very reasonable, reasonable very conservative retail value of those properties to understand the spread or the potential profits from those deals so an example would be say you have five properties in inventory all you bought for twenty dollars each so you're a hundred thousand dollars invested in these properties and you think very conservatively you can double your money, so you can sell a hundred thousand dollars with properties for two hundred thousand dollars and you'll be able to pocket eighty thousand dollars and you could do that in the course of six months, if it's marketed well.

Well, then you take and you select a factor. I usually suggest 10 or 15% of your projected profit in the deals that are in-house over the course of a set period of time. For me, it's usually a three-month cycle. And that's what we allocate to marketing. So 10% annualized of 80,000 will be 8,000 divided by three would say $2,000. Okay, so I have $2,000 over the next three months that I need to put towards marketing if I'm I'm going to be selling these properties. That's one way of doing it. There's no right or wrong way of doing it. But the best way of doing it is to do it, to actually allocate, set a budget that you are going to stand by for at least three months, ideally more like six months or a year to make it more of a cyclical, predictable expense in your business.

So if you have $2,000 to spend over the course of three months, well, then you start looking at what sort of subscriptions or sort of passive things you might want to buy into. Lans.com, I think is like 700 bucks a month for five premium listings. And then there's a bunch of other ones. Landflip, Prime Land Exchange is $100 for 25 listings. Plug. Landflip is also great. We use them. I mean, we try to put our marketing everywhere. So for $2,000, you could actually have multiple paid listing services. Then if you have leftovers, you can spend directly through paid social media marketing. That is too big of a topic for me to directly approach here.

But then there's also tons and tons and tons and tons of other ways that you can spend marketing that most people don't ever think about. For example, if you have a property in, say, Tennessee, and you're used to marketing on Facebook, well, you know, you probably post these things in buy-sell groups. Well, a lot of these buy-sell, buy-and-sell groups can be bought. You message the moderator and say, hey, can my property show up in, say, the story, the Facebook group story, or be a pinned post for the next week if I give you $100? You know, a lot of people say yes, because they don't really know how to monetize the big groups that they currently have.

So anyways, you set aside a certain amount of money and then you specifically decide how you want to spend that money. But the goal is whatever money you're spending, you want to have this flow to drive the traffic back to your website, all the way back to your website. Make sure that website's designed so that you can catch the data. Add them to your mailing list. Retarget them through, you know, making sure you have a pixel on your website for paid social media marketing or even, you know, some sort of content that you can get them to engage with. A newsletter, a podcast, whatever. The whole idea is like, how can you get back in touch with them and stay top of mind for them?

Sorry. Finally, sorry, not finally, next. Next, Facebook is the most obvious and easy, free marketing platform for land investors. I would say about 65% of the properties that I have sold have sold through Facebook Marketplace, believe it or not. And a lot of it was myself. I've done all sorts of tactics to try to outsource that duty and varying levels of success, but always temporary success. So if I say paying somebody to post my properties under their own social media account and then giving them some sort of marketing money, one, that's kind of legally gray. I stopped doing it. But two, you really never know what they're saying. Are they representing your brands? That kind of goes against my first rule, which is like, no one protects your brand. Long story short, there's a lot of different ways to do it. People have successfully done it and even outsourced it to people in the Philippines using their own personal accounts. I've tried that. I've never been successful doing any of that stuff. So it always just comes down to me. And how can I just have a manageable inventory of properties that I can, if I'm going to be the one selling properties, post them on Facebook myself. And that's what my company's kind of been shaped around recently is how can I be the only one doing this and have it still not consume much of my time. So I might spend maybe 10 minutes a day engaging with Facebook leads and I sell a property a week doing that. Facebook is its own mystification. Maybe I'll do a whole episode just on Facebook. I probably ought to.

All right. Next, we're going to talk about selecting brokers and agents, right? So if you have your own brand, your own company, you're using these listing services, you're pushing people to your website, you're on Facebook, churning and listing these properties and all these different buy and sell groups and on Facebook marketplace. Well, you also have the ability to go just hire a broker or get it on MLS using a flat fee listing service. I do not suggest that I really ever, I don't know anyone who has luck with it, but not like I've taken a poll of everybody. Maybe some people do. I prefer to find a broker, okay? Even if it's a cheap property. And the way that I select a broker is kind of in depth. We actually call anywhere between 10 to 15 local brokers or agents. We ask them all kind of the same scripted series of questions. And we identify which ones are one, familiar with marketing and selling land, because that's not common. Maybe one in 10 actually know what they're doing. And then are real estate investment oriented. So they're willing to work in slightly unique ways. And we'll get into that in a minute. And then three, if they're checking those boxes and we're really looking for the best one, we want somebody who maybe already has some of these listing services that their brokerage is paying for so that you don't have to double dip. You might be able to find someone who's local that is already paying for all these things. And then you're just going to reimburse them through their commissions. And then finally, you want them to be actually willing to show a property. A lot of these folks will do your listing, do all this stuff, get it live, but they won't show your property. And that is no bueno.

So because of that, you need to be able to incentivize them correctly. So if it's a low value property and you want them to actually do work and show the property, well, you might have to pay them above 3%. So some of the things that we'll do is we'll just have set rate payouts for brokers or agents if they sell the property. So instead of 3% of a $20,000 property, which ain't much, maybe it's $3,000. For us, it's still worthwhile because they're out there showing properties and doing this sort of stuff. And for them, it's like way more and actually makes it worthwhile for them to give time and attention towards selling this property. Because even a $20,000 property takes as much effort as selling a $100,000 property. You still need someone who's going to be giving attention to it.

And then secondly, on these high-end properties, since I'm already putting a bunch of my money and effort into marketing, I don't want to have redundancy there with somebody else. So what I've had in the past is before I started negotiating directly with our agents is I would do all this marketing. I would find a buyer for the property. Then I'd send it to my agent. And all they would do is handle paperwork and get a 6% commission. And I'd be sitting there like, what did you do? You know, you didn't do nothing. If it's a $100,000 property, they're walking away with $6,000. And all they did was listen on MLS. That hurts my feelings a little bit.

So what I do is I negotiate with every one of my agents. So I say, hey, I'm going to do my own marketing. I'm going to try to make this as seamless as possible. I don't even really want you to show the property unless necessary because I should have my own marketing going on this. But I do, since I'm a one-man band or a very small business, I don't want to engage with all the buyers directly. So what if we had the relationship where my marketing is driving traffic to my website side and I'm generating leads and I'm doing a little bit of a qualification, but then when it's time to actually get them to sign a contract and negotiate with them, I'm going to hand them to you. And then you can be a hard ass with them because I'm kind of a softie. I'm actually not good at negotiating. And that works really well. But the trade-off is if I bring the buyer, I pay you a 3% commission or a reduction of some fixed rate or negotiated fee. So that incentivizes me to do all my work and actually kind of effectively adds to my marketing budget because instead of saying paying $6,000 to a broker, I'm going to pay them $3,000 and that $3,000 is saved can go back into marketing, which is going to be spent driving traffic to my website and building my brand and building my audience and engaging with more people.

So selecting and negotiating and how you work with agents and brokers is huge. And man, is there a disparity in the quality of agents and brokers? I am telling you, some are absolute, I'll not say bad things, but not the best people to work with. And others are like destined for sainthood. You're wondering like, how are these people, you know, I have this lady in Connecticut right now who is just like a gem. There's no way I could pay her enough. I could pay her a 10% commission and I'd still be like, she deserves more. Outrageous. And then, oh, the last thing on brokers and agents, especially if you're working in a remote market, is they could be the ones connecting you to the other useful services that you might need. Surveyors, title companies, maybe someone to clear the lot. Maybe you need someone to put a gravel driveway in. You know, they are going to be the ones connected. Maybe they even know the county city council, the city councilman, maybe the county district representatives, whatever. So they, if you're asking those questions, they checked all the other boxes. Is they need to ask who they know. And if they know everybody and they can assist you in that way, man, you can build a whole career around operating in three areas. If all you have is the best agents or brokers there, it's crazy how valuable they are. I mean, I can keep going into how to work with agents and brokers to maximize your time and energy, but we got to keep going. Okay. I'm going to try to run through these because I'm already running out of time.

So imagery and overlays. So one of the biggest issues that honestly, I still make it sometimes out of laziness is we might be selling a property and all we do is grab some images from the GIS because I don't really want to invest additional money into the photos or whatever. But if you're going to try to move a property quickly, one of the things that you want to add to your marketing budget is definitely drone footage. So you can have high quality video, ideally and photos of the property. And you want them to be from the certain angles. See, maybe if it's near a lake, you can see the lake in the background. Like you kind of need to coach the drone person through getting the best imagery of the property. And then either that drone photographer themselves will have some sort of imagery editor, or you might want to have someone that you work with on a regular basis, maybe a virtual assistant, someone overseas that you