Travis King is a land flipping expert and Owner of Land Flipping Mastery. He has completed over 400 transactions in 29 states with over 100 additional JV transactions. In this episode, Travis discusses the four steps to his land-flipping system, the types of properties he focuses on, and his strategy for assessing whether a property is worth the purchase.
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TRANSCRIPT
Slocomb Reed: Best Ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm Slocomb Reed, and I'm here with Travis King. Travis is joining us from Chandler, Arizona. He buys and sells land. He also coaches and teaches how to buy and sell land. He has flipped land in 29 states with over 400 transactions in his career, and over 100 JV transactions just in 2022 with mentorship students. Travis, can you give us a little bit more about your background and what you're currently focused on?
Travis King: Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you the short, sweet version. Early 20s I tried to be a house investor, and it wasn't the best to timing in hindsight, right? Got into it in about 2004-2005. So just getting started in it, and we all know what happened in 2007-2008. So I really got hit hard with the 2008 recession, and I was just starting to get into house investing and buying rentals, and really got hit hard with that. I also had a job loss as part of the recession, and it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth for single family and house investing, and it took me a number of years decide... I always wanted to stick with real estate, but it was scary. "How do I get back in the game?", you know what I mean? Or re-approach it more intelligently, and with that hindsight of knowing that markets can change; the whole bottom can fall out, and everything, it feels like, in a matter of a year, with recessions and market shifts and things like that. So I said, "Okay, this next go around, whatever avenue I take, I kind of approach it with that wisdom of a recession in hindsight, and getting into the properties, and really --" I first approached it as it really is a speculator, I would say, more as an investor; I was really counting on appreciation, everything going up, and continuing to go up... So just being young and naive and eager to get going in real estate.
Thankfully, fast-forward about five years, after several side hustles that we don't even need to go into, trying to find my avenue or find my lane, I stumbled across land, land flipping. And that's what we've been doing for almost 10 years now. It took me about two or three years of overlap, of working the job and doing that as a side hustle thing till I can make it my main thing... But that's what it's been for several years now, when we got to the point where we could replace my salary with the income from real estate investing and I became a full-time investor. And then now my wife and I work the business together, and have built up and stood up a couple other businesses around land and land flipping.
Slocomb Reed: Awesome. So Travis, I'd like to make a bunch of assumptions about what you do, and then let you correct me where I'm wrong, and then we can dive into some of the specifics about land investing from there.
Travis King: Absolutely.
Slocomb Reed: So with land investing, outside of developers who are looking for land to develop, my understanding is that land investing is almost always transactional, very similar to what in the residential space we would call wholesaling, where you find a below-market property, you purchase it or get it tied up below market, and then you turn around and sell it relatively quickly for a profit on market, or to a retail buyer. Travis, I don't know about your strategy, but sometimes going through the entitlement process to get land potentially rezoned for a specific developer, but with the interest of selling the land to the person who's going to develop it, just getting it through the entitlement process yourself to make it that much more valuable before you sell. Travis, am I on base, or off-base?
Travis King: Well, what you've just described it is one play in the playbook; one exit strategy. So there's several, but that one would be the entitle and flip, or sourcing to a developer or builder. So we've got like typical arbitrage where we're identifying properties, backing things up. What we really do is we pull datasets, marketing lists, and then we do outbound marketing campaigns, primarily direct mail, but we also cold-call and text message as well... But really what we're doing is we're trying to identify off market landowners who don't have their properties listed for sale, and then we're trying to buy their properties for 50% tol 75% discount. So we're capturing anywhere from 50% to 75% of equity, buying off market land... And then we've got options.
So when we get that under contract, here's where that decision tree comes in, that exit strategy you're talking about. We get the property under contract... At that point, much like a house wholesaler would assign the contract - you could assign the contract to another land investor, and just collect an assignment fee, and let them worry about finding the end buyer. Or you could buy the property outright and then list with an agent, and sell it for full market value. That's primarily our play. That's primarily what we do, is we actually buy outright, capture all that equity, and then sell for almost full market value. So that's our primary strategy. But there's times when it make sense to just assign the contract to another investor, or like you're saying, assign it to a builder, or assign it to a developer, depending on the potential and best use of the property. But for the most part, we buy outright and [unintelligible 00:06:06.10] full market value through agents.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, thank you for correcting me on the number of exit strategies that are available to you guys. It sounds like it is all transactional investing, that you're not buying land to develop yourselves. Given that it's a transactional investing strategy, I'd like to break down land flipping into four segments, and then dive deep into each of those segments and what it is that makes land investing unique, what makes your strategy unique, what makes it so profitable, especially 50% to 75% discount on some of these land deals. The four segments I'd like to drill into are lead generation acquisitions, due diligence, executing on a business plan, if necessary, after you own it, and then disposition. Those four segments - does that work for you, Travis?
Travis King: Yeah, absolutely.
Slocomb Reed: So let's start at the beginning with lead gen and acquisitions. You already said, you're building off market lists; the three big ones, direct mail, calls and text messages - that makes sense. Couple of questions here, though... What areas are you targeting, both areas of the country, and then areas more specifically within the metro, or rural, with what characteristics? And then after you have your locations identified, what are the characteristics of the land that you're looking to buy?
Travis King: Yeah, really great questions. Appreciate it. You teed me up pretty high here, because those are excellent questions. So I would say within our business and what I teach also is there's two product types. A lot of people will just go after one; ,like they're flipping lots to builders in metro areas, right? I feel like when markets shift, as we've seen recently, with interest rates going up and builders pump the brakes, if they stopped building - if that's the only play in your playbook, is sourcing buildable lots to builders, and the builders aren't building, you're in a spot. So really what we've found over a decade of doing this is having two product types. We've got rural vacant land, which might be larger acreage, a couple hours from a city, and then we've got residential infill lots, that might be right in town, or within 45 minutes of a major metro.
So we have those two product types - rural vacant land, residential infill lots. So within that, if we work both of those product types as markets change, we can swing the pendulum and focus more on one than the other, based on what's going on in the economy. We're riding that wave when houses are being built, and the economy's cranking, and interest rates are low, we're really leaning all-in on that big cash flips, and sourcing buildable land. And then if it's more kind of a stable market, or even potentially now an inverted market, we'll lean in more on the rural vacant land, because people are always buying rural vacant land, for one reason or another - recreational, maybe build a cabin on it, hope to eventually retire on a homestead there, or just take the kids there in the weekend and get away from the city... So people are always buying rural vacant land, especially if you sell it on payments, or offer owner financing, or seller finance.
So that's the two product types. Now, when we pick a market - you said "How do you pick your market?" The cool thing with the land is you don't have to be local at all. We never visit a property. We leverage agents to walk the properties, even when we're buying them on the acquisition side. So you can invest anywhere. So it becomes a game of -- if you happen to live in a great state where everybody's moving and things are growing, then you can invest in your home state. But maybe you're somewhere in the Midwest, maybe you're in Wyoming, where hardly anybody lives, and there's not a huge buyer pool. You could invest in any state.
So what you start to look for is these states and really cities that are growing. So you either approach it from finding metros that are growing, where are all the jobs, where's the growth, where are people moving to, and then you approach that -- if you're going to focus on those residential lots to flip, then you would essentially pick those metro markets that are really emerging and really growing, and there's tons of job growth and population growth, and you'd focus on those and it just becomes like a radius search, right? Everything within 50 or 75 miles of Austin, Texas; everything within 50 miles of Tampa, Florida. You find these growth cities, that are growing and all the jobs are there, and then you target a radius within those. And that's really how I like to approach the residential lot flips.
The rural vacant land, typically you're just a couple hours out or away from those metros... Like Phoenix - I'm in Phoenix here; we go North a couple hours in the heat of the summer and there's a lot of people that want to go pull a camper up, camp, get away from the heat and the higher elevation for the summer... People want to build a cabin... So there's all this recreational property, and that's really well suited for the rural vacant land. Within an hour of a metro is kind of those residential lots that people are going to build on, and then within two to three hours from those metros is usually your rural vacant land, which is going to be the residential lots, I'd say zero to two acres; two to the 52 acres can be really large acreage for rural vacant land.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, last question before we transition to talking about due diligence, because there are, of course, a lot of variables to land. I think you hooked all of our listeners with buying at a 50% to 75% discount... The question I feel compelled to ask - I'll ask it the way my gut wants to ask, and then I'll try to make it a little more intellectual... 50% to 75% of what? The reason why I ask is if you're buying a $15,000 vacant land, that's a very different margin quantity to a $150,000 land. And obviously, a 50% to 75% discount on a larger value is a greater value and a greater margin for you and your students. Is there a particular purchase price, or value of land, or value range that you and your students target?
Travis King: Good question. So really, with our own business model, I've kind of just duplicated our business model in what I teach our students. And what we've found - our first two or three years we really focused on lower-value properties, 30,000 or less, because how it was the framework and how it was presented to me was any property 30,000 or less, there's just not enough commission in it for these agents. So that's why these people will sell you their land; they don't have a lot of options. The agents won't take the listings. So we focused on those cheaper properties. So these people are in a spot, so that's why you get those discounts; it's lower-value properties, with not a lot of agents wanting to take the listing... So that's the sandbox that most of the gurus, most of the courses kind of put you in.
What we've found though, is we started doing 50+ transactions a year of those low-value lots... You have to do a couple hundred of those if you're only making three or four grand a deal. So as we got to the point where we go, "Okay, we're gonna end up having to do hundreds of transactions a year if we're only making 2,000 to 4,000 a deal", that's where we started to look at bigger deals, and we actually found that most of the space as far as online courses and education, most of it is steering everybody to these lower value properties. So that's actually where all the competition was. So when we moved above 30,000, these people actually got a lot less direct mail, a lot less calls, because I think people were limited on their own capital; they didn't have enough money to buy a $100,000 property, and nobody was teaching them to target that.
The way it was kind of explained to me at the time was that it's a really inefficient market below 30,000, but why would anybody with a $200,000 property sell you for such a discount? So it's kind of presented to me like it didn't work, so it took us a couple years to even try it... But then we found it's always a situation you're identifying. It's timing. So you're identifying a situation and timing. So right now, we focus on $30,000 to $300,000 properties. That's the market value. That's what we list or resell at; we focus on those, and - yeah, absolutely, full transparency, people aren't lining up to sell their $200,000 property for a 50% discount. But it's a numbers game. So if I send 10,000 units of direct mail, and I have that list cold called as well, maybe I get 100.
Slocomb Reed: [unintelligible 00:14:58.08]
Travis King: So maybe we spend five grand on the lead gen, on the marketing campaign or something. Five or six grand. We're targeting a $200,000 property. Maybe out of those 10,000 people only two sell us their property. So out of 10,000 letters, maybe we get 100 leads. And of those, maybe only two are willing to sell at that discount. But let's say we make 50k or 100k on each deal.
So it's a numbers game, it's a percentage. We might only have a 1% response rate, we might only get a 1% response rate, and we might only buy one property for every 40 leads. So it becomes really important that we're capturing enough equity and there's enough net profit per deal that it makes sense. But yeah, that's really the thing, is if we were targeting lower-value properties, you have a higher response rate and people accept your offers. So it's much easier to do this at the lower level, so that's where some people get started. We focus on higher value, because you want to do a deal that moves the needle in your life. 20k, 30, instead of 2k or 3k.
Slocomb Reed: Of course. It leads to my last question here with acquisitions before we move on...
Break: [00:16:10.27]
Slocomb Reed: I don't know if this is the best metric to use... If there's a better metric, give me that answer, but - do you know your average cost per acquisition?
Travis King: It has everything to do with the value we focus on. So if we're running a campaign and we're focusing on $50,000 properties, it's going to cost us less, because we're gonna have a higher response rate, and a higher acceptance rate at that lower value. It completely changes when we're at the $200,000 to $300,000 value range; that cost per acquisition is going to be much higher if we're targeting those higher value properties.
So two things happen - you're going to get a lower response rate when you target those higher value properties; you're gonna get a lower response rate, and you're gonna pay a higher percentage. So on a $30,000 property you might only pay 25% of market value to buy it. But on a $300,000 property, you're probably going to pay 50%.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, it makes a lot of sense; you can get a better discount on cheaper properties. What I was trying to ask - I didn't ask it very well... How much money are you spending on your lead generation per deal that you actually do?
Travis King: We might spend anywhere from two to four grand on the smaller deals, where we make about 20-25 grand; we might spend five to eight grand on a deal where we make 50,000+.
Slocomb Reed: That makes a lot of sense. And great margin on your cost of acquisition, for sure.
Travis King: A stamp costs the same, whether you're targeting a $10,000 property or $200,000 property.
Slocomb Reed: Yeah, but you get the $200,000 properties less frequently. But when you do, you make more money. So yeah, that all makes sense. Let's transition to due diligence. When I say due diligence, I have a feeling that you tie up a property when you have a good sense that it will be profitable, but you haven't spent a whole bunch of time researching the specific parcel, the specifics of that individual piece of land and what the transaction will look like, both on your acquisition and disposition... So post contract, pre-closing, what do your processes look like specific to vetting the deal?
Travis King: I have an acronym I created I call FASTER, where we run through these checks. The F is flood zone or wetlands; we make sure it's not in a flood zone or wetlands. The A is access; we make sure that we've got legal and physical road access. The S is slope - we want to make sure it's buildable, it's not too steep. And then the T is two or more comps. We want to make sure there's transactions occurring in the area. The E is exit strategy; like you talked about earlier, we're going to hand this to a builder, and they're going to build a home or many homes on it, or we're going to sell it to somebody as a recreational property. So that E is the exit strategy. And the R is the resale. Let's get to know the value here looking at comps and getting an opinion on values from agents. Let's really establish that we know the value, so we can calculate our profit on the deal. So that's a FASTER check for the due diligence.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, I really dislike unnecessary, forced acronyms... This one is excellent. The FASTER acronym makes so much sense. Flood Zone, Access, Slope, two plus Comps, Exit strategy, Resale value... Genius.
Travis King: [unintelligible 00:20:27.29] we hand it off to an agent. So we do 100% of our deals. We have agents list for us. And it's typically we always get two agent opinion of values when we're making offers and we're buying the property. So we identify of those two agents that give us opinion of values... There's usually one that stands out right that has more experience in the area, or really knows the land, or is willing to drive out there... So we're now listing with that agent. And agents handle 100% of our dispositions.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, one last question before we move on. In the FASTER acronym, those six pieces of due diligence - I'm asking about your experience as well as your students - where are most of the mistakes made?
Travis King: Let's say working in Florida... The flood zone and access are really the two. Maybe somebody doesn't realize there's a difference between a flood zone and a wetland. So your property might have some wetlands on it, but not being in a flood zone; or just the opposite - as a flood zone, but not a wetland. So people don't know when they're new. But we have mapping software, mapping tools; you click a button, turn on the layer, and then you can see if it is. But when you're new, that's something people don't look at, or they see a road from the map... It's a rural vacant land property and they see a road, but it's not a legal road. It's a man-made road. So I would say road access and flood zones or wetlands are the two things, the landmines that newbies step on.
Slocomb Reed: Gotcha. Is that everywhere, or is it specific to the geography and topography of Florida?
Travis King: I would say road access is a mistake people make everywhere, in all 50 states; if they see physical, but they haven't verified legal. But the wetlands is state-specific, whether your states with a lot of lakes, or coastal states... That would be more the wetlands and flood zone. But road access and slope are those mistakes that people make everywhere.
Slocomb Reed: Any chance you can rapid-fire, in your experience, the cost of those mistakes a few times?
Travis King: Oh, absolutely. We bought one property that sat for nine months, because early on -- it sat for nine months, because we didn't know to check for flood zone when we first started. The training program I went through it didn't even mention it, and I didn't know it; I was too naive to know. So we bought a property, people would go out there, and then I couldn't figure out why it didn't sell, and I started talking to the people, and they're like, "Well, it's covered in a couple inches of water right now", right? So you could make that mistake on a $10,000 property. Fortunately, at the time, we were just getting started, so we made that mistake on $7,000 property, so it wasn't as big of a mistake. But you could make that same mistake on a $300,000 property and end up stuck with a non buildable property. So really being well-trained or getting brilliant at those basics when you start can prevent the mistake, because obviously, the bigger the deal, the bigger the potential.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, I don't want to dwell on this, but speaking about how things can spiral negatively. Are you and your students always paying cash for this land, or are you ever borrowing?
Travis King: It could go either way. A lot of students that came over in the last couple years [unintelligible 00:23:36.29] house investing and house wholesaling has got so competitive. I have a lot of students that have moved over that were really good at house wholesaling, but it just got too darn competitive. So they come in and they lock up the contract and they just assign the contracts. They're assigning and wholesaling land, just like they did houses. Most of them are buying outright and reselling to get that full profit.
Now, just like there's hard money lenders in the single family space, there's hard money lenders and funders in the land space. So a lot of my students use other people's money, especially when they do these bigger deals, $100,000 $200,000 property. I mean, you would use a capital partner, and then you would split profits in some manner. So that's like you're actually taking ownership, and then you're splitting some profits.
Slocomb Reed: You bring on an equity partner instead of a debt partner.
Travis King: Yeah, exactly.
Slocomb Reed: That way, if you mess up, they're on the hook, too.
Travis King: Yeah, exactly.
Slocomb Reed: Gotcha. From close on the buy to close on the sell, business plan, it sounds like this is pretty cut and dry or cut and paste frankly for you all. You buy it, you either identify or have identified the right real estate agent to put it on market and get it sold for top dollar. Is that always the case? Or are there ever other steps involved?
Travis King: Sometimes we'll find the larger acreage properties that have road access on two sides. So we might subdivide a property. That doesn't mean we're putting in jogging trails, and infrastructure and developing it. We're just literally splitting the parcel. So sometimes we identify those opportunities, and we buy one property and we can turn it into four or five lots to resell. So sometimes we do that value-add play, I guess; I would say that's where it differs. Or a little bit of improvement, maybe have the brush cleared, the trees pruned, the lot mowed... So there's sometimes -- to get the highest value and based on the agent's feedback, we might improve the lot. But most of the time we're just reselling it, and occasionally, we identify subdivide opportunities, which allows you to force 100% plus appreciation. Subdividing is incredible, but definitely not in the deal you start with.
Slocomb Reed: It sounds like your deals are either buy then sell, or buy, then subdivide, then sell.
Travis King: Yep, exactly. And then we sell cash, or we sell with seller financing on payments.
Slocomb Reed: With regards to the disposition, you find the local expert at getting these sold for top dollar; a real estate agent who's putting it on market, most likely. And then depending on your needs, I'm sure the capital you have in the deal, the needs of a JV partner, if you have a capital partner - you either just sell cash top dollar, or you sell for a higher dollar amount on some sort of seller financing.
Travis King: With any asset you're dealing with if you offer payments or somebody to buy with a down payment/payments, you increase that buyer pool massively. So that's really the consideration.
Slocomb Reed: Makes sense. And you increase the value for which you can sell the property if you're taking that payment over time.
Travis King: Yeah. When interest rates go up, that's great. When you're the lender. It's not so great when you're the borrower, but in a situation like right now, especially with land, a lot of banks don't like land, they don't want to be stuck with land, so they charge a really high interest rate. So that allows us to come in at the same interest rate or even lower; our typical note would be 10.9% interest. So the interest income is another opportunity.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, unfortunately we're running out of time; as many more questions as I have about your land investing, it is time for the Best Ever lightning round. So Travis, what is the best ever book you've recently read?
Travis King: Recently? I'd have to say "Who, not how." I don't know if you've read that one, but it's really about identifying who can do something for you, versus how can you do it yourself... And it really comes into play as your business grows and scales, and you move from trying to do everything yourself to needing to hire people and stand up a team. So I feel like it was a timely book for us in the last couple of years as we've moved from being the solo act to building a team.
Slocomb Reed: I am a big fan of the book, and one of my favorite things about it is that Dan Sullivan is credited for writing, but he didn't. He "Who, not how-ed" the authorship of "Who, not how", and got Benjamin Hardy to write it for him.
Travis King: Yeah, I know; it's so meta. It's incredible.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, old school Best Ever lightning round question - what's the most money you've ever lost on a deal?
Travis King: Houses, when I started in the early 2000s - I lost a house. I got foreclosed on it. So that would be my worst deal. But with --
Slocomb Reed: With land investing.
Travis King: With land investing, I've never -- and I'm gonna say knock on wood, because we are so conservative; we go into that knowing that we've never lost money. The worst deal I've done - I made 100 bucks. And that was the flood property I talked to you about. But we capture so much equity on the buy side; we really top-grade. So there's a lot of people that would buy three to every one that we do. But I'm really conservative with my approach, so we really make sure -- again, we're valuing it ourselves with all the comps that I can find online and all the scraping tools we have, and then I have two agent opinion of values. And then I'm capturing 50% of equity. So it really positions us to not lose money.
Slocomb Reed: Travis, that being said, what is the biggest mistake you've made, and the best ever lesson that resulted from it?
Travis King: I think that oversight of my own... That's where that faster check came from, was making those mistakes; buying properties without legal access, buying properties that were in flood zones, buying properties that had slope, a mountainside... Because we were looking at our map on Zillow, it looked great, but Zillow didn't have 3D view. So we've made every one of those mistakes in that FASTER acronym.
Slocomb Reed: Due diligence is always where the mistakes are made. That makes sense.
Travis King: Absolutely, yeah.
Slocomb Reed: Awesome. Well, last question here, Travis... Where can people get in touch with you?
Travis King: Yeah, so the best spot - kind of the hub would be Travisking.com. From there, you'll kind of see everything we've got going on. Over the years, after several years into this being an investor, I'd say becoming an advanced investor, I started answering questions and helping people on forums and in communities, and it really led to building a network of other advanced investors, and then they kept referring people as they'd get results... So we kind of started a consulting business a couple years back, 100% organic, huge growth though, to where now we have a community of 300 people that I coach and teach, and we do deals together.
So if you go to Travisking.com, we've got a free land flipping challenge, a seven-day challenge you can take to get oriented with land. We've also got an online course, a training program, we've got live group coaching... So we've got a lot of things going on, but I think if you go to Travisking.com and starting with the land flipping challenge is probably the best point to get oriented and learn land, and learn more about me.
Slocomb Reed: That link is in the show notes. Travis, thank you. Best Ever listeners, thank you as well for tuning in. If you've gained value from this conversation, please do subscribe to our show, leave us a five star review and share this episode with a friend you know we can add value to through our conversation today. Thank you, and have a best ever day.
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