Are you thinking about finding cheap land to flip? If you’ve heard about the benefits of land investing and you want to learn more about how you can go about finding these properties, then you are in the right place. In this lesson, we will share some of the best methods for acquiring vacant land for resale.
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The Motivated Land Seller
Before we go into the various strategies that can be used to find land deals, I think it’s important to take some time to understand motivated seller psychology. Doing so, will help you to recognize the myriad of reasons why a property owner might be interested in selling their land. Some common reasons why landowners may be motivated to sell their property include the following:
Plans change – Sometimes an individual or couple may purchase a tract of land with the intention of someday building a cabin or home on it. Fast-forward a few years or more, and their original plan may have to be put off or they may have changed their mind entirely due to some other life circumstance.
Cash may be needed now – Some owners of land may have some pressing financial obligations that they need to reconcile, and they often view vacant land as a good source for freeing up capital to meet their specific obligations at the time.
Tired of paying property taxes – Imagine paying taxes on property that you have owned for a decade or longer and all that you’re doing with the property is paying taxes on it. You’re not making any use of the property and now you’re looking a way to escape from that regular tax burden. This is all too common and can be a motivating factor for many vacant landowners.
Received the land through an inheritance – One of the more common motivating factors that lead to people wanting to sell their lot or parcel is if they have recently inherited the property. These sellers generally do not have any attachment to the property, and often have no plans for it. This group of sellers is often motivated to sell to make use of the funds elsewhere.
Find Land To Buy Using Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail is a tried-and-true marketing strategy that is particularly well suited for investors searching for land deals. Direct mail marketing can take various forms, but the two most common types include sending out letters and postcards to landowners potentially looking to sell their land. Direct mail is a relatively expensive way of finding land deals, however, it is much more targeted and less time consuming when implemented correctly compared to many of the other methods that will discuss later on.
When you’re targeting potential sellers through direct mail you have the ability to access a great deal of detailed information about the owner and the property. You’re able to do this by getting a list directly from the county or use a paid real estate data aggregation service such as Datatree or Realquest. Generally, these days, it is much better to use a data aggregation service for building your list since the price is relatively affordable, and the data itself is cleaner and comes in a more usable and consistent format.
For example, let’s say that you are interested in finding a deal on land in Clay County. Florida. Additionally, you want to target those landowners who own vacant land that is between 3 to 10 acres and wherein the seller resides out of the state.
Furthermore, you want to exclude any properties that have a property tax rate of $1000 or more. This can be accomplished with relative ease with data from a professional list source. You can get very granular in your targeting when using a professional real estate data service such as Datatree or similar.
With direct mail marketing via letter or postcard, you should be able to see response rates in the range of one half of 1% to 2% or higher depending on the quality of your offer. For best results, It’s imperative that you or someone from your staff are handling the incoming calls rather than having them go to voicemail. Alternatively, you might consider using an answering service that specializes in the real estate industry for answering the incoming calls.
Find Land For Flipping Using SMS Marketing
SMS marketing or text message marketing has steadily become more popular within land investing circles. In fact, it is the primary source of leads for some land investors. Some of the major benefits of using SMS marketing for finding real estate deals is that it is relatively inexpensive, and scalable. What’s more, when you send a text message to your prospect list, you can start receiving feedback almost immediately.
The downside of SMS marketing is that as it grows in popularity within the real estate investing space and other verticals, its increased use has led to tighter regulations that continue to evolve and become stricter.
No longer can you just text thousands of potential sellers a day anonymously without getting blacklisted by your texting service provider. The new regulation requires that all businesses that utilize text message marketing must register with their carrier and be issued a 10 digit long code often referred to as a 10DLC.
In order for businesses to get approved for the 10DLC registration they must provide various pieces of information including their legal business name, address, and tax identification number. In addition, businesses are required to provide a detailed explanation on their intended uses and samples of the type of messages that they will be sending out.
These rules have been implemented to minimize the number of spam messages that are sent out and to weed out scammers who do not have a legitimate business purpose.
The savvy land marketer might consider using SMS marketing as part of their overall outreach strategy; however, the current regulation suggests that there are more restrictions yet to come. And so, land investors would be wise to have a backup marketing plan in the event that SMS marketing becomes less viable in the future.
Finding A Deal On Land With Digital Marketing
Should you consider using search engine optimization, SEO, or pay per click advertising, PPC to help you look for raw land to buy? What about using Facebook ads or Twitter ads to find potential land sellers? These are all forms of digital marketing, and they can help you secure more leads for your land investing business.
If you are tech savvy or have a background in digital marketing, then these advertising mediums can be implemented with much greater ease than for someone who is less familiar with online marketing.
Assuming that you have some level of comfort with digital marketing, then building a website to attract buyer leads can make a lot of sense. An SEO strategy for land investors entails creating content on your website that potential prospects would be searching for online. This would lead users to visit your website from a search query that they put into a search engine like Google or Bing.
An SEO-based strategy for lead generation is all about creating the best content you can so that the search engines rank you as high as possible within their results pages. The higher you rank, the more likely that you would receive a click to your website. One thing to keep in mind about search engine optimization is that it can be a time-consuming process. It may take several months if not longer to get your content indexed by the search engines.
Another form of digital marketing that is worth looking into for land investors and flippers is pay per click advertising. Similar to search engine optimization, pay per click is also a search engine based strategy.
But unlike SEO where you would receive organic traffic from posting high quality content on your website, pay per click falls into the category of paid media. So, in simple terms, you would set up a campaign on Google ads or Bing ads and pay for every click that you receive to your website from your PPC campaigns.
Cold Calling For Land Investors
Another method for looking for land to buy is the cold calling approach. Cold calling potential land sellers entails pulling a list of targeted prospects and getting in touch with these prospects over the phone.
Cold calling is a labor-intensive process and is best suited for those on a very limited budget. Unlike some of the other forms of marketing and advertising mediums mentioned here, you can get started with cold calling with very little capital. You just need enough capital to purchase your list from your data provider and a telephone connection.
If you do decide to venture into cold calling for vacant land leads, then it’s important that you prepare a script and practice it to ensure that you are getting your message out in an effective and efficient manner. You want to prepare a list of questions that you’ll ask the seller to make sure that you’re spending your time wisely.
But keep in mind that cold calling is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for lazy or unmotivated land investors. Cold calling requires a bit of grit and determination because most of the individuals that you reach will not be interested in selling their property.
Just like any other form of advertising, cold calling is a numbers game. It may take you 50 calls to find a motivated land seller who might entertain the idea of selling their property. Or it may take you 100 calls or 200 calls to find that motivated seller. Therefore, you will need to stay determined and consistent if you are to have any chance of success with cold calling.
Look To Buy Vacant Land Through Networking
It goes without saying that networking is important when it comes to real estate investing. And this is particularly true if you’re a land investor seeking to find great deals on a consistent basis without having to spend a lot of money on marketing or advertising.
You can network with other land investors through forums, meet ups, conferences, and other related venues. The beauty of working with other investors to purchase land is that you will be dealing with like-minded individuals who understand your business model.
So why would another land investor sell you a property that they own instead of trying to market it and sell it directly? Well, there are a host of reasons why a land investor might want to offload some inventory.
They may need to free up some capital for another real estate project or land deal that they’re closing on, or they may have too many like kind properties in the area and are looking to diversify their portfolio. It could be that the land investor actually specializes in wholesaling land and as such they may have no interest in holding it for any length of time.
These are just a few of the reasons why another land investor might sell you a parcel or portfolio of land that they own. It pays to network so that when these opportunities arise you top of mind for these other land investors. These relationships can lead to introductions with other land investors and your circle of contacts can grow steadily over time.
Find Land For Sale Through Online Listings
Another way investors can find land for sale is by scouring the MLS or land for sale websites. This method is not always as obvious as some of the other marketing channels, but it can be a viable means for finding cheap land for sale.
The MLS, or multiple listing service, is mostly used by realtors and agents to list properties for sale. These listings are then aggregated across dozens of different real estate websites and portals across the Internet. This includes sites such as Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia and many more.
As you might imagine many of the land parcels that are listed on the MLS tend to be priced at market or just below market price. These are not the types of properties that we are particularly interested in. However, with some time and research, you should be able to uncover some deals that stand out.
Once you find a listing that interests you, contact the selling agent to put in an offer on the property. One tip I could provide as it relates to finding good deals on the MLS is to look for active listings that are nearing the six month mark.
Most listing agreements tend to expire in six months’ time. As such both the listing agent and seller tend to become much more anxious around this time in hopes of finding a buyer. This could help you negotiate a better deal on the land that you’re looking to buy.
Similarly, you could find the perfect land deal by scouring through the hundreds of listings across land for sale portals such as Landwatch, Lands of America, and Land and Farm, to name a few. Some of the land listings that you’ll find on these land specific websites will be For sale by owner, or FSBO. So, in this case you could be dealing directly with the owner of the property, who may be a private landowner or professional land flipper.
Billboard Advertising To Acquire Land
Have you ever driven down a local county road or highway and seen a billboard sign that says, “We buy ugly houses” or “We buy land”? Chances are that you have. As outdated as it may seem in this new digital age, good old fashion billboards and signs still work incredibly well in generating seller leads for your business.
Billboards are generally located in areas where the traffic counts are relatively high. They are great for building up your brand so potential sellers have you in their mind when they may be ready to sell their property. However, billboard advertising is an advanced marketing strategy and one that requires a relatively large budget.
The cost of billboard advertising can vary greatly depending on location. For example, the cost of a billboard on a small county road within a rural community might cost several hundred dollars per month, while the cost of a billboard on a major interstate highway may run into the thousands of dollars per month.
If you’re fortunate enough to have built up your land business and have the required budgets in place, then you may want to consider doing some billboard advertising in areas where you have had the most amount of success.
For example, if there is a particular county that you tend to get a deals from regularly, then it might pay to have a multi-touch marketing strategy within that area. So, for example, you could run a direct mail campaign there and complement that with several billboard ads within the county to help reinforce your message.
Download the short printable PDF version summarizing the key points of this lesson...
Summary
Finding cheap land to flip is one of the pillars of successful land investing. This is primary goal for any land investor. And so, a good land acquisition is imperative. We’ve discussed a myriad of strategies that you can use to locate potential buying opportunities.
While implementing all the marketing methods mentioned may seem overwhelming, the good news is that you only need to start with one or two methods. In fact, many successful land investors generate millions of dollars of revenue by simply using one tactic. So, try to find a suitable strategy that fits your personality and go out there and start acquiring land for resale.
Vic Patel is a full time land investor and co-founder of Land Dealmaker. He specializes in flipping rural vacant land across the country and teaches others how to start, grow, and scale their land investing business. Make sure to sign up to the Land Dealmaker Email Newsletter where he shares his exclusive land investing tips, strategies, and insights.
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