This episode details tactical efforts to generate buyer interest for three premium 10-acre turnkey parcels in a stalled Louisiana market, including AI-assisted postcard campaigns targeting 500 recent acreage buyers and local builders, plus direct cold calling/texting the top 10% of that list using personal phone numbers for authenticity.
Key Takeaways:
- Personal iPhone Texts Increase Response Using personal numbers instead of automated systems creates blue-bubble legitimacy and higher engagement, worth the manual effort for targeted campaigns under 100 contacts.
- Sub-20-Second Scripts Hold Attention Cold calls structured as “Hi [name], Chris with Serious Land Capital, three turnkey 10-acre parcels near [town], saw you bought acreage recently—still looking?” delivered in under 20 seconds prevented hangups.
- 500 Postcards Generated <10 Website Visits Highly targeted postcard campaign to recent buyers, neighbors, and luxury builders produced minimal traction, confirming that market timing matters more than outreach volume.
Hear the complete tactical breakdown of manual buyer generation in a frozen market.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious, giving you all a more tactical update on our approach to this larger Louisiana deal that we’ve been working on. To recap, it’s a roughly 32 acre piece that we subdivided into three child parcels, did a whole bunch of value add to make them turnkey for residential uses, super, super high quality properties.
It’s just the market has been very tough over the last, you know, a couple of months here. Really, since we had listed it, pretty much the market just shut off. And, you know, it’s starting to turn back on a bit here, starting to get a couple, a couple of showings here. You know, I’ve thoroughly reviewed the market, chat with the broker all the time and.
You know, still think we’re very well positioned from, you know, a, uh, know, underlying value standpoint and where we’re priced at is just, you know, nothing is, is really moving at the moment. Um, with, w with a couple of exceptions here. And again, generally my approach be, you know, trying to cut prices, you know, is that, you know,
That’s usually one of the most helpful, if not the most helpful trigger for a lot of areas, but there’s already a lot of precedent within that market that your price cutting into a vacuum, which is never that helpful to do if the buyers aren’t there. So, kind of be patient and wait out the anticipated rebound in the market eventually here. Again, we’re starting to see some more green shoots.
But in the meantime, you know, I have to explore every possible avenue to stir up some buyers. And so we, I believe I had recorded within the past few weeks, we did a, you know, targeted, very tactical postcard campaign, heavily used AI to both assist within that postcard creation process, as well as the targeting set up to go after recent acreage buyers in the nearby areas.
some of the neighbors to the property, especially ones that owned a little bit larger properties, as well as some of the local builders in the area as well, particularly for more custom or luxury homes that our parcels would be a good fit for. And then we prepped roughly 10 % of that list of like the highest quality leads.
to actually cold call and cold text and just, you know, kind of put the word out, hey, we got these properties, any type of interest that you might have in them. So again, we heavily utilize AI to like set up a possible script here. Again, not really for like, hey, a discount, we’re trying to move this property. You know, it’s generally been the MO for neighbor letters and reach outs for various.
of colder campaigns when you’re trying to dispo property. But you know, we have premium listings here. So it’s more of just like a okay, spurring some interest at least, you know, getting getting the word out. So it’s like, how would we structure that? And so we set all of that up and use true people search to skip trace the data. And you even found some LLCs and you have to find the I think we were using some state
Yeah, some governmental website from the state that helped us find, who are the managing members of each LLC that might have been buying locally. Some were better fits than others. But to me, for these campaigns, I’d prefer to be OK, a little bit more broad just to ensure that we get the word out properly. And I also adjusted. Usually I would use my open phone number for reach outs here.
But I had heard about a technique more recently where, especially if you have an iPhone, that’s a huge chunk of the smartphone market. It adds a level of legitimacy if you get kind of that blue bubble text message directly to people. Because then you’re clearly not using a automated texting service.
And it has to be more one-off. So for smaller campaigns like this that are more targeted, it’s appropriate to do so. So I was just using my personal number to call these folks on the list as well as text them thereafter. And again, this is kind of like AI driver mentality, which I’ve talked about, like having to go back to the AI and like, okay, what actually works here? Cause I was looking at some of the call scripts they were suggesting and they should be super fast, right? You want to get to the point.
with, you know, any type of cold call or texts, or, voicemail, especially on, on that first hit, like just, you know, qualify to see whether, whether it’s of any of interest here. And so like, for instance, the recent acreage buyer, AI was suggesting like saying, hi, first name. It’s. know, Chris at serious land capital, quick 30 seconds. So.
You know, it’s immediately asking a question there. I adjusted that because I just wanted to get to the reason quick enough and I could go over it faster and still hold people’s attention. Just to get to the point. No one was immediately hanging up on me. It’s a different situation compared to like talking to sellers or sell your land or whatever. Like this is very targeted. Like we know they bought property in the area. We’re asking something very specific. So I just jumped into the, you know, jump straight to the
point to get an answer more quickly. And again, didn’t get any hangups, know, pretty much every folk, you know, person said they weren’t interested, but you know, it’s not surprising for a cold call, cold reach out campaign here. So, yeah, I can’t reveal the exact area that we’re in and confidentiality reason, but you know, it’s within Louisiana. So instead I was like, hi, you know, first name first, If I knew it otherwise, I’d just say, you hi, it’s Chris. That’s your serious land capital.
we’ve got three turnkey, roughly 10 acre land parcels outside of Blanktown name and blank parish. and we noted that, you’d recently, bought acreage in the area, just checking to see if you were still on the market for anything more, like what we have.
And then just leave it hanging right there. So, you know, I could get through all of that and, you know, sub 20 seconds, you know, enough to hold people’s attention even on a cold call there. And then just see what what they say. I would say something similar in a voicemail as well. Again, jumping straight to the point asking, hey, if you have any interest, like call or text back, it’s my number. And then
after that, if I didn’t get in touch with somebody and it wasn’t like a business phone line or one that you’d have to have an extension to reach whoever or text messages probably not going to go through, then I also sent over a text, you know, very similar with like, you know, hi, whatever name if I have it, it’s, you know, Chris, it’s serious land capital. And, you know, we have again, the three turnkey, roughly 10 acre parcels.
when I say roughly I’m just including a kind of the The tilde is that what you’d call it on? You have little squiggly line On the keyboard there, so it’s even shorter. It’s less less characters near again such-and-such Town name and then you know want to quick map plus basics and just leave it right there
And I know for like automated texting systems and AI was suggesting that like have like a yes slash no and then reply to stop out. I didn’t include that because it was from my personal line here. You know, could some folks really get pissed off at me for doing that? Potentially, I think, you one off texts, especially coming from an iPhone.
Is not overly bothersome. So I was willing to live with that Obviously if somebody replied back stop, I just wouldn’t text him again, but that didn’t happen So, you know Some inherent risk and probably incurring there, but you know, I just wanted it to seem even more personal on the outreach Got a couple responses back and they weren’t Immediate fits there. I have more on the list today to go after and some local builders to reach out to
But you know, it’s like, again, in a market like this, especially if stuff is just, you’re trying to dig up any lead possible. Yeah, it’s not the most fun to go through like, I’ve kind of like higher activation energy to like start getting into like, once I can start getting into cold call mode, then I’m like, okay, just knock one out and knock out another two, knock out another two and just like, you start getting into a rhythm, but it’s usually like, I’ll usually procrastinate for a while to actually get into.
process of making those calls. I don’t know who like oftentimes has like a lot of energy just excited to get into cold call mode because it’s just, you know, it’s hard to get hard to get any responses from from folks like not my favorite part of the business. But again, you got to do what it takes to try to stir up anything in a difficult market. So sometimes you have to do the unscalable things to to scale here.
and this is just part of the process. you know, a bit more of a disappointing campaign so far, know, postcards didn’t really get, you know, we probably sent out close to 500 ish postcards, like very, very targeted. And again, we have a relatively limited budget to work with for this particular, you know,
Outside investor involvement and so forth. So it’s not like we just throw more budget at it in internally. I mean we could but It would just Disturb the bookkeeping a bit more which is not not something we want to entertain At at this moment here So, you know, I’m trying to be very very mindful about our limited dollars to work with and only do super targeted stuff and you know, we only got like
less than 10 clicks on or, you know, know, scans of our QR code visits to the website from our postcard outreach, which again, it’s just kind of speaks to the market of just, you know, it’s just slow, slow, slow, slow. So, you know, we’re doing what we can. I’m going to try it again, but, know, just wanted to share some tactics, some tips on, you know, our approach here and how we were thinking about it, you know,
If have other suggestions, maybe, you you can mention something in the comments or, you know, cold calls, text not as much my specialty here. So I’m always open to suggestions. But, you know, keeping people on the line, though, at least, which I think, again, just speed and getting right to the point is always going to be helpful. hopefully this one is of help to you all. Seriousland.
capital for any of your funding needs. Again, 50K minimum buy price. Land Daily Diligence Facebook group did several pretty interesting deals yesterday. If you want to check out the replay and Landpricer.ai for the most reliable land pricing tool on the market. With that in mind, take care, subscribe and share. Talk to you next time. Bye.
