This episode chronicles due diligence on a $350K Florida Gulf waterfront infill lot with potential $500K gross profit, complicated by four protected burrowing owl habitats that required extensive regulatory research using AI tools and biologist confirmation to verify buildability wouldn’t be permanently blocked.
Key Takeaways:
- AI Speeds Regulatory Research Using ChatGPT and Claude to analyze PDF guidelines for endangered species removal revealed the complete permitting pathway in hours versus days of manual research.
- Owls Removable with Development Permit Florida law allows burrowing owl relocation for ~$2K mitigation fee once development permits are issued, with construction starting within 48 hours of removal—no permanent buildability impact.
- Always Triple-Check Edge Cases Even with AI analysis and written guidelines, confirm findings with multiple department officials directly before risking $350K+ on assumptions about exotic regulatory scenarios.
Hear the complete walkthrough of solving endangered species complications that most investors would walk away from.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious today. Again, we’ve been in this industry a long time here and something new with every property that we get deeper into DD for. So this one is super exciting, has ton of profit margin built in, maybe the most that we’ve ever seen.
a property like roughly 500 grand of gross profit potentially maybe a little bit less conservatively here But like very conservatively at least a double like a 350k by price So it’s in Florida with access to the the Gulf waterfront property, so you know
tough properties to find, even tougher to actually get real discounts on them, just given the demand. I know Florida’s probably the roughest state in the country right now when it comes to both housing and land prices in regard to just facing a lot of downward pressure due to a number of reasons. nevertheless, for pristine and prime properties, there are still
great opportunities there. Um, you know, especially when again, you just have to consider the underlying, uh, comps all comes back to, comps, right? So, um, very, very cool property to get an opportunity, um, to potentially purchase again. It’s just, you know, right time, right place. Distress is starting to enter the market for a number of folks. I was seeing some other reports like FHA loans, um, are
about 12 % now that are delinquent. Is that turning into exact foreclosures? No, foreclosures is more of a lagging indicator compared to the leading indicator of delinquencies, but a lot of those foreclosure protections are going by the wayside, I want to say, within the next couple months, something like that. So we just have to be more aware, like there’s going to be more distress entering the market.
And that’s where those opportunities are still going to lie. So and and this is why like I’m kind of glad that You know, we have a number of opportunities. There’s still a number of folks that are reaching out for like sub 50k purchase price deals And it’s like it’s so easy for us to revert. You know, we could do more volume Just like say yes to some more of these continue to review but I just
kept saying, no, like the only way for us to continue to grow is go after larger deals. And like, if we have to sit on some liquidity for a while, I would rather do that so we can jump on the bigger opportunities. And here we go, like a fairly quick close at 350K. Like there’s just not a lot of funders who can do that effectively. And again, this is like kind of the bane of my existence. I didn’t feel a lot. It’s just like, my gosh.
we have to make sure something this expensive, like we did not miss anything that could potentially dissuade a potential buyer from purchasing this, at least at an amount that we won’t lose money on it. And it seems like all those protections are in place here. So I could do kind of a full review of lot, but the most unique factor about this one is that
We had a realtor go out there and we could see within the photos that were taken on the lot, there’s these four kind of roped off little area. And it’s kind of crazy because this is just like a, like it is the most kind of cookie cutter infill lot you can imagine where it’s just grass. And it has access to like kind of a,
You know, dock with a seawall. you know, what water access there, but there’s really no even other trees on it. So it’s like flat, you know, the grass, you know, basic infill lot here, just under 0.4 acres. And there’s these little four roped off areas that are kind of like raised grass portions that appear to be, owl burrows.
and it’s a protected species. Now off the top of my mind, I can’t forget exactly, but I think that it was called burrowing owl, something like that. and we, you know, when, when, you run into properties with some type of endangered species, like usually Florida is a key, a key culprit there, you know, turtles or what have you, that can cause a lot of complications for potential development of, of the lot.
And in this case, I mean, again, it’s just kind of crazy where you’re in the middle of like a almost completely developed subdivision on an island. And there’s just these four random burrows for, for owls. So we really had to figure out, okay, what is going on here? Are they active or not? Is this going to prevent some type of development?
Is the lot even buildable? that’s the number one question, right? Like, is there anything that could prevent the lot from being buildable? Because then all of a sudden, the lot becomes, or just dramatically loses value or doesn’t have any value at all, especially when we’re risking a potential 350K cash purchase. Like we just can’t mess that up. So we were working with the realtor as well as figuring out, all these different
guidelines for these owls here and You know, this is another avenue where you can you know heavily utilize ChatGPT, Claude take your pick and so, you know, we were just You know adding all those PDFs in and doing like very deep context search and again, you know Everything like Callan will teach and you know, it’s proper use of AI she’s treating it as a thought partner and like providing that full full contacts like
Hey, I need you to fully review this. need to understand like all the various practicalities of what happens when there’s these owls on the property. And like most importantly, can the buildability of the property be permanently impacted by these owls? Like if you don’t answer any other question like that is the number one thing that needs to be answered. And it pretty clearly showed no.
our routes to remove the owls if needed and it kind of provided a whole bunch of guidelines to do so like Again that this might be outside the scope of the full podcast, but you know for the most part the only thing you could prevent Owls from being moved is if there’s you know eggs or little owlets And you know rarely they take longer than you know two to three months at most to be able to fly away
But if there’s just adults there, there’s no little baby owls, then the burrows can be moved and the owner of the property can mitigate the habitat impact by either paying a financial contribution, just like two grand, or they can pay a little bit less than that, but also try to set up some other burrows on the property that are outside the building footprint or maybe elsewhere.
I’m not exactly sure about that. So there’s routes to, you know, both handle the removal of existing burrows, so long as they’re not like hosting little baby owls. And, you know, trying to.
you know, kind of play fair game, okay, financial contribution for the removal, et cetera. Like there’s a whole bunch of biologists and experts about this, which I think, again, like we should be mindful, like, you know, humans were, you know, consistently disrupting the environment more than enough as it already is. like, yeah, but if you want to build a house, like on an infill lot, like it’s a legal activity, you pay all this money for it. And okay, what can we do to, you know, have the owls move on? But,
We’re still trying to mitigate the impact as much as possible there. So kind of interesting the way they handle this. But this process can’t even get started. You can’t just go ahead and remove the boroughs until you have a development permit in hand. And so they try to save it to the last minute as much as possible. Like, you need to be constructing, starting to break ground.
within 48 hours of moving the owls. So it’s like, they’re trying to disrupt them as little as possible to really ensure people are super serious about actually building the land so they’re not moving the owls for, you know, just kind of on a whim or if people change their mind. So I kind of appreciate that line of thinking there. So ultimately we were able to go through, you know, back and forth with AI. Plus we got in contact with, you know, some of the biologists and some of the people who are directly involved with this, again, just confirm everything.
Yeah, even though we see stuff in writing and even getting the responses back from AI, like AI, you know, hallucinates less now, but like I’ll always go back and ask, okay, I need you to actually quote from the guidelines, from the written materials we sent you yourself, like show me exactly where it says such and such piece of info. So that’s just the way to use it properly. Then we go ahead and confirm it with the people working directly at those departments, usually more than a handful of them to, to again.
100 % confirmed that even in like the most edge case scenario, there is no permanent prevention from being able to build on the property. Like that’s really the only question that matters, right? Everything else can be sorted out and buyer can deal with the time delay, a little bit of nominal, you if they’re going to be buying a property for almost a million dollars, you know, two grand to move some miles is not a big deal.
So that was an open question there the seawall also needs repair that’s probably gonna be like another 40 grand or so But again, like we can account for that for you know with the margin that we have in the deal To just consider it so yeah, this is another one of us looks like you’ve got to be ready to strike, you know I’m Seeing this late at night just getting like super excited about wow. Okay, we’re getting something very very rare
to come down the pipe here and it is all lining up. But again, just walking you through, yeah, endangered species, owls here, like it’s a totally new situation that even though we’ve done hundreds properties at this point and reviewed thousands, like understand, okay, there is a process to figure out how do we solve this?
from a D.D. perspective and understand, okay, what are the key questions to ask to ensure that it’s a property we can successfully purchase without potentially catastrophically risking our money in a situation like this. So even if you encounter a situation you’ve never seen before, you can understand what the pathways and the guidelines are to arrive at the right answer in relatively short order.
I thought this was a pretty interesting one to deal with, not just from the size of the deal, but yeah, how do we handle some of these endangered species situations here? So I appreciate the team from the Land Investor we’re working with for handing a lot of this back and forth. Again, obviously a ton of money at stake here on the deal, so we will double, triple, quadruple check.
To make sure that we aren’t missing anything. So Hopefully this is helpful for your own review here Serious Land Capital for any of your funding needs Please send us more big ones to go after Land Daily Diligence Facebook group for zero cost review for land deals and LandPricer.ai For the most reliable land pricing tool on market. I was just testing it even more now on that lot in Florida I get is performing very well here. So engineering team is
continue to work on it. I know I said end of September will probably be now closer to mid-October here. It’s really polish up the UI and the UX. But I am working on it and our engineering team is working on it daily to get this all set up for you guys. So looking forward to it, subscribe and share. Again, take a look at the links for Callan’s AI Bootcamp. You just heard some more examples on how I’m using those skills.
on a day-to-day basis, it’s like no, know, fluff or using AI. No, this is like directly impacting how we work in our business every single day. So it’s an invaluable tool. If you want to learn from the best, go ahead and click that link. It’s a hundred bucks or 97, whatever, to join the bootcamp. Like I would have paid a thousand earlier this year if I had to do it over again here. like,
It’s no brainer as it gets to learn from the best if you really like it how Callan teaches Then you’ll be able to join her accelerate to automate. That’s the meat and potatoes course ten weeks Starting in late October. So go ahead and check that out subscribe and share. Take care everybody. Bye
