In this episode, a Texas parcel bought at roughly $3,000 per acre (inclusive of value-add) shows how fast a buyer’s market can reprice, with the exit assumption sliding from an underwritten $5,500 to $6,000 per acre to a $5,000 listing that still barely draws a bid. That same parcel would underwrite closer to $4,000 per acre today, a 20% to 30% drop in under two months. Charles Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet” supplies the lens, contrasting innovation that pushes past limits against caution that respects them.
Key Takeaways:
- Land Can Reprice 20-30% in Two Months A parcel underwritten at $5,500 to $6,000 per acre in Q1 now underwrites closer to $4,000, a rare speed of decline for land.
- Price Solves 95% of Property Problems Cutting the Texas listing to $5,000 per acre drew offers faster than waiting on seasonal hunting-land buyers.
- Be a Wizard in One Domain, a Prophet in Another Push AI past its apparent limits while underwriting land conservatively, since the right mindset depends on where the real risk sits.
- Take the Win, Then Guard the Second-Order Effects Capture innovation’s productivity gains, but budget for the long-tail costs (job displacement, AI slop, weaker critical thinking) a prophet would flag.
- Collapse Forecasts Usually Lose Doom calls built on one dominant mechanism and static human behavior (1970s population bomb, peak oil) failed, so conservatism should not curdle into paralysis.
Listen to the full episode to calibrate when to push like a wizard and when to protect like a prophet across your own business.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious, where at Serious Land Capital we have successfully funded over six and a half million dollars worth of land deals with industry leading 41% operating margins. So today I wanted to go over you know some updated market thoughts as it relates to to real estate primarily and and relate it back to some
Updated thinking and some mental models from a a recent book that I didn’t fully read, but I utilized my learning accelerator skill within within Claude to kind of orient all the key points that relate to you know my own professional and personal goals. so just plugging that that in there pretty much any nonfiction content.
runs through that filter so I can stay firmly, firmly focused on what I need to actually apply within my business. So just throwing that out there, I believe I’ve talked a bit about that before. Otherwise I can dive more into the mechanics. but nevertheless, this one book that is you know consuming the content and applying it even more specifically is called
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann. Came out a little less than 10 years ago. core thesis of this book is that there are wizards who, in in this case, for for much of this book, it was represented by this Norman Borlog, father of the Green Revolution. I’ve heard a couple podcasts about him. you can look him up a bit more.
You know, there’s quotes that says, you know, he saved billion lives on the planet. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and did a whole bunch of work related to wheat engineering to just make make wheat much more hardy within different environments and you know, that just allowed a lot more people to be fed over much of the nineteen hundreds and still now.
Supplying a whole bunch more calories. but his whole viewpoint and mindset was more around like innovation is breaking through any apparent limits, just like keep pushing, grow more, engineer more, ceiling is not real. I’m generally going to be more within that type of mindset, especially as it relates to technology. And then the profit viewpoint. this was represented by William Vote.
I might might be mispronouncing that V-O-G-T. he was this founder of like modern carrying capacity thinking that is more oriented towards limits being real. and you know, the durable move is to consume less and live within them a lot more. Yep. Again, th these guys were kind of focused from an agricultural perspective, so a lot more just sustainable environmentalism.
was you know William Vogt’s core focus. so again, these are separated from more like the hard charging innovation works and and can push past any limit, called the Wizards. And then the prophets are more like the, you know, again, r respecting kind of the natural way of things and trying to live within what we might say, you know, quote unquote natural laws are.
So that’s the framework to keep in mind as I relate it back to current market conditions. How I’m thinking about a lot of things. So jumping now to the real estate side of things, you know, again, I I think all of us try to pay as much attention to macro and you know what our businesses are are telling us. and you know, I again I I I don’t know anybody.
out there. I think it’s like pretty much a you know a given that people are considering this to be a challenging environment for real estate in most parts of the US at least not all but but most especially if you look at you know countrywide data and you know different sections of the US, especially the South and the West.
There there’s definitely more buyers markets than there are sellers markets here. again, we’ve commented on this a number of times. but you know, taking a look even more so where we’re at, I have both felt within our business like just a continued disconnect on
Even assets that I thought were going to perform well and we had enough downside protection, like even those ones are just moving even slower than anticipated. And you know, our initial underwriting just started to you know, falter more than expected. Again, this could probably be its own podcast here, but you know, we had bought this property in Texas that
you know, was bought at right around 3,000 per acre, inclusive of some value add that we did. And all the underwriting that we had seen in much of Q1 of this year, it’s like some title issues, it took a while to close on this thing, pointed towards moving it at pretty reliably between 5,500 to 6,000 per acre.
And that would have been a even more conservative approach. Like I felt good about even listing it at 7,000 per acre, given some of the characteristics of this property and other compare comparable properties moving around that price. And we’ve had to cut steadily down. Right now we’re at 5,000 per acre here and still like barely any hits. Like we might actually get an offer on it shortly. but it’s been super slow. And you know, the realtor is like, yeah, things have just really collapsed.
more s more recently here. and some other thoughts of like, yeah, you know, people are maybe looking for hunting land closer to late August, September. And this is not like it’s kind of hunting land, but you know, it could serve r residential or there’s a lot of people on vacation. Like I I don’t know. I I wouldn’t necessarily like burn an entire summer waiting around for you know people potentially being on vacation for that long of a period of time. Like to me that’s a little bit of a week.
rationale behind it. So like again, you know, price will solve 95 plus percent of any problem you have with property. But I was just surprised how much we had to keep cutting to even start to find our market. And I went back and, you know, recomped everything out. And again, the change was so dramatic. Like usually land and oftentimes real estate in general, like does not move that fast. Like a couple of months should not like dramatically
Change anticipated exit prices by like, you know, 20, 30 plus percent. Like that’s a really fast moving market. But when I when I relooked at the comps, and it just slowed down a lot more since we had purchased it and listed it on market and like more reliably, like if I if I was just fresh underwriting this property before we had you know, if it came across our our desk, like again, earlier this year, I was forecasting like
5,500, 6,000 per acre. to feel you know comfortable where we actually pull the trigger again, given how conservative we are. but in this case, I would have underwritten this like closer to 4,000 per acre. so again, like really dramatic change here. And it’s like, yeah, this is just it’s a tough environment to work in. And I know, again, hyperlocal real estate, et cetera. But you know, you can pay attention to a lot of the other.
macro indicators or you know, again, like I’ll follow the reventure data and so forth. And like there there are a lot of folks like losing their shirt for real in the real estate industry or even just you know whether they’re investor owners or just o owners of homes, especially folks who have bought more recently when interest rates have crept up a bit more, like taking you know 100K plus
losses on on homes that they might have bought within the last, you know, four or five years or less. just because of how dramatic the the real estate market has worsened in, you know, a lot of locations around around the US. And I just e even though we’ve been in like pretty much a bottom in like a plateaued buyer’s market for the past four years, like it feels like things have
you know, still continue to bottom out even more. And I’m not sure where where it’s actually going to end. So like my conservatism is just even higher than than it had already had been. And like pulling the trigger on you know virtually any property, I I just I I value liquidity even more so when it comes to dealing with with with a market like this.
Which like what what does it take to even get us off the sidelines here when, you know, all the data that that we’re looking at, you know, even if we’re right on the initial underwriting, if things are like can can shift so dramatically downward right at that purchase point or right after we start to list, like that, that’s so hard to predict. I mean, you can have some future indicators, like from the reventure data and so forth, but like predicting, you know.
20 to 30% decrease in prices over like the next two months after you buy something. That’s it’s really hard to find any data that that’ll show you such a dramatic drop there. But nevertheless, like that that that’s what’s happening in real time as we’re dealing with that. Like it again, exceptionally difficult to deal with circumstances that are that fast moving in a traditionally more stable i industry to work in. so
Noting all of that, and again, like I could spend a whole bunch more time just on how we’re gonna reorient capital allocation and so forth here. But going back to what I prefaced at the start and kind of introed you to like this wizard and and profit mentality here, and like as I was going through, you know, my own.
thoughts and like again Claude has all the context and how I think and you know relevant business and personal context and so forth. And like it it it realistically pointed out it realistically and and you know I I mean a accurately pointed out hey like you are much more of a wizard when it comes to like AI and technology, which is very true. Like I I’m just again couldn’t be more pro as far as how
Transformative this technology is, like limits are almost meaningless as this tech continues to improve here. Whereas it was like, hey, you’re more of that profit mentality of hey, be you know, much more conservative and kind of keep additional options on the table when it comes to underwriting real estate. so it’s entirely possible within different realms of your life. Again, the nuances everything, right? To
you know, be a wizard in one dimension and a prophet in in others. And how how do you kind of balance your your decision making when when when it comes to that? now the the key factor here and kind of like the punchline of this whole book is like, okay, what what’s you you would think what what’s better to be a wizard or a prophet here. And when you look through the data on a whole bunch of various examples, and I know it’s kind of like represented by these two guys within the AG.
field is there there there’s no clear cut outcome as it relates to which which worldview is generally better. Like where where it kind of sorts out is that you know when you do have room for innovation, like in this case like AI and so forth too, like yeah.
Try to be a wizard and if there are great gains to be made, like take it. Like don’t be afraid to take the win. and and that’s what we’re trying to do now. but just be mindful that there’s almost inevitably going to be long tail or second order effects that profits might be more aware of that are gonna come at the expense of pursuing.
you know, innovation and wiz wizard oriented goals, potentially at at all all costs here. So like from the AI side, we’ve named a whole bunch of those. I mean, like these loneliness epidemic and AI slop all over the place. you know, people being less capable from like a critical thinking perspective. you know, th those are just a a handful, right? you know, potentially like
massive job displacement. Like all those are major pieces, but it’s like, okay, do we we are we mindful of those while we’re trying to take the win of the productivity gains that that we can get from AI in in the first place? Or you know, another one, there can be like a lot of controversy th thrown into it, but there’s at least theorized and you know, some evidence, I would even say like, you know, stronger evidence if you look into it.
Like we think back to the COVID pandemic, you know, people had kind of settled on, okay, this was you know, spontaneous mutation and disease that kind of crept all over the world. but there there’s a again a reasonable theory that suggests that it was gain of function, research, that unfortunately kind of broke past.
guardrails that these scientists had in place, and then you know, led to this COVID pandemic. and if you really want to like get get spicier there, it’s like, okay, which countries were behind this? You know, is there US involvement, Chinese, both, whatever? Like again, the the the whole point of this is not really to settle in on hey, this is exactly what happened. It’s more the
approach to kind of keep in mind here, whereas like a wizard type approach of like, okay, let’s go into this gain of function research. We can potentially solve a whole bunch of diseases and so forth. But the second order effect of hey, what happens if something breaks past our gar grails and we unleash this you know, pretty terrible disease that you know brought brought the world to its knees for a a a few years there. when when everything’s considered and we’re
still dealing with after effects of COVID, even all these these years later. but even if you throw out, you know, COVID in and of itself, like let’s just take what let’s just consider a world where COVID didn’t happen. If if you went through that gain of function research, like we could still consider that from a wizard perspective of you know pursuing growth and innovation at all costs and still consider okay here here’s the second order effects that a prophet would be worried about
and people had been worried about this, even like much, you know, pre-COVID and so forth, on yeah, what what can happen? There’s like a a lot of nasty effects, whether it could be biological terrorism or you know, accidentally changing the human genome and shifting our species in a unexpected direction, something like that. So people had these thoughts in mind. It’s just like we actually saw this play out in real time. you know, yeah. Whether that actually happened or not is besides the point. what
what serves is that this is like an analogy on how to think about again, wizard versus profit here. so you can see that in like one domain. and also again, within your own life here, you can be a wizard or more pro-wizard in in a certain domain and a more of a prophet in in others. and and just having to be aware that there are trade-offs to both. Like again, there there’s not a clear cut
You know, wizard always is always gonna work, profit’s always gonna work. there there’s always a balance be between the two, and just understanding how to hold both of those mindsets and where you might be focused on one so you can orient your your decision making accordingly. and one key piece from you know all the various research is that you know, regardless of whether you’re coming from a a a wizard or a prophet mentality.
Is that you know, a ton of people would try to do various forecasts. and when it came to making, you know, the the some some of these grand predictions, like, you know, there was you know that this population bomb.
perspective. This is like in the 1970s roughly, and thinking, yeah, the population’s going to grow so much, it’s going to outstrip our ability to produce food and everything. Didn’t actually happen because we were able to keep up innovation to still feed the the planet or, you know, peak oil. Hey, the world’s going to run out of oil here. No, like the US turned into a net exporter of of oil roughly 15 years ago through the through the shale evolution. so
That that that’s another example. There’s a a handful of of others. So like when you really, you know, a lot of those like doom and gloom or just you know, collapse level forecasts, which is something that gets thrown around now. Like, I mean, from the AI size, like, man, are are is every single job going to be displaced? like we we we don’t know what what’s going to to happen there.
or you know, some folks that might say, you know, again, also from the AI side, but more of the hardware, like look at this global supply chain, and there are certainly a lot of issues, especially with this, you know, geopolitical instability, but it’s like, okay, take one of these you know, supply chains offline and all of a sudden like AI is just gonna disappear for like the next 10 to 30 years. like are are we really going to bet on something like that compared to
potentially a gentler approach or you know enough momentum that humans have developed in in this certain arena that they will find a way to work it out versus just going backwards for decades to come. Like that that that’s so hard for me to to e even consider here. So
that that’s why I’m just more mindful of like these collapse level dynamics. Or even like look at, you know, how many people be predicting, you know, recessions or depressions and what have you. And you know, even like the multi-billionaires like Ray Dalio, I mean, he’s been saying for years and years and years, like this, you know, 75 year cyc debt cycle, things are gonna collapse over time. But you know, he’s also been saying that for, you know, I know at least 10 plus years, maybe 20 years, something like that. So
Yeah, not not to say that he doesn’t have some rationale behind it, but when you make these larger collapse level forecasts, they tend to be less accurate. w w when you keep that in mind. So like I have to be mindful too of where, yeah, you feel a lot of trepidation in the real estate market. It’s like, yeah, is this gonna bottom out even more? How much is this gonna collapse? but just being aware that that type of mindset,
Where you might be forecasting this just, you know, is it going to collapse due to interest rates or continued inflation or displacement from AI and so forth is probably going to be less likely. just looking at the data across a whole bunch of other you know, collapse forecasts that were predicted in in the past. So I can still be a profit when it comes to conservative underwriting and just being very cautious about you know, capital allocation and so forth.
but also being mindful that I still have to be open to opportunity that might still come up, and not just getting stuck within, hey, everything’s just collapsing. I’m gonna paralyze myself from not not taking action on on any possible opportunity. So you have to know how to balance that correctly. whereas again, like there are other forecasts though that that can
Perform well. like for example, like climate change that was, you know, predicted i extremely well here. That would be more in the favor of like, you know, the profits. in instead of like, you know, h heading towards environmental stability and and so forth here, but you know, heavily based in science. it’s it’s you know, the the evidence has been pretty overwhelming from that perspective, or like, you know, exponential capability, Moore’s law.
rights law and Swanson laws as it relates to solar and battery cost declines, like those have been very predictable a as well too. So, you know, there are some forecasts that can that can perform better. But more of the tell here, like be when you’re gonna be making forecasts, is that much of the losers kind of share just, you know, a single dominant mechanism. Again, like from population side, like human population across the whole world is gonna lead to
you know, total collapse of civilization, et cetera. Like it’s it’s too many variables and confounders to be more reliable there. and kind of extrapolating a current trend to a full catastrophe again. You could look at that from the real estate market. assumption that human behavior stays static. Like that this is the thing that I center in so so often. It’s like humans
are constantly evolving and constantly adapting to the situations around them. I mean, we we saw that again, like do with with COVID, there to to bring that up again, during the the early stages, it was like, you know, no vaccine has ever been created in, you know, less than five years, something like that. I don’t know. I’d have to go back to that. And we were able to, you know, through enough resources to get these mR mRNA vaccines out.
I know there’s like, you know, some thoughts. Hey, no, this was actually more negative. I know. I think if you look at the signs, for most people taking the vaccine, it was a more of a positive in terms of the overall health of the population, with some negative factors that should have been portrayed more carefully. but again, things were moving fast. it was a difficult environment to to work in. So, but you know, that nevertheless just serves.
as an example that like, yeah, humans, if we’re pressed against certain constraints and and pressures to act, you you can’t necessarily predict that if even if you look at thousands of years of of human history. because you have to take take into account the ability to to adapt and and change the environment accordingly. and especially like having a confident near-term date and like that that that’s just hard to do.
Especially in again, this world of AI, like I would say I I love being futuristic or like looking, you know, five, ten plus years out. I would say like anything, even beyond a year, it’s really, really difficult to to kind of ascertain or even put a stamp on. like the it’s just so fluid at the moment. whereas, you know, on the flip side for forecasts, you know, winning forecasts.
tend to share, you know, it’s more of a bounded scope, like really laying out, hey, this variable will lead to this variable. you know, oftentimes it’ll be more like scientific, not, you know, necessarily going to get as much attention and so forth. but that’s the route to accuracy, or like a very stable physical mechanism. like, you know, from a dep demographic side of things, like there is population momentum, like it’s
easier to predict population projections over the next at least, you know, twenty, forty years because most of these people had already been born. and we have idea of of fertility rates and and and so forth. So or like manufacturing learning curves. Like that’s a very stable mechanism. We can develop like years worth of data, Moore’s Law, et cetera, that that you can reliably predict. but you know, also just being yeah
humble about the timing again too. It’s like, yeah, this could happen a year from now, five years from now, 10 years potentially. So just keeping that in mind as far as how you might forecast with with w some more accuracy there. or like another one too, and I I like I I would love this to be the case. Like we’ll we’ll kind of start start re wrapping this up now. But like even like Ray Kurzweil, more famous kind of futurist
AI expert as well. you know, we see a lot of this. So there’s gonna be like nanobots living in our body within the next 10 years and like all of human disease will go away and we’ll basically be able to live forever. And it’s like, okay, theoretically, that’s possible. I would love that to be the case. Like if you could give me like almost any wish, I think that would be maybe my number one for for humanity here. I think that would be at the top of most people’s lists.
But but when you look at you know the profit perspective of like, okay, what’s actually realistic to happen? Like would I throw away any sustainable health related mechanisms like exercising and eating properly and sleeping properly because I’m just so gung-ho about this, you know, potential immortality that’s going to come over the next 10 years? No, I would think that’s a very bad bet.
So that’s why it’s like, okay, yeah, you can have the bullishness plugging away and hoping or investing in this potential for, you know, wizard-oriented immortality technology that can come along the way, or at least like significantly health increasing technology while still being a profit and taking care of your body in case that doesn’t happen. So you can still
live a more sustainable life g given our our current mortal constraints so to speak. So that that’s just another another an analogy to to throw that back in. so to summarize here, real estate market, tough spot right now. Very tough.
e again, e even with all of our experience, our our conservatism markets might be moving faster than than we’ve ever seen them in a downward trending correction. So we were even tighter on liquidity than than ever before. but we’re balancing that conservatism against being mindful of a wizard versus a profit mentality. Again, wizard, you’re gonna be more oriented towards innovation, growth at all costs, that that that will push past any ceiling. Profit, hey.
Let’s be careful. There’s going to be second-order effects that could potentially be extremely damaging or eliminate any of the gains that you know, the wizard, wizard innovation might might get quicker. in understanding that we can hold wizard mentalities in some areas of your life and profit mentalities as more dominant mechanisms in other parts of your life, but there’s always a balance between them. and the key thing is to take the win when it’s in your hands.
from a wizard perspective, but be mindful and try to protect against the second order effects that wizard related growth can contribute to from a from a profit perspective and try to mitigate as much as possible whether they are potentially known risks or unknown risks. So how do you prevent that accordingly? And again, in our side, like AI technology, hey, we’re really wizard oriented, at least I am personally.
whereas from the profit side, yeah, like the way we underwrite real estate is much more profit-oriented. and you know, just what wanting to keep op options open, very sustainable business and monetary practices here. So hopefully this one was was interesting to you and gives you another mental model on how to assess your own business and life in in general here.
I I thought this was a a really fascinating read. Again, you know I I think I got more out of it by running it through my learning accelerator quad skill than I would have just, you know, reading the the book. It would have taken me forever to do this anyway, with the newborn at home, 600 pages and so forth. Instead I can just fly through it with within a day and you know share my learnings with you on on this podcast here and soon to be newsletter. So you know, tell me this is probably wizard type thinking, right?
but what what what’s at the cost of it? I I don’t know, second order effects, maybe it’s gonna fade out of my mind more. Who knows? But just to give you another example on on how we might balance out those ways of thinking. So again, if you ever have deals to send over, seriousland.capital, be on the lookout for our SLC chat cohort plugin. Ton more progress on that recently. Feel free to DM me if you want to be on our priority list.
for for the launch here. It’s a white glove boutique install. And subscribe and share, everybody. Looking forward to next time. Bye.
