This episode advocates for separating economic data from political opinions when making business decisions, drawing on Serious Land Capital’s experience navigating five years of volatile markets (COVID crash, 2021-22 bull run, 2022 rate-driven correction, late-2024 mini-rally, 2025 trade war impact). The core argument is that unconditional success requires responding to actual market conditions rather than partisan sentiment or external blame.
Key Takeaways:
- Control What You Control Entrepreneurs cannot afford opinion cycles or topic avoidance, they must operate on circumstances at hand using data from multiple sources and local market intelligence.
- Political Bias Creates Blindness Excessive optimism when your party wins or defensive paralysis when they lose both distort data interpretation and delay necessary strategic adjustments.
- National Portfolio Advantage Operating across red, blue, and purple states reveals that political narratives rarely explain local market performance, success and struggle occur everywhere.
Listen to understand how to maintain data-driven decision-making when macro conditions create pressure to adopt partisan narratives.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. today wanted to go over, I think a pretty relevant topic. you know, about, about a number of things that I’ve kind of routinely commented on recently, you know, status of the macro economy and how to navigate continuing to build your business and being an entrepreneur and
you know, fault or macro and who knows what’s, what’s going on. Um, and to be able to separate out the data from, uh, whatever political opinions you may or may not have. Um, so I know obviously that can be a, uh, a touchy topic and I’m not a particularly politically minded person, but I was just reminded of this a bit because I was actually doing a radio.
a radio guest spot. That’s the first time on an AM station yesterday. First time I’ve done one of those and, you know, was kind of going over my business and, you know, trying to provide as much value and so forth. And, you know, they’re asking like, how do you, you know, adjust your underwriting and so forth. And, you know, I got into a
You know, a response that was mentioning, you know, since we had entered the land space, you know, a little bit before COVID. I mean, it’s been a. Twisty turvy market to say the least with a lot of significant changes spread over like a five-ish year period where, you know, we went from, you know, really nasty downturn for.
a few months during those early months of COVID, then it turned into, and it was like a kind of greatest combination of buyers and sellers market at the same time. Like a lot of people were flush with cash. And again, we were getting started then got a lot of mistakes out of the way, but I I really wish we knew what we knew now.
and could have gone after way larger deals. And it would just been, you know, even easier to make bigger returns in a market like that. But, know, what can you do? We’re here now. You adjust as needed. But yeah, I went from like buyers to heavy sellers market and then back to a mostly buyers market in many parts of the country by like mid 2022 with the interest rates getting a lot higher. And it’s been kind of settled into that buyers market in a lot of parts of the country.
particularly like those, hot, hot flipping areas, that COVID really spurred. and it got a lot more difficult to start selling into those market. Not, always again, but you know, just general trend. And then I thought there was another mini bull run, between, roughly mid November of last year to mid,
January of this year, we offloaded a whole bunch of portfolios, same with a bunch of other land investors and real estate in general. mean, just look at the market caps of the bigger builders and the crashes they’ve had since then. And now I think it’s like a very difficult market overall, not everywhere, you know, since the start of April and, you know, these ongoing tariffs.
trade war situation and so forth. And so, you know, when I was going through these, this response, like it’s just unlike how to navigate the actual economy here. tried to remove as much, you know, opinion as possible and just stick with, with, with the data and how we adjust underwriting depending on, you know, what our end buyers might be considering. And, you know, the, hosts with, with, with the program, you know, it’s their show and everything, but you know,
could kind of tell like they wanted to kind of gently, you know, move away from, from that topic after which said no problem on, on, that side. But, know, to me, I, it just got me thinking a little bit more where, you know, we, as entrepreneurs and business owners, like you can’t, you can’t afford to get trapped into opinion cycles or avoid certain topics just, you know, because of how
hot those topics might be, from like an online perspective or just, you know, general sentiment around the country or, you know, difficult conversations, what, what have you. whereas to me, it’s just like, okay, regardless of what’s going on, regardless of what my opinion is politically or what, you know, I think of the decisions I just have to operate based on.
the circumstances at hand. all I can do. I can’t control anything else, but I keep my ear very close to the floor in all of the local markets that we’re in and try to get news from a number of different sources so that we can make the most informed opinions possible. Because, you know, if you have the sense that
you know, these greater powers that be actually are controlling the results that you can get, then you’re just putting power into somebody else’s hands. But, you know, if you understand that, Hey, you can still get results. It might be harder, in, in, in, in, certain economies to still succeed. but you know, to make your success unconditional, regardless of, you know, whatever extenuating circumstances there are.
to me that that is always the, you know, North star that we should be heading toward as, as entrepreneurs here. So that was the distinction that I was just like, kind of keeping in mind. like, okay, I, know, anything that even like sniff, like smells like, remotely like, you know, political oriented topics, like,
Now we can’t really discuss that. And so like you notice I’m not necessarily saying anything about the parties or anything. I’m just talking about the data. I’m talking about what we’re seeing consumer sentiment, how troublesome it is to move some properties that we weren’t having much trouble with a few months ago and how we’re adjusting our strategy to account for that.
And, know, if things shift again, boom, we move on. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just about staying as, unbiased as possible, when it comes to the actual data and just making decisions and adapting, therein. And we’ve seen so many different market shifts over the past five years, regardless of who’s in charge or what’s going on in the economy. I don’t know. I can’t control all that. No one can, no one person can. and, you know, we, we still find a way to.
succeed. And I think have even a better sense of that, especially because we operate nationally here, know, red state, blue state, purple state, doesn’t matter. We operate in all of them and find success in all of them and also find difficulties in all of them too. it’s, you know, we don’t, we don’t blame any of those, you know.
political undercurrents for, how our business is performing. Like ultimately that, that comes back to us and how quickly or not so quickly that we can adjust and still find a way to kind of like stabilize, survive and thrive or just, you know, continue to thrive. I ideally, that that’s just kind of the name of the game here and
I mean, just look at how many people that, you know, if, they’re, you know, preferred political party gets, gets elected, for instance, um, you know, you, you can get biased either way, right? Then all of a sudden you might have misleading thoughts, uh, in terms of being more optimistic about taking
You know, certain pathways or decision-making within your own business or your own investing, whatever you’re doing. When in reality, the data is showing, Hey, this is actually shake year. Then, what you actually might be trying to believe or really want to believe. on the flip side, you know, if your preferred party is not elected and you’re just like way too defensive.
And thinking, Hey, I can’t get anything done because, know, this person or these people are just ruining everything. And so I’m just like, to bury my head in the sand and just wait. I’m just going to wait, um, for things to change and not try to adapt to what’s still in my control. And, you know, that can be just as damaging as well. Um, because again, you might be misinterpreting some of the data and realize that you still can succeed no matter what anyway. So.
You know, I just think this message needs to be shared more routinely here. and you know, to realize that it’s usually more of a mix. It’s less polarized when you even look around the country and like, know, look at red States or blue States and what have you, and how evenly the country is really split at any given time, or even like take like a state by state basis. Yeah.
I’m from like as blue as day as possible grew up in Illinois, moved to Texas, which is, know, quote unquote a red state. But, you know, if you look at like actual voter breakdowns and so forth, like it’s usually, or it has been more recently, maybe like a 52 to 48, um, in terms of, uh, you know, favoring, um, uh, you know, red, red candidates, but, know, just, just consider that for a moment. Let’s say you had, you know, like a hundred people representing those.
you know, percentage points within that state and 52 people were wearing a red shirt. 48 people were wearing a blue shirt. Let’s say you just mix them all up and you put them in front of you. And like, if you were just looking at that, you’d probably have to think really carefully. Like it’s not obvious that it’s a red state, right? It’s like, wait a second. It’s like a really even mix. think I’m going have to actually count each person individually before I give my answer, because it looks basically half and half.
So I think that’s an important reminder to understand that, again, things are not as black and white as they seem. And there’s multiple different forces and opinions and, you know, competing interests going on at any given time. And if you don’t understand how to work with those circumstances as they come up and adjust with the winds, control what you can control and just.
try to be as unbiased as you can about the underlying data when it comes to actually growing your business. Like you’re just inevitably going to falter or just, you know, get distracted and, you know, not focus on what’s actually driving the needle forward. So I just wanted to share that, that sentiment, especially again, cause I think we have a very good sense, you know, having operated less geography.
geographically focused, you know, seeing kind of national exposure and having a lot of different inputs coming in to where we’re actually getting our, our data from. And again, even within our portfolio, yeah, there are definitely some that I’m like, you know, just as I commented yesterday, maybe a couple of days ago, just like max Dispo focus, figure out the right problem. And some other ones are really performing well, like one we’d literally just closed on less than a week ago and listed.
less than two days ago, already is going under contract full, full price cash offer three X what we put into the deal. couldn’t, couldn’t be a better result, right? But like, this was also one that I like double, double, double and triple checked, with the broker on the status of that local economy. He said, yeah, things are still flying off the shelves here. People are still moving on deals. Plus it wasn’t that, that expensive a deal, you know, 60 K by it’s not huge, but.
That’s still a nice return here. So, you know, like we, we, are, are obviously concerned about some of the properties that are not moving as much for us, but we’re still putting stuff under contract as well. We’re still investing in properties. I’m doing some other transactional deals as well too, in the meantime, and you know, still our underwriting, is, is, tightened up more, more so than, than it was before, but you know, clearly we’re still showing we can perform and adjust our criteria to operate in whatever environment.
Again, that’s always the goal. Find a way to succeed no matter what. So if you’re looking for funding, serious land dot capital, for, zero cost review of your land deals, land daily diligence, Facebook group, check it out. I’ll be on live later today and landpricer.ai. I’m about to get on a meeting with my development team. Again, trying to get the new product launched before end of June here. Take care, subscribe and share. Talk to you next time. Bye.
