This episode documents the rapid decision-making process for a top-five deal—a pristine 50-acre Texas property with excellent road frontage, utilities at street, nearby high-quality new builds, and reliable double potential on conservative comps. The catch: $400,000 cash required with title closing in five business days, forcing evaluation of whether expertise and systems justify breaking normal risk parameters for truly exceptional opportunities.
Key Takeaways:
- Expertise Enables Rapid High-Stakes Decisions Thousands of deal reviews create pattern recognition that allows confident $400K commitments within 24-48 hours when terrain, utilities, comps, and subdivide potential align perfectly despite compressed timelines.
- Strategic Partnerships Distribute Risk on Premium Deals Teaming with trusted co-funders on screamer opportunities reduces individual exposure while leveraging complementary expertise for complex value-add transactions, growing absolute returns even at smaller relative ownership.
- Liquidity Becomes Competitive Advantage Being one of few funders capable of deploying $400K cash within one week creates access to deals other capital providers must pass on, with systems in place for accelerated title work and same-day LLC documentation.
Get the complete story of aggressive timeline navigation, partnership structuring, and when breaking your own rules makes strategic sense for exceptional opportunities.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hey, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Today’s one of those days where, you know, we got started running this daily podcast and, you know, inevitably there’s going to be bumps along the way and unexpected life events happening. And it was just a combo of a tumultuous
week with weather closing down my daughter’s daycare yesterday and parents not being in town so my wife and I having to trade off child care duties during the day and then to put on top of that for most of the night. Last night, daughter started throwing up. So having to deal with that and then having to keep her home.
another day unexpectedly, right before going to a Mastermind event. It all kind of throws things in whirlwind, but yeah, that’s just part of being a parent or just being an adult with various responsibilities, but you have to carve out the time and still share what is going on here, committed to providing that value add.
one way or another, we’ll find a way to get it done. This is good practice for times that aren’t as ideal here. Amidst all of that less than fun type of happenings going on within our business, fairly unexpectedly we got
Maybe a top five deal that I’ve ever reviewed out of the thousands that we’ve looked at over the years here. Just one of those that almost takes your breath away and makes you think, what am I missing here? It seems too good to be true. It was a larger 50 acre piece in Texas, again, where we’re based and done a lot of.
deals here are very familiar with most of the markets within Texas and just seem to be a perfect minor subdivide set up. mean, the terrain was spotless, no real contour to speak of, appears to have electricity and public water at the street.
excellent road frontage for at least three or four child parcels, high quality new builds within the last three or four years right across the street. Indicating some other recent subdivide activity. And within an hour of one of the larger Texas triangle metros, it’s just.
very unusual to find something like this and to see, you know, if you were to carve up the property into some child parcels seem to be reliable doubles, even conservatively on this one, where a lot of the initial comps were…
You know, just kind of riddled with more inferior features, know, they’re more heavily wooded, creek running through flood zone, et cetera. and you know, anybody, any of us who’ve been in the land game long enough, like usually most parcels that we’re finding at a possible discount are on average going to be a bit more inferior, than not some, some hair to work through. but this was just not the case. And.
Uh, what made this in even more unique setup is that, uh, the individual who brought us this deal thought it was too good to be true as well. And, um, you know, you always have to be wary. It was okay. Does the seller actually own the property before diving in further? And it turns out that, um, the seller did own the property. was just an air chip situation, kind of just standard, um, motivated seller. mean,
since the dawn of time, Those are always gonna be some of the possible sellers to work with and just wanting to move on quickly at a pretty significantly discounted price, even if you’re just selling the parent parcel for a good downside protection scenario. The problem is, this title came back
And an anticipated close day of, you know, five business days after that. we’re brought in, you know, potentially to try to close this week, trying to get it extended to next week. I’m unlikely to get beyond that. And this is pricey, a $400,000 cash purchase. Normally if I see something like that with that turnaround time, I’m just, I’m just going to pass on it. There’s, there’s too many ways for things to go wrong.
You have to rush your decision making and especially for that amount of capital out. If you screw up, I mean, it can, it can really turn the business upside down and destroy your, returns for potentially the whole year. And we definitely faced that down in the past. So, you know, have the scars to prove it. In this particular case.
We had to weigh those trepidations that we normally have with our underlying experience and the thousands of deals that we’ve reviewed and understanding, okay, this is like a really special case. Again, if this is truly a top five property we’ve ever seen, it’s in our home state. And most of the diligence already been completed, like title has been reviewed, utility has been checked on.
a realtor identified, it allows us to clarify more quickly whether we can put this together. So in situations like this, if there’s really a true ticking time bomb, how do I accelerate my whole team to do a full written due diligence pathway to comp everything out? The realtor that was already engaged.
had they already done site visit in this case, no, but I was able to reach out, get ahold of them quickly, get a site visit scheduled for today. And kind of expressing the urgency there while at the same time trying to buy a bit more time with the seller to potentially close. even if it was supposed to be this week, most title companies, we have to submit new LLC docs and all that. Some can work in a rush.
complete that within a few hours. Sometimes it takes a little longer to update titles, so it just depends. And in this case, this title company, we have worked with them before, so they should already have our info on file. We could move that fast if needed. But yeah, it was just trying to nail down all of these possible issues and complete our DD as quickly as possible. know, calling on my partner to say, can, you know,
Are we able to put this together? Are there some additional terms we can throw in that give us a bit more downside protection? In this case, you know, thinking about profit splits that might adjust depending on the blended price per acre that the parcels exit at. Because looking at it a bit further, know, land, even when you see
something that just appears really obvious like there’s always still a chance to be kicked in the teeth, especially high price parcels like this. And you can never be too conservative when it comes to purchasing here. The market can change, a whole new slew of potentially higher quality trial parcels could enter the market and try to undercut what we were already underwriting an exit price would be anyway.
those are always just the risks that you’re going to have to potentially live with. we’re, trying to protect that downside within such a limited time to fully review this, this parcel here, try to get survey quote, all that, that type. it looks like it was already done too, and timeline. we can assess that further, as well.
And in the meantime, just to reduce risk even further, there were a few other funders who were potentially looking at it, but again, very tight timeline. We know that we’re one of the only funders, if not the only one that can move that much capital that quickly, just being more liquid and more capital reserves than the other funders on the market. So, us able to say yes to a 400K cash deal within a week.
is rare within the industry. But one of the other funders who was looking, you it’s not going to be able to fully take it down, but, know, could potentially partially participate is actually someone I know very well and have spent extensive time with. And so it’s comfortable calling him up and seeing, okay, can we put together a, you know, partnership deal here quickly? If it was someone I didn’t know, I wouldn’t do that.
Um, uh, but, know, it just so happened that we already have an preexisting relationship, um, uh, trust each other that, you know, could spin up some documentation within a rapid period of time to try to take down this deal, um, and distribute the risk a little bit more. Plus they’ve had some experience doing, uh, deals in this area and subdivides like that. um, you know,
even deals that are true screamers like this, understanding it as we get bigger and continue to go after more value add deals. Like I’m, I’m just always focused on long-term where I’m trying to grow the pie as big as possible. So even if we’re eating a smaller relative portion of it, our absolute returns just continue to grow. Plus we have more people to
to lever when it comes to expertise for more complex transactions and you know, there’s other funder has a significant background knowledge for a lot of value add type deals, that, we’re pursuing in, in the future here. yeah, if you send some type of tenderness down, I’m just trying to protect, the specific details about this, this deal here, not give, too much away, but
giving you the key points to understand primarily, okay, if there’s a really screamer of opportunity, even if it’s a ton of capital, are we willing to break our rules in some instances to still pursue it based on our experience and, you know, de-risking it enough, even in a super short turnaround time. So this was a very interesting scramble. You know, it’s not done yet. We still have a bit more to do, but you know, even within
24 hours of looking at this, we can accomplish so much, especially with lot of knowledgeable people on all sides of the transaction here. So just, yeah, take that to heart. Keep after it. Expertise and reps pay off to allow you to make decisions faster and more comfortably. It’s taken us years to get to this point and feel comfortable at that amount of capital, but it’ll come if you…
Stay focused and and trust your your underlying systems and process to to adapt to the needs at hand With that again serious land dot capital friend of your funding needs land daily diligence for zero cost Review of any land deals you have whether you want funding or not
landpricer.ai for the most accurate and simple way to value US land deals. again, check out Dave Dennison’s on conference in early August of this year in Minneapolis. Use my last name, Duff D-U-F-F, all lowercase in order to get $200 off your ticket. Hope to see you there. Take care, everybody. Bye.
