This episode documents the strongest week of lead flow since Thanksgiving, featuring a 30+ acre Louisiana minor subdivide opportunity with significant initial capital requirements for turnkey improvements. The analysis weighs faster turnover with minimal improvements versus higher percentage spreads with full horizontal development, while examining industry trends toward messy title deals and note portfolio opportunities as operators seek new alpha sources.
Key Takeaways:
- Higher-Value Deals Require More Conservative Spreads Properties above $200,000 face naturally diminished buyer pools, demanding greater percentage margins between purchase and anticipated exit to compensate for extended days on market and adverse selection risk.
- Industry Evolution Toward Complex Deal Types Operators increasingly pursue messy title and undivided interest deals requiring legal expertise and patient capital—positioning as capital partner with internal legal capabilities creates new funding opportunities.
- Input Focus Prevents Output-Driven Mistakes Targeting $1 million monthly anticipated revenue as loose North Star while prioritizing consistent lead generation over hitting specific numbers avoids forced decision-making on marginal deals.
Get the complete discussion of value-add deal structuring, industry trend analysis, and why January’s $2 million pipeline validates strategic marketing investments.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hey, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. I was having an update meeting with my partners yesterday and even to start the year, just figuring out how our marketing efforts have started to pay off. And, you know, it’s a, a big plane to get off the runway. You’re not going to get overnight results, but we have started to see a trickle up in leads, probably the best week of leads we’ve had since.
before Thanksgiving. I’m not diving into the data, but just my sense of it, not too surprising this time of year, but good to see that we’re really kind of pushing all cylinders here and just trying to be also more open for where the industry might be headed in certain directions here. Of course, our bread and butter is going to be flips.
Ideally larger sized ones whenever possible, though trying to push more into the value add opportunities. And one property I might’ve commented on earlier this week, I know I reviewed it on the live, is a 30 plus acre piece in Louisiana that seems to be ripe for possible minor subdivision. And we had a
very knowledgeable broker, had out there, review everything. And it looks like it might be a pretty penny to invest further into the property to really prepare it for just turnkey build sites for residential buyers here. But he really understood our focus as faster turnover land investors than that.
you know, sometimes you have to weigh, okay, are we really going to put extra funds into this deal? It’s already expensive in order to potentially move this one faster. you know, we’re internally, diligent seeing this deal as quickly as we can here, but, know, it’s one that I thought we might be able to pull off and as is subdivide and still have room on it. But in terms of a days on market approach,
It seems that the numbers will still be in our favor, perhaps even more in our favor in terms of percentage spread on the deal compared to if we had just tried to do minimal improvements or just a straight up survey and then just try to move them as is. So, you know, given our experience, we’re just more open.
Uh, and, just, uh, Proving out our track record at higher value deals. We’re more open to potentially pursuing these even, uh, that might have larger initial, um, capital requirements, uh, associated, um, with them. And that’s the thing too, is we’ve been bit hard in the past before. Um, you know, know a lot of folks will try to pursue higher value deals, you know, north of a hundred, eight hundred.
plus purchase price and be okay with less spread for a potential conservative sales price. Of course, if you’re just trying to double close, who cares? Doesn’t matter. But when you’re trying to flip by purchasing the property outright, we’ve found that we’ve actually trended towards being more conservative in terms of percentage spread.
between the purchase price and the anticipated sales price, just because naturally your buyer pool is going to diminish for most properties that are above 200, 250,000 on the market, especially if they’re not just incredibly rare valuable piece of land like oceanfront on the Atlantic or Pacific, what have you, but those are few and far between.
Um, and rarely come up from a flip perspective. The owners are, uh, rarely pushed in that type of direction. So you really can’t count on, um, something like that showing up usually, uh, there’s going to be a bit more hair on the properties. You’re going to be more creative with figuring out the value add. So, um, that’s just to give you a very recent example of what we’re trying to pursue here. And, um,
Yeah, I’m not trying to focus as much on the outputs of the business. know, the rough guidelines I’d like to get us for this year is approximately a million dollars minimum in anticipated revenue for deals monthly. So, you know, buying in terms of liquidity out, maybe about half that, maybe a little bit more depending on what the particulars are for the deal there.
but I know I can’t control that all the time. And if I am focused on the outputs that might buy its need towards making, improper decisions from a investment perspective, just to hit, those perceived, revenue goals. So instead focusing on the inputs and just going lead, Jen, lead, lead Jen as much as possible, tightening up our, our sales cycle and understanding that.
You know, we’ve been in this business for years. It’s oftentimes lumpy. You know, some weeks, weeks you might get five strong, funnable leads. Sometimes it’ll get zero. Um, we try to smooth that curve out as much as possible, but you know, it’s just the nature of, of this business and just understanding as long as you stay consistent, more is going to come your way. Um, beyond that, you know, there was a couple other avenues that we think, okay, where is this industry heading? I’m sure you’ve seen more recent marketing.
you know, what Clint Turner has done in his business. know, extremely savvy land investor. I’ve learned a lot from him and I know he backed out of the education space for quite a while coming back now with, you know, those messy title deals, similar to what, you know, Logan Fulmar will pursue aggressively here. And while I think our team is set up from our, deeper legal internal knowledge and just
willingness to dive into hairy problems. you know, the sourcing and acquisition side is obviously quite time consuming. And it’s not like, you know, Clint or Logan try to, try to hide that legwork. Uh, there’s, there’s a reason there’s, um, you know, so much alpha in those deals because they’re, hard to perform. So, you know, us looking at, you know, our model, okay, you know, we’re already so time strapped anyway. Are we really going to try to pursue that?
In addition, everything else that we have going on, you standard funding business trying to launch a software and pursuing other value add deals too, it’s just not realistic at the moment. But because we have the capital and the legal expertise to help take some of these to the finish line, especially some of these higher value ones, capital is still potentially going to be required. So as the land investing industry moves closer towards
you know, pursuing these deals more regularly, inevitably there’s going to be some capital shortfalls and that’s, or, you know, just legal tie-ups where, you know, folks might not want to, you know, spend the time to figure it out internally or just look for, you know, those of us that can provide the capital as well as the ability to figure out the title related issues.
and potentially invest in some of those deals in our more traditional funding models. So it’s just figuring out, okay, where can we see where the industry is going and how do we adapt that into our model? as well. And we have worked with nastier title issues, not quite some of these that are, routine, undivided interest. really having to like try to close without title and so forth. but you know, we, have enough wherewithal.
to be able to figure that piece out, just given our internal legal teams experience. So that’s just something else that I was kind of turning around or also investigating, trying to buy some notes at significant discounts to try to build up a note portfolio potentially. That’s not gonna be a primary focus of ours, but we’re more open to the opportunity.
if the pricing is appropriate and us just understanding the underlying assets more and diligencing the folks that are buying into the properties and financing them out with our various kind of internal tools for assessing credit worthiness and so forth. So that’s another avenue that we’re just more open towards. Again, you just have to kind of…
continue to evolve and grow within the industry. And just wanted to share a couple of the very recent updates that we’ve had even over the past few days here. And so far, this Louisiana subdivide deal, and there’s a couple other larger rural tracks that we’re looking at for this month. If we’re looking at an output of a million in potential revenue on the table, we’re probably already
Approaching About two million even for the month of January coming out of the holidays. So That is, you know hitting again our loose goal here. Don’t focus on the outputs focus on the inputs But you know as a very light North Star guideline of what we’re trying to go after That’s just
keeping that mind to understand, our efforts seem to be paying off in the right direction here and the sentence are still aligned. Again, you want funding, serious land dot capital or our zero cost deal reviews, land daily diligence, a bigger bump in the growth of that group. Probably the biggest bump over the past four months. It’s been exciting to see and more additional positive feedback.
Beyond that, landpricer.ai for the simple and accurate way to price land. And again, check out Dave Doniston’s unconference in August, 2025. As long as you’re making six figures in revenue, you can apply and get in and then use my last name, D-U-F-F, all lowercase for $200 off your ticket. Again, only land. Large land conference that I’m going to this year. Hope to see you there. Bye.
