This episode details manual builder outreach for the central Tennessee two-acre infill lot held 4+ months with razor-thin margins, requiring personal involvement despite being CEO-level work. Twenty-five builder contacts generated 6-7 live conversations with one interested party—a 4% hit rate on difficult inventory.
Key Takeaways:
- Google + Aerial Maps + Planning & Zoning Combine search methods to build comprehensive builder lists—scan recent construction permits, check new development ownership, and ask county offices for active builder names.
- Three-Touch Cadence Over Two Weeks Initial call, 3-day follow-up text, and week-later final outreach maximizes response rates without becoming spam—persistence separates deals from dead ends.
- CEO Does What’s Needed No fire is beneath leadership attention when it’s the biggest portfolio blocker—an hour of calls beats weeks of waiting for assistants to execute imperfectly.
- Cell Numbers Enable Text Follow-Up Identifying mobile numbers in builder lists allows SMS outreach after missed calls, dramatically increasing connection rates versus voicemail-only strategies.
Listen to the full episode to hear why unglamorous manual work remains essential even as businesses scale and how to delegate versus execute yourself.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Today I wanted to go over some additional Dispo strategies and what areas you might delegate and what areas you might take ownership on your own. So within our portfolio, the trickiest parcel to sell and we’ve held it the longest.
you know, a little over four months. That to me is like, um, getting very long in the tooth here. we have extremely limited margin left in this deal and central Tennessee and, you know, two acre infill lot. And if, if we were looking at this property in this current environment, you know, I wouldn’t have funded it. It’s 2020 hindsight at the same time. I knew it was a bit more questionable when we bought it, but we thought we had enough.
protections in place. Now it’s just, got to get this property off, off our plate. it’s the number one biggest problem that I’m trying to sort out. So I’ve just been having my assistant take every possible step to, look to dispro the deal and then stepping in myself for anything I can help on.
so a couple avenues of this today, I just wanted to comment on reaching out to local builders or developers in the area. So I had my assistant prep a local builders list. you know, there’s a handful of ways to do this. You can use, some variation of a Google search or perplexity.
Um, to try to figure out, you know, who are the local builders? don’t know, within a 25 mile radius, you could go even beyond that, depending on how rural it is. Um, you can also scan around on the aerial maps and, uh, especially if you’re in an infill lot area, just see if there was any, um, you know, current builder owners for instance. Um,
That can be another good avenue. Some people might suggest, you know, reaching out to one of the county or city offices, maybe at planning and zoning and to see, would you be able to tell me who are the builders in the area?
you know, purchased or been building on lots here recently. And usually it’s publicly available info and you know, the planning and zoning department, they’re incentivized to get lots developed and, you know, increase the property tax value within the county and more revenue in the door. So, um, you know, some counties will be more helpful than, than others in that regard, but that’s another avenue that, that you could explore there. Um, or you could also look at.
Completed homes that are on market or have sold recently in the area again with you know X number for your search radius on Zillow Redfin, whatever and then figure out What the name of the builder is from those listings? Sometimes it’s a bit easier to tell than others. You might have to like look up. Okay, who’s the owner? You know search the APN and figure out who the owner is So you’re not just stuck on
you know, trying to go through an agent or anything. So, you know, all of these avenues, you know, require a bit of legwork to figure out. And the thing is, if you’re just, you know, pulling from Google and so forth, you know, you want to make sure that they’re working phone numbers or see if you can actually find a site associated with that builder or developer and get the right contact info.
And so, you know, utilizing any of that, of those strategies, you know, plug it into a spreadsheet with all the relevant phone numbers, emails ideally too, if they have it. And then, you know, create a column. Okay, is this a cell number? So you can potentially text them. And then I’ll usually have upwards of a three.
reattempt outreach basis spread across roughly a week or two to see if I can really get an answer out of all of these builders. They’re surprisingly not, none are unresponsive for the most part. know, occasionally some will have secretaries and so forth and yeah, I’m not trying to reach out to like Lenar or DR Horton or anything like that. want smaller local builders who might be managing very small subdivisions or just one off lots for custom builds. Those are.
the folks who could be potentially buyers for us for just, you know, those one-off lots. and so I just, you know, sat down, just knocked out the list that we had prepped today. and that’s something I’d rather handle personally, versus my assistant. just again, kind of command of English language. and you know, this is such a problem within.
our own business trying to offload this lot. Like, and it’s like, I’m, and it’s not even for that, that much money. You’re barely going to make every, we might break even, but probably it’d be a small loss, but like, I really need to get this one out. So he has like a 35 K by we’re listed at 42 five right now. So it’s very thin, especially net of closing costs and allocated overhead. Um, but yeah, nevertheless, like, you know,
You’re never above any problem that arises within your business. I just like there’s no, there’s no shame in jumping in as needed. You know, no, no fire is not worth my attention when it comes to moving the business forward, especially when it comes to, you know, what is the overall largest blocker for our business.
moving, it’s getting this Dispo out the door for portfolio. That’s just, you know, long in the tooth here. So where do I need to jump in? I’m going to carve out the time. I’m to get, get things done. And there was a fair amount of positive responses, like 25 ish outreaches. I want to say I spoke to you. Probably six or seven of the builders or, you know, various people at their companies, live.
Yeah, probably half of them were not interested in out of that whole list. Probably sent, you know, three follow up messages like for folks right here. Yeah, send stuff over one out of eight hit rate. Like, that’s not too bad for.
possible Dispo, especially for like much more difficult property. So got that info to them right away. Also indicated, Hey, we have like blow market pricing or open owner finance. Just, know, not showing desperation, but showing, we’re pretty motivated here. We can, we can work with you if you’re interested at all in acquiring in this area. It’s a lot with utilities, et cetera. Just like get to the point, figure out what does the builder need to know regarding
this property and just following up routinely. And then I tried texting all of the other numbers who seemed to have a cell phone. And if they didn’t, I’ll just mark that down so I don’t text again from that number, replaced a few broken numbers as needed to try to find the right ones. And then I’ll plan to reach out for a second round this.
Friday, so roughly three days from now and then do another round next week too, to just again, really figure out if there’s any potential to work together with these builders here. So, you know, this strategy has worked with us or worked for us in the past. Again, it’s more manual. It takes some legwork. Ideally, you would be doing outreaches like this for much larger properties here, but you know, that’s where we’re scaling up to.
This is just enough of a problem property. Like I need to get this like it’s my number one biggest problem in the business to solve. so I’m jumping in, exploring every avenue to sort this out. So if you haven’t done something like this already, that’s the playbook.
Again, I know it’s nobody’s cup of tea to go through some of that manual work or just calling around and so forth. Um, especially if you’re more like visionary business leader like myself, uh, but you know, that’s what it takes sometimes is, the, hard work is, is the stuff no one wants to do, but you know, it can get results. So if I even get possible sale offer sheet, who knows from one of these builders that will have been worth that hour of time that I put into.
Knock out all of those calls. So hopefully this one helps today I’ll go over another dispose strategy tomorrow that I my assistant doing in the meantime With that if you’re looking for funny, we’ve picked up a lot more even over the last week
seven or eight like big development type deals, including some people looking like for over $10 million equity checks. Very, very significant. So I’m just never sure. You know, is there just more activity in that space where, you know, our name is coming up more or, know, are they reaching out to other funders and just no one is funding these bigger deals? Like I’m never positive about that. But, know, those are the type of deals that I want to reorient toward.
more as we continue to grow, which I was referencing yesterday. So it’s good to see that. And then a number of smaller deals been coming our way as well too. Just good to see the activity in the industry and keep that in mind for your own businesses. We’ll see if we’ll fund any other ones. Some are like very, very borderline that we probably would have done pre April tariff trade war situation. But now
It’s just like, it’s just not worth that risk. Like unless they’re really super de-risked and exceptional deals, like we’re just, not throwing liquidity at those deals in favor of just waiting for better ones and being safer in a very uncertain environment. So that’s just our thinking there. And then land daily diligence, Facebook groups, cost review of your land deals have.
Another slew of them ready to review this Thursday and then landpricer.ai. Another a lot more work done on that. I have a whole block set up for additional engineering prompt engineering tasks for the LLM model on that tomorrow. Subscribe and share if you haven’t already. Looking forward to next time. Take care everybody. Bye.
