This episode examines market conditions showing economic distress concentrated in lower-income segments while luxury purchases like land remain viable only for the top 10% of US households earning enough to afford discretionary real estate. The analysis questions whether aggressive sales teams can effectively expand land’s inherently limited buyer pool when 80%+ of purchases already come through MLS listings and traditional channels.
Key Takeaways:
- FHA Delinquencies at GFC Levels FHA mortgage delinquencies now match or exceed Great Financial Crisis levels, representing 40% of all delinquencies and serving as a leading indicator for lower-income financial stress.
- Land Targets Only 30-35M Buyers Since land is a luxury purchase, you’re realistically selling to the top 10% of US households (30-35 million people), not the general population—this fundamentally limits scalable sales strategies.
- High-Powered Sales Teams Hit Limits Fast After exhausting MLS (80%+ of transactions), secondary channels like Land.com, and basic local outreach, additional sales expense becomes cost-prohibitive without reaching genuinely interested buyers.
Tune in for the full breakdown of why land disposition requires patience over pure sales horsepower in today’s market.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. I wanted to comment a bit more on the overall market today and, know, some, associated tactical updates as well here. so I know I’ve mentioned recently on, some podcasts that, you know, I, think the only deals that we’re truly finding the good numbers on again, are just more of the distressed sellers.
Coming down the pike here and that won’t always be the case especially if you’re trying to do minor subdivisions and might still be able to find Things closer to on market value or otherwise here, but to really find those 2x March and plays It really has come back to the
kind of meat and potatoes of what land investing had been for so many years of just, you know, family situations and various financial troubles that folks may be dealing with here. And that’s pretty much the only archetype that we’re able to find. I mean, there might still be a handful of folks. Yeah, you know, I plans with the land and just not moving back to the area. It’s like not really distress.
from that sense, we still see that sometimes, but it’s been just a bit more rare comparatively. And so I just wanted to run down even some other items to break down more on the macro level here. And I follow Scott Galloway. Many of you might’ve heard of him, NYU professor has done really well on various business ventures, a pretty well-known author and…
Um, within his newsletter earlier today was just remarking, um, you know, how there was like kind of some conflicting notes about the market because I think I, and I saw a report last week too. It was like, you know, okay, Q2, you know, GDP was, um, you know, 3.8 % fastest growth in almost two years. Uh, corporate earnings are on track to rise another 12%.
Um, third straight quarter of double digit growth, um, retail sales rising last month, you know, stock index is high highest ever. Um, you know, within the last week or something. Um, and this is as of late September, uh, 2025. Um, but so much of that is driven by just these booming AI, uh, stocks for the most part, like.
Even if you try to diversify away from that, and there’s these other stats too, I won’t belabor the point, but you pretty much can’t avoid it. Even if you’re in public reads or overall indices, you have such huge exposure to really the top 10 US stocks and those huge AI, at least oriented companies that…
That’s really what’s driving most of the returns within the overall market here. And so it’s kind of just overweighing how healthy the economy is. Whereas most folks are just not seeing those actual returns or getting kind of a share of those earnings and profits there.
Cause again, like the key stat to go back to is that, you know, the top 10 % to the U S drives 50 % of all consumer spending. And I forget the note about, you know, breaking that down even further, but I want to say the top 1 % is responsible for like close to a third of all spending. So it’s even more weighted in between that. But like when you kind of keep that in mind,
And actually to pause there, a couple other tangents like on why, you know, lower 90 % is probably just continuing to struggle a lot. And there were some really good stats about how cheap food items, the purchases and searches for those and sales overall have increased year over year by a significant margin. People are searching kind of like for cheap eats.
More folks are looking for help with their mortgages. I I commented last week too, FHA delinquencies for mortgages are at 40 % of all delinquencies now and they’re at like, sorry, I’m mixing a number of the numbers. I’m mixing a number of the numbers.
some of the stats together, but I know I commented, I want to say last week that yeah, the FHA mortgages or the delinquencies are as high, if not higher than they were during GFC. And FHAs tend to be more lower income or first time home buyers. So they can be more of a leading indicator for those more finance, financial risk anyway. It’s like we are seeing more of that distress here.
Or how about this one one-third of all adults in the past year said they’ve opted out of getting health care They needed because of the cost and I know as an entrepreneur to that’s one of our biggest Expenses like pretty terrible Health insurance overall and just paying You know paying like close to a grand a month roughly for stuff that Has like huge copays all the time. So I got all different on paying anything, too
Or I like the cardboard box making capacity. I know that’s like a key trigger. They’re saying it’s Down 9 % in just eight months. So that’s double the cutscene in the GFC And you know, generally these cardboard box metrics are related to okay are people you know, just buying extra consumable supplies or
you know, various gifts sometimes can be related to like, people moving? So generally it has to like, cardboard boxes are a good just overall indicator of economic activity. And, you know, the fact that they’re down pretty considerably is just, you know, again, kind of a leading indicator of, of, lower, lower sales, more pets ending up in shelters. and
Recently, yeah, this is the last data point. I just think this is so fascinating. There was a recent estimate about the cost of the American dream, which is a wedding, a home, kids, college, et cetera. So I don’t know like the exact numbers between that, but let’s say like, yeah, maybe a medium price home, a couple of kids and.
know, college educations, and that’s coming out to like more than $5 million over, you know, needed to earn the American dream. Whereas the stat for an average American making $2.8 million over the course of their career if they have a bachelor’s degree. And so you would need at least two folks.
in a household earning that equivalent to even hit that American dream. And interestingly, I found this just mind boggling is that having two parents, whatever, or two adults in a household, both with a bachelor’s degree and working only represents 7 % of all US households. I thought the education rate was way, way higher than that.
it just kind of blows my mind or maybe they’re not including like renters or something to within that. but that, that just seems like an alarming, absolutely alarming number, the ultimate, piece of this is that, you know, we’re overestimating the ability oftentimes of what the average consumer can actually
pursue and just again how much consumer spending is just related to that upper echelon of earners in the US here. And so to bring this back to land, that’s what I often think about. It’s like again land is, you know, it’s a luxury purchase here. And so, you know, again, we’re, we have to assume that pretty much every purchase, you know, other than
maybe some owner finance plays for desert squares or things like, I don’t know, below 10, 15 grand. And even then like a cash purchase, probably most folks can’t make that. Like you just have to assume you’re targeting the top 10 % of, you know, US households.
when it comes to purchasing our products. like really we’re just trying to split, you know, it’s still a decent number of people, like over 30 million between 30 and 35 million people who can more reliably purchase properties around the U S but like it’s, it’s only a small sliver of the overall pie. Right? So like, we just have to keep that in mind with, you know,
the price points that we’re working at and, you know, that land is, you know, pretty much always just a want and not a need for people. You know, it’s a need when, you know, eventually needed a place to live, but, know, generally they’re, if you’re more on the bottom tier of earners, like you’re going to be looking to rent anyway. And so you’re kind of like a step removed from, you know, actual purchase of the underlying real estate. So just kind of keeping that in mind.
and so the last point I wanted to make here to wrap up this one, yeah, I just think about this stuff constantly, right? operating in a more difficult market. And there were a handful of companies I spoke to recently, bigger bland investors. They were like looking to bring on like even like a VP of sales type position, like higher powered sales team. And I just wonder how.
useful that is within the land space. Because it’s not crazy hard to exhaust most reliable channels for dis-bowing land. mean, first off, if you’re working with a solid realtor, like you’re going to get exposure to most of the channels that are going to bring in routine buyers.
Um, this is something I remind myself often too. And like, when you look at like real estate purchases, I want to say like 80, 80 plus percent of them happen from, uh, the MLS. So like you’re, you’re hitting the lion’s share right there. Of course. Yeah. How can you maximize that remainder 20 %? Um, but you know, just listing it is like most, you’re going to get the most eyeballs and sure. You can have like the land.coms, cetera.
But even then, okay, that’s another avenue you can look at. know, yeah, you can potentially cold call, text, send letters to folks in the area. There might be some other, know, bulletin boards hanging up signs, et cetera. But, you know, pretty soon you start to exhaust your potential buyer pool without
really running into significant just cost or time of your team. Like if you’re trying to reach like out of all those avenues that I just mentioned, if you’re trying to reach anybody more, it’s like I think about this stuff all the time, right? Like what else can I do to bring buyers to the mix, especially for struggling properties? And you really have to start to reach then it’s like, okay, how much more money would I be willing to throw to like, I don’t know, market to
every single person in the township. Or maybe you could break that down into certain slivers of more active buyer profiles or everybody in the county, depending on, you know, the total population. But like that gets expensive really quickly, whether you’re trying to do cold calls, texts, or letters, especially letters, that’s going to be like crazy expensive. But yeah, from a timing side to like, you know, if you already have a cold call,
protects team, especially for acquisitions. And you basically have to build in, you know, maybe double the cost now just to try to handle extra dispo side for what I think is just on average reaching more for less qualified buyers and less interested in general, especially when we’re in like a pretty deep buyers market in most parts of the country. So like, I just kind of wonder.
How aggressive can you really be in sales in this space? Yeah, you could consider doing paid ads potentially too or kind of really, you know, solid SEO work, PPC possibly. Again, you can kind of like manipulate channels that work for acquisition, but use it for Dispo instead. But again, it’s not gonna be like super targeted even if you have a huge brand presence.
It doesn’t help you that well when you’re looking for such like a highly targeted local buyer. for the most part here. like, I mean, you can, you can correct me if I’m wrong here. I’m open to comments if you have any thoughts, but I just, I really questioned the validity of like a high power expense, potentially probably expensive sales team, to, to really try to push, to push properties.
Like, you know, again, kind of a luxury good here, like same thing, you know, okay, maybe like, consider Burberry or Louis Vuitton or something like that. Yeah, they can kind of exhaust their sales channels, but like if people aren’t coming in at stores or they’re not going on the websites and they’re kind of like pushing out at, I know it’s a little bit different here because it’s also like a mailable good for the most part. So you get like exposure to a larger.
client pool plus again even those expensive luxury goods like usually aren’t as pricey like maybe it’s a $5,000 suit or even 10,000 or something that’s still like on the way cheaper side of land here like You know, so it’s still like a different level of Purchase for the most part, but like you don’t you don’t see like door-to-door Burberry
salespeople or anything or, you know, trying to do like I’ve never gotten a mailer from Burberry or Cold Call. Hey, like when you want to come in and buy like, yeah, a nice coat or something like it just, they kind of have to meet these luxury buyers where they’re at. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something about their model. They’ve clearly built crazy, crazy good businesses.
but I kind of think of land in a, a similar, a similar setup here is like, just, it’s going to get so, difficult, and expensive. and I think super inefficient to like over push Dispo. like if things are slow, like they’re just slow and you just have to figure and you have to be just willing to be patient and wait longer if you’re exhausting all the other channels. So if I’m missing anything, you can let me know again.
We think we’re pretty on top of the Dispo side and I’ve talked to lot of folks I think are kind of the best in the business and I kind of just tried everything that I’m aware of at the moment for most of these properties without again like trying to mail or call like every single person in township and county which is just to me it’s an option on the table but I don’t think it’s realistic and even remotely cost-effective to pursue for virtually any other any property out there so
Just something to keep in mind. Let me know SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, 50K purchase price minimum, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group, and LandPricer.ai. We’re just burning through the UI UX improvements here. So most reliable land pricing tool on the market. Check out Callan’s Bootcamp. Again, that starts this Thursday, October 2nd. If you haven’t signed up, it’s only $97. Get it while you can. With that, subscribe and share everybody. Take care. Bye.
