The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - Land Flipping for Beginners: Zero to $10k a Month on the Side

How once side hustler built a $10,000 monthly income stream in a year? And how you can get started too. Oh, what's up? What's up Nick?

A loafer here. Welcome to this side hustle show because sure persistence follows passion, but more importantly passion follows persistence. I'm excited to introduce Roberto Chavez today who started a raw land flipping side hustle a little over a year ago and with persistence has built it into five figures of monthly revenue. This is a business model that was first introduced to me by Mark Podolsky from the landgeek.com in episode one, eight of the side hustle show.

And he called it perhaps superlatively so the best passive income model because it avoids the three T's of traditional real estate investing, those being tenants, toilets, and termites. How the model works is you acquire parcels of land on the cheap because the existing owners don't want them anymore and you resell them either for a quick cash flip or more commonly as an owner financed sale where for a period of three to seven years, whatever terms you agree on, you collect a low monthly payment from your buyer win, win, win, right? Where the persistence part comes in is in that initial seller outreach. There's very much a numbers game as you'll hear Roberto explain in this episode.

And I think that's what separates those who have success in it from those who don't. You're not likely to run out of people to contact sellers to contact anytime soon because there's practically unlimited inventory, an estimated 150 million parcels of land in the United States alone. But it's been three years since we last covered this unique real estate side hustle on the show and it's a fascinating one to me. So I thought it would be worth revisiting with someone who's in the trenches of it.

Now Roberto is actually a student of Marx and when I told him about the episode, I asked if he had any info or promos for side hustle nation and Mark agreed to give away his $97 land investing launch kit, which you can claim at side hustle nation.com slash TLG TLG for the land geek. But stick around in this episode to hear how Roberto finds parcels of land to buy for $0.25 on the dollar, how he figures out how much to offer the due diligence that goes into those deals and how he resells those for a profit. Notes and links plus the full text summary are at side hustle nation.com slash Roberto. I'll be back with my top takeaways from this chat with Roberto after the interview.

Ready? Let's do it. We're usually not listed for sale. These are unsolicited offers to property owners in different counties.

And so I think the first step, Nick, is to see where other land investors are selling land. And so there's several websites out there, landmoto, landwatch, lands of America, land in farms. Those are all good websites where you can start seeing where there's movement. And so wherever there's movement, that means people are buying and selling.

And so once you have an area that you like to work with, then you basically reach out to the county and you start doing your due diligence in terms of county research. And so you determine who you need to contact, who's in charge of assessing the property values. You start making phone calls to see if what department within the county could give you a list of delinquent tax rolls. So this varies county to county.

It sounds like. Yeah, it does. It does. Every county, I mean, a lot of counties have their own list and they'll sell it anywhere from I've gotten list from 70 bucks to $200, $300.

It just depends on some counties, even outsource their delinquent tax roll list. And so there's companies that they direct you to to be able to get these delinquent tax roll lists. Okay, so I'm taking a look first on these other land. Please go to buy land and see what areas of the country are for sale in that sense.

And then kind of going to try and find that county's website if one exists, doing a little bit of research to see, okay, how can I access their your property records, essentially? Right. Correct. And some of them, you can actually go into their their county website and they'll have the list and depending on how much information is on their website, you could start building a list of people that you can mail to, but usually they have it in Excel spread in an Excel format where they'll email it to you once you pay them.

And so I usually, if I'm interested in a county, I'll try to call or I'll even send out a letter to them just a general letter saying how much would it cost to get your delinquent tax roll list? They usually send their tax roll list. You can ask them for just raw land, but most times they'll just send you a delinquent tax roll list of every single property in their county. And so you have to do a little list scrubbing to narrow it down to just raw land so that you can send letters off to just raw land owners.

Okay. And you're looking specifically at properties that owe back taxes. Yes. That's one way to do it.

And that's usually the low hanging fruit. If you've got somebody that owes back taxes, let's say in Texas and they live or their mailing address is in Washington or Florida or some other place, then the theory is it's more likely that those people are willing to sell their property than somebody who doesn't owe back taxes and lives in the same county where the property is located. So that's not to say there's not people who would sell you their property even though they're up to date on their taxes and they live in the same county. But chances are somebody that lives outside the county and owes back taxes is more likely to accept and offer to just get rid of that property.

Sure. And we'll dive into why somebody might accept a low ball offer in a few minutes. Okay. So anything else to narrow it down because there are millions.

I don't know how many counties there are, but millions and millions of parcels of land. And it's just, it seems like a very needle in the haystack search or a very labor intensive search to try and come up with these lists of land owners. The first step is to see where other people are. That's your safest bet to see where other people are are buying and selling land because if there's movement, people aren't going to, they've already done the upfront work of determining whether they're, people are interested in buying land in that area.

So if there's already people working in that area, chances are you're going to be able to have deals. So that's definitely the first step. You wouldn't take that. The opposite view and say, we'll grab somebody already, hit that county.

I better find something else. That's a problem that a lot of people face when entering into this business. And that's because they go into it with a scarcity mentality, believing that if there's somebody already in there in that county, then there's not going to be enough deals. I know there's land investors in certain counties and in Colorado that, I mean, I would dare to say maybe hundreds of land investors investing in the same county just because that county is so big and it's enough to feed so many people.

So I think it's a safer bet. There's no question that if you go into an untapped county and you do your research correctly, then you might just find yourself a great county that nobody has exploited and it could be very lucrative. But I think you'd have to do a lot more county research before you make that leap or maybe go into it slowly with just a couple of offer letters out and not maybe not investing too much into it without kind of getting your feet wet first. Okay.

That makes sense. Yeah. You're blazing your own trail in that case. Exactly.

Which could be lucrative. It should be great or it could end up being a dead end. I mean, it's kind of you're doing it on your own there. So I've got this list of delinquent, like you said, the low hanging fruit delinquent tax properties out of state owners.

What do you do next? Once you have that list, you price it. You want to send them a concrete offer, something that they can analyze and review and determine whether it makes sense for them. And so the way we usually price the properties, Nick is whatever it's selling for, let's say it's a five acre property.

And if these websites land watch land model, all these those properties are selling for five acres for $10,000. My offer letter is not going to be greater than $2,500, which is one fourth of what they're selling for. Right now, a month I send out at least 600 offer letters. And so hopefully I have all five acres of at that offer price.

And I usually get a response rate between one and three percent either response rate meaning they're interested. They counter offer or they just reach out to discuss the offer. And so I rarely would pay more than that one fourth of what the market is saying that those lands are selling for. 600 offers a month, my tongue hurts from looking all those envelopes.

But in your doing that diligence or that price comparison that the that concrete research on every single one of those. No. Well, I mean, the way it works is I do it per size. So if the size is all my 10 acre properties are going to get a certain offer price and then all my five acres are going to get another offer.

My one acres are going to get another offer. And so I'm not very precise in the offer amount. Just as an example, I know another land investor friend of mine sent offer letters accidentally for $0 in her offer letter. And she got a response from a gentleman who wanted to sell the property to her.

And so for $0, just get it. Just take it off my hands. Exactly. So I mean, it's a conversation starter more than anything.

You want to put some thought into the offer, but I really don't waste a lot of time or energy and determining an exact offer for a 2.5 acre as opposed to a three acre property. More than anything, I just want to get those letters out into people's hands to see if they're interested in selling their land. Okay. So you can kind of filter those tax role lists or that landowner list by parcel size and then print out a bunch of those five acre offers.

This bunch of those 10 acre offers, you know, kind of batch process it that way. But do you do anything to sexy up that offer? Like you know, you for probably heard the strategy of lumpy mail sending something, you know, putting something else in the like a Cheerio in the envelope or something to make it stand out. Yeah.

I've heard of that. I really don't just because I don't feel like I've needed this far. I get the response rate that is expected the one to 3%. And I'm happy with that response rate because at this point, at least I only also have a limited amount of resources in terms of buying capital.

And so with what I'm getting, I'm content. So, but if it reaches a point where I need to get my response rate higher, I might consider that. I've heard about that recently. And I think it's a pretty good idea to put one of those like little plastic soldiers inside of the envelope.

I don't know a little something like a rock. Here's a token of your property. Here's some. Yeah.

I mean, if it's still a normal stamp cost, I'm okay with it. Yeah. Like a little pumice pebble or something. I don't know.

There's something to test out. We'll do a follow up. Yeah. The letter itself is just like, Hey, is there a certain script that you use?

What's that look like? Or what's that template look like? Yeah. It's just a one-pager, one-sided offer letter saying, Hey, I'm a land investor.

If you're interested in selling your land, we'd like to offer you X amount for this property ID that's your property that's five acres. We're interested in buying. The offer letter would be contingent on us doing due diligence and making sure that you're the rightful owner and making sure that back taxes are not something out of this world that would break the deal. And we're happy to consider a counteroffer.

And I leave like a blank where they could put a counteroffer if they want to send it back with the counteroffer. And that's pretty much it. I give them my information, my email, my phone number where they could reach out. And that's it.

It's very straightforward. I think a lot of people use the same format of letter just to the point. And I think it works. It's worked thus far.

Now, how come if these parcels are going for 10 grand, how come somebody's going to sell it to you for 2,500? Well, there's several reasons. I mean, if they owe back taxes for many people, it's a headache. You really don't know what financial situation people are at a certain point in time.

And so 2,500 might be something that they need at that point in time. And if somebody comes along and says, if you respond to this letter, we could have your money in three days, that's very appealing to a lot of people. Whereas if they want to go through the process that I go through selling it, posting it on all these websites, posting it on Craigslist, posting it on Facebook, it takes work. And the chances are that finding somebody that is willing to pay cash, I don't know, $56,000, $7,000 for it, it's going to take them a while.

And maybe they don't want to do the terms deal where they sell it on terms to buy or so. It's an easy, fast way for people to get rid of land that they're not interested in holding anymore. Okay. It doesn't matter at all to you if it is near a city.

If there's any infrastructure on it nearby or just a middle of nowhere is totally fine by me. Middle of nowhere is totally fine by me. I mean, if the price is right, Nick, I'll buy it. If it's closer to the city, of course, chances are I'm going to have to pay a higher price.

If it's out in the middle of nowhere, I'm going to offer a lower price. And at the end of the day, if I think I can find a buyer that will pay me X amount of dollars a month for four or five years, I'm going to buy it. Mark Pedolski, who's the Lange guy, he says there's a pick for every barn. And I've seen that to be true.

You're going to have a buyer for any piece of property. Okay. Let's say you offer the 2500, somebody writes back and says, okay, but you know from your research that there's $500, $1,000 back taxes owed on that property. Does that deduct your offer amount or their cash at closing or how do you deal with that?

Kind of clearing the tax lien. Well it just starts an negotiation between me and the seller. At that point, I know how much I'm willing to pay for the property. I know I have an idea of what I can sell it for or at least I hope I can sell it for.

And so if it's a $2,500 offer and there's $500 in back taxes, my default is always to tell the seller that I'm going to have to reduce the 500 from the purchase. Do you know that amount upfront or is that something they're going to have to disclose to you? Well, I do the research once I hear back from them expressing interest and selling. So at that point, I start my due diligence process and I verify with the county if there's any back taxes.

And so maybe not on the first telephone conversation with them, but for sure, by the second time I speak to them on the phone or by email, I'll know if there's back taxes. And so at that point, I tell them, look, we sent an offer for this amount. We didn't know there were going to be $500 of back taxes. We're going to have to reduce the purchase price by this amount.

99 times out of 100, they're okay with it because they understand that that was their responsibility. Or other times, other times they say, well, no, I mean, your letter said that you would take care of back taxes. And I explain to them, yes, within reason 500 is not within reason. I'd be willing to, and then if they really push, you could start negotiating and say, well, I'd be willing to cover $100 of the back taxes.

So we'll have to reduce the purchase price by $400. Okay. Gotcha. So that makes sense.

Instead of doing that level of due diligence on the 600 letters that go back, just do it on the five to 20 responses that you get that just limits the workload. What else goes into the due diligence for an empty piece of the land like this? So of course, the most important one, taxes are important, of course, but the one that you need to make sure in order to proceed is chain of title. And so you've got to make sure that there was the person that you're speaking with has the authority to sell the property.

And that's probably one of the biggest hurdles in buying land because a lot of times it's people who inherited the property or were gifted the property, but the documentation wasn't done properly or the dad passed away and the mom still owns an interest in the property. It just, you just have to kind of dive into that legal aspect of it to determine whether the person who is ultimately going to sign the deed over to you has the legal authority to do so and make sure that that going back. And I usually go back up to where I can find information in the county that if the grandfather owned it, that he properly deeded the property to the father and that when the father owned it, he properly deeded the property to the son. And so now I'm dealing with the son.

So I make sure that there was a proper chain of title, meaning the legal description was always the same and never changed to make sure that the guy that I'm buying it from can actually transfer ownership to me. Oh, okay. And so that information is provided usually by the county. Yes, that's part of my research.

Sometimes the seller has all that information and then they're happy to share that with you. And so they'll send us copies of everything that they have and that might be enough, but even then I'll still do my own due diligence with the county. Then of course, there's determining exactly where the property is located because I sent a bunch of offers, but I didn't look up every single one of them to see where it was. And so I have to determine where it is exactly.

And sometimes I'll use that to negotiate the property down and ask for a lower purchase price because I don't know, access to the property is not as easy as I expected it to be. And so I'll try to to use that. It's the back taxes. Make sure there's no leans on the property.

See if there's any easements on the property. See if it's part of an HOA. A lot of times these properties have monthly payments because there's HOA fees associated with them. So I've got to make sure that there's none of that.

And if there is, how much is it owed and what does that look like? Finally, I mean, you also want to see how close utilities are to the property. Is it a couple of blocks? Is there electricity lines running through the property?

Is it 10 miles away so that you're going to have to market it as a kind of retreat property for people to buy and just go out and relax? So it's just a lot of things that not only dictate how I'm going to negotiate the purchase of the property, but I can then turn around and use that to market the property and say, oh, there's utilities close by. Oh, there's easy access. There's no HOA fees.

Things of that nature that could still use to market and sell the property. Do you ever go out and look at this stuff in person or is just all side unseen? 95% is side unseen. I've started doing this where I try to find somebody in the area through Craigslist or some other website to go out and take pictures of the actual property.

And so they'll go out there and take pictures so that I could use them for my marketing. But yeah, mostly side unseen. Okay. Yeah, that's true.

You got to have some pictures to sell this thing. That makes... Yeah, I mean, Google Maps only goes so far, which usually does a trick, but it helps to have something that you can tell the potential buyers. These are actual pictures of the property.

That's kind of funny. Like the satellite view and the 3D rendering of the GAC die and stuff. Okay. So sitting at the 600 offer letters, getting those five to 20 responses back, how many of those turn into deals for you?

I'd say of those, I usually close on at least half of them. It's probably sometimes more. It just depends, but I think half is a fair number. Okay.

So it sounds like a somewhat cash-intensive business upfront. You buy a ton of stamps for one. Maybe there's some savings hack on the stamps. But then you're putting the cash outlay upfront to buy these parcels.

And then the name of the game is to resell those. But interestingly, not usually for a quick cash flip, usually on an owner-carry contract, meaning I'm going to charge a car payment, a low monthly payment, and over the next five to 10 years, the new buyer is going to buy this stuff off, right? Correct. That's a good way to sum it up.

Okay. So do you go back? Is it when somebody signs the deed over to you? Okay.

So you say, now this is mine. There's the other side of the business, the revenue side of the business is to figure out, well, this is in someplace far away from where I live. I don't see myself using this. I just want to sell it to the next person.

Is it going back to those sites that you mentioned, the land watch, the land motto, the lands of America, and creating an ad for sale listing, basically? That's one avenue for marketing the properties. I've seen better results with Facebook and Craigslist. And so there's a whole bunch of buy-sell groups on Facebook where you can post the properties for sale and it'll attract interest.

And at that point, you just kind of begin a conversation with a potential buyer on Facebook or Craigslist where you post the ad on Craigslist. And then you just wait to get an email from an interested buyer and you start a conversation with them. It's a different marketing in terms of content. It's a different approach because on the Facebook posting, you want to make it a little bit more intriguing to catch people's attention and to start the conversation because not a whole lot of people wake up any given day and decide that they want to buy raw land.

I mean, it's just not something that people instinctively want to do. So you have to kind of make the pitch interesting on Facebook to capture their attention and then you start the conversation and you move forward from there. Whereas landmotors, lands of America, landwatch, people are already looking for raw land. So there, it's a little bit more technical in the sense that you want to put more information.

You want to give them a little bit more information about the property so that they know what they're looking at. Because if they're already in that website, it's because they're looking for land. And so the more information you can give them, the better. And so in my experience, I've seen way, way great results, better results with Facebook and CREXs than I have with the typical land buying websites.

Is that Facebook marketplace or just inside Facebook groups? Both, but I've been successful with the buy sell groups. Okay. Any favorites that you want to plug or you're going to be like, no, those are mine.

Well, I don't have them. So what I do to be completely honest is I'm depending on county in New Mexico or wherever it is, I'll just go to the cities in that area and I'll just sign up to every single buy sell group that I can find on Facebook for that given city. And then I'll post on every single buy sell group. So I really don't, I don't even follow which ones are giving me the results.

I just post it on every single buy sell group. And then I start, I start getting messages and I just take it from there. Okay. No, no, no, that totally makes sense.

So it's like location buy sell in the search bar and see what kind of groups pop up. Okay. That makes total sense. Regarding making that posting compelling because you say, I'm not necessarily going on Facebook to buy Raleigh and until this guy, it's an impulse buy.

It came along any type of language or image that you're using to make that post stand out. No, I think what captures a lot of attention and I use it probably in every single post that I put on Facebook is saying that a person can buy a piece of property for a low down payment, usually 250 or lower. And then with a monthly payment of $199, which is less than a car payment, they can own land. And that's usually pretty compelling statement that people are attracted to.

And so they'll read that and then they'll usually they're one of their first messages. Is this available? And then next one is, how does that $199 a month work? And so they're curious as to how they're going to be able to own five or 10 acres of land with just $199 a month.

And so I go on to explain it that I own the property, that I finance the property, that I make accessible, monthly payments because I'm interested in just flipping the land and selling it to somebody that wants to own land. And so then I just try to build a relationship with the potential buyer and usually take the conversation to a telephone conversation where we can have a better conversation about the property and I can give them more details. And hopefully it eventually translates to a sale. Okay, I got it.

Yeah, low down payment, low monthly payment, is there a break even window on your upfront cash that you say, okay, after eight months, like I want to be in the green on the steel or in the black, I don't know what you're green black, or is it just like based on the comps, you know, the total sum of the payments is going to equal the $10,000 comp that I found. Yeah, I try not to be too strict on how I structure the deals. I let the buyer have a say in it, they're the ones who are going to be making the payments. So I don't like to be so narrow minded in the sense, well, I want to get my 100% that I invested back in 12 months.

If it takes two years, three years, I'm okay with that. I mean, as long as they're making their payments, I don't have a problem with that. And so I let the market dictate the terms. I make an offer on terms, but if the buyer, if they're to legitimate buyer who's interested in buying land and given their circumstances, they can only make $150 a month or $99 a month.

I'm okay with that. And I'll work around that and I'll make it work for them. Okay. And then similar strategy on Craigslist, hey, you can own a piece of property for this little monthly payment.

Exactly the same idea. You've got to be a little careful with Craigslist because depending on certain words you use like financing and I can remember what other ones you could be flagged, but the idea is the same and you can communicate it in a way that doesn't get you flagged and doesn't get your ad removed. Oh, that's interesting. When I was shopping for cars, I swear like every post was like, we will finance anyone.

Yeah. I might have the word, there's certain things that if you put on an ad on Craigslist or like a phone number on the body of the ad, there's certain things that might get you flagged and get your ad removed. Maybe wrong on financing, but you just got to be careful and test the ad posting that way. Okay.

Tell me about the logistics of this business juggling all the inbound requests, the buying side, the selling side, keeping track of the monthly payments for dozens and dozens of properties at this point, working the day job still, I should add how do you keep it all straight? Well, I think you just pinpointed the hardest part of the business. I think that's just juggling it all. You're right.

I mean, I have deals coming in for me to buy and then at the same time I'm pushing deals out for me to sell and it's a constant kind of jumping back and forth, wearing one hat and then another lately, I've been trying to manage that by hiring a VA, a virtual assistant that helps me with the intake process of the business, which is dealing with the people selling us the land. And so that's been huge help because it lets me concentrate on what actually generates money for the business, which is the selling side of it. But going back three, four months ago where I was doing it all, it's a lot. I mean, it's just you get overwhelmed with so much coming in in terms of response from your letters.

And then at the same time, you're thinking, well, I mean, yeah, it's great to buy the land, but I need to sell it because otherwise I'm not going to have money to buy land anymore. And so it's a constant juggle bringing on people that can help you with certain aspects of it, certainly helps automating certain aspects of it also helps. So as an example, I use geekpay.io for selling land. And so I upload the buyer's information into geekpay.io.

I obtain written authorization from them to make the automatic withdrawals every month, which is something I talked to them up front before we do the transaction. And I let them know, look, I can't be going around asking people to send their monthly check if I haven't received it by the first of the month or whenever it is. And so I have a system where I automate your payments. And it's great for me because I don't have to chase you around.

And it's great for you because there's a lower chance that you send a late payment and I have to charge you a late fee. It's done automatic. It goes out. It's withdrawn from your account on the first of the month.

We set it and we forget about it. That alone saves a lot of time because I don't have to be chasing anybody and I don't have to be worried about having people make the payment. It'll be automatic from from their account. It's those little things I use a service called pipe drive, which you're probably familiar with to keep things organized in terms of me buying land.

And that's where I've been training my intake manager to keep things in order to see, okay, we heard from this guy. If we haven't heard back from him or he hasn't sent us a documentation we need, we put a reminder to reach out to him in two days and see where we are. There's a lot of technology out there that helps make the business flow smoother than it otherwise would. And it's just a matter of implementing it into the business and helping me make things go smoother.

Yeah, so pipe drive is sales tracking tool or customer relationship management tool. And then geek pay that I like that is the service for automatic basically setting up direct deposit with your buyers. Because I can just imagine like trying to keep track of 50 different checks every month be like, oh, did someone sell pay me? Yeah, no, I started using geek pay from the beginning.

So I really don't know what that's like, but I don't want to know what that's like enough. I'm happy not having gone through that process because before geek pay or other forms of automatic payment, that's the way it was done. And that must have been a tremendous headache. Have you had the situation where buyer is not making their payments and how long do you let that go for before you say, hey, I'm canceling our deal.

If there's a late payment, let's say their payment is due on the 15th of every month. And they've been paying, they paid March, April, and then May comes around and the payment doesn't go through. They automatically through the geek pay.io application, they automatically get a notification saying, hey, there weren't funds in the account, whatever the case may be. There's a late fee of $40.

That's going to be automatically withdrawn from your account next month. In next month, they don't have the payment for that month, the previous month plus the $40. Then at that point, I send them a notice saying, hey, if you don't cure your default within X amount of days, then the deal is off. And you've defaulted under our agreement.

And therefore, you don't have access and you don't have ownership of that property anymore. It's only happened to me ones where they just completely gone black on me. They actually reached out at some point in today, sorry, I had family issues, but I completely understand and I understand that you sold it. Let me know if you get another piece of property that you'd be willing to sell to me.

Yeah, I imagine doing a certain volume of deals that's bound to happen. So just curious how that worked. Tell me a little bit about managing the cash flow because you're like, okay, I've got a lot of, I've got a lot of capital going out the door to acquire these deals and then smaller amounts coming in. And I was like, over the long run, very profitable.

In the near term, you're kind of going backwards. Yeah, yeah. So when I first started, which was at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, I did a couple of cash deals. And so I focused on getting cash up front.

And that's what has financed a lot of my initial buys. And so I used a lot of that cash just to buy land. I'll do a couple of cash deals here and there, probably out of every 10 deals, out of every 15 deals, I'll do one or two cash deals, which help with financing the purchase of land. But I'm buying lots at anywhere from 750 bucks to max of $25, $3,500.

And so I'm able to use what's coming in to do that. And I'm not going to lie. I mean, especially at the beginning, I was injecting some of my own money to finance the purchase of the lot. So I think I'm getting to the point where hopefully what's coming in will be enough to finance the purchase of the properties plus some, which is used to pay for the expenses.

And hopefully at some point, it'll be used to pay me something. Yeah, I was going to ask you, you're taking anything off the table or just everything is driving towards towards growth and to continuing to build up that monthly recurring passives and my passivings. Like a lot of work up front to get that passive income, but such is the nature of the beast. Do you see this becoming a full-time thing or where do you want to take it?

I think so. I mean, it just depends on how it progresses. Hopefully it continues to grow. And it at least gives me the opportunity to choose whether I want to do this full-time or not.

I think that's where it's headed. I love the passive income aspect of it. That's true. If you stop buying stuff today, you'd be raking it in.

Yeah, exactly. But only for maybe two, three years or a long, and then... Sure, however long the contract's last. Yeah.

I mean, it's anywhere from three to five, maybe a couple of six-year deals. But yeah, you're... I mean, it'd be great for a while, but the idea is to reach a certain point where it's enough to finance the purchase of properties that pays you. And then it's just a matter of maintaining it.

So whenever somebody finished paying off a property, I just have to substitute it with a new one to continue the passive income at whatever level I determined that is needed to make everyone happy, the business, and myself happy. And do you have an estimate of how many hours you're putting into this every week? Probably between 20 and 30. Based on what you're telling me, I was going to get...

Man, it does this guy ever sleep, but... It's like, okay. Utilizing the tools, utilizing virtual assistant. Yeah, well, it was a lot more at the beginning when it was just me.

Now I've got a VA that helps me with the listing aspect of it. And then I've got a VA that helps me with creating ads. I've got a VA that helps me with the intake process of things. So I think time being spent in the business is probably around 40 hours a week.

But of those 40 hours, I'm only now putting 20 to 25. And then the other 15 are being put in by outside help. Okay, gotcha. And you've proven out the model.

So it makes sense to bring on some assistance to continue to grow this thing. So very generous of you to come on, share your experience, share your insight into this side hustle, into this industry. I'd plug your website, but there's no website yet. So what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Yeah, if people want to learn a little bit more about how I've been doing it, when I'm doing it, who would have reached out to get more help on this? They could reach me at my email. It's rchavisakostaatjima.com. That's rchavisakasaatjima.com.

And I'd be happy to speak to any of your listeners about the land investing business and then share a little bit of my experience with them I'd love to. Well, that's very cool. Thank you for doing that. We'll put that email on the show notes for you as well.

We'll try and do it in a way so you don't get a ton of random spam. Rchavisakostaatjima.com. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. Bottom line is I think to take action, whether it's land investing or any other sort of passive income generating strategy that your listeners have had the privilege of hearing here at your podcast.

But the first step is that to take action. I did it a little bit over a year ago. It's paid off. It's a lot of hard work, but it's been paying off.

So whether it's this or something else, take action and I think the reward is there if you're willing to put in the work. Yeah, absolutely. Really inspiring to hear everything that you built. I remembered one last thing I was going to ask if you've ever had, I know it's been not tons of time in this business.

If you ever had a deal go south like you acquired this piece of property that was awesome or you thought it was a good deal and then you just haven't been able to find a buyer for it. No, my worst deal so far is where I doubled my money on terms. Wow. Wow.

That's been my worst deal thus far where I think I bought a property for and it was kind of expensive. It must have been like a $5,000 property that I thought I could probably sell for $15 or something like that on terms and I ended up settling for $10,000 on terms. I got like $500 down or $600 down and I was bummed out. So that's just to show you the beauty of the business.

I mean, even when you get bad deals, they're still good deals. Yeah, if you, my worst deal was where I doubled my money. It sounds like a pretty good deal to me, man. Roberto, thanks so much for joining me and we'll catch up with you soon.

As you've seen from hundreds of side social guests at this point, a comment rate is that they never stop learning and Roberto is clearly no different. He's made some important investments in his entrepreneurial education, which is important to know because it's not like he was born, no one how to do this stuff. Instead, he's learned and figured it out as he's gone practicing just in time learning. All right, my top three takeaways from this call with Roberto number one, mind the cash flow.

I appreciated Roberto being upfront about this, but land flipping can be a capital intensive business in the beginning. It's like any product business. He's having to spend money upfront to acquire his inventory. He could stop hustling for new deals today and continue to get paid for years, but he wants to keep someone fuel on the fire.

I think those initial cash flips were really helpful in both seeing the potential and in providing a little extra cash to fund new deals. Some of the other buy low sell high models we've explored, this isn't a business you can start for zero dollars. One thing that was helpful for me when I had some cash flow lags, particularly in affiliate marketing, was keeping two sets of books. One was the official cash basis accounting statement and the other was the accrual basis accounting, which more closely tied expenses to the revenue they generated, if that makes sense.

If I spent $1,000 on advertising one month and that ad spend generated $3,000 in affiliate commissions, but I wouldn't get paid for two or three months, my cash accounting statement would show $1,000 loss from the advertising expense, but my accrual basis statement would show a projected $2,000 gain. But mind the cash flow, critically important in this business and every other where your payments aren't going to come back to you immediately. The point number two is that striking out 97 times out of 100 is considered good. It's hard to imagine another business model with those kinds of odds, but there's a lot of looking and sticking that goes into this hours and hours a week.

It reminds me of Todd Tresseter's advice from a couple weeks ago about leverage. His formula for wealth growth was probability times payoff. In Roberto's case, the cost of outreach is so low and the potential payoff of quadrupling his money or better is so high that it turns out to be a favorable model. He's managed the downside risk with inexpensive leads, inexpensive outreach, relatively inexpensive virtual assistant support so that you can make this work with only a 3% response rate.

Imagine if you had a 3% batting average. So if you are just getting started in the land flipping business or any other side hustle that's similar, recognize that it's a numbers game. But over time, if you have the deck stacked right, the odds start to work in your favor. The closest comparison I have from my personal side hustles is my old shoe business.

I'd buy targeted traffic from Google, the vast majority of which wouldn't convert, but those that would would more than offset the cost. Take away number three is to start the conversation on both the buying and selling side. Roberto was just trying to get a live human on the other end with whom he could start a conversation, starting negotiation, right? He's trying to figure out a win-win and that's not always as simple as one size fits all offer or he hears the price, take it or leave it, sale.

And not everything is going to be win-win and that's fine. It's all practice. At least I'm still practicing on this. So consider this the start of a conversation about land flipping and maybe the end of it if it doesn't appeal to you.

But if you like this one, if you want to learn more, check out episodes 108 168 and 169 of the side hustle show. They're really similar in scope and strategy, but everyone has their own unique take on it. Also be sure to check out sidehustlenation.com slash TLG to download Mark's free land investing kit, normally $97. That's sidehustlenation.com slash TLG, TLG for the land geek.

And you should know this too. I'm an affiliate for Mark's paid program because I've seen the success students like Roberto are having. And he offered $500 off that program for side hustle show listeners, which I want to make sure to tell you about. You can find the details of that on the show notes page for this episode side hustlenation.com slash Roberto.

But disclaimer, it's not for everyone. You heard the level of effort in time and investment and systems that Roberto poured into this. Most people aren't going to take that kind of action and because of that, they're not going to see those kinds of results. And they're just going to be out the money for the program.

I definitely don't want to paint the picture that it's easy, that it's get rich quick, that it's not a ton of work because that wouldn't be accurate at all. But it all goes back to the persistence piece from the very beginning was Roberto passionate about vacant parcels of land when he started this. Probably not, but you better believe he is now passion followed his persistence just as my passion for podcasting followed my persistence in producing the show. That's a good place.

It's any to wrap. So that's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen.

And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show where you'll meet the guy who's built a six figure online business targeting modest men. I'll see you then hustle on.