After watching his parents’ single-family investments crash during the 2008 recession, Tim Krause swore off real estate. Years later, after many career switches, Tim finally came across land investing, and ever since he’s been all in. Tim shares why you should invest in land, along with the tips and tricks that helped him kickstart his business and continue to grow his portfolio.
Tim Krause | Real Estate Background
- Manager of Done with Land, which does direct mail buying and selling of land.
- Portfolio:
- 30 acres of oyster fields
- Has bought and sold over 50 properties
- Full-time land investor for the past two years
- Based in: Tacoma, WA
- Say hi to him at:
- Best Ever Book: $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi
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TRANSCRIPTION
Ash Patel: Best Ever listeners, welcome to The Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I’m Ash Patel and I’m with today’s guest, Tim Krause. Tim is joining us from Tacoma, Washington. He’s the manager of Done with Land which is a direct mail buyer and seller of land. Tim’s portfolio consists of 30 acres of oyster fields and he has bought and sold over 50 properties in the last two years. Tim, thank you so much for joining us, and how are you today?
Tim Krause: Doing well, Ash, glad to be here.
Ash Patel: It’s our pleasure. Tim, before we get started, can you give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and what you’re focused on now?
Tim Krause: Yeah. Going back a little ways, I started in real estate actually back in ’07. My parents flipped from ’05 to ’08 and I got my real estate license back then. Even before then I even worked as a handyman on my grandfather’s apartment complexes way back when. In ’08 when everything blew apart and my parents lost everything, I swore off real estate and said I would never go back to real estate. I did a bunch of different jobs and then eventually started a video production company. Did that video production company for three years, went around the world twice, went around the country several times, found a lot of real estate professionals, ran across land investing, and then tiptoed my way back in. The first unit I bought was 1,800 bucks and sold it for 3,000, and I went from there. Now I have my land company, I’m also coming up with a brand that’s going to go after commercial deals, and also, I have a small investment company that I’m getting to fund all those other ventures.
Ash Patel: Alright, you’ve given me enough material to talk for an hour. But the most important question I have – you own 30 acres of oyster fields.
Tim Krause: Yes.
Ash Patel: I’ve got to hear that story.
Tim Krause: In 2020, I was sending out letters to a guy and we were negotiating on a piece of land. He went back today, “I want to sell you my land,” but we couldn’t agree on a price. He’s an older gentleman in his 80s, and I found out that he owned a different piece of land too, so we were negotiating about these two different pieces of land. And then he said, “Hey, what if I just sell you all the rest of the land that I have?” A big chunk of that was oyster fields. I was like, “I have no idea what I’m going to do with these things. No idea at all.” Then he offered me pretty much a deal that I couldn’t refuse. He offered me a seller financing with zero down and a five-year balloon. He offered that; I didn’t even ask for it, but he offered that.
Ash Patel: I don’t get it. So you got free land, essentially, with no money down, and it was an operating oyster field?
Tim Krause: It wasn’t operating at the time, but we got it up to operating. We didn’t have to do a whole lot, just get approval from the Department of Health.
Ash Patel: And you manage that or do you just outsource that?
Tim Krause: I lease it to an oyster farmer who actually has a whole team, and they go out there and they harvest and then I’ll reseed. That’s my first piece of cash flowing, if you would, real estate, is roughly half a million oysters; about a quarter to half of them are gone now and we’ll keep on harvesting them.
Ash Patel: Do you get free oysters?
Tim Krause: I bet I could. I don’t eat a whole lot of oysters; I’m sure I could there. Yeah, we went out and we evaluated the next 20-acre piece a little bit ago. Also, oyster fields and oyster maps are very strange. I might actually own a little bit more than 30 acres, I’m not sure. There’s only one title company in that whole county that could do the transaction. We tried to do it with someone else and they said, “Sorry, we don’t have any maps for oyster fields, so you have to go to this title company over here and they have the actual map.” So I got to contact them again and confirm where the last little piece is. I could have, give or take, 10 acres more. It’s hard to tell.
Ash Patel: Alright, that sounds like a deep dive for another show. So after ’08, you got jaded on real estate. What were some of the odd jobs that you took on?
Tim Krause: I did everything. I had close to 11 jobs over 11 years. I worked as a civilian mechanic on Stryker vehicles on base, I worked in a computer lab as a technician, I was on an EMT in an ambulance for three years, I worked at a lumber mill, I was a security guard, window washer, carpet cleaner…
Ash Patel: You didn’t know what you wanted to do when you grew up.
Tim Krause: No. I had no idea.
Ash Patel: Okay, what the hell were you doing? Just trying to find your way?
Tim Krause: You know, it’s funny… As I was getting towards the end of all those jobs, I was like, “Man, why is so much of life figuring out what I don’t want to do?” I didn’t get a job in this, but I also paid for my way to go to the Fire Academy in 2010, so I saved up about six grand… Which is so dumb. I had a nice paying job, my wife had a job, my grandfather had a nine-unit apartment building, and we were living in 170 square feet, one of the units, and I was the manager for the building. So I fixed up the apartment building, because I have some handyman experience. I redid the bathroom, put in a wall, put in a backdoor etc., and then I was managing it. We were living rent-free in 2010, and I was making, as a mechanic, 50,000 bucks a year, and my wife was making some money, and I was like “We can’t afford anything. We can’t buy anything.” Literally, this was like my parents were losing their houses and the beach house and etc. But yeah, I went to the Fire Academy and that was fun, but again, not really for me.
Ash Patel: Tim, what is your wife saying when you change jobs on an average of once a year?
Tim Krause: It became a joke at the end of the year with how many different W2s I would have. That became a joke amongst my friends, and she’s been a stay-at-home mom ever since a few months into having our first kid. As long as I’ve been able to support her and where we’re at, she has been happy. But yeah, I definitely jump around or have jumped around a lot, for sure.
Ash Patel: Awesome. It sounds like she’s been supportive of the decisions that you’ve made. Now I want to know, how did you get to land flipping?
Tim Krause: I was doing a video job for a commercial property investor; he was buying an RV park in Midland, Texas. We were actually flying down to Texas together, he’s from Seattle. We were driving out from El Paso to Midland, and we were talking about different styles of real estate. He was super on board for commercial, and I was like, “It’s kind of scary.” But we both were in the same camp of fix and flips, [unintelligible [00:08:43].15] was just really not our wheelhouse. They’re really kind of scary, because I saw my parents lose everything in their fix and flip. So with that, I then came home and started watching videos on mobile home parks. I found a guy mobile home parks, and then you find someone’s name, you search for them on YouTube, you watch everything they do. I did that for one of the ones who was interviewed by a guy who does land investing. This one land investing guy was very, very proud of their land investing.
I was like, “What the heck is land investing? This sounds like the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.” I also filmed a real estate conference, one of the biggest ones in the Pacific Northwest, for three years in a row. We filmed 24 hours of content and I watched all of it. So I’ve consumed a stupid amount of real estate education. From that, I was like, “What is land investing?” Then I just started watching a whole bunch of videos on that; there are about four or five people in the land investing space really. Yeah, I found that little world, and I was able to start very slowly and rebuild my confidence, little by little, after watching everything fall apart. My wife, we were married in 2009, just right after the crash. Her dad was a mortgage broker. When we got married, my family didn’t have anything, her family didn’t have anything, we just watched all of the fall apart there. I was early 20s at the time. We definitely had some PTSD, if you would; very, very light PTSD of the real estate space.
Ash Patel: I can imagine. You must have been a legit videographer if someone’s flying you halfway across the country to shoot a commercial.
Tim Krause: Or I was very affordable. I think I did a good job; I enjoyed video, but it’s just wasn’t long-term where I wanted to be. Also, it’s really hard to scale, there are other things too. Yeah, I got flown to Iceland for a wedding once, and also to Bosnia to shoot a small Bosnian-American indie film.
Ash Patel: Wow. Alright, so you’re exposed to land via YouTube videos. What’s your next step?
Tim Krause: I watched probably 200 YouTube videos on it, and then I saw what I needed to do. I got a mailer to put together and I sent it off to Coconino County, Arizona which is South of Grand Canyon. Pretty much, I’ve sent my first mailer in January 2020. Literally, mail hits, I start talking to people, and then COVID hits, and I get super upset. I got my real estate license in ’07, and then ’08 happened. Now, I’m starting on my land thing in 2020, and now COVID is happening. But I had the resolve to not quit this time, to just push through and say “Screw it. I’m just going to go for it.” So I bought my first property for 1,800 bucks, a little three-acre property out there, off a dirt road that was off another dirt road that was just in the middle of nowhere. I sold it on, I think, on Zillow, For Sale by Owner for like $3,000. Actually, last week, I saw they put a little shed thing on it and they’re now selling that little house again on the market, because it still has me as the owner history on Zillow.
Ash Patel: Alright, hold on. You live in Tacoma, Washington.
Tim Krause: Yes.
Ash Patel: But your first land purchase was in Arizona. Why?
Tim Krause: The price point of it was good. Also, the price point was really the main part. I searched on Zillow by certain price points to see where certain properties sold. That was my very first one, and a lot of them were in the county just to the West of me, in Mason County, where I actually went to in person and did my own photos. So relatively it was the price point, also [unintelligible [00:12:04].03] the land space are sort of where things start. There are not many things complicated to them, there’s not a whole lot of different soil issues; there could be some flood zone issues, but nothing too intense.
Ash Patel: How did you know what price to buy that piece of property for?
Tim Krause: Now it comes into how we price things in land, and land is challenging to price. That’s one of the reasons why it can be very profitable, because it’s hard to price. Now I have a tool with four different ways that you price a piece of land. Back then, I looked at what I think they were selling for and then threw out a number here and then hope for the best. I also have more calculators now that I used to calculate different things. Our systems have gotten a lot better since then. I’m a big systems guy.
Ash Patel: Alright, your first land deal was a win, even though you were winging it?
Tim Krause: Yeah, basically.
Ash Patel: How has that process evolved over the last… It’s only been – how many years?
Tim Krause: Two.
Ash Patel: Two years, yeah. What’s your process look like today?
Tim Krause: For now, I have two full-time employees, Americans, one part-time employee, a full-time guy in the Philippines, and about three or four other Filipinos that help out with different pieces of the process. We have about a 75-point checklist that we go through for the buying and selling process, I have about 120 training videos in my company. We’re buying anywhere from three to five properties a month and selling three to five properties a month, coming on about a half million dollars – or I will by the end of this month – in private lending, that I’m able to use and keep on flipping. I own 10 properties now that I’m working on selling… So the process has gotten better with systems. My first year was just like me learning a whole bunch of different stuff and I actually put a bunch of systems in place. Now, we have all different little checklists of what we’re supposed to do and assign to different people. I had a meeting with my team an hour ago and we went over some things of where stuff is at.
Ash Patel: Alright, my mind’s blown. I retract that question… Tell me about your second land deal. I want to come along with you on this evolution to how you got to where you are. That’s incredible, so let’s dive into that. So you’re feeling pretty good, you had a win… How long did it take from purchase to sale on the first property?
Tim Krause: Probably two months. This was right in the middle of the start of COVID, so it was definitely a different time.
Ash Patel: Okay. So if you can do that during COVID, you’ve got to be feeling pretty confident. Your first deal was a win, this real estate bug is off your shoulders… What did you do next?
Tim Krause: I mailed Mason County, which is a county to the west of me. There’s a small development where I liked the price point, so I mailed there and actually got several responses back from that one. I bought my second property for 2,000 bucks, and I sold it for five or six. But I priced it a little bit too low, because I got an offer within the first four hours from a real estate agent who locked it in and bought it. I felt like I left some on the table with that one. I did a few more in that one little HOA, a few properties that I got that had septic issues, perc issues, and actually one I got for free, very small.
Ash Patel: Okay, hold on. So you bought not land in middle of nowhere, you bought land in an HOA, in a subdivision?
Tim Krause: Yeah.
Ash Patel: For how much?
Tim Krause: This is, again, a really rural spot of Mason County, but 2,000 bucks was the first one. It was actually from a nurse who lived close to me, and she just was done with the land.
Ash Patel: And she received one of your mailers?
Tim Krause: Yes.
Ash Patel: Got it. Okay. Now you’re feeling even better, you were onto something. So what was your third deal?
Tim Krause: Now we’re getting to where it gets blurry here a little bit. I ended up spending a lot of time in the county to the west of me, Mason County. I did I think my next 15 deals in that county, just mailing that area, just growing and hitting it. One big one was that I bought some properties from a medical company that was in Hawaii; a Hawaiian medical company that owned a lot of land — all land has a huge history. The landowner who lived there got cancer, went into remission, then was so excited, flew to Hawaii because he was feeling good, cancer came back super-hard, so he actually leveraged his land in Washington to pay for his medical bills in Hawaii.
He ended up not living, but his medical company has all this land, so I bought two pieces of land from them for 5,000 bucks apiece, five acres. It turns out, when I went to go see the land, all I could see was a ravine. I was like, “These are garbage, so I’ll just shoot it at 5,000, 1,000 price per acre.” When I go up there again, I’m talking to the neighbor and the neighbors like, “How much will I sell them for?” I’m like, “I don’t know, 10, 15, somewhere in there.” He’s like, “Well, you know about the building lots, right?” I’m like, “I don’t have a building site…” So he showed me an overgrown dirt road that went down to two building sites, and one of them had a view. So I sold one of them for 28 and one of them for 39. That was a good one.
Ash Patel: Awesome. How do you find the deals? How do you find the history of the land?
Tim Krause: With the deals, I just mail, in general. Everyone has a piece of land that meets my criteria; so I make up some criteria. I have a macro that I made that scrapes Redfin to make my own land database… Because no one cares about land, so I made a little tool that does that for me. Then I basically mail to the zip codes that match my criteria, and then I send them off an offer of what would work for me. Most people say “Heck no”, but a few of them say “Yes”, and then we just start talking to them about the piece of land. We find out a little bit of the history, if we can, in the conversation. I now have a checklist of six questions that are the minimum required answering by my acquisition’s person. 90% of the time I don’t talk to buyers or sellers anymore. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes guy, so I have an acquisitions person who talks to people and a disposition person who talks to people. I’m actually starting to use a lot more agents in my disposition as well.
Ash Patel: Can you share the gist of those questions? What’s important to find out on the initial call?
Tim Krause: Yeah, so what’s important find out – obviously, a big one is access. This could be a property that doesn’t have any access, or hasn’t been used in a long time. Any sort of utilities, proximity to utilities? Also, asking about have they built on the property before? Have they ever tried to build on the property before? What issues does it have? We also ask if there are any sort of hazardous waste issues on the property… It might come in later on the story here why I asked that question now.
That’s the big part, we just try to ask the story. What’s going on with the property? Because land can be rough; there are pieces of land out there that you can get bit pretty good. But then again, it’s part of the high-risk/high-reward type thing. Also, I’ve been doing it for a while now to where I’ve seen a few things, just a few, and been bitten by a few things, so I’ve learned a little bit.
Break: [00:18:45] – [00:20:42]
Ash Patel: What have you’ve been bitten by, and I want to hear the hazardous waste story.
Tim Krause: I’ve only had one property so far that I’ve lost money on, and my lenders lost nothing. I just wrote a cheque, paid off my lenders, and took care of everyone… Because I use private money for 95% of my deals, if not more. But with this one, I had a builder and an agent check this one out. There was a paved road and there was a sewer manhole, we opened up the manhole and we looked, the sewer went in front of the property. Okay, so the property has access to the sewer, done deal. It turns out, that one property, within all of the city block around them, was the one property that could not get sewer unless you did this whole extra thing that was like $30,000.
It was just a really brutal thing, and that’s why also I use agents, even though this time an agent didn’t catch it. Because every area has so many individual things. If you’re on Thurston County, the county to the South for me, gophers are an endangered species. The gophers are very, very well protected. Now, if you asked any landowner in Thurston County, they will say, unofficially, off the record, “Make the gophers go away by any means necessary.” But then if you go to the county to the Southwest, East, or North of it, they don’t give a crap about gophers; just that one county, but that’ll bite you. So there are so many little things. Can we go to the hazardous waste story?
Ash Patel: Yeah, for sure. You’re middle of it now.
Tim Krause: Oh, yeah, it’s not over.
Ash Patel: Yeah. Let’s hear it.
Tim Krause: It’s not over. So I bought a property in Nevada County, California, 34 acres, beautiful property, beautiful area, just south of Empire Mine State Park. I had a photographer go there and everything looked good. I didn’t use an agent, because that was back when I was feeling like I didn’t need to use agents. Honestly, I was a little bit prideful; I was not valuing some of their expertise. Basically, I bought this property and I found out afterwards… Because I wanted to potentially get it split. I knew I was going to try and split it, but if I couldn’t split it, I could sell it as a single piece and still do just fine. So I waited until after I bought it, and then I just went into finding out more about getting it, split because I really wanted to make sure that I bought it because it was a good deal.
So I bought it and the land surveyor was like, “I’m sure you know, this property has a lot of problems, the main one being hazardous waste.” I’m like, “I did not know about this problem at all.” I got title insurance, it wasn’t in the title report, it wasn’t in the recorder’s office. The report on the hazardous waste was in the Environmental Protection Office, which is now one of the six offices that we call and ask specific questions on. We’ve changed a few things in our due diligence. We ask the seller six questions, we call up six different departments and ask each of them questions about the property… Because every county department is a silo. The zoning can say you’re perfect, but then city planning could say “Hell no.” But they could be totally different and they’re in the same area.
So I bought the property, we’re trying to sell it now, kind of. We’re trying to see where it’s at. I called an agent finally a week and a half ago. The property on the Southern portion of the property has three mine shafts. So we might be able to fence off the three mine shafts. The engineer has to go out there and then give us an envelope that we can build in of good soil; if we can get 20 acres of good soil, I could still potentially double my money, depending on how much the other costs are. So there’s a glimmer of hope, just a tiny one. But yeah, that situation with that – I’ve already told my private lender I’m paying them off no matter what; we’ve already had this conversation, and he is informed of what’s going on. We’re all on the same page with that one.
Ash Patel: Interesting. Tim, can you take us through the evolution of how you started to systemize? Your first deal, you obviously just winged it. Now you’ve got these incredible systems in place, and a team that you’ve hired as well. Can you take us through building all of that?
Tim Krause: Yes. The first employee I hired a little bit earlier than I was planning on, but I hired her as an acquisition’s person. Right before then, in January of 2021, a year and a little bit ago, I had zero checklists, zero training videos, zero automation. It was basically me and I was using a one [unintelligible [00:24:52] service from Land Masters. Then I started putting in checklists because I joined a little land mastermind that we meet every month or twice a month, and I saw the people have checklists. I’m like, “That’s a really smart idea, because I kept on forgetting stupid things.” I was like, “I’m so dumb. I asked them this question this time, but not this question this time. Two different properties… Why am I repeating the same mistakes?” So I started going on my checklist system.
Then I hired my first employee. I was like, “I don’t need any training videos,” even though I owned a video production company. I was like, “I don’t need any training videos, I’m good.” My employee – she’s great, she’s very good on the phone; she’s not that good technology-wise, which is why now she doesn’t do as much technology as she used to. But after the fourth time of showing her how to make a Craigslist ad, I was like, “This is not going to work. I’ve got to figure out something here.” So I then started making videos. I had all my checklist items and I sat down and I just made a ton of videos. It’s always changing, always developing. We use Trello, we used to have one Trello board from start to finish, now let’s divide it up into three different Trello boards with different people, and the cards jump from one thing to the next.
It’s all to try to think for my team – how can I make it the easiest for them to remember the information. It’s foolish to think that they’re going to remember everything that I put into place, because they have lives, they have things to do, and they’re talking to a bunch of other people. So all of my checklist items have a two-digit number, all my videos have a two-digit number that’s corresponding to that checklist item, and I also have an additional two-digit number that’s corresponding to the checklist number, and then another two-digit number that corresponds to the number of videos that are in that particular checklist item. So if your checklist number two doing item number 20, there are two videos for that. You can click a button and you could easily see what that is.
Ash Patel: Alright, how are you the same guy that had 10 jobs in 10 years? This sounds incredible. Good for you, systemizing everything. What gives you a competitive advantage over other land flippers?
Tim Krause: Two things really, I think, for that. I work a lot on my letter, trying to make it sound more compelling. There’s a book that I just read from PostcardMania about postcard marketing, also the book $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi. I try to put myself in the actual seller’s position. Her name is Sally, she’s 77 years old, she has a property that her kids don’t want, and she gets five to 10 letters a year, and she gets my letter. What’s going to make my letter stand out as being different? I have a website, I have a Facebook… My Facebook I don’t do a whole lot on, because most of my clientele is older than that. I have a website, I have an email that’s not an @gmail or @AOL, it’s my company, you could look me up there. I have Google reviews, you can look them up there. I even have reviews that I let people see on my letters now.
When you call in, you don’t call into a call center, you call into my acquisition’s person, who’s an American, and she’s great. She’ll talk to you on the phone and it just helps build up that legitimacy. Also, it’s common in the land space, and I’m not against it, it’s just something we don’t do. We don’t do a lot of double closings or assignments; even though it lowers the risk, I think it is not as good of a service to the actual seller. We buy the properties cash and then we sell them cash or on payments. I’ll get into more of that later.
That’s a few of the things we do. What would be the best to serve Sally and also to serve us too? Because we can’t just pay market price, because then we wouldn’t have any business on the backend. So I try to think from the seller’s perspective, what would help them, and then what can I do to make it work together.
Ash Patel: What’s so compelling about your letter?
Tim Krause: I think for the people that we want, the legitimate details matter. We do what’s called blind offers, so all the offers have a price in there and… This is going to sound really dumb, but I record all my competitor’s letters. I own land, so when I get letters now, I have a folder of all of their letters on Google Drive that I’m able to then look at and see what’s going on. But stupid stuff – our font size matches, everything is consistent, our spacing matches; it doesn’t look janky. Because, again, Sally who’s 77, and who watches probably Fox News or CNN, she hears about two things when she hears commercials. She hears about medical scams and people getting scammed out of money.
So how do I make myself not look like someone who’s going to scam people out of money, because I don’t? Also, we mention in our letter, “Hey, if you want a reference, we work with escrow companies who are licensed in the state that you’re in. We’ll give you a reference. Just call us up.” And we have people ask us. Now, they rarely actually ever contact the escrow company, because I talk to the escrow officers… But we’ll say “Hey, we work with Suzy from First American, or we work with Roxanne from Corinthian Title, or we work with so and so from so and so. Here’s their phone number, here’s their email, please feel free to give them a call.”
Ash Patel: I like that. You’re a good-looking guy. Do you put a picture of you on there as well?
Tim Krause: I do not put a picture of me. I have a picture of me on my website.
Ash Patel: Have you ever tried that?
Tim Krause: The hard part is that the print company we use and the bulk printer that we use, them printing fine details and high contrast, printing doesn’t look that good, or doesn’t come out that well. I’ve not tried that personally; there’s so many things to test. I’ve done probably six or seven different split tests, if not more. Now, they’re relatively small, five or 10,000 units aside. But yeah, I’ve not tested that one yet.
Ash Patel: Tim, I’ve got two questions for you, the easier one is why not do what every other wholesaler does and test drive the land. So hey, here’s an offer. I’ve got 30 days, 60 days to try to find a buyer for this land, and you have no risk.
Tim Krause: I’ve done a few of those; there’s a few tough things. One is that I’m able to close faster doing it just cash. Sometimes if a property is a bit sketchy, we’ll do what’s called a blind ad. We’ll put up “Hey, five acres in this area, coming on the market for roughly this price,” and we’ll just put up some basic photos. So that’s also part of it. Also, it seems — the only assignments I’ve ever done, I literally wrote out in the contract that I’m going to try to assign this property. How it’s done a lot of the time in the land space – the seller doesn’t know. For me, I don’t want to have a business where I do that. Because, “Hey, what happens if the seller finds out?” “Well, it’s a contract, and this and this.”
Here’s the thing – I basically have a guarantee in my contract. My land contract has a clause in there that says the seller could cancel it anytime, which you would never have on an assignment contract; never ever, ever. But, again, trying to make Sally feel more comfortable with signing from someone that she just got a letter from out of the mail that she has no idea who this person is, what are things that are going to make her feel more comfortable? So why do that? Yes, it is technically more risk, absolutely. But it just means you have to be better at due diligence. So that’s my answer to that.
Ash Patel: Incredible. And speaking about due diligence, how do you make blind offers on land that you probably haven’t even seen?
Tim Krause: There are many different ways to do that. There are some services that do that, that can do approximations of that. I basically just do the assessed value times a multiple. I trained my brother who will do this for me now. He goes to every zip code and he looks at three or four pieces of land that are within our data within that zip code, and then looks at the sold prices versus the assessed value. Let’s say that the sold price is $100,000, and then this property is assessed for 50k. He would take that assessed value, and times two, 100k. Then he would go down a little bit longer and look at a different one, and then see if it is about two times the assessed value.
Essentially, we’re trying to figure out how far off on an average is the assessor from the market value. It’s not perfect by any means whatsoever. It’s like a shotgun, and then there’s a sniper approach… We’re hoping this is like a machine gun, a little bit in the middle. It takes days to price a mailer. Is it perfect? No. [unintelligible [00:33:00].07] Oh, yeah, we do. We do that, we’re really nice about it. Most of the time, we usually say, “Hey, Bob. Sorry, we can’t buy your property for $30,000. I really don’t want to offend you with a lower price.” And then we shut up. Then they always say, “Well, what’s the lower price?” Then we give them “$10,000” About a third of the time, the people actually say yes. So yeah, I’m buying two now that I renegotiated the price down. One of them from 60k to 35k, and one of them from 42k to 35k.
Ash Patel: What’s your average margin on a piece of land percentage-wise?
Tim Krause: Percentage-wise? I usually get pretty close to doubling my money, which is pretty common in the land place. I know in most spaces, it’s not. I just have a big property now that I’m moving on, that I’m not doubling my money, but still getting a large amount of money. In land, you could buy for 500 and sell for 2000 all day, but you’re not making a whole lot of money. I’m aiming for anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 per deal, it’s my goal. I’ve been able to do that quite well as far as in all my deals.
Ash Patel: Tim, how does somebody get involved in land investing and land flipping?
Tim Krause: There are courses that are out there. Here’s the thing, you don’t need a course. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos; there’s enough free content out there, you can just do it yourself. You could just watch the videos, jump on in, learn, bump your head, and all that type of stuff. There are some good paid courses out there, Land Academy has a paid course, REtipster has a paid course. I’m actually in the process of making a course with a friend of mine, because he saw my stuff and he’s like, “Tim, you’ve really got to make a course.” I was like “Alright. Well, if you do it, I just want to talk, and I can’t have it take up a lot of my time.” Because doing courses is not my goal to make money, it’s land. My course, if you want to sign up for the email – it’s flipping.land.
Ash Patel: Tim, I think you’ve got a lot of wheels turning out there in our audience. I’m going to ask you, what is your best real estate investing advice ever?
Tim Krause: Best Ever real estate investing advice – you have to be willing to walk away from a lot of deals. Get enough deal flow that you can comfortably walk away from bad deals. If you’re not confident in your ability to get the next deal, or the next deal is going to come, you’re going to make things work that don’t work.
Ash Patel: Great advice. Tim, are you ready for the Best Ever lightning round?
Tim Krause: Let’s go for it.
Ash Patel: Alright. Tim, what is the Best Ever book you recently read?
Tim Krause: That’d be $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi.
Ash Patel: What was your big takeaway from that?
Tim Krause: He has a really good value equation in there and how to communicate actual value to someone on the other end of your offer.
Ash Patel: Tim, what’s the Best Ever way you like to give back?
Tim Krause: I do post some videos to the group as well. Also, with the course thing, potentially giving back with that. Right now, I don’t do a whole lot of volunteering. I used to do a lot more of that. That’s my answer to that one.
Ash Patel: Tim, how can the Best Ever listeners reach out to you?
Tim Krause: You can send me an email at info@investmentmentscrafted.com. You can also check out some of my stuff there.
Ash Patel: Tim, I want to thank you so much for being on the show. 10 different jobs in 10 different years, getting an oyster farm, and putting all these incredible systems in place, putting a team in place to turning and burning deal after deal over the last two years… Congratulations on your success and thank you.
Tim Krause: Thank you, Ash.
Ash Patel: Awesome. Best Ever listeners, thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five-star review and share this podcast with anyone who you think can benefit from it. Please also follow, subscribe, and have a Best Ever day.
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