You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AD Edwards Nerds, a high tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now your host, Dan Barrett.
(00:41): All right. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. There's always, this is Daniel Barrett here, ForWord nerds.com, who's got two thumbs and is here from edwards nerds.com. It's this guy, and this week I have an absolutely wonderful interview for you. I am so excited to introduce you to Jeremy Davidson from the Davidson Land Company and to Davidson land company.com. Now, Jeremy is a really fascinating guy. We dive deep into land investing, how it works, what makes it special, what makes it a good investment, and something that pretty much every real estate investor should be thinking about right now. But not only that, we get into how he markets, and specifically how he's been killing it, using PPC pay per click ads to find land leads. Without any further ado, let's get into my interview with Jeremy Davidson from Davidson Land Company dot Jeremy, welcome the Showman. Thank you so much for coming on.
(01:40): Thanks, Dan. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, it's, uh, it's my pleasure. I am actually very curious about land in general and sort of how it fits into real estate investing as a whole. So I really wanted to have you on and kind of talk through this a little bit. But before we kind of jump into the specifics, let's talk just a little bit about your story or people that don't know who you are. Give me just like a kind of a quick description. What is Davidson land company.com? Like how, how, what's your sort of, you know, what's your sort of involvement with the real estate investing industry? Yeah, so this adventure, I'll call it, started back in, uh, 2005. I came out of the corporate world. My three year old son at the time asked my wife, Mom, where's dad live? Does he live uptown or does he live at that airport? ? You know, and that was just like, that was like a zinger man that you never really recover From. That's, yeah. That is nasty, huh? Kids are real. They are really good at those. That's amazing.
(02:45): So at that point, I had actually been meeting with a friend, uh, learning real estate investing kind of on the side. I knew I wanted to get into it. And so when that conversation took place, I really said, All right, we're going for it, You know, and I just kind of went head first into real estate investing, and when I say that I was, you know, uh, buying and selling rentals, uh, or buying and selling like fix and flips before Burr was a popular term before, I don't even know if that was a term back then, but it was Like BRrr like that. Yeah. That's what we were doing. And that was just, you know, common go. So I did almost every kind of deal out there, whether it was land commercial rentals, uh, multi-family. We kind of did everything. I went and got my license. Uh, so I was a salesperson, became a broker, opened up my own brokerage company, got into the construction side. So I, I covered a wide gamut of, uh, roles within the real estate world. And that continued on for, for several years. I took a little bit of a break in, uh, 2014 and 2015, and then jumped right back in land, specifically in 2016, because I sat back and I thought about, I've touched almost every angle of real estate, um, that there is, and which one did I enjoy the most? What did I have the most fun with? And for me, it was a real easy answer.
(04:11): Land, I'm an outdoors person. Uh, we were living in Tennessee at the time, and we had a little bit of land, not, not a lot, but enough to be able to go out and enjoy. And we really taught life lessons to our kids out there. And, uh, we had a blast as a family. And for me, it became a sense of freedom for our family to be able to go and enjoy and to do, whether we were riding motorcycles, shooting guns, uh, raising, you know, chickens, uh, planning gardens, whatever it was that we got to do out there, that's, it kind of became part of our DNA and our, our, our fabric of our family. So land is part of kind of who we are. And, um, so we just kind of continued to go in that direction. I own the business. It's been a family affair. I've had everybody in my family working with me at some point, some more than others, but, um, we've had a lot of fun. And, uh, today my wife and I continue to, to kind of move forward with it on a day in and day out basis. So you and your wife work together in the company? Yeah, we do. We do. We've, uh, it's kind of a new venture for the two of us. She's helped me on the side in the past, and she's been a teacher for many, many years. And, and she comes from the corporate world as well, but, uh, now she's, she's taken on more responsibility with the business. So we're, uh, we're stepping in it delicately
(05:37): This conversation with my, like the guest I had on prior to you where they were doing the same thing Right. Working with their spouse. And I have like a million questions about that. So I will, I'll probably come back to this, but I want to go back to the decision to jump from corporate world to investing, Right. Because it sounds like you were sort of working, you said you were working with a friend, right? You're sort of learning it. Mm-hmm. , how did you know, well, let me back up. Did did you have sort of revenue coming in from the real estate business before you made the jump, or did you just make the jump cold Turkey and you were like, Look, this is important for the family, You know, you got the singer from the kid, you know, you're like, I wanna be home. Or did you kind of get some revenue coming in first, or did you just make the jump?
(06:26): We went cold Turkey, man. It was, uh, it was a hard decision actually. It sent my wife and I into counseling . Yeah. Because it was a hard conversation to have and such a major transition for our young family. So we've stepped into it. We ended up selling, we had a rental home at that time, and so we ended up selling a rental home a little bit later, and that provided a little bit of income cushion to, to pass us through because you know, you don't just decide one day you're gonna go into real estate investing or real estate in general, and then the next day or the next week start drawing income from it. So it's a little bit of a turnaround there. And so that allowed us sell it at home, allowed us to stay afloat for a little while.
(07:08): So, I mean, so yeah. And we, we don't have to get too much into the personal details, right. But it's like, it does strike me, and you just said this, it's absolutely correct of all the businesses in the world that you jump into, right? Real estate has this sales cycle that is months long in some cases, right? And sometimes the optimistic cases, it's months for you to actually have money come into the checking account, right? So when you were going through that transition, you're making this decision, how did you navigate that in a way that was, I guess, constructive both for your family and for you? You know what I mean? Like, there's gotta be a lot of uncertainty, you know, it's like, you know, there's a crypto, they always talk about fear, uncertainty, and doubt, right? It's like these feelings where it's like, I don't know if this is for me. I know a lot of people listen to this show are sort of like thinking of making that transition and the process of making that transition. So when you look back on it, what was helpful to you in that early period where you're committed, but you don't have the validation yet, right? You don't have the revenue coming in yet. Like how did you get through that? Yeah,
(08:13): A a lot of prayer . Yeah. Yeah. To, uh, to, to keep us at bay. But I knew I had been doing a lot of research and reading a lot of books about moving into self-employment and being an entrepreneur, and I knew that was a direction that I wanted to go. And so I knew that there was gonna be a lead time to get me into a position of drawing a consistent or somewhat regular income out of it. And I felt strongly enough inside that I was like, This is the direction I want to go. This is where I want to be in life, and I'm gonna do what it takes to get there. So it was, uh, you know, there were a lot of hard conversations in our household. There were a lot of, you know, a lot of lean times to get through that. But, um, you know, we persevered and, and by the grace of God, we came out on the other side and everybody, nobody missed a meal. You know, everything got taken care of along the way. And so it's, you know, it's hard, but those are stories that build character and you can look back on and say, remember when.
(09:18): Yeah. And it sounds like too, I mean, the thing that sort of comes across to me when you talk about that period is there's a lot of communication happening, right? I think there's a, there's a sort of an, an illusion in entrepreneurship that it's this like great man or great woman theory of history, where it's like, I took the risk and I did the thing, but there's a whole supporting cast of people that have to hundred percent be there, right? And I mean, it sounds like you guys really handled that well. I'm sure that kind of translates to the way the business runs now is, so let's talk about land a little bit, right? I think land is fascinating mostly because, you know, I got into real estate investing through AdWords nerds, right? So I wasn't an investor beforehand. I didn't have any real estate experience, right? I, I'm sort of learning through my clients and for so long, you know, we were doing residential lead generation and it never occurred to me that you could, like real estate is also the ground underneath. Like, I don't know how that never occurred to me, but it just never came up, right? It was never, But like when you were, you know, you said like you, you touched all these different angles of real estate investing and you have this like emotional connection to land, right? Be through this sort of experience with your family and everything. But if, if pretend I'm an investor, I'm doing residential, what should make me think about land? Like why should I think about adding land to my portfolio or maybe investing in land or like what makes land a good investment today versus just traditional wholesaling fix and flip the kind of classic REI stuff that we all think of?
(10:51): Yeah. For me, and, and what I talk with, with the investors that I, I work with and partner with is land is, is very simple. It's cut and dry. There's a, there's only so much of it, you know, they're not making anymore. And not to be cliche, but it's true. And then there are, it's a pretty quick turn. You know, in most cases, especially this last five, 10 years, uh, well, I'll say won't go back 10 years, but 5, 6, 7 years, uh, things have been in a great position with the market, with the growth of, of, you know, resident. You can't grow residential without the land underneath, like you were just saying. So, you know, people have, whether it's new builds or renovations, there's always look, you know, people are always looking for land, whether it's to build on to retreat to, there's so many different uses for it that your customer base is probably a lot bigger than you going into one single type of property, real estate building, you know, multi-family or you know, single family that you're trying to invest in or, or, uh, purchase and flip or whatever it might be. There's so many different uses for land that you can draw from many different customer bases. And we have seen our time on market be pretty, you know, we've, we've averaged probably about 110 days on market from time we buy it to the time we close on it, and it's off our books. So it's been a pretty good turnaround for us. Uh, we consider that good. And the profits have been there as well. From an investor standpoint, I would say you're gonna be, I've been hard pressed to find better returns out there, uh, from what I'm doing. So it's, and the investors I work with are very eager to come back, and partner with me when we do deals. So
(12:43): Yeah, I mean, it strikes me too, right? Like if you are just examining it from a lens of where is the competition within the industry, right? I think there's like not, there's not as much competition among investors for land as there is for residential, right? Residential has the HGTV element and like all this stuff that sort of brings, I don't wanna call 'em outsiders, but you sort of newbies into the industry, right? I'm curious, you, you mentioned the market over the last couple years. So we're recording this in, you know, the mid to late 2022. We were so 2022, it's somehow almost, Yeah. You know, like I was at the Dollar store the other day with my son cuz he'd never been in a dollar store. And he was like, I have a dollar, I want to go to this store. And I was like, so we go to the dollar store and like all their Halloween stuff is, you know, it's like, I was like, oh, it's already, it's pumpkin spicy season already. So anyway, but it's been a weird year, right? We're coming off of, at least in the residential markets, 2021 was one of the more bonkers markets I can ever remember. And now we're heading into what feels like this transitional period where there's more inventory, maybe there's less demand. It's a sort of a market by market issue where things are kind of getting weird. I'm curious what you see happening in the land market. Is the land market less affected by sort of the traditional housing market economics that that kind of investors know about it? Does it follow that market very closely? I'm, I'm curious kind of like what you see is happening maybe over the last couple years and, and what's happening right now?
(14:17): Yeah. You know, coming out of, or as the country America entered into the pandemic, everything kind of went, you know, pushed pauses a little bit there, but it didn't stop. But as people started to come out of it and move out of the bigger cities have the desire to move out the bigger cities, the land business just went bonkers. Um, and the prices, uh, you know, everything went up with it as well. So, you know, it costs more to get into a parcel land, but you, you made up your money on the backside as well. So as we've kind of moved through that stage and season and we're kind of, you know, getting back into, you know, a year or two remove from the pandemic, it's as rental or as a residential starts to, you know, see higher interest rates and, and, uh, still struggling with the inventory issue, the land piece of it has really kind of stayed a little more steady.
(15:13): It hasn't gone up and down, it fluctuated as much as the residential side of things, but the, the land piece is somewhat affected by the, the mortgage rates, you know, so if you're buying and selling a piece of land that's a hundred thousand dollars or more, a lot of times folks are gonna take a loan out to get that. And so with those higher mortgage rates, it's gonna affect, you know, who's able to buy it and maybe they've got second guesses on if that's a right decision or not. Mm-hmm. . But at the same time, what I've done to kind of curtail that is I've just become more tighter and a little more aggressive on my buys, the, the acquisition side of things. So I know that if I'm gonna have, you know, if people are pausing a little bit on the back end to sell, I'm going to be a little more aggressive on my offer to make sure I leave myself margin to sell at a little less room there on the back end.
(16:05): So, you know, I try to stay abreast of, you know, trends and, uh, data and that's in the marketplace. And most of the data that you find out there is on the residential side, you've got some gurus out there that, uh, kind of predict real estate as a whole. And I'll, I'll listen, but at the same time it's, it's not gonna change what I'm doing. I, I, I believe in what I've been doing. I've been doing it since 2007 when I did my first land deal, and I'm just gonna stay the course, you know, and, and Yeah, it strikes me, right, like the, it's a, it's sort of a narrative issue, right? There's the micro narrative, which is like, over this year X is gonna happen, why is gonna happen, right? And then there's the macro narrative, which is kind of what you said in the beginning, which is there's a finite amount of land, they're not making any more land, but we are making more , right? Like, we are making more people every year. We are not making any more places to put 'em. That's right. And basic economics means this number, you know, the price of land is gonna go up over time. I mean, it strikes me as a pretty solid, you know, as the narratives go, that seems fairly, you know, based in reality, right? So I mean, I I like what you said where it's like you're paying attention, but it doesn't necessarily change your long term plan.
(17:17): Exactly. Right. Like, um, so okay, so that's, I find that really interesting. I, I'm curious, you know, obviously it's rem marketing nerds podcast about marketing. Let's talk a little bit about marketing. Cuz marketing for land in some ways is very different from marketing for residential leads. And in some ways that's very similar, right? Like the, what struck me about land when I first started learning about it was how the marketing for land deals often boiled down to, essentially it was just a yellow letter, but for, but for land, right? Where it's like, send someone something in the mail that says like, you have a piece of land and I wanna buy it. And in some ways, right, the land industry kind of strikes me as in an earlier phase than like residential investing is right now. So can you talk a little bit about how you guys have done kind of marketing in the past? Like sort of what, what that sort of breakdown looks like in terms of, you know, what, what seems to work for you guys?
(18:13): Yeah, sure. Up until 2022, I was strictly sending the mail, you know, that's what we would do, whether it's postcards or letters, and, um, that's the way we brought in our leads and that's the way we, you know, found our acquisition process. And as I wanted to, I'm always kind of wanted, wants to think things through a little differently and, and try to set myself apart from the crowd, if you would. Uh, as I thought about, I was like, I need to explore ppc, you know, and, and see if there's an avenue there that could really bring in substantially because mailboxes are cluttered and, and full of all kinds of offer letters, whether it's residential or land. And, uh, so to set myself apart, and there's texting that a lot of people choose to do, and I, I've not really gone down that route, but, uh, the PPC was, was, was very beneficial for us.
(19:09): We, we saw some, uh, we saw a good bit of, uh, return come back from that. What I realized, and probably the most eye-opening thing for me is how specific and direct you needed to be on who you're targeting your, for your customer. So I thought I had a good idea of who that was, but after several conversations back and forth, I'm like, let's, I need to really drill down a couple more layers here to figure, you know, and when I did, I saw the results and the quality of the leads that came back in. So it was a direct, you know, correlation there for the, uh, you know, targeted demographic and the quality of the lead I received back on the, the other side. So, uh, the PPC has been working for us and, and has been a good experience. And so we've just kind of mixed, you know, this past year we, we've kind of gone a more or less like a 50 50 mix and just kind of, you know, testing the waters and seeing how the PPC works and the, the amount of leads and, and we actually got to a point where we dialed back on the mailers a little bit because we were getting so many PPC leads and just needed to spend time working through those. So it's been a, that's really been our target of how we've gone out in the marketing sense of, uh, bringing business into us.
(20:31): So, muting my mic because, you know, it's a perfect time to operate. The band saw outside my window, you know, just, just a broadcasting trick from the old base. There you go. Uh, yeah, I mean, what struck me about the PPC market for land deals specifically was two things, right? Like one, the market for sellers is a tiny, tiny fraction of the market for buyers in terms of what's available online, right? Mm-hmm. . So it's like, especially if you're looking for buyer traffic, it's a very amenable to SEO sort, organic marketing. You could do a little bit of PPC for buyers and get a ton of traffic, right? And by the way, I highly encourage people are listening to this davidson land company.com, that's the website that you guys were driving traffic to. It's really, really well done. It's very attractive. The logo is good, the whole website is really set up well.
(21:26): So like, if you want to go see a good example of somebody doing this in, you know, in the moment, Davidson land company.com, you should go there and check it out. But like, also the thing, even with sellers, right? The seller's market for PPC, for land leads is much lower cost than that. The sort of equivalent market for residential, right? It's just much, much less competition. So there's a lot of potential there, I think, to kind of keep growing it, which is awesome. I mean, so when you guys do direct mail for lands, something that I'm, I'm never quite clear on is like, are you primarily targeting geographically where you're just like looking for parcels of land in a particular area? You know, some people when they're building lists for residential, right? They're doing like, Well, I want people with this amount of equity or this or that, or, you know, zoning violations or whatever. They have their sort of pet lists, right? When you guys think about who is a, and we don't have to get super specific, right? Like, don't gimme the secret sauce or whatever. But when you guys think about targeting in terms of, like you said, diving down on like who is your ideal target? Uh, how do you think through that? Like what makes someone a good target to potentially be a land lead for you guys?
(22:37): Yeah, so I am very geography focused. Uh, that, that is a big deal for me because, uh, we primarily do business, core of our business is in the southeast, so north and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. And, um, and so we, we, we do the majority of our stuff right there. And I've traveled and grew up and, and lived in this area for so long that I know kind of those areas pretty well enough to know where, where the attractive areas are and where the crap areas are, you know, and I try to stay away from the, the ones that I don't think anybody's gonna be interested in. So geography really drives it. The data fascinates me, it really does. I mean, there's so many segments and directions you can go with sorting through data, and it really is such a fun, um, adventure if you would to go in and say, Hey, I wonder if I tried this, what would that look like? And, and so you can go in and, and you could sort for, uh, people that are zoned for a certain type of property, you could go in and, and sort for, uh, it's just like you're doing on the PPC side, you're trying to find those certain, you know, clumps of people that aren't, you know, that you can kind of zone in on. Yeah. And, uh, and get to. And so we can, we look at that a lot of times. But, um, at the end of the day, I'm really just kind of going geography focused and certain size of parcels because I know what, how much money it's gonna cost me to buy it and what kind of money I'm gonna get back on the backside of it. So price and geography are, are probably the key things. Our ultimate, you know, customer essentially on a mailer looks like somebody who inherited some land, They bought it years ago and they're, they're used, their situation in life changed and they don't need it anymore.
(24:37): They're not gonna build there, not gonna retire there, whatever it may be. And so those are the kind of people that are great for us because they just don't, they don't have any need for it anymore. And there's a young family or a, you know, an up and growing family or that wants to, you know, take it off their hands at some point. And we have brought in a lot of customers from outta state, which I thought was pretty interesting. Uh, a lot of our customers that buy the land we have, we have found, uh, have come from the Midwest and northeast in, uh, most cases. And so that's been kind of a interesting find for us as we kind of pinpoint back, you know, reverse engineer the process of where these people are coming from so that we can, you know, target our advertising to sell to those areas on the back eye backside.
(25:25): Yeah, I mean, it's kinda like you were saying, right? Is it a lot of people who are essentially looking for like vacation properties or they're like, Oh, I want a place to get away from, you know, I live in, you know, Brooklyn or something and I'm looking for a place to go. Yeah. I mean, it, it, it's such a cool model. Now you guys have like, if, so if, if folks go to look at the website, which they absolutely should, right? So again, that name again, Davidson land company.com, you should go check it out. You have a thing there where it's like, get in touch, you know, if you want to check out our future offers or whatever. So, Right. So are you guys basically constantly building a buyer's list and then shopping the properties to those buyers as they sort of come on the market, just like you would for, you know, if you're, you know, your wholesaling or whatever. Is that, is that kind of what you guys are doing back End? Yeah, essentially. So, you know, we see, we try to build this buyers list and, and one obviously we market our ties to them because they're, they've told us we want to buy property, we wanna buy some land. And sometimes we have stuff that fits their criteria, sometimes we don't. But I wanna make that group aware every time we have a new property that comes into our inventory at the same time, make them aware of other things that we're doing. Because I think a lot of people love the idea of buying land, but don't really know how to get started. And, uh, what that first step is. So I've started doing like a webinar live stream of how to buy land and just giving people the basics of it. Because in most conversations that I have, people love, like I said, people love the idea, but they're like, How does that work again?
(27:02): You know, is that, is it the same as residential? You know, so I've, I've kind of put this presentation together that I just kinda walk people through loosely and, and you know, uh, offer, you know, people to have any questions. I started a podcast and wanted to have, you know, terminology that tends to show up more on a land side of things than other residential or other real estate, uh, areas that to help people understand kind of what, what goes on behind the scenes and, and, you know, things to be on the lookout for just to be helpful, provide good content out there for people that might be interested in land. So yeah, I love that cuz I, I think you're right, right? There's sort of an air of mystery about it where it's like, Hey, I just bought this piece of land, but how do I get there? And you know, it's kinda like this weird, like, so if people wanna go check any of that stuff out, is the place where they would find that, like Davidson lane company.com? Like where, where can they check out some of the educational material you are putting out?
(28:01): Yeah, so we've got, uh, a YouTube channel and, uh, Davidson Land Company on the YouTube channel, and then we also are on Facebook and Instagram. And so we try to promote across those channels, if you would, platforms, uh, all the content that we're putting out. And, uh, and we're working to put some, uh, I would say little more polished touch on, uh, some of the content. Uh, had a couple meetings this morning, uh, in that regard. And so we're looking to kind of step up our game because we feel like there's a lot of people out there that know about land in, in my, you know, in this, in my space, in this industry. Not all of it's good information. It's not necessarily bad, but it's not always a full scope and breadth of what, what can take place. And I feel like with my experience, going back to 2007, being the real estate broker, doing the investment side, having the brokerage, being in construction, there's so many different narratives that I can add into the story to help people understand more of a full scope of what land looks like and entails. So yeah, we're just trying to,
(29:08): Yeah, no, go ahead. Yeah, so I was gonna say like, if, if you are listening to this, so I will have all the links, well, like you said, just go to YouTube, search for Davidson Land Company and you'll find it, or Facebook or Instagram or whatever. But we, we'll put all the links on edwards nerds.com. I think this is such a great example of you guys are doing this thing that I keep telling everyone that they need to do, which is differentiate themselves by building a relationship with the market before those people are ready to sell or buy from you. Right? It's like building that trust over time, letting them into your world. We just did an episode, um, like the episode prior to this was all about the importance of social media and like, just showing what you do and kind of opening the curtain a little bit and letting people see how the business runs.
(29:53): I just think this, that's the coolest thing. So I'm gonna link to all these things, but like we said, Davidson land company.com will go to YouTube, type in Davidson, Davidson Land Company, you will find it. Uh, Jeremy Davidson, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. I really appreciate it. This has been really, really interesting and I just, I really appreciate your point of view. So thanks for sharing, Dan. Thank you for having me, and thanks for what you're doing for the industry and, uh, the services you provide. No, thank you. All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode. Look, if you need more leads and deals for your real estate investing business that includes land by the way, you could go over to AdWords nerds.com, that's AD W O R D S nerds.com and sign up for free call with our team. Look, we get on the call for free with real estate investors across the country every single day to help them put together an online marketing strategy that's gonna work in their market. And we would love to do the same for you. So that's adwordsnerd.com. Go check it out. And look, thank you so much for listening this podcast every single week. It means the world to me. I will see you back here next week.
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