On today’s episode of the Forever Cash Life Real Estate Podcast, we’re going to talk about how to deal with difficult title companies.
I’m going to share a recent experience of mine with a really terrible title company. Let’s just say I’ve never seen anything this bad in the 19 years I’ve been flipping land. I’ll share some valuable advice, in case you find yourself in a similar situation.
What Title Companies Are Facing Right Now
The current situation in the U.S. has title companies swamped with deals from everywhere. It’s like 2005-2007 again, and title companies are overwhelmed. I get this. It’s like a perfect storm.
But does this give them an excuse to be incompetent and do terrible business? No. In fact, I’ve dealt with some really great title companies lately. They’re doing their job and doing it well, in the midst of all that’s going on in the market.
What Can Happen When a Title Company Doesn’t Do Its Job
When you’re in the land flipping space, the title company is a very important entity. They can make your land deal go smoothly or do the exact opposite. In the past few weeks, we’ve done five deals and dealt with four different title companies. Two of the title companies were absolutely fantastic, and two absolutely sucked.
For one of the deals with the not-great title company, we sent them the signed contract, and they started doing the title search. A week went by, then two, then four. Seven weeks later, we finally got the preliminary title report.
The property was inherited from a father who had put it in a family trust and made the son and daughter trustees. This isn’t difficult to solve. You just need the estate documents, the trust documents, and their information. A decent title company should be able to get this done in two days. It took this title company another eight weeks.
I followed up every day, and every single time, the woman on the phone said, “These land deals are so complicated.” This agent was 100% unqualified and inept. I literally woke up in the middle of the night with nightmares about this person.
What a Competent Title Company Will Do For You
At the same time I closed another deal. I bought a property for $90k and sold it for $199k. That deal involved multiple LLCs and a family trust. This time the title search took three days, as it should.
At the end of the day, the title company’s job is to:
The title agent for this deal needed more documentation, and I got it all for her. She was thrilled. She sent out closing documents 2 days later, and we closed in 12 days total.
What You Have to Do Yourself If the Title Company Is Incompetent
If you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck with an incompetent title company, you’ll have to jump in and help them do their work. I left a voicemail, then sent multiple follow-up emails every day. They kept dragging their feet. I know the squeaky wheel gets the oil, so I made some noise.
The road on the extra mile is empty. You’ve got to do whatever it takes. We’re 15 weeks into this deal. We’re too far in. It should have been done in 2 weeks. I’m not going to pull it and go to a different title company. So I jumped in. I have a relationship with both the buyer and the seller, so I told the agent I’d be the go-between. I did more work than the title agent to close this deal.
You Can Go the Extra Mile Even with the Good Title Companies
Title searches are taking longer these days, even with competent title companies. They might have 25-50 deals on the docket, and they’re prioritizing the ones that make them the most money. If yours isn’t a million dollar deal, you can move up the list by making noise.
Basically, you commit to being a bother until they give you what you want.
Remind them that, if interest rates go up even a little, refis will stop cold. If you’re dealing with a reasonable title company, they will value your relationship and take a long-term view.
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On today’s episode of the Forever Cash Life Real Estate Podcast, my wife, Michelle Bosch, shares a well-kept secret to getting 6-figure land deals as a real estate investor.
There’s a lot of conversation and hoopla around these bigger deals right now, and with good reason. They’re the fastest, most potent way to turbo-charge your land profits. But there’s a piece that most people miss, and Michelle gives us the inside scoop.
You Need More than Tactics and Strategies to Master the 6-Figure Land Deal
When it comes to 6-figure land deals, yes, there’s an actual blueprint to finding the right area to focus on, the right market, the right offer, the right negotiation, the right way to talk to more sophisticated buyers and sellers. But before all of that, there’s something most investors don’t talk about, a secret important ingredient that will give you the power to go after—and get—those big deals.
That ingredient is confidence.
Confidence is 100% power. It’s about trusting in yourself—or in the experience and expertise of a mentor that you’re going to lean on. This confidence is what will help you go out there and commit to doing a 6-figure land deal.
Commitment, at the end of the day, is a precursor to confidence. If you’ve been watching any of our masterminds, you know Michelle and I are big believers in confidence. And that confidence cannot come if you haven’t committed to doing this new, big thing.
How to Make the Leap from Small Land Deals to Big Land Deals
A lot of people hover in the $10, $15, $20k land deal space for a long time, longer than they need to. It’s not that they don’t have the capabilities to do bigger deals. They just don’t have the confidence.
Bigger deals aren’t a lot of extra work. You roll up your sleeves, put in the effort, use smart strategies to identify properties, market them, sell them, and close those deals. They just require a pivot in focus. You have to be committed and have the courage and confidence to pull it off.
If you find yourself stuck in small deals, there is courage and confidence inside of you that needs to be activated. Michelle and I believe that, when your soul wants to expand and grow, you’ll have people cross your path or you’ll hear an idea that triggers exactly what you need to push through and move forward into a bigger, bolder reality.
Expect Resistance When You Get Ready to Take the Plunge
Any time you embark on a new journey, you can expect your ego to fight you, but this just means you’re so close to an amazing breakthrough. You’re attracted to a growth beyond a bank balance.
Push through the resistance of the ego saying no. Push through those inner voices that say:
Our clients in our coaching program all go through this when they’re activating their confidence. Their ego resists, and they have to power through. This 12-month journey they take with their coach is all about receiving bigger and bigger visions for their business and for their lives. They crave that success, so they’re willing to go through the discomfort of expanding themselves.
They start putting themselves in situations where they can’t back out, where they have no choice but to grow. And it helps to have the support of a community—and a mentor.
A Good Mentor Doesn’t Want to Be Your Hero
When I talk about a mentor, I’m not talking about someone who wants to be a hero to you. I’m talking about someone who will serve as a guide so you can be the hero of your own life and family. The coaches in our Land Profit Generator Coaching program help our clients push the boundaries of what’s possible, help them bring people on board their team that they love working with, and guide them into success.
If you’ve been dipping your toes in the water, afraid to take a leap, and you’ve seen your peers committing, doing the work, mastering the courage, activating their power, and seeing six figure leaps of income, then it’s time for you to do something about it.
Our coaches aren’t going to try to sell you something that’s not a good fit for you. Do a quick self-evaluation.
If you answered yes to all of those questions, you’re a great fit.
Remember, confidence is a key ingredient in a successful land flipping business, especially if you want to grow and scale with 6-figure deals. Sometimes you build that confidence yourself, and sometimes you lean on the confidence of a good mentor to get you started. Regardless, it’s impossible to get to where you want to go without it.
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On today’s Winning Wednesday episode of the Forever Cash Life Real Estate Podcast, I’m sharing a quick training on the difference between blind offers and neutral letters.
We have a lot of discussions in our Land Profit Generator Facebook group about these two very different strategies. “Which one should I go for?” our students ask. The answer is very simple. YES.
What We Mean When We Say “Neutral Letter”
Let me tell you about our proven, tested, Land Profit Coaching neutral letter. Our core copyrighted method goes like this. When you go into this business of land flipping, you pick certain areas in the United States based on:
This data-driven approach gives us valuable information on how this market will likely perform. Then we send a test balloon into the county. We send 500 to 750 neutral letters out, asking people to call us if they have land they’d like to sell. Then we get responses back and, based on those responses, we can tell which areas will get us a lot of deals and make us a lot of money.
What Is Involved in Making a Blind Offer?
As we go through this process, it wouldn’t make any sense to send out a blind offer. A blind offer is where you look at a list of properties, choose one, and make an offer. The seller has never heard from you and has never indicated that they want to sell. You just send them an offer.
To get this offer out, you have to find out the ballpark value of the property. Let’s say you’re going to research 500 properties and send out your offer. These properties aren’t all going to be the same. They’ll each have different:
You might have a property that’s ¼ of an acre but worth $50k. Another property might be 2 acres and $10k. Let’s say it takes 10 minutes to research each property. That’s roughly 80-90 hours. If you’re doing it full-time, it would be two full work weeks. If you’re doing it a couple of hours a day, it’s going to take you two months. This is all before you even send out an offer.
We all know that time is money. A better use of your time would be to send out 700 letters for $400. You don’t even know if those 80 hours will be worth the time and effort.
Following Up Neutral Letters with Blind Offers
So, you’ve sent out our proven, tested neutral letter. Let’s say 5% of the people call you back. Of 600 letters, you’ll get 30 phone calls. Now, you do research on those 30 instead of 600. For about 25 to 40 offers you make, you get one accepted. And, over time, you can improve that.
Once you do some deals in the area, and you become more familiar with what properties are worth, then you can send out blind offers on other properties nearby. You already know what you can sell these properties for, and you already have people lined up looking for properties. At this point, there’s no more need to send out neutral letters. In that particular pocket, you can switch to the blind offer.
So, here’s what you do in the simplest terms:
It’s much less work, much less overhead, and much less time commitment. This is a much simpler and efficient way of doing business. It’s not just a one-trick pony. It’s a skillful, scalable, tested method that works for any size deal.
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On today’s episode of the Forever Cash Life Real Estate Podcast, my wife, Michelle Bosch, shares some valuable principles that will help you scale your business quickly and bring the right people on board.
Whether you’re running a land flipping business, or something else entirely, you’ll find these principles to be timeless and important. Michelle and I have followed them the past 18 years with great success.
You’ll Never Know Freedom Without Hiring a Team
Building a team that’s bigger than you will give you the opportunity to enjoy the four freedoms of money, time, relationships, and purpose. When you’re just starting out, all these things depend on YOU:
But this is unsustainable, and you can’t scale your business If everything depends on you alone. These freedoms will never be yours.
Your Employees Need to Share Your Core Values
In the beginning, when you’re first hiring, you might start small with a VA or independent contractor, someone who can start taking non-critical activities off your hands. Eventually, you want to pivot into thinking about a team where you are all in on them and they are all in on you. Your ROI (return on involvement) is way superior with an employee than with someone who is doing 5-10 hours for you here and there and not fully committed to you and your business.
You’ll want to bring people on board who embody your core values, who become like family, who see opportunities for personal and career development, and who are truly excited about the dynamic growth of the company. You need to be clear on your core values so you can magnetize the right people.
Collapse Time with This Hiring Practice
One thing Michelle and I have found over the years is that we can collapse time by hiring two or three people at a time for one position. When it comes to our sales team, we’ll onboard these people at the same time, train them at the same time, and then let them fight for a spot on our rocketship. When you give two or three people the same resources, one of them is going to rise to the top.
When we do it this way, our new hires have extra motivation to succeed, and we aren’t wasting time training someone who turns out not to be a great fit for our team.
Train Your Employees With a Purpose
You will be tempted to dump all your unwanted tasks onto your new hire and let them figure it out, but you need to think long-term. You need to train them, explain the purpose of each task, show them how each task fits into the context of the business, and the impact it has on the company as a whole.
Don’t just teach them steps and methodology. Give them a sense of purpose. Put in the time and energy at the beginning, and your return on involvement will be exponential.
Utilize Technology to Simplify the Onboarding Process
We have so much access to technology these days. Make the most of it. Record what you do with new employees, so you can use it again in the future with your next hire. You’re not abdicating the whole onboarding process to videos, but they’ll be there for your team to watch, listen to, and reference again and again.
You can actually provide your entire team with a valuable library of resources that will save you so much time and money over the long haul.
Recognize Your Value as CEO
When you start out as a business owner, you can get hit by impostor syndrome and think, “Oh my god, who am I to be demanding an all-in mindset from my employees?” We don’t automatically have that assertiveness and confidence to recognize the incredible value we bring to the marketplace. You need to step into this power and attract the right people who recognize it as well.
You need to understand that you are offering an amazing opportunity to someone. It’s a privilege and an honor to align themselves with a CEO like you, someone with integrity and excellence, who is making people’s dreams come true. There are very few people out there operating at this level, in a way that’s not transactional, but transformational. You are a freaking big deal.
Don’t bring just anybody on board with you. Make sure they embody your core values, and that they’re excited to use the velocity of the growth of your business to meet their personal growth goals as well. Your business, with their help, will spit out the cash flow. And you, as CEO, will be flowing in the freedoms of money, time, relationships, and purpose.
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