Why I’m Buying UNWANTED Land (And You Should Too)

I just bought 10 acres of land for less than $10,000, and I never even saw it until today. Why? To figure out if the American dream is still alive and if we can buy it for cheap. Today we're gonna teach you how we did it, how we almost got scammed doing it, and how you too can make money on it. Oh, and we did it in one week. And you have to stick around to this video because we're gonna talk to a couple who is killing it doing exactly this, so much so they're about to exit for millions of dollars. Okay, we're gonna buy some land. There's three steps to get this done. Step one, criteria. What do you want the lands to be? In my case, I really have only a few criteria. First one is 10 acres or more. Second is I want it located in West Texas. Why? Because I think there's land available for cheap out there. Also, it's by a bunch of national parks, which is cool. I think we'll have a bunch of tourists come. The last thing is I want this land to have no rules. I can do whatever I want. Second, budget. How much money do you wanna spend on your piece of land? In my case, 10K, no more. And the third, timeline. In my case, this timeline is one week, which is crazy, but I actually think we can do it. But first, let's break down all of these listings. So on land.com, I've already got some saved favorites. So this one's at 14,276. It's kinda sick. Look at that river running through it, vistas, beautiful. It is 10 acres for 14,000, so we'd have to get it down lower. One of the issues with this one is it's right on the US-Mexico border. It's cool that it's seller financed, but I don't love this location. We'll keep it on the list, though, and we'll run it down. This is $17,500 for 10 acres. It's in Alpine, Alpine Suite, because it's close to Marfa, but it's actually kind of a town. Also, look at these mountains, guys. We've got a ton of mountain property. Looks really level. I like that. Also, this thing's seller financing. $5,000 down, 10.5% interest rate. That's high, we're gonna mess with that. Five years payments of $268 a month. Call today to own your piece of paradise, they say. I don't know about that. We're gonna call this guy, though, and we're gonna figure out this piece of land this is keeping on the listing. Look at all these properties we have. We're gonna run through this list, and we're gonna see which one of these we like best. I know that I wanna be close to Marfa. I know that I wanna make sure that we can have easy access land, and I think I found a couple places for us. We're gonna call some experts and see if I'm on the right track. We're gonna call Pros. Hey, Pops. Hey, Cody, how are you? I'm good, random question. I want to buy some land in West Texas, like 10 acres, inside of a week. Wanted to get kind of your take. You gotta be kidding, right? Inside of a week? Yeah, no, I'm not kidding. You've looked at it on your computer, I take it? Yes, I found a couple that I like. One of my clients came to me and said, hey, that's what I want you to do for me, Stan. I would just tell them, absolutely not, but you're probably gonna do it anyway. That is probably true. So if I go and get a realtor to help me figure this out, you can help me do a little double check-see later? Absolutely, I can try to protect us as much as possible. All right, you're the best. Love you. Love you, too. Good luck. Thanks, bye. Bye. Okay, trusted expert, aka dad, check. Now we go to new experts, aka realtors. So we got texasrealtors.com. We got Ramsey-rated realtors, and we're gonna pick one of the top ones. What's up, Melissa? And we're going to call Melissa and say, what's up? Hey, Melissa, this is Cody. If you could give me a ring back, that'd be great. I'm looking to close on a deal really, really quickly. Okay, talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Okay, let's do rule of three. Typically, realtors, I get one answer for every three phone calls, so we're gonna call three right now and see what happens. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. No answer. Okay, now we're gonna call Chris. Hi, Chris, my name's Cody. I wanted to reach out to you because I need to buy some raw land in West Texas. Kind of weird, but I think we can do it. I need to close inside of one week. Less than $10,000. If you could call me back. Thanks, Chris. Okay, we'll see. So I left a message for him. Nobody answered me. My rule of three did not work for realtors in West Texas. They do say it's slower out there. We will now wait for somebody to get back to me as we dig in a little bit more to due diligence. I need to get some inspiration and start putting together a list of all the ways we can make money on this thing we're gonna buy. All right, I finally got a call back from Chris. So he left me a voicemail. Let's see what we got from our man, Chris. Your text this morning, and I'm driving to a meeting. Your best bet is to go out there, and it's just, it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen to me. For you guys to get out there and have a piece of property under contract, the chances of that happening are so slim to none. I'm not saying it's impossible, but every star would have to align. Give me a call when you get a chance, and if I can't answer, I'll call you back. Okay, dude, bye. All right, nice guy, Chris, but he obviously hasn't met us. He thinks that this is impossible. Now, it's fair, all the points that he made, but we're not gonna let that stop us. I hit up a bunch of other realtors, and we're gonna see if one of them gets back to us, and we are going to keep working the problem until one of them does. Amazing, thank you, Phil. Perfect. Okay, so Phil is our new realtor. He thinks that he can not only find us our land, but he already has a place. Phil is DTF. Down to find it, guys. Take it easy. Okay, so now that Phil's gonna find our place, we've got a list of inspiration here that I wanna start working on. A bunch of these are really expensive to stay at. I'm trying to keep mine cheaper, so I'm probably more like this TP tent situation, somewhere between like 10 and 30K. I got ahold of this guy, Ryan, who has this trailer that it looks like you just like put on the site. I wanna see if I can do that, so I don't even have to build anything. It's like all set up already. So let's go check out Ryan live. This is Lula. This is our glamping camper. We're outside of San Marcos, Texas, out in the hill country. She's a one-bedroom, one-bath camper that people can come and stay whenever they want. Me and Brittany, my wife, we dreamed about having a place where everyone was welcome for a long time. Did your wife do this? She picked it out, but we bought it off Facebook Marketplace. Turnkey, $16,000. That's ridiculous that you got this for 16K. Nice job, man. So we got this Lula here. We're on 20 acres of your land? That's right. But you did it smart. You partnered with somebody else. Yeah, so we worked with a group called Casa Maranella. Oh, that's amazing. It's hard to put a number on how helpful Casa Maranella has been. They welcome people who have recently immigrated to the United States, and they help them get on their feet. We partner with them in allowing them a place to work, sometimes a place to stay, and it just helps give this place hospitality on several different levels. You rent this out for what a night on average? On the weekdays, probably about 80, 90 bucks. That's amazing. I'm coming out here. 140, 150. Okay, 80 to 90 bucks, 140 to 150. You get your own trailer, sweet little deck set up, beautiful views, nobody around, birdsong. I'm into it. All right, this is amazing. Three days later. Huge update. We almost got scammed on the first piece of land. Turns out the guy didn't even actually own the thing, but that's okay, you guys. This is why we do due diligence, and we're gonna teach you all the steps to make sure that you can not get scammed either. But an even more exciting update. Bill found us a piece of land. 10 acres for less than 10K. It appears to be pretty perfect. So we actually already are signing the documents. We are going to right now go and give cash at the bank, and then we're gonna go check out our land. Are you guys ready to see what they said was impossible? Money sent. We've gotta get out on this property now, but I'm feeling pretty confident. I think we need a website. Oh, you guys thought I forgot this? Come on. Before we get to the website, we gotta break down the costs. I read your guys' comments. So first, we're getting 10 acres. We're paying $9,000 for that. But it's not just the $9,000. We also gotta pay, I don't know, about 200 bucks for gas to get down there. We've got to pay about 500 bucks to get the title checked. I'll explain why that's so important later. And then finally, we gotta pay 300 bucks to our main man, Phil, for finding this land for us. So all in, we're at 10K for 10 acres. But I wanna spend a little bit less money here, so I'm gonna get a website for cheap. For any business, a website's really important. We gotta have a good online presence, especially if we're gonna have a remote business. We gotta make sure we nail the website. The problem is, all the good website names are taken. That's where .onlinedomains comes in. Unlike .com, where good names are basically impossible to find, .online lets you get the exact name you want without weird extra words or dashes. It's trusted by over 3.5 million businesses and used across tons of industries, from global brands to small businesses. And here's the best part. You can grab your .online domain anywhere, at GoDaddy, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify. But for a limited period right now, you can get the domain for just 99 cents at get.online using my exclusive code, Cody, at checkout, or by simply hitting the link in my description below. Also, you guys, I need help naming this thing. What should the website be? Tell me below in the comments, and then let's go meet Phil. We gotta check out this land we bought. So now from Austin, all the way to West Texas. Phil, what's up? How's it going? Great, pleasure to meet you. Let's do this. Oh, wait a second. Let's talk about how you could really screw up a deal with titles. Super important. Whenever you buy land or any kind of property, always get a title policy. Title companies are the ones that provide the policy, ensure that the owner is the owner, and there's no liens against it. And sometimes you could be like, I bought this land, but it doesn't have a clean title. Yes. Then you're in trouble. You're in trouble. Yeah, we don't want that. No trouble. The other important reason we gotta go out to the actual property is because we don't exactly know what we're getting. So you put some interesting things in the contract to make sure that they don't scam us. We put an option period in there for 10 days, which will give you time to inspect it. We're gonna get a couple of well guys out there to see if we can drill a well out there. We're gonna get a septic guy out there for sanitation reasons. And then we also got to call them to the electric company to see how much it'll cost to run some power to that property. And we're not talking black oil wells, right? We're talking water. Right. When we have drilling, we want to be able to get water out there. It's the most important thing to a property. And there might actually be, even though it looks like there's nothing and it's all desert, underneath there, there might be a water table. We don't know. It could be. And if there's not, you can always have it hauled in and put in tanks. Let's go. Fun fact. We chose Marfa because West Texas is one of the few areas where you can buy affordable land in the state of Texas. One other hack, if you want to buy cheap land, you can buy in the middle of nowhere, but make it kind of close to a touristy place like this. So people come here, but then they go back to your spot to get away. There's five scams we got to watch out for when we buy land. First scam is, we got to make sure they actually own the land themselves. A lot of times they're misrepresenting. That's why we check title. Second is the land isn't what they say it is. This is another type of misrepresentation. So they might actually have land that has a bunch of issues and they haven't told us. The third is owner financing. They might put provisions in the contract that allow them to take back the entirety of the land if we just miss one day of payment or we're late for one payment. The next is we've got to be careful for things like floodplains. A lot of times you'll see on this property, there's some drainage. We got to make sure we understand where they're at. Even in the desert, floodplains are dangerous. And the last one is mineral rights and drilling. So we got to think about the fact that if you are an energy company, you could have rights to the land that allow them to come in, drill on your site while the kids are playing, while your campers are hanging out, they're throwing up flares, they got in pipes. We don't want that. So we're going to watch out for the five types of land scams. One second. Also, if you're into crystals, turns out the land behind me is full of this. There's a mountain all full of what's called green calcite. You crystal bitches, this is your spot too. Let's do this. So we bought some land, like 30 minutes outside of Marfa, right? So we're not trying to get close to the border because sometimes that can be a little sketchy. Correct. We're still pretty far from it. And how far are we from Big Ben? What do you think? An hour and 40? I think about an hour and 40 to Big Ben because Marfa is one of the gateway towns to Big Ben and the Marfa lights. This is crazy. So Marfa is known for aliens, crazy lights, mysteries. I don't know what they're doing out here, but the Wild West is really wild. Do you know anything about tax breaks on real estate for having cows? Sure, there's always agricultural exemptions and it differs from county to county. So you always wanna check that out if you're looking to get that ag exemption. So you can run cows, you can do a wildlife exemption, which is hunting, counting the number of deer or animals that are on there. That's one type of exemption. You can even do honeybees. So you can raise bees on there and you can get so many bees per acre and get your exemptions there. Most counties, you wanna be over 10 acres. 10 acres or more to get your exemption. Or we could do this, but I don't think this makes any money. Phil, let's go. So there's three access points to this lot. This one is chained up, which is an easement back there. So there's two other access points we're gonna have to try to go down. Okay, otherwise we get out the wire cutters. And I'm gonna take a picture of this to send to the realtor. All right, off to the next one. Gate number one locked. So we're gonna go. There is two other access points to get to this property. So we're gonna go down here and try those. So we're having a hard time getting on the land. There should be these gates that are open. We have an easement for access. Somebody's locked it and they shouldn't have. It's actually a reason to bow out of the deal. Eight day option, period. So I'm gonna try to go back this way and see if we can get a cut across. On a different easement. Try to see if I can find a little road. It might get a little rough, but we can do it. Is this it, Bill? This is it. We have arrived. Nice, let's get out and see this place. Okay, we're on our land. Now we gotta figure out where are the boundaries? What exactly do we own versus not own? And is this buildable? What can we do with it? We gotta check out the drainage and figure out how do we make money on this thing? Or how do we live on it off the grid? I think it's time to call in Phil. Phil? Hi, Cody. All right, let's talk about this. So this is mine. This is yours, all 10 of them. That's amazing. I'm a West Texas landowner now. You are. Okay, let's talk about what we got here. How do we start to figure out where our boundaries are? What's in this like magic stack here? So what we've got is the GPS coordinates for each corner. Now, in our land contract, we've asked the title company to order a survey for you. So they'll actually put the stakes in the ground on all four corners. Love that. Also, what is this right here? That's your deed. Congratulations. This means we're official? It's your contract for the deed. So you'll have the deed shortly. We have about eight days of our option period to make sure that electrical and water and everything that we need. Let's talk about that. So theoretically, we've seen a couple of things we really like about the land, but let's say something comes back that we don't like about it. Because we have this option period, we can bail. Correct. It takes a while to get people out to verify that everything that you want to do with the land can be done. Can't imagine why it takes them so long. I also bought this land because of this, how close it is to one of the biggest national parks in Texas, if not the country. People come and they camp in these mountains, they camp in the mountains out there, and they look for that mountain, which is Needlepoint Peak. I think it's called. You guys will tell me in the comments if I'm wrong or not. Phil? Yeah? I need some inspiration. I'm thinking teepees, yurts, containers. I want to go see it live. So I'm going to take us and we're going to steal somebody else's homework. Hey. How are you? Thanks for having us. I'm Cody. Nice to meet you. This is Brian and we're so happy to have you. This place is amazing. Thank you. Can we be totally nosy and walk around it? Absolutely. Let's look at some yurts. Okay. You have this view out that's incredible. So this is the quintessential hill country. Our property is 46 acres and we have six units that are down this way and then three that are up the hill and one straight across we're going to go look at in a little bit. So 10 total. 10 total. By the way, we have Brian here for all the numbers. Brian, what did you buy this place for? 3.1 more or less million. How many yurts do you have on this property? We have 10 yurts plus one yurt that we use for spa massage, yeah. Love that. What's the average daily rate? As high as 550 a night or we could be as low as 198 a night. How much does a yurt cost to build? Leaving out land, acquisition costs. We're between 125 and 150, including all the utilities and infrastructure that goes around the yurt, yeah. The word for yurt in Mongolian is gur and so what we have are Mongolian gur. So we're going to go tour Magi Gur. Oh, let's get into it. All right guys, let's go. Look at this. This is amazing. Wait, how much does that cost to build? So that started as a galvanized tub and we put tile on the bottom and plastered the sides and added a pool pump, like a sand filter pool pump and a heater. This is so sexy. You can throw some ice in it in the summer and it's your cold plunge. No way, you're tricky. I like this. Then we've got this, a little fireplace. Okay, this is amazing. Wow, how cool is this? Yes, they're very unique. So this is a traditional Mongolian gur. It's all hand painted. The wood that they use to make the lattice is Siberian pine and they hand strip it and then you can kind of tell it's bent in places. They steam it to bend it and then these are called bagan. This is the female and this is the male and they're holding up the tuno, which is the connection between the earth and the sky equally. What a cool spot. Okay, so I think we should go talk about not the type of business that gets done here, but the real type of business. You wanna help? Okay, one, two, three. Okay, this is where the business actually happens, in the laundry room. Talk to me about what's going on here. So this is where all the real work happens. We bring all the dirty laundry in, we wash it, refold it, make sure it's clean and wrinkle-free. We have a list here of which units are gonna be open on which days. I love a checklist. This is so cool. So basically you have all the things that you've learned over owning Airbnbs for this long. You're like, okay, do all of this. They have to check it off and then you know they're done when they've checked it off and signed off on it. Yes. You guys have turned this not into a job, but a business. And I think so often businesses are actually just glorified jobs because you don't have processes and people that overlay on top of the business. The process is huge. How much did you make with this property last year? Yes. We had gross revenue of just under 800,000 and net income of just under 300,000. Nice. So this business makes money. It does make money. So it turns out you can buy land without having a ton of money. It turns out you can do it faster than you're told. And it turns out you can do it without a ton of permission from other people. Those who say it's impossible should get out of the way of those of us who are doing it. You can literally just do things. You guys, what should I do with this land? Comment below your best idea. I'm going to pick one of you guys and you're gonna get a little surprise. Ah, this is rare. I can't believe we found this out here. Oh, wait a second. Did anybody not know that I wrote a book? Because I did.