All Forum Posts by: Bryant Brislin

It's a lot of work. Try to put in some time listening to podcast interviews of guys who do this full-time, those episodes are out there. Also, join FB groups in land investing (they are out there) and see if someone can mentor you, since it's not a quick, easy answer on underwriting land. The shortest version is most of those guys are trying to get land at 1/5 of the retail value, close on it with their own or someone else's money, and then put on the MLS for 2/3 or so of the retail value so that is sells quick (assigning a contract can be difficult, because for many pieces of land, finding a buyer is hard without putting it on the market). A lot of us use LandVision (Lightbox) and/or Propstream, or you can start off using land sales from Redfin. You have to separate the apples and the oranges and the bananas, as far as if you pull fifteen land sales in a certain area, they can all be so different as far as zoning, topography, utilities, access, regular or irregular parcel shape, drainage, soils, environmental, etc. Wish you the best!

I think that can be a good business plan if the numbers work, of course.  It's nice to know you won't have signifcant repairs for a few years.  Also, in some states, like California, the homebuilder is responsible for many repairs for the first ten years. 

I think it's more something that's required by the Department of Real Estate (or similar entity, it may be different state by state, but in California it's the DRE) or by cities/counties based upon their codes for subdivisions with common areas, etc. While HOA's can be cumbersome, expensive and political (i.e. conflict between homeowners), they are certainly needed for various reasons. However, what I've seen on smaller projects of, for example, fifteen lots where there is only a common driveway to maintain, and maybe some landscaping, is them doing a "Maintenance Association" which is less cumbersome and expensive since there are so few matters to handle. There are real estate attorneys who specialize strictly in these matters, i.e. forming HOA's, etc.

Local REIA's, if any in your neighborhood. And many areas have Facebook groups for investors, flippers, wholesalers, et al for that part of the state or large city.

In the beginning, you can probably start with a generic one with all states, but of course if you identify with escrow company you are going to be working with in each state, you can run the contract by them.  Once you open escrow, escrow companies will often have their own "escrow instructions" or "general provisions" that gives them coverage of anything that may have been missed in your contract. 

I can answer a question here and there for you.  I've been a land broker for a long time.

Hi Gabriel, I'm a land broker and I have sold 150+ properties to builders (both big and small) to do new subdivision tracts.  You should find a local engineer who also helps get projects entitled/approved at the city you are focused on.  Many engineers are not that desirable to work with, i.e. they are too busy, not responsive, etc, so you'll want to find one who seems like they are experiened and actually like to give good customer service. They can help you figure out a bit more to determine which properties are developable from an environmental standpoint (swamps, species), a topographical standpoint (slopes) and what the potential lot count yield will be given the zoning and the city's development standards (set-backs, height limites, lot coverage ratios, etc) associated with said zoning. At some point you would involve an architect, too, but sometimes they can take you down the wrong path. As far as getting a tract map approved and then the actual permits for construction, again, hopefully you can find a hybrid engineer/entitlement consultant. As far as your last question, yes, you'll have to find a competent general contractor (GC) to do the site work and construction, and yes, if you want to also hire a project manager to oversee the GC, engineer and other matters, they are out there to be found. 

If you have done that many deals I'm surprised you want the headache of investors, and don't have the capital to do it yourself.  But with that said, I think I'd rather use business credit cards rather than deal with investors (even the nice ones can be high maintenance).  And hopefully within a short amount of time you are doing enough deals to pay for the marketing overhead yourself. 

There is an FB group called High Value Land Group.  Start there.

@Kreg Thornley please know the following, as I've seen this happen a lot in Southern California where I'm based.  A lot of opportunistic investors who don't know how to really analyze land naively assume that every tax delinquent parcel has a situation where the land owner just didn't have enough money to pay the taxes and thus lost the parcel.  But in many cases, at least here in SoCal, it's many times a situation where the land owner essentially abandoned the parcel for reasons like bad zoning, little-to-no access, irregular shape (i.e. triangular) that makes it less efficient, environmental challenges, topography, etc.  Why would a land owner abandon a parcel to the tax collector? Because if not much can be done with it due to the reasons stated above, they don't want to keep paying property taxes, weed abatement/landscaping, have liability/insurance issues, etc et etc.