Buying A Town & Making Millions in Land Investments w/ Jon Jasniak

Jon Jasniak: [0:00] Immediately started direct mailing West Texas, was buying up 10 acre lots for like 1,500 to $2,500 a pop. And I would owner finance them off to people out there for a $152,150 bucks a month for forty eight, sixty months, and I was like quadrupling or like five, six, seven x my money on these owner financed little lots. That's kinda how it started. Welcome

Speaker 2: [0:23] to the collecting keys podcast. The show where you'll learn how to use real estate to create massive income, not just passive income. Real estate doesn't have to be a get rich slogan. Listen to the country's top real estate operators, and you'll have all the tools you need to replace your w two income and go beyond in under twelve months. Ready to take things to the next level? Let's jump in with our hosts, Mike DeHaan and Dan Austin for today's episode of the collecting keys podcast.

Mike DeHaan: [1:01] On today's episode of the collecting keys real estate investing podcast, we have John Jasniak, who is a land investor in Flipper, and he gives an absolute clinic today on what it takes to make massive, massive money in the land investing business. This dude regularly does 7 figure deals. His current business is like a multi 8 figure business. He's a young guy. Like, I don't know how old he is, but I think he's probably, like, in his late twenties, early thirties. And he is absolutely crushing it. We go into all sorts of different things like how he is doing subdivisions to make a ton of money, how he is pre selling land, so he can determine value before he goes and buys everything, how he finds his deals, how he splits up these different ways to make money in like singular transactions from like he talks about one where he sold to buy this land, he sold some of them cash, sold some of them via notes, then sold some of those notes to other investors, he seller financed them, he did a whole bunch of different things, and it is just really mind blowing when he goes through them. So anyways, guys, there's a ton of value here. This is a great one to take some notes with, and absolutely reach out to John as well. He has his own land investing community, which is very, very popular.

Mike DeHaan: [2:10] And he also has an Instagram that is going very well that he posts a ton of extremely valuable content. He even talks about how he bought a town and what the whole process looks like. Like, this dude's related to everything. It's pretty wild. So anyways, guys, it's a really, really great show, and I know you're gonna enjoy it. So enjoy the show with John Jasniak. Alright, guys. We are here today with John Jasniak. And I don't know where you're based out of. I forgot to ask that before the show. But you are a land investor and developer. And I'm super excited to have you on the show today, John. Because land is kind of all the rage right now. It is a very, very common investment strategy people are starting to pursue. I feel like there are new land gurus popping up every single time, but you're kind of an OG. You've been in this way before it was cool. So I'm super excited to hear about your business, everything that you have going on, man, and it's super great to meet you.

Jon Jasniak: [3:03] Well, I appreciate y'all for having me hailing from Fort Worth, Texas here, so I'm a Texas guy. Love Texas, and yeah, we were talking about that a little bit before the show. There's a lot of land so called gurus popping up. I wouldn't necessarily consider myself an OG. Almost an OG. Been doing it, I think, probably at this recording seven and a half years now. So it's been quite a while, but, yeah, I've learned a few things, and there is a lot of hype right now around land because the returns are just still crazy sky high and projects you can do.

Mike DeHaan: [3:35] Yeah. Well, seven and a half years is pretty good

Dan Austin: [3:37] for To do anything for that long.

Mike DeHaan: [3:39] Like honestly, especially these days dude, I feel like people there, you know, one year, two year maybe, before they're moving on to the next thing.

Jon Jasniak: [3:47] Yeah, just to hit it right off the top, that's something I see so much in business, man, especially with students and folks coming in and learning and stuff, it's like, the shiny object syndrome nowadays, especially in real estate, is like, you can do short term rentals, you can do fix and flips, you can do multi family, like it's just stay focused on one thing, man, and the more you can do that, like the more money you're gonna make.

Mike DeHaan: [4:07] Yeah, well I mean, you look look at the last seven and half years, there's so many other things you could have gone and done outside of land, right? Could have gotten into crypto, You could have done an Amazon store. You could have been drop shipping. You could have gotten into wholesaling. OnlyFans.

Jon Jasniak: [4:20] The other ones. Totally optional.

Mike DeHaan: [4:22] Yeah. OnlyFans. Yeah. You may missed that one for sure. But no, that's awesome though, man. So I guess, let's let's start from the end first, just give people sort of a little bit of context about where you're coming from. What exactly does your business look like? What exactly is it that you do? And then from there, we will kind of go back to the beginning, sort of hear about how you build all that.

Jon Jasniak: [4:41] Sure. So right now, I would say I kind of run three main businesses. It's an 8 figure operation in whole. It's the land side, you know, flipping, developing, subdividing. My unincorporated town, Cornudas, that's a whole another business. And then my third arm is the consulting and teaching businesses. So basically run three main businesses. The main one, obviously, and what drives the most profit, and what I'm an operator in day to day, and passionate about doing is the land stuff. You know, a lot of subdividing, a lot of flipping, that's a multi multi million dollar revenue business per year, and growing quickly. And so doing a lot of subdivides, lot of land deals, then also crazy busy with the two other businesses as well.

Mike DeHaan: [5:26] With an unincorporated town, he just blew over that, like it was nothing, we're gonna dive into that a little

Dan Austin: [5:30] bit I know, love it. I said that's the most Texas thing when Right. He told me

Jon Jasniak: [5:33] Like that's what everyone's fascinated on my social media and everything. Obviously the town posts and everything far outperform the other posts I'll drop. I made a million dollars on this land subdivide, and it's like, God, a fifth of the views is like, I bought a town. And it's like, clearly what people are interested in.

Mike DeHaan: [5:50] It's because it's weird man, like you're literally the first person that I've met that's even said that. So, I mean, as we're going into it, let's dive into that. What do you mean you have an unincorporated town? I know we said we don't do a lot of fundamentals, but I've never even heard that before.

Jon Jasniak: [6:02] Yeah, so my first land deal was in Hudspeth County, Texas, it was a small 53 acre piece, and there's a lot of land out there, and so I've been working in Hudspeth County, Texas since 2017, and then in 2022, I see across my Facebook feed pop up, the town of Cornudus, Texas is for sale in Hudspeth County. Dude, you know, had some trouble with back taxes and was kind of running the business into the ground, and it was time for him to sell. And all 2022 went along. I didn't buy because it's middle of nowhere. I'm in Fort Worth. It's, like, eight hours away. I'm like, how am I gonna manage this? How am I gonna run this? Then finally, late twenty two comes around. Me and my dad go tour the property. I love it. It's you know, I'm like, if I'm gonna become the known person in land and blow up my businesses, what better way to do that than to say I own a town? And so, long story short, was probably the hardest transaction I've ever had to accomplish with the seller, and the situations, and everything involved. Ended up buying it early twenty twenty three, Now we're in late twenty twenty three. It's been probably ten months of solid renovation, hard work, refinishing the kitchen as we speak.

Jon Jasniak: [7:09] Just got the FRP panels up on the wall, and I think we'll be ready to open in a month or two, finally.

Mike DeHaan: [7:16] In town. I I still don't understand.

Jon Jasniak: [7:18] Yeah. So Cornutus, Cornutus is it's out near El Paso, Texas, so you're talking like 50 miles east of El Paso. It's got a motel, a six bed motel, six spot RV park, an old cafe, diner, and convenience store type setup, and three mobile homes on the property. So kind of the goal here, it's certainly a kind of tourist stop along a major highway, US Highway 62180, kind of out in the middle of the desert, but it's also, it attracts surprisingly a lot of locals. There's probably 500 to 1,000 people in a ten, twenty mile radius, like we're talking desert, very sparsely populated, and people love that place, man, to go eat burgers, to go hang out, have a coffee and everything. So it's gonna be a mix of like tourist stop slash local ground for people to come hang out, and kind of the goal is to do glamping setups and have cool Airbnbs out there, and just kind of make it a spot.

Mike DeHaan: [8:13] Yeah. Going through this, I just keep thinking of Schitt's Creek the entire time. That's what I was saying.

Dan Austin: [8:17] I know, right, yeah. It's awesome. I got it on street view, it's it's cool. If you're listening to this, gotta go check it out.

Mike DeHaan: [8:23] Yeah. So Cornedas, that's C O R N U D A S, Texas. And you know, pull it up, First picture is an article of you about how a man bought an entire Texas town on Facebook, and here's what's saying in the picture of you right there.

Jon Jasniak: [8:35] Yeah. Yeah.

Mike DeHaan: [8:35] You're you're not lying, man.

Jon Jasniak: [8:36] That's crazy. So

Mike DeHaan: [8:38] I guess, you know, what's the Is that like a cash flow play or like are you trying to up the town and then sell it to you know, a billionaire who's going bankrupt and now needs to move

Jon Jasniak: [8:49] into the hotel? My goal is to hold it forever because it's more of like a legacy, like reputational thing, like part of my brand, but any, you know, everything's for sale I guess at the right price, but I think though it's a cash flowing property at a high level, it's kind of capped by the operations, because the cafe can obviously do so much business, like the RV park can only expand so much and have so many spots. So really what you could do is start buying land around it, you could actually incorporate it and do lots and start running electric and water and start selling people. Like you could do whatever you really wanted out there, but to keep it simple, at least to start, it's just gonna be a cash flowing business, and I intend to hold it for as long as possible, Hopefully forever.

Dan Austin: [9:32] Yeah, interesting.

Mike DeHaan: [9:33] Yeah, so, no, that that's super super cool. Awesome, man. So let's go into your your land flipping business as well. First off, how did you get into that? Especially if you're doing it seven and a half years ago Yeah. There wasn't really all of the material and gurus and stuff out there like there is now, so I imagine it must have been a lot of trial by fire, just trial and error.

Jon Jasniak: [9:54] Yeah, to get where I am now for sure, back then there was really two people teaching it. It was The Land Geek and Land Academy, and so I ended up hearing good old Mark Podolsky on a podcast, just like, you know, your listeners are probably hearing me on a podcast, right? I was like, man, this guy's, what's he doing? This is interesting. I was working nine to five at the time as an engineer, and I was really searching for extra income, and kind of a way out of that grind, and so I don't know, instantly something just resonated with me, man. I've always been flipping, and buying and selling stuff, and I was like, I could just do that with land. And so I'm listening to Side Hustle Show with Nick Loper, episode 108, It's Mark a great episode, by the way, for your listeners, highly recommend check it out. The guy comes out and starts talking about all the cash flow opportunities with land, you know, I'm buying lots for $5 and selling them for 20 and all this stuff. I ended up buying his course, I bought the Land Academy course as well, studied both of those, and I was pretty quick to take action. Probably after two, three weeks, I was buying my first piece of land that I found, like I said, in Hudspeth County.

Jon Jasniak: [10:53] Some guy out of Florida was listing 53 acres in the Gunsite Ranch on landwatch.com for $10,000, and I ended up negotiating them down to $8,500 for these 53 acres, so it was like $170 per acre. And what was special about that piece is it already was subdivided into five separate lots, and so I ended up selling off each one of those 10.6 acre lots individually, and like doubled my money, you know, total walked away with like 17 or $18. At that point, I was like, okay, there's something to this. I immediately started direct mailing West Texas, was buying up 10 acre lots for like 1,500 to $2,500 a pop, and I would owner finance them off to people out there for $152.50 bucks a month for, you know, forty eight, sixty months, and I was like, quadrupling, or like five, six, seven x of my money on these owner financed little lots. That's kinda how it started, and it just, it really snowballed from there. It was at the beginning of those small lots, and the cash flow started pouring in. At the same time, I was like, fueling this fire with my $150,000 per year engineering job. Like, I was blessed coming out of school to be in petroleum engineering, so I'm just like, you know, buy more land, buy more land, and then it kinda just snowballed to where it is today.

Dan Austin: [12:05] That's fascinating. So is there like, I'm just curious with the business model, are you specifically, do you only now target West Texas, or

Jon Jasniak: [12:11] you go other places? I work all over Texas, and then folks I work with kinda work nationwide, and it can be done nationwide, which is why I love it. There's a few spots I would stay away from, like close to New York City, California for instance. Like, some of these areas not great, but you could still do it. But yeah, you do it nationwide. I do mostly Central And West Texas, but kinda expanding into East Texas now. We got some projects we're looking at out there, but all over Texas, Texas is a great market. I always tell people, you could do like, just one state alone, whether it's Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, etcetera, you could probably do a billion dollars just in one state in land transactions. Certainly a 100 Wow. Just a ton. Wow.

Dan Austin: [12:53] So with that being said, is there the cool part about what you're talking about is the exit on this, because like for me, I'm looking at a map on West Texas, and my inclination wouldn't be that I could pair these land deals with a, basically a retail buyer, this case, how you got started. And you weren't doing necessarily anything, like big subplats, all that sort of stuff. So, I'm just curious on that initial stuff you were doing in West Texas, like how did you pair the buyer for these properties with what you were coming up with?

Jon Jasniak: [13:21] Facebook marketing, that's still how I do all my stuff today. Marketplace, You Facebook really don't need that big of a city, or that big of an area to sell someone land. I've done projects in cities. A good example is Andrews, Texas. I just did a big 32 lot subdivision up there. Andrews is like 15,000 people, and all those lots sold in two and a half months, 32 lots. And so a ten, twenty, 50,000 person city is more than enough market size for, you know, a 10 acre piece of land. And so that's what I was doing, is I was marketing these to people in El Paso, which is a bigger city, or people in Pecos or Fort Stockton, or Midland Odessa, which is a couple 100,000 person city, and they were just, you know, folks who wanna move out of the city, own five, ten, 20 acres of land at market nowadays, and The US is gigantic, like bigger than anyone can even fathom.

Mike DeHaan: [14:14] Yeah. Fascinating. The biggest thing that always gets me with land, you're getting out into some of these funny rural areas trying to sell it to somebody from El Paso. How do you even value it? Right? Like it's there's especially like I said, it's a massive country. There's nothing but land in all directions. So how do you determine what actually is a good price to be buying and selling this land for?

Jon Jasniak: [14:36] Yeah, so that comes down to comparable analysis. Even the small rural markets are gonna have some sort of comparables and some sort of market. Sometimes, what's interesting is you won't even find pieces of land for sale on a given market, and sometimes you can almost set the market. But really, at the end of the day, it's all about what the consumer will pay and what the market will pay and withhold and withstand, so to speak. In places in the middle of nowhere, like Hudspeth County, can be hard to get comparables sometimes. Texas is a non disclosure state, so there's a couple of tricks we use. My favorite's just kinda doing demand testing on Facebook. So like, you know, if I were

Mike DeHaan: [15:13] to buy, if I'm worried

Jon Jasniak: [15:14] about buying a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, like the first thing that I would do is to see if I could sell it before I even bought it. So I would throw up like a little Facebook teaser, whether it be a marketplace, or maybe run $50 in ads to it, and be like, okay, is anyone actually messaging me on this piece of land I'm trying to sell for a thousand dollars per acre, or whatever? So that's kind of reverse engineering into a buy price, which I still do today, especially when I'm entering a new market. Like, there's no way I'm buying a piece of land, especially some of these bigger projects, without seeing if I can find an end buyer who's interested first.

Mike DeHaan: [15:47] Yeah. Do you worry about the seller, like, seeing those ads? Have ever had a deal blow up because of that?

Jon Jasniak: [15:51] I've never had a deal blow up, but I've had brokers and or realtors representing people ask me to take it down. Was like, I've really never gotten in trouble, nothing's ever happened. Beg for forgiveness, not for permission, and I've never had a problem with it. Any people I've worked with never had problems with it. Most we've ever had happen is like, hey, take this ad down, whatever, which I don't understand. Because like, I'm literally driving traffic to your property. You have this piece of land for sale, you're not advertising it as hard as you could or should be, I'm giving you free leads, you have some exclusive contract probably with your seller, like why would you not want me to drive more traffic to your land listing?

Dan Austin: [16:28] Yeah. Right. That's fascinating. Okay, so let me just make sure I understand that is, you'll basically, when you're doing what you're calling demand testing, you'll go and see something that might be listed right now, and actually run ads basically on behalf of that broker for it to drive traffic to it, to see what it looks like. Yeah, so a good example of

Jon Jasniak: [16:44] this was the Andrews County subdivision I just did. Never worked in that market before, it's kind of like an auxiliary, or like a secondary market of like Midland Odessa. I was like, okay, I'm gonna go buy this three fifty acre piece for 1,500 per acre, spend 510,000. How am I actually gonna know that my 10 acre lots I'm gonna create out there are gonna sell? So before I even got under contract, I just ran a geo targeted ad towards Andrews, Texas. Hey, 10 acres coming soon, 1,500 down, 1,000 a month for sixty months. So I was aiming to originate $50,000 notes or so out there, 60 k total. And then I look at the messages and the cost per lead as they pour in on Facebook. Anything under $10 is pretty strong. Anything under $5 is like really strong on a cost per lead. You gotta run ads to these tests to get your data. So on Andrews, I think I was at like 6 or $7 per lead, so I, okay, it's a pretty strong market. I know people are interested, before I even go under contract, in buying 10 acres out there for 1,000 per month for sixty months. And so boom, I went under contract, and then, I mean, obviously the data panned out within two and a half months, we've sold said we're all sold out. We technically got one lot left, but we sold 31 out of 32 lots.

Jon Jasniak: [17:59] Wow. Solid.

Mike DeHaan: [18:01] I guess to put that together at the end, what's your total return on that? You bought that for, is it 510, And then you were selling them for, what'd you say, 1,500 down and 1,000 per month? So how many lots is that? What's the

Jon Jasniak: [18:12] total end result? Yeah. So let's walk through numbers real quick on that. On the buy side, I got it for 1,500 per acre. It was 345 acres. It was a 510 k purchase price. I actually didn't come out of pocket 510 k. I love to do seller financing and ask the seller to carry it out, but she wouldn't do it in this case. So I brought in a private money guy, and these are my two favorite models. You use either seller financing or private money guy. So he comes in for 450 k, straight debt, 18%, amortized loan over five years. So I'm paying him, I think, 11,000 per month on that 18%?

Mike DeHaan: [18:47] Is that interest No. Only, or is that

Jon Jasniak: [18:50] No. Fully amortized. So I think the looking at my calculator right now. It's 11,000 per month for 60 with that private money guy. So he comes in with $4.50, I come in with 60, we get it closed up. Immediately, I started selling him 32 lots. Let's just keep it simple, because at the end of the day, it's never this it's never this clean, right, because I have 32 lots. I probably sold five or six for cash. You know, I'll probably originate, call it 25, 26 notes out of the 32. I'll end up selling a few of those notes, whatever. But to keep it simple, 32 notes at $50,500 each. That's a thousand a month for sixty months. 50,500 at 7% interest times 32, you're looking at about 1,600,000 in notes receivable. I'm carrying 460,000 worth of debt on the property, so it'll be, you know, net over 1,000,000. I'll probably get a few cash sales in there. I'll probably sell some of those notes at 80% or so of face value. So, you know, all said and done, I'm gonna net probably $7,750,000 on that project. We do have to do, to be fully transparent, we're doing a $70,000 road, and I paid 30,000 to get it surveyed, so all said and done, I'm into it, you know, for 60,000 as a down payment up front, and then another 100. So I'm into it, 160, and within a year, if I really wanted to, I could net, call it 750. That's wowed.

Jon Jasniak: [20:19] Yeah, that Man,

Mike DeHaan: [20:20] So got a lot questions for it,

Dan Austin: [20:23] first question is, you taught, you just, because it's top of mind here, you said you sell the notes at 80% of value, where do you find the marketplace for that? Is that just contacts, or is there a marketplace you find?

Jon Jasniak: [20:32] Yeah, so there's a few ways to do it. I've obviously built up a good network of note buyers over the years. If you're interested in selling notes, whatever form of real estate it is, you gotta start building that network like ASAP. A good place to find them nowadays is Paperstack. P a p e r, paperstac, paperstack.com, anyone in real estate might be familiar with that. It's kind of a newer website, but they're putting a good amount of effort into growing it, so I figured I'd plug them. Not affiliated at all, but I found, I have found note buyers on there. Another good resource is, if you just go to Facebook, in the search bar, just search private money lending, private money investing, anything like that, toggle to groups, join all of those big private money groups. There's note buyers just trolling those groups, looking to buy notes. Wow. Not always the greatest discounts that they're offering, but you can find legit note buyers in there. Then finally, just you know, word-of-mouth, referrals, local real estate events, all those are a good option. Really, all you need is three, four, five folks in your network who can buy notes, I mean, I got, you know, that's more than enough that I'm willing to offload. I mean, I got, you you build a network, people are willing

Dan Austin: [21:41] to buy millions of dollars worth of notes pretty quickly. That's solid. So another unrelated question after the notes is, you talked about buying the land and obviously you have to do some level of entitlements or sub platting or something. Like how does that process look for you and is there a reason why you wouldn't go to certain locations because of their local processes for subdividing the land? Definitely. Subdividing is a pretty complex area of expertise,

Jon Jasniak: [22:08] because it can vary so greatly. I mean, you could do, and I've done it all, you could do an entitlement process, working where you actually need to build some roads, do drainage studies, do some minor, even more extensive sort of engineering to get it passed by the county or city. So it's like full blown subdividing, it can get pretty complicated, and quote unquote, you know, entitling the land. My favorite area is to be outside of city limits, where there's basically little to no entitlement required. Maybe a dirt road, maybe run some power, that's pretty simple. And then you could go even easier than that, where you're looking at plat exempt or minor subdivides where there's basically no approvals needed, and that's, you know, lot of cases, all lots are touching public roads. You're above a certain acreage range, like in Texas, it's 10 plus, in Tennessee, it's five plus acres. Kind of each state, each county has different regulations and loopholes. So those are really simple, especially for beginners. And then as far as different counties and different states, for sure, there's places I would stay away from. California, like, you can get hung up in a plotting process for eighteen months, because they want environmental studies, and how's it affecting the fish, and what's it gonna do to the soil, and blah blah blah. Whereas Texas, or Tennessee, or Virginia, or some of these areas are almost care less what you do, which is crazy.

Dan Austin: [23:29] Right. That's cool. One question on that too, is, so are there situations, and you did talk about seller financing, maybe this plays into that, but are there situations where you might take, let the seller remain entitled while you take it to different phases of entitlement just to make sure that you're like going to get it, and then having more earnest money go hard as you go through the phases? Do you ever do anything like that?

Jon Jasniak: [23:51] Yeah, definitely. That would be kinda just like an extended close or an extended option scenario to get it under contract, start running, you know, traps with the county, what exactly are you gonna require the city to get me approved here. A lot of things like doing water studies or water testing I will do on some sort of extended feasibility on these big projects, like the Andrews one we're doing test water wells. If well water is a proposed use, we wanna make sure that they have at least a few gallons per minute, they can hit a water well, so that way they can have water. Now I've sold dry land, and you can sell dry land, but obviously having water in your land is gonna greatly improve the value. So for sure, I always tell people, don't go under contract unless you absolutely need to. Like, there's a lot of this stuff that can be done before going under contract, before giving any sort of hard earnest money. And I think what a lot of folks get kind of looped into are kind of this mindset of like FOMO. They're like, oh my god, this deal's so good. I'm gonna miss out. I need to go under contract. And it's like, a lot of times, especially with these pieces of land, there's not like a huge buyer pool. Like, oh my god, this is a bidding war on this piece of land. Most of the times, if it's on market, it's been on market for months and months at a time, or if it's off market, you know, the seller's gonna be there in a couple weeks after you've made some phone calls, and run some traps. Never get FOMO on a deal.

Jon Jasniak: [25:09] Yeah. Good advice. That's crazy, man.

Mike DeHaan: [25:11] You got my mind just sort of going through this stuff. And, you know, with Dan's question about avoiding areas, so we did like just a small sub plat on a house that we bought here locally that we renovated the house and we just separated off the back half of the lot. It took forever Mhmm. Just to do one lot that took a took grunty year. It's a freaking nightmare.

Dan Austin: [25:30] Washington. Right? Washington. Yeah. Exactly. Washington and in the and in city limits where they claim that they have a affordable housing policy, which they Yeah, do right.

Jon Jasniak: [25:40] Yeah. Just gotta be careful with that, because the way I look at it, that all goes into the economic analysis, Like that year, there's always a cost benefit, like that year, what could you have done with the capital elsewhere? Or, you know, if you're hard or you bought the project, a lot of people will go in and buy these projects, and then do all that due diligence, and, like, planning and rezoning or entitling, whatever, and it's like, alright, now you got however much, a 100,000, 500,000, a million dollars tied up in a project, and it's not cash flowing, you're not getting anything from it for a year. That affects your yield, your IRR at the end the day.

Mike DeHaan: [26:12] Yeah, exactly, especially with Rawland as well. Like with ours, we had the benefit of the fact that it is a house in a class location that we rented. House is worth $4.50. Yep. And then the land's worth $1.50 about the whole thing for, $2.89. So we had a ton of upside on it. But, you know, if it's just raw land, you're not necessarily gonna have that ability.

Jon Jasniak: [26:31] Yeah, it sounds like a good project. That was a solid Yeah.

Dan Austin: [26:33] It's worked to our benefit for sure.

Mike DeHaan: [26:34] It has so far, yeah. No, that's awesome, man. How are you sourcing all of your deals? Are you doing stuff purely direct to seller? Are you running like marketing campaigns? Are you working with brokers? Are you just sniper targeting land opportunities in different areas?

Jon Jasniak: [26:49] So I've done all of that obviously, but right now, where I'm finding a lot of my deals, and it surprises everybody, is just on the MLS, with land deals. I just, I'm about to go under contract, they're asking 350,000, this is a relatively small deal, but they're asking $3.50 for two thirty acres, and I came in and offered them $126.05.

Mike DeHaan: [27:12] And I they

Jon Jasniak: [27:12] love it. It was like 40%. Yeah. So I'm finding stuff on market like that, low balling, getting creative with offers. It's like there's so much just to be had, especially with subdividing on market. I think everyone's getting caught up in SMS texting, and direct mailing, and all this stuff, I'm like, there's so much opportunity just on market right now, I think everyone's skipping over that, and going straight to the landowner approach.

Mike DeHaan: [27:36] Yeah, it's so funny, Zach, the biggest land deal that we ever did, we wholesale that, it was on the market for $4.50 and then the seller received a mailer from us and I didn't know it was worth so we offered him 200 and they accepted it, right? Know, 40% of what it was listed on the MLS form, we ended up assigning it for I think 300.

Jon Jasniak: [27:54] The Andrews one was listed for like 1,050,000, and I offered $5.10, so that was like a little bit less than half of what she was asking. Wow. Like basically what you did, you sent out direct mail, it got hit, an MLS listing got hit with your mail price, and they offered it, so why not just offer people on the MLS what you would offer them over direct mail? Like the most they're

Dan Austin: [28:13] gonna say is no. Totally, makes too much sense.

Mike DeHaan: [28:15] I think a lot of people are just embarrassed to have that conversation, right? Especially because I think in The United States, we don't come from like a bartering culture. You know, you go out of places around the world, they're used to kind of having and having those. But here, we're used to walking into a store, and if something says that it's $2, it's $2, right? Is True. You know, someone's asking, x amount of money, they think you should do that. Unless you're trying to sell something on Facebook marketplace, and you have like your perfectly fine, I don't know, air compressor you're trying to sell for a $100, people will come in and offer you $20 for it. But for some reason, when it's more expensive things, people feel weird about doing it. Right?

Dan Austin: [28:49] Right. So the other thing that comes to mind too, that I would like, is when you see something listed, at least for me, one of my natural inclinations I've had to overcome, so if you see this property listed for a million dollars, you got to assume, oh, I'm sure a ton of people will offer that. I totally get it, it's so high, and they're probably a stubborn seller and they won't come off of that. What are you seeing when you go in and meet these people that have it for a million and you get it for $5.10?

Jon Jasniak: [29:13] I'm saying that most of the time they haven't even gotten off.

Mike DeHaan: [29:15] Which

Jon Jasniak: [29:16] goes to, you know, the point that was just made, is like, okay, they're asking a million people think, oh, well that's why I need to pay them. I'm just not gonna offer them anything. And so I think, yeah, not many people are willing to have that conversation, like, okay, I'll give you 50 or 60% of what you're asking. I've found that, it's just sitting there and they haven't gotten any Yeah, more often

Mike DeHaan: [29:37] than not. That's the other thing too, is people like to think that if something is on the market at a certain price and no one's bought it yet, then there's something wrong with it. People don't like to consider the fact that something probably is overpriced or, you know, there is another motivation there. They are willing to take less, but no one's even tried to do that yet. So Totally. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

Jon Jasniak: [29:58] Yeah. A good story that comes to mind for me there is my biggest project to date, my Jazz Acres subdivision, it was a $1,500,000 purchase on seller financing, and all said and done, was 5 or 6,000,000 gross worth of land in this big subdivide, and it had all these pipelines and some oil field running through it. And I remember calling the broker, I was like, I wanna subdivide this thing. And he's like, John, I'm a broker owner. If this was a developable piece of land, a subdivide candidate, trust me, I would've already done this already. And I'm like, okay. It kinda scared me a little bit, but I ran with it, and next thing you know, I'm buying it and subdividing, and it sold like hotcakes. I'm like, this dude was scared of all the pipelines and some minor problems. There was this pig property or whatever, and I was just like, no problem for me. Not everyone has the same vision, which is just, it's interesting how differently people think, and how there can be just drastically different outcomes.

Mike DeHaan: [30:53] Yeah, you gotta shoot the shot, right? It's like that with every home or real estate. I mean, most people, they look for reasons not to buy as opposed to reasons to buy. Right? I mean you see that in residential, in multi family, and whatever, like that's been one of our big things on the wholesale side. We get so many buyers that are interested in properties that we send out, we're trying to dispo. People always have reasons why it's not a good property. Had one that for we tried to a $15,000 fee that no one would touch and everyone thought it was a terrible deal, we ended up flipping and made like $85. There we go. It's like they could have bought it and still made 60, right? But they instead

Dan Austin: [31:29] Like this isn't the same exact deal they talked about on that podcast I listened to, so it

Mike DeHaan: [31:33] does Yeah, not work a

Dan Austin: [31:34] exactly. Just crazy.

Mike DeHaan: [31:35] No, that's awesome, man. So before we get into the initial questions, for people that were interested in getting into land flipping, where's kinda like the basic place that people should start, do you think?

Jon Jasniak: [31:46] I think YouTube, man. There's a lot of good free stuff on YouTube nowadays. A lot of people, including myself, have even full free courses and stuff on YouTube, and the Facebook groups as well. If you just go into Facebook, again, search bar, toggle groups, search land flipping, land investing, stuff like that. It seems kind of the land community likes to hang out on Facebook in the groups. Like there's a lot of good groups, and there's questions flowing back and forth. You could learn a lot without having to do anything. It's like drinking from a fire hose, you can learn a lot.

Mike DeHaan: [32:19] Yeah. Awesome man, good stuff. I mean, YouTube University is a great way to learn anything these days. Yep. You know, can't convince people of that, but they're happy to go and take out a $200,000 loan to go and learn about ancient Roman history in a university class.

Jon Jasniak: [32:32] Well, they also, they love to go take out 200,000 out of their bank account or a loan, and buy a piece of property before even watching like a free video on how it's done, it's it's crazy. That's very

Dan Austin: [32:43] very true. Totally.

Mike DeHaan: [32:44] Awesome. Well, good stuff, John. Lots of lots of great tidbits here. So we're gonna dive into our end of show questions here. We ask the same three questions for everyone that comes on the show. So the first question that we have is, what is your craziest real estate investing story? This can be a big win, a big loss, you know, crazy tenant, crazy seller, whatever you got.

Jon Jasniak: [33:05] Yeah, it's gotta be the Cornudas story, for sure. The guy was selling, he had over 100,000 in back taxes and attorney fees, me and my dad went and toured that property, it would've been December 22, and immediately just combative, a little hostile, didn't really think I was a serious buyer or whatever. I'll never forget, we're kind of going through a couple points during that tour. One was we're going through a truck ride with him through the property, and I was like, can I get out and get a video? And he was like, no. He locked the doors of his truck. He's like, there's plenty of videos of this online, like no videos. Like, okay, and so I'm like trapped in this dude's truck. Where is this going? And then we get back to the diner, and there's one water well on the property, and I'm like, Can I get a water sample of this well? Because I didn't know, is it contaminated water, is there something crazy? What's going on with this? And he's like, you can try, but I'll shoot you. I was like, oh And my so there was just a bunch of different scenarios like that that tour. I ended up buying that property completely without any inspections, with basically just sight unseen, my one brief tour of the property ended up buying Cornudas just based on that.

Jon Jasniak: [34:16] Was like, you know, it's a spot on the map, I'm gonna own my own spot, it's what's the worst I can go wrong here? Thankfully nothing, like no radioactive waste or anything has been found, very thankful

Dan Austin: [34:28] Yeah, for that's good to know, oh man.

Mike DeHaan: [34:30] Did you say what you ended up buying that for when we talked about it before?

Jon Jasniak: [34:33] I've never disclosed it to anyone, I don't know if I ever will, but I will say it was in the multi 6 figure range, that's the most I've ever disclosed it.

Mike DeHaan: [34:41] Okay, multi 6 figures but under under a million bucks, but you know, decent amount of money so, okay. 6 figures.

Jon Jasniak: [34:48] I would say. Yeah, we'll

Mike DeHaan: [34:48] just keep it there. Somewhere in the 6 figures. That gives good context. Did you end up having to pay all of his costs,

Jon Jasniak: [34:54] like the legal costs? Yeah, I came out of closing.

Mike DeHaan: [34:56] Did you? Came out of It was 100

Jon Jasniak: [34:58] It was 100, I think it was 125 or so, came out of closing, so that is the baseline of what I paid for Cor Nudas, you can go from Yeah, yeah, was 125 gs's in back taxes and attorney fees, and that I can disclose, because that's actually public record. It was all filed, and he was about to get foreclosed out. I'll never forget, there was late night conversations with him and the title agent. He made the title agent who was closing the deal cry, and all this crazy stuff, because he was like, I need to get a runner down to in the courthouse and file this paperwork, because we need to fight the foreclosure. He said, I need to know if you're gonna go through the transaction. He's screaming on the phone, I'm like, Just calm down, it's all gonna be okay. Because he wanted to do a quick handshake deal, like give me a cashier's check at the courthouse. I'm like, dude, there's a tax lien on the property for 6 figures, there's no way we're doing that. So I ended up convincing him to close with the title company, and it was rollercoaster the entire way through. There was multiple times where I thought I was gonna lose it, but we ended

Dan Austin: [35:58] up getting it across the finish line. Sounds like one of our sellers.

Mike DeHaan: [36:01] Yeah, sellers are all the same, man, when they get into that desperate mode. We've all had that before. Nope, totally. Especially this thing with older I people don't know why they think that like this, we're gonna bring like a briefcase full of cash, we're just gonna like write them a check and walk away. We deal with that all the time. Did they used to do that in like the seventies? I don't think they did.

Dan Austin: [36:21] Who knows? They used to do it I

Jon Jasniak: [36:22] believe as of like twenty years ago, twenty, thirty years ago, we forget that technology sometimes has evolved so quickly, and you know, just like twenty, thirty years ago, it was like me at the closing office and shake a hand and sign documents and hand over checks. And nowadays of course, we do it all online, and we just email and scan stuff back and forth, and wire funds, so we're kind of

Mike DeHaan: [36:45] blessed Yeah, in that they don't want any part of that spaceman technology, you know? So Nope. Awesome. No, that's a crazy deal though. Cool, alright second question, what is the number one tip you have for an investor trying to scale their real estate business?

Jon Jasniak: [37:01] Trying to scale, I mean there's so many different ways I could go with this. I think don't delegate what you don't know for sure, especially in the real estate space. The first thing that people wanna do is start hiring VAs. Having people do stuff that they can do in thirty seconds or a minute, and it's just like, dude, sometimes you needed to sit your butt down in your computer chair and crank out some work. So if you wanna scale your business quick, I would say put in a more manual work, longer hours, and don't be quick to delegate. Like, my best decision I think was hiring someone full time. Like, he's on his way to my office right now, my desk is a mess, there's papers here, we're gonna sit down for probably twenty, thirty minutes, he's gonna notarize some documents for me, it's gonna go into the mail, all this stuff. Like, you can't do that stuff with a VA. And sometimes I gotta get to the post office myself and drop something in the mail, it's like, I'm not gonna complain about that, because I'm trying to scale my business to a $100,000,000 business. There's certain things, signatures, stuff I need to sign. Of course, you need to hire and delegate when you get to a certain level in order to keep scaling, but especially starting off in the land space, that's the first thing they wanna do is, I'm gonna get a VA in The Philippines to be my acquisitions manager, and all this stuff. Dude, how many deals do you have coming in where you need an acquisitions manager, and you need to buy it right, so you need to be looking at

Dan Austin: [38:20] the deal, especially starting off. So that's kinda my advice. Boy, man. So underrated is an actual thing called hard work. And especially when you're trying to scale a business, because there are so many people out there saying delegate, delegate, systematize, make it so you don't have to work that much. But in reality, if you're going to grow a good business, and you're going to be the owner, you're gonna be the key player there, you have to work, put in your time, and it's not always easy. Mike and I know that firsthand.

Jon Jasniak: [38:44] Now systematizing, for sure, systematizing and delegating, kinda two completely separate things. Systematize, I've learned that the hard way, like that, you wanna start doing as soon as possible. The delegating part, I think you actually wanna push off as long as Obviously, it's kind of inverse thinking, push that off as long as possible, especially if you wanna scale quickly.

Mike DeHaan: [39:05] Yeah, it's such an underrated comment. Like, I can't tell you how many people we've talked to that are like, we're mostly in the wholesale space, but they'll be like, we're doing one to two deals a month, I'm trying to figure out how to remove myself from my business. I'm like, what are you trying to remove yourself? You're not making any But money if you're looking at what that's gonna look like over the next year, you're probably making like an okay salary. You don't have a position to be just like taking a step back.

Jon Jasniak: [39:31] I oftentimes wonder what people do on the day to day, because if they're doing one, two deals a month, you know, are they only working one, two hours a day? They've already created a pretty seamless, delegated, low work business. Maybe that's for them. There's plenty of people, that's what they should be doing. They should be living a comfort, carefree lifestyle and just do two deals a month, like that's perfectly fine. Nothing wrong

Mike DeHaan: [39:55] with Yeah, think a lot of times what people are doing when they're in that zone is they are not doing the actual money making activities, they are doing the things that feel safe and comfortable. So in our zone, what they're always not doing when they aren't scaling up is they're not doing their follow-up calls, they're not making offers. Right? They are instead going around and fiddling around trying to figure out how to optimize their data or their marketing when that's not why they're not closing deals. They're not they're not closing deals because they're not making the sales calls. But Yep.

Dan Austin: [40:21] The hard stuff.

Mike DeHaan: [40:21] Super, super cool. I I think one of the most telling things, just quick out of tangent on this, I heard I think it was Leila Hermozzi. She was saying that they deal a lot with that with their acquisitions.com stuff. And she said, you have no right to be trying to remove yourself from your business until your business is making $10,000,000 a year. Interesting. Right? And I thought that that was a very different perspective from so many of like the financial independence people out here who were trying to, you know, remove themselves from their business, that's doing $50,000 a year.

Jon Jasniak: [40:51] A great podcast everyone should listen to, as well as recently it came out, Grant Cardell was on the iced coffee hour with Jack Selby and Graham, and he talked about the exact same thing. He was like, they're like, do you have someone like a CFO, like, making your financial decisions or financial advisors? He's like, no. I make all my financial decisions, and they were like asking him all these questions, and he was basically saying the same thing. He's like, people don't realize, like, I do all this stuff myself. Like someone GC's level, like still operating in the trenches, like don't think that you're too good to have some VA or financial assistant like making decisions for you.

Dan Austin: [41:28] Yeah, Totally. Amazing.

Mike DeHaan: [41:31] Alright, John. Where can people find you, follow you, and reach out to you if you'd like to do so?

Jon Jasniak: [41:36] Johnjasniak on all social medias, I answer all my DMs, emails, love connecting, love looking at deals, just for free, if you wanna DM me, hey, what do you think about this piece of land? Like, is this a deal? Whatever. Like, I'm just obsessed with looking at land deals. And then johnjasnic.com/land, like you can find my free course there, ebook, a bunch of stuff, all the connections. Shoot me a DM or an email.

Mike DeHaan: [42:01] Awesome. Yeah. Jasniak, got there for you audio listeners is j a s n I a k. But we will also put that in the show notes for you guys. Awesome, John. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show, man. You dropped an incredible amount of knowledge, and congrats on your success. I definitely wanna keep in touch with you because what you're doing is super interesting to me. And also to you, you're one of the people that we've had on this show that I can tell just by your vibe, but you're saying that you are a legitimate operator. You're not flushing numbers, you're actually out there crushing it man. You'd be surprised, we always, we get a lot of people on this show, it's like yeah, have some information, but also half of the year kinda like, you like to think you're a big deal, but you're really not much, but you're definitely the opposite of

Jon Jasniak: [42:37] I that, appreciate that, and I definitely appreciate you guys having Yeah, me absolutely.

Mike DeHaan: [42:42] So right on guys, we'll absolutely reach out to John on his social medias and check out his website, you heard it from his own mouth, you have a deal you're looking at or you're interested in land flipping, go ahead and give him a DM, reach out to him and he'd be more than happy to take a look at whatever you're looking at. So hit him up there, that is why people come on these shows, it's because they want public exposure, they wanna interact with you. So don't be shy, we're all nice, everyone who comes on this show is more than happy to chat with you. But besides that everybody, please go and leave us a five star review, ready to listen to your podcast, share this with anyone who's interested in investing, or land flipping, or you know, just wants to hear through you guys talk about making money, which you I feel like there's a lot of people that just like listen to that even though they don't take any action. You do you. I don't care. It won't happen to everybody. Thanks so much. We appreciate it, and we'll talk to you next week. Thanks. Thanks

Speaker 2: [43:30] for listening to Collecting Keys. Drop us a five star review on iTunes and send us a screenshot to mike@collectingkeys.com for your chance to receive a free collecting keys t shirt.