Mark Podolsky, aka The Land Geek, has been buying and selling raw land full-time since 2001. Hence the title of his book, Dirt Rich, which details his approach for creating passive income through land investing, without worrying about renters, renovations, and rehabs.
So how’d he get to this point? What’s he trying to sell you? How much does it cost? Should you invest? What are other people saying about it?
Let’s find out. Read on for my Land Geek review.
“I worked on my land investing business part-time for about 18 months until the income from that exceeded my investment banking income,” Mark said. “And I’ve been doing it full-time ever since.”
“I’ve done over 5,200 land deals and I absolutely love it,” he continues.
“The way the model works: let’s say I’m looking at 10 acres in a county in Texas. And I see someone on the tax roll that owes $200 in back taxes.”
“This tells me two things.”
“Number one, they have no emotional attachment to that raw land. It’s in Texas. And the owner lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
“And number two, this person is distressed in some way. Because they owe back taxes. When we don’t value something, we don’t pay for it, right?”
“So what I’ll do, then, is I’ll send ’em an actual offer on that property.”
“And the way that I’ll do that is I’ll look at the comparable sales for the last 12 to 18 months. Whatever I determine it’s worth, I’ll divide that number by four. That gives me what Warren Buffett calls a 300% margin of safety.”
So say it’s worth about $10,000. Cool. Mark will send the owner an offer for $2,500 for this hypothetical 10 acre parcel.
Now in reality, fewer than 5% of people will accept this offer.
But when someone says yes, now you need to do some deep research. Make sure that person does, in fact, still own that plot of land. Make sure there’s no liens on the property. Make sure there’s no breaks in the chain of title. And so on and so forth.
And then, if everything checks out, you go ahead and you buy the property.
Now that you own it for $2,500, you already have a best built-in buyer.
Who? Anyone who lives close to that area of land.
You’ll send ’em a letter: “Yo, before I go to open market, here’s your opportunity to expand your holdings, protect your views, protect your privacy, know who your neighbor’s gonna be.”
Oftentimes, what’ll happen is, one of those neighbors is gonna buy it back from ya – at its full price of $10,000.
If they all pass, however, you’ll go to your buyers list, Craigslist, Facebook buy/sell groups, and any of the land selling websites online.
You’ll make the offer irresistible. A car payment, basically.
Maybe you ask for $2,500 as a down payment and then finance the rest of it at $449 a month, at 9% interest, for eight years.
Boom. You’ve just created passive income. Monthly mailbox money for the next eight freakin’ years.
And you don’t have to deal with any renters, rehabs, renovations, or rodents.
Now go rinse and repeat to desired level of monthly cash flow.
That’s essentially the mile-high overview of Mark’s land investment strategy.
There are a number of different ways to learn from Mark.
You can snag a copy of his book, Dirt Rich.
He sells an Investor’s Toolkit, which has video training, paperwork, and other resources, for $1,997.
Or there’s Flight School, a live 16-week program, which costs as much as $12,000.
Or there’s one-on-one coaching that costs even more.
Or you can attend one of Mark’s upcoming Bootcamp workshops.
Sounds so slow and complicated and expensive compared to what I’m doing: virtual real estate. Tap below.