Episode 61: The 7 biggest mistakes Land investors mande in 2025

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ground Game Podcast. This is your co-host, Clay Hepler.

Justin Piche (00:07)
This is your other ghost, Justin Piche, we're here to show you how to win the ground game.

Good morning. Happy Thanksgiving. Let me be the first to wish you.

Clayton Hepler (00:23)
What's up, dude?

you

Thank you, thank you, man. Happy Thanksgiving to you too. ⁓

Justin Piche (00:30)
⁓

What are

you guys doing? What are your Thanksgiving traditions?

Clayton Hepler (00:40)
⁓ We usually host in our place, we usually host and so my wife was ⁓ she's cooking a 24 pound turkey dude. I'll send it to you. It's massive.

Justin Piche (00:54)
Dude,

that's a big one. That's a big one.

Clayton Hepler (00:57)
It's

massive. We don't even have that many people. So ⁓ we probably 10.

Justin Piche (01:03)
How many people are coming?

Dude, that's a big turkey for 10 people.

Clayton Hepler (01:08)
It's so big. It is so big. So, yeah, I'm just doing daddy duty this morning, man. My wife's gonna sleep in a little bit. She was working pretty hard yesterday, prepping for everyone to come over. We have our neighbors coming over later. But that's it. How about you guys? Do have any traditions?

Justin Piche (01:28)
you know, not, I mean we have like family traditions, but now that we're, you know, we have little kids of our own, we haven't really set up anything. So we are, we're in North Carolina at my brother-in-law's house. And so we're going to do Thanksgiving with them. They've got two little girls as well. And we all have decided, you know, we're not really, we're not going to go all out. We're going to do a turkey. So we got a turkey. I thought it.

I finished thawing it yesterday. I made a brine. I started brining it yesterday. So it'll be ready to go to cook. It's only 13 pounds. It's 13 pounds for, I think, like six adults maybe and five kids. So we'll have probably not much but a little bit of leftovers is my guess.

One thing I remember most about Thanksgiving is my mom making this French dressing is what she called it. It was ⁓ like a meat-based stuffing that was just so good. But we're not gonna have that this year, because I'm not gonna make it, because it takes forever to make. So.

Clayton Hepler (02:34)
Got it. I mean,

usually I've answered a really good bakers and so usually for me, it just became more about eating the pies like the pumpkin pies. We have a banana pie this year, like a banana custard pie. We cherry pies. I mean, dude, I'm a sweets guy. I love my sweets. it's it'll be a day like that. So got to get some

Justin Piche (02:45)
Ooh.

Don't

do anything that's gonna hurt your bet with Drew, you know? I don't know what would hurt it, but...

Clayton Hepler (03:01)
I know, I know, I know. I'm so far ahead,

dude. I'm so far ahead of Drew right now. He's kind of like thrown in the towel. I hope you'll listen to this, ⁓ And so it's like, definitely won't drink, definitely won't, but I might mess up a bit and be like, dude, it's Thanksgiving. Like, did we get a mulligan here? ⁓ So we'll see. But I'm so far ahead. He could even give me a point. ⁓

Justin Piche (03:12)
You

Clayton Hepler (03:31)
red spot and I would still be ahead of him. It's been really good though. It's been a really good challenge. I've just really, it was interesting. My wife made me a drink the other night and I just didn't drink it. Like I just didn't have any desire to drink it. ⁓ So it's been like really healthy in terms of my alcohol consumption and just respecting boundaries. So.

Yep. Another wife guy on a podcast talking about how he's not drinking alcohol.

Justin Piche (04:04)
I had

a drink yesterday, I two beers yesterday. I had yours. No, it's good, it's good. think there's I went, every Lent I give up alcohol. So every year I give it, like don't drink for some decent period of time. And then a couple years ago I did the full kind of like 75 hard, spent six months going.

Clayton Hepler (04:11)
For me, thanks dude, thanks, yeah, I appreciate it.

Justin Piche (04:33)
ridiculous on health stuff and it was good. I I felt great. I was in the best shape of my life. But it took a ton of... I was just having conversation last night with my family about young people on Ozempic and they were talking about... I made a comment. was like, man, you know...

It's not really that hard to do. It really isn't. It does take a lot of mental discipline though. And my wife was like, yeah honey, that's one of the reasons why. If somebody doesn't have a medical reason why, they just want to be a little skinnier, it's because they don't have that mental discipline to just actually control what they eat and exercise in a healthy way. That's why they're doing it.

Clayton Hepler (05:04)
Yes.

Justin Piche (05:27)
I'm not here to judge.

Clayton Hepler (05:28)
I think that brings us perfectly into the topic for today about mistakes that people make. We all know what we should do. We shouldn't eat the brownie, but people make lot of mistakes that you and I are seeing jointly by land investors that is causing them to... ⁓

not hit the results they're looking to hit. ⁓ I'd love for you to hit us from the jump in. What's top of mind for you? What's the number one mistake or a mistake that you see a lot of land investors making in 2025?

Justin Piche (06:06)
Man, yeah, there's so many mistakes people make. And hey, I'm guilty of some of these myself. these, even though I know they're mistakes, it's still sometimes, sometimes the ⁓ momentum or inertia of having a process and ⁓ having a system, a way you do things is really challenging to turn from, even when the market has already turned.

And so the first one that we'll talk about is spraying marketing with no real strategy. And this used to work. You know, a lot of these mistakes are not necessarily inherent mistakes. They're just techniques that maybe worked at one point, but the market has moved past this and where you are and you need to, you need to adjust with the market. So, ⁓ I think we talked about this last podcast, but I think they're

there is a whole lot of effort that needs to go into selecting markets and deciding where you're going to go. And actually,

doing an analysis on sell through rates and days on market and demand and where demand is shifting and where prices are increasing versus decreasing and using that to target your markets. And the reason why this is a big mistake, why why spraying out marketing and not spending enough time actually analyzing where you want to go is a mistake is because there are a lot of very slow markets right now.

And there are a lot of markets where price trends are going down because demand is softening substantially. And the way we comp, especially if you have a team of people comping, is you're looking at past sales and past results of things, of properties, days on market, et cetera. And if price is softening, days on market is going up, and you're making offers based on end of ⁓ 2024 or mid 2024 prices,

you're going to be offering too high in lot of those markets and you're going to hold onto your inventory a lot longer than you would like to. And that can kill, know, if you don't have big capital resources or if you're doing mostly double closes and you rely on that fast transaction to happen for you to actually close a deal, then working in markets that ⁓ don't have quick turnover or high demand are going to be bad for your business.

Clayton Hepler (08:25)
Yeah, I completely agree with that. Just one thing to add is that spraying marketing without a strategy comes also down to how quickly you're learning from the marketing. Like, are you A-B testing everything or are you just sending out one mailer that you got downloaded from a PDF from a website, right? Are you actually putting thought into the way that you're talking to your demographic? Are you targeting the right demographic?

⁓ you know, there's easy modes and hard modes, right? And you know, the easy mode is let's just send it out. Just like the easy mode is let's just take the OZ because you were talking about earlier. the hard mode is I'm going to build my program. I'm going to follow my program. I'm going to track my calories. I'm going to track my steps. I'm going to track how much I weigh. I'm going to do all the things that you were talking about doing, man. ⁓ so I, I love that.

Justin Piche (09:17)
That's a good point.

Maybe just to dig in just a teeny bit more detail on that.

Feedback loops are so important. And if you aren't tracking how your marketing is performing, you will never have confidence that you're going to the right place or doing the right thing. And maybe the example here is, I have spent a lot of time spraying marketing. I rescaled a team. We had a lot of outbound capacity. And the idea of spending hours upon hours upon days sorting through markets and then trying to get enough data that could actually fill the time of the big

team

that I had built was like, this is not going to work. So let's just market everywhere to everything in these states, these markets. And it worked great for a long period of time because we were just, don't know if we were lucky or if just the market was still kind of pretty steady and there was demand. And then it stopped working great. You know, it's not like not working. It works. You strikes, you know, every once in a while kind of thing, but it's, there's not really a method to it. I can't look at this County and that County and

and

say like, this is why we should go after this county, or this is why we should go after that county.

Justin Piche (10:29)
So we have data now though. The good thing about all this is that we have data and so I can look at that marketing of that spraying that I did and I can actually hone in on like the sweet spots. I can say, these are the counties we've never had any success in despite sending X amount of mailers or whatever. These are the counties we've had a lot of success in. I can even go down and look at what are the characteristics about that person or that property that gave us success. And that's where the feedback comes in. Even if you're spraying.

You still need to be tracking stuff, but a better way to do it is to have focused A-B testing in different markets, track everything so you know exactly what is happening when you get the results back. And you can go, that'll inform you, right, of where you should go next.

Clayton Hepler (11:11)
This is something that we're working on in the deal engine right now, which is list stacking. How do we stack the list so that we are guaranteeing to get a higher response rate on whatever marketing we're sending? This is common in the household selling world. We've always talked about how household sellers are five to 10 years ahead of us. So we have been experimenting with list stacking, demographics, distress. ⁓

background and really, really working on that. ⁓ so that we can help our, you know, everyone in the deal engine for that. got some interesting stuff, probably Q1, it'll be coming out, ⁓ in the deal engine, but that's just the result of our own testing. Like you were saying. ⁓ so I think mistake number two comes down to no lead management discipline for me. I, know I've talked a lot about the sales component and how that's truly alpha now. ⁓ no speed lead, no follow up.

No recycling, no KPI dashboard and team flying blind. One thing we'll say about discipline, discipline comes down to what you do when you don't feel like it. Right? So there's the initial thing. There's the discipline, the inertia of let's establish this process, which most people don't have. Let's track the KPIs, which most people don't have. Then there's a discipline dude of every single day. This is how we do it. People will regress. Your team members will regress to the mean and the person on your team with the highest standards.

dictates how the team performs. As a CEO, you should have the highest standards, specifically in the sales department. And so if you create a culture of excellence and you reinforce the excellence, then your lead management will have discipline. But a lot of us were sold when we got into this business, the ease in any business, right? We're sold this by the people that are selling the courses, how we got into it, which thanks, you know, thanks for them. You had a great experience.

Justin Piche (13:04)
Thank

Clayton Hepler (13:09)
with learning the business and look where you are today, right? You're in North Carolina, able to pay for a lot of stuff, you're in your entire life as a result of this business. But they don't talk about the soft skills that really make you successful and that's actually how you level up. The excellence, the standards that you have. I can tell you man, the difference that I see working with people I know you know this or even in my own team or talking with other business owners is not about necessarily their background.

It's about their character traits and their attributes. Right, that's how we hire people and that's also the difference that I see reflected in the sales process of an organization. ⁓ So, at a very high level, think lead management discipline is a mistake that I see a lot of people make and I think it's rooted psychologically versus just tactically. Of course, the tactical component is important as well.

Justin Piche (14:03)
Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, I feel like I remember basically every single, know, coaching client that I've ever talked to. I would ask the question of, so how many leads are you getting? How quickly are you able to negotiate an offer with them? It's like, yeah, like a couple days. We'll get back to him in a few days. I'm like, oh man.

Let's change this one thing about your business without changing much else and let's just see what happens. And like it's only positive basically.

I get it, right? It's overwhelming. Especially for folks who generating a lot of unqualified leads. Maybe you're doing some cold outreach type tools where you're not really qualifying on price or the property. You're just kind of qualifying on motivation or if they say they want to sell, etc. Which is a fine way to do things. Obviously you just need a better lead management process to sort through those type of things. for a solopreneur who has

Maybe you've hired your cold outreach team and the lead manager or something, but you're still the one negotiating and talking to all these leads. That can be really overwhelming. I remember a lot of folks who first went to the cold calling, ⁓ like ⁓ Joe Roberts or Brandon Parker, who first started having cold callers call for them. They were overwhelmed with leads. And it's because those services are great and they generate leads for you, but you need a system of triage inside of your business so that you can prioritize those leads.

And within that, you need to have an incredible way of sorting them and following up with them. You need to know exactly why they are not a good leader, are a good lead, or what you're going to do in the future so that three months from now, know, Billy who said, just wasn't the right time on his 100 acres, but call me back in the summer, like that pops up on your, like you know, you're ready to go back and talk to that person. This is so important. This is so important.

Clayton Hepler (16:08)
Yeah, I would say mistake number three that we see man is stuck like people that are stuck in old time comping logic or they don't have the right comping logic. They learn comping from the wrong person. They don't have a process or a procedure of how to actually comp. I know I talked about the APCP formula all the time, but having something that is a consistent, reliable process that allows you to comp. In addition, comping relevant. Dude, you were saying this on our last podcast, right? When we're looking at a market, when we're looking at comps, we're not looking at two years ago.

Market shifted, Some markets, it's compressed. And so we need to live in 2025 logic. We need to live in last six months, maybe last 12 months if there's not a lot of comping, so that you can have a really good idea of what is working, what is not, what the actual price per acre is in this market and what is not.

Justin Piche (16:58)
I agree with that. Number four. This is a big one for me. And the real mistake is only having one tool. And what I mean by that is If you're a hammer.

Clayton Hepler (17:08)
It's perfect for you, dude.

Yeah.

Justin Piche (17:20)
everything's Right? If you only have one skill and that's wholesaling small parcels or medium parcels or whatever or buy and sell flipping land. That's your only skill. You're going to miss a lot of opportunity. And so my encouragement for anybody who's doing that is you've got to figure out ways to add value. We were talking about it last time. You're talking about putting mobile home packages on land.

How do you get something that people want? How do you improve the land and force appreciation so that you can pay more for it? We all know that the number one, the number one objection for any seller is price. lot of people are not attached to their land, and I hear it a hundred times a day.

I'll sell it for the right price. Yeah, of course. You offer me enough money, I'm going to sell my land. And I feel the same way. I own a lot of land. I own personal land, I own personal houses. I'm like, if somebody offered me the right price, I would sell that property. I don't have enough, maybe my house with my children in it and where we live, that's maybe the only thing I wouldn't sell if somebody, you know. But if they offered me the right price, you better believe I would move. You know what I mean? I'd sell it. I'd

Clayton Hepler (18:34)
Yeah, you'd sell it bro. I'd sell it too.

Justin Piche (18:38)
guys, this is Justin.

Interrupting our podcast again to say thank you for listening today. Clay and I are talking about some of the biggest mistakes that we see land investors make in 2025. Frankly, we have made some of these ourselves. If you're getting value from this podcast, please leave a review, subscribe, click automatic downloads on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us get visibility and provide more value to more people. So we thank you guys. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

it, right? I'd sell it.

So, subdividing, adding value in some way, entitlements, those are all ways that you can actually pay more for a piece of property because you have more tools. You don't just need to buy it at a discount so that you can make a margin on it, or buy it on a slim discount so you can market it and make some sort of assignment management fee or double close fee. You can actually add value to the world and make real money on it.

Clayton Hepler (19:35)
Yeah,

yeah, I would say I would add to what we talked about earlier. That's a great mistake. The highest and best use right is weak sales performance man. And dude, have some people join the challenge, land man challenge I've seen in different you and I have been in a couple of events jointly this year and connecting with people man. ⁓

Justin Piche (19:42)
Yeah, you said it last podcast.

Clayton Hepler (20:02)
If you get into this business and you don't have a stellar salesperson in the, in the seat, it's going to be hard, man. We're a sales and marketing business. It'd be like me or you getting into, I don't know, the farming business that we've never farmed in our entire life. Right. Um, or a product based business. Right. I mean, you're an engineer, so you're a little different, but, um, people that are not educating sellers, people that are not.

following a clear sales process. This is the acquisition process. We were talking about the lead management process earlier. I view them both pretty differently. The first call versus the second call, the qualification versus the negotiation. If you don't become an expert in negotiation, by the way, it's a life skill, man. It's so helpful for anything. But being able to have that, we're implementing currently and working on currently a couple of AI softwares to give our team sales feedback.

really excited about that, you know, real time feedback and dude, that's a, that's going to increase our ability to execute and close one or two extra deals per month. And the key is like, everything comes down to ROAS. Everything comes to return on our money that we invest in the business. And if we could do these slight tweaks specifically around good high sales performance, going from a 5 % to a, or 4 % to an 8 % close rate.

It is not four points. It's a hundred percent more.

Justin Piche (21:31)
Yeah, that's a lot.

Clayton Hepler (21:33)
And so these little shifts, the negotiation, having really good negotiation skills and sales skills is a difference maker.

Justin Piche (21:42)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. There's so many nuances to buying a piece of property and how you offer on it and how you discuss that relationship and the follow-up that it takes to get a deal done. And there's also a lot of pressure on each deal where you're close on.

Right? Because, because close rates are low right now. I mean, they, they, even if you have a great team, they're just a lot better if you have a great team and great salespeople, but they're still like, like you're saying, you're talking about going from four to eight as being an exceptional increase. like that, frankly, if you have an 8 % close rate, you probably crushing it. You really are. And it's just so important when, when you get people that are so close to be able to get over the line. And that's the, that's what the difference that an exceptional salesperson makes.

is that lasts like 10%. You know, a good salesperson can get somebody up to the line. An excellent one can get them over that one.

Clayton Hepler (22:38)
I love that. addition, like you were talking about in the previous mistake is like, can you be creative, man? Can you do owner financing? Can you do double close? Can you think on your feet such that you, that 4 % to 8 might not be a 4 to 8 % cash close, but it could be a 4 to 8 or 4 to 9 % creative close. And I think creative financing specifically now being able to put those types of deals together. Dude, maybe you can't afford to have a funder.

But maybe you buy something at 65, 70 % of market value, you put 10 % down, you buy it for a hundred, you put 10,000 down, you sell it for, I don't know, 150, 140, and you make 20K. Dude, take that deal. You do 10,000, you put 10,000 down and you make 20,000. That's a good deal, right? But being able to be flexible and have high sales performance is, I think, the difference maker.

So mistake number six would be, ⁓ not focusing on one lead channel in the beginning, comma.

And then as you scale, when you become an operator, then you have over reliance on one lead channel, right? So this is kind of a dichotomy. So at the beginning, you shouldn't be ⁓ doing anything more than, and this is an opinion, right? You can find success elsewhere. I've just found the highest probability of having success is getting really good at one lead channel. It goes down to when we were doing outbound marketing, we were A, testing the first ⁓ sentence or two sentences ⁓ every single week.

every single week. And we saw our call drop rate go from 20 % to like 10 % over a period series of like three to four months. Dude, that's incredible. Our leads, our leads per caller per day went up significantly. Like we were like one and we went up to like 2.2 or something like that. Like crazy. And it wasn't anything other than the fact that we were relent, we were tracking and focusing on how do I get better?

Now if you hire an agency, right, it's a little different. If you work with like Joe Roberts, our buddy Joe Roberts, Brandon Parker, a texting agency, I don't really know many of the other agencies. You don't have nearly as much control, but you do have a control over your sales process. So if you don't, especially early on, a sales process for direct mail as you know is very different than for outbound marketing. And so at the beginning it becomes confusing. And so there's a lot of friction.

in your process and what to focus on. And it prevents you from prioritizing the right things. And then later on, if you just have one lead channel, that one lead channel dies, gets shut down. It becomes a handicap, right, for you to actually scale the business. And most importantly, dude, people respond to texts. Some people respond to calls and some people respond to direct mail pieces. So you're not gonna be able to get the entire, if you have a thousand records, you might not be able to reach

every person there, but you would if you tried all three channels. later on it's over reliance and earlier on in your journey if you're a beginner, it's focusing on too many channels.

Justin Piche (25:43)
I agree I agree with that. I don't really have a lot to add on that one. Mistake number seven and this is we've harped on this a million times but running the business as a hobby and not a business and maybe I'll caveat this by saying if your goal is to run it as a hobby and do a deal or two a year and you run it like a hobby like okay maybe that's not a mistake for you maybe it's fun but it's gonna be tough to have

significant success and you may find it to just be a very expensive hobby that takes a lot of your time. But people who are running this, here's some examples of ways that maybe, things that you're probably doing if you're running this business as a hobby. You're not consistent. You don't have a marketing outbound cadence that you're sticking to week in and week out.

you don't have SOPs for your processes. You're kind of just winging it and doing one thing and then you're doing the next thing and you're not creating a process or you don't have a repeatable process. You're doing this by yourself and you're doing these other things while you're doing it by yourself. So you have no one to delegate anything to. You've got to handle every single aspect of the business.

Turning this into a business requires a lot of discipline and focus. And it's hard to be disciplined and focus on something, especially when you aren't confident in it.

Clayton Hepler (27:09)
you

Justin Piche (27:10)
You know, if

you have self-doubt, you know, you're almost sort of like guarding yourself against failure by like maybe not quite putting everything into it really treating it like the business that it is. Like it's like, I'm just doing this thing on the side. Maybe you've told a couple of friends and family members, hey, I'm starting to flip land. They laughed at you or they're like, you're crazy or whatever. know, anybody who's not in the real estate investment realm. So you've got kind of a chip on your shoulder. You don't want to publicly fail. So you just kind of like, don't go all in and treat this like a real business.

I've seen that happen a lot of times and it's tough. think if you want this to be your life, you want to make a difference for your family in this way with this business, you've got to treat it that way.

Clayton Hepler (27:54)
couldn't say it better myself. It's like the guys that, you know, the weekend warriors that they're trying to compete on a high level, like the triathletes or the ultra guys or the marathon people. ⁓ You can only get so far. You could only do so much. And, you know, sometimes people want that. They want to build. They want to make a little bit of extra money. They want to flip some land, right? They want to be extra healthy or they're super competitive. They want to relive their college days.

Right. So they run the marathon, they run the Ironman, right. But you can't compete at the highest level if you are doing that. And that's the same thing here, man. You can't compete against you or me if you are running this like a hobby and not a business. And maybe you don't want to, maybe you're good with making a hundred, 200 K a year, ⁓ getting good margins, adding that to the, ⁓ your bottom line. My COO, is he owns some rental properties, man.

And he, um, you know, basically, you know, he probably is like 10 units. Um, and he knows what to buy. knows what he's looking for, but he's not going to light the world on to fire. Right. Um, but he's selling one unit going up 10 31 and up to his property in, um, Nashville outside of Nashville. Uh, but he knows he's not going to get the best return. He might, he's looking for a 14 % return once I was like, bro, that's pretty good.

but for, for a lot of, for a lot of people, you can't get the alpha, the extra two, three, four, 5 % difference that really gets you that extra profit margin.

All right guys, well this is a shorter episode as we are recording during the holiday season. We appreciate each and every one of you and we would recommend don't make these same mistakes because we've made them individually and we hope that it's a good frame going into the holiday season for you guys to check yourself and say, am I making this mistake and if so, what can I do? Guys, Justin and I super active on social media. If you got any questions, you can DM us. We'd be happy to answer questions. As always, the gentleman's agreement of the podcast. If you got benefit from it.

Plus, if you like these shorter form episodes, we're trying this out for a short period of time. If you like these shorter form episodes, leave us a thumbs up, a five star review, and subscribe to the podcast that lets us know that we have a group of loyal listeners that really appreciate what we're saying, and we can keep bringing these free value to you guys every single week. Thank you, and happy Thanksgiving.

Justin Piche (30:27)
Hey