Journey to Multifamily Millions
Journey to Multifamily Millions
From Land-Flipping Profits to Longer-Term Wealth From Multifamily with Jack Bosch, Ep 124
Welcome to the Journey to Multifamily Millions podcast, where we hear about investors' journey to financial independence through commercial real estate!
Jack Bosch is an expert land flipper and founder of Landprofits and, his successful coaching program, the Land Profit Generator System.
Jack provides insights into his experiences with land deals, the significance of learning and adapting to market changes, and his pivot to multifamily investments as a strategy for creating long-term wealth. The conversation also touches on the importance of holistic success and the challenges faced in different asset classes.
This episode will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in land investing, diversifying their real estate portfolio, and filling in the gaps in their financial education. Jack shares his unique journey from being an immigrant to the United States to becoming a successful land investor.
Episode Topics
[01:27] Meet our guest, Jack Bosch
[03:37] Discovering the Land Flipping Strategy
[13:04] Understanding the Market and Buyers
[27:45] Scaling Up: From Single to Multifamily
[32:29] Adapting to Market Changes
[36:18] Balancing Multiple Ventures
[40:35] What is one red flag every investor should look out for?
[41:34] What is a myth about the real estate business?
[46:09] Connecting with Jack
Notable Quotes
- "People sell land at discounts due to life changes like divorce." – Jack Bosch
- "Real estate offers financial abundance, especially when done right and part-time." – Jack Bosch
- "Schools teach you to get by, not how to build wealth." – Tim Little
- "Your first deals can give false confidence; not all are that easy." – Tim Little
- "Seller financing creates long-term cash flow with attractive terms." – Jack Bosch
- "House flippers often make money but encounter tax problems." – Tim Little
👉Connect with Jack Bosch
- LinkedIn: Jack Bosch
- Website: Land Profit$
- Podcast: The Jack Bosch Show
- Telephone: 1-(602)-712-0175
👉 Connect with Tim
- Linkedin: Tim Little
- Instagram: @tim_at_zana
- Email: tim@zanainvestments.com
- Visit www.ZANAinvestments.com for more info on Tim and how you can passively invest in multifamily real estate
- Get your Passive Investor's Cheat Sheet FREE
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/journey-to-multifamily-millions/id1634643497
[00:00:00] Jack Bosch: 99 percent of all realtors historically have not been trained on how to sell land. They have been trained on how to sell houses. And the way you sell land is very, very different from houses. A house you sell by which school district is it in? Is it a split floor plan or is it a two story home? Does it have a pool? Does it have a backyard thing like that? So basically if you have a three bedroom two bath split floor plan one story home in a good school district there's a specific amount of people that look for that. What you need to do is you simply get the photographer in for the sunset pictures you stage it you declutter it You make it look nice. and then and then you put it on the mls Yes And if it's priced right, people are looking for that. They're buying that.
[00:01:16] Tim Little: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the journey to multifamily millions. I'm your host, founder, and CEO of ZANA Investments, Tim Little. And on today's show, we have Jack Bosch with us. Jack is an expert land flipper, creator of the land profit generator land flipping method, Best selling author and multifamily investor jack. Welcome to the show
[00:01:37] Jack Bosch: Well, thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:39] Tim Little: and it is great to have you. So buying land is something that i'm starting to hear more about and we'll we'll get into some of that here in a little bit But first, please tell us how you got started and how you got to where you are today
[00:01:54] Jack Bosch: All right, absolutely. So yeah, land, land, investing, land, flipping, land, wholesaling, land, self financing, land development is the new asset class that is currently getting more and more sexy. So I have been doing this for 24, 23 years already. So my wife and I came to this country as immigrants from different countries. So I'm from Germany. She's from Honduras, Central America. And we got started here simply out of frustration about the American dream, about frustration, about the, like the, the journey that we were all sold, which is like, go get a good education, go get a good job, go continue. And I see rich dad, poor dad in the background,there, in one of your books, so many people got started. I read it too. It changed my outlook on life, on many, many levels too. Cool. and we, we started realizing that we needed to do something different because that traditional prescribed journey was not leading, in our case, at the very least, to happiness, also not necessarily to financial abundance. We had good jobs, we made good money, but, after paying, we finally bought a house, we built up our credit, bought a house, had two cars, and at the end of the month, there was no money left and we were exhausted. So it was like, that doesn't sound like what we want to do for the rest of our lives. I didn't go to college for like seven years or so in order to do that. And then, and we were kind of, our dreams were crushed a little bit. So we started looking around and we, we, we decided on real estate for various reasons. Number one is because we like that in one transaction, you can make a lot of money. We like that, most real, most wealthy people either made their money or held their money in real estate. And, we also liked the fact that if you do it right, you can actually do this part time. So we failed forward. We, we, we failed at a bunch of real estate strategies. And then finally we stumbled into, and I can only say we stumbled into, into, a strategy where we could find pieces of land. At ridiculously low prices, or ridiculous discounts from market value from people that just simply owned them for decades or gotten through a divorce or, or passed away. And they had the heirs and had that garage sale mentality. And they were just literally living, giving those pieces of land almost away. And we would pick them up for 10, 20, 30, 40 cents on a dollar. And we turn around and then we just wholesale them. Just like you see on television people wholesaling houses where they're doing fix and flip We never got into fix and flip because there's nothing to fix on a piece of land But he simply took those and taken a fifty thousand dollar property put it on a contract for ten thousand dollars And turn around market it on the market for thirty thirty thousand dollars. That's the best deal on the market because it's Sixty percent of market value versus a hundred percent of market value. Flies off the shelf sell very quickly and we have twenty thousand dollars in our pocket. We're like, well, let's do that again And let's do that again. So the first deal only made us 4, 000. The second deal made us 10, 000. But in either one of these cases, did we see the property in either one of these cases that we have to fix and flip anything in either or neither one of these cases that we have to talk to banks and all this kind of thing. So all these complexities from real estate fell off and we're just simply putting 000 properties on a contract for 20 to 40 cents or to 50 cents on a dollar, and then passing them on to somebody else as a small markup and making 10, 15, 20, 000 per pop. And then fast forward, our green card arrives. We were able to do this full time. A few months later, we hit the million dollar level, a couple of months, a couple of years later, we hit the eight figures. And to this day, we have done over 5, 000 real estate transactions like that. And then we've taken the money we made from that and moved that into other asset classes, including multifamily.
[00:05:34] Tim Little: No, that's, that's awesome. And so there's a couple of things I want to hit on here. So I love that you guys were, we're seeking the American dream, but just like a lot of people that are, we're bored here and live their whole lives here. You got frustrated at some point because, and this might be a personal rant, but, you know, one thing that they are really good at doing in school here in the U S is teaching you how to get by. Not how to be wealthy, not how to be successful, how to get by, do just enough to make enough money to pay your taxes, pay your bills, but not necessarily to go anywhere beyond that, to, to be wealthy, to be rich. And I think that's a failure of financial education. That is what is missing from our curriculum. I don't know if that's the case in Germany and I don't know if that's the case in Honduras, but I think it's a gaping hole in the education system here in the US.
[00:06:30] Jack Bosch: it's the same everywhere. I like Honduras for that matter. Honduras is like a third world country. Like you have teachers that don't even show up to school. my, her mom, my m my wife's mom is an elementary school teacher. She made something like $450 a month. That's like, that's that, there's like, it's ridiculous. You can't even survive with that. Luckily her dad in his youth had bought some pieces of land, coincidentally, no, we didn't do it, but he passed away when my, when my wife was nine months old. So we never get to learn from him. But luckily those pieces of land were translated into something else into a little bit of an income source so she didn't grow up super poor and also not wealthy, but the school doesn't teach you anything. They don't even teach you proper reading and writing over there She was lucky that she was able to get because of that into a private school Which costs a fraction of what it costs here but in germany It's the same thing germany is the country of the rule followers germany is the country of like You In the good and the bad, as we know, right? Like go back in history and everyone followed the wrong rules. And, but it's like, there's no entrepreneurship being taught. The entire culture is almost like anti entrepreneurship because the moment you start something, everyone is like, isn't that risky? And so the U S is still the blend of opportunity, but it's, but still not through the school system, more like through the entrepreneurial overall underlying spirit that exists in the U S and I'm very, very happy to be here.
[00:07:52] Tim Little: Yeah. And I would say, you know, knowing several Europeans myself, one, the one advantage you guys do have is that you're usually able to go to college for little to nothing out of
[00:08:03] Jack Bosch: That is true.
[00:08:04] Tim Little: In, in many instances, whereas I'm sure you know the situation here in the us you know, some people have,very large, school debts that they're working out from, and it kinds, you kind of puts you at a, you know, you're already behind the power curve when it comes to, to building wealth if you have six digit debt, sitting in front of you. So, I, personally was in that same situation when I got outta grad school, but luckily I. I made some smart decisions along the way, and have since paid that off and, and moved in well into the plus territory, but
[00:08:35] Jack Bosch: but good for you. Yeah, no, my, like I have a 17-year-old daughter. Tell me about it. Like, I, I just came here for a college, for one year college degree at a state school, and back then it cost something like $15,000 for the year. Which part of it? My, my, my parents lend me and part of it I had saved up. But, but, but yeah, for my daughter, I know there's like half a million dollars you want to cost her to get her to college because she's looking at out of state private schools and, and I want to support her and she's good enough for potentially even some Ivy league schools. So, it's, it's, it costs basically a hundred grand a year and it's crazy. So, yes, that's, that's true. I had the benefit of going through college. Again, my dad is a high school teacher, so they didn't have much money. They paid for my apartment. And my basic food thing, basically like buying ramen noodles, that thing, everything else I had to pay myself, but I didn't graduate with several hundred thousand dollars in debt. That's true. That's correct.
[00:09:30] Tim Little: yeah, and, and I love that, you know, you talked about, okay, how are we going to get out of this situation? How are we going to, you know, build our wealth and, you know, find a way to be, be happier, improve our financial health, et cetera. And you started exploring different aspects of real estate, right? A lot of people gravitate towards real estate. Generally, but there are so many different asset classes even within real estate. So I think it's funny that you said you stumbled upon land because that's a lot of times how it goes. We started looking at all these different options. Some things might resonate with us and other things won't. And you found something that worked for you, at least at that time. Why don't you talk to me about how you did that first deal. And then the other thing that I'm curious about, you know, because one thing you said made a lot of sense to me, people find themselves with land. And like, if I, if I had 30 acres in, I don't know, Milwaukee somewhere, like I, I wouldn't know what to do with it. Like,
[00:10:29] Jack Bosch: Exactly. Right.
[00:10:30] Tim Little: And so I think people are just like, well, crap. How much can I sell it for? Sure. That sounds like it makes sense. They probably do minimal research on the actual worth of the land. Wouldn't know who to sell it to even if they were able to find out how much it's true worth is. And so they just kind of, you know, sell it at bargain basement prices to someone like you. So, so one, tell me a little bit about that first deal and two, who are the buyers? Buyers your end buyers. Are they,
[00:11:02] Jack Bosch: There's one extra. Yeah. I'll tell you that there's one extra thing that I want to add to what you just said, which is many, and I'm sure the audience has that thing. So why don't you just list it with a realtor? And the thing is, many have, but 99 percent of all realtors historically have not been trained on how to sell land. They have been trained on how to sell houses. And the way you sell land is very, very different from houses. A house you sell by which school district is it in? Is it a split floor plan or is it a two story home? Does it have a pool? Does it have a backyard thing like that? So basically if you have a three bedroom two bath split floor plan one story home in a good school district There's a specific amount of people that look for that What you need to do is you simply get the photographer in for the sunset pictures you stage it you declutter it You make it look nice and then and then you put it on the mls Yes And if it's priced right, people are looking for that. They're buying that. You cannot sell land that way. Land is not being sold by saying, this is a two acre parcel over here. Come buy it. Nobody buys it that way. So plus these realtors, since they don't know what to do, they simply go put zero effort into those listings and that has changed in the last few years, but up until about five years ago, 99 percent of all realtors, absolutely did we're horrible at selling pieces of land. And as a result, these pieces of land often didn't sell. Now, at the same time, we have developed a clear formula on how to list the piece of land. And step number one is, you need to basically start with a good headline and an attractive headline that basically that dream built was like two acres of paradise, like beautiful views, hiking, biking. I'm like, Oh, I want to go hiking. I want to bike. Yeah. What, what is this? Right. And then after you do that, you need to show them what's around. People don't want to just have a piece of land. They want to know, well, if I get sick, if I live on the land, if I get sick, where's the next doctor, where's the next grocery store, where's the next gas station? Cause I don't always want to bonfire out there, right? I want to actually eventually go to the steakhouse down there somewhere else. So, people want to know, like there's, so there's three kinds of properties we focus on. Number one is an obvious case. It's the infill lot, like in the city street, 35 houses, two empty lots. You sell those to the builders. Number two, it's the properties that are in the outskirts of town, like between anywhere right after the last development, you sell those still to the developers or like 20, 30 minutes outside of town. And a lot of people nowadays work from home and they're willing to buy these properties because they're interested in having a place a little bit outside of town where they have two acres or four acres or five acres and be in the city in 20, 30 minutes if they have to be in a meeting, but at the same time have space. So since covid that that buyer group has exploded And the third group of people that want these kind of properties are people that are, that are in the more like, in, in, future retirees. So people in their fifties, they realized, man, I haven't saved enough money. I need to retire at a lower cost. So they buy these kinds of properties. And then the third kind of category of properties is like 20 acres plus larger mini ranches, a couple of hours away from, from, from the city. And they're interesting where like for a lot of people, the outdoors lovers, they have that big F three 50 truck. They have an RV, they have a, they have the toys, they have the things, a Friday afternoon comes around, they want to spend their weekend,like horsing around on these, on these properties. And I mean, how many, who wouldn't want to have their own ranch, right? Their own mini ranch. So these kinds of properties are what we're focusing on. So the very first deal that we, that we got, and again, if you now take into consideration that people that, that had these for years and then hire some realtor and the realtors are like, yeah, I'll put it up there to put it one, one picture, no description, no dream building, no putting into context, these properties sit there, they don't sell. And then they're like, well, I guess my property is not worth as much. Now our offer comes in and they accept the offer because now they're like, well, I guess my properties are worth a whole lot. I can just give it out. They accept a low, low offer and then we come with our clear strategy of pictures and maps and dream building and descriptions and really telling people what can you do in the area? Why is being on that property your dream come true? And now all of a sudden these properties sell very, very quickly. Now to the point, what was our first deal? Our first deal ended up being a property that, was, was an acre in a small town, a couple of hours away from a bigger city. So all, all amenities were there. This is a cute little town in Arizona where I live. So we started in our home state for the very simple reason that back then when we started google maps wasn't around google street view wasn't around google, satellite images weren't around county barely had web pages. This is 2003. We're talking about so there's not Facebook wasn't even around zillow wasn't around So we've started where we where we where we could drive to to actually ultimately see the property So we we found this property and in this particular case the property had come out of a divorce You They had bought this piece of land to build their home on there to retire down the road on there Well things got bad They got divorced and apparently it was a bad divorce and after that divorce the husband who got it He did not want to have anything to do with anything having to do with Arizona anymore He wanted to move he wanted to move have clean slate move to colorado Leave everything behind and get rid of everything and he did not care how much he got for that property So we made him an offer. We have a rural area. Prices are not crazy high. We made him an offer of the property worth about 8, 000 and we made him an offer for 400 400 bucks and he accepted it. So then what we did is we drove up there to look at it at that point. So we did see one and a couple more after that. And then we basically literally sold it to the next door neighbor the same day that we bought it. And the next door neighbor wanted it because he needed a place to store stuff. And he had actually some property right behind it. He wanted to open a gate and use it almost like a driveway. So whatever the reason was, he offered us 4, 000 right there on the spot. They were like, Hey, we got it for 400 bucks. We haven't done anything to it. The closing cost was another 400 bucks. So we had about 800 in it. Okay. And then we sold it to him for 4, 000. He paid closing costs and we made 3, 200 on that deal. And that was the very, very first deal. And we were like, we don't know anything about real estate. And we just made 200. We don't know what two by fours are, because again, coming from Germany, it's a different language with a different terminology. I don't know what drywall was. I didn't even know the word deed. There's like what the good deed, bad deed. What are you talking about? I had no idea. But we figured out that other properties in the area sold for like eight thousand dollars. They're like, okay, but we knew that if we offer eight, we don't make money if you offer six We don't make money. so we just realized the guy doesn't want it. So we made an offer of 400 bucks. He's like, yeah take it and we sold it right to the neighbor And then two weeks later, we got 40 acres in a rural area in arizona for five hundred dollars And we sold that one online on eBay. Today, eBay doesn't work that much anymore, but back then it worked really well. We sold it on eBay for 10, 000 in 10 days. Never met the seller, never met the buyer, never met the seller. We drove out to that property to see it. It was just a bunch of semi-desert. Somebody wanted it. Somebody wanted it to put their RV out there. Somebody wanted to spend their weekend out there. And so now we had made 13, 000 in a matter of, in a matter of like six weeks without really knowing much about real estate. Now we didn't have to deal with tenants, toilets and termites, no repairs, no mold, no, no roofs, no kitchens. Because that's the stuff we had failed before. When I said we failed forward, we basically, we got some house on a contract and it was actually a triplex and we estimated everything repair wrong. We tried to sell it. Nobody would buy it. So we backed out of the deal. We bought some tax liens and they were redeemed right away. We attended tax deed auctions and we were outbid, but then we found this piece of land where there's a lot of people who didn't want it. In this case, this guy owed some property taxes. Which was included in the 400. And he's like, I'm, I was, he told us I was ready to let this property go to tax sale. And just like, let's just let it go. And yet we were so, so he was jumping on the opportunity to instead get 400 for it.
[00:19:10] Tim Little: Wow I'm thinking that it's almost dangerous that those first two deals were so easy for you because it might give you like this false sense of security like they're all gonna be like this and I'm sure you have some stories where some of those deals were not all like that and you're you're welcome to correct me if not, but
[00:19:33] Jack Bosch: No, I mean, the, the, the majority, the reason why you get. Properties for 10 cents, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 cents on a dollar is sometimes a reason like the one where it's a totally simple deal. It's just the divorce kind of situation, an airship situation. Somebody inherited the properties and heirs don't want land. Because on top of it, when you own land and you do nothing to it, it costs your property taxes every year
[00:19:56] Tim Little: of
[00:19:57] Jack Bosch: and people don't want to keep paying that property taxes. What used to be like that lakefront, rural lake, beautiful and hour away from a big city, this lakefront property that they bought in order to build a retirement home there, that sounded like a fantastic idea back then. But today perhaps one of the spouses has passed away or perhaps Their grandchildren were born and they want to start close to their grandchildren Or perhaps the kids have moved away and they don't want to go there They want to follow the kids and be close to the kids or perhaps they have both passed away Now the heirs have it and the heir is 35 years old and lives in new york city It doesn't want the lakefront piece of land that they have to pay for There are all reasons why you can get these properties cheap and when you get them like that the transaction is usually just as simple as I just explained but You also sometimes get properties so cheap because they have problems So sometimes the reason why you get them is because it's a convoluted airship situation when you got eight airs They don't talk to each other And now you need to go to probate and, and you need to help connect these guys and need to help getting signed off and things like that. And it's a little bit more involved. Now, the most I've ever dealt with is 16 heirs, but usually it's, it's with that, we didn't let it go. We didn't even deal with it, but sometimes you have three air. Sometimes you have a situation where the heirs have no money and think it's going to cost, it's really expensive to go to a probate. So they don't do it. So they're like, Hey, I can't put it on, I can't sell it to you because it's not in my name. It's in my dad's name. And it's like, well, can we, is your dad still alive? They're like, no, my dad passed away. It's like, okay, well then we need to do probate. And they're like, yeah, I know, but we don't have the money for it. And that's why they're giving you cheap. Now that's an easy solution. You just initiate probate to the title company and have the probate attorney agree to be paid out of the sale of the property. Not every probate attorney needs to be paid up front. Many of them are happy to be paid six, eight weeks later when the property sells. So there's reasons why you get those, but sometimes there's, but mostly like I would say 70 percent of the 60, 70 percent of the transactions are really simple. Okay. 10 or 20 percent have some simple things and about 10 or 20 percent are more difficult to do. So what we typically do is we make sure we hire, like we, even the, even the difficult ones. It's usually title issues and the title company solves them for you.
[00:22:20] Tim Little: right
[00:22:20] Jack Bosch: just give them to the title company and they come up, Oh, there's all these issues. And then you solve it. And now we teach this. Also, we have a coaching company for that. So we provide a lot of support for our coaching students on these difficult deals, because after 5, 000 deals, there's almost no title issue that has ever, that has come in front of me that I haven't been able to solve. And so often it's actually the father. If a title issue is so complicated that the title company doesn't solve it, they escalate. We look at it and we're like, Oh, you need to do this, this, this, this, this, and that it's resolved. And usually the title company agrees and they do that. And it's still a deal. But the point is, worst case scenario, simply back out of the deal. So in perhaps one or two out of 10 deals, you end up backing out. Okay. Because it's either the value is not there or there's other things and so on so it does happen. But about 50-60 of the deals are actually fairly simple and straightforward deals.
[00:23:13] Tim Little: Yeah, and that makes sense and I would imagine those ratios are pretty similar across a lot of assets, right? You're always going to have that. That one end of the spectrum is just more headache than it's worth. But once you know what you're doing, then you know how to pick deals and vet them appropriately so that you're not picking the biggest headaches. Most of the time, stuff will still happen. But, and it sounds like, you know, you have a ton of experience doing this a couple of decades now. And, at some point it sounds like you decided to, you know, not change, but necessarily add on something to your wealth building strategy, which is investing in multifamily. So can you talk about how that started and how you first got into multifamily as part of your overall strategy?
[00:24:35] Jack Bosch: Yeah, I'll be happy too so the first reason the first time we did this was when 2009 came around, I'm an avid student of real estate. I love learning. So I'm also a member of many organizations. So I'm a member of the Arizona Real Estate Investors Association. I recommend everyone join ARIA, and attend their meeting. Just for networking purposes, because you'd love to know great things, you get to know great real estate attorneys, great title companies, great, great money lenders, great and so on and so forth. Now, none of which you really need in the land space. We don't need to have,we don't need to have lenders and things like that because typically you take a deal, you put it on a contract for 10, 000, you sell it for 30 and you use the buyer's money to fund everything. You're doing what's called a double closing. Here, I'm going to just light my camera here a little bit to make it a And, you, and you don't need money for that, but, when you, but so, so, so as a result, we, we, we loved selling. We like to this day, we love selling our property. One of two ways. One is the wholesale deal. The second way is seller financing and seller financing is a way where we would say, if you get this 50, 000 property for 10, 000, You can sell it as a discount or you can also sell it at full market value And allow people to just make a down payment and then pay the rest in monthly payments So we basically advertise a 50 000 property at 50 grand which under normal circumstances means it sits there for a while But when you say hey, you can get this 50 000 property Even if you don't have 50 000 you can just give me 12, 000 down and finance the remaining 38, 000 for the next 14 years at 15 percent interest with monthly payments of 500. You just generated 85, 000 in profits over the next year. So we did that and we started building this up and we built huge amount of cashflow and we had all this going and now we had a tax problem,
[00:26:38] Tim Little: Hmm.
[00:26:39] Jack Bosch: right? Cause the number one downside of land. Is that it doesn't depreciate.
[00:26:46] Tim Little: Oh,
[00:26:46] Jack Bosch: write it off,
[00:26:47] Tim Little: that makes
[00:26:48] Jack Bosch: That's the number one problem with land. So we looked around and said, what do we do next? And the next thing, you know, I'm at the real estate investor association meeting and I had not paid attention to what the house market has been doing because once we had done like 10, 50 land deals, we put the blinders on and we're like, this works so well. Forget about anything else. We're not going to get distracted. We're not going to see the shiny penny. We're just going to focus on this. And then come 2007, 8, 9, we lift our heads again. We're like, what's going on? Everyone is losing their money. Everyone is losing their shirt. And we go to a Rio meeting and they're telling us in the Rio meeting, the guys that there's talking about getting houses for 50, 000. And he's like, excuse me. What's going on here? Literally, I was like blind to the world. We were just in our tunnel, just focused on land, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, land, land, land, like wholesale these lands, sell the finances, land, build up well. And, and all of a sudden, we're like, well, my God, in this way, if a house sells for 50, 000 and it rents for 1, 000, it's a no brainer. So we started buying houses. We started buying houses. We started something, buying like 50 houses over the next two, three years. in different markets and, and buying them cash, just buying them and then driving cashflow from that. But then we realized this is a lot of hassle, but we also realized that if we can manage a portfolio in Phoenix where we live without seeing it, and we can manage a portfolio in Cleveland, Ohio, without seeing it. And in Omaha, Nebraska, without seeing is why don't we jump the next level and go into the much, much into the bigger real estate, like multifamily, particularly. 70 or 80 90 units or more where you can afford a full time property manager, a full time leasing office meaning a full time leasing manager, a full time maintenance manager because the number one thing that drove us crazy with single families is that The phone constantly rang, emails constantly came in. This one needs a new heater. This one needs a new water boiler. This one needs this, this repair the turn of this unit is 2, 500. Is this approved? And we're like, ah, going, going nutty because of all the maintenance. So we figured if we go level higher into these larger multifamilies, I mean, they're not larger in the industry, but for us, they were larger. Then we can we can be we can be buffered from this level and at the same time we can Park our wealth in something that continues to go up if it's managed Well, and at the same time get all these deductions and write offs to to buffer our income from our land business That's how we why we got in and also we started realizing that They were like i'm in 54 years old right now. And when we started that about You 10 years ago,not 15 years ago with the single families and then 10 years ago with the multi families that we're like, you know what as we go Enter the second half of our life I want to make sure that we put some money from that just sits in the bank account from flipping and move it into long term generational wealth cash flow So it's a combination of things so we we buy we now buy multi families on our own but some some of them we syndicate You With also with people, a lot of people that went to our coaching program are doing so well that they now invest with us and so we we syndicate some of those. We keep some of those. And as a result, though, we get more cash flow. We get the depreciation and it offsets our income. So now we make money from land flipping. We have wealth that grows over here, and we pay very little taxes. And I like that combination.
[00:30:11] Tim Little: Yeah, and obviously you hit a bunch of the highlights of, you know, investing in multifamily in general. What I find so interesting is that, you know, you're, you're doing land flipping, but I hear similar stories about house flipping all the time as well. The people who have the stomach to like continue doing it over and over again. They make a lot of money up front, but then they run into a tax problem. Right. because
[00:30:38] Jack Bosch: anytime you flip, I mean, anytime you flip, you don't get depreciation, obviously. But, So that's, that's the crux of it. That's the problem with it. So we add, and the key is that at that point that we decided to add this, we were now no longer novices in real estate. Now, given we had never fixed up a house and we had never managed a house and we've never managed a multifamily, but at least from a point of view, it's like confidence, the language of real estate, the ability to analyze deals. And the network, we were there already. So now it was just a small jump from that to single families. And from that to multifamilies, it wasn't like it would have been a humongous jump from the beginning from zero to that, to us at least. But now it was like through land flipping, we became experts in some real estate. And then from there, we just needed to add another vertical to it, which was another learning curve, but it was, definitely, not as much as it would have been just going from zero.
[00:31:34] Tim Little: And that's why I really love what you said about, you know, you admitting that you had the blinders on. For a little bit and there's that that give and take that we get caught in with hate, you know, focus on whatever your asset class is, like you said, don't get distracted by the shiny object, but at the same time, you have to be open minded enough to see the the benefits drawbacks of other asset classes and, you know, make a decision based on what you see there on whether it makes sense Sense for you to dive into it, but , you know, you, you can't just close yourself off completely because you may need to pivot at some point. When the market changes dramatically as it did, like you were talking about in 2007, 2008, you might need to shift the asset class or what you're investing in, to be able to either take advantage of it or not get steamrolled, by, by what's coming at you. Mm
[00:32:28] Jack Bosch: No, absolutely. Now, and, and, luckily for us, land continued to work really through the 2008, nine, 10, like downturn. Obviously prices went down, but demand for land didn't go away. So we were able to continue to, to, to flip land as we call it, wholesale land, seller financing land. Well, just like instead of buying a property for 40 and selling it for 70, we would now get a similar piece of land for 20 and sell it for 35. So in other words, our margins were smaller, but we were able to ride it out just fine. And, and, and as a result, we have never stopped flipping land. We do this to this day. I can't really see an environment where we couldn't do this anymore. But at the same time, you're 100 percent correct. You always want to be alert. And you always want to be able to pivot the market now with one thing that has changed in the last few years is that the price levels of land, where the sweet spot of where you do deals has changed. So when we started out that 4, 000 deal at the next deal was a 10, 000 deal. Those kinds of properties today do not sell on the market. And it's very simple because, when COVID after COVID the inflationary period after COVID Or let me let me put it the other way the people that that are in that want to buy an 8, 000 piece of land or a 5, 000 piece of land or a 10, 000 piece of land are the people that unfortunately For socioeconomic income reasons on our can only afford and if I've a 10 or even 20, 000 off piece of land. So those people are typically people with a lower income and the people with a lower income. Unfortunately, their discretionary spending ability has been wiped out. Through the inflation when X costs eight bucks, when groceries double, triple, quadrupled, and then, and rent has gone up 50 percent as we know in multifamily, it has, right. And so on, if they have at the end of the month, 500 left over, they don't have 500 left over anymore that has gone away. So as a result, five years ago, we would sell lots of 20, 30, 000 properties. Today. We are avoiding that price segment, but what is on fire is the 30, 000 price property because the people that have money, they want a representative kind of piece of land and what happened in COVID is that everyone was forced to be endorsed for a long time, particularly in a lot of markets, not Florida, not so much Arizona, but like California and many other States. And as a result, there's this big pent up demand for people to say things like, well, if I have to be stuck, if I can't even let my kids on the playground. Then screw that I want to have my own piece of land out there that I can do what I want to do with it. So land went on fire during COVID and has not come down. It's particularly expensive land because people with money I've realized that even their money didn't help them to be able to move freely. So now they're, they're, they're wanting space. They want freedom. They want, so a lot of them are looking for land and they're looking for a representative piece of land. If somebody makes 200 grand and has an RV in the backyard and a big, big pickup truck, they're not, they don't want to buy a 10, 000 piece of land. They want to buy the 120, 000 mini ranch. They want to buy the 150, 000 20 acre kind of or rolling hills property in the in the smoky mountains like if they live in Atlanta, Georgia So don't so so we have to adjust to the market But luckily in our space the market has only shifted from cheaper land to higher land which is actually a good thing because on the higher end properties you make way more money than on the smaller, on the smaller property.
[00:36:00] Tim Little: Yeah. So land is becoming a status symbol just like anything else for those folks. And that, that kind of aligns with, with everything else, right? Like, you know, the lower income folks are hit the most, but those who had money still have money and they're willing to spend it. Let's fast forward, you know, to where you are today. And I'm just curious in terms of how much you're doing with each asset type. Is it 50 50? Is it 70-30? What does that look like for you guys?
[00:36:31] Jack Bosch: So our land business is a little smaller than it used to be, but the, the, the, the level has gone up quite a bit. So when we started out, we, we used to do for some years, we did three, 400 deals and whatever we would take, whatever comes our way. All right, then, now we probably only do like 50, 75 deals or so, but they're like higher end deals. And more than anything, we also have taken the next step, which is into land development, land and titling. So for example, I'm working on a deal right now with two partners. that is a, that we have on our contract for 1. 7 million. And once it's all fully done, we expect it to be worth 8 million. So that's a three way split of 6 million profit. So basically each of us. Can reasonably expect on the worst case scenario make a million each on a more realistic scenario million and a half Up to two million dollars each. So those deals are completely different. That's an entitlement deal. The property is 26 acres. It's already zoned for multifamily. We already know we can put I think 574 or 576 units on it And, it's only it's it's the process is now going through all the different entitlement steps doing like the, different analysis for rare, rare animals, rare, rare plants, drawing it out, making sure the setbacks and, and working with the city back and forth until it's approved. But, that's the kind of deals that I like to do more and going forward, I will probably even do less deals in volume, but more of those. So this year I want to actually get another five of those kinds of deals under contract and work on them. And then of course what we also have we have a coaching company and we have our multifamily So in other words, we have a land business. We have a land now we're building this out to more like in the land development business So it's kind of almost like becoming two separate kind of things land flipping land developing We have a land coaching company and we have our multifamily business So that's like three and a half kind of companies Please And currently our coaching company takes a lot more time because we're making some changes. It probably takes about 50, 60 percent of my time. multifamily takes about 10 percent of my time because I have a full full time asset manager for it that meets with all the property management companies and, and, and, and so on. And then, the rest of the time is between land deals and land land development deals.
[00:38:48] Tim Little: No, so you're staying busy is what you're saying.
[00:38:51] Jack Bosch: Oh, I'm staying busy. I'd like to, I'm, I'm, I love, I'm going to do real estate until the day I die. The beauty of it though, is that at some point of time in the future, might be years from now, probably will be years and years from now, but if I ever wanted to like really take a big step backwards, then I can, because we've taken our active income and moved it into passive income and like we have a property in North Carolina, it's 90 units, that's worth 13 million. And we only owe five, 5 million on it. So you do the math, you can figure out what this is a highly cash flowing property. We have a similar situation in Kentucky on a 258 kind of unit property. So, so we're, we're moving our assets, our profits over into multifamily, not just because it creates proper grades, it creates depreciation, but also because it creates legacy wealth as we call it. So when we take that step back down the road and perhaps do a couple of development deals a year and nothing else. We have at that point probably like 1500 units or a thousand units that we own without investors potentially even and that spit out a not very very nice amount of cash flow and with that we'll ride into the sunset and And I think that's that already working. It's already a plan but again in the meantime I'm keeping busy because I'm loving it and I'm enjoying it. That's
[00:40:12] Tim Little: Yeah. And that's, that's an awesome outlook just to, to have that plan and to kind of, you know, shift those assets to where you can become more passive as you want to, but also, you know, stay as active in it as you want to. All right. Well, now we do need to get into the turbo round. So I'm going to ask you three questions. I ask every guest, just ask for a quick, honest answer. Are you ready? All right, Jack, let's do this. What is one red flag every investor should look out for?
[00:40:39] Jack Bosch: a hard one I'm, like, I don't know like on the land side of things Thanks like be careful if the seller is too eager to sell the property because it usually means they're hiding something. There's also a bunch of land fraud out there these days. There's people trying to sell you properties that they don't even own. So be careful with that. Now, usually a title company will fix that and catch that. But if you have a situation where somebody is really eager to sell the property, really ask them extra questions. Because there might be something going on that you don't know. It could be a great opportunity because it could be that the owner of the property is really severely ill and they want to make sure they sell the property before, well, unfortunately, perhaps that person passes away. So while they can sell signs and then it gets all tied up in probate, but it could also be that there's something wrong with the property. So you don't know and make sure you, you, you, your, your alerts, your antennas go up when you ask a lot of questions.
[00:41:32] Tim Little: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Second one. What is a myth about this business you would like to set straight?
[00:41:37] Jack Bosch: Like the number one myth and I think I hopefully addressed it already implicitly is that People think land is risky and expensive and it takes forever and what they're talking about is land development Land development can be risky can be expensive and can take forever They're talking about the five acre lot in there or the one acre lot in downtown next to the skyscrapers That's worth 10 million dollars And if you get it develop it and build a skyscraper and you do finish that thing in the wrong time of the of the economic Cycle, you might lose everything you might go into bankruptcy because you're losing 100 million dollars That's not what we're dealing with here. We're talking about 46 million pieces of land in the United States. At any given time, there's 5 to 6 percent of these pieces of land where the owners just had him for years, decades. In many cases, they're sick and tired of paying these property taxes. They don't want it anymore. They want to get rid of them and you can pick them up for pennies on a dollar. And these are not 10 million lots, but the vast majority of them are lots between 30, 000 and a million dollars. That's our sweet spot even within that, the sweet spot being 30, 000 to 300, 000. That's where the majority of these deals are happening. And when you do that, I mean, you get them on a contract for 35 cents on a dollar. In a way that you don't have to buy them. You can back out of the contract anytime. And you don't even put an earnest money deposit down. You can literally go around, go, go ahead and pass that deal on to somebody else in a double closing whole assignment, whichever way you want. And, and you have no money in the deal. You will never get stuck with the deal. You can back out of the deal anytime for any reason. So there is none of the risk that is being taught. It's not, it, the risk comes in. If you start doing big development deals. But you don't want to do those without having first a bunch of experience. I'm doing them now, but I have a couple of decades of experience.
[00:43:19] Tim Little: Yeah, that's a really great point that I didn't think we, I don't think we got to before, which is the, how minimal the risk is if you don't have that earnest money, money deposit in there. If you do have the contingencies in place to back out anytime it, I mean, your risks are virtually zero. So, all right. Question three, what does success look like to you?
[00:43:42] Jack Bosch: So 13 years ago, my wife and I went to a program called life book. And I think you can still Google it might be still out there. I don't know. But where you create the book of your life, really a vision of your life. And what I love about life books, or there is that it doesn't just talk about money. Instead, it covers 10 different areas of your life. It's, and I don't know if I get them all, I have my life book right around the corner over there. I need to open it again. It's, it's, it's literally a book that I received at the end of the day with pictures and inserts and things. And you work on it on the laptop for multiple days or now I think it's an online program. But, it is your spirituality. It's your health. It's your friends and family. It's your, it's your, it's your money. It's your money. It's your career. It's all these different kinds of things. So success means to me being successful in many of these areas. Not usually they're not. You're not. Nobody's usually equally successful in all of them. But I look at, you know, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, with 12 children, five times divorced. It's not my, it's not my idea of success. He's like, he's glorified and, and, and I like what he is, I mean, I'm in awe of the person and by what he has accomplished and impossible thing after impossible thing after impossible thing. I wouldn't trade places with him because I don't want to be divorced five times. My wife and I have been married 23 years. Hopefully we'll be married for another 75 years or something like that. We have one daughter who is very much like she loves hanging out with us. We travel around the world together. I have a great relationship with my brother, with my, with my parents. my, like we, we have a circle of friends that are well trusted. We go work out. We live hell healthy. To me, to me, this is my definition of success and also be control of your own time. Very, very, very important. Most people are not. So success looks like how you are doing in many of these things? Not just in one.
[00:45:42] Tim Little: Yeah, a very holistic approach to defining your success. I think that's
[00:45:47] Jack Bosch: absolutely.
[00:45:48] Tim Little: Well, hey, Jack, this has been great. I thought it was really interesting going through your journey, starting with, with land starting off easy, but then getting more complicated as your experience grew and then how you transitioned. into multifamily as well. Please tell our guests how they can get a hold of you. And if there's anything else that you'd like to share with them,
[00:46:09] Jack Bosch: Yeah, absolutely. I would love to. So first the easiest way to get a hold of me, obviously I have my own podcast called the Jack Boss Show. I'm not an egomaniac for calling me that way. I simply call it that way so that it's not. Tied to just one subject matter. So I want to talk about entrepreneurship. I want to talk about finance. I want to talk about real estate. I want to talk about different kinds of things. So I just simply call it my name. like the Joe Rogan show. I'm just not just. I don't want to put myself into his own league by far anyway, but it's a fun show Talk about different kind of things but in order to find out more about you can follow me on all the social media under my name But in order to find more about particularly the land investing the land flipping side of things you can simply go to land profit Fun fun like fun like having fun Like landprofitfun.com there you get to a page where you can download a 30 day blueprint, which is like a 30 page You Detailed PDF that shows you exactly how this works and what the components are and and so on so you can you can look through It and and see if this is something that you want to pursue at I think it's a great foundational strategy to build Income to then do what we have done to then get into multifamily and those kind of things or passively invest in multifamily That's why I say when we syndicate a deal Like last year, we bought 91 units in Fort Worth, Texas. We needed to raise three and a half million dollars. Most of it came from people that learned from us land flipping, now make a million dollars a year or half a million dollars a year and have discretionary income. They know that what we teach them works. They know that we wouldn't invest in something stupid. So they invest their money with us. And obviously people, the bottom line is when you make a ton of money, you have options. So people can do that too. So I, so check it out, landprofitfun.com.
[00:47:55] Tim Little: All right. Well, Jack, well, thanks again. We'll definitely have all that information in the show notes. I appreciate you coming on and look forward to continuing to see you do big things on your journey.
[00:48:06] Jack Bosch: Thank you very much.