The Next Big Opportunity in Real Estate (And It’s NOT Multifamily)

Aviva (00:00)
This week's listener of the week is TeaTime42. TeaTime, thank you so much for leaving us a five-star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five-star review below, you might be next week's listener.

of the week, week, week. This week on Commercial Real Estate Secrets, have Jack Bosch. Jack is the co-founder of LandProfitGenerator.com. Jack, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Jack Bosch (00:31)
Thank you for having me, I'm excited to be here.

Aviva (00:33)
Jack, let's start just by telling the audience who you are, where you come from, and how we got here today.

Jack Bosch (00:41)
Okay. Yeah, I'm happy to. So yeah, again, Jack Bosch. I'm originally from Germany, but now American citizen, been here in the country for over 27 years. Actually, 2024 marked my 27th year. I'm 54 years old. So I've now officially spent more than half of my life in the US. Whoop, whoop. And I came here to finish my college degree, met my wife here, who is also an immigrant from Honduras, Central America. So we're very international family.

And we started a real estate investing company in 2003, like dabbled with it since 1999 all the way to 2003 until we figured out what we want to do when we grow up. And we stumbled into this little known strategy that we call land flipping, which really is land wholesaling, land self-financing, land splitting.

And from there, you can open the Pandora's box and go into all kinds of things, including land development, land entitling, and so on and so forth. But our core strategy is simply to take a piece of land, let's say a $50,000 piece of land, put it on a contract for 15, sell it for 35, make a $20,000 deal, and simply do that in a double close without even using your own money and just simply as a wholesale transaction and sell it, or take a similar kind of deal, put it on a contract for $10,000.

sell it for 50, get a $10,000 down payment and sell the rest of it with self financing. So, make land cashflow in a way without again using very little or none of your own money. With this strategy, we have my wife and I have done over 5,000 deals since then. We're teaching this for 15 years already now, we've created over a thousand millionaires. And that strategy has given us the funds to then also, since you're in a commercial real estate space,

leverage that money into 800 apartment units, a whole bunch of single family homes and really create what we call generational wealth, what we hope will be generational wealth.

Aviva (02:44)
How did you stumble into this?

Jack Bosch (02:47)
So to a sequence of kind of thing, trial and error, really. Like I came to this, I came into real estate not even knowing what the word deed meant, what the word drywall meant, what the world, there's like, none of the terminology of land was familiar to me because when you come to from another country, you have to learn, mean, English was okay, it was good enough to get into college, but I learned English since in fifth grade. my, but obviously each industry has its own language. So I knew nothing about it.

Plus, I had a job that I had to travel 100 % that was in consulting, and that was gone from Monday to Friday. But still, we like real estate, we like real estate, there's big possibility to make bigger checks and things like that. So that was all very, very interesting. So we

I read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Kiyosaki, obviously, me and 2500 million people read that. But I read something out of that book that perhaps other people did not read.

And that is about two thirds into it, he talks about getting 16 % on his money with tax lien certificates. And I was like, what even is that? So I researched it and I found that there is people in the United States that don't pay their property taxes. First of all, that blew my mind. Because like why in the world would you not pay that? And then the second thing is like what even blew more my mind that is like that we're living in a wild wild west country that if you don't pay your property taxes for three years, five years, two years, different states has different rules.

Aviva (03:50)
Hmph.

Jack Bosch (04:10)
The government literally takes your property away. And now in the tax lien states like Arizona, where this was the example, the lien holder forecloses on it, but we've quickly realized that in one state over in California, somebody hasn't paid property taxes for five years, the property actually goes for auction. We're like, mind blown, never thought this would be possible because in Europe, it's not being handled like that. In Honduras, it's not being handled like that. So,

So the next thing we know, we take our life savings, go actually Michelle, I was traveling and I had airline miles. So we put Michelle on an airplane to California, to San Francisco to attend a tax deed auction. And unfortunately, she gets outbid on everything because there's huge competition there. And but she gets to talk with a lady. And the lady tells her that she has an extra piece of land. So we get

that piece of land on a contract, we figured it was worth 150, she wanted 70 for it. We got on a contract and we put it in a newspaper and sold it in two weeks for a $31,000 profit. And we're like, I didn't even have to know anything about deeds. I mean, deeds, yes, because that's you learn from a title company. But I didn't even have to learn about two by fours and four by fours and drywall and electric and things like that. Because all we did was value the land, put it in a contract, move it on to somebody else.

But then the next step was we then realized, okay, that was a coincidence. You don't just randomly sit next to somebody that land and sells it to you. That's like a once in a lifetime kind of thing. How can we make this more, more frequently? How can we do this again? And the next thought that came up was, well, let's look at that in a state like California, it takes five or even six years. It takes five years until the state can even take action. And that usually takes another six year.

before they even sell the property at auction. But these people six years ago decided to stop paying property taxes. Six years ago, they decided they don't want these properties anymore. Six years ago, they decided that they'd rather walk away and get nothing for the property than deal with that property taxes and deal with that property anymore. So what if we could get our hands on a list of people that don't owe six years property taxes, but they'd owe four, three, two, one, or even just a few months worth of property taxes?

If we could get our hands on these kind of people on the list of these people, couldn't we contact them directly with a direct mail piece and or cold call or something. And not all of them are going to sell to us, but some of them are going to be the people that that basically says, I'm done. I don't want this thing anymore. You can have it. And that's what we tried doing. And then all of a sudden deals come and started coming in. And the funny thing is that any deal that came along was a land piece.

House owners would not agree to sell those properties to us cheap. They wouldn't even respond. But the landowners responded. So we're like, well, we've done one land deal already. Let's do another one. Let's do another one. Let's do another one. And soon enough, we realized that this also applies to 20 times more people that even don't owe property taxes. So at any given time, the property taxes, people that owe property taxes, only like 2 to 3 % of the actual tax base, the property base.

Focusing just on tax delinquent properties makes your market really small. But then we realized there's 20-30 times more potential sellers out there that are just as frustrated with the property taxes, but they're kind of rudgingly paying them every month, every year still. But they would love to have an offer and we just have to pay a little bit more to them than to the other ones. And all of a sudden the

this blew up and we started doing 63 deals in our first year, 150 deals in our second year, something like 500 deals the next year and just gone since. And since then we have done over 5,000 deals all over the United States.

Aviva (08:09)
Do you find locationally there are states that you see more action in in general?

Jack Bosch (08:16)
Little bit, there's some states that are just like we focus on three kinds of properties. Let's go to that. First kind of property is infill lots in growing cities. So if you have a city that's not exploding, but slowly growing, that's where we like to be. So think about a street, 35 houses, two infill lots, two empty lots. They're beautiful. If that's a $500,000 neighborhood, the builder, like any of the builders in that area are going to snatch that up for a hundred grand in a second.

Aviva (08:27)
Hmm.

Jack Bosch (08:45)
And you don't even need to get a steep discount. You can buy it for 70, which is close to market value and sell it for 95 to the builder and the builder is happy and you made $25,000. So the second kind of, and that works nationwide in all growing cities. Now if the city is shrinking, you don't want to be there. Or very, very selectively because let's say even when Detroit, like 15 years ago when Detroit was shrinking, there was entire areas where

completely being abandoned, but other areas were being revived. So you just got to be extremely careful where you go or rather not go into those markets at all. The second kind of property we focus is one to 10 acre lots. Typically that's the size, they can be smaller, but one to 10 acre lots in the path of growth. Meaning after the last development of a city, and again, this works best in growing areas. And that goes that the growing area is the theme that will eventually answer your question here. But

So in these growing areas, it means that the city is expanding outwards, which makes these properties 10, 20, 30 minutes outside of town extremely attractive to people that want to live close to the city, but not in the city, but also to people who just want to hold on to the land and wait 20 years if the city approaches and their land is 10x, 20x, 30x more valuable and so on. And virtual, like the virtual workers today since COVID more than a third of the United States still works from home. That's 50 million people.

And not everyone wants to live in a cookie cutter home. So this is very attractive to those. And again, but if the city is shrinking, again, do people really want to live outside of a shrinking city and so on. So you want to looking for areas that overall are growing. And the third kind of property is, is like 10 plus usually acres, 10 to 100 acres plus. I'm talking about your own mini ranch. A lot of people have good jobs, good income thing. They would love to have 20 acres.

an hour, two hours outside of town. Those are usually very stable rural areas. So with that said, to answer your question, this works nationwide, where there is these rural areas in particularly, they should be somewhat pretty in itself. Like there's a car, there's an area in Northern Nevada called Elko County. And Elko County has lots of 40, 50, 60 acre parcels, but it's just butt ugly. There's nothing there. There's a bunch of

Aviva (10:40)
Hmm.

Jack Bosch (11:06)
Dumbleweed, some coyotes, some road runners and rattlesnakes and scorpions. That's everything that's there. And unless you're a animal lover of those kinds of animals, unless you're a dirt biker, because there's not even fences or anything, can do like outdoor sports there really well. You don't want to go there and park your RV in the middle of the desert with nothing around, right? So there's 40 acres. You can pick them up for $2,000, but you sell them for four.

Like literally, there's land is worthless over there. So take into consideration that if you want to be in the rural areas, it's want to be in a rural areas like, like, I don't know, Branson, Missouri, like you're within, it's like people like I've never been there. But there's like theaters and stuff like that and restaurants, at least there's lakes. And within a couple of hours, you're in St. Louis, you're in Kansas City, you're in other kind of places. So

You got millions of people that potentially want to spend their weekend out there in the recreational green areas. And that makes those areas attractive. So with that said, not really, it works in the entire United States, but as long as you follow the rules of like growing cities and attractive areas, you find those anywhere.

Aviva (12:21)
super interesting. So when you acquire a property or get it under contract, how do you find the buyer?

Jack Bosch (12:28)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, so the buyer you find usually use like four or five different strategies for that. The first one is simply you, I mean the first one and most straightforward is and nowadays that worked like 10 years ago that was really hard to do. There's been a renaissance in land and actually the realtors now finally start understanding how to sell land. Realtors never, I I have a real estate license in Arizona, I'm not bashing realtors, but realtors are trained for houses not for land.

They're trained to get the house staged, to get it decluttered, to get the photographer in it for sunset, to get a brokers open, to get to do all these different things. And you can't do most of them on land. I mean, you can do drone photography. Yes. And that's might be a good idea, but you can't stage a piece of land. you can't do a brokers open. You don't even show pieces of land because what are you going to show them? Like there's three trees, right? So

Aviva (13:15)
one.

Yeah

Jack Bosch (13:26)
I mean, unless it's like an 80 acre parcel and you take your four wheeler and you show them around, then it's a different thing. But usually realtors are not, they don't know what to do with land. They don't know how to showcase land. They don't know how to describe land. They don't know how to dream build with land. So land listings traditionally were but ugly and neglected. And as a result, a realtor was usually the worst possibility to sell your land with. Because again, they didn't know how to sell proper land. I'm not even, it's not their fault. It's just they were never trained.

Today, that's different. Today, every market has a few land rock star realtors and the simplest way is just find them, give them your land and sell them. My 16 year old daughter, now 17, my daughter when she was 16 earlier in this year, did her first land deal. She put the piece of land on a contract for $6,000, interviewed three top realtors. The second one was it that lady got, all she does is land in that area. Within four days, she got her two or three competing offers.

And she sold that thing for $40,000 with a $15,000 down payment. She had another contract for six. So off the $15,000 down payment, the realtor got four. She got 11 out of 11, six went to the seller. So she made $5,000 cash and now receiving $500 a month for the next eight years. Not bad for a 16 year old, right? And the effort in selling was zero because all she did is interview, look, follow the criteria of finding the best land realtors.

schedule a few interviews and we had her interview them herself. didn't daddy didn't do that for her. She didn't she needed to do it. She did everything herself. Like I was like, I'm not gonna go tell anyone about this if I have to do even the first thing about it. You do this business, not me. And so she did it all and I'm very proud of her. So with that said, the second way is and the traditional way used to be and it still works very, very well is to put it on Zillow. You can put your piece of land on Zillow.

Aviva (15:22)
Hmm.

Jack Bosch (15:24)
You can put them on on Facebook Marketplace. Love Facebook Marketplace. Go on Facebook, pull it up right now. I mean, not right now, but pull it out after the podcast and put in Land for Sale and you'll find hundreds of listings out there. Most of the people we trained in our coaching program and and so you can put them on there for cash for self financing and any kind of thing. There's a website called landwatch.com gets over five million visitors a month. All they have is land on there.

Aviva (15:30)
Wow.

Jack Bosch (15:54)
That's a paid for thing. Craigslist and Zillow is not Craigslist. Craigslist is no longer good. But Facebook Marketplace and Zillow are free. Landwatch you pay for. And there's a whole bunch of other websites like that, that you can put them on there. Like even on Facebook. Like if you have a property 50 miles outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, and let's say it's a 20 acre mini ranch, who would be interested in that property? Well, what I find is that

people that love real estate would love to have more real estate. So if you can go into a if you go put that join a group on Facebook, that's the Arkansas Little Rock Arkansas real estate investors. You put your listing in there chances are one of these guys is doing fix and flips in Little Rock makes a ton of money and would love to have 20 acres outside of Little Rock. Right there you have your buyer. Right? So places like that. That's the third.

The next method would be selling it to the neighbor, to people in the neighborhood of the land. People that have land in the neighborhood, not everyone wants to get rid of it. Many people want more, even though because perhaps it's in the path of growth, values are going up. Or sometimes they buy it for the opposite reason. Sometimes if somebody has 10 acres and you have another 10 acres that you're selling there, they're buying that 10 acres so that nobody moves there so they can keep their privacy.

Different kind of reasons for that. But neighbors, we sell about 30 % of our properties to neighbors. then over time, as you put it on Facebook and Zillow and in different places, you get a lot of people inquiring and you're building what's called the buyer's list. And then over time, the buyer's list is very specific geographic, because you have a property in this subdivision and you get 50 people inquiring about it, one buys it, well, 49 couldn't buy it.

Aviva (17:24)
makes sense.

Jack Bosch (17:46)
Next time you have a property in that same subdivision, guess what? Send those 49 in email. Is it like, I got a new deal. Chances are one of them will buy it. So at the end of the day, turns out that you sell like, I mean, we have 14 coaches now in our company. One of them does 90 % of these deals with realtors. Another one does like 40 % of their to the neighbors. But on average, I would think it's like about a third to the neighbors, a third to your buyers list over time, a third to like the social media platforms.

And that also includes a realtor because the realtor is going to put them there too and you're to put it on the MLS and so on.

Aviva (18:22)
Real estate is crazy in this country. I love it. It is so wild. Just there is so much opportunity. It is absolutely insane and.

Jack Bosch (18:25)
Yeah, me too.

The things you can

do, I mean, now I would humbly consider myself an expert in some areas of real estate. But the fact that I was able to do this without really knowing anything, because all I needed to figure out is how to value a piece of land. That's the most important skill you really need to do. If you can do that, if you get the value right, then you just contact people, make offers, follow up with them.

renegotiate sometimes a little bit, get deals on a contract. And nowadays there's so many tools out there on the selling side that you can have other people sell it for you.

Aviva (19:10)
Love it. It's so cool. As the family of immigrants who have made our wellbeing off of real estate, it's an amazing thing that we can do in this country. And I could talk about that all day, but I won't bore people. Talk to me about landprofitgenerator.com.

Jack Bosch (19:20)
Yeah. Yeah, me too.

Yes. So yeah, so about to like the first few years of us doing these businesses, we, started doing large volume land deals, I actually putting together big in person live auctions. So we would literally buy 200 properties, sometimes even 250 properties in a four month period, and then sell them all in one day. And

That was hugely exciting, but also very complicated, very expensive, very huge endeavor. But then 2008 came and in 2008, that business model no longer worked. So what happened is at that moment, nobody would show up to the auctions anymore. because people, the media started saying real estate is bad, which is really ridiculous because actually 2009 to 2013 was the best time in the history of the United States to buy real estate.

But that's a different kind of thing. People tend to listen to the media, just like right now. Right now is the time to get into real estate. Because if you can do make money in this market, whenever whatever the market turns into, you got to explode. But anyway, we stopped doing these auctions. And for about a period of six months figured out what to do next and how to do this and how to structure it. And we realized that at that point, all these exit strategies that I just told you about, land watch was around.

like, Zillow started being around, Facebook was starting to be around, Craigslist back then was really big eBay. could sell properties on eBay actually really well. And that has gone away, but so these, strategies, what it eventually did is allowed us to go from a very expensive business model where we spent $200,000 in advertising, renting a convention center, get 800 people into a room to a model where we basically put

properties on websites for free, had people contact us every day and sell properties every day. And what we realized that even though prices went down in 2008, nine, 10, demand didn't disappear. So we considered, we continued doing deals and we just shifted how we sell them. And what we realized is what we have created was a very replicatable model.

We created something that now everyone else could do this. when I, and I'm member of real estate investors associations, like the Phoenix area, I'm member number three, my wife is member number two. So we're like the one almost like the founding members of that, of that RIA. And so I go to educational events. go to real estate investors association meetings. I consciously educate myself on all these things. And what I realized is that people were losing their shirt.

Obviously, blood was on the street, people were bankrupt, the Ferraris were being impounded, they lost their houses. I know so many people that been in business since before that, that lost everything during that time. And we didn't. We didn't. Our business, our margins were compressed. So instead of putting a deal on a contract for $40,000 and selling it for 90, we would take a deal in that same neighborhood now in a contract and put it on the contract for 20 and sell it for 40. So instead of making $50,000, we made $20,000, but

Aviva (22:26)
Hmph.

sure.

Jack Bosch (22:43)
That's still good money. Right? So we're continuing to do deals. And what happens is, at that point, we started realizing that we're one of like 10 people in the United States doing this. Like literally, there's nobody that did that. And we said, like, you know what, we need to teach this because we're not creating competition. We're just helping those that are losing everything right now, getting back on board. And that's and why we started the coaching business.

And first it became a home study course and we ran it for like as a hobby next door, just on the side. And then since 2016, 17, we actually put more focus on it. And now it's a, we now we have a, a team of like 20 people in our company that plus an extra 14 coaches. So it's a total of 34, 35 people. We have created a thousand millionaires. We have programs ranging from a home study course to one year, one on one.

coaching with daily group coaching sessions with with partnering with deals and things and it's it's like It's it's it's game-changing kind of program that we put all our knowledge and all our our Expertise behind and and we are We're the industry leaders in that and we're we have by far probably by 10x grade at the most millionaires and the most successful people in our industry from that

And we don't just teach that $10,000 deal that you get for a thousand and sell for $8,000 with tele-sale financing. We teach you, you want to do a land split and take a $100,000 lot, it into 10 and sell those 10 pieces for $500,000. We teach you that. You want to learn land entitlement? We'll teach you that. You want to learn how to do double closes, triple closes, how to sell notes, how to create notes, how to partially sell them, how to...

how to build a multi-million dollar business. We teach that because that's what we and our coaches all do. So we have people that just, their goal is to make a hundred grand a year. So we take them there and we have people that made $950,000 in their first year and built now by now, built an almost eight figure business out of this.

Aviva (24:53)
Impressive. Jack, what makes you happy with what you do every day in real estate?

Jack Bosch (25:00)
I love the creativity of real estate. we do even our coaching students when they come on board, the very first thing we do is we have them take what's called the Kolbe test. And the Kolbe test is a test that tests you in four different areas. First area, it's all about quick start. How what do you need to take action? And I'm a profile. So the first area is about how detail are in how much detail do you need in before you take action? How much organization do you need before you take action? How much do you just like to take action? And the fourth one is your vision solutions or your hands on?

Well, I'm a 6483, which means I need a little bit detail, but more than anything, I love variety. I love taking action. I can't do the same thing every freaking day. would kill me. Like I'm, I'm more creative kind of person than I am. And I thrive when, different things happen every single day. And another word for that is realistic.

Because you never get bored with real estate there. Every deal is different. Every analysis is different. Every structure is different. Every title issue that comes up is different. It constantly, sir, it's constantly asking for problem solving and not major problem. Worst case scenario, deal falls apart and falls apart. But it's not like, but it's exciting. It's exciting because it is problem solving and it's creativity all day long while at the same time.

If you do it the right way, and that's why we have 800 apartment units providing long-term financial peace of mind. Because I like to be entertained every day, but I also like to sleep well at night by having my financials taken care of to the day that I die and even to the day that my daughter, for my daughter's life.

Aviva (26:42)
couldn't agree more.

Real estate being a creative sport, I love that about it. There's no right or wrong answer as long as you do things ethically. But I talked to somebody, my sister and my brother-in-law, they're both doctors. One's a surgeon, one's an OBGYN. They go to work and somebody could die on the table and they've got their gloves on, right? It's like what we do, a deal could blow up, someone could lose money, but this is not.

Jack Bosch (27:02)
Right.

Aviva (27:11)
something where somebody could not walk out of the room. And so I just wake up every morning so grateful that this is what we do because it's like you said, we can sleep at night, but then we can get up in the morning and today will not be what yesterday was and it's not going to be what tomorrow is. So

Jack Bosch (27:17)
Yeah.

Exactly.

exactly. sometimes a lot of gives you the freedom sometimes like, unless you're like doing a fix and flip, and you have to be there yourself. That's why I don't do fix and flips. This year, this in 2024, I was three months in Europe, I took, I took a sabbatical, I spent 35 days walking 500 miles through Spain doing a pilgrimage, a spiritual pilgrimage or through Spain and

Aviva (27:36)
Thank

Yeah.

Jack Bosch (27:58)
And then I spent two months traveling to Europe and having fun and visiting my brother and my parents and attending the Eurocop soccer and just like having a blast. Because a lot of the decisions that you can make, first of all, a land business, as I said, there's nothing to see, there's nothing to be. I haven't looked at a piece of land that I've flipped for 17 years because there's nothing to see.

Aviva (28:08)
That's cool.

Jack Bosch (28:23)
I don't particularly, I'm not even an outdoors person to the center. I don't want to go camping or things like that. So I want to go look at land and then I come back to my hotel. So I want to walk on that. love hiking, but other than that for the land business, I don't, I can be in Europe. So while in Europe, we did land deals and you can do them from anywhere. And, and, and as I said, that's, that allows you to, and with the flexibility of it, it also allows you to not do anything for a week or two weeks or three weeks, and then just pick it back up.

You can't do that in certain areas of real estate if you really like the project manager of something, have to be there. And you certainly can't do that in most professions.

Aviva (29:06)
Ain't that the truth. Jack, where can our listeners find you, follow you, contact you? Aside from visiting landprofitgenerator.com.

Jack Bosch (29:14)
Yeah.

Sure. One of the easiest ways is to go to land profit fun, fun, like having fun, right? Like landprofitfun.com. Cause when you go there, you can download a 30 day PDF blueprint that basically gives you exact instructions how to, how to set up your own land business in a 30 day matter. And even if you just want to read through it, then at least you know exactly how to do it. But, but if you want to take action, you can literally do that. The second way to get a hold of me is also I have my own podcast, The Jack Bosch Show.

And I have also, I'm on social media and YouTube anywhere under my name. So if you look up Jack Bosch or in some cases it's Jack.Bosch, you'll find me everywhere. Literally like any platform.

Aviva (30:02)
Jack, thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show today and for every, yeah, and for everybody listening. We'll see you next week.

Jack Bosch (30:06)
Thank you for having me.