Member Kevin Farrell Shares Land Academy Success Stories (LA 1036)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And, I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny, southern California.
Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I interview member, Kevin Farrell, and he shares his Land Academy success stories, and hopefully, a little bit of his background. And, he's ... I can't wait to talk to you, Kevin, because you're not just a regular Land Academy member. You're nice enough to be the moderator on land investor sites. And, [crosstalk 00:00:30] a bunch of stuff to ask you. It's awesome.
Jill DeWit: Yep, thank you Kevin, glad you're here.
Steven Butala: Yeah, so Kevin, tell us a little bit about [inaudible 00:00:38].
Kevin Farrell: All right, I'm glad to be here. When 2016, I had determined that I wanted to get into real estate investing, and I was looking really hard at small, multi-family, small apartment buildings. I was hanging out on Bigger Pockets, and discovered Seth Williams over there. And, I thought, well, the land thing sounds pretty interesting. So, I started researching land. And actually, Jill, I don't know if you remember. While I was on Bigger Pockets, I was looking for ways to get tax delinquent lists for counties, and you piped in over there and said, "Hey, you don't need to do that, because you're going to miss a lot of deals."
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Kevin Farrell: And so, you and I scheduled a phone conversation. We talked, and I ended up joining October, 2016, something like that. And at the time, we were running a pest control business in Indianapolis. And, that was my full-time deal. So, I knew this was going to be part-time for awhile, and we reached that point in 2018 in the spring. We decided if we're going to go full-time with land, I just can't do the pest control work anymore.
Kevin Farrell: So, we sold that business, and that's ... It's easier to say than it is to do. It takes awhile to get everything together and wrap that all up. We sold that business, and at the same time, we had an opportunity to buy the condo that we're in now for cash. And, we sold our home. So, that whole summer was just kind of like, a real long train wreck thing.
Kevin Farrell: I wasn't sending any mail out. We had properties and inventory, so I could sell a few here and there, but from June until October, we didn't work on the land business. And so, that's just devastating. So basically, we rebooted our land business toward the end of 2018.
Kevin Farrell: Really, the first quarter of this year is when we're really trying to hit the numbers that we're working on right now. And, what I'm doing is, even though I don't meet these goals every month, I'm trying to send out 3,000 offers a month. And, I'm purposely targeting areas that are higher priced. Some of these are east of the Mississippi. The personality of these counties and the way people respond is totally different than rural, vacant desert property out west, so the numbers are lower, I think.
Steven Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kevin Farrell: The response rate is lower. That also meets my needs. My wife and I concluded that we weren't very good at building a really high-volume business, working with smaller properties, but actually, you know, trying to do 10 or 20 deals a month. We failed that.
Kevin Farrell: But, we're pretty good at doing some larger dollar deals. I'm fine with doing three or four that make 10 or 20 K a month, and that's what I'm working towards right now.