Jack Bosch’s Land Empire: The Secret to Flipping Dirt for Dollars

Announcer (00:03):

This is the Self Storage Podcast with the original Self storage expert, Scott Meyers.

Scott Meyers (00:11):

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Self Storage Podcast. I am your hostess Scott Meyers, and in today’s episode we have my good friend Jack Bosch. Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack Bosch (00:20):

Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Scott Meyers (00:22):

Well gang, for a little bit of background, Jack and I have known each other for gosh, going on a little over 15 years now. He and I met in the real estate education space, ran around in the same circles, going out to live events. I’m speaking on the same stages for different large groups. So like me, Jack has both an investing business and an education business and we’ve also been a part of a mastermind together for going on. I think about eight or nine years we’ve been in that together and in the same rooms and had many conversations about the business and Jack specializes in land whereas I specialize in land and then putting self storage on it. And so I thought it would be great that we could have a conversation so that Jack could talk about what he has been doing and how he’s been killing it and the land and business so that those of us that are looking for land to be able to build on can learn from his secrets to marketing finding and ultimately ways of making deals on land for development. So Jack, if you would share a little bit with Storage Nation, how you got into this business.

Jack Bosch (01:22):

Yeah, so thank you and good to see you here buddy. Yeah, we’ve known each other forever. We’ve shared one or the other bottle of wine with each other or more in the thing

Scott Meyers (01:34):

Or more,

Jack Bosch (01:36):

And it’s always wonderful to see you really somebody that I look up to in the industry that is doing things the right way. So the way I started out is that I’m an immigrant from Germany can tell from my accent does sound like Arnold. I don’t look like him. Plus Arnold, it’s Austrian, not German. We as Germany, we do make a little distinction there and just kidding, it’s just once you’re far away from the homeland it all becomes one thing. Somebody’s like from Europe, yay and so on. Anyway, so when I say my wife and I met here, she’s from Honduras, central America, so we are both immigrants here. We fast forward, we graduated here, got jobs here, didn’t like our jobs. Fast forward, tried to realize we needed to do something different, couldn’t because we had to wait for the green card. So parallel to the green card as a part-time we started in real estate and through a whole bunch of trial and error, we stumbled into this strategy where we can identify how to find people that have pieces of land and they don’t want them anymore and they’re willing to give them away for pennies on the dollar.

(02:45):

And what we typically are bread and butter business is to simply take them and wholesale ’em and just wholesale land like people wholesale houses. But since then it has evolved into much more. It has evolved into also a land splitting and to some degree land developing. And that’s why probably we have synergies here because

(03:08):

You can use that exact same strategy that we use to find land to just wholesale or to the sell with a financing and create cashflow with land. You can also use that to find specifically pieces of land to develop poor multifamily, poor self storage for single family developments. Whatever you want to. I’m working on a deal right now, 26 acres in California, it’s already zoned for 574 apartment units. So we only need to get it through the process of entitling. The city can’t prevent us from building, we just need to make sure we cross all the dot, all the i’s have all the studies and all the things that need to be done. Then we have basically a deal that is a smoking deal because the upside is several million dollars on that deal.

Scott Meyers (03:58):

So that is always been the intriguing part, Jack. For folks that are really truly into land that I’m buying the land off of folks like yourself or an individual owner just depends. Or a broker who has it listed by and many times I don’t know who the owning party is, but talking with you and a number of folks, it’s always intrigued me to see the profits that I never would’ve anticipated with the land without improving it. In other words. And when I say improving meaning buying a large track of land and then either chopping it up into smaller pieces and then selling it off or selling it off after getting it entitled, taking it through that piece or doing a partial development like a residential development as you mentioned, putting in roads and curbs and doing all the heavy lifting for the builder to come in and then pick it up at that point and run with it because not their specialty. And I never thought that just moving dirt, buying dirt and then moving it around could be as profitable as buying a piece of dirt and then putting a building on it with an income stream on it. But it’s looking more and more appealing and more enticing all the time. So is there a particular focus now? I mean we all graduate within our own asset class on our own niche. Is there a particular flavor, if you will, of working in land that you like most right now?

Jack Bosch (05:12):

Well, I mean there’s always the question of do you want that big hit, that quick hit or you want? Typically the bigger numbers take a little bit more time

(05:25):

And the smaller numbers accelerate time. So we have a lot of, again, our bread and butter is that you simply find a 50,000 piece of land that the owner just absolutely doesn’t want anymore. You get on a contract for $10,000 and you sell it for 35 and they make a quick 25 grand that happens like bread and butter. There’s people in our universe, students ourselves, we have done 5,000 deals like that. Our students have doing 30, 50, a hundred deals a year and that can add up to a nice chunk of money that can add up to hundreds, thousands of dollars a year. But it’s an active income because you’re wholesaling now just like or seller financing, just like you’re doing in the housing world. As you go into the higher price properties, typically the sizes go up unless of course you’re dealing in Beverly Hills and there’s a property like that, it’s probably worth 10 million.

(06:15):

But outside of that, the sizes go up and with the sizes, the potential use of the properties becomes more important. So the favorite thing, I mean I love my bread and butter deals because they pay the bills, they pay, they do all these kind of things. But then also lately I’ve been much more, as you said, we graduate out of our own asset class in a way that it becomes so second nature to do these deals that at some point of time, I don’t want to say we get bored, but you almost, I want to keep learning, you want to keep learning. So what’s the next challenge? And the next challenge is really taking pieces of land that are just raw land and say, well what can I do with it? And then you look at what is it zoned for, what does the city want for it to be done with it? And then really start having those conversations and then go either just a little bit into that or not or all the way to net or again, sometimes even that wholesaling process is possible in those kinds of properties. So it’s not

(07:26):

Uncommon

(07:27):

That deal that I sent, we have in our contract right now, similar properties are currently in the market at the exact same stage of development or lack thereof are sold for three times as much per acre. So we just happened to find somebody that where there’s a situation, one of the owners just passed away, the heirs are there, well we don’t really want this thing that if we can get X for it, let’s just sell it. And in that moment our direct mail piece hit and they’re responding. We negotiated a deal. It’s not a cheap property, it’s 1.7 million in this deal, but similar properties are already listed for $5 million or per acre, at least the acre price and that’s 26 acres on $7 million, whatever that is. Some similar properties are listed for three times. So really there’s two ways to go into this land space. My preferred way to this day is get it below value because then you don’t have to speculate on what you can do with it. The value you have, the value from day one, right? So I dunno if that makes sense.

Scott Meyers (08:41):

It does. It’s like every other investment tell you make your money when you buy rather than when you sell. And so if you’ve got that buffer built in, we teach the same thing. Speaking of that, let’s talk to, I’m going to have you talk to the self-storage investor that wants to learn about land from a standpoint of where do I go from here? Many of these folks, they’ve been in self storage for a while, they’ve bought existing facilities because there’s a track record, there’s a history of performance and the lenders like to see that, but now they’re graduating, they got some experience under the belt and they’re looking to do some development. And so without divulging all of your secrets because you have an entire business built upon that as well, where are some of the places people should start? What are some of the things that they should be looking for to at least give them an edge or at least maybe eyes wide open heading into the place where they’re looking for some land to be able to develop a self storage facility?

Jack Bosch (09:37):

So I think I want to go answer the question if I may, just slightly a little bit different and even almost simpler than that from the point of view is like if you want to develop self storage, and I am not a self storage expert, I do land deals and as I mentioned 90% of my deals or 98% of my deals, I just simply get ’em on a contract for cheap, pass ’em on and that can be a million dollar property I get for 600 and sell for 700 or it can be a 30,000 property I get for three and sell for 20. But that’s our usual cookie cutter business. But with that said, this business works just as well. If you’re looking for these larger properties, and I think it’s really the secret, which I’m happy to explain how it works is really behind the marketing strategy.

(10:25):

So the point number one is in real estate, everyone chases houses, everyone chases finished product, everyone chases. So everyone out there chases finished self storage I assume, I dunno, you tell me, true or not, everyone chases. We also in the multifamily space, we own close to a thousand apartment units. Even in today’s world where multifamilies with interest rates high, not so sexy anymore, any deal that comes on the market is being fought over by multiple bidders. So land now let’s open the door to land. That’s not the case in land, that’s the first beauty of land. Land is almost like the forgotten asset class that most people don’t look at or at least not many people look at it. So that’s a beautiful thing. That means that marketing strategies that don’t work other things like direct mail for our house flippers in the master mastermind that we are, when I talk to these house flippers, I ask them what’s their response rate? They’re telling me they’re getting 0.3% response rate on the direct mail piece. Now this deal that I talked about, the we are three partners on that deal. One of them is actually the guy that got it. So this wasn’t a deal I got, it was gotten by one of our students. He sent out 320 letters using our exact strategy, 320 letters out, and he got three land deals from that, three large land deals.

(11:56):

One

(11:56):

Of them is this large development deal, 574 apartment units. The second one is another deal that could be developed and potentially not even a self storage kind of deal. And the third one, I actually don’t know what it is, but it’s more like a hundred thousand wholesale deal. So the point is direct mail works in our way. So I can’t tell you which market to go after because I don’t know, I’m not an expert in self storage.

(12:27):

What I can tell you obviously, but from my understanding of self storage and I’ve been forever wanting to attend one of your classes, by the way, you always extend invitations to me, thank you and I’ll do it sometime, but you keep saying that I know this year I’ll do it this year because actually I want to develop some self storage because I know how to get the land. But this is how I would go about if I’m a self storage expert that wants to develop it, I would look at the market that I want to be in. I would look at where the market is growing and typically the market is, there’s infill lots, of course they’re usually there a little bit sought after and hire that the owners know what it’s worth, but then there’s often land in the path of growth.

(13:13):

So

(13:13):

We’re talking about, and one of the things that we do and we like doing is we’re getting the city’s early year development plan. Every larger city has that. I don’t know if you teach it or not, perhaps I’m teaching something that you’re already teaching, but every bigger city has what’s called an association of governments. So I live in Phoenix, Arizona, there’s Phoenix, there’s Scottsdale, there’s Paradise Valley, there’s Glendale, there’s Peoria, there’s Tulsa, there’s Tempe, there’s Mesa, all of these and probably another 20 other towns. All of these make the greater metro area of Phoenix. Well, they don’t just say, oh, I’m going to expand that road over there. The city of Chandler doesn’t say that. And if the city of Kee what’s up with Chandler, they’re not just saying we expanded, but no we don’t. The street doesn’t go from a three-way road to a dirt road. Instead they all cooperate on their city development plan. So in other words, they know 5, 10, 15, even 30 years ahead of time, which road is going to be expanded, where the growth is going to be, where the next big large developments are going to be and so on so forth. So

(14:27):

You can get that information from free. It requires a little digging, but you can get information for free. So that’s the first thing I would do. Once you have that, you kind of know where the city’s growing and then you go into some strategic spots on the main road, whatever your criteria, whatever the best locations are for self storage. Again, I’m not an expert in, but I would assume it needs to be on a main road. So that’s easy, visible, ideally on a corner one. But since if you know that in the next five years there’s plans to develop all this area and you can get a corner lot of 10 acres at a fraction of what it would cost in the city, then you can even afford to pay market value because as the city develops, that land is going to go 10 x up in value, but you already have it and now you have the ability to build self storage much, much cheaper there. Next thing you can do is you can go in there, you can get a list of land up until 10 years ago, no online service list of land. You want to make sure it’s zoned the correct way.

(15:29):

If it’s not, then you got to go to the rezoning process, which of course contains more risk, et cetera, et cetera. But the ideal world is you get it zoned ready. Our apartment land that we just gotten is already zoned multifamily. So therefore, and we are excited about that because once we do all the tests and things, the city cannot prevent us from building. So the same thing there. So you want to then look at is its owned the right way and then perhaps go to one of the data server and basically say, I want identify what’s the minimum size that you need. You tell me what’s the different size, what is the minimum size for good mouth sub storage for silky four acres, five acres.

Scott Meyers (16:06):

We’d like to see about five acres if we’re going single story and maybe a little bit of multi, we can build on two and a half to three if we’re going vertical.

Jack Bosch (16:13):

Okay, so you choose that and again, and then you select and then what you do is you simply use a direct mail strategy.

(16:23):

We have a letter that we have tested millions of times, well not really millions of times, but dozens, probably a hundred times that to this day has not been beaten. And that letter just invites the people that are on the land to call us back. That’s all it does. It’s not like, Hey, I’m offering you XI things. It’s not a blind offer. These are sophisticated sellers often or at least or it’s been in the family for a long time or they know it’s worth something and you’re not going to get 300 phone calls anyway. So you go into one niche, you target 300 pieces of land, you contact them and you might get 20 phone calls. Now you get 20 phone calls. Now you got 20 leads that you can really evaluate and then you take it from there. And then everything else, I throw it over the fence to you. But it’s really, I think the way, the reason why we can find those deals is that we know how to identify where the growth is. We know how to identify how to get in front of these owners in a way that they want to respond.

(17:24):

And at that point, it’s your choice what to do with it. You can buy and hold, just simply wait until everything is developed around it and then have prices go through the roof or you can buy and develop and just be the first one and probably have and not fully occupied, sell storage for a little bit until everyone is full, but until everything is developed in the area. But it’s definitely, but either way you can lock out a piece of land in a really good strategic location that has a lot of future growth

Scott Meyers (18:01):

And I appreciate that. That is right there. Storage Nation, that is a masterclass in itself. So Jack, I appreciate that. Obviously you never disappoint. So let’s fast forward. Now we’ve identified some land and it is not zoned for self storage. And so we have our pitch deck, our presentation when we go in to talk to the zoning board and city county, just depends on where the land is in order to gain acceptance and gain either a variance or a change of zoning. And we’re not always successful, even though we put our best foot forward, we got a standard pitch. It’s a quiet neighbor, it doesn’t utilize a lot of resources, all these things. But we run up into nimbyism all the time, which is not in my backyard. And people don’t, they have the stigma of surrounding self-storage. So whether it’s self-storage or something else, what are some of the strategies that you’ve utilized Jack when you’ve gone into these boards, the zoning board in which they’re resistant to the change in zoning that you want for the land, any secret weapons, any magic pills that you’ve used to be able to have these folks see things your way to be able to get the zoning changed?

Jack Bosch (19:14):

Zoning is a risky business and I’ve seen people, again, it’s not typically what we do. We love flipping, but again, I’ve been part of some of these deals. It’s what we want to do for more. For example, in our education company, we have 15 coaches and each of them have a specialty and some of them have done these rezonings and things like that. I personally am not the biggest expert on the rezoning, but the beautiful thing is I don’t coach rezoning. Our company can teach you that because we have master coaches that do that, but I’m not necessarily a business expert. So I’m going to talk from what I’ve seen being done in a combination of our students, our coaches and so on and so forth. And typically what happens is I try to shy away from properties that are neat rezoning because the number one biggest question mark is how do the neighboring people react to it? The city can be all in favor of it and everything, and all of a sudden you get this firestorm of a neighboring revolt coming in and all of a sudden they just fold like crazy because they want to be reelected next time.

Scott Meyers (20:27):

So

Jack Bosch (20:27):

One of the most important things you want to do is if you want to rezone, is contact the neighbors sooner than later. Don’t try to sneak it in. Contact the neighbors, let them know you’re looking to do this. Engage in a conversation, put their concerns at ease, and then also ask the city or the county, whichever the territory you’re in, what they want to see on the property. So if they tell you absolutely no self storage, you might as well not start because then it becomes an uphill battle. In that case, what you do is you go, well, what do you want to see?

Scott Meyers (21:02):

Well,

Jack Bosch (21:02):

We want to see multifamily then get a letter of commitment from them or a letter, not a letter of commitment. It’s more like a letter of support from the city that says, yes, absolutely we support development of multifamily in that space and then just take that letter and the raw piece of land and sell it to somebody else because just that letter of support is going to make somebody take some of the risk out and make somebody else more confident in taking that project on. And right there, if this is a half a million dollar property as it is, and let’s say if it’s fully entitled for multifamily, it would be a $3 million property. By getting that letter, you can probably increase the price by $200,000 and just move it onto somebody else. So that’s a valuable letter to get if they do tell you, yeah, no self storage sounds good and just, well then just make sure you have the neighbors somewhat in agreement and then it should be a clear shot. But that’s always like when I’ve seen them fail, it’s always, always because the neighbors come in droves or the city or the city just simply says, we don’t want that right from the beginning. And you have it set in your mind and you’re fighting crazy against something that is just impossible to win. Because unfortunately, I mean city officials are the most wonderful people in the world, but they’re bureaucrats and bureaucrats follow the rules. And if you’re not following the rules a hundred percent, or if you want to change something into something that is not by the book, good luck. It becomes really difficult then

Scott Meyers (22:44):

Well, everything you say is true, and that’s exactly how that plays out. Anytime that we’re looking at a piece of property that we are interested in our first call, before we even write the LOI, let alone a purchase agreement or enter into a contract, we’re visiting the zoning board to just ask them, Hey, this is a piece of ground that we’re looking to buy and we’d like to put self-storage here. It is not currently zoned for self-storage. Have you had folks looking to convert to pieces of dirt to self-storage and has that been met with resistance? What about the neighborhoods? And would try to get as much information from them as possible. So you’re right, if they said, yeah, the last three projects that came up for development in front of the zoning board, were all shut down, we don’t like it, then yeah, we know to move on somewhere else. And to the extent that we could get a contingency in the purchase agreement, we certainly wouldn’t enter into a contract if we knew that was that we were going to have an uphill battle.

Jack Bosch (23:36):

But the thing that I want to mention is you can still make money with those. You just need to ask them, what do you want to see there? Because you got the opportunity to buy that X, let’s say you buy it at a million dollars and it might still be a smoking deal that you can still increase the price for a little bit by getting the city to tell you exactly what they want there, what they’re all excited about it, and then find the buyer that’s willing to do that. And then it becomes more like a wholesale deal. You just pass it on. But you can still make a ton of money with that. That’s

Scott Meyers (24:07):

A hundred percent now never squander your marketing efforts when you find, as you said, a deal on land and it is priced up below the rest of the dirt that is around it and you’ve already yet a buffer built in, whether you can build on it or not, you’re in the real estate business to make money. And so we’re in the land business to make money as well. So folks, I want you to hear that and recognize that because I see so many folks that look at an opportunity in sell storage and it maybe doesn’t fit your buy box, but it’s a deal and it could be passed to somebody else. Don’t let it fall off your desk wholesale that you can get a fee out of that, an assignment fee. Same thing with lan. Anytime that you are out there analyzing and looking at opportunities in the marketplace and it is a deal, then there is a way to be able to monetize that. So Jack maybe give, how about a mini case study or at least maybe an example, one of the better examples you’ve seen from one of your students or on your own in which a land deal produced probably way more income than it should have or what people may normally think you could get out of land.

Jack Bosch (25:10):

The perfect example for that, even though it’s not necessarily a self storage kind of story, but is land splitting.

(25:17):

And as a matter of fact, as we talk here, I’m thinking about my 26 acre kind of deal, I was like where we could just simply carve off six acres, only convert 20 acres, keep six acres and see if the city wants to rezone that. Because again, it’s in the path of growth. But we have done quite a few of those kind of deals and typically we do them on the lower kind of programs, lower kind of properties, which are, let’s say you have a 40 acre parcel outside of town on a couple of dirt roads, not super valuable property. There is a lot of 40 acre parcels out in rural America or a couple of hours outside of a big city that might only be worth $50,000. So there’s actually a lot of that out there. So it’s not farmland, it’s often more like in the desert areas or in Texas or rolling hills and so on. So you take that kind of a property and with our strategy, you can get that property for 10 grand in many cases and turn around and sell it for 35, great, make $25,000. Great, wonderful. That’s a good paycheck. You do do four deals like that a month. You make a hundred thousand dollars a month.

(26:31):

Yellow

(26:31):

Strategy though isn’t, that’s how we started. That’s how we started doing these deals. We had jobs, we did this part-time and our first year we did 63 deals, made 10 x what we made in our jobs and then our green came and were able to quit. And then we took that to a million dollars and a few months later and eight figures after that and so on. But then across the thing, just like you say, I love what you said, you graduate out of your own thing. So as you start doing the same thing sometimes you then start looking at it differently. So the first, so one time, and that’s how it started. And then since then we have done it many, many times. We came across this property on two roads, a road here, road there, 40 acres right there. And so we realized that we could have made a quick $25,000, but we could also have, but instead what we did is we took some of our profits and just bought the property. So we spent 10 grand to buying it. And then what we did is we split it into five smaller parcels because

(27:29):

There’s something interesting that is actually an interesting kind of thing in land in the city, like in an infill situation in the city, the larger the plot, the more per acre it’s worth because you can do more with it outside of the city. It’s the exact opposite. The larger the land, the lower the price per acre or the smaller the land, the larger the price per acre, the higher the price per acre. So keep that in mind. In the city it’s like everyone half an acre is good or half an acre pieces combined to two acres is way better than four times that because now you can start going vertical on soft storage and you can build multifamily and you can put, if you have the right density, you can do much, much more with that out in the more rural areas splitting it increases your profit drastically.

(28:16):

So in this case, we put this property, we bought it for 10, then we split it into five, which is one 20 acre parcel and four or five acre parcels. So that’s the total of 40 acres. And then what we did is we still wanted to have our 10 K back quickly. So we took the 20 acres and we sold that with 30 K very quickly because again, 20 acres isn’t worth that much less than a 40 acre parcel because it’s so much land that people, most people are satisfied with it, but they’re paying a little bit of a premium instead of selling. Instead of that being worth 50, it’s probably worth 40 or 35. And we sold it for 30. Now we paid 10, so 30 we had our 10 back in our pocket and $20,000 cash in our pocket. And then the nice part is then the other four five acre parcels, we now own pre and clear, we have 20 grand in our pocket already.

(29:13):

We’re in the profit and we have four pieces of land. And then we turned around and sold all of each of these four or $15,000 each with a $3,000 down payment and $12,000 seller financing with $285 a month. So if you add this up, we basically now, instead of taking your property for $10,000 and selling it for 35 and making 20 5K, we split them, made $20,000 cash profit and our money back on the first one and made $1,040 a month in monthly payments for the next eight years and gotten an extra $3,000 per lot as a down payment. So that’s an extra $15,000 down an extra $12,000 down, I’m sorry. So we sold the first one for $15,000 with 3000 down. The second one, the third one, the fourth one, so 3000 times more is 12,000 and had cashflow of $1,042. If you add it all together, the profit that you get from the cashflow over again, whatever it is, 60 months or five years I think it is, and the profit from the beginning and the down payments and things like that, we made over a hundred thousand dollars on that deal.

(30:30):

So instead of making 25, you have a four x return and part of it comes as cashflow of $1,040 a month from land by being the lender, not the landlord, therefore no tenants started termites, no hassles. And really after the split we only had $10,000 out for like eight weeks until it was split. Then we sold it, had our $10,000 back and with $20,000 in profit, then we sold the other ones another $12,000 in profit. So $32,000 in profit in our pocket and $1,040 a month for the next five years. Heck, you do that 10 times a year, you have $120,000 a month, $120,000 a year and in income with $300,000 in cash profit. And that’s a good life too. So that’s a different strategy. And what I find is a lot of people, particularly if they’re in coaching programs that are a little bit more, that are catering to the more larger dollar figure, like self storage, you can’t usually buy yourself storage for $5,000. It’s more like seven figures and up or smaller ones might be lower in that this is a great strategy to create seed money, like raise money for yourself so that soon enough you do a bunch of these deals, you don’t even necessarily need partners in your self storage deals, you simply go out there and do it with your own money or at least you have the money for the down payment and you can do more deals because you got more liquidity to do bigger deals.

Scott Meyers (32:09):

Well, again, I think you pick an asset class and you can make money in many, many ways by wholesaling, by keeping, by doing joint ventures, by partnering and doing all those strategies. There’s more than one way to be able to make money if you’re really good at your craft and choosing one that, well, I guess it speaks to you or one that you’re interested in. And Jack, you’re the master at land and that’s why we had you here and I’m thankful for the time that we’re able to have here. And you’re right, everything that you shared plays out, I think not in all asset classes as we mentioned, but what we do in storage, really when you’re talking, I’m thinking of our conversion model where we buy a large warehouse that rents out for three or $4 a square foot industrial gross per year, but we’ll buy it and then we’ll add mezzanines or floors to it and we’ll triple, we add two floors to it and we’ll triple the amount of square footage in it and then we chop it up into individual units and then we’re leasing it out at 12 to $13 a square foot.

(33:09):

And so you buy it by the gallon and you sell it by the shot or you lease it by the shot, and there’s just much more money to be made in those infill locations or in the path of progress and buying ’em right to begin with. So Jack, with that, before we end with my last question, how do folks find you if they want to learn more about the many ways to be able to make money or acquire land and then create wealth, how do they find you? How do they learn from you?

Jack Bosch (33:36):

So the easiest way is to simply go to land profit fund fun, like having fun like FUN. So land profit fund.com. And when you go there you can download a pre 30 day blueprint that shows you kind of like the process to our bread and butter product. So if anyone’s interested in that, then great, obviously all of these programs include that letter that I talked about, include those things that you can use for a $10,000 deal or a several million dollars deal. And as I said, this deal that we, that we are doing right now, it’s entitlement deal, $1.7 million once we’re done, it’s going to be worth like $8 million came from using that exact letter, using that exact strategy, that exact marketing strategy that in essence just laid out.

Scott Meyers (34:25):

Well, Jack, once again, I appreciate your time and I want to ask you a question because you shared in our mastermind, you and I have been around investing get this storage nation, Jack and I have been investing since the 19 hundreds, and I know many of you that may sounds a little odd, however, there’s actually things that you learned along the way. It is, and there’s things you learn along the way and we’ve been through economic cycles, we’ve been through challenges in our businesses and in many fashions really we’ve earned our scar tissue. And you recently went on a journey and walked the Camino for about a month and when you came back and then talked about that and presented on just the clarity you had by having conversations with yourself until you were done having conversations with yourself, then things became really, really clear on how to simplify and get really dialed in and focused. So given the decades of experience you have in real estate and then having those experience of and inflection and a whole lot of experience under your belt, what are some of the advice that you would give to folks that are either starting out or very early on in their journey, either now or as we sit here in 2025?

Jack Bosch (35:37):

Yeah, so what you’re referring to is the, I’ve done last year, I took a three month sabbatical and I basically went, walked the first 35 days, I walked 500 miles to Spain in what’s called the Camino Santiago. So Google it, if you have never heard about it, it’s one of the most magical things. I mean, you know how I heard about it. I mean the audience,

(35:56):

One of the most magical things you can do. So you’re basically walking half a marathon a day and with a backpack and 15, 17 pounds of just three sets of clothing and a few medical supplies and a sleeping bag with you. And that’s about it. And simplify your life down to three decisions a day, which is where do I sleep, what do I eat and do I turn left, right or go straight? And it brings the ability to really think about life. And that’s where I did it because as you said, I’ve been investing since the last century for 25 years, and this sounds so crazy.

(36:34):

And the clarity that I came from was, you said simplicity. So it was very clear. We’re simplifying a lot of things in our life. We’re changing a lot of things in our life to live a life. And so I have a model for this year, which is simplified growth. So I always want to grow, but I want to do it in a simple way. So my advice to somebody out there would be depend is find something that really excites you. If it’s a real estate, there’s 27,000 real estate strategies out there, perhaps not 27,000, but you know what I mean. But probably 27 real estate strategies out there, or 99 real estate strategies out there. Self storage is a beautiful one. Michelle was, we have a bunch of our stuff like our equipment and things like that in self storage unit. And I think it was the very first time my wife Michelle was in a self storage unit and she’s like afterwards, she’s like, we got to get into self storage. I loved it. There’s nobody around. There’s nobody there. Anyway, so pick something. It’s the same advice. Pick something that doesn’t create another job, that doesn’t create

(37:47):

That

(37:47):

Doesn’t suck you in like tenants and things like that. The reason why we are multifamily is because for asset allocation, but we’re picking, we do not invest in small 10, 12, 8 unit apartment complexes because the amount of anything breaks. You constantly get phone calls.

(38:07):

We invest in 90 units plus because there we have a leasing manager, a maintenance manager, a regional manager, and if they can’t fix it, it comes to me. That means in one of our properties, I hear something from them once a quarter. So once a quarter I get one phone call and make one decision, yet I’m managing a $13 million profit. So the point is go after asset and I’m sure the exact same thing in sub storage, right? So you have a manager that manages and things and you don’t hear it. So you want to build a buffer between it, between you and the daily crap that comes up in real estate because real estate is amazing, but daily crap comes up

(38:49):

Often

(38:49):

If you pick the wrong kind of strategy or you want to pick something where there is none of that involved in the first place. And that’s why I fell in love with land. And perhaps partly that’s why you fell in love with self storage because it allows us to run our businesses without the constant noise that the number one asset class that everyone wants to get into houses just unfortunately brings with it. So my recommendation is look beyond the obvious, look beyond just the house flipping and those kinds of things because there’s 27 TV shows about it. Look at yourself also, how do you want to live your life? What things do you want to deal with on a daily basis? What things do you not want to deal with? And then based on that, pick something in real estate that fits that lifestyle, that fits that characteristic, that fits that style. And you’ll never get bored with it because it actually feeds what you want out of life instead of you getting sucked into something. That’s a nightmare to do as so many real estate investors have done, particularly when they’re focused on houses.

Scott Meyers (39:57):

Sound advice. Jack, thanks so much once again for your Time Storage Nation. There you have it. The framework for 2025 if you choose to do so is to grow, but to grow simply. Jack, appreciate your time and looking forward to being back in the same room with you again sometime soon. Thank you for having me. All right, thanks Jack. Take care.

Announcer (40:20):

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