Chapter #4: The Seller Finance Play

Play number four, the seller finance play. Never let the male carry your pasture house without leaving a check. Lonnie scrugs. When I grow up, I want to be filled in the blank. Long before you learned about land investing, back when you were a child, what were your aspirations for adulthood? An NBA player? Maybe you saw yourself becoming some other, equally larger than a life figure. Like a professional sports player, NFL, MLB, maybe an astronaut, maybe even the president. Then again, it's also possible that you're more realistic in your aspirations. As a realistic child, you might have looked towards a traditional profession. Perhaps for example, you wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor, or at least that's what mom and dad wanted you to be. In contrast to those professions above, here's one that we can probably agree you did not envision when dreaming of grown-up life, the bank. No kid aspires to be the bank or the banker. Okay, well I guess when I really think about it and look back, it did seem like the banker always won when I play monopoly as a kid. So maybe some kids somewhere has that as their dream, but it's not something I aspire to be. Nonetheless, for the overwhelming majority of kids, it's highly, highly, highly unlikely that their eagerly dreaming have become in the bank or the banker. Today though, we're both older and maybe just a maybe a bit wiser. More importantly, we're both land investors. And as we think about growing up in the land investing sense, it's only right to consider being the bank. Being the bank is a worthwhile aim for any land investing grown-up. This chapter will explain why and detail how you can go about it. Being the bank. To begin, let's explain what's meant by being the bank. Things were referring to our fourth play in the land investors playbook. AKA big league seller financing. As to what exactly being the bank means, here's your definition. Being the bank means you're the one who allows the buyer or borrower to purchase the land you have for sale on payments, just like a traditional banking provider. By traditional banking provider, I'm referring to everyone from household names like Bank of America and Wells Fargo to credit unions and other bank communities. When you become the bank, you're walking in the same figurative shoes as these providers. There are some obvious differences, of course, as the bank, you won't get to have your name on an NFL stadium. In addition, Congress probably won't bail you out if you get into trouble, as it seems to have gotten into the habit of doing. But if you can live with these drawbacks, you'll find that being the bank is still an excellent position to be in. What makes it so desirable is the fact that the tables have been turned. Normally, you'd be in the borrower role going into the bank in hopes of obtaining funding. Notice how we say "in hopes of obtaining funding." That's because most borrower's typically lack of guarantee, at least initially going in that a bank will provide them with a loan. What they have instead is hope. Hopefully the bank will give them the loan. Assuming that happens, then hopefully the loan will be on the terms that they, the borrower, can tolerate. And finally, if the loan does proceed as planned, then hopefully the borrower will be able to make their interest payments over the course of the loan. Hope on top of hope on top of hope brings to mind a house of cards, doesn't it? Want to build your dreams for the future on foundations of hope? I don't, and I doubt that you do either. This isn't to say that there aren't times for you to be a borrower. There are, as any of us with a mortgage for our primary residence can attest, when you can borrow a large amounts of money for super cheap interest, then being the borrower makes sense. The point is only to reinforce the tremendous value in being the bank. When you become the bank, the tables are turned. You're no longer the borrower. Coming in with hope and fingers crossed, instead you've figuratively flipped the table around to now sit on the bank side. As this happens, you get to decide whether a borrower gets a loan. You also get to set the terms of whatever the loan or loans you provide. Interest stops being your enemy as well. It no longer dogs you as an annoying payment accompanying the loan. And the new dynamic where you're the bank, interest becomes a payment that you look forward to receiving on a regular basis from the borrower. Interest rates go up. Excellent. You're the lender. That's good news for you. Speaking of your borrower, they won't be of the usual variety, not in the same sense of someone borrowing money to purchase a new home. We're concerned after all with land investing. In the land investing world, with you as the bank, the borrower will be the land buyer. The borrower will be seeking an arrangement that allows them to purchase a parcel of land. This arrangement may be a loan in the usual sense. More often though, it may be a loanless creative arrangement around the amount a seller can provide and payment over time for the purchase of the land. This sort of arrangement is referred to as seller financing. For seller financing is concerned, you'll find that land as an REI niche is suited perfectly to it. Those in the land niche see much more inclined toward it and more accepting of offers to do seller financing. This tends to be more so than with houses. The main reason being, most investors don't own the house outright, so they can't be the bank and sell it on payments. If you follow our business model within this play, then you will own the land outright, re- and clear, which opens up the possibility of you reselling it on payments with interest. For our purposes in this chapter, we're going to be focusing on the concept of being the bank, specifically on seller financing. Staying true to the spirit of this book, we're not going to play small in our discussion. In other words, what you're about to read on seller financing isn't for those who want to kind of sort of maybe make a few bucks on the side, each month from a kid sized seller financing arrangement. Well, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's not your only option. You can go bigger, much bigger on seller financing. When you do, you engage in what I call big league seller financing. Big league seller financing. Before we elaborate on big league seller financing, let me offer a few disclaimers. One of the disclaimers is that states often have laws governing seller financing. Which states? Well, that's for you to determine. Someone goes with the specifics of what a given state will and will not permit on seller financing. I'm not in a position to answer these things because, and this is another disclaimer, I'm not an attorney. Sorry to disappoint you, especially if four chapters into the book, you'd somehow believed I wasn't attorney. I'm not, however. And so it's on you to find one who can advise you around seller financing and other aspects of the law and land deals overall. There is no way for me to realistically address how to be compliant with seller financing in all 50 states, so I won't attempt to do it. I will give you an overview of the play and it's up to you to dive into the nuances of running this play in your market. Okay, now that we've got those disclaimers out of the way, what exactly is big league seller financing? Well it's an approach to seller financing where the payments made by your borrower in a single deal are in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. This is a dramatic departure from what you'll encounter on seller financing and other land flipping educational programs and courses. When it appears in other programs or courses, seller financing is typically presented around earning small monthly payments. A common example would be seller financing with payments of $99 per month. Why would anyone bother with this small monthly payment you ask? It's because they're targeting low value properties. Quite often, properties below $10,000 and value are less. Tiny values equate to tiny payments, spread out over small amounts of time. The most immediate problem with minor league seller financing, i.e. it amounts like $99 per month, is that it takes more time for you to reach your financial goals. As an illustration, let's say your goal is $10,000 per month in cash flow. In seller financing's minor leagues, you'd be earning $99 per month off of each deal. At that rate, you'd need 100 seller financing deals in order to reach the $10,000 target. How long would it take you to line up 100 such deals? Two years? Three years? Maybe four years. Although the exact length of time will vary, we can both acknowledge that it's going to take a while. The other problem is that if you are focusing on originating notes on minor league properties like $10,000 or less in market value, then quite often, the length of the note or loan is only two to four years. This really creates a problem because just about the time you're achieving your monthly cash flow goal, the first batch of notes that you originated are being paid off. If you're wondering how we labeled this land mine, I just made you aware of, I'll be referring to that as note churn. I will talk more about this later in the chapter, but this is just a glimpse of what can be a massive problem when focusing on minor league seller financing. You don't see the plateau, your hockey stick growth is leading you to. Let alone the grand canyon type cliff you will go off when these small notes start to mature and you start battling note churn. In contrast, consider what it looks like to pursue the same $10,000 per month goal of note income only with a big league approach. In the big leagues of seller financing, you'd only need 40 deals at $250 per month each and you would only need 20 deals with a $500 per month note payment. Lining up 20, let alone 40 deals isn't something that you can achieve overnight, yet it's also unlikely to take nearly as long though as with 100 deals. You'll reach your financial goal sooner than in this example in elsewhere from running the big leagues seller financing play than you would doing minor league seller financing. Still, what's wrong with cash deals? If you're wondering about that, I don't blame you. It's a logical question since cash deals can provide spectacular windfalls. With these windfalls, you may be able to jump directly to the achievement of a goal. If your goal for example was that 10,000 per month from earlier, you'd essentially need a total of $120,000 per year. A single cash deal could get you there. So would two cash deals where you earn 60,000 each? Here's the problem though. With cash deals, you're limiting yourself to only those buyers who can pay the full amount in a single payment for your property. For the example we've just given, you're therefore seeking those who have 120,000 available if you're doing it in a single deal, or 60,000 if it was two deals. The number of people with those amounts on hand to spend for land deals will inevitably be less than the number of people with the funds for a big league seller finance deal. In the latter case with a seller finance deal, you'd be seeking people who could, at the big league level, put down 30 to 50% of the sales price as a down payment. The remainder of the money for the property would be do it a later time. On a schedule, you would arrange with the buyer. In other words, you're selling the property on payments. Payments are something that all Americans are familiar with and comfortable with. They get what they want now and they pay for it over time. This 30% to 50% down payment ensures that you as a land investor get all or almost all of your money back immediately or at least within nine to 12 months of originating the note. Plus, think again about those percentages. 30% to 50% of the listed sales price right now versus 100% right now. See how the first percentages with seller financing open you up to far more would be buyers. That's why we've moved beyond just focusing on cash deals. Your buyer pull increases when a land deal can be financed with payments split up over time. Another thing to consider here is that online listing platforms often allow prospective land buyers to search for listings where seller financing is available. If you don't offer seller financing, your listing might not show up and the search results for these folks. What I'm referring to here is that little box that a person browsing land listing sites would check a magical little life changing box titled owner financing. Let me also say from personal experience that seller financing will big league seller financing anyway can produce some pretty remarkable results. In my own life, for instance, seller financing allowed me to take a 30 day vacation with my family. Over the course of those 30 days, we took an epic family road trip. We left Billings, Montana. We drove first to Denver, then on to Las Vegas for some fun. After that, we headed over to Rdondo Beach, California. Then we worked our way up north to Lake Tahoe. From Lake Tahoe, we went to Boise before driving the last leg home into Montana. We took the kids to an MLB game and NBA game. We swam in the ocean, went on some great hikes and did a number of other memorable things along the way. I was able to relax, be present, build lasting memories with my family, will spend only a few occasional hours on my land business. What enabled me to do that was having $14,000 per month in monthly recurring revenue from seller financing payments coming in at that time. I'm not by the way in my 70s or 80s, so it didn't take decades of baby steps to build up that $14,000 per month of cash flow back then. I did it in approximately three years, just as you can with seller financing. Today we have an empire of notes with higher monthly payments per note and longer notes. We have one closing this week that is a five year note with a $773 per month payment, just a live example of a big-leg note. If it's helpful for you as an analogy, you can view big-leg seller financing as a dependable garden. In this analogy, the garden can be relied on to feed you, provided that you take the time to plant the seeds and cultivate it. This is also true of big-leg seller financing, where you'll receive a reliable harvest of income after taking the necessary actions to plant deals and cultivate your seller financing operations overall. Having a reliable garden is preferable, at least in my opinion, to the alternative. Continuing on analogy, the alternative would be to rely on hunting and fishing for your food, which can be quite unpredictable. I can still remember doing both with my dad while growing up in Montana, and I remember being frustrated after not catching any fish. And my dad's saying, "Hey son, that's why they call it fishing, not catching." Now as humorous as that may have been, even as a kid, I realized I preferred a predictable outcome and an approach that yielded results consistently, not potentially. Even only being able to eat, whatever you're able to catch from fishing or whatever you could successfully harvest on a hunt. That's what it's like as a land investor with cash sales. Each cash sale is like a fish you have to catch, or a deer that you have to hunt down and successfully harvest. The idea in these analogies is that you eat only what you kill. No one else is providing food or income for you to passively enjoy. You are only as good as your next deal. That's fine if you're always in good health, and able to take action and if the market cooperates. But what if you're not? What if it doesn't? Or what if simply you want a bit more slack, so there's not always such urgency around finding your next meal? That's where big league seller financing comes in, helping to alleviate these concerns. back to Plain Embrace. Number 4. Big league seller financing, however, is not without its drawbacks. Foremost among them is the paper to cash flow problem. This problem crops up because you're typically using your own money to do big league seller financing deals. Your cash goes in to purchase the property used in the deal. Then when you find a buyer, they, the buyer, provide a down payment. The down payment is the first payment of many to come is the buyer steadily pays for the property. Unfortunately though, the down payment is not always equal to the full amount you paid to purchase the property. As a result, you're not always being fully paid back at the start for what you spent on a deal. This can lead you to the point where you've got a sizable portfolio of notes, i.e. seller financing arrangements, yet you have limited access to equity or liquidity of this note portfolio. Your only access comes in the form of whatever monthly income you receive from the notes. I call this the paper to cash flow problem because on paper, you're doing quite well. Yet there's a striking gap between your position on paper compared to your cash flow. Without the means to bridge this gap, you're therefore in a predicament. You might as an example have half a million dollars in notes on paper, but those notes could only be providing you with a cash flow of $10,000 per month. You will sometimes hear me frame this exact scenario is being dirt rich and cash poor or note rich and cash poor. Seeing that terminology, you end up with a note portfolio but without the cash to do deals and thereby build more notes. Personally I've been in just that position. My note portfolio looked great on paper with a dollar value carrying an inviable number of zeros. Yet, I didn't have much cash. How did I escape the paper to cash flow problem? The answer was, I decided to sell off some of my note portfolio. It wasn't a fire sale or anything and I did really well selling them. With the sales, I gained access to much needed cash. From there I made sure to pace myself in the future so that I didn't air again and spinning myself out of money. Instead of intentionally selling all of our properties on payments, I now had a more intelligence and more balanced approach. If you find yourself in a similar position and you want to sell off a portion of your own portfolio, you've got two options. You could sell notes individually or you could bundle notes together, selling them in packs or portfolios. The key in both cases when selling your notes is for the notes to be high quality. Keep in mind the following criteria is subjective and is my opinion and my personal approach. I define a quality note as being one that's typically 5 to 15 years in length. The 5 to 15 year window is seen by no buyers as a desirable term since it avoids a note churn. With note churn and investor's notes are being paid off at such a fast rate that their business hits a plateau. On this plateau the investor or you must generate just as many notes per month as are being paid off in order to keep from backsliding. As we've said notes with 5 to 15 year window keep that from happening and that's what makes them quality notes. Apart from their duration quality notes are also distinguished by three other characteristics. One of those is with interest rates. A note will be seen as a quality one when it has an interest rate of between 9% and 12.9%. Again my criteria. The exact interest rates will usually be negotiable based on the size of the down payment you receive along with the current interest rates and the conditions in the US economy. That said try to hit 10% or more since note buyers love that level of interest. Second, what else distinguishes a quality note is the amount of the down payment. The best notes in the eyes of note buyers have a 30% to 50% down payment. As context here minor leagues seller financing often has down payments of 15% or less. In fact zero percent down is common among those plain in the minor leagues. Since we're playing at a much higher level in the big leagues of seller financing our down payments are going to reflect that. Hence the 30% to 50% range. There are a lot of upsides to requiring a down payment greater than 30%. The first being that you are closer to recovering your initial purchase price of the land and if you took a lesser down payment like 15%. The second is I have personally found that there is a huge correlation between the size of the down payment and the default rate of the borrower. The larger the down payment the more skin in the game and the less likely the borrower is to default on the loan. Third among characteristics of quality notes is the fact that the note payment should fall in the range of $250 to $1000 per month. Most of our note payments are between $250 a month and $750 a month. Originating notes with this payment range will ensure that your empire doesn't take you a lifetime to build. To clarify there is nothing wrong with originating notes that have a monthly payment exceed in $1000 per month. This example just illustrates most of the notes in our business model. What if you don't want to sell notes to others? What if instead your primary concern is getting your money back from notes and is timely a manner as possible? Well you certainly don't have to sell your notes but if you build your note empire in such a manner that you have that is an exit strategy you'll be in great shape either way. Your approach might be slightly different if you don't ever intend to sell notes. In that case you would be more concerned with getting your money back as soon as possible. So you'd likely want to structure notes with 12 to 48 month duration and much higher monthly payments. Note buyers are less likely to want notes like that since the notes would be paid off in the blink of an eye. You on the other hand need cash in the blink of an eye or even sooner so this way of structuring notes is therefore perfect for fulfilling your aims. Before you structure notes however or consider selling them there's the small matter of actually getting the notes. How do you come to originate them in the first place? To recap a bit of our earlier discussion notes originate from big league seller financing. When a person purchases a piece of land from you on seller financing you create what's called a note. The note is the agreement for the person to make the payments in the financing arrangement because this is all based around a piece of land being sold the how of getting a note can be tracked to getting the land. If you can obtain a piece of land to sell you can sell it on terms and thereby create a note. How do you obtain a piece of land to sell? Sorry but we already covered that. You find properties and people willing to sell them through the exact same methods with notes is the earlier plays in the playbook. What's changed now in big league seller financing is to play your running on the sales side of the business. Earlier plays took it as a given that you'd be selling for cash. But with this fourth play you're challenging the paradigm of cash only sales. Turns out cash isn't always king. Not with big league seller financing. Sell or financing when done right can allow you to reap equally royal rewards. Just make sure you avoid the mistakes we mentioned earlier around the paper to cash flow problem and spending yourself out of money. Well we're on the topic of making mistakes. It seems like an opportune time to talk about a few more of them. To keep this from being all doom and gloom let's mix in the mistakes. The don'ts with more upbeat matters. The do's. Do's and don'ts for play number four. One. Do focus on the quality of notes. Having quality notes matters as we've seen in the eyes of note buyers. If you decide to sell your notes individually or as a portfolio they need to be quality ones. Even if you don't intend to sell the notes you still want to build your own empire of quality notes. Build your foundation with the strength of a skyscraper. No matter how humble your aspirations might be initially. 2. The Second Don't Don't originate the loans yourself. When using title companies to close the deal, you'll often find that the title company can also service the note. If they cannot service the note, then a regional loan servicing company can probably do so. Where do you find either of these companies, a title company or a regional loan servicing company in your area? Start by asking your land agent and your title company. Ask both of them because they've very likely been involved in a seller financing closing in the past and are likely to be able to recommend one now. If your listing agent doesn't know, then ask the title company if they service loans or know of a third party that does service notes. 3. The Third Don't Don't try to service notes yourself. Servicing refers to collecting payments from borrowers, aka buyers, the ones who pay you over time. Servicing the notes yourself is a mistake because borrowers can notoriously be difficult to deal with. Do you want to deal with them, chasing borrowers down to collect a past due payment or notifying that their card or account on file failed the auto draft charge? Or would you rather let an experienced loan servicing company handle the borrowers while you yourself focus on land investing? Choose as you will, but I'm certainly not racing for the former because I've been there and I've done that. I'd rather be a land investor than the jerk bill collector trying to chase borrowers down for late payments. If you want a low hassle note business, then let a third party collect and deposit your payments as well and send any delinquency notices or any other activities that would take you away from your revenue generating activities in your land business. 4. Flexibility is a due offer flexibility on the interest rate in a seller financing arrangement. Flexibility comes into play since a buyer may be willing to put more money down in exchange for a lower interest rate. If you're willing to be flexible on the interest rate, you could get more of your money back from the deal via the down payment in the beginning. This might shorten or even eliminate your wait time to break even on your initial cost of buying the property in the deal. For example, if they want to put 50% down instead of 30% down, then perhaps you charge them 9% interest instead of 11%. 5. Don't let the buyer dictate the terms. Bring your cake and eating it too, that overused expression sums up the issue and this don't. The issue is that a buyer wants to do a terms deal while also dictating those terms. Nope, it does not work that way. If you allow the buyer to purchase land on payments versus in cash, then you as the seller get to dictate the terms. You're the bank after all. As the bank, it's you and not your buyer who gets the final say on terms. 6. Do keep seller financing in perspective. Sell or financing should be seen as one strategy in your land investing playbook. It's not the only one as you'll find from reading about the other plays in this book. Having the right view of seller financing also means knowing when and when not to do it. While this varies from situation to situation, I can tell you that seller financing usually works best on properties having a market value of $100,000 or less if you're following my model. The subdividing and selling off of large ranches may be the exception as quite often ranchets go for much more than $100,000. How much less? The floor on big league seller financing deals? Well, it's about 20,000. Go there. In my subjective opinion, it's a mistake to offer seller financing on properties with a market value of less than $20,000 as it sets you up for no churn. No churn was the scenario we described earlier where you have to keep generating new notes just to keep up with those that are expiring. 7. Do consider seller financing on the buy side. On the buy side? Yes, you're reading that correctly. Seller financing can be something that you engage in on the buy side when you purchase a piece of land. I've saved this revelation for last because it's not going to directly put money in your bank account and allow you to quit your 9-5 job, but seller financing on the sell side is what's going to do that, which explains why we've covered an in-depth over the course of this chapter. But as we're nearing the end of the chapter, it doesn't hurt to shed some light on what else is possible in financing. And the most immediate instance of it comes when we challenge what it means to do seller financing. Is seller financing only something that can happen when you yourself are the seller? No, definitely not. The seller can be someone else and you can approach them as the borrower. On the buy side, you'll find that seller financing can be used for a couple of different exit strategies. My personal favorite is for single properties you're planning to subdivide as a value add play. Because subdividing forces appreciation and then you sell off the child parcels. And those instances you can often use seller financing as a buyer to purchase a piece of land still at a discount of its market value. But then you only put 20 to 40% down. From there you could subdivide the parent parcel property in the multiple properties, also called children parcels. And then you do it's called a partial release. In this partial release you'd be able to sell the newly created properties one at a time without the note you'd taken on for purchasing the original property being due. You might also be able to force 100% appreciation on the property. Now this may sound complex, but the reality is that if you are being fully transparent about your subdivide intentions and you have the correct legal verbage in your contract then it's actually quite straightforward. This is another play for a different playbook, but I wanted to plant the seed and introduce the concept as it is still within the realms of seller financing, but also under the creative financing umbrella to buy using seller financing. Appreciation? Subdividing? If I lost you on those terms, don't worry. We'll be getting to those terms later in this book. Once more, I just wanted to show you what else is possible with seller financing that cannot only be used on the sell side but also on the buy side of your business. Executive Summary of play number four, the seller finance play. Up next let's conclude this chapter with our usual review of the material we've been covering. That's the executive summary and for big league seller financing here's what it consists of. Signs set. Begin with the end in mind. That's the ideal mindset for you to have around big league seller financing. Your end will probably be the specific amount of money you wish to earn each month and fancy your terms you could describe it as your target monthly recurring revenue. Once you've identified the target, you'll formulate a plan to achieve it within a specific length of time. This where seller financing comes in. Seller financing can be a powerful means of guaranteeing you earn your desired revenue each month. This assumes you're doing seller financing of the big league variety. I know we've been sloppy over these last few pages saying seller financing without making any distinction. But the implication is that it's the big league seller financing play that you'll be running. Frankly, for those of us who are serious land investors, big league seller financing is the only way to do seller financing. The majority still play in the minor leagues, however. The distinction must therefore be made if only occasionally. Of the two, be sure that your mindset is of the big league and not the minor leagues. Skill set. With seller financing, it's imperative to have the right skill set. Part of your skill set will need to be empathy. Empathy here isn't about touchy or filly stuff, but about understanding the buyer or bar or psychology in their financial situation. As an example, if you're offering a cabin property, i.e. land to build a cabin on, empathy means understanding whether you're a buyer or a borrower will be building a family cabin on the land. It's also about understanding whether the buyer or borrower is scraping together their last dollars to afford the land. Details like those can only come through empathy and perhaps more specifically, a willingness to consider things from the buyer or borrower's perspective. Put yourself in their shoes and walk the proverbial mile. You'll be in a better position to get the right buyers for your properties, and with the right buyers, ensure fewer people default on their terms payments. Alongside empathy, other parts of the seller financing skillset are willingness to negotiate, plus the skills we've looked at in the previous chapters around prospecting for and acquiring land. Capital This one's going to depend on your goals. It takes less capital to make, say, 3,000 per month from terms deals, aka big league seller financing, than it does 300,000 per month. Regardless of the goal, you will need capital, though. This is because you'll most likely be purchasing the land that is being seller financed using your own cash, and you will be selling it off by collecting a down payment. As we discussed earlier in the chapter, the down payment doesn't always cover your initial cash outlay on the purchase price. This results in a business model that can, as I mentioned earlier, leave you no rich and cash poor. Do the math ahead of time and ensure you have a strategic dispositions plan, one that has a harmonic balance of both seller finance sales and cash sales. Connections To succeed at play number four, the seller finance play aka big league seller financing, it pays to have good connections with note servicing companies and title companies. Note servicing companies will help you with, shockingly, servicing the notes. As for title companies, they can often do both the closing and servicing of the note. In this way, a title company can actually be a replacement for a note servicing company. Lastly, it's worth having strong connections with land agents as they can potentially refer you to worthwhile title companies and note servicers. Tools Last and least are tools. I say least because there are no real tools in this fourth land investing play. The reason is that you're not servicing the notes yourself and don't need to go out and pay for any note servicing software. Rather, you're having companies handle the servicing on your behalf. Are there tools out there if you want to self-service your notes? Yes, but we're not going to be playing in the minor leagues, where self-servicing notes would make sense. We're in the major leagues, and that means we've gotten better things to do than scrabble around servicing notes and filling the role of Bill Collector. A CRM software and follow-up system is also critical for capturing converting leads. Visit thelandinvestorsplaybook.com to see our most current recommendations for tools. Subdividing. Remember that term from a few pages ago? I threw it out there and promised we'd explain it in the coming chapters. We're now at that time, and the next chapter, I'll dish out the dirt on subdividing. You'll find that subdividing is among the most exciting plays in land investing. Join me in the following pages as we see why. You've completed another chapter, armed now with a wealth of new strategies. Yet here's a challenge we all face. Our minds, as intricate as they are, tend to let new information fade amid the day's countless distractions. Farther knowledge alone isn't enough. Like I said earlier, it's akin to learning about farming theory, but lacking the tractor to actually farm the land. The solution is the Landboss Mastermind Vault. Please visit thelandinvestorsplaybook.com and check out our Landboss Mastermind Vault. You're going to be able to dive deep into training videos, utilize exclusive resources, and gain the tools you need to act and profit from these plays in the playbook. As a gesture of gratitude for your dedication, you can enjoy a massive discount by using the coupon code playbook. You agree for more insights? Let's journey to the next chapter and continue to unlock the treasures of this playbook.