HIP E73 Brent Bowers - Land Investor 400 Deals

My guest today has never bought a hotel in his life, and that is one of the reasons I wanted to have him on. Sometimes, the best investing lessons can come from people operating in completely different lanes. Brett Bowers has done over 400 real estate deals, built a passive income machine generating hundreds of thousands a year, and then intentionally dismantled his entire operation, so he could work five hours a day. The tactics he uses to find off-market sellers create value through entitlements, and structure deals that sell themselves map really well onto what we do in hospitality. Let's get into it. [Music] The Hotel Investor Playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through hotel and hospitality ownership. [Music] Welcome back to the Hotel Investor Playbook. I am Michael Russell, founder of Melama Capital and your host. On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and in hospitality assets. Now, full transparency. Today's guest does not invest in hotels, and that is exactly why I wanted to have him on the show, because sometimes the most valuable lessons do come from people that are operating in a completely different lane. My guest today is Brent Bauer's. He's the former Army officer. He's a land investor. He's the founder of Landsharks. He's done gosh, over 400 land deals. He's built this huge passive income machine that generates hundreds of thousands a year, and he intentionally works only from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. So for me, that's personally that is really interesting. I want to dive into all of this. He's posted gosh, darn near a thousand videos on YouTube. So this man has clearly got something to say. Brent, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michael, man. Thanks for having me. And I'm excited to learn about hotels because I just got to have lunch with the gentleman, who's very good friends with a banker. He wants to introduce me to. But this guy owns real estate all over the place. He's made his initial money from hotels. He owns nursing homes. He's starting a bank in town. So it's like, okay, if you're starting a bank, you've done something right. What a coincidence. I'm on a this famous hotel podcast now. So thanks for having the land guy here. I'm just a regular, like I'm just a normal land guy. So I hope what I've got to share helps somebody today. Yeah, well, absolutely. Listen, if you are interested in learning about hotels, you are at the right podcast today. We're going to learn about what investing in raw land is all about. Now, before we get too far, look, I want to prompt you like I would, chat GPT. I want you to explain this to me like I'm a 12 year old. Okay, walk me through this business. Yeah. Like I know nothing, right? So you buy land that nobody wants for roughly pennies on the dollar. And then what? Like, how do you actually make money from this? Yeah. In the beginning, that's how I did it. Now I've completely changed it up. Because it's here's a thing like it's like it takes just as long to make $5,000 as it does to make 50,000. Like which one you want to spend your time on. So in the beginning, I would send these people a postcard saying, hey, my name is Brent. I'd like to buy your land at 123 Main Street. If you're interested in an all cash fair price offer, call me or text me. God bless you. Anybody can get a copy of that postcard that go to thelandssharks.com for such postcard. I still use it to this day for some of the land buying we do. But I've completely kind of changed it up a little bit. Because it's kind of difficult to sell those inefficient parcels. Because they're landlocked or the neighbors really are the only ones that would buy those. Or you can't build on them. It's better to find something and asset that is in demand and get it out of discount and then just fill the demand. That's all you do. So now, the way the business model looks is I'll go on redfin or zillow and I'll see where land is trading. Where it's selling. Then we price it out and then we use our software program to mail offer letters to landowners where we've basically reverse engineered what we can pay for it. Minus like real trophies, minus closing costs, minus maybe even our lending, minus our profit that we want to make. And that's the offer they get. So it's not like full retail and it's not pennies on the dollar. But it is at a discount. And most people are going to throw this in the garbage. But the ones that do sign it and send it back to me via email or fax it back to me. Yes, I use a fax machine because a lot of our sellers are 50, 50 and older and they understand fax machines. But the ones that do sign it, we're going to earn anywhere from $10,000, $15,000. That's before a seller financing it to our buyers. So a lot of times we will sell this land on seller financing. It's almost happening. Okay, I want to pause there though. Okay, because this is really it. So you made an important distinction. So my understanding of raw land investing was buying these low-value parcels and flipping them. So you know, anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars and you're making a small margin on the trade. So it's transactionally very cumbersome. There's a lot of volume you would need to do to make money. But what you're describing is, hey, I've learned from that. I've grown from that now investing in higher-value land that serves a purpose. What I want to understand, you're going on Redfin where information is public. You're determining a value by looking at where there's enough volume activity for you to determine a market value. So then you're going and you're soliciting directly to sellers or property owners if they're willing to sell their property. I want to know, who are these sellers? Because why don't they just sell at market value? Why are they selling at a discount? Yeah, it's the same thing for your hotel sellers. I don't know. You might not do off-market, but it's the same thing with house sellers. Not everyone wants to do the traditional list it with a realtor, wait 180 days. The reason why people accept our offers, it's about the speed, it's about the convenience, it's about timing. And I always ask, I'm like, why? You know, hey, why don't you just sell it? So the realtor or why don't you just keep the land? They always have the reasons. And I always say, hey, not everyone wants to sell to us. And as you probably know, just pretend you're a seller, Mike, hey, Mike, I actually am not going to keep this land. I actually resell it. Are you okay with me? Make it a little profit on this. And I've never had anybody say, absolutely not. I don't want you to make it a penny. They know we're basically a pawn shop for land. We're just the speed, convenience time. I always tell people it's like, imagine you have a nice car or a classic car in your garage. At one time you used to pull it out, you take it, you take it for drives, you'd wash it, you'd vacuum it, and you 10 years later now there's boxes stacked up around it and on it and your wife's like, gosh, man, it's taking, it's taking the whole garage up. Can you please just get that thing out of the garage? And you're like, no, I don't want to sell it. And then one day you get a letter for an offer. It's like, well, you know what? Let's just get it out of the garage. Let's sign it, send it back. That's kind of what people do with land. Or they're tired of peeing the back taxes. Or they inherited the land. Or they've had a step foot on it in 10 years, or they plan to build a cabin on it or a house on it one day, but life kept happening. So those are those are our sellers. And I want to go back to those original deals I was buying on the first offer or the first set of postcards I sent. Yeah, it wasn't tons of money, but I was only making like four grand a month back in the military as an army officer, like working crazy hours responsible for millions and millions of dollars worth of humbys and equipment and all that. And I literally made $4,700 net cash within four days on the land transaction. I had no clue what I was doing. I was hooked. I was like, there is no way this can keep happening. And the second one I bought for $500 and I sold that one on Craigslist for 500 down in 400 a month. That's the one that changed my life. It was actually the second one. Yeah. Now my truck, my truck's being paid for. Well, I think what you're describing is look, everyone's at a different journey, a different point in their journey of their real estate investing journey. And you know, for me, look, I don't get excited by a few thousand dollars and no disrespect for those that are out there busting their ass because, you know, they're working hard for that money and they deserve every bit of it. And so what I see value in and what you're describing is for someone that is maybe looking to gain reps and experience and know how knowledge there's less of a risk factor because when you're getting started with transactions that are under $10,000, for example, like you can recover from that. If you're going to go and buy a hotel for millions of dollars, you know, it's sometimes hard for people to draw the line from point A to not even point B or C or D. It's down the line because hotels are there's a lot more going on. It could be a lot more complicated. But for someone that wants to get started, man, you can get a lot of reps and learning how to negotiate, learning how to determine value, learning how to set up systems, learning how to raise money, how to finance all of these things and you can do so from a little risk point. That seems like an opportunity to springboard someone who wants to get started in the game into bigger and better things. It's an ability, it's an opportunity to stack skills. That's what I hear you saying. Yeah. And I'm sitting here thinking to you on the hotel side, why not just go all out on the first one and make a couple of million dollars on one deal. I sit here thinking that if I had to do it all over again, I mean land is created in an incredible lifestyle for us but it's like I have a a friend, Dolph Theroux, a Dolph Theroux, he's a commercial investor. He's like, "Why not just make a couple million dollars on your first deal?" Rather than your 10th or your 20th deal, that's why he does commercial real estate. Yeah. So, I guess there's, like you said though, there's different points for everyone. I didn't have the confidence back then. So I was only willing to spend a couple hundred bucks on a piece of land and make a couple thousand. Some guys are willing to come in and do a couple hundred thousand, or off the bat, or a couple million, and make tens of millions. Yeah. So what you described, the value proposition that you're offering sellers is convenience. That if they've got something that they need to get rid of quickly, that you offer them a solution that is not as cumbersome. And so you mentioned, well, I imagine it's the same with hotel investors. There's actually a pretty big distinction though with hotel investing because a lot of the value, if we're looking at a value add opportunity with hotels, there is some value creation that will come from a seller that's not operating efficiently. Maybe they've got an outdated property where they're not commanding market rate rents, or someone has a vision to remodel and convert the property to be able to generate more higher ADRs, higher occupancy, things of this nature. Sometimes it's out of positioning in which the person doesn't have the capital to invest in the repairs or the renovations necessary to bring an outdated hotel up to current standards. So for all these reasons, people look for exits at that point and then the next generation comes in and makes it better. With raw land investing, there's not as many levers to pull, right? This is really about speed, this is about volume. If you've done enough of these deals, I imagine you've got, you must have discovered that there's got to be some landmines here, right? Like it sounds simple, but what can go wrong or what has gone wrong in your experience with investing in raw land? Yeah. Quite a few things. I don't know for a due diligence checklist in a land buying roadmap, but some of my first initial properties were just, I didn't know what I didn't know. I eventually hired that guy later on, paid him $40,000 to coach me, but I had probably 20 or so land transactions before that made a couple hundred thousand dollars. But, you know, what's the access like? Is it dirt road? Is it grass road? Is it asphalt road? Is the land buildable? Is the county going to let you build on it? And what are the requirements for you to build on it? You know, what's the septic? Is it septic? Is it sewer? Is it water? Is there any water close by or do you have to drill a well? What about electricity? Those things are very good to know. And now, there's, here's the thing, there's still profit and all of that, but you got to buy it at the right price. I give this land buying roadmap, thelancharks.com/dde. These are like 14 things that I check on every single one of them. You know, did we get a percolation test like for anybody's like, what the heck is that? It's just imagine a coffee filter, the way water flows through it. It's the same thing for a septic system. Like, does it's a land soil? I'm sorry, is the land sandy enough for the water to go through or does it run off? Is it clay? Is it rock? Well, what I want to know is like, have you ever bought, for example, let's say a property that maybe had a clouded title and then that just spun out and was problematic because, let's say you bought this land, you think that you're going to be able to sell it and now with the clouded title, you can't move it and you're still responsible for paying for it. Has that scenario ever, I mean, that's an example, but have you ever gone through something like that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. In the beginning, I would open LLCs and corporations back up just to be able to transfer the land. You've inherited land with literally 157,000-darriris tax scenes on it. Yes, clouded title. In the beginning, I had no idea who to contact to uncloud that title. I mean, sometimes it's a real easy thing. You just write an attorney a 3,400-r check and they'll uncloud it and I sell it and get my 48,000-r check. Literally, that exact thing happened. It's just about getting in the reps and finding the right people and it's just like every deal built onto another one. So yeah, that's a good point. You mentioned clouded title. I was dealing with this all the time. Yeah, I've got another one. A friend of mine has recently got into investing in raw land and he's only six months in and he explained to me that he's now involved in a lawsuit because what happened was he negotiated to purchase some land from somebody, turns out this person was elderly and person passed away. So really after the land was sold and then the next of kin, the heirs, they found out about this and I forget what the legal protocol was but they somehow put a cloud on title where the property can't be sold because the lawsuit is alleging that maybe this was, you know, I don't know. It could be a number of things. I don't know for certain but let's just go with it could have been like elderly, abused, or fraud. Maybe it wasn't really fully disclosed. The lawsuit of the allegation could be anything factual or not. The problem is when you're dealing with buying land and the real value proposition is buying it undervalued, then clearly some family members could say, "Hey, did my family member get taken advantage of? Have you ever been in a position similar to what my friends are going through now?" No, they're even hurt of that. But it makes sense. Greedy kids want their parents or their grandparents land. They wanted it. They wanted to be able to sell it. That's what I just said. I imagine right there, I always have a conversation at lunch as well where a lot of these larger land investors, like I mean big time, like several thousands and thousands of acres will leave it to their grandchildren. That way their children don't end up hating each other whenever they pass away. So yeah, it makes sense but no, I've never heard of that. It could happen though. It could totally happen. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about your systems and kind of how you set up your business now with the rise of AI and technology. Can you walk us through what does your tech stack look like and what is your process for systematically finding your deal flow? Yeah. So once we find the markets where land is selling and obviously you can use AI to really help you do that very easily. Once you find the markets and you price them out, we use a software program. You can go to thelandssharks.com/CRM. We use a program that's it's ran by a company called Pebble to where we can upload lists of landowners in these exact areas that we've already priced out and offer them daily, offer them weekly, however often we want to. And then there's auto replies, text replies, email replies, auto-fops to where once these guys come into our system and never get forgotten about. Once we figure out they want to sell to us, it's really easy to now go to that property and contact all the neighbors around it because a lot of times landowners, they usually want to own the land next to them. So we sell a lot of the stuff to the neighbors. I also find the land sales specialist real estate agents. I find out who's the guys out there selling all this because they a lot of times will have the buyers for us or they'll list it for us in addition to other marketing that we do to move this stuff because a lot of times like I don't want to sit on this land. I want to have it sold the next 30 days and that's been a reason why I've kind of shifted into putting brand new manufactured housing on this land because here's the thing. When interest rates went up a couple years ago, I sell a piece of land in a week. Now my timelines are about two and a half, three months for some of this land and that's price right. Now I'm building that into my offers. It has slowed down a little bit though. These levers you talked about pulling, one of the levers is now we add septic, we add water, we have electric and we put a brand new double-eyed manufacturer home on it. Now people with FHA loans, VA, conventional and USDA loans can now qualify for our land. I don't have to sell our finances to them and these things are selling like sometimes in a weekend because they're affordable. It comes with land and warranty. That's kind of been one of the levers. I know you asked about the tech stack. You're talking a little bit about your deal pipeline and your systems. Let's continue on this path. You mentioned previously, "Hey, look, we look at Red Fan and we look at transactional activity." If you zoom out a little bit, where do you start? How do you identify markets in general that you want to dive into and look for deals? It's real. One thing you could do is Google North American Migration Map. It's owned by North American bandlines. It shows you where all the moving trucks are going to. That shows you the incoming states where people are moving to and then the outgoing states. That's one of the first places people could start right there. Once I know that, right now it's the southeast of the United States, like the Carolinas, top states where people are moving into Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, hot states right now. Start there. Start with one of those states, pick a city on Red Fan or Zilla, whichever you prefer. I prefer Red Fan. When I'm looking for basically solds, I want to see where stuff is selling because those are called, we call those heat map or hot zip codes. Once we see that, we just micro down to a neighborhood where land is moving. Lands moving in the last 60, 90, 180 days. I just had a train call with one of our land sharks yesterday. He's like, "Brat, your example, there was like 100 solds in the last seven days." I was like, "Man, let's get away from the example. If you see six sold in the last six months, that means there's demand. Let's click on the four sale." Oh, there's only three listed. There's only three listed. Because there's not a lot trading, but that's enough. Six parcels are enough to see a pattern of what, okay, this is how much it is per acre. This is how much it is per square foot. Now, obviously, the larger properties we go for acreage, but if you see stuff moving, there's a way to get into that action. It doesn't have to be like 1,000 sold in the last three months. It could be six. All right, so let's break that down. Let's say there's like three things that you'd be looking for. I think you said number one, population growth, identify where people are moving to. So like any real estate investment asset, you want to identify demand drivers. If it's multifamily, similarly, you're looking at that, hey, there's jobs, there's resources. People are moving there for a reason, and the population is growing. Number two, you got to have sales comparables. You said that it was a minimum of six comparables. Is that correct? If you saw six comparables? Yeah, if I see six and six months, I'm happy. I'm happy. What are the other steps if you're going through your checklist that you would want to evaluate when making a determination on a specific area? Yeah, I would say a third one and the huge one for me now is I want to see other real estate, I want to see real estate agents selling this land compared to the very beginning where it's under $10,000, like no realtor is going to touch that. That is not worth their time at all. But when you see realtor selling the stuff, 30, 40, 60, $150,000, okay, now we got something that someone else is going to go out there and market, and if they don't sell it, they don't get paid type stuff. So that was a huge pivot in my company where I said 16 virtual assistants just moving this stuff, like posting on all the platforms, paying for land.com, landwatch, landmote, like all these subscriptions of the paying $1,000 a month, and I was like crap. Like my buddy that I trained how to do this land business just made $187,000 and he had a realtor sell it. A light bulb went off, like the one behind you there. I was like, what is wrong with me? I was doing these cheap parcels of land and this guy didn't even work. He's like in the Philippines, he was in Costa Rica surfing and made $187,000. I was like, I'm basically kind of still a system, even though I taught him, I was like, okay, I'm just start doing that in my areas. I just started from more expensive land. - Now that makes sense, you're working smarter and harder. Is there a minimum threshold in which, I guess you're gonna look at the exit value because you can buy it for next to nothing. But what is the minimum exit value you will take on a purchase app? - Yeah, I have a different, I don't have a minimum, I'm not gonna touch a land deal unless we're gonna make at least 10K on it. I won't even look at it because it's just like why even bother with it? So I always say 10K all day or it'll do the deal. But you're talking to the guy, they like a couple of hundred transactions where I made $5,000, $6,000, a couple of hundred dollars a month. At one time we were $44,000 a month coming in on monthly payments to our just raw land. And I just like, I have made it. Like I went from making $4,000 a month to that. So it took a several weeks off, took a vacation, got bored. You can only sit on the beach for so long. I know you're in Hawaii. - I can relate man, yeah, Bill, I read it. That's something I wanna touch by. I really wanna dive into that. But I wanna hold off for a second here because I wanna ask you right now, like okay, you've built this lifestyle for someone to be successful at this. How many transactions do they need to do on average based on some of these price points that you're describing? Like what does someone need to do transactionally speaking to be able to make a healthy living out of this? - Yeah, we got a corporate guy. He's never gonna leave his job 'cause he's got huge retirement. He just wanted to make an extra $100,000 a year. So he does like two transactions a year, one every six months. Talked to him the other day. He actually had two goings. He was like, oh, Bren, I'm working hard now. But like some people just have a goal of 100K a year. And I have a retired, she's actually a retirement from the county right now. She just wants to earn $4,000 a month. She's halfway there. Like she's just wanted to double her retirement. So everyone has different goals. Me in the beginning when I was trying to leave the military, I was like, if I can just earn $10,000 a month net, I've made it, I've arrived. You're talking to the guy that was making a four grand a month back then. As soon as I got out May 2018, I had a $55,000 net profit month. And I was just like, okay, that's my new bar. So my goal post kept moving. My goal kept, and I kept spending more marketing. And one day I was just like, oh my god, I'm just doing deals to pay my team. So I fired everyone. And now it's just me and my office manager. So I'll scale up and I'll scale down. So I think everyone's just different. Like I think there's so many different ways you can do this. Now that we're putting brand new manufactured homes on our land, I'm actually not buying any land unless I can put a manufactured home on it. 'Cause I looked at two things. When the market started slowing down, it started seeing more real estate signs than my market. I was like, oh crap, here we go. Every 18 years, right? There's a great book called The Secret of Real Estate Banking. Like every 18 years, there's a cycle correction. History? It's just 2007, 2008. We're gonna be in a correction era, right? We're here. Yeah, I think we're pretty much there. So I look at the housing market, what's selling out there? I did, I say 2007, you know what I meant. I meant, 2007, 2008. Because I was thinking, yeah, 2009 was when things were really tough. Yeah, it got back. I was like paying credit cards with credit cards back then. But I looked at housing market, I noticed like, gosh, and I had half-hastily been putting brand new mobile homes on over the last since 2020. And I always made pretty good money, but I didn't know what I was doing with it. And long story short, but I looked at what's moving, oh gosh, it's the brand new double-wide mobile homes. And most of these markets were what's moving the fastest. Like I'm talking like four days. And I looked at my land deals that I always sold the fastest and for the most money, and guess what? They always allowed mobile homes on them. And then I went and looked at some of those past deals and like, crap, that guy that was buying these from me was putting these on there. And I saw what he was selling them for, and I was doing the numbers. I'm like, shoot, he's making like 70 grand. And I made like 10, 15, 20. Yeah, which I got greedy. 20 grand is a great amount of money to make on a land deal. Sure. So-- Well, you're describing, Brent, you're now you've graduated to become to a degree, a real estate developer. You're buying the land. You're getting the entitlements. You're presumably setting the infrastructure foundation. I'm talking about utilities and such, so that the next buyer can buy something that's turn key to be able to mobile homes on. Is that correct? Right, you go. They're literally moving in with like a less than $1,000 down because we give seller concessions, like 3%. So they get an FHA loan or a VA loan, no money out of their pocket. Sometimes they get money at closing. It's just nuts. And so from your perspective, you do the hard work, and then you can sell this at a higher price point and the new buyer because they're getting such favorable lending terms because the infrastructure required from these institutions, FHA, you name it, that they require that, hey, it's got to have these conditions. And if they do, it's much easier for someone to put down less than 10% in some cases. Like you said, it could be 1% or whatever. It's much easier for someone to justify a higher price point if they're putting less down. And so that's where you make the biggest spread is preparing this for the end buyer who wants something that's already turned key and can go obtain the financing for it. That's right. That's absolutely spot on. And the market that I'm doing the best on is where they can get the same size house, same square foot, it's 1,500 square foot, same size parcel land, acre, acre in a quarter, but they want a stick built house or maybe a concrete block structure, CBS. They're paying $100,000 more. Well, at a 6% interest rate, that's $600 more at a month. That's a difference between someone putting food on the table or having a brand new car payment. So it's almost a no-brainer for them to choose our house over the brand new stick built. Yeah. I mean, we could go down the rabbit hole with how AI is going to affect the working class folks and how maybe wages will be suppressed. There's a lot of preparation for this. I don't want to get to Doomsday, but this is real. If you're going to continue this journey, there's an area, there's an avenue, there's a lane in which this makes a lot of sense. You see the rise of co-living. Well, the reason is people don't prefer to live with others necessarily. It's an affordable means for them to have a nice place to live in and not necessarily have to make millions of dollars a year to do so. So I get that. So, transactionally speaking. Now that you've shifted, you've reduced your team from a 15 person team where you are spinning out deals, these low dollar amount deals to now these longer timeline projects with higher profit margin. How many deals are you doing on average per year? I sell two a month, two of these a month. Just so 100% clear, I haven't stopped them through in my land. We've got subs of the vides going where we sell probably one or two parcels a month, max two, max two parcels a month. I'm on, I want to be a low volume high profit margin. And then I'm selling two brand new manufactured homes on land per month. So max for transactions a month now. And realtors are selling this stuff. Transaction coordinators are taking care of the transaction side. So, I'm going to go back to the main thing. Yeah, that was a goal about a year ago when I started pulling this lever, 'cause really it came from, gosh, I can't sell this part. Parts of the land for 10 grand cash anymore. I'm starting 10 grand net anymore. I'm getting like three to six grand net. Well, the numbers were no longer working. I either had to like, double my business again, or find another market, but I was like, what if we put a brand new mobile home on it? Like, 'cause I was looking at all this. So we did first one, $51,000 net profit. And the average time for these, I'm in now Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, for all, for these, what we're doing, those three states, oh South Carolina as well. We just started in South Carolina, average four months. Florida actually takes the longest. It's the permitting process takes longer, but. That's quite as me. For months and a half. Let's talk about this scale, this idea that you've learned, the light bulb moment went off, right? That you could reduce your workload by focusing on larger deals, but you've also, like, you mentioned, you went from this large team, 15 people managing virtual assistants, the whole deal to now it's you and a project manager. But more specifically, I wanna understand why this shift, you've mentioned in your YouTube channel or on previous podcasts that building kind of this hustle culture, I'm paraphrasing, but this hustle culture is really tied to ego, right? Build more, get to the next level, all of this. And I am personally disresdened with me because I'm at a point now where, like, I'm questioning, well, what is the point of all of this? And really, I'm judging my success more on my, less on my financial freedom and more on my lifestyle freedom. And I've heard you say that you're now working strictly from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. And I mean, is that a hard boundary? Because for someone like me, that is really hard to shut off, right? Like, let's say someone calls you at 4 p.m. so I got a land deal, I got something, a mobile home park, I got this opportunity, it's 4 p.m. and you get some kids who are outside wanting to play with you. For us hustlers, for us people that are driven, for us to get to where we're at now, to where financially we're free, it's really hard to shut off the ambition in us. And I'm curious, how do you set boundaries? - Yeah, man, I'll tell you what, I'm not perfect. That's for sure. There's a little slight variations from time to time. And there's, it's like when I go on a trip, like I've got one at the end of April, you better believe that Monday that through Thursday, I'm gonna be working like 14 hour, 'cause I'm just like, go all out, I'm being. So there's sprint moments, but really the baseline is the 10 to 3. And sometimes the boundary gets crossed, but I'll tell you who helped me was my office manager 'cause I couldn't do it. I was literally going from like 4 a.m. to like 4 p.m. And when I turned like 38, I don't know how old you are, Michael, but like around three or four o'clock in the afternoon, if I'm up at four, it's like my brain doesn't work very well anymore. I start getting irritable in like little small mohils that turned into mountains. And I'm just like, I've hit my desk a couple times and like 4 p.m. like dang it. And I'm just like, and then like in the morning, like that wouldn't be with bothered me. So my thank God for my office manager, she went in and blocked my calendar at three o'clock every day, stops. And like it's blocked out, no one can schedule my calendar anymore. And then not before 10 a.m. either. So she's the one that did that for me. And I try not to fill it, you know, it's usually family time, God time, children time in the evening. So yeah, I'll tell you what, I'm not perfect. I've been working on myself for years now 'cause I thought I always grew up thinking I was not good enough. Like, so I thought I can outwork. If I didn't get up at 4 a.m. and work until at least 5 p.m. I didn't accomplish anything that day and I wanted to be significant. Now I'm realizing that's such a stupid lie that I've been telling myself that somehow another came from childhood. So I'll tell you, all I'm saying is it's a work in progress. It's a clear work in progress. And I love that my neighbors are doctors and they're coming home at six. And I'm already playing and riding bikes with my kids. I hope they don't even, I think they, here's what I think they think. What does that guy do? He must be a bump. - That is too funny. I'm gonna digress a little bit here because when I was in my early 20s, I remember I was working in an office and I was stuck at a desk and I'm a lifelong surfer. And as a surfer, when the waves are good, there's a calling that you can't plan to go surfing around your schedule. The waves are good when the waves are good. Now, if you're a mountain biker, if you're whatever kind of like skiing, you go on the weekends and you feel that, you satisfy that need. Well, I was in this office and I knew that the waves are good and I was looking out the window and it's sort of unrelated to my own interest, but there was a guy. And every day, he'd be casually drinking a cup of coffee walking his dog. He was probably in his late 30s, maybe early 40s. And I just remember thinking like, "F this guy, how is he able to be out there right now?" Casually walking his dog at like 10, 30 in the morning without a care in the world. And that's when it hit me. In that office, stuck there going, "I want to build a lifestyle that suits me. I don't want to be married to the work and be stuck in the, and have the responsibility." So for me, that's the entrepreneurial journey. And I think anyone listening to this probably can relate, like, buy back your time or buy your freedom, like work really hard when you want to work hard. That one someone else tells you you have to work hard. That is the ultimate dream. And there's a lot of ways to achieve that, whether it's investing in hotels, other asset classes. What you're doing now with land investing and ultimately developing land. And as we're recording this, I want to be conscious at the time because we're approaching your time, that three o'clock threshold. So I know we got to be respectful of that and hop off. I've got one question that I just, I have to ask this because I feel like our audience is maybe sophisticated enough to appreciate this next question. And it's a tough one. But here's the thing. If raw land investing or what you're doing now with developing land is as good and as profitable as it is, that you say it isn't by all accounts, I believe that you've got the numbers to back this up. I guess I just wonder, why are you spending a significant chunk of your time and energy teaching other people how to compete in your own market? Like what is in it for you? Oh yeah, so much. No, thank you for asking that because I was always like, "Man, if you're so good, why are you telling other people about it?" The more I give, oh my gosh, the more I get. So I went to, I used to go to these real estate investing seminars. This is Robert Allen, I'm shown it on the screen. I actually finally met this guy, but I went to one of his seminars in 2018, paid like five grand or something like that. I mean, a lot of money. That's a 2018, 2005 right after I graduated high school. I maxed out a credit card and I thought it was going to meet this guy and he and the Pav and someone else in there. The guy looked like a million bucks, talking about all these real estate deals he was doing. I'm like fresh out of high, I'm like 19 years old, and I was like, "One day I'm going to be that guy." And I finally got to be that guy. I'm like, literally, I don't have a Rolex or anything. That guy had one, but I kind of care about that. But I wanted to be a real estate investor and I wanted to share with people what I'm doing. I love getting on stage. This is the highlight of my week, getting on this podcast. I like running our community. I get to be the leader of that and I've created so many multi-millionaires now by just sharing what I do. And a lot of times our land sharks are doing better than I am in my business. Yes, I make about $50,000 net profit on every single one of these brand new manufacturing homes on land that I do. And I probably could have done at least one more with the hour I spent with you and probably would have made more money. But I also charge people to teach them 'cause I coach a couple of people a month and they pay me pretty darn good money. And a lot of times I'll do deals with them as well. But I get to do deals that never would have been able to do. I get a lot of times people don't want to learn this business. They've got cash on the sidelines. They want to lend out. So I've got 85 lenders that give me cash anywhere from eight to 12% and I secure their money with real estate. So one thing feeds the other. I could probably be quiet and hold it like my precious. But I want to have friends that do this with me. So I could sit here and talk about that for another 10 minutes actually. Yeah. Yeah, I think that also when you're teaching, you're also learning. So just, yeah. Yeah. You're forced, right? To figure out what is, what are the things that I'm doing that are valuable? And it really helps you to refine and sharpen your own sword. Yeah, so true. Yeah. And you want to know the pastor's sins come to his sermon because sometimes I talk like, here's what you should be doing. I'm like crap, I look at my own business. Okay, I need to go fix that myself. It's happened. Right on, man. Well, Brent, I appreciate this conversation. I appreciate you being on. For anyone that is listening who wants to learn more about what you're doing in your space or follow along with your journey, where do they find you? Yeah, jump on my calendar, thelandsharks.com or check out my YouTube channel. I think you had mentioned it earlier. Brent and L. Bowers, I try and post a video every single week. Awesome. Well, that is a wrap then on today's episode. Big thanks to Brent Bowers for keeping it real, giving us some pretty valuable information. Listeners, look, if you got value from this episode, do us all a favor. Send this to a person who needs to hear it. Helping to grow the show is one way that we continue to get great speakers on this. show like Brent, so you guys can continue to learn and we continue to get better. So again, this is Michael Russell and we're wrapping up another episode of the hotel investor playbook. We will catch you again next week. Aloha.