The personal blog of Justin Ferriman

Investing in Land

If you are like most people, then at some point in your life you have considered owning real estate.

Even people who don’t consider themselves to be entrepreneurs find real estate an attractive concept because it’s an easy business model to wrap your head around. Own a couple of low-maintenance residential rentals and let that other person pay off the mortgage while building equity.

Sounds great on paper, but as anyone who does this will tell you, things don’t always run smoothly.

I just need to look to my parents. During the recession of 2008, they purchase a few foreclosed condos. They are in a nice area with low crime and good schools. Even still, there is constantly something to be taken care of. Like the time their renter was literally stabbed by their crazy ass ex-husband, and was late on the rent by a few months because of the whole ordeal. I mean, there isn’t a book that can teach you how to deal with that.

When you peel back the onion, the reality is that real estate is not for the faint of heart. While it’s a great way to build wealth, it is not passive by any means. Depending on your property and the person renting, you may end up sinking insane amounts of time and money into the property to the point where you barely break-even.

I want to build wealth in real estate, but I prefer not to deal with the bullsh*t of having renters.

Upgrading appliances, fixing sinks, evicting squatters… I don’t have time for this. Okay, scratch that. I have time, but I want to spend my time dealing with it.

Still, the idea of real estate is very appealing to me, especially as I am completely burnt out from anything to do with the software industry, especially WordPress. As someone who started and sold a software business, there is something therapeutic about owning physical real estate. Like, you can touch it. It’s real. You can actually see the asset. Most importantly, it’s proven as the world’s oldest way to generate wealth – be it for a side income or a financial empire.

So, for me, it’s land > rental properties.

That’s not to say it’s all rainbows and butterflies. Land has its ups and downs, like any industry. But what I find refreshing is that the business model is straight-forward, with less complexity than other profitable industries.

Also, land is less impacted by the housing market. It is a little as you can imagine, but seeing as banks don’t generally provide loans for land in the first place, it creates additional opportunity for seller financing of deals (which has an added benefit of spacing out capital gains tax on a short-term flip).

I have already got the wheels in motion for this journey. I started off by getting the legal entities set-up and the business presence. All the software I am going to use initially has been configured and is ready to go. I’m also taking courses and getting up-to-speed with the basics because I don’t have a background in this business. Though honestly, that’s never stopped me in the past.

If I know anything about my learning style, I am a “ready-fire-aim” kind of guy. Give me the basics, and let me start working it. I know that I’ll make mistakes along the way, but I don’t sweat those as I know it’s a learning opportunity (I made a crap-ton of mistakes when running a software company, and everything worked out just fine).

Want to learn how to make money from land investing?

If you find the concept of land investing interesting, and you don’t want to worry about renters or fixing sinks, then I encourage you to follow along as I share what I learn!

I won’t be writing about it here too much, as this is my personal site and I use it to write about a variety of topics.

I started a newsletter where I document my journey in building a land investment business from scratch – with no prior experience. Think of it as my online journal of lessons learned, from “hell yes” to “oh sh*t”, and everything in between. Things like…

I hope you follow along with me, I promise you will learn something along the way!

#entrepreneurship

Justin Ferriman

Justin Ferriman

Amateur blogger for over 20 years. I write about life, happiness, entrepreneurship, and politics. Full bio.