40 Genius Ways of Making Thousands from Unwanted Land⏐Ep. #258

Chris Koerner (0:00)

There is a million ways to make a million bucks. This is a business that nobody talks about. That's over $10 million in revenue. Guess what they do? It rents out for $600 to $950 per night. With all of these options I'm going over today, there are no more excuses. So what if I told you that for about $200 a month, you could find some ugly, unwanted, unloved land and turn it into a cash flowing machine that makes you over $10,000 a month? Well, the only thing holding you back from doing that are ideas. Well, that's what this episode today is for. So let's go.

If you live in the United States, you need to look into what's called the USDA Rural Development Loan. This loan has no PMI, no mortgage insurance as in less fees. And if your land or property is in a specific area, there's a map online where you can look at all this. If it's in an area and your credit is not terrible, it doesn't have to be amazing. But if it's not terrible, you can qualify for 0% down for a government backed loan through most legitimate banks. There are some restrictions. One of the restrictions is you can only use it on raw land if you plan to build a building or a piece of real estate on it. I believe it does qualify for stick built homes, modular homes and manufactured homes. There are income limits, but the interest rates are even lower than FHA loans. And if you want only raw land and to never put anything on it, this will unfortunately not work for you. I paid about $7,200 for the shed all in including delivery. It is 8 by 18 feet and it's not just a shed. It also doubles as a she shed or it can double as a tiny home. Thanks to new reality shows, the costs of tiny homes are outrageous. You can easily pay over $100,000 for a tiny home, easily $50 to $80. $200. Why? Because of the framing, the fact that the seller positioned it as a shed, which you generally cannot monetize. If you want to have a tiny home business and buy unwanted or unloved land, put a tiny home or multiple tiny homes on it and rent it out, you should consider instead buying a shed either in a kit or fully built and delivered on site as is. You could put a loft up top and call it all in $20,000. You can rent it out for $500 to $1,000 a month, make your money back in a couple of years. Whereas if you go buy a purpose built tiny home, you're not going to make your money back for a decade or more. It's really the same product. We're talking about four walls, a foundation and a roof. It's just a different way of approaching starting a real estate business or a tiny home business. There are several websites that enable you to take quiet spots and rent it out to tent campers. Campspot being the biggest, Tenter with two R's, Campspace, Harvest Host. There's three to five different peer-to-peer marketplaces that provide the opportunity to rent out mere plots of dirt on your property for $10 to $50 a night. You don't need hookups. They're not expecting hookups. They're not expecting electricity or plumbing or any of that. They just want to go camping, usually with their kids. I'm a customer of these websites because I live in Texas and there aren't a lot of state or national parks here, unfortunately. So we go out to other people's private land and we have a great time camping for about 20 bucks a night. I had an Ingram Trampoline installed recently. I paid way too much for it. The trampoline itself was about $4,000. But the install cost was outrageous. $4,500 for someone to roll up with an excavator, spend half a day digging it out. They put some weed barrier down, some landscaping rocks. They installed a $50 water pump, plugged it into the side of the house. That way when it rains too much, it'll pump all the water out so mosquito larvae don't find a nice place to live. But there's a huge opportunity for heavy equipment parking, right? If you have unwanted or unloved land, it doesn't matter how rural it is. There are business owners that need to park their trucks, their excavators, their skid steers, you name it. So the company that I hired to dig this thing out, they dig out pools, they dig out trampolines, they level land for new home construction. They need a place to park their stuff. And you can charge between $80 and $250 per month per spot. 43,000 square feet in an acre, and you can make six figures of income with truck parking. And there are websites that kind of act like the Airbnb for parking lots and truck parking and semi-trailer parking. And you can use those to acquire customers. In the state of Texas, and every state has similar laws to this, if you buy a parcel that's more than 10 acres, you can get it split up. As long as each parcel is 10.01 acres or more, you don't have to get it rezoned. You just need a new survey. So I have a friend that goes out to West Texas. He'll buy a 500-acre plot. As long as it has a lot of road frontage, he will split that up 50 times into 10 lots. I'm making these numbers up, but it's directionally correct. Let's say he buys 500 acres for $500,000. He splits it up into 50 units. He sells them for 20,000 each, and he makes a million dollars on his money. He just pays a few thousand dollars for his surveying costs. That works all day in every state. Some states more than others. In Texas, if it's under 10 acres, then you gotta go through all kinds of approvals. You gotta get septic and all kinds of other things. But if you keep it at 10.01 acres or more, then you can still subdivide the land without having to go through all that rigmarole, and you can sell it for a profit. You should also look into master lease agreements. It doesn't always apply to only raw land, but I've used this on some RV park deals, where let's say you can't afford to buy the land cash, or you can't find a loan, or you can't afford a down payment. You basically make lease payments to the owner, but all of the cash flow over and above those lease payments go to you.