How to Make Money From Land You Don’t Own - Ep. #329

Chris Koerner (0:00)

$17,000, $18,000 a month. No brainer of the century. Go look at the price right now. Insane, it is parabolic, it is through the roof. It's the best time ever. You don't need to own any land to do it. Most people don't know this, it's very, very cheap. He finds raw land on highways, and he gets portable storage units, and he builds storage facilities. They're temporary. That way, if heaven forbid, it doesn't work out, he can just walk away at the end of his lease. But so far for him, it's always worked out. So he rents it until he's proved the model. Once he has a successful business, he buys it. So that is a business I love because a lot of different people can do it. It's not winner take all. You can do that with any type of use case. It doesn't have to be portable storage. I know a guy that just goes to auctions. He buys them and he sells them. He never even takes delivery of them.

Okay. I did something a little insane. I just spent millions of dollars on dirt, a 231 acre ranch, about 45 minutes from my house here in Dallas, Fort Worth. And in this episode, I'm going to tell you the whole story. And I'm going to tell you all of the business learnings and monetization ideas I had along the way, all the rabbit holes I went down on how you can make money from anything having to do with a ranch or raw land or equipment or ponds or there's so many guys, you know me, I'm ADHD. I'm all over the place. Most of them not requiring much money. All of these ideas and learnings that I had over the last six months looking for this ranch, I'm going to break down in this episode. But first, I want to tell you how I found it and why I found it and what my thesis is. If all the things I could spend money on, why raw land? I'm also going to tell you about how I negotiated almost 400 grand off the list price, even though it wasn't an ugly ranch, it wasn't in trouble, it hadn't been listed for a while, it wasn't distressed.

It comes with quite the cast of characters, all of them awesome, and I'm going to share all the numbers, everything, what I paid, why I paid, how much I think I can make from it. The goal is for you to have a ton of ideas for yourself on how you can make money in any number of ways I'm about to talk about. We've got ideas from spreadsheet databases to grass-footed beef and everything in between. Okay, but first, let's talk about the story because the story is where the money got made. Why a ranch? Number one, one emotional and one financial. The emotional one came first. I've got kids, four of them. Most of you know this, and I kept having this nagging feeling, especially because my buddy Jeff bought a ranch a couple hundred acres a couple years ago, and ever since then, I've been watching his boys drive out there, move a bulldozer around, move dirt around, drive a skid steer side by side, bring it in the cows, building a burn pile after the storm. And I just admired that. I love that. Everything about it. I just feel so strongly that having your kids learn to work hard is one of the best things you can do as a parent. And it's also one of the hardest things. And I think they're correlated. I think the harder things you do as a parent are also the most important things you do as a parent. And our kids have always done chores, started out as pick up your room, take out the trash, go get the mail, right? And then we've slowly started making them harder and harder and more outside and longer periods of time. And it's hard. They kick back all the time. They push back. They don't like it. But now they're so much better and they're harder workers and they complain less and it's going to pay dividends for the rest of their lives. And I just wanted to do that on a bigger scale. Of course, you don't need to buy raw land or ranch to teach your kids the value of hard work. But selfishly, I want to own heavy equipment and push dirt around and it's a chore that I think my boys could get more excited about. And I could get more excited about too. And I want my kids to have opportunities that I never had and I don't want them to be soft. So a ranch to me is like the greatest hard work simulator ever invented. Fixing fence in the July heat or feeding cows when it's 37 degrees hauling hay, that will just like change a kid. It'll build something in a kid that no app ever will. And then there's the name. You know, this is more emotional stuff, but my wife and I got married on 80808 August 8th and three eights. So this is called 888 Ranch. And I kind of like the branding aspect of that because three eights in a row will be a great cattle brand. Oh, I forgot to mention it is a cattle ranch. There's about 100 cows on it. And I'll talk about how those are going to get taken care of as well. But it's also going to be the name of a YouTube channel where I'm just going to document all this. So I'll link to that in the description. So those are the emotional reasons. And they came first, honestly, you know? They say business isn't personal or yada yada yada, but like it is, it is personal.