How AI Is Helping Land Investors Find Better Deals Faster

Brandon Parker (00:00)
With just big data. I’ve made over ten million cold calls with humans, and with human lead managers. And so the intermediary was I had a team of salespeople who did basically the Maya call, the a lead manager who calls, talks to them, qualifies them. And so we have thousands of those calls recorded, thousands of Maya calls recorded, and we just crush the output. And so the data tells us that Maya’s better. The main difference is on

Their best day, a very good salesperson. Yes, they can outperform Maya. But Maya on Thursday afternoon crushes. Monday morning crushes. a person is mean to them, which happens often on these types of calls. She crushes. Like it just never gets fashion.

Cody Crabb (02:19)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Cody Crabb,

today I’ve got Brandon Parker with me. Brandon is the founder of Land AI, and they’re helping land investors solve one of their biggest problems in the business right now. not just getting seller leads alone, but qualifying them, following up, and figuring out who’s worth talking to. So I I love a good time saving service app, whatever you want to call it.

so thanks so much for hopping on with us, Brandon.

Brandon Parker (02:46)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Cody. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (02:48)
course. so to start out, I’d love to hear a little bit about, you know, how you came to be I mean, w what what side came first, right? So usually it usually when I talk to people with products like this, either the tech side or the real estate side came first. Which was it for you?

Brandon Parker (03:05)
Yeah, classic solving up my own problem. It was the real estate side first, and then technology followed. started with a call center actually, but was doing land investing, got a call center to just get massive amounts of leads to find vacant land to buy. And then started renting the call center out to other land investors. And then quickly realized that finding leads is actually pretty simple. It’s sorting through leads without wasting your entire life just talking to tire kickers.

that became the issue. And so that was the problem that I started to solve. And that’s what landed us here almost three, three plus years later with a conversational AI that sorts through those leads and qualifies them for us.

Cody Crabb (03:47)
Yeah, so tell us about tell us about what Land AI does and about Maya. I’d also love to know why why Maya. Why’d you choose the name Maya if that if there’s a interesting story there.

Brandon Parker (03:56)
Yeah. So what we do is we do everything from the very beginning of the process to capturing leads. So our clients will come in, they say, Hey, we want to buy forty acre properties in Missouri. We s we go pull the data, we go find phone numbers, we find who owns it, we cold call, we text, we do outbound, we bring the leads in, we have them talk to our conversational AI, which is Maya. Maya talks to them about their to the land sellers.

about why they want to sell the property, their motivation, their timeline, how much they might want for it. We decide if leads are qualified or not. If they are qualified, we hand them to our investors to to close the deal. If they’re not qualified, then we will nurture them long term. So we’ll send them text messages, emails, we’ll even call outbound to them if they’ve approved it. We’ll call outbound to them with our conversational AI and have further conversations with them. And we’ll just nurture them forever once they’re ready to or they’re pre-qualified.

They’re like laid down, like ready to just give their property away, but you know, they’re ready to talk to, we’ll send them to our investors. So everything from our clients tell us where they want and what they want to buy, and then we go grab it and bring it to them. and the Maya name is just a it’s easy to it’s easy to say, it’s easy to remember, it’s unique enough where it stands out, but it’s not unique enough where it sounds weird. So it’s just a name that landed. Yeah. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (06:10)
Yeah, it’s same same pros same principle behind how I choose chose the names for my kids, basically. There’s that’s the same exact thing. yeah. But yeah, I I thought so sometimes you get like those ones where they’re like, it’s an ancient Greek myth where the and so yeah, anyway. I just had to ask if it was one of those. no, but Yeah, there you go. Yeah, good idea. Yeah, okay. So I f that’s pretty interesting. So when when you say you were solving your own problem, you know, you were you’re calling all these

Brandon Parker (06:26)
Make something up. On my list.

Cody Crabb (06:38)
calling all these potential leads and and you said it it worked but like you wasted a lot of time and money and stuff because you were kind of finding you you had to sort through so much crap right before you actually got through people that were actually interested. and I find that that’s kind of AI’s strong point is not necessarily coming up with ideas for you but like sorting and pack repackaging and things like that that is just for humans it takes a really really long time.

Whereas, you know, an AI can do this lightning fast. what would you say to someone who I mean, I hear this a lot. This is why I always kinda if I get someone in the AI space that talks to me, I always like to ask him, like, what would you say to someone who is like, well, but like, you know, you’re not gonna get the same, you you know, you maybe you might be missing out on some gold because how do you know the AI is not messing it up? How do you know they’re, you know, getting all the right things?

Brandon Parker (07:29)
With just big data. I’ve made over ten million cold calls with humans, and with human lead managers. And so the intermediary was I had a team of salespeople who did basically the Maya call, the a lead manager who calls, talks to them, qualifies them. And so we have thousands of those calls recorded, thousands of Maya calls recorded, and we just crush the output. And so the data tells us that Maya’s better. The main difference is on

Their best day, a very good salesperson. Yes, they can outperform Maya. But Maya on Thursday afternoon crushes. Monday morning crushes. a person is mean to them, which happens often on these types of calls. She crushes. Like it just never gets fashion.

It’s the same thing every time. It never misses a beat. you know, sometimes says something a little bit funny, but like that trade-off versus a human who’s going to be.

Tired some days, great some days, get flustered by callers saying crazy stuff. It just over time it plays out where the consistency wins by a very, very clear margin. And the other thing is it scales as well. So you know, if we get a thousand leads, okay, maybe your first two lead managers are doing great. You add a third lead manager, you’re training them, you’re doing QA, they’re not performing, you’re bringing in another one. There’s just

the operational aspect of it too doesn’t scale as well when you’re trying to build a sales team. So it just outperforms night and day when the numbers start to get bigger than just the very small operation.

Cody Crabb (09:08)
So do typically typically do do sellers know that they’re well, the sellers I would assume know because they’re getting in touch with you, but do do do all does everybody kind of fee get the feeling that it’s like this is an AI intake, or does it feel like it’s really talking to a person? Cause I mean I’ve been on the receiving end of some very convincing AI calls that I could still tell were AI. I’ve been on the c on the receiving end of super not convincing calls that were terrible. So I just just kind of give me the experience. Like what is it like to

to chat with Maya. Is it really like talking to a person or or what is it what is it like?

Brandon Parker (09:41)
Well, we had the funniest call we had yesterday actually. Someone said we were we were A B testing voices. And because we’ve done thousands of A B tests trying to get what’s the perfect voice? How do you phrase this? How do you do this? And the guy said, Well, I’ll talk to you because he was just so interested. He the the voice and the conversation was going so well. that’s what at the end of the call, hey, you want to call back from our from our team? He said, Well, I’ll have a call back from you.

Like he enjoyed the conversation so much. so yes, people yes, people know. We disclose it up front, we exclose it, we disclose it during the call. It’s just, you know.

what you don’t want is a even just a 1% lingering question in someone’s head where they’re kind of like, is this AI? Is this not AI? And if they’re trying to figure that out, they’re not just in the conversation. And so like it’s we just get that out of the way. but people forget that they’re talking to AI is.

What it seems like to me. Like maybe they remember, but then they get halfway through the conversation, they’re just talking. And another interesting thing that pops up is that people are a little bit more candid with AI than they are with humans because there’s no barrier there. So they’ll they’ll just disclose stuff. It’s like we cannot believe they said that, but let’s run it, you know. So

Cody Crabb (11:33)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I th I I find that really fascinating actually. because that’s a whole new this didn’t exist a few years ago. So I I’d be curious to know. So be you’re digging into the data, which I find really interesting about sales and about you know, just

seller behavior and investor behavior and things. And I just I’d be curious to know, like you’re talking about 10 million cold calls. Like that’s a lot of cold calls. You pulled a lot of data probably just personally, no knowing, this is what happens. This is what happens. I’d love to know some lessons that you learned from all that data that maybe someone who didn’t look at the data maybe could miss.

Brandon Parker (12:08)
So I think that our key indicators of s whether someone’s just kicking tires or whether they are worth talking to are their motivation and their price. If they have some sort of reason that they’ve stated to sell the property, like my kid moved away to college, then that’s generally a a key indicator. if they say a price that’s tethered to reality, that’s generally a key indicator. So those are the two like big overarching tidbits that I’d say. You know, so for example

Cody Crabb (12:37)
It seems so obvious, but like when you s now that you say that, it’s like, Well, of course. Like they’re they’re selling it for I’m I’m doing this now, which means I need to do this. And it’s not just like, I’ll see what happens. You know, exactly.

Brandon Parker (12:50)
And y the the problem with any cold outreach in any system is that you get tire kickers. You can imagine if someone hits you up, Cody, and they’re like, Cody, I wanna buy your truck. Can I can I give you money for your truck? You’d be like, Well, I mean, I wasn’t thinking of selling it, but like maybe, like, how much you wanna give me? You know, that’s like it’s that that that doesn’t mean you’re gonna actually sell your truck. So that’s what you that’s what you run into with with cold leech in.

Cody Crabb (13:14)
That’s I find that really this is this is absolutely fascinating to me because I feel like this is a this is something that just ha like I said, it didn’t really exist before. And so we’re kind of still trying to figure out I think the strategy that you’ve adopted is probably the best one where you know some companies will be like, let’s just not straight up say that it’s AI. Let’s say it might be AI, it might not, like just kind of to hold the facade. But I love that you just tell people right up front because like you said, I feel like knowing that it’s fine.

If I know that it’s an AI, it’s fine. What I don’t like is me trying to guess if it’s an AI. That’s that is you’re right. I that’s the part that I hate. So I totally see why that would why that would be helpful.

Brandon Parker (13:53)
Yeah, and people are getting more used to talking to AI because a lot of people are doing it on their phone now, having conversations with their AI. And so that is that’s lowering the barrier a bit, lowering people’s guards. And even so, it’s only been it’s less than one percent of people who just say, I don’t want to talk to AI. So it’s yeah, it’s it’s going that direction for sure. And and philosophically it is really interesting because as

you talk to something that has a lot of information and that’s sharp, there’s something people start to lean on it a little bit, let’s say, you know, like they want to know. So it’s like we what we do for the whole the cold, the handoff from the cold call to the AI, it’s a it’s a live transfer. It’s like, okay, you might want to sell your property. here’s what we’ll do. We have a really cool AI that can talk to you. It actually knows all about your property.

It’ll ask you some questions. After we’re done, we’ll even send you a property report. We’ll send you information about your property. And so they’re getting something out of it as well. And then we send them a PDF with a real nice layout of their property, flood zone and road frontage and things that they they just probably haven’t seen their property displayed like in that nice of a way before with a little property report. And so that’s it, that’s sticky for them as well.

Cody Crabb (15:56)
Yeah, I th I I think that’s that that’s genius. so all right, in in terms of the the investment side, so investors are coming to you in what situation? Like, you know, what what types of investors? Because when we’re talking about land, I mean sometimes we’re talking about big massive properties. Like what’s kind of the what kind of span is there as far as like what’s available on Land AI?

Brandon Parker (16:20)
So land investors are people who buy property consistently and then resell it or develop it. So it’s not just like, hey, I’m looking for a hunting property of 30 acres. You know, people go on land.com for that, you just go buy one. these are people who are buying land at a discount and then reselling it. So they just buy it for 50,000, they resell it for 70,000. Or they’re people who are buying large plots of land, let’s say.

hundred acres and then they’re splitting it up into subdividing it into 10 acres and they’re reselling it that way. Or they’re doing entitlements, they’re buying stuff and then they’re getting the paperwork all done so they can flip it to developers. So, or they’re doing some value add. Maybe they are building roads and putting up a gate, clearing the brush and then reselling it. So it’s each person has a different approach, but they have some sort of business where they’re buying land, making it more valuable and then reselling it just.

Cody Crabb (17:17)
Gotcha. so who do you think could get the most benefit from from using Land AI? Is it whi which side really, really walks away with the benefit? It kind of to me, it kind of just sounds it kind of sounds like both sides, but I would say I’d give a little advantage to the sellers because this is a thing that they maybe have a tricky time doing. And the fact that they can kind of get the onboarding happening so seam seamlessly, I’d be curious if you see it that way too.

Brandon Parker (17:42)
Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s the issue with land, there not the issue, but there’s two things about land. One, it’s a it’s a sign of abundance. Like if you just have a piece of land sitting somewhere, generally like you’re you know, it’s just extra. It’s not like this isn’t your livelihood, doesn’t depend on the 10 acres you own in Texas. It’s just you have that. Maybe it got passed down through the family, maybe you bought it at one point, you were hunting it, you don’t anymore, or you bought it. A lot of times it’s people bought it and they were gonna build a

house there or a cabin and then they went a different direction. It’s been sitting for 10 years. And so what it represents most of the time for people who are selling it is something they used to do or never got to. And it’s illiquid. It’s just sitting there, not appreciating very much. It’s cash that they don’t have access to. And we give them a really simple way to turn it into cash and in a really transparent way to do that as well. Because land investors, what they lean on is we’re good at this

The money will land in your bank account. We’re going to be transparent with pricing. We’ll give you a fair price. And it’s likely not going to be market, but they’ll be upfront about that. Like, hey, we’re going to do this all for you. Take care of all the paperwork. You’ll get 80% of the value. And, you know, and people take that all day. It’s the same thing, same concept as like Carvana or trading a car in. It’s not, it’s not some big trick. People know they’re not getting value, but they don’t have to go list it on Craigslist and then or

Facebook marketplace and talk to a bunch of weirdos. So they take the trade.

Cody Crabb (19:12)
Yeah. wow. So I in in in this podcast, it’s not super often that we’ve talked about just land by itself. We typically we’re talking about like, you know, structures on the land and stuff. But it’s I find it interesting because it sounds like, you know, part of the issue with land specifically is, you know, people that are maybe dreaming about something or thinking about maybe one day type stuff and you get like you said, the tire kickers.

And so what the problem you’re solving is we’re gonna you find someone to care right now, somewhere that has real land right now in the real world, and you’re connecting those people. So I think that’s that’s great. I mean, i I didn’t realize it was such a problem. Obviously in real estate, there’s always gonna be people like that do the showings and all that stuff, but it seems like it’s definitely maybe a little worse in the land in the land realm, as far as like you what you just mentioned to me.

Brandon Parker (20:02)
Well,

yeah, the reasons for it, it’s an inefficient market is what you’re getting at. And it’s because it’s hard to price land. Land is it’s there’s not like a Zillow where it’s just like your house is worth like this much plus or minus ten or twenty grand. There’s not that. It’s just people aren’t quite sure. We can give them clarity there. and then also, real estate agent is harder to find because there’s not very many real estate agents.

compared to realtor f real real estate agents for houses. And so they’re fewer and far between. They don’t do as much work to market it. And so it’s yeah, it’s just harder to get sold. It’s a harder to find the price. It’s more legwork. It’s the the path isn’t as well worn. And so what we’re trying to do is and what land investors do is help make that market. They help make it more efficient.

Cody Crabb (20:49)
So before we wrap up here, I’d love to kind of zoom out a little bit. So you’re sitting on a lot of data. You’re sitting on, you know, I mean not literally, but like you you’ve you’ve gone through tons and tons of these calls. you’ve done tons of conversations with sellers and buyers and things. You’re seeing how people are operating behind the scenes.

So I’d love to know your opinion on where things are going over the next couple of years. Like for you, but also just kind of for for the industry. I think AI obviously is gonna play an increasingly large role in in how we do everything, but also obviously in real estate too. What’s your what’s your view on where things are gonna change?

Brandon Parker (21:26)
Yeah, so I have a take on land where AI is going and just overall. So the land industry is professionalizing. So it used to be a lot of small mom and pop kind of people send out a few thousand mailers, they get a couple deals, they do a deal every month or two, and it’s like it’s easy. It has become more professional, a lot of it because of companies like us that are making the markets more efficient, but it’s getting more competitive.

And so people need good operations to keep doing good deals and be profitable. I have to be serious business people to come in and be land investors. It’s no longer a just kind of side hustle. so that’s one. And so that’s what we that’s what we help people with is we are hyper-professional. We just try to run the very best and most efficient land operation possible. And that’s what we’re focused on. And so we partner with people and help them compete. number two.

is with AI in general, within the land business, where I see this going is just full stack end-to-end acquisitions. So right now we do everything up until the acquisition. Soon we’ll be able to have those sales conversations with good underwriting and maybe even close those deals. Be able to do the back end where we put it on the market and relist it, be able to do the funding where we bring funding to the thing. And so really it just becomes

a per a a human who has a business sitting in the middle that’s closing and underwriting deals and we taking care of basically the entire process of the sales end as well. And so the entire thing being an AI app basically here we bring in Maya, Maya goes and brings you the deal and then she sells it. And you just make sure it’s the right price and say yes. So that’s the big

Cody Crabb (23:12)
It’s

like t it’s like Tinder. Like, holy cow. I’m just imagining you literally just go, Yeah, that looks good. that’s crazy. Yeah. And I think I I think you’re probably right. I mean, I just talked to someone who his company does funding via the blockchain, and it is like he said it’s like so fast now that it’s like scary, like it’s a little too fast. So you don’t even have time to really prepare what you know to to so so I’m just combined with the all the stuff you’re saying, I think you’re it’s gonna things are gonna be

Very accessible, I think. The whole legwork part is gonna not be as much of a thing. It’s gonna be more just, you know, sticking with it and making sure you actually do invest instead of just thinking that maybe you should someday. but yeah, thank you so much for for all that you’ve given us today. So if someone wants to check out Land AI, you know, where obviously, you know, it’s you we we already mentioned is landai.ai. But what else where should they go to kind of learn more and and find out if they could benefit from this?

Brandon Parker (24:08)
landai.ai. You can go on there, see what we do. You can book a call with me to talk about it directly. And if you want to see me on socials, Brandon Parker on YouTube and BrandonParker_o on Twitter.

Cody Crabb (24:25)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Like I said, this has been a really useful conversation. and I I think our listeners got a lot too. And listeners, thank you for giving us some of your time. If you liked what you heard today, go ahead and give us a like, subscribe, comment, follow. All the things. what were you gonna ⁓ one more thing?

Brandon Parker (24:43)
Or Brandon Parker brandonparker.com got a newsletter. And so if you’re just kind of interested in AI ops, the way that I’m thinking, brandonparker.com and go hit that newsletter.

Cody Crabb (24:54)
Love it. Love it. Well, thank you. I I a better audience would love to hear from you. and audience, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in.