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Show Summary
In this conversation, Seth Williams shares his journey in the investing world, focusing on land investing and self-storage. He discusses the unique strategies he employed to acquire land at low costs and the transition to self-storage facilities. Seth also introduces his CRM software, Stride CRM, designed specifically for land investors, and shares insights on scaling his business while overcoming various obstacles. He reflects on the lessons learned from building a self-storage facility and emphasizes the importance of consistency and adaptability in business growth.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Seth Williams (00:00)
So if they don’t pay off those taxes soon, they’re going to lose everything. And this is really important because these people are in a very ⁓ unique situation and you can reach out to them and tell them truthfully, like if you don’t pay off these taxes in the next, you know, X number of weeks or months, you are going to lose your property and get nothing for it. Would you rather have that? Nothing? Or would you like me to give you?500 bucks or a thousand bucks or whatever the number happens to be. I’ll pay off your taxes for you and I’ll give you this money and you can just sign the deed over to me.
Michelle Kesil (02:03)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kessel. And today I’m joined by someone that I’m looking forward to connecting with, Seth Williams, who is a land and self storage investor and founder of Stride CRM Software. So excited to have you on the show today, Seth.Seth Williams (02:26)
Hey, Michelle, thanks for having me. Good to be here.Michelle Kesil (02:28)
I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching your investing business and all of the education and CRM information that you’re creating for other investors as well.Seth Williams (02:42)
Awesome. Yeah, I hope so.Michelle Kesil (02:43)
Cool, let’s dive in. So first off, for those not yet familiar with you and your world, can you share what your main focus is these days?Seth Williams (02:52)
Yeah, good question. ⁓ I should probably whittle this down, but I have I have several different focuses. Probably the main one I spend most of my time is on is running Retipster.com It’s like a blog, a YouTube channel podcast where I share all the things I’ve learned from the past 15 plus years investing in land and self storage and houses and that kind of thing. ⁓ But on that, the other stuff I work on is land investing business.Self storage business and now running a CRM software as well called Stride CRM. So that’s kind most of it right there.
Michelle Kesil (03:27)
Awesome. How did you get started in the investing world?Seth Williams (03:31)
Sure. So for me, it was back in, guess going way back in like 2005, 2006, I discovered the book Rich Dad. Poor Dad, as so many of us have. I read that book, just got a ton of inspiration. The light bulbs were going off, just realizing like, ⁓ I don’t have to work a job forever. Like I could start a business and I could invest in real estate and do all that stuff. It was a greatyou know, ⁓ revelation, but at the same time, didn’t really give a lot of specifics of like how to do it. Like it didn’t really explain any specific investing model. It just talked about real estate in generalities. So I spent a couple of years after that kind of just struggling because I didn’t know what to do. I knew I was supposed to buy houses or something. So I would look on the MLS and try to find houses to buy as rentals or to flip. And I couldn’t find anything.
Everything was priced way too high. The numbers never made sense. It was getting really frustrating. And then in 2008, a couple huge things happened. First was that the market crashed. Everything went way down the price. And also, I discovered the land investing business and not just land, but also something called the delinquent tax list where you can get a list of all the properties and property owners in any county in the country that still own their properties, but
they are past due and delinquent on their property taxes.
So if they don’t pay off those taxes soon, they’re going to lose everything.
And this is really important because these people are in a very ⁓ unique situation and you can reach out to them and tell them truthfully, like if you don’t pay off these taxes in the next, you know, X number of weeks or months, you are going to lose your property and get nothing for it. Would you rather have that? Nothing? Or would you like me to give you?
500 bucks or a thousand bucks or whatever the number happens to be. I’ll pay off your taxes for you and I’ll give you this money and you can just sign the deed over to me.
And it was amazingly effective. A lot of people said yes to that. And I was able to buy vacant lots for dirt cheap. I mean, we’re talking like a few hundred bucks free and clear for vacant land. And the reason vacant land specifically and not like a house, that’s another big revelation.
So, you know, at first, when I heard the idea of buying land, it seemed really weird and kind of dumb to me because I didn’t understand how that would make cash flow. But being able to buy it for such a cheap price, that’s what makes it work. Because if you buy any kind of tangible asset for a fraction of its market value, it’s not hard to make money on that thing. You can buy it for a really cheap price, do nothing to it and turn around and sell it for a discount off market value and still make a lot of money on it. So.
And the beautiful thing was like, because it was so cheap, I could buy this stuff without loans or anything. So I able to buy lots of property, even though I didn’t have a lot of cash to my name. I could do it free and clear. And once I owned it, I could list it for sale on Craigslist or some free marketplace like that. And it was awesome. And to this day, it’s a great business. It has changed a lot over the years. A lot more people have gotten into this business and it’s more competitive now, but it’s still way easier than dealing with houses.
because there’s no tenants, there’s no contractors, there’s no people involved. It’s just dirt. And that was kind of like the core business model that I was working for many years. And then eventually I started our eTipster.com. And the idea behind that was just to share with the world all the different things I learned about like, how do you get this list? And how do you do this and that? And I’m still running that to this day. And it’s awesome. So yeah, that’s the story.
Michelle Kesil (07:55)
Wow, super cool. I’ve never heard of that before. That’s really awesome that you were able to, yeah, discover this strategy and make it work.Awesome. So how has your journey progressed from like that start to now? Are you still investing in land? What is like your current investing strategies look like?
Seth Williams (08:14)
Yeah.Yeah. So these days, my involvement with land is mostly on the funding side. So one of the unique things about buying and selling vacant lots like this is that in most cases, banks want nothing to do with these things. They don’t want to finance your vacant land unless you have an immediate plan to improve it in some way or build on it or develop it. Then they’re interested. But if you’re just going to buy it as land and do nothing to it, ⁓
that’s just not the game they play in. So because of that, getting financing for vacant land is very difficult. And what I do as a funder is I can step in for a land investor and if they find a great deal, but they don’t have the money for it, I can fund that deal for them. I can pay for the whole thing. And then when it eventually sells, we split up the profit in some way. And the reason this is great for both parties is because
The act of finding these deals can be kind of time consuming. You’ve to talk to lots of people and make lots of offers. And if you have no money, but you have time, it’s great because you can do that. ⁓ But I don’t really have a ton of time. And so it allows me to leverage other people’s time and use my money to do it. So I need them and they need me. And that’s how that works.
But at the same time, ⁓ land investing, think for any land investor, it is an amazing cash generating machine. It’s a great
engine to build a capital and that kind of thing. But it’s a lot of work. It’s ⁓ a hamster wheel that pays very well. And because it pays so well, a lot of land investors have trouble getting off the hamster wheel because it’s hard to find other things with as good of an ROI as this land investing model. But even so, I think it’s important to do that because there will probably come a day for every land investor where like they just kind of don’t want to do it anymore.
Or maybe they just get tired. Maybe they just have other things they want to pursue in life. And when that day comes, you want to have other stuff to back you up and have depreciation write-offs and that kind of thing. So what I started doing was investing in self-storage facilities. And I built my first one, ⁓ finished it in 2023. It’s been operating for a couple of years now. I’m planning to buy more of them and…
I think every land investor should eventually be trying to work themselves out of the land business. It’s a great place to start, but I don’t think most people actually want to stay there forever, whether they realize it or not. yeah, so I’m actively working my way out of it. And it’s been a whole separate but equally fun journey to figure out how the self-storage business works.
Michelle Kesil (11:16)
Yeah, amazing. So cool that you’re able to use those skills as transferable into your new endeavors into self storage and able to grow that business.Seth Williams (11:29)
Good thing.Michelle Kesil (11:30)
So I know that you created a CRM software. Can you explain what that is and who it’s for?Seth Williams (11:39)
Yeah,absolutely. So we actually launched it in April of this year. It’s called StrideCRM. That’s stride, S-T-R-I-D-E-C-R-M dot co is the website. But ⁓ this is essentially a customer relationship management software for land investors. And I kind of realized I needed this for my business because I was subscribed to like 10 different softwares that did all these different things. They didn’t communicate that well with each other like.
I’ve got a calendar’s app and an email app and texting and phone and this and that. And ⁓ the idea behind this CRM is you quit all that stuff and you bring it into one place, which is Stride CRM. And it becomes way cheaper and it works better together because it’s all integrated with itself. So, you know, things just kind of work a lot more seamlessly and you can set up automations so that when you need to follow up with people, I don’t need to manually think about that.
It just happens and that’s a beautiful thing. And I think the challenge with CRMs, especially when like stride is that it just does so much. It’s almost overwhelming at first to like figure out all that it can do. And it’s, you know, it’s not, ⁓ I guess maybe if you’re starting from scratch, it’s probably not that difficult. But if you have an existing CRM or other systems elsewhere, don’t get me wrong. It’s a bit of work to get it into the system. But once it’s there, it’s so awesome.
Not only do you save thousands a year on the stuff you’re not paying for anymore, but things just work and the business kind of works for you even when it’s three in the morning. So, we’ve also got like ⁓ voice AI agents that can answer the phone for you now. That sounds stunningly real. It’s intelligent, asks the right questions, it collects information and puts it into the CRM for you. So, it’s literally like a human employee, but better because it doesn’t call it sick and it works around the clock and…
easier to understand and it’s a pretty cool thing. So that’s the latest big project I’ve been working on this past year.
Michelle Kesil (13:36)
Yeah, so cool that you were able to create an all-in-one software. Is it only for land investors or can other types of investors benefit from it?Seth Williams (13:48)
I mean, honestly, any kind of business could use it, whether it’s real estate or otherwise. The reason we pitch it to land investors specifically is because ⁓ we have a very good understanding of how the land business works, because me and my co-founder, founder Mike, we’re both land investors. So like we get it. We know what land investors are going to need out of the gate. So lot of the automations that we built in there and like the website templates and things like that are kind of plug and play, ready to go. So you don’t have to build them.And those things are made with the assumption that you’re a land investor. But that being said, like, you don’t have to use any of it. You could just make your own thing and ignore it. The core systems that any business still needs, like your phone and, you know, email broadcasting software and calendars and all that stuff, that’s all built in there as well. So it’s usable by anybody, but land investors specifically are who we had in mind when we built it.
Michelle Kesil (14:38)
amazing? What would you say your most focused on solving or scaling next in your business?Seth Williams (14:46)
Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s a lotstuff I have to scale. I’m actually in the process right now of trying to build. It’s in Claude, which is an alternative to chat, but trying to build a Claude project that is a. It’s kind of like a sales wizard, and what I mean by that is. It deeply understands my business and the different problems that we’re trying to help people overcome.
the different objections people have to signing up for the stuff that we have to offer. And it basically just knows how to help people through that process and convert people to sales. Basically by just when people have questions, this thing has the answer to them. And it’s somewhat complicated to build this thing because it needs a lot of information about what is your business? What do people have problems with? Like, how do you overcome those objections? This and that.
So it’s no small feat to build this thing. But once it’s built, it means I don’t have to like think so hard about answering these questions anymore because it has the answers right there. ⁓ that’s ⁓ in other similar projects, just tasks that are fairly repetitive. Like whenever I need to write an email, like there’s just a lot of mental energy that goes into that.
At least it should be if you want to have a well-written email that communicates and says what the person needs to hear. It just takes thought to do that. And I think with AI, not just generic AI, but like AI that’s trained on my voice, what kinds of things that I say, what our business needs to communicate to people, like really helping to understand that. And it can just get a lot further in the process of saying the right things to people. So those are some of the problems I’m trying to solve right now by building different.
Claude projects and custom GPDs that can assist with this stuff.
Michelle Kesil (17:15)
Awesome, that’s really exciting and yeah, definitely important for where everything is heading in the world. Awesome. What are some of the main obstacles that you’ve experienced on your investing journey, whether that’s with land or self storage that you kind of wish you maybe had some guidance on before you started that you could share?Seth Williams (17:22)
Yeah, definitely.Yeah, man, there’s so many things I could talk about with that. ⁓ I mean, even if you pick one business, there’s so much about that one, I could say. But one of the things that comes to mind when you say that is my self storage facility. And this is really interesting. I’ve never built anything in my life until I built this storage facility. So I really got to understand like. What does construction even look like? Like, who do you hire and what do they do?
Michelle Kesil (17:43)
Yeah, I’m sure.Seth Williams (18:08)
you know, what are some of the just weird things that come up along the way? I’ve always heard it’s kind of ⁓ fraught with issues. Things can go wrong, but I got to see that firsthand. And even with something like self-storage, which is not a very complicated type of building to build, like there were still complications. And one of the things we just we didn’t discover this until a couple of years after it was built. But the way that we designed the drive aisles between the buildings, ⁓ we have a design flaw.where there’s supposed to be a little dip so that when water falls off the buildings, it flows to the center of the drive aisle and then goes down to the retention pond. And ⁓ our designer basically didn’t understand this fairly obvious thing. So we don’t have that dip. It’s just flat all the way across. And the problem with that is water does not flow away from the buildings fast enough as it’s going down to the retention pond. It does drain a little bit.
but not fast enough. needs a steeper pitch. And the reason this is a problem, it doesn’t make water flow into the buildings. Thank goodness that would be a disaster. But in the winter time specifically, when water falls off the building, it freezes right in front of the doors and it literally freezes the doors shut so people can’t open them, ⁓ which is just super annoying. And we can deal with this by like salting the door and
letting it melt and that kind of thing. But it’s just like, it’s not supposed to do that. It’s just never supposed to freeze ever. Like, why was it designed like that? And the problem is, in order to fix this, it’s going to cost about $100,000 to grind up the roads that we put between the buildings and repave it the right way. And it’s one of those things like if it was just designed the right way, this would never even be something we have to think about. And it’s one of those things where, like, I understand why it was missed because it’s just something
I mean, we didn’t even know it until two years after it was built. So you just don’t know everything as you’re doing this. And if and whenever I build facility number two, you better believe this mistake will not be made. But it’s just frustrating when you get all the way through, you pay all the money and like it’s still not perfect. It’s an annoying problem to have to deal with.
Michelle Kesil (20:16)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure there’s so many random things that come up that you would have never known until you’re like in it.Seth Williams (20:23)
Yeah, definitely.Michelle Kesil (20:24)
Awesome. When it comes to growing your business, what are some things that have made the biggest difference for you?Seth Williams (20:27)
Thank you.Yeah, you know, that’s a question. ⁓
You know, it’s weird. I guess when I say this, I’m thinking about Ari Tipster. ⁓ Even to this day, I don’t even really know how much control I have. I mean, what I can do is put together the best information I can, make it entertaining and fun to listen to or watch or read. There’s all these different things I can do, but so much of my quote unquote success, I feel like is not even in my control. Like I can’t control it.
Michelle Kesil (20:39)
Mm-hmm.Seth Williams (21:02)
Google is going to make my stuff rank high or low or if chat GPT is going to steal my information when people ask the question and give me credit or not. Like I just, you know, all I can do is try to make a great product and put good information out there. And there are times when you’re rewarded very well for that and other times when it’s completely thankless. Like you just you’re literally doing hours and hours of work for nothing and you don’t really know until you just do the work. And I still don’t know the answer to that.It’s a… I wish I could just say, okay, if I push this button, progress will be made. But instead it’s more like, I can push this button and progress might be made. So either way, push the button. Like just keep doing the work and hopefully it’ll come back in some way.
Michelle Kesil (21:47)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like you said, not everything is under your control, but you can control the type of material that you’re putting out. So that’s important. Awesome. So before we wrap up here, if somebody wants to reach out, connect or learn more, where can people find you?Seth Williams (22:04)
Yeah, probably the best way would be like retipster.com. R-E is for real estate. So retipster.com or if you’re on any social platform, just search for retipster. You’ll find me on YouTube and Facebook and all the normal places. But when you’re there, you’re welcome to send me a message or if you go to retipster.com and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find a little contact button where you can reach out to me that way.Michelle Kesil (22:29)
Perfect! Well, I appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. Thank you so much for being here. Of course. And for the listeners tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Seth who are building real businesses. We’ll see you on our next episode.Seth Williams (22:35)
You’re good. Thanks for having me.
