How Ron Apke Made $700K Profit in His First Year Flipping Vacant Land | Land Investing Explained

Ron Apke:

My brother and I started a land investing company, flipping company back in 2020. Essentially, buy land under value, sell it for market value or close to market value, make the difference essentially. You guys have all heard it from house flipping, anything like that. Over the next few years, we did a lot of deals. We did, I think, $700,000 in profit our first year and scaled up from there, where we were doing 50, 75, 100 deals per year.

Scott Bursey:

Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast, powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey. Glad you’re with us. And today we’re joined by Ron Apke. Ron runs Land Investing Online with his brother Daniel, a business built entirely around buying and selling vacant land. The model is simple to say and hard to do: buy land below market value, then resell it for a profit. Listeners, today you’re going to learn how this business really works: how to pick a market, how to read the data, and how to build deal flow that never dries up. Ron, welcome to the show.

Ron Apke:

Awesome. Thanks for having me, Scott. I’m excited for this conversation.

Scott Bursey:

It’s awesome having you here, my friend. And to help our listeners get up to speed, please give us the ninety-second highlight reel, if you will, of how your career ignited and where you’re pouring your fuel now.

Ron Apke:

Yeah, so my brother and I started a land investing company, flipping company back in 2020. Essentially, like Scott said, buy land under value, sell it for market value or close to market value, make the difference essentially. You guys have all heard it from house flipping, anything like that. Over the next few years, we did a lot of deals. We did, I think, $700,000 in profit our first year and scaled up from there, where we were doing 50, 75, 100 deals per year.

2023, we started Land Investing Online, which is an education platform. Always throughout this time we knew there was a gap in data around land. And there’s a lot of big softwares giving data for houses and other property types, but there was never something for land. And in 2023, we started developing Land Portal, which is a data software essentially, a data provider for land properties in particular, where you can filter based on land attributes, not just like the square footage of the house or all these other things. You can actually filter by what kind of land you want.

This business model as a whole, land investing has transitioned to over the last few years, is a lot more project-based things and less buying under market value, reselling for market value—a lot more of buying for eighty percent of market value, adding some improvements, whether it’s subdividing, adding a mobile home, and then selling for, I guess you’d say above market value. So that’s what the business looks like today.

Scott Bursey:

Appreciate you laying that out for us, Ron. You know what really caught my attention about you was the way you’ve been able to build a business in a niche most investors walk right past. Everybody chases houses. Your world is vacant land: no tenants, no renovations, no roofs to fix, and most investors ignore it completely, which is exactly where you found the opportunity. Taking that a step further: when you’re picking a brand-new market for land, where does your eye go first?

Ron Apke:

It’s a great question, and it’s probably one of the most asked questions. We like to be a little more rural America than what traditional people would think. We like to be the outside of—all when you get into Atlanta, Georgia, there’s a lot of restrictions. There’s a lot of different things. There’s less vacant land. I like to go two to three counties outside of these main metro areas. And typically turns out to be two to three counties removed, as opposed to being in the middle of urban America.

Scott Bursey:

I guess the big follow-up question would be: what does the data have to tell you before a county earns your time?

Ron Apke:

Yep. We need transactions. That’s a big thing. It’s like, if I can buy land here, am I gonna be able to sell it? We need days on market to be under a hundred twenty days or so for land. We need sell-through rate, things to be churning. We need not too much inventory where I’m competing with a hundred other properties and mine will sell when it sells. Our goal is to have things under contract to sell when we buy it within ninety days. So that is basically—we’re picking a market, there’s a balance between: let’s get rural enough where my population density is sub-five hundred in the county, but let’s also make sure we’re in a county where there is demand, where there are buyers out there when we do acquire the land.

Scott Bursey:

I love that, and I know our listeners do too. Here’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you: where do land deals most often fall apart?

Ron Apke:

Once we get under contract, soil—how the soil is, that’s a big one. We always get perc tests to make sure, ’cause we’re in rural America. So there’s not—typically there’s not city sewers, city water, all these things. So we need a well, we need a septic system. And there’s things called perc tests on sites. If you haven’t heard of them, it’s basically where it’s testing the soil if it can take a traditional septic system. It’s not common—maybe five percent of properties fall out of that phase—but it’s definitely something that can kill the value of land if it does not pass a percolation test.

Scott Bursey:

Ron, if somebody’s listening and they’re thinking to themselves, “This is somebody I really like and potentially would like to partner with or do business with,” what would you like them to know first about your operation?

Ron Apke:

It’s not like—I try to portray this business as what it is. You can make tremendous money in this business. In twelve months, you can make leaps. There’s people that try to promise things in thirty days. Could things happen in the first thirty days? Absolutely. But it’s a long game in this business. You want to be in it not just for the next six months; you wanna be in it for the next five years. So while you can do, I think, better than a lot of other real estate avenues—you can make tremendous amounts of income, you’re not doing rentals, you can replace your W-2, in my opinion, faster than any other form of real estate—but that being said, it’s not an overnight thing. There’s a lot of work. There’s people online that will promise things that’s gonna happen faster than it actually will. So it’s a business at the end of the day, Scott. Seven years ago, it was a little easier to just come in and just throw things at the wall and it works out. Today it’s like you gotta have a little bit of a business plan, you gotta make things happen and be consistent.

Scott Bursey:

Switching gears here just a little bit, what’s the biggest threat to a land investor’s margins right now?

Ron Apke:

I think if you’re unable to see the highest and best use of land. So again, five, six years ago—and I look at deals from five, six years ago, I’m like, my goodness, I was flipping land and I could have 4x’d my money instead of doubled my money because I could have subdivided this so many times, whatever it is. So being able to look at land and understand, “If I do this to the land, I’m gonna be able to get more for my money.” And that’s kind of what the name of the game is now. And that’s where I see a lot of land investors fall off is they’re just looking for the flip or the ten-thousand-dollar margin, whatever it is, as opposed to: how can I improve this land to increase my margin, increase my ROI? But there’s also a balance of that with: I don’t want to put too much time, effort, work into it, because we do like quick, quick projects.

Scott Bursey:

Ron, as more people pile into land, how do you stay ahead of the crowd?

Ron Apke:

I think constantly learning, honestly. I think it’s the same as anything. There’s a lot of people that were in this business when I got started that aren’t in this business today. There’s a lot of people that joined this business in the last 12 months that are absolutely killing it because they’re learning, they’re making adjustments. I think that’s the biggest thing is constantly learning with any—’cause things today are changing so fast with AI, technology, all these different things. Just staying ahead of the curve, continuing to learn, keeping your mind—being open-minded with different strategies.

Scott Bursey:

Man, that’s a great way to look at it. Where does Land Investing Online go from here?

Ron Apke:

We just want to help people, honestly. We try to do it very honestly in terms of how we do it, not overselling course education, anything like that. Our goal is genuinely to help people, whether your goal is to quit your nine-to-five, or your goal is to keep your nine-to-five and add fifty thousand, hundred thousand dollars in income per year. That’s what we try to do as a whole. It doesn’t matter if it’s a thousand people or fifty people, it’s satisfying to help. And I want the right people coming into this business model. So for us it’s just helping the next person, honestly, Scott.

Scott Bursey:

Beautifully said. Thanks for sharing that with us, Ron. And you’ve been in business now for quite some time. What has being in the right room—what type of value has that added to your professional status?

Ron Apke:

It’s huge. I think, again, in any business, any work, learning from people who are doing bigger and better things than you, it opens your mind. And it’s also a constraint. I feel like your brain is constrained to the top person in the room, honestly. So if you’re in a room with a bunch of people that aren’t doing that much, it caps you. But I’m in rooms all the time with people that are doing eight-figure deals and they’re flipping land, they’re subdividing four-million-dollar properties, selling for eight million. Those are real deals you can do in this business. So it just opens up your mindset to what can be accomplished in this business. I think networking, talking to people that are doing—and I think it’s key to talk to people that are doing more than you. It really opens up your mind for what is possible.

Scott Bursey:

Ron, let’s dive deep here. What’s the one habit that gives your deal flow—what makes it steady month after month?

Ron Apke:

Consistent marketing. I think it’s with anything. For one of my other businesses, for Land Portal, let’s say, if I turn off ads, my lead flow is gonna go down, my subscribers are probably gonna go down. So consistent marketing spend, consistently reaching out to sellers. And it doesn’t have to be—there’s people that are doing hundreds of thousands of reach-outs per month, but it doesn’t matter the volume, but consistently doing it is going to lead to a consistent lead flow, which leads to consistent deal flow. So that’s the biggest thing. If you turn off your marketing, your leads are going to get turned off as well.

Scott Bursey:

Pure gold right there, Ron. Ron, let’s talk macro here for a little bit. What’s the long vision, the long game for Land Investing Online?

Ron Apke:

Land Investing Online, we are keeping doing the same thing. For Land Portal, the software side of things, we want to continue to grow that. Reaching out—so we initially started that software with very like-minded people to us in terms of flippers, all these things. As in the last 12, 18 months, we’ve been spreading out to developers, realtors. So our reach is getting a little more—there’s more use cases on the software than there was 12, 18 months ago. So that’s there with Land Investing Online again: just helping the next person is our motto there. Land Portal, we have a little bigger visions there.

Scott Bursey:

Could you take us down the path a little bit more about Land Portal?

Ron Apke:

Yeah. So when we were first doing this business, the first three years, we were sending direct mail—20, 25,000 pieces of direct mail per month. We didn’t have Land Portal at this point. We didn’t build it. And what we found with land is there’s a lot of bad land that I don’t want to market to, but we had no way to not market to it. So if I go rural Kentucky, for example, and I’m pulling a list and I’m like, “I want vacant lots”—this is on some other softwares—”I want vacant lots,” I found 40% of the lots had mobile homes on it or a structure on it. So I’m targeting these lots that aren’t good. Or you think about what makes a piece of land bad: slope, wetlands, no road frontage, all these things—there’s a ton of properties in the country that fit this. On Land Portal, we built it: we want to be able to filter this. So if I want land that is 100% dry, if I want to make sure it has a thousand feet of road frontage, I can do all that. It can be all the land—if I want farmland, if I want wooded land, we can do all that within there. So that’s what it was. It’s: how did we want to build our land, or what kind of data did we want in our land business? And we just built the software to follow it.

Scott Bursey:

Man, that’s some good stuff. And Ron, you have given us a lot of really good advice here today, some really good insights on your niche. Is there any additional words or golden nugget or two you could leave with our listeners?

Ron Apke:

Yeah, if you’re in real estate, this is a business model that can be attainable for a lot of people. I think I always tell people who come from house wholesaling, if you’re successful in house wholesaling, land is gonna feel really, really easy to you. But that being said, this business model is not for everybody. There’s definitely a learning curve within learning a new asset. But I believe in the future of land. There’s 330 million parcels in our country. There’s still millions and millions and millions of vacant land waiting for something to happen to it. I just think the opportunity is great right now.

Scott Bursey:

That’s powerful right there. Ron, for those of our listeners that want to keep this conversation moving, stay in your lane, or collaborate with you potentially on future deals, what’s the best way for them to plug into your pipeline and reach you directly?

Ron Apke:

Land Investing Online, we have an opt-in where you can learn more there. Instagram, Ron Apke, R-O-N-A-P-K-E. Direct message me there. Let me know you came from Scott. Those are two really good places.

Scott Bursey:

Ron, thank you so much for joining us today on the Real Estate Pros Podcast.

Ron Apke:

Thank you.

Scott Bursey:

And to our listeners, we appreciate you. If you received value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ll be filling your tanks with a lineup of elite guests, just like Ron Apke, who are accelerating and setting the pace for the rest of the industry. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you on the next episode, everyone.