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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Micah Johnson interviews Mark Podolsky, a seasoned land investor with over 25 years of experience. Mark shares his journey from a stressful investment banking career to finding success in land investing, emphasizing the importance of creating passive income. The conversation explores the integration of AI in real estate, the challenges of optimizing business processes, and the significance of long-term thinking in achieving financial freedom. Mark also discusses the potential future of AI and its implications for humanity, encouraging listeners to embrace change and challenge their assumptions.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Mark Podolsky (00:00)
Yeah, so Ziglar has this great quote, it says, if you’ll do for the next three to five years what other people won’t do, you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life what other people can’t do. And so I love that quote because it’s not saying three to five months, which is why I typically see is people are like, oh, know, it’s just not working for me after three to five months. I’m no, no, this is three to five years of learning, growing and.iterating and everyone’s learning curve is different when it comes to real estates.
Micah Johnson (02:02)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Mark Podolsky, who’s been making serious moves and land investing for the last quarter century. Mark, welcome in, man. Glad to have you.Mark Podolsky (02:15)
Micah, thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.Micah Johnson (02:18)
Absolutely, man, absolutely. I’m excited for our conversation today. You’ve spent a lot of time building an intentional business and the way that you go about what you’re doing now. And I think there’s a lot of value our viewers and listeners can get from just what it takes to be successful in this business and then the mindset to keep growing. So let’s dive in, man, for those who may not be familiar with you yet, tell us some more about yourself. What’s your main focus right now?Mark Podolsky (02:44)
Yeah, so my main focus is buying and selling raw, undeveloped land and making cash flow like a rental home. And so my focus is to help everyone along the economic spectrum create enough passive income where it exceeds their fixed expenses. And so they’re working because they want to, not because they have to, but do it in a way where they’re not dealing with the typical traditional headaches of real estate. So no renters, no rehabs.No renovations, no rodents. Raw land is just so sub-
Micah Johnson (03:18)
I love that man. It’s passive gets tossed around a lot in real estate, a passive investment. I can tell you, single family residential, that’s not one. That’s one it’s not. You get sold that one a lot. So I’m interested in digging more into ways where you’re truly cash flowing land. Like you’re saying, it’s nothing’s on there. You don’t really have to take care of anything. So I’m pumped to dig in there. But take us back for a second. How’d you get into land? What led you to where you are today?Mark Podolsky (03:43)
So if we rewind the tape to 2000, I was a miserable, micromanaged, 45 minute commute to work and back, investment banker, specializing in mergers and acquisitions with private equity groups. And Micah got so bad for me. I wouldn’t get the Sunday blues anticipating Monday coming around. I get the Friday blues anticipating the weekend going by really fast and having to be back at work on Monday. So my firm hires this guy and he’s telling me that as a side hustle, he’s buying up raw land, pennies on the dollar.at these tax deed auctions and selling them online. And he’s making a 300 % return on his money. And I’m like, 300%. I’m looking at companies all day long and a great company, great, has 15 % EBITDA margins. Average company is 10%. I’m looking at companies all day, less than 10%. So I don’t believe him. So I’ve got three grand saved up for car repairs. I go to New Mexico with him. I do exactly what he tells me to do. I buy 10 half acre parcels, an average price of $300 each.
I flipped them online and they all sell for an average price of $1,200 each, 300%. It worked. So I took all that money and went to another auction. And this is 2000 where I live in Arizona. Again, there’s no one in the room. I’m buying up lots of acres for nothing. I sell all that land and I made over $90,000 cash. So I go to my wife and she’s pregnant. said, honey, I’m going to quit my job and become a full-time land investor. And she’s like, absolutely not. So I said, okay, okay. So it took.
18 months for the land investing income to exceed the investment banking income and then I quit and I’ve been doing it full time ever since and I absolutely love it.
Micah Johnson (06:06)
that man. I love that. It’s a, can find it in real estate where it pays both paychecks really well, that emotional paycheck and that financial paycheck where you’re really creating that life you want where I bet you now, man, you pretty much don’t even care what day it is anymore. Do youMark Podolsky (06:21)
No, I don’t care what day it is.Micah Johnson (06:23)
It’s such a good feeling when you get to live that way where it’s, today’s just Tuesday. That’s awesome. What do get to do today? And it just flows all the way through. And I feel like that’s what all of us really get into real estate for is to feel that way, to truly enjoy your life, even when you’re just doing your normal everyday stuff. And so that’s awesome, man. I’m glad for you that you pulled that off. Congrats. Not everybody does that. It’s awesome thing.What are you really excited about now? You’ve got a lot of experience in land investing. You’ve been doing this. You’ve seen changes in the market. What do you pumped about this year that’s happening that you think could take your business to that next level?
Mark Podolsky (07:04)
Well, right now I’m so excited. I’m so geeking out on AI and all the different ways that you can utilize AI with agents and ⁓ just different ways to really inject these tools into the business and make the business more efficient, smarter.leaner, faster, and it’s just a ton of fun to learn ⁓ what it can do, what it can’t do, trying to stretch it. And so every day it’s like this little lab of, know, what can I, you know, create and then, you know, look at it. And so right now I still feel like it’s an intern. Like I wouldn’t ship any of its work yet, but it’s getting better. It’s getting better. And it’s a lot of fun.
Micah Johnson (07:57)
Okay.love that honest assessment because you run around online, you hear AI is doing a lot of things and they’re saying it’s doing a lot of things where reality, we’re still training a lot of it. It is highly effective. It’s going to do some incredible things. It’s growing. I was reading an article the other day about how the exponential abilities each time that new level of it comes out is just astounding at how fast it can stack on itself where it’s literally now writing itself for the next layer. can identify weakness, build it and keep going.
Where are areas that you know, though you feel like those interns are starting to really step up in your business? Where are finding it most effective now?
Mark Podolsky (08:39)
Well, right now I’m finding it most effective in coding and creating tools. So ⁓ the vibe coding that it can do has been really, really great ⁓ in making tools for us. But as far as like the actual business, right? You know, if I break down each part of my business where we have someone doing county research, we have an intake manager handlingseller inquiries, then we have marketing, posting ads, and then of course we have sales, right? And then we have follow-up. And so what I’m doing is I’m taking all the little pieces of our business, like we just are org chart and I’m creating markdown files. And essentially like a job description, I’m getting a guardrails, like I’m treating the AI like I would one of our team members. And then I’m, so I’m creating this squad.
Micah Johnson (09:36)
Okay.Mark Podolsky (09:39)
of agents essentially, and then I have my lead agent Jarvis that manages all the other agents. And so every day I give it a new task and I test it and see what can it do, what can it not do, right? ⁓ I have one client, his agent has sold three pieces of land for him, sell by chat, and he trained it. And so we haven’t gotten there yet, but it’s just fascinating. ⁓Micah Johnson (09:59)
No way.Mark Podolsky (10:08)
playing with it and seeing what it can do and ⁓ hopefully augmenting what our team can do and helping them move faster and be more efficient and really move the needle.Right now though, it’s an intern and so it’s actually, I’d say costing us money at this point. Yeah.
Micah Johnson (10:59)
Right.Right.
Interesting,
interesting. Yeah, because it is, it’s a lot of time goes into it. it’s a, mean, your time’s valuable. So when you’re spending it doing that now, ultimately it’s like anything front loaded effort. The, the time you’re spending now, it may, it has a cost, but it’s value. Man, your farm and time later is how I like to say it, where when it comes to, when that thing harvests the ability to do those sales to find, you described it earlier, the machine, right? You have this machine that trades in land.
Mark Podolsky (11:33)
Right.Micah Johnson (11:35)
And it’s a bunch of parts. So each part cannot be optimized by its own little AI agent like you’re doing to make this machine. You’re going from like an F350 diesel to a ⁓ V10 Ferrari engine, right? Like you’re like, let’s augment this thing to really get it going. I find that exciting too, man. It’s ⁓ what’s gonna be coming out.Really back to the passive thing. How can you create your business where you’re not having to run it all the time? Or even the people that work for you, they get more of their life back. They’re better at what they do. That’s how I think of AI in my own life and what I do with it. It’s this tool to make things simpler. That’s its ability, right? It can already process.
Like human brains can’t process that much at once. And if you use that thing to help process and then bring your creativity back to it, that’s where you find this mix of really how to stretch this tool’s legs. Because it can do all the math for you, right? It can do all the processing of information that would take us years to access on our own. Boom. And it’s fun. It’s fun. You can get sucked in.
Mark Podolsky (12:41)
Yeah, I’m totally sucked in. mean, it’s the best timeever to be an entrepreneur. But I do think it is the highest leverage activity that I can be doing, to your point. Because if I’m going to choose, what is, as CEO of all these different businesses, what is the best use of my time besides leadership and vision and watching the money, I think this is the best use of my time right now. It’s staying on top of it, seeing what it can do, what it can’t do.
and leading the team and motivating them like, Hey, if there’s any drudgery work you don’t like doing, let’s figure out how to get out of it. Let’s have the AI do it. But, you know, we have to have judgment. We have to have creativity. ⁓ and, that’s, and that’s really where the fun is, is, you know, if everyone is, using these tools, like how are you going to differentiate ourselves? Because that’s where, you know, the creativity is, is, is really fun. And so.
I’ve used these Stanford models called JIPA DESPI so that my prompts are really good now. And I’m like a prompt engineer. And so that really helps train our models. But even with all that, it’s still 80 % there.
Micah Johnson (14:01)
Right. It’s still learning, still doing its thing. And that’s where, you know, I appreciate you saying that because if you’re using it out there, you can’t trust everything yet. Like you’ve got to inspect what you expect on it heavily right now, but it has that long-term payoff. Cause I remember back when prompts used to be the most difficult part, right? How to solve, how to tell this thing what to do. And now we have things that can create them for us. Where like you’re saying a prompt engineer, you can now go make sure that part’s perfect every time.Mark Podolsky (14:03)
Thanks for learning.Micah Johnson (14:29)
And then it reveals that next layer of, okay, now where’s it messing up? And then boom, and you just kind of keep going down that line. It’s, keep going back to it. It is fun. I talk to mine a lot because it grows with you. And that’s where, you were saying, that creativity comes out. Yes, we’re all going to be using it, but you’re going to see that individual flavor now more than ever. If someone’s using it in a,Mark Podolsky (14:40)
It is so fun.Yeah, yeah.
Micah Johnson (14:58)
in my opinion, where, you’re letting it bring Mark out. Like you’re teaching it about Mark and the business and it gets to, all right, what about this kind of ad? What about this kind of copy? What about this way? What about that way? Where it’s not the robots. If you train it long enough, it’s no longer the robot’s voice. It is your voice. It starts talking in your voice and saying things like you say it. And that’s when I completely agree.we’re gonna see some highly effective things working and in a way that’s not manipulative, right? It’s actually, you’re able to say what you can really do to help a customer so clearly out of the gate where it’s like, man, obviously that’s who I need to work with. Because we’ve all been sold to our whole lives, right? We’ve been professionally sold to and that’s again, how you can start marketing in a way that cuts through that noise. Cause you know when you’re being sold to, I know it.
Like you use the older method on any of us. It’s like, all right, I’ve tuned out. I’m already gone, not listening anymore. And it’s how do you cut through that noise?
Mark Podolsky (16:41)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And my Achilles heel is I’m trapped by expertise because I’ve been doing it for so long. And so now I want this to challenge all my thinking, my assumptions, go out there and find me a different client avatar. What have I not thought of? And constantly challenge my thinking and the way I’m doing things. Like, can I do this better? Can I do this smarter? Can I do this faster? Can I this cheaper? What am I missing? And then, and see.Micah Johnson (17:07)
Right?Mark Podolsky (17:08)
And so it’s super interesting.Micah Johnson (17:12)
That’s just it, man, our blind spots. Ways we never thought where we used to have to talk to a lot of people to get that information and we still might not get it. Where now, that’s cool, man, just ask it a question. Because if you’re willing to let it challenge you, right, it comes out of the box wanting to tell you how cool you are. But if you’re willing to challenge it and tell it, like, don’t talk to me that way, expose the holes in my ideas, show me where I’m wrong.Mark Podolsky (17:24)
Yeah.Micah Johnson (17:36)
mess with what I’m talking about and it will do it. And that’s when that real value starts to come out of it. Don’t have thin skin when you mess with it, because it’s going to tell you, hey, this is what I see. This is about how about this? What if you thought this way? And you’re just like, wow, I never would have thought of that. it’s it’s I’m interested to see what it does for overall humanity, too. Honestly, man, like if you using it correctly to help you grow. have a friend that is a personal development agent that he created, and it justhelps them grow and use it. It’s like, dude, that’s amazing, where you can ask questions to it all day long as you’re going through it. And they can boom, pop back at you. Its applications are super wide. I know I’m wandering off track, but man, just it’s like what we don’t know.
Mark Podolsky (18:18)
Yeah, no, I agree with you. think it’d be thegreatest thing for humanity, but I do think there’s a 10 % chance it just kills us. If we have super intelligence, yeah, exactly. Think about it, because if it becomes that much smarter than all of us, we love our dogs. We pour into our dogs, we’ll do everything for our dogs and our pets, right? But I guarantee you.
Micah Johnson (18:26)
Right. You got to still say please and thank you.Mark Podolsky (18:47)
If the dogs are threatening us, we’d have no problem wiping out all the dogs. And I think it’s the same thing that could happen with supern…Micah Johnson (18:55)
Right, right. We’ll have to pay attention to it. And that’s where, as we all get to grow along with it and see what happens throughout the world, that’s where it’s the raw edge of time, right? There hasn’t been an invention like this accessible to so many people. I don’t know if ever, obviously this hasn’t existed, but when other big things came through, right? Just watching how the world, like social media, we haven’t done the best job with regulating that on the backend to keep it a little more healthy than I think we could.So it’s like, how do we learn from this? How do we keep using these tools? Cause they’re, I mean, as business basic as they are, they do go up through there and they have an effect on the future, which is really something, especially as real estate investors, we think about that a lot, right? Real estate is a long term or long game play. You’re not doing this for the short period of time. So thinking in longer amounts becomes natural of, how do we make sure we’re, our machine’s still working when we get there?
Mark Podolsky (19:51)
Yeah, no, absolutely. And again, I don’t think AI and the robots are going to displace, you know, real estate entrepreneurs.Micah Johnson (20:01)
No, I don’t think that’s the purpose. I’m very careful with anybody that’s selling fear to me because that’s just a sales psychology upfront and it’s easy to get folks to buy in. ⁓ I don’t think it’s meant to replace anything except all the stuff we hate if it’s used correctly, right? How many…Mark Podolsky (20:21)
Yeah.Micah Johnson (20:23)
If it’s done right, how many people really enjoy reading like all those long documents for hours and weeks that you could have it do shortly, give you summaries, talk to it about it and finish it in a day. Right? Like that’s the part it’s supposed to do. If we’re a good team, that’s what humans have. We can do better than anybody else has worked together. We just got to make sure we keep that teamwork. Right. And then man, possibilities are endless for what we can do because we all want our own lives.We all want to create this life. That’s why we got into real estate to begin with. Using these tools help do that, man, whatever that looks like. That’s the point. Freedom’s kind of what we’re all after, whatever that means to you.
Mark Podolsky (21:01)
Yeah, no, absolutely. It could just be another Renaissance period where just people are living in these self-actualized lives, like their greatest purpose. And all the drudgery that is in their day-to-day lives is just gone.Micah Johnson (21:14)
Right. Ooh, I love that. Okay, I’m for that. So there’s two people out here ready for the new Renaissance, me and Mark, you can join our team where people are truly living that purpose. Cause I’m telling you, there’s a reason why I keep Jim Carrey’s, he’s one of my favorite people. I had a little statue made of him. Cause he said, I wish everybody could get rich and famous and find out that that’s not it. That’s not.the thing that makes it does it for you. It’s really individual to you. Go solve what that looks like. How do you position yourself? And that’s available to everybody. If you’re willing to walk down that road, which kind of, were dancing on that question earlier. I want to, before we get closing here, you were mentioning a Zig Ziglar quote about you go ahead and say it, cause you say it better than I do, but it’s kind of tying here at the end about, you you’re taking a lot of time to learn this. And if what you’re willing to do right now,
Take it over there. How’s that quote go?
Mark Podolsky (22:08)
Yeah, so Ziglar has this great quote, it says, if you’ll do for the next three to five years what other people won’t do, you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life what other people can’t do. And so I love that quote because it’s not saying three to five months, which is why I typically see is people are like, oh, know, it’s just not working for me after three to five months. I’m no, no, this is three to five years of learning, growing and.iterating and everyone’s learning curve is different when it comes to real estates.
You I think you said it’s like, this is get wealthy slow. But if your timeline is arbitrary, it’s three to five months or even less, or even, know, even, even only 12 months, you’re like, it’s just not working for me. Like, no, you’re, you’ve just haven’t gotten good enough at it yet. You’ve got to keep getting your reps in. And so I, and that’s not just real estate. I think there’s anything that you, you do.
Micah Johnson (22:54)
Right.Right. It’s always hardest upfront. You just always got to know it’s front loaded effort. That’s, that’s one of my opinions. If you can just realize that, that everything is front loaded effort back in reward and just accept that. And farming really, grew up farming and it really taught me that.
I can plant something and whine and moan for the next 90 days about why it’s not growing so fast and it won’t do anything. It will not make that plant grow any faster than it was always going to grow. There was always a date on the calendar it was going to come right and there was nothing I could do about it to speed it up or slow it down. It was just going to happen.
Like you’re saying, if you quit early, and that is what most folks do is they quit early. You quit right before that breakthrough. You always hear about that story of the guy digging the mine and he quit a foot before. One guy comes in later, makes one hit and there it all is. There’s a reason that story exists because of how many people do that.
When you get into this, couldn’t agree more. Think long-term. This is long game plays. You still wanna be doing this next year and the year after that. And there’s no way to rush it. A group I’m in, I read earlier, a guy was talking about, I’m gonna stop, I’ve been doing this for three months and it’s this and this and this. And everybody was quick to say, dude, dude, calm down. You’re not even started yet. You don’t even know what you don’t know yet.
There’s a lot. That’s why I try to encourage people. Education is step one, not writing the offer. We all want to make offers, but education is step one that lets you write as many offers as you want, because it’s a process, it’s a system. And you do some coaching too, right? Don’t you have a program for land?
Mark Podolsky (24:48)
Yeah, we have a program. We teach people how to do it and ⁓ accelerate their learning curve. Absolutely.Micah Johnson (24:58)
Love that man, love that. Well, I appreciate your time today. Appreciate your story, your perspective. I think we need more folks out there like yourself living their purpose, that new Renaissance man. For those listening in and watching that want to learn more about you, what’s the best way for them to find you?Mark Podolsky (25:14)
TheLandGeek.com and for the listeners, actually have, I wrote a book called Dirt Rich and I talked a little bit about the model, my story, and they can get that book for free, just pay shipping. ⁓ I got a special link for you.Micah Johnson (25:26)
Excellent, well thank you so much. Viewers and listeners, check the show notes. We will have all of Mark’s links there. Like I say, when we bring professionals on this, take their advice, listen to what they have to say. Get that book if you’re interested in land and that’s what you wanna do. Learn from people that are doing it still today because real estate changes. Learn from the folks actively doing it. So Mark, man, again, thank you for being with us.Thanks everybody out there for following along. If you got value from today’s episode, please like this episode, share it with someone else you think you get value out of it. And as always, please subscribe to our podcast. We appreciate every single one of you that follows along with us out there. We have more conversations coming up with operators just like Mark out there building a real business in the industry. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you in the next episode.
