Land Development Mastery: Turn Your Passion into Profitable Ventures

John Harcar (00:02.369)
Welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar. And I’m here with Gregory Monette Jr., right, Jr. And we’re going to talk today, you know, besides about his his journey in business and in real estate and kind of what brought him to today. But he’s going to share with us what he’s currently doing with land development. You know, I know it’s a topic that’s been passed around our mastermind and in some other groups. And I’m curious to learn more. Remember, guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors.

service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business. And we do that by providing the tools, the resources in the community to really scale the business you want to have, which in turn grows the life you want to live. So Greg, hey man, welcome to our show.

Greg (00:49.953)
Yes sir, thank you John. Thanks for having me.

John Harcar (00:51.781)
Yeah, yeah, appreciate you coming on. Look forward to talking land. Like I said, it’s been a topic that’s been passed around. But before we kind of jump in those weeds, why don’t you give our audience a little bit more info about you, kind of your background in business and in real estate and what brought you to today.

Greg (01:08.151)
Yeah, sure. So I am stationed here in Houston, Texas. My background is a little bit unique. Started off working in accounting at CPA firm. Then I jumped into commercial banking where I learned about financing land projects, anything from commercial real estate offices, multifamily. And then I jumped ship and I joined Lennar, Lennar Homes, one of the larger builders. And I worked on a land acquisition development team. And there I helped source individual lots and communities.

helped work on some master plan community developments. And then after a while, I got a little tired of the corporate. So I decided to jump ship and join a startup company, startup home builder, basically doing the same thing, set up operations and started sourcing land deals. But we took that company from four lots to 50 to second year and about 85 to the third year. And then the third year we went from, basically went from scattered lots, almost like a wholesaler to

building in subdivisions next to large builders like Century Community, some of your publicly traded guys. So in three years, we took them from a nobody builder to building on scattered lots to competing with the big boys. So and now focus on doing some larger land development tracks like we have 800 acre tracks, 2300 homes on the east side of Houston, and then just kind of more infield tracks here and there on subdividing land deals.

John Harcar (02:12.355)
Nice.

John Harcar (02:34.358)
Nice. Yeah, man, it sounds like that’s a lot to put back in that nutshell. Let’s try to unpack a little bit in in what it sounds like. I you you started with accounting, right? But there it seems like there was maybe always something in the background that maybe had a real estate seed planted. And I like to ask this about people. Was there any real estate in your life, any exposure, any experience, an aunt and uncle, a friend, a cousin, an uncle who flipped houses, sold houses, was a landlord, anything like that?

Greg (02:35.371)
That’s it in a nutshell.

Greg (03:03.593)
You know, family wise, no, I’m first generation. My mom, she always wanted to help. She always wanted to get into fix and flips, right? You watch ACP and stuff and it’s like, hey, I want to do that, you know, but what I’ve noticed is a lot of people don’t have the courage to actually do your first deal. And so for me, I got exposed to it from accounting, seeing business owners do deals and whatnot, but what really opened my eyes to it was I attended a Robert Kiyosaki event.

in Dallas and that really opened my mind to investing. So much to point where I filled out a credit card application for Chase, got approved for a $10,000 credit card and I tried to go buy my first property on auction.com and then, yeah, no, it didn’t work. I missed out on it, but that didn’t, I kept trying to find deals. started looking at foreclosure lists. I worked at a bank, so I would print out the foreclosure list and

John Harcar (03:48.57)
Awesome. Did it work?

John Harcar (04:01.807)
Yeah.

Greg (04:02.347)
Cold calling and sending out mailers and then my first property that I bought I maxed out three credit cards with the I wouldn’t advise anybody do this don’t ever over leverage it But you don’t ever over leverage yourself, and this was from a credit guy under right right? But sometimes you got to do your first deal So I maxed out three credit cards. I bought my first house $22,000. I did a lot of sweat equity. I was driving

John Harcar (04:12.986)
Disclaimer!

Greg (04:30.175)
From Dallas all the way to Beaumont,

John Harcar (04:33.442)
Yeah, I say that’s that’s a, I know that, I mean that’s a long way.

Greg (04:37.163)
Yeah, and I had just had I had just my wife was probably eight months pregnant seven months pregnant and so but I was driving down there every weekend fixing up the house and then I think like it took maybe 30 days we renovated it and then we sold it for I think like $55,000 the renovation in grand but it you know, we didn’t make a lot but that opened my mind. So okay, I can do this, you know, and then I did

John Harcar (04:57.262)
Nice.

John Harcar (05:06.522)
It’s that proof of concept, man. It’s getting that first one over that mind hurdle.

Greg (05:11.282)
Mm-hmm. That’s it. I think, you know, and I’ll share this with the audience too, is like a lot of leveling up in life and in business is sometimes you just got to like ignore those fears and just lock in and just do it. You take the first step. The first step ain’t writing it down. The first step is, well, you write it down, but you got to do it. Once you have proof of concept, now you got the courage to do more and bigger deals, right? But yeah, I started off wholesaling. I started off, then I started doing fixing flips.

I got tired of doing the fix and flips because the last rental I did, shoot, we did laminate flooring and redid and everything. But as soon as I pulled up the flooring, they had turned my damage all over. And it was like, I think 500 square feet. I passed that thing up so quick. I was like, you know what? I’m going sell it cheap. after this, hey, I’m doing new construction, period. And that was, you know,

John Harcar (05:51.044)
Terry might rot.

John Harcar (05:59.333)
Yeah.

John Harcar (06:05.667)
Nice.

Greg (06:08.326)
I decided I wanted to do new construction back in like 2021. I had no idea how I was going to do it. And so was in banking at the time. And so I just knew this is what I wanted to do. And so I started off land flipping. Once I got into land flipping, like, hey, hit up people on Facebook. Like what builders can I connect with? What’s your resume like? I went through a couple of builders and stuff. And you know, sometimes you find the right contract. Sometimes you don’t. And,

But eventually it led to me learning, okay, maybe you need to go get a job where they do it at a high level. Then you actually learn the ropes. Then once you learn the ropes, then you go out do your own thing. Because it’s hard as heck trying to do your own thing when you don’t have mentors, you don’t have guidance. So, yeah, so.

John Harcar (06:43.726)
learn.

John Harcar (06:56.42)
Yep. So, yep. So much, so much value there, right? Guys, I hope you’re at home taking notes. I mean, this guy’s dropping nuggets, like left and right. First and foremost, you like you said earlier, you got to risk it to get the biscuit, man. You got to, you got to take the leap. So in that position or a question I want to ask you in that regards, was there something, cause you mentioned a lot of people just can’t get out of their head and make the, make the move. Was there something that helped you mindset wise, maybe, you know, something you listened to a book or

Greg (07:09.834)
Eugh.

John Harcar (07:25.56)
I don’t know, something that helped you just kind of get over that fear.

Greg (07:30.954)
I’d say two things. Faith and then knowing your big why. Like I think when my child was born or before my child was born, knew like, hey, I want this vision for my life. I want to be able to, you know, work on my own time. I want to be able to provide value to the communities that I serve. And it’s a bigger picture than me. Right. And so

That drive made me overcome the doubts and also the challenge. It’s a five hour drive, I got a brand new newborn, I’m 24, I’m in a new city, got a new job and everything, but I just knew I wanted different for my life. So I think once you set a big goal and then you put some emotion behind it you put some people that you can’t let down.

John Harcar (08:09.209)
Yeah.

Greg (08:27.186)
then that really fuels your fire to be like, you know what, come hell or hot water, I’m gonna make this happen. And so I think that that’s what helps spark that in me.

John Harcar (08:36.51)
And then the second piece of what you said I wanted to unpack too is the whole, you know, get around people that are doing what you want to do, right? Go get a job with folk and learn, you know, from high level operators. Why for you was that so important versus, you know, what a lot of people do is YouTube you, right? Try to learn that way and then go learn by error.

Greg (08:58.333)
Right. Well, mean, biggest for me is like, I got three little kids, you know, so I could just, I just couldn’t just hop into it. Right. So I had kind of stable income. So I couldn’t just jump into it. But even when I was in banking, like the reason that I jumped from development into, from corporate banking to development is because I found out about

Like I found out about a program that was a master’s program on development at Texas A &M. And I found out about that through just networking, going to Urban Land Institute, some other organizations, and just being in the room with people doing different projects that I wanted to be involved with. And so that is important to make sure you in the same circles of people that are doing similar things. Because this guy might be doing apartment complex, this guy might be doing hotels.

And if you knew her and your career trying to figure it out, you might pick up on the idea to do something in a different lane. Right. So that’s why I was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but because I was in, I knew I wanted to do real estate. I knew I wanted to do home building. And once I got into those circles, somebody said, Hey, development, check it out. Never heard of it before. I never did any subdividing anything, but just because I was in proximity, somebody that did it, you know, that opened up the door to be like, okay, I can do this instead of just.

John Harcar (10:06.916)
Mm-hmm.

Greg (10:27.064)
land wholesaling and doing it, I can do subdivide. I could actually do the development construction, you know. But yeah, that’s that’s pretty much. And then I’ve always been in a corporate like I was a portfolio manager for companies that did mergers and acquisitions. And like, you know, you talk to them, they making beaucoup money, like 100 million dollars plus. And you see that they operations in place and you see private equity companies come in. But it’s all about systems and processes.

And so when you see it at that level, you’re like, okay, I don’t need to just figure this thing out. I need to learn from people that are already doing it at a high level. And then once I learn how to do it at a high level, you come back down because that’s how all these proven companies have done it. You know, don’t reinvent the wheel. So yeah.

John Harcar (11:10.979)
Yep.

John Harcar (11:15.034)
I mean, that’s, with our mastermind, that is like one of the biggest things is, you know, you got to be around people that have done everything you want to do. The guys are doing big things and, you know, and it’s going to help you grow and get your gap. So where are you at now? Are you still working with that company? Do you have your own company? What does all that look like? Where are you buying land?

Greg (11:35.419)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so right now I’m with my own company, Monet Properties Group. We are vertically integrated real estate company. So we’ve got the land brokers team, they focus on acquisitions. We’ve got the development team, they focus on the construction. And they also do master plan communities. And then later on, we’re going to have our commercial real estate group. But right now we mainly focus on the development side, which is our biggest track is that 800 acre piece that we have right now.

And then we’re just working on trying to get more infill lot. So our strategy is If you have a landowner is like hey, I got 20 acres or I got you know, 200 acres How can we maximize that? So I talked to my builder partners, you know as some of the larger builders and say hey What kind of lot product do you want and then you say hey, okay. I want a 5,000 square foot lot I need a hundred of them. So we’ll take that 20 acres. We’ll see how many lots we can put on there

and then we’ll pre-sell them to a builder and then we’ll just take it through the entitlement process and produce finished lots. And then, of course, sell the lots to the builder and then the project is done. So our main focus is doing subdivisions. And then later on, we’ll have our own home building entity so that we can maximize our lot yield and profitability and stuff. but yeah.

John Harcar (12:57.09)
Now are you all over Texas? You just in Houston, where are you focusing?

Greg (13:01.338)
Just Houston right now. Houston has a really strong growth market. We’ve got the port, we’ve got NASA. lot of companies are coming out here. Land is relatively cheap still. And then we’ve got special financing districts like MUDs, municipal utility districts. So we get reimbursements and stuff versus other states and other cities. But Houston right now, Houston and the Beaumont market.

Eventually, we’ll get up to Dallas next but Austin we might hold off on Austin for a little bit. Yeah

John Harcar (13:35.446)
What are some of the pros and cons of land development versus, you know, let’s say guys that are out there single, you know, single family flipping.

Greg (13:44.26)
Yeah, so it’s all about scale. matter of fact, I talked to lot of my builders in town. It’s like, you know, I’m doing like 20 houses, but I’m always chasing more lots. I always got to get single lots. Like you might hit a home run and you know, you buy acre and you can replat it, you know, but it’s like, you always have to chase more deals, right? Where I’m used to is if I buy a 20 acre piece or a hundred acre piece, that will

If I get like 100 lots out of it and I’m only selling four homes a month or whatever, that gives me two years worth of supply. So the biggest thing that I always tell people is like, look, start with your scatterlots first, but you don’t want to be in that game forever because you’re going to be for big deals. Find a way for you to basically almost get like a portfolio where it’s like, you know what your revenue is going to be like for the next couple of years.

John Harcar (14:31.0)
Yeah.

Greg (14:42.15)
I’m speaking for more of the builder side, but yeah, it’s just more at scale. That’s all it is. And then it also becomes more attractive to like, if you want to sell off an entire portfolio, I mean, I can put together a 20 acre piece. I can sell a hundred homes a lot easier than I can sell 20 or 15. You know what I mean? So it’s just a little bit, and then it’s more attractive to investors too, because

John Harcar (15:02.734)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Greg (15:09.125)
You know, when your margins are thin on fix and flips and it’s like, you know, you might make 30,000, you might make 50,000. You know, you have a really small margin of error, but if you add a couple of zeros to it, then it’s like, okay, I can give you 15 % return or 20 % return over two years. So it’s just, it just makes it a little bit easier at scale to raise capital, you know, to make a little bit more juice on it.

John Harcar (15:34.35)
Any cons?

Greg (15:36.325)
cons. Yeah, it’s capital intensive. like, so typical. So like the deal we’re working on now, and most of the deals you got to take through the entitlements process. So that’s basically getting the county or the city to bless your plans. And you got to get it through engineering, you got to get all these kinds of approvals. So like, it might take you 18 months before you even start turning the dirt.

John Harcar (15:38.382)
Capital Incentives. You need a lot of dough.

Greg (16:05.741)
Right. It might take 12 months through the approval process and we get mud districts and like special finance districts. It has to go through the Texas legislature. And so, you know, with the politics, they can shut down, you know, they can shut down the Senate or whatever they want to. And then now your project is stalled for six months and you got investors talking about, man, you know, I thought this going to

John Harcar (16:14.618)
Cheers.

John Harcar (16:26.49)
Where’s my money? Where’s my money?

Greg (16:29.26)
And like, it’s, so many things involved with it. Like we found out that like we, we, our project, luckily we bought it for cheap enough to where it makes sense. But like for our detention, right? We originally, I think it was like nine, 15 % detention, right? That was the county requirement. We did a drainage study. We found out we had to increase that to 19%. That’s another 5%. To most people that that’s not a big deal, but

you essentially end up losing almost 100 to 200 homes or 200 lots, right? If you start putting money behind it, you say, hey, it’s 20 grand a lot as our profit, 100 times 100, you you talking almost two million dollars, right? So, it’s different things like that you find out. Like sometimes you might spend half a million dollars in entitlements for nine months and then all of a sudden the economy shifts.

John Harcar (17:11.502)
Do the math. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg (17:25.366)
And then now builders are not still paying the same prices. And now you got to take a haircut or you got to walk away from the deal. You know, so it’s, it’s very, very capital intensive. And, know, unlike a fix and flip, you can walk in and be like, yeah, this, this, and it is, is visual. Everything’s visual. But when you buy land, especially at larger scale, you got pipeline. Yeah. It’s very speculative. You can’t see in the ground until you start turning dirt and everything is done on paper for the first year.

John Harcar (17:46.426)
speculative.

Greg (17:55.605)
I know what’s really gonna be under the ground until I start, you know, moving dirt. So it’s a big risk, you know, but it’s high reward.

John Harcar (18:06.874)
Yeah, I mean, gotta, once again, you gotta risk it to get the biscuit, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing all this stuff. If there’s folks out there that are down in the Houston area, or maybe just some things you said resonated with them, how can they get in touch with you? Do you got any deals that they can get in on?

Greg (18:11.971)
You got re-

Greg (18:27.875)
Yeah, so right now in Houston, of course, if you want to look me up as Gregory Monette Jr. Just you can Google it. Usually Instagram pops up and then my LinkedIn pops up next. I’m really I market a lot on social media, so it should be easy to find just Greg Monette Jr. Right now, mostly what I’m looking for is twofold. If if you’re a landowner or you’re wholesaling, you have land deals as anywhere from 20 acres.

on up to thousand acres, generally no more than $35,000 per acre. That’s usually what I’m looking for on the outskirts. Now, if you’re more inside the loop, more closer to downtown, that’ll require a special conversation because land prices are way jacked up in town. But that’s not to say we can’t work something out. So if you have land deals, let’s talk about them.

It’s easiest to submit it on our website, monetpropertiesgroup.com. You schedule it on the calendar and we’ll have a free consultation. We’ll talk you through it. And then another way is like, we do land consulting too. So if you have a deal and you’re like, hey, I don’t know how to put this deal together, we’ll consult with you as a manager and open up our door to all of our engineers, architects, developers, builders, you know, and basically we take it on as our project. So, but.

That’s pretty much it. then sometimes you need help. Dispone the deal. I’ve got a good roll of decks of builders. So you can get in touch with me about that too. Yep.

John Harcar (20:04.058)
Cool. Awesome. And I’ll put, think you sent me a lot of your socials, so I’ll put that all on the show notes. know, Gregor, man, thank you again for coming on here. You dropped a lot of good knowledge, guys. I hope you took some good notes. I hope you enjoyed the podcast as much as I did, and I will see you guys on the next one. Cheers.

Greg (20:22.743)
All right, thank you all.