Land Flipping Goldmine: How Investors Are Making Big Profits With Vacant Land

Sumner Healey (00:00)
There is a whole other path that probably hasn’t been revealed to you of how to play the real estate game. And that’s playing the land game, the ground game. And I mean, frankly, there’s so many ways to skin the cat in the land space. There’s so many ways to make money, whether it’s entitlement, subdividing, rezoning, flipping, the list goes on. But the little niche that we’ve kind of tripped and stumbled away into is what I call mid-market land flipping.

Quentin (02:02)
Pro’s podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds and I’m excited to be here today. Like I’m excited about my gentleman, this guy being here today and I’ll let him reveal what part of the world he’s in if he feel comfortable. But trust and believe the time difference is big right now. So the time that he’s here right now, I would have been like this a long time ago. I would have been knocked out. So I appreciate this guy being here. And

He put two words together that I’ve personally never heard before. So it got me really, really excited about this podcast. Flipping Land. Yeah, I’ve never heard those two words put together before. And I’m excited. I’m excited to hear about how he does it, what he does, the intricacies of it. And so I want to introduce you all to Mr. Sumner Healey Mr. Sumner, how you doing today, sir?

Sumner Healey (02:53)
I’m good. Q, thank you. I should say good evening to you. on the other side of the world. It’s nine o’clock for me. I live in Bali, Indonesia. We run a real estate business in America, but I moved here about a year and a half ago. And the only downside is doing podcasts like this at night. But you know what? It’s a small price to pay, man. It’s not too bad.

Quentin (02:57)
Yeah.

brother, I appreciate you and I’ll give you kudos on how much I value your time probably a little bit later on because I do honestly value your time and you’ll see I’ll try to put it in an eloquent way because I really, really value when people give us their time. so, but right now, Sumner, what I want to do, brother, I want to jump right in. I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus. And if you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story of kind of how you got into the space that you’re in. So sir, you have the floor.

Sumner Healey (03:42)
Yeah.

All right.

Yeah, you know, it’s a funny story. So I got into the land flipping business by total accident in 2019. You know, I always tell people and I won’t go like off the rails origin story, but I always tell people I was that kid selling candy on the schoolyard like that classic entrepreneur story that was me. And I was spent the age of like seven years old to 24 year olds 24 years old trying to figure out what like I know I want to build businesses like what what is the thing like I think a lot of people have that question like what do I

dedicate my life to? What do I spend my time on?

And I had this weird idea at 24 that, maybe it should be real estate. And so I tried household sale. I was living in San Diego, California. I was door knocking horrible experience. If anyone’s ever done that, I did that for six months in 2019. I literally got gooseache. I didn’t get a call back. I was leaving letters to people doorstep. I was getting doors slammed in my face. I mean, it led to nothing. And during that time, I was listening to bigger pockets like most new land, new real estate investors. And I heard a guy on there talking about

Quentin (04:28)
Mmm.

Sumner Healey (04:47)
flipping vacant land. I was like okay that’s interesting and I had heard a couple other podcasts about tax delinquent investing so I kind of put two and two together and I started just googling tax delinquent lists and I found a list in Elko County Nevada. Q, do you know where that is? Elko County Nevada? Yeah it’s the middle of nowhere man. Most people have no idea where this is.

Quentin (05:04)
I do not, sir. I do not. You knew I wasn’t

going to know something.

Sumner Healey (05:12)
Yeah, Elko County,

Nevada is like a different planet, man. Sorry for anyone that lives there, but it’s way out in the boonies, northern Nevada. And I find this list online. It was just like a CSV file I could download from the county’s website. And most of the properties on there, TaxLink, were land. It was property owners that bought land 30 years ago, forgot to pay taxes, et cetera.

So my girlfriend and I at the time, handwritten, hand wrote a bunch of letters, said, Hey, we want to buy your lands. And I mean, the rest was history. Now, to be, to be honest, I didn’t get a deal from that. I sent like a 50, whatever, 50, 75 letters, something like that. Didn’t get a deal, but I got a call back. And that was my foot in the door. That was my wedge to this business. And fast forward a couple months later.

December of 2019 I pull a big list of data from data tree. It’s the first American product the first time I ever found like an easy way to get property owners information. I went to Nye County, Nevada another really rural market

outside of Las Vegas. This time I sent a thousand letters and I got a deal. I got my first deal beginning of 2020. Tiny deal, dude. mean, a quarter acre. I bought it for a little over a thousand bucks, sold it for 2400 bucks. Two weeks later on Facebook marketplace. And that was really when I got my foot in the door and I was like, okay, these might be tiny deals to start with, but I knew that there was something here. And dude, for context, I was making $40,000 a year in a job at the time. like,

making a couple thousand bucks flipping a contract for a piece of land seemed like the dream. anyways, the rest is history, man. Now we do very different deals in our business. looks nothing like that, but that was the origin story. yeah, it’s been seven years, man. It’s crazy. Yeah.

Quentin (07:45)
Seven years, right?

So bro, man, thank you. Thank you for the journey. Thank you for taking us. I’ll tell you what you do now, taking us through the journey. And I put a premium on stories. And I’m about to show you how I put a premium on stories. So thank you, man. Thank you for taking us down the road. And I was actively listening, OK? So I’m going try to regurgitate some stuff back to you, right? So 2019, got into flipping land.

What is my note saying? got into flipping land by accident. I had to look at my notes. like, what did I write? But you got in 2019, got into flipping land by accident. I think you said from seven to 21 years old, you were trying to figure out like what it is that I want to do with my life. Like you knew it was something, but it’s like what it is. 24, think you said that’s when it sparked. Like I think, think it was part of the real estate. So you spent some time in San Diego. I believe you said that was a terrible, terrible experience. Did I hear you say that right?

Sumner Healey (08:41)
door knocking for deals in San Diego. I love San Diego, but door knocking for real estate deals was tough. Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin (08:42)
You’re knocking, right? Okay. Yeah, okay. Gotcha, gotcha.

Listening into bigger pockets, found out about a property out in the boonies. You asked me, I can’t even, I couldn’t even write what you said the place was, but property in the boonies, right? Didn’t get a deal, but you found another role earlier and you started sending out a thousand letters. Bind up getting a deal. They got your foot into the door.

Sumner Healey (09:00)
Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin (09:11)
At the time you was making 40K a year. And now that was seven years ago, right? Now you’ve been doing what you do now for seven years. Sumner, I regurgitate all those things to you. One, that you know I was actively listening because your story matters. mean, it literally matters. Two, I always have a saying where I say destiny has no wasted moments. Your story, your moments have been building momentum. I mean, from the time you were seven, you’ve been building momentum.

Sumner Healey (09:20)
Yeah, that’s right.

Quentin (09:41)
⁓ Every stop along the way, it reinforce what you do now. It kind of strengthen your strategies that you do now. Now you have the capacity at a whole other level, all because of the journey has been just building momentum. So Sumner, I would love to know, man, what has the journey taught or revealed to you about yourself? Has it revealed discipline? Has it made you humble? Has it changed your innovation, resilience? What is the journey? What is the moments taught you about you?

Sumner Healey (10:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look, to be honest, Q, I grew up in a kind of a funny situation. I I love my parents to death, but my parents were super young when they had me and I had a learning disability. I had a speech impediment. I was held back like I was never like good at sports growing up. My parents never really put me into sports growing up. So I never really got to stress test my capabilities. Honestly, even when I turned 18, I didn’t really I had no idea what I was capable of. And so business

Quentin (10:58)
Mm.

Sumner Healey (11:14)
has kind of been the proving grounds for me, whether it’s our land flipping business or building a software company from scratch with essentially no experience there or launching one of the biggest communities in the land space for land flippers like and I have a graveyard of other businesses that I ran since I was a child. That’s been that was really my proving grounds. And so I think the takeaway for me on a very personal level is like, yeah, I have grit in a way that I never gave myself credit. And

And I think that business has revealed that to me because, dude, on some level, never being able to prove yourself growing up, like I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder and I think I also.

Yeah, I probably didn’t look at myself in the best light because I just never had that platform to realize my potential, frankly, and business has been that domain for me. So it’s been a process of self-realization. And I think that business is one of the greatest games of self-development on so many levels. And so there’s been a gazillion other takeaways, but I think that’s the one that comes to mind immediately.

Quentin (12:16)
Man, bro, thank you, man. Thank you for that honest answer. Actually, thank you for that transparent and what I call the gift of your vulnerability, right? You just shared stuff with us that you didn’t have to. And I appreciate it because one of the things I’ve always tried to, and I love how you say stress test, man. One of the things I always try to implement here is no matter what goes on around your business, you’re at the core of your business, is you. And so really,

sometimes putting the pieces together, realizing that you’ve been acquiring different tool sets all your life. And like, you’re applying it now and you know, you’ve had several businesses. It’s just, it’s just some common practices. There’s just a transferable from one business to the next. But one thing for sure is you, you developing yourself, you strengthening yourself, you knowing who you are. always say, one of my mentors says, when you know who you, when you know who you are, you know what to do.

So you can be in any business, in any place of your life. When you know who you are, you know how to proceed forward. And so I love, man, that business has stressed us through, has, has poured out your superpowers and you’re applying your superpowers to be successful. And so I really, man, appreciate that thoughtful answer, man. Thank you so much for that. ⁓ I would love to know, sir, what’s next for you, man? What is next for the business? What are looking, what are you looking to solve a scale next? What’s next for you, Sumner?

Sumner Healey (13:44)
Yeah, it’s a good question, Q. I mean, I’ll kind of cue the listeners in. I alluded to it, but I split my time between three different businesses. ⁓ Between the three companies, I work with about 50 team members. So I’ve got my hands pretty full. And I think one of the things I wrestle with is, where do I spend my time? You would think that you would split it a third, a third, a third, but it doesn’t quite work out quite that cleanly. Comes in seasons for each business what’s needed from me.

just figuring out ⁓ how to allocate my time correctly to be honest we’ve got a really good thing going on with all three of the businesses I mean cumulatively this year we’ll probably do eight to ten million dollars in revenue between the three companies ⁓

But it’s yeah, time allocation, I think is the biggest thing that I wrestle with. And I always tell people, you know, I think on some level, if I was if I wanted to optimize for flat out growth and just revenue and ultimately profit, I would probably just do one thing. And it’s like this devil and the angel on my shoulder where the optimal thing to do is play one game. Definitely. But for me, business is also a creative pursuit. I enjoy the problem solving. I enjoy going into a completely new business and saying, I have no idea how to do

this great let me start iterating and figuring it out like I always tell people business to me feels like you’re in a dark room and there’s a bunch of different doors you can open and you have no idea what door to open and some of those doors have a pot of gold some of those doors a hammer hits you in the head some of those doors are locked they don’t even open and it’s that game of like having incomplete information and having to problem solve and figure it out that I find fulfilling so it’s this balance of like optimal versus fulfillment and so I don’t even have an answer on that one cube but I think that’s what I’m wrestling

currently yeah yeah

Quentin (15:31)
Yeah, no, thank you, man. I appreciate that, brother. And I think

part of the journey is holding attention, right? Holding attention to both. And of course, know, figuring it out, but you are in search of how to merge the whole Sumner. Like, I want to be fulfilled, but I want to be optimized. Don’t want to be bored, but I want to be effective. Like, I get it. And that’s part of holding attention.

Sumner Healey (15:50)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin (16:39)
But because of your success, there’s no doubt in my mind that you’re holding attention well. I don’t think you’re reckless with either side of it. You’re just holding attention like, okay. And like you said, I’m gonna keep opening up this door. I’m gonna take a little peek behind this door. If I could shut it quickly, you know, before I’m like, no, no, no, not this door. I’ll shut it. But sometimes you gotta fully walk and submerge yourself, walk into the door and just see, hey, what’s gonna happen next? know, and I often say this, and this is my point phrase, a lot of phrases I pick up.

Sumner Healey (16:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin (17:08)
but this is one that hit me over the head is that failure is just fertilizer, man. Failure is just fertilizer. And if you know anything about fertilizer, right? lot of it, some of it is just shit. It’s horse manure, you know, it’s dung. Some of it is stinky. But here’s the thing. If you allow yourself to get the nutrients from the fertilizer,

Sumner Healey (17:15)
I like that.

Yeah.

Quentin (17:34)
Beautiful things grow from it. Plush things grow from it. The greenery, the scenery. If you allow it to grow you, the visual concept changes everything. And then you get seeds that develop into things that produce seeds itself. So you take that seed, you plant that seed again into the failure to fertilize it. And before you know it, the failure starts working for you. And you literally start to just grow and expand.

Sumner Healey (17:35)
Yeah.

Quentin (18:00)
I think you’re holding attention very well from what I’m listening and I’m picking up, man. And eight to 10 million in revenue ain’t nothing to sneeze at. So to me, you’re holding attention well, sir. You know, so yeah. You know, so ⁓ I got to get your… No.

Sumner Healey (18:12)
I like the phrase too, sorry real quick Q.

Failure to fertilize, mean that’s, this fire. You might need to make a t-shirt with that or something man. I like that. That’s killer. Kudos, kudos. Yeah, I like.

Quentin (18:21)
I had to do that, I had to do that. Listen,

and I’ll give you credit for that idea. Let me write that down. T-shirts. I didn’t think about that. So yeah, I had to do that, But I want to hear your, because I love how you talked about the way you grew up. I think I would get a, every time I ask somebody this, I actually get a unique perspective, but I definitely think I’m going get a unique perspective from you. I want to hear when you hear the word relationships, what comes to mind?

Now, of course, you know, there’s business relationships, sometimes personal relationships help us in the business, you know, aspect as well. So I would just love to know, when you hear relationship, what comes to mind for you?

Sumner Healey (19:03)
Dude, I mean, I’ll give you the knee jerk reaction response. I think relationships and I immediately think everything like truly I think on all levels, the human experience can be boiled down to the quality of our relationships and that dictates the quality of our life on literally every like on every level, man.

And so I think that was a lesson that I didn’t learn until I was older. Like when I was in my, I mean, I’m only 30, but when I was in my early twenties, I would, I was never doing anything malicious by any means, but I would put relationships second for my goals. Absolutely. 100%. And what I, you know, when I look at what we’ve created over the last couple of years, like if I look at, for example,

is just a microcosm example. If we look at the software company, that was all relationship based. That came from putting myself out there, launching a community, teaching other people to land business, building relationships with my students, getting connected with a student who was a software developer. And one thing led to the next. And so on a very tangible level, we could look at it like that. But even on a more mushy level, if I think about juggling all the balls that I juggle without my girlfriend, without my partner, there’s no way or without the solidarity of having my family by my side, there’s no way.

And if you look at the most, in my opinion, the most successful people, and life’s not all about success by any means, but if you look at the most successful people, like I’m talking like titans. Dude, they all have like deep ties with their family and big families and kids everywhere. And there’s something to that. There’s power in having deep bonds, whether it’s family, friends. And I just think relationships are everything. Full stop, full stop, yeah.

Quentin (20:37)
I appreciate it. Sumner, again, you’re just well thought out answer, reflective answer. I always equate relationships to community. You know, I think relationships and you build the right relationships you’re building a community. And community means common unity. It’s people in common unity that sees things the same way, that have the same goals, and they support each other.

And so when you in common unity, always say healing happens in community. Like, and healing just means like to become whole. You just, you become a whole person. Your business become whole, your mental mentality, your affect become whole. And then your health start becoming whole because now it’s like things just start to line up in perspective. And so I think the right relationship, enough of those that builds a healthy community, a healthy culture where you literally thrive. You thrive in every aspect of your life.

Let’s say like if you came in here with a thought, like I want to make sure the viewers get this thought. I want to open up the floor so that you can deliver that message,

Sumner Healey (21:38)
Yeah, I mean, I think I guess I’ll lean on something very tactical. mean, Q, are most of your listeners, I’m sure they aspire to be in real estate. They’re probably looking at fix and flipping wholesaling, burr stuff, buy and hold. Is that right? Yeah. Okay.

Quentin (21:49)
Yeah. Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah.

Sumner Healey (21:53)
⁓ Yeah, I mean, think what I would share on a very tactical level is like

There is a whole other path that probably hasn’t been revealed to you of how to play the real estate game. And that’s playing the land game, the ground game. And I mean, frankly, there’s so many ways to skin the cat in the land space. There’s so many ways to make money, whether it’s entitlement, subdividing, rezoning, flipping, the list goes on. But the little niche that we’ve kind of tripped and stumbled away into is what I call mid-market land flipping.

And so in our land business, we acquire 10 to 12 to maybe 15 deals a month on average. And our typical deal looks like this. So we buy land that’s between $25,000 and $250,000 as a list price. Most of the deals that we acquire are somewhere around 40 to 55 cents on the dollar. So buy $100,000 deal for 50 grand, whatever it may be. And if we look at our business this year, our average days on market for all of our inventory is 21.75 days. So let’s call it 22 days.

50 grand and turning into 100 grand in 22 days or whatever the math is, right? We just sold a deal. I got an offer on a deal.

This afternoon. It’s been up for one day on market. We bought it for $163,000 It’s 50 acres and we’ll sell it for about 289,000 and that’s one day on market. There’s a whole world here that no one’s talking about and the crazy thing is, you know, I started queue flipping Deals that I was buying for thousand dollars and selling them for two thousand dollars. You can play that game. That’s fine It’s a great way to get your you know cut your teeth in the space but that model can ratchet up to bigger and bigger and bigger deals and that you know what I

really

look at if we look at a real estate business most folks are going direct to owner to acquire deals know cold-calling texting direct mail whatever and the thing that I always get I kind of reference as a benchmark is I think the ultimate health metric of any business is your return on ad spend it’s like if you put a dollar into ads what do get on the back end and that’s just like how healthy your business is and so if you look at a lot of household sailors fixing flippers I mean nowadays depending on the channel 3x would be pretty bad but there’s some folks running at 3x 5 6 X is probably pretty damn

for most folks. We look at our cold calling campaigns that we run in the land space, we’re getting a 40 X row ass on average $1 in $40 out direct mail 10x 15x. And so like just every single KPI that we look at land just dominates from a flipping active income perspective. You know, we still I still buy Airbnb and Section eight and all that stuff because you know, you want to park your money somewhere else besides just land that doesn’t cash flow. And so I get it. I think if you if you’re a new listener, or if you’re

Quentin (24:17)
Yeah.

Sumner Healey (24:27)
a new real estate investor, maybe you’re an old listener or a new listener. Yeah, just understand that there’s a whole other world out there. so, Kia, what I actually put together for your audience, which I think is pretty interesting. So two years ago, I took two strangers that were household sailors. They were doing subject two deals and household sailing and all that stuff. And they were doing it at a pretty big level. They’ve been doing it ⁓ for most of my adult life. They’ve been doing it for like a decade. But they just started to see the writing on the wall that this is turning into a bloodbath, is getting super competitive in their markets. And so they came to me.

They sent me a DM on Instagram like, hey, can you teach us the land stuff? And so they joined our coaching program. They were in it for a couple of months. They said, you know what? What we should really do here is we should make a case study together. You will coach me one on one and we’ll document it and we’ll see how far we can go in 90 days. They were good at sales. They sold me on the idea. was like, you know what? Sure, we’ll do that. So we created a program called the 90 days zero to hero. And for everyone here that’s a listener, you guys can get it for free. I’ll give the link to Q. You guys can use the code podcast at checkout.

the link for the course for free. But what we did is over 90 days returned $10,000 into $270,000 flipping land. And we documented it every step of the way over my shoulder, just showing everything that I was doing with them. We recorded all of the seller conversation, made everything you get access to the contracts, we use the templates, etc, etc. And so it’s just a really cool over the shoulder program, where we’re actually doing what we’re teaching, then you’re actually seeing the results play out in real time. And fast forward to today, I was actually just talking

to one of the guys that was in the program is two partners, Dennis and Rob. They run the land business together. I was talking to Dennis earlier this week. They’re on track to do $4 million in profit in the land business this year. And this was only two years ago. And so it’s just been like a really cool testament to what’s possible and it’s all well documented. So Q, I’ll give you the link. You can put it in the show notes for your listeners and then code podcast to get it for free.

Quentin (26:22)
Man, bro, yes, definitely make sure you give us the link. I’m interested in going to check that out. And I think everybody else should be interested in going to check that out, Man, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, Sumner. Like, I really enjoyed talking to you, ⁓ If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,

Sumner Healey (26:48)
Yeah, I mean, best place to find me is I’m inside of our community every day. So I’ll give you I’ll give you a link as well. You guys can get free access on there. And what’s cool as well as where I got another freebie for you. For everyone that joins, it’s called LIA, that’s our coaching community. You guys can get a free pass to come and join. And when you come in, even if it’s on a free pass, my team and I will do a one on one coaching call with you an architect your land business, even if you’re just getting started over the next 12 months. So we’ll build out a game plan. We’ll show you the KPIs. We’ll show you everything on what it looks like. Or maybe you’re

season that’s fine too we’ll still outline it with you.

for me, like, my whole kind of dynamic is the land business is purely for profit. There’s zero fulfillment in flipping land straight up. And so I get my fulfillment from pouring into other people and frankly sharing this weird business model that I, frankly, it was just dumb luck to find this. And so I really try to over give and try to be extremely generous in everything that I do. So you guys can join for free. You can get on a call. We’ll outline it together. ⁓ Or best place is Instagram. Just my name’s Sumner Healy. You can find me on Instagram. Yeah.

Quentin (27:52)
Man, all right Sumner, I gotta say three things to you. This is where I really try to champion you and who you are and what you do. So three things, sir. First, thank you for your time. I think I told you I was gonna come to this. I honestly believe time is our most precious commodity. I think everything we do should afford us to be able to do what we wanna do without time.

And I think everything we build is what I had to option. This is what I want to do with my time. So the fact that you gave me your time all the way on the other side of the world, sir, I really appreciate that. I really, really do. So thank you for your time. Secondly, man, thank you for your story. Told up a premium premium zone stories. Kobe Bryant before he passed away, one of the last podcasts that he did was with Lewis Howes of the School of Greatness podcast. that podcast. Lewis asked Kobe what

What have you what do you want to do that you have not done? And Colby said, tell the perfect story. He said nothing in this world moves without story. And so, bro, you have moved us with your story. This is why we do what we do so that people can get your story. You plant seeds in them and it course correct their life. So, man, thank you so much for your story, sir. I really appreciate it. Lastly, man, thank you for your mindset, bro. Thank you for the way you think.

and bringing that mindset to this platform. You’ve paid for that mindset in years and experience and probably some money too. So man, thank you for your mindset, bro, and bringing that to this platform. I greatly appreciate you,

Sumner Healey (29:25)
Thank you, Q. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you.

Quentin (29:27)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard my man Sumner. Listen, he’s going to send me everything. Everything is going to be in the show notes once this premiere. Please get in contact with him. Get your free gifts. Let him help you. Let him listen. Let him help you. Let him change the way you do things for the better. So get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you are subscribed here because I promise you going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Sumner. So, sir, I say thank you again. And everyone else, listen.

Y’all have a fantastic day.