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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Kristen Knapp interviews Akingbade Akinfenwa, founder of LandZille, about his journey in the real estate industry, focusing on land investment. Akinfenwa shares his background as a land surveyor and his passion for land, discussing the opportunities he identified in the market. He explains the innovative business model of LandZille, which allows them to sell land below fair market prices while providing significant value to their clients. The conversation also covers the importance of building a strong team, understanding client demographics, and insights into the North Texas land market, highlighting its rapid expansion and future prospects.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Akingbade Akinfenwa (00:00)
So North Texas for people that are not aware of it, it’s just one of those places right now that will tell you it’s just crazily expanded. And you know, don’t take my word for it. Just go online, check right now and see what’s going on there. As a matter of fact, if you have the time, you can visit our website, landzille.com and check out some of our articles on development inKristen Knapp (00:12)
Yeah.Akingbade Akinfenwa (00:24)
North Texas. We have a full publication just for that. It is insane. One of the big factors of course, think about it this way, number one, anyway, there’s significant road infrastructure expansion. Naturally, the no brainer would be a magnet for development, right? So that’s a big one there. So road infrastructure is just insane right now in terms of expansion of the road within North Texas. I’ll give an example.Highway 380 is expanding crazy right now. One of our big highways. We are seeing 75 expanding up north towards Melissa, Anna, towards Sherman. Insane expansion. There’s the Dallas North 2-way expansion, Phase 4A, Phase 5 coming. Crazy insane expansion within those highways also. There are a lot of farm-to-market expansion also. Then there’s the McKinney National Airport. Now McKinney is one of our major cities in North Texas.
Now, believe it or not, it’s going to be a commercial airport by 2026. So this is significant expansion. We have that, which is a real expanding crazy right now. Then when we go to Grayson County, this is another county we’re talking about $40 billion investment from the Sherman Semiconductor Chip Act. So we have Mega Fab being built there. We have Global Waffer, another $5 billion. So on the aggregate, we’re talking of
up north of 50 billion dollar plus coming to one city. So you can imagine all this the axis around those cities just going crazy right now. So, you know, the city is technically gone really because it’s very expensive now. But you can imagine 45 miles radius of those city is just going crazy. The projection is about 6500 jobs coming there. So think about it. 6500 people would need places to live.
Kristen Knapp (03:39)
Welcome back to Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Akin Akinfenwa, who is the founder of LandZille. Thank you so much for being here.Akingbade Akinfenwa (03:47)
Hi KristenA pleasure to speak with you, Kristen.
Kristen Knapp (03:50)
Amazing. So we’re going to talk all about land, which will be very exciting. So let’s get to the beginning. When did you kind of fall in love with the real estate industry?Akingbade Akinfenwa (03:53)
Let’s go, Kristen.So I’ll tell you a little bit about my background really. My first degree, I used to be a land surveyor. And because of that, the passion of land was just inherent in me, my first degree. I moved to the US, originally from Nigeria, moved to the US and did a master’s in geomatics and evolved into technology space. And I got into cybersecurity, became head of delivery of a global consulting firm in cyber operation technology. But over the years, I still kept my passion of land.
And I started considering areas I can explore in real estate. Land was just a natural fit for me. And the question is, okay, why land? Okay, yeah, it’s natural and it’s visionary, really. Land is a vision. Land is something you tell someone to think and say, this is a San Francisco when it was at the early stage. This is an LA when it was at the early stage. It was just bare land, really. And the last I checked, we can all agree, land is not, the maker is not creating any land again, right? So.
Land is always going to be there. And it’s the bedrock, the foundation for any major development, including the roads, the waterways, and the homes, and every kind of infrastructure we see out there. So because of that, it kind of gave me a natural affinity towards land. It was easy for me to just relate with, unlike other part of real estate. So I started the business four years ago with a partner of mine. And as we started, the first thing was we bought as investors ourselves our own.
use for our family and ourselves. Then over time we realized it seems to be a need, you know, in some underserved market, you know. So we kind of did a pilot. We bought a few acres, maybe about 60 acres. And to our surprise, we had pipeline of people waiting, you know. So we’re shocked that, wait a minute, this seems to be an opportunity here. You know, we wanted to ⁓ sell to like three, four families. We had about 10 people in the wait list.
So we said, wow, okay, this is an opportunity we can explore. So we started doing more research, educating our sub, understanding the implication, working with surveyors and strategic partners. And today here we are, we’re excited where we are right now. It’s a very amazing, fast growing business for us. And we just can’t wait to see what’s coming up next.
Kristen Knapp (06:55)
That’s incredible. And when did you really make the decision to go all in on this ⁓ when you were juggling kind of the two passions in your life?Akingbade Akinfenwa (07:02)
So I will say, at some point, you just realize this is big. This is massive, because the need is always there. And ⁓ the demand is just there. think it became my moment was when I realized in one of our projects, we had a slot for about 11 people. And we had20 something people in our pipeline. So at that point we knew, okay, we have to work with more strategic banks, more strategic title companies, more strategic surveyors, because for our community that we serve, they are extremely educated, extremely savvy, extremely knowledgeable. They would ask you all the hard questions. So for us, it kind of elevated our game. If you notice in a, you know, for us we have
tons of research we put together at Land’s Hill. So at Land’s Hill, we have a resource page. We have a team dedicated strictly to just work on research, check for all the city ordinances, check for all the state’s infrastructure bill, the federal infrastructure bill, any kind of lake, airport, road expansion, colleges. We check to make sure we have a first-hand knowledge of what’s coming up within your city.
So we constantly check for development data because we have a very sophisticated, educated community that would ask you a lot of questions. So for us, the blessing was that because these folks will ask us tons of questions, you better step up your game and be ready to answer those questions. So it forced us to go back to our books, to go back and do more research, more information. And also very important for us is for any city or county we decide to go to,
We go to meet their leadership. know, our most recent project is in the city called Gainesville, amazing city with solid infrastructure, proximity to a $40 billion investment in Sherman, Texas. And it’s very close to Oklahoma. It’s just a very well positioned strategic location. One of the best city out there. Beautiful downtown, amazing college. The oldest community two-year college in Texas is actually located there. They have Frank Bog’s Zoo. It’s just amazing place, right?
We spoke with the city leadership, you know, also to tell us about the city, what’s coming up with the city. And, you know, the leadership was very gracious enough to give us more information about the city. Barry Sullivan was, you know, is the city manager and he was so gracious, gave us a lot of insight about the city, the plan, the road infrastructure expansion coming up, the inclusion of some Fortune 500 coming to the city to create employment. So.
We do a lot of research, you know. We also go to the Chamber of Commerce. We go to the planning and zoning to kind of know because it’s important to have that knowledge to share with our community. Because if I talk to you, let’s say, Kristen, I say, hey, Kristen, this is an opportunity. You would ask me, OK, what is the data point that supports this investment? So I want to be able to give you that information confidently without any issue.
Kristen Knapp (10:21)
course.Yeah, and you guys sell a lot of your land below fair market price, correct?
Akingbade Akinfenwa (10:39)
Yes, and the beautifulthing is that we have a model that is just amazingly effective. I’ll give an example data. So, you know, it’s still like Gainesville, amazing, beautiful city, you know, ⁓ it has Moss Lake, one of the beautiful Eden treasure in Texas right now. And homes within Moss Lake, neighboring of Moss Lake go for as high as five million dollars, one million. It’s quite expensive, right? Now, if you buy an acre of land within this vicinity, we’re talking about probably paying easily.
100 grand, 85 grand above for one acre. But we can, you know, we sell a minimum of 12 acres and the reason is simple in the state of Texas to qualify for a Greek exemption, you should have over 10 acres of land. So because of that, we make sure I think 10 or 11 acres, we make sure that we, you know, sell minimum of 12 acres so that you have room to qualify for the Ag exemption. The implication of the Ag exemption is that it allows you to qualify for a lot of tax breaks.
Right? So if your taxes to two grand, for example, your tax for the year based on your ag exemption might be under a box. So the difference in the gap, you know, in the tax difference is really astonished. So because of that, we want our community to take advantage of that. Then also the price you will get it for us might be 20 grand an acre, the equivalent. So you can imagine the fair market value is going as high as 70, 80 grand. But because we bought
large chunk of land, can break it down to smaller track and sell it at a much more affordable price to our community, for example.
Kristen Knapp (12:11)
That’s amazing. You guys have like a really sophisticated, you know, like in place you have a lot of great systems. How did you go about choosing your team and building it up?Akingbade Akinfenwa (12:21)
So, you know, I mean, it’s a blessing when you have partners that are strategic and you really love to work with each other. You know, my partner and I have been friends over 20 years, you know, my co-partner. So it helps a lot to have people that you, you know, you do live with and you kind of enjoy each other’s company. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is, you know, you have to understand that at the end of the day, inherently, most of us want to do the right thing, right? People want you to give them an environment they can be themselves and still…add maximum value. So for us, some of the criteria for our team selection is we want to make sure you have the genuine passion and interest of people. We have passions about our community and our people. Relationship is everything for us, really, because our business is long term. We’re not thinking short term. So everything’s relationship. We’re ready to work away from a deal to protect our customers’ interest all the time, 100 % of the time.
You know, and so if you’re working with us as a partner, we must see the same value system. You must, you know, at the end of the year, it’s a business for us. We are there to be profitable as a business, but we’re not going to compromise the profit, the value system because of some bulk here and there. So for us, it’s so important because, you know, and these are customers, some of them are your friends, some of them are your referral from friends, right? So you want to keep and preserve those relationships. ⁓
to us is very personal. For every one of our projects, we want to make sure we protect the interest of the client, make sure we get you valuable land, get you a good team to help you with the financing, get you the best title company to help and integrate and help you with the lien check and all of the key fundamentals are checked. We have the best servitors in the world. And so we put all those fundamentals together to help our team to be successful.
So I think the choice of theme is simple. Just, you you must align with our value system. You must be, you know, bring excellence to your game 100 % of the time. And when you miss things, you must own it quickly and let’s just fix it and move on.
Kristen Knapp (15:02)
Amazing. Yeah, I mean all that stuff is incredibly important. And what kind of clients are you working with? What kind of, where are they at in their career and what type of people in the real estate industry are they? ⁓Akingbade Akinfenwa (15:13)
So,you know, the clients we work with, you know, they’re a mixture of a young startup, young graduate that just left college and they are starting to build their life and they are looking at things they can invest in and hold for maybe seven, 10 years of their life as an investment vehicle. Now, as they do other investment, you know, a lot of people do mutual funds, you know, buy homes, whatever you’re doing is good. Land is just…
One of those vehicles you can also add to your portfolio, right? You know, we also have clients that are established, that are professionals working in the field already. And a lot of them are getting to 35, 55, upward, and they think of retirement. And they are thinking, I’m not sure this my 401k is going to cut it because right now it’s not looking, you know, as exciting as I think. So they said, you know what, why don’t we find a way to kind of put some funds somewhere that we can fill the…
potential return on investment can be really, really substantial in the next 10 years, you know, for us. And in North Texas, there’s a lot of use case for that. A city called Free School, amazing city. A city called McKinney, amazing city. And at Texas, super awesome places. You know, 10 years ago, some acres of land, they were going for probably 10 to 15 grand. Each of this city right now, the minimum you’ll see is 100 grand an acre. So these are very significant shift within 10 years. So.
And you know, the reality is 10 years come so quick. So you wake up and realize, shoot, I got white beard and it’s 10 years, right? So you just realize things change so quick. So because of that, we think it’s a solid vehicle for investment for long term for a lot of our community. And the other piece of folks we work with a lot are actual builders. A lot of builders buy with us and intend to hold for five, seven years so that once development gets crazy within the city.
they can now use their investment to start building in those cities. So it’s just a better way. You know, a lot of them buy at premium now and they wish they had bought earlier to start developing. So now they blend from that experience. They’re now buying, you know, cheaper now and within five years towards development down the road. And the other folks I’ve seen is just families I want to buy and set up their children. say, okay, you know what?
My daughter, my son is about to go to college. I’m going to buy a land as a gift for you. I put the down payment, then you start financing $500 a month or whatever the number is just to force you to start thinking of savings and have investment for yourself long term. So those are the things we’ve, those are the typical clients we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks. One I also missed is we have a lot of realtors in our communities.
So they bring their clients and they get their referrals based on the clients they bring. that’s also a big one in our community.
Kristen Knapp (18:00)
Yeah, I mean you work with just a variety of people with a variety of things that they want to do in the market. And I would love to hear your perspective on the market. I know that a lot of people are a little reticent to enter it. I would love to hear your perspective as someone who deals with a lot of land.Akingbade Akinfenwa (18:16)
Yeah, so,you know, that’s a great question, Kristen. So a lot of people ask me, okay, what do you think about the market now? What do you think? Should we go into the market? Yeah, okay. So I would say ultimately make a decision based on where you are at your space at the moment, right? Don’t make any hasty decision. No emotion attached to this. At the same time, I know land…
is one of those assets historically has not had record of significant depreciation. So that’s the good part of it. So unlike your brick and mortar real estate, you buy multifamily home, apartment complexes, and all that, the maintenance cost, and the fact that sometimes the value drops a lot because of a lot of people having issues with foreclosure or the economy downtime.
For land many times we don’t have those challenges really as much You know, I think it’s very very minimal to be honest because the maintenance is non-existent in our case because once you buy a land from us We also have farmers lined up to start maintaining your land So they pay you for leasing your land to use, you know, which is amazing So you get paid, you know per acre on your land. So imagine for a land you’re paying maybe
$100 a year for tax. I are collecting for lease, maybe $700 from the farmer leasing the land to you. So we don’t have a lot of challenges at this point in terms of land. And I think honest truth is that for investors is a big opportunity I’ve seen because areas that are typically out of reach, now you can actually, you have a chance because
The market is a little bit slow, so you can get in now because of the slow pace of the development in the market. I’ll give an example. There’s a lot of infrastructure construction going on in North Texas. And some of them have been delayed because of ⁓ they have been short-staffed because of the current immigration crackdown. Then there has been also some elements of ⁓
you know, some of the equipment and facilities they use are not, you know, easily available because of the tariff at the moment. So there’s that element of, you know, people kind of, you know, slowing down a little bit because of those two factors right now. However, with that comes opportunity, I think, because the slowdown, the pace of, you know, it’s slowing down makes the development not as rapid.
to increase the value of the relisted. So because of that, a lot of people can even get in quicker, think, in my opinion.
Kristen Knapp (20:49)
Wow, I mean, it’s great to hear optimism about the market and it’s great to hear your perspective on all that. And you’re specifically dealing in North Texas. Talk about that market, because that seems like a great place to get in with land.Akingbade Akinfenwa (21:02)
So North Texas for people that are not aware of it, it’s just one of those places right now that will tell you it’s just crazily expanded. And you know, don’t take my word for it. Just go online, check right now and see what’s going on there. As a matter of fact, if you have the time, you can visit our website, landzille.com and check out some of our articles on development inKristen Knapp (21:15)
Yeah.Akingbade Akinfenwa (21:27)
North Texas. We have a full publication just for that. It is insane. One of the big factors of course, think about it this way, number one, anyway, there’s significant road infrastructure expansion. Naturally, the no brainer would be a magnet for development, right? So that’s a big one there. So road infrastructure is just insane right now in terms of expansion of the road within North Texas. I’ll give an example.Highway 380 is expanding crazy right now. One of our big highways. We are seeing 75 expanding up north towards Melissa, Anna, towards Sherman. Insane expansion. There’s the Dallas North 2-way expansion, Phase 4A, Phase 5 coming. Crazy insane expansion within those highways also. There are a lot of farm-to-market expansion also. Then there’s the McKinney National Airport. Now McKinney is one of our major cities in North Texas.
Now, believe it or not, it’s going to be a commercial airport by 2026. So this is significant expansion. We have that, which is a real expanding crazy right now. Then when we go to Grayson County, this is another county we’re talking about $40 billion investment from the Sherman Semiconductor Chip Act. So we have Mega Fab being built there. We have Global Waffer, another $5 billion. So on the aggregate, we’re talking of
up north of 50 billion dollar plus coming to one city. So you can imagine all this the axis around those cities just going crazy right now. So, you know, the city is technically gone really because it’s very expensive now. But you can imagine 45 miles radius of those city is just going crazy. The projection is about 6500 jobs coming there. So think about it. 6500 people would need places to live. Most of them would not want to live in the city. So they need all the orb around those cities to
definitely leave. So we’re talking about the places like Gainesville, Texas, Ornigroup, Texas, Bonham, Texas, Anna, Texas, know, Melissa, McKinney. So these are places that are going to be very significant in terms of, you know, where people would want to definitely live in. Then beside that, we also have big expansion in terms of lakes, you know, the largest manmade lake in Texas in 30 years, Burdak Lake is also up north there, right?
in Ernie Grove. We also have Leonard Water Treatment. We have Lake Raff, another huge massive lake coming there. Then also the proximity to Oklahoma, Oklahoma, the borderline, have a lot of development coming there, you know, within that space also. So all of this kind of just laid the foundation in terms of growth and expansion within North Texas. Then, not to forget, Frisco, one of our big cities right now.
Universal Studios is coming there. Safari is coming there. A lot of golf courses are coming there. A lot of massive construction of hotels. Billions of dollars in terms of investment right now in those locations. those are the big factors driving developments within this axis right now. It’s a lot of funds that have been pumped in there. So naturally the development is just crazy. Everywhere. Everywhere is massive development there.
So those are the drivers.
Kristen Knapp (24:35)
It seems so exciting. mean, it seems like such a big opportunity. So we’re kind of at the end of our time here. So remind everybody where to find you with LandZille and kind of the resources you have on your website. ⁓Akingbade Akinfenwa (24:37)
It is. It is. It is.Thank
you. Do you want me to share and show people where it is? If you want to just go to and I’ll show you real quick. Just go to landzille.com and we have tons of resources you can grab here. Go to landzille.com and go to our resource page. You would see amazing, amazing information here. We have a magazine here. Just subscribe to our blog and look at the magazine here. Just go there and pick.
Kristen Knapp (24:50)
Sure.Akingbade Akinfenwa (25:15)
and just get information. We’re an education platform also. love to educate and we have the passion for teaching and making sure people are knowledgeable and understand the power of land. We love land. That’s what we do.Kristen Knapp (25:28)
I love that. Well, thank you so much for being here. I think people learned a lot today.Akingbade Akinfenwa (25:31)
Thank you, Kristen. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time. I appreciate your time, Kristen.Kristen Knapp (25:34)
and thank you everybody for listening. We will see you back next time. Bye.Akingbade Akinfenwa (25:37)
Thank you, bye.
