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Intro

If you want to learn how to increase your net worth and monthly cash flow with ease, you’re in the right place. My secret is land, and they are not making any more of it. Although many do not find it sexy, I think it is one of the most overlooked assets in the world. Banks look down upon it, realtors and brokers won’t “show it” to their customers, and nobody knows how or where to buy it. All of this creates a massive opportunity for those who are willing to put in a little time and effort to understand this asset category and how to buy and sell land!

My name is Jon Jasniak and I began buying and selling land in late 2016. Fast forward to 2021 at the time of writing this and I’ve created over 4.5 million dollars in net worth, all through self-funding my own company named Jaz Land. At the age of 25, I quit my job as a Petroleum Engineer where I was making more than $150k per year to run my land company full time. I’ve bought and sold over 4500 acres in multiple states while living in Texas, proving this can be done anywhere no matter where you live. In 4 years, I’ve done over 350 deals ranging from 1 acre to over 600 acres. Diving headfirst into the land business is probably the best decision I’ve ever made, and I’d love to teach you about how I did it.

People love to ask me what I do for a living. I’ve narrowed that answer down to “I buy and sell land. I have my own real estate company”. Most do not believe that you can make money doing this. Most people will also think you need to be licensed as a realtor or a broker (you don’t!). The truth is you can make more than just money. You can create true wealth. There are levels to this business, and you can achieve whatever level is right for you! From just a few extra bucks a month to massive amounts of money and net worth, the possibilities are endless. For myself, I could not settle for just a little spending money on top of my engineering salary. Growing up in Michigan, I always had a vision to go elsewhere and do big things. That is what pushed me to Texas to study petroleum engineering. That was an adventure but after graduating, the real world hit. Going to an office every day and working a 7 to 5 job (much longer hours than typical 9-5!) left me wanting more yet again. Just one year after entering the workplace straight out of school, I started to hate my lifestyle as an engineer. Workdays were extremely long. I would get midnight phone calls from the oil rigs where it was my responsibility to handle the situation before morning. Call me entitled because I was making $150k as a 23-year-old, but I just couldn’t help but think this wasn’t for me. Personally, it has always been about the freedom and the respect of being a master at your craft, not just the money. For these reasons, I knew I needed to search for a way out.

I never read books in school or studied anything outside of Petroleum Engineering. After 6 months on the job, that changed. The first book I read was Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, James Altucher’s financial edition of his best seller Choose Yourself. To this day, that book remains my favorite I have ever read. It opened my mind to an entirely new world in regard to money and mindset. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial by nature and I couldn’t envision working in the corporate world until one day, it just happened. Shortly after came The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, an all-time classic. I was reading about a book a week, something I still do and highly recommend. I tried many things, including stock trading (I still attend Tim Sykes’ conference every year), product development (World Patent Marketing took some of my money!), and blogging. I would listen to over 10 hours of entrepreneur podcasts a week on my way to the corporate office or to the workover rig site in Catarina, Texas which was an hour away from the field office I worked out of. There was a lot of anger, stress, tears, and sleepless nights in there. It was by pure happenstance that one day I listened to a podcast with Mark Podolsky, the LandGeek, and discovered the land business model. It instantly fascinated me. I always loved flipping stuff and finding deals, so why not do that with land? I then spent a couple of months researching the business model and going through the LandGeek and Land Academy courses. When I felt confident enough, I just went for it and pulled the trigger on my first deal. The rest is history! Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing about the journey because without it, I would have never discovered this business. Everyone’s journey is different but what’s most important is you embrace yours and get started on the action you want to take TODAY.

My goal is to make this book clear and concise to demonstrate how you too can create net worth and cash flow out of thin air by buying and selling land. You too can create your own land journey. No BS and fluff will be found here. At times I will get a bit technical, talking numbers while providing examples of real-life projects and possibilities. At the end, I will provide a detailed notes and resources section that encompasses everything I think you need to know that will be helpful to your journey. Why would I help other people try to understand this if I’ve made so much money doing it? The answer is because there’s enough opportunity for everyone and most importantly, because it makes me feel good being known as the master of my craft. I know I can deliver unique insights on this subject that no one else can and help a ton of people, so let’s do it!

My favorite thing about land is how easy it is. Anyone can buy and sell it! For the most part, it just requires a deed which is often a single sheet of paper. Typically, there are no third parties involved. Land has no tenants, contractors, or work on the asset itself from your end. My first deal, which happens to be one of my worst, demonstrates this better than anything else. It was a 53 acre piece of land deep in West Texas, out near El Paso. I had just gotten through two educational programs detailing raw land. These were the Land Academy and LandGeek courses, basically the only educational information for land at the time. I was at my day job sitting in my dumpy little office with no windows surfing Landwatch.com for land deals. In the LandGeek community, I remember hearing someone say they had sold a 53 acre piece of land in this specific area I was looking at for around $15k. I found a listing for 53 acres in the same subdivision for $10k. This is a solid margin if everything were to go right, but it never does. So, I picked up the phone and called the seller, a middle-aged foreign land investor who lived in Florida (bless you Rashed!). What the hell was someone in Florida doing with 53 acres of land in Texas anyways?! As I mentioned, anyone can buy and sell land from anywhere you want. He was simply an investor. Rashed picks up the phone and we begin to haggle over price. It was obvious he didn’t know much about the land itself and had definitely never seen it in person. Imagine this 23 year old kid, fresh out of college, working his big time engineering job with his office door closed during work hours negotiating with some investor 1500 miles away over a piece of land neither of us had ever seen… Not only should I have been “working”, but I hardly knew how to negotiate a deal at that point. I knew nothing about business or vacant land. It was my first deal and I was nervous! After a few calls back and forth, I was able to get Rashed down to $8500 which is $160 an acre. I agreed to sign a purchase agreement and wire him the money. I was sweating bullets, imagining a foreign prince somewhere on the other end just waiting to scam me out of my $8,500. However, next thing I knew, he had a deed prepared in my name and I was a landowner. I didn’t expect how much easier it would get from there.

Shortly after buying that 53 acres, and I mean like days later, I bought some photos of that area from another investor. This 53 acres was already subdivided into five separate 10.6 acre tracts. I took those  photos and created a listing on Facebook buy and sell groups in El Paso, TX and the surrounding areas. Without even seeing the land myself, I had 3 of the 10.6 acre pieces financed out to customers in 5 days at $100 down and $100 a month for 36 months EACH! That’s $10,800 in notes receivable over 3 years, which already covered my cost of the land and then some! Shortly after, I ended up selling another 10.6 acre for $2400 cash.

From the looks of how fast this sold, I knew I had greatly underpriced it. Eventually I was able to make it out to this land personally and fell in love with the area. West Texas will always hold a special place in my heart, so I decided to keep the final 10.6 acre piece for myself. In late 2019, about 3 years after the purchase, I ended up selling the final 10.6 acre piece for $4,750! 

What happened here? In total, I bought a 53 acre piece of land for $8500, which was under market value. Within 2 weeks, I ended up selling one lot for $2400 cash and 3 lots on “terms”, or monthly payments to customers creating “land notes”. I created $10,800 in notes receivable over 3 years with $300 per month in cash flow from these 3 notes. That’s a solid car payment! Finally, I sold the last piece 3 years later for $4,750 in cash. In total, I walked away with $17,950 over 3 years from an $8,500 investment, over doubling my money.

You can do this too. Anyone can do this. Land is so much simpler than you’d think. The process is as follows:

• Buy the land
• Market and sell the land to a buyer
• Manage any customers and land notes

I break this down into 3 simple steps: buy, sell, and manage. This makes it look really easy, however there are more details that go into the buying and selling side. These include finding the right place to buy the land, finding a deal in that area, and doing the due diligence on the buy side while becoming a wizard at online marketing and sales on the sell side. The truth is land is very straightforward to understand, but there will most definitely be work involved. Nothing worth having in life comes very easily. With some hard work at the beginning, it will become a lot smoother later on!

A couple of the best aspects of land is there are essentially zero holding costs, and it always sells! The market for land is gigantic. In 2020 because of the corona virus situation, civil unrest in the cities, and ungodly low interest rates, there has never been as many people looking for land. Land websites are receiving record high search volume. A lot of this market consists of the everyday person like you and me who are looking to get away from the city. They want to own something that is theirs with their name on it. It gives them freedom and security. Depending on the market, it offers people the flexibility to hunt, shoot, have fun doing recreational activities, put alternative housing out there, just hold as an investment, and so much more! It surprises most people the number of reasons why someone buys a piece of land. It’s one of the most common questions I get asked by friends and family, “who buys that stuff?!”. To this day I still learn of new reasons why someone is buying. Recently, a customer bought from me to create a shop to build guns and test them. Before that it was someone who wanted a place with little light pollution to see the stars. I guarantee you the market for land is bigger than you can imagine!

Taxes and any HOA/POA are the only costs on raw land, and you don’t have to deal with any people to take care of those. Just mail in a check to the appropriate office and consider it done. Also, the land itself is never going away! Someone will end up buying it for some price. With the internet, it is so easy nowadays to sell a piece of land. E-commerce is growing at an alarming rate, and I’ve personally seen real estate move heavily towards the internet. This is especially true if you have a solid brand and credibility. Truth be told, although I over doubled my investment on my first deal, this was one of my WORST deals! Right then and there is when I realized the power of buying undervalued land and the ease of selling it with today’s marketing platforms.

You see, most people spend their money on stupid things. Cars, toys, clothes, homes… the list goes on and on. That’s the reason why according to a 2020 first capital bank of Omaha study, 49% of Americans expect to be living paycheck to paycheck. Other studies put that number much higher. People tend to buy depreciating assets and they do so at FULL value. People need to focus on buying assets that can appreciate, but most importantly at a fraction of the market value. This is how you get an instant net worth bump! For instance, if I buy a piece of land for $4,000 that is worth $10,000, I essentially just created $6,000 of net worth like magic. Imagine doing this with tens of thousands of dollars and instantly creating tens of thousands of dollars in net worth. Imagine learning how to buy and sell land to create monthly cashflow instead of relying on your 401k or puny dividend yields. This is what people need to be doing instead of blowing their money on stupid stuff and instead of making horrible investments in stuff Wall Street is pitching you. The quickest way to real wealth is buying undervalued assets that cash flow, and in my opinion, a simple way to do that is with land.

Finding Your Area

If you’re serious about buying land, the first thing you must do is choose the right area to buy! This is easier than ever with all the resources at our fingertips on the internet. The first step is to choose a county, or two or three counties, that interest you. Land buying and selling is largely broken down into counties within the states because they are the gatekeepers of tax and ownership information on property. The reason it is beneficial to potentially choose a few counties within an area is because it will broaden your reach and lead to more deals while maintaining similar market conditions. Cost per acre, the features of the land itself, buyer demand, reasons people want the land, and more will all be similar. I always recommend trying to start close to where you are living, but this is not necessary. Some of my first deals were in Mohave County, Arizona and I live in Texas! Hell, even my first deal in deep West Texas I did not see the land. If you do get familiar with an area near your home, it makes it easier to get boots on the ground, take photos, and really get a sense of familiarity of the county you want to buy and sell in. This will limit mistakes. It also makes it easier to sell the land for those who want to meet you to make the purchase! I will go more in depth on the selling process later, but a lot of people will want to meet with you in person before you attain an online presence and credibility. This is also a perfect opportunity to get video testimonials!! To get your business reputation to skyrocket you MUST get testimonials from your customers. In the end, all counties, cities, and areas have land that can be bought and sold. This can be done ANYWHERE, but we must narrow our focus, especially starting out. Choose an area and become extremely knowledgeable about it. The more knowledge you have about a specific market, the more money you stand to make.

To do this, simply go to some of the areas where land is sold. The LandsofAmerica.com interface is my favorite to do research on because of their mapping tool. See what land is listed and for how much. You typically want to see land already selling in the area. This means that people are buying land here and there is a demand for it. Keep in mind different areas will vary drastically in price. It always makes me laugh when people message me saying something along the lines of “well here in California the land prices are crazy!” or “can you really buy land in Arizona or Texas for $1,000?”. Look… Each area is going to have its own market and that does not mean you can’t make money in it! You will need to know your budget when deciding where to work. The closer you get to the city or highly populated areas, the more expensive land will get. If your budget is small you should focus on rural areas with cheap land. Geopolitical, regional economic activity, and other things will come into play as well, causing varying land prices. The good thing about this business is you can make money anywhere. In expensive areas you may be buying for $25,000 and selling for $40-$50k whereas in cheap areas it will be buy for $5,000 and flip for $10,000. Just because an area’s land is expensive does not mean there is no market, just like if an area’s land is dirt cheap does not mean it will sell like hot cakes. There are multiple variables at play. In the end you must choose what’s best for you. It’s possible to start with a small amount of money (less than $1000) in the right area. Also, do not get scared if there is little to no land listed in the area you are looking at. I’ve personally seen this lead to some of the best deals because there is no competition and you can pretty much control the market and pricing. It’s even more important to have an in-depth knowledge of the market when buying in these areas because the risk is higher. There are no other land sellers providing proof of concept and to study from. As with anything, with more risk there is typically more reward!

Things to consider when choosing your area:

• Population density
• How far is it from a big city? Which big city?
• Why do people want to own land here
• Are other brokers, realtors, land investors selling land in the area?
• Capital requirements to work in the area. How expensive is the cheapest land?
• Are there any subdivides in the chosen area? Or is it all large tracts
• Is the area growing or is it on the decline?

Let’s have a look at a couple of different counties in my home state of Michigan. Osceola County is located in rural central Michigan. Here you can find little lots for as cheap as $2500 per acre and larger lots as low as $1,000 per acre