Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you guys are.
Happy New Year, because for me, this is my first recording for the new year,
and I'm really excited to have on a first-time guest on the show,
and he's going to tell you a little bit about him and what he does,
and he's also a podcaster, so you're not just going to hear this on my podcast,
you might even hear the same show on his podcast, and who knows where else it might syndicate.
So, Logan, let everybody know a little bit about you and what you do.
Yeah, thanks, Paul. Yeah, my name is Logan Swanson. I'm the host of the Land Fixer podcast.
I've been a real estate investor for seven years now, focusing exclusively in
land, land flipping, land subdivision, those sorts of projects.
And recently, in the past couple of years, we've kind of grown into a funding
business where we're funding other folks in their land endeavors.
And it's also kind of culminated in a marketing service we have called primelandexchange.com
where folks are able to list their land that they want sold along with a bunch of other services.
And it's been a wild ride. Before I got into real estate, I was a restaurant
manager and I worked in construction as a project manager as well.
And very, very grateful to be out of those careers and into a new one.
So that's kind of what brings me here today.
Awesome. You know what? The fact that you have already jumped into your backstory,
origin story, whatever they call it these days, to me, that's one of the most
important parts of storytelling is to, of course, start with the,
you know, the, the early days,
the, the perhaps non glamorous side of what many of us did before.
Funny that you mentioned construction, because that is literally what I should
be doing with three generations of construction in my family,
I really had no business going into the real estate.
So basically going from the guy who builds the house to the guy who sells the
house, that was sort of not really a transition that my parents probably thought
ever was going to happen.
And it was almost a reason why. And I think my whole life has been spite based.
So if just someone told me not to do this, or you shouldn't be doing that,
or that's not for you, that exactly, That literally was my, my,
how my life course changed.
So besides construction, you mentioned being in the, in the food,
the restaurant industry, nothing gets you prepared for rejection.
More than being in the food industry. And I only spent a year in that business, but it was grade nine.
I was 13. I was in the pizza shop and angry people at 2am in the morning gets you ready for life.
And this is when you're, this is before you're having any drinks yourself.
This is dealing with angry drunks way before you know what that even means.
And you literally have to become superhuman to be able to negotiate with these
unreasonable people who were complaining about not enough pepperoni or it's overcooked.
Who cares? It's pizza. You're drunk. Eat it.
Move along. But the fact is those careers, what you, what you've obviously been
through, you know, was sort of, I call it silent training.
And this is, I think the best part about talking to people on the podcast is
we can sort of just open up the can and just sort of go into all those things.
So obviously, yeah. So you coming from those backgrounds and I wanted to do
a podcast. I've been wanting to do a podcast about land purchases and,
and, and I've recently become a, become a fan of the TV show.
It's, it's a pretty new show land land men. Yeah.
Yeah. So just, I'm just, I'm just early on in that, but the,
but the whole premise, and this is even something my, my wife and I discuss
20 years ago when I started in real estate, it really wasn't something I was actually, correction,
I was thinking about buying land in my teens, and this is stuff called crown
land, which in our country, in Canada,
there's land that's owned by the crown.
So we've got this really, I would say, stupid ownership system where a lot of
the property here is owned by the crown.
So like the people in England, they own a big chunk of land of ours.
So some of that land once in a
while they sell it off so my idea was to
just as as you know someone young with like
this was like i guess back then you could probably buy
like an island this is you know i'm not i'm not exaggerating that much for but
for like two to five thousand dollars you could probably buy an island somewhere
back then and it was still too much for my head to handle i couldn't understand
you know what am i going to do with like you know i'm a 20 year old with two
islands or something Like.
What am I going to do with any of it? I had no clue.
I'm much more interested in the idea of land as I got older.
So for you, what was sort of the spark?
Obviously, from the other things you've said you've done, because construction,
I can see you getting interested in that.
Restaurant industry, maybe owning the property that you own is really,
I think the only secret for, I've helped a lot of restaurant owners,
you know, sort of find properties.
And the only thing I can tell you is the ones that are still around own the building, so to speak.
So for you, what was the spark? How did it all sort of start?
I'd say desperation. I was a restaurant manager for a long time,
which is just a soul-sucking job, 60 to 80-hour weeks for a low salary and terrible benefits.
I got out of that. That's when I got into project managing, construction,
which is effectively more like a sales job more than anything else.
It was a straight commission job. Of course, it was highs and lows and headaches and hurdles.
In order to subsidize my income, I went back to restaurants and I was kind of
moonlighting at a high-end steakhouse here in Dallas.
And I remember specifically, I drove into work.
I should say I left my project management construction job, drove to my second
job, was about to go clock in for the day. And I sat in my car for a minute.
I was just like, I have almost nothing in savings. I have three kids, a wife.
All I do is work, no freedom what is
this you know what am i doing so so how long ago
was this just to sort of set up the time frame seven years
ago seven years ago oh yeah okay seven years ago okay and no yeah six years
ago maybe yep it was right when the pandemic right before the pandemic okay
and i had heard about real estate investing so i started looking into maybe
buying single family homes or something.
That was the only thing that people talked about where you could get out of
your job and start making money.
And nothing really made sense. It's like, well, I don't have money.
So how am I going to start making money with homes?
If I bought a rental home and I had a mortgage on it, I might arbitrage like
a couple hundred bucks a month maybe out of it that I could actually take home.
It just didn't really make sense to me.
I mean, that's when I stumbled into land investing where there was folks saying,
hey, you can go buy land very affordably for 10, 15, 20 cents on the dollar
and resell it for, you know,
100 cents on the dollar. And I was like, well, that's something manageable.
And I dove in headfirst. I went to a friend of mine because,
like I said, I didn't really have much money.
And I borrowed $2,000 on a zero interest loan for a year.
And that was enough to start us off, you know, and within three years we had,
you know, a seven figure business. I own land in 14 States and it's just been
kind of a roller coaster ever since.
Wow. That's a, again, that's a very interesting story.
You say, you're saying you literally got, you, you started a business with $2,000
that has of course, you know, rolled into probably more than $2,000 value.
Probably the card's gone, but the return's there.
Yeah. So I, I, I love, again, I love sort of the, the bootstrap element of how
people can start in this business.
For me, it was similar. It was just a matter of when I started,
it was a matter of buying the cheapest house I possibly could on a decent street,
which is the only rule I knew at the time.
And this was before real estate. This was me in my early twenties,
no direction, but just for some weird, strange reason in my head, I was finance obsessed.
And that means I was, it was the, it was never talked about a,
you know, obviously it's never even talked about these days in school,
but it was never talked about in school, you know, saving money.
Government bonds, like the ways to invest compound interest,
all these things that for my, my, my kids hear me, you know, puke this stuff at them,
literally sending them like literally daily texts on, by the way,
you're this age, here's how much money you put away now for the next five years
and you're rich in 40 years.
So it's me doing that all the time for them. So they've got this unfair advantage.
But back then, before the internet, before social media, no YouTube,
it was weekends at the library.
So just sort of building up my knowledge from there and basically just piling
$5,000 together over five years from like 18 to 23.
I figured out how to do that and put, put it all in real estate.
I literally went all in at a time where, again, I didn't even know what that
meant, but clearly again, it's something that you did yourself.
And of course it worked out.
Sounds like it worked out pretty well for you as, as a starting, Cause you kept going.
So what was the learning curve like, as far as like the first land deal?
Tell me a little bit about, you know, any, any curves, any, any,
any, any curve balls, stuff like that, that you had to learn about.
Yeah. Land is chock full of them.
The, you know, there's a bunch of land gurus, sort of educator people out there.
And I went through one of those sorts of courses. That's part of where my first $2,000 went.
And one thing they always preach is just how simple it is. You know,
when you're dealing with land, there's no, you know, they always say no tenants,
no termites, no, you know, toilets. You don't have to do inspections.
None of that stuff. It's a very simple transaction. Let me get this straight.
This might be a good clip. No tenants, no termites, no toilets.
That sounds almost like a great course name. Just that's the course.
Okay. All right. Yep. Yep.
And they say it's so simple and at times it is right.
And you can transfer the ownership of a property outside of a title company.
You know, you can just sign a deed and now you're the landowner or you sell
it to somebody and it's that simple. You just sign a document and record it with the county.
So when we started, we started with really low stakes properties.
This is kind of shocking when people hear this, but the first markets that we
worked in, you mentioned the show Landman.
I believe that's in West Texas, right?
Yeah. And that's where we started. We bought and sold what we call desert squares out in West Texas.
And it's these little five, 10, 20 acre tracts of land, completely off grid,
no utilities, effectively desert land.
And we were buying those for around 50 to 70 bucks an acre.
So I would buy, you know, a five acre tract for $250.
The recording fees were a substantial cost, right?
In considering it cost me like 50 bucks to go record the deed somewhere or 150
bucks to get a notary out there.
So it was like for real estate, it was very low stakes, but I was selling those
same properties for $2,000, $2,500 cash.
Or if I owner financed them and I generated notes, which was a big part of the
business, you know, I could sell those things for five, six,
$7,000, but only 99 bucks a month.
So you're telling me you guys could buy, or maybe could buy,
maybe not anymore, but could buy an acre, which if I'm not mistaken,
an acre is about a football field. Yeah.
Yeah, 6,000 something square feet. Yeah, there's some joke.
It goes over my head, but some joke about how many yards in an acre.
There's some sort of weird real estate joke. I've never even understood it enough
to tell it. But apparently, yeah.
So let's just say for people listening, an acre is about a football field. Yeah, roughly.
And you're talking about buying a football field for 50 bucks? Yeah.
Jesus. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's a pretty, even, even like, again,
real estate for dummies, personal finance for dummies.
My first ever book I read that would be in there.
If you're, if you just don't know what you're doing, 50 bucks football field,
you probably can't loops.
Yeah. More than 50 bucks. Yeah.
And we were going direct to seller. So we were just sending letters to folks
that own this land in the middle of nowhere.
And most of them bought it out of the back of a magazine years ago because they
were kind of sold in these in the back of hunting and fishing magazines as recreational
properties that you could go hunt on someday.
And people never went out there.
So it was really easy it was low-hanging fruit we
were buying them every week coordinating transactions all
the time and that's really where our business
took off was being able to turn those you know
say five hundred dollar purchases into six to
seven to eight thousand dollar land notes that were paying us you know 100 200
bucks a month so i would say within the first year we were able to generate
enough income to when my wife got kind of randomly laid off from her company
and we were making enough off the land notes that it was fine.
It was like, we'll be okay. You know, whereas a year before that would have
been a nightmare, you know, how are we going to get by? Right.
So yeah, it went really quick. It was really cool. And we just kind of kept expanding.
We went from the middle of nowhere, closer to cities, you know,
closer to Dallas, Fort Worth, where I'm located, into other states. We grew really quickly.
And then after the pandemic, things started shifting in the market. So I had to adapt.
We've done a lot of growing and shifting since then, but it was a hell of a
start. It was a great way to start.
So yeah. So as far as that goes, obviously buying up land and obviously the
fact that you're saying you're doing it now in 14 cities?
States, sorry, 14 states. So obviously, yeah, you're going to,
you know, at some point, of course, you're going to learn the ins and outs of buying land first.
And then of course, buying land in different states. And of course the,
you know, the laws and zoning and obviously all that stuff that goes with that.
So just out of curiosity, what would, what would the $50 acre be now versus seven years ago?
Probably around two to 300 bucks an acre. If I was buying direct from a seller now.
The real expense now is not actually that the land has gone up so much,
but the cost of marketing for an acquisition lead to find like a,
you know, an interested seller who's willing to take a discount has gone up dramatically.
Okay. And that's kind of what's made these affordable markets not so affordable anymore.
Because if you think like sending a single letter, like a direct mail piece
is like 50 cents and that's not a lot.
But if you have to send a thousand of them to buy a property,
well, that's five hundred dollars that you have to kind of staple into the cost
of that property. Right.
So when you're working with low stakes properties, all of a sudden the stakes
kind of they get out of control there a little bit. And the higher all the costs
go, the less wiggle room there is for really knowing exactly what you can buy and sell for.
Yeah, I know. It's interesting. As a side discussion that we're having here,
whether or not we meant to, obviously, there are still people out there.
And this is just for everyone listening.
There are still people out there who are using print marketing.
There's still a few of us that believe in that. And one of the reasons I talk
about it, and I'm actually even teaching a course on this and doing some mentoring
with young agents and people coming up, is to basically say, you know,
here's something that you need to know.
It's only written in this book. Yeah.
Social media, for the most part, training for a lot of the things we do in marketing doesn't exist.
So because of the fact that so many people, and I remember getting so much pushback
from people, even just like random people about the idea of,
you know, flyers don't work anymore.
And even, even for a while, I remember people saying email, you know,
is going to go, is going to be extinct soon. And this was 20 years ago,
and I think email is probably stronger now than it was.
And the reason is, and print marketing, I guess I'll just summarize that,
is it's a powerful tool because when people are reading that and it's about them,
there aren't 400 pop-ups on
that print marketing that are going to distract them and take them away.
Everything we do online, and I do it, I invest in online stuff.
I want to see what works. I want to see what fails.
But when someone's reading, you know, a print piece and it doesn't have to be
very glamorous, but it has to be sort of about them.
It chances are they'll get, even if it's whatever it is, the goldfish,
the goldfish level of attention, even if it's eight seconds,
even if you just get eight seconds of uninterrupted time and they say,
well, maybe I'm interested in that.
That's probably way more than they're going to pay attention to something where
they can just scroll. OK, next next thing I'm going to keep scrolling up or whatever it is they do.
So, I mean, I really appreciate you sharing a lot of that sort of the background elements of that.
So we talked a little bit about your previous experience.
Previous life stories and what you're doing now.
So tell me a little bit about how, how does the future go? How does the future
look for you over the next, let's say five or 10 years?
As far as, you know, the place, the place that you're living in,
you're living in, you said in Texas.
Yeah. Right outside of Dallas, Texas. Right outside of Dallas.
Actually, I might be, I might actually be coming down to Houston later on this year.
So I'm going to try to reach out to anybody I've met from Texas.
The Realtor Conference for the National Association of Realtors Conference is
there. Might be coming down.
So I might be hooking up with some of you guys in real life, which would be cool.
But most importantly, and maybe doing some live podcasts right from there,
I think that would be even more fun because I haven't been to Texas yet and
just looking for a reason.
But hearing about what you're telling me and even just the popularity of the
fact that there's a show.
And of course, maybe you saw the clip with Jerry Jones, the Landman clip with Jerry Jones.
I kept watching it over and over again, just because I'm like,
man, this is some heavy duty acting from a football guy.
And it almost seems like he wasn't acting.
I think that's sort of the line. I'm not sure whether it is or not,
but because of the popularity of that show, because of the fact that you've
been doing this for a while, where do you see your business being,
let's say in the next 10 or 5 or 10 or 15 years?
Yeah, so kind of as a side note, one of the things that I think is really savvy
when you start making money in real estate is picking a way to get it out of real estate.
So a lot of people kind of graduate from real estate to businesses, buying businesses.
And I'm working with a local guy here. We're going to start opening.
We're doing our first one this year, but we're opening coffee shops here in Dallas.
So that's going to be kind of half my time, I would say.
But as far as real estate goes, I'm really trying to find a way to chase my passion a little bit.
And if I, I wouldn't say land per se is a passion, but I really like the idea
of providing affordable communities to young families.
So my goal is to move from, you know,
strictly doing land and subdividing land and things like that to trying to build
really intentionally designed affordable communities that can never be turned into rentals.
So the projects, and I've kind of been diagramming it for a while,
but the idea is build a community where everybody has a one acre lot that kind
of circles around a common area in the middle that has a park and things that are great for families.
Then create the homes where they start as maybe a two one.
So they're really affordable to purchase a two bedroom, one bath,
but have it designed and kind of already have the architectural renderings for an addition.
So when you have kids, you can add another bedroom, add another bathroom,
and it's already designed in such a way to receive those additions without a lot of headache.
And that's, that's kind of where I want to be is I do want to get into that
sort of light intentional development in the future.
In the meantime, I'm probably going to move into like starting to park manufactured
homes, which have increased in quality a lot here in America,
putting manufactured homes on lots.
You can effectively double the value if you have a lot run utilities and put
a manufactured home on it.
So just trying to make more money off of fewer deals that seems to keep my stress
level lower while continuing to do funding and development and a lot of the
stuff that really is not too time consuming,
but it's still generating a fair bit of, you know, revenue.
Yeah, no, that sounds like a pretty good plan. I wish you nothing but the best,
Logan, as far as that goes.
And by all means, if and when, again, you've got some plans to share for new
ideas, for new avenues, and even if it's just to plug the coffee shop,
I'm happy to help get the word out there.
I've actually been, weirdly enough, attracting sponsors all over Canada and
the US and a couple in Texas.
So obviously there are people that are
listening there to again just these really great
discussions that i'm i'm you know i'm just part of i'm
i'm sort of you know i get to be on the screen with you
guys that's enough for me i don't really
you know i i i'm so interested in this stuff and
the reason i'm going down to maybe maybe maybe or maybe not the texas one the
houston one but the reason i've gone down to these conferences and one of the
reasons i started the podcast was because of conversations I get to have with
just like just monsters in real estate, people who were, you know.
Sometimes, you know, at a level that, you know, I wouldn't even dream of being,
but I've had these conversations with them and I've benefited so much.
Like it's almost unfair. It's kind of like business steroids.
So I'll pick up something from a conversation. And then 10 minutes later,
and this is, I guess what happened is 10 minutes later, I'm like,
man, I got all this great stuff.
I put it all in my handy notebook, but that's it. The conversation's over.
They forget about it. I forget about it. But because of the podcast,
I'm having these conversations now in this manner, which is a way to sort of
go back and say, what the hell were we talking about last time, me and you?
And I can actually rewatch the podcast and say, okay, we were talking about
that. Let's, let's keep talking about, you know, X, Y, Z, whatever it is.
But Logan, thanks so much for joining me. Obviously, you haven't said much about
it yet, but tell everybody who's listening a little bit about your podcast because,
of course, I want people listening to podcasts in an addictive manner.
I actually want people off social media and listening to podcasts full time. Go to the gym.
This is what I do. I plug in a podcast.
I'm tuned in. I'm learning, and I guess I call it learning and burning. it.
So I'm learning stuff and I'm burning calories and burning off the,
you know, the anger from the day before, from the negotiation I had the day before.
But tell everybody a little bit about your podcast and then we'll call it a day.
Yeah. So my podcast, it's all about land. That's all I talk about.
Land news, land development, land investing strategies, everything I can think
of about land. And it's a giant topic.
So I'm never going to run out of information, but it's called the Land Fixer
podcast. You can find it on any of the old pod catchers.
It's on YouTube. If you want to see me for some reason, while I'm talking,
we do have on guests who are, you know, full-time live real estate investors that focus only on land.
So you can kind of learn from them a little bit and how they do it.
Other than that, if you ever want to get in touch with me, you can reach me
at the land fixer at gmail.com.
If you're interested in buying land, you can go to primelandexchange.com.
We have land there for sale.
Awesome, Logan. Thank you so much for joining me as the first guest on my show for the year.
I was a guest on somebody else's show this week, so it was kind of my warmup
for the new year. But thanks for having me. Thanks for joining me here.
Happy to join you on yours. But of course, again, you're welcome to share this as your episode.
Either way, thanks again for joining me and I appreciate your time.
Yeah. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Logan.