The Mail Room

Before I found deals with data, I found them with paper. Lots of paper.

It started with one letter from 90210

In 2015 I learned about mailing cash offers to landowners. The first call came from the 90210 area code. The owner had two 5-acre desert lots in 29 Palms, California, and sold me both for $500 each. I sold one on Craigslist for $4,700 and the buyer mailed me a check. I was hooked. If I could buy land for $500 and sell it for $4,700, how many times could I do that?

Send more mail

The answer was simple: send more mail. In 2019 I wrote that I had 38 pending accepted offers from a single week of mailers sitting on my desk. “If I had not sent any mail out, I would not be evaluating these deals.” That became the rule. I mailed more offers, answered the phone as fast as I could go, and put the best areas on auto-mail every three months.

Over the years I mailed cash offers to most of the vacant landowners in the country, in every state except Alaska. I bought land in most counties of every state and sold it too.

The garage became a mail room

My mailing capacity kept growing. I hired out multiple print shops, then started bringing it in-house when COVID wrecked print-shop timelines. I bought folder-inserter machines off eBay and Craigslist (Formax, Neopost, and a Quadient), ran envelopes through a Hasler envelope printer, ordered container loads of custom envelopes from China and pallet loads of toner.

Eventually I converted my 4-car garage into a full mail room with three full-time employees. I bought extra machines just for parts, because they always break in the middle of a run. The technicians who fixed mail-stuffing machines started coming to my shop for parts — they said I had the best parts selection in Southern California. One of those mechanics and all three of those employees still invest in my deals today.

Too much mail for the post office

All told, I’ve sent well over 1 million letters. At that volume, the mail outgrew my local post office. They barred me from dropping off that much mail at once. So I loaded my Toyota Tundra until the bumper nearly dragged on the road, and when that wasn’t enough, I rented Penske trucks to haul the mail to the big regional post office.

What all that mail built

• Well over 1 million cash-offer letters mailed to landowners
• Over 1,000 properties in inventory when COVID hit, funded by my own money and investors from my earlier Detroit house deals
• More than 1,500 land listings published on RuralVacantLand.com since 2016
• Over 40 serious land dealers listing their land on this website before COVID

Why I stopped mailing the way I used to

After COVID, rural land sold out and prices jumped. Lots of other people started mailing the same owners — a realtor in Texas told me some of his sellers were getting over 100 letters a month. It no longer made sense to keep mailing for the same small desert lots.

So I pointed the same playbook at bigger targets. I made one offer — $127,327.37 — to high-traffic retail land across the country. One mailer of 1,500 letters brought back 30 acceptances. Those deals became land for developers, cities and national brands, and they taught me the Reverse Deal Finder approach I use now: reverse-engineer what a brand wants, then find the site — often with no direct mail at all.