Building Freedom Through Dirt: How Land Investing Changed Everything with Brent Bowers

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. We are here with Brent Bowers. Brent, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, so give us a bird’s eye view of what you do and what you’re all about.

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, so I am a simple land investor. I do simple land flips. I find land to buy.

I like to buy that land and turn around and sell it. And if possible, I want to sell it on seller financing. I just hung up with one of my realtors.

I was like, what’s up with this land? I had a piece in Florida, and we have a small barn on it. And he’s like, ah, he only wanted to put 10% down.

Or he told me we had an offer. He only wanted to put 10% down. I was like, why don’t you call me about this?

Like, I am negotiable, man. We haven’t had any offers. Like, we’ll take it.

So it’s just, I love to sell with 10% down. So I want to be the bank. I want to collect payments.

It’s like having rental properties that I never have to go out and repair.

[Mattias]
Yeah, there’s no toilets, typically.

[Brent Bowers]
No leaking roofs, no HVAC. I just had a, so I have some houses I’m selling off. But we just had a rental go vacant.

And squatters went in there. And we couldn’t get rid of them. You know how we got rid of them?

We condemned the property with the police department. And they ripped out my boiler, my water heater, the electrical meter. Like, we can’t turn water, we can’t turn gas on.

Like, they did like $10,000 worth of damage. I’m just like, dirt? No one’s ever damaged any of my land.

You can steal the dirt, maybe, and cut down the trees. But there’s more dirt underneath it.

[Mattias]
What state are you operating out of? Are you investing all around with the land?

[Brent Bowers]
I started in Colorado Springs, El Paso County, Colorado, because that’s where I was stationed out at Fort Carson when I was in the military. I expanded out to Arizona, and then Florida. That’s where I was originally from.

And my dad was in Florida. Now we’re in Tennessee, and Georgia, and the Carolinas. I think that’s about it.

Yeah, we’ve done some deals in California. Like, I don’t care what you hear about California. My, by far, one of my favorite land deals was in California.

[Mattias]
Okay, and I would imagine, I mean, you said you had rental properties. I imagine the starting point for you was not land.

[Brent Bowers]
How you got into real estate? Yeah, well, I was reading, you know, I read Think and Grow Rich, like every other person that’s in real estate, and I was reading The Art of the Deal when I was in middle school by Donald Trump, President Trump now. And I was always interested in real estate.

I went to seminars at like 18, and I was looking at the guy up there teaching that stuff, talking about all the doors he had, the 100 plus doors. I was like, one day I’m gonna be him, you know? And I saw it, I saw the vision.

I forget who says it, but he says, if you can hold the vision in your mind, you can hold it in your hand. And that was the vision I had in my mind. One day I was gonna teach people how to do this stuff.

So I started out with the real estate business in 2007. I was a realtor for about two days. I made the offer on the first house I can find.

It’s just like, in Exit Realty, they have a training agent. So the person that recruited me, she got a listing and I made an offer on it, and I bought it as a rental. And then 2008 happened, 2009, and man, I quit.

I was like, this is too hard. I can’t do this. And I ended up having to move in with my in-laws, me, my wife, and our dog.

And I was like, man, I’ll join the military because the military’s gotta be easier than real estate. So I took a little break because I was in Germany and deployed back-to-back deployments to Afghanistan. So I took a break from real estate till about 2013.

[Mattias]
Okay. What part of Germany?

[Brent Bowers]
I was in Bamberg, Bamberg, Bamberg. The Americans pronounce it Bamberg, but I think the Germans call it Bamberg.

[Mattias]
Okay, cool. Okay, so then you came back and then you kind of got back into real estate. And is that when you started buying more rentals or did you start getting more money?

[Brent Bowers]
So the Army pulled me out of Afghanistan on my second deployment and sent me to school to be an Army officer. So I went to a little school called Florida Tech in Brevard County. It was the closest school I can get to my parents because I’d been away from home for several years at this point.

And me and my wife had just literally split up because I was gone the whole time, all the time. So I’m now a new bachelor. And so I bought the house next to the college and I rented out the rooms.

So I guess they call that, they call it pad share or whatever they call it now. But I was like house hacking, that’s it. That got me my start.

I was making probably several hundred dollars a month in living there for free. And I was the maintenance guy. It was a bank owned foreclosure.

I had a ton of equity in it. We painted it, put all new carpet, new appliances, water heater, just decked it out. And I furnished the rooms and I was the guy that mowed the grass.

And I just enjoyed living there. And I was making hundreds of dollars a month doing that. So I took the equity I had in that and I did a cash out refi.

I got a check for 55 grand and I was getting student loans at the same time. So I bought another house and fixed it up with all that money. So I just kept snowballing that.

And then we moved to Colorado. I met a new lady. I’m still married to her today.

We have three kids. And I bought a triplex in another house in Colorado. And when our first baby came in 2016, I had seven doors and I was just like, there’s no way I can ever leave the military with seven rentals.

If I quit my job, there’s no way. Well, I let my real estate license go, by the way. That continuing education, when I saw that, I was like, heck no, I’m not doing that.

I’m not taking another test. God bless real estate agents for having all that continuing education. And it was costing all these fees and I wasn’t making money because I wasn’t selling real estate.

But going back to not being able to leave the military, I had bought a bunch of terrible rentals in Colorado. And this triplex was basically falling into the ground. So if I would have left my army job, I would have lost these rentals because there was only a couple of them actually netting profit.

So I was like, I gotta find something. I had wholesale a few houses prior to help pay for the schooling because I used my student loans to buy a house so I had to pay for the classes somehow. I just started listening to podcasts just like this, like the REI Agent Podcast.

And I was just listening, trying to learn. I never listened to music. My car was like a mobile university because I knew I didn’t want to keep deploying to Afghanistan.

We were preparing for another deployment. This time there was babies involved. And I heard a guy talking about land investing.

And he was like, I’m doubling my money overnight by buying this junk land and selling it. And I was like, shoot, I’ve never made money on a real estate deal. It’s all been buy and hold and wait except for the couple wholesales that I did.

And I was kind of hooked. I immediately went home and took action that evening. And it really paid off.

[Mattias]
Yeah, okay, so tell me the strategy behind it. I mean, so what’s the angle here? You know, when you think about investing in land, or one of the things that one might think of is you buy land, you can’t really, you can maybe rent it out to a farmer or something for some cows and cover the taxes and some maintenance on the land.

But it ultimately, it ultimately is just gonna be costing you money. You know, if you buy it in cash, it’s gonna be costing you at least the taxes until something gets put on it. So yeah, tell me the strategy here.

[Brent Bowers]
That’s what I thought too. I came from a cattle town. I thought the only way you own land is if you’re rich or you’re a cattle farmer or a dairy farmer.

I didn’t know how to make money with land. And that’s why that podcast just shook my world because no one else was talking about this. I heard you buy land and wait.

30 years from now, maybe they’ll put a parking lot there or a mall or a housing development. And I wasn’t gonna develop because I was pretty busy in the military. But this strategy, I’ve changed it a little bit since I started, but I literally just started mailing people that were behind on their taxes, like way behind.

This was the county held tax delinquent list in El Paso County, Colorado. And this was land that no one was paying the back taxes on, not even the investors that wanna make an interest rate on their money. And how that works is basically the more people that bid on it, the less the interest you get.

Well, no one was paying these back taxes. So when these people received a letter from me, they were like, heck yeah, I got a sucker. I’ll sell this stuff.

Because it wasn’t buildable, not accessible, landlocked, you name it, there’s all kinds of issues why this land wasn’t worth much. But I always go to one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. People want to own American land.

Now, these are my first deals. That’s not how I do it today. But I sent out 687 postcards, and I still use these postcards today.

But it was basically like, hey, my name’s Brent. Mattias, I’d like to buy your land in El Paso County, Colorado. If you’re interested in all cash, fair price offer, call me or text me.

God bless you. And sure enough, people called me. And the first one was like, yeah, I owe $285 in back taxes.

You can have it. And I was like, whoa, okay. So I went and looked at the land.

I had no clue what it’s worth. Called the real estate office. Thank God a realtor answered the phone on a Saturday, and she was very familiar with the area.

She’s like, oh, because I was like, what’s the blowout price? What do you think you can sell it for? What’s your get-or-done-now price?

Because I don’t want to be sitting like a year from now trying to sell this land. And she’s like, maybe about $10,000. And I was like, my eyes almost popped out of my head.

I was like, $10,000? Back in 2016, that was like winning the lottery for me. That was like what I made in three months.

So she ended up actually making an offer on it for 5K. We agreed to do the deal. Basically, she can close the following week.

I called the seller. I was like, hey, I already sold the land. I’m gonna get paid on it Wednesday.

Can I write you a check? You give me a deed, and I’ll take it to the title insurance company, and I’ll pay you on Wednesday. I’ll call you on Wednesday and tell you you can cash the check.

And he trusted me, and we did the deal. And I just kept doing those over and over. And the second one actually turned into a seller financing deal.

That’s how I learned that. People ask me how I learned seller financing. I was like, I don’t know.

I just put it on Craigslist, $500 down, 400 a month, and we figured it out from there. And I just kept growing it. And before I knew it, I was making over 12,000 a month in payments from land.

And now it’s turned into today where we go on the internet. We see we’re land selling. We price it out.

And we have a software program that automatically sends offers to landowners. And we get land deals in our inbox. So that’s really, if I can just sum it up in a nutshell.

We make a bunch of offers every day. Not everyone accepts them, but when they do, it’s like, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching. Some are bigger, some are smaller.

There’s all kinds of buyers. Sometimes they live in Japan. Sometimes they live right next door to us, or they wanna own the land.

Sometimes it’s a neighbor. A neighbor. I’ve never met a neighbor that didn’t wanna own the land next to them.

But I’m gonna pipe down for a minute and let you talk.

[Mattias]
No, that makes a lot of sense. When you’re doing one of those deals where you’re owner financing it. I’m blanking there for a second.

That’s a very simple thing to say. When you’re doing owner financing on this deal. So when you structured that first deal, the example you gave, you basically had everything lined up so you didn’t really bring the money and have it owned fully in cash.

I mean, you had that kind of lined up to have the buyer or whatever pay for it essentially. What about when you’re doing an owner financing? Is at that point, are you buying that deal in cash and then you’re just getting the payments back?

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, that second deal, the lady was like, yeah, give me 500 bucks because her husband was a stock trader. He bought it. This one was actually not accessible land.

It was four and a half acres next to NORAD on the Cheyenne Mountain. Basically next to the Cheyenne Mountain State Park. So surrounded by state park.

I mean, how much better can it get? And I bought it for 500. I actually negotiated with the lady and she’s like, you can get off my porch because I know I’m giving you a deal.

And I was like, I didn’t know I had a deal. Honestly, I was just scared to spend 500 bucks. Really was.

So I wasn’t trying to hustle her. If I know what it was worth today, it’s worth a lot of money today. But this was in 2016 as well.

So I just wanted my 500 bucks back. So I went on Craigslist. I should have called that same realtor actually.

I ended up doing like 18 parcels of land in that one area. And then that buyer ended up turning it into like a conservation easement and sells green credits to corporations. And he’s made over like a million bucks doing it.

So there’s so many ways to make money with land. There’s always another way to make money with land. So I put it on Craigslist, the second parcel that I bought for $500.

I put it for $500 down, 400 a month. And sure enough, I had this guy just wanted a piece of hunting land and he bought it. And I said, you’re gonna have to figure out the access.

I can’t afford an attorney. So you’re gonna have to hire him. And he did.

Like this guy was a mechanic. And if I only knew, boy, I let that land go for 5,000. It’s probably worth 500,000 today.

Five acres next to an ORAD like that. But anyhow, hindsight’s 20-20. And my sixth property, the sixth one, the seller gave me seller financing at 0% interest.

He just went up 30 grand down. 30,000 down, that’s all he needed. Well, I didn’t have 30,000, so I called USAA.

They gave me a $30,000 loan at 14% interest. And then I sold that land to someone for 29,000 down. And I gave him a mortgage for 30 years.

So I paid off almost, I had like 1,000 more I had to pay off the USAA. But I gave him, we did what’s called a sandwich mortgage. I had a 0% loan, and I gave him a 6% loan.

He ended up dying, my buyer, several years later. And his children, not his children, his siblings, his sister and brother, sold it. I bought it for 75.

I sold it for 159. I ended up making about 150K from the interest I collected and the sale of it over, it was over actually a five-year period. But really, if you look at a 30-year mortgage, for seven years, it’s all interest.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, it’s so true. What’s your favorite deal you’ve done?

[Brent Bowers]
All of them. I’d say those three. Honestly, those three, because I remember them so well.

I’ve made way more money on deals than those. But I think those were the three most foundational ones. And I get the monthly income from it, which is life-changing.

I didn’t get into this business to get rich. I just wanted to get out of the military. I wanted time freedom.

Today, I work for almost three hours, and it’s almost time for the kids to come home. Now, some days I work more than others, but I just really like when someone pays me monthly payments for a piece of land. It really just works out.

It’s like having a bunch of rentals and not having to repair anything, what I already mentioned.

[Mattias]
Yeah, what are the, I mean, name some other uses. So hunting, recreation, what are some other uses for people that are buying these?

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, I got three acres we bought in Colorado Springs. It’s on a four-lane major highway. It’s approved for a 34-unit townhome.

So we’re gonna, well, hopefully we got an offer on it. We’re gonna sell it to a builder, and we’re gonna joint venture with the builder on it. Other uses, I love putting brand-new mobile homes on some of this land.

I’ve got six of these going right now, where we’re putting brand-new mobile homes on it. And I’ve seen a lot of people, well, we bought some, and we built stick-built houses on it as well. I’m not the contractor or anything.

I’ll hire the contractor. But a lot of times I’ve seen people put cabins on it. Most of the land I’ve sold to people, they’ve never even touched it.

A lot of people just like to own land for one day maybe. I bought 120 parcels of land in the desert. I remember one of the buyers very specifically, they bought like 11 parcels from me.

I had a rule. You can’t just buy one, you know? You gotta buy more than one when I had that many.

But these guys were college students, and they had a van that they would buy land across the country and just go park on their own land and go through like online schooling.

[Mattias]
Okay. That would have not been one of my expected answers to my question.

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah. I’ve had people just buy mud holes for me just to go and destroy it, you know, on four-wheelers. And you name it.

Truck drivers, just a place to park when they make their route in Colorado.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s fascinating. So when you said you’re doing the mobile homes, that’s you putting that money into it, right? Are you then seller financing the whole shebang to them, or are you just doing it as a rental?

[Brent Bowers]
No, I actually sell them to FHA homebuyers, sometimes VA, sometimes USDA, sometimes conventional. But no, I don’t hold the financing on that. I haven’t done any of those yet.

I haven’t financed any of those. I probably should, though. That would probably be really good.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what the drawbacks of stuff would be on a mobile home versus a stick built on the financing side. But I know that it is harder to get financing sometimes as a buyer when it’s a mobile home.

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, we attach it to the land. We get a letter from an engineer, and I won’t do it unless I can get FHA, VA, conventional, USDA financing when I sell it. Now, when I sell it, I wanna make it so easy for someone to get a mortgage on it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, totally, that makes sense. I mean, that’s super fascinating. How do you pick the markets that you look at, look, invest in?

[Brent Bowers]
I keep it real simple. I wanna see land selling. I wanna see land selling.

Why? Well, it tells me there’s demand, too. It tells me what the land’s selling for.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Brent Bowers]
I look at the incoming states where people are moving into, and then I micro down with that, with our software program that we have with the Landsharks community. It makes it real easy to make these offers to these landowners and keep track of it, and the phone numbers, all of that goes in, and then the follow-up, it’ll email them and text them and call them and send them another mailer, because it’s all about the follow-up. When I got married, I had to go on a few dates with my wife before she would marry me, so.

You didn’t follow up with her? I did. I followed up with her probably too soon.

I probably followed up too soon. It was like the next day, but.

[Mattias]
Oh, that’s funny. Yeah, no, it’s true. I think that’s something that people fail at often in sales and, yeah, in anything, that they just forget to follow up or just get kind of overwhelmed with it all.

[Brent Bowers]
Oh, yeah, so easy.

[Mattias]
So easy. Rules can definitely help that. So, when you joint venture with a builder, are you basically providing the land as your capital?

Are you gonna be involved then with any of the other aspects?

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, I approve all the spending, because whenever I have a piece of land that’s free and clear, now this is, I’m not the expert on this. There’s probably people out there that can teach me how to do this better, but, well, not probably, I know. But one of the joint ventures we’re doing is we own the land.

Bank’s gonna put a mortgage on it and I’ll go in the second position, which is risky. But I approve every single penny that gets spent, because I wanna make sure that this money’s not used for something random and I get stuck with this bill three years later and the roads aren’t even in yet type thing.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And would you be driving by it to check up on the in-person stuff at all, do you think? Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

[Brent Bowers]
And I don’t do a ton of these. I’ve done a lot of just regular, simple land flips. This is a whole nother level of sophistication.

You want someone with boots on ground with this, because these deals can go south, they really can, and you don’t wanna leverage your property and get a bank loan on it and not know the steps. You need to be talking to that civil, you need to be on all that stuff. Don’t just say, all right, I’ve seller financed it, I’m gonna collect payments.

No, that’s risky.

[Mattias]
Yeah, to anybody that doesn’t understand what the second position means is just that if they were to go under, the bank would collect first and get paid in full before you’d be able to receive any penny, right?

[Brent Bowers]
That’s right, yeah, you need to make sure the taxes are paid on it, the bank’s paid, have a builder’s risk policy, just you name it, there’s a bunch of different things. And that’s not, again, that’s not my expertise by any means.

[Mattias]
But yeah, it could definitely be a profitable venture done carefully. Absolutely it is, absolutely. Yeah, so tell us a little bit, I mean, you’re gonna be able to plug websites and stuff down the line here, but tell us a little bit more about this Landsharks community you mentioned.

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, absolutely, and I should’ve gave out the link, I put this on a link before I got on this podcast, that postcard that I was talking about. If anybody wants a copy of that postcard, it’s simple, it’s black and white, it’s handwritten, they can go to the landsharks.com forward slash postcard. The community, the Landsharks community, pretty small, tight-knit community.

I interview everyone that comes in. I wanna make sure that we’re bringing in people that are gonna raise the tide, rather than lower the tide. A rising tide rises all ships, but when it’s going down, you see who’s naked.

So I wanna make sure that we are bringing just winners in our community that wanna work and that wanna do land deals, and we coach them, show them exactly the steps to take, exactly the blueprint, and we do three calls a week just for the land side, and I do two of them, and I have another land investor doing a third one. But yeah, it’s just a great community. A lot of people doing land deals.

We fund the land deals with joint venture together. It’s like you wanna learn how to run marathons, just hang out with people, run the marathons on the weekend. That’s kinda what we’ve created, this incubator of that.

[Mattias]
Totally, I mean, that’s such a great way to, yeah, anything you wanna learn how to do, do better. Yeah, surround yourself with those people and weed out the people that are gonna be poo-pooing on all your aspirations because they’re probably feeling insecure about themselves.

[Brent Bowers]
It happens, you know, and it’s just, and it’s like every time I get on one of these calls, I could be having a bad day, and then Jeremiah just got a win where he just made $23,000 selling the mineral rights to the gas company, and he still owns the land. He’s now selling that for 1,500 acres times 79 acres. Like, I realize, like, man, you just made 140 grand, and you don’t even make that in a whole entire year on one land deal.

Like, now I’m having a better day, you know, so I really enjoy it. I told you, I wanted to be that guy at the front of the room when I was going to those seminars.

[Mattias]
Yeah, it’s a different thing. You’re not talking about your doors. It’s a little different, but it’s, you’re there.

That’s right. That’s awesome.

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, my doors suck. We’re actually unloading a 19-unit apartment complex right now. I thought I was, you know, this awesome real estate investor.

Back in 2018, we had this apartment, someone wanted to sell me an apartment complex, and we were gonna wholesale it. Could have made like 85 grand wholesaling it. Like, that was good money.

Still is, and I had so many offers on this thing, and I was like, I got greedy. I was like, man, if this many people are offering me, I should keep this. Well, we had to do the foundation, and the roofs, and the plumbing, and the electrical.

We had to rebuild these things. It took us like six years. Well, Colorado Springs built a whole bunch of brand new state-of-the-art apartment complexes with like hot tubs, and pools, and bars on the roof while renovating these 1961 old army barracks, basically.

Actually, they were Air Force barracks. Like, we put a lot of lipstick on these pigs, but you know, it’s just, by the time we did that, interest rates went up, rents went down, and it kind of got stuck holding the bag. So, we’re unloading those right now.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I was just thinking that instead of talking about the doors you have, you could say, I have six trillion roots.

[Brent Bowers]
That’s funny.

[Mattias]
I don’t know if that’s a close estimation at all.

[Brent Bowers]
I like that. Yeah, there’s a lot of trees on some of this stuff, and then you can count the grass, and that’s good, six trillion roots.

[Mattias]
What, I mean, so what would you say would be your biggest mistake in the investing space?

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, well, one recently, I talked about that barn with the offer I had on it. So, I bought this land a few years ago from a wholesaler, and that wholesaler made 77 grand on an assignment fee, and I was proud of that. I was like, man, you did well, I’m doing well.

I paid 115K, land was selling for 55,000 an acre all day long, and I just got four acres for like 27,000 an acre, give or take a few dollars. And I’m like, this is a no-brainer, right? I’m gonna double my money on this thing.

Well, we had tons of interest, tons of people looking at it. I’m like, why is no one making an offer? And I was like, I called my assistant, and I said, hey, just see if we can get a building permit on it.

We’ll either put mobile homes on it, or we’ll build houses on these things. Well, the county says, you can’t build on it. I’m like, what, what do you mean I can’t build on it?

Well, you need to put the asphalt, curbs, gutters, all that, and I was like, it shows the rows right on the assessor’s website. So, me nor no one from my team, nor anyone from my team, called the county to see what the process to get a building permit was. I was like, there’s no curbs and gutters anywhere in this neighborhood.

Everything’s on dirt road. So, they wanted me to invest, which the developer didn’t do, that cut out those lots. So, we would never be able to build on this land.

So, I was like, well, what do I do? And we put a, well, back up a little bit. I was like, I wonder if someone would wanna like an agricultural barn on four acres.

This is horse country out here. And I was like, let me do a ghost ad on Facebook. So, I basically put the barn I was gonna build next to the land, and I had like 59 messages in two days.

And I was like, okay, that tells me there’s interest. Let’s do it. So, we bought the barn, had it erected.

I built a big barn, too, like 20 foot tall ceiling, 16 foot roll-up door, 80 foot long, 24 foot wide, 1920 square foot. We build it, post it on Facebook. Crickets, like that’s right now.

I’m talking about a deal right now. So, I don’t know if Facebook’s like blocking me or what, but then we had to deal with the county and all that crap. We’re dealing with them right now, and just, it’s been a pain in the butt.

But that’s why I opened it up. My realtor’s like, tell me, I’ll take anybody that makes an offer on this place. Usually, a deal like that, you take the first offer and run with it, and you just call it a win and live to fight another day.

So, there was a bunch of mistakes made in that really short time period, but I think the reason why those mistakes were made was because I had too many other deals going that were great. And I got, like my grandmother would say, I got too big for my britches and got cocky. So, that’s why I have a due diligence checklist that I try to give out to people.

If someone wants it, go to thelandsharks.com, forward slash DDE, and follow those steps. Like, all 14 of those items have got me at one point or another. So, let my misfortune, my learning, which I wouldn’t trade it, I wouldn’t trade it at all, but let my learning be someone else’s wise moment.

Like, stupid people learn from their own mistakes, wise people learn from other people’s mistakes.

[Mattias]
Yeah, and also, like, if you’re scared about making mistakes, and that’s what’s stopping you from doing it, know that most people in your shoes that have made mistakes are like, you know, I would do it again. Like, I mean, like we, all the value, all the money, all the whatever you’ve earned outside of this one, you know, far supersedes it. And even if it’s your first deal that you don’t do 100% well on, it’s kind of like a cost of education.

I mean, because you’re gonna learn so much in that process. I’m thinking about flips, too. You know, like, I mean, that’s definitely.

Oh, yeah. I got kind of, I don’t know if it’s lucky or unlucky, where my first flip was probably the most profitable one I’ve done.

[Brent Bowers]
You got spoiled right off the bat, huh?

[Mattias]
Yeah, it’s almost like the most dangerous spot to be in. Like, I started as a real estate agent in like 2021, where, you know, you step outside and like, people are throwing offers at you. But yeah, anyway.

I’m curious if you have any golden nuggets you wanna share with the community?

[Brent Bowers]
Well, just like you just said, you can’t be so afraid. Everyone looks at the negative. Well, look at the positive.

Also, look at what will happen if you are sitting here in the same job, same thing, doing the same thing 10 years from now. Are you able to live with that? Will you be happy with that?

Because I think, like, just like Tony Robbins says, people overestimate what they can accomplish in one year, but underestimate what you can accomplish in a decade. I’ve been doing real estate for over a decade now, and it’s just unbelievable what I’ve accomplished. I would say I probably wasn’t successful till about probably 2016, in my eyes.

So we’re about to hit 2026. That’s a decade, and I’ve amassed a bunch of real estate. And going back to one other thing you just said, too, about being scared.

Like, love my dad. He is the hardest-working man I’ve ever met, but his mind goes to the negative. All the things that can go wrong.

And I’m like, dad, I don’t even think of any of those things. So I think we get what we think about, and we attract what we think about. Like, we have a Landsharks community member, and he was that poopy pants that you mentioned.

And he’s done very well on land now, but at first, he had all these negative, like, well, what if a realtor steals my deal from me, my land deal, because I use realtors to sell most of my land. I love using land specialist real estate agents. Well, I was like, now I’m not gonna say his name, but I was like, bro, that’s never happened to me, ever.

This was like two years ago, and I started land in 2016. So for several years, I’ve been doing that. You won’t believe it.

A month later, he goes, yeah, this broker stole this land deal from me, I was gonna make 30 grand. I was like, you frickin’ manifested that, man. I didn’t even think about that.

So I’ll never forget that.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, it is crazy how that works. You attract what you think about.

[Brent Bowers]
Where energy goes, where focus goes, where focus goes, energy flows, you know?

[Mattias]
Then you’re just gonna prove yourself right, always.

[Brent Bowers]
Oh, yeah, every day, man, I journal every morning. It takes me like five minutes. I try and track my five wins that I had in the last 24 hours.

And then I also do five things I’m grateful for, or five people, or whatever. It could be anything I’m grateful for. And then I do five more wins I wanna see happen.

And two out of those five that I’ve marked down today have already happened, and the day’s not over yet. So sometimes I dream, sometimes it’s just simple stuff. But it’s crazy, just that five minutes a day is powerful.

[Mattias]
Okay, I like that.

[Brent Bowers]
That’s my golden nugget.

[Mattias]
I love it, that was perfect. What about a fundamental book that you think everybody should read, or just one that you currently really enjoy?

[Brent Bowers]
Definitely the Bible. Even if you don’t understand it, I don’t care. Read it out loud.

Everyone should be reading the Bible. No excuses. And then the number two in my real estate book is The Wealthy Gardener.

[Mattias]
Okay, is that land-specific, being a gardener?

[Brent Bowers]
No, no. It all starts with land, my friend. It all starts with land.

You want a garden, you need some land. If you want a house, you’re gonna need some land.

[Mattias]
True, that’s true. I love it, cool. I don’t think that one’s been on before, so I’ll have to check it out.

[Brent Bowers]
My favorite real estate book. I like it, listen to it on Audible, honestly. It’s such a beautiful story.

[Mattias]
Okay, yeah, check it out. And then you mentioned your website. Is there a social media or anything else, a good place for people to find you?

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, I’m pretty active on Facebook. Brent L. Bowers, hit me up on YouTube, subscribe to my channel.

I try and put out a video a week, at least.

[Mattias]
And that was thelandsharks.com?

[Brent Bowers]
Yeah, if someone wants to schedule a call with me, go to thelandsharks.com. You’ll get on my calendar. Maybe we can kinda see what you’re up to or what you wanna do.

Maybe I can point you in the right direction.

[Mattias]
I love it. Brent, hey, thanks so much for being on the show. This has been really fun, and you’ve opened my eyes because I’ve not considered this type of investing in this way.

Thank you, thank you so much for having me.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit reiagent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.