Seth Williams (00:00 )
I was able to buy a lot of land at dirt cheap prices. So there's no mortgages or anything on it. And when you buy anything for a small fraction of its actual market value, it's not hard to turn around and sell that thing and make money on it.

Jason Hull (00:14 )
All right, I am Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of property management businesses, helping them add doors, improve pricing, increase profit.

simplify operations and build and replace entire teams, we are like bar rescue for property managers. In fact, we have cleaned up and rebranded over 300 businesses and we run the leading property management mastermind with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. At DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and

residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. And my guest today I'm hanging out with is Seth Williams. Welcome, Seth.

Seth Williams (01:28 )
Hey, Jason, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jason Hull (01:31 )
Yeah, it's great to have you and of REtipster. so Seth, let's get into a little bit of your background. You've done a lot of different things connected to real estate. Give us the background on your journey and how you got it kind of got into entrepreneurism and what made you start all this crazy stuff.

Seth Williams (01:48 )
Yeah, sure.

Yeah. Well, my journey kind of starts back in about 2005, 2006 when I was still in college. And like most people, I was trying to find houses I could buy that I could flip or rent that kind of thing. Just get into the real estate game. But I didn't really know anything about how to do it. I had no competitive advantage. I was looking on the MLS. That was the only place I knew I could look for to find deals.

And there weren't any deals. It was horrible. I spent hundreds of hours and found nothing that made any financial sense. And I was just like, man, how do people do this? Like, how do people find good real estate deals if I can't find them? I was looking everywhere and there was nothing out there. And it was around, you know, after struggling with this for a couple of years, I discovered two things that kind of worked hand in hand. The first was the land business. So buying vacant land and

Like most people, when I first heard that I was like, what? Picket land? Like, why would I do that? That makes no sense. It's just dirt. Like, where's the cash flow? Where's the income? The other thing that I discovered though was how to find deals off market through something called the delinquent tax list. And this is basically a list of property owners that every county has of properties that are currently back due on their property taxes. This is not the same thing.

Jason Hull (02:52 )
Yeah.

Seth Williams (03:11 )
as the tax sale list. So it's not the list of properties that's going to go up for auction soon. It's people who still own their property, but they're back doing taxes. If they don't pay them off soon, they're going to get their property taken from them. And these two things together, land and the delinquent tax list, I was able to find and contact people who had land with delinquent taxes on it. And because there were delinquent taxes, they're in a situation where it's like,

Jason Hull (03:18 )
Yeah, they're just behind.

Seth Williams (03:37 )
You got to pay off these taxes in like weeks or you're going to lose everything. So why are you in this situation? Is it because you don't care about the property? Like what is the issue? And in many cases, that was it. Maybe they just inherited it. Maybe they bought it 20 years ago, but for whatever reason, they didn't care about the thing. And I'm sitting there saying, Hey, I'll pay you a few hundred dollars, maybe a few thousand dollars, and I'll pay off your taxes and I'll make this problem go away.

And because a lot of these people didn't want their property anyway, and I was kind of taking care of a nuisance in their life, I was able to buy a lot of land at dirt cheap prices. And I could also buy it free and clear. So there's no mortgages or anything on it. And when you buy anything for a small fraction of its actual market value, it's not hard to turn around and sell that thing and make money on it. So that was the business I got into. And it's been awesome. It's changed a lot over the years, but

It's just been a really great way to, you know, without needing a whole lot of cash, finding properties, getting them for a very cheap price, and then making money without having to change anything on the property.

Jason Hull (04:45 )
Yeah, got it. Okay, cool. Is that still the go-to strategy? Delinquent tax lists.

Seth Williams (04:52 )
So, it's definitely still effective, but the drawback of the delinquent tax list is that they're kind of a pain to get, and then even when you do get them, they're kind of a mess to sort through. So, if you're willing to go through the nuisance of getting the list and sorting through it, there's a ton of value on that. But there's another way that's actually easier through a data service that I use called the LAN portal. And it's basically just a much more streamlined

Jason Hull (05:04 )
Yeah.

Yeah.

Seth Williams (05:20 )
seamless, organized way to get lists of landowners. They don't necessarily have delinquent taxes, but I can find specifically the types of properties I want and then either send the mail or a cold column, that kind of thing. So both ways work. They both have pros and cons. The delinquent tax list is more of an annoying way to do it, but it's probably the more effective way. The land portal is a lot easier, but you get a little bit less motivation on that list because people don't have this delinquent tax problem.

Jason Hull (05:48 )
Yeah, less of a mess to clean up, but probably a little quicker. so cool. you're going to unpack today the secrets of building wealth through land investing. This is like your number one specialty. And we'll chat a little bit about self storage. And I'm sure there's some property managers that are listening that might be like, haven't done that yet. Like I have not gotten into.

That sort of investment and most of the property managers listening you if you're on a property management business your number one goal Should not be to just manage other people's properties. It should probably be to build up your own portfolio of stuff and and make some money That's probably a bigger better play and leveraging your company to attract deals and to attract Real estate so let's get into this. Where do we start?

Seth Williams (06:37 )
Yeah, well, what I just described, there's kind of the high level view of how you find properties in the first place. And I mean, in terms of like people out there who are property managers who might invest in houses and that kind of thing, there's only one tax list or the land portal can work for those kinds of properties to the main difference is that you're going to find usually less competition when dealing with vacant land, because most people aren't thinking about land, thinking about houses. They think that's the way they have to do it.

And that's fine if you want that. But the problem with houses, as you probably know, in property management, there's a lot more wrinkles. There's a lot more people problems. There's things falling apart that are broken and get stolen and destroyed. With land, there's none of that. It's a much simpler animal to deal with. But if your strategy is to find rentals or something like that, you could certainly scope out rental properties using the same method. You would just be targeting different types of property owners than I do.

Jason Hull (07:10 )
Thank

got it. So how does this connect to self storage?

Seth Williams (07:34 )
Well, self storage is a totally different business than buying and selling vacant land, but there is some crossover. So back in 2021, I found a piece of land that was zoned residential. It was 6.7 acres and I bought it and I rezoned it to commercial. And then I got approval to build a self storage facility because I had always wanted to get into this business. A land business is great for

generating big influxes of cash. It's like a cash generating machine. But self storage is a little bit different. At least the way that I do it, it's more of a cash flow play. you know, all in all, took me a couple million dollars to buy the land and build this facility. It took me basically a year to design it and build it. And it's comparatively speaking, more of a trickle of cash, cash flow, but it's permanent cash flow. There's also a lot of depreciation write offs.

It's also very scalable. So it's easy to increase every single person's rent by $5 and the value effectively goes way up because of that. But like nobody moves out because it's just five bucks and most people don't care about a $5 increase per month. So it's a very different business. And for me, my long-ter