Mark Podolsky AKA The Land Geek – Land Investing
Monday December 10, 2018
Tune in to hear as Josh talks to Mark Podolsky about land investing and learn
- Why you would want to invest in land.
- How to turn raw land into monthly passive income in real estate without renters, renovations and rehabs.
- How to begin investing in land.
Mark Podolsky: So my firm hires this guy, and he’s telling me that as a side hustle he’s going to tax deed to auctions, he’s buying up raw land pennies on the dollar, and he’s flipping them online, and he’s making a 300% return on his investment.
Mark Podolsky: I’m thinking to myself, I’m looking at companies all day long, and a great company has 15% [inaudible 00:00:25] margins, or free cash flow. A great company.
Josh Mettle: Right.
Mark Podolsky: Your average company’s at 10%, and I’m looking at companies all day long at less than 10%, so I don’t believe him. So, we go to New Mexico, I’ve got $3,000 saved up for car repairs, and I do exactly what he says to do. I buy up 10 half acre parcels at an average price of $300 each, I put them online, they all sell for over $1,200 each in the next two weeks, so it worked! 300%.
Josh Mettle: Hello, and welcome to the Physician Financial Success Podcast. My name is Josh Mettle and this is the podcast dedicated to advising physicians how to avoid financial landmines.
Josh Mettle: This podcast is sponsored by the physician group at Fairway Independent Mortgage. Fairway recently expended their physician home loan program to encompass other medical professionals, including CRNA, RN, Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, veterinarians, dentists, and a host of other medical professionals.
Josh Mettle: Basically, if you have an advanced degree in the medical field, you’ll likely qualify for our medical professional program, and we’d love to hear from you. We invite you to reach out to us through our website, which is fairwayphysicianhomeloans.com, or you can call us at our direct line, 855-260-9932. We’re here and we’d absolutely love to hear from you.
Josh Mettle: Today we’ll be talking with Mark Podolski, AKA The Land Geek. Mark is an expert in building passive income through real estate investments without tenants, termites, and toilets. I love that. All of my real estate investments have toilets, if we could get rid of those that would be awesome.
Josh Mettle: Through Mark’s company, Frontier Equity Properties, Mark’s completed over 5,000 land deals, and he’s here today to teach us the art of engineering geeky systems that create, grow, and protect your cashflow. Brother, you’re speaking my language. Mark, welcome to the show, how are you doing today?
Mark Podolsky: Josh Mettle. Pulse is normal, respiration’s fine. I just created a Chemex coffee. I’m fired up. I’m ready to go.
Josh Mettle: You are ready to roll, and I will tell anybody who’s listening in to this on the audio version podcast rather than seeing it via video service, because we do both, Mark is walking. He’s on a walking, stand up desk, which is the first time I’ve ever done a podcast with somebody exercising during the podcast, so I love that.
Josh Mettle: I am wearing my ugly Christmas sweater because it’s our company Christmas party today, and it says, “When I think about you, I touch my elf,” and then of course there’s Santa touching his elf, and what’s even weirder is I had to explain this shirt to my 9 year old son this morning.
Mark Podolsky: Oh.
Josh Mettle: Zander looked really awkward at me and said, “Okay, it’s Friday. I know you have work today. That’s not a work outfit. It’s not an exercise outfit. So, why are you wearing that ugly sweater and what does that mean?” I had to tell him, “Well, you know, when you’ve been a good boy and Santa sees you, he has to touch his elf to let him know that you’re one of the kids who gets Christmas presents.”
Mark Podolsky: That … That’s really some incredible improv there, to be able to think that quickly.
Josh Mettle: Well, thank you. When you’ve got 9 year olds around you gotta think quick, Mark.
Mark Podolsky: Oh yeah.
Josh Mettle: So, buddy, tell us a little bit about your background and how in the world did you get started with land investing?
Mark Podolsky: Let’s rewind to like the year 2000, and I’m a miserable, micro-managed, over-worked, over-stressed investment banker, and I specialized in mergers and acquisitions with private equity groups. I had a forty minute commute to work and back and it got so bad for me, Josh, that I wouldn’t get the Sunday blues anticipating Monday coming around, I’d get the Friday blues anticipating the weekend going by really fast and having to be back at work on Monday.
Mark Podolsky: So, my firm hires this guy, and he’s telling me that as a side hustle he’s going to tax deed to auctions. He’s buying up raw land, pennies on the dollar, and he’s flipping them online, and he’s making a 300% return on his investment. I’m thinking to myself, I’m looking at companies all day long, and a great company, a great company, has 15% evened out margins, or free cash flow. A great company.
Josh Mettle: Right.
Mark Podolsky: Your average company’s at 10%, and I’m looking at companies all day long, less than 10%, so I don’t believe him. So, we go to New Mexico. I’ve got $3,000 saved up for car repairs, and I do exactly what he says to do. I buy up 10 half acre parcels at an average price of $300 each, I put them online, they all sell for over $1,200 each in the next two weeks. So, it worked! 300%.
Mark Podolsky: So I took all that money, I went to another auction where I live, in Arizona, and again this is 2000, there’s zone in the room. I’m buying up lots. I’m buying up acreage. I sold all that property and it took about six months, and I made over $90,000.
Josh Mettle: Wow.
Mark Podolsky: So, I said to my wife, I’m like, “Honey, I want to quit my job, and I want to become a full time land investor.” She’s pregnant at the time, and she’s like, “Absolutely not.” So, I worked land investing as a side hustle, and it took about 18 months for the land investing income to exceed the investment banking income, and then I quit, and I’ve been doing it full time ever since.
Josh Mettle: Awesome man. That is a great story. I’m glad to hear that you eventually convinced your wife. I think that was sound advice of her, by the way, to say, “Absolutely not,” and make you prove yourself. That was pretty cool.
Mark Podolsky: No, and she’s annoying in that way. She’s like, “You know I’m always right,” and I’m like, “I know.”
Josh Mettle: Oh man. It sounds like you’ve been married as long as me.
Mark Podolsky: Oh yeah, 21 years.
Josh Mettle: Awesome man.
Mark Podolsky: Yeah.
Josh Mettle: All right, listen. Your website is pretty interesting and it says a few things that I want to chat about and have you tell me about because again, I have zero knowledge in this space of yours, but the website says, “Investing in land can be simple and low-risk,” so, help us understand how an investment can be simple, lucrative, and low-risk.
Mark Podolsky: Okay. So, I’m going to walk you through it step by step.
Josh Mettle: Cool.
Mark Podolsky: Josh, where do you live?
Josh Mettle: Salt Lake City, Utah.
Mark Podolsky: You’re in Salt Lake City. Okay. So, I’m going to go to the county treasurer and I’m going to go to this county in Texas and I see, oh my gosh, Josh Mettle owns 10 acres in Texas and he owes $200 in back taxes. Josh, you’re advertising two things to me, number one, you have no emotional attachment to that raw land. You’re in Utah, the property is in Texas and number two, you’re distressed in some way because if we don’t pay for something, we don’t value it anymore.
Mark Podolsky: Now, I don’t know what’s going on with you but somethings going on and you’ve been getting notices from the treasurer every single month, that if you don’t pay your taxes you’re going to lose your property either to a tax deed investor or a tax lien investor. So, what I’ll do then, is I’m going to look at the comparable sales. Let’s say 12 to 18 months on those similar 10 acre parcels and then, all I’m going to do is divide by four and that’s going to get me what Warren Buffet would call a 300% margin of safety.
Mark Podolsky: So, in our example, if the comps ar $10,000, the most I’m going to pay for your parcel is $2,500. So, I’m not going to be like the housing guys. I’m not going to say I’m interested in buying your land. I’m going to send you an actual offer of $2,500 for your property. Now, you’re going to accept it because $2,500 is better than nothing.
Mark Podolsky: Now, in reality, 3% to 5% of people except our “top dollar offers” but you accept it and so, the next step for me is I’ve got to go through a list of what we call, due diligence, or in depth research. Number one, I’ve got to make sure you still own the property. Number two, I’ve got to confirm that the taxes are only $200. Number three, I’ve go to make sure there’s no breaks in the chain of title. Number four, I’ve got to make sure there’s no liens or encumbrances clouding that title. Number five, I’ve got to make sure there’s something compelling about the property. Why is anyone else gonna want to buy that property? Then, I go down the line and essentially what we do on these parcels is we outsource our due diligence to our group in the Philippines. They’re connected to an American title company.
Josh Mettle: Awesome.
Mark Podolsky: The prepare the plot maps, the [inaudible 00:09:36] maps. They Google Earth aerial view maps. They get the pictures and while they’re doing the due diligence, they’re creating for me a marketing package at the exact same time for that next buyer and this is where the magic happens and this is where our land investing niche has the greatest advantage over all the other real estate niches. I have a built in best buyer for your parcel of land in Texas. Do you know who it is?
Josh Mettle: The internet.
Mark Podolsky: Nope. No. It’s a tough one Josh.
Josh Mettle: I don’t know.
Mark Podolsky: I’m going to give you a quiz on your own podcast.
Josh Mettle: Yeah, you got me.
Mark Podolsky: The neighbors. The neighbors. So, I send out neighbor letters and say, “Hey, look, before I go to the open market, here’s your opportunity, expand your holdings, protect your views, protect your privacy, know who your neighbors are going to be.” So, often times the neighbors are going to buy that parcel. Now, if they pass, I’m going to go to my buyers list. If the buyers list passes, I’m going to go to a little website you’ve probably never heard of called Craig’s List. It’s the 10th most trafficked website in the United States. I’ll go to another even smaller one that you may have heard of called Facebook, buy/sell groups and marketplace. Within 30 days, I’m going to sell that property and the way I’m going to sell it is I’m going to make it irresistible.
Mark Podolsky: I’m going to ask for a $2500 down payment. So, I’m going to get my money out on the down or maybe within six months of the down and then I’m just going to make it a car payment. Let’s say $449 a month at 9% interest over the next 84 months. So, now, I’ve created a passive income stream of $449 a month, the next 84 months. I don’t have to deal with any renters, rehabs, renovations, or rodents, and because I’m not dealing with a tenant, I’m exempt from Dodd-Frank, VESPA, and the Safe Act. All this onerous real estate legislation and then the game we play is can we create enough of these land notes where our passive income exceeds our fixed expenses and then we’re working because we want to, not because we have to. That’s the model.
Josh Mettle: I feel like we could end the podcast right here, like you just blew my mind and we’re 10 minutes in.
Mark Podolsky: See, it’s really simple but obviously it’s not easy, right.
Josh Mettle: Tell us a little bit more … First of all, I love the simplicity of the plan and I love also, how you have thought through the ability of taking this form a flip business to a passive income business. I’m all about that.
Mark Podolsky: Right.
Josh Mettle: And so, walk us through how one would get started with your group. Let’s take me for example. I’ve invested in real estate. I have some index funds. I’ve got my little investments sprinkled around and I say, “Okay, I’m interested in trying this out.” What’s the course for the prototypical person that meets you and comes into your system?
Mark Podolsky: So, most of the people that come to me have what I call solo economic dependency, which means, if they’re not working, they’re not making any money. Right. So, let’s take a surgeon for example. If his hands aren’t in somebody’s body, he is not generating any revenue, right.
Josh Mettle: Right.
Mark Podolsky: So, that person, even though they may love surgery, at some point, their back is going to start getting sore. They might start feeling some type of just external pressure as their life begins to evolve, what happens if I get hurt, disability is not going to cover it any more and those types of things and they need some other passive income vehicles. Now, they’ve got a time issue because from an effective hourly rate, that surgeon, the most effective time is going to be doing surgery. So, they have the other two options. Number one, they can try to do it themselves or number two, they could go to somebody like me, and if they’re an in-credit investor, then I can talk to them one on one about a fund but if they’re let’s say, they have a smaller effective hourly rate, it might be worth it for them to start doing it on their own and building a team and do what I did and make 300% to 1000% margins on these land deals because we’ve basically created systems and software and automation, so it’s 90% automated. Once that is built, you’ve got this machine of just doing all your land deals through auto=pilot if you will and now you’re just managing it.
Mark Podolsky: I spend two hours a week in Frontier Properties with my team and all I’m doing is I’m looking at numbers, how many offers went out, how many deals are pending, how many deals did we close, and did anyone default this month. IN the case of default, we use a land contract, which essentially means that we keep the down payment, we keep all the monthly payments and then we resell that property, there’s no cost of foreclosure, which really lowers our risk as well.
Mark Podolsky: So, I would say, for somebody getting started, they’d really have to determine for themselves which camp they want to be in and then, number two, just like anything else, you’ve got to commit to it and really let go of the timeline. Some people they start moving the need on their lives. It takes maybe three to six months. Other people, it can take 12 to 24 months. Once that passive income starts to move the need on your life, you become addicted to it, just like I can tell Josh, you are.
Mark Podolsky: There’s no better feeling that waking up and seeing more money in your account and you didn’t have to do anything.
Josh Mettle: Yeah, or for me, going on vacation and giving myself permission to be on vacation because I know the machine that I built is making money while I’m gone and something psychologically says, “Buddy, it’s okay, turn the phone off and be on vacation and be present with your family. It’s still working.”
Mark Podolsky: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, and that’s how we test if you actually have a business or not is, can you take a month off and totally unplug and if revenue increases, you’ve got a business. If not, you’ve got a bad job.
Josh Mettle: I love it. That’s right. Very well said. Hey listen, there were a couple of terms that you used. I just want to make sure, have you give it some definition on and then, I want to talk about camp one and camp two that you decided or that you described. So, first of all, you mentioned an accredited investor. For those of our listeners that don’t know what that is, will you just clear that for us.
Mark Podolsky: So, an accredited investor is a high net worth individual with at least a million dollars in net worth or $250,000 of income per year.
Josh Mettle: Got it and to whom do they have to prove that to?
Mark Podolsky: They just have to sign a form saying that they are an accredited investor.
Josh Mettle: They qualify. Got it. Okay. Cool. Then, you mentioned the land contract. Will you just go … You don’t have to go super deep but just go a little deeper on how that mechanism gives insurance or protection to the buyer and also protection to the seller who’s now the investor, the note holder and how that mechanism works, if you would.
Mark Podolsky: Right. So, for the buyer, not a lot of protection, right. So, when we go and buy a house, the bank doesn’t give us a land contract. They do what we call a deed of trust.
Josh Mettle: Right.
Mark Podolsky: So, they deed the property to us and they put a lien on the house. If we stop making our mortgage payments, then the bank has to go through a very tedious and expensive foreclosure process to get that asset back onto their balance sheet essentially, but a land contract basically says, “Hey, sorry Mr. Buyer, you have a promissory note. You have purchase sale agreement in the land contract. They all say the same thing, make your payments on time and then at the end of that promissory note contract, we’re going to deed that property to you with title insurance, free and clear of all liens or encumbrances. We’re not going to double sell, triple sell that property, but that is the risk with a land contract for the buyer, is in those situations.
Mark Podolsky: The other risk is if I die. What happens if I die on a land contract? Then, there has to be some type of continuity in place where my attorney and my wife, my state can then sign over the deed to the buyer and we have that in place as well. So, there is more risk for the buyer but there’s a lot less risk or actually nor risk for me, the seller.
Josh Mettle: So, it sounds like the major difference between the two is, if you sell to me on land contract, you’re actually still on title. I don’t take title to the property until we execute the terms of the land contract.
Mark Podolsky: Exactly. Exactly. If I’m going to loan money to you, which is essentially what I’m doing, I’m owner financing it and I’m not going to ask for 50% down or 40% down, then, I think it’s fair.
Josh Mettle: Right. Okay. Great. Very good. So, now, let’s keep in mind that most of our listeners are trying to pack more hours into the day then there are hours into the day and so, the chances of them wanting to take this as a main stream hobby that takes a serious amount of time for due diligence, for most of our listeners is probably slim. So, you mentioned a fund, and I assume that’s connected to your group that does all of the analytics and analysis and marketing presentations and everything else. Would you walk us through that process.
Mark Podolsky: I really have to do it on a one to one basis. So, if anyone who was interested who was an accredited investor wants to have any kind of inquiry into our fund, I can do that with them on a one to one basis, but the way that’s its structured, for me to not run a foul of SEC rules, I can’t really publicly talk about it.
Josh Mettle: That makes sense. No problem. So, we’ll give them your contact information, people can reach out to you. I certainly want to learn more, so, I’ll be reaching out to you post interview here buddy.
Mark Podolsky: Sure.
Josh Mettle: Let’s talk about the other camp. Let’s say somebody does have extra time and this is so fascinating to them that they want to really get into it. How would you advise them and what steps would you say they should take.
Mark Podolsky: Yeah, so, I have a lot of physician clients but they themselves are not doing the business, just like what you said, they want to pack more hours into what they’re doing but for their children, they have their children doing it.
Josh Mettle: Interesting.
Mark Podolsky: Se, essentially, they’re being the bank and then their kids are doing the work. So, the way they get started then is there’s couple different ways to get educated. We have several different levels of training, everything from do it yourself a digital course, all the way up to one on one coaching where we hold your hand for a year.
Josh Mettle: Great. Okay. So, you alluded to camp one and camo two. I just want to make some real clarity around those. Camp one is someone who is let’s say more of a do-it-yourselfer and has maybe a team built around them exactly like I do. My wife and mom ar upstairs and they run the real estate business while I’m running the rest of our businesses and I’m injecting the capital and they do the heavy lifting if you will and you have a coaching platform or process and material available to educate a team or someone how to do that.
Mark Podolsky: Right, right. So, what we’ve essentially done is we’ve eliminated every pain point in the land investing business for our clients. So, just like you said, what if you don’t have a family in place to do this. So, we have a landing VA team, virtual assistants that are already pre-trained. They have office space int eh Philippines, reliable internet and they’re already trained. They know how to run our business. So, we provide that service for our clients. We also provide the software for our clients. So, essentially, all they have to do is get the lists, scrub the list, upload the list into our software, and using law.com and API, the offers immediately go out.
Josh Mettle: Wow.
Mark Podolsky: Once those offers come back in, our team does a due diligence for them. Once they get those due diligence pieces back, it’s all within the software and the software takes them from sending out offers, all the way to the sale and essentially, we can have our VA’s do add writing for Craig’s List or Facebook postings. We teach them how to start building a buyer’s list. We teach them really how to market because the only two things that make money in this real estate business is mailing and marketing, that’s it, everything else is not really essential to business. It’s kind of fun. So, I always get annoyed when my clients like, “Hey, I’m working on my logo.” I’m like, “Well, how much money is that logo gonna make you?” Forget the logo. So, we provide that and then on the back end, we automate the note collection.
Mark Podolsky: So, we have a program called Geekpay.io, it’s a set it and forget it system and what’s beautiful about that is we know we’re getting paid. So, it takes the down payment and then every month via ACH or their checking account, it draws out their monthly fee from their checking account, it does the amortization math if you’re charging interest. It does all the notifications and then, if their ACH bounces for whatever reason, we take a credit card on file as a back up. So, we know we’re getting paid. Now, if the ACH and the credit card fail, then we know we better resell that property because we probably have a bad buyer and within 30 days we’ll resell that property, get a new down payment, get a new note and in a bad economy our default rate is about 8%. In a good economy like today, we’re at a default rate of about 4%.
Josh Mettle: So, it sounds like soup to nuts, you’ve got a system that’s going to educate a assist somebody if they want to do it themselves and camp two is the fund where they could come to you and just park some money and let you run the magic.
Mark Podolsky: Exactly. So, land business in a box or here Mark, just do it.
Josh Mettle: Yep. Got it. Wonderful. So listen, I know we’re running short on time but I would love you to end us with a story or two. Maybe just talk to us a little bit about what was the funnest land deal you ever did, maybe it’s the most lucrative, maybe it was just fun for one reason or another and then give us the biggest mistake you made, the one that cost you the most amount of money or put the most amount of yoke on your face, the one that you learned the most from a painful lesson.
Mark Podolsky Yeah. Yeah. So, lets just start with the bad one because I think we learn more from the mistakes.
Josh Mettle: Let’s get that one out of the way.
Mark Podolsky: So, it’s 2006 and I’m telling you, I think I’m the smartest guy in the room and I’m making so much money in land investing and I find this over-developed sub-division in Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania and it’s beautiful. It’s gated. It’s got million dollar homes in there, two PGA rated golf courses, three lakes. It’s like a country club. They’ve got the restaurant and the post office and I fly in there and I’m like look, “You’ve got a thousand lots here just sitting there. It’s dead money,” because there’s POA fees, property owners association fees. I’m like, “You’ve got liens on all this property. The county’s getting nothing. The owners association is getting nothing. Give me that thousand lots and I’m going to sell them all. I’m going to get a new buyer in there. I’m going to make that money come alive.”
Mark Podolsky: Well, they start negotiating with me. They’re like, “Well, who are all these people going to be? They’re going to fill up the lake and I’m going to have to start standing in line at the post office,” and I’m flying back and forth negotiating. The whole time, not realizing the effective hourly rate of my time. I’m spending all this time. So, finally, I take down the thousand lots. I’m paying nothing for them but let’s say $50 bucks a lot but I took them all down at once and the deal that I made was during my ownership of the lots, I’m not going to pay taxes, I’m not going to pay POA fees an then I’ll get someone else to sell them and that was what I negotiated.
Mark Podolsky: Well, what happens in 2008? I made about $100,000 on that deal before the crash but it was the first time in business I was not able to keep my word and when I did the backwards calculation of how much time it took me to make that $100,000, it was the first deal I ever did that I feel like I broke even on. That was the worst deal and to this day, I stay away from these POA association fees. My buyers just don’t want them.
Mark Podolsky: The best deal I ever did was with a public company. They bought millions of acres of land from the railroad and they just wanted the mineral rights. They didn’t want the land. So, I came in there and I had … I didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so, I had them owner finance me a million dollars and so, essentially, I borrowed a million dollars from them, and then I bought the 640 acre sections, I sub-divided them into 40 acre parcels and I made over $5 million dollars on that one deal.
Josh Mettle: Wow.
Mark Podolsky: That was a good one.
Josh Mettle: What an awesome engineering and how long into your career and land investing were you when you came upon that deal?
Mark Podolsky: About three years.
Josh Mettle: Did you get to circle back to your wife and make her say those beautiful, beautiful words, “Mark, you were right?”
Mark Podolsky: Okay. So, how long have you been married.
Josh Mettle: 15 years man. I’m 15 years.
Mark Podolsky: 15 years. So, you know I got three kids, there’s no way on earth I was going to circle back. No way.
Josh Mettle: Yeah. Good call. Very good call. I think I hear those three years once on my 15 year marriage, and I was just wondering if you ever got those back.
Mark Podolsky: Yeah, no because she had such a long list, a longer list of times when I’ve been wrong.
Josh Mettle: You dare not bring them up.
Mark Podolsky: That’s a box I don’t want to open ever.
Josh Mettle: I love it man.
Mark Podolsky: Yeah.
Josh Mettle: Mark, what else should our listeners know and of course I don’t want to end before you tell them what’s their next step. How do they reach you? Where should they learn more? Anything else that you think our listeners should know? Any wisdom you want to impart?
Mark Podolsky: Well, I love this Zig Ziglar quote. I always like to end a podcast with his quote. “If you’ll do for the next three to five years what other people won’t do, you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life what other people can’t do.” Now, the fact that this is a physicians podcast, they probably already know that because they’ve already invested in themselves in medical school and they’ve already paid that price but it even applies though from a real estate and a business perspective as well because there’s a lot of people Josh that don’t want to hustle out there. They don’t want to do the analysis of how do I price a property? How do I market a property? How do I build a team so that I’m not doing the work but if they do, do that and they commit to it for the next three to five years, for the rest of their lives, they’ve got this passive income, business, or machine, that’s just paying for all their bills.
Mark Podolsky It starts off as grocery money and then it’s car payment money and then it’s mortgage and vacation money and the next thing you know it’s do I want to practice or not money and that’s a nice position to be in.
Josh Mettle: By the way, that’s really where every physician wants to be. They want to be in the place that they decide that they’re practicing because they love to serve and they love to take care of people and not because they’re trying to get out from this mountain of student loans. So, you hit the nail on the head there man. I thought of one more question to ask before I let you go if you don’t mind.
Mark Podolsky: Sure.
Josh Mettle: It occurred to me that because physicians are so incredibly busy, the majority of their investments seem to be low cost index funds, hand it over to a financial advisor, let me practice my trade, spend a little time with my family, and maybe ai can get on the mountain bike or the ski’s a couple of times if I do things right but they don’t have time for another side hustle. So, that kind of relegates them in many instances to just financial advisors and index funds. This appears to me to be the ultimate diversification because it is not correlated to the stock market. It’s not correlated to gold. It;ls not correlated to a bond yield and at the same time, it is something that has a passive income component, which is another level of diversification. When you have a stock portfolio and you get to retirement, now it’s kind of like you’re at the top of the hill and you’re looking down and you’re like, “All right, I better make sure that I don’t spend all this money. I want to make sure I die before I spend all this money because I don’t want to be 90 and no money.”
Josh Mettle: So, it gives them diversification away from index funds and what they’re typically investing it but also diversification in the fact that it brings in a heavy stream of passive income. Anything else you would add to that or that you think would be important for physicians to think through?
Mark Podolsky: Well, I think you really hit it on the head. I mean, really if you’re making more traditional investments then you’re going to get more traditional returns. Alternative investments like what we’re doing, there’s a reasons why you have to be an accredited investor. It’s a little bit more higher risk but with that higher risk comes a lot higher reward. So, if you can get your head around the model and then you have the due diligence on the operator, do I trust this operator that they’re going to get me the returns that they say they’re going to get me in this fund, then it’s worth pursuing and that’s time worth investing in and I would say that, that’s a better investment of your time then saying, “Well, I know I can make this return on index find. It’s low cost and I don’t have to think a lot,” but if you spend a little bit more time, your return could be a lot higher and not just with any other piece. It doesn’t have to be my fund. It could be any other type of alternative fund.
Mark Podolsky: I know a guy that invests in operators that owns 300 ATM machines. His fund throws of a 30% return. It’s ATM machines. It’s these things that people don’t think about that are a little bit alternative that are a “little riskier” that you can find your upside bigger returns at. Yeah, for sure.
Josh Mettle: Well mark, it was a pleasure buddy. I appreciate you. Let’s leave with how do people find you and where do they go for more information and I know you’ve got a couple podcasts. So, if you want to plug those, id love you to.
Mark Podolsky: Yeah, yeah. So, my current podcast is, The Art of Passive Income Podcast. I wrote a book, Dirt Rich. You can get that on Amazon and then, I think the best place to start is thelandgeek.com and then, Josh, if your listeners want, they can start with our passive income large kit course. It’s a $97 course for free if they just go to thelandgeek.com/launchkit and they can just get in that course for free.
Josh Mettle: Well, that is an awesome giveaway. Thank you very much for that. You’ve bene super generous with your time Mark and we appreciate you and hope to circle back with you sometime soon. Thank you.
Mark Podolsky: Josh Mettle, thank you.
To learn more about land investing and Mark Podolsky, please visit www.thelandgeek.com
