Mike Browning

Tag: Market Analysis

  • It’s All In How You Look At It

    It’s All In How You Look At It

    We often make things harder in our minds than they really are.

    I’ve heard land investors talk about searching for deals and use the metaphor “like looking for a needle in a haystack.” And I get it. You have to look through a lot of stuff you don’t want to (maybe) find what you do want.

    But think about it a minute.

    And don’t assume rules that nobody spoke.

    Hay is flammable. Needles aren’t.

    Needles are magnetic. Ashes aren’t.

    So if you really want to find that needle, just burn the haystack. Then take a magnet or metal detector to find the needle in the ashes. And you’re done.

    Instead of getting worked up about how hard something sounds, just think it through and see if there’s a creative solution.

    I recently ran a quick search in the greater North Texas area (22 counties). In the land category, there were a little over 4,200 properties available.

    That’s a pretty big haystack. Over 99% of those aren’t going to be suitable for what you’re looking for. Makes it hard to want to start looking.

    And even if you could look through them all, the list changes every day. New properties come on the market. Others sell, expire, get canceled, or get reduced.

    I’ve figured out a way to screen daily for new and reduced properties that appear to be priced well based on recent nearby sales. Burning the haystack, if you will. That leaves me with a much shorter list to run the magnet over.

    Most low-priced properties are cheap for a reason. Floodplain. Access problems. Utility issues. Some other defect that isn’t obvious from the listing. Those get ruled out too.

    Every so often I end up with one or two that are worth a closer look.

    And I have a list of people I alert when that happens.

    But there’s not always a fit.

    It may not be in an area they like. Or it’s more (or less) money than they’re looking to invest. Or maybe they just bought something else.

    So every now and then I end up looking at something I think deserves a closer look and don’t really have the right investor to send it to.

    I’m trying to fix that.

    To hear about opportunities when they survive the filtering, click below and tell me what you’re looking for.

    No obligation. No pressure. Just a way to see what catches my attention before it disappears.

    Would it be a bad idea to know about them?

    Learn More Here

  • The Gas Price People

    The Gas Price People

    It doesn’t pay to worry about the price of something you have to buy no matter what.

    Since I’m out looking at land all over DFW, I drive more miles than most people do in a month. And I don’t drive a Prius, I drive a pickup. Not one of the giant, jacked-up models, but I’m still not winning any awards for conservation.

    So if anyone should be paying attention to gas prices it should be me. But I don’t. But that doesn’t prevent others from telling me about the latest moves.

    You know the type. They watch the price board every time they pass a station. They’ll drive ten miles out of their way to save three cents a gallon. Burn more gas than the savings they get. They text their spouse: “Buc-ee’s in Melissa is at $3.09 right now.” The gas price conversation comes up at dinner like they’re tracking a stock.

    But think about it. Say prices jump twenty cents a gallon. My truck takes about 26 gallons. That’s five dollars more per fill up. Five bucks. The mental energy some people spend tracking that number, recalculating, stressing, and comparing costs more than five dollars. Probably a lot more.

    As a wise man once said: he who knows the price of everything knows the value of nothing.

    And that’s the real problem. When you’re focused on what something costs, you stop thinking about what it’s worth.

    Landowners do this too.

    Not with gas prices. With phone calls.

    They’ve been sitting on a piece of land, could be a hundred acres, could be forty, and every so often they wonder what it’s worth. What’s been selling nearby. Whether the market shifted. Whether now’s the time or not.

    But they don’t do anything about it.

    They’ve decided that the cost of checking is too high. Not in money. Something worse: the pressure. The pitch. The agent who’s going to spend forty-five minutes making it real estate conversation instead of land conversation, then follow up every two weeks until they finally block the number.

    So they wait. And while they’re waiting, they’re not getting the information they’d need to make a good decision when the time comes.

    That’s the real cost. And it’s not five dollars.

    Here’s what I’d ask you to think about.

    What if you knew ahead of time that the pressure thing wasn’t going to happen? If I promised you the conversation was just going to be information, that I wasn’t going to push, that you reach out and end up with a clearer picture and nothing more, would it still make sense to wait?

    Of course anyone can promise no pressure. But don’t take my word for it, hear it from people who actually got a Land Reality Check:

    “The information was helpful by providing market information. I did not and do not feel pressured to take any action. The information provided serves as a baseline for the market value of the property.”

    — Mary G., Frisco

    “How quickly I received a response that was so full of detailed information that I never would have known to even think about.”

    — Lisa H., McKinney

    “I was amazed at all the info I received. For free.”

    — Barbara K., Denison

    The value of knowing what your land is worth doesn’t go away because you’re not planning to sell today. If anything it goes up, because the people who make good decisions on land almost always understood the market before they needed to.

    The cost you’re worried about? It doesn’t exist here.

    PS- You’re probably not looking to sell today. And that’s great.

    But is it a bad idea to know where things stand?

    That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. Sales data, competing listings, development pressure, the factors that affect value that you can’t see from the road.

    No pressure. No drama. Just valuable info to use when you’re ready. If ever.

    Get Yours Here

    PPS-Not ready for that yet? You can sign up below and just read. Land, markets, negotiation. No pitch.

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  • What Matters a Lot More Than Why

    What Matters a Lot More Than Why

    The why is mostly a guess anyway.

    Most people who get stuck spend too much time on why instead of just noticing what and operating accordingly.

    The why is hard to know. When you’re dealing with people it’s especially hard, because sometimes they don’t want you to know what they were thinking, so they don’t tell you. Other times they aren’t hiding anything but you still don’t get accurate information. A lot of the time people do things for reasons buried in their subconscious that they may not even be aware of. When they tell you why they did something they aren’t lying, but it’s also not accurate.

    I was reading something this week about a company selling a business opportunity. They held seminars in various towns and tried to convert interested attendees into buyers.

    They were doing well, but things got much better when someone on the team asked a simple question: what do the buyers who say yes 99% of the time have in common?

    Turned out to be middle-aged married men with crew cuts.

    Why? Nobody knew. The company’s answer was: who cares?

    Instead of trying to figure it out, they sent people ahead of their seminars to visit local barbershops and pay them for contact info on customers who got crew cuts.

    This was decades ago, so it wasn’t as creepy-sounding as it might be today. Though I always find it interesting that the people most vocal about privacy are also the ones who hand all their information to social media for free, where it gets sold in basically the same way.

    Anyway.

    When I do a Land Reality Check for someone, what you’re going to get is what has been happening, with a lot less focus on why. Because that’s what we can actually know, and it’s what helps you decide what to do next.

    That doesn’t mean there’s no explanation at all. If you own a custom home lot, that market has been slow since interest rates rose a couple of years ago. Higher rates mean higher costs. Higher costs mean fewer buyers, other things being equal. That’s a partial why.

    But I’m not getting into what caused rates to go up, when they might come down, or whether the Fed is doing a good job. That’s someone else’s job and you can find that content anywhere.

    What’s been happening is what matters. The rest is mostly guessing dressed up as analysis.

    PS- Most landowners aren’t planning to sell today. But things change, and when they do, the people who already understand their market tend to make better decisions.

    That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. It looks at nearby sales, current listings, development pressure, and the details that affect value but aren’t obvious from the road.

    Is it a bad idea to know where things stand?

    Get It Here

    PPS -If you’re not ready for a Reality Check but like reading about land, markets, and negotiation, you can sign up below and get these posts in your inbox.

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