How to get unlimited deal flow for 15-50% IRR land dev deals on LinkedIn

As a passive investor, finding land development deals is surprisingly hard. I spoke with a sophisticated investor from a family office a few weeks back, and he mentioned that his biggest problem is deal flow.

But here's the weird part: when I talk to other land developers, what I hear from them is that finding passive investors to join their projects is their biggest struggle. As a land developer who raise capital for our own projects at Groundwork, anyone here would tell you the same.

Why in the world is that? If investor have capital and want deals, and developers have deals and want capital, shouldn't it be the easiest thing in the world to have them connect? If only that were so. But here's the good news:

In investing, there's no free lunch. As a passive investor, you get paid to:

When information is hard to get, the analysis and decision are easy. When information is easy to get, all the easy decisions get made quickly, so the only ones left are the hard ones. In the stock market, information is easy to get, which means geniuses all over the world who work 12 hours a day, six days a week and make $500k to $20m/year in personal compensation are looking at the same information you are. And odds are good, they're looking at it more rigorously. Their decisions about stocks are generally going to be better than yours.

On the other hand, in land deals, the information is hard to get. The deals aren't listed on any public exchange. There isn't a standard SEC-mandated format that is easy to parse. There sure aren't any brokerage accounts that let you buy with a click. It's sooo much work to get the information and the deals are relatively speaking so small, the math whiz working for RenTech stays away. This is why you and I have a chance to get outsized returns compared to the market.

Land deals are in the dark ages. In order to do land deals you need to jump into the network that gets them done.

You can do that by connecting with land agents/brokers, bankers who lend on land, or broker-dealers (the kind that sell securities; not land) but the true decision-maker in the project is the Sponsor/General Partner. They'll make the final decision as to who gets to invest and who doesn't. The good news is, they're easier to get in touch with, will be happier to hear from you, and will often make your investment go further because they don't have to pay a referral fee to the person who introduced you.

The process is simple:

To find sponsors on LinkedIn you only need one simple search land developer.

Here's a little gif that shows how to do it ![[251017 LinkedIn Land Developer Search Process.gif]]

NOTE: the more land developers you connect with, the more you'll be able to find in the search. That's because LinkedIn limits the distance of people you can see in your network.

A quick screen (<15 seconds) will often tell me if the person is someone I want to work with.

What to avoid:

LinkedIn will only allow you to send 20-40 connection requests per day or 100-200 per week (depending on how active your profile is). If you get a message letting you know that you've hit your limit, simply login and try the next day.

A day or two after sending your connection requests, check your recent connections and click the Message button for folks you haven't reached out to yet. ![[251017 Find Recent LinkedIn Connections.gif]]

Developers will fall all over themselves to respond to this message.

Most sponsors HATE raising capital. So when it comes time to raise, they start with investors that are top of mind and work their way down that list. They don't have an efficient capital raising process where they shop for the cheapest capital. They just want to get the deal funded and move on to the next one.

That means, if you're at the top of the list, you'll maximize your deal flow.

You can do that with a simple, one line message every month.

That's it.

I know this process isn't 100% automated, and does involve some work. But honestly, would you have it any other way? The work you do to build this network is your investing edge. Plus, we're talking about 30-60 minutes of total work, once a month to keep a flow of deals that have IRRs in the 15-50% range.

At Groundwork, we're a land development company that specializes in land entitlement (permit) projects that 2-6x the value of the land in twelve to twenty-four months.

Just like all the other sponsors I mentioned, we are always interested in finding more passive investors to help partner in our deals.