From Broke to $12K/Month in Passive Income—Here’s How He Did It

Aviva (00:00)
This week's listener of the week is Sarah sells 02. Sarah, thank you so much for leaving us a five star review. And for those of you listening, if you leave us a five star review below, you might be next week's listener of the week, week, week. This week on commercial real estate secrets, we have Brent Bowers. Brent is the owner and founder of the Landsharks. Brent, thank you for being on the show today.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (00:29)
Yeah, thanks for having me, I'm excited!

Aviva (00:31)
Yeah, for all the listeners here, who are you? What do you do and how did we get here today?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (00:38)
Yeah, my name is Brent Bowers. I'm a Christ follower, husband, father, serial entrepreneur, and I love real estate. And how did I get here today? Boy, honestly, I was just looking to buy my time back to get out of the military. So I became a land investor and here we are.

Aviva (00:59)
So tell me how did you become a land investor? Tell me, let's go from A to Z. I want to hear everything about it. How you do it, where you started. you for your service. That was all, yes.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (01:06)
Yeah. Well, yeah, I started in 2007. Sorry.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

I started in 2007, I got my license, my real estate license, bought a rental property. Then 2008 started going on and I quit in 2009 and joined the military. Fast forward a couple of years, a couple of deployments to Afghanistan and I kept buying rentals and had like eight or nine doors by 2015, but I surely never could have left my job and lived on those doors because something always broke in rental.

houses for me and or I was evicting tenants and it was a catastrophe. And I was listening to podcasts just like this and I found the guy that was talking about flipping vacant, raw land. And I was like, man, no one's talking about this. Why is no one talking about this? Like I didn't know you could buy land and make money. I thought you buy land and wait. Well, I didn't have time to wait. I needed to make money. So I took action immediately and started sending out postcards and

Aviva (01:48)
Hmm.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (02:11)
My phone started ringing. I started doing some random land deals with like raw land that was either not buildable or landlocked or not accessible, like stuff that no one really, you would think no one would really want, but people love owning American land. So people were buying this stuff from me and I literally was making money almost overnight. I was like 10Xing my money because I'd buy it for like 300 bucks or $285 and sell it for 5,000.

And then I started selling it on payments. And that's when my paradigm shifted, honestly, because I was getting monthly payments and I never had to fix anything on these parcels of land and the payments just kept rolling in. Sometimes I take the land back too, by the way, which is kind of the sucky part about this business, but I'd resell it for more the next time.

Aviva (03:02)
It sounds simple, and I think inherently it is simple, but who are you buying from and who are you selling to and are you assigning the contracts? Tell me a bit about that.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (03:14)
Yeah, I have

assigned quite a few of them. Great question. The first one I ever signed that was land was from a bank. They wanted 25 grand. This was actually near Shreiver Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, your neck of the woods. And I didn't have 25,000, but I knew it was worth like way more than that. So I went and put up signs at that Friday evening. And by Saturday, I shook hands with the guy on the side of the road and he bought it for me for 38K. So I signed that contract.

It's like 13,000 bucks. And then I started, I mean, most of them I buy myself and or with other people's money. And I've gotten in more expensive land now at this point. And you don't have to do as many parcels when you're doing more expensive land. So, and then, yeah, I'll pause there.

Aviva (04:06)
there's just something beautiful about when you realize you can just go bigger and it's easier and you make a lot more money. How long had you been selling land before you had that revelation?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (04:16)
Yeah.

Well, that's a really good question. It was about 2022 and I saw, I started a community called the Landsharks in 2018. And I noticed that a lot of the Landsharks community members were dwarfing my land deals. Like I'm doing like $10,000 land deals. I'm buying it for a thousand, selling for 10,000. I think I'm like brilliant. And they're buying land for

like a hundred thousand and sell it for 200,000. And I'm like, Oh my God, you just made a hundred thousand dollars net profit. And sometimes they didn't even buy them. They just assigned the contract. I was like, I need to change my, I need to step my game up. And then I saw guys doing things called entitlement plays and they're making like a million dollars. And I'm like, Oh my God, I need to step my game up. So it's honestly been from the people I've coached and seeing what they do. And I'm just like blown away. So I'm

learning all the time. I learned something new today as well from another land shark.

Aviva (05:29)
⁓ that's so cool. I love that. Who's buying this land? What kind of land is this? Like that, like my inherent fear would be you'd buy it and then nobody wants to buy it.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (05:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's a great, great fear because I've bought a land in a lot of places, a lot of areas in the middle of nowhere that wasn't in high demand, but I got a cheap price, like a no-brainer price. So it's always easy to sell something cheap, but it's also easy to get something that there's not much demand for. So I changed up the whole strategy in like 2018. started buying

in areas where it was actually in demand. How did I know it was in demand? Because land was selling in those areas and it made it easier to price out that land. Most of the stuff we're doing is residential by the way. It's real simple. It's not like commercial highest and best use. You got to get a commercial broker in there. No, this is stuff that's residential. Apple to Apple comparison, five acres sold for $5,000 an acre over here, $5,000 an acre and I'm paying 2,500 an acre. I should be guaranteed a profit.

are we selling it to? A lot of times people that just want to own a piece of American land, they want to build on it. For a while there when I was buying that like unbuildable stuff, a lot of times it were landlocked, I'm selling it for hunting land. A lot of times the neighbors buy the land. So I've never seen a landowner that didn't want to own the land next door to

Aviva (07:01)
That is so interesting. What are you working on right now that's making you excited?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (07:05)
making you excited?

A couple things. I've seen some, well, a couple things. I've got some rural land we're throwing up a barn on and we're going to sell the land with the barn. It's been kind of a project I've been wanting to do. We've got another entitlement play where we're turning 38 acres into 80 lots and we're going to sell to a builder. Another thing we've been having fun doing is, you know, well, it's always fun to sell land on seller financing.

but that gets boring. The payments come in, that's the best part about it. Payments come in monthly, but something that's been fun and getting us big pops of income has been putting brand new mobile homes on some of these lots because there's really an affordable housing issue out there and these mobile homes are beautiful. mean, they're brand new. They're drywall, they're qualifying for FHA financing and VA financing and conventional financing.

Aviva (07:49)
Mm-hmm.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (08:04)
So that's been fun. But really the foundation of this is buying the land and turning around and selling it on seller financing. It's like a rental property that brings me money for a long time and nothing ever breaks. And I take that cash and I buy light industrial buildings with it. I started that two years ago and I've accumulated a few of those now and like kind of like what you do, know, small buildings.

Bay with bays, three or four bays and a small office in the back with one or two bathrooms.

Aviva (08:38)
Bays all day, I get it Brent. Talk to me about entitlements. If I were in the fifth grade, how would you explain entitlement?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (08:41)
Bays all day.

Yeah. And

let me just say, I am by no means the expert in entitlements. I am still going through the first one I've done. I've actually got another parcel. We've got two of them going on in entitlements at this point. I've done a lot of simple land flips since 2016. I mean, simple. I don't change zoning. I don't subdivide it. I buy it for a discount and I sell it for what it's worth. So this entitlement play, this one particular, we got 38 acres under contract.

We're buying it for $400,000 and what we're doing is we've done a, we had to do a wetland study and then we had to do like a little mitigation with the wetlands. And then the next thing was we got a survey and then we get a new plat map as well as engineering for that plat map to show where the roads are going to be and all of that. So once that engineering goes through, that's when we present it to

the builder that's building next door, and hopefully they'll want to put a letter of intent. So we will take that land from being worth about 400K and about a year of work and about 100K so that just the engineering costs $70,000. know, the survey, wetland study, wetlands mitigation, and then now we've gotten, then we take all of that to the city and we get a stamp of approval to be able to,

to put 80 lots on it. And now that builder can go in and start building, but they don't make money until the roads are done and the electricity and the water line. So builders don't make money doing that. They make money by actually building houses, because they're paying roughly $80 a square foot and they're selling these houses for $180 a square foot. So that's where the builder comes in and makes money. So we're going to take that land from being worth about 400K to almost $2 million. But do the math.

The builder only had to sell like maybe 10 houses to pay for that land free and clear. And they could build 80 houses, so the other 70 are complete profit.

Aviva (10:48)
Wow.

I don't know if that was a fifth grader explanation, but maybe sixth grade. No, no.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (10:57)
⁓ boy, I don't know. I did the best I could. I gotta dumb it down. I shouldn't say that. That's

actually not, that's not fair to the fifth grader.

Aviva (11:04)
No, no,

I'm just kidding. So tell me about the land shark.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (11:10)
Yeah, so the Landsharks was started in 2018 is because I had a lot of time on my hands. I left the military in 2018 and I had built it up to where I was making about $12,000 a month net every single month in passive income from the land that I had sold. So I had a lot of time on my hands. So I was going on all these coffee appointments and sharing with people what I was up to, friends, and I ran a meetup. So people were always wanting to take me out for coffee and no one was doing anything with it.

I was like spending all this time and extremely caffeinated and a friend of mine that started wholesaling ink, his name is Tom Kroll, he's like, well, how's the land thing going? I'm like, it's going great. He's like, are you teaching anybody? I was like, I feel like I teach people every day, but no one's doing anything with it. And he's like, how much do you charge? And I was like, I don't charge anything. He goes, well, that's why. Like they're not paying anything for that knowledge, they're not doing anything with it. There's a reason why librarians are not the richest people in the world. So it's funny, like a

about a week later, a guy named Lance King asked me like, how much? And I was like, what are you talking about? Cause I had just given my whole entire land presentation. I was trying to get lenders. I was trying to get lenders to help me buy this land. It was how much? And I was like, what do you mean? It's how much to teach me what you know so I can do the same thing. And I was like, oh, I was like, and I, you know, there's a great book called Go for No. And I pulled the best answer I can give him. And I said, a thousand bucks.

Aviva (12:19)
Thanks

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (12:38)
And he goes, all right. And he paid me that next day via PayPal. And I was like, well, here we go. I had my first student and Lance now moved his wife and six children from Colorado Springs to I think they're in Maui now. He makes like 40 grand a month passive from his land deals. But that's how the land sharks was started. I actually coached 16 people one-on-one just like that all for a thousand bucks each. So I thought I was, I was like, oh my God, it just made 16,000 from my knowledge.

Aviva (12:58)
you

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (13:08)
That was a lot of work, by the way, to get all those guys a land deal. So I learned how to make successful land investors. we, we've done the course around it. Now we have multiple support calls a week. It's a awesome community doing a bunch of land deals that I'm learning from too.

Aviva (13:23)
How do you teach people who might be your competition?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (13:28)
great question. Like I had so many people come at me like, dummy, you're creating your competition. But I do more land deals today because of just like sharing with people. Because when I share, not everyone wants to start a business, but they've got, just found a lender with 700 grand sitting in his bank accounts. House is paid for, rentals are paid for. You think he's gonna start a land business? Heck no. But he wants me to help him make

Aviva (13:36)
Hmm.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (13:56)
1.4 million. He wants to double that money over the next like 10 years. So that guy's my lender now. And then this guy over here, he's a brand new land shark and he just found a deal of the century, but he has no money. I know how to get money. This guy will lend me the money. So now I'm doing more deals just by being a connector.

Aviva (13:59)
Hmph.

Sure. Do you all like divide and conquer when it comes to markets? Or do you do the same markets?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (14:25)
Yeah, some of us are in the exact same market, because there's so many ways to make money on land deal. So that entitlement play I just told you about, I have sold to a lot of those guys for 500,000, where I get it for 400,000. So I get it for 400,000, I sell it to this guy for 500,000, I make 100K. Now this guy's smarter than me, because he's going to spend another 100K on it. He's going to have it at 600,000, he's going to sell it to that builder for 2 million. Now the builder goes in and-

Aviva (14:35)
Mm-hmm.

Wow.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (14:54)
puts houses on it. Now he's going to make like all these ways of making money on just one piece of land.

Aviva (15:02)
I say this a few times a day, there's a million ways to make money in real estate.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (15:08)
That's so true. Yeah. I think land is the oldest business really. It all started with land.

Aviva (15:17)
I love it. You don't have to sell me on it.

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (15:20)
Yeah, yeah, what do they say? There's the guys that sell the pickaxes and shovels and then there's the guys that mine the gold.

Aviva (15:27)
Yep. No kidding. Brent, what makes you happy with what you do every day in commercial real estate or residential?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (15:37)
One of the things

that make me the most happy is seeing someone do their first real estate deal, their first land deal that may have been in education mode for the last two years and they wanted to quit their job or they wanted to retire their spouse. That is just like, okay, so I got a 20, well, he's 25 now, he's 23 when he came into the Landsharks. His mom is my office manager.

This guy literally just did a $50,000 net profit land deal and he helped the seller. The seller was losing the land. He negotiated with the bank. So the bank was happy, the seller was happy, and then they had eight offers on this land in Florida, and he never even took ownership of it. He actually assigned the contract. But watching him share his story today on the Whole Selling Inc podcast, interviewed...

If I find out a land shark just did a land deal, want to interview them and see how it was done from beginning to end because that story is going to inspire some other 25 year old that like says, heck with this, I'm not going to college. I'm just going to do what Mason Crane is doing. So that makes me super happy. I like, I like seeing that the ripple effect.

Aviva (16:55)
It's cool, it's an abundant world, an abundant industry. no, I feel the same way. I like to just sit back and learn how people navigate it. So Brent, where can the listeners find you, follow you, join Landshark, et cetera?

Brent Bowers TheLandSharks.com (17:14)
Yeah, the easiest way you want to jump on a call, go to the landsharks.com. Maybe you don't want to do land. You want to hear more about these, I don't know, these industrial buildings I'm buying or whatever. I'd be happy to have a conversation. I think I didn't create any of this. Other people have helped me go to the landsharks.com, schedule a call, or if you want to just check out, I put out videos every day on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, Brent L. Bowers. And yes, the L stands for land.

Aviva (17:44)
Brent, L. Bowers, everybody go follow Brent. Thank you so much for being on the show today and for everybody listening. We'll see you next week.