Travis King is an entrepreneur who helps people achieve their dream of financial freedom with land flipping. After a number of years entrenched in the corporate world and with multiple side hustles failing to provide financial freedom, Travis discovered land flipping. The results would be life-changing: within 2 years he had built up passive income which enabled him to pursue this venture as his full time job, resulting in a seven-figure empire over the following decade. Unsurprisingly, it was from this pursuit that Travis found true purpose – helping others experience wild success through niche land flipping opportunities; now providing coaching programs and training courses so all can benefit! Travis joins Chris Van Vliet to talk about how to maximize your side hustle, what finding your passion looks like, how he discovered land flipping, what to look for in a great deal, the power of gratitude and much more!
Where to start your side hustle:
“Yeah, well, I have like, so what I did, I created a free challenge. Because when I started, everything was paid, right? Like everything was if I had questions, or I emailed somebody, like, you got to buy the course. Right? So for me, I thought if I ever get in a position of educating, I want to give people like without [money]. Because it took me several months, Chris of like Googling and watching YouTube videos, like trying to get familiar with land. And then also like, I was very sceptical and needed proof of concept, right? So I’m, it took me a long time, almost like a year of analysis, paralysis of getting started. So I’m like, Okay, if I ever do this education thing, like I want to give somebody a free like kind of like an intro class. So if you go to travisking.com, I have a free challenge that’s a seven day 100% free challenge. And it’s kind of like though seven days. Each session is like anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour where you’re really getting oriented with the concept and the idea that over the course of seven days, you have a feel for me, and you’re also familiar with land without having to you know, get out your your wallet, right and buy a course or anything. So that’s probably the best like starting point, you know.”
On beginning to side hustle:
“Well, the passion like, or the interest was always there. But the execution is what I lacked. So very similar to how people would go to like a seminar and fill that motivation and rah rah feeling and then leave it like that. It doesn’t mean you’re educated, it just means you’re hyped, right? That was kind of me, I was interested in real estate, and I started reading like, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and some of these, like very well known or traditional books. But the problem was, I didn’t really study them, right? And I didn’t execute them on like, they’re fantastic books and have amazing concepts, but I use them more like they got me hyped up. And then I ran out there really naively as a young 20 something right, with a high income and pretty good credit score, and bought up as much property as I could not knowing anything about, like, how to vet the properties and what’s a good property and and where are we at in the market? You know, so it looked like a good strong start in the like, mid, like 2004 2005. And then, you know, I’m sure a lot of listeners can tell where the story is going. Right?”
What happened next:
“What happened in 2008 ish is even billionaires, right, very intelligent guys lost 40 50% of their net worth, right, with the economy so that’s kind of what happened to me. I got bit early on with foreclosures, and you know, losing houses. And so I started really young, kind of trying to be that entrepreneur on the side, like with houses and house investing, but due to just not seeing the, you know, the recession coming, and then also just being young and naïve, right, and not really studying things, just diving in, I got hit pretty hard. So that was like my first attempt to kind of be an entrepreneur side hustle, and it didn’t end well. Right. So then we spent the next five, six years kind of licking my wounds and recovering and just getting up going to work in that same routine and kind of going what’s next. And that’s where, you know, fast forward five, six years, I still had that itch and at this time, speaking of side hustles and so I mean, that’s why people say side hustle, like we’ve done everything. And I say we, like my wife and I, so we, you know, we’ve been on this journey together and we’ve done all these side hustles so we like we flipped cars, we flipped campers, we mystery shopped, right, at what point at our lowest point right. Looking back, we’re doing a mystery shop at like Payless Shoe store, right? Not even like Nike, right? Or a Cool Kicks like Payless, right? So we’re in the middle of a mystery shop and it’s like, what are we doing, but we’re just trying to make outside money and trying to do something outside of work. And then fortunately, I stumbled across like land flipping as a side hustle or as kind of land as an asset class. And that’s really when we, you know, we grabbed that and it didn’t have the barriers to entry, like house investing did or multifamily single family multifamily, where you gotta have gobs of money for, you know, 20% down payments on three $400,000 houses. You could buy cheap property at auctions, and it just had a really low barrier to entries. And I still had PTSD from the crash of housing. So I felt like starting small with something cheap, where I wasn’t betting the farm would be like a safe way to try the side hustle again, within real estate.”
How to flip land:
“Yeah, well, now it’s a lot different than when we started. When we started we would buy off of tax online tax auctions. So whenever somebody doesn’t pay their property taxes for enough years, three to five years. And not all states are the same, but in a lot of states, you know, they want to, they want to collect those property taxes, obviously, right. So they want to bring it back from the tax roll. So they have auctions. And they have online auctions, that it’s not like the 80s and 90s, where you need to go stand at the courthouse steps, right, and hold up your like, you know, your paddle. And like bid like you can just online and put your max bid, and it’s very similar to eBay, right. So that was our first flips were like buying a property for $500. And then selling it for $2500. So this was all like we would buy on an auction, and then we’d resell it on eBay for $2500. And then we bought one for like $600 and sold for $5000. You can sell land on eBay, I know it’s insane.”
On low barriers to entry:
“Yeah it’s, the thing is, it’s really like the boring, less sexy, like under looked asset class, right. So like, you turn on HDTV, you’re watching flipping this house, people are picking out cabinets, they’re remodelling homes, right? That resonates with people, they get excited about that. But like, can you imagine, like, turn on your TV and like people are like, Okay, so here’s this dirt, right? We’ve got a little hill over here, like, here’s where the driveway will be, you know what I mean? Like, it’s just, it’s not an attractive asset class. So because of that, it’s kind of overlooked or dismissed. And then the reality is, it’s a little more challenging to appraise or value, because the assessed like county assessed tax values, there’s not always a correlation with market value. So it’s not like houses where there’s 10 different estimates or 10 different places, you can see what a house is worth. So that’s where the opportunity comes in, because it’s harder to value, and everybody’s occupied with houses and house investing. So land is just kind of this like blue ocean right over here that people aren’t interested in. Because there’s all the stigma from decades ago of like, land is just this thing that sits, it doesn’t make money, right. But the reality is with the internet, you know, with the internet and visibility and reach now, it’s not the same as it was I think in the 80s of like owning land. You know, it’s just like any it could be flipped just like you said, like a couch or like anything.”
On life before business:
“Yeah, so I you know, so I started college with little to no direction, so what do you do, right, when you have no direction out of high school? It’s either military, or it’s college, and you know, figure it out. I, you know, snuck in my four or five years of fun in a semester and a half of college right? And so I enjoyed all the social aspects of college but had no clue where I was going, you know, with it like as far as profession or degree and really was like, just impatient, you know, like, just kind of wanted to get out there and take on the world and start doing things, you know, not learning, right? If I had a lot of clarity on what I wanted to be, I think it would have felt different, right? But because of that, it just more felt like this like holding pattern of like, alright, like, I’m just here because I don’t know what I want to do next.”
On side hustling running in the family:
“So I’ve got a 14 year old, a 12 year old and an 8 year old. My boys, the older two, they’ve been buying this energy drink Prime right? They’ve been buying Prime, Logan Paul’s energy drink. They’ve been buying it for a $1.89 a bottle by the case and taking it to school and selling it for $5 to $7 a bottle. Okay, so like this is like, on their own right, it’s really cool to see them like, you know, kind of be little entrepreneurs. And that arbitrage buy by the case, sell by the bottle, right? So it’s really cool to see them like load up their backpacks and shorts to go push their prime right product. So it just shows the like, the asset class or the item or the arbitrage or whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s legal. Right? Like, it doesn’t matter. But it’s just like that desire, you know, of recognising that opportunity and then capitalising on it, you know, at any age, right.”
What is Travis King grateful for:
“My wife, my kids and that I get to help people.”
Featured image: Land Investing Mastery
