Five Courses to Make You a Better Land Broker | with Guest Bill Eshenbaugh, ALC, CCIM

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Justin Osborn: Welcome to the Realtors Land Institute podcast, The Voice of Land, the industry's leading land real estate organization.

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JO: Hello, this is Justin Osborn, Accredited Land Consultant with the Wells Group Real Estate Brokerage in Durango, Colorado. On today's podcast we have Bill Eshenbaugh, ALC and CCIM. He's been active in the brokerage and land development in the Tampa Bay area for more than 35 years. He's weathered and prospered through several real estate cycles and has a keen ability to see and forecast trends ahead of the curve. Tenacity and fervent passion for the business have earned him the nickname The Dirt Dog. Bill is frequently an industry speaker, teacher and active board member of multiple associations. He's been honored with numerous Broker of the Year and Top Producer Awards over his 35 plus year career. He was recently inducted into the RLI National Educator Hall of Fame, having co-authored and taught multiple courses for the Realtors Land Institute. He takes great pride and honor. How are we doing today, Bill? 

Bill Eshenbaugh: Good morning. I'm doing great. Beautiful Monday morning in early October here in central Florida.

JO: Well, thanks for taking some time to do this recording, man. I think you've got a lot of wisdom in your years that our listeners can learn from. And man, the dedication you've given to the education field and the development field have been quite impressive for me to watch.

BE: Well, thank you. That's, I guess I come from a family of teachers. My mother and father both taught in one room schools more than 100 years ago. And, growing up we sat around a kitchen table. We had to do reports on what happened in class when we were in the milking parlor, we had to do our arithmetic tables, that sort of thing. So, education... I would've been a history teacher if it had paid any money, but I realized early on I needed to do something else if I wanted to make a lot of money.

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JO: Nice. Well, it looks like you figured it out, man. Your career has been quite successful. Now, did you grow up there in Florida? 

BE: I grew up on a farm in western Pennsylvania that our family's had since the late 1700s and came to Florida when the steel industry all took a crash and burned in 1980 and left the... As I say, Elvis left the building, the steel industry left Pittsburgh, so I left Pittsburgh.

JO: Gotcha. All right. Well you've obviously made a good career there in Florida for yourself, and you've done a lot of that around education. So, tell our listeners, how does formal education fit in becoming a better land broker and you becoming the land broker that you are today? 

BE: I think it starts with the basic premise of being able to develop good communication skills, both verbally and written skills by having a formal education, hopefully in college. And every one of my guys has at least a bachelor's degree. We have one master's degree here in ag business, for example. Everyone has a real estate background actually in their educations at places like Auburn and Florida State has a really strong program. About half our team came through that real estate school program there. And just they learned not only the good conversational skills and the written skills, but the analytical skills, how to look at a site and go through the analytical process, both financially and narratively to be able to go out and do a good job of understanding the property and describing it so you can present it to somebody who wants to buy it, but doesn't know what they're buying.

JO: And are there certain courses that you really recommend for your agents or for newer agents? 

BE: Well, I think that anyone who wants to have an interest in land, and I still teach three hour seminars here locally to the general population of residential brokers, but for RLI people Land 101, the Introduction to Land Brokerage absolutely is a wake up call if you're licensed already to understand the difference between selling perhaps residential real estate and moving into the land arena, the fact that this is not an instant gratification business, as you know, that land transactions take longer, more complicated in many cases. That is a kickoff one. Learn to understand the unique issues of land. I tell people, you can go buy a shopping center and that's anchored by one of our leading grocery stores. Most of the mystery is solved. Now you just have to look at the leases in the shopping center and how much is left on them and quality of tenants and so forth.

BE: But you don't have to worry about an eagle or ground penetrating radar studies to determine what was on the site and so forth. So that's a good one. And in site selection, I helped write it as well. And I think it's just invaluable to have, if you're going to be in an arena where you have the crossroads of commercial, agricultural, and transitional land all coming together, that site selection is really paramount. There's some other good courses too, in taking some of the financial analysis courses as well.

JO: Now you said you're still teaching like a three hour course for the local association. Tell me a little bit about that.

BE: It's basically an abbreviated Land 101. It's just an introduction. There are two local associations that are, both have thousands of residential members, I guess, on either side of the bay, and they both put on basically a year long program for their residential agents. So they'll have an industrial broker, they'll have an office broker, retail, and I don't know why they seem to always end with land. I don't know if it's because it's the only thing left or they think it's the most important. I'd like to think they think it's the most important. But [laughter] we end up with three hours of land analysis. It's kind of a short form 101 for three hours. And I give them a scary lesson. Look, it's gonna take you three years to make a living. You got 1000 moving parts instead of 100. But if you want to get into it, you need to go take the RLI courses and get you going down the road. And if you feel like you have a question, email me. I'll answer it for you. I'll try and help them.

JO: Well, maybe they are saving the best for last, like you said, when it comes to having their brokers take that land class.

BE: Well, I want to leave that lasting impression on them, put it that way, right? 

JO: There you go. Well, and do you find that most people are pretty open, pretty receptive, excuse me, pretty receptive to the material that are in these courses? 

BE: Oh, absolutely. I think for a lot of them it's scary because it's such a different world than they live in, that, oh my goodness, we have to learn all this. What do you mean you don't even know if you have a contract for 90 or 120 days 'cause you have a free look? What do you mean you're not going to have a closing for two to three years? This is unreal for people who close in 60 days or 30 days or whatever. But yeah, I think it's invaluable. I don't know how you get into land business without doing it. And I preach to them, look at your code of ethics, starts out with under all is the land. And somewhere in your code of ethics, you have an obligation to disclose if you're incompetent to your client. I wouldn't sell a house, save my soul. I've sold two houses and bought two condos and bought a ranch. But in every case, I did the deal and then I hired a realtor for a point or something to just come do the paperwork. As a licensed person, I don't want to be on that hook for all the things I don't know about residential...

JO: Yeah, there's definitely a liability there. I think a lot of people, especially starting out, they're hungry, they're motivated. They just need to get some deals under the belt. And we were all rookies at one point, so no judgment there. But, man, the liability is huge without bringing in somebody to work the deal with you, to educate you and to really warn you about the pitfalls that can come because every real estate transaction is so different. And I think a lot of people think, oh, they're all the same, every real estate transaction is so similar when you're selling land. But, man, you're in an area where you could be selling a citrus farm one day. You could be selling a home site another day or you could be selling transitional land for a big national developer another day. And those are all probably within, I would think a 30 mile radius of each other.

BE: Oh, yeah, absolutely. They're maybe next door to each other in some cases. But yes, absolutely.

JO: Well, talk about kind of what do the brokers accomplish and how does it make them better when they're done taking these courses? 

BE: Well, they've learned to know what they don't know when they went into it, first of all, and learn to know that while they're not going to know everything they need, they'll know maybe some more resources on how to find the answers, how to network with an architect or an engineer or a civil service or ground penetrating radar firm, the geotech firms, all those kinds of questions that they hadn't asked. I use an example. I went out on a ranch with two brokers last cycle 15 years ago. They wanted to show me this ranch. I had my client with me. The two brokers are in the backseat. They don't know anything about land, it's obvious before we get there. But we have to cross one of the big humpty hump railroad tracks to get into the property. None of their stuff mentioned that you got to cross a railroad track to enter it. There's a problem. We get on it and my client, my buyer's with me and he's in the right front seat.

BE: He said, "Would you all like to tell us about the eagle?" And I said, "Oh, he's not on our property, he's got a nest on the next property, but he's right on the property line." And you've got a cone of 1500 feet around a nest, that's 750 feet into our property. We've got an eagle we have to deal with. And we drove up a little further and I looked over to my left and I see a white post with an orange top. Aha, gas line. Where does this thing go? And as I turn back to look to my right across my truck, my client is doing the same. He's turned to his left and our eyes meet and he has seen the post on the other side. We're literally sitting on top of a high pressure gas line, not shown in their materials. He said, "You know what? Let's get out of here. Railroad tracks, big problem. Eagle, big problem. High pressure gas line, big issues of crossing them. We're wasting our time here, ladies. Let's get out of here." And we left. But here were two agents had no clue that either one of these three things were actually a problem. But nice to know.

JO: Yeah, that would have been nice to know for everybody. That was a waste of your time, their time and your client's time, and the negatives have got to be put up front in order not to waste people's time, but also to help them understand the property because a buyer, in my experience, they're going to buy the property and they're going to pay top dollar for the property that they understand the most. And so many agents don't even understand the property that they're representing. It's no wonder they can't explain it to the buyer's agent or to the buyer.

BE: Well, our job is to identify mystery and help get rid of it. And I'm a big believer if I'm going to get a no, let's get the no up front. Or if I'm not going to get paid, let's not get paid today.

JO: Well, yeah. That's clear just from knowing you and some of the other agents in your office. It's very much what I'd call a proactive approach as opposed to a reactive approach. And I think that just more people benefit by trying to be proactive and figure out, all right, what are the hurdles that are going to come up in this transaction? And let's try to figure out how to get around them or over them ahead of time instead of right when they're thrown at us 30 days before closing.

BE: Well, exactly. The other thing I would add to that is in land transactions, we have a bunch of hurdles of how long the inspection periods are and so forth. If you know what some of the problems are, you don't have a solution to them, but you know what they are, you can build that into realistic expectations up front between both your client, the seller and the buyer 'cause, gosh, my clients all think they got the perfect piece of property. There's nothing wrong with it. And we ought to... I cancel [0:12:40.7] ____ may close in 30 days. And the answer is, okay, you got a bunch of things going on after, it's going to take 36 months, not 30 days, probably to get to all permits in hand. So the more we can be realistic and help set that realistic expectations in the early stages, it makes a much easier process going down the road when somebody needs an extension. How do we deal with it? 

JO: Bill, talk to me a little bit about the two designations. I mean, I don't find very many people that have both the ALC and the CCIM. And that's pretty sweet to see that you have that. And I know there's some correlation between the two, but I think a lot of our listeners may not understand how those two can overlap and work together so much. So talk to us a little bit about that, if you would, please.

BE: Sure. I first met the CCIMs... I ran the sales center in Florida for the State of Florida for the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was the bailout agency for all the failed savings loans back in 1992. And I met some CCIMs and, wow, these guys are smart. They know what they're doing. These are people I need to know to sell failed commercial properties through them. So got to know them a little bit. A woman who became national president was here locally, got the hooks in me and said, "You gotta get in the CCIM program." So she set the hooks for me to spend $15,000 or $20,000 on getting the pin. And as I'm working through it, I'm thinking, I go to these national meetings and the CCIM people are a little formal, a little stiff, maybe. When I go across the aisle and there's some meetings with the RLI people going, oh, man, I feel at home.

BE: I grew up on a farm. These are really salt of the earth people. They're smart. They're teaching stuff. And I realized, to me, the CCIMs were teaching some stuff that was maybe a bit more theoretical. The RLIs were teaching stuff I could put to work on Monday. And so I came back and I'm thinking, what am I going to do? Which way am I really going to go here? And I found a guy down in Fort Myers, a fellow by the name of Chuck Bunchew, who had both of them. And Chuck was a little bit older than me. He was the only guy that went to short Normandy without a gun. He was a photographer. And he went all the way to Berlin to surrender without a weapon.

JO: Wow.

BE: Tough guy, right? [laughter] They couldn't shoot back, literally. And so I called him up when I went down and made a lunch appointment. And of course, he's 20 years older than me, so he's Mr. Bunchew. And Mr. Bunchew, I really admire that you have both destinations. But I'm trying to figure out why. And he didn't say anything. And then he took a bite of a sandwich and put it down. And he looked at me and he said, "It's 'cause I make money with them." [laughter] Okay.

BE: He said, "No," he said, "I'm in a bit smaller market than you. I do land one day. I sell a little office the next day. I've gotta do a little bit of everything. And I wanna be the best I can be in both those arenas. So I got them both." And I find that they're complementary as we cross over with transitional land and in our marketplace as well. Well, that makes sense. Well, I'm a bigger market, but we still are crossing over. I'm just going to get both of them. So to show you what an idiot I am, I went and did them both at the same time. It's like kinda just [0:15:49.2] ____, man. I'm jumping in the pool with some ice water floating around. And I'm gonna see if I can make it, right? I got them both now, I guess, 27 years ago, 'cause last year or year before last, CCIM sent me a new pin and said, "Congratulations. You're in the 25 year club." Okay. But from that, as I taught classes in Florida, I would say to them, and I've said to my own shop, look, unless you're with Cushman & Wakefield or CBRE or somebody, there is a glass ceiling for you as a land broker that you cannot get through.

BE: But let's push the glass ceiling a little higher by having both those designations on your lapel. You'll make more money and you'll know the person on the other end of the line or the other end of the phone or the conversation if they are also duly designated and you're a land broker, you've got somebody that has spent the money, spent the time and owns two really expensive pieces of jewelry on their shoulder. I've got mine and my new one's on my shirt today. They've made the commitment and they know what they're doing. So it just turned out to be wonderful. I tell everybody my earnings were Bill getting out of a Volkswagen and getting into a Corvette with two four barrels on it and a four speed. I went from blogging along, making a living to making a lot of money with those two designations and working it and working the system.

JO: Well, I know you definitely worked hard to get where you're at. For the CCIM folks out there, if you'd like to learn your ALC, there is a fast track designation. You can go to the RLI website at rliland.com and you can find those details under the accreditation tab. Now, Bill, I know there was a book you were recommending. It was taking place in Florida, 1858, I think. Tell me kinda what you took away from that book and how it's relevant still today.

BE: Well, it's a book called "A Land Remembered." It was written by a fellow named Patrick Smith. It's fictional, but it takes the truth of the journey for families to Florida pre-Civil War and shortly after the Civil War and that whole era. Now, Florida has been under six different flags of government, including the Confederate flag, the US flag, British, French, Spanish, and Seminole flags. So we were a state with no law, no governance for a long, long time, and even for the 10 years of occupation after the Civil War. We had all these families that would migrate here.

BE: There were some land grants and so forth, but they came usually in a wagon drawn by mules or oxen from Georgia or Carolinas or Mississippi, somewhere down to Florida. Maybe got some free land if you homesteaded it, but it was tough. No air conditioning, no highways, lots of mosquitoes, no irrigation systems and so forth. So when I go out today and I meet a ranch family that's been here for a while, my wife's 5th generation, which means her family came here in around 1862, '63. Those families pride themselves in that heritage. So when you meet them and you talk to them, they all think "A Land Remembered" was written about them. So it gives an understanding of how a family goes from that era, rounding up cattle left here by the Spanish who came in 1521 and left behind a bull and seven cows to feed future Spanish explorers. That became five centuries of cattle. Lots of cattle were running free here both when the Civil War came along and after the Civil War.

BE: So to honor those folks, "A Land Remembered" helps anybody who comes here from up north somewhere or somewhere else, other states read it and understand the character that went into pioneering here that they would understand better today the value that these families put on their farms and their ranches, and the families are reaching that emotional crisis today, crossroads, maybe. Growth is coming to them. The ranch is worth a lot more for development. Citrus is a dying industry because of diseases called Green that came from China, killing our citrus. Labor force has left the fields to hang drywall and make more money doing other things. And today's generation wants to go off and be doctors and lawyers and such as Willie Nelson said, and make a lot more money doing things other than running cattle, growing tomatoes. Heck, you can grow tomatoes down to Monterey and Mexico cheaper than you can deliver... And deliver them here to Publix in Florida.

BE: Then you can grow them 20 miles away and deliver them just 'cause of agricultural rules and all that kind of stuff. So we've got a lot of segments of our industry that're dying, and those families just are, they're having a hard time trying to figure out, what do we do next? Do we do conservation easements, keep the ranch in the family and so forth. So it's such a great framework. In fact, I went up to the Florida State Real Estate Conference two weeks ago and met, good God, so many smart young juniors and seniors in the real estate program, and they had the presence in the boys who come up to an old gray haired guy like me, standing there with a drink in my hand going, "Sir, I'd like to meet you. I'm so and so." Wow. I wouldn't have done that at 20 years old. I'd have been scared to death, but they came up to me. And so each one of those had the audacity to come meet me. I got their card and I sent them a copy of "A Land Remembered." And I'm getting back so many cool little notes from them going, "I never knew this existed." So it's kind of fun to give that book out as a guideline for somebody who wants to understand the history of our state.

JO: Man, that's great. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. So aside from reading books like that, with the experience and the accomplishments that you have, what are you doing these days to continue to learn and stay up to date with what's happening in the industry? 

BE: I go to more meetings collectively than my other seven guys to tell you the truth. [laughter] 'Cause I'm mostly old school. I go to a breakfast meeting, I go to an evening meetings, and one of my guys once said, "Well, we're young people. We don't like to go to evening meetings." I said, "I'm an old guy. I don't like to go to evening meetings either. But I come back with a new business card and I help build our database. I come back with somebody that's interested in one of my properties." So I'm staying very active out there listening to speakers, to what's going on in the marketplace, what are the trends? I'm trying to get a little bit of a handle on understanding artificial intelligence. Wow. Who would've thought that was something I was going to have to learn in my lifetime? 

BE: Trying to stay very proficient on my computer skills, my communication skills and so forth to be relevant. I don't want to be irrelevant. I don't want to be the guy who's signed and 10 years from now is hanging off one nail out there. Everybody goes, "Whatever happened to the old dirt dog, man?" He disappeared on us." And I'll tell you this, I taught in class back when we first had cell phones, and they were 20 cents a minute. There were brokers who wouldn't put their cell number on their card 'cause they didn't want to be charging them 20 cents a minute to call them. And I would get their cards and collect them places like Colorado and say, "Give me all your cards," at the first break.

BE: And I would look at 'em and go, "Okay, Kevin, how come you don't have your email address on here?" "Well, I don't have an email address." "Oh, okay." And this guy or gal or whatever, "How come you don't have your cell number on here?" And, "It costs money." I said, "I'll tell you what, you could talk to somebody for an hour at 20 cents a minute. I think I've got it figured out. That's 12 bucks if I do my math right. You'd pay $12 for a breakfast meeting with somebody. You've got an hour of their time for 12 bucks. You need to get your numbers on here, folks, because I'll tell you what, if you don't have a cell number and an email address on your phone, on your business card, you're irrelevant to anybody under 40. They're not going to mail you something at post office Box 512, Tuscany, Georgia, wherever you are. So get relevant." And that's what I'm trying to do. I want to make sure I'm staying semi relevant at least.

JO: Well, I think that's awesome, man. I mean, that's a great, great story of obviously that transition period that was taking place. Probably my guess would be early '90s is probably when that was going on. But man, so many people do just get stuck in the rut of what worked for them at that time, and the change just comes by and leaves them in the past. And so I admire that you're still getting out there going to meetings. So many new people in our industry think that it's a digital industry and there's certainly a digital component to it. But man, the one-on-one relationships, the sitting down, having conversations with clients, going to these meetings and being a voice in the room, that's where a bulk of the business is done. I know for a lot of us land brokers, so I hope our listeners will really take that to home and listen to what Bill and I are talking about and get out from behind the computer screen and go meet some folks. Go get involved.

BE: Well, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having great skills and being able to do all the aerial photography and then zoom in on a property and research all the public records. Gosh, I had to spend my Fridays down at the courthouse looking at microfiche to get records. So I admire somebody who can get it instantly on their iPhone as they're driving down the street and tell me who owns the property and what they paid for it and how long they've had it, blah blah, that's wonderful. But get on the property, get out of your vehicle, shut the motor off. Listen to what sounds are in the background. Is there a sawmill or an airport or a highway, and smell of the air. I mean, good God, where's the hog farm or the chicken farm or whatever the obnoxious use might be that you're never going to see on your computer.

BE: And when you list it, get out and walk all four corners 'cause you're looking at a prospective buyer maybe on all four sides of your property. The worst thing in the world is you mess around for six months and someone else, Wells group walks in with a contract to buy it, and you have to pay half your fee to the buyer's broker when you were looking at the buyer. So I think it's a combination, and one of the questions I asked my guys when we hit a problem in a contract and we have them, problems in negotiations, my question is, well, what did they say when y'all met? And there's like this dead silence.

BE: Well, we did a conference call I said, "That really wasn't the question, was it? What did they say when you met?" Because you get in that room, eyeball to eyeball, it's a lot harder to be a jerk maybe than if you're sitting across the table from each other. But on a conference call, it's easier to be a jerk, on a video call maybe not quite as easy, but in person it's a little tougher for most people. So I just think you'd make a lot more progress if you have a problem and probably good to have a meeting early on where you're all still friendly and warm and fuzzy about this deal, so that you're just setting the stage for when you have a problem down the road, you know each other a little better.

JO: Bill, I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you just said there, man. So many people are willing to say things behind a screen or behind somebody's back that they're not willing to say in a room to the other person. And I think if a lot of the agents would get together with their clients and maybe the other broker, actually have a face-to-face conversation, they could actually avoid a lot of these kind of mountains that, or excuse me, a lot of these molehills that turn into mountains because they're not in a room talking together, one-on-one, face-to-face.

BE: Well that's true. And if somebody is trying to babysit kids or out of softball game or something and they're trying to respond and they're a little angry and they send a text back, they can really inflame the situation and that's probably the worst you can do right behind us, an email that you haven't thought out and read out, draft it and put it away till tomorrow morning, man. Send it... After you read it tomorrow morning if you still feel as perplexed and angst about it as you felt last night, then go ahead and send it, I guess. But it's a little harder eyeball, just you and me on here, Justin. If you were angry with me, I could tell it a lot easier than just getting a text from you or an email from you.

BE: Sure, yeah, yeah. Slow down and sleep on it, man. That's great advice. Well, Bill, thank you for joining us today. I hope our listeners will use the information you provided to explore the courses you talked about as well as the book "A Land Remembered" and become an even better land broker. Anything else you'd like to share here as we're wrapping up? 

BE: Well, I will say this, for those who are listening, I made a pretty nice donation to the Education Foundation, the Land Education Foundation. I think it provided, I'm trying to remember now, 50 scholarships maybe to take a course. It's in my brother's name, John Eshenbaugh. And please sign up and use one 'cause it's there for that purpose. So I'm trying to give back a little bit in that regard as well.

JO: Oh, man. That's great. Well, yeah, listeners, you should definitely go on the website, rliland.com, check out the education tab and look at those specific designation courses that'll help you build more confidence and also better advise your clients across a wide variety of land real estate topics. For more expertise on land real estate topics, be sure to check out the RLI blog, follow us on social media, and of course tune in for the upcoming episodes of The Voices of Land podcast.

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