Welcome to the Purpose Driven Investor, where we build more than portfolios, we build communities. I'm your host, Robert Howell, a real estate investor and founder of Define Communities. Each week, we'll explore how purpose and profit connect through affordable housing, land home packages, and impact-driven investing. If you're a lender, land seller, or a partner who believes money should move with meaning, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Purpose Driven Investor Podcast, a show about the people behind the deals and the long game of building wealth with meaning. Today's guest is Wayne. He's the founder of Junk Land Into Gold. Wayne has been investing in real estate for over 50 years, and he got into it completely by accident, which we'll talk more about. Along the way, he discovered a niche most investors overlook, undervalued, underdeveloped land in prime areas. Not scraps in the middle of nowhere, but hidden opportunities right in the best parts of town. He's seen deals bought for as little as$1,000 and sold for six figures. And today, he teaches others how to find, fix, and sell land that most people walk right past. This is a conversation about perspective, patience, creativity, and what Wayne has learned over five decades in the game. So welcome to the show, Wayne. Hello. Glad to be here. Oh man, like I said before we started recording, I'm really excited about this conversation and really learning about what you do. I think it's an interesting niche. So before we get into all the details and all the ins and outs, let's talk about how you got your start. So as I was reading your bio, it said you're the accidental investor. So I just got a master's degree at Georgia State University in business, and I couldn't get a job in Georgia. So I moved to Seattle just to visit for a little bit on my way to Hawaii where I wanted to live. And I was with my wife and my daughter. And I thought, just for the hell of it, I'd go to the University of Washington job board and see what they had. And I saw this card that says, real estate consultant for a real estate company in Federal Way, which is close to here. What the hell, I'll just call it. I called it. He says, well, I'm the president of this $40 million real estate company, and ITT just bought it, and I'm with ITT in New York. You're the only guy to answer the ads, you're hired. And the ad offered a lot of money for the job, and I doubled it. He says, how much do you want? I said, well, I want double what you offered. And he goes, OK, since you're the only guy that answered, we'll pay you double. And so I started out with a huge salary, giant salary. And I didn't know anything about real estate. So I went, and I just started. I really dove into learning everything about real estate. And I really got good at it because I'm a real good researcher. And so my job was to determine the sales price of the company and all their assets. And it took me two years to do it because they owned a lot of stuff. And by the end of the two years, I really knew my way around real estate. But then the job was over once I did that. And then I decided to go and try and sell real estate. And then I worked for a commercial company and I sold the property for half a million dollars. And then I was supposed to get a 10% commission. And when it all boiled down, I ended up with $5,000 commission off a half a million dollar deal because everybody else took their piece of pie. And at that point, I looked at the closing statement and it said, the seller got 95% of the 500,000 and our company got 10% of it. And then I got 5% or whatever, 10% of that. But that made me realize that being the seller is where you wanna be. So at that point, I decided I'm gonna be a seller, no longer an agent. And then I said, I didn't have any money. So I just went out and tried to figure out how I could buy property with very little or no money. And I went to the found out there's tax sales every year in King County, where you could buy a lot for $100. And I was just shocked you could. And so I started going these tax sales. And I'd buy these lots for $100 that I didn't know if they'd work or not that, you know, I just kind of play around with them. But they're so cheap. You can buy 10 at a time. And then I figure out how to make them work. And I didn't really know, but over 40 years of dealing with all these, I learned there's seven basic rules to fix any junk piece of land and make it buildable. And it multiplies the price by hundreds of thousands of dollars. And for example, I bought one in Issaquah right next to a commercial area. Gilman and Newport way, which is a very high rent area. And I paid a 1000 dollars for this lot. Okay, this is a half acre. Flat free and clear beautiful location. It's on a corner as water, sewer and power. And I called the guy up and I said, it was in a tax sale. And I said, why are you letting it go in the tax sale? He says, well, the title's all screwed up. He said, I tried to give it to the city of Issaquah. They wouldn't take it because the title's all screwed up. And one of my techniques is clearing title. And I can do that in an eye blink. It's really easy. So I tell you what, I said, I'll give you $500 for the property. He said, what do you think, I'm crazy or something? And I go, well, how much do you want? He says, well, I got to split it with my sister. So make it $1,000, and I'll sell it to you. So I said, OK. So I Venmoed him $1,000 and sent him a deed. He was back east of me. And within about 48 hours, I owned the property for $1,000. Then I sent it to my attorney. I said, clear the title, told him how to do it. And in 90 days, I had clear title, cost me $15,000. And now at that point, the lot's worth 500,000, that one lot. But that's not enough. So then I went to the city and I said, since it's a half acre, can I split it into two quarter acre lots? They said, yes. So I did a short plan. So now I have two lots worth 500,000 and my total investment is 50,000. And so it's a million dollar potential, you know, I make almost, you know, $900,000 profit. Yeah, that's great. That's what I do. And, um, and what the beauty of it is that there's always, uh, an availability of junk lots. Uh, there's 10,000, uh, properties in, um, uh, raw land property land in King County where I work. And, uh, and now that 10,000, there's 100%. All right. Well, that's great. That's a good background on how you got into it. Tell us about some of the mistakes that you made early on in this process of One of the biggest things I teach is mistake your way to success. That's one of the rules. If you don't do a lot of mistakes, you'll fail. And so I made all the mistakes you could possibly make. And each one taught me something good. If you bump your head against the wall over here, you find the hole over there and you make it through the wall. And I bought a lot of properties that never worked. And I probably bought maybe, in the beginning, I bought probably 80% of what I bought didn't work. I couldn't make them work. Now, 90% of the ones I buy now work with And the important thing about it's your ego is on the line when And the key to failing properly is to understand that every time you fail, you get stronger and wiser because there's a lesson in every failure. And the goal is to first understand you're failing your way to success. And then when you think about your ego, you feel like you're doing something positive. But if you say you make a mistake and you go, well, I'm no good, I made a mistake, then that hurts you. And that makes you want to stop doing what you're doing and makes it hard to go forward. So every day I make at least 20 mistakes now and it takes me 10-15 minutes to write a one-line email because I can't type worth a shit because I'm 80 years old and my fingers don't listen to my brain. You know, I say one and it puts it at eight and you know, but I just laugh at myself that Well, God, I'm gonna be really make a lot of money today because I made, you know, 50 mistakes, you know, it's really, it's important. It is very critical to have that attitude. Because this way, you always win. You fail with the right mindset. Yeah. And that's, that's one of the most important things Love it. So, let's talk about junk land and why junk land isn't junk. So, tell us a bit more about what does junk land really mean when you say, hey, there's lots of junk land, what's that mean? Yeah, okay. Well, if you go to the county tax sale, like once a year, they do a tax foreclosure sale. And all the properties that nobody bids on, because they look so awful, that's junk land, okay? And it's gonna be like one foot strips or a little corner of a lot that's two feet by two feet or whatever. But there's a happy medium is that those are the real junk that you can't build on. Well, actually I can, but there's a way, it's very technical. A normal person can't build on a two foot strip. But if the strip is like 20 feet wide, You could, anywhere you can get a footprint, a thousand square foot footprint of a foundation you can build on. So let's say you have a 20 foot wide strip, but it's maybe a hundred feet long or something like that. You can get variances to build on a house on it that would be like 14 feet wide by 50 feet long, which is, and you go three stories. You can build a reasonable house on that. And you'll be able to buy a strip like that, nobody's gonna bid on it because they think it's not buildable. And there's some tricks, there's seven tricks you can use on land to make them buildable. And one is called a variance. So if your land is too small, like let's say the land was, well, even smaller than that, let's say it was 18 feet wide, okay? And then if with the standard setbacks, you end up with 11 foot wide house, which is, you know, you can go to the city and say, can I reduce the setbacks to one foot on each side? And a lot of times they'll let you do that. So you can actually make the lot, even though the lot's only 18 feet, you can maybe build a 16 foot wide house, you know, by 50, and then three stories. And Yeah. And I imagine in some cities that that makes Well, I buy properties right where I live. I live in Kirkland. It's a real high rent district. Bill Gates lives, he lives in my neighbor, you know? I mean, you know, I mean, the property is worth a million dollars a piece. And this, I do have a 20 foot strip in downtown Bellevue that's close to Bill Gates's house that I'm getting, I'm going to get a building permit for on that one is 20 feet by 300 feet. And, but there's tricks to it. On that, the lot was too small to build a big house. So you can go to a neighbor and ask them if you can do a boundary line adjustment and take some of their land and add it to the 20 foot strip and made it, make it like a, like 40 foot wide where you put the house. Then you can build a normal size house and three stories. And those houses in that neighborhood are about, probably about 4,000 square feet. You know, they're big houses. And that lot, once it's built, is worth a million. That's huge. One million. So you can afford to spend money on it. Spend a little bit of money to get it buildable. And what I do is I go to the neighbor and I say, look, I'll tell you what, if you give me enough land to make this buildable, I'll give you half the profit. Right, And for you, some money is better than no money, right? I said, look, you're going to make $500,000 if you play ball with me. If we take this junk piece of land and add, you're not using this back part of your yard, just give me that part. We'll do a boundary line adjustment. And Tell us, so you mentioned you've bought some lots that just aren't really worth anything and made mistakes that way. What separates worthless land from what you There's certain rules that apply that make it buildable. And so when you're looking in my program, I teach people what those things are. When you're going through the tax sale list and you're checking them off and you look at each piece, you see if any of the rules apply to that piece, if none of the rules apply, then it's That's how you determine it. Okay, that's great. So with that, let's move into talking about your process. You've got a course that teaches people how to do that. Can you talk us through, just high level, what your process achieves and what the desired outcome is Yeah, right. Well, first, the program is called JunklandIntoGold.com. So it's JunklandIntoGold.com. And Basically, it's got two books and 50 videos. What I decided to do is when I turned 80, I realized I'm going to die at some mortality becomes an issue. I decided to give away all my knowledge on real estate to young people so they could get ahead of the game and get out of the rat race thing where you just never end up with any extra money. They could do this, what I do on the side while they're working, and make a huge killing. All they have to do is make one deal. Then they can quit. Then they got $400,000 in the bank, which they would never achieve in their rat race job. Most of us just, we work to pay the bills and there's not much left over. Well, that's how it used to be, me. And I want to, I sincerely want to help people. And, and, and I'm more than happy to give away all my knowledge to people to do this, you know, and, um, I have several sites that I have for helping people, but this is one to, this teaches people how to make money. That's important. You have to be financially free to be out of the pain of, of, of your existence. You know, if you live month to month, you know, and, uh, uh, I have two other sites that teach people how to deal with their personal problems too, like how to be happy in their lives. I have another site called AchieveLoveEnergy.com, and if you have personal problems and you're not happy, you go to that site. It's free, and it teaches you how to be happy all day long. That's important. That's important. And I have another site, if you're full of fear, you're worried about nuclear war and all that shit. The other site's called thefuturewasperfect.com. And what that does, it allows you to create a picture of the future where everything was actually golden perfect. And then you look at yourself now and you go, everything was perfect, so now I'm happy. That's great. So that's I try. My goal in life now is to help people and help financially. I can help them personally. I can help them emotionally. But what we're talking about today is financial and financial is important. And somebody who has a job and they need a side gig, this is perfect because you can get the program. It's a. It's about $500 to buy everything. It's not very expensive. That's a lot of hours of information, but if you learn any one of the techniques, anyone can make you a million dollars. If you learn all of them, you're guaranteed, and make a lot of money if you- Sign me up. That's great. You've been doing this for a while. What's kept you so engaged over Well, I don't see it as work. To me, it's a hobby because I love doing what I do. For years, you know the feeling of searching for gold, panning for gold with a gold pan? Every tax sale I go to, I look at it as a gold pan full of gravel, and every gold pan has nuggets in the bottom of it. And every tax sale, if you go through enough properties that might be a couple hundred properties, you're gonna find one golden nugget. And all you need is one for sale. And sometimes you'll find two or three. One time I found 10 in one tax sale, about 10 properties, and they were all golden. I mean, they were just killer good properties. And they were relatively cheap. I think I paid about $1,000 or $2,000 for each So it sounds like the thrill of the search, the It's like when you're hunting for gold, you get the gold fever. Except the land is actually worth more than gold. Because even if you found a gold nugget that was this big, maybe it'd be worth $5,000 or $10,000. but I find a nugget is worth 500,000. They're worth Talk about your definition of success. I imagine what you thought success was 50 years ago is different than what you think success is today. Talk about how that has changed over the years. That's a difficult question. Some people I've talked to, they say it used to be funny. When I first worked I didn't know that the outcome would be so great. But I went forward in the unknown, just trying all this stuff, just kind of playing it. And I didn't know how good it would be. I had no clue. But I just buy these lots for $100. And if I sold them for $200, I go, I made 100% of my money. I'm killing it. And I didn't realize that was you could sell them for a hundred times. I didn't know that until it took me like a year or two after I got these techniques down better and found that I could do them much easier. So I failed a lot initially. And then later, now when I pick a lot, it's so easy. I can spend two or three hours going through the list, maybe make one or two calls and do a $500,000 deal. I mean, it's so easy. Now I know what to look for and stuff. And the trick is, well, the main trick is calling the guys before the tax sale. See, once it's in a tax sale, you got to compete on bidding, which you still might get a good buy, but if you can get the guy before it goes in a tax sale, they're looking at losing everything. And they don't want it and they're called the don't wanter. And I call him up and I say, do you want to keep this property? And he says, no, I don't want to keep it. So you don't want it, right? And I go, well, I'll give you peanuts for it. And they'll go, okay, I'd rather have one peanut than nothing. I mean, it's kind of silly, but it's true. That's why I offer $500 for most of my properties I offer. And I almost always get the same thing. You think I'm crazy? I want to sell it to you for 500. And I say, well, how much do you want? And they give me a crazy low thing. Well, I want 3,000 or 5,000 or some ridiculously low amount. I had that from a guy. I bought a relatively new, gorgeous chalet cabin up in one of the ski areas. And I offered the guy 500 bucks. He said, you think I'm nuts? And he sold me this cabin, gorgeous cabin for $2,000. Wow. Yeah. That's great. I mean, it's, you know, it's just unbelievable. Do you still have it or you sold it? I use it. Yeah. And I go up there, you know, it's, it's a beautiful cabinets in it. It's all it's watertight. It's been there for a long time and it's got all the accoutrements and it's on top of a Hill. And it's, it's got, it's on an acre and a half with a stream and a river in the front of it. I mean, it's, Let's talk about land and the future of land. Why do you think land will still matter in the future? They're So it's a limited resource. And they're always developing land. And when they develop land, they take all the cream of the crop land and make lots on it. But the goofy pieces, they segregate them out of the plats. And then they don't like paying taxes on them, so they let them go for back taxes. And those goofy pieces are the ones you can buy for peanuts. And they were unbuildable to the contractor because he likes, you know, flat and clear square lots with no problems. And your criteria is dramatically lower. You'll buy a triangular lot, or a sloped lot, or a wet lot, or a lot with no access. And so those will always be there, because as people create shorts, they do plats, there's always extra lots left over. Another thing, every time they put a road through a community, They cut the lots at a diagonal. There's all these triangular lots. Originally, the lots are all square. You put a road through it, it almost always goes at an angle. I don't know why. You get a triangular lot over here and a triangular lot over here that theoretically looks non-buildable because they're goofy. The law says that when a road in our county, when you cut a lot in two pieces, it becomes two separate building sites. Where before it was one site, you only build one house, but you put a road through it. And even if they're little teeny pieces, you get a variance to put, as long as you get a footprint of a thousand square foot footprint on that little triangle, it's Then you build a 3,000 square foot home. Yeah, that's genius. All right, let's get in our rapid fire questions here to wrap it up. What's the biggest lesson that real estate has taught you? The number one lesson, this is the most important lesson of all. is you have to buy from a don't wanter, somebody who does not want their property. If you buy from a wanter, you have to pay full price. If you buy from a don't wanter, you get it for absolutely peanuts. And don't wanters, there's gobs of them. Kids who inherit their property from their parents and stuff, those are huge category of don't wanters. In fact, the one in Issaquah, that was from the kids. you know, their dad was a smart guy, and he knew he could make this thing work, but he died. They got it. They didn't know what to do. And they didn't know how, you know, they didn't care. So they're don't wanters. And you can use that philosophy anywhere in the world. Anywhere. If you're looking for property, you talk to 100 people and find out which ones are the don't wanters. And those are the guys you negotiate with. And if they want it, Perfect. All right. What is one habit that Well, the biggest one is don't give up. Don't give up. Just don't give up and fail your way to success or mistake your way to success. That's the biggest one, because it's really easy to get stub your toe on something and give up. And most people do that. And if you could change how you think, just That's great advice. What Oh, well, I think the future is going to be absolutely phenomenal. I really believe that we're in a most extraordinarily wonderful time that's coming. And it's going to be absolutely just devastatingly and provide everything you want, and provide everything you want. That's Let me just say my three sites. There's junklandindegold.com, Perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate you joining Wayne. And if people want to reach out to you, what's the best way to go to your websites? Yeah, All right. And I know a lot about everything. So you can ask me anything about I just have so much knowledge and I just love sharing it because once I die, it's gone. So I All right. Well, listen, I really appreciate you joining today. That was a very insightful conversation. I look forward to dive deep into junk land and I appreciate you joining. All right. Well, I'm more than happy to help anybody do anything. Good deal. All right. Well, thanks for listening today, and go follow Wayne. Go contact him at one of his websites if you want to learn more about junk land, want to learn more about happiness, want to learn more about the future. All right. Have a great day. All right. Thanks for listening to The Purpose Driven Investor. If today's episode sparked an idea or inspired you to make an impact, connect with me at howellandsons.com. Join our community of purpose-driven investors who are helping families find stable homes while building real returns. Because when