Right now, as you read this, there is another investor country working in your exact market.
They communicate with sellers faster than you, perform deeper due diligence than you, and submit more offers than you. Some of that work is done while they sleep.
Here’s the part that should catch your attention: tHe probably isn’t smarter than you, doesn’t have more money than you, and doesn’t work more hours than you.
They just discovered something about the technology in 2026 that many land investors haven’t realized yet, and it’s quietly becoming one of the biggest unfair advantages in this entire business.
Before I continue another sentence, I want to be honest about something. A good part of what I am going to describe I do through a CRM called Passedwhich I co-founded last year. So yes, I have a horse in this race and I’d rather you know it now than wonder about it later.
You can think of this as a checklist. As you read, ask yourself a simple question about each ability:
Can I currently do this with my setup?
If the answer is yes, fantastic! You are ahead of most people.
If the answer is no, or “I have no idea,” That’s no reason to panic. It’s just a sign telling you where to look next.
The whole issue comes down to this. Traders who are taking the lead have surrendered two things to their systems: their time and their mental bandwidth. The land business has always rewarded people who do things a little differently, and this is the 2026 version of doing exactly that.
1. Be available when sellers are available, not just when you are
The first operator to respond usually wins the deal. That’s nothing new. What is new is the environment.
For years, he could miss a call on Saturday, call the seller again on Monday, and still close the deal because no one else was contacting him. That world is gone.
Many owners now hear from several investors and a motivated seller remains motivated for about 48 hours. If you are asleep or on another call when they communicate, There’s a good chance you’ll lose that deal to someone who wasn’t.
For a long time, my response to this was a prerecorded voicemail greeting, and honestly, it worked well for years.
The next step was a virtual receptionist service like PATLivewhich is better because a real human being takes the call, but it’s expensive and that person doesn’t know anything about your business beyond a script.
What’s available now, and which many people don’t know about or don’t want to try, is an AI agent that answers your calls 24/7. He never calls in sick, is trained to ask exactly what you tell him to ask, and remains courteous even when a salesperson calls.
Best of all, it repeats the seller’s details for confirmation and then connects that information directly to your CRM, so the data entry is done for you.
Is it as good as a highly trained salesperson? No, and that’s not the comparison. Compared to a voicemail greeting or a receptionist reading a script you’d pay two or three times as much for, it’s pretty good.
There’s also an AI that texts sellers with real contextual responses, reading what the person actually said rather than sending the same default response to everyone.
The question you need to ask yourself is simple: can your current system intelligently answer the phone or text a salesperson when you’re not there?
2. Stop carrying your entire business in your head
Your brain is doing work it should never have done.
Most of us walk around trying to remember what each salesperson said, when we last spoke, what we offered, and what we promised to follow up on. The human brain is a pretty terrible file cabinet, and anything your software can remember is mental energy that you get back for the work that actually grows your business.
So here’s the next capability your system should have, and it’s basic: Every conversation with a salesperson takes place in one place. Every call, text, email, and note all attached to that contact.
Be honest with yourself about how you are doing right now. If you’re like many of the investors I talk to, you’re looking for text messages on your personal phone, threads in your inbox, and something you scribbled in your notebook during a call.
One of my favorite plugins here requires almost no effort to set up: AI that automatically summarizes your calls.
Your phone system should already transcribe every call, but the real upgrade is a workflow that summarizes that transcription and puts it directly into the contact’s notes. You don’t write anything.
A month later, when that salesperson calls out of the blue, you glance at your notes and remember exactly who they are in about three seconds.
3. Let your system advance agreements, so your memory doesn’t have to
Here’s something I’ve noticed over the years. The investors who really scale are almost never the ones with the best memories or the greatest willpower.
Many of them are a little clueless and sometimes I wonder how they do it. The answer is that they took your manual and turned it into automations, so nothing depends on them remembering to do it.
A contract is signed and the system automatically creates a task for whoever is in charge of due diligence. A contact has not been touched for 60 days, so the system assigns a follow-up task to their main manager.
I won’t pretend it’s magic. You have to create the workflow, but you create it once and it runs forever.
Along the same lines is something that could be the most profitable element of this entire list: a really easy-to-use electronic signature, where 95% of the work is done for you.
The number of offers you accept depends directly on the number of offers you send, and each friction reduces your volume.
I used to spend 15 to 20 minutes per deal opening a Word document, pasting details, saving a PDF, printing it and mailing it, and that friction killed the number of deals I won. Your system has to make submitting and signing an offer almost effortless, right on the seller’s phone.
And while we’re here, building a clean, credible website to capture leads should be almost idiot-proof in 2026. If you’re still paying more than fifty dollars a month for a site you’re not proud of, you’re behind.
4. Connect your tools to an AI that can actually do the job
All of the above is about having good software. This one is different and, in my opinion, is the real dividing line in 2026.
A normal big language model like ChatGPT or Claude is a brilliant consultant who answers any question you ask him, but never gets up and does the work. An AI agent is more like a smart college intern who actually goes out, performs the task, and brings it back for approval.
The gateway that makes this possible is called an API or sometimes an MCP connection. Don’t get stuck in the letters.
In simple terms, it is a gateway that allows an external AI tool to connect directly to your software, read your data, take actions on your behalf, and even connect two separate tools to work together.
Whatever you’re running your business on, it should have that front door. A lot of software still doesn’t do this, and I’m not sure how those tools survive once their users realize what they’re missing.
Here is a real example. Country portal recently opened its API. I have trained Claude to do the due diligence for me so I can give you a parcel number, county and state, and compile a complete research report with an estimated value and clickable links to the comparisons he used.
Work that used to take me between 15 and 20 minutes now takes me about 10 seconds. I keep cross-checking the results, because AI can make mistakes, but after a while you’ll find that it usually gets it right.
It gets bigger. once I delivered claudio a list of delinquent taxes of 900 rows and asked it to enrich each row using the Land Portal API.
About 30 minutes later, each row had acreage, assessed value, estimated value, price per acre, annual taxes, whether landlocked, road frontage, flood zone percentage, wetland percentage, buildability score, and more.
Doing it by hand would have taken days, and that’s exactly why most people never bother. With that data complete, I went from a nearly useless spreadsheet to a hyper-targeted email campaign in half an hour.
Now this is where it comes full circle. Both Stride and Land Portal have an API, meaning you can connect them to Claude and manage a huge amount of your business without having to log into either of them.
You can tell Claude to find a contact and report when you last spoke, add a new property to your portfolio worth $40,000, or compose and send an email to your list. Exchange any CRM and data services you use, and as long as they have that connection, you can do the same.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that any of this is free.
To do what I’m describing with Claude, I pay for a $100/month Claude plan, plus a Land Portal plan on top of that, which currently costs me $99/month at its advanced level. The price goes up if you want to enrich thousands of rows.
That said, it’s still a hell of a lot cheaper than paying a human to do this job. And if you already pay someone, you don’t have to let them go. It simply redirects your time toward higher-value tasks because this type of data collection and entry He doesn’t need a human anymore.
Where to start?
You don’t have to do all this for next week. Choose one thing from the list.
Maybe automate your call summaries, or run a single property through Claude just to see how it works, or just find out if your CRM has an API in the first place.
When I was figuring this out, it took me a little while, but it was absolutely achievable, and this is exactly the kind of low-risk, high-reward opportunities that really exist right now.
The operators that will advance in 2026 are no smarter or better funded than you. You just handed over two things to your systems: your time and the mental load of remembering it all.
Go over that list in your head again. If your current setup can do most of it, you’re in great shape. If you can’t do half, take it seriously, because that gap doesn’t stay the same size. It just gets wider.
You can put this together with a handful of tools, which is exactly what I do for the Claude and Land Portal side, or you can use something with a lot built into one place.
Stride is the CRM I co-founded for exactly this reason, so if you want to see how it handles this checklist, you can take a look at stridecrm.co. Either way, whatever you end up running, just make sure it can keep up.
If you want the step-by-step tutorials, including the message and the skill file I created that you can steal, they’re in the videos above. And if you’re ready to treat this like a real business from scratch, that’s exactly what we cover in the Land Investment Masterclass.
