A land teacher on my shortlist hasn't bought a parcel since 2019

B, and it isn't close for me. I've spent nine months trying to find things again in a Facebook group and a Discord, and the answer is always in a video somewhere that I can't locate. A searchable library is worth real money to a slow learner.

The thing I'd want to know from B is when the material was last touched. Organized and stale look identical from the sales page. Ask her which module she rewrote most recently and why.

Coming from zero, I can't evaluate either of them. That's the honest position I'm in. I don't know enough to tell whether A's chaos is authenticity or just chaos, and I don't know whether B's curriculum is good or just tidy.

So I'd take B, because at least with structure I'll know what I missed. With A I'd be sitting on calls nodding at things I don't understand and calling that learning.

Question I'd have been too embarrassed to ask out loud: what does "still doing deals" actually mean? Three a year? Thirty? Because a guy doing three a year is barely more current than someone who stopped, and a guy doing thirty probably has staff doing most of the work he's teaching you to do yourself.

orchard, do you know his volume, or just that he posts closings?

I train people for a living now, small team, and what surprises most folks is how much of the job is sequencing. Knowing a thing and knowing which order to hand it over in are separate skills. My best tech is my worst trainer, every time.

So I'd take B on principle. Teaching ability compounds across everything she covers. Currency only helps on the handful of topics where the market actually moved.

cobalt, I'd sign that except I've watched the decay happen up close. A guy who taught me pricing five years ago is still teaching the same margins and they don't clear anymore. He's not lying, he just stopped getting corrected by reality.

Operating is what edits your material. When you stop, nothing tells you the thing you say on slide 14 has quit working.

Every instructor in my licensing course is a full time instructor and the material is visibly old. One of them read a slide about a form that got replaced. Structure didn't save it.

I paid $4k for the A version of this. Active guy, real deals, and he cancelled six of the twelve calls because he was closing something. Two of the six got rescheduled. The material he did give me was better than anything I've bought since.

So I'd say the risk with A isn't that he's wrong. It's that you're buying an hour of a person whose most expensive hour goes to his own deals. Ask what happens when he cancels.

I wouldn't decide this on biography. I'd ask both of them for an artifact.

Ask A for the last underwriting file he built, seller name blacked out. Ask B for the workbook page that walks a new person from raw acreage to an offer number. Then look at whether the file and the workbook agree with each other.

What you're actually buying is a method for turning inputs into a number. If B's method still produces a defensible number when you feed it today's inputs, her sitting out since 2019 costs you nothing. If her method has assumptions baked in as constants, it's dead and the binder doesn't help. That test takes twenty minutes and it beats guessing about their character.

Nobody's said the part that would decide it for me. Is A active in anything like your market? An active buyer in a hot metro fringe teaching me about a county with 900 people and no comps is worse than useless, because he'll be confident about the wrong things.

I'd buy B for the structure and pay A separately for two hours of office hours if he sells them. That's roughly $3,100 plus whatever he charges, which is more than either alone, and it's still the version I'd pick.

The curriculum and the current market read are two different products. I don't understand why we keep buying them bundled.

In the trades the best teachers were always the foremen who'd stopped swinging a hammer four or five years back. Still on site, still getting told when the drawing was wrong, but off the tools long enough to remember what it's like to not know.

Guys who were still framing all day could not teach at all. They'd do the thing in front of you at full speed and say "like that."

girder that foreman is neither of orchard's options though. Still on site is the whole point. B is off the site entirely.

Is anyone measuring this on student outcomes? Both of these seem answerable by asking each one for four people who finished and closed something, and then calling those people. Whether the teacher is still buying is a proxy for the question I actually care about.

beacon, you'll get four handpicked people and they'll all be great. I've been the handpicked person. I said nice true things and left out that I'd have closed that deal anyway.

On the main question, the split I see is this. The full time teachers are excellent on the clean case. Deal comes in, numbers work, here's the sequence. Active operators are the only ones who can teach you the broken cases, because the broken ones are most of their week. My margins are thin enough that all my money is made or lost in the exception. That's why I'd pay for A and eat the chaos.

Third option for me. Every time I've paid a person at the front of the room I've ended up with their opinion instead of a skill. Small paid group of people slightly ahead of me, no guru, has done more.

The decay is uneven and that's what makes this hard. Process decays slowly. Legal and forms decay fast and vary state to state, so whichever one you pick, don't take any of it as settled and confirm anything that touches contracts or disclosures with an attorney in your state.

The part that decays fastest is what people say to you. The tone of a seller call in a slow market is different from a hot one, and someone who hasn't taken those calls in five years will teach you a script that makes people hang up.

trellis put it better than I did. It's the language that goes stale first, not the framework. My framework from five years ago is fine. The exact words I used on the phone are museum pieces.

flint, fair, though I'd still make the calls. I'm not looking for a reference so much as a description of what the first ninety days actually felt like. Even a handpicked person tells you that accidentally.

Depends where you are, and orchard says he's slow and long hold, which changes it.

I'm four deals in and stuck at a ceiling. What I needed was someone who had been through that exact ceiling recently, because the constraint is capital structure and relationships, and that stuff genuinely moved in the last two years. A beginner's constraint is different. A beginner needs someone who can explain a title commitment without making them feel stupid, and that hasn't changed since 2019 or 2009.

So for orchard's actual position, I'd say B. If he asked me the same question after twenty parcels I'd say A.

keystone, that's the cleanest version of it. Currency matters more the further along you are, because the frontier moves and the basics don't.

girder, on your foreman point, I run into the same thing. My best trainers are people about two years past the work. Far enough to explain, close enough that the memory of being confused hasn't gone.

hollow, I'd push back a little. Process transfers, inputs don't. A pricing method built on comps and days on market works in a 900 person county, you just have almost no comps and have to widen the radius and accept a bigger error bar.

The failure isn't the teacher being from elsewhere. It's the teacher who hands you a number instead of a method, like "offer 30 percent of assessed." That's an input dressed up as a rule, and it's wrong in most places and right in a few by accident.

Nobody's mentioned that A is cheaper for six months than B is for twelve. $400 a month against $258. And the thing A is short of is time, which is the thing you'll be trying to buy from him. That pricing tells you something.

Voted peer group. I'm building a list and haven't bought anything, and the most useful hour of my month is four people arguing about their own mail response rates with real numbers on the screen.

bramble, the failure mode there is everyone confidently wrong in the same direction. I sat in a group like that for a year where we all agreed on a management fee structure that turned out to be leaving money on the table, and nobody in the room knew enough to say so. You need one person who's seen more than the group has.

Land specifically. The stuff that will actually cost orchard money is zoning, access, and whether the county will let you split, and that knowledge is county by county and it goes bad fast. Ordinances get rewritten, a planning director leaves and the unwritten practice changes with them. Some of it varies at the state level too, including how recording and disclosure work, so anything either teacher says about that needs checking against your own state and county before you rely on it.

Neither program can teach you your county. What they can teach you is which questions to walk into the planning office with. I'd pick whoever gives me the better question list.

I'd email both a real question I'm stuck on and see who answers and how. Costs nothing and tells you more than a sales page.

trellis, that lands. My group has a guy about six years ahead of everyone and I hadn't counted him as the teacher, but he is. Take him out and I think we'd drift exactly the way you describe.

Changed my mind reading sextant and parcel. I said structure doesn't save stale material and I still think that, but I was treating it as a coin flip between two people. Asking for the workbook page and the question list is a test either one can fail on its own merits. I'd pay whoever passes it.

Small portfolio here, and looking back at what I paid for, the thing that mattered wasn't the teacher's deal count or the binder. It was whether someone answered on a Tuesday night when a well came back bad and I had four days on my inspection period. One of my two programs did. That's the whole difference in what I got out of them, and orchard, you can't tell which is which from the outside. Ask both what response time looks like and get the answer in writing.