(dynamic music) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ - Farm ground, to me, it's like the greatest thing you could ever have.

I've said, "I've never met a farm that I didn't wanna buy."

But what happens when you have some ground, some tillable ground, and you're not sure what to do with it?

Well, today's guest is gonna have some interesting ideas.

Today we're talking with Brad Belser.

Now, you are from your Peoria address, right?

- Peoria address, yeah, outside of Bartonville, between Bartonville and the little town of Glasford there.

- Okay.

- Yep, Peoria County.

- Out in the middle of nowhere?

- Yeah, out there a little bit.

- Okay, is that where you're from originally?

- Originally, well, I grew up in Morton from, I guess, since 1995 or so.

But growing up, was born in Memphis, Tennessee.

- Oh.

- I moved from Memphis to Albany, New York, Albany to Morton, where both my mom and dad were originally from.

Dad was a Cat guy.

And so Morton, then to Houston, Texas, Houston to Vancouver, British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, to Spokane, Washington, Spokane, Washington, to Yorba Linda, California, Yorba Linda, California, to Morton, when I was going into the eighth grade.

- You're kidding me?

- Uh-huh.

- Is that because of Caterpillar, moving?

- Caterpillar, yeah, yep.

Dad was a Cat guy.

- How tough was that as a kid going through school?

- I don't think I knew a whole lot different.

- [Rob] Really?

- Yeah, it's just what I knew, so.

- Yeah, do you have like a list of people that?

Because everybody went to school with people they don't like.

(both laughing) Do you have a list hanging on to your wall?

- I don't, (laughing) no.

- Someday when you-- - I don't think I probably remember hardly any of them.

(both laughing) - What was your favorite place?

- Man, really good memories from, Vancouver, British Columbia, at that time, was a really neat place.

- You weren't there in the winter then?

- Yeah, we were there, we lived in Vancouver for four years.

- Of course, Vancouver doesn't get as cold, does it?

- It's just kinda rainy all, from what I remember, rainy all the time.

But, man, it was just a pretty place to live.

Great big aquarium, and just neat stuff there, Puget Sound and-- - And you're an outdoors guy, right?

- Very much so, yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

Besides other things, you're a land broker for Illinois Farm and Rec Land?

That's your title, land broker at Illinois Farm and Rec Land.

You could- - It's a long title.

(laughing) I know, I know.

(laughing) - push that sucker together somehow.

(laughing) - But yeah, so I've been a land broker for nine years now.

Illinois Farm Rec and Land is my little company there.

And my main brokerage is actually Jim Maloof Realty out of Peoria here.

And so they've allowed me to kinda grow my own little land-base business within their residential brokerage space.

So it's been a nice fit.

- What does a land broker actually do?

- So I will market and sell ground for folks.

I'll go and turn over rocks, find parcels for people that are, if you're looking for something specific, let me know, and I, in a lot of instances, have opportunities within my network of landowners that I can at least go start conversations, and say, "Hey, would you be interested in selling your farm?

I have somebody that might be a good fit for it."

- Okay, so if I come to a guy like you and say, "Hey, I'm looking for farm ground that I can farm, but I don't wanna pay any money," you're gonna go out and find me something?

(Brad laughing) - Not necessarily, but I'll find you something, it's just we'll have to talk about the price a little bit probably.

- Kinda oversold what you did, really.

(Brad laughing) - I will find it.

(Rob laughing) The hard part is finding 'em sometimes.

- Oh, I can only imagine, 'cause everybody wants that, I don't know, get outta town, right?

That little farmette or that little patch of timber they can play with.

- And they wanna be able to go hunting, they wanna have a lake on there to go fishing, and then they want some tillable income and a nice cabin site, good electricity, make sure there's wifi there and all that sort of stuff.

That's everybody's checklist.

- All for under six figures.

- Yes, yeah.

(laughing) (Rob laughing) - Once you find something like that, it's probably not a problem to get rid of.

- No, and especially in today's market, the land market is still very, very strong.

And so, so many transactions happen offline that things get sold, I guess, prior to a lot of people knowing them, unless you are directly connected with an active land broker like myself.

- Yeah, a while back we had, well, he's your partner, right, Chris Bowman on.

- Chris is my partner, yep.

- Yeah, but that's a whole different deal, that's CommonGround?

- CommonGround is very separate from my land brokerage business.

I would argue, I guess, probably I work two full-time jobs, that the one, CommonGround, is still a growing business, and so we don't take any salary outta that, and so-- - Isn't this what you'd call a startup?

- A startup, yeah, yeah.

- Okay.

- We're still in the startup phases, and so we're very cognitive on how we're spending money, it all goes back into the business 100%.

And so I make my living off of still selling ground for folks.

- So you're working two jobs, getting paid for one?

- That's right, yeah.

- Okay, but I mean, the hope is that this goes big and, yeah.

- Yeah, we strongly believe in the CommonGround business.

- And tell us in a nutshell how it works.

- CommonGround?

- Yeah.

- So CommonGround is, it's a very simple way of connecting landowners with either a tenant farmer, or in a lot of cases, if you're a landowner and maybe you don't utilize your timber portion, and we've had discussions even with operating farmers that you own 1,000 acres, outta that 1,000 acres, 700 of it's tillable that you farm, but some farmers don't necessarily hunt and utilize that additional 300 acres of good prime deer-hunting ground, especially here throughout Central Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, those sort of stuff.

And so CommonGround will take your property at no expense to you as the landowner, and we will market that to the masses of, like in this case, hunters in particular.

We found that it's really a supply and demand thing.

There's not a whole lot of supply at times of good hunting tracks that can be leased.

Not everybody can afford to own their own properties.

And so the demand for hunting leases is astronomically high, with not a ton of opportunities out there.

And so through CommonGround, not only can you lease your tillable ground, but you can also lease your hunting ground in a open, transparent, bidding sort of a platform, and so-- - [Rob] You do it separately?

- Yeah, yeah, you can.

- Okay.

- So if you are a landowner and you say own, you've got 100 acres.

70 of it's tillable, 30 of its timber, you don't live in Illinois, you've just had the ground for a long time.

You can run your tillable ground through CommonGround to bring some price transparency to what farmers are willing to pay to lease that ground, and the same deal with the hunting ground.

And so instead of setting a price on a hunting track or a tillable track, especially the hunting, historically, well, maybe $15, $20 an acre was kinda the going rate in people's minds.

- [Rob] Sold.

- Correct.

- Where's that at?

- Yeah, yeah.

(laughing) - We'll take that.

(laughing) - Well, we still talk to a lot of people that say, "Well, yeah, I've just always got," maybe a little bit higher, "$30 an acre."

Which in today's times is very, very low, that we're seeing through CommonGround, $50, $60, $70 an acre for hunting leases, in some instances, so.

- There's a lot of times, too, they, "Oh, we'll give you a stick of salami from the deer we shot."

I mean, some landowners, honestly, in my mind, just don't have an idea of what they've got as far as an asset.

And to be transparent, I am a state license white-tailed deer and turkey outfitter, so I deal in this, too.

- Absolutely.

- We rent out hunting land, and sometimes it's funny, because as an outfitter, the landowner doesn't want me, 'cause we run people from Virginia, that's all we do.

Sometimes they do, because they want the people from outta state to come on the farm, and then they don't have to worry about them coming back throughout the year or whatever, just randomly showing up when they don't want 'em to.

So can a person that has this hunting ground, can they put it on CommonGround and can they decide?

Is it their decision or is it just whoever bids the highest?

- Yeah, so it's ultimately the landowner's decision.

So out of the active bidders on any specific hunting track, we don't go per acre on the bidding like we do on tillable ground.

It's just different, it's $2,500 is the starting bid for the entirety, for an example, instead of a per-acre price.

But when all the bidding's done, it's still up to the landowner to have a discussion with the hunters and the landowner gets to decide who they're most comfortable with to be on their ground.

We help the landowners in the aspect that hunting liability insurance has got to be completely in place before the hunters enter the farm, which has been a pain point, I feel like-- - Purchased by who?

- By the hunter.

- Okay.

- Yep, so they have to show proof of that hunter liability insurance, that I think, historically, some folks have maybe been a little bit against leasing their ground out for hunting, because of the liability.

- Oh, guarantee it.

- 100%.

- Yeah, been told that a bunch of times.

Yeah, "We don't wanna worry about being sued."

- Yeah, but we kinda connected all those dots to where the landowner can sleep easy at night knowing that that hunter is insured.

- Mm-hmm, so you are an outdoors guy.

- Very much, yeah.

- I mean, did you find these?

- I did, yeah, I found these.

I mean, one of my favorite things to do outside of just bow hunting for white tails is shed hunting.

- It's so addicting.

- I love it.

(laughing) - When you try to explain to people what bow hunting actually is, it's just, I'm sorry, what shed hunting actually is, it doesn't make sense to them, "Oh, you look around and you look for where the deer dropped a shed."

But if you do that and you actually find one, the feeling is almost like you've harvested a big buck or something.

- I know, it's very rewarding.

It's like a Easter egg hunt for grownups.

And I mean, the kids love it, too, but for me, I could go walk all day.

- And it is, I mean, you can go with somebody, you can talk, and you don't have to be quiet like when you're, and you can do it when it's warm, yeah.

- Mm-hmm, well, especially trail cameras and stuff have come so far now that most everybody's running trail cameras and see they have somewhat of an inventory of the bucks that live on their specific farm.

And so it's so neat to be able to capture, go pick up the antlers off of that deer that you've been watching on camera all year.

- Oh, you make it sound so easy.

(both laughing) - I don't know.

- You can walk around for a week and not find one.

And then one day, you'll be walking around and you find 10.

- It's a timing thing, though, and I feel like if you know where the animals spend most of their time, especially late in the year like this, if it's February, early into March, when most of the deer are dropping their antlers, then you're gonna primarily look, this year's been a little bit different because it's been so warm.

- It's early, yeah.

- But you're gonna look for bedding areas close to food or in the food itself, whether it be cut beans, corn, standing beans, corn.

- It's not guaranteed.

- It's not guaranteed, but your odds go up.

- I'd say.

(Brad laughing) We leave corn every year.

And this year was a first year in probably 10 years that we've been doing it that I found a shed in the standing corn.

- That's surprising.

- Yeah, I don't know what the deal is, but the one thing I noticed about these are they're not chewed up.

That's the thing, once they drop 'em, it's a race between you and the squirrels that are gonna eat 'em.

- Uh-huh, yeah, or the field mice.

Yeah, both, they love chewing on them.

There's calcium in there, I'm sure there's good minerals that they love.

But they don't last real long on the ground sometime, and so you gotta be diligent to-- - If they drop 'em in timber, it's bad.

- They get smoked real quick.

- Yeah, and the nice thing is, they stay out in the field so that when you run over 'em with your tractor tire.

(sighing) - Have you done that?

- (blowing) Probably 10 times.

- 10 times, yeah, that's an expensive deal, too, right?

- I've never lost a tire to it, but each time, it's a patch, which I am not equipped to do.

So you have to have somebody come out and fix it.

- You're down for some time.

- Yeah, but yeah, there's a lot of stories out online where people have actually lost a tire 'cause they got up in the sidewall and they've completely ruined a tire, so yeah.

(Brad laughing) - Go pick 'em up.

(laughing) - (laughing) Believe me, you don't want the tractor to.

Three grand for some of those tires.

- I was wondering what a big tractor tire goes for.

- Yeah, but these are cool.

It's not a set, though, right?

- It's not a set, no, these were just a couple I grabbed off the shelf on my way over here.

- All the years I've done it, I've only found one true set that were laying there side by side.

- Oh, really?

- Yeah, go ahead, tell me about all the ones you found.

- Oh, no, no, that's okay.

(laughing) No, I'm not gonna get into that.

I found a couple sets from time to time, (laughing) but.

(Rob laughing) - It's not a competition.

(Rob laughing) - No, it's not a competition at all.

- Everything is.

- But I also have the ability, there are some landowners that when I'm showing properties, even this time of year, I'll make sure that I am very diligent.

Like, "Hey, listen, I'm gonna be out there, we are likely to stumble on antlers, would you like me to leave them?

I can drop you a pin of exactly where they're at.

Do you want me to pick 'em up, bring 'em home to you?"

Some say, "Yeah, I'd love to have 'em," some say, "Take 'em, it's really of no interest to me," so - Yeah, but if you find one out in a field, I would always pick it up.

- I'll grab it, just to help a farmer out, right?

(Rob laughing) (Brad laughing) - Put it on a fence post or something.

(laughing) So you can do the hunting rights, right?

Now, that would be for everything, so if I'm putting on my hunter hat and I want to lease ground for hunting, will it be for deer hunting, turkey hunting, shed hunting, morel hunting?

- In a lot of cases, and it's really up to the landowner, that they can say, "Hey, listen," maybe, "I like to turkey hunt and I don't care to deer hunt, and so I'm gonna lease my deer hunting rights in the fall.

I'm not gonna transfer turkey hunting rights to anybody."

But in some cases, you can get morel mushroom hunting rights, you can get turkey rights, the whole nine yards.

But it's really landowner specific.

And as you add more of those on there, the price, in many cases, does go up, the landowner's ROI can increase if you say, "Hey, listen, you can basically utilize the property, as it's yours, year to year, and do as you would like, be a good steward of it."

- As an outfitter, I find, a lot of times, I'm an excuse not to have an uncomfortable conversation, the person that owns a ground doesn't (laughing) like the person that's hunting it, but they were hunting it for their dad or whatever.

So then they contact me, and they were like, "Hey, do you wanna rent this?"

I'm like, "Yeah."

And then it's always, "Oh, by the way, you have to tell.

So let's," (laughing) yeah.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, "Sorry, Rob, you."

(laughing) (Rob laughing) - But I mean, this would also be, I could think if you had ground and you have people that are hunting it, or you don't know, right?

Because you're not involved in the farm ground or whatever, this would be a great way to kind of take control of that aspect that you've just kinda been letting go.

- Well, it is, and I hate to see it, but we've seen it many times, too, where the landowner, if you are kind of away from the farm, you're not spending a ton of time there, you're not hunting yourself, you're not there in the fall, what happens is, I think it promotes neighbors or outsiders that once they find out that this landowner really isn't present or they don't care about this necessarily, I think it encourages trespassing, I think it encourages a lot of bad behavior, in a lot of cases.

Get a hunter on there that is gonna treat it like his own, he's gonna watch out for it.

And the last thing this hunter who's paying to be on your farm once is the neighbor sneaking in there and hunting, or something along those lines.

So I think it is kind of an additional insurance policy that the farm is not being trampled on by outsiders that the landowner's not even aware of.

- Yeah, I will tell, y'all, if you have ground out there, and because we've rented it, and people say, "Well, nobody's hunted it for years," somebody's hunting it.

(Brad laughing) Somebody, it never fails, somebody's hunting it, somebody's on there.

So unless you have a hunter that you know, probably one of the bad guys, the poachers are probably sneaking on there and doing stuff, ne'er-do-well stuff.

- Well, and you're having an insured hunter on there, too, 'cause the guy who's sneaking on there trespassing is just as likely to sue you or go after you once he falls out of the stand, whether he's supposed to be there or not.

- Really?

- That's how it works, unfortunately.

- And can you rent it to where they hang their own stands?

- Yes, absolutely.

- Yeah, you kinda probably want it that way.

- You 100% want it that way.

- Yeah, that way, you're not liable for.

(laughing) - Yeah, "Don't get into any of my stands," sort of, yeah.

Or old stands that are on the property, I would not encourage that.

I think the new hunters should be responsible for putting their own stuff up.

- Mm-hmm, so you're a broker, you're an outdoor guy.

I mean, why get involved in this startup?

- I mean, I saw a need for it through my land brokerage business, far too many times that I go to meet a landowner and we're gonna go through the numbers of what his property should be worth, and he tells me, "Well, I'm getting $150 an acre on the 60 tillable acres that are on the farm."

And so I start running maps and it's like, "Man, it's like, that's mid-B soil sort of, it's timber soil still, but $150 an acre," and so now we're talking 60 acres at 150, the annual return on that farm is very, very low, which is gonna make my life much more challenging to get the most out of that property for that landowner when we go to sell, that if we can get that return, that annual return up, I can drive a much higher price for that property than the way that it potentially was set up previously.

And so it does increase the value of the farm inherently by increasing the return on it.

- Okay, I mean, sometimes the farmers and even the hunters, they're gonna look at your product, and go, "Aw, man, it's just gonna drive prices up."

But in some cases, I mean, literally, it kills me to see someone that has like 40 acres of timber and they see the guy once a year and he comes back with a stick of salami.

And when you go to a, "Hey, do you wanna maybe lease that out?"

They're like, "Oh, no, they usually show up late summer and ask if they can hunt it and hang their stands and that."

And I think it's just they just don't know what it could be worth.

- Absolutely, and just like so many things, it's the tillable ground, the hunting's exactly the same, though, Rob.

There's a lot of value there.

And the amount of hunters out there, especially the white-tailed deer hunting in Central Illinois or throughout the Midwest now has become so popular, that it's really the thing that so many people wanna be doing.

- And a thing that (laughing) people are not afraid to spend some money doing.

- They love to spend money doing it.

(laughing) - You think farmers are bad, these hunters, boy, they'll throw down the cash.

- They will spend a lot of money to get.

(Rob laughing) Especially on a decent deer-hunting farm.

- Yeah, are you a good hunter?

- I don't know.

- I've heard you're not.

- I've heard I'm not, too.

(cue cards tapping) I might be, I don't know.

Well, how do you measure "Are you a good hunter?"

- I don't know, it's whatever you tell yourself.

(Brad laughing) - I don't know.

- If you can sleep at night.

- I don't know, yeah, I don't know.

I spend a lot of time doing it, let's say that.

- [Rob] Do you enjoy it?

- I absolutely love it.

- Because I know you a little bit, and you're more than just the casual guy.

I mean, you understand the science of food plots, you understand the science of growing deer, letting a buck, even like this, a big buck like this walk, because the next year, 'cause he's not fully mature yet.

- That's correct, yeah.

And I think I've matured over time, that the hunting has changed a lot, that I don't really love killing them, which sounds odd.

I'm passionate, passionate about bow hunting, but I don't love the actual killing side of the whole business of sorts.

I love watching these deer grow up, I like knowing who they are, I like learning their patterns.

And when you get a deer to 5 1/2-6 1/2-year-old range, that's fully mature, and you're able to navigate with a bow and arrow in his own habitat, kind of in his house, and getting an opportunity to outsmart him, that's really what is kinda the cat and mouse puzzle game for me that I enjoy.

- You're a hippie.

- I'm a hippie, yeah.

(laughing) (Rob laughing) Of sorts, yeah.

(laughing) - No, I get it, I'm the same way.

If you shoot something, that's the end of it, right?

- Correct.

- And it does not have a chance to get bigger.

So if you reach it at its pinnacle, "That's gonna be that deer's last year, he's not gonna get any bigger," to do that, and that's when they're also (laughing) the smartest.

And those stupid things-- - Oh, they're smart, man.

- Oh my gosh.

- They're smart.

- I don't know what Spider-Sense they have or what nose they have, but it's incredible how they know where you're at.

- When they get older like that especially.

But it allows for these younger up-and-coming deer that have good genetic opportunity to move into a specific area, too.

Now you get those older, maybe more aggressive, larger animals outta there, that these smaller up-and-comers, it gives them an opportunity to move in and be comfortable then on the farm.

- Mm-hmm, any advice for people that are, say you've never leased hunting ground before, any advice what to look for and what not to look for?

- To me, I think, we're very much for looking for previous referrals or references, I suppose would be the correct word.

Look for references, check the references.

And that's something that we can do internally at CommonGround, that we look for strong references in the past from hunters.

We look for, I guess, a multitude of things.

But it's something that we really pride ourselves on, being able to help these landowners out with.

- Mm-hmm, 'cause it is an honor to step foot on someone's ground.

I mean, that is an investment that either their family made or they've made.

And to be given permission to step foot on their ground, I think sometimes is lost in people.

So I like this, because you kinda get what you pay for.

And to me, this is my opinion, if you're giving the hunting away, then you're probably, a lot of times, gonna get people that don't really appreciate what they are being given.

- I believe so as well, especially if you get into a longer term sort of a lease that I'm not going to come in and I'm not gonna shoot a bunch of young deer, or as a hunter, you expect the hunters to not come in and shoot all the young deer and take a mass quantity of deer when they know that they're gonna be able to have that lease for three, four, maybe even five years in some cases, try to make that farm as good as possible for the length of that lease and get the most out of it.

- Yeah, and trying to get the farmers to understand that, you're not gonna cure that problem.

(Rob laughing) - No, huh, no, I'm not gonna, no, that's all right, that's all right.

- (laughing) Oh my gosh.

Well, if people wanna find more about CommonGround, where do they go?

- You'll go to commonground.io.

- .io.

We talked about that with Chris, 'cause commonground.com was-- - Man, whoever owns it, they just wanted a lot of money for it.

- I don't think that's unusual, though, right?

- No, it's not.

- A name like that, 'cause, I mean, commonground, I mean, that could go for a lot of.

- I think there's a lot of coffee shops, there's so many- - Oh yeah.

- different businesses that are CommonGround.

But commonground.io is what we landed on, we were able to get that domain.

And at the end of the day, it functions just like a commonground.com does.

- [Rob] Okay, any social medias?

- [Brad] Yeah, we are, what is it?

findcommonground on Instagram.

- Okay.

- And just commonground on Facebook, but there are gonna be multiples on there.

- You seem like a TikTok guy to me.

- I don't have a TikTok account.

- I think you'd do well, 'cause it seems like you're the kinda guy when the day is long and you've done your thing, you're brokering, that you might just break out into dance.

- Yeah, (laughing) I don't know.

I might try it, I suppose.

But TikTok kinda scares me, I don't understand it, I guess.

I've never been on it.

- I imagine you being an awful dancer.

- I'm a terrible dancer, Rob.

I'm painfully-- - [Rob] What would be the opposite of dance?

Oh yeah, you.

(Rob laughing) - It would be me, I've always been like that, though.

- I believe you.

(Brad laughing) (Rob laughing) - I have no rhythm whatsoever, none, none.

- All right, you're enjoying it, though, right, the CommonGround stuff?

- I love the CommonGround stuff, I really do.

Yeah, just the people we get to meet and the help that we've been able to give to people.

Old ladies who call crying, literally crying that, "You changed my life on the amount of income that I'm getting outta the farm now.

On my fixed income, the farm makes up the majority of it, and at my old age, you have changed my life.

I can do some things now that I was never gonna be able to do before I pass."

- Mm-hmm, well, there's no better way to end it than that.

So yeah, Brad Belser, congratulations- - Thank you.

- for what you guys are up to.

- Thank you for having me.

It means so much.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And your little antlers here.

(both laughing) (Brad clapping) CommonGround, go check 'em out.

Chris, or Brad, thank you very much.

- Thank you Rob.

- Everybody else, we'll catch you next week.

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