How to Flip and Subdivide Land: Lessons From a Former Navy Submarine Officer Turned 400-Deal Land Investor

Justin Piché spent five years standing watch aboard a nuclear submarine, then walked into a stable engineering career at ExxonMobil — the kind of resume most people would never risk trading in. Instead, he traded it for raw dirt. Today Piché is the founder of Scout Land Group in Houston, and he has closed over 400 land deals by doing something most agents and investors overlook entirely: buying large, unglamorous tracts of rural land, splitting them into smaller parcels, and selling those parcels to everyday buyers who want a piece of real estate without a mortgage-sized price tag attached to a house.

On this episode of The REI Agent, host Mattias Clymer sat down with Piché to unpack exactly how land subdivision works, why it can out-earn traditional house flipping, and — maybe most usefully for agents listening — how brokers can plug into these deals without ever having to develop a lot themselves. What follows is drawn directly from that conversation.

Why Did a Submarine Officer and Petroleum Engineer Walk Away From Stable Careers?

Piché grew up in Houston, studied chemical engineering at LSU, and was recruited into the Navy’s nuclear submarine program during his sophomore year. He spent five years aboard the USS Maine, an Ohio-class submarine based in Bangor, Washington, logging roughly a year of his life physically underwater — including a 96-day deployment, sixty of those days continuously submerged. “Groundhog day, man. It’s groundhog day. Every day is the same thing,” he said of the routine, which alternated between running the nuclear reactor, standing watch as officer of the deck, and managing a division of sailors.

He left the Navy not because he disliked it, but because five years of long deployments were incompatible with starting a family. ExxonMobil followed — a “solid” job, in his words, but one that came with the same problem every W-2 job has: income tied directly to hours worked. That tension pushed him toward the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early), and by 2018 he was buying rental properties remotely in cash-flow-friendly markets like Oklahoma and Kansas City, since Houston’s high property taxes and low rents made buy-and-hold math difficult locally.

The real turning point came in September 2021, when a friend from church who was flipping land showed him the math. Piché had been wholesaling and flipping houses, buying at $150,000 and selling at $170,000. His friend was buying land for $20,000 and selling it for $40,000 — a far higher margin per dollar invested, with mailer response rates dramatically better than houses. “There’s not nearly as much sentimental attachment” to raw land, Piché explained, so sellers are more willing to accept a fair offer without the emotional baggage that comes with a family home.

What Is an Exempt Subdivision, and Why Does It Matter for Land Investors?

Once Piché started flipping land, he noticed a pattern: he could often make far more money by subdividing a property before selling it than by flipping it whole. A 50-acre tract selling for $5,000 an acre is worth $250,000. Cut that same tract into 10-acre lots selling for $10,000 an acre, and it’s suddenly worth $500,000 — for a comparatively small amount of additional work, if the county’s rules allow it.

The key phrase agents need to know is “exempt split” (sometimes called a “minor split”). Many counties allow landowners to divide a property into a handful of lots — often five acres or larger, with a minimum amount of road frontage — without triggering the full subdivision process (no new public streets, easements, or utility installation required). In those cases, all an investor typically needs is a survey and a legal description for each new lot. Piché contrasts this with major subdivisions — the kind homebuilders like DR Horton or Lennar pursue — which require full engineering, infrastructure, and often a formal zoning change, representing a much bigger capital commitment and a much bigger risk.

His first-ever subdivision deal illustrates the difference perfectly. His team had a 10-acre property under contract in Charlton County, Georgia for $40,000, originally underwritten as a simple flip worth maybe $45,000–$50,000 — barely any margin. Instead of walking away, Piché checked the county’s subdivision regulations and discovered the property, which had road frontage on two sides, could be split into three-acre lots with nothing more than a plat. He hired a surveyor for $2,800, listed the three new lots with an agent, and sold all of them within two weeks — turning a $40,000 purchase into an $80,000 sale. “Everything’s a nail. All I got is a hammer,” he said of his flip-only mindset before that deal. Subdivision gave him a second tool in the toolbox, and it changed how he evaluated every deal afterward.

How Does Justin Piché Decide Which Markets to Target?

With hundreds of deals under his belt, Piché has refined his market selection down to three factors, evaluated roughly in this order:

1. Demand and sell-through rate. Before anything else, Piché looks at how quickly comparable “child parcels” — the smaller lots he’d be creating — are actually selling in a given area. He wants markets approaching a 100% sell-through rate within 12 months, with meaningful transaction volume, not just a high percentage on a tiny sample size.
2. Price arbitrage. For a simple exempt subdivision, he generally needs the per-acre price of small lots to be at least double the per-acre price of the larger tract, after accounting for costs and the return he needs on capital and risk. When infrastructure (roads, water, septic) is involved, that multiple needs to be much higher — sometimes close to 10x, as in a current Bastrop, Texas project where his firm, Triune Capital Partners, bought 56 acres at roughly $30,000 an acre and is developing 77 half-acre lots that will sell for $250,000–$300,000 an acre once utilities and asphalt roads are installed.
3. Regulations. Piché actively avoids certain states and counties based on hard-won experience. Virginia, for example, is largely off his list because of how the Virginia Department of Transportation restricts connections to public roads — he once lost earnest money and due diligence costs on a beautiful property near Lake Anna after learning VDOT would only allow a single road connection across thousands of feet of frontage. By contrast, he favors states like Tennessee, which has a statewide five-acre exemption, and Texas, which allows a 10-acre exemption (though cities and municipalities often layer on additional restrictions the closer a property sits to town).

What Actually Kills a Land Development Deal?

Land looks simple from the outside — buy dirt, cut lines, sell lots — but Piché was candid about how often deals fall apart in due diligence, and why he now insists on roughly 90 days to work through them.

Water availability is the biggest culprit. A listing might accurately say “water at the road,” but if that line is only sized to serve a single home, splitting the property into multiple lots may require expensive offsite water-line extensions that can wreck a deal’s economics. Soil quality is the second major risk, especially for properties without access to public sewer, where septic feasibility hinges on a successful perc test. Piché described a current North Carolina deal where the seller’s own undisclosed reason for abandoning house-building plans turned out to be a soil map showing the site simply doesn’t perk — forcing a renegotiation from a residential-lot valuation down toward a much lower recreational-land price, a conversation he called one of the hardest in the business.

To manage the risk, Piché sequences his due diligence deliberately: title commitment first (so he’s not spending on a property he can’t actually buy), then drone footage, then a mock site plan submitted to the county for early feedback, and only then surveys, engineering, and soil tests — each of which can run anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Even with that discipline, he estimates his company loses an average of roughly $70,000 a year in earnest money on deals that ultimately don’t pencil out. It’s the cost of doing business at volume.

Where Do Real Estate Agents Fit Into Land Development Deals?

For agents listening to the show, this may be the most actionable part of the conversation. Piché said his best and largest deals consistently come from on-market listings represented by agents — not off-market mailers. When a broker understands the subdivision process and sets realistic seller expectations (rather than pricing a raw tract as if the entitlements were already complete), it makes a real difference in whether a deal can actually close. Piché emphasized that he’s not trying to lowball sellers; his underwriting already accounts for the value he expects to add through subdivision, so his offers reflect current market value, not a discount grab.

Scout Land Group has also started a more formal push to partner directly with agents and landowners on larger, slower-moving tracts — properties too big or too illiquid for Piché to tie up capital in for years. Under an option-contract or novation-style structure, the landowner keeps ownership while Piché’s team funds the subdivision work (cutting lines, driveway approaches, etc.), and proceeds from each lot sale are split so the owner nets more than an outright sale would have brought, the agent earns a strong commission, and Piché’s firm profits from the development margin. It’s a partnership structure most agents have never heard of — which is exactly why he’s actively looking for brokers to introduce it to.

What Are the Tax Tradeoffs of Land Investing Compared to Rentals?

Land isn’t without its drawbacks compared to rental property or multifamily investing. Because raw land can’t be depreciated, investors lose out on the depreciation and cost-segregation benefits available to rental owners. More significantly, when an investor buys land with the intent to develop and sell lots, the IRS classifies them as a “dealer,” and the lots become inventory — meaning every sale is taxed as ordinary income, regardless of how long it was held, with no access to long-term capital gains treatment.

That classification gets especially painful when selling lots on owner-financed notes: the IRS counts 100% of the sale price as income in the year of sale, even if the seller has only collected a fraction of that in actual cash. On the flip side, Piché noted that land notes can be a strong passive-income vehicle in their own right — he buys and sells notes regularly, with rural land notes typically yielding 15–20% annually depending on the quality of the land, the note, and the borrower.

The Real Foundation: Reputation Over Everything

Asked for his top takeaways, Piché didn’t lead with a tactic — he led with people and integrity. First, he stressed that scaling a business requires letting go of control and building a team; he credited Dan Martel’s book Buy Back Your Time with reshaping how he thinks about delegating so he can focus on higher-impact decisions. Second, he described real estate and land investing as fundamentally sales and marketing businesses, where doing what you say you’ll do is what actually builds a business over time.

His third point was the most memorable, tied to a story about a team member who nearly closed on a contract with an elderly seller whose daughter later revealed her father had dementia and wasn’t capable of signing. The deal was terminated immediately once the family raised the concern. In Piché’s words:

“You got to be beyond reproach, your reputation, your heart, your honesty… that stuff just follows you.”

Listen to the Full Conversation

Justin Piché’s path — from submarine reactor rooms to ExxonMobil to closing 400+ land deals — is a reminder that the most overlooked strategies in real estate often carry the least competition. Whether you’re an agent looking to add land subdivision to your own toolbox, or simply want to understand how to spot development potential in a listing before you price it, this conversation is packed with specifics you can put to use immediately.

Listen to the full episode of The REI Agent for the complete conversation, including more detail on note investing, market-specific regulations, and how Piché structures partnerships with agents. And if you’re ready to build a business with the kind of systems and relationship-first approach discussed on this episode, check out REI Agent Advisor at advisor.reiagent.com for tools built specifically for relationship-based real estate professionals.

You can find Justin Piché at justinpiche.com, his listings at scoutlandgroup.com, and his land-investing podcast, The Ground Game Podcast, wherever you listen to The REI Agent.

Full transcript: read the complete episode transcript on the episode page.