Build You’re A-List of Buyers (CFFL 0059)
Build You’re A-List of Buyers
Jack Butala: Build You’re A-List of Buyers. Every single month we give away a property for free. It’s super simple to qualify. Two simple steps. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and number two, get the free ebook at landacademy.com, you don’t even have to read it. Thanks for listening.
Jack Butala: Jack Butala here for Land Academy. Welcome to our Cash Flow From Land Show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about how easy it is to build an A list of buyers, and you only need a handful to get started. Jill, I have to say, on this recording date it’s December 31, 2015, and I’m really super excited about this new year. I’m sure that you are, too. What better way to start it off than with a healthy handful, a healthy group of buyers waiting to write you a check?
Jill DeWit: Yes. It sure makes my life easier. It’s …
Jack Butala: I’m sorry, go ahead.
Jill DeWit: When you get into it, too, and you have this list, it’s so nice, because as you acquire properties and you get calls about properties, you know right away where they’re going to go from the very beginning.
Jack Butala: Yeah. What we teach at Land Academy to our members is to build a group, a A list of buyers, and to really promote the fact that you have properties for sale and to plaster them all out on the internet, because you’re going to get more money if you sell them to what I call the end user, or sell it retail. You sell it on eBay or Land Watch or Land And Farm. What we do in reality is wholesaling. We have a group of buyers that we love, and they love us, and long before we even buy the property we slate it for one of these groups of people. It didn’t happen overnight. This show is about … Well, what did you say earlier? It’s the importance of having an A list and then how to do it.
Jill DeWit: Right. Yeah, the importance and the value, and then Steven’s going to follow up with the specifics on the how. That’s the why. The why is you want to have this list. You want to be able to have buyers right there ready to go and in your back pocket.
Jack Butala: The first person that should be on your A list is us, by the way.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Here’s what I was going to share, is I actually have two lists, and I think that’s really, really valuable. I have one list that has hundreds of people on there, several hundred people on my one list, because they’re people who have reached out to me and identified that they like our product, they’re looking for something, they’re looking for a specific property or something like that, and they want to be in the loop. That’s on Land Stay. That’s my Platinum Buyers Club. That’s my A list.
I also have my own separate little list, which is my repeat, I’d say my big spenders. These are my people that have bought from us over the years. They might have bought 40 properties at one time and things like that. They buy multiple, multiple things. It’s very beneficial to keep two lists going, so that’s what I do, the big guys and the other ones. The real value is, like I was explaining, when a property comes in, I already know who I can sell it to, how much I can make off it, and as I’m negotiating the acquisition I’ve got the numbers already figured out and I know how it’s going to happen.
Then I don’t even have to advertise it. Sometimes, like Steven said, I don’t even do the retail thing. I usually don’t. I’m a wholesaler. I do things out there sometimes, but I’m just going to put it out there via e-mail, on my website, things like that, to our buyers.
Jack Butala: If you’re starting out in this business, I highly recommend that you do not do what Jill just said. I think that you should … I mean it’s because we’re so seasoned in this.
Jill DeWit: Oh, just starting out. Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were … I’m like, “Jill’s doing it all wrong.”
Jack Butala: Hey, I’m glad we’re having this show because we’re going to change all the policies in our company now.
Jill DeWit: Wow. I’m like, “What? Did you just throw me under the bus? Oh, you mean … Oh, I see.”
Jack Butala: You want to be known to a ton of people. You want to be building this list at multiple people a day. You want to me known that you have lots of inexpensive property for sale and they’re constantly getting new properties in. We are already known for a lot of reasons that that’s what we do.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: You don’t want to hide behind a rock and just buy property for one specific person or two people and wholesale it …
Jill DeWit: That’s true. It’s going to slow you down.
Jack Butala: … and never have a website and never post anything anywhere and just be basically super lazy about this.
Jill DeWit: Good point.
Jack Butala: You don’t want to do that.
Jill DeWit: That’s true. Sorry if I was confusing.
Jack Butala: No. I wasn’t confused at all. We’ve earned it, let’s put it that way.
Jill DeWit: It’s true. That’s very, very true. The value of the list, I think we got it. Really the important part, Steven, is the how.
Jack Butala: Right. Here’s the thing. This is super important. This is actually pretty valuable advice. The people who buy property, they have several characteristics. One characteristic is they already own property in the area where you’re hawking your land. Let’s use Taos, New Mexico as an example. Taos is one of my favorite places to buy property. We never keep it in stock, ever in stock. Listen to me, we never … We just never hold it because it sells so quickly. For whatever reason, it’s still very easy to buy inexpensive property.
If you pick up a couple of properties in Taos, New Mexico, for example, and you’re sitting around wondering who the heck’s going to buy it, the first place to look is at other property owners in Taos, New Mexico. How do you do that? There’s two easy ways. If you followed our program, you sent a bunch of mailers out to landowners. That’s how you sourced this super inexpensive property in Taos. You can contact the same people who own property there to see if they want to buy that one. Man, if you’re good about that, you will sell it very, very quickly.
The second way, and you can do this in an hour from now, you can have a great A list going, go onto LandAndFarm.com or LandWatch.com and look up the people who either own property, let’s say in Taos, New Mexico, or the agents that are representing people who own property, and put them on your list. You don’t even have to own a property. You can contact them and say, “I have five acres in Taos, New Mexico. I haven’t purchased it yet, but I would love to sell it to you for five grand. Would you be interested in that?” Believe me, you’re going to build a great buyers list for free on those two websites really quickly without ever having really ever been in this business.
Jill DeWit: Love it. That’s great advice, Steven. That’s really, really good.
Jack Butala: Everybody gets tripped up. Not everybody. Certain people get tripped up at certain points in this little adventure, adventure to money, adventure to income from land or real estate. That seems to trip people up, and I’ll tell you why I think it is, because the conventional way to sell property, thanks to all these real estate agents out there, is to put it in some system like an MLS, a multiple listing [inaudible 00:07:17], and then wait …
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: … wait for people to find you.
Jill DeWit: To find you.
Jack Butala: What other business do you sit around and wait for your customers to find you?
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: You go out there and get them.
Jill DeWit: Right. That’s really, really good. They’re used to it. They get it. Do you know how many e-mails I get all the time, just random people? It doesn’t make me mad or anything like that. I’m like, “Oh, look what they’ve got going on. Okay.” I’m like, “Oh, I might look at that property,” kind of thing. I get it all the time. I am on several people’s A lists that I never reached out to them first hand. They found us, and they are specifically saying, “Hey, I’ve got this available here, here’s the price, blah, blah, blah.” All the time. I’m like, “Great.”
Jack Butala: That’s how you rent a house, too. It used to be you put an ad in the paper, but now you go out on Craigslist, you say, “I have a three bedroom, two baths, whatever, in XYZ neighborhood, and it’s for rent for this price and it’ll be available on this date,” and you see what comes back. Man, if you get 30 or 40 or 50 people that are interested in that long before you even ever think about buying the property, that’s how you test the little environments. Jill and I have a very close friend who has hundreds and hundreds of properties, and he does that still. He’ll still do that before they buy a property.
Jill DeWit: Craigslist?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: That’s great. What a good way, too. That’s a whole nother topic and really good advice. If you’re thinking about being an investor and having a rental property before you buy the house, I think you’ve done this, run the ad, get an idea what the market’s like …
Jack Butala: I’ve done that.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. See what people were … If I want to rent it for $1,000 a month, I want to see are there enough people out there that it all makes sense? Put an ad out there, see how many phone calls you get. Then you know that this is a good investments, do it. Great way to test things.
Jack Butala: Yeah. If you’re a house wholesaler, do this. Go on Craigslist and post a posting that says this, or some version of this: “I’ve spoken with the seller of a property and we’ve agreed on a price for his … ” you can do it with land too ” … for his house. It’s way below what the market value of the property is,” probably $30,000 below if it’s a house. “I don’t want this deal to go to waste and I don’t have the money to close it, so if you’re in this business and you are a house flipper or you just generally like to buy stuff that’s way cheaper than and make some money, please e-mail me, because time’s important.” You will get inundated.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Everybody says, “How much money do I need to start?”
Jill DeWit: Isn’t that funny?
Jack Butala: Or, “What’s the zero down? Can you really do this with no money?” The answer is hell yes. Can you buy property for no money? No, but everybody gets confused.
Jill DeWit: They do.
Jack Butala: Find the deal. You can find a very undervalued piece of property, multiple pieces of property in any property type, houses, apartments, and then cut yourself in on the deal with the guy who does have the money.
Jill DeWit: That’s one thing that I think people, for some reason they can’t quite grasp. There’s a lot of money out there that people are dying to spend on this kind of thing, but they don’t have the time or the whatever to go find the deals. They would love to have deals brought to them, like us.
Jack Butala: That is why I started Land Academy. There’s way more money out there than there is talents. I’ve said that many times. You want to have all the talent, because I’ll tell you, if you can source undervalued property, if that’s your talent in life, you are going to make as much money as you want. You are going to control your destiny.
Jill DeWit: Right. You know what’s interesting about that? I just thought of something. All of our members, well, the members that are vocal and I see and communicate with, they’re doing this for themselves. I wonder how many members are out there doing this for other people, like you just said. What we have done has shared our knowledge, our expertise, on how this all works. I am sure there’s people out there that have our program who are just doing it for somebody else. They don’t need the cash flow. If they’re not, they should be, and just keeping a piece of the profit.
Jack Butala: Yes. In investment banking … I used to work for a company version of what you just described. We were a acquisition company for private equity groups.
Jill DeWit: There you go.
Jack Butala: We would source companies, and then because private equity groups are under a tremendous amount of pressure to buy new, to have acquisitions, so we would find these companies that were worth, call them middle market companies like between $5 and $15 million that were generating 10 or 20 million, priced very well.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: We would source them and just tee up the deal, and then the private equity groups would buy them.
Jill DeWit: There you go.
Jack Butala: That’s what we do with real estate.
Jill DeWit: Right. We buy it. That’s a good idea, though, for somebody, if they’re a little bit, “I don’t know … ” Tee up the deals. We’ll teach you how to find them. Tee them up.
Jack Butala: This is so much better position to be in, because we make the decisions.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: We don’t report to anyone.
Jill DeWit: That’s why we like this, yeah.
Jack Butala: That’s ultimately why I left that business. It was very lucrative, but it’s like, “Hey, do you want to do this deal?” “Uh, I don’t know. I’ll check with my boss. I’ll call you back.” It’s like buying a car from a dealership every day of your life. It’s awful.
Jill DeWit: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. That made me think of the other day on the phone when I told that guy that he must have a job. It must be rough having that guy’s job.
Jack Butala: Will you please tell that story?
Jill DeWit: Are you serious?
Jack Butala: I have a confession to make. When Jill gets really angry with certain customer service people, it’s a kind of a turn on for me. When you get angry with me, that’s not my thing.
Jill DeWit: I lost it yesterday.
Jack Butala: You lost your head on the phone with this guy at C-H-A-S-E bank.
Jill DeWit: Oh, my gosh. That was so darn funny. All right.
Jack Butala: What set you off about this?
Jill DeWit: It was the principle of it all.
Jack Butala: It takes a lot to get you upset, man.
Jill DeWit: Do you know what it was? It was an hour out of my life over $70.75.
Jack Butala: Yeah, you could have made like a hundred grand in an hour.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, but it was the principle of it all. I was mad.
Jack Butala: Start from the … I want to hear this.
Jill DeWit: Here’s the thing. I had written a big check …
Jack Butala: We can horse around for this rest of this episode because we gave it all away.
Jill DeWit: We’re all done with our important stuff?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Okay, good. All right. This is more fun anyway.
Jack Butala: I agree.
Jill DeWit: Okay, so here’s what happened. I was writing a check to Chase to pay off this purchase, and specifically called, made a big deal, was on hold three weeks ago, whatever it was, to make sure, okay, what is the exact amount today, I want my balance at zero, went through the whole thing and waited, had to check. I’m assuming they’re calculating the interest or doing all that stuff, and came back with this number. I’m like, “Okay, fine.” That’s as of today it’s got to be duh-duh-duh today. I’m like, “Done, fine.” Transfer the money. It’s over, I’m done. Great.
If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in iTunes . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on iTunes. My staff and I read each and every one.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steve@LandAcademy.com.
I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.
And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes.
