REI With Your Full Time Job (CFFL 0263)
REI With Your Full Time Job
Jack Butala: REI With Your Full Time Job. 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 with Jill DeWit.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode, Jack and I talk about REI with your full time job, real estate investment, but you have a regular full time job. What do you do? Great show today Jill. Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on successplant.com, our free online community.
Jill DeWit: I have to say something. Do you know you just said Jack and I?
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh, no.
Jill DeWit: I think that’s funny.
Jack Butala: What am I thinking?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know.
Jack Butala: What’s going on in my head?
Jill DeWit: It’s early.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: It’s okay.
Jack Butala: We record these shows at like 6:00 in the morning.
Jill DeWit: It’s the middle of the week, it’s a Wednesday, it’s early, so you’re good. It’s all good. Sorry, it just made me giggle.
Jack Butala: Jack and I?
Jill DeWit: Jack and I.
Jack Butala: Should I start over?
Jill DeWit: No, oh gosh no, keep it.
Jack Butala: Oh my God. Don’t do it again.
Jill DeWit: You cannot. No, don’t start again.
Jack Butala: Oh my God, dad, don’t do it again. Please stop.
Jill DeWit: Shucks. No, yeah, everybody’s laughing right now. You just woke everybody, everybody’s up. It’s okay. It’s cute. Okay. The question is, Jared asked, “I just found a county. Low population, vacation dense destination in a state, good access, but it has high prices on land and only two properties are for sale on the tax sale list. Is this one I should run from?
Jack Butala: This is a good question.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: It’s a great question, and the answer is absolutely not. I think you’ve probably found gold, maybe silver, maybe not gold, but silver. This comes up a lot, but it doesn’t really come up in this, packaged like this. It comes up like this, does the package work, or your program work, send a lot of offers out in the mail for other product types. Does it work for houses, does it work for apartments, does it work for skyscrapers, does it work in a city, do you have to be in a rural location? Here’s the answer, because this is what he’s really asking, yeah. It worked great, but don’t offer $500. Make sure you offer intelligent amounts of money where you can double your money. A lot of our members use it.
I personally, Jill and I used this program on residential houses and we just needed to make $100,000, I mean $10,000 on each property, so we might spend $150,000 to buy property where we know we’re going to make $10,000, and we know who’s going to buy it, we have a buyer that, we’re putting a program together that talks all about that. What Jared’s asking is, hey this isn’t the exact same model that you guys talk about where you offer $100 an acre for property that’s west of the Mississippi and you see what comes back. No, it takes a little bit more planning, a little bit more analysis and correctly making offers that are undervalued, nonetheless undervalue, and it works like a charm. I got many, I have a specific member in Florida that does this for what he calls canal lots. They’re $300,000 lots and he offers $100,000. He does a lot of deals.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly.
Jack Butala: Did that answer it Jill?
Jill DeWit: Totally.
Jack Butala: All right.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Can we move on?
Jill DeWit: Yes.
Jack Butala: Can I call you Jack for the rest of the show?
Jill DeWit: No. You know what? Hey welcome, I got to share this about my world. Oh my goodness. The time that we sit and record these shows is the most that you and I talk period.
Jack Butala: I know. I get to know you during this thing.
Jill DeWit: I know that, and I don’t think you necessarily like that.
Jack Butala: I like it. What are you talking about I don’t like it?
Jill DeWit: Well, because, this is what I want to share. This is for our listeners Jack. I’m not throwing you under the bus. This is just welcome to my world.
Jack Butala: Don’t you love when people say that right before they’re getting ready to say something.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. “I’m not going to throw you under the bus, but I’m going to throw you under the bus.”
Jack Butala: “Hey, I’m not throwing you under the bus here, but…”
Jill DeWit: Jack has instructed everyone in our office that one word answers are by far the best.
Jack Butala: I hate to admit it, but that’s true.
Jill DeWit: Yes. That’s all I’m going to say. There we go.
Jack Butala: The followup on that, it’s just not worth it.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, go ahead.
Jack Butala: No, no, it’s a matter of I just want stuff to be efficient. That’s all. This is the meat of the show. Real estate investing, REI, with your full time job.
Jill DeWit: What? How can you do that? That doesn’t work. No, no, no.
Jack Butala: I did it. I did it in the beginning. We could call the show too, when do you know to leave your job. We’ll cover that in a minute, but how do you do this all when you have a full time job? This came up on a consulting call I recently did. The guy said, “Every day at the end, when I’m done with work, I check my phone, I check my voice mail, and I see who called and the whole thing.” I said, “Whoa, wait a minute. Let’s talk about how you actually should do this with your full time job.” There’s a few keys to this that really are going to dramatically increase your success. You have to have somebody answer the phone. It’s not very expensive. You can find a resource out there pretty easily where someone answers the phone and they say, “No, Mr. Smith is not available. I’m sorry. He really wants to talk to you. He’s available after 6:00 pm today, and I’ll give him the message.”
Jill DeWit: There’s probably somebody in your world that could do that right now.
Jack Butala: In the end, this guy specifically, his wife was on the call too. She was like, “I’ll be happy to do that,” because she’s at home.
Jill DeWit: Right. They don’t have to make the deals. I’m just going to answer the phone, and there’s a voice at the other end, and that’s easy.
Jack Butala: Statistics, this is not just my dream, I didn’t dream it up, statistics show that if somebody answers the phone, it pretty highly changes your percentages of doing the deal.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: That’s one way, and then if you explain to the person that you’re doing a deal with that you’re available after 6:00 pm, or whatever the numbers end up being, and ask that person very nicely if that works for them to arrange to close the transaction, are they available at that time. This is what Jill does, you make friends with this person, and so you two have an understanding, and then you get the deal done. I don’t think having a full time job, in any way hinders you on this. Should you do 5,500 deals a month with a full time job? Absolutely not.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, not by yourself anyway. I would love to paint the picture Jack, of how you were doing it with your full time job and then I was going to show how I was doing it with a full time job, because I think it’s funny, and I think it would be good for people to hear.
Jack Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, so I did exactly what I just described. This is what, in late ’90s, early 2000s, so I didn’t actually have anybody answer the phone. From an acquisition standpoint, I chose to, and in a lot of ways I still do choose to only do deals that come back signed. There could be, my voice mailbox could have five million people, and answers, and all that. I just didn’t care to do those deals.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Jack Butala: My answer was, and it is now to some degree, not doing enough deals, send out more mail. We have members who are not real interested in talking to people, like me, on the phone endlessly, and negotiating and stuff. That was my answer.
Jill DeWit: Okay, wait. Can you be a little more detailed. Did you go to a job? You would get up and go to your job and didn’t basically come home and check your PO Box, if you will, what did you use for your mail back then?
Jack Butala: I used the exact same mail address that we have now, literally.
Jill DeWit: Okay, cool. Right.
Jack Butala: It’s a mailbox [inaudible 00:07:39] address.
Jill DeWit: Got it, so you already had that all set up, so you would check your thing, and then you would have those deals, and then you would just call them back outside of your work hours and make it happen?
Jack Butala: Yes. I put the deals together, actually on the weekends.
Jill DeWit: You did? Okay.
Jack Butala: I’d get the mail, but I’ll tell you, I worked as an investment banker. We bought and sold companies, and I was on the sale side. Somebody else would arrange for the fact that this company was for sale and then I would call all these private equity groups and stuff and say, “Look we got this company in. Based on the fact that you guys bought these three companies recently, this one might make a fit.” I was on the phone a lot, so it was real easy for me to slip away, and I hear a lot of people say this, it’s real easy to slip away for let’s say an hour during lunch, or whatever, go to a conference room, check the voice mail, see if there’s anything good, do some return calls. I don’t even remember it ever taking a whole hour. When I left, I left my job too late, which is highly what I recommend everybody doing it, just being real conservative about it and waiting. I probably left my job maybe a year, possibly two years later than I should have. Hindsight is 20/20.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, but that’s a good thing to talk about. You knew for an extra year or two that this is definitely going to work.
Jack Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I was a one man show and then I was a one man show for probably two years until I actually hired that first person to do the paperwork and actually return the calls. Yeah, I mean it’s not hard at all. You just explain it to everybody.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: We never had any issues at all. I never remember having any. I worked on the weekends.
Jill DeWit: You want to hear my story?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: You know my story, but I was going to share it.
Jack Butala: It’s better than mine.
Jill DeWit: I think it’s funny, because I literally had two workstations set up because I worked at a position where I could work from home. I was in my home office, but I had set hours, so I’m killing it on the phone sitting there, and I could whip around and have another workstation. I literally had a desk so I’d swing my chair around and had all my stuff spread out, everything on a desk right behind me. Talk about taking on and off different hats. I would swing my chair around and now I’m doing this. I do work, work, work, work, work, take a break, whip around, “What do I need to do? Oh yeah, I need to setup that notary. I can do that right now.” Whip back around, back on the clock. It was the funniest thing.
I think what’s great, like you shared is pushing it. Don’t get overexcited. Yeah, these deals are coming, they’re more consistent, you see your bank account going up. Push it, push it, push it. Don’t jump the gun, and like you said Jack, I love that you waited a year or two. I waited a long time too. It was a point where it was like, this is ridiculous. For me it was, “I’m officially losing money because even when you add up my day job paycheck, and add it in, I’m still losing money because I’m not 100% focused on this,” so that’s usually what I tell folks. When you’re making more than your day job and you have a lot of consistency, then you can think about that. Still I don’t want anybody to jump the gun. I’d rather you have like, “Oh I should have done it a year ago.” I’d rather hear that all day long, because that’s fine.
Jack Butala: I bought a 40 or an 80 acre property, I can’t remember, for $100 an acre, and then doubled my money. It was either $8,000 or $16,000, and I had that amount of money. That’s what I started with.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I left my job when I had $500,000-$60,0000 in my checking account. That is not fiction. It happens to our members all the time. They call Jill and I thanking us, thanking, thanking, thanking.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Everybody’s got a number. At about 150 I should have said, “You know what?” You have that thought like, “Gosh, what if I spent all my time just buying property and not doing this job?” That’s after you’ve done a bunch of deals, you know what you’re capable of, the deals that you want. I hate something like this. I really don’t like selling property, I love buying it. What if I align myself with some people at Land Academy who are all setup to sell property, ding ding, like us, and that’s all I do is buy property and then they sell it, sell it on their venue. That solves that. There’s a lot of different ways, because you have a job. This should never stop you because you have a job.
Jill DeWit: Do you know what I think? I think having a day job, you have a full time day job is really actually a benefit in the beginning, because it forces you to get efficient and use your time wisely, and to be picky and not waste a lot of time on deals that you’re really not going to, that don’t meet your criteria, if that makes sense.
Jack Butala: Absolutely. That’s a great way to look at it, and I completely agree. It makes you organized, it gets you efficient, you’re maybe probably going to do stuff and make decisions because you’re not thinking about it too much, you’re just really doing it.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative), you don’t have time to think about it that much.
Jack Butala: I’ve said this on the show 50 times probably. I had an old high school football coach, and he said, “If you’re going to make a mistake in the field, I want to see you make it at 100 miles an hour. Don’t be walking around like Eeyore. Just make a mistake. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, just make them big. Make them big, and good, and fast. If you pass it, then do it right the next time.”
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative), exactly. I hope that helps.
Jack Butala: I hope so too.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. It’s funny, people go, “Oh I can’t do this,” and I’m like, “Yeah you can.”
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: It’s really, do you want to do this, and yeah you’re going to have to get good, and you’re going to have to get speedy, and get creative, and efficient, and those are all qualities you want to have when you’re starting your business anyway. Hello.
Jack Butala: Our kids watched us, and still do, watch us work all the time.
Jill DeWit: They do, it’s true.
Jack Butala: We have a home office, and we have a regular office in a commercial building. Sometimes we spend a lot of time in our home offices, and they do stuff for us. They all work for us, in some capacity, all three of them.
Jill DeWit: That’s true.
Jack Butala: They like it, so if you have kids, don’t let that stop you either. That’s my point. Get them involved.
Jill DeWit: Oh yeah, that’s true. Kids can go drop stuff off at the post office, [inaudible 00:14:01], they can pick up things.
Jack Butala: They’re good on computers, they know photo shop, I don’t know, they’re just born knowing photo shop, these kids.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Isn’t that funny? We’ve had kids help with logos, especially in the beginning, you’re making your own logo. There’s just a lot of little things that you’re doing on your own. Your kids can help with this, and I think it’s kind of cool. You know?
Jack Butala: Exactly.
Jill DeWit: It’s not a bad thing. You know, gosh, and we laugh about this, but what a good experience. Let’s think about this. You teach your kids how to build a website, what’s that going to do for them down the road?
Jack Butala: Exactly. Everybody wins.
Jill DeWit: Man, that’s a huge benefit.
Jack Butala: If you don’t have kids, you’re going to have a ton of time. If you don’t have kids, you have a regular 40 hour a week job, hopefully you don’t have much bills then, or your bills aren’t too high, now there’s no excuse.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Hey this is the technical two, two minutes of property investment advice from our 15 year, 15,000 transaction experience. If you have a job, a full time job, I want you to make a plan with a number, and when your bank balance is X, execute the plan. If you’re married, or live with people, and you have people in your life, share the plan with them. Set aside a bank account, and if the number’s, let’s say $100,000, say I’m going to do this in X amount of deals, I’m going to have $100,000 in the bank, and I’m going to start the plan to leave the job. Do not, please do not, without ever having done a transaction, or without a bunch of money in the bank from this, don’t leave your job and then put all kinds of pressure on yourself, and stressed out and the whole thing. Get the money first, and do the deals first, and have a plan, and execute it, and do it with enthusiasm, as Jill would say. If you have a question, you want to be on the show, call 800-725-8816. Jill has inspiration for us today.
Jill DeWit: Is it just me, or is the technical two becoming inspiration also? It’s kind of funny, because mine inspiration sounds like your technical two. Maybe we’ll change them up a little bit because I think that would be funny, but my inspiration is just about staying focused. Where I got this was, I keep seeing things, and I was just looking actually, in this Facebook forum that Jack and I are in. It’s not ours, it’s a guy in our world, in our community and stuff. Anyway, he has this Facebook forum that we’re in, and I’m watching people post these crazy, nebulous things that I know it’s just eating up their time. I’m like, “Gosh.” A person just posted something about, “Hey, I have a buyer who wants fishing property in Northwest US, so gosh if anybody out there has something, shoot them my way.” Talk about eating up your time. I mean that’s great, but-
Jack Butala: That’s a sign to me that they’re not going to succeed.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: They’re not focused.
Jill DeWit: That’s my concern is like, “Gosh everybody, stay focused on whatever it is you’re doing.” Like Jack and I talk about a lot, it’s Jack thing really. I’m taking some credit here. Have an acquisition criteria and stick to it period. This is another thing, are you here to drive your customer all over town, or are you here to sell them your property? Maybe that’s it too. Why is this person not focused even on their own properties? Why is this person just, “Hey I know somebody who wants to buy something.” Well that’s great. We all do. Stay focused, use your time wisely, and you’ll get there.
Jack Butala: Excellent advice. Join us in another episode where Jack and Jill discuss how to use information, that’s me-
Jill DeWit: … and inspiration, that’s me.
Jack Butala: To get just about anything you want.
Jill DeWit: We use it everyday to buy property for half of what it’s worth and sell it immediately.
Jack Butala: You’re not alone in this real estate ambition.
Great show Jill. That focus thing is so important. I’m really glad you brought it up.
Jill DeWit: I know the guy who just posted that too.
Jack Butala: I see it all the time.
Jill DeWit: I’m like, gosh why are you guys doing this? I don’t want to call them out and say, “I think this is a big time waster.” I just hope that nobody else goes, “Oh I have this, I have that,” because all he’s doing is spreading, those are the kind of buyers we don’t want, because they’re not really buyers. It’s a tire kicker. He’s sharing his fabulous tire kicker with everybody, and we all don’t want tire kickers.
Jack Butala: Yeah. I mean, it so rarely works. Here’s the problem, if you just forget about the fact that it’s really a time waster, but it is, that type of transaction, or that way of doing a deal, the percentages are so low, it’s not even worth talking about.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: It’s like when they teach you, as a real estate agent I’ve heard this, I don’t know this for a fact by any stretch, but the most successful real estate agents, the ones that make six digits consistently, they get listings, they’re experts at getting listings, but they’re not experts in any way, and don’t even work with buyers.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: They just get listing, after listing, after listing at a reasonable price, and they allow all the other real estate agents in that environment, in their office or not, to drive people around, and spend all the money, and do the fishing pole, whatever that story was that you just said.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: There’s a right, focused way to do this, as you said, and there’s a messy, silly way.
Jill DeWit: You know what? I am happy to share something with everyone to save them some time. A long time ago when we started our platinum buyers club, I had people that would come to me and say, “Hey I’m on your platinum buyers club, I’m really interested in this date, this date, this date, and this sized property in this price range.” I, thinking this was a good thing, actually started to keep track of that. I can show you Jack. I have a spreadsheet where I really tried to. When I got those kind of properties in, I would try to send them to those people. Never, ever, ever had it make a difference.
Jack Butala: Yeah. That was my question. Did you ever close a deal?
Jill DeWit: Nope. That’s what I’m trying to save people with this too. If you think that this is going to work, no. You’re just wasting your time. I tested it, I tried it. I would literally say, “Hey you asked me for,” and dream it up, however specific it is, I could say, “You asked for these six things, and I actually found, it finally came across my desk, it has these six things.” They’re going to go, “Oh gosh, I really thought the mountain was going to be on the north side of the property, not the south side of the property,” whatever it is. You’ll be like, “All right, you’re not serious.” That’s really what it is.
Jack Butala: The reason our model is so successful is because the people that want to sell their property to us, they decide that on their own. They get a letter from us like thousands and thousands of other property owners, and the ones that decide, they decide on their own that they want to sell it, and they sign it and send it back, or they call us. It’s the same thing on the sell side, when we sell it. It’s all plastered everywhere on the internet, overkill. They decide if they want to buy it, and they click on it and buy it like they buy a pair of shoes.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: There’s no, “I got a fishing guy.”
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: In theory, you don’t need to talk on the phone at all. I don’t. We’re lucky because we have some people that do it for us in the office, but not very often. It’s just, that’s our model. If they have a lot of questions about buying a property, chances are they’re not going to buy it at all. I used to say, “Are you going to buy this or not?”
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You know what? You can think back to yourself, and we all know situations that you’ve gone down somewhere knowing you’re going to buy X, maybe it’s a car. You’re going down to a lot, and you’ve done all your research, you know darn well you’re going to buy that car. You’re just going to make a difference on getting the price that you want, but you’ve already made it up in your mind. It’s the same thing. You’re not walking onto a used car lot waiting to be talked into a car. No, you’re going there for something specific, and that’s the same with the buyers.
Jack Butala: Well said.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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