Why Owner Data Direct From County is Substandard (CFFL 0286)
Why Owner Data Direct From County is Substandard
Jack Butala: Why Owner Data Direct From County is Substandard. 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 DeWitt.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about why owner data directly from the county is substandard. Great show today, Jill. Before we get started, let’s share something interesting that happened to us lately.
Jill DeWit: This is funny. I was walking around, like I normally do, and some of it’s because of the show and some of it’s because it’s funny who we are. I pay attention to funny things that people say, and I heard two really good comments yesterday, two quotes and I wanted to share them because they made me giggle. One was this girl walking along, all I caught was the tail end of whatever the conversation is and she said, all I need is a blender. It totally was like so funny for me. I had to share it. I’m like, I want to make friends with her.
Jack Butala: That’s hilarious. I heard that too. I heard that exact comment, right at the end of the thing and she was ending the whole thing with, and all I really need is just a blender.
Jill DeWit: It was so good. I’m like, what’s going in the blender? I’m very curious now. Is it a fun thing? Is it old? It was so good. Then I heard another one too, like a couple of hours later, and it was so cute, from this, I guess whoever this girl is, she’s on it, and she just with so much confidence said, if you’re going to wear lipstick wear it well and not like a pound.
Jack Butala: Not like a pound of it?
Jill DeWit: Yes. It was so cute. She’s walking out of the door of the bank and her friends are all there. It was like a little group of kids. That was the two sentences that just jumped up at me as she’s walking away, I’m like, that’s good.
Jack Butala: That’s good advice for anybody doing anything. My dad used to say, if it’s worth doing do it right. She’s right. She nailed it.
Jill DeWit: If you’re going to wear lipstick, wear it well.
Jack Butala: You know what that is? It’s a good example of reaching people from where they come. Her thing was lipstick at that moment.
Jill DeWit: It was so cute. I loved it. It was really good.
Jack Butala: Let’s take a question posted by one of our members on successplant.com, our free online community.
Jill DeWit: Chris, now this is interesting because this came from Facebook …
Jack Butala: It’s not on successplant?
Jill DeWit: No. This is actually from a Facebook group. This was so good I wanted to share. I put a little note in there too, I alerted Chris that we’re going to talk about this this week. I thought this was such a good post and a good question, that a lot of people could benefit from this, and I mean a lot of people could benefit from this. I wanted to bring it up here.
Jack Butala: When she says a lot of people she means me.
Jill DeWit: No. Not you. Seriously. This means a lot, like forty million can benefit from this.
Jack Butala: This is what she means like, everybody’s a little cranky today. That everybody means me.
Jill DeWit: That’s not what that is. No. Chris asks, can anyone recommend a good printer for home based printing? I’ve been thinking about getting one of those Epsons with an eco tank. Actually, I don’t even know that whole thing.
Jack Butala: Boy, I know where this is going.
Jill DeWit: Apparently you can print like four thousand pages with a bottle of ink. Then the bottle’s only like twenty dollars. That’s interesting. Jack.
Jack Butala: Go ahead. I’m going to try really hard not to sound agitated.
Jill DeWit: I guess my thing is, if I’m printing from home that means I’m not doing volume. There’s no way I can really do that many printing, that many mailers, without my family wanting to kill me for stuffing envelopes and the cost of buying stamps and the printer and the paper and the ink, I’m not doing any volume. If I’m doing a thousand printers I’m not going to spend times forty-nine cents a stamp. I’m not doing that.
Jack Butala: If you really do a spreadsheet on the whole thing, which I’ve done for you, and if you go on to successplant.com you’ll see a comparison chart on one of the side widgets about how much it costs with the main bulk mail printers out there on the internet plus a dioy column, do it yourself, and I have yet to see anyone, regardless of number, print out their own letters and stuff them and stuff, it’s between eighty cents and a dollar twenty-five. We do it for like forty-one to forty-two cents, and the iti which is an affiliation does it for just a few cents above that.
Now you don’t paper, envelopes, printing. You don’t need to lick a stamp. None of it. You just do the mail mergence, send it to somebody whose a pro. There’s no minimums. If you’re going to do fifty units, I don’t why anyone would do that, but if you’re going to do fifty units a week or two hundred a week or four hundred a week it’s still forty-one or forty-two cents a unit. To recoup the cost of this printer you would have to do thousands of letters. You want to be a deal maker. You don’t want to be a printer.
Jill DeWit: Here’s the other thing too.
Jack Butala: You want to buy some dirt.
Jill DeWit: Just to be serious. You know, Chris, Jack and I went down this path. It’s not just the printing. It’s the stuffing the envelopes and sealing the envelopes. That’s a whole separate machine. We actually really looked at buying one of these at one time. Jack and I really considered this. We went down and looked at the monster corporate level printing machines. The ones that do fold them are astronomically expensive. You’re getting two machines. Now you have a printer and you have a separate folder and then I don’t even remember how the stuffing thing worked in the envelope. We gave up on it. We walked out of there going, that makes no financial sense at all to spend thousands of dollars. Then, are you going to do four thousand pages? That’s two thousand mailers. Who’s going to sit down with you and do this once a month and are you going to pay them? There’s even more of an expensive. Your family will by the way, want to shoot you.
Jack Butala: We’re not selling anything here. We’re really not. This is not a commercial for our printing company. We have a printing company. It’s not. I bought a printer just like this, a lot of years ago, just went down the exact path and it does not make financial sense. I’m not even talking about the time. What Jill is saying is how much time it takes and then you got to go buy stuff and you got to get in the car and get it. Then you’re going to have left over envelopes and on and on.
Jill DeWit: I have a good example too. One of our members was really going to do this. We have one member that does bulk mail. He gets with a bunch of people and they do mixed mailers and everything to bring the cost even down more, before we had this new thing that we’re going to be rolling out here in a little while. Anyway, he went out actually and bought a printer and tested it once and said, I’m out. That’s it. Not doing it.
Jack Butala: It’s just sitting in his garage.
Jill DeWit: He’s like, who wants it? Come get it. It’s free.
Jack Butala: He took a picture of it and said, come and get it.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, he did. It’s on successplant.
Jack Butala: Go on successplant and see if he’s still got that stuff.
Jill DeWit: You’re right. There’s one for sale right now.
Jack Butala: It’s not for sale. He said come and get it.
Jill DeWit: Chris, you’ll use it once and then you’re going to pass it on to the next guy and go, this is really ridiculous.
Jack Butala: Look, we’re not picking on you. It’s just, we see this all the time. Or, if you’re one of those guys who’s just got to fix your own car and stuff, this is for you.
Jill DeWit: Here’s my thing. If you’re going to do this right you need to go get a commercial license to do the postage less at whatever rate, because you really are not going to be out there putting forty-nine cents on everything, when you could not do it yourself for less than forty-nine cents. That makes no sense.
Jack Butala: Here’s the thick of it. There’s a lot of little things that are involved in owning a real estate investment company, and there’s little experts all over the world, on the internet, that are going to help you do this. A printer is one of those. You want to find somebody who’s got it all figured out. It’s going to be cheaper than the price of a stamp. I guarantee.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: Now, you take all the labor out of it, all the equipment, all the material, and it’s still cheaper than the price of a stamp that you would put on it anyway. There’s not decision there. You have to send it out. Our company, which we have not launched called offers to owners, which we will launch in September, this month, there’s no minimums. If you send fifty out, we haven’t priced it exactly yet but it’s below forty cents. Ten thousand or a hundred it’s the same number. That’s all subject to change but Jill and I are still working out the math but it’s going to be some version of that. There’s just no discussing it. There’s a lot of other little things in this business too.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: You need experts. You do it way cheaper and they’ve spent thousands of hours figuring this stuff out. You want to be a deal maker.
Jill DeWit: Unless you want to be a printer. That’s the thing too. If you’re held up with the printing you’re not going to have time to answer the phone and now you’re not going to have time to do the deeds and close these deals and posting the properties.
Jack Butala: That’s it. I was just going to say that. All that stuff. Land academy is meant to take all the back office function out of this for you. Printing is one. We have already launched, what’s it called? D perfect. This is not a commercial. We have launched dperfect.com.
Jill DeWit: Let’s not talk about our products. I just want to talk about the big picture. Think about that Chris. Just thinking about putting your efforts, like Jack just said, where you are most useful. Focusing on the property that you want to send mails to, isolating the right group. You need to be keeping track, that was a good area, look how much money I made on this. Now I’m going to go back and buy more of the ten acres because I did so well on the five acres in this area.
Jack Butala: Exactly. Data.
Jill DeWit: That’s what you should be spending your time on right now. Who cares about what kind of printer is best?
Jack Butala: Exactly, Jill.
Jill DeWit: You got people to do that menial stuff for you. This is your business. This is where you’re making money and that’s the stuff that you need to know and be good at.
Jack Butala: Thank you for reeling me back in, Jill.
Jill DeWit: You’re good.
Jack Butala: I’m serious. If you have a question or you want to be on the show, reach out to either one of us, or anyone for that matter, on successplant.com. Today’s topic, why owner data directly from the county is substandard. What? Isn’t that the root of all data? Yes. Here’s why it’s substandard. The data itself very often that they release to the public does not contain the whole database. It just contains what they want to show you. The last two county databases that I bought and reviewed, they did not contain assessor value. When you pull it from real quest, which is the source of data that we use, it does contain the full assessor database.
That’s a deal that real quest has with all the county assessors. We want the full data. It’s in the same format. Real quest is really the way to go. The county data it’s not that it’s necessarily substandard. It’s just in a different format. Every county’s different. Every data set that you get from each individual county contains some of the data that you need. Maybe it contains all of it but it’s just in a different format. Why not just learn it once? That’s my point. It is substandard and it’s expensive.
Jill DeWit: It’s true. One of the things that I’ve heard people have trouble with is they have called the county and after a while got to right person and they’ve actually given them a specific list of I need to know a b c d. I want a list with all the owner names, addresses, zoning, acreage, apn, legal, whatever, and they leave out one, or they didn’t know to ask for it, like, shoot, I meant to ask that, or even the county didn’t send it to them, like you just said. Great, I got a list from the county. This could easily happen to anyone of us. I got to this county. I got a list of everybody who owns this sized property, duh, duh.
Jack Butala: Let’s say five acres.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, all the five acres in this whatever. I’ve got the names, I’ve got the addresses, I’ve got the legal. What I don’t know still is, I don’t know what the zoning code is. Shoot. Or the zoning code might be missing. I don’t know the assessed value. I don’t have this information, that information. Maybe you forgot to ask for it or maybe they didn’t include it. Whatever it is. Like Jack says, now you’re stuck and most of these counties it’s not like it’s a free thing for them. That’s a lot of work for someone to go do and you’re not going to have it right away. It might take a week or two to get it from them and it might cost you. I’ve heard anywhere from under a hundred dollars to a couple hundred dollars, depending on the county. Then I go, did we save any time? No. Did we save any money? No.
Jack Butala: Instead of doing a Google search for some answer to a question, on your phone, and you just type it in and get the answer. What if you had to call Google, tell them that this is the search that you want to do, and then they said, we’ll get the results to you in a week and a half and then you’d get the results and you asked the wrong question, or half the question? That’s what this is. Instead of walking right up to the database and pulling the data and learning. Is that clear?
Jill DeWit: I’m along those lines too. You’re all good. My example, like yours, is like, imagine going to the motor vehicles, pulling the number, and standing in line. Now you’re going to get up to the front desk, because it’s public knowledge. You can say, hi, Betty is your name? Thank you, hi, Betty. Wow. You’ve been here thirty years? That’s great. Hey, Betty.
Jack Butala: We did a little show today.
Jill DeWit: You like this? I’m going to do a little role, probably here, just to bring this home.
Jack Butala: Can I be Betty?
Jill DeWit: You can be Betty.
Jack Butala: Okay. Go.
Jill DeWit: Hi, Betty.
Jack Butala: Hi.
Jill DeWit: Hi, how are you today?
Jack Butala: I’m okay.
Jill DeWit: Great.
Jack Butala: I work at the DMV.
Jill DeWit: You just look like you love your job.
Jack Butala: I’m not a happy person. It’s all a show.
Jill DeWit: Betty, how long have you been here?
Jack Butala: Thirty-five years.
Jill DeWit: Wow. You must know a lot.
Jack Butala: I’m going to retire in forty-one days and thirteen minutes.
Jill DeWit: That’s so great, Betty. I’m so happy. Before you retire, you know what, I know this is really easy because you guys have all the information right there. I just want to see if I could real quick get a list. Actually I don’t really want a list. I don’t want to walk away with it. Can you just email me please Betty, a spreadsheet? Here’s my email address. I would like every single person in the state who owns a sixty-five Ford Mustang, red, and I need the name and the address and I want to know the mileage and I want to know what it was sold for. Can you email that to me Betty and can I have it by two o’clock?
Jack Butala: What’s a spreadsheet?
Jill DeWit: What do you mean, Betty? You have all that right now.
Jack Butala: Jill is perfect.
Jill DeWit: Seriously. That’s the equivalent of what you’re asking when you’re calling them. Instead of going behind Betty and you are coming into the back end of Betty’s database, Betty doesn’t even know what you’re doing, and you’re pulling the data out yourself and Betty’s like, whatever. I don’t know what’s going on over there. That guy’s a pro.
Jack Butala: All kidding aside, these are great examples, Jill. The other thing too is this. When you look at a data set, any data, real estate data or not, any data set, whether it’s from the county or whatever, you’re going to see things in there that spark thoughts like whole, like what do you mean they have assessed data for the improvements and the land? Maybe I can send out a house mailer. They might have the last completed sale amount. What do you mean? It sparks all this creative stuff. You’re going to become a data expert. A lot of you are. Thank God. That’s the real beauty in this is data, is becoming good at data scrubbing and going off. Land academy is just kicking you out of the nest. That’s what we do. You teach yourself to fly and we’ve got multiple members, they’re doing completely different stuff now and it’s because of the data.
Jill DeWit: For me, this whole topic is just thinking big picture. It’s not getting out the phone book anymore and calling every person in the phone book, saying, do you own any property you want to sell? We could be doing that or we could really just get the rocking list of the people that we know there’s no mortgage and we know all the things that Jack just listed.
Jack Butala: We don’t want industrial property, and on and on.
Jill DeWit: We’re not here to waste anybody’s time. We’re just really here to send out a lot of good offers to the right people.
Jack Butala: You want everything to be maximally efficient. You want all the back office stuff to be efficient. You want the buy side to be efficient. You want systems on the inbound acquisitions and systems on the outbound sale. That’s your goal. That’s our goal.
Jill DeWit: It’s funny. If anybody was watching us right now, I’m glad we don’t have a camera in the room in here. We’re almost like, but me, but me.
Jack Butala: We both have a lot to say. This is why we started land academy.
Jill DeWit: You and I both feel so strongly about this subject and we’re still both so overwhelmingly shocked that people, I don’t understand.
Jack Butala: We’re not picking on you Chris.
Jill DeWit: No. It has nothing to do with Chris or anything. It’s amazing to me that it’s an uphill battle to explain to people that there really is a much easier way. Every person that has said, wait a minute. Wait. What did you just say? Then they get in and they look at the data, they’re like, I wish you would’ve beat me up six months ago with this. I’m like, I tried. I really tried. They’re like, now I get it. I know so many people, we’re all spreading the word that there’s a better easier way but still everybody has these things in their heads, there’s preconceived notions like, I have to have a real estate agent to buy a house, right? No, you can actually just buy a house.
Jack Butala: Here’s the takeaway from this whole topic. You want to become a data scrubbing expert. The real estate, all that stuff will follow. If you become really good at pulling lists and analyzing them from an active database it will feed your family for generations. I’m not exaggerating. It is a talent that pays out like nothing else that I’ve seen and it’s accessible to anybody. I’m not plugging any of our products. I’m just saying, become a data expert, at anything, whatever you do.
Jill DeWit: That you just touched on, anybody can learn this whole flipping thing, buying it, selling it, blah, blah. That’s great. Are there a lot of people out there doing it? Yeah, but how many of them are doing it really well and are taking the time to understand the data, like Jack just said, and going out there and really finding those deals that nobody can find?
Jack Butala: We do this on a SFR level too. The guy that we wholesale these houses to, it’s one person. He’s an expert at flipping houses and cleaning them up. He does great. He does financially extremely well for the amount of work that he does, in my opinion. He has absolutely no interest in learning about data. The vast majority of people in real estate are just like that. They need us. They need you.
Jill DeWit: Awesome.
Jack Butala: Join us in another episode, where Jack and Jill discuss how to use information. Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what we just talked about. That’s me.
Jill DeWit: And inspiration. I didn’t really have a lot of that but it was fun. That’s me.
Jack Butala: We should do this on every extra. We use it everyday to buy property for half of what it’s worth and sell it immediately. I just sell it to Jill.
Jill DeWit: That’s okay. You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jack Butala: I think we came on way too strong.
Jill DeWit: We just feel so passionately about that subject.
Jack Butala: I know. It’s [inaudible 00:20:49].
Jill DeWit: Do you know why? I feel like I’ve subtly tried to tell people, there might be a better way. Now I’m hitting you over the head with it. This is silly. I feel like, you guys, this is really silly. There is a better way. I promise you. Don’t mess around, do it right, and you know what? If you don’t want to care, that’s fine. We’re going to be over here making a whole lot of money while you’re still, I don’t know, tapping stuff together wondering why it doesn’t work.
Jack Butala: Do it wrong your first few times. I did everything wrong for probably a decade and then really tried to figure it all out and redo it.
Jill DeWit: I’m going tough love now. I’m sorry.
Jack Butala: I can tell. actually you’re scaring me.
Jill DeWit: Seriously. I’m at the tough love moment here. There’s my inspiration. It’s tough love.
Jack Butala: On that note, information and inspiration to buy under valued property.
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 jack@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.
