No Risk – Average Money in Then Money Out Two Weeks (CFFL 0288)
No Risk – Average Money in Then Money Out Two Weeks
Jack Butala: No Risk – Average Money in Then Money Out Two Weeks. 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: Happy Friday.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show. In this episode, Jill and I talk about no risk, average money in, and take your money back out in two weeks without any risk. That’s what we do. Great show today Jill. Before we get started, let’s share something interesting that happened to us lately.
Jill DeWit: Okay. I am just so curious about the magic of HGTV, and I was going to ask Jack if you would share some of the numbers, because I am really curious. What is it that’s there, and does that maybe explain kind of what you and I are, I’m watching you and I grow, I don’t know how to say this, but in our followers, in our popularity, different things, our listeners are growing and all this stuff. Is it like an HGTV kind of thing?
Jack Butala: HGTV by definition is a, it’s a specialty media station. You probably know it from cable, possible from the internet. It stand for home and garden TV. I think it started out as home and garden, but really what it’s about now, it’s become just a real estate. It’s a real estate channel, slice of life, people doing real estate deals, mostly residential, residential, purchasing properties and flipping them, or redesigning stuff, that whole thing. There’s a lot of places on the internet you can go to see what shows and what media venues are more popular than the other ones. HGTV consistently comes out at the tip top over network stations.
Jill DeWit: Where are you reading this Jack?
Jack Butala: In Variety magazine.
Jill DeWit: Do you get Variety magazine?
Jack Butala: Why are you doing this? What’s funny? You’re cracking me up.
Jill DeWit: I just think it’s cool.
Jack Butala: You know what? Everybody has little interests.
Jill DeWit: That’s good.
Jack Butala: I know. I just find it so interesting to see what shows do well and which ones don’t, and why.
Jill DeWit: I know. Share with us a little bit about that.
Jack Butala: I honestly don’t know.
Jill DeWit: You have a movie thing.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: That’s my thing.
Jack Butala: I love to see how much money movies make, and internationally, nationally, so Variety’s got all the numbers in there about the whole industry, what shows do great, what shows don’t, which ones completely flopped and didn’t make any money at all. It has nothing to do with the stars. I don’t care about that. I love the business side of why shows do well, why stations, channels like HGTV do well, and what it’s all about.
Jill DeWit: I would like to share without throwing you under the bus.
Jack Butala: It’s not possible. Well, it’s actually already happened twice, and that’s fine.
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: In a minute, we’re going to talk about your hobbies.
Jill DeWit: Oh geez. All right, we’re all done. Just kidding. Just kidding. No, no, what I was going to say is, jack, you love the movie making thing, and the cameras in our world. We just got this 30 camera. If you’re not following us on Facebook, you should be watching us, and please let me know if you’re getting sick of our 360 photos, because we think it’s really cool.
Jack Butala: Jill loves to go in a crowded place and take a 360 photo, and it’s just, you know, people love it on the internet.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: I love it too.
Jill DeWit: Don’t think that with those, hold please. I found a way to get into a crowd of men, six foot five tall men without shirts on wearing board shorts and say, “Hey guys, will you pose with me for a photo in front of a volleyball tournament.”
Jack Butala: They said, “Heck yes.”
Jill DeWit: Yeah they’re like, “Oh yeah. What’s that camera all about?”
Jack Butala: Everybody won.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. We’re having so much fun with our equipment and everything. Jack, will you close the door next time. I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding. It’s coffee. That’s my joke. I’m just being silly. I just wanted to share that I think it’s cool. You are really into the movie stuff, and boy if we could do nothing but make YouTube videos all day long about our business, and what we’re doing, and really, really show you, we would.
Jack Butala: That’s probably the root of it. I just like doing these videos.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: I didn’t know it. I did the program, the Land Academy program whatever, more than a year ago, and learned all about video making, and how not to do it, and what to do, and I guess maybe that’s the root of it, because it all started from there. What ended up happening honestly, and I hope that our members feel this too, I got done with it, and I said, “Is that all there is to this? Is that it?” I thought there was some magical thing that goes on. No. I went about a Sony camera, read the directions, watched some YouTube videos, and made a thing. Now every time our kids do something, I have to make a movie out of it. They’re on our YouTube channel, and I love it. I love doing it.
Jill DeWit: You are so downplaying this, because there’s a lot that goes into it Jack.
Jack Butala: No, no, I’m not saying-
Jill DeWit: You did, it’s you. You are really good at this stuff. I’m serious. Not anyone could pick it up as fast as you did. You are really good at that stuff.
Jack Butala: Land Academy, buying and selling real estate is basically the same thing. You look at the end goal, in the movie case, there’s massive examples of what’s good and what’s not. Then you just work it backwards. Oh, there’s cut shots, there’s this, there’s three cameras with this whole thing, nothing’s more than a second, nothing’s more than two seconds, and on, and on, and on. Pretty soon, and it doesn’t take long, I’m not joking, like an hour, you realize there’s no secret to any of this, you just have to have the right equipment, and patience, and the right instruction.
Jill DeWit: It’s a lot of work.
Jack Butala: The right instruction’s key, and there’s a lot of YouTube channels about that. Duh, because it’s about video. YouTube is video stuff.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Yeah. Buying and selling real estate’s the same thing. You look at what you want in the end. “I want to 50 deals, make $10,000 a deal,” and you work it backwards. “How do I do that?” You got to buy it cheap. “How do I sell it?” You got to sell it on the internet. “Where do I sell it?” Land and Farm, on, and on, and on.
Jill DeWit: Perfect.
Jack Butala: It’s the whole, that’s a 35,000 foot view. Yeah, I love Variety magazine. There’s two in there, HGTV shocks me how popular it is. HGTV is also a section in Facebook marketing where people just love it. You’re a woman, and I haven’t checked the numbers, but I’m assuming that the vast majority of the viewers on that station are women. What’s the appeal?
Jill DeWit: You know what? I don’t know if it’s just women though, because I think men, I hear even young men, there’s like a tiny house, I hear younger generation men that are in a tiny house movement kind of thing. They just want to own something, so I don’t know if there’s something there.
Jack Butala: You know what the original tiny house is? It cracks me up.
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: It’s called an RV.
Jill DeWit: That was like, originally that’s what they called it?
Jack Butala: No, that just cracks me up, there’s a tiny house movement.
Jill DeWit: Oh.
Jack Butala: You put a house on a trailer.
Jill DeWit: That’s true. It is an RV.
Jack Butala: Or you could just go buy an RV on Craigslist. There’s your tiny house.
Jill DeWit: It does have wheels. Exactly.
Jack Butala: It’s a marketing thing.
Jill DeWit: True. You’re right.
Jack Butala: No seriously. What is at HGTV? What is the appeal?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking.
Jack Butala: If I was a producer, and somebody had did a bunch of pitches about a new channel, and HGTV was on the list, I would say, “This is never going to work. Why would you ever want to watch somebody go through the turmoil of flipping a house?”
Jill DeWit: I know, ripping open a wall and seeing what’s behind.
Jack Butala: Finding maggots and that stuff. I really, there’s something about that. I don’t understand it. It’s hard for me to watch actually a lot of it. It’s like, “Oh this is never going to go right.” Then they never really give you the numbers.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, that’s true.
Jack Butala: “I bought it for $130, and I sold it for $240.” That’s like 1/10th of what happened.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: How much did it cost to put the new roof on and all that.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. That’s good.
Jack Butala: What about after the real estate agent fees and on, and on, and on. I guess it’s just a, it satisfies some kind of thing in the back of everyone’s head like, “Man I could just go flip a bunch of houses and be done in life.” I guess really that’s what it’s doing is satisfying that.
Jill DeWit: Maybe.
Jack Butala: Which you can do that with land. I think houses is tough.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: Let’s take a question posted by one of our members in successplant.com, our free online community.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Jim asks, “I’m just setting up my business, and the goal is to be geographically independent. I would like to continue the business.”
Jack Butala: Whoa. Look at how smart these people are Jill.
Jill DeWit: Right? “With the ability to move regularly and live anywhere.”
Jack Butala: That’s what our goal was.
Jill DeWit: Yep. “I’m concerned about changing addresses as Jack states that you’ll receive responses to direct mail up to several years after you send it out. I have looked at Earth Class mail, which provides me exactly what I need, but is quite expensive at $99 a month. Also, they do not offer an address in my state, so I’m not sure about the implications of setting up an LLC in another state. Anyone been through this?” Such a good question.
Jack Butala: Yeah. There’s like six questions in here, and these are great questions, and you’re asking them at the right time, right at the beginning.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: I’ll tell you, I know the answers, only because I did them all wrong. Number one, the LLC, you can have an LLC in any state. You can be operating in Nevada and have an LLC in Delaware, or New York, or wherever you choose. I will tell you, Nevada and Delaware are two great choices for amenity reasons, so forget that. I would do an LLC in the state of your choice, do a little bit of research on that. You don’t have to live in the same state or any of that.
Number two, this mail business, you are dead on. You obviously have listened to our stuff and taken it seriously. You need to have the same address from the beginning of your career to the end, because these offers that you spend so much time and money on to get them out in front of owners, they come back years, and years, and years. We literally today will open mail, and some of it will be signed from five, eight, 10, 15 years ago that we sent out. People pass away, their kids get the letters, you name it, so you want to have the same address.
How do you do that? We personally have had the same address from the beginning, or almost the beginning at a small little, personal relationship UPS store. The person there, the guy’s name is Jay, and he, wherever we are, he packs up all our mail once a week and sends it to us. We never miss a deal. You want to have a relationship, and chances are, these little places, they’ll do that for you, and they’ll charge you a little bit.
There’s expensive services, and frankly, I don’t think $99 a month is too expensive, where they’ll actually open the mail, scan it, and you get it via email. While this is not a commercial, Jill and I, it’s on our slate of problem solving for our members to offer a service like this along with answering your phone if you want. Everybody is requesting it, which I think you are, in an introverted way here too Jim. We’ll solve that problem for you. What other, what else is in here Jill?
Jill DeWit: I think you covered it all.
Jack Butala: Direct mail, [inaudible 00:11:07].
Jill DeWit: Yeah, that’s right. Everything’s great.
Jack Butala: Earth Class, I haven’t heard about Earth Class.
Jill DeWit: I’ve never heard of Earth Class too. For me, my only thing is I just have, one of the things I like about a brick and mortar place to accept your mail is because it’s a brick and mortar place, I don’t worry about them going anywhere. Ours has been there for, gosh, how many years, right? Remember, we stumbled across one the other day at the beach. I was looking at like, they had the old golden mailboxes too. I’m like, “How long has that been there?”
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Someone’s still getting their mail here.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: It was just so funny.
Jack Butala: Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: I don’t know about the online. You know what? Here’s what I think. When I hear of an online mail thing like Earth Class mail, it makes me think that they have something like we have, and their mail is being forwarded somewhere else to be scanned and input, and then to be emailed to you.
Jack Butala: Here’s the thing. You’re not going to trick anyone.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I learned this the hard way.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: People are going to look into what you’re all about. The first thing that anybody does when they receive an offer from you, is they look you up on the internet. They see where your address is, maybe they map it, and look at it, and they want all that to be real. If it’s a picture of your garage door, and they know you’re operating out of your house, red flag number one. You want to have a commercial address that’s respectable, and you want it to be the same forever, and then when they look up your name and all that, you have a website there, maybe your picture’s on it standing next to your favorite dog, or whatever is important to you, so you look like a real person. Then they’re going to pick up the phone, or they’re going to sign your stuff and send it back. That’s what you want to make yourself look like on the internet.
Jill DeWit: Bingo. Couldn’t have said it any better.
Jack Butala: I think that’s about it.
Jill DeWit: That’s perfect. You did great.
Jack Butala: Hey, if you have a question, or you want to be on the show, reach out to either of us on successplant.com. Today’s topic, no risk. How do you eliminate risk in real estate investment? What the heck is he talking about now? Average money in to average money out in time, two weeks. You write a check to buy a piece of property, you get a check back in less than two weeks. Hm, Jill was playing with technology again. This is going to be the meat of the show. If you don’t know this by now, Jill and technology sometimes, ugh. Jill has, this is funny, I’m going to say this. Jill operates on two notebook computers. One is a little Dell laptop, and one is a Mac pro laptop, and one gets thrown out of the window, she picks up the other one, and vice versa.
Jill DeWit: That’s my way of trying to stay current.
Jack Butala: Oh okay. Oh okay, I see.
Jill DeWit: I don’t have a need for a desktop computer, so I have two laptops.
Jack Butala: Anyway, that’s a funny little side, anyway. Seriously, how do you reduce the risk? Here’s the whole trick to reducing risk in real estate investment. Please listen to this sentence. Have the buyer all lined up before you go out and look for property to buy. What does that lead to? It leads to writing a check, and getting a bigger one two weeks later. It’s like taking an order. Here’s how Jill and I do it in houses, and I’ll tell you in a second how we do it in land.
We have a personal relationship with a guy who flips houses in Scottsdale, and he says something like this, “If I had five houses at this zip code, 8525 whatever, and I could get them for like $120,000-$140,000, man I could clean them up and sell them for like $320.” We say, “Done,” and we deliver on that. We scrub the data, and we fill his order. That is how you have a no risk real estate transaction in wholesaling. That’s the whole thing.
If you’ve ever wanted to know all the secrets, they’re right there in that one paragraph. That’s how you write a check, and in a lot of cases, well all the cases with him, we don’t even write the check at all. We locate the property, put it under contract, and then he closes the deal, or he says, “No I don’t want it,” and we walk away, and we go onto the next one, open the next letter.
With land, it’s basically the same way. You build up a huge list, and invariably, you build up a list, and we show you exactly how to do that, and invariably, somebody walks in and says, “I want all this property,” or “Man, if I had 16 40 acre properties in Montana in this little area, I got a guy who can do this, this, and this,” and so you send out offers. It’s as simple as that. Having a buyer before you start down this path, and they’re very easy to get. You post it in Craigslist, “Hey I’m an expert at this. What do you want to buy?” You’re going to find a ton of buyers, and they will find you.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: We have one member, this has happened to me three times in my career, three or four times, and we have a member who just experienced it. He received a phone call from a guy who said, “I want to buy all your properties. I want to buy every single thing you have in inventory. I just found it. You’re a good guy.”
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I watch our people too, just talking about share stuff like that with each other, like, “Oh my gosh, I just had five five acres in this county. This guy bought them all and he wants more. Does anybody else out there have any?”
Jack Butala: Yep, and then they do a deal about it.
Jill DeWit: “I’m scrambling to buy as many as I can. I’m scrambling to do it too,” but it’s kind of nice they’re sharing the deals and spreading the wealth, because that comes back. It really does come back, working together like that.
Jack Butala: The takeaway from this whole show is this. If you want to have a no risk operation, find a buyer, or a set of buyers before you send out mail. Is that what we do? No. Is that what we teach? We teach a version of that, but in the very, very beginning, you need to know how to market stuff on the internet, and do maps, and go through all the motions. Then the buyers will come out of the woodwork. Jill and I, we never need to post another property on the internet again. Do we still do it? Heck yes, because we find new buyers. We have buyers all over the country, they call us all the time. “Can I please have another one?”
This is a funny story. It’s not a funny story, it’s serious, and it’s incredibly profitable. I sold a property in southern California a lot of years ago to a guy who ended up putting in, sold it to somebody else who put an airport there. Millions of dollars this guy made. I bought the property I think for four or $8,000 and sold it for $25. This guy went and made a million bucks on that deal, and I’m happy for him. Do I feel bad? Not one bit. The millions of deals, or thousands of deals that I did after that added up to way more than the money that he made on that one deal. That’s my model, that’s his model, and on we go.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I love it.
Jack Butala: You’re quiet today.
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: You’re just all Friday.
Jill DeWit: No. It’s really it is all Friday. It is really good. I’m just enjoying it, and listening, and my, I don’t have anything better to add.
Jack Butala: Wow, she’s speechless.
Jill DeWit: I am speechless.
Jack Butala: What the heck?
Jill DeWit: Well you know?
Jack Butala: Whatever you’re taking, I want some of it. I want to be speechless.
Jill DeWit: I was thinking about your comment the other day too, “listening is inefficient.” That’s hilarious. What the heck?
Jack Butala: You know, I took that [inaudible 00:18:27], because you’re taking it out of context, which is funny.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: Actually, it sounds silly that you would say it that way.
Jill DeWit: That’s why it’s funny. I just have to repeat that quote. It means nothing what you think it means, but the words are funny.
Jack Butala: You know what it is? Actually talking is inefficient.
Jill DeWit: Yes. That’s it.
Jack Butala: Wow. It really is.
Jill DeWit: That’s awesome.
Jack Butala: Join us in another episode, where Jack and Jill discuss how we use information, that’s me-
Jill DeWit: And inspiration sometimes I’ll share, sometimes I’ll be quiet, 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 are not alone in your real estate ambition. You’re cracking me up man.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I didn’t, I’m just sitting back listening. I’m like, you know, you just didn’t need me. It was beautiful. Everything you said was fantastic, and I didn’t want to muck it up.
Jack Butala: Okay.
Jill DeWit: I hope I don’t muck stuff up.
Jack Butala: You never muck stuff up.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: People listen to this show because of you, not me.
Jill DeWit: Oh. Thank you.
Jack Butala: Six, or seven, or ten people that listen to this show, they love you.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: What they say to their wives or their husbands is like, “God I wish he would shut up so she could say some funny stuff.”
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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