Getting Property Data to Work For You (CFFL 306)
Getting Property Data to Work For You
Jack Butala: Getting Property Data to Work For You. 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: Hello.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about getting property data to work for you, not the other way around. Great show today Jill. Before we get into it, I’d like to share something interesting that happened to us recently.
Jill DeWit: How about where we’re sitting.
Jack Butala: Yeah. This is new and different for us.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. We are now in a … As you can tell, a … Well, let me back up. As we’re recording this show right now, we’re in a brand new studio local here in LA. We are doing a little Facebook live at the same time, which is really really fun. What’s great for us is our commute still rocks. You know what I mean?
Jack Butala: Yeah. I feel all grown up. People doing stuff for us. It’s not … We’re out of the bedroom so to speak.
Jill DeWit: This is very true.
Jack Butala: It’s a lot of fun, but it might be the last time. We’ll see. See how the numbers come out.
Jill DeWit: You’re so silly. I think it’s going to be just great. Thanks. Love it.
Jack Butala: Let’s take a question before we begin. Posted by one of our members on successplant.com, our free online community.
Jill DeWit: Okay, Erin asked, I posted my property in land stays platinum buyer’s club. I’ll explain in a minute. I stupidly wasn’t expecting … Oh I love this. I stupidly wasn’t expecting a buyer very soon, so I didn’t have the checkout process locked down before I posted them. The buyer emailed me and wants to know how to pay. Sadly, I don’t know how he should. Can anyone give me some pointers on the best way to finish this transaction?
Jack Butala: Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: I love it.
Jack Butala: Because this is classic. Erin, you’re not alone.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: We tape everything together, and then we figure out that it works, and then we take off the tape and actually do it right. I’m proud of you man. You’re on your way.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. You are correct. Well first of all, I wanted to explain what our platinum buyer’s club is real quick. One of the things that we do for our members is that we allow them to market their property with our property. We let them post their properties on what we call our platinum buyer’s club, which is a list of thousands of buyers that we’ve collected over the years since 99. It’s an opt in. They want to be on this list and get an advanced peek at our properties. Erin did the right thing. He’s got it. He doesn’t even have the process figured out. He just knows I need to get it out there. Now that I own this property, I need to get it out there for sale. He threw it on our platinum buyer’s club list, which is a weekly email that goes out on just a spreadsheet with just crude details. Just the parcel information. The APN. The legal description and a price and a link to the seller. We, by the way, there’s no commission or anything like that. It’s just something that we do that we help our people. Th best thing could possibly happen is, he’s like I wasn’t thinking. I thought this was going to take some time.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Sure enough, somebody pulled up this property. One of our buyers and wants it. It’s great.
Jack Butala: How do you … To answer the question, what do you think? How should he close this deal? I’d say kick it old school.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Just call the guy and make arrangements.
Jill DeWit: Have him wire it, depending what the … How much it is.
Jack Butala: How big the deal is, right.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. If we’re talking a couple thousand, that’s my first choice right away. Let’s just do a easy bank wire transfer. It’s very safe and easy and you can provide your bank information and let the guy do that. Then once you have it all done and confirmed, the transfer is confirmed, then you can go ahead and do your deed.
Jack Butala: That’s it.
Jill DeWit: And process the transaction. You know what another nice thing is? This group, Erin, that you’re working with here, they’re not usually retail people. They are other wholesalers. They’re buyers of property, because you … That’s what this list is. They’re pretty cool about that.
Jack Butala: Yeah. Exactly. Like I mentioned earlier, congratulations. You taped it together and it worked, so now all kidding aside, you want to take off some of that tape. Get a credit card company or a check company online so that you can strike while the iron’s hot. If the person wants to buy this property, they should be able to check out like they’re buying a pair of shoes. That’s how we do it.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: It works perfectly.
Jill DeWit: That’s the end end end goal. That’s the best thing ever Erin is when you pull up your account and you just see, oh, somebody checked out. You didn’t even have to talk to them. Nothing happened.
Jack Butala: Like when you wake up in the morning is even better.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Sold 3 pieces of property last night.
Jill DeWit: Oh. That’s great.
Jack Butala: Hey if you have a question or you want to be in the show, reach out to either one of us on successplant.com. Today’s topic is getting property data to work for you, not the other way around. The vast majority of people in real estate that I know about get up in the morning and they do it wrong. They do it the wrong way. They go out and look for business. What you want to do and what we’ve been doing since the 90s is get the property data to work for you so that, like I said, earlier an example here, wake up in the morning and everything is all … It’s coming into you and you’re deciding what you’re going to buy. Jill and I have put together … We’ve made … Well, it’s the same exact products and data and tool set that we’ve been using for years and years and years. We’ve just made it available to our land academy group.
To summarize, this is what happens. You take the assessor data that’s in the product that we use. Choose the pieces of property or the owners that you want to mail offers to. Not just letters of interest, but offers based on a parameter set. Let’s say you only want 5 acre properties in one county somewhere, and mail it out. Get them in the mail. About 3 weeks later, some of the properties, some of the owners send it back. They send the actual signed offer back and then, you review whether or not you want to buy it. You’re really leveraging your time and energy and every single … Now, and then you put a system together, and every single morning you’re reviewing new deals. You can check it off the list, your deal flow, or how you are reviewing data or properties is … It’s automated.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: That’s what I mean by getting property data to work for you. I think a lot of real estate agents and a lot of real estate investors go out looking for deals every day. It’s just tiring. It’s maddening. I think a lot of good people get turned off by the business quickly because of that.
Jill DeWit: Oh exactly. I agree. It’s like they’re doing it backwards, and I don’t understand the mindset. When you really … What keeps happening … Hang on a second here. I have no … What keeps happening is people keep … I know that there’s realtors that are touching on the same house and just flippers and things like that 80 times. We drive around a neighborhood and you see a property. You’ve identified the neighborhood. Let’s back up here. This is what I see a lot of people doing the wrong way. You identify this neighborhood. You know the homes that you want, and you’re driving around one by one trying to find that.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: We all latch … Not we, but they all latch onto that one. There one on this end here that could be a candidate, and that could be a candidate. Gosh, how do you know? You don’t know until you reach out to them what the situation is. Instead of blasting everyone, like Jack just totally explained, and let them come back to you. What’s so interesting is when we have people that have said that they’ve tested this theory, and they always come … They come back to us. Yeah, you’re right, that house was boarded up for 5 years for a reason. I wasn’t the first person that … that’s what’s funny too. What makes you think that this one house that’s in this row that’s been boarded up and vacant for 5 years, that someone else has not tried to do it.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: I mean, are we really surprised that there’s a problem there? No. We’re not.
Jack Butala: What you’re looking for is a situation. You’re not looking for a piece of property. You’re looking for somebody who sat around their dinner table the night before and said, you know, we really should sell these properties. I’m done. We have a terrible rogue tenant. I’m just kind of sick of it. Or, Aunt Sally died. She doesn’t care if we own them anymore. Then, you really look at the real estate. It’s the situation you’re hunting for, not the piece of property.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Believe me. I’ve been around.
Jill DeWit: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Jack Butala: That’s how I came to this conclusion.
Jill DeWit: Well, I understand … You know what’s so funny? The whole mind … Getting people to change their mindset is what I think is so interesting. Why … We have all this data at our fingertips. Why are we not using it? There’s a … Why do we think … Here’s an example. We don’t have a phone on the wall with a cord anymore. Seriously. We have phones in our pockets now. We can adjust to that.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: You know what I mean, but we can’t adjust … And we don’t have answering machines and we have to go home and check them. We can … There’s a lot of things we can understand technology and move forward, but this whole finding these properties and stuff, it’s very interesting. People go backwards sometimes.
Jack Butala: It’s interesting you say that, because this is the way to do that right now. On my opinion, but what do you think it’s going to look like 10 years from now? What if we have everybody’s email address that’s associated with a property? So you drive down a street let’s say, and you know what? You can get an email address for every single person that controls that piece of property.
Jill DeWit: That would be the coolest thing.
Jack Butala: Then after that … I mean, email is kind of antiquated even. The way that we’re going to contact each other is not going to be through an email address. Here, probably in the next few years. It’ll be some version of … We’ll have our own personal app. That’s how I see it.
Jill DeWit: Well, you know that’s coming.
Jack Butala: Oh yeah.
Jill DeWit: I’m sure there are some counties that the assessors do have the emails. They’re probably on that path. Instead of sending out physical mail tax records. It’d be crazy for the county not to do that.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Eventually start doing another way of sending a message that your taxes are due. That’s the data that we’ll have.
Jack Butala: Yup.
Jill DeWit: Now we can reach them that much faster. Right now, like you said Jack, we have a beautiful way of getting all that data and getting out real offers in the mail.
Jack Butala: Quickly.
Jill DeWit: Right. Cheaply. Not like 80 cents.
Jack Butala: 40 cents.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. I can’t believe what people spend on these post cards and things like that.
Jack Butala: We had that all worked out too.
Jill DeWit: It’s just crazy what they spend. Yeah.
Jack Butala: I mean, it takes the same exact amount of time to send out 10,000 offers as it does 10 offers.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Think about how much time. You always say that … You’re famous for saying that if you’re going to go out and look at property to try to see if it’s available in an 8 hour time frame, you’re going to look at 10 or 20 or 30. If you’re really good, 30. I’ll tell you with LA traffic here, it’s going to be more like 3. Or do you want to send out 10,000 offers in that same amount of time?
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: It’s a pretty easy decision.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Then , I mean, really to take it a step further, getting the best current data is the key. Not calling up xyz county and try … Hoping you get the right guy at the county by the way to pull what you think is the data that you want. You’ve just dreamed up the field, so I need to know abcd and e. Right?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Then you’re sitting and waiting. You pay a couple hundred bucks sometimes. Now you’re waiting weeks for him to gather this data. Get to it. And get it to you, and then you can … Now we’ve got to figure out how to work with it.
Jack Butala: In an effort to make sure that this doesn’t sound like one big long commercial, reach out to us personally.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: At land academy, and we’ll point in the right direction. Actually, we’ll send you probably to some of our members who are doing it right now. They’ll show you exactly how to do it in real time. How they’re doing it.
Jill DeWit: That’s what I tell everybody too. I say don’t listen to me. Go ask some people that are doing it too.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: They’re doing it. It’s good.
Jack Butala: 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 every day 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. What do you think? You’ve got bright lights in your face.
Jill DeWit: I do have bright lights in my face.
Jack Butala: You look good.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: You’re all grown up. This is weird.
Jill DeWit: I’m really liking this set up here. This is nice.
Jack Butala: It’s really really cool to have someone put a mic in your face and say okay you ready?
Jill DeWit: Ready go. On.
Jack Butala: Instead of doing it all yourself.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: It’s a whole different program.
Jill DeWit: Do you think we’re getting our point across with the data?
Jack Butala: Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I think … Yes I do. I think this is complicated. I think that if I’ve learned anything since we’ve started this whole thing, since we kind of transitioned from just doing it yourself to trying to help other people do it, this is a lot more complicated than I thought to communicate how simple it is. As ironic as that sounds. How simple it is.
Jill DeWit: Do you know what’s funny?
Jack Butala: And the benefits of doing it.
Jill DeWit: I think that the only thing that worries me about the word data as I think some people hear data and they shut down because they think, okay now I don’t get it. I’m not that technical. Whatever it is.
Jack Butala: Well, maybe they should be out.
Jill DeWit: Was there another term we can use? I don’t know. Is there another …
Jack Butala: If you don’t like computers and you don’t like data, you just like real estate, this is not for you.
Jill DeWit: You’re so silly. But it is, it is. Everybody can use it. That’s the thing.
Jack Butala: Not everybody can use it Jill, I’m sorry.
Jill DeWit: All right.
Jack Butala: I know princess that you want … It’s not a magic wand. There’s no magic dust.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Jack Butala: You have to learn how to do it and use the right tools and probably do it wrong a few times.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy under valued property.
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