Where to Get the Best Property Acquisition Data (CFFL 307)
Jack Butala: Where to Get the Best Property Acquisition Data. 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: Hey.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about where to get the best property acquisition data in the whole country. The only reason e know that is because I’ve gotten it in all the wrong places.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Great show today Jill. Before we get started let’s share something interesting that happened to us recently.
Jill DeWit: I love this. Jack, you’re so good. Jack came to me the other day with a new app that he found. It’s this 5 Mile app. It’s like a Craigslist scenario-
Jack Butala: It’s called 5 Miles.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I’m like, “This is really cool.” I’m thinking business purposes. We started out down that path thinking properties, we could put properties on here.
Jack Butala: We could sell some property.
Jill DeWit: This would be a great thing. What’s funny is it starts off with business to properties, and next thing you know, it’s going to drums and motorcycles.
Jack Butala: Everything ends with drums and motorcycles, and some other stuff that boys think about a lot.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: We can’t talk about it at all.
Jill DeWit: That’s not what 5 Miles’ for.
Jack Butala: I know, but that’s what I … Everything life comes back to drums and motorcycles and a few other things.
Jill DeWit: Jack, I didn’t even think about that.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Jack Butala: A to G.
Jill DeWit: Thank you very much. I just thought that was really good. It really is how that goes, I just wondered if that happens to everybody else. We start off on this … We have very good intentions talking about business stuff, then it goes, “I could use it for all this other fun stuff,” now it’s not business at all, and nothing’s getting done.
Jack Butala: Yeah, it happens. To clarify, the app is intended to post … Let’s say you want to clean out your closet, you post a bunch of stuff in this 5 Mile app, and everybody within your 5 mile radius because you all join this thing, and then you buy it, you sell it.
Jill DeWit: Yup.
Jack Butala: It’s a 24th century classified ads thing.
Jill DeWit: Yup. That’s hilarious.
Jack Butala: I have all the keywords in there set to … It started with good intentions, and now there’s going to be-
Jill DeWit: I didn’t know there’s going to be keywords.
Jack Butala: Yeah, you can-
Jill DeWit: You can put couch and-
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Does it alert you when things pop up?
Jack Butala: It can.
Jill DeWit: Oh, hey that’s-
Jack Butala: You know everybody’s listening to this saying, “Wow, welcome to the … That app’s been out for 42 years. Welcome you guys.”
Jill DeWit: You know what’s funny? I think I heard about it awhile back, but I didn’t give it a chance because I think it was so new that it wasn’t being used. Now it’s out there. We have an app.
Jack Butala: We do. We never talk about it.
Jill DeWit: I know, we should talk about it. We have a free app everybody.
Jack Butala: We just did, there it is. We have an app.
Jill DeWit: It’s Land Academy. We have an app. No, it’s good. You know what’s funny, I do use our app when I’m going to go … I want to listen to some of our shows, I use the app. I don’t go to iTunes, and I don’t usually go to our website. I go to the app. I do it from there.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: It’s perfect.
Jack Butala: I don’t go to the website either.
Jill DeWit: You’re so silly.
Jack Butala: If you’re listening or watching, do not go to our website.
Jill DeWit: Yup.
Jack Butala: Let’s take a question posted by one of our members on SuccessPlant.com, our free online community. Jill.
Jill DeWit: Okay, Cathleen asked, “Has anyone ever purchased and sold land on the side of a mesa or mountain that has limited access? If so, what marketing strategy would be effective?”
Jack Butala: Should I take this one?
Jill DeWit: Yeah, this is so good. We talk about this … I wanted to share, this is some of the stuff too that we talk about with our members live when we do our weekly calls. We can all kind of chat about this stuff. It’s fun to share what we really talk about everyday here. Yes.
Jack Butala: I literally, here’s a true story, quite some time ago, literally purchased on accident a piece of property that was like mountains of the climbers. It was inside the Grand Canyon. It was in a huge group of properties, I obviously didn’t review them as well as I should have. A lot of it had to do with the fact that Google Earth Pro wasn’t available. The tools back then were not available. It looked like I was buying a piece of property on a mesa, but it eroded to the point where it was really like a wall that you could scale in a rock climbing situation. That turned out to be one of the most … Properties that people were interested in the most in all the stuff that we had posted, it sold very quickly, and I’ve spent a lot of time after that intentionally looking for property to buy that way. It just didn’t work.
The moral of the story there is anything may set your property up that’s really, makes it look very different on the Internet, you’re going to do well. There’s cookes out there that’ll buy anything like this.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: As long as you’re really straight forward about it, and say, “Yeah, if you’re a rock climber, and you want, for whatever crazy reason, own the property that you’re climbing, knock yourself out. This is it.” Yes. I have. To wrap up the other end of the question, access, believe it or not, there are many people out there who intentionally seek out property that has very difficult access to get to. I don’t know what they’re cooking out there, how they’re going to use the property is none of my business, but for whatever reason there’s a subsection of people that are interested in that.
Jill DeWit: Yup.
Jack Butala: Again, don’t get caught up in fibbing about what you have to offer. Just be real straight about it.
Jill DeWit: That’s a good point. Don’t fib or there’s going to be a refund in your future.
Jack Butala: You don’t want to refund property 10 years from now.
Jill DeWit: No, that’s the thing. I stopped guessing, that’s it for me Cathleen. Just because you think this is an unusual property, it has … The access is limited, I get that, but it’s obviously got some attributes. We talk about our 4 A’s: affordability, acreage, access and an attribute.
Jack Butala: Gosh, that’s amazing you can remember that. I’m impressed because I cannot remember that sometimes.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. That’s the thing. You want to have 3 of the 4 or all 4. You found a great property, it’s got this attribute for somebody, it’s not crazy. Like I was just saying, I stopped guessing. It took me a long time, so I understand, it took me a long time to get over that. I would always think, “Who would want this,” just because it’s not my cup of tea. I stopped asking.
Jack Butala: Yeah, exactly. It’s the same thing, Jill and I are city people. I love living in a big city and having access to all that. Some people, it’s absolutely not their thing. My sister lives in a farm in northern Michigan, and I would rather slit my wrists.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: To each his own.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: If you have a question or your want to be on the show, please reach out to either one of us on SuccessPlant.com. Today’s topic is where to get the best property acquisition data in the country. Believe it or not, Jill and I have a program put together where you … We are licensed providers of a company called RealQuest.com or Core Logic, which is their parent company. They aggregate all of the assessor’s data for every county in the country with very few exceptions, 4, 5 or 6 exceptions. That’s because those counties are not computerized yet, or maybe they intentionally, in the case of one county in Arkansas, intentionally will never get computers. That’s fine.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: What Real Quest does is they have an agreement with all the county assessors, and the county assessors do either a live feed, or depending on the computer system, a feed once a month, twice a month, once a week depending on the agreement that they have, and people at Real Quest, sometimes it’s automated, and sometimes it’s manual, put it in one format. That’s the good news. You can go directly to the assessor, sometimes they charge you, sometimes it’s free. We talk about this all the time in the show, but unless you have a PhD in data deconstruction, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting it in the format that you need. Real Quest did us the favor of making it very, very easy and manipulatable. You only have to learn one format. I think it was yesterday we talked about you don’t have to have a PhD in data kind of thing.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Are we getting our message across, is data to complicated?
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: This is as easy as it gets, the Real Quest data. We’re licensed providers. It’s extremely inexpensive through us. Way less expensive, and you get a lot more stuff like free education and all of that versus just going straight through Real Quest where you get no education at all. It’s expensive.
Jill DeWit: It’s list source too. Don’t a lot of people use a scaled down version?
Jack Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit: There also list source. I was also going to touch on why you want to go to the mac daddy.
Jack Butala: List source is really just a shell. It’s a shell designed for foreclosures, single-family residential foreclosures. We’re obviously land people. We do a lot of housing deals, but not like that. We don’t hunt down foreclosures or back tax property or any of that stuff. If we identify an area, whether it’s houses or land, everybody gets an offer with few exceptions. We never mail offers to industrial property, for a lot of reason I don’t want to get into now, but to answer today’s topic, this is where you get the best property acquisition data. What’s the second best Jill? Agent Title Pro-
Jill DeWit: Agent Title Pro. They’re really giving our main guys a run for their money. What’s interesting, why I wanted to bring up the mac daddy version too, is you need … It’s not that you just need to have the property ownership information, you’re not looking for just the name and the address of the person who owns the property, you’re looking for very specific information about this person who owns the property. You’re looking for very specific information about this property. That’s why this is the best data.
Jack Butala: That’s a great point. You do not want to send a $1,000 offer to a 5 acre property that has an assessed value of $6.2 million. You’re wasting your time. You’re wasting money on postage, and quite frankly really pissing off the person that you send it to. You want to be smart about it and isolate the properties. Let’s say they are all 5 acre properties, isolate them to the point where the assessed values are the lowest ones in the county so you get a higher yield on the mailer.
For every hundred offers we send out after we do what we call data scrub, we buy between 1 and 5 properties. That’s for land. For houses, it’s about 1 to 2,000 mailers, but Jill’s exactly right. You can’t just buy a list of names and addresses and send it out. It’s a little bit more complicated than that, and quite frankly, that’s what makes this really successful.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. This data we’re using too. Like Jack says, there’s a reason we’re here and we’re sharing all this because we’ve done it all wrong.
Jack Butala: I have.
Jill DeWit: Right, but some of the-
Jack Butala: Still do some stuff wrong.
Jill DeWit: It’s so nice the people that come to me, and that come in our world, and are like, “Oh,” when they see our data and they line it up with what they’ve been using, and to see all the different parameters that they can select. One of my big ones is the improve percentage. We’re looking for properties that don’t typically have a structure on them. We don’t want to do it accidentally to this-
Jack Butala: That’s a great point.
Jill DeWit: -cabin on there. That’s one … When I explain that to people they go, “Oh,” because a lot of places you can’t get that specific data. It exists, but for whatever reason that company or whoever it is, they don’t pull in that data from the assessor. It’s really important to be able to say this exact size property is what I’m doing. This exact zoning. I’m doing this exact whatever it is. I can even put in the improvement, 0% or null, and that’s what we’re looking for.
Jack Butala: When you look at lines to data, assessor data, and we’re to end on this point, it’s real hard to see if there’s a structure on it or not. Nearly all the assessors that we deal with, separate the land assessed value, which Jill just referred to as improved value. Improvements are anything that’s done to the land to make it usable. In a lot of cases, that’s putting a structure on it. We only mail to improved value of 0. It’s just land.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: There’s a bunch of little tricks like that. It’s not tricks, it’s just experience.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, but for other people who use our data who want to put an improved percent up to something, maybe they’re looking for a structure. You have that capability.
Jack Butala: Right. 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 are not alone in your real estate ambition. I thought that was pretty clear.
Jill DeWit: I think so-
Jack Butala: Did you miss anything?
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: Did we miss anything I mean?
Jill DeWit: No, I don’t think so. You know it was kind of funny we talk about that I’m the inspiration. I don’t have anything inspirational to share. That’s kind of funny.
Jack Butala: I think if you send out 100 letters, you’re going to buy a piece of property that’s grossly undervalued. That’s pretty damn inspirational to me.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, here’s what’s inspirational. Just get it in the mail. That’s what’s kind of funny. We’re talking about all this data and everything, and some people, they get a little hung up. They’re a little too … There’s so much data. Here’s the inspiration, there’s so much data, they’re a little bit overwhelmed at what’s at their fingertips. I get that. That’s why we’re here, and that’s why we share what we share so we can show you what you need. You need this one, this one, not that one, this one, this one, this one so you can say, “Okay, I did everything Jack and Jill suggested. Now it’s going out in the mail. Let’s see what comes back.”
Jack Butala: Yeah, well said.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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