3 Perfect Ways to Scrub Property Owner Data (CFFL 318)
3 Perfect Ways to Scrub Property Owner Data
Jack Butala: 3 Perfect Ways to Scrub Property Owner 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: Hello.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about three perfect ways to scrub property owner data. Awesome show. Before we get into it, first let’s take a question posted by one of our members on Land Academy’s community; free online community.
Jill DeWit: Cool. Rod asks, “Here’s the situation. I have two parties that own two parcels in JT, so joint tenants. The seller states each party owns one parcel, each by mutual agreement. Party A on the deed wants to sell their parcel, and the other party, B, does not want to sell theirs. How do I buy the one parcel from party A that wants to sell? I was thinking Party B quit claims to Party A. If this will work, how does it effect chain of title, or is this a pass?”
Jack Butala: I mean, I have my opinion, I wonder if yours is the same.
Jill DeWit: No, go ahead. I’ll wait, go ahead.
Jack Butala: I think Rod’s dead on. I think that’s exactly what they need to do, and if I were him, I would offer to do all the paperwork and get it in a recording and stuff for free, if it’s the regular economic situation on this deal that we’re used to. Buy it for five-hundred or something, can sell it for two, or three, or four, or five, or even more. That’s how I would resolve this. I would resolve it first between the two of them, because they’ve structured some silly … It looks like a silly deal. Get A what he wants, and then get the property eventually into your name for B, everybody’s happy.
Jill DeWit: This is a perfect use of a quick claim. People think of quick claim as a thing that you use in every single scenario, and it’s not. A quick claim is when there’s a … You’re cleaning up a little something, or brother is giving it to sister. There’s really no money changing hands, or just like, “I’m out,” kind of thing. It’s perfect for this.
Jack Butala: Yeah, I mean, I differ a little bit on that, on the use of a quick claim [inaudible 00:01:59] than you do, and that’s fine. We don’t do everything exactly the same, but I don’t think there’s any reason to ever use a quick claim deed.
Jill DeWit: Right, you don’t need to do a quick one, that’s true.
Jack Butala: The reason you do … That’s not what this show is about, but the reason you do a quick claim deed is traditionally been for this situation, where it’s interrelated parties. There’s nothing stopping you from doing a warranty deed, which means the person is warranting the title of the property from A to B, let’s say. I would do a special warrant deed. I would say, “Yeah, I warrant the title quality of this property for the time that I’ve owned it.”
Jill DeWit: Which was the same time as you.
Jack Butala: Right, right.
Jill DeWit: Which is really kind of funny.
Jack Butala: Quick claim deed, for a lot of people, is a big red flag. When I say, “A lot of people,” I mean title agents. Lets say six owners down the road they’re doing a title abstract to see if it’s all good, and they say, “Oh, darn. There’s a quick claim in here. I don’t know.”
Jill DeWit: The nice thing is it’s like this one, I mean … You and I, we really are the same Jack, I don’t really like them, but it works for this, because it’s like husband and wife on the deed, now it’s just husband on the deed, so you can see something little happen, not a major name change. If I see a major thing like a quick claim from a corporation to somebody else, now I got a red flag. We do see the same way.
Jack Butala: Oh, good.
Jill DeWit: On this, and many other topics Jack.
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh, it’s peaches and cream with you all the time.
Jill DeWit: Don’t leave, we always do. I can’t think of a time that we didn’t agree.
Jack Butala: Jill and I were at a dinner party recently, and this guy that I … I just met this guy, and he’s like, “You know, you’re not a super model or anything, and it’s a good thing you’re smart.”
Jill DeWit: That was so funny. Oh, it was hilarious. That was really good.
Jack Butala: It was perfectly timed.
Jill DeWit: It was a small dinner party, and it was really good. Everybody quickly connected, so it was a little bit like the airport game, but we’re going to see each other again, so it was okay to say, “You could kind of say anything you want, we’re all cool with it.” Yeah, he very nicely said, “Good thing you have a sense of humor, and you make everybody laugh.” That’s good.
Jack Butala: It was his way of saying it, and for a lot of reasons, he didn’t think I was a super model. He was interested in male super models for a lot of reasons that I’m not going to get in to. I wasn’t one of them.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, you’re not one of them.
Jack Butala: He was a little disappointed with my looks, but I have a good personality.
Jill DeWit: By the way you have a partner already, so we’ll there.
Jack Butala: Hey, by the way, an airport game is a game that Jill and I came up with a lot of years ago, because we’re never going to see any of those people ever again in an airport, so we just say stuff that’s shocking, and encourage them to say shocking stuff back, because hey, we’re never going to see each other again.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, so Jack does intentionally get us to the airport early, just to play the airport game. Then it’s like having to leave it … “We’re boarding, we got to go.” It’s hard to pull him out of there. That’s funny.
Jack Butala: Today’s topic, this is the meat of the show, is three perfect ways to scrub data, or specifically scrub property ownership data. What happens is this. Every county has a fantastic list of owners of every single property that’s in it’s county. Why? Because they need to know, and have a huge vested interest in knowing where to send a tax bill every year, two times a year.
There’s your universe of data that are also required by law, as we’ve said many time in the show, to disclose that data. They can’t just say, “No, you know, that’s not…” You can access that as a person in a public … No, you can’t. That’s illegal. They have this beautiful data the collect. Not only do they collect ownership data, they collect every single thing about the property. Like Jill said on the show yesterday, whether it’s got a pool, what the cash value is, what the assessed value is, what the improvement value is, and on, and on, and on. It’s literally sixty, seventy, eighty, lines, columns of data.
Jill DeWit: Mortgage information.
Jack Butala: This is imperative. Understanding data and what all these … Not all of them, but how to use it to get offers to owners is imperative in your real estate. It’s made us, quite frankly, incredibly successful. You have this universe of data, of every single property owner, and all these columns of information. Well that’s great. You can’t use all of them, and you have to organize it and send a specialty … Unless you’re a bajillionare, and send everybody an offer for a hundred dollars for their property, which you never want to do, you’d upset everybody, you have to scrub the data. What are the ways to do this, and what are the steps?
Start with the universe of data, and remove … Begin the process of removing the stuff you don’t want in there. Let’s start with number one. What don’t we want in there? Certain property types. We’re going to do a vacant rule, vacant land mailer for this example. Number one, we remove every single property in that universe of data that has a structure on it. How do we know? Well, it’s got something called improved value. There’s land value and improved value. You take all the improved value out, if it’s not zero, you take all of that out. Wow, all right, so that’s like more than half of the … Usually, more than half of the properties gone.
Then, you take out the property that has an assessed value … This is number two … That’s too high. You do not want to send a person who owns a piece of property that’s worth … It’s assessed at millions and millions of dollars a five-hundred dollar offer. You’re going to upset them, and you’re going to waste the price of a stamp. You get all the real high dollar valued property out of there.
Number three; Then you take the uses out. Some property’s used as a parking lot. Some property’s used as a farm land. Some property’s used as a cemetery. You want to get all those uses out, and now you have a fantastic list. There’s a few more little things, like you want to take duplicate records out. If one person owns forty-five properties, you really don’t need to send them forty-five offers. You need to send them one. That’s the path down, and we’re not getting into every single detail on this because the show would be eight hours, and frankly, Jill is falling asleep already.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, totally.
Jack Butala: Her eyes are rolling back, and she’s typing some stuff. She’s probably writing a grocery list, I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: Totally, that’s exactly what’s going on over here. Let’s see, I need milk. Just kidding.
Jack Butala: You start with the universe of data, and then you scrub it down from there. See what you have, what’s left, and those are the people who get offers.
Jill DeWit: Why do I want to do that Jack?
Jack Butala: Well I already explained it, you were sleeping.
Jill DeWit: I wasn’t sleeping. I don’t want to waste my time, and I don’t want to waste my money. Are we really hitting that point home?
Jack Butala: You don’t want to waste time, you don’t want to waste money, and really … This is important. You don’t want to send an offer to somebody who owns an office building for a thousand dollars. You want to make sure that’s out of there, that’s what scrubbing’s all about. Make sure the right people get the right offers for the right amount of money.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, and you don’t want to send it to the fire department, or to the federal government, and you don’t want to do any of that accidentally.
Jack Butala: That’s part of the ownership part. Get the right owners, get the duplicates.
Jill DeWit: One point I was just going to say, did you talk about absentee and non-absentee? Because that’s important.
Jack Butala: For vacant land, that doesn’t apply at all.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: The one that we used is … The example I used was for vacant land, but there’s just so much fiction out there about real estate investing.
Jill DeWit: That’s my point.
Jack Butala: There’s different camps in real estate. Jill and I are firmly of the camp that everyone should get an offer where it’s appropriate. If you’re going to focus on back tax property offers, big mistake. If you’re going to focus on any type of signal that is perceived as distress …
Jill DeWit: Right, absentee.
Jack Butala: Absentee back tax is the property’s falling down. It’s been vacant for a long time, it’s in a foreclosure situation. The chances are, you’re going to fail at this. I can’t be more clear about it. The way that you will succeed is by scrubbing data correctly, and for all the logical candidates, property owners, after that’s scrubbed, after this three-way process, they need to get an offer from you that’s priced properly, sent professionally, and with respect.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: People who fail at this fail at the things I just mentioned, or they’ve tried that I’ve mentioned, and they wonder why it doesn’t work.
Jill DeWit: Do you think that they just think that there’s a better way? “I think I have an even more secret,” kind of thing?
Jack Butala: I’ve asked myself that a lot, honestly. All kidding aside, this episode’s a little bit more boring than I anticipated.
Jill DeWit: It’s philosophy.
Jack Butala: I’ve asked myself that, “Why don’t they just listen to us?”
Jill DeWit: Exactly, that’s my point.
Jack Butala: I’ve done it wrong, I’ve done all this stuff wrong. For more than fifteen years I’ve done a lot of stuff wrong. I feel like we really do have this to a point where it’s a machine.
Jill DeWit: It works.
Jack Butala: So why don’t they listen to us? Well, here’s why. I don’t think people have forty hours a week to really sit down and focus and concentrate on it like we do, which is a very valid reason. I think that people are very used to being snowed over by people, so they think their way’s better no matter what, and that’s a valid reason too. What’s not a valid reason, and I think this is the most predominate reason is, it’s just easier to buy a list for twenty-five bucks and send out an offer for a hundred dollars on every single property, and I lick the stamp and put it on my kitchen table, give my kids … Eight kids, come on over here.
Jill DeWit: We’re going to hand write them today, I’m going to address those envelopes …
Jack Butala: Jill and I have sent out more than 1.4 million offers over the years, and we don’t own a printer. Leave that stuff to the pros. That’s why. I think they’re just lazy. I think they’re used to doing it themselves and, “No one can do it better than me.”
Jill DeWit: Exactly, “I’m going to save some money.” No you’re not. Eight hours of you doing nothing but hand writing letters, how much money did you save?
Jack Butala: I had a buddy who bought a house one time, a lot of years ago. He bought the house, he was going to live in it. It wasn’t a flip or anything, and he went in in the kitchen, I went in a couple days after he bought it, and everything’s ripped out. I said, “What was wrong with this?” He’s like, “Uh, I don’t know. These cabinets are new, but I just want to do it myself. The cabinets need to be my cabinets. I don’t really know what’s behind those cabinets, how they’re fastened to the wall.”
Jill DeWit: This is weird.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: Do I know this person? This is really weird.
Jack Butala: No you don’t. He’s actually no longer living. Maybe he stressed himself out, I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: That’s sad.
Jack Butala: There’s just people like that. I see them in Facebook a lot, “I need to do this my way.” We’re going to talk about mailing in the next show tomorrow, aren’t we?
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Here’s a hint. If you lick a stamp and put it on an envelope, there’s about an 80% chance it’s going to get where it’s going. If you run it through professional grade software, and leave it to like bulk mail printing pros that are all literally hardwired in real time into the post office, into their database, you will succeed. Doing this yourself, this is not one of those cabinet projects. Let the kids play outside. You don’t have to lick any stamps.
Jill DeWit: Imagine you’re flipping a property. Think of the people, if you didn’t bring in a contract. Say like the guy that you were talking about. Maybe he bought this property to flip it. If he was going to do it himself, how much money would he waste by spending a year and a half to put in the cabinets, and do this, and do that, you know what I mean?
Jack Butala: Did you ever hire somebody or work with somebody, and they say, “Oh yeah, I’m great at IT, I can do this, this, and this,” and then you hire them and they spend three weeks learning how to do it, on your work clock?
Jill DeWit: On your dime, yeah.
Jack Butala: You don’t want to do that. You want to pick somebody who’s got years of experience. They’re not learning on your own dime. They’ve got it all figured out. You walk in, you sit down, and you do it.
Jill DeWit: Whatever level you are, it makes sense to use professional grade equipment and tools, and resources. Pull us in. Why wouldn’t you?
Jack Butala: All the tools that we provide in our membership for extremely small amount of money are all the tools we use. There’s nothing on there that’s like, “Oh, let’s test it with our members.”
Jill DeWit: I’ve had people that tell me that. I don’t even tell them, then they’re like, “Yeah, so here’s the deal. I thought about it. Do I want to spend five years learning this thing, or do I just want to learn from you and jump right in?” I’m like, “Hello, yes!”
Jack Butala: Do I want to learn how to use my own website or …
Jill DeWit: Build my own website, yeah.
Jack Butala: I see that website specifically. I think there’s a lot of sources of information out there about, “Oh, you can do it yourself. It’s not that hard.” That’s silly. There’s a few parts of this whole real estate investment scenario that you have to do yourself. This is one of them. Scrubbing data, there’s a very closely aligned competitor to ourselves who believes that outsourcing the scrubbing the data is part of this, and that’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. You have to control who’s going to get an offer, and then it’s one of those things. The next one, you’re even better at it. The next one you’re better at, and better at. Higher percentage yield.
Jill DeWit: It’s scary. It’s like giving somebody my money to invest, and trusting they’re doing it correctly. I don’t want to do that. I need to know it’s going how I want it and where I want it.
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 everyday to buy property for half of what it’s worth and sell it immediately.
Jack Butala: Even though Jill slept during most of this episode …
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: Thanks.
Jack Butala: You’re classic man.
Jill DeWit: I know. No, you know what I was thinking about? I was going to share this story, that we were talking in between shows about Ellen, you know the Ellen show and stuff? Anyway, kid number two is explaining to me this story about his friends that …
Jack Butala: Oh, I love this story.
Jill DeWit: This is so funny.
Jack Butala: This is hilarious.
Jill DeWit: Okay, so kid number two knows these guys, and it’s the next school over. Well, this guy got homecoming king. I’m not going to share the state even … Well, it’s private anyway. It’s going to get out. Anyway, homecoming king, he wins homecoming king, decides to give up his crown and give it to this other guy who was like special needs, or has some condition or something anyway, and wanted to give him the homecoming king title, so he did, which is really cool. Ellen gets word of this, and she has them out on the show and makes a big deal out of it, how cool it is, and selfless, and nice stuff, and gives them both like ten-thousand dollars in scholarships, and it’s a really cool …
End of the story. You’d think that’s the end of the story, but this back story is the guy that was the homecoming king that came up with this is like the drug dealer at the school, and that’s what makes it so funny. Like, “Oh no, I didn’t need to money by the way.”
Jack Butala: The back story.
Jill DeWit: Right, but the back story is he’s a drug dealer at that school, it’s hilarious.
Jack Butala: Remember when we met that TMZ producer?
Jill DeWit: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack Butala: This is a perfect story for them.
Jill DeWit: Oh gosh. Oh, that’s … That is kind of funny. Yeah, we were just randomly a bar, met this guy, and he works for TMZ, and then all this stuff comes out. That was funny talking to that guy.
Jack Butala: It was really was. We got the inside scoop at how TMZ gets stories, and why …
Jill DeWit: Oh, it was hilarious.
Jack Butala: How hard it is to get stories, and they just want to … It’s kind of like a tabloid. They want to catch … It’s like … What do they call it? Investigator reporting is a beautiful way to say, “We want to find some people behaving really bad.”
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Well they can follow us around and get that all the time.
Jack Butala: The more famous they are at behaving badly, the better it is for us.
Jill DeWit: It’s funnier.
Jack Butala: There’s something awful about that, but it’s like watching a car accident.
Jill DeWit: A car accident, yep. Love it.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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