The “If Then” Real Estate Game with Jack and Jill (CFFL 376)
The “If Then” Real Estate Game with Jack and Jill
Jack Butala: The “If Then” Real Estate Game with Jack and Jill. Leave us your feedback for this podcast on iTunes and 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 Monday.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about the if/then real estate game. With us, Jack and Jill. Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landacademy.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Cool. All right, Bae asked … Hi Bae.
Jack Butala: I haven’t seen her name in a while. We met Bae.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, that’s really cool. She asked, “I have a couple off-grid living properties, no cell phone signal. Other local property owners even put padlocks in that area. It’s a great property, but people could not find it. How can I sell it? Any advice?”
Jack Butala: We discussed this with a member, Luke Smith, two weeks ago now and he had a pretty good solution. He just said, “Let the problem solve itself.” He said he doesn’t go look at any property without bolt cutters in his truck.
Jill DeWit: Oh, yeah. If he goes out at all.
Jack Butala: This came up on a deal that Jill and I recently did in Texas and the first three or four people that went to go look at the property had the same comments and then the person that bought the property solved it himself. I’m not exactly sure how they solved it, but throughout the years it’s been a topic that comes up and I stopped … My bolt cutters, by the way, are long gone.
Jill DeWit: Right, we don’t do that.
Jack Butala: There are some people that love, and anybody’s who’s in this business will echo this sentiment, there are some people who love not to be found.
Jill DeWit: Correct.
Jack Butala: That’s one of the reasons they’re our end-user customers, so they’re figure it out.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, and you know, it’s funny and it sounds silly, but it’s true and Luke’s a great example. He’ll put great descriptions in there saying like, “You want to not be found? This is the property for you,” kind of thing. Because there really is a market for that.
Jack Butala: Jill asked me to do … I write short column in our newsletter every week and she asked me this week to talk about how to post property. What to say, how to title it, some things to include and not include, so look for the newsletter. If you’re a member, I guess. Right? It’s a members only newsletter?
Jill DeWit: No, everybody who signs up … If you have our ebook or you … I have a group off Facebook that you can sign up to get the weekly newsletter.
Jack Butala: Okay.
Jill DeWit: We’re going to start really getting into … That’s a good point. Thank you, Jack. We’re going to start a series, probably it’s going to be a four or five week series starting with, “Let’s talk about how to properly title your posting.” Right there, because you want to grab their attention, you want to have a great heading, because they’re just going to scroll on down. If it doesn’t sound like a good property and they see something else further down the list, then they’re going to look at that person’s posting even though your property could be much, much better and better priced. It just didn’t capture their attention.
Jack Butala: I use the upside down triangle method to writing postings and it’s really, really effective. Here’s a preview. The whole point to writing a title is to get the person to click on it and then to get into the posting. Then, the whole point of the posting, as you go from our north to south, is to get them to buy it and get them to do, let’s say, more research and get interested and get excited.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: Here’s example. If you have a property, large acreage, let’s say 40,50, 80, 160 acres, you want that in the title. If you have a quarter acre property, you don’t want that in the title. You just want to say awesome parcel with beautiful mountain views.
Jill DeWit: Established subdivision or something like that.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Homes nearby.
Jack Butala: I see a lot of people LandPin, which is our landpin.com, where we post all of our properties, where all of our members do and I see some titles in there that I think I would probably rewrite. That’s how this all kind of came up.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: We want you to sell property.
Jill DeWit: Totally. The other thing is, too, Bae about them being able to find it, that’s what GPS is for and it’s interesting that people … Not everyone knows that any iPhone, your cell phone, whatever your android or not, and your mapping function. Just like you put in 123 Main St. you can put in 34.123456 and then space, hyphen 109.34 whatever and it’ll drop a pin … LandPin. That’s where that came from. It’ll drop a pin, funny coincidence right where the property is. That’s what’s really interesting because people go, “I have the GPS coordinates, I don’t know what to do with this.” Sure you do, put it in, it’s like an address.
Jack Butala: It’s not a hyphen, by the way love. It’s negatives.
Jill DeWit: I know it’s negative, but I’m just saying dash, hyphen, negative. I know it.
Jack Butala: A lot of years ago, we put GPS coordinates in everything. A lot of years ago I inadvertently left out the negative.
Jill DeWit: [inaudible 00:05:07] take you somewhere else.
Jack Butala: It’s like rural China.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. That makes a difference.
Jack Butala: That leads me to the next point here. That leads me to the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: Cool.
Jack Butala: This is the if/then real estate game with us Jack and Jill. The game goes like this. If you do something in real estate, it will yield results. Want to play a game?
Jill DeWit: Sure.
Jack Butala: If you send out a lot of mailers … Go ahead and finish my sentence, please.
Jill DeWit: You’ll get a lot of people calling you back.
Jack Butala: If you send a lot of offers you’re going to buy a lot of property. If you send offers out, then you’re going to buy property. If you send wrong offer out, you’re going to get a result. What’s the result? A ton of people calling you back to talk about it.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: The whole theme for this week, I’ve decided, is in and out overtones. It’s not undertones, you don’t have to read between the lines here with Jill and I, ever.
Jill DeWit: That’s true. You wish sometimes you could.
Jack Butala: It’s about negotiation and here’s why. We’re doing a very large … We’re always doing a lot of real estate deals, but one deal in particular was very large and for some reason on this transaction, and I’m not exactly sure why, our staff is negotiating a lot. I designed this whole thing. You know, I didn’t copy this whole business model, I designed it a really long time ago in the ’90s and it’s designed for no one to talk to each other. You send an offer out with a signature block at the bottom and all the details that you ever could want, it gets signed, theoretically if they accept it, and it comes back and you do the the real estate deal. You call a notary or you call an escrow agent, depending on how large the deal is, you get the thing done.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: What ends up happening for a lot of people, especially new ones, and really even a lot of seasoned real estate people because they’ve been doing it wrong for quite some time, in my opinion. There’s a lot of talking. There’s a lot of negotiation, a lot of back and forth so if you send an offer to buy a piece of property for $4,000, they sign it and send it back, you might want to just give them one courtesy call to say I got it, I’m going to send out a notary, they’re going to be calling you and that’s about it. When I do the deals myself, which is really not very often anymore, I say right there in that phone call, “This is probably the last time you and I are going to speak. You’ll be getting a check here this week. A cashier’s check if we go the notary route.” The escrow agent might talk, they might talk three or four times to schedule the whole thing out, but that’s it.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: The sellers that we do really well with love that. I used to have a three call rule.
Jill DeWit: Yes.
Jack Butala: I’ve actually said this to people. I haven’t been as nice about it as I just was.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: If we talk more than three times, then I’m terminating the deal.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: This deal in particular, our staff is just having some serious trouble and I think it’s the nature of the buyer and the nature of the seller.
Jill DeWit: Correct.
Jack Butala: For whatever reason, people love to negotiate and it’s a habit.
Jill DeWit: It’s true. They do and you’re right. It’s interesting, in this transaction, a lot of it started because of the buyer. This particular buyer doesn’t know us, doesn’t know how we roll and apparently this is how they roll which is not the same. You know, it’s funny is we’re all about to kill the deal because we don’t like working with those kinds of people, too.
Jack Butala: I don’t think that our staff, we have some very new staff and hopefully they don’t listen to this show. I don’t think that we … I didn’t properly-
Jill DeWit: It’s all good.
Jack Butala: I didn’t properly explain how we roll.
Jill DeWit: Right, we’re just not going to do that. Because we’re not going to do back and forth phone calls.
Jack Butala: Takes too much time.
Jill DeWit: It does. It’s wasting our time. At the end of the day, whatever price it is that we’re negotiating and I’ve wasted all my time on, that’s three more deals I could’ve done quickly, easily and so now it’s cutting into money and it’s not worth it. Move on.
Jack Butala: That brings me back to our title. If you send the wrong offers out that don’t have a signature block, that don’t have a purchase price, we talk about this in our education programs right down to the last detail, you’re going to generate a lot of talking and a lot of negotiation. All kidding aside, it stops you. We’re in a volume business, right? We buy property really expensively, but we also sell it really inexpensively. We just aim to double our money, that’s it. If we buy a 40 acre property for $4,000 to $8000 we’re going to sell it between $8,000 and $16,000 which is a smoking deal.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: That really messes with some people. They think they’re selling it too inexpensively.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: Then, of course it’s very natural for someone, a buyer, to want to get some money, to negotiate the purchase price. Well, guess what? We don’t do that either.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: They click on it and they put their credit card in. If it closes by escrow, they put the down payment in, then that gets the ball started with the escrow agent, or if it’s a cash sale or a term sale that we’re going to close ourselves, it’s for the whole purchase price or the down payment there. There should be no talking there either.
Jill DeWit: It’s like, if you open the door to allow negotiation then it’s going to be a mess.
Jack Butala: That’s right. Hey, it’s your deal. It’s your deals. It’s your acquisition and your purchase. It’s not the seller’s and it’s not the buyer’s. You’re the owner.
Jill DeWit: You know what’s interesting, Jack? I’ve seen this happen in people in our group when they’re nervous and they’re new and I’ve seen people so shocked. Here’s an example. A person several months ago that was getting nervous about this property, it was not even a month, it was just two weeks and they’re worried thinking it should’ve sold overnight and they’re stressing about it. They accepted, next person that came along, they accepted a price they weren’t really happy with, but they did it anyway. Then, two days later, the floodgates open and there’s three people that would’ve paid their original asking price and they’re like, shocked. “I should’ve waited.” That’s the thing, don’t get nervous. You’ve got to stand your ground and hang in there. You’ve got to make sure you’re … A lot of it is reaching the right people. You know it’s priced correctly, sit tight. Don’t negotiate because you’re nervous and you think you have to take the first offer.
Jack Butala: We’ve left nothing to chance, here. That’s perfect. Because we’ve been doing this since the ’90s. 15,000 completed purchases and sales and we’ve generated over $20 million from one investment a long time ago. Now, we’ve got a couple hundred plus members who are doing the same thing and they’re almost without exception. Once you aren’t doing it, they’ve got unfocused or they veered so far off of what we’re showing them how to do and this is included in that. They’re negotiating so much or veering so far that that’s not working. I’ve done this all the wrong way.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: This is the right way. No, this is 15 years of experience.
Jill DeWit: I want to walk around doing this in life today. If you take me to the, whenever, I don’t know. If you pick a horrible, gory movie then you might find me sitting there with my eyes closed, not having a good time.
Jack Butala: If you take your wife to the wrong movie, then you will pay.
Jill DeWit: No, silly. I was just going to say, because it’s like if you go rogue and think you’ve got a better way of doing things, then you might not have the success that we have. You know what I mean?
Jack Butala: Here’s the take away. This whole system is designed for you to not talk to anybody.
Jill DeWit: It’s kind of true.
Jack Butala: You’re always going to run into people who want to talk about it a lot and the reason is very simple and I understand it. That’s the way it’s been being done forever.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Now, with the Internet … The Internet hasn’t completely kicked in yet.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: At least for our generation, maybe for the one before us, maybe the kids understand it better.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: You don’t have to negotiate everything.
Jill DeWit: You know, it’s funny. My mom-
Jack Butala: I can’t stand negotiation.
Jill DeWit: My mom’s getting ready to sell her home-
Jack Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit: I didn’t have the heart to say anything yesterday when we were at lunch. She was talking about getting a realtor and not knowing anybody and I just wanted to say, “Don’t. You don’t have to do that, mom,” but I couldn’t. You know what I mean?
Jack Butala: We can help her. Do you know anybody that looks really honest, extremely honest good Arizona real estate agent? We’re going to get 5 million [crosstalk 00:14:07]. What path did we just down?
Jill DeWit: Jack, I have to really think about that. Seriously. Could you imagine?
Jack Butala: Dennis.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Maybe.
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. I love the guy. I think I love him because he does things not always by the book. You know what I mean. In a good way.
Jack Butala: A different drummer. He beats to a different drum.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say.
Jack Butala: That’s good.
Jill DeWit: Not illegal or anything.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Anyway, that was weird.
Jack Butala: It’s going to be fine.
Jill DeWit: Okay, here come the hate mail. Great, thanks.
Jack Butala: I was thinking, we’re going to get that, too. I was thinking we’re going to get, “I’m a licensed real estate agent.” I’m not, but that’s the notes we’re going to get.
Jill DeWit: What are you talking about? That’s so funny.
Jack Butala: If you’re a licensed real estate agent and you’re going to try to get Jill’s mom’s listing, don’t contact us.
Jill DeWit: That’s good. Don’t go through us. That’s so funny.
Jack Butala: Join us in another episode were 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’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: Oops.
Jack Butala: I love this week now.
Jill DeWit: You know what? Last week was kind of Jill rant week.
Jack Butala: Uh-huh, it was.
Jill DeWit: This week’s kind of a Jack rant week.
Jack Butala: Exactly.
Jill DeWit: Is that part of our New Year and our new way of doing things in 2017 is we’re not messing around.
Jack Butala: Yeah. I mean, I never have been messing around.
Jill DeWit: I know, you don’t.
Jack Butala: Honestly, I need to corporate culture our people more and a lot of it’s because we’re going back and forth between states.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. We’ve got to reel everybody back in here.
Jack Butala: For years and years and years, really up until ’16, we were all in one office together.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: Now, that Land Academy is what it is, people actually like it. It just cracks me up, still.
Jill DeWit: Sill. You’re so silly. It’s funny when I tell people that, now they understand. I’m like, “Really, seriously? When Jack and I put this together, who knew?” I mean that sincerely. A, who knew that this many people would love it? Who knew this many people could understand it? It’s one thing to know your business, but to be able to properly convey what you really do and teach people, that surprised the heck out of me. Then, C, the final one is how successful everybody is. That’s the part that I just love.
Jack Butala: It’s clear to me that there’s a lust out there for this product.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: It was an unfilled segment in the market, for real estate education and I think most real estate education is a pile of malarkey.
Jill DeWit: True.
Jack Butala: I think we just had to … All we do is sit here and tell the truth.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: There’s no advertising.
Jill DeWit: That’s right.
Jack Butala: We do things that are very unorthodox, almost all things. Like, the first level of Land Academy membership, they’re all capped. We’re not going to have 7 million members.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: The first silver membership level, there’s only 250 people.
Jill DeWit: We’re almost there.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: Then, that’s it. We’re going to continue to do what we do. Continue to do this show and all that stuff and continue to help people and do our calls and we’re not going to stop any of that. We’re just not going to take in any new members until the ones that, for whatever reason want to leave … That’s incredibly not normal.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: I think everybody else in this business is like, “Yeah, I want to sell more.”
Jill DeWit: I’ll take a million.
Jack Butala: I want to sell more.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I know.
Jack Butala: That’s not how we roll, man.
Jill DeWit: We want to keep it small and there’s a reason why we’re all here doing so well and you and I both know, don’t mess with it.
Jack Butala: Exactly.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.
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