Buy Like Jack & Sell Like Jill (CFFL 378)
Buy Like Jack & Sell Like Jill
Jack Butala: Buy Like Jack & Sell Like 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 hump day.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today. In this episode Jill and I talk about, hey buy like Jack and sell like Jill.
Jill DeWit: This is going to be good.
Jack Butala: This is a really good opportunity to make fun of each other.
Jill DeWit: Totally.
Jack Butala: Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landacademy.com online community, soon to be called Land Clique.
Jill DeWit: Land Clique.
Jack Butala: Clique, French-y.
Jill DeWit: I’m going with the French thing since we all know it’s C-L-I-Q-U-E, cool. All right, David asked, “How do you decide, or should you vary, lot acreage or narrow assessor values with a big county to get Real Quest Pro to populate a manageable count to scrub down from?” What this means is, Real Quest Pro, which is what we use for getting our data, it’s the best data out there for all of our data for our mailers.
Jack Butala: We’re a licensed provider of Real Quest and Core Logic.
Jill DeWit: Yes, we are. We’re very happy.
Jack Butala: They let us.
Jill DeWit: They let us.
Jack Butala: We have millions and millions and millions or records
Jill DeWit: Of stuff that we’ve done with them, yeah. It’s amazing. We obviously know what we’re doing, we obviously teach people how to do it and it’s perfect. Anyway, when you pull up a county, it’s a pretty big list, so David is asking some questions about, how do I get this down to a manageable list to mail offers? I’m not going to mail 130,000 offers from everybody in the county. No, you’re not going to do that.
Jack Butala: Here’s what David’s really getting at.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: If it’s a huge county in square mile size, like Coconino County, Arizona, versus a super tiny little one like some of the counties back east, the larger the size the more opportunity there is for variance in price. Right? The more you have to put into really studying when you do your mailers to get offers out, let’s say you’ve got a [universe 00:02:19] of five acre properties in Coconino County is like thousands and thousands of properties and in a county back east it might be 500 properties. What he’s asking is, can you really seriously offer all the same amount, or do you offer it based on assessed value and the whole thing? Here’s my answer. The size doesn’t matter. Size matters to Jill, but size doesn’t matter. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Jill DeWit: Don’t worry, I won’t let it go there.
Jack Butala: She is so blushing.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that came out.
Jack Butala: She’s blushing.
Jill DeWit: I’m like, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to turn this off for the people who have kids in the car.” That is hilarious. I won’t let it go there, right Jack?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Wow, okay. That woke me up.
Jack Butala: I know, there’s a pretty substantial delay.
Jill DeWit: There was a one, two, what?
Jack Butala: No, the size of the county doesn’t matter at all, you price it the exact same way. However you work it out, you use the assessed value as a gauge to calculate the prices. You don’t ever offer the assessed amount. The assessed amount has nothing to do with the real value. We use it and we use it very effectively to gauge the offer prices.
Jill DeWit: You know what’s interesting, too? I have a note here so I know where David is in the process. Unless he’s testing it not with all of our data, he doesn’t have the Real Quest stuff yet, so that’s why he’s asking this. David hasn’t gone in yet to really accurately see what’s available to him. That is probably part of this question. Part of this David, wait til you see what you have at your fingertips. I tell people that. My favorite is when I have someone that, they understand the process, they’re kind of in the business, they are trying to get properties different ways. Then when they get in and see what our data is and what we can do with it, what’s right there, they fall over.
Jack Butala: My favorite is when we get, some of the members are pretty seasoned real estate professionals.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: When they get in there, because they’ve never purchased properties through sending out offers.
Jill DeWit: This way, exactly.
Jack Butala: They’ve done it through brokers.
Jill DeWit: Or driving around.
Jack Butala: Whatever, yeah. Then they get in there and spend two or three hours; I always tell everybody, “Spend two hours in Real Quest, ice out a block of time. Go in a dark closet if you need to, with no intention of doing a mailer, just go in there and see what Real Quest is all about.”
Jill DeWit: What are you doing in the dark closet, Jack? Since we’re going to go there.
Jack Butala: Concentrating on size.
Jill DeWit: Parcel size.
Jack Butala: Yeah, property size. What did you think I meant?
Jill DeWit: Ah, thank you. Oh no.
Jack Butala: No, it doesn’t matter, in all seriousness. Just price it the same way. The more time you spend on pricing property, the more successful you will be. If you price property correctly, then you will make a ton of money.
Jill DeWit: That’s not today’s show.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: Just kidding.
Jack Butala: But, I like saying it.
Jill DeWit: I know you do. If you go in a dark closet …
Jack Butala: No, no, no.
Jill DeWit: Then …
Jack Butala: You come out a man.
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: Some people … Nevermind. If you have a question or you’d like to be on the show reach out to either one of us on landacademy.com. Today’s topic: buy like Jack and sell like Jill. This is a blast. What the heck does that mean? How do I buy and how do you sell? I’d love to hear your opinion of how I buy real estate. How bad is it?
Jill DeWit: Oh, it’s fantastic. I have a couple notes here about the way that you buy, and it’s really good stuff. One of your “mottos” is, just buy them all and figure it out later.
Jack Butala: You’re right.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: I have the Luke Smith approach to this a lot.
Jill DeWit: You kind of do, and it’s very true. There’s times that I’ve been … A lot of this is from the beginning, when we were getting started, so that’s why I think it’s pertinent to a lot of our listeners. You would find me pouring over these deals as these offer letters are coming back. You would find me doing a whole lot of homework on, making sure this is right, do I like it, does it have enough four A’s, and I’ll explain that in a second.
You would come along and go, “What the heck are you doing? Buy it, buy it, buy. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.” Only because you knew that subdivisions, the only reason you said no on one of them was like, “We don’t do those anymore, they’re too small,” or whatever. Otherwise, you’d just be saying, “Yeah, buy them all.” I’m like, “Well how do you know?” That was one of your things. I will add the four A’s are … This is all Jack, too. This is really good.
Jack Butala: This is how you value a piece of property, this asset type.
Jill DeWit: This is what you want to make sure that they have. You want to make sure it has, one, accessibility, so access. Two, affordability. Is it priced right?
Jack Butala: The cheaper the better.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Three, acreage.
Jack Butala: The larger the better.
Jill DeWit: Four, attribute.
Jack Butala: Is it close to the Grand Canyon, is there water?
Jill DeWit: Is there a lake?
Jack Butala: All the cool stuff; mountain views.
Jill DeWit: By a city.
Jack Butala: Next to a working ranch.
Jill DeWit: Stuff like that.
Jack Butala: All of that.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: When you’re brand new, brand-spanking new, I recommend that you get all four A’s.
Jill DeWit: Got it.
Jack Butala: At our level, we make sure that one of them is unbelievable.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: If one of them is so unbelievably awesome, you can overlook the other three; not entirely.
Jill DeWit: Not entirely.
Jack Butala: Especially access. You really got to look at that.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, yep. That’s one of your things; I have three. The second one that I love about the way you buy, Jack is, flat rate, this is it. This is my offer, no talking or the deal’s off.
Jack Butala: We don’t negotiate. We just talked about this earlier this week, and this is kind of the theme for this week. Negotiation and talking to buyers or sellers wastes a lot of time. That’s why we send offers out with dollar amounts right in there. If you get them signed back, you have to price it and say this to yourself, “Well, if anybody signs this thing I’m buying it for sure. It’s so cheap, there’s no way I can lose money on it.”
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: That’s how we roll.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: There’s certain product types where that does not apply, like houses. Jill and I buy houses a lot, but that’s not what this show is about. We wholesale houses, we don’t scrape the bottom from an offer standpoint on the houses at all.
Jill DeWit: Right. My third one, you never sweat finding deals because you just send out more mail, more offers.
Jack Butala: That’s the other thing. Again, it’s very natural to look at a property and convince yourself that something’s not there.
Jill DeWit: Yes.
Jack Butala: I see that happen all the time, because you want to be in the business, you do the deal that bad. Do you remember when we were younger and you’d buy an album, and you only heard the stuff that they play on the radio.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: We’re dating ourselves now. We’re dating each other.
Jill DeWit: Literally, figuratively, what, and yes.
Jack Butala: The two hit songs are on there and the rest of the songs, you never heard them before, ever. That doesn’t happen in this day and age.
Jill DeWit: You still felt like it was a good investment.
Jack Butala: You start convincing yourself, “This is a great record.” It’s not, it sucks.
Jill DeWit: You’re right.
Jack Butala: Don’t do that with real estate. Don’t see something that’s not there.
Jill DeWit: That’s true. Why the heck you picked that?
Jack Butala: If there’s any problems at all, just open the next letter.
Jill DeWit: Here’s my example. Like dating, then. Seriously. Well, he paid for dinner, nevermind it was awful, so we should go out again. No, it was awful. The guy was a jerk, he was mean, whatever it was, he was rude to the staff and everything, and he never said you looked nice. Don’t go out with him just because he paid for dinner. He’s got to have all the other A’s.
Jack Butala: This is hilarious. I’m taking notes here.
Jill DeWit: Let’s see …
Jack Butala: I went out with a girl one time, and this is our first date. She flat out said, “I am going to get lobster.” This is a long, long time ago, obviously.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.
Jack Butala: My response was, “I think you should get the lobster, because this is the last meal we’re having together.”
Jill DeWit: Yeah, there you go.
Jack Butala: And it was.
Jill DeWit: Yep, I hear you. This is so not cool. Those are three of my cool points of how you buy. What are yours about how I sell?
Jack Butala: I’ve had Jill’s job. In fact, I’ve had all the jobs here at landpen.com, and I’ve failed at every single one of them, except for the one that I have now, which is naive owner. I really mean that. Everybody who’s in every job in this company does it better than me. I’m pretty confident all of them couldn’t do my job.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. It’s pretty hard to be naive owner/CEO.
Jack Butala: Now that I’ve set that up correctly, sales is my least favorite part of this. Everybody’s got a part they love and a part that they’re not too happy about. I don’t like paperwork and I don’t like sales. I love acquisitions. I love engineering. I love all that stuff. The thing that makes Jill so successful as a salesperson, whether it’s for Land Pen or not, any of the other positions she’s ever had, is that you do not know that you’re being sold something. That is a huge compliment.
Jill DeWit: Do you know why?
Jack Butala: You really just hang out, you talk to everybody like they’re kind of your girlfriend, and it works.
Jill DeWit: You know why? How do I say this? I never am talking anybody into anything, I’m just properly conveying what it is. If it’s not for them, I tell them to move on, it’s not for you. I do this with Land Academy, too. There’s people that call me up and they think that, for whatever it is, they have a wrong impression of what we do, or they think they can do this with zero money in their pockets. That’s one of the big ones that comes along.
I often tell them, “No this is not for you,” or, “it’s just not the right time. Take your time, we’re going to be here in a year, save up. If you really want to do this, absolutely we’re going to help you, but you got to have money to send out a mailer. Even if I handed everything to you for free, you got to do a mailer and buy your own properties; you got to have some money,” kind of thing. I don’t think of it like that. I just think of properly conveying it. Thank you, though.
Jack Butala: My number two is, you never put yourself first. I don’t even know if you know this stuff about … We’ve never talked about this.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Picture walking into a dealership … We’re crushing dealerships this week.
Jill DeWit: We are, because you’re car shopping.
Jack Butala: Walk into a dealership, and you know, the guy’s standing in front of you, hair’s out of place, he’s all sales-ey, “Hey, how ya doing there man? You look like you’d like to buy a car today.” That kind of crap, you know? He’s putting himself first. It’s all about him. Once you buy a car, he’s going to go high-five the guys in the back and say, “God, I stuck it to them.” You know they are. You put the customer first, or the whoever, the member member or whatever it is at the time.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: I don’t even think you know you’re doing it, it’s just natural. It’s true in life, too, Jill. You put us first. You put the kids first, you put me first always.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. Shucks.
Jack Butala: I’m serious.
Jill DeWit: Aw, thank you.
Jack Butala: I’m really serious, and that’s why you’re so effective at this.
Jill DeWit: I appreciate that, thank you.
Jack Butala: I forgot my number three. Are you crying a little bit?
Jill DeWit: Just a little. Thank you very much.
Jack Butala: Number three is, all I ever do when you’re on the phone is, I hear you ask questions. You only make statements in the end when you’re just trying to get it over with. I hear you asking a lot of questions. Do you think you’d like to do this? Do you think you’d like to do this? Are you more interested in this? Are you less interested in this? You’re really helping the person that way, instead of selling them something.
Jill DeWit: There you go. I do that, you’re right.
Jack Butala: You’re earning their trust.
Jill DeWit: I’ll say, “What are you looking for? What are you trying to do here?”
Jack Butala: What’s happening is you’re earning their trust, and in my opinion, it doesn’t happen in one sitting. This whole notion of cold calling and closing, closing with one occurrence, maybe that worked in the ’50s, but we have all the answers to all the questions in our pocket right now on your phone. That’s just not how it works. Multiple impressions are required.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: The same’s with real estate, so you want to present it right on the internet, and you really want to be a nerd about it and put all the details you can think of in there. Make a long listing, because buying land is not like buying shoes. You have to think about it.
Jill DeWit: You want to hear something funny?
Jack Butala: She just raised her hand. That’s hilarious. Are you 12?
Jill DeWit: You brought up cold calling. I have two funny stories of two jobs that I miserably failed at. This is good. One was, I took a job years ago, you said cold calling, literally cold calling doctor’s offices to sell rubber gloves. I’m not kidding.
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh, that’s terrible.
Jill DeWit: I did not last a day. I couldn’t stand it. Back then it’s like, you have a sheet of paper with the doctor’s names and the phone numbers, and you’re calling trying to get through to the office manager, whoever does the ordering, and sell rubber gloves. Seriously, I barely made it through the first day. I did not go back the second day. I was so miserable, I didn’t even go pick up my paycheck. They would have paid me for that day; I couldn’t. It was hilarious. It was so funny.
Jack Butala: I never heard that. You actually failed at a sales position?
Jill DeWit: Oh yeah, I couldn’t do it. It was just too hard, there was no way I would do it. My other silly one was I tried to work in a department store. It was a lot of commission, and that’s not my thing because, you know what? People walk in the door, and it was like, you had to hurry up and get to that customer, because you didn’t want anyone else to have that customer before you.
Jack Butala: You’re competing with the other people. That’s how a real estate office, real estate agents do, they compete. It doesn’t make any sense.
Jill DeWit: I couldn’t do that. It was just not in my nature.
Jack Butala: Work together, not against each other.
Jill DeWit: I lasted a little longer there, but it wasn’t even two weeks. I made up a story that we were moving and all these circumstan- It was the funniest thing, because I figured it out three days in going, “This is not going to work for me.” I couldn’t do that, couldn’t be pushy like that. It was so funny. I started to go home for lunch and I’d fake sick and not come back. I was really young, I mean, come on, I was not even 20. It was so funny. Then I didn’t want them to think poorly of me, so all my family had to suddenly move. My dad got relocated, this whole thing. Seriously. Then they, “Oh, if you ever want to come back …” “Oh, thank you.” Then I had to hide from that store for six months or so. It was hilarious.
Jack Butala: That’s outstanding.
Jill DeWit: It was funny. I just thought that was good, because those are two sales jobs that was just not the right thing for me. I can’t be like that. When I feel really, really good about what I’m selling and what I’m doing, I really sincerely feel like I’m helping people every day, Jack.
Jack Butala: So do I.
Jill DeWit: Every day.
Jack Butala: That’s why we do this show.
Jill DeWit: It’s not just our …
Jack Butala: We don’t make any money on this.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, not just our Land Academy customers, but our Land Pen customers. These people are so excited to find this property and it’s just priced so great that, wow, they can actually afford to do this.
Jack Butala: I’ve heard that a million times. I should talk about it more, from buyers. They just say, “I never knew that property like this could be this cheap. I never thought I would ever own a piece of real estate.”
Jill DeWit: Exactly, that is what they say, and it’s phenomenal.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Thank you, Jack. I appreciate this.
Jack Butala: Yeah, heck yes.
Jill DeWit: Hey, I appreciate this whole opportunity.
Jack Butala: You’re welcome, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: The soft launch for our website called Offers to Owners, the number two, and it’s up now in data collection mode, but long story short, a lot of people don’t want to be involved in a group. I’m kind of like that. I’m not a big group person. I just want the tools. That’s exactly what Offers to Owners is. It’s exactly two tools that are essential to succeed at this. If you’ve been in the business for a while, you’re the kind of person who goes in your office and locks the door, and comes out and you know everything two days later, that’s what this product is.
It’s access to the world class bulk mail company for cheaper than the price of a stamp to get the offers out, and it’s access to the data on a subscription basis. It’s half the price of everywhere else. It’s less than half of the price of getting the data from Real Quest, and it’s less than half of the price if you walked off the street to get offers out, but all the same benefits. It comes automatically with Land Academy membership, but there’s some people just don’t want to be part of the group, they just want the tools. [crosstalk 00:20:43] I’m not plugging this site at all. I’m trying to make it easier. That’s why. I’m trying to provide yet another product to make it easier for that personality type.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: Buy like Jack, that’s my point in saying all of this.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, exactly.
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. I mean it.
Jill DeWit: Thanks.
Jack Butala: We should just end the show right there.
Jill DeWit: Done.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy under-value property.
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