Cross Marketing with Tiny House People (CFFL 404)
Cross Marketing with Tiny House People
Recording Location: 33.840103, – 118.391379
Jack Butala: Jack Butala and Jill Dewit.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to our show today, in this episode Jill and I talk about cross-marketing with tiny house people and with the tiny house industry. I didn’t make this title up, they called me.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: Before we really really get into it though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com online community, it’s free.
Jill DeWit: Okay, Claire asked, “While looking at a county I noticed that a golf course Property Owners Association, POA owns a whole bunch of its own land. POA dues are $900 a year, would you say these are bad signs?” Jack?
Jack Butala: Okay it depends on the kind of investor you are. The good news is you can get pretty much cheap to free land on a golf course, by buying it right from the HOA. Home Owners Association, Property Owners Association, or LOA, Land Owners Association. Is that a bad thing? No it’s never bad to buy cheap property or in this case probably almost free property.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Do we do it anymore a lot? Not really because we find we’ve got much larger fish to fry but Claire god bless her, she’s one of our original members is just knocking it out of the park. I think for her, that’d be perfect because she tends to really look into things and she’s really detail oriented. To answer your question directly Claire, no I think it’s a great thing. I would concentrate a little bit more on finding out how much property is actually out there on the market. If it’s oversat … all the regular logical stuff applies. If there is a ton of property and it’s real cheap and it’s not getting sold let’s say on Land Watch or Land Pin or anywhere else, what would concern me. If there’s only a couple lots and they are all 10 grand, jump in.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: I think I would … since whenever there’s a situation where you can go back to the well, where there’s a bunch of property and you just know it’s going to be there for quite some time, don’t buy a ton of it. Buy three, four, five properties, see how it goes. See what the reaction is.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Hey by the way, on these HOA’s they will almost always write it down to zero if you ask them. If you say, “Hey I’m not going to buy these properties because there’s a bunch of accumulated leans or fees on them”. If you go in and say … Jill’s an expert at this, she did it, I can name three places she’s done it in the last few years. “I’m sorry we would love to buy your stuff, my check book is open, you got to write the leans down to zero”.
Jill DeWit: And I’ll buy several.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: That’s my thing, I’ll buy a chunk of them, what can we work out together? And they’ll negotiate.
Jack Butala: You can really hard ball that.
Jill DeWit: They can’t … what they’ll do though, they can’t mess with the taxes traditionally but with the HOA fees, they sure can.
Jack Butala: Yeah and in some very rare cases the county will write the taxes down.
Jill DeWit: Very rare, I hate to …
Jack Butala: They are concerned about it.
Jill DeWit: I wouldn’t count on that one but I would certainly go to bat on the HOA fees or the POA fees and all that.
Jack Butala: Here’s why, the county can’t do it because they have an obligation to fulfill statues, state statues on how they get property back onto a tax roll and writing it down to zero is …
Jill DeWit: Not one.
Jack Butala: Unless they’ve already done it through the board of states … I don’t want to get into this. It’s beyond the scope of this.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: If you have a question or you want to be on the show, reach out to either one of us on landacademy.com soon to be landambassadors.com. Today’s topic, cross-marketing with the tiny house industry. This is how this came up …
Jill DeWit: Okay I’m ready.
Jack Butala: There’s various websites out there about this tiny house movement which I call, really the RV movement but this generation likes the tiny houses instead just going to buy an RV on Craigslist but it is what it is. My whole point to this show is, and I’m sure Jill because she’s all sales, way more salesy than I am. There’s lots of different ways to liquidate this property verses just slapping it up on Zillow and Trulia and Land Pin and Land Watch. They contacted me and said, “We’re selling a lot of tiny houses and all these houses that we’re selling, they don’t know where to put besides a Walmart parking lot”.
Jill DeWit: Need a place to put them.
Jack Butala: Who wants to live in a Walmart parking lot?
Jill DeWit: Or their grandmothers backyard. They don’t want to live next to their grandmother exactly.
Jack Butala: Right so we are investigating or taking a look at cross-marketing with them. Even actually maybe funding a show where they build on. Build it on our land or walk through the process of … I’d love to know what if our listeners about that or if you have any experience with that. Or if you’re a member.
Jill DeWit: Well we do have some members, remember we have an Airstream member who has an Airstream model where finding them. Fixing them up, and making them a VRBO or an Airbnb on the property. I know I remember doing that. I know someone who has vacationed in the Bay Area and done that. There’s a person up there and it’s gorgeous and really really cool and fun. There’s two plays there, one can be an Airbnb type of scenario, have several of them in an area where people want to go stay and check out. Then the other one could be the long term personal use. Pop your own tiny house right there and … gosh isn’t that great? Nowadays you could just roll up and park it. I mean it’s the greatest thing on the planet. It used to be … I remember starting out and people didn’t know how to get water. Well now they learned they can have … you didn’t have to do a well you could have a big tank and have water delivered and trucked in. Then there’s the power issue. Then all these other issues. All of that stuff over the last many years.
Jack Butala: Last five years.
Jill DeWit: Yeah has really gone away and it’s … now I mean we joke about HGTV and their shows sometimes but I mean they have a show and it’s a real deal. I mean people are doing it.
Jack Butala: If you don’t know by now Texas as really been in our favor as investors. Changed the rules about modular/mobile housing. It used to be and traditionally most parts of the country, in the eyes of the law, mobile homes and modular homes are the same. Traditionally, it’s not my opinion but like it or not there’s not a lot of people are in favor of putting up a new mobile home park where they live.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: It’s not my opinion it’s theirs. So because that’s changed now and Texas has kind of really loosened up the rags and because of technology, we can put a solar system on top of a tiny house. You can accumulate rainwater or there’s a lot of ways you can create water. My point is it’s very conceivable to have an off the grid type subdivision with one acre properties. You could do a whole area like this and throw a bunch of tiny houses on there, modular houses and really live off the grid truly.
Jill DeWit: Well there’s two other things to I just thought about that have made this way more feasible for a lot of individuals. One is technology, having internet everywhere it’s getting better and better and more and more consistent so that’s not an issue. Then now we all have hot spots on our own phones. You never really have to think about it which is fantastic. I use it all the time, I don’t even use it when I’m in some places and the public places, I just use my own hot spot because it’s safer and it’s great. The other thing is the traditional … I hear more and more people and the traditional going to the office, there’s a lot of companies that don’t have that. Including major companies, we’re talking like American Airlines, has remote people that do reservations that do it from their home. They could be doing it from their home in the middle of the woods in Colorado.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Kind of thing, a lot of companies are doing that. It’s great, it saves on the overhead for the company and the employees love it and there’s no commute.
Jack Butala: Yeah the telecommuting thing is not going away.
Jill DeWit: Right and that’s why these Weworks and all those places are popping up to because if you need an office now and then, you want walk in, go in somewhere you can. You need a conference room now and then, you can. Otherwise you don’t, it’s great.
Jack Butala: The whole point to this show is … it’s not just about tiny houses it’s there are lots of places and lots of ways to market this land or to expose … Everybody love’s cheap property. Think about that for a second, if you’re into this from a career standpoint or even a hobby standpoint, or you’re just listening because you’re for some reason you’re listening to this show I don’t know why.
Jill DeWit: Yeah I was just going to say.
Jack Butala: Who doesn’t like buying property that’s way less than it’s actual real value?
Jill DeWit: It’s so nice.
Jack Butala: Think about it, that’s what we do.
Jill DeWit: You don’t have to try shove it in a safe. It’s not like … it’s awesome.
Jack Butala: Yeah there’s many, many, many outlets. Jill and I are working on a tech product where you buy a piece of property, let’s say it’s a house. You buy it like we buy it, under value and you notify everybody within a one mile radius, several different ways. You notify them by mail, you notify them by URL location on Google with Ad Words, you notify them by Facebook or Zip Code. If you can effectively buy a piece of property and notify people within … very efficiently notify people that it’s for sale and it is very under priced, somebody is going to buy it real quick.
Jill DeWit: Do you know how we’re not notifying them?
Jack Butala: Smoke signals?
Jill DeWit: By knocking on the door.
Jack Butala: Yeah you don’t want to do that anyway.
Jill DeWit: No we’re not doing that.
Jack Butala: Only because it’s not efficient.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: And it’s annoying as hell.
Jill DeWit: I’m not driving around with business cards saying, “Hey do you know what I have?” No.
Jack Butala: Remember when we were kids they encyclopedia people would come?
Jill DeWit: Oh my goodness yes I do. You always did, your parents always did. They had the … remember the gold leaf edging on them?
Jack Butala: Yeah and it was college kids that were doing it in summer.
Jill DeWit: Britannica.
Jack Butala: During the summer so they could theoretically get their tuition paid and then you were guilted into it.
Jill DeWit: Pretty much, it’s kind of like girl scout cookies.
Jack Butala: Yeah, it’s girl scout cookies.
Jill DeWit: 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: 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 am so personally intrigued and I don’t think I can bait it about this off the grid thing. I think it’s the way of the future and I think there’s so much inefficiencies. It was necessary in the past. There are some many inefficiencies to connecting a huge network, wether it’s sewer lines or electricity or anything like that.
Jill DeWit: No I love how … I love when off the grid living goes from, I mean this happens at all kinds of things. It went from, “Oh you’re a prepper and you’re a weirdo” to, “Now I’m efficient and I’m living the way I should live and I recycle and I do all these things”. Now it’s like a cool in thing, from weirdos to cool.
Jack Butala: Yeah I mean it’s also weirdos in the beginning.
Jill DeWit: Right that’s true.
Jack Butala: Change is always … what the heck is that guy doing over there? Then it becomes, “Wow that’s a good idea”.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: You know, Elon Musk has this thing called a Power wall and it looks like the size of I don’t know, four phone books. If you know what a phone book is, probably not even.
Jill DeWit: Yeah you need to come up with a better description that that.
Jack Butala: It looks like an encyclopedia.
Jill DeWit: Great, keep going. It looks like a textbook, if you still have textbooks because even those …
Jack Butala: Now it’s cool because Elon Musk is cool and you put a couple of solar panels up there and it’s stores and you can run a couple of houses off it, very efficiently.
Jill DeWit: You want to say who Elon Musk is or do you think everybody knows?
Jack Butala: If you don’t know who Elon Musk is, there’s problems.
Jill DeWit: All right.
Jack Butala: You’re listening to this show because it’s all … this is entrepreneurial stuff. Elon Musk owns Telsa and he also created and sold Yahoo. He owns a company called space something where there’s literally people going into space. Regular people like us can buy an airline ticket into space, which they have not launched yet, pretty cool.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy unvalued property.
Jill DeWit: Can’t wait to see the people walk in behind us and the stop …
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