Why Investors Don’t Need Real Estate Agents (CFFL 418)

Recording Location: LAT (i.e.  33.488237)  (LONG i.e.  -111.921540)

Jack Butala:                       Jack Butala with Jill DeWit!

Jill DeWit:                           Hi there!

Jack Butala:                       Welcome to our show today. This episode Jill and I talk about why investors don’t need real estate agents. Another wonderful – Wonderfully written title by Jill. We’ll find out why she’s writing -[crosstalk 00:00:15]

Jill DeWit:                           I’m having fun this week.

Jack Butala:                       – Why she’s writing these titles this week in a few seconds. Before we get into it though, let’s take a question posted by one of the members on the LandAcadamy.com online community. It’s free.

Jill DeWit:                           Okay, Mike wrote and asked, “Apparently, a lot of folks are having success selling land on Facebook. Can you share your procedure, and/or the groups you’re posting to? Perhaps you can recommend a tip or resource? Thanks.”

Oh, I have one.

Jack Butala:                       I have a lot to say about this, go ahead.

Jill DeWit:                           Okay, well my favorite tip is … If you have it on the right selling site like, oh I don’t know, LandPin. You push a button and it posts it on Facebook for you, and it posts it to your account where you’re signed in, slash however, I’m sure. And then you can share it all over the planet from there.

Jack Butala:                       Yeah, here’s a short answer. You can reach 1.6, well between Jill and I, its 1.2 to 1.6 million people by the push of a button right out of LandPin. And you can do it, not just with your property, but with everybody’s or anybody’s that’s posted on there. So, if you want to promote yourself and you don’t have any property to sell, we designed it this way, you just press a button on LandPin and it draws a huge amount of attention to yourself.

Jill DeWit:                           It’s true.

Jack Butala:                       So, you can use other peoples property’s to kind of piggyback on building your own following, let’s say, for land. We’ve spent a lot of time on this and it’s … Please just go to LandPin, click on any property, and at the bottom you’ll see all the share buttons. Facebook, Instagram, the rest of them. You can do it on all of them.

Jill DeWit:                           I was just gonna say, the whole point of this is, Mike, it’s reach. That’s the biggie – [crosstalk 00:02:05]

Jack Butala:                       That’s why it works.

Jill DeWit:                           That’s it, you’re just trying to reach somebody, and that’s just one more way, between Facebook, and Twitter, and all that stuff. Who knows where that one person is? It could be somebody sitting on Twitter looking at tiny houses and tiny cute curtains. Who knows?

I’m not kidding. On Pinterest looking at curtains for the tiny house to go on the piece of land they don’t own. Seriously, I’m sure this happens, and here comes your land, and you reach them, and that’s exactly what they want. You never know, so don’t discount any of that.

Jack Butala:                       And the second part of your question is, “What are the names of the groups?” There’s a million Facebook groups that are really special. Not a million, there’s probably 30 or 40 that super, ultra specialize in rural vacant land. Or any type of vacant land, or investing, and just sign up for all of them. And when post it from LandPin you can select wich group it’s going to go into, or you can just share it into a group through where it got posted. It’s really – Just horse around with it for 15 or 20 minutes and you’ll see how powerful it is.

And then my final point here is, if you want to get into Facebook ads, and we do this for very specific stuff like podcasting, but Facebook ads are incredibly inexpensive and effective. Because you can reach the people that have identified themselves as podcast listeners or rural vacant land buyers. That’s why its so effective. So, I would heavily encourage you, and anybody else to really look into – Look I’m very vocal about the fact that I didn’t get a username on Facebook until, what, late 2000 so … I was one of those guys who say – Boasting, “Oh, that Facebook thing is silly.” Well, it’s not. It’s incredibly effective.

Jill DeWit:                           Well, and that’s why we’re here to save you. I say that all the time -[crosstalk 00:04:00]

Jack Butala:                       That’s why there’s two of us.

Jill DeWit:                           – We made a lot of mistakes. We can save you a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of frustration.

Jack Butala:                       If you have a question or if you want to be on the show, reach out to either one of us on Landinvestors.com

Today’s topic: Why investors don’t need real estate agents. I love this topic. Jill wrote all the topics and all the shows this week, and I’m just kind of the bystander, but I do have a lot to say about this.

Jill DeWit:                           I know you do.

Jack Butala:                       It’s one of my hobbies. Take it away Jill.

Jill DeWit:                           Well, I’ll start it, and I want you to way in a lot here. This is a question that I get often, because people can’t seem to fathom the idea that you can buy and sell property for yourself as yourself, and that’s the key. You are your own investor. You are buying the property, you’re not representing anyone, you are an investor. You may be buying property for five thousand dollars or five hundred dollars. I mean, it’s not that it has to be five hundred thousand dollars to be “an investor” and doing your own deals.

You’re buying these assets, you’re taking them in under your name, your company, however you want to do it and then you’re turning around and marketing them and selling them as yourself. You are the owner, you are selling the property to the end user or who ever is buying the property. You don’t have to have a real estate agent. And for some reason it seems real easy for me to explain it like that, but for many people it’s hard to grasp.

It’s kind of like buying a car. I don’t have to go to the Toyota dealership to buy myself a used Sequoia. I can actually get out the newspaper – Or not. Newspaper, how funny is that? But I can get online. Cars.com, whatever site, Craigslist. I could buy it from my neighbor down the street. I don’t have to say, “Okay, great. Now let’s all go down to the dealership ’cause they’re gonna complete the transaction for us and take a piece of it, a commission. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Jack Butala:                       Exactly.

Jill DeWit:                           When I say investors, I did not even specify the property type here, by the way. It could be vacant land. It could actually be something with a structure on it you don’t have to go through an agent. You can do your own title. You can do your own escrow, if it’s some real big deal like that.

Jack Butala:                       Yeah, when we started this I just thought it was something that everybody understood, and it comes up consistently now. And so, no you do not need a licensed real estate agent to facilitate a transaction for you. For sake of clarity, the reason that agents get a license and are required to get a license, is because they are representing other people in real estate deals. Whether they’re buying or selling property, and Jill is right, any single property type, they’re representing somebody else. They’re playing with somebody else’s money. Or they’re giving advice about, they’re opinion theoretically, about an area that’s good, or bad, or any of that.

So, that might have been really valuable in 1979, before the internet. So if you ever listen to any other episode on this program at all, you know how we stand on this. It’s just not necessary. In fact, I think it’s gotten to the point where it’s getting in the way. If two guys meet in a coffee shop, and one says, “You know I think I’m gonna sell my farm, I’m thinking about selling my farm.” And the other guy says, “You know, I’m thinking about buying more farm land.” Do they need a real estate deal to finish that? No. No, not at all. All they need is, really they need nothing. If they could go down to the county courthouse and record a deed on a back of a napkin, it’s a valid deal. And it’s recorded, and it’s over.

I don’t want to get too technical, they’d need a lot less than that actually for it to be a real deal. Real estate agents came about because back in the day there was always a socialite and they were putting deals together. So, think of that coffee shop situation, and think of the person that’s always there, just kind of being a socialite, and putting deals together. Then it was valuable. They had inside information, social stuff, they knew everybody in town. What was going on in their families and stuff. But now, with the internet, there should just be a place, hint hint, there should just be a place where you go and say, “I’d like to sell my house.” And put in the information, and its for sale. That’s it. [crosstalk 00:08:32]

Jill DeWit:                           I wonder – I was just thinking, you brought up a good point ’cause what we do so much is cash. And then we do seller financing on the sell side if needed, but most of it’s cash. So I’m sure a lot of this came about when there were lenders involved. That does make a little bit of a difference. And that’s why – Again though, even if there’s a lender involved there’s a thing called FSBO. When did that come up? In the 80’s. I think people started to figure out the whole FSBO – For sale by owner. Fisbo.[crosstalk 00:09:02]

Jack Butala:                       I think it came about long before real estate agents were around.

Jill DeWit:                           Oh, okay. That is true. It was that way, and then it became real estate agents, and then it was like, “Oh, what so you mean you’re doing a Fisbo? Oh, what is that?”

Jack Butala:                       You know what it is? It’s just easier. We all fall back, not all of us, but we all fall back into just being kind of lazy. You know you don’t have to buy a car at a dealership. There’s a lot of ways to buy a car cheaper than a dealership, but we do it because its like, “well, we’re pressed for time. It’s Sunday or Saturday.[crosstalk 00:09:27] I have to go to work on Monday, my car doesn’t work, yeah.”

Jill DeWit:                           “They’ll take care of all the financing for me all I have to do is sign.”

Jack Butala:                       So, is it the right way to do it, or the cheapest way? Almost always no, but it’s the most convenient. [crosstalk 00:09:39] It’s the same way with houses. That’s just how its been done so everybody’s kind of … To dig the stake further in, the multiple listing service, which is their answer to the portal to all the property that’s “for sale” I just have a lot of real negative things to say about this.

Jill DeWit:                           I know it’s like we’re kind of brain washed. We think that, “Watch the MLS, the best deals gonna pop up, you gotta be ready, watch it every day, get up and search it.” What about all the deals that didn’t make the MLS?

Jack Butala:                       There’s way more.

Jill DeWit:                           I know!

Jack Butala:                       There’s more property [crosstalk 00:10:20] that’s for sale right now that’s not on the MLS. And how do you find it? By sending people a letter. Send them an offer and make it easy.

Jill DeWit:                           Exactly.

Jack Butala:                       We do it all the time. Our members do it all the time. The whole point of investing is to make money. So, the cheapest way to buy real estate, by leaps and bounds is to contact owners of real estate directly. We do it by mail, by direct mail and we’re starting to do it in different ways, and creative ways. Or have them find you and buy their deal, buy their property. Sometimes we do it with a title agent some times, Jill mentioned earlier, we do it with our own title. We do our own title plant work. We’re making that resource available. We do it now in house. We’re making it available to all of our members shortly. On a website called Titlemind.com. So, you need, for some reason, if you’re gonna get your nails done, you need a licensed person to do it. [crosstalk 00:11:18]

Jill DeWit:                           Isn’t that funny. There’s a good example.

Jack Butala:                       But you do not need a licensed real estate agent to buy or sell your house. You can do that yourself.

Jill DeWit:                           That’s really funny.

Jack Butala:                       I think you could do your own nails, too, though.

Jill DeWit:                           I could do my own nails, too. Exactly.

Jack Butala:                       You would never do your own nails, would you? Have you ever done your own nails?

Jill DeWit:                           Do you know what’s funny about that? [crosstalk 00:11:31] Of course. Not often but I do. Oh, gosh.

Jack Butala:                       What year was it?

Jill DeWit:                           Silly, no. Here’s a funny thing you just brought up though. The number of licenses – I just remember – Here in the state of Arizona, our Governor, Doug Ducey, I think he was setting out to get ride of some of the licenses because there’s like hundreds and hundreds of things that require licenses. Almost like, to change someone else’s bike tire you have to have a license. Not kidding. ‘Cause barbers have to have a license, hair dressers have to have a license, everybody has to have a license. Some of the things doesn’t make a lot of sense. Really? I need a license to … It’s crazy.

There are too many licenses out there. And I don’t mean to give them a hard time. I just want to make sure that … Gosh, at a certain level, maybe financially, or maybe because your time and your job and your family, whatever. You need an agent. You’re moving somewhere way across country, you do not have the time or the resources to get to know the areas. Sure, God, that makes sense. Pick a great one. [crosstalk 00:12:44]

Jack Butala:                       That’s right, Jill. Or you’re relocating.

Jill DeWit:                           Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. They’re gonna earn their money.

Jack Butala:                       They’re gonna earn they’re fee. And that’s the big difference, Jill. You nailed it. If you’re doing a deal, and they’re just slapping a sign on the ground, taking three pictures, putting it on the MLS, because you live in a market like in southern California, Where everything sells in 13 minutes. All they’re doing is getting in the way of your deal.

Jill DeWit:                           Right. So that’s some of it, that’s true. How many people that we talk to that said, “I don’t know why its not listed yet. I got it ready for the photographer and then this, and Oh my gosh I guess I’m gonna have to hold my own open house.” Not kidding, I had people said, “I held my own open house, and I baked the dumb cookies.” And I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.”

But yet, there’s some agent out there that – I do know some agent that have literally rolled up their sleeves, shown up on a Saturday and helped rearrange furniture. There’s not a lot of them but I do know some, and that’s cool.

Jack Butala:                       We’re working on a portal so that anywhere in the country you can input a very small amount of information and say, “I do want to sell my house.” And nobody gets in the way. Nobody gets in the way of the deal, and its then for sale. That’s it. And then we facilitate that transaction. We don’t represent anybody. And for a very small fee, that’s what happens.

Jill DeWit:                           And it’s just gonna be the cost of doing business, pretty much, for us. Not like six percent, or three percent times two on both ends. So, here’s my [inaudible 00:14:18] too.

If I’m selling my house by the way, I can either go through an agent and pay them the money so I gotta mark it up that much. And it might sit longer ’cause I had to mark it up that six percent or I don’t mark it up that six percent. I go on this website, [inaudible 00:14:34] that we’ve got coming up some day. Or just even the way we’re talking about just do it on my own. Hey I’m listing my home by myself and I’m saving you and I six percent on this deal. I’m happy with that. Hope you are too.

Jack Butala:                       It turns out that we’re experts, and our members are experts at getting the word out that a piece of property’s for sale for less than retail value. I mean that’s what we all do for a living, after we find it. [crosstalk 00:14:59]

Jill DeWit:                           If you’re actively on Facebook I’d be very surprised if you have never seen a home roll by your stuff for sale[crosstalk 00:15:07] there’s a reason why people are doing that, it’s brilliant. Thank you, Jack.

Jack Butala:                       I love this title, Jill.

Jill DeWit:                           Thank you.

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 every day to buy property for half of what its worth and sell it immediately.

Jack Butala:                       You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill DeWit:                           Thank you for letting me have this week to get a few things – I had a few points I had to get across. [crosstalk 00:15:38]

Jack Butala:                       I guess. It’s a blast.

Jill DeWit:                           Thank you.

Jack Butala:                       No, you know, it’s not so much that real estate agents are awful. They’re not. In a lot of cases they really are necessary. But the way that technology has, for what ever reason, has changed a lot of things. Think of Uber, and really the way that we’re connected has changed in a tremendous amount of stuff. It has not, for whatever reason, trickled up or down to buying and selling a house, and I think we’re gonna change that.

Jill DeWit:                           I think we are.

Jack Butala:                       Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.

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