House Academy is Coming (JJ 617)
House Academy is Coming
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi!
Jack Butala: Welcome to the Jack Jill Show. It’s here that we provide entertaining real estate investment advice. I’m Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: Yes we do, and I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting still from sunny Southern California, but next week it’s gonna change.
Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about House Academy, and it’s coming! What is it? It’s our next company release, next year.
Jill DeWit: Yay! What is it, Jack?
Jack Butala: What is house academy?
Jill DeWit: What is it, Jack? What is that?
Jack Butala: I will answer that question. Before I do, though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members.
Jill DeWit: I have to wait? I have to work?
Jack Butala: Well, you’ve heard of LandAcademy.com, where you’re not alone in your real estate ambition about land investing. Well, turns out same thing’s happening, only times 80 with houses for us right now. We decided to share it with everyone.
Jill DeWit: Gee, could it be because the whole planet is asking for it?
Jack Butala: Yes, that’s exactly why.
Jill DeWit: Possibly. This question is from our online community, JackJill. You can find it off JackJill.com, and it is free. Joe M wrote, “Does anyone out there deal in attorney states? I have a few residential spec builders asking me to find lots.”
Jack Butala: So, before we get into this question, there’s states that you can close transactions with through a title company, or an escrow company, and there’s states that you have to choose, or you have to close through lawyers. Of course, all of them, what they never tell you is that you can actually walk the deed in, or send the deed in yourself and do your deed. This is a lot of what we teach here. But there’s a perception out there of these “Attorney States” where you need a lawyer to close your real estate deal. So go ahead, Joe.
Jill DeWit: “I’ve already negotiated a deal with an attorney to facilitate the close for $500 per property. Are there any things to watch out for that I should consider besides the longer closing timeframe due to having an attorney involved?”
Well, that’s for sure.
“My plan is to delegate the majority of the due diligence to the builders, so that they can determine if the leads are viable options. Naturally I will require some form of non-compete clause on any leads I provide them. If a lot meets their criteria, I will get it under contract and sign it over for a pre-determined price. Any insight would be appreciated.” -Joe
Jack Butala: I love the take on this. That’s the good news here is that you’re dealing with professional people in a business instead of end-users, you’ve pre-negotiated with a lawyer, so at $500 a property, which is really cheap, there’s probably a lot of properties that you’re dealing with. That’s good. All this lawyer is gonna do, by the way, is call First American Title or some large company and get a title insurance policy for you and check the stuff that our staff checks.
Jill DeWit: What does that look like?
Jack Butala: I’m not gonna do much, but that’s okay. It’s a good peace of mind. So, do I have any good insight? No, I think you’re doing everything right. I would, if there’s tons and tons of property and you don’t own it, you don’t completely control it, be careful of the people that are professionals in this business, like home builders, because they might want to snatch them.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, that’s the thing, especially until you really build a relationship, err on the side of having your hand in a lot of it. I would keep an eye on these.
Jack Butala: This is a good time to bring up the concept of equitable title. Equitable title means you control the property. You might not own it, maybe you didn’t even pay for it, but for whatever reason you retain and control the decision making on that property.
So if you have equitable title in a property for $8,000, and you sell it for $28,000, then good for you! You keep the $20,000, and the person is forced to, if it’s a legally binding contract, the seller take the $8,000 and that’s it.
I would look into that on this transaction, or some version of it.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Thank you!
Jack Butala: Today’s topic? HousingAcademy.com is coming. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: Oh, I’m so excited.
I just have to tell you Jack. I have had floods, so many questions, people reaching out, in a variety of places. Social media, you name it, because this word’s getting out that we are now about to do this. So I just wanna prep you that I’m excited and I’m gonna have a lot of questions here for our people.
Jack Butala: Jill and I have been buying and selling houses in the background of Land Academy for years, and we’ve been talking about it, I guess in a spotty way, on the shelf. We certainly talk about it with our members on the Thursday call.
We talk about it a lot! So people are asking us, “Land Academy is great, and we’re jogging along, but I’d like the spotty throw-ins from … I would like to taint my investing recipe with houses. Like, my land investing recipe with houses.”
Jill DeWit: I just love the way you put the spin on these things. Yesterday it was “blatant damn lies”, today it’s “our spotty whatever”
Jack Butala: So it turns out I started writing it a while ago, just like Land Academy. We’ve been doing this for ourselves for a long time. And then I have to cohesively and coherently get in front of the camera, and do a program.
Jill DeWit: Jack! That’s it! Let’s back up. Let me just throw this out here. Hold, please.
There’s two reasons we end up doing programs like this. Number one, like Land Academy, our buyers are coming to us, going, “All right, knock it off.”
No, seriously!
“We’re buying it from you, we’re marking it up, we’re still making some money. How the heck are you buying it so cheap? We want you to teach us.”
And we held off, held off, held off, finally we did, and huge success. So, same thing is now happening with House Academy. But now it’s a double whammy, because not only are we getting it from our current Land Academy members, but other people who already learned about us, and our home wholesale people. This is something they’re asking for too, because, let’s be honest, we know how to buy it right.
Jack Butala: The reason I never separated it, or even thought about doing this is because I’m like, y’know, if you have the data, then you’re just gonna go buy some houses anyway. It turns out, for whatever reason, people need more instruction than that, and that’s fine.
Even now, if you go on LandAcademy.com and you look up membership, you’re gonna see that the membership to Land Academy is, it flows into buying different types of real estate. Maybe you don’t want to make a career out of it, you just want to buy your primary residence or a cabin lot. All that stuff’s kinda in there, but what we’re getting a request for from everywhere now is, I don’t really wanna buy land, don’t care about land, I wanna buy houses. Or I already buy houses; I bought some stuff from you guys, in fact. Just teach me how to do the house thing, let’s separate it. I don’t care about landpen.com, I don’t care about these other things you guys do with land, I just want to know about houses. How does it work? Here’s my money.
Jill DeWit: And there are some nuances. I guess that’s it, too …
Jack Butala: It’s really different.
Jill DeWit: It is.
Jack Butala: I’ve written the program that we’re now filming. A perfect example is … It’s very different. A perfect example is, we buy property, or land, we sort the data through on a county basis, but you can’t … if you sent a letter to every person, house in a given county, it’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Jill DeWit: It’d be a pain in the …
Jack Butala: It’s not effective. You have to price it neighborhood by neighborhood.
Jill DeWit: What’s interesting is, the whole big picture concept is the same. But every property type, let’s be honest, like you just said, it really has a different way of doing things, looking at them, pricing them, sending out the offers, and being strategic. Because you don’t want to waste your time or your money.
I mean, if you send out stupid offers all over the planet, homes are different. Houses are different. We know this because we’ve done it. I’m excited because I know this is leading down the path to other property types.
Jack Butala: Like commercial? Strip malls and stuff?
Jill DeWit: Apartment Academy, who knows?
So, I know that stuff’s coming. Industrial Academy! I don’t know about that.
Jack Butala: Industrial Property Academy?
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: I don’t think so.
Jill DeWit: Run.
So what can you … Jack, please, will you share some of the nuances?
Jack Butala: Sure! So we’re kicking around the format of how we’re gonna convey the actual education piece, but I’ll tell you. I always say this. What is the same is the monthly membership will include access to licensed providers for DataTree, which is First American Title’s data arm, and with Land Academy it’s RealQuest. There’s a bunch of reasons for that, but I can tell you.
The stuff that we learned from starting Land Academy, which is the first time that we’ve ever done anything like that, all the things that we’ve learned and the mistakes that we’ve made with that are getting solved and celebrated. And we’re doing it correctly with House Academy. It’s simpler. We expected to come to the table with a little bit more this time, a little bit more experience. Some of the back office stuff that we talk about, like having somebody answer your phone, we leave a lot of that out.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, there’s some details that …
Jack Butala: This is a little bit higher level of professionalism. The big premise of the program is, we advocate finding a buyer of the property, finding the person who’s actually going to renovate it, like we talked about yesterday, the HGTV people. Find that person that’s gonna do the work because they have all the money, and the local contacts and all that. All they really want is the deals. They pass of the deals, and then they close it and pay you. So it takes all the sales out of it, and waiting. Sometimes you gotta wait for land to sell it; there’s nothing like that involved in this.
It’s shorter! Truth be told, the program’s a lot shorter, because the sales is removed. So that’s good.
How to use DataTree is a pleasure. It’s like driving a car that’s got power steering and an automatic transmission. I mean, you’re still gonna get there in the same amount of time, …
Jill DeWit: Versus a model T?
Jack Butala: But you know, you don’t have to shift and you don’t have to wrestle with the steering wheel, but the result is the same.
Jill DeWit: I’m dying to share more. Is there any little secrets that we could share?
Jack Butala: Secrets? Like what?
Jill DeWit: Let’s see.
Jack Butala: I’m excited as heck! I mean, we have a tremendous number of pre-orders. That’s exciting for us.
Jill DeWit: Oh, I know one that’s kinda cool. We’re working out closing the transactions. Let me back up. House Academy will be a lot like Land Academy in that it’s start to finish. It’s gonna be all the way through to closing the deal. Not just having the asset, but having it sold. And that’s part of it, because you’re doing it on the front end. So that’s really cool.
Jack Butala: We’ve talked about it on this show before. When you find a buyer who’s a house renovator, and let’s say they have 6 or 7 projects going on right now, they’re gonna tell you exactly what they want.
“Oh, ya know, I want a house for less than $125 a foot, in this little neighborhood.”
Or in this Zip Code, or whatever, and you go find it, and it is that easy. Jill was talking about that a couple weeks ago. People expect this to be hard, for some reason. They expect there’s just this magical Midas touch that we have that closes deals, and it truly is not. Once you learn correctly how to use data, and put all the people in their right place, who are good at closing deals or whatever you need, this is not complicated.
It’s really complicated for certain people who are uncomfortable on a computer, are really uncomfortable with math or data, or are just really struggling with the 21st century way of doing things with Google and solving your own problems on the internet, which is second nature to younger people. And I include us in that.
Jill DeWit: You’re right. I think that’s the biggest takeaway that people are gonna get from House Academy, which is to stop driving around, driving for dollars, seriously. Stop hitting up … The holidays are coming, stop hitting up everybody at every family reunion to find out who might be selling, and who’s dying. Seriously!
Jack Butala: People don’t do that.
Jill DeWit: Yes they do! I’m not kidding.
Jack Butala: Jill, seriously?
Jill DeWit: I am not kidding. I have heard crazy stories of people, “Did you hear that? I just overheard so-and-so’s thinking about selling. We gotta talk to them first before anybody else does.”
Seriously!
Jack Butala: That’s insane.
Jill DeWit: I know. So, that’s the funny thing. People just … You have to grasp this whole new computer concept, that’s my whole thing. It’s so funny. We have computers now. You don’t have to do this stuff the hard way anymore. That’s it! That’s really the secret, if you will, just figure out data and make it work for you.
Jack Butala: Here’s the secret to buying a house that is cheap. Get your act together, put a website out there that says, “Hey, I’m Jack and Jill, here’s a picture of our dog” and stuff, even though we don’t even have one, but make yourself a normal person. Understand and educate yourself for about six months about how to manipulate data, how to use data and send it out. We cover all of that in a tremendous amount of detail in this program. And then get some offers in the mail, and get them in at about 70%-80% of what you think you could sell the property for overnight, without ever seeing it or renovating it.
“Yeah, well, Jack! It’s not that simple!”
Jill DeWit: I love it when you do that. You make me laugh every time.
Jack Butala: You know what? It is that simple, I’ve left a lot of details out. The details are in the program.
“Well, what about if somebody tries to steal our … ” Yeah, we have all the answers for that, because it’s happened to us!
You need what we call boots on the ground. If you’re from Los Angeles and doing this in Indiana, you need somebody there to …
Jill DeWit: Oh, that’s a huge thing too. You’re right. What we’ve been doing forever is the stuff with Land Academy. You can do it from anywhere. This is a whole different ball game.
Jack Butala: You can do it from anywhere, you just need to have somebody who’s not licensed in that state, making sure that stuff is going well. And it’s really easy to find those types of people.
So yeah. Is it that simple? Yes, it is. Are there a bunch of details that you have to overcome, like with any business, and anything that goes on? That seemed to trip some people up for some reason. Are there all those with this, too? Yeah!
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: But it’s really funny because, I don’t know, 90% of the people we deal with overcome those issues.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Jack Butala: Mostly because they just listen to us.
Jill DeWit: I agree. Like me. I listen. I hang on every word you say. That’s what I’m doing right now.
Jack Butala: Yeah right.
What if that was true? How boring would it be to be with somebody that’s like, “Oh my god, you’re so brilliant.”
Jill DeWit: “Oh, what would I do without you?”
Jack Butala: That would be awful.
Jill DeWit: But if I really ran around quoting you, that would be hilarious.
Jack Butala: Yeah, or vice versa.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh. I’m glad you like that.
Jack Butala: That’s what Land Academy is all about.
Not Land Academy. Listen, it’s gonna take a while for me to get up to … House Academy is what it’s all about.
Jill DeWit: That is hilarious. Whoops.
Oh yay, I’m excited.
Well, you’ve done it again! You’ve wasted another 20 minutes maybe, listening to the Jack Jill Show.
Jack Butala: Join us tomorrow, when we discuss how to use your real estate agents as an investor.
Jill DeWit: Or just how to use a real estate agent.
Just kidding.
And we answer … I have a lot to say about that tomorrow, I’m excited. I’m gonna use a different tone when I say that.
We answer your questions. Should you have one, post it on JackJill.com, our online community. Go find it there. It’s free.
Jack Butala: You’re in a good mood today! I’m really happy, actually.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. I know, because it’s your birthday week and I’m having fun.
Jack Butala: Yeah, you are, aren’t you?
Jill DeWit: We’re just celebrating the whole week. It’s awesome.
You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jack Butala: You’re reading my lines, too!
You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: Sorry.
Jack Butala: You’re cracking me up today, man!
Jill DeWit: I know, sorry.
Jack Butala: It’s all good.
Jill DeWit: We’ve been celebrating this week and so it’s just been kind of fun.
Jack Butala: It might be safe to say …
Jill DeWit: Did you get some good birthday messages on social media?
Jack Butala: Yeah, I did on social media and texting, too. My whole family is just going nuts this year for some reason.
Jill DeWit: How many people have you had delayed, like, “Oh, shoot! It’s Jack’s birthday!” Because it’s close to Christmas.
Jack Butala: None. This year, none.
Jill DeWit: Really? Everybody was kinda Johnny-on-the-spot?
Jack Butala: Yeah. I don’t know why. It’s actually really, really unusual. All my family has texted me. That never happens.
Jill DeWit: Oh, good! It’s good that I dropped the ball. It’s okay, then.
Jack Butala: You didn’t drop the ball!
When did you drop the ball?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know.
Jack Butala: You know what happened? You bought … you got me a birthday gift that I deemed too expensive and unnecessary.
Jill DeWit: I know. I’m still scratching my head about that.
Jack Butala: I’m sorry, Jill, I just can’t get my head around the whole thing.
Jill DeWit: Well, I kind of have it on hold. I’m hoping you’re going to wake up and change your mind.
Jack Butala: I’m not.
Jill DeWit: All right. Well, it’s one of those I can’t surprise you, because it’s really … you have to pick it out.
Jack Butala: It’s all custom made and everything.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: And I seriously do not need that kind of stuff. But I appreciate the sentiment.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
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