Record Your Own Deed Stories (JJ 694)
Record Your Own Deed Stories (JJ 694)
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack and Jill here. Hello.
Jill DeWit: Good day.
Jack Butala: Welcome to the Jack and Jill Show, entertaining Real Estate Investment Talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And I am Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny, Southern California.
Jack Butala: Today Jill and I talk about recording your own deed and all the stories that surround that. Seems to be, in particular, that topic has some crazy, crazy stories. I know I have nutty, crazy stories about recording my own deeds.
Jill DeWit: Because there’s always, always something that happens.
Jack Butala: There’s drama.
Jill DeWit: It is and it’s funny because I think people will talk about this more. They get unnecessarily hung up on it and it’s not that big of a deal.
Jack Butala: Right. There’s always drama. Maybe you don’t have it, but if you ask anyone if they have a good DMV story-
Jill DeWit: Yeah. There you go. That’s it.
Jack Butala: … it’s the same kind of thing.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. That’s true. No one ever comes back from the DMV going, “That was great.”
Jack Butala: “That worked out really. That was fast.”
Jill DeWit: “That’s how I wanted to spend my morning.”
Jack Butala: “It was fast, and I smell good.”
Jill DeWit: “And the coffee was great. And the people were pleasant and dressed well.”
Jack Butala: “Man, they picked a great location for this.”
Jill DeWit: “Parking lot’s a bree … did you know they have valet now?”
Jack Butala: “Great … great neighborhood.”
It’s the same thing recording deeds.
Jill DeWit: That’s exactly it. Recording a deed is like going to the DMV. Awesome. Thank you.
Jack Butala: Except the person that actually records it-
Jill DeWit: Oh, my gosh.
Jack Butala: … is just power hungry. They’re drunk with power.
Jill DeWit: I think they’re that way at the DMV though too, don’t you?
Jack Butala: Are they? I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: They’re like, “You know what? If I don’t push this button, you don’t get this license. You better be nice to me.” Okay.
Jack Butala: Before we get into that, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com, online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Okay, Fred asks, “Hello, I am learning about deed preparation and deed recording.”
Jack Butala: Oh, it’s perfect.
Jill DeWit: “And plan to use a title company for some deals. I was curious if anyone had any recommendations for a title company in either Northwest Arkansas or Park/Costilla Counties in Colorado. Thanks for your help.”
Well, Fred, we know where you’re buying.
Jack Butala: Yeah. Thanks for sharing. The first thing I do when I go into a new market … or if I were you. Let’s say this, if I’m doing one, a deal, I call the county recording and I ask them to recommend a mom-and-pop type escrow company that’s in close proximity to the county seat. And they usually will say something like this, “Oh, sir, I’m not allowed to do that. I can’t. That’s against the rules here. We don’t make recommendations. We play fair.” To which I say-
Jill DeWit: To which, play fair.
Jack Butala: … to which I say …
Jill DeWit: But if you send me, just kidding.
Jack Butala: “That’s brilliant bumpkin, then can you give me three names?” And they do.
Jill DeWit: And your other brother Earl. Darrell, Darrell, Earl, what was his name?
Jack Butala: Darrell.
Jill DeWit: Darrell. Sorry.
Jack Butala: All kidding aside, try to find a mom-and-pop, because you can really negotiate the price.
By the way, they’re looking to underwrite the deal through First American Title or Pioneer or one of the really large companies anyway. They just negotiated a fantastic deal with them, so you get all the power of the big title insurance companies and all the good price of the mom-and-pop escrow companies. It’s kind of divided into two.
Jill DeWit: Was hungry for the business.
Jack Butala: Yeah. You can get them as cheap as two, three, four hundred dollars especially-
Jill DeWit: And they have investor rates. If you say, “Hey, what’s your investor rate?” Most of them, they do offer a special thing for us, so that’s good.
Jack Butala: Jill and I are big enough so we went to two title companies and negotiated this deal. Anyway, so when we go to any of the offices we get a smoking deal. And because we’re resellers, what ends up happening is … you should ask them about this. I wouldn’t recommend it on a first deal. But how it works for us, is when we buy a piece of property through title we prorate it 50/50 with the seller. So let’s say it costs two grand. The seller pays a grand, we pay a grand, and then we say, “Hey, title agent, please leave this open because we’re going to sell it in 20 minutes anyway.” And then they cut us a smoking deal on the backend. Jill and I just sold a house for $300 or $400. All the fees at the backend.
Jill DeWit: It was like 500 bucks each.
Jack Butala: For a really expensive house so that worked out great.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. It was really good.
Jack Butala: There are all kinds of games you can play is what I … not games. It’s all open for negotiation.
Jill DeWit: Totally.
Jack Butala: They’re posted rates are not their real rates.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Took me a long time to realize that.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: Today’s topic, Recording Your Own Deeds and the Stories Surrounding That. This is the meat of the show. Give me a good story, Jill. Do you have one off the top of your head? I do.
Jill DeWit: Well, yeah. It just happened to my team. Poor Jen, I come like … “What are you doing?” She’s like, “Ah. This one came back again. I think it’s the third time.”
Jack Butala: I think it’s okay to name counties here.
Jill DeWit: I don’t even know what county it is to be honest with you.
Jack Butala: It’s Kern County. I heard her talking about it.
Jill DeWit: Oh, is it?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Oh, okay. I don’t know even know-
Jack Butala: Kern County, California.
Jill DeWit: Okay. I wasn’t even sure. I’m like, “What is it this time?”
It’s just like the check was off by 25 cents.
You know that’s …
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh.
Jill DeWit: Seriously. That’s the funniest one. So here’s one of my stories. So this is what’s goes on. Things happen and if it’s not perfect, they’re going to send it back. Even if the amount of the check is off by more than the postage costs to send it to you and turn around and send it back, they still do it.
One of the things I’ve learned is, I always tell my team, put a sticky note on there and tell them who you are, and thank you when you’re sending your deeds in, and sometimes, not all, but if it’s a nice note, they might call you and say, “Hey, since I’ve got your number here and everything. I just want to tell you, you’re off by $3 because you forgot this doc fee, whatever, for the extra copies. I’ll keep it on my desk if you mail it today.” That’s the cool people. So sometimes they’ll do that. So that’s my goal, but look, things always happen. Right Jack?
Jack Butala: Things always happen and you need to go into this with … this is some advice from somebody who’s been in the business for a long time. You need to completely and entirely adjust your attitude about recording your own deeds.
Jill DeWit: True.
Jack Butala: Because it’s just like the DMV, like we said-
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: … stuff’s going to happen.
Jill DeWit: Totally.
Jack Butala: You’re going to get somebody who doesn’t, for whatever reason, they personally believe that you should not be doing this deal. And it’s all centered around that. So the sooner you can defuse that, usually with baked good, and a sweet little, “You look beautiful today,” crap, whatever you can manufacturer, defuse it all at that, then they’re probably going to give you what you want.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: But they do not like, especially these rural counties, don’t like outsiders coming in and buying property for $500 a parcel.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: They take it personally.
Jill DeWit: They do.
Jack Butala: That’s really what the show is about.
Jill DeWit: They do.
Jack Butala: Here’s my story. I’ve got big huge stories and tiny little stories. I bought a piece of property. It was probably eight or nine hundred actual parcels from a guy who went through a foreclosure action and it was a long, long process for him, but he got a court order, and they did all the notice, and he foreclosed on a ton of property, and sold them all to me for one check on one deed.
I was skipping along. I was walking on the clouds for probably a month after that. We were selling these properties on the internet. I remember the deal. I paid $60,000 for all these properties and ended up making something close to two million dollars on it by the end of it. They were separated into two categories.
Several people got foreclosed on. He did all of this. I personally wouldn’t go through a foreclosure action, but he chose to do that. There was one owner and then all the other owners, like 400 owners. And the county happen to agree. The judge stamped both of them and I got two deeds and recorded them all in one. The deed that, for this one owner, they all agreed to [inaudible 00:08:08] this one owner that was a legitimate deal. This is the people at the county who have no authority. Literally, it’s the recorder sitting there eating a donut saying, “I personally agree with this large foreclosure. I do not agree with this 800 person foreclosure. In fact, some of my family members were in there.”
Jill DeWit: That’s why.
Jack Butala: So they took that and threw it away. And any properties that I tried to record, they didn’t record them. I went to go see the county supervisors, I had meetings with lawyers, I met the judge who stamped it. He said, “I understand your point, there’s nothing I can do.”
Jill DeWit: Wow. See it’s crazy.
Jack Butala: So you know what happened in the end of that?
Jill DeWit: No.
Jack Butala: I just dropped it.
Jill DeWit: You had so eat it.
Jack Butala: I eat it. I still made two million bucks on this whole thing.
Jill DeWit: Right. From the one guy, didn’t like the one guy that owned all the property, but all the little people that didn’t pay their bills, they deserve to not pay their bills. I don’t think that’s right.
Jack Butala: Through the course of this, the County Recorder, who’s no longer there, she said to me, “We don’t take kindly to evil yuppies from Scottsdale buying our land.” And that’s really what it was all about.
Jill DeWit: Wow.
Jack Butala: So tell a good story, Jill. You always come out shining on these things. Remember that story in Washington state.
Jill DeWit: Oh, I didn’t come out shining.
Jack Butala: We got that deal-
Jill DeWit: I got it done, but it was a lot of work.
Jack Butala: She was evil.
Jill DeWit: I had to jump through all the hoops that she wanted. This was the funny thing … they didn’t trust us because the guy was pretty much gifting us these properties.
Jack Butala: Price was too cheap, yeah.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, and I was doing it as a gift because there really wasn’t any money changing hands. She’s looking for something wrong. She’s calling him, the seller, to verify, which he did. And asking me because it was in my LLC, for all of my LLC docs, which is hilarious because she could’ve looked them up online herself.
And so here’s what I had to do. I had to play by her rules. I had to say, “Okay, Mrs.,” whatever her name was, and say, “I will do that.” I went online and printed out, same as she could, two copies, one for her, one for the assessor, and I mailed them to her with a nice note. Every time I would write a formal letter and I would say, “Per your request here are the two copies.” That’s just what you have to do sometimes. You have to play their games to get it done and that’s fine. It’s just silly.
So my whole point with all this stuff is, be ready for it. Something’s going to happen. Don’t get hung up on it. It’s not you. Just fix it and move on. That’s what I’m doing with my team right now. She’s like, “Oh, here we go again.” It’s going to be hilarious. We’re going to have a party when it someday comes back recorded. And it’s not that big of a deal, it’s just somebody … like Jack said. There’s just … I don’t know.
Why do they think they have so much power in this office? I don’t get it. Where does that come from?
Jack Butala: Seems to be more prevalent the older I get. Maybe it’s me or not, I’m not sure. I got a ticket one time. The kind you get on your wind … parking ticket, that kind, sent in the mail because I bought a bunch of properties in Oklahoma. The weeds got too big and I’ve recorded the deed and somebody found out. They looked at the mailing address was Arizona, Scottsdale and they sent me a bunch of tickets because my weeds were too … in these little town lots in a town in Oklahoma.
Jill DeWit: Did you pay it?
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh, no. I sold the property.
Jill DeWit: That’s so funny. So that’s like those speeding cameras, which I haven’t seen those in forever. Are they all gone? I don’t know. Remember those cameras on the freeway that they did, and they were hoping you would find it and pay it. We all knew just ignore it, throw it away. You didn’t get it.
Jack Butala: Yeah, so legally they had the right to do that, but you are not obligated by law to pay so they were just fishing.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Totally.
Jack Butala: It all comes down to that. That’s a good point, Jill. It comes down to that mentality.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: That follow the rules or die mentality.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I just bought some data, along these lines … this is kind of a rant … I’m enjoying this. I bought some data [forward 00:12:18] up from a Canadian company, or tried to. For whatever reason, they did not believe that my credit card was legitimate. They said, “We don’t believe this is legitimate. Please take a picture of the card, back and front and send it to us.” So I did. Then they said,” We still don’t believe it. Please take a card next to your driver’s license because we don’t believe this is correct.” So I did. Now we’re talking about … I’m starting to feel the heat in my head, you know?
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: This is potential … like bad.
Jill DeWit: You did more than I would’ve done.
Jack Butala: So finally they said, “We still don’t believe this. Take a picture of both of these cards, held up to your face so we can match the picture on your driver’s license,” at which time-
Jill DeWit: And hold today’s paper.
Jack Butala: … at which time, I blew my top.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, no way.
Jack Butala: I called the president of the company. He’s like, “Yeah, what she did was right.” So this all comes from this cop mentality, for lack of a better description.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I’ve never been like that. I know you’re not. I’m more of a, we’re all in this together.
Jill DeWit: Right. Let’s do the right thing.
Jack Butala: Let’s work together. I have a talent to buying cheap property. I’m happy to sell you some super cheap, cheap property.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Just be cool about it.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: I’m happy to pay my taxes.
Jill DeWit: Right. We’re recording it. We’re paying all the fees. You know what’s funny too, what’s interesting is the counties … the HOAs get it. The HOAs [inaudible 00:13:51] are excited that we are buying and selling these properties because we’re breathing new life into them, and they stand a much better chance with a new person of actually getting their fees paid and take these properties back. They’re excited thinking, “Okay, good. This person’s going to actually move in and live there and love it.”
The county for some reason doesn’t see it that way. I don’t know why.
Jack Butala: They see it as extra work. It’s recording deeds and there’s new stuff. I’ve heard every reason.
Jill DeWit: Isn’t that job security?
Jack Butala: They shouldn’t have an opinion about it at all. I don’t know, Jill. They should not have an opinion. No one should have an opinion about it at all.
Jill DeWit: That’s true.
Jack Butala: This thing about ticketing for weeds. If they would’ve called me and said, “Look, I understand you’re an out-of-state owner, but these weeds are ugly and here’s the name of Billy Bob that can really clean this stuff up for 50 bucks a month.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I would’ve been, “You know what? Thank you so much. I’m happy to do that.”
Jill DeWit: Makes sense.
Jack Butala: I do not want to inconvenience anybody.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I’m here to do the right thing, but to send me a ticket. It’s just there’s a right way to approach stuff.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: That’s all.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: That’s the end of my rant.
Jill DeWit: Thank you, Jack.
Jack Butala: Okay, that’s it. The vast majority of the time, you send in a ticket … you send in a deed and it gets recorded and everything’s fine.
Jill DeWit: Especially now with the online recording too.
Jack Butala: Yeah. You recor-
Jill DeWit: We’re doing that and it’s awesome.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: If all else fails, just like the [inaudible 00:15:09] question today. I think, let’s see, Fred asked. Hire a title company. They will do the work for you. Oh, that reminds me I have one additional story.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Bring it.
Jack Butala: This is Flagstaff, Arizona. I bought a bunch of property up there. A ton of it. This is before your time for $500 a property. It was completely unwanted real estate and it was really nice, tall pine trees, good access. It was a smoking deal for us. Made a lot of money. And the title agent who’s recording it is looking at all of this and she calls her husband and says, “This is criminal what these people are doing.” And so what does the husband do? Calls the seller and tries to buy it all for like $700 a property. To which, I reacted like you can imagine.
Jill DeWit: Believable.
Jack Butala: I ended up having to pay a little bit more for the property with the seller, because the seller was just as mad about it as I was.
Jill DeWit: Wow.
Jack Butala: It was a retired professional male guy who was like, “These people are-“
Jill DeWit: That’s like, that’s …
Jack Butala: ” … these people are criminals.”
Jill DeWit: That’s criminal what they’re doing.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: Talk about conflict of interest.
Jack Butala: I know.
Jill DeWit: “Oh, Not only, I’m not going to let you buy it-“
Jack Butala: Yeah, ethics.
Jill DeWit: Right. “… I’m going to buy it out from under you.” That’s horrible.
Jack Butala: So that always stuck with me, that deal because I could’ve lost that deal. If that guy wasn’t cool about it-
Jill DeWit: That’s horrible.
Jack Butala: … if the seller was not cool about the whole thing-
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: … and it ended up costing me more money, which is whatever. I mean, we make enough money, but it’s not … I’m always very conscious of that now in House Academy for some reason.
Jill DeWit: Oh, okay, got it.
Jack Butala: Not the escrow people at all, but I think the people that we resell the property to, that we wholesale them to, at some point are going to do some math and it might be a macho thing too where they’re like, “These people are not doing any work. They’re shuffling a bunch of paper around, marking these properties up $25,000, I want to do that.”
Jill DeWit: Well, they can.
Jack Butala: I want to be the quarterback.
Jill DeWit: It’s called House Academy, but they don’t want to do that.
Jack Butala: Coach, put me in the game. No, no you suck.
Jill DeWit: They can.
Jack Butala: Don’t suck.
Jill DeWit: Don’t suck.
Jack Butala: In the words of Tom Hanks, “Just don’t suck.”
Jill DeWit: Nice.
Jack Butala: Well, you’ve done it again. You’ve spent another 15 or 20 minutes with us listening to the land investors show. Join us tomorrow when Jill and I talk about land sales automation.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions, should you have one, post it on our online community at LandInvestors.com. Go there, it’s free.
Jack Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition. I have a million more of them.
Jill DeWit: I’m sure you do.
Jack Butala: Though your eyes are rolling back in your head a little bit.
Jill DeWit: Oh yeah, because it gets too much. It’s when people are new and they’re starting out, it’s exciting and fun and there are a lot of stories because always something.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: But after a while you’re like, okay. You can’t keep talking about this at your dinner table. Your kids are not going to show up and your wife’s gonna, I don’t know.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: We’re in it so we get it, but other people don’t.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: You need to be careful. You certainly can’t do it at a dinner party or you won’t be invited back.
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh.
Jill DeWit: Could you imagine.
Jack Butala: I could do another talk show I created.
Jill DeWit: People do want to hear though is like, “Dude, I bought this for 500 bucks and I just sold it for $5000.” They’re going to go, “What the heck?” That they want to hear, but they don’t want to hear is, “Then when I got to the recording, let me tell you want this lady did.” That’s what they don’t want to hear.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: That gets really old. Too fun. Share the fun by subscribing on iTunes or wherever you’re listening and while you’re at it please rate us there.
Jack Butala: We are Jack and Jill.
Jill DeWit: We are Jack and Jill.
Jack Butala: Information.
Jill DeWit: And inspiration.
Jack Butala: To buy undervalued property.
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