How to Plan and Execute an Offer Campaign (LA 761)
How to Plan and Execute an Offer Campaign (LA 761)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hello.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And I am Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how to plan and execute an offer campaign. This week is all about staying on track here in the land investment world. I’m going to approach it from a data/task standpoint. How are you going to approach this, Jill, because I know we do stuff differently.
Jill DeWit: That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Steven Butala: Yeah, it’s great.
Jill DeWit: We do things very differently. No, but I’m going to talk about the touchy-feely part and how that all works out.
Steven Butala: Okay, I know we do stuff so differently.
Jill DeWit: Very differently, so-
Steven Butala: But you should be celebrated. You’re right. It shouldn’t be like, “Oh my gosh, does she get it or not?”
Jill DeWit: What if we were both exactly like you?
Steven Butala: That would be terrible.
Jill DeWit: Or both exactly like me?
Steven Butala: That would be better.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: Than my first option, but-
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: This way is the best.
Jill DeWit: It’s best.
Steven Butala: Before we get into the topic today though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Okay, Bae asks, “I have sold a property for seller financing two months ago. I told the buyer that I am okay with him using the property to build his house while he’s in the financing stage. Two weeks ago the county emailed me and called and said that the buyers built an illegal shed without getting any approval. I contacted the buyer and asked them to tear down the structure, but he always finds an excuse to postpone the date and was not being responsible. The county was also getting sick and tired of her excuses and they decided to have a hearing next week-“
Steven Butala: Geez.
Jill DeWit: “Regarding this issue. They informed me that I will take full responsibility as a property owner. Therefore, I told the buyer if he’s not going to act on this by Friday, I will hire someone to tear down the building and bill him the cost. He’s mad and said that he will tear down the building, but at the end of the week, and walk out of his land contract. 1. What kind of paperwork do I need to send him to document the situation since he’s violating the building code and opts to terminate the contract? Does this require both parties to sign? 2. He has just paid the down payment. If he is the one who decided to terminate the contract, do I have the right to keep what he paid?”
Steven Butala: Yes.
Jill DeWit: “And, 3. Can I end the contract right away-“
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: “Without giving him any default period? Thanks in advance.”
Steven Butala: So this is hard to answer this question. That’s a great question.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: [inaudible 00:02:29] from the very beginning by the way-
Jill DeWit: Almost. Really, really, really on you.
Steven Butala: I’m glad to see it’s working for you. If it was our contract, if you used the one that kind of gets circulated that’s loosely based on the one that we use, he’s in default by the fact that he’s breaking the law.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: So in our contract we have multiple places it says you can’t use this property in any way that’s not in compliance with any type of local, national laws. Any of that stuff. So that, and then if you’re one day late on a payment, according to our contract, which it sounds like this guy is, it automatically terminates and it says right on the contract, our contract, we don’t have to do anything.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: We don’t have to give him notice. You don’t have to give me notice, but it terminates. It’s voidable, or voided.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: I think. Do we execute that that way? Almost never, unless somebody’s being a pain in the butt, like this guy.
Jill DeWit: Yes. We have 16 outs-
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Basically, to make sure that everybody is doing … The bottom line is, the guy should be doing the right thing. He should have done it the right way, contacted the county, make sure … Maybe it has to be a site-build structure, and he just rolled something up there. It could be as simple as that.
Steven Butala: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit: So-
Steven Butala: But I know what Jill is do is this, I think. She would call the county, make friends and say, “Look, I’m in a situation. I understand. I’m taking responsibility for this-“
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: “But I need you to be a little bit patient because I’ve got a rogue guy out there.”
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: So, “And I’m working on it, and we’ll get it done.” Just so that they understand that.
Jill DeWit: In that, and I see that picture because really you’re telling them as the property owner you do care-
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: And you are working on this. “Hey guys, give me some time. I’m trying to make it right.” Because at the end of the day everyone wants whoever’s using the property to love it, and enjoy it, and pay their taxes.
Steven Butala: Yep.
Jill DeWit: So if he’s trying to love it and enjoy it, and he’s doing it wrong, let’s just work on that.
Steven Butala: I’d be interested to know, Bae, if you can send in an email what county this is? I don’t want to tell the whole planet about it-
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: But … Because usually these rural counties, they don’t care.
Jill DeWit: I’m surprised-
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Whenever it’s an in-fill lot somewhere-
Steven Butala: Yes.
Jill DeWit: That everybody drives right by-
Steven Butala: Exactly, Jill.
Jill DeWit: And they see it, because most of these properties, especially if you’re in a large acreage out in the middle of nowhere, it’s going to take them years to say, “Huh, what’s that over there?” You know, kind of thing, and then who cares at that point because I’ve already driven by it 80 times.
Steven Butala: We’ve said this on the show a few times, well many times, over the years. This stuff’s all complaint-driven. The county responds to complaints. They don’t drive around and look for issues.
Jill DeWit: Good point.
Steven Butala: Especially in these rural counties. They’re just not staffed for that.
Jill DeWit: Good point.
Steven Butala: So, somebody is spilling the beans. Probably some neighbor that just doesn’t want to have a new neighbor.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, I think that you are 100% correct.
Steven Butala: You think we covered it?
Jill DeWit: I think we did.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, how to plan and execute an offer campaign. All this week, it’s staying on track in your land investing career. This is the meat of the show. So I put this title in here because I just implemented, because I’m filming Land Academy 2.0, I just implemented … I of all people, got tired of doing a weekly/monthly mailer.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: So I implemented one where I only have to do it once-
Jill DeWit: For like 90 days, or something.
Steven Butala: Yeah, it’s actually a quarter, right?
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: So that’s what I want to talk about today. You can get poll data and download tens of thousands of records the way that we had it all set up. I think, well actually I think the cap’s at 10,000, right?
Jill DeWit: No, 25,000 a poll.
Steven Butala: Oh, great.
Jill DeWit: Like, a month.
Steven Butala: I’m not sure how I’m [crosstalk 00:06:06]-
Jill DeWit: Or a poll. I can’t remember. Yeah.
Steven Butala: And then I broke it all down for the people at Offers to Owners to make it easy. I scrubbed all the data one time instead of a bazillion times, which is way, way easier in Excel, and cut it all up into weekly Wednesday releases. Then I just forgot about it for like a whole quarter, which has been … and shoved a new date a quarter ahead in the calendar. Its says, you need to go do it again for the next quarter. So I’m literally doing four mail campaigns a year.
Jill DeWit: But they go out weekly.
Steven Butala: But they go out weekly.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, so can I … So just to kind of break it down a little bit, so what that means … and it’s so much easier, too, sometimes because when you’re going in, say you’re going to send an offer, you’re going to do a mailer campaign and send offers to all of the five acre properties in X county. Instead of remembering what you downloaded, because some of our members, I know, have gotten confused.
And I’m like, “Oh gosh, should I have pulled a 4.8 to 5.0?” And then, “Did I do 5.1 to 5.4?” You have to keep track of it. You could do a whole big chunk, and that’s kind of what Steven did, like maybe you would pull the 4.81 to 5.11, whatever it is so you’re staring at 20,0000 records. Great. And you can … you’re doing less downloads and making it easier on yourself. But you don’t want to spend all the postage all at once. You don’t have the time to answer the phones all at once-
Steven Butala: Yeah, because you’ll just get slammed.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: Slammed with phone calls.
Jill DeWit: You’re not ready. You don’t have all the acquisition funds to do them all at once.
Steven Butala: Exactly, Jill.
Jill DeWit: But you know that I could send out maybe 3,000 a week or every week. I know my business, I know my life, I know what I can handle, and that’s about it. So you download all these records at once, you go through the whole thing of scrubbing, doing your pricing, doing your due diligence, if you’re looking … maybe you’re even getting … you’re a little further along, so you’re looking at APN schemes.
You had to price this area a little bit different from this area, so you do all of that at one time. Maybe spend a weekend on it. But, so this is the Steven way. That way, you’ve pretty much gone into your … You know, we joke about going into your dark hole for the whole weekend with your sandwiches, and getting this all done, but then when you come up for more air, now you’re done-
Steven Butala: You’re done.
Jill DeWit: And you just say, “Okay. Now I’m all done. I’ve got all this great, I have all this data, it’s all ready to go. My mailer’s great, and now I’m going to send it to Offers to Owners a week at a time.” You could even just say … have all your emails kind of ready to go and just say I’m going to send this one on this day-
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Send this one on that day, and then until it’s all budgeted out. You know what you’re spending, you have an idea of what your call volume is going to be. I mean, talk about easy. So, that’s what Steven did, and it’s just so great.
Steven Butala: That’s what it’s all about, making this easy on yourself and on your staff, or whoever is answering the phones. I wouldn’t recommend-
Jill DeWit: It really is easier doing it that way.
Steven Butala: Doing this … don’t do this the first time you’re doing a mailer, maybe even the first few times. Get used to using the data.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: The other thing that’s really helpful here, and if you’ve been in this business at all you know that it’s really tempting to buy 100 properties in one place really cheap-
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: But it’s hard to sell them. It’s not hard, they all sell eventually-
Jill DeWit: True.
Steven Butala: But you don’t want a bunch of lifetime property all the same time. So, you can download multi-county mailers this way.
Jill DeWit: That’s true.
Steven Butala: And you can say I want to do it in X, Y, Z Arizona, all the five acre properties in X, Y, Z Arizona. All the eight to 10 acre properties in X, Y, Z county California, and because the way the data comes out with Real Quest and Data Tree, depending on what you’re using, or Title Pro, it all comes out consistently. Here’s the key, this is the takeaway from this. If you do 10 downloads, just copy and paste it all into one master, and scrub the data that way. You don’t want to scrub 10 data files. You’ll be there all year. That’s the beauty of this, and then cut them back all up, depending on how you want to do it.
Jill DeWit: How you want the mail to go out.
Steven Butala: You could jumble them all up so five percent of each county goes out every single week.
Jill DeWit: I think that would be cool-
Steven Butala: Yeah, that’s not hard.
Jill DeWit: And that would be fun. Uh-uh (negative). Or, I would even do, to make it easier for your new, I would do week one is this, week two is this, week three is this, week four goes … Like we have three different sets: ABC, ABC, ABC, stuff for consistency.
Steven Butala: Exactly.
Jill DeWit: Then you know when the calls hit, okay this week … oh, here we go. Here come the Colorado calls. Okay, next week’s going to be the Arizona calls. The next week’s going to be the California calls.
Steven Butala: So from the time you submit, and this is pretty universal, the time that you submit a completed data set when you mail merge to Offers to Owners or anywhere, it takes about two weeks before it hits people’s doorsteps.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: So all you have to do is observe that two weeks one time with my concept here.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: Then, you just make sure that it’s constantly coming in.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: It works.
Jill DeWit: It does.
Steven Butala: We’re planning a live event, right?
Jill DeWit: We better.
Steven Butala: Where we cover this all-
Jill DeWit: I’ll be there.
Steven Butala: I mean, I’m going to … We’re actually … Everybody who comes to this thing. I’ll be there to.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I was going to say-
Steven Butala: I just gotta be at the front of the room.
Jill DeWit: Hello? And they’ll be looking at me like, “Right?” [inaudible 00:11:27] is scheduled and people are … There are still spots.
Steven Butala: Oh, okay.
Jill DeWit: If you are still listening and you want to do that. It’s not a secret. Go to LandInvestorsLive.com, and you can find the details there.
Steven Butala: And the actual people that are there, we will complete a mailer by the time you leave.
Jill DeWit: That’s the goal, man.
Steven Butala: The mailers will be completed.
Jill DeWit: You will. That’s to say you will be peer pressured. If you don’t think you’re going to be doing a mailer while you’re there, you will be peer pressured into a mailer. That’s the whole point of this.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Why would you not do one when this is the whole thing. That’s why I love we’re doing this. Have you, Steven, standing there blessing a mailer, looking them over with everybody, and that’s sort of keeping the script small too, it’s the coolest thing on the planet that you will be right there say, “Yep, that’s good. Do it. Here it comes.”
Steven Butala: So please come with the basic knowledge of Excel.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: And please, if you don’t know how to type between now and then, just learn how to type. That would be good.
Jill DeWit: That would be helpful, too. I love it.
Steven Butala: I just lost our script, I’m going to be really honest.
Jill DeWit: Oh, I can help you. Do you want me to help you?
Steven Butala: Oh, I got it.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: Oh.
Jill DeWit: I can help you. Well, you’ve done it again. You’ve wasted, I don’t know, another 10, 13 minutes listening to the Land Academy show. Join us next week where it’s … or, our next day-
Steven Butala: Tomorrow, yeah.
Jill DeWit: Excuse me, tomorrow, where it is buy property same day … buy the property the same day the seller calls. How’s that sound? And, we will answer your questions posted on our online community found on LandInvestors.com. It’s free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: Good thing I can ad lib.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: While you’re scrolling up and down.
Steven Butala: You know what that means really? What it really means?
Jill DeWit: What?
Steven Butala: Is I probably have to do some editing after this.
Jill DeWit: That’s okay. Last time I checked, you’re pretty good at that. Can you edit?
Steven Butala: I can edit.
Jill DeWit: Okay, good. Share the fun by subscribing on iTunes and wherever you’re listening. While you’re at it, please rate us there.
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Jill DeWit: And inspiration.
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