Sending Offers to Owners Overview (LA 816)
Sending Offers to Owners Overview (LA 816)
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: I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California.
Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about sending offers to owners. It’s an overview. And byy the way, all week this week is getting your offer in the mail week.
Jill DeWit: Cool. Why is this popular, Jack, Steven?
Steven Butala: Why does it sound to Jill and I like we’ve been talking our heads off about this topic?
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: It’s popular. It’s pretty highly requested, and because we just got done with our first live event …
Jill DeWit: That was the biggest hangup, I think.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: It’s just getting them.
Steven Butala: So we decided to alter what we’re talking about this week.
Jill DeWit: I’d like to quote Luke Smith. He just said, “Just get the dang offers in the mail.”
Steven Butala: Yep. It was a little more expletive than that.
Jill DeWit: But it’s true. It’s like … We’ll talk about it more, I’m sure.
Steven Butala: It’s like that Nike slogan. It’s as simple as that, just do it.
Jill DeWit: Yep, it is.
Steven Butala: Before we get into the show, though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Chris asks, “I just pulled back and list and have noticed many of the properties have patented vacant listed as a property usage on the assessor’s website.” I guess he pulled a back tax list or something? I’m not sure what the first part means.
Steven Butala: We’ll see here in a second.
Jill DeWit: All right. “The others are listed as residential vacant. Does anyone [stand 00:01:42] exactly what patent-”
Steven Butala: Patent.
Jill DeWit: … patent vacant was? My voice is still not back from last weekend.
Steven Butala: I know, neither is mine. I apologize in advance, both of us.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh.
Steven Butala: How many words did we just say?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know.
Steven Butala: This whole weekend.
Jill DeWit: I don’t know, a lot. “I’m not finding much on Google. I’m just wondering if this causes any issues with the building or the property. Thanks.” Patent vacant.
Steven Butala: This topic came up in the live event quite often, because we actually did a mailer, or most of us did, or some of us did.
Jill DeWit: We’re still waiting.
Steven Butala: Here’s the thing about land use. It’s different in every county. When you look at the spreadsheet, here’s what RealQuest does, they’re an aggregator. They don’t create this data. They have agreements and contracts with every, all 3,144 or whatever number of counties that they cover. It’s over three thousand.
Jill DeWit: Assessors.
Steven Butala: And the way that they get their data varies widely. Some of it have a direct EPI from really urban counties, the really rural ones, literally they have people type it in. So that column in that spreadsheet called LandUse, means different stuff to different assessors. In fact, it’s widely varied. So patented land means something in the county that you’re in. And there’s no way to find out what that is from us or from RealQuest or Google.
Jill DeWit: Or Google.
Steven Butala: The only place you can find out what that means is from the county assessor. Potentially, planning and zoning, so you’re going to have to get them on the phone and find out.
Jill DeWit: It’s a good point.
Steven Butala: This brings up, this is a perfect actual question for this week and what we’re doing.
Jill DeWit: Yes.
Steven Butala: When you pull data, you want to play around with it. Quite extensively for several hours actually. And really get in there and find out what it means, what is doesn’t mean and apply a lot of logic. Do I want to send offers to people who own property that zoned industrial? Do I want to send it to vacant NEC? Do I want to send to classified as single family residential? Just apply logic. If someone gets an offer for $4,000 on a piece of property that’s vacant in an urban and zoned for multi-family, that’s probably not going to work and you might be wasting fifty cents. So you really have to apply logic and send offers that are appropriate for the prices that you put in the offer.
You can’t just slam it out there and just say, I don’t know, we’ll see what happens.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: This is what those guys told me to do, so I’m going to do it. It’s your company.
Jill DeWit: Well, we talked about this weekend too was, this is the important part of the whole process is what you’re doing right now. It’s worth spending a little time making those calls and getting to really understand what that means for that specific county and don’t assume it’s the same two counties over, cause it’s probably not.
Steven Butala: Right. Certainly not two states over.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic: sending offers to owners, an overview. This is the meat of the show. So like Jill said, we covered this extensively in our live event. But here’s an overview of what it’s like, and how you should be approaching sending offers to owners and why it’s so important. You get access to a database. You don’t buy a list from China. You don’t have a VA go around and figure out who owns what. All that stuff’s already done for you. I made all those mistakes over the last two decades for everybody.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Steven Butala: And the right way to do it is to get a subscription to some data, somewhere. This is not a commercial, we have aggregated the top three assessor databases. We’re licensed providers and there’s no place that you’re going to get more education and where it’s going to be cheaper. This is not a commercial, I’m just telling you the facts. And if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. Many people succeed without it.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: But anyway, find a reliable place to pull data and in our case for land, and our group and we use RealQuest, RealQuest Pro. And the concept is, you pull a bunch of data out of RealQuest for people that own vacant property in a certain area that you’ve identified. It might be by zip code, might be by county, might be by state. Some people send the whole state out and it works for them. I think that’s crazy but that’s what they do.
You got a data set, you merge it, you run a mail merge and the documents that we provide on offers to owners, we provide both documents in perfect format. Both the Microsoft Word document and the Excel document.
Jill DeWit: A letter template, which is your offer.
Steven Butala: And a spreadsheet data that’s behind it.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: You literally merge them into a PDF so that you have thousands and thousands and thousands of offers. All of them are different prices, they’re all being sent to individuals. It’s actually pretty cool if you ever see it.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Don’t trust us, go out on YouTube and type in mail merge and watch somebody do it, it’s pretty amazing. You’ll see the value to it. Once you have that PDF, you get it in the mail and that’s what offers, offerstoowners.com, a company that we own, does for you. You don’t have to use us, you can lick a stamp if you like. I’m just saying, we made the mistakes for twenty years, you don’t need to.
Jill DeWit: Every company, every time we name this company, it’s a tongue twister, I just realized. Offers to Owners is hard to say sometimes and then what it used to be was Data to Doorstep. That was a tongue twister too sometimes, that’s so funny. The point here is, are you really saving time hand writing them? No, I mean, if you…
Steven Butala: Stay motivated. Jill ordered, oh I’m sorry, I’m interrupting you.
Jill DeWit: That’s okay.
Steven Butala: This is not a commercial either. We have, all the companies….
Jill DeWit: I still have those mugs around.
Steven Butala: All the companies we ever started, Jill orders stuff. This is about five companies ago.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steven Butala: It’s called Stay Motivated, you can see it if you’re watching.
Jill DeWit: JillDeWit.com is what it says on there, that’s so funny. That’s good.
Steven Butala: Oh yeah.
If you’re watching this and not listening, this is interesting for you. If you’re listening, you’re probably bored as hell.
Jill DeWit: Yes, thank you.
Steven Butala: Sorry Jill, go ahead.
Jill DeWit: So, anyway, I kind of lost my train of thought. But the big picture here is, and we talked about this a lot, getting offers in the mail and in peoples hands immediately takes so much of the work out of this. Justin brought up a comment that he was standing in the back of an REI group and he was…
Steven Butala: Justin Sleva. (inaudible)
Jill DeWit: Yes, Justin Sleva, who is in our community and just killing it. Anyway, Justin Sleva was mentioning that he was in the back of an REI group and they were talking about trying to get wholesale offers and negotiate wholesale deal with sellers. And Justin asked the comment “How many times do you guys communicate before you’re talking about the price and it’s in the price that you want?” And it was multiple times, so imagine, hey are you interested in selling? Yes, I am interested in selling. Well I’m a wholesaler. Well, that’s nice, tell me about what you guys do. And here’s the kind of I’m looking to buy.
Steven Butala: Sixth phone call. Seventh phone call. Seven phone calls you find out you can avoid all that.
Jill DeWit: Right. Instead of, imagine this, this is what Justin does successfully. For not only land, just for multi-unit apartments and (inaudible) like we do. Justin sends out an offer to that individual using the mail merge, using our offerstoowners, and using our data. That it’s going to go straight to the right people, with an offer price in there, and he only communicates with them if they get that offer and it passes their test and they want to do the deal. That’s it. Talk about easy. And how much time and money is saved.
Steven Butala: If you’re serious about this, go to offerstoowners, this is all free, offerstoowners.com. Pull down the letter template.
Jill DeWit: Under forms.
Steven Butala: The offer template that Jill’s talking about. It’s imperative. Well, there’s multiple important things but there’s two reasons why we do so well with direct mail and our members do and other people don’t. Number one, ours contains a custom purchase price that you calculate on the spreadsheet that ends up on the offer. Number two, it’s sent out to an individual. So, it’s sent out to John and Mary Smith at 123 Main Street regarding their property in Mojave County, Arizona. We’d like to offer you $2,158.31.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: And every one of them are different. So they believe, here’s the key, here’s the meat of the show, the take-away. John and Mary Smith believe that we only submitted one offer, we sent out 10,000 offers in Mojave County.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: But they believe that they are special, and that they have an offer and that we have an interest in that piece of property only for some reason, which is why we offered them a really weird number. We didn’t offer them $6,000. And we tell them when we are going to close. So there’s a lot of little things that go on in these offers that really matter and all throughout this week, we’ll really get into the details.
Jill DeWit: It’s so well done, I just realized, we kind of realized together this weekend, all of us. Why we get the phone calls when we reach out with these offers to people, there are some that don’t want to sell, sure. And there’s some that definitely don’t want to sell at our price, heck yeah, that’s obvious. So it’s funny when they call us back, why are they so..why do they call us back, why don’t they just throw it away. And we figured it out which is, if you get a pizza flyer or you get something that says Dear Customer, you’re not going to call a guy back and say Hi, I’m the one that you addressed it to dear customer, please don’t mail me. No, you’re going to throw it away, you know it’s a waste of time.
But, when you, in your heart, think that you’re the only one that got this offer, you’re like, hey I need to call this person and let them know they’re wasting their time here. Don’t do it again, I’m not interested, don’t send me anymore documents, don’t start the process. So I think that’s why they do reach back out, which is really funny. But, the other side of the coin is, we talked about this together, all of us too, is some of the group, as I do, believe that sometimes when they pick up the phone, there’s a reason for it. Sometimes, they’re bored, that’s true. But sometimes there still might be a deal there. And it’s worth..I’m glad that generated a phone call that you can have that conversation.
Steven Butala: It’s really interesting because we had this live event and I learned a lot. What kind of surprised me is the wide variance. These are people that, it was a beginning event for Land Academy, people that were just starting. And Jill and I chose to have two of our star performing members, Luke Smith and Justin Sleva, there to help us answer questions and it was shocking to me how different we all approach meeting the same goal in the end. Which is making money flipping land.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steven Butala: Really different approaches. You know, I don’t believe in conversion and Jill believes in it and both of those guys did so that tells me something. I’m surrounded by extremely successful people and my way is wrong. I justified not caring about conversion by just sending out more mail.
Jill DeWit: Which is not crazy.
Steven Butala: So, cause I don’t want to talk on the phone as much.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: I would rather just send out twice as much mail and just get the ones that are easy, and that are signed and done and easy and close them. And so, Jill, Justin and Luke are more of a get on the phone and kind of convert them. Which is maybe more efficient, I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: I think you and Luke are more on the same page and Justin and I are more on the same page.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Cause Luke does blast out, he’ll blast a state at a time and just take the little hanging fruit and that’s awesome.
Steven Butala: Both way works. Anyway, all week this week is get your offers in the mail. It’s mail week.
Jill DeWit: Get your dang offers in the mail.
Steven Butala: So, by the end of the week, there should be no questions left.
Jill DeWit: Awesome.
Steven Butala: That’s my goal.
Jill DeWit: Good.
Steven Butala: Well, you did it again, you spent another 15 minutes or so listening to the Land Academy show. Join us next time where we talk about the concepts of a mail merge 101.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted in our online community, landinvestors.com, it’s free.
Steven Butala: You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. That was so much fun, that live event.
Jill DeWit: I know, I can’t, it took us two days after, the hoarseness is setting in.
Steven Butala: I was just thinking, while we’re recording this, what’s it going to take. How much do we have to actually talk before our vocal chords shut down on our body and say, that’s it.
Jill DeWit: We’ll know tonight. Share the fun by subscribing on iTunes and YouTube. And, while you’re at it, please rate us there.
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