001 WELCOME!! Flipping the EASIEST type of RE: LAND
001 WELCOME!! Flipping the EASIEST type of RE: LAND
Transcript:
Jill DeWit: Welcome to Show #001. Flipping land is the easiest type of property. So, this is kind of an Intro to Land Academy with myself, Jill DeWit. We all know there’s money to be made in real estate, and there’s no better way to get started, which is flipping the easiest type of real estate possible: land. Rural, vacant land. I want to do this show to answer questions about getting started in flipping land and then how to transition onto moving into bigger transactions or other types of real estate.
Jill DeWit: I’m Jill DeWit. I am cofounder of Land Academy. And together with my partner, Steven Jack Butala, we have completed over 16,000 real estate transactions. Hard to believe. That’s a big number. Jack started in the ’90s. I came along in the 2000s. And here we are. And we’ve done it all. We’ve done rural vacant land, infield lots, houses, mobiles. Jack started in commercial properties. So we’ve covered every possible type of property and we keep coming back to land. And I wanted to answer a lot of questions with this show now. So ask away.
Jill DeWit: We all know that there’s money to be made in real estate, and most people are doing it wrong, by the way. And that’s what this is about also. That’s really the foundation of Land Academy, is trying to save you from doing it wrong and teach you how to do it right and to get going in real estate.
Jill DeWit: So this show, right now today, is gonna be about 20, 30 minutes. I’m gonna do it every week. And it’s for me to help you connect the dots. And in a few minutes, I’m gonna answer your questions. I’m gonna talk about a topic. I’m gonna kind of fill you in a little bit. I’ll have some time for some Q&A, and then at the very end, I have a great little special promotion that I want to offer everyone watching right now.
Jill DeWit: So, it’s so funny. Our friends see our lifestyle and they see us not working a lot. And they see us having a lot of fun. And their first thought is, of course, we must be drug dealers. So I have to [inaudible 00:02:42] past that. And we tell all our friends, no, it’s real estate, they all say, great, tell me how. This also comes up every dinner party we go to. It’s so funny. I often hesitate telling people what I do or what’s going on, because most of our dinner party conversations turn into these lengthy explanations about flipping land and how the heck we do it so easy and we make it look so easy, and how can they get in.
Jill DeWit: It’s so interesting that initially, people are excited, and they like the outcome. They think they understand the concept. But not all get it. And I want to think that you do, because you found us, and you are here watching right now. So I’m here to help you.
Jill DeWit: You know, if you really want to get ahead in real estate, the best way to get started is the easiest type of property. Don’t jump into house flipping. Don’t jump into everything you see on HGTV. You don’t want to jump into getting your commercial contractor’s license. That’s a lot of hard work and a lot of time and a lot of money.
Jill DeWit: Let’s just get you going in real estate. And that’s really what Land Academy is about. We’re here teaching people how to start easy, start with small transactions, and build up some wealth. And then start making different decisions.
Jill DeWit: Land is the easiest thing possible to flip. Hands down. Here’s why. Number one, I can buy and sell land all over the country. Number two, I don’t have to see it. I don’t have to do an inspection. I don’t worry about the roof falling down. I don’t have to do anything to it. It’s fantastic. I don’t have to be there to sell the property as well. I don’t have to meet with someone, walk them through. There’s no lock boxes, for sale signs. We do it all on the Internet. It’s just the easiest, simplest, best way.
Jill DeWit: The other wonderful thing about land, if you really want to get started and making money in real estate, is the low barrier of entry. We can buy properties, you can buy properties, for 1000, 2000, $3000, sell them for double easy, ’cause you know how to buy it right. And that’s how you get going.
Jill DeWit: So imagine this. This is a common thing with a lot of our members. Even people who aren’t our members have just kind of been following us along for the last couple years and following us in our online community and asking good questions, and just kind of testing this and doing their own. It’s not hard to go out and even put an ad on Craigslist. We’ll talk about that more in a minute. Get people calling you. That’s the key.
Jill DeWit: And buying some land that you know darn well it’s worth. Let’s just say it’s $10,000. And you pick it up for $2000. So when you pick up something for $2000 and it’s worth 10, and you post it for sale at four or $5000, you totally doubled your money, and the person who bought it from you is thrilled. And by the way, it sells really fast, because look at my numbers here. And these are all real numbers.
Jill DeWit: So that’s the thing about what we’re doing here. Gosh, if you’re gonna try to take on a house or take on a multi-family unit, we’re all running around in bigger pockets, thinking big, which I appreciate. And if those are your goals, you should absolutely do that. But if you don’t have the funds to get going in that, and you don’t have the team in place to get going in that, which most people don’t, this is a great place to start.
Jill DeWit: Start with a couple thousand dollars in the bank. Before you know it, you have $10,000. And then you turn it into $20,000. I mean, this has really happened with our community. People turned around and not really paid attention to their bank balance, and then before they know it, there’s $100,000 and they don’t know how it got there.
Jill DeWit: And that’s the best thing on the planet. Then you can start making some different decisions. You want to go start flipping houses? All right. Now you’re in the position. But what often happens is, this is interesting that, like us, these properties are so darn easy that you often don’t need to transition. You won’t want to transition to other property types, but just bigger deals.
Jill DeWit: So think about this. Think about doing only bigger properties, like things that are now worth $50,000 and you sell them for 100 ’cause they’re worth $180,000. That’s often what happens. Or maybe you start going from five acre properties to buying 120 acres. That’s worth a lot of money.
Jill DeWit: So that’s often what happens. We’ll get in the land game, and you realize, oh my gosh, I can do this from the back of the boat. Which is, by the way, that’s been Steven’s goal this whole time. And we have done that and we do that. So you can do it from anywhere around the world, back of the boat, on the road. Just simple land. It’s great.
Jill DeWit: I have a few more minutes, I’m gonna talk a little bit more, and then I’m gonna open it up for questions. So, the simplest product. It’s not a big barrier to entry. This show is all about asking those very simple, basic, easy questions.
Jill DeWit: And the basic concept is this: you are sending offers, real offers, to owners, to property owners to buy their property, and then you’re doing nothing but sitting back and waiting for them to contact you. You’re not chasing people down. You’re not skip tracing their phone numbers. You’re not doing any kind of chasing. You’re getting them to call you.
Jill DeWit: And how am I qualified? How do I know this work? Gosh, we’ve done it, like I said, 16,000 transactions ourselves. I haven’t even begun to add up the numbers that our community has done. It’s astronomical. But that’s what we all do. We’re sending out real, good, legitimate offers. And we …
Jill DeWit: We’re back. Well, you know, I just told my marketing team, we got that out of the way. You know, just like everything you’re learning, we’re learning. And that’s another thing about Land Academy, by the way. We’re here to help you. I’ve made all the mistakes, Steven and I have. And we’re here to help you. So that’s a topic for a whole nother show.
Jill DeWit: So basically, what I was trying to explain is, the basic concept of what we’re doing, we know there’s money to be made in real estate, great. We all understand land is easy. Okay, we got that. We understand that it’s a good place to start ’cause it doesn’t cost a lot of money. We got that. ‘Cause what the heck are we doing?
Jill DeWit: What we’re doing is sending real offers and good offers, not crazy offers, not embarrassing offers. I don’t want to piss off the whole state of New Mexico or wherever, Wyoming, wherever I’m mailing. I’m not trying to piss people off. I’m trying to smoke out people who really do want to sell and in my price range and make it so easy for them that it’s attractive, and they act on these offers.
Jill DeWit: So we’ll get more into that in other episodes as we talk about this. So, and the whole point is, I don’t do anything until they contact me back. So I’m sending out offers. People are emailing or calling or signing them and sending them back. Now I do something. It’s the greatest thing.
Jill DeWit: And then too, by the way, we all know that we’re in the same price range. They read my offer. They’re interested, they said. In fact, this works for land, this works for houses, this works for mobiles, this works for apartment buildings. None of this is crazy. We’ll get to that.
Jill DeWit: So, what’s the first thing to do? You just found me. You’re listening. You’re kind of getting it, it’s clicking. What do you want to do first? Just get our free eBook. Go to our website, it was up there just a minute ago. If you go to landacademy.com, and on the top, you’ll find a quick little link to get the free eBook. Download that, read it.
Jill DeWit: There’s a great example that you can do right now today to just put something out there, putting on your investor hat, put some ads out there that you’re looking to buy property. See, and there’s examples, real, detailed examples. Copy and paste it, we don’t care. Copy and paste it into Craigslist in whatever county or area or city you want to test this with. See the response that you get. That’s gonna help you go, all right, this is a real thing. People out there wanna do this. And that’s where you need to be.
Jill DeWit: Next thing then, when you’re ready to ask some questions about that too, feel free to check out our online community. It’s landinvestors.com. That is also free. So I want to take a moment now to answer a few questions. I’m gonna kinda look over to my left here. What questions do I have?
Jill DeWit: Teddy asks, can we scroll back up? I had some comments, I have some people that I want to say hello to. So, hi, John Reed. Hi, Neil. Hi, Tom. Joe. This is so great. Aaron. So, these are some great questions. And by the way, I’m happy, I’m gonna say this every week right now. Wednesdays, it’s gonna be about 30 minutes.
Jill DeWit: So please get in the habit of saving up your questions, you know, if I didn’t get to it this week, throw them in next week. Also put them in the comments. If you have a great show topic you want us to talk about, put it in there. I want to hear it. That’s what this is about. All right. This is for everyone just trying to figure out this whole land gig, so. All right.
Jill DeWit: Teddy, what do I need to do to buy land? You just need to find a seller. That’s it. There’s nothing special. You don’t need to have a fancy website. You don’t need to have an LLC. You don’t need to go crazy. And that’s something that Steve and I talk about all the time. When you’re just starting and you’re just testing this out, it’s very easy and very common. And you should just put the property in your own name. When you find a seller, and they wanna sell you the land, there’s more steps to it, obviously. And we’ll help with that as this show goes on. But put it in your own name, and we’ll teach you how to buy it, how to market it, how to sell it, and that’s it. What other questions do we have?
Jill DeWit: Let’s see here. Aaron asks, hi Aaron, when are you going after the bigger deals? How many letters do you have to send to get a deal? Great, great question. We typically find our numbers about, we send about 1500 units at a time. And that yields us between three to five deals, regardless of the size. That’s for land. For houses, I don’t know if you’re talking bigger deals like houses, ’cause we’re doing houses too, and this isn’t really the forum for that, but just to give you an idea, but for houses, about 3000 units to get us one to two houses. So excellent, excellent question.
Jill DeWit: Jake, I see Jake ask, I’ve seen people say things like they do drone flyovers to make videos et cetera. Is this necessary, or if not, can it enhance the sale? All right. Excellent question and the answer is yes. You should do this. Now, depending on the price point of your property, if you’re selling a property worth, let’s say, you bought a property for a couple 100 dollars and you’re selling it for $1500. Does it make sense to go spend $500, even, on a drone flyover? Not necessarily. You can, on those smaller properties, do your own version of that in Google Earth Pro, which we do, and kind of zoom in on the area. You can get a lot of pictures of the area that way.
Jill DeWit: A good thing to do is, for less than $100, you can hire a photographer in the area of the property, have him go stand there, take pictures, make some videos on their phone if you want to do that. That’s up to you. But stay on the property, take pictures. That’s a great thing.
Jill DeWit: Now, having said that, when we get into these bigger properties, the answer is, heck yeah. Those drones and those shots will absolutely enhance your property, sell your property, and we can help you with that. We have a lot of people in our community that are working together and sending photographers out and drone professionals out to hit areas all at the same time so it kind of brings the cost down on it. But it does really make a difference, and that’s an excellent question, thank you.
Jill DeWit: Carla asks, how do you price land? Awesome. All right, so here’s how we price land. Because it’s very different than homes, the completed sales for land are never trustworthy. We are common transferring property within our own companies for a dollar. You can’t trust those numbers. And by the way, most numbers are not, they’re just not reported accurately for land like they are for houses.
Jill DeWit: So you don’t really have a good gauge. And we all know the assessed value. If you didn’t know this, this is a great topic to talk about on another show. The assessed value for a property is most often very different from the actual value of the property. So you don’t want to look at that either.
Jill DeWit: In a perfect world, your property is assessed very low. Why? You don’t want to pay a lot of taxes on it. But it’s worth much more, so you don’t even really look at assessed value when you’re pricing land. How do you price land? You go look at what’s for sale out there. It’s an awesome question. You go look on all the internet sites. I would look on Land Watch, Land and Farm. Even look online. Even if Zillow, some of those places, are a little more retail, I’m still gonna kind of use those to get a gauge. But pretty much all the land selling sites.
Jill DeWit: And then what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna sort. I’m gonna say I have a five acre property in San Bernardino, California. I’m gonna give you one example. I would go to, and I would do it right now, we’re gonna get there. I’ll show you this on another show. I’m gonna do a whole show around this. But I would go to Land Watch. I would put in the details on my property. And I would sort for the price lowest to highest. And I wanna see who’s in there the lowest. And then get a good gauge.
Jill DeWit: So maybe the lowest properties in the area are selling for, let’s say, it’s a five acre in San Bernardino, California. Let’s say the lowest property is $9000. All right. I know what I want. I need to come in under $9000. So that means I want my property to be tied between, let’s say, six, $7000. ‘Cause I want mine to sell fast. So that means I need to buy it for like, $3000. $3000, $3500, ’cause my goal is to double my money, sell it fast, and move on. Good question. Do you have another question here?
Jill DeWit: Can you show this top one there? Steven Butala. Looks like Steven Jack Butala has a question for me. How is land flipping different than house flipping? Oh my goodness. I could go on. This is a whole nother show. Thank you for asking, Steven. Land flipping is so much easier. I sleep so well at night. I don’t have to worry about land flipping. I don’t need to worry about inspections and the, how do I say, the cost. Land flipping versus house flipping is just easy. I can get in, I can get out, buy it for a couple thousand dollars. There’s no real estate people involved. There’s no brokers, there’s no lenders. I hope that answers your question, Steve, and we’ll get more into that. So thank you for asking.
Jill DeWit: How aby, I’m looking for another question. Hi, hello, Patrycja. I know Patrycja really well, I just got to hang out with her last weekend here in Los Angeles at our live event. Patrycja asks, so pumped up after the LandAcademyLive event, thanks again, sending good vibes from Chicago. Thank you, Patrycja, I love it. I’m so happy to see you.
Jill DeWit: All right, what else? Erin asks, what can you tell me about the data that you get? Why does where you get the data matter? Excellent, excellent question, Erin. You want the best, most current, detailed assessor data on the planet. Where do we get that? We use RealQuest Pro, which is CoreLogic’s data company. We are licensed providers, and we provide that to people in our community, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. So, why do I want that? It’s current. I can go in and type in, I want all the five acre counties. That’s a whole nother show that we’re gonna do.
Jill DeWit: But imagine this: imagine you decide, remember I gave you my San Bern example, and you want to hit all the five acre people in San Bernadino.I can go in right now, in minutes, by the way, not hours, not weeks, with a VA, minutes. I can go into San Bernardino County, I can type in 4.9 to 5.2 acres, I can pick rural vacant land, I can pick an assessed percentage of zero, or null, so I know that’s nothing improved, it’s just real vacant land.
Jill DeWit: And I can download all the information of all the property owners. I have their names, I have their addresses, I have their deed information. I have all the legal description. I have the APN. It’s 300, not kidding, I have 363, but it’s something like that, lines of data on this property available to me. And by the way, it’s also the same data for houses.
Jill DeWit: So if you wanted this for houses, have at it. But I put in rural vacant land. I could put in three bedroom, two bath if I wanted. I have all the current information. Now, I can go and put that information into an offer letter, which I do very easily, that’s another show. And then send them an offer in the mail and just sit back and wait for them and wait for my phone to ring. Another good question here, thank you.
Jill DeWit: Some of the questions are complicated. Oh, sorry. Sorry about that. Let me get in here. I don’t mind bringing a complicated one. Thank you, Terry. Jake Terry Robinson asks, I can’t see it here, will you scroll down? Thank you. Should the price you offer and the price you sell it be related to the tax assessor’s value assessed? Awesome question, and nope, I don’t care.
Jill DeWit: The price I offer is not related to the tax, and the price I sell it is not related to the assessed value at all. I’m really looking for, Terry, what’s available right now for sale. That’s my real number. That’s what the value is. If everything out there, like my San Bernardino County, the lowest price is $9000 and the highest price for sale is $50,000, and my five acre example, they may all be assessed for $1000. I don’t know. It’s usually all over the place, and I don’t care about the assessed value.
Jill DeWit: In a perfect world, remember, think about this too. A couple things happen. The assessor, number one, things are often reported incorrectly. I’ll just use myself as an example. My partner and I transfer properties back and forth between companies. I don’t put in there what the value is, I’m not gonna bother and look what it is. I put in a dollar and I transfer the property. That’s it.
Jill DeWit: Number two, the assessor’s often a year or two behind. When there’s market shifts, it takes a while for the assessor to catch up. And then number three, this is kind of like for houses, if someone does improve their property, let’s say you put an addition on your house or you put a pool in, the assessor will catch up.
Jill DeWit: And they’ll know you put a pool in or you did an addition based on your permit. But most people are not gonna run down to the assessor the day that the pool’s done and say, by the way, hello, you need to come out and look at my house and reassess it, ’cause now it’s worth $20,000 more ’cause I put this fabulous pool in, and I owe you more in taxes. Most people don’t do that. So those are kind of some examples of why it’s not a good gauge. That’s an excellent, excellent question.
Jill DeWit: All right. So we’re getting close on time, I have time for just a few more. Keep going. Okay. My team just says keep going. I’m just gonna keep on answering. So I have, Redjie has a question. Is there an easy way to scrub a huge mailer’s list? Yes. All right. That’s an excellent, excellent question.
Jill DeWit: Because when you’re sitting down and you’re downloading all this data and you have three, let’s say you pulled 1500 lines, or let’s say you pulled 2000 owner details, right? And you have 363 lines across of data to scrub, that can often make your head hurt. And I understand that. This is the part, by the way, you need to spend some time on. And don’t be worried. You can do this. You’ll figure this out. As you go through the data, you’ll notice that some of the columns are duplicate columns. Great. Hide them, move them, delete them.
Jill DeWit: First, of course, always share whatever you download. Keep that perfect file separate in case you screw anything up. Now you have that saved. Now you have your working file that you’re learning to download. Because what you’re doing is you’re getting this owner information, and you’re turning it into a mail. And you’re turning it into an offer to send to a property owner to buy their property.
Jill DeWit: It’s just that simple, but there’s a lot of moving parts. So, scrubbing it down, you’re gonna go through and take out those duplicates. Super easy. You’ll find the owner’s address was in there three times. Great, I don’t need three versions of the owner’s address. Take that out. There’s a lot of columns that are provided that may not be used, or you don’t need them right now. Take that out. It’s not necessary.
Jill DeWit: So we’ve cleaned up our 363 columns and now we’re down to just what we need, which is really the owner name, their address, the APN, the legal description, the acreage, and so on. That kind of pertinent property information that you need to put in your offer letter. Then, now I’ve got that. I’ve got 2000 lines of sellers. Next thing you’re gonna wanna do when you’re doing your scrub, go take out the obvious ones.
Jill DeWit: Am I gonna send an offer to the city of Riverside? No. I’m not gonna send it to San Bernardino County. No. Am I gonna send one to the hospital there? No. Am I gonna send one to the post office there? No. Often, some of those ownership details will get mixed in with the property, and you don’t want to waste your money on sending them an offer, so scrub that out. It’s very cheap to download data. It’s expensive to send mail. So, that’s what I want you to think about. So that gives you an idea of scrubbing down.
Jill DeWit: Do we have any more? Do you want me to cover here? Hi, John Reid. This is such a good question. Will all the deal flow go away if people start buying land? Man, I love getting this question. I wish I had the numbers exactly off the top of my head, but Steven can, and we’ve covered this in a podcast. We have a podcast also, by the way, if you go to landacademy.com you’ll find it. We’ve been doing our podcast now for three years, and we are 880 shows in.
Jill DeWit: But there’s so much land to go around. It’s not even funny. And there’s even more houses. And the amount of property that changes hands year over year is astronomical. And it’s great. We just had this discussion in person with our investment group that was here with us in Los Angeles last weekend. We have sent letters to areas and kind of overheard that someone sent a letter to an area right after me. I picked up two pieces of property, and they picked up three more. How did that happen? Why? Because you’re looking for a situation.
Jill DeWit: So first of all, if there’s postcards and things like that, they don’t work. That’s great, we all just toss them in the mail. A real offer means something. And you’re looking for a situation. I could’ve got an offer letter six months ago to buy my property, but six months ago, everything was great. I don’t need the money, I threw it in the trash. I could care less. Guess what? Today I got an offer letter, and you know what, I just lost my job. Something happened, my dog’s sick, these are all crazy, real stories. My mom’s sick, I gotta travel. And, thank you, I just got a thumbs up from our team.
Jill DeWit: So, the point is, the situation, now the person’s gonna act on my letter. And we’ve been doing this for I don’t know how many years. And there’s so many areas. We just, there are people in our community that are killing it in counties that I’ve never even heard of. And what you find a great county that works, you’re not just gonna stop. Say you figure out this great county in XYZ state. You’re gonna hit the five acres. Then you’re gonna hit the 10 acres. Then you’ll get the 20 acres. Then you’ll get the 40 acres. You’re gonna be busy for a while in one county. So great, great question.
Jill DeWit: One more, do we have time for one more? Aw, this is a great question to wrap this up. All right. So Steven, was it Butala? Just kidding. Steven Butala, thank you for asking. Are you fully recovered from the live event? And the answer is no. No, and I had so much fun for the people who are watching who were with us in person in Los Angeles last weekend, I want to give you another heartfelt thank you for being there.
Jill DeWit: We had … look at me, you guys, you’re making me cry. We had such a good time. And I learned so much from you. And the thank yous that you have been sending us all this week from what you gained from what we were able to share with you, keep them coming. I love them. Thank you so much.
Jill DeWit: This show is really about newbies, and just really getting an understanding of what this is about. But we’re here to help you not only understand, wrap your head around what land is and flipping land and get over the little hurdles, but take it all the way.
Jill DeWit: And that’s what we did with this group. This group was an amazing group. And the deals that they’re doing are just, buying it for $45,000, selling it for $150,000. And it’s like, where do I get more, you know? It’s like they can’t get enough. It’s just wonderful.
Jill DeWit: So, thank you for all of your questions. I have a special thing that I want to announce right now, which is between now and the end of the month, if you go to landacademy.com, you’re thinking about doing this, I have a reason to help. I have something to help you. Put in the code spooky, S-P-O-O-K-Y, and you will get $600 off the program. Which I looked it up, that’s 30% off right now.
Jill DeWit: So go to landacademy.com, go to join, and you’ll find your way to the checkout. You’ll get the program and the membership page, and you’ll get $600 off. So this show is not really about that, this show is really to help you and just get you around it, but we’re doing it anyway.
Jill DeWit: So this show’s gonna keep going whether or not I have a special going on, whether or not there’s anything great going on. I really want to answer your questions and help people understand what land flipping is and really how to get started. So, thank you for joining me. Please leave your comments in the area below on Facebook or YouTube, wherever you’re watching. My name is Jill DeWit. I am here to get you started. That’s the hardest part. Thank you.
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