Finance Friday Episode 1 (LA 873)
Finance Friday Episode 1 (LA 873)
Transcript:
Justin Sliva: Alright. It’s still kind of booting up on it. Maybe because my phone too, it’s trying to pick up between my phone and YouTube.
Steven Butala: Does it work now?
Justin Sliva: Yep I got you loud and clear. I see you good.
Steven Butala: IS the upload good?
Justin Sliva: Yeah yeah.
Steven Butala: Alright great. We can just jump right into it. What I was going to do was do the typical intro that I do and again I’ll carry the whole thing.
Justin Sliva: Okay.
Steven Butala: Just ask about your week and in fact if you want to take a few minutes and write down notes that’s fine. Or otherwise you can just wing it I don’t care either way.
Justin Sliva: Okay, how in-depth do you want it to be?
Steven Butala: You know I would love to talk about, I am going to introduce the fact that you can fill out the form on landinvestors.com, and then I’ll probably just ask you what kind of deals came through this week and because it is the first show it could be any deal. The deals that you’re working on now and why it works. Maybe some deals that you rejected. Maybe you can bitch a little bit about how people try to use you as a should I do this deal kind of thing, and I think that … You can tell them, we just talked about it on one of our shows, which said, “If you do this twice, you’re gonna get black listed.” So something like that.
Justin Sliva: Yeah, let me take a second here and remember what all we have going on right now.
I’ll list states, that way it’s just kinda … it’s specific. I won’t talk investors’ names or anything like that or specific … Texas, Kentucky, Arizona, and then New Mexico. Okay. I think that should do it. Should get us at least going.
I’ll talk about some round of the back ones and some kind of issues we saw trip up on us real quick.
Alright, cool. Yeah, I’m ready when you are. Is that light okay now? Or does it need to be adjusted?
Steven Butala: No, it’s great. Much better.
Guess I’ll just start the show now.
Steven, Justin Sliva here. Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala, with guest, Justin Sliva. I’m broadcasting from dreary Cali- Southern California, today. Justin’s out at Dallas-Fort Worth area.
We’re trying something new. It’s called Finance Friday. This is actually episode one. Justin has been much to my happiness, surprise, financing a lot of our groups. A lot of our members in our group. I’m actually him how it works … maybe you can introduc- start out by introducing us to how this all works and how they get ahold of you and what’s generally going on, Justin.
Justin Sliva: Thanks. It’s pretty simple to get ahold of me. People do it by different ways: we’ll see them come through Facebook, through Instagram, through … and our website, which is primarily the easiest way … Plumb Investment Group dot com. And they can fill out a schedule there and schedule an appointment and it shoots me an email. I’ll shoot it right back to you and set up a time and a date for us. [inaudible] phone call, we can do it via email, do it via text. It’s pretty easy. It’s the craziest thing, I had this guy heard a podcast from last week and he reached out and said, “hey, I’m stuck at a hundred and sixty deals. I need your help with scale. What can we do? And how can we do it? You know, to me, that’s pretty awesome to see that work like that. And he went through one of my listings on my personal land page. So it was pretty neat for him to get ahold of us that way and kind of work through that.
So if any one of those mediums there: Plumb Investment Group, it’s got a Facebook. It does have an Instagram. It does have a website. SO all of those are the easiest way to get ahold of us.
Steven Butala: You can also go to Land Investors dot com and there’s a top menu item called Get Funded or Get Funding. That goes to Justin, too.
Justin Sliva: Yeah, great. I appreciate that help, that plug. It’s nice to see that we can … the things we saw in the beginning of our career in land investing, we saw that we ran out of money, fast. And so we needed to know how to scale it and make that faster, so we’re trying to solve that problem for some of our newer land investors.
Steven Butala: I mean that’s what Land Academy 2.0 is all about. It’s about scaling up your business and doing more expensive deals, even if you don’t have the money. That’s what this Finance Friday’s all about too. Talk about the deals you’re doing and generally how it works, or maybe how it doesn’t work.
Do you have a couple of examples this week?
Justin Sliva: Man, I had some killer deals come in this week. Right now, about six states we’ve green lit this week and that’s crazy to me to think that you have the Pacific Northwest, you have the South, you have – actually – east of the Mississippi, you’ve got some of the desert states, your New Mexicos and Arizonas.
I had one come up and we’re working through a little bit of hair on it, but it was three hundred and twenty acres in the south and it’s got a cool story to it. As I was talking to a guy, we were working through some … I helped him through pricing, through making sure his mailer was correct, and working on his bi-side set up on his email, on his website, and other stuff. So just kind of helping him along through the process. He got his first deal back and he was freaking out, ’cause, you know, that first mailer goes out and you get ’em back and you don’t think that it really works and you’re getting this plethora of deals coming in. But he had two deals that he wants to partner with and made an amazing three hundred and twenty acres.
The people bought it in the Cold War. They were in the military and that was for fallout for Russians. So they bought it in the fifties, four group of guys bought a section and two of them had already sold out and the other two want to sell their half. The cool thing is they had this … and I’m telling this story a little bit before him, ’cause … I hate to ruin it for him, but I’m gonna put it out there, ’cause I think it’s an awesome story.
They stocked up a bunch of guns and ammo, soaked them in the oil, then they put them in the cases and bury them. And they had hand-written typography maps, because this was before Google Earth, cause it’s the fifties, sixties, seventies, somewhere in there. A tornado came through and changed the typography and they can’t find the gun now. And they’re all in their eighties, so it’s a great story. But for that reason alone, I’m like, yeah I want to partner on this deal with you. Let’s do this.
There’s a little bit of access we’ve gotta work through. We’re gonna get somebody out on the property to make sure it has solid access. We all run into one of those situations where have a farmer who’s trying to do a first possession. We’ll run it through title. I think these deal’s gonna be about … It’s gonna make this guy on his first deal, probably, close to fifty, sixty thousand dollars depending on how we do it. It’s a heck of a deal.
Another one was a sixty acre place. It’s a forty and a twenty that he’s got together. I’m kind pushing that if he had that tool chest or the war chest to cover himself to do it, but I would walk him through it if he needed me to. His first two deals he’s gonna … He’s got potential at making anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand bucks on his first two deals on his first mailer. It’s amazing to see.
Steven Butala: Is this the same guy?
Justin Sliva: Same guy, yeah.
Steven Butala: First mailer?
Justin Sliva: First mailer, yeah. He reached out, he heard us on a podcast, reached out and said hay. He wanted to start small with the one and a half to two acres in the desert for a couple hundred bucks and I was like no, man. I’ve got your back. If you get something big you can’t handle, we’ll take care of it for you. To see that now, his wife’s giving him permission to leave his job and do that sort of thing. And that’s kind of the cool thing for us. It’s what we want to see. But like I’m telling him, hold on, let’s bump our breaks. Lets not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s make sure that we have the money and a place to take care of our family – ’cause he’s got two small kids – and that you have that to grow your business as well. Because that’s the whole point of this. It’s scaling your business to get that financial freedom and be able to be successful.
Steven Butala: That’s great advice.
That’s fantastic though. So he contacted you before he even sent a mailer out to talk to you about what you’ll finance.
Justin Sliva: Yep. Yeah, and we’ve actually had a couple of people do that in the last two months.
We worked with a couple of people from actually pricing their mailer all the way through getting that first property back. We’ve done that with three people and so far, those three people have got potential ninety, hundred thousand dollar deals. They’re hitting two and three, ten acre places. They’re gonna profit fifteen, twenty thousand. We started sending out checks today for the first deals that we’ve closed. That title takes a while, we’ve been open two months. So two months on the front side or month on the front side, got ’em in, sold ’em, month on the back side get closed, and now we’re getting paid and we’re starting to distribute and these guys are like “This is great. We’re getting ten thousand dollar checks, six thousand dollar cashiers checks in the mail,” if they don’t want to be wired money to. SO it’s a great thing.
Steven Butala: I honestly didn’t … When we sat down to do this podcast today, I didn’t realize that there’s that much success. I didn’t know.
Justin Sliva: Yeah, no. It’s exciting. I do have a new business partner, his name’s Shane. We had a supplement copy together, so we’ve worked together. We worked in the railroad industry together, so we’ve been in and out of partnerships for, you know, since 2010, hand in hand. We’ve known each other since 2004. He’s like, “Hey we’ve just got to keep turning money back, keep turning money back.” So he’s loving it and he’s trying to find the time to get to sit down with me so he can kind of adjust what we’re going to do on some of the home side. And so that’s where he wants to be. I’m kind of hopeful. So it’s definitely neat. We’re seeing both sides kind of get moving pretty quickly here.
Steven Butala: What’s your capacity, ’cause I think, I mean that story’s fantastic. This show is getting pretty big, so I expect this first episode … and now we’re going to do it every Friday, I think. Now we are for sure. That we’ve got stories like this every week.
I expect your phone to kind of ring off the hook, so what’s your capacity?
Justin Sliva: It’s kind of ebb and flow with where deals are. So we may have a couple closings coming in or pending and then I start ear marking money, once we have an investor agreement. Then it stays ear marked until it actually closes, then we fund it and then it’s just a matter of turning that money. Right now, we have about a hundred thousand ready to go to be dispersed today that’s not ear marked, with some reserves hidden back in the back. And that kind of depends upon where I am with my lands too because me and my partner will both turn more money into Plumb as it needs, but we kind of just got started with a set amount and started turning through it. But again, if it’s run through the bank, we have access to get more capital.
Steven Butala: I mean I have to ask this: How much do you help brand new people with actually getting the mailer in the mail?
Justin Sliva: When we go through that … I’m trying to think … We’ve done probably about seven or eight people through the Plumb process, where we’ve gotten them from pricing the county, double checking their mailer for them, and getting the bill [inaudible] and get them sent out. It’s helped them in that aspect.
We just did Kentucky with a guy where we mailed some of it ourselves then mailed it with them. It was their first mailer. We handheld them through the pricing, through the picking the counties, and checking the counties to make sure they had the data that they needed to support their business. So, I mean, when people get mad at us, they’re like, “oh you want fifty percent of our deal.” But we’re taking the rick with you. We’re willing to help you through it. This is a tru joint bench, here. We’re not just saying, “hey, bring the deal to me, we’re gonna fund it. Yes or no.” If you’re having problems, were going to walk you through it and kind of get you that success.
Steven Butala: It’s priceless. That’s priceless consulting for free.
Justin Sliva: Some of the guys, they say, “Hey, I just want you to help me price. I want to understand it.” We do charge a little bit. We’ll say, “Hey, sit down with me. I’ll price your mode at seventy-five bucks.” Not a huge deal. If you have a problem and you want me to work you through it, all the way through something, we’ll do it. I think I charge … That’s a hundred and fifty bucks. But you’re getting two hours of my time just sitting here focused in on what you’re having an issue with and we kind of give you some ideas.
But some guys that we’ve partnered with, we’ve done five or six deals with the guy, and he’s having trouble understanding something, he just calls and says, “I’m having trouble with this, can you help me?” And yeah, of course. You know, we’re a partnership. We want to make sure you’re successful.
Steven Butala: Truly amazing. I did not expect this, honestly.
When we sat down on Skype, here, I thought you were gonna say, “We’re doing a couple of deals in an ordinary zone,” or whatever. You’re gonna make a couple of new members, Land Academy members … They’re Land Academy members, right?
Justin Sliva: Yeah. I had a couple of people reach out this week that aren’t, which is … they’re in other groups. Which is kind of neat to me. But I’ve had to have a firm conversation eith some of them, that they send out ten thousand postcards saying, “I’m interested in buying your land,” and it’s just like, c’mon man. They’ve got five thousand voicemails they’ve got to go through and it’s just like, come on, dude. Let’s think a minute. That’s not how we do this. This is not what we’re gonna do here. So let’s fix that, get to the point, let’s get the land bought, and let’s get it sold.
Steven Butala: Yeah. My age old comment to that is: Are you serious about this or not?
We’re not … Look, I understand. Everybody wants to save money and spend as little as you can, but let’s just do it right. That’s a perfect example because you’ve got a couple guys who’re gonna make sixy to eighty hundred thousand bucks on their first mailer. It took me like three year to do that … to make that much money.
I mean it’s good for you, though.
Justin Sliva: It’s good to have these people out there looking for deals. And it kind of slows my land business down because of it. We’ve got a few houses going right now. A few pieces of property … I’ve got a few places I’m gonna start mailing. I’m kind of working through the data side on how I want to do that. But it’s hard for me because I may get a call from a guy and he tells me he’s going to mail a certain state and a certain county and I have to back off of it ’cause I was looking at that area as well, so I’ll let them go ahead and do it. And I know I’m gonna partner with them, so I’ll say, “Hey, I’ve already done the research. This is what I see it as and this is where we’re at. If we work together through it, we’re both successful.”
Steven Butala: That’s amazing. I think you mentioned, in a conversation we had in person, that you fund about twenty-five percent of the properties that are submitted. Is that still true?
Justin Sliva: Yeah, that is pretty true. We kind of get a little bit particular on certain type of deals. I have to have that conversation, usually in the first meeting with somebody, I tell them, “It may be a great deal,” I may say. “This is a good deal, but it doesn’t fit my model right now.” Because if I tie up twenty grand to make us all five grand, and say it sells for twenty-five. That’s not a bad day. But when you put a partner in that’s taking half, now you’re only taking ten percent of your money. If it takes six months to sell it, then we’re slowing down in the loss to get money. Our capacity’s created by the turning of the money. The velocity there. And we’ve had that conversation with some of our investors and we say, “You can sell this property and we make a profit. Don’t be bashful about calling, saying, ‘Justin, hey I got an offer. We’re gonna make twenty-five percent real quick.'” Make the call and let’s keep going. ‘Cause that gets in another deal and we can keep turning that money and we all make money.
Steven Butala: Is it always money or is it the quality of the property?
Justin Sliva: Sometimes it’s … Access is one of the big downfalls for us. I got … My three properties, I always go back to the three properties I lost money on, were access issues. It wasn’t a lot of money, you know, three properties, thirteen … twelve, thirteen hundred bucks total, which isn’t bad, but I had a property come in that was eighty acres in Texas. I had bought one within a quarter mile of this place and it looks like it has a road on the map, it goes across a ranch. And I’m like, “Hey, man. If you’re gonna buy,” I said. “I wouldn’t buy one. This is where one of the deals I lost money on. But if you’re gonna buy here, you need to make sure you can get from this highway to there, legally, and go from that. And go make sure you’ve got that access.”
That’s our biggest downfall. We’ve had some properties come back that are beautiful and the mountains of Arizona are beautiful and the mountains of New Mexico and its like BLM roads to it and all of a sudden it’s like a trail that you don’t know. The person, you start pushing for more information, then they reach out to their seller and they get more information and say, “Yeah, you can’t go between November and March, because it’s too wet. It gets unpassable.”
That’s our main thing is access.
Steven Butala: You know what I think I’ll do is go ahead and set up a new, a full blown forum on Land Investors so you can ask questions ’cause we are, I notised, getting some questions about getting funded and things like that. It only helps us to our group, so I’ll set that up today.
I think this Finance Friday thing worked great. We’re at about fifteen minutes, which is typically our number.
Join us next time, where Jill and I actually talk about relationships.
And every Friday, now, if Finance Friday with Justin, so we look forward to that.
As always, to answer your questions, post it on the online community at Land Investors. It’s free. You’re not alone in your real estate vision.
Dude, that worked out great.
Justin Sliva: Great, I’m glad it did. It’s exciting to see what some of these guys are coming up with. We’re in a queue right now, I think, with about seven more properties that we got approved this week.
Steven Butala: Awesome, bud. We’re at that trailing part of the show. We’re still on, so why don’t you give them the best way to contact you?
Justin Sliva: Okay. Yeah. Justin at Plumb Investment Group dot com. Or you could reach out via Facebook Messenger. A lot of people do that as well, so I’m easy to reach there.
Steven Butala: Alright, bud. Talk to you next Friday.
Justin Sliva: Yessir.
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