Outsource Transaction with TitleMind (LA 876)
Outsource Transaction with TitleMind (LA 876)
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’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about outsourcing your transaction with TitleMind.com.
Jill DeWit: Woo hoo.
Steven Butala: If you’ve been with us for a while, it’s like, “God, these guys have been talking about Title Mind forever.”
Jill DeWit: Well we had Title Mind. We took it away for a while. Now we’re working on bringing it back.
Steven Butala: Title Mind 1.0 which we launched I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: Fall, it was probably a year ago. It’s about just maybe a little over a year ago because it was October in 17 I think it was.
Steven Butala: We had a massive demand. Massive demand from members and non-members and we couldn’t keep up with it.
Jill DeWit: Overwhelmed. Overwhelming demand. It was awesome.
Steven Butala: And a lot of it too was successful members who had problematic transactions and they just kinda said-
Jill DeWit: It’s worth it for me to pay and let them figure it out.
Steven Butala: Let Title Mind figure it out. I can’t undo this dead person thing.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: And that’s fine too because we’re all set up to handle that stuff. We’re just not set up to handle 50 orders in one day.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Well, when we relaunch, and it’ll be soon, it’ll be early 2019, let’s just say. We are now … We have hell planned for that and we’ve got backup contingencies to send orders with people we know and trust. And we can actually … The reason … We could’ve taken your money back on. We stopped it because we want to deals right. We do deals too. And quite honestly, it’s the same people that do our deals.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: So that’s the deal we hope. 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: Curtis asks, “I’m in California and I’ll be buying land in California and other states. Is there a reason I should not set up an LLC in another state? I will say that I do intend to buy some land in a solo 401K and sell on terms keeping it entirely passive income, I think. But the majority of it will be flipped for cash. I just want to get my first mailer out. But I do not know how to appear credible with a company name and website. I’m real close to just getting a burner phone, signing up with a call service, and sending the damn mail.”
Steven Butala: That’s what you should do.
Jill DeWit: Website be damned. It just seems like that will delay the mailing way too long for me. Thanks.
Steven Butala: It’s almost like I wrote this question to make a point, which I didn’t do by the way.
Jill DeWit: This is like … It’s like did you-
Steven Butala: I have done that in the past.
Jill DeWit: Are you confessing?
Steven Butala: No, I’ve done it in the past, but that’s not what happened here.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Not what happened this time. Alright.
Steven Butala: That’s all we teach new members is to get the damn first mailer out.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Don’t let these other things hang you up. Slash however I want to answer all his questions.
Steven Butala: Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: Okay so number one, can you start an LLC in another state? Yes. Should it really make a difference in here? I don’t think so. Whatever’s the best state for you, do it. Should it make a difference? Should it slow down the show? No. Should it slow down sending out mail? No.
Steven Butala: And it won’t be your first LLC.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Let me, I want to pause for just a second and answer this because this will probably help people understand. Even if you send out a mailer with your landperfect.com, that’s your company. Whatever it is, let’s just say.
Steven Butala: That’s a good name.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: Landperfect.com, I wonder if that’s available.
Jill DeWit: Landperfect.com. Let’s just say that’s your company name. You got the .com. You have one stagnant page there with a photo of you and your dog saying, “I’m real,” whatever it is and you’re still putting that stuff together. That’s totally fine. Now, what I think people get hung up on is so you send the mail out and you’re Bob Jones from landperfect.com. The people come back to you and now they want to sell you their property. You don’t have to have your Land Perfect LLC in place to buy the thing. To buy the property. It could come from a whole nother entity. So maybe you’re putting it in the name of your business partner because he’s the money guy right now. So you could be Bob Jones sending out mail for Land Perfect. And when you send out the deed, and the cashier’s check, and everything with the seller buying the property, they’re not gonna even look at it.
Steven Butala: They’re not gonna-
Jill DeWit: They’re not gonna stop and go, “It doesn’t say Land Perfect here.” Whatever name you want to put it in, whether it’s you buying the property, your business partner just name of the property of this one-
Steven Butala: Your wife.
Jill DeWit: Whatever, however it is, they’re not gonna care at that point. So I think this is … I want to make sure you’re not getting hung up on that. They don’t … And if you just say they say, “Who is Mark Jones?” Well, that’s my brother in law and we both do the business together and that’s why or whatever.
Steven Butala: They’ll never say that.
Jill DeWit: And they won’t. But if they did, you just explain that’s my business partner. We put them in his name. Whatever. It doesn’t matter if they ever did. And like I said, they don’t. And you don’t even … By the way. This is good stuff I haven’t talked about in a while. Don’t volunteer that. You don’t need to say … You don’t need to hedge off anything too. If anybody asks anything, always be up front and honest and explain it. But don’t go, “By the way, just so you know, as the deed comes to you, it’s not gonna have my name on it. It’s not gonna have Land Perfect on it. It’s gonna say this on it. So I want you to be prepared.” Don’t even go there.
Steven Butala: Yeah, what you’re saying when you say stuff like that is, “Oh, by the way, I’d like to give you several reasons why you don’t want to sell this property to me.” Because that’s all they hear.
Jill DeWit: Just to make you … I want to make you uncomfortable.
Steven Butala: Yeah, I want you to question the validity of this.
Jill DeWit: Or I’m gonna assume you’re uncomfortable. No, don’t assume that. Because you are doing everything right.
Steven Butala: That’s good advice, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. And I thought this is stuff we haven’t talked about.
So back to the LLC, get it going when you can. Absolutely I’m glad you’re getting the mail, and the phone, and everything. That should be right away the first things you do to go on that first mailer and have them ready to go because you need … Because that first mailer is gonna launch you and it’s gonna … Those calls and those buyers are gonna be spread out probably over the next couple years. Maybe several years depending how many that you’re sending out right now. So you need to be able to retain that information. And then the rest will just fall into place. Did I answer it okay?
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: I mean you answered it better than I would.
Jill DeWit: Did I miss any part, I don’t-
Steven Butala: The burner phone thing, more and more people are-
Jill DeWit: Oh, you want the phone number.
Steven Butala: More and more people are … Because I’ve historically said go buy a phone number. Everybody keeps coming out of the woodwork saying, “Hey, when you get a cell phone, you own your phone number.” And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but a lot of people have been saying it. So I guess if you have a burner phone, you own a phone number forever.
Jill DeWit: So just do research.
Steven Butala: I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: And but you do need [inaudible]. So here’s the whole point. And you do need to get the damn mail out. So even if you do a 1500 unit mailer, and you change your address, and you change your phone number after that first mailer, it’s not the end of the world. However, you don’t want to do 10, or 15, or 20 mailers. Or in our case, 20 years of mailers and be changing that stuff all around because people-
Jill DeWit: They won’t be able to find you.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: They’ve gotta find you.
Steven Butala: But hell or high water, you gotta get the first mailer out. And get that out of your system. Get those calls coming back. And get that first deal done regardless of what happens that’s … Jill and I recently made a shift of between get your ducks in a row and then get a mailer out to get the damn mailer out. Just get it out as ugly as it is. Because we have a small group of people in our group that have been in our group for years and they just can’t seem to get a mailer out and we don’t want that to happen to you.
Jill DeWit: Right. Thank you, Steven.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, outsourcing your transaction with titlemind.com. This is the meet of the show.
Jill DeWit: I would like to ask. So let me back up into some … I’m gonna give a little background and then I’m gonna ask you questions.
Steven Butala: Excellent.
Jill DeWit: So Title Mind, we launched, like I was saying earlier, in fall. I want to say it was October, if I remember correctly, of 2017 because of a need. Like all of our products, all of our tools and resources, as a need from our community and help closing their deals. So Title Mind, what it did originally was only escrow, not Title, that was coming. So what we did with Title Mind was for a flat rate fee, you could just send us … Give us the buyer. You’re the buyer, excuse me. Or you might be the seller. Whatever it’s happening. Give us the information. We would do the deed. We would arrange the notary. We would arrange the payment. The money would pass through us to the however it would go and we’d get it back to you. Basically, we were just like your assistant doing your work.
Steven Butala: Just like a virtual assistant deal closure [crosstalk]
Jill DeWit: Right. But what we didn’t do is do the due diligence. You’ve already solidified the deal. It was already done, ready to go, and you knew you were gonna buy it, you agreed on the price, the guy wants to sell. So the next step instead of you arranging the notary in this, and then making the deed, and getting it recorded by the way, all the way to that, you would then pick up the phone and call Title Mind and say, “Here you go. Here’s the guy. I don’t know when he’s available. I’m not even sure where he really lives.”
Steven Butala: Because I’m moving on to the next deal.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. And here is my money. And I’ll see you when it’s recorded. That’s what Title Mind was. And as Steven was saying too, holy cow was that popular. It was so popular, I couldn’t even get my deals in. I was having a hard time getting … It was my team who was doing our deals. So our idea was, well, this is fine. We can do this for everybody else too. Brilliant, right? Holy cow had idea the demand. And again, this was escrow only. It wasn’t even title. Even though we called it Title Mind. Because that was coming. We didn’t even get that far. We’re like, “Uh-oh.” [inaudible] So anyway, we had to slow it down. There were days that I just-
Steven Butala: We had to turn it off.
Jill DeWit: Well yeah, eventually we turned it off. But there were days that I closed it up and just said we’re not accepting any right now. And then I’d open it back up. It would get flooded. And I would close it down again.
Steven Butala: And that’s no way to run a website, by the way.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. And that’s why we just said, “Alright. We gotta wholly revamp this thing. Hold on, everybody.”
Steven Butala: Imagine if Walmart was closed on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Jill DeWit: Right, because it was just too busy. And then they’re back open on Saturday. And then they’re closed again on Sunday. So you can’t do that. So that’s what we said, “Alright, this is not working. We gotta totally circle it back around and figure this out.” So that’s where we are now. So now and … I love that you’re calling it Title Mind 2.0. So I want to know, Steven, will you please … Because I’m new to … You’re putting this together in a different, better way. Will you please explain to all of us a little bit more about Title Mind 2.0 and what we can expect.
Steven Butala: Well, I mean you did a perfect description. But it’s all under the guides of this. Right around the 10th or 12th deal that you complete, one or two thing … You’re gonna look at the mirror and you’re gonna say one of two things. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’ve accumulated X, Y, Z in this amount of time. This amount of money. If only I could, fill in the blank. If only I could outsource financing. [inaudible] investments. If only I could get somebody else to do these deals so I could get the other new deals faster into the pipeline. That’s what Title Mind is. Is to get somebody else to do these deals because I’m not interested in shoveling as an investor, I’m not interested in shoveling paper around.
So you submit the deal to Title Mind and we complete the deal on the front end and the back end of the transaction. And there’s two products. One with title insurance and one without title insurance. Where we … Where smaller deals, we just close the deal for you. There’s no title insurance. And Jill’s right. We don’t review the deal for accuracy or anything like that. We just go through the motions. And there’s a limit to the problems that we’re gonna solve so we’ll leave that for later. And then a second product is we’ll go get an escrow company for you. We’ll manage the transaction through escrow and close the deal. And they will probably in that case collect the money. So the back end of Title Mind is a handful of very professional title agents and transaction coordination agencies that are all based in southern California, they’re very close to us, that we do business with already. And that’s where 1.0 didn’t work because we were trying to take on too much of it … Our transaction coordinators in house can’t handle it.
Jill DeWit: Couldn’t keep up.
Steven Butala: Yeah. So that’s how we’re addressing the demand.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I was hiring. I was kept hiring to try to keep up.
Steven Butala: The whole thing is designed for you just to be a deal maker and not an administrative assistant.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: The same thing with … That’s just outsource [inaudible] by the way.
Jill DeWit: You know what this is? It’s like in field reports. You describe in field reports as having your own due diligence team.
Steven Butala: That’s tomorrow’s topic.
Jill DeWit: Oh, cool. Awesome.
Steven Butala: The first show today was why the outsource [inaudible], forget funding. So you don’t have to spend any of your own money. Why to use Title Mind to get and close your own deal. And then tomorrow, Thursday, is why and how to outsource your own due diligence. So now when you really think about that, there’s no work to do except send mail out, and get great deals, and start shoving them off to other agencies to get them done.
Jill DeWit: Done.
Steven Butala: Can you do it with every properties?
Jill DeWit: It’s like mic drop. Done. That’s it.
Steven Butala: Yeah. Can you do it with a $500 property and then sell it for 1500? No, there’s not enough money. You’re gonna be spending some money. It costs money for financing in the form of equity. It costs money for Title Mind. Probably at least $1000 between title and escrow, maybe more. In some cases just a little bit less. And then due diligence is gonna cost between 500 and 1000 depending on how you do it per deal. So for $2000-ish, you are gonna be able to outsource a deal completely.
Jill DeWit: And it keeps you from hiring a staff of people, by the way. This is the whole point.
Steven Butala: Speed.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: The speed of doing deals matters.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Because if you’re gonna take on … Otherwise you’re gonna take on a staff of I don’t know how many. And you’re gonna have to be really involved, by the way, because they’re not that professional yet. They’re not that good getting into it. If they are, you’re spending a lot of money. And then again, now you’re back to this. Outsourcing.
Steven Butala: Or maybe you use these agencies for a while on some deals and you have an in house person … Then it gives yourself enough time to hire somebody else-
Jill DeWit: And teach them.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: And they could do that.
Steven Butala: Every deal, we don’t outsource to every deal the same. There’s some big huge deals, we do it with other people. We bring in different partners, equity partners, and all kinds of … So that’s where it’s headed for you too.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: All of these outsourcing products are driven by very successful Land Academy members saying, “Dude, if I could only have this.”
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: Join us next time where we discuss outsourcing due diligence with inforeports.com. And partialfact.com, sorry. [crosstalk]
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted to our online community, landinvestors.com. It’s free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
I get excited just talking about this because-
Jill DeWit: I know you do.
Steven Butala: Every once in a while I wonder about … Especially with Info Reports we’re gonna talk about tomorrow. Where my career would be now if I had Info Reports in 2004.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Steven Butala: I mean, we’re not suffering at all. But it was due diligence.
Jill DeWit: How much faster it would’ve gone.
Steven Butala: Outsourcing due diligence and really knowing here’s what changed. It’s not so much is it buildable because that report answers that really quickly. It’s, “Wow, all utilities [inaudible] and it doesn’t need any grading, and it’s got a score of three on every category? Oh, I could sell this property for $45,000. Whereas my whole career-”
Jill DeWit: Three of three by the way.
Steven Butala: My whole career I’ve been just saying, “I’ll just double my money.”
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I understand.
Steven Butala: I just game away tomorrow’s show.
Jill DeWit: It’s cool. Hey, wherever you’re watching or listening, please rate us there. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala: Information …
Jill DeWit: And inspiration …
Steven Butala: To buy undervalued property.
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