LandLocked Pros and Cons (LA 886)
LandLocked Pros and Cons (LA 886)
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 land locked property, the pros and cons.
Jill DeWit: Oh, goodie.
Steven Butala: You know, it’s 2019.
Jill DeWit: Gosh, I’ve been waiting for this one.
Steven Butala: And this show is about real estate, specifically land most of the time, and Jill, here’s what’s happening. Jill is starting her own show.
Jill DeWit: I am.
Steven Butala: She already started it on every Wednesday, at what? Two or three o’clock?
Jill DeWit: Two o’clock Pacific time. Every Wednesday.
Steven Butala: Live on YouTube and Facebook.
Jill DeWit: Facebook.
Steven Butala: And it’s all about-
Jill DeWit: It’s gonna evolve-
Steven Butala: It’s not really about real estate.
Jill DeWit: It’s evolving into something else.
Steven Butala: It’s more about life and fun stuff.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: And so, I have to drag her into the studio once a week to talk about real estate, and we got, like-
Jill DeWit: Nevermind that’s what pays the bills.
Steven Butala: The shows, you know, the last few shows we’ve done have been about New Year’s Resolutions and fun stuff, and now we’re gonna talk about real estate. And probably-
Jill DeWit: Back to business.
Steven Butala: Ends up I’ll be talking about it and she’ll just sit there.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: Like Robin does with Howard Stern.
Jill DeWit: I’ll paint my nails.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com Online Community. It’s free and it’s about real estate.
Jill DeWit: Oh goodie.
Steven Butala: Sorry, Jill.
Jill DeWit: JT asked, “I sent out my first mailer, focus on infill lots, two weeks ago, and focused on 60 different zip codes in Arizona.”
Steven Butala: Wow.
Jill DeWit: “All I came up with was about 4,500 records, and after some owner duplication, it came down to 2,500 mailers. Is it really me, or does that seem really low?”
Steven Butala: No, that’s right.
Jill DeWit: “I only sent to residential parcels. No commercial or agriculture. Anyone else had this issue? Is this not really an issue and I’m just expecting too much?”
Steven Butala: Yes.
Jill DeWit: “Thanks.”
Steven Butala: It’s not an issue.
Jill DeWit: He just picked property.
Steven Butala: It’s called scrubbing data, and you scrubbed great. Here’s the thing. Data’s cheap. It’s super cheap. You know what’s expensive? Mail. So, you do not want to be overzealous about sending duplicate mailers out, or sending it to like, you know, you could really scrub out some serious data. Here’s some examples, save yourself a ton of dough and really hone in on a profitable mailer by taking out all … I mean, I go through all this in 1.0 in great detail, and I do it right on the screen. Take all the municipalities out, take all the stuff out that’s a zone like hospital, all that stuff, even in residential property, you’ll see the owners are … Just, they’re never gonna respond to you.
You wanna keep all churches and all that, you wanna keep all that in there. We regularly buy property from nonprofits, because it gets donated and they’d just rather have the money. So, no, 50% specifically for infill lots is, you’re doing the right thing.
Jill DeWit: Cool.
Steven Butala: It’s not inefficient. I mean, I don’t know if JT’s new. He’s not new, is he?
Jill DeWit: No, he’s not new. Not at all.
Steven Butala: He’s probably new to infill lots.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: But not rural vacant land.
Jill DeWit: He’s-
Steven Butala: So I wonder, I mean if he were on the Thursday call, this is the question I would ask: What are you used to?
Jill DeWit: That’s a good question.
Steven Butala: You know, are you used to 10%? 20% scrub out? I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: JT, get on the Thursday call and fill us in. We can talk more about this. That would be fun. I’d like that.
Steven Butala: Is today, today is Wednesday.
Jill DeWit: Today’s Wednesday. Get on the call tomorrow. That would be so cool.
Steven Butala: Yeah, I’d love to know.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Awesome.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, landlocked real estate, the pros and the cons. This is the meat of the show. For a lot of years, I would not let this L word … What are you doing?
Jill DeWit: You should explain what just happened to the people who can’t hear or see.
Steven Butala: To the people that are just listening to this and not watching it.
Jill DeWit: You should just see this.
Steven Butala: You have a choice, you can watch this on YouTube, or you can listen. And I feel bad, like when stuff happens on the camera, because for the vast majority of the people listen to this, they don’t watch it.
Jill DeWit: That’s true, and some people fast forward at that. They just read it, Justin.
Steven Butala: Some people just read the transcript of this.
Jill DeWit: They don’t even watch it.
Steven Butala: Because it takes too long, and it’s so painful.
Jill DeWit: Justin [Slabough 00:04:37]. But anyway, we’re not gonna call anybody names.
Steven Butala: I said, “Justin, why do you just read it?” He says, “Because I can just skip through-”
Jill DeWit: I can go fast.
Steven Butala: “… All the stupid stuff you guys say.” Literally, that’s what he said.
Jill DeWit: I’m sure of that. So anyway.
Steven Butala: You know, you should see Jill’s laugh, and her dopey audition. Banging her head on the desk. Wow.
Jill DeWit: No, but in all truthfulness, I am the one that brought this question to you, because it was brought to me.
Steven Butala: Oh, really?
Jill DeWit: From one of our members. Yes. One of our members said, “Hey, hey, I have a few things I’d really love to talk about that I don’t think we talk about enough, and I really want to know what Steve has to say.” And one of them is, “What the heck do I do with landlocked property? Do I worry about it? Not worry about it? Some people love it. Some people think it stinks. What should, you know, when should I even worry?” So that’s what this is about today.
Steven Butala: Well, I mean, most people are saying, “What’s the pro?” I mean, pros and cons? What’s the pro about landlocked property?
Jill DeWit: Cheaper.
Steven Butala: Like sometimes it’s free.
Jill DeWit: And sometimes, people love it, and you can maybe sell it to the guy that owns a parcel all around it. Any one of those people that owns around the landlocked property, you just made their property bigger and more valuable. Ding ding.
Steven Butala: Joe Martin just told a story on the air. Our member, Joe Martin. Jill had him on her show, and somebody said, “What’s the first deal you ever did?” And he said, “I bought a piece of property. It was incredibly inexpensive, and it was the L world. It was landlocked, and it didn’t have access.” Let’s just say that. Didn’t have legal or physical access, so he went out there to look at it, and the neighbor’s like, “What the hell are you doing here? You’re walking on my property.”
And he said, “No, I just bought this piece of property over here.” And the guy said, “Oh, really? Are you selling it?” He said, “Yeah, I’m selling it for X.” He said, “Let me go get my checkbook.”
Jill DeWit: He did.
Steven Butala: So, landlocked, the pro, the serious pro about landlocked property is that it’s ultra cheap, if not free. We’ve gotten, we’ve had properties were just [crosstalk 00:06:44] to us.
Jill DeWit: Handed. Yeah.
Steven Butala: So, it makes it real easy to sell it to the neighbors for very little. So you could, I mean we have people in our group, that’s all they target. They target property that has no access, and sell it to the immediate neighbors.
Jill DeWit: There’s two. I still, you know, you never know. This is one of the things that when I first started, I used to say, “Who would want that way out there?” You know what, there’s somebody for it, and you just have to properly convey that, too, by the way. You never try to pull a fast one on someone and say it’s like paved access when it’s not. Be realistic. But there are people that, when you tell them it’s way out there and you need 4 wheel drive, and boy, it’s hard to find, here’s the GPS coordinates kind of thing, have fun. There’s some people that go, “Yippee ki yay.”
Steven Butala: Yep.
Jill DeWit: They love it. So, because they want to hunt, and camp, and hide on their own property.
Steven Butala: Right. What are the cons of landlocked property? Well, it’s pretty obvious. You can’t legally get to it, so it’s really hard to improve it unless you get legal and physical access, which is not that hard, so all you have to do is to get lack of access property, get legal access to it, is get consent from the people who have the property between a public road. It’s just an easement. They need to say, “Hey, yeah, you can put a road there. It’s fine.”
A lot of times, people don’t wanna do that. A lot of times, you end up buying multiple properties, and the properties in the middle don’t have access, but because you own all the surrounding property, you can create an easement. It’s really easy to file for an easement at the county, so … This business of landlocked property or lack of access property constantly comes up, and there’s almost always a positive solution around it.
Jill DeWit: There is a solution.
Steven Butala: Yeah, there’s always a solution for any piece of real estate-
Jill DeWit: You just have to do something.
Steven Butala: … if it’s cheap enough.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: You know, there’s this phrase out there that I see once in a while in bigger pockets called junk lots, or junk property.
Jill DeWit: That’s silly.
Steven Butala: And I’ve never, you know, it was coined I think a lot of years ago by developers.
Jill DeWit: That’s dumb.
Steven Butala: Real estate developers.
Jill DeWit: That’s like secret county list, that’s right there with there for me.
Steven Butala: It’s real estate.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Steven Butala: It has value.
Jill DeWit: I agree. I’ll take that junk property, thank you very much.
Steven Butala: The value might be 200, me too. You know, if you got some junk property you wanna just throw away-
Jill DeWit: I think-
Steven Butala: Send it our way.
Jill DeWit: I think people think that some of our very valuable and expensive land is junk in their eyes, because there’s nothing on it. Well, that’s fine. I will, and this is not cheap, quote unquote, you know.
Steven Butala: We have a whole big group here who would be happy to take your junk property off your hands.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, totally.
Steven Butala: Steven@landacademy.com. Send your junk property.
Jill DeWit: Yes, please. All shapes and sizes. Landlocked included. We love it.
Steven Butala: So, it’s 2019. Here we are talking about land again. How do you feel about that?
Jill DeWit: I’m okay.
Steven Butala: You gonna be okay?
Jill DeWit: I have a counselor.
Steven Butala: We have a whole new year of talking about land again.
Jill DeWit: I have a drink. Just kidding. No. Do you know what would be really funny? We should do that. I guess we can’t do that. Well, we can do it in the after show, but there’s a TV show in the mornings where I swear, or late morning or something, I think they’re really drinking wine.
Steven Butala: In the morning?
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I swear it’s like a late-
Steven Butala: Oh, they probably don’t. Is it live?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. It’s like a Kathie Lee and Hoda. I don’t watch it, I’m never around to watch it.
Steven Butala: You don’t even have a TV, so how do you know this?
Jill DeWit: I know, but I remember seeing one time, like I walked by. Like maybe I was in an airport and I walked by, and I’m like, “Are they drinking wine?” It looks like, they have wine glasses. I think they might be drinking wine on their show. So, anyway. Anyway, no, I’m happy to be talking about land, because you know what, Steven? Deep down, I love this.
Steven Butala: I know, me too.
Jill DeWit: And I love land, and I crack up every time someone goes, “Oh, what’s, that’s,” every time someone says something like, you know, landlocked, or junk property, or, “Oh, there’s nothing on it,” you know what? That’s great. You go over there and you work on all that, and while my nice little group over here, we are quietly killing it, and I’d rather you not be in our group, so it works out just great.
Steven Butala: Yeah, if you don’t get it. Well, if you don’t get it now-
Jill DeWit: I’m not gonna convince you, I don’t care.
Steven Butala: You’re not listening to this anyway, if you don’t get it.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: You get it.
Jill DeWit: You get it.
Steven Butala: You sought this out.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Steven Butala: I ask people once in a while, “How’d you find us?” Like really successful members, they said, “We were driving the car one day, and I’m looking at all this land, and it occurred to me that there’s gotta be some way to make money on all this land. There’s so much of it.” And so then they, it usually ends up in a Google search, they find the podcast, and then they find out, yeah. It’s largely a huge secret.
Jill DeWit: It is.
Steven Butala: When you think about the number of people that probably buy and sell houses, versus the number of people who buy and sell land.
Jill DeWit: It’s great. I wanna keep it this way.
Steven Butala: Me too. Well, you’ve done it again. You spent another 15 minutes or so listening to the Land Academy show. Join us next time, where we discuss, this is how 2019 will become our efficiency year.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted on our online community, landinvestors.com. It’s free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Efficiency year. Every year, I label our year. This year, 2018, was our institutional year. We institutionalized processes for Land Academy, and for buying and selling real estate. Both houses and land, and it worked. We pulled it off. This year is all pointing toward institutionalize, or making this so efficient that Jill and I can take back some of the time.
Jill DeWit: It’s kind of like work smarter, not harder.
Steven Butala: Yeah, we have, we spend … I’ve decided we’ve spent way too much time working.
Jill DeWit: I agree with you.
Steven Butala: We live in paradise, and our lives are like as near perfect as they’re gonna get. We just spend too many actual hours working.
Jill DeWit: I agree. There’s days, like you know, it just happened the other day for me. I was watching people walk by our house, going to look at the sunset.
Steven Butala: Going to the beach, yeah.
Jill DeWit: And I’m like, “Why am I not out there looking at the sunset? I could be out there looking at the sunset, doggone it.”
Steven Butala: I have those moments, too. Mine, it all revolves around-
Jill DeWit: I’m sitting at my flipping desk. Why am I sitting here?
Steven Butala: Like I can see the ocean from my office.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Steven Butala: And every other minute, it seems like now, I’m like, “You know, I should be out on the boat fishing and stuff.”
Jill DeWit: On the water. Exactly.
Steven Butala: You know, cracking a beer out, just fishing.
Jill DeWit: I agree.
Steven Butala: Thinking about nothing. Literally. Like, not thinking about the next product that we’re gonna launch at Land Academy.
Jill DeWit: You know, it’s like when you get away from your kids, you know, and you get a little break, you’re a better parent. I think that that holds true for us, and maybe that’s it, too.
Steven Butala: That’s a great analogy.
Jill DeWit: We need to take a little break, because if we take a break, we’re gonna come back and be better bosses, that’s for sure. We’ll be way more relaxed, and we’ll probably come up with some better ways to run our business and help our members.
Steven Butala: Well said.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: Wow, on that note.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. Hey, wherever you are listening or watching, please rate us there. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala: We are Steve and Jill. Information-
Jill DeWit: And inspiration-
Steven Butala: To buy undervalued property.
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