Land Academy Members Speak Their Mind (LA 924)
Land Academy Members Speak Their Mind (LA 924)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hello.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk, I’m Stephen Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: I’m Jill DeWit broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about how Land Academy members speak their mind.
Jill DeWit: As do you.
Steven Butala: I was thinking that, trying to figure out how I could say it and you did it for me.
Jill DeWit: Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. I never have to come to you and say, “Steven, I think you’re holding back. Could you please tell me how you really feel?” Could you imagine if I ever said that to you?
Steven Butala: Jill and I, from day one, set this all up so that this is not like a college lecture, where we sit here and say stuff and people take notes and then they regurgitate it out on the test. This is a place for everybody to just get in it.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Steven Butala: Say what you need to say. We’ll talk about in a second.
Jill DeWit: Hilarious.
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.
Jill DeWit: Daniel B. asks, “I was wanting another tool in my toolbox for closings plus a source to get a little more knowledge on quiet title and gaining access to properties. It doesn’t take long to see the benefits of just sending more mail, but there might be some jewels hidden in some of the multiple, problematic properties you get calls on. As we grow our property price points, some of these problems might not be that difficult to remedy.
Steven Butala: Okay, I’ve said it a thousand times in this show. It just constantly amazes me how smart our members are.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Steven Butala: … and the people that join. This is an incredibly astute perception, a well-written question. I’m going to list three or four of the offshoot companies that people have started, members have started, based on solving problems.
What happens is you send a bunch of mail out. People sign it. They send it back and you jump up and down and say I’m about to buy 40 acres in a fantastic area for $10,000 or $12,000 that’s got to be worth $50,000. A couple of minutes later, you find out the person you’re talking to is the niece of the actual person on the deed and you’ve got to undo a bunch of legal stuff. It’s all centered around dead people, the vast majority of these issues, dead owners, and the person on the phone’s-
Jill DeWit: Dead people. That’s hilarious.
Steven Butala: I say this stuff and I don’t realize what I’m saying like I don’t even think that’s derogatory or funny.
Jill DeWit: I’m going to go with that one.
Steven Butala: What if I was just sitting here talking about myself? This would be no fun.
Jill DeWit: Make America alive again.
Steven Butala: Make America alive again?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. I was just thinking of the dead people. I’m trying to grab any type of one liners I could throw dead people in there.
Steven Butala: Let’s make America thin again is more accurate.
Jill DeWit: I know that’s yours.
Steven Butala: Make America thin again. Oh, we just lost half our listeners.
Jill DeWit: Oh, my gosh. David dropped that one on. We were somewhere and it was clearly that environment and he leaned over and said it to me. I could not stop laughing. I was crying.
Steven Butala: A nice cycle, laughing in church.
Jill DeWit: I think we were in a restaurant and-
Steven Butala: Laughing in church. Just so inappropriate.
Jill DeWit: It was inappropriate wherever we were. It was so good. Okay.
Steven Butala: You’ve got a bunch of dead owners of real estate and you’re talking to their nieces and nephews and they want the $12,000 bad, so they’re real motivated because they have otherwise thought that they’re going to get zero out of this thing. They’re just going to let it go back to the state.
Jill DeWit: Because every person said, “Oh, that’s a mess. I can’t help you” and walked away.
Steven Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: It’s not even-
Steven Butala: Adverse possession is a way to solve this or remedy it and it’s appropriate in some states and not appropriate in other states. You’ll have to figure that out on your own, but the short answer to this incredibly well-written question is there’s lots of way to make tons of money remedying these title issues.
You would need another tool in your toolbox. What you need is to find a real estate attorney who understands adverse possession and then you need to research it just like you do for everything. Figure it out, maybe hire them to do the first deal and watch them very closely, because it’s really simple.
Adverse possession is incredibly simple to get. It’s filing a lawsuit. In some places, it’s called quiet title. Go through the motions. It’s almost always statutory and it’s stamp, stamp, bang, bang, 30 to 60 days later, you own the property and then you can complete the deal with the excited niece.
This environment is not the appropriate place to actually go through all the details and I’m simplifying it, but there’s a huge whole business model in there. We have probably 11,000 canceled transactions in our database over the years where this is the situation, 11,000 deals we couldn’t close. We chose not to close them because-
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: It’s not our business model to do adverse possession. Our business model is just to pick the low-hanging fruit and resell it fast. It’s out there and I love that attitude. You’re a perfect Land Academy member.
Jill DeWit: I agree.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, Land Academy members speak their mind. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: Again, I wonder where they got that idea.
Steven Butala: Right before the show, Jill and I were talking about we used to give a lot of property away.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: She turns to me and says, “We’re never doing that again.” I mean, really, Jill doesn’t say stuff like that often. She doesn’t have this conviction so every time she does, I stop and I’m like, “What? Okay, there’s something here.”
What she’s saying is it’s just never right. I got to thinking, “All right,” because I know she’s right. I don’t disagree with her at all. I got to thinking, “Why is that?” Then I started to think you teach a man to fish; he’s ready set for a lifetime. If you give him a fish, he’s set for that minute. I started thinking.
Let’s say you took a cooking class or a fishing class and you show up and you’re all ready to learn how to fish or you’re all ready to learn how to cook and instead of that, they just hand you a piece of fish and say, “You know, we’re not going to learn how to fish. Here’s your fish.”
Jill DeWit: Cooked fish. Perfect. It covers both.
Steven Butala: Yeah, or show up for a cooking class and they throw a meal in front of you and say, “Okay, go ahead and eat it.” You’re like, “What are you talking about? I’m here to learn how to cook.” I think I made an error in judgment in the beginning of this. I don’t think people want free property. I think they want to know how to buy cheap property and they didn’t show up for this, so I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s me.
Jill DeWit: Maybe. Maybe. How does this tie into the show?
Steven Butala: I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: Let me put it his way. If you want a free property and you want to learn how to buy inexpensive property, let us know. We can pull that all together but we’re just going to stop offering this.
Jill DeWit: Hold on a minute. If you’re here, you’re here because you want a free property. If you want free property, big flippin’ deal. Seriously, you’re here because you want to learn how to do this over and over and over, make it a business and a life and what? Pay off something? Who knows? Whatever it is.
Steven Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: So yeah, thank you. Today, the show is about members speak their minds. You had a lot of good stuff to say about that earlier, about-
Steven Butala: From day one, Jill and I have set this whole Land Academy environment up, soon to be House Academy to make it interactive. I go into LandInvestors.com, our online form, and I pull questions just like the one I read for all the shows every week and I’m amazed in there at how much everybody helps each other and speaks their mind and says, “Man, I’m really frustrated with this deal. Have any of you seen it?”
There’s multiple questions that are being addressed really professionally and conclusively, so speak your mind. Even if you’re not a Land Academy member and you have that personality type, jump into Land Investors or any of these tools or on these calls, on the Thursday calls that we do, the advanced and the regular call. Just let it rip.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, if you’re new to our group, you notice quickly, “Boy, these guys are not shy.” Everybody does really pipe in and they’re real verbal and shockingly helpful. It’s so amazing. It’s funny how I see a lot of people in the beginning and they’re kind of quiet or on the calls, they’re listening and “Oh, should I ask that question?” If you’re thinking it, ask it. That’s why we’re here.
Steven Butala: Nothing ever great happened by somebody sitting in the back of a classroom quietly listening to some teacher say some stuff.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: That has never sat with me right since first grade.
Jill DeWit: Well, I think what we’re saying is the same thing. That’s not our group and I think that’s part of the success of our group. I’m sure a lot of the success of our group is because of the support. What I mean by support, it’s all these conversations and it’s our online community, it’s our member calls. It’s like you just said, addressing these questions on the show and in other formats, all the training. There’s so much training. We’re just about … What is today? I think it just dropped in-
Steven Butala: Today’s Monday.
Jill DeWit: Um-hmm (affirmative.) I think it may have dropped. I haven’t looked at the calendar. I can’t remember because we just finished it last week but we just did a massive overhaul on our original program so if you have not seen it, check it out. I’m pretty darned sure there’s probably some special running alongside of that. Seriously. I didn’t look to see the details right now. I know we talked about a bunch of stuff.
Steven Butala: That’s a perfect example. We call it Land Academy 1.0, which is a revamp of the original [inaudible] from the Land Program. It’s a lot more condensed and it’s all in response to people jumping up and down on these calls or through our customer service channels or whatever, saying, “This doesn’t make sense.”
Jill DeWit: Or asking questions.
Steven Butala: Or this is great, but it would be better if this happened.
Jill DeWit: Can you update this for me? I’m a little confused.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: So we did.
Steven Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: We did. I love it.
Steven Butala: We’ve done it again. You’ve spent another ten minutes or so listening to the Land Academy Show. Join us next time for the Land Academy members survey results. Jill and I took a huge extensive survey for our members and we’ll talk about the results tomorrow.
Jill DeWit: … And we’ll answer your questions posted on our LandInvestors.com. It is free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: I’m excited to show this survey. What was it? 20-something questions? I can’t remember. What a great response, not only from the people who took the survey, but did it all the way through. I was a little worried. These are a lot of questions.
Steven Butala: I’ll save the content for tomorrow, but I am shocked and amazed at the number of people that responded in our group and it probably took an hour for them to respond all the way through and they were really dedicated. They really showed up and gave us some incredible feedback, shocking results quite honestly.
Jill DeWit: It was really good. Thank you. Wherever you’re watching or wherever you’re listening, please rate us fair.
Steven Butala: We are Steve and Jill, information-
Jill DeWit: … and inspiration-
Steven Butala: … to buy undervalued property.
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