What Makes a Market Mail-able (LA 967)
What Makes a Market Mail-able (LA 967)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Good day.
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 what makes a market mailable. This is a very popular question.
Jill DeWit: Makes marker mailable, that’s a lot. Sorry.
Steven Butala: Oh I didn’t notice that.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, makes marker mailable. Alright.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com, online community is free.
Jill DeWit: Okay. This is from a Mike M, but not the Mike M that we talked to yesterday, just to point that out. So a different Mike M. He wrote ‘hi all, has anyone taken a property through probate in Arizona? The first property I ever brought a while ago without a title, I am now trying to sell through title. One problem, the wife and the husband are on the title not as JTROS, which is joint tenants with rights of survivorship. And the husband is now deceased. The title companies require this to go through probate to get him off the title. I’m looking for some advice on the quickest way to get this done. $11,000 is at stake on this too. Anyone have experience with this in Arizona? Thanks, bye’.
Steven Butala: Yes Joe and I have tremendous amount of experience in Arizona, and specifically with this, I’m gonna direct you to an attorney named Mark Manoil, M-A-N-O-I-L. He’s an expert at this stuff, he’s the tax lien expert in Arizona and tax lien’s are pretty prevalent. Every tax lien jurisdiction’s from a state standpoint has different opinion on how to go about this situation, and it’s a very, very popular situation in California. You get a death certificate, you file a piece of paper, and affidavit, and you send it in to the county recorder and you are done. It’s very easy to undo this in California. Arizona, totally different situation, in fact the truth is we have stacks of situations on our database like this that we have chosen not to pursue for this exact reason.
Steven Butala: There’s two ways to approach this. You can go through an adverse possession situation if you have a good relationship with the surviving wife. Or is it the-
Jill DeWit: I remember a guy.
Steven Butala: … the survivor.
Jill DeWit: I think so.
Steven Butala: Or you can go through this probate situation. Both are going to cost you … in excess of a thousand dollars, one may or may not be a little bit more expensive. For $11,000 it’s worth it. But I’ll tell you that the vast majority of people who have gone through this and who are smart, make this their business model. They go through this adverse possession slash in the situation of maybe probate. First of all don’t listen to title agent. Their knowledge of this is not, they’re not a lawyer. A title agent has been instructed by their supervisor to close 30 deals a month, or some number like that. This is good news for them ’cause they don’t have to close this deal, they can go onto the next one and hit their number. So while they’re not incorrect, they’re certainly not the-
Jill DeWit: Authority on everything.
Steven Butala: Exactly Jill.
Jill DeWit: I have a lot of experience on that one.
Steven Butala: Try contact Mark Manoil, I think he’s a state treasurer now, or some version of that. Actually I think he really is the state treasurer now.
Jill DeWit: Really?
Steven Butala: Yeah. Just like your brother used to be.
Jill DeWit: Wow. That’s kinda funny.
Steven Butala: Jill’s little brother used to be the state treasurer in Arizona.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: For what seemed like 20 minutes.
Jill DeWit: It was like two years.
Steven Butala: Oh was it?
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Then he took a new job at NASA.
Steven Butala: Mark will probably not be able to handle this case for you but he’ll know exactly who to talk to or his staff will.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, what makes a market mailable. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: [inaudible 00:03:46] pause and say that correctly.
Steven Butala: Jill … broke this topic down into two responsibilities. Hers and mine, and yours goes first Jill. So when we look at a market what do you look at?
Jill DeWit: Okay, so when I thought my side of the sheet on choosing a market that is worthy of sending mail, which would be mailable. I look at it like, how good it is as far as doing my due diligence. And sales. So I like to think of it like that. So when I’m picking a market, ’cause you do your part, I do my part right, kind of thing. So what’s a good market? One is maybe they have good county GIS. I hope it’s supported in parcel fact, I can get copies of vesting deeds and title pro 24/7. I test all these things and make sure I can get them on the phone, what if I have question for the county? Are they a big enough county that I can call planning and zoning and ask them a question and somebody’s there to answer the phone.
Jill DeWit: Those are all kinds of that are gonna come up when the offers are coming back and I’m doing my due diligence, I don’t wanna be hitting my head against the wall going shoot I shouldn’t have picked this county. It was too hard to get these answers, darn I would’ve mailed somewhere else. So that’s part of it. And then also, I look at it for the sales side of it. Are things moving in this county, kind of thing. What’s the prices of this county? Is it meet my buying criteria in this county? Are there not too many properties for sale, but enough properties for sale? Things like that, is it a good place that people wanna buy property? Is it gonna be easy for me to write a good description and promote this property, and get the word out. So really it’s all focused around my due diligence and sales. Now you wanna talk about your part?
Steven Butala: First of all, this works in every market. Sending unsolicited offers to purchase property works in every single market. Every zip-code, every county and every micro sub-division market that you can dream of. It’s all a matter of price and execution tactics. So now we got that off the table. There are things that trip me, it can really concern me if I review a market as a candidate. Number one is the number of properties for sale, and how long they’ve been for sale, what we call days on market. If there’s a lot of property for sale and they’re been on the market for a long time, move to the next market. Unless you’re an expert and you can surgically go in there and buy properties where you want, which sometimes we do. More help with houses than land.
Steven Butala: You can find this information through redfen.com, or more importantly realtor.com. Those both have great interfaces that show you almost in real time exactly what’s for sale in that market, and what it’s going for, whether it’s pending. And the websites are getting better and better, the data piece and all that so there’s a lot of tech available that wasn’t even available two years ago. And it’s always getting better, so that’s really good news for all of us. What makes a market really really mailable? What do I look for from a land perspective, and really from a housing perspective? I look for consistency, pricing consistence. Price per square foot for houses and a price per acre for rural vacant land. I mean you can find some consistency, and the days on market for the stuff that’s there, is not real long, it’s a short days on market. There’s not a lot of property for sale, and the stuff that is for sale is relatively consistent. You nailed it.
Steven Butala: And more often than not, probably 80% of the markets that I test, work. So the other thing too what Jill mentioned, and this is a misconception that happens a lot … When you’re new you think every county’s equal. IT equal. So you take a really urban county like Los Angeles, or like Phoenix. The LA county or Maricopa county, and you look at their websites and it’s just a big joy to be in there. Every question that you have including documents, investing days, bang, bang, bang it’s all organized and professional and it’s like oh this is great, why didn’t I get in here before. Well, then you go to a rural market in Montana, or I’ll pick on Cochise county, Arizona. They’ve just revamped their website really, really recently. And it has nothing there. There’s one sheet. Then you go there and it says, welcome to Cochise county, see ya.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Here’s our address, here’s our phone number, have a nice day.
Steven Butala: That’s what Jill means.
Jill DeWit: And the weather today. It’ll show that, the temperature in Cochise today. It’s brilliant.
Steven Butala: What Jill means is make sure they have, if you get somebody who’s calling back, make sure the county’s got the recorders phone number. There’s counties in Arkansaw that are not computerized yet, and they have phone answering machines only-
Jill DeWit: West Texas too.
Steven Butala: … work three or hour hours a day, three or four days a week. If you live in those counties by the way, they’re untouched and you know Sally the recorder, you can make a fortune.
Jill DeWit: And you know when she’s coming back from maternity leave and you can get stuff done, you’re gonna kill it. That funny? We’ve had those. No nothings gonna get recorded till next week because of so and so’s gone. Really? Yep.
Steven Butala: We’ve had a situation recently where somebody said everybody’s out of the office ’cause it’s a holiday. Well we’ll record it next week. Thanks.
Jill DeWit: Yeah we’ll get to it when we get to it.
Steven Butala: That kind of stuff makes [crosstalk 00:09:30].
Jill DeWit: Oh the [crosstalk 00:09:30] one. Yeah I did that one, yeah that made me mad. Like yeah we ran out of time in Friday, you’re sitting on my money, what the heck!
Steven Butala: The other thing too, I don’t think we mentioned it is, you might find a great market but make sure that RealQuest covers it. RealQuest covers 99% of the county, 3,144 counties in the county. Make sure that they cover the county. There’s like, it’s less than a hundred. And they’re working on it.
Jill DeWit: Make sure they’re in ParcelFact, ’cause you wanna be able to, when the calls come in you wanna make sure you can quickly look it up and get all the information you need right there, and make a quick decision. And there’s so much out there. We just brought up a good point, the counties that are not covered, don’t try to crack that market. There’s plenty of other counties that are supported and are good this way that no ones really working in. And we want you to be there. And that’s one of the things that I just talked to somebody about this the other day too, they were kinda asking me the secret list. Like you said it does work everywhere, it really does. We’re here to teach you and show you philosophy. Even this show, I’m not here to tell you, go here, go here, go here, go here, go here. Price it like this, we’ll see ya in two months, let me know how it goes.
Jill DeWit: No we’re here teaching you the whole concept, what we look for, what makes a good county, why do we pick one. Because we want you to go off and find it in your area, your neck of the woods. And you’re gonna be off doing some area that we never heard of, and you’re gonna be quietly over there killing it and happy for five years. Just hanging out with that county, and three counties around it. That’s how it goes.
Steven Butala: So here’s a case study, Luna County New Mexico. Which is the exact center point between …
Jill DeWit: Albuquerque?
Steven Butala: Yeah it’s Albuquerque-
Jill DeWit: And Taos?
Steven Butala: … on the west. And on the east it’s-
Jill DeWit: Taos or Almogordo?
Steven Butala: It doesn’t matter, it’s like a truck stop kind of county.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: And you know it’s not a major freeway between two cities. It’s a midpoint so a lotta overnight truckers stay there. On the freeway part of it anyway. Anyway, in the 70’s a company called Horizon went in there and sub-divided two massive sub-divisions. Deming Ranchettes and Sunshine Valley Ranchettes, so there’s thousands and thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of five acre properties that you can buy for 500 bucks. All day long. And if you have an acre you can put a house on it and retire. There’s a lot of people that live there, so on the onset when you look at it it’s like this is the greatest thing ever. There’s places like this in Florida too.
Steven Butala: Those two sub-divisions specifically in Luna County, are not good for what we do, even though on the onset it-
Jill DeWit: Looks great.
Steven Butala: … it looks great. All the other places in that county, all the acres and the ranches, it’s huge county, are fantastic for what we do. So, it’s not like Luna County’s bad. It’s just that those sub-division are over done, they’re over exposed for what we do. And it’s not just ’cause of our group, this has been going on long long before even I was in the business. So it’s not that a county’s bad, it’s maybe just that one sub-division’s overdone. If you want a rock bottom place to live go buy to lots next to each other in Deming Ranchettes and have a beautiful life, it’s gonna cost you next to nothing. Or buy them of them all in a row and have just a beautiful-
Jill DeWit: Compound.
Steven Butala: … off the grade or whatever.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: There’s always a silver lining, and I never say stuff like this. There is always a way, and always a silver lining in every single market you look in. Even though one section might not work, or some version of it. Or let’s say maternity leave Sally, there’s, then you know what, go over there. Go over there, find out when she’s coming back and make it work. There’s always a way to make this work, it’s just a matter of how much we have to put into it.
Jill DeWit: That’s true. That’s awesome.
Steven Butala: Well you’ve done it again, you spent another 15 minutes or so listening to the Land Academy Show. Join us next time for the episode called ‘scaling your real estate operation’.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted on our on-link media landinverstors.com, it is free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: Poor-
Steven Butala: Luna?
Jill DeWit: No, poor maternity leave Sally.
Steven Butala: We should just write all of our stories on about stuff.
Jill DeWit: They hilarious.
Steven Butala: There’s a lot of people that have real estate agent stories, we have title agent stories.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. There’s a book right there, that would be fun reading. I mean think about how long together, our combined real estate experience. The years and the transactions and the stories are … There’s a lot there. And you know what, I know that’s why everybody’s here too. I mean we’re not brand new, we didn’t just start this yesterday. Or even a year ago. We’ve been doing this, and even before we went into Land Academy we were here doing this business for a very very very long time.
Steven Butala: 30 years.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: More than that now.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: I think.
Jill DeWit: So crazy, it’s good. Wherever you are listening, or wherever you are watching, please subscribe and 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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