Our In-House Title Escrow Company is COMING SOON (1026)
Our In-House Title Escrow Company is COMING SOON (1026)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steven and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
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 our in house title escrow company that’s coming soon.
Jill DeWit: Coming back soon.
Steven Butala: And it’s not, not that, it’s nothing new for us. This’ll be our third launch of our title and escrow company.
Jill DeWit: You think it’s three?
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: You think so?
Steven Butala: We had to turn it off twice because it was so popular.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: We weren’t staffed up right.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: It was priced a little bit incorrectly.
Jill DeWit: Too low.
Steven Butala: And we just didn’t have the right people running.
Jill DeWit: We got bombarded. I didn’t have enough people running.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: I had the right people. I didn’t have, I didn’t have 12 of them.
Steven Butala: Exactly. It turns out our members, well, we’ll talk about it in a minute.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
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: Jason asks, “When you’re creating your mailer, how do you send offers to the owners of the property?” All right. He’s clearly new and just found us. He’s asking the right question in the right place. So that’s good.
Steven Butala: Picture a spreadsheet with a thousand lines in it. Every single line in that spreadsheet represents a piece of real estate. And in each line there’s lots of columns. There’s a the first name of the person who owns it, the second, their last name, the address of the property, the address of where the tax bill goes to, how large it is, how many acres,-
Jill DeWit: Zoning.
Steven Butala: How many square foot and on and on. Three hundred actual pieces of, lines of, columns of data that are associated with every one of those lines.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: You take that thousand line spreadsheet and you merge it in what’s called a mail merge into Microsoft Word. So you take Microsoft Excel document into a Microsoft Word document.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: And you merge them together and all the variables, the size and the person’s name, there’s constants and variables inside the Microsoft Word document. So now the end result is, without getting into tremendous amount of detail, a super long pdf that’s miles long with perfect offers that have diff… Every single offer has a different name on it, who it’s addressed to, a different assessor’s parcel number. And so if you go on YouTube and you look up mail merge 101 or how to do a mail merge or what is a mail merge? There is incredibly, an incredible amount of free and valuable information about how to do this.
Jill DeWit: Right. What you are doing is creating unique and personal offers to each and every property owner.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Because that’s what sings to them. Let’s be honest, and we’ve been doing it. We’ve tried them all, you know, and that’s part of why you’re here. You know, we learned the right way because we test it all the wrong ways.
Steven Butala: I did a video long time ago and I think it was taken down by somebody.
Jill DeWit: Really.
Steven Butala: Yeah. I said “Imagine you want, imagine there’s 10 girls that you really like.”
Jill DeWit: I did not. I didn’t take that down. I didn’t take down, I’ve never taken down any of your videos and you know that, you silly.
Steven Butala: Imagine there’s 10 girls you like and you’re going to write them each a love note.
Jill DeWit: I think it’s fine.
Steven Butala: But you don’t want to write 10 separate love notes because it’s a pain in the butt.
Jill DeWit: It’s, that video’s there, it’s funny.
Steven Butala: And you don’t want either one, any of the girls to know that the other girl got a love note from you. So your write a love note. Then you slide in their names, and their addresses and stuff, that are all different, where it needs to go and then you send it off to their different addresses.
Jill DeWit: It’s like Dear Lisa, fill in name. I can’t wait to see your blank again. Fill it in. Maybe it’s smile, maybe it’s eyes, maybe it’s something else. I think that’s great. Fill it in and you merge it together.
Steven Butala: And so-
Jill DeWit: And then, meet me at a certain location on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they all get different ones.
Steven Butala: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
Steven Butala: Yeah. Well said.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: Great finish there.
Jill DeWit: I know this one, I didn’t take anything down. I’m very comfortable in my role.
Steven Butala: And that’s what a mail merge is and you can do it. And the beauty is none of them, assuming that all of these women don’t talk to each other, which is not physically possible.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: But assuming they live in all different states and there’s no, they don’t know what’s socially media is.
Jill DeWit: That’d be helpful.
Steven Butala: They don’t know that the other person got a letter so they feel very special. Just like a landowner, it feels very special that you want to buy their property very specifically. All this infor, they don’t know what a mail merge is when they get this.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: You do. We do. They don’t know you can send out 25,000 offers at one time.
Jill DeWit: It’s funny. I tell our people too, by the way, you want to, when you answer the phone, you want them to feel like you only sent like a handful out. You don’t want to say, “Well I mailed 3000 last week. So I don’t know off the top of my head, Mr. Jones.” Because then Mr. Jones feels like this.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: You want the person’s calling you back, to sell his property, to think you sent out five, you know kind of thing. Like, you know, “I did send out a couple offers last week. Is that if you’re calling about that, can you give me some information?” That kind of a thing. Don’t, don’t say 3000.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, our in house title escrow company and how it’s coming soon.
Jill DeWit: Like, you know, I sent out several text messages, you know, whatever. “Which girl is this again?”
Steven Butala: Yeah, I can really see that.
Jill DeWit: Because could you imagine? I was like, “Are you the Lisa?”
Steven Butala: “Are you Sally S. or Sally G.?
Jill DeWit: Exactly. The Lisa in New York or the Lisa in LA. Could you imagine? “Oh good. Okay. Yeah. You. Actually I do want to see you. I’m sorry. I thought you’re the other Lisa.” Kids like started. Could you imagine? Wow.
Steven Butala: I know exactly how that would go.
Jill DeWit: Wow.
Steven Butala: Exactly. We all do. Hey, every single person here, male or female, knows exactly how that would go.
Jill DeWit: Wow. Let’s take it up in your numbers to a whole new level.
Steven Butala: This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: By the way, have you ever had two dates on the same night?
Steven Butala: I have.
Jill DeWit: And how’d you get out of it? Or did you pull it off?
Steven Butala: I can one up this.
Jill DeWit: Uh oh, oh no.
Steven Butala: I’ve had two scheduled dates.
Jill DeWit: Uh huh.
Steven Butala: I’ve also had, you know, a date, a scheduled date that just went horrific.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: And then just found somebody else very quickly.
Jill DeWit: Like left with somebody, like you went somewhere with one person and left with the other.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: I think that’s funny.
Steven Butala: Have you?
Jill DeWit: No. No.
Steven Butala: Oh. Every time, Jill and I, when the cameras are off, have talks like this. She really admits what really went on during her singledom and it’s way, way, way further out there than any of us realize.
Jill DeWit: What? What?
Steven Butala: I say all this stuff on the air for some reason, probably because of my gender, which is ridiculous. You can tell, you can say anything you want.
Jill DeWit: Nope. [crosstalk 00:06:53]
Steven Butala: I’m not just, you don’t have to uphold the relationship, a reputation, Jill, any longer.
Jill DeWit: It’s okay. Thank you.
Steven Butala: For me. I get it. I knew what I was getting in to 10 years ago.
Jill DeWit: Yes. Okay. So this show is all about our upcoming title company. Okay. So let me talk about this. We did this a couple of years ago and again, everything we’ve done here at Land Academy’s based on need and request, not only us, but from our members. So years ago they said, “Hey guys, we’re getting tired. A and B could use some help closing our deals. What are you guys doing?” “Well we have our own in house staff that closes our deals for us. You know, they arrange the notaries, they take care of the mail back and forth that comes in. They get them recorded.” So, you know, we decided, “Hey well, why not? We could, we can do handler on deals. Let’s open up to our members as well. Oh and let’s even do the general public as well. Why not?” Because that’s a good idea.
Jill DeWit: So we create a Title Mind and it was a huge success.
Steven Butala: It was a smash hit.
Jill DeWit: It was, we were overwhelmed. Like almost within the first week we had to shut down taking orders, put like a curtain up and say, “We’re, we got, hold on a moment.” Because some people hit us with these orders for us to close their deals. And let me back up and explain what, just a little more what this is. Imagine you’re sending out your offers, the letter comes back signed. You have your one conversation with Mr. Jones. You’re all on the same page about the price. Everything’s great. He wants to sell, you want to buy. Great. And then you say, “Thanks my people will call you.” Click.
Jill DeWit: Now what you would do is call our Title Mind company and say, “Hey Mr. Jones, here’s the price we agreed on.” If you have the purchase agreement, great, if not, doesn’t matter. You know. “And here’s the property information. Please close this deal. Bye.” Click.
Steven Butala: Please close this deal because I have 10 more offers to deal with.
Jill DeWit: Right. So then what would happen is now my team would jump in and say, “All right.” And they would call Mr. Jones, “Hi, My name is Title Mind. We work with Mr., you know, we work with Luke here and we’re calling to arrange a notary and get, you know, see what day is good for you.” We’ll get the all that done. And then my team, my in house people would talk to the seller, arrange a notary, prepare, create and prepare the deed, collect the money from you. So you don’t have to, you just send it all to us. We would take sure, make sure that the payment got to the seller and we would take care of the notary. When we get it back, we would go all the way through recording it for you. And then when it’s all said and done, all you would do is get the recorded deed back. And then I just like, “Ooh, perfect. That was it.”
Jill DeWit: And then you know, and we would keep putting, keep you posted. So you know when the recorded deed is on it’s way back or when it was recorded. So you can go ahead and start getting it, you know, sold kind of thing. And then we would do it again if you want us to. On the sell side you could say, “It’s sold, here’s the buyer, get it done.” So it was beautiful.
Jill DeWit: And as you can see, that’s why it was seamless to our customers because we know what we’re doing, how to do this. We just got overwhelmed. And then what happened was our transactions were getting slowed down too, because of the volume. We just couldn’t keep up. So we had to eventually stop Title Mind, do our own deals for a little bit, and we’re going to bring it back.
Steven Butala: I mean it’s a, what we ended up being is our members outsourced transaction coordinator.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: So all you, it was always designed for, it was designed so that our members could do what’s important, which is actually put the deal together.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Get the mail out, negotiate the deal, make sure it’s okay, do the first steps and just pile all the crap work.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: On our staff.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: And as you can imagine, like this is a bunch of type A entrepreneurs that we have in our group. We don’t want to do paperwork. I still don’t want to do paperwork.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: Jill doesn’t want to do paperwork.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: But we have an army of people that are interested in doing that and work for us.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: So we’re bringing it back.
Jill DeWit: Yep. And we’re going to add another thing. And then just to add this to it, I don’t need dates and timelines now. So I know you, I know there’s a lot of our members are listening right now are like, “Oh, we’ve been waiting for this.” Or like, “I was hoping this would come back because it really was a time saver.” And then just, it’s amazing what a service this is.
Jill DeWit: But we’re also going to bring back, back then we were doing escrow only. Which is we were only handling the deals that didn’t need title. Just like you know, not a lot of money, real easy transactions, very cut and dry kind of transactions where you really didn’t really need title insurance. You weren’t going to buy with title insurance. You weren’t going to sell with title insurance because they were very, you know, more inexpensive and they weren’t necessarily going to build on it kind of deals.
Jill DeWit: So now what we’re going to do is, what we’re working on, it probably will be phase two again, like we did originally with Title Mind. We’re going to bring back the original escrow only phase and then we will roll in with title phase. So it’s going to be good.
Steven Butala: You know, we’ve got, I don’t know, nine or 10 companies. Some of them are support companies for Land Academy and House Academy. This one was the one that broke our actual website.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: It was so, but seriously, We were on vacation in Moab and this site got broken.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: Because of so much traffic.
Jill DeWit: We couldn’t do it.
Steven Butala: I’m looking forward to it. Because now, you know, we learned.
Jill DeWit: We did.
Steven Butala: I think we didn’t get one negative review. Everybody loved it.
Jill DeWit: No.
Steven Butala: Everybody loved it specifically for the transactions that were tough to get done.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: When there’s dead people and stuff. And we can solve that.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: Hey, we know your time’s valuable. Thanks for spending some of it with us today. Join us next time for the episode called Complementing Data Results With Offers To Owners.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted on our online community found at landinvestors.com. It is free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: I’m super excited because the team that’s going to be doing this is kind of an outsourced, if you will, team that won’t be sitting in our office. So we kind of won’t know and see what’s going on until they say, you know, whatever.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: But it’s, we’re preparing them, I think, too, that they don’t really realize what’s coming and we know what’s coming. So if it’s going to be good, I’m really excited.
Steven Butala: Everybody wins with this.
Jill DeWit: Oh yeah, exactly. And wherever you’re watching, wherever you are listening, please subscribe and 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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