Why Land Academy Advanced Group is Free (1073)
Why Land Academy Advanced Group is Free (1073)
Transcript:
Steve Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Steve 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.
Steve Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about why the Land Academy Advanced Group is free. The Land Academy Advanced Group …
Jill DeWit: Is free.
Steve Butala: Is a group of knuckleheads. I think there’s about 12 to 15 of us, ish, that we have chosen because they’ve been with us for a long time. Some of them have been with us only a very short amount of time, but we can see because they pull data out through our subscription, how much mail they’re pulling, how much they’re using offers to-
Jill DeWit: Don’t give too much away.
Steve Butala: Really?
Jill DeWit: Yeah, for the meat of the show.
Steve Butala: Oh. So I mean we don’t choose them, they choose themselves. It’s just based on their activities, that’s my point. But they’re just constantly outperforming each other. We all are. And there’s a special call. So we’ll explain about why it’s free and what the whole point is in the meat of the show. But we have an advanced group and it’s I guess 15 of us, and it’s a pleasure for me to be involved in that group.
Jill DeWit: Well, let’s save it for the show.
Steve 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: Allan wrote, I’m working on my next mailer and I noticed that at the end of about 500 of the legal descriptions, it says potential additional tax liability. For example, township, range, sec, tract, acres, 35.14, potential additional tax liability.
Steve Butala: That’s what he’s talking about, that sentence at the end there.
Jill DeWit: That sentence at the end.
Steve Butala: Potential additional tax liability.
Jill DeWit: Besides the obvious, this could mean just about anything. Barring a unproductive call to the County, has anyone come across this before? Did you still mail those parcels? I saw it when I was spot checking my mail merge and it made the legal description on the purchase agreement look kind of off. For now I use the find or replace tool to delete that at the end of the descriptions. Just curious if anyone has seen this before.
Steve Butala: So he means he’s deleting that sentence off of the legal description in the mailer, in the offer, not in the deed.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steve Butala: You don’t want to do that in the deed. Here’s the thing. This is a borderline PhD level question, and in your career as a land investor or a real estate investor, when you’re doing mailers and doing research, this is how I spend almost all of my week. You’re going to come up with stuff in the legal descriptions that shocks you. And it’s never going to end.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steve Butala: I’ve been doing this for 25, almost 30 years.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steve Butala: Here’s an example. I’m buying a bunch of property in Maricopa County right now, Arizona. In every single one of the legal descriptions, I’d had this exact experience. At the end of the legal subscription, it says MCR. Capital MCR, and then some number like 338, forward slash 142. And so I first gasped. I’m like, “I thought it was a undivided interest.” And you can imagine. So I’m on Google, I’m trying to figure this out. Should I buy this property? Shouldn’t I?
Jill DeWit: Can I guess?
Steve Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Is it Maricopa County Recorder and the document number or something?
Steve Butala: God, I should’ve just called you. How did you know that?
Jill DeWit: It took me two seconds to figure it out. I’m good at this stuff.
Steve Butala: I spent four hours on this.
Jill DeWit: I’m sorry, I’m good at that stuff.
Steve Butala: Seriously, you never saw that before?
Jill DeWit: I’ve read so many. I’ve not seen it, but that was just my guess.
Steve Butala: That’s exactly what it was. So fortunately the result of that was a positive, positive ending for me. Here’s a real negative and a tragic ending to the story, another story. In Kern County, California, there’s a lot ending in the legal description that says UND and then a number like 3 of 22.
Jill DeWit: I know what that is-
Steve Butala: 3 over 22. That’s an undivided interest and you own that percentage of that property, and it’s terrible. It’s wrecking real estate values all over Kern County.
Jill DeWit: 3/22nds of this property, of this 200 acres.
Steve Butala: So they long since have corrected. That’s a very old legal description. We see it once in a while and certainly don’t send mail out anymore, but there’s no way you can just keep track of all these. What you have to do is just come up with a little system. Apparently you just have to ask your partner first. They might know.
Jill DeWit: I get into those. I really do. You know what it is, for me it’s like a puzzle. Way before we had ParcelFact and I really had to read the legal description backwards and find the property, that was a puzzle for me. I had fun. I enjoy that, so I get into them. I’ve seen some crazy ones too, but this exact thing doesn’t worry me at all because every property is subject to potential additional tax, whatever. You check what the back taxes are.
Steve Butala: It’s worth a call.
Jill DeWit: That’s usually what that means.
Steve Butala: What ends up happening, and here’s a big picture point-
Jill DeWit: It’s like a duh comment.
Steve Butala: What ends up happening is every once in a while counties, they elect new people. They elect a new assessor or somebody new comes in, out with the old, in with the new, and they get these crazy ideas and so they implement stuff, which is good. They implement new things based on new technology. And so somewhere along the lines, somebody decided to add that sentence to a bunch of legal descriptions if not all of them in the whole county. And so now you just have to deal with it.
Jill DeWit: I’d mail them anyway. It doesn’t mean anything.
Steve Butala: Well, I would find out.
Jill DeWit: So you know what it’s means to me and I’m curious, we’ll find out, but to me just sounds like it’s a little bit of a buyer beware clause, because when you’re buying a property you are assuming the property in its current condition, back taxes and all. So for me it sounds like the assessor or somebody was adding a little thing on there just making sure in the legal description, you’re buying this whole property also with ever what back taxes are attached to it, which is true.
Steve Butala: What it means to me is it’s redundant. When you buy any piece of property, you’re usually buying it for more than the person did before you. So it’s subject to new taxes and new assessment. That’s just the way it is. So it’s-
Jill DeWit: A buyer, you just seen a-
Steve Butala: I would check, but it doesn’t concern me at all. And there’s always weird stuff in legal descriptions that’s funny.
Jill DeWit: By the way, that was not fake. I really just guessed what the MCR was.
Steve Butala: Awesome, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Sorry.
Steve Butala: It makes me attracted to you, stuff like that.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steve Butala: Today’s topic, why the Land Academy Advanced Group is free. This is-
Jill DeWit: You know, go ahead. I’m sorry.
Steve Butala: This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: I was going to reciprocate. Do you know what’s hot for me?
Steve Butala: What?
Jill DeWit: Picking a hot county is hot for me.
Steve Butala: Oh my gosh.
Jill DeWit: Seriously. You come in, the deals that sometimes, the things you send out and it comes back and I’m like, “We’re buying what for what?” Because I don’t see it in the pre-stage. I just see the phone’s ringing stage. Like, “Hi, I got your offer to buy X for Y.” And I’m like, “Hello, all right.” Boy, you went in hot here and it worked. So that’s attractive.
Steve Butala: We all have this. It has to be, I guess. We all have something that we bring to the table. That’s actually what this topic’s about. We all have some quirky thing that we’re just good at for some reason, and we don’t know why. And that just happens to be mine, I guess. I don’t know.
Jill DeWit: I love it. So here’s my thoughts on the advanced group. So why is the Land Academy Advanced Group free is our topic. Our weekly advanced group is really, there’s some things that we do together, little perks like special days on our live event shows, and things like that that’s just for them and that are also free. But we always get together every Thursday at one o’clock, and it’s nothing more but a weekly chat for me with like-minded individuals, is how I see it. They’re also full-time investors and it’s our time to brainstorm and create new deals and new partnerships.
Steve Butala: That’s what this is all about, is doing deals with people. Everybody in that group brings something crazy to the table. In a lot of cases it’s just doing a lot of deals that are just impressive, even to Jill and I. We’re like, “Wow.” Maybe it’s not the sheer volume, but it’s the types of deals. They’re a little bit different than the ones that we do. Maybe it’s a an incredible flair for marketing. A couple of guys in the group have that. Almost all of them came to Land Academy itself with other businesses already, that they’re either currently operating in addition to this, or they sold them in some cases. Even one guy’s I think owned a couple of restaurants and sold them, which is really off target here. But off target for this type of business-
Jill DeWit: You wouldn’t think that it would relate.
Steve Butala: But he understands staffing, he understands marketing and all that same stuff. So why is it free? The real point is I think what Jill just said. I spaced out there for a second because I was thinking about something else. But I think what you said is … I think what you said is we’re here to do deals with people and that’s what we do. That’s what that group is for. It’s for us to do deals with some of our advanced members who express a huge interest in it, or they do deals with each other. Some of them have full blown, they became partners like we’re partners. They just work together in different parts of the country.
Jill DeWit: I’m excited.
Steve Butala: That’s what this is all about, and that’s why it’s free. Why would we charge for that?
Jill DeWit: Right. I’m excited, and they’re coming a day earlier for our live event coming up on the first weekend of October here in LA, and we’re going to have a whole little closed door session with just them and us. It’s going to be awesome.
Steve Butala: At least once a week, a question gets to me like, “How do I become a part of the advanced group?” I send it back to our customer service people, but the standard answer for me is, and I don’t know how they answer it, but I answer it like this: we don’t choose you, you choose yourself by how many deals you’re doing, what you bring to the table, how much mail-
Jill DeWit: The data you’re pulling-
Steve Butala: How much data you’re pulling, how much mail you’re sending out, and how involved you are in the regular Land Academy Thursday call, and the types of questions that you’re asking us on that call. We don’t choose you. It’s just glaringly apparent that you’re taking this seriously, making tons of money, hopefully in your case, making more money than we do. And it’s that simple. Everybody wins. For the life of me I don’t know why we would charge for that. There’s other educational environments out there that punish you for being successful.
Jill DeWit: They do.
Steve Butala: They charge you $50,000 or something to be involved in what they call a mastermind group, which I guess that’s what the advanced group is, but these cute little words-
Jill DeWit: It didn’t even dawn on me.
Steve Butala: These cute little words really just annoy me-
Jill DeWit: I hate that-
Steve Butala: Sometimes, like mastermind and guru. Come on, we’re real estate investors and we believe for whatever reason that we’re better together, not apart. In fact, some of the people in the advanced group just lurk. They’re not really involved, but we can see how much data they’re pulling.
Jill DeWit: And they learn. They’re learning new techniques, learning what we’re doing over here. Maybe they are doing deals. They are. I know some of them, they’re doing deals on the side and it’s great. I love it.
Steve Butala: I bet we know 30% of what’s really going on. I bet there’s so much amazing stuff going on.
Jill DeWit: I’m sure you’re right.
Steve Butala: I bet maybe, what?
Jill DeWit: No, no. It’s good, in a positive way.
Steve Butala: It’s a great way. It’s great.
Jill DeWit: No, I love it. That’s the whole point here.
Steve Butala: It is.
Jill DeWit: That’s it.
Steve Butala: It’s not about us at all.
Jill DeWit: No, and I’ve said that. That’s what Land Academy is. We’re here teaching people to be solid investors in the hopes that, which we are, we all do bigger and better deals together.
Steve Butala: Exactly.
Jill DeWit: And someday we’ll do stuff together, some day we won’t. You hook up with that guy, whatever it is, you need us for one little thing, we can all benefit, great. Love it.
Steve Butala: Exactly. Join us next time for another interesting episode.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted on our online investors found in land investors, excuse me, found in our online community found at landinvestors.com. It is free.
Steve Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: It’s pretty fun, actually. You know what I love? One of the best things I love about our tight little group here, it didn’t even dawn on me until you said it, that other organizations, not even in our world, but people that have communities and things that they do stuff together like this and they educate and whatever, they always seem to charge these advanced groups. And that to me, that’s the wrong direction-
Steve Butala: That’s what I think-
Jill DeWit: You should be going. You should be giving more to these people because you want them to do better … and everything just grows. It’s so funny but, what was I going to say? Oh, our group, it’s nice because we’ve developed these relationships with people that we can all bounce things off of on the side. We know what areas, each person’s kind of really been a pro in this area or this state or in this situation, and we’re all so tight and close and trusting that we can say, “Hey, can you look at this deal? Tell me, am I missing something here? I’m about to sink a lot of money in it. And I know you know this area better than I do. What do you think? And by the way, do you want in on this, because I know you know it better than I do.” That’s the stuff that really goes on and that is huge for all of us.
Steve Butala: Here’s a working example. One guy in our group’s got a client that he can’t satisfy. This guy wants to buy so much property in a very urban area, and he reached out to Jill and I to help because we’ve got people answering our phones and acquisition people all set up and staffed up and ready to really manage, to satisfy this guy’s just, they have tons and tons of money behind him. So we’ll help each other. It’s not costing each other a dollar and we’re partnering the stuff 50/50.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. That’s the value.
Steve Butala: The Land Academy show remains commercial-free for you, our loyal listener.
Jill DeWit: So wherever you’re watching or wherever you’re listening, please subscribe and rate us there.
Steve Butala: We are Steve and Jill.
Jill DeWit: I missed that.
Steve Butala: What happened?
Jill DeWit: I did. Let’s do it again. Ready? I don’t know.
Both: We are Steve and Jill.
Steve Butala: Information-
Jill DeWit: And inspiration-
Steve Butala: To buy undervalued property. I got blindsided there.
Jill DeWit: It’s Friday. I’m out of it. That’s what’s going on. Happy Friday!
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