How to Make a Good Land Posting (LA 1082)
How to Make a Good Land Posting (LA 1082)
Transcript:
Steve: Steve and Jill here.
Jill: Good day.
Steve: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill: And I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about how a good- how to make a good land posting. Sorry. I got a little confused there for a second.
Jill: Okay. What is a good land posting?
Steve: What is a land posting?
Jill: What?
Steve: What’s a land posting?
Jill: Wait a minute.
Steve: Wait, don’t I just call my real estate agent and say, “Hey, I’ve got a piece of property. How about you sell it?”
Jill: Can I just put a for sale sign on it, and just walk away? Put my phone number?
Steve: This has got off to a good start.
Jill: Oh, good.
Steve: Because that’s what I think the whole world thinks.
Jill: I want to think. Okay, let’s think of all the things you would just [inaudible 00:00:43] like.
Steve: My sister in-law is a real estate agent [inaudible] last Christmas she was talking about a piece of land that this she looked at. Let’s call her.
Jill: Yeah.
Steve: Shell get solved, it’ll be fine.
Jill: Well, how about the girl that we bought our house from? Let’s just call her.
Steve: So it turns out it 21st century, almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are think about that and the internet and how we do stuff with computers is so dramatically changed. This industry since it was kind of the whole concept of it, the modern day real estate industry was started in the forties and fifties 1940s and fifties for some reason there’s lingering real estate agents still.
Jill: Yep.
Steve: If you want the answer to that question, go see who the number two lobbyist group is in Washington for the last 35 years.
Jill: That’s interesting.
Steve: It’s the national association of realtors anyway.
Jill: Who are they? Who are they behind? I hate to guess, does it start with an N?
Jill: [inaudible 00:01:41].
Jill: Is it? is it, is is number one the, is it the NRA is number one?
Steve: NRA, up there, it’s top five.
Jill: Okay, I would guess.
Steve: That’s a good question.
Jill: We should look this up.
Steve: I only ever looked. I look up, I obsess on this stuff.
Jill: I know.
Steve: And all five of them or if you just, they’re propping themselves up, falsely. Like it removes ironically removes the raw supply and demand of capitalism. But wow that went sideways fast.
Steve: Turns out…
Jill: You’re getting a lecture from dad right now or professor Steve pick one.
Steve: Jill and I are in the pre development of a show called the Jack and Jill show about relationships and working together and you know, kind of like couples therapy and, and a non real estate show for is what Jill wants to do and I and I completely agree with her.
Jill: It’s going to happen.
Steve: So what we’re practicing that was a… [Inaudible 00:02:42].
Jill: There we go. Perfect. Thank you. Professor Butala.
Steve: It’ll launch out in October and I’m sure it’ll fail.
Jill: Hey, I get to sleep at the professor. [inaudible 00:02:51].
Steve: Yah that’s what this new show is about.
Jill: Good. Okay.
Steve: That gets me thinking. It’s like the middle of the day, right? [inaudible 00:02:58]
Steve: Turns out when you own a piece of real estate, specifically land, which is what this show is about, you have to take a lot more personal responsibility and getting the thing sold. You do all the work to buy it, right? You can’t just shove it on some real estate agent and expect it to get sold in almost all situations. So you have to do a posting, like an online posting. It’s a literal piece of HTML. And so you make this, create this posting and then you lasted, Oh this is the whole show.
Jill: You want to save it, cause I got [inaudible 00:03:30] stuff to say to.
Steve: All right, 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: Ken, to ask, do any of you guys use, wait, can’t ask you any of you guys use them? If so, which model? Okay. Whoever. I’m sorry. Our script person cut off the beginning of the question. [inaudible 00:03:52]
Steve: He said he’s thinking about purchasing a handheld GPS unit and then that, and then that sentence. Do you have,
Jill: Oh.
Steve: Id cut this off.
Jill: Good it.
Steve: This is a good Jack and Jill thing.
Jill: Yeah, it is too.
Steve: You work with your spouse and they make an honest mistake like this. What do you do?
Jill: What do you do?
Steve: I don’t know. You could have a couple of choices. This is a total Jack and Jill episode.
Jill: Did I do it? Okay,
Steve: Sure. The camera’s on so she can’t yell at me.
Jill: Oh thanks.
Steve: But you know you have a choice. You can blow your top and get all upset and wreck everybody’s day, including your own, or you can just say, you know what?
Jill: That’s what I do. [inaudible 00:04:28] No I don’t do that. [inaudible 00:04:29]
Steve: You’d never do that.
Jill: I think about that because I think what I meant to say was I think about that path and that’s not the path I want to go. I choose not to get in an argument and I lose. I will. I lose a good large, this is a Jack and Jill show right now. I lose more than half of our battles because I don’t have the energy. And you do.
Steve: That’s, I don’t even think, I don’t look at it as winning and losing. The only reason I ever liked address anything is to, in the hopes that the next time it comes up, we kind of have some kind of systematic protocol other than just crazy emotion.
Jill: That’s it. Don’t argue.
Steve: [inaudible 00:05:09]
Steve: Just totally show.
Jill: Exactly. Steven’s protocol is, I’m going to go home now and she’s not going to want any to question this ever again.
Steve: Don’t give me kind of [inaudible 00:05:24]
Jill: Anything.
Steve: I mean the content, you know, you know what I a inadvertently left out a sentence in our script.
Jill: I don’t care.
Steve: I know.
Jill: I didn’t throw you go to the bus.
Steve: I know, I know. So if you did though, not yelling about it and saying you’re an idiot, which you never do, that’s not how you go about that you.
Jill: People do that.
Steve: I know.
Jill: Sad.
Steve: What you should do is say, you know, this is inconvenient, Steve and I get it and how can I help you to, so we don’t copy and paste the wrong stuff anymore. Like you’re in third grade. [inaudible 00:05:56]
Jill: Hey, just to finish the Jack and Jill excerpt here, do you want to know how I really do handle it? I have a mantra in my head. It was an accident. Don’t lose your cool. Move on.
Steve: Yeah. [inaudible 00:06:13] My own thing is, you know, how can I help you do this to that? We don’t do this next time.
Jill: Hey, you know what?
Steve: Usually ends up in everybody yelling at each other anyway, but these are nice thoughts.
Jill: Were in show 1000 and whatever, you actually forgot the part of the question. Who flipping cares?
Steve: That’s Awesome.
Jill: You knew what it was.
Steve: If we had a camera map, if we had cameras on all the time, we’d never argued. [inaudible 00:06:32] We’d would just be happy
Jill: I would love it. [inaudible 00:06:35] Would advocate for that.
Steve: Wow. I’m going to think about that.
Jill: Yeah.
Steve: It’s like a $300 solution to some huge grief removal.
Jill: All right.
Steve: Any of these GPS, which one of these GPS units do you guys use? And if so, which model?
Jill: So one of our members, Andy wrote in, he said, I’ve always had good experiences with Garmin handhelds, and that my dad had those two.
Steve: I mean Jill’s a pilot. So that’s why I put this in here.
Jill: I should get a new one. Those? Are they pretty, I bet they’re like amazingly awesome. Now I’ll put on my Christmas list. Mine is an old Dakota model and has been great lately though I’ve just, I’ve just made KML files using Google earth and I use the free maps.me app on my phone.
Steve: So what he’s saying is he takes, he plots out the weigh points. This is GPS 101 plops out the wave points in Google earth while he’s sitting in his house or in front of the computer with GPS coordinates on them and then go ahead.
Jill: And then pops it into his maps.me app on the phone.” It doesn’t need a single signal. Once you load the base maps”… That’s huge. “It’s also easy to share with future buyers so they can go and check out the properties. Surprisingly, just about every one I’ve shared the KML files with has been able to get to it pretty easily. I figured it could have, I could have created some headaches. The KML is a pretty easy to make and it beats having to enter all the coordinate separately. Have you worked with a drone photographer? They can also import it into the DJI ground system, ground station pro app to see where the property lines are in order to line up their shots rather than winging it.” This is great stuff. Wow. Thank you. “For the first screenshot is of the maps.me app.” I guess it puts it in there, it’s in our [inaudible 00:08:23] If you want to go see this.
Steve: [inaudible] investors, that kind of, if you just looked up GPS coordinates.
Jill: “I’m showing a portion of the outline development. The second image shows the DJI app with a flight plan over at KML outlined to automatically take pictures of a property. The drone guy just has to hit go when he gets there. The KML files are pretty powerful tool that not many people seem to be utilizing.”
Steve: That’s right I agree with that.
Jill: “It would be actually be an awesome addition to parcel fact to spit out a KML out in addition to the GPS coordinates.”
Steve: So creating, auto creating a KML file, auto parcel fact is now on my list and it’s as tech projects go, it’s not a big deal at all because every look up that you do on Google earth is a very specific URL that’s GPS coordinate based. So that’s something very easy that we can do this more than answering this GPS question. This is the value that this group brings. Cause I’ll tell you, this is very truthful. I could have never answered this question and I don’t think Jill could have either, not the way this person did with personal experience. So.
Jill: Right.
Steve: And he’s not only personally with personal experience, she answered the question and then offered a better way to do it and then told us how to do it.
Jill: Right.
Steve: In great amount of detail and in perfect sentence structure. So that’s the value of Land Academy. You know, it’s not where Jill and I are, well by the time this airs, we’ll be having our live event.
Steve: Actually now that I’m thinking about it on this day, and that’s the value of this, you know, of this group that we’ve created because we’re going to get some incredible real time information from people who are making half a million bucks or more a month and how they do it and how their, the, the workarounds are the fixes or the improvements that they’ve taken to the thing that we’ve created and made it made money for themselves. So it’s not so much that Jill and I are brilliant, you know, if we, if there was any brilliance in what we do at all, it was to create this group.
Jill: Right. And attract the right people.
Steve: Yeah.
Jill: Yeah. We are. We are. Hands down brad are together.
Steve: Exactly. Today’s topic, how to make a good land posting. This is the meat of the show.
Jill: Are we still have to do so now.
Steve: I know.
Jill: I’m just kidding. Hey, I made some notes. Okay, so here’s what’s funny. What prompted me to do this was I’m a, I’ve got a new person in our office that’s being trained on land postings and at the same time we need to refresh. That happens so often things get a little stagnant. So I went digging for some of our old content and they found a document that you created probably five years ago.
Steve: Scares me.
Jill: No, it’s phenomenal.
Steve: Really?
Jill: Yes. So why do you say that?
Steve: I don’t know.
Jill: I pulled it up and I said, Hey everyone, what happened is we started to veer a little too far from a good posting and things are getting missed. Things were getting left out. And I said, “Everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody” to quote you sit down. I want you to look at this post, this thing from 2009 whatever it was.
Jill: It might have even been, I don’t know how old it was, maybe 14 and, and like we all need to make sure that all of this stuff is included in our current postings. And I thought, you know, this would be a good show to kind of just share with everyone some things that we know. So a good land posting is, like you said, it’s, it’s basically an advertisement with pictures and description and everything. For a buyer to want to buy your property, it’s going to be something that you make one, it’s going to be on your website, you’re going to put it in Craigslist, you’re going to put it in social media, you’re going to put it on any land selling sites that you use. You know you’re going to, it’s maybe you do the MLS, it’s your template to get everything out there and make sure you don’t forget. And I thought, I’m just coming up, run down. What makes a good land posting to make sure you’re thinking of all of these things.
Jill: So, and the goal is to sell your property fast and not have a lot of phone calls, have everything in there. So let me tell you what I’m talking about you and. Can I jump in?
Steve: Yah. [inaudible 00:12:22]
Jill: Okay. [inaudible 00:12:24] You want to go get some coffee or something?
Steve: Nope.
Jill: Okay. All right, good.
Steve: We’ll have a drink of water though.
Jill: Okay, all right.
Steve: So you’re qualified. I have a bunch of stuff to say. At the end, I’ll fight on this topic than I ever will be.
Jill: Okay. Well, number one, it starts with a good title and a good title has three parts of it. A, you list the size. If it’s more than one acre, please don’t put 0.09 plus or minus, you know, dreamy, large, whatever property. No it’s not. That’s not what it is.
Steve: What is it? What’s a better title?
Jill: Info lot. Some kind of a a, it’s a lot at this point. It’s a mobile home lot. It’s a subdivision lot. It’s a good plot.
Steve: Give us a full title.
Jill: So, okay, well let me, let me give you a little, let me, let me, okay. I do have some here, but I’m going to tell you, so the title should include the size if it’s more than one acre. So if it’s like 10 acres, you want that in their five acres. You want that in there. Point one six yeah, look at your thing. Do you remember this?
Steve: No.
Jill: This is yours.
Steve: Wow, that is good.
Jill: I know from help from how old? So these are there. These are formatting instructions. It should have part with. So that should be, the size should be included in there. Number two, how many miles it is from some identifiable attributes.
Steve: Wow, I remember this.
Jill: Like the grand Canyon, like Disneyland, like a Lake, like the beautiful Florida coast near whatever’s, something like that. Yep. And the third thing should be in there is a call to action. Invest by now, build your dream home. Something like that. That’s what should be in there. So that’s your title. You should have, I’m going to go through the thing.
Jill: The second part is I’m hearing, here’s an example that you wrote of a good title ready a “10 acre Nevada ranch, 120 miles to Reno. See the video ranches nearby. Great access.”
Steve: Wow.
Jill: That’s an example of a good title.
Steve: What’s it called? The action.
Jill: Great. See the video?
Steve: Okay. Yeah, the video.
Jill: So I might even add it, you know,
Steve: Trusting myself and passing [inaudible].
Jill: Do some, and then they’re going to block, open the video and go, “Oh wow, look how pretty this is. Oh, I see Regina.”
Steve: This is all coming back to me now.
Jill: So then it goes onto you. I’m going to talk about the next important part are photos and uni and a video and your photos should include, and this is taken directly from you a while back and I thought it’s important to bring this up again.
Jill: “Deep blue sky, as much color as possible. Mountains, foliage from ground shots. You want clarity, scarce. White clouds are okay. I don’t want an overcast day. I want a really good day. Would you want to be there? Would Clint Eastwood be riding around in the back out somewhere?”
Steve: I wrote this stuff?
Jill: You wrote this, this is really good quality stuff.
Steve: I’m going to interrupt you for a second.
Jill: Okay.
Steve: It’s not in photography, it’s with real estate specifically. Putting the camera on the ground and shooting up is always great. Always you want to make it look as with houses, buildings all off it. And movies, you’ll always see shots of buildings or houses from the ground with people it’s atrocious.
Jill: I do not want to hear bigger and in the photograph shot from the ground that I really want.
Steve: Personally. I personally take pictures and we have tens of thousands of pictures that I have personally taken since the 90s they actually included in our, in the program, in the land program, you’ll see a tons and tons of shots with the camera on the ground.
Jill: This is by the way, in our program, the stuff that I’m rattling off right now is in here. I’m just reading a condensed version that we pulled together for our team. So, and by the way, I’m happy to share this document.
Steve: Yeah, reach out to us.
Jill: Yeah. If you want this document, just literally reached out to support Land Academy and we’ll get it to you.
Steve: Yeah, we’ll put it in the knowledge base there.
Jill: So yeah. Okay. Now also do not include, you’ll love this pixelated pictures. Snow, the color gray pictures that look like the surface of the moon. [inaudible 00:16:44]
Steve: You know, when I do stuff like this that’s really detailed. Hold on a second, Joe,
Jill: You’re obviously mad.
Steve: I was mad, you know, I’m sure. I sat in a dark room back then and I was out of anger, created this whole thing, brought this down to the fourth grade level.
Jill: Yeah.
Steve: So that everyone could just follow the rules and now it’s resurfacing of decade later.
Jill: Right. You also said don’t include attribute list pictures or inaccurate pictures, which are true. You don’t want to see tall pine trees in the desert.
Steve: Or you know one…
Jill: Don’t do that.
Steve: One of my peeves and land listings is a picture of Las Vegas and the property is like an hour away from Vegas, like Las Vegas strip.
Jill: Right.
Steve: What the heck is that? [inaudible 00:17:25] Exactly.
Jill: Okay.
Jill: Then the next thing you should have going on to that is the property statistics, everything, all the details about the property and you want to include in there the size, the APN, the legal description, the state, the County, the general location, GPS coordinates, maybe driving directions.
Steve: Yeah, that’s this question was about today. This GPS question, actually, that’s a modern version of doing driving directions. You can get driving directions to any GPS spot. Even really rural vacant land. If you go into Google maps, not Google, not Google earth, it’s just like if you’re taken a trip and you type in your destination and it’s in the, and it says go on this road. You know younger generational really understand this so it’s, wait, I say this because driving directions where the biggest pain before all the Google earth and all of this stuff in the back in the 90s was so hard to just take a math paper map out and say go East on I-93 till you get to you know was very difficult.
Jill: Exactly. You want to include things about zoning, power if there is any water, sewer, if there, if it exists, roads are they paved, are they dirt? You know, property taxes put in there with the annual property taxes if it’s current or not current, put it in there. These are all things too that are going to save you time. People are going to, a real knowledgeable, serious buyer will read that and you have all your questions right in there. All their answers are in there.
Steve: That ties into my point. If you do the right land listing, this is how you know you’ve hit it. Number one, you don’t get any questions.
Jill: Right.
Steve: When you’re listing 30 to 80 to a 100 properties a month, you got to have a template listing that’s very consistent and you have to do on that. Jay answers everybody’s questions, so if you’re getting a lot of questions, the only reason that people should be calling you at all on rural vacant land is just to see if you’re real like, “Hey, I just wanted to see if there’s somebody on the other end of this before I check out on the internet?” Or “How do I pay?” Or things like that. They’re asking you a lot of questions about the property itself somewhere you failed in the posting, describing what it’s all about.
Jill: Exactly, exactly. And then we go on to the next thing is how to buy and the deep process. Do you want to put that in there. And then finally you want to put, put a little something about you, about us, Who you are? How long have you been in the business? Where are they can reach you? You know, a contact us kind of thing. So that’s really what I wanted to go over today. How many times have you gone into LandWatch or Land and Farm or somewhere and even the MLS and you see one photo or no photos, right? It’s like a placeholder. Exactly. And all it has is the APN and that County and the price. You’re like at a phone number. Really. You think I’m going to do all that and call you? No, don’t know why they even bother. What’s the point? It’s the funniest thing. So who’s going to find it and see it and want it and make a good listing. So that’s what.
Steve: Make a listening, like you’re proud of the property. Like it’s not just an after thought and you really wanted to go to the bar.
Jill: Yeah. You know what? And another thing is I’ve, we even, we have this now in our current system, when we buy property, there’s usually something that gets, that gets us excited it. So I have a little thing in there and we call it, what do I call it? The shoot. It has a funny name to it now. But it was something about, you know, the hot little attribute, what was what got us excited about the property and I have a field in there and I’ll put in like.
Steve: It’s called the hook or something.
Jill: That’s it. The hook and cause I want to share that with a, with a good, thank you.
Steve: We got, you know, actually this is one of the things, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m actually really good at this. There’s not a lot of stuff. There’s like four or five points in all of this. That’s that I’m pretty good at. Data is one of them.
Jill: You’re really good at this.
Steve: I just know, you know why? Because whatever excited me, you know, as soon as these properties come in and I go look at it and say yes or no, you know, I’m doing the same thing that the buyer’s doing. So whatever the things that I’m like, wow, let’s close to a Lake or it man, it’s got road access or it’s way under priced. That’s a huge thing. Whatever you’re excited about, that’s, that’s the hook best what the seller is going to get. A, the buyer’s going to get. Excited about and you need to convey that in a posting.
Jill: Yep.
Steve: And I’m learning, you know, I learned so much since we started Land Academy about where people struggle and where their talents are and where they might not be.
Jill: Right.
Steve: This is really important because I’ve been doing this show.
Jill: Exactly, you know, one of the thing that I didn’t cover that I don’t remember, but usually we put it towards the top of the posting. Just a paragraph about the area. You know how close it is to certain things.
Steve: Yeah.
Jill: That’s guys don’t make it three pages long. Nobody wants to read through all that. You know, where the post office exact miles to the post office and the Wal-mart, and this and that.
Steve: We have three sections in a listing. It’s the immediate area description. Like what’s really right there. Is it close? We have a lot of property in Arizona and a bunch of property in a close to a town called Wilcox. So we describe Wilcox in there cause it’s like three blocks away. So there’s Wilcox then I call it. They’re the local property. Then the area, what’s the area all about? Well, it’s Arizona on the population’s growing really fast. It’s warm there. And then the bigger picture, like the big picture, know the Southwest rocks or whatever. That’s like kind of like this like a triangle and yeah, with the point of the pyramid.
Jill: Perfect.
Steve: Got a little excited.
Jill: You did.
Steve: Join us next time for an episode called maximize your valuable time fielding inbound phone calls.
Steve: And we answer your questions posted on our online community@landinvestors.com it is free.
Steve: You are not alone in your real estate ambition alongside your good. This is good though. It was really good. Informative real estate. You know, he did a lot of homework, Jill, I appreciate that.
Jill: You’re welcome.
Steve: I would have never.
Jill: Thank you. But land Academy daily shall remains commercial-free for you, our loyal listener. So wherever you’re watching or wherever you are listening, please subscribe and rate us. There we are, Steve and Jill.
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