Waiting for the People on TV to Tell Us When We Can Be Educated (LA 1234)
Waiting for the People on TV to Tell Us When We Can Be Educated (LA 1234)
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 DeWitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and I talk about waiting for the people on TV to tell us when we can be educated or not.
Jill DeWit: Because that’s the right thing to do. Right?
Steven Butala: I had a blast writing this title.
Jill DeWit: I bet.
Steven Butala: And Jill as usual, just put up with it.
Jill DeWit: Oh, yeah.
Steven Butala: What does this mean to you? What does this title mean to you, Jill? Because I think we’re pretty much on the same page about this.
Jill DeWit: Oh my gosh. I’m frustrated by, we’re all sitting around waiting for people to tell us it’s okay to do this. It’s not okay to do that. Now you can buy this. Now you don’t buy that. And the bigger part is, this is a huge opportunity while we’re all having some time that we could be really learning something and reaching out and taking matters into our own hands.
Steven Butala: This is how this came up. Jill and I have three kids together and the third one’s still at home. He’s a sophomore in high school and he hasn’t had to go to school for quite some time. He’s waiting for the people on TV to say it’s okay to go back to school.
Jill DeWit: Do you know what my favorite is? I’ve got to say this. Here’s what pushed me over the edge. Have you heard this? We sat him down and said, “What’s going on?” And we’re pushing him to do his schoolwork and everything. He’s like, “Look, I just want to enjoy my life right now”. Like is this summer break? I was like, “Oh, no”.
Steven Butala: Then steam came out of mom’s ears.
Jill DeWit: He thinks this is one … This is the spring break that melds into summer break. Yay! I don’t have to do anything year. Guess again.
Steven Butala: So I mean, to his credit, he’s been on a pretty good schedule. He’s still a teenager. There’s stuff that happens, but we’ll talk about the topic.
Jill DeWit: I would do the same thing.
Steven Butala: So would I. So would I.
Jill DeWit: I would’ve done the same thing and this is why we’re doing the show too. I would have done the same thing and I needed to be pushed and me personally, I was not pushed in high school. I did want to please my parents. So I got A’s, but I did the bare minimum. I had to get A’s. I could have done all kinds of stuff. I could have really gone ahead and gone above and beyond, but I didn’t. And I wish somebody would have pushed me a little bit. And I want to push our kid and I want to push you.
Steven Butala: Well, the real points of this, and we’re going to get to the question here, the real point of this is that there’s no reason ever that any government or any type of institution or anyone for that matter, including your parents or your children that are going to tell you when it’s okay to be educated again.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Or when it’s not okay to be educated. The foundation of everything in the human race is based on education and more of it’s always better. Always. So it’s a true tragedy that we’re in where we’re all sitting around waiting for the people on TV to tell us we can go back to being educated.
Jill DeWit: Right. Go back to school.
Steven Butala: And as land investors and entrepreneurs in general, we don’t need them to tell us to do that. We can do it to the internet. It’s packed full, including the education company Jill and I have. It’s packed full of stuff to learn. 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: Brandon wrote, “So I just did the same search criteria with RealQuest Pro and DataTree and I got an insanely huge difference of property reports. 16,500 with RealQuest Pro and only 4,800 with DataTree. What is the biggest difference in how they pull data? I also just did the whole county instead of going by zip code just to see what the difference would be. Any help would be great.”
Jill DeWit: So it’s 16,000 versus 4,000 is a big difference in costs and I would like my next mailer to not flop, obviously, while spending so much money. So one hour later.
Steven Butala: One hour later he came back and said this.
Jill DeWit: One hour later, here we go. Update. I just did a search on DataTree and took off the assessed improvement value option and the results went to 14,000, but that’s still a $2,000.00 difference.
Steven Butala: 2,000 unit.
Jill DeWit: Or excuse me, 2,000 unit difference. And does that mean RealQuest Pro improvement criteria filter is meaningless? So I was going to say my first point is there’s something checked that’s a little bit different, which he just found right there. Obviously. Look, uncheck that one box. You think you’re selecting the same thing. They may be labeled a little bit differently for the company and that’s partially why you’re getting some differences.
Steven Butala: Jill’s exactly right. It all has to do with buckets. So DataTree, if you start like this … First of all, anytime you have two data sets and you’re comparing them, there’s going to be discrepancies. I hate to sound like a politician. Oh that’s great, Steve. Thanks a lot for that canned answer. You told me nothing. Let’s just start there.
Steven Butala: Two data sets giving you a different data. Let’s get them equal first. So if you go to Los Angeles County in DataTree and you see how many pieces of real estate … Forget about checking any boxes or buckets. How many pieces of real estate are in LA County? Great. This is the number in DataTree. How many pieces are in RealQuest ? Properties are in RealQuest? It’s very, very, very close. It’s within 20 units.
Jill DeWit: Right. I love it. I know I’m going the same way. I’m giving a visual. I’ve seeing a visual. So we’re here and here, which I totally agree with you. That’s what I would do. Go ahead.
Steven Butala: Then you want an improved … Let’s say you want to take out everything. You only want land. All right? So, that’s what’s really what this question is. I’m removing any properties that have any improvement value, which has structures or improvements. So there’s a lot of different ways you can do that. In DataTree, completely different company’s DataTree might look at that column or it’s a table and that database differently. So you really have to play with them both to make sure that you’re getting the right data.
Steven Butala: I’ve long said and there’s this long string about this in land investors, a lot of people are piped in on it because it’s a good question. I have long said that RealQuest is a little bit more accurate when it comes to land. How they handle improvement value is a better. So, that’s not necessarily the case everywhere. There are all kinds of differences going on. RealQuest pulls their data from the assessor database as does a DataTree, but how they manage that data from a database, like a big data scenario, how they manage it might be a little bit different.
Steven Butala: That’s why we’re licensed providers for all three. So you can horse around with it and look at it. And let me finish on this. Data is to be messed with. We’ve had developers, Jill and I get a call from a very intelligent set of developers a lot. Maybe, probably once every other week. And they’re patting themselves on their back and they’re saying, “Hey Jill and Steve, we can make this product for you where you press a button and it does whatever and it gives it the 1200 units that you’re going to send out and make sense and then we can connect it to 020 and you don’t have to do any work”.
Steven Butala: And you know what? That’s not what this is about. This is not about creating an easy button. It’s about learning how to manipulate data and making little tiny decisions as you’re going through the scrubbing process. And so that when you get the results from a mailer, you send a bunch of them out. You get the results, you spy and sell a few pieces of property and you say, “You know what? Four times I’ve done this data set this way. I’m not sure I need to include industrial property anymore. People just don’t call me back.”
Steven Butala: Or I totally should include industrial property on this next one, because I inadvertently bought two properties from an industrial property owner and so there’s endless, literally limitless combinations of details that go on with these scrubs. That’s the reason I’m good at this is because I’ve done this a million times. So I don’t think that you really, the fact that you’re getting a discrepancy rant, Brandon is a great. I want you to keep testing the data back and forth. I want you to spend hours on a mailer, not just seconds. I don’t want you to hit a ClickFunnel button that takes your data down and there’s a dataset and you send it. And he’d go have a Coke and watch TV.
Jill DeWit: I agree. This is why I hate, what’s the one that … Agent Pro 24/7. A lot of people love Agent Pro 24/7 and that’s the reason why. They’re like, “Look, I just hit a … It says rural vacant land. It says like motivated sellers, rural vacant land. Hit this button.” Oh, that’s great. What does that mean? I bet if I asked anybody what is that exactly? They’re going to be like, “Oh, I don’t know. But everybody else uses it. So I’m doing it too.”
Steven Butala: Well, that’ll answer your question.
Jill DeWit: You know what it is? you’re buying a list from somebody else that they created for you, not your list. You need to … Like you just said this very longwindedly.
Steven Butala: Wow, really?
Jill DeWit: I’m just kidding. It was good.
Steven Butala: Was it?
Steven Butala: It was really good. It was good.
Jill DeWit: It was longwindedly.
Steven Butala: It was a show. Every time I kind of go … Anyway. I will hold all my comments till the end. So anyway, I’m confusing you.
Steven Butala: Data is the nucleus of why this works. It’s why House Academy works and we’re soon to release a Car Academy here. It’s all data. If you ask any seasoned real estate investor about data, they will look cross eyed at you and say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. That’s what separates us. The Land Academy, the group that we have with everybody else out there. Everybody else is guessing.
Jill DeWit: And you want to pick, you want to know what you’re getting is what you’re getting. Do you know what I mean? So that’s the thing, you want to really be able to do the exact criteria, your criteria. First you’ve got to know your criteria and then you want to use your criteria. And like you said too, there’s a reason why we use those. So there are some nuances between all the companies and still comes back. We love RealQuest.
Steven Butala: She’s exactly right. I mean behind every easy button like she described, these are motivated sellers. Behind that is some, usually a developer who’s completely unqualified to build a case scenario for what’s behind that easy button. They might think or somebody told them that people who own land with no improvements values for more than 10 years are motivated sellers. And so that’s for us to decide. That’s not for developer decide. And that’s why it’s important to do this manual,
Jill DeWit: Right. It may even be like it was quick claimed within the last five years so we can all tell they inherited it or something like that. And they think that’s going to be the solution.
Steven Butala: The largest source of frustration for what I do in my life right now at work is not-
Jill DeWit: Please don’t be me.
Steven Butala: It’s not working with Jill.
Jill DeWit: Oh goodness.
Steven Butala: It’s not.
Jill DeWit: The largest sources of frustration in my life.
Steven Butala: Is dealing with tech developers and their attitude and their ego and every single one of them with one exception. Thank you, Roy. One exception. They all think they know more than me about all of this.
Jill DeWit: That’s true.
Steven Butala: And there they all talk down to Jill and I because of our age. It’s total full-blown age discrimination because of our age. They just don’t think we really even have ever been on a computer before.
Jill DeWit: That’s the funniest thing.
Steven Butala: Thank you for letting me rant.
Jill DeWit: You got it. You know what? And to their credit, some of our friends are there, but we’re not. That’s not us.
Steven Butala: There are other people our age that have-
Jill DeWit: Perpetuate that stereotype.
Steven Butala: … Have led them to that conclusion. Probably rightfully so. And so by the time they get to us, their opinions all formed about our age and computers.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. And then we have to undo it all. Yep.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, waiting for the people on TV to tell us when we can be educated. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: Let me take this a step further. Try being a girl.
Steven Butala: Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: This is even worse.
Steven Butala: This is good.
Jill DeWit:It’s worse for me because of my age and I’m a girl. I couldn’t possibly know what I’m talking about. Remember when we used to have those things you can go to like a group meeting, like in 2019 and you get a bunch of investors together? Those were fun. But as a girl standing in the back of the room, they think that I’m like arm candy for him or something. I don’t know. Or maybe I’m his secretary and I’m here to take notes. It’s the funniest thing. And then sometimes I say things and then they’re caught off guard. They’re like, “What the heck?”
Steven Butala: Every live event, this happens two or three times. Somebody stands up and asks a question and I start to answer it and they say, “No, no, no. This is a question for Jill.” And I love when that happens.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So this show we already kind of alluded to it, is that why are we just sitting around? Some people are really sitting around glued to the TV. We know that one, when there’s so much you could be doing.
Steven Butala: There’s always these stories, these personal stories. This is my favorite type of personal underdog story. And I’m not a big fan of personal stories. I’m a big fan of data. But every once in a while somebody would tell their life story and they’ll say, “Yeah, oh yeah, I grew up with not enough food in the most horrific conditions you can possibly imagine.” And they’re a bajillionaire. They’ve set out to accomplish whatever it is that they’re going to accomplish.
Steven Butala: It’s not necessarily financial success, but I don’t know, an accomplished author or an emergency room doctor. And those people didn’t sit around and wait to get educated. They didn’t have the advantages that most of us have. They probably didn’t have access to the … Certainly they had the same type of education, but it didn’t stop them. That’s the same thing here. We can’t sit around and wait to be educated. Only you, personally, I don’t care how old you are, not your parents and not anybody, not your children and certainly not your spouse can tell you that, “Okay, you’re educated enough”. Or, “You know what? Let’s just chill out and in a couple of weeks we’ll start the Land Academy program and we’ll get to it then”.
Jill DeWit: Good idea, let’s wait until we’re back to work and then really dive in with everything.
Steven Butala: It would be a true tragedy if any version of that went on. People who are successful don’t wait for other people to tell them what to do or what not to do and that’s really what’s going on in this … I don’t want to sound like your father, but I probably do. That’s really what’s going on in this market right now. There’s a lot of people who have a really loud voice and they’re very, very, very used to having a boss and being told, “Stand up, sit down”. We’re all raised like that in our classrooms, unfortunately, to pay attention. There’s somebody up there telling us what to do and when to do it.
Steven Butala: And then we go to college, A little bit less. So some of us do, some of us don’t. We get into the workforce. Now we have a boss instead of a teacher telling us what to do. And before your teacher, it was your parents. So it’s very easy to fall into that. Well, the teacher’s away, so I’m just going to horse around.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. That’s a good point because it’s like everyone right now is in substitute teacher mode. You think I’m kidding?
Steven Butala: No, no. It’s a great analogy.
Jill DeWit: It’s really good. And that’s true. Well this conversation started because of our kid. And we’re watching our kid and I’m really kind of mad. I’m actually mad at our educators right now for our school in particular. I don’t know about all schools. I lean on our school right now. And they’re more worried about our children’s social wellbeing and being connected right now. Well, I’m going to connect with my kid and in a different way. It might be my foot on … No, just kidding.
Steven Butala: He’s a good kid.
Jill DeWit: He’s a great kid.
Steven Butala: He’s a teenager. He’s used to having … Did I interrupt you?
Jill DeWit: It’s okay. It’s okay. Go ahead.
Steven Butala: I thought there was a pause. Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: No, it’s all right.
Steven Butala: We’ll work this out.
Jill DeWit: No, I know. It’s all right. You go ahead and talk now.
Steven Butala: No, go ahead.
Jill DeWit: It just changed my train of thought though.
Steven Butala: Sorry.
Jill DeWit: Well, I know.
Steven Butala: Go ahead.
Jill DeWit: I lost my train of thought. So go right ahead.
Steven Butala: No one can tell you when you’re supposed to be educated or when you’re not. And our group, we’re entrepreneurs here. Some of us are at the later stages in the entrepreneur thing and enjoying kind of the spoils. Some of us are at the very, very beginning. And for whatever reason, you’ve chosen this path, just trust me on this. You’ve got to make your own time, make your own schedule and get educated from people like us. But I’m certainly not going to tell you and nobody else should, when you can get educated, how much you could get educated.
Steven Butala: I mean, what if Jill and I said something like this? There are four or five places on the internet that I know of where you can learn how to buy and sell land, but we are the only one. I don’t want you to go pay attention to anybody else’s stuff. It’s all meaningless. We’re the only one. We’re the best one. That’s crazy. I want you to go educate [crosstalk] for you.
Jill DeWit: That’s true. I agree. Whatever’s going to get you motivated and teach you and learning, that’s the best thing. I have had a lot of people, it seems like a lot of people come to from other programs and I think that’s the greatest thing. It got them motivated. It got them. excited. They’re like, “I got the ball rolling now I’m to you guys because I need the systems. I need the data. I know you guys are the best for taking this to the next level and really up and making it a business, not just learning the little things.” Whatever it is.
Jill DeWit: And I really firmly believe that you’re going to get something from everybody. I never feel like I’ve wasted time or I never want anyone to feel like they wasted time because I’m sure that listening to someone else’s point of view, even about the exact same thing, you’re going to get some nugget from that. I think it’s great.
Steven Butala: And this virus thing started about a week into it, the stuff that I’m watching on the TV, just my jaws on the coffee table because when it started, and I’m just giving facts here. Jill and I, we’ve always half worked at home. So no change there. Our people that work for us all have independent responsibilities and intentionally so, don’t need or want a lot of guidance from us because they work independently.
Steven Butala: We’re used to buying and selling a lot of land that sometimes that happens in front of a car seat. Sometimes it happens at 2:30 in the morning. And just that’s just how we’ve always lived our lives, jill and I. In fact, we never even talked about it with each other until all this stuff went down. And so a week into this week and a half into this, I’m like, “Nothing’s changed for us”.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. How lucky are we?
Steven Butala: And all of our people are like, “Nothing’s really changed for us”.
Jill DeWit: And our community too, they’re like, “Yeah, I’m buying and selling land two states over anyway. I don’t need to go there.” But that’s all I’ve been doing.
Steven Butala: Watching stuff on TV where the world’s just falling apart. So I guess we inadvertently chose this role for … We’ve given ourselves this role. And so that’s my point here. They can’t tell you what to do. Give yourself this role.
Jill DeWit: Happy you could join us today. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show. Tuesdays and Thursdays we are next door on the House Academy Show.
Steven Butala: Throughout the episode on the House Academy Show is called a screwed up mailer, now what? You are not alone in your real estate ambition. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does-
Jill DeWit: You can still fix it.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: I’ve got lots of ways to fix it. The Land Academy Show remains commercial free for you, our loyal listener. So wherever you’re watching or wherever you’re listening, please subscribe and rate us there. We’re Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala: Information-
Jill DeWit:… And inspiration-
Steven Butala: … To buy undervalued property.
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