How to Improve Your Acquisition Confidence (LA 1320)
How to Improve Your Acquisition Confidence (LA 1320)
Transcript:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
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 how to improve your acquisition confidence. Jill, what’s the acquisition confidence?
Jill DeWit:
Acquisition confidence is going into a buying situation and feeling good about it. That’s basically it. And I’ve got some steps here that I’m going to share in a few minutes.
Steven Butala:
I would even take it 10 times further than that. When you get that property back, when you’re staring at a return purchase agreement or somebody on the phone saying, “You know what? I got your offer and I do want to sell.” And you look it up and there’s that little tiny moment where you pull it up on NeighborScoop, or wherever you’re looking at the property, and you can’t believe that you’re about to do this transaction. It’s that good. And you execute on that logical due diligence, period. But then you execute on it and you own it. That’s acquisition confidence.
Jill DeWit:
You know what’s so funny? It’s a good thing there’s two of us. It’s kind of cool, because we look at it totally different. You’re looking at the acquisition. I’m looking at the person. So I’m excited to talk about it more. It’s totally important.
Steven Butala:
I can’t wait to talk about that. Here’s the funny story about that. Every single acquisition person, without exception, that I have ever hired, who’s a female, categorizes the deals that they do by the last name of the seller.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, I don’t do that.
Steven Butala:
The Dawson deal. The Smith deal.
Jill DeWit:
That’s hilarious.
Steven Butala:
Every male acquisition person, including myself, categorizes it by APN.
Jill DeWit:
That’s funny.
Steven Butala:
I could care less about the seller. I could absolutely care less. The less I know, the better.
Jill DeWit:
No, it’s funny. I go about the property.
Steven Butala:
I only care about the dirt.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. That’s how I am about the property. Which one is that? That’s the 40 acres in such county. I’m like, “Okay, thank you.”
Steven Butala:
Guess who does more deals than Jill or me? Times 80, Jill, because this is a people business.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
There’s a huge real estate component to it obviously. But…
Jill DeWit:
So you’re saying I’m in the middle?
Steven Butala:
No, I think you’re correct.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
If you have to be one of the one or the other. You’re talking to a person who’s going to sell their property for way under value of what it’s worth. There’s a lot of finesse and a handholding and a lot of stuff involved. You have to meet that person from where they’re coming. In my early days I was like, “This should be the last time we’re going to talk. You gave me the APN. We have a signed purchase agreement, and the [inaudible 00:02:37]. Thanks very much.” That, in reality, is silly. And I got away with it back then, because nobody else ever sent a letter to them ever, and a bunch of other reasons. 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:
Cody wrote, “Hi Sean.” Oh, so this is a response.
Steven Butala:
This is a response. So there’s a string. I should have prefaced this. I’m sorry. You kind of got blindsided there. Land Investors is people post a question and then there’s responses and responses. And so this is Cody’s response to Sean.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. And I’m sure the response is going to tell us what the question was.
Steven Butala:
Yes.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, cool. So here we go. Cody wrote, “Hi Sean. I was able to view a little bit of your response from the members only forum from the activity on the homepage, but I’m not currently a pro member. So that means I can’t dig in and see the whole thing.”
Steven Butala:
Right.
Jill DeWit:
“I was looking to potentially sign up with the either ParcelFact or NeighborScoop, but it seems like you’re saying ParcelFact doesn’t work anymore. I’ve been debating which one to use between the two, and I don’t think I’m too sure about the differences. NeighborScoop seems to do exactly what ParcelFact does, but has more features. Is this correct? Or am I missing something?”
Steven Butala:
So Jill, this is a very, very popular topic right now on the internet, when it comes to our stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
So I wanted to, just because the viewing audience that we have is much bigger here than anywhere else. What’s the difference between NeighborScoop and ParcelFact, both of which we owned by the way?
Jill DeWit:
Right. NeighborScoop is the second generation of ParcelFact. And it has added phone numbers.
Steven Butala:
Seller phone numbers.
Jill DeWit:
It has added additional maps. Yep. The property owners’ phone numbers are in there, additional maps.
Steven Butala:
Map layers.
Jill DeWit:
It’s got FEMA floodplain overlay. It’ll drop the whole property. I think they both do this. I can’t remember if they do, but I don’t… Actually, I don’t think it does.
Steven Butala:
No, they don’t.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, no, NeighborScoop, you can click on a Google Earth button basically, and it’ll drop the whole outline that you’re looking on ParcelFact into Google Earth Pro. Love it. Also, you can draw. This is one of my favorite features too. Say, you’re sending out a neighbor letter, or maybe you’re a real estate agent and you’re canvassing a certain area. You want only the subdivision or only this section of area to have downloaded that ownership data and get their phone numbers. You can draw a polygon or a square. You can do all kinds of different shapes. And then, it’ll download just that ownership data for you. It’s amazing. It’s not just ownership. It’s all the attributes on the property that are there in NeighborScoop, like maybe mortgage information, what they paid for it, what kind of deed they, did when they did the deed. There’s loan information in there. Square footage, if there’s a structure, legal description, it’s zoning. It’s a couple hundred lines of attributes.
Steven Butala:
I can’t imagine doing this without one of these.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
Do you need both?
Jill DeWit:
No, you don’t. You just need NeighborScoop.
Steven Butala:
That’s right. That’s what I think. That is the only tool that I know of where you can put state county APN in, and in seconds to be looking at the property and make a decision, which is actually a good parlay into this topic.
Jill DeWit:
And I click on, what do they pay for it? Got it. What did the neighbor’s pay? Got it. How long did the neighbors own things? This is how I do due diligence. And I’m going to work on this as a training that I’ve got coming up is doing due diligence. There’s two levels of due diligence for us. There’s the first level, and then the second level. The first level is you are going to quickly look at everything and make a decision if you’re going to take it to the next level, because you might see some fatal flaws right there, such as no legal or physical access, or maybe it’s a side of a cliff or maybe the person that you’re talking to is the son whose it’s been passed down three times and you can kind of see, “Shoot, it’s still in Dad’s name. There’s some problems here.”
Steven Butala:
Or it’s underwater.
Jill DeWit:
Or underwater. All kinds of things.
Steven Butala:
It’s a full blown, less than 30 seconds level one due diligence tool.
Jill DeWit:
Saves so much time.
Steven Butala:
For what we do. I created this from top to bottom.
Jill DeWit:
I can’t imagine how we did it before. I remember. Crazy.
Steven Butala:
And there’s nothing else like it on the internet that I know of.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, how to improve your acquisition confidence. This is why you’re listening. We were talking on the webinar last week. There’s this moment where you look up a property that came in. This business of sending out mail and having these deals come back is it resolves with finality the age old concept of deal flow. You have to have deal flow. If you’re a stock market investor, there’s no such thing as deal flow for you. You turn your computer on and there’s just a bajillion options of stock to buy. In real estate, that’s just not the case. And the deal flow was historically resolved in many, many cases in commercial real estate right now, it was resolved through brokers.
You’ve got 10 brokers. You have two favorite brokers out of 10. They call you with the deal. They say, “Hey, Steve, this deal came in. I know about it. It’s not listed. And I thought of you, because it’s just like the last one we did together.” And so as an investor, your whole career is tied to these people and what they bring you. It’s a super, super bad idea at this day and age. There’s no brokers that we deal with ever on an acquisition like that, ever. And if they did, I would really say, “All right, what’s up your sleeve?”
So this business of sending mail resolves that. It’s going to do nothing for you. It will be a useless tool, if all this stuff is coming back and you don’t have any acquisition confidence. This topic comes up for Jill and I all the time, and it has since day one, since we started a Land Academy. And the silver bullet here, the only way to get acquisition confidence on the long, long term is by doing deals.
Jill DeWit:
Experience.
Steven Butala:
Experience.
Jill DeWit:
I agree.
Steven Butala:
But there’s a bunch of really new people doing this, whether you’re buying houses or anything else. So how else would you get acquisition confidence?
Jill DeWit:
Well, here’s what’s so funny. So I looked at this title and I hear you. You know you see a sentence and, depending on the word that you emphasize in the sentence, it changes the whole sentence. So that’s what just happened to me with this exact topic. You’re talking acquisition confidence. You emphasize the acquisition. I read acquisition confidence. I emphasize the confidence part. So that just seems really interesting how we did. But to answer your question, and then I want to share, because in case anyone read the sentence like I did, I’m going to give you the other part of this. But to gain acquisition confidence, you’re right. You have to dive in and do a deal. If you’re not sure about it, bounce it off somebody else.
That’s the beauty of our group. That’s the beauty of our weekly member calls. We do that all the time. We have a little segment that’s throughout the whole call, “Would you do this deal?” And that really I know helps people build up acquisition confidence. And I’m sure that a very large percentage of the time, they know the answer. You know the answer going into it. You’re weird. You’re just double checking yourself. “I think the slope is bad. Let’s see what Steve and Jill say. Yep. I was right. Thank you very much. You confirmed it.” So that’s how you could build confidence.
The other way is when you get to know an the area pretty quickly, once you do one or two deals in that area, you quickly are going to figure out, “This is what the buyers want. I know how fast it’s going to go.” That for me is a great way to build up the confidence. The other part I want to share… Do you mind if I keep going?
Steven Butala:
No, I love this.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. So the other part I was going to say is just-
Steven Butala:
I’m learning stuff.
Jill DeWit:
… acquisition confidence, and just confidence in general. So I’m really kind of talking to people that are new to this, because this comes up often. They’re afraid to answer the phone. “I’m afraid to sound like I don’t know what I’m doing. These sellers are going to call me. What if I stumble and I forget to ask something?” So I have three things for this. Number one, know your stuff. Be prepared. When you send out that mailer, you did a lot of research on the area. Trust yourself. You know what’s going on around there or you wouldn’t have sent those offers to those people. You know really what they’re valued at, again, because you couldn’t have price them that way. And have a checklist.
When the calls come in, I have a checklist. It’s on that site, by the way, on landinvestors.com on the left-hand side. You can print out. It’s the inbound seller call sheet and just have it on your desk. That’s for everybody, It’s free. Use it. And that’s a really easy way for you to make sure you asked all the right questions when the seller calls. It also helps you sound like you know what you’re doing, because you know what questions to ask. You’re not sitting there going, “What am I missing? What am I missing?” You’re going to ask their name, the city, the state, the APN, where they are in the tax situation. Who owns the property? What’s going on? Why are you selling? Does my price work for you? Those kinds of things. Is there anything that I need to know about it? Can you get to it? Was there a fire? I don’t know. You ask all those questions; you’ll get all that information.
So all of that ties into being prepared. It’s like, have you ever gone into a… Well, this is a good one, because this ties into yesterday. You and I were so different with school, it’s not even funny.
Steven Butala:
What do you mean school?
Jill DeWit:
The way you described your experience, how you got through college of not cracking a book, trying to make an mission. I’m sure you did crack some books, but-
Steven Butala:
On certain classes, I did.
Jill DeWit:
But some, you’re like, “Yeah, I’m just going to show up for a lecture or two. I got the gist to this. I can take the test.” We are so different. I was the geek. I’m serious. I was listening to a podcast, and they were talking about… I don’t remember who it was. Freaks and Geeks, that show way back in the day. You remember Freaks and Geeks?
Steven Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, okay. Well, some of you know Freaks and Geeks. Anyway, they were describing themselves as geeks and geeks, and that’s kind of me. I was totally a geek.
Steven Butala:
Past tense.
Jill DeWit:
So I can’t stand… Thank you. But I still do this to this day, if I’m going in with a test or doing a test, I know that information forward, backwards, inside out. I still use flashcards. I haven’t, but if I needed to… I’ve been thinking about, I’ll tell you right now. I have a friend. He’s thinking about getting back into flying, and he flies helicopters. And he was thinking about going back to helicopter instructing. I said, “Pick me. I’ll be your first student.” And so I’m already thinking about, “Do they have a different ground school? What do I need to learn?” kind of thing. And crack out the flashcards, because I’ll do that. I’m that kind of person. I will know it all. So anyway, that’s way too much information about this stuff.
Steven Butala:
No, it’s not. I think this is really, really helpful. Here’s why. What I learned recently, like it or not, we have developed characters. We’ve developed these characters who are successful at buying and selling real estate. So I think for a lot of people, maybe not so much super experienced people, it’s extremely helpful, especially because there’s two of us. And we’re in a relationship together, a social relationship. Developing your character is really, really important.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven Butala:
And I have people, how many times have you heard? “I’m the Jill in the thing.”
Jill DeWit:
Oh, that’s true.
Steven Butala:
I’m the Jack in the thing.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven Butala:
So, no, I don’t think that’s too much information at all, Jill. Plus it’s fun for me to listen to it.
Jill DeWit:
All of that was number one, by the way. I promise the other two are not that long. So know your stuff. I go into every test, every situation, every market with confidence, because I know it. Number two, practice. May sound silly, but it’s not. Have someone call you. Pretend someone’s going to call you. And you’re going to be talking to them as if they’re a seller. And then number three, just go for it. You are the investor. That’s how these sellers see you. They don’t know this is your first deal. I wouldn’t even say that. I would go in with confidence, answer the phone, “Hey, Jill’s Land Company. Great, you got my offer? Fantastic. Hey, just one second. I’ve got a couple of questions I want to ask you,” as I grab my sheet. And we just dive right in.
You quickly are going to have 50 phone calls under your belt. They’re only calling one. They only have one property and they may have only got your offer. So this is all new to them. They’re not comparing you to anyone else too. So that for me helps build my confidence that I am, I am the pro here. And they’re looking to you like you are the pro.
Steven Butala:
Can you imagine walking up to a girl and saying, “Hi, I was standing over there and you [inaudible 00:16:05] seem like, so, yeah.”
Jill DeWit:
What was that? A mumbly thing?
Steven Butala:
Or walking up to a girl and saying, “Hey, excuse me. I don’t ever do this. You’re the prettiest girl in the room, and I have a couple of questions for you.” Which one do you want?
Jill DeWit:
We know. You’re right. That’s how you got me.
Steven Butala:
That’s exactly what goes on with the seller. Exactly. If you approach a seller that way, they’re going to hang up the phone, or a buyer for that matter. So you have to have confidence. You have to have confidence in everything. And this isn’t some judgment thing or something that I made up. It goes back to caveman times.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven Butala:
In the women example, women want a guy who’s confident, is going to knock the hell out of somebody if they come in the cave. They want to be protected. It gives them confidence and security. This isn’t a gender thing at all. I don’t want to hang out with a woman who’s all cowering on the phone either, at all. I’ve had some experience in that and this is better.
Jill DeWit:
So this whole thing, yes. Thank you. I got that. That’s very good. Now we’re going to name names. No. But this totally is my last comment. I just thought of something that my dad taught me. My dad was so good at this. He taught me just to act like you know what you’re doing. I grew up with that phrase in my head. So I took it to an unhealthy level. I would-
Steven Butala:
Yep, to the point where this is where you’re sitting, right now in this moment.
Jill DeWit:
I would walk into everything, like, “I got this. They don’t know that I don’t know. Watch me.” It was really funny. Actually, it really helped in many situations in my life.
Steven Butala:
Wait, wait, wait. I have one more question before we close. Can you take this too far? When does it become cocky?
Jill DeWit:
That’s when it’s too far, if you’re cocky. When you’re over-confident and you’re making mistakes and you’re just a jerk, now you’ve taken it too far. I want you to be confident, but don’t alienate people, because you walk around telling everybody that you’re the number one. Please don’t do that.
Steven Butala:
I think the failure starts when you start talking about yourself. And I noticed that a lot. There’s people that on the internet, for some reason, it’s just jam packed with people just talking about themselves.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. And that’s true. That made me think of when you got to dinner. We went out to dinner a couple of weeks ago with a billionaire and he didn’t talk about himself at all.
Steven Butala:
No, he was just laughing at himself. We all were.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, it was hilarious. And you’re right. That’s confidence too. He doesn’t need to prove anything. You don’t need to prove anything. You know what? The proper confidence level is you feel confident, who you’re working with feels trusting in you. They’re confident in you. And you’re not taking it over the top and saying, “Here’s how many deals I’m doing. And you’re one of many,” or something like that. That would be too far.
Steven Butala:
The best way to accomplish that, and he did it, and everybody at that party did it, including us, was just to be yourself and just laugh and just say, “Yeah, you think that’s a screw up? I’m going to tell you about my last disaster.”
Jill DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Butala:
It’s just be who you are.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Thank you. Happy you could join us today. Monday through Friday, you can find this right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Managing Communications with Sellers, Brokers, and Buyers. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. What’s it called? What week is it? Inspiration week.
Jill DeWit:
I guess it is. We just decided.
Steven Butala:
And it’s Wednesday.
Jill DeWit:
It’s going that way.
Steven Butala:
Oh, it’s Tuesday.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, today’s Tuesday. Love it. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find the content valuable, and we really appreciate your support. If you haven’t done this already, please check out our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button.
Steven Butala:
And your comments and suggestions, help us create the type of content you’re here for. Hitting the like button helps to support our channels algorithm, engage your interest in future shows. It’s all about the data here.
Jill DeWit:
We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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