People Who Create Change are Overwhelmingly More Content (LA 1400)

Transcript:

Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Happy holidays.

Jack 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.

Jack Butala:
Today jill and I talk about the people who create change are overwhelmingly more content. I read an article a couple of days ago. I don’t know if you call it article anymore. What do you call it? A piece.

Jill DeWit:
That’s true.

Jack Butala:
It was by a pretty … It was like CNN or something.

Jill DeWit:
I think it’s still an article.

Jack Butala:
It was a credible source that somebody did a study and I’ll talk about it more in the content of the show, but people who make some serious change in their life end up happier, a lot happier. And what better time to make change when the world’s on fire, right?

Jill DeWit:
That’s true. Oh, boy.

Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of the members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free.

Jill DeWit:
Lucas wrote: Hi folks. Land Academy posted an ad on Instagram today about assessed value. I have a question about the usefulness of assessed values when pricing a mailer. I understand that the assessed value doesn’t reflect the actual retail value of a property. However, does it make sense to use the assessed value as an indicator when the property doesn’t fit the normal data?

Jack Butala:
Yes.

Jill DeWit:
For example-

Jack Butala:
This is a very good question.

Jill DeWit:
Imagine a scenario where a bunch of properties have an assessed value of 30 to $40,000 with retail values close to $100,000.

Jack Butala:
Excellent example.

Jill DeWit:
Most of them are wooded and undeveloped. Then I see one property with an assessed value of $400,000. When I check it out, I can see that it’s cleared, there’s a road, and it’s in a high-end neighborhood with an excellent view. This makes me think that the assessed value can at least help me distinguish between the extreme spectrums of a given county, very valuable versus very useless. So I’m thinking, can I use this column to manage the outliers in my dataset and hopefully get more accurate and a precise mailer. Does this make sense? [inaudible 00:02:11] Lucas.

Jack Butala:
Lucas, you’re 80% of the way there.

Jill DeWit:
Great.

Jack Butala:
So let me clarify what he’s saying. You take a dataset, it’s got, what did he say, 30 to $40,000 retail values. Let’s say there’s a real consistent assessed values of 30 to $40,000 with retails of 100,000, right? This is long after we’ve gone through the process of collecting data on for sale and sold property in the area.

Jill DeWit:
And picks the county and now we’re going down.

Jack Butala:
Yeah, in a perfect world, the assessed values would be consistent with the price for acres and you would look down a dataset of let’s say, I don’t know, I’m going to just use an example of a thousand lines of data and everything’s peachy. It’s like, oh, it all ties. It’s great. And then at the top, there’s properties that have an assessed value of zero, a bunch of them. Why? Because they’re probably non-profit properties. And then at the bottom, there’s assessed values. I’ll use his numbers of 400, 500, 600,000. But they’re all at that same county, same APN scheme. What the hell? They’re outliers. They’re data exceptions. In the world of data, that’s what they call it. So what do you do? Do you increase your price per offer in that like he suggests? No. What you do is you lop them off your data set because it’s screwing up your averages.
If you have in a thousand unit data set, if you have 25 to 50 with zero on the top, and then at the bottom, you have, let’s say 50 or 80 that are in the millions or the hundreds of thousands or the 50,000 even, it’s going to throw your data way off. So you terminate them.
So yesterday we talked about these automated pricing tools. That’s the problem with that. It doesn’t count for a test for a reason. There’s no person looking at this data saying it’s not really $500 an acre when you average it out, it’s really 300.

Jill DeWit:
I think that these assessed values, they naturally don’t change much. If you’re working in an area in a county, they will fluctuate very little. Every year you get the postcard that tells you what goes on, but when you have some big change like that, something triggered it. And it sounds like they pulled permits, they cleared it. They’re doing something for it. Somebody paid a lot of money for it. That would trigger a little bit of a change too. And hopefully, it doesn’t trigger a bunch of properties around there. And usually, in our world, that seems like it doesn’t and that’s why you get these variances.
It’s interesting that this came up with me just the other day talking to someone on our staff. Someone had called in and was looking at buying one of our properties. They’re like, “Well, wait a minute. It’s assessed at this price and you’re selling it at that price.” I said, here’s what you need to say next time because this happens all the time. Okay. “Dear Bob, well, lucky for you, it’s only assessed at this amount when it’s really worth this amount. Go look around because it’s actually worth way more than that. Because that’s how we roll, what we’re selling it for. So your taxes are kept down. However, if you would like me to call the county and change the assessed value to be more in line with what I’m selling for, I’m happy to do that. It’s going to raise the taxes on it. I think you’re nuts.” And they go, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” Yes, that’s the situation.

Jack Butala:
By definition, the assessed value of a property is what the assessor uses to value it, and then they send those calculations to the treasurer, who sends out tax bills. That’s what assessed value is. It’s a means to equalize all the property in the county, assign a value to it, run some type of weird calculation, and send out a tax bill. The problem is that, and that’s why there’s so much discussion about this is that every county does it different. Every single one. There’s all kinds of methodologies about how to assess property to get taxes.
I mean, here’s my favorite example about assessed value is, a nonprofit hospital … Non-profit hospitals, people donate stuff to them all the time, land. And non-profits, whether they’re churches or hospitals or any type of nonprofit entity, it’s usually places of worship and hospitals. After a while, in some counties, not all, they don’t have to pay any property taxes at all. They’re exempt. Universities too. Nonprofit university, especially Ivy League ones don’t pay any taxes and they have huge campuses in metropolitan areas, like Harvard, no property taxes at all. So when people donate property to them, it falls under their thing and the assessment goes to zero. And it can be very valuable properties. So if you’re downloading all this vacant land and it really throws off your dataset. These automatic pricing things don’t account for that.
Here’s another one on the other end that’s very common that will throw off your data. I’m not saying this to confuse you. It’s real simple. At the end of your mailer … at the end of your data scrubbing. I’m not trying to make this complicated. I’m actually trying to solve it. All you have to do is at the end of your data … And we teach us in the education, lop off the top and lop off the bottom, the data outliers. But in Arizona specifically, there’s this thing called multi-sale. And so if I sell one property to Jill and I fill out the affidavit of property value and I submit it, the assessor gets it, and it falls in line with all the other data. I can sell 50 pieces of property to Jill and tell you how much I sold for, and that will go in every single APN slot in Arizona,

Jill DeWit:
Right. So it looks like I paid $100,000 for each one when I paid $100,000 for the bulk.

Jack Butala:
For all of them.

Jill DeWit:
That happens a lot. And you have to go dig a little bit. Look at the document number. That’s beyond the scope of this.

Jack Butala:
This is the difference between-

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, that’s true.

Jack Butala:
… between crazy successful land investors and people that are just trying to look for an easy way to do this. If you’re the type of person, you’re just, yeah, I just want to buy a couple of properties. I don’t really want to learn how to do this. It’s too complicated and it’s hard. This is not for you. Go buy some stock. Go get yourself an E-Trade account and buy and sell some stock, or go to Vegas.

Jill DeWit:
Right. I have one more thing to add about this because this comes up and it’s so important. I’m glad we’re talking about this, is even the very best counties when there are changes, let’s just say, especially like here in Southern California, things are commonly going up and quickly, but the very best counties will be year or two behind on the assessed value calculations. So there’s another reason why you can’t look at this and go, oh, that’s what it’s worth. No.

Jack Butala:
In fact, if you’re new, what I would do is forget about this discussion entirely.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Assessed what? There you go. That’s what you should be saying. Assess this. That’s it.

Jack Butala:
This a huge topic right in the beginning of Land Academy. For Jill and I, there’s three or four topics like this and we learned … This stuff, Jill and I already knew. But it didn’t make it into our original education. And so we would have people coming back saying, “Well, why don’t we just do it this way?” Like a lot. And so we haven’t talked about it in a while.

Jill DeWit:
Price it based on the assessed value. Because that’s so wrong.

Jack Butala:
Hey, the last thing you want to do is waste money on a mailer because it’s way too expensive. So just forget about this. The [inaudible 00:09:54] education addresses it all. Yeah. Today’s topic, people who create change are overwhelmingly more content. This is the meat of the show.

Jill DeWit:
This is Steven’s psychology week.

Jack Butala:
It’s called success weekend.

Jill DeWit:
Oh, is that what it’s called? I like psychology week. This is get in your head week.

Jack Butala:
I read a study that just got released. Some university interviewed a ton of people. It was a pretty simple study. They asked them if they wanted to make some serious change in their life. Of course, everybody says, yes, don’t they? Yeah. Everybody says, “Oh, yeah.”

Jill DeWit:
Oh, of course. Always.

Jack Butala:
And they asked him to flip a coin and they’re going to make that change or not. And they flipped the coin, and the people who have got heads were asked to make the change, and the people who got tails stayed the same. And the people who got heads, at the end of the whole study were 68% more happy and satisfied and really glad that they made the change. And so I’m really paraphrasing or slimming this down. You should actually if you’re interested in this, please Google it. But that’s something that I’ve known all along. Change is hard. Making a career change … I’m doing this because it’s late December, and everybody, there’s a whole January, New Year’s resolution, it’s just a restart, especially, who among us doesn’t want to get out of 2020?

Jill DeWit:
Exactly.

Jack Butala:
So now’s the time to make some major, major change. Whether it’s a career change or swapping out a spouse, however that works for you. The biggest changes that I made and the most painful changes in my life were relationships. I never struggled that much with careers and money or kids. It’s just when someone’s dragging it down, and I don’t mean social relationships, like you have a bad boss.

Jill DeWit:
Oh, my God. I know. Until he met me.

Jack Butala:
Yeah. I mean, we’re in this for life, Jill.

Jill DeWit:
I know.

Jack Butala:
Whether we want to be or not, because everybody’s used to seeing us.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, we’re stuck. Great. That’s kind of funny. What happened to Jill? Don’t go there. Don’t bring it up. Ixnay. Don’t say it. Just kidding. No, you know what’s interesting is, we talked about this in my women’s group, my women land investors group, we talked about we know what needs to happen. Okay. There’s two things I want to talk about. Some people can do it, some people can’t do it. And I don’t understand why. Well, actually, I mean, I do, but I wish there was a really easy way that you could make it happen. You could … I don’t know. And then the other thing is you know you need to do it, but you need a push.
So let me back up. Every time in my life I’ve made some big career changes, I’ve always been happy. It’s always worked out.

Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill DeWit:
Whether it’s career, a move, a relationship, things like that, it’s always worked out. I was going forward instead of being stuck in where I was. And I’ve always had people, like close friends of mine kind of standing on the sidelines going, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” And I’m always like, “Why can’t you? Who says you can’t do this?” “Oh, I’m just not you.” Well, I’m not any different than you are.

Jack Butala:
I have to agree with them.

Jill DeWit:
You agree with them, how?

Jack Butala:
They’re not you.

Jill DeWit:
Oh.

Jack Butala:
They’re not ass-kicking Jill.

Jill DeWit:
Thank you. Thank you. It’s interesting though.

Jack Butala:
You’re afraid of nothing.

Jill DeWit:
Well, maybe you should make … So here’s my thoughts on this. Take a baby step change. You don’t have to do what I do. I’ve done major … left the town, left the job, left the relationship all in one big swoop kind of thing. Like I’m going big or going home. That’s how roll sometimes. I snap and look out. But you don’t have to do that. If you have some changes, make baby steps. So here’s my thoughts.

Jack Butala:
That’s what tomorrow’s show’s about.

Jill DeWit:
Oh, is it really? Okay. Here’s my little thoughts on this. Right now, like you said, we all want to get out of 2020, and fast, and hit the reset button on January 1. I know I do. And I’m sure most of us do.

Jack Butala:
I’m a big fan of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Click, click, click, click. That’s half of our listeners, we just lost them.

Jill DeWit:
You’re going to give everybody a lecture?

Jack Butala:
Yep.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Jack Butala:
And it’s like two sentences. Just get to know yourself. If you look back, however old you are, not super young, but if you’re older and you’re like looking back and saying, “Yeah, I’m real happy. Just I’m happy. I don’t want to change anything. I’m good. Yeah, my job sucks, but I’m not moving. I’m not going to change anything. I’m not going to do it,” this is not for you. And I don’t mean Land Academy. I mean, just this whole show and everything. This is about making a swooping, big positive changes for you, for your family.

Jill DeWit:
Maybe that’s why you’re here.

Jack Butala:
Well, that’s what I mean. If they’re here and they want a change and they’re saying, “You know what, this is probably not the right thing.”

Jill DeWit:
We’ll help you.

Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
Well, just even knowing that it’s possible, maybe now is not the right time, but in six months it will be, you’ll get to that point. My concept I want to share is if you can’t make a big change, I totally get that. That’s crazy and scary to some people, I understand. Make a little change. What’s something you want to do? You want to go down the path of having … How about this, here’s a change I think a lot of us want to make. I do not want to be dependent on somebody else. Period. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t-

Jack Butala:
I think this is a huge change. But, okay.

Jill DeWit:
I know, but, that’s where you are. But you’re like, “I’m not going to quit my job tomorrow and import stuff from China and start a little web company or something.” And I don’t want you to do that.

Jack Butala:
This is fascinating. Go ahead. What little changes could you make then?

Jill DeWit:
Start researching what makes sense to you. And number one, start allocating some time to do this. You know you have your 40 hour a week job, you have your family, and your other obligations. Why was-

Jack Butala:
Just about the yell at me. She’s just about to say, “Hold on.” You know how when you live with somebody for a long time, it’s like, God, I know what’s coming.

Jill DeWit:
No.

Jack Butala:
That’s what I just … The hairs stood up on me.

Jill DeWit:
Change number one is you need to ice out the time. You need ice out time and it’s probably going to be getting up at five in the morning. I don’t care. There’s something like that. So from five to six in the morning is your time to think about and start planning for a change. So number one, get used to getting up early. Change number two, start researching some things. Change number three, start getting educated on whatever you think it is. And then change number four, start doing it on the side. You could do all this between five and six in the morning. And I’m not kidding, in six months from now, they bringing in some money doing something else. And then you get to take a step back and go, “Do I like it? Do I want to do something different? Look what I’ve created. How do I want this to go?” And by the way, you’re going to be a lot happier.

Jack Butala:
I mean, she’s right. Taste liver pâté before you say it’s terrible. Try it. And if it’s bad … This is you are outlining the book that I am 80% done with called Stuff Your Father Never Told You. And it’s making me think we should do one called Stuff You Parents Never Told You. Because I think you have a lot to say. I know you have a lot to say.

Jill DeWit:
I’d be happy to do it with you.

Jack Butala:
And I think that-

Jill DeWit:
That’d be fun.

Jack Butala:
I’m totally the dad in all this. And not in the … But I’m just the dad in our family and all that. And I’m sterner or more stern and less soft about everything. And Jill’s like, “Just hold on. Just break it up. Do these things.” So, you’re right. I think the first thing you need to do, which is fun and easy for me and I still do it at my age and where we are financially and everything, is sit down in front of a computer or a pad of paper or whatever it makes sense to you or whatever age you are, it might be a Mickey Mouse notebook, sit down and write out a plan for yourself. I guarantee you there is a plan inside of you. You just don’t know about it yet. And for me, if you just write and write and write, the plan’s going to come out. It might be that you really want to get married. And that’s great, You can make that happen as long as you do it slowly and methodically and step-by-step according to a plan.

Jill DeWit:
Right. You are really good about that. I have to compliment you, Jack. That is how … It’s so funny, that’s how when we go in our separate corners, we’ve done this, partners go in our separate corners. What do you want to work on next year? Let’s come back and talk about it and then things like that. His way is very different from my way, and how we’re going to go about it is very different. And I love that you do this and you are right. But what’s funny about us is, the five-year plan is the same and the 10-year plan is the same, but all the little paths along there of how we’re doing it is all a jumbled mess.

Jack Butala:
It’s a classic tortoise and the hare situation.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Jack Butala:
And I’m not necessarily the hare.

Jill DeWit:
That’s true. That’s fun. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find this right here on the Land Academy Show.

Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Reframing Your Money-Making Mindset. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. That’s what I’m talking about.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Jack Butala:
Because again, I read a piece on this from the same source. Because this is what stops a lot of people from making change is that they want … If you ask 10 young people, specifically men, what their definition of an entrepreneur is, they’re going to say Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. Which is great. So if you ask a young basketball player, who they want to be, they’re going to say Michael Jordan or whatever it is now, LeBron James whatever it is now. So look, you’re never going to be LeBron James, and I’m never going to be Elon Musk. You have to reframe that mindset to make sure you get step one done first. Just step one, whatever it is, then to step two. You make 5,000 bucks this month on one deal, and then what’s realistically going to happen, then you miss four months because some stuff happened in your life, and you don’t throw it all away. You look back on that one deal and you say, okay.

Jill DeWit:
Pick up where you left off and do it again. And you’re right, my baby step and your baby steps are very different, but that doesn’t mean they’re not equally important. That’s awesome. We hope you find our content valuable and we appreciate your support. Thank you for tuning in with us today. If you haven’t already, please get on over to our YouTube channel, you’re going to find my new show over there too, by the way, and hit the subscribe button.

Jack Butala:
I like how you snuck that in.

Jill DeWit:
Thank you.

Jack Butala:
Your comments and suggestions help us to create the type of content you’re here for. Hitting the like button helps to support our channel’s algorithm engage your interest for future shows.
We’re Steve and Jill.

Jill DeWit:
We’re Steve and Jill.

Jack Butala:
Information …

Jill DeWit:
… and inspiration …

Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.