Boondocking on Your Land (LA 1441)
Transcripts:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
Jill DeWit:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land, investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWitt coming to you from sunny Scottsdale, Arizona.
Jill DeWit:
Where am I, where am I, where am I? Nevermind, I’m looking straight out a window staring at a big cactus, but every now and then you forget, and these old habits, you just-
Steven Butala:
Well, we’ve been saying sunny Southern California for about-
Jill DeWit:
A long time.
Steven Butala:
…two, at least two years.
Jill DeWit:
Wait a minute. You know what’s funny? We started this in Arizona.
Steven Butala:
I think so, too.
Jill DeWit:
I wonder what I used to say back then. But now we’re here, that’s funny. Went to Southern California and now we’re back.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about boondocking on your land. What the heck is boondocking? It’s when somebody that you don’t know at all is driving their RV around because their employer lets them use their laptop to work anywhere they’d like now. Not lets them, but he’s forced to because of the COVID or whatever “de jour” problem there is.
Jill DeWit:
That’s cool.
Steven Butala:
And he’s on your land. Is that good or bad? And can you do it if you have an RV on other people’s land? We’ll talk about that in a second. 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:
And if you’re a member of Land Academy, by the way, you can also catch up with the [inaudible 00:01:24]. James wrote, “Hello in Texas, a real,” excuse me. “In Texas, realtor.com does not have data on rural counties. Steve mentioned that this should not exclude you from going after rural land. Anyone have a manual way to pull data in the red, yellow, green test and figure out which rural county is best? Assuming that days on market is the most important indicator, pulls data on all property types, including housing, which may skew results for land. Also, Texas land seems more expensive, like $9,000 an acre retail, than most of the two to $3,000 retail deals that you have here around in Land Academy. Does it matter as long as the land is retail for the price on the various websites, such as Redfin, Zillow, realtor, et cetera?” Take it away.
Steven Butala:
Well, this is the third or fourth time I’ve answered this. And I think at least two times, maybe three times from the same person. This is not, there’s no equation. And if you think like in math, in high school or college, where you figure it out and you’ve got it and that’s it. Every single county is different. The states are different. You have to feel your way through this and figure it out. And data is readily available for certain product types like houses in certain areas like urban areas. When you get out into rural areas and you start changing product types, like land, like we all buy and sell, you’re going to get a different result. Especially in Texas, Texas is famous for not reporting the completed sale and everything that surrounds it, including and most importantly price. So yeah, you’re going to have a tough time completing an OCD complete, I’m going to write this down. Red, yellow, green test. This topic comes up a lot for new people and I’m trying to drive this point home.
Jill DeWit:
There’s no secret. We’re not holding you back. We’re not holding back.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
There’s a special way.
Steven Butala:
The reason that some people do extremely well with this, us included, is because we have an open mind when we go into a dataset and we say, “It’s not complete. I’m going to have to fill in some gaps here. I’m going to have to guess over here, I’m going to have to take the data that I have,” which could be 50% incomplete. Look around surrounding counties. Look at housing data, call the 7-Eleven clerk. I’m not sure what you need to do, actually to get a comprehensive dataset, to get you to the point where you’re comfortable mailing it. And maybe you’re not that person, maybe your OCD or whatever it is that’s stopping you from being creative with this and filling in the gaps where they don’t exist, maybe you just can’t do it. I don’t know. This reminds me of Jurassic Park, when they pulled the DNA out of a dinosaur bone and it was incomplete. The helix was not complete. So they used frog data and lizard data. And it worked in the beginning. But at the end, remember?
Jill DeWit:
This is hilarious. The secret one that they added in Jurassic world?
Steven Butala:
Yeah, the last one.
Jill DeWit:
That we didn’t find out till later what was added in Jurassic World? That’s hilarious. It’s a raptor, FYI.
Steven Butala:
So if the question is, “What the hell do you do?”, which I think it is. Because I can hear how frustrated James is here.
Jill DeWit:
I know. I have two ideas. One, you’re going to spend the time figuring it out. And you know what, James, maybe it’s going to take you a week. And if you want to share what you’ve come up with with other people, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too, but you’re going to find a way to price it because we all do. You’re going to come up with something that makes sense. It’s not going to be perfect. The other thing is, go somewhere where it is perfect. I hate to say it. If it’s really going to drive you that nutty, then move on. There’s so many other places that you could be doing this very close, like wow, Oklahoma look right right.
Steven Butala:
It’ll shock you. You’ll be shocked. If you go to Dallas County, look up all the available properties or the completed sales on properties, if you can get the data, for land and there’s going to be hundreds and hundreds. In LA County, there’s thousands of pieces of property for sale that are all over the place that you can get data on. So you just might be an urban land person.
Jill DeWit:
I think Dallas is in Tarrant County. I don’t think there’s a Dallas County. Tarrant County.
Steven Butala:
I don’t know Texas like you do, so.
Jill DeWit:
It’s okay. It’s cool.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, boondocking on your land. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit:
You just got me thinking, there could be somewhere. I don’t know. Cool.
Steven Butala:
Boondocking is when somebody’s in an RV, it could be, you drives around some rural dirt road somewhere and sees a spot and says, “Wow, that’s flat and nice and the sun’s going to set and it’s great. I’m just going to park my RV there. Somebody sent me this article, that’s why I’m doing this episode.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, I was wondering.
Steven Butala:
My initial thought was, this is America.
Jill DeWit:
Good for them.
Steven Butala:
And God made shotgun shells for a reason.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
I couldn’t be more wrong. So it’s not a good idea on private land, but I know it’s worthwhile talking about. There’s different types of boondocking, the one we’re talking about is you just park, you know, it’s not an RV park. You can, shockingly and it’s really worth looking up, especially if you’re an RV-er, there are hard rules in your favor about pulling over, especially on Bureau of Land Management property. You can stay there for like 30 days. The states, Arizona specifically, has some amazing laws about it, just pulling over.
Jill DeWit:
Not even like, “I was tired, I was tired for 30 days.”
Steven Butala:
But then you have to move it and there are certain rules. So is boondocking on your land okay, privately owned land? Heck no, it’s not.
Jill DeWit:
I think I saw this was a new HGTV show or something, or Discovery plus, not kidding, like a boondocking show. Because with COVID so many people are getting out and doing this.
Steven Butala:
You know, of course Walmart and other companies like that have long, as a marketing tool, have said, “You can park overnight for free in Walmart.”
Jill DeWit:
I do know, here’s my experiences dealing with them. Most cities and counties have rules about how long you can park somewhere there. And I think that most of them it’s intended for, “Hey, you could have an RV up to six months, one year,” something like that. And it’s intended to be temporary while you’re building, kind of a thing. That’s the point, and that was my take on why they had a time limit on it. What’s funny is, if you really read the rules on a lot of counties, it’ll say, “At a time.” So it’s like, you could really kind of go there for six months, leave for the weekend, come back and be there for six months at a time.
Steven Butala:
And I think that if that’s what the rules are and you’re complying with it, I think it’s great. I know that there’s a property, two counties that Joe and I are buying a ton of property in, and they explicitly say, “You cannot have an RV on the property for more than a week.” But they encourage mobile home development. Seriously encourage it.
Jill DeWit:
Isn’t that funny? So many different things.
Steven Butala:
Logic doesn’t apply.
Jill DeWit:
No.
Steven Butala:
When I started down the path of researching boondocking, I didn’t think I would find anything that was pro, “Pull your RV over and stay for a while.”
Jill DeWit:
But you found a lot more than you thought?
Steven Butala:
Yeah, Bureau of Land Management has real specific rules in favor of having you do this.
Jill DeWit:
By state?
Steven Butala:
No, that’s BLM, federal.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
I only looked at a couple of Southwestern States and both of them were encouraging it.
Jill DeWit:
This is good.
Steven Butala:
I mean, you can’t knock over cactus while you’re doing it and they have some rules about it, but they’re all really workable rules. Like please don’t set a forest fire, open flame and all that. Which are to everybody’s benefit.
Jill DeWit:
This sounds to me like at the end you’re going to tell me to pack my bags.
Steven Butala:
There would have been a time recently, right around, let’s say April and May of 2020, I would have said, “Maybe we can do this.”
Jill DeWit:
I kind of wish we had.
Steven Butala:
At the top of a sports car.
Jill DeWit:
Don’t you wish we had?
Steven Butala:
No. Here’s what Jill and I do while we were staring at each other during COVID, we developed, I think at least two, maybe four new products for Land Academy. How many-
Jill DeWit:
We could have done that on the road, all this stuff we could do on the road. So, all right.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, with a 17 year old.
Jill DeWit:
There is that.
Steven Butala:
That’s the problem.
Jill DeWit:
Well, again, we could do it on the road, because he wasn’t in school at the time, but we won’t go there. We would have killed each other or him.
Steven Butala:
Or been eaten by her child.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true. That could have happened. That’s awesome. Happy you could join us today, five days a week can find us right here on the Land Academy show, right?
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode of the Land Academy show is called, “How to develop the skills I’m missing to have a successful company.” You are not alone in your real estate ambition. That should be an interesting topic to talk about. It was fueled by a question that we took in the accountability group this week.
Jill DeWit:
I loved it. I loved it, because what happened was it was going down the path of, “Okay, I’ve heard you talk before. And you talked about how successful people were coming into this that have had prior businesses. Well, what’s that all about?”. And we explained it and he said, “Well, okay, that’s great. Now, how do I develop those skills if I don’t have them?”. And so it was really interesting. We both had the same answer and I’ll share it with you tomorrow. If you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers and FEMA flood overlays, check out neighborscoop.com, created by investors, that’s us, for investors like you,
Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information-
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration-
Steven Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.
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