Are you One Deal a Month or One Deal a Day Kind of Investor (LA 1443)
Transcripts:
Steven Butala:
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 DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Scottsdale, Arizona.
Steven Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about, are you a one deal a month or a one deal a day kind of investor?
Jill DeWit:
You to do our answers now, or you want to save it for the show?
Steven Butala:
I think everyone can pretty much guess.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to count down. I’m going to do three, two, one. And then you either say month or day, depending how you feel. Okay, ready? Three, two, one. Month.
Steven Butala:
Both. Month? You’re a one deal a month person?
Jill DeWit:
Boy, if I had my way, I’d be-
Steven Butala:
Are you serious?
Jill DeWit:
We used to … that’s why I wanted to do this.
Steven Butala:
Wow. I’m both.
Jill DeWit:
I would love to do one stellar deal a month. I think that would be awesome because then I can goof off the rest of the time.
Steven Butala:
I understand that goof-off point, but you’re just putting your eggs in one basket if it doesn’t work out.
Jill DeWit:
But I have 12. I have more going on. Let’s be honest. Because you know what? I’ll have a rotation of many in the pipeline at the same time. But, hey, between one deal a day and one deal a month, I’m leaning towards month. But as I say that, I’m eating my words a little bit because I do say volume a lot.
Steven Butala:
I just think that you got to have 10 or 20 really good deals in the pipeline. And some months you’re going to close 10 of them. Someone months you’re going to close two. It’s not often that you would close-
Jill DeWit:
All the bigger ones.
Steven Butala:
Yeah. It’s not often you’re going to close 20 a day. But the point is-
Jill DeWit:
But you have.
Steven Butala:
… we all have met people. If you’re in this group, you know people that are one deal a day kind of people, and you know people that are just one deal a month. That’s it. I’m good. I want to make a couple hundred thousand bucks.
Jill DeWit:
This one’s been one deal an hour.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
It’s a little nuts.
Steven Butala:
It’s not that I want to do the deals because I’ve done that. My time for doing deals is over. My job is to keep everybody motivated and paid and happy and healthy and working in an environment they want. And generally being kind of, hopefully, a leader and not a pain in everybody’s butt.
Jill DeWit:
He’s become the HR department. Just kidding. I’m joking.
Steven Butala:
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:
You know I was teasing?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. By the way, if you are a Land Academy member, don’t forget you can find us on Discord. Jesse wrote, “I’m new to Land Academy, just about ready to pull the trigger and lay down my money. In the interim, I figured it would be a good idea to brush up on my Excel skills. Does anyone know of a good online course that is applicable to the data analysis used here at Land Academy? I did a search, and the only one I found mentioned was it at … ” Is it Udemy?
Steven Butala:
Udemy.
Jill DeWit:
Udemy.
Steven Butala:
Like university.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. “I had someone else, not Land Academy, suggest DataCamp. Does anyone have any experience with DataCamp? Thanks in advance.”
Steven Butala:
There’s a lot of places to learn things like this, and I think it’s great that you’re trying to learn more. I would start with Khan Academy, K-A-H-N.
Jill DeWit:
That have Excel stuff?
Steven Butala:
They have everything. I mean, I have never … and it’s all free. It’s a foundation. Now they raise money, people donate. It’s been around for a while. It was originally designed to help young people from not affluent areas who didn’t have access to learning how to code. It was founded by their last name was Khan.
Jill DeWit:
Is there any kind of specific course I should seek out, like writing macros within Excel?
Steven Butala:
No. Well, if this person’s “brushing up” on Excel skills, I’m not sure they’re ready for macros. I would just take it step by step. We’ve all been there. I had to learn Excel, and I learned it by default at a summer job that I had when I was very young as a teenager. This was before computers had a mouse.
Jill DeWit:
Was it Lotus123, or what was it back then?
Steven Butala:
Yeah, it was Lotus.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
So I was fortunate to learn without a mouse, which just makes you a lot faster in Excel. But I still learn. I am still going out onto YouTube to figure out what functions that are appropriate and how to do it and why. And so you’ll never stop learning that.
Jill DeWit:
I’m going to give Jesse a kudos here. Thank you for not asking someone, “Hey, what’s the formula that so-and-so uses in this thing. And can you show it to me?” Thank you for not saying that. That drives me nuts. I really appreciate your going, “I’m going to brush up on this. I’m going to learn myself.” That’s the right thing to do. I’m going to go get some training. I’ll be back in a couple days.
Steven Butala:
We are in that. Jill brings up a great point. We are in the age of self-learning, and it’s here to stay. I don’t think it’s ever going to go away now between YouTube and solving your own problems.
Jill DeWit:
I concur.
Steven Butala:
And I just think that not very many years ago, certainly since we’ve been in our professional life, you couldn’t get answers anywhere unless you either went to the library or talked to somebody who knew more about it than you did. And the only reason that they know more about it is because they knew somebody else who knew more about it. So knowledge is very, very, very limited. Now, every answer to every question’s in your pocket or your purse. So you have to make that crossover. If you haven’t, if you’re older like us, you have to make that crossover into every answer’s on YouTube, just about everything. I’ve never gone on YouTube and not gotten an answer, I mean, for anything.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true. It’s true. You’re right.
Steven Butala:
So start with YouTube and it will lead you to paid courses, if that’s what you want to do, or however you learn. I’m not sure. You might be months away from really getting good enough in Excel to actually do a mailer. So I’m just being honest.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you for your honesty.
Steven Butala:
What do you think about that?
Jill DeWit:
No, I’m done. I think that’s great.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, are you one deal a month or one deal a day kind of investor? This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit:
I was avoiding saying pineapple.
Steven Butala:
Really?
Jill DeWit:
I’m joking. I’m just being fun. Come on. It’s fun. Today’s just a good day. We have a lot of good stuff going on here. And this is good. We’re talking about deals. This is great stuff. And I love this topic.
Steven Butala:
Me too.
Jill DeWit:
And I find it so interesting. So I will start. It first sounds nuts, obviously, like Steven pointed out. All right. If you’re doing a one deal a month, you’re putting all your money in that and all your money in this. No, I mean, for me personally, no, that’s really not how it’s going. But I do like taking down big deals. That’s just it, and here’s why. The deals that I’m doing, it’s pretty much the same amount of energy. And then some times, it’s a little easier, the bigger the deal, because there’s other people involved doing work that I would do on the smaller deals. So that’s part of my attraction for the bigger deals.
Jill DeWit:
Here’s what I don’t want to be doing: one deal a day, buy it for $200, sell it for $500 on eBay. And that is someone’s business model. You’ve done versions of that in the past, and down to the hour. And I don’t think the numbers were that small. I’m just throwing out a number just to give you an idea. Buy $1,000, sell for $3,000. I don’t care how you want to look at it. But you could do stuff like that and have an auction closing every day, every other day, whatever you want to do. Now, how many deals do you do in a week? And how many people are you chasing? Make sure they get paid. And did that get recorded? Did this get recorded? And you’re buying a lot too.
Jill DeWit:
So I guess, as I’m getting into this too, I am going more to your side, which is both. I do want to do volume. I do. You are correct. I do want to do volume. I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. I love having a variety of deals from all different sizes. And now, for me, what’s developed is I have a threshold, and it’s a bottom number. Not really. I have kind of a top number, but I really don’t have a top number because I have other people that I can invest with. So big numbers don’t scare me. But I do have bottom numbers where I’m like, “I just am not going to go below.” It’s like $10,000. It doesn’t make any sense for me now.
Steven Butala:
That’s the lead into my point. My point is, it’s not the number. It’s the type of deal. So whatever mailer you choose to send out, that’s what’s going to come back. So if you choose to target $100,000 properties wholesale and send out an offer for $40,000 for each of those properties, those are the deals you’re going to do. If you send out 10,000 offers like that, you’re going to do a lot of deals, a ton of deals actually. Is it going to be one a day? Does it matter? It’s not going to be one a month. It’s going to be a lot, a lot more than that. So it just ends up becoming, do you have the systems in place? Are you willing to put the systems in place to manage it? It’s a numbers game. You’re going to send out a certain amount of mail, for sake of argument 10,000 units. You’re going to probably get 20 or 30 great deals, viable deals out of that mailer. 10 or 15 of them are going to work for the ownership reasons and all kinds of stuff, access reasons.
Jill DeWit:
What’s interesting is usually one starts out not knowing what kind of person they are. If you’re doing it right, go for it and you’ll figure out what kind of person you are. And we have some really interesting people. We have some people that are one deal a year. Remember that girl in Northern California?
Steven Butala:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit:
She was kind of a one deal a year kind of person, and it was good, and she made it count. She wasn’t dependent on it. It’s not like this pay the bills. She had a PhD or her husband did, something great. This was kind of like paying for kids’ college kind of thing is why she was doing it. And she had little kids and wanted to spend time with little kids.
Steven Butala:
She was a stay-at-home mom. A stay-at-home mom that did … I think she did four or five deals a year. Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Something big. But, yeah, she didn’t do a lot. And she went into this just guns ablaze. Did a great job. She was one of our very first members. And then she backed off. I’m like, “Where’d she go? Claire?” And she’d pop up now and then. And so if you’re listening, we’re looking for you. I’d love an update. I would say her name now and then. She popped up and go, “I’m still here. Here’s what I’m working on now.” I’m like, “That’s so good.” And she would just pop back up, and she’s like, “Yeah, I’m just doing this many deals. I’m just kind of over here. It’s working out great. Thanks. I got exactly what I wanted out of this.”
Steven Butala:
She asked us one time on the Thursday call, she’s like, “Could you really put this all in a textbook please? Because I don’t understand these videos that you guys are doing.” She’s like a genius.
Jill DeWit:
Definitely. She’s got a PhD I think. Yeah, she’s really smart. So, yeah. And then we have the other extreme. And it’s funny, well, they have other people like her that … and it’s usually just life decisions. They’ve figured it out and there’s some life reason. They just don’t want to work that hard. And maybe that’s just it. Maybe they just don’t want to work that hard. But some of them are like, “I can’t. I have other commitments. I care for somebody. I do this. I do that. And this is perfect for me.”
Steven Butala:
Yeah. That’s a perfect prelude to my next point. Some people build this land business, their own land business around their life, stay-at-home mom, for whatever reason. Who knows? All kinds of stuff. You’re a caretaker at home. And some people, like us, I don’t know if this is good or bad or healthy or not, that’s the other way around.
Jill DeWit:
That’s very true. We build our life around our land business.
Steven Butala:
This is our business.
Jill DeWit:
This is our life.
Steven Butala:
Land Academy and all this stuff. And then our social life and the pieces that fall off of it, fall where they will.
Jill DeWit:
So we were out there the day. So dear Steven loves to wear these embroidered shirts and things that I have that I got for live events that I give out at the live events. And we were somewhere the other day, and he’s so used to wearing them for stuff that we’re doing, he just forgets. Right? And someone said, “Are you Land Academy?” And he’s like, “How’d you know that?” It’s like, “Well, it’s on your shirt.”
Steven Butala:
Yeah. They looked at my name tag.
Jill DeWit:
It was so funny. It took your for a surprise because, for us, it is the opposite. You’re right. It’s all intertwined, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m very happy and very proud of what we do and our community. And not to hijack your comment there, but thank you.
Steven Butala:
I think you said it earlier. I just don’t think you choose. It chooses you. Once you start going down this path, deals are coming back, you’re doing the deals, then you find out who you are.
Jill DeWit:
I agree. I’m super happy, and I’m happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Join us tomorrow for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
That was good.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
I liked that talk.
Steven Butala:
Me too.
Jill DeWit:
That was fun to bring up. By the way, if you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers and FEMA flood overlays, check out neighborscoop.com. Built by investors, that’s us, for investors like you. We are Steve and Jill.
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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