What to Do When You Can’t Find a Data Set for a Mailable County (LA 1447)
Transcripts:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hey, hey, hey.
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 southern California.
Steven Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about what to do when you can’t find a dataset for a mailable county.
Jill DeWit:
I’m going to sneeze. Nope, we’re good. Sorry. I’m like, “Oh, oh, can I talk?”
Steven Butala:
This week it’s like most popular questions week. “Jack, I can’t find this dataset. I could find it for the county over. I can’t find it at Redfin and I can’t find it in realtor.com, but I know it’s in Zillow. What do I do?” It’s a very valid question. It’s like looking at chocolate cake through glass. It’s like, I know it’ll work. I have all the answers actually.
Jill DeWit:
I have never heard of that. What is that, like up against the window? I want the chocolate cake. What? That’s funny. Did you make that up or is that a thing?
Steven Butala:
Yeah, just now.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, that’s good. Very good.
Steven Butala:
I just watched this video on YouTube.
Jill DeWit:
Chocolate cake through glass.
Steven Butala:
This guy sits his toddler down and puts a … Did you see this?
Jill DeWit:
No.
Steven Butala:
It went viral. Sits his toddler down and puts a bowl full of Skittles or M&M’s, a big bowl, like big as their head. And says in the nicest way, “Oh sweetheart, I’ve got to take this phone call. Don’t don’t eat this. I’ll be right back.” And it goes on. She only can take it for three minutes and it’s just pure torture. And she’s tiny. She’s really little.
Jill DeWit:
That’s not nice. Here’s the grown-up version. Oh, I put down a bottle of scotch and there’s a little a bit at the bottom, all of it’s gone. You’re like, “Oh man, I wish I hadn’t even thought about scotch. Now, I’m thinking about scotch. We don’t have enough scotch.” Shoot, I could see you trying to get every last drop.
Steven Butala:
Well, I think there’s a lot of grown-up versions of temptation that we could talk about too that, you see it, but you can’t have it.
Jill DeWit:
Hello. That’s not where I was going. Well, yeah, yeah. Okay. I get it. Let’s get to the show.
Steven Butala:
So, back to data. Yeah. 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:
Julius wrote, “Hello everyone. My name is Julius and I’m just jumping into land investment, 100% fresh.” I like that. It’s a great way to put this. “I’ve been thinking about it for my own personal property purchases for a while now, but after some research, I found this business model to be rather incredible. I’m currently a grad student, so I’m in the process of saving up to join Land Academy and I have some extra capital for the actual mailers and deals when the time comes.” Thank you, Julius. You’re doing it correctly and I really appreciate that.
Steven Butala:
Me too.
Jill DeWit:
“So my question is this, for someone who’s totally new, how would you recommend someone who has a couple of months to prep make the most of their time doing so before diving in? What are some good resources to really map out the process and maybe even get a feel for searching for, scrubbing and playing with some data? I’d also be super grateful to get the chance to speak with someone who’s been through it to see how they learn from those first steps. In any case, it’s a pleasure to be here and very excited to start. Thank you very much and wishing everyone all the best. Cheers, Julius.” Well, he’s already in the right place.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say, that he took the first step. And then there’s a bunch of people in Land Investors that go on to say, “Hey, give me a call. I’ll tell you exactly what to expect and what to do,” other members.
Jill DeWit:
That’s so nice.
Steven Butala:
And the moderator too. So you’ve already taken the first right step, which is to reach out. And then you’ve got a plan. Not only do you have a plan, you have a pre-plan and a pre-plan to that. So you’re going to do great at this.
Steven Butala:
I did come across this other … It’s a good time to bring this up. Came across this other person who was just struggling in our group, and this example or analogy came to me. If you’re the kind of person your entire life who loves to go to the library and read books, please don’t join a group about how to successfully go camping outdoors, and live outdoors on the land. If this is so far, if the actual use of Excel doesn’t come natural to you and data and understanding data, and then walking on a piece of land, if none of that stuff excites you, in fact, you’d really just rather go quilt or scrapbook, this isn’t going to work. See what he says here, Julius says here? All right, him or her.
Jill DeWit:
Already thinking about doing it for personal use. That’s great.
Steven Butala:
He’s already. He’s like, “I looked into it. I thought about it.”
Jill DeWit:
He’s already into it.
Steven Butala:
“I’d like to look at a dataset and maybe practice on it.” That’s very, very intelligent, pre-thought stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. It’s not like, “I’m bored. I’m looking for something to do to spend my time when I’m not doing X, but not too much time, because I do enjoy my free time.” Yeah, he’s doing something great. I hear where you’re going with.
Steven Butala:
I just talked to my sister on the phone because I got my nephew, I got her son an internship with Kitchell, it’s a huge construction company, because he’s about to graduate from Michigan State in construction management and he needs to do an internship to complete his degree. And Kitchell, specifically Hardison/Downey in Arizona, has these paid internship programs. Actually, it’s pretty amazing. I didn’t realize it. They didn’t have that stuff when I was a kid. Or maybe they did and I was too silly to-
Jill DeWit:
I’m sorry, sweetie. You didn’t make the cut.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, that’s more likely.
Jill DeWit:
Oh yeah, they’ve been going on forever. How do you think I got started? Oops, sorry.
Steven Butala:
My sister just gets … I’ve been talking to her a lot lately. Usually we don’t talk this much, but because of this. Anyway, she just got all these awards again. She’s a very successful real estate agent in Traverse City, Michigan. And I was talking to her and I said, “What the heck? This is a craziest time in real estate that all of us have ever seen.” She said, “Usually there’s 1500 properties on the market,” because we’re coming into spring now. We’re out of the thick of winter and that’s her real estate season. She said, “There’s 100.” So I said, “What is it with you?” I’ve had this conversation with her before. “Why do you, every year you win an award, multiple awards this year. And then the vast majority of real estate agents never make a dollar. And then when you read the news, it’s like, well, the average income for a real estate agent is $60,000. No, it’s 3.2 million for my sister and it’s zero for everybody else, and then there’s 13 people in the middle.
Jill DeWit:
I understand.
Steven Butala:
And she said this, “You either get it or you don’t. You either jump right into it.” She’s like, “My first year, I did 42 deals or something like that.” And she said, “The real reason is everybody thinks you can do this part-time.”
Jill DeWit:
I agree. I concur.
Steven Butala:
Or they get their real estate license to buy their own deal to save 3%, buy their own primary house. So, it’s the same thing here. If you’re going to make a commitment and do what it takes …
Jill DeWit:
He already is. You’re doing everything right.
Steven Butala:
He absolutely is.
Jill DeWit:
Save your money, do it right. I’ve told people, we’re not going anywhere. If anything, you know, we’ve been here for years. We’re not going anywhere, and we’ll be here when you’re ready. And every time, and for anyone that’s listening that’s in the same boat as Julius, I tell you, you haven’t missed it. Because you know what’s going to happen in six months from now? We’re going to have a better way to do X, fill in the blank. We’ll come up with a new solution. We’ll solve, like today, some of the data things that we’re talking about are not going to be issues in six months. Wait for it. It’s common. Because you’re going to solve it.
Steven Butala:
Exactly. I’ll tell you, if you want to practice Julius, contact a county, any county, the bigger the better, like an urban county, or go on their website and see if you can find the assessor’s tax role. So you will get, and it’ll either be free or you’ll have to pay some nominal fee to get it in a data form so you can download it and work with it. And it’s going to be grueling. You’re either going to get through it.
Jill DeWit:
This is good.
Steven Butala:
No matter what, don’t let it turn you off. But I will tell you this, here’s my challenge to you. If you can get that data, which is a gobbledygook mess even for me, that’s how I started, and make it into a usable form, and then send some mail out just for fun. This is long before you ever join, just to see what’s going to happen. You will smash it out of the park if you can get to that point.
Jill DeWit:
Just by learning how to manipulate it and learning what all the columns are, learning all the different zoning. You’ll get your feet wet. That’s actually a good idea.
Steven Butala:
Take that data, that’s step one. Step two, do a mail merge. Go on YouTube, figure out what a mail merge is. Go to O2O, offers2owners.com, which Jill and I own. Download those templates, all the templates, and work with them.
Jill DeWit:
Do a practice little something. That’s a good idea.
Steven Butala:
If you can get raw data from the county into a mailer and then get it out through O2O, you don’t have to be a member to use O2O, and get some deals back, then you need to join Land Academy because you’re-
Jill DeWit:
He will. He’s saving and he’s doing it.
Steven Butala:
This excites me.
Jill DeWit:
I’m so glad.
Steven Butala:
This is the right way to do this.
Jill DeWit:
Today’s topic, what to do when you can’t find a dataset for a mailable county. This is why you’re listening.
Steven Butala:
Okay.
Jill DeWit:
I’m going to interview you.
Steven Butala:
I can start or you can start.
Jill DeWit:
I’m going to start. You want to set me up and then I’m going to ask you questions. Give me this scenario, like explain exactly what we’re talking about.
Steven Butala:
So imagine yourself on the internet scrolling through, there’s a picture of the United States. You scroll down to a state, you scroll down to a county and you start moving through that state and looking at each county. Each of those counties, why is it a county? It’s a county because that’s how the tax situation. So in this country, that’s the tax situation. You pay taxes to your county, typically not to your city. I don’t know of any situation where you pay city taxes, I mean real estate taxes. Maybe in Texas. Anyway, there’s three scenarios for that county that you’re going to run into. Number one, this is the most amazing situation I’ve ever been in. I have all the data. It’s on redfin.com. It’s on realtor.com. I can see it on Zillow and I can call the county and I can get the dataset, just like we were talking about. That is, you’re all set. That’s mostly urban counties.
Steven Butala:
Number two, I see the data on Zillow. It’s very complete, but I don’t see it in the data sectors for Redfin or realtor.co. And the data download, not just scrolling through, but Redfin and realtor.com have separate areas where you can go to download their data. Number three, there’s just nothing here. This is like Arkansas and South Dakota and a few other places. There’s only three things that can happen. Number one, it’s very urban. Number two, you’ve got half the data. And number three, there’s just nothing.
Jill DeWit:
All right. Can I start asking you questions now?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
You set this up. All right. I’m dealing with the tough one. I’m new and I’m stumped. I can’t get any data even to figure out how to price this stuff.
Steven Butala:
Find another county.
Jill DeWit:
All right.
Steven Butala:
Find a county that’s got data that’s easy to practice on.
Jill DeWit:
That’s good. That flows into number two.
Steven Butala:
When you learn to drive, you don’t learn to drive a semi. You learn to drive a little compact car with some stinky old person next to you because they can’t get a better job than just to be a driving instructor.
Jill DeWit:
So what are other reasons that I might move on to another area, other than no pricing data?
Steven Butala:
Well, you can’t … I’m going to explain how to get the data.
Jill DeWit:
I’m going to get to how to solve. You want to jump to how to solve this?
Steven Butala:
The reason that you would go to an easy county if you’re brand new is because again, you don’t want to learn how to drive a semi before you learn how to drive a car. Do you want to keep going?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. So what are other areas that I would move on? Just I’m new, I can’t find it anywhere at all. There’s no, no, no data. And when I go to try to download it like DataTree, I mean would there be … I’m going to find assessor data most of the time, 99% of the time.
Steven Butala:
Okay. There there’s two types of data sets. I’m talking about the red, green, yellow test.
Jill DeWit:
Just for pick a county and pricing a county.
Steven Butala:
Yes.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you. Okay.
Steven Butala:
So there’s going to be those three things I said.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, cool. And then are there ways … What if I have one of them, but not all three? Can I work with that one?
Steven Butala:
One what?
Jill DeWit:
What if I can find some data, a little bit, maybe 10 land properties in Zillow and then I went to LandWatch and there’s a few there, but they’re obviously all these investors. I don’t know how they’re pricing stuff. Can I work with that?
Steven Butala:
No. If you’re new, just move on. I’m really serious.
Jill DeWit:
No, it’s good.
Steven Butala:
If you’re new, find a county that has a perfect data set, like we teach in all the programs, so you can get a mailer out that passes the red, green, yellow test. It’s not that hard.
Jill DeWit:
Right. This is just you’re pre picking a county and you’re doing … What this is, it’s like we have a checklist when we’re picking a county, we have checklists during due diligence to buy a property. All throughout this whole business, there’s checklists. And one of the things you need to have is, can I reach the county? Are they accessible? Can I get good numbers? What’s for sale? What’s not for sale? What’s for sale? How many have sold? So this is all about getting around bad data. You know what’s so funny? I think we’re talking about this, but there really is only one easy, good solution, which we still do to this day, and I think people don’t believe us.
Jill DeWit:
People come to us every Thursday on a call, or often, maybe once or twice a month. They say, “All right, I’m wracking my head against the wall here. I know I love this area, and Colorado’s great. It’s hot. Things are moving. I can see it. But doggone it, I’m still having trouble pricing.” I’m like, “So what? Go one county over.” Really? Yeah. Why don’t you just go one county over? This one looks great. Look what’s moving over here. Look at all this information they have and that information. Why are you trying to hit your head against the wall over that? And sometimes too, people are like, things like I would be able to do great in this area, but we pull it up on a land selling source. And I say, “Why do you want to swim in this pool? There are 1800 properties for sale. Do you really want to be one of 1800?” Hell no.
Steven Butala:
And that’s what the red, green, yellow test is. It smokes out those statistics, namely days on market. You want to reload days on market. New list to sold, that’s what Jill’s talking about, if there’s in a universe of property in county X for 14% of the actual properties that’s for sale, there’s just too much property. It’s a sea of for sale property. Too many people are there. You don’t want to do that. That’s not that common.
Jill DeWit:
I would like to add that, because some people don’t know this, not every county in the United States is covered by an MLS. And not only that, are their MLSs that necessarily share that information. For example, is it Redfin, Realtor, which is the one that you can look at really easily and see grayed out areas?
Steven Butala:
Redfin.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. That’s not participating information. It may be only at the local level for agents in those areas. And you know what? That could change in six months.
Steven Butala:
It will change.
Jill DeWit:
It could change in six days. So this is the part I want to make sure everybody knows.
Steven Butala:
Here’s what she means. Let me be super clear. If you go to redfin.com, scroll up as high up to an altitude as you can, and you’re going to see the urban areas are yellow, which means there’s coverage there. And then if you scroll around and get to a more rural area, it’ll be grayed out. That is because it’s a different MLS. There’s not just one MLS in the whole country. It’s either 344 or 800. There’s a lot. So some of them aren’t interested in participating with Redfin, or Redfin doesn’t care because Redfin only really cares about the high velocity areas like Houston or Phoenix or any urban area. Their coverage is pretty good and it’s continually getting better, but they don’t have data for more rural markets. Well, we like rural markets. So you’re not going to find the data that you want to make those kinds of decisions by clicking through Redfin.
Steven Butala:
Great. Let’s move on to Realtor. Same thing. Realtor covers right now about 1200 of the 1344 counties. Why? I don’t know. I’m not sure why. Sometimes you can isolate land. Redfin is really good about this, realtor.com not so much because real estate agents don’t focus on land. What do you do? That’s right in the title, Jack. What do we do? You learn how to extrapolate data from places like zillow.com by using scraping tools. And this is very advanced and if you’re new, don’t do this. If you’re rolling along and you’ve got to staff and you’re looking for new places to buy property, this is for you. And it’s not that hard. So please go onto YouTube or look back into pure member, look back into our stuff, into our Thursday calls and you’ll see, I think it’s about eight weeks ago. I do a whole demonstration on how to scrape property data. It’s completed sales and active sales property for land only on Zillow using a very inexpensive scraping tool. And it works.
Steven Butala:
Is that the only way? No, there’s all kinds of other ways. There’s data experts out there that can get this data for you.
Jill DeWit:
I’d like to add that you don’t have to do this to be successful. You’re either really bored. You’re hung up on an area. You’re making so much money, you don’t want to-
Steven Butala:
It’s that.
Jill DeWit:
You’re like, “Hey, let’s just see if we can solve this problem over here.”
Steven Butala:
If you’re already making five or $800,000 net a month, or some crazy number like that, and you want to double it, and so you can afford the time or the additions to your staff, whether outsourced or in-house, to figure this all out. My point is this, you can get the data. It’s just if you’re new, get it the easy way. If you’re really advanced, the way I just described will work for you.
Jill DeWit:
And I would argue too, that there’s plenty of advanced members who say, “I’m not doing that.”
Steven Butala:
Me too.
Jill DeWit:
Why would I mess with a good thing? I’m doing just fine.
Steven Butala:
We have advanced members that have been working in a single county their entire career and killing it.
Jill DeWit:
Yep, and it’s a county we’ve probably all heard of, and it doesn’t matter.
Steven Butala:
That’s right.
Jill DeWit:
They’ve got it all figured out.
Steven Butala:
That’s right, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
They have a system that works out great. So, that’s my final point, is you’re not missing anything. You don’t need to get to this level. You’re not nuts. Move on. And then, like I say when you get these offers sometimes, you’re like, “I don’t know if I want to buy this.” Well push it down on the list. So this is bugging you, push it down on the list. And then in six months and a year from now, you’re going to go, “Oh yeah, I forgot. I’m too busy making money. I don’t even care about that area anymore.” Thank you.
Steven Butala:
I’ll leave you with this.
Jill DeWit:
Correct.
Steven Butala:
I’ll end on this. The data is always there. It depends on how bad you want it, number one. It’s always there. And it depends on who you want to hire to get it out of there and get it into a format that you can use. I know a lot about this because these data sets that we all have didn’t exist when I started. I had to go to the county and walk in with a CD and sometimes a floppy disc, believe it or not, and sit down on a terminal and figure it out. So I know how to pull out data that’s tough to get.
Steven Butala:
Number two, does it really matter? I use Arkansas because it’s real. Arkansas is packed full of counties that are anti advancement of anything, but you can still get the data set there if you walk in. If no one’s ever mailed Arkansas ever because it’s so hard to get the data and nobody has ever thought about buying and selling property, what do you think’s going to happen if you send out an offer for $1000 a property for every single property once you get that data set in there? You’re going to smash it out of the park. So it doesn’t really matter if the data’s available on the internet. What matters is how hungry are you to get in there and get it.
Jill DeWit:
I agree. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week-
Steven Butala:
She just cut me off. That’s awesome.
Jill DeWit:
… you can find us on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Where to Start when Starting a Business and Without Fear. You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
What is going?
Steven Butala:
I lost myself.
Jill DeWit:
Oh yeah, you did.
Steven Butala:
Was it bad?
Jill DeWit:
It was going into, and here’s another thing, and here’s another thing, and here’s another thing. And I love you.
Steven Butala:
All right. Sorry.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m like, I have my talk today in a little bit and I’m going to be late, and this is all great information, but you know what? We do this five days a week. We can save some for tomorrow. It’s not a once a month show.
Steven Butala:
That’s right, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
If it’s once a month, oh baby, we’ll sit here for five hours if you want. If you need to send out a few thousand offers to property owners like us, check out offers, the number 2, owners.com, offers2owners.com. No setup fees, free mail merge, and exceptional customer service. We should know because it’s our company. Give Offers 2 Owners a call today. 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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