Using WebHarvy to Collect Comparison Values on Zillow (LA 1464)
| Using WebHarvy to Collect Comparison Values on Zillow (LA 1464) |
Transcript:
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 DeWitt, broadcasting from sweet Scottsdale. Arizona.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about using WebHarvy to collect comparison values on Zillow.
Jill DeWit:
Oh boy. Alrighty, it sounds like, and we’re out. I promise it’s not that bad. This is a good thing, but it sounds like this is a big topic.
Steven Butala:
Today, we talk about how to make the best out of your new encyclopedia set.
Jill DeWit:
There we go. That’s what this sounds like, “Today we’re going to dissect and discuss your accounting,” whatever. “We’re going to dissect and discuss all the tax changes from 2021.”
Steven Butala:
You know you’ve made it in life when you don’t have to write the titles of your own show anymore. I’m not a writer on the show anymore, and I think that’s great.
Jill DeWit:
That’s funny. So, okay. Yes, I did have encyclopedias, by the way. I remember that.
Steven Butala:
So did I. Did you have World Book or Britannica?
Jill DeWit:
Britannica.
Steven Butala:
We had World Book. Britannica, that’s why you’re smarter than me.
Jill DeWit:
I didn’t say I used them. We had them.
Steven Butala:
Mine were very, very, very unused.
Jill DeWit:
Remember you’d opened them up and the pages would just crinkle
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Because they were brand new.
Steven Butala:
Because it’s brand new. I think it was a guilt thing. Our parents they had to get it because they wanted to make sure we were educated.
Jill DeWit:
They felt like they were better parents.
Steven Butala:
Right.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, it’s true. You had to have it as a parent. It was a rite of passage or something.
Steven Butala:
It was really truly just silly because any topic you looked up, there was a paragraph on its whole subject. I don’t know, let’s say you looked up turtle, and it’s a tiny little paragraph. You didn’t learn anything.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
All it did was say, “You need to go to the library and actually get a book on turtles.”
Jill DeWit:
Right. Here’s where the country is.
Steven Butala:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit:
Not going to tell you that much about it.
Steven Butala:
Right.
Jill DeWit:
Here’s the brief overview. You know what? Actually, this is one of the reasons I like encyclopedias, it was a Cliff Notes to wars, countries, all of that. I’m all about Cliff Notes.
Steven Butala:
You’d look a country up and it’s like, “Their major exports are shale and oil and corn.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s awesome. That’s exactly what I needed to know about country X.”
Jill DeWit:
Exactly. Population. This is funny. We should find some old, that’d be really good, like at Goodwill, it’d be fun to have an encyclopedia to show the kids.
Steven Butala:
These kids, I’m going to sound like an old man, these kids have no idea with Google and then with YouTube how …
Jill DeWit:
Lucky.
Steven Butala:
… far ahead and how educated they are at such a young age on anything, because I had a computer when I was a kid. I was real lucky, I always started with computers, and I said, “My dream one day is to have a computer in the living room, in the corner.” There were no such thing as notebooks back then, or laptops, but to have a computer terminal where you could find out the answers to stuff when you wanted it.
Jill DeWit:
Is that why we had that computer in the corner?
Steven Butala:
Yes.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
That’s exactly what that was.
Jill DeWit:
When we got together, there was a computer in the corner and I’m like, “Is that a timeout? Someone has to go sit there and stare at it?”
Steven Butala:
Yeah, your punishment is to go sit there and learn stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. That would be punishment for me.
Steven Butala:
Jill, we’re so similar in some ways, and so not similar in other ways.
Jill DeWit:
Oh my gosh. That’s so funny.
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, and if you are Land Academy member, and I don’t say this lightly, I’m really serious, if you’re already a Land Academy member, please look us up and share your experience at the whole Land Academy experience on Discord. It’s my favorite tool of all the tools that we have. I’m in there all day learning with other Land Academy members.
Jill DeWit:
Cool.
Steven Butala:
Here’s a perfect example. This morning, there were two or three people on Discord that are closing deals in Land Academy group and they’re getting together talking about what they should do with the money. And one person said, “We should buy apartments.” Another person said, “We should convert office buildings that aren’t being used into apartments.” And then I piped in and said, “You guys are all nuts. We should buy mobile home parks,” so everybody’s scrambling and look for mobile home parks right now.
Jill DeWit:
That’s good. Cool.
Steven Butala:
That wouldn’t happen before Discord.
Jill DeWit:
No. Are you doing this?
Steven Butala:
Yes.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
Luke says, this is not a question, this is a stroke of brilliance on Luke Smith’s part, Luke says on easements, “I’ve spent a crazy amount of time on legal access to properties,” because as you know, the way that we buy property, we send out these mailers, we get a lot of properties back and we review them in the due diligence process and they don’t appear to have legal access. So he says, “I’ve spent a crazy amount of time on legal access to properties. You can look at the deed. You can also look at plat maps. From there, you can look at older deeds and the neighbor deeds.” This is up Jill’s alley. “If you can figure out where the property was split off back in time. It’s the best deed to look at, or the deeds from where the neighbors came. Look up all the maps and the legal descriptions you’re referencing also. Better yet, hire out a preliminary title company and ask them to make color coded map of the easements.” This is brilliant.
Steven Butala:
“They’ll do all the work for you and may charge you, may not if you do enough business with them. This is where the bigger dollar deals shine through.” I could not agree more. Jill’s looking at her watch. “Even if the title company does not find the access, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Go look back further in time. Usually go back 30 to 40 years, get the old docs, go to the general land office website. If you need to get the really old documents from the federal government to the homesteader or from the estate on the first land owner. Some of the time, easements are spelled out in there too and they have saved my bacon many times. If that does not work, offer cash to your neighbors to make some deeds to create access through your neighbors. Seriously. We have great tools like neighborscoop.com to help figure out what properties to look up and where most others don’t even know where to start.”
Jill DeWit:
That was really cool.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Thanks for sharing that, Luke. That was awesome.
Steven Butala:
I am proud to be a member of Land Academy when I read stuff like that.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
So that was access 101.
Jill DeWit:
You’re patient zero.
Steven Butala:
Why am I? Oh, I am.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, you’re Land Academy patient zero.
Steven Butala:
Oh my God, I am patient zero.
Jill DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Butala:
I don’t know if I want that responsibility.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, as if that wasn’t brainy enough, using WebHarvy to collect comparison values on Zillow. WebHarvy is a web scraping tool. When I first heard about scraping about 10 or 15 years ago, probably 10 years ago, I laughed. When I first heard about Facebook, I laughed. When I first heard about FedEx, I laughed and said, “That’ll never work.”
Jill DeWit:
Really?
Steven Butala:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit:
That’s hilarious. What do you think about Clubhouse?
Steven Butala:
I think Clubhouse is great.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, good.
Steven Butala:
I think Clubhouse, I’m over it now. I’m over that old man stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
I believe that all this social media there is … I say the word social media, and a lot of people, they look at me like I’m an idiot. I don’t mean social media. I just mean the internet and the resources that are available. I was the last person to get a cell phone. I always held out on this stuff back in the day and that’s just not the case anymore. I drank the Kool-Aid on all of it. I really think that the world’s a better place because of all this.
Jill DeWit:
I agree.
Steven Butala:
WebHarvy is just another current example of harvesting. WebHarvy is a tool to harvest data on websites and put it into a spreadsheet, or however you see data, to make decisions. That’s all it is.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala:
And it’s free if you’re a member. We have a master subscription to it. I’m trying to get that person who owns the company, who’s also the developer of the tool, to do a presentation for all of us to let us know, fill us in on the hidden …
Jill DeWit:
Best way, best practices kind of thing?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Please, can you rattle off the sites? Does it work with everything?
Steven Butala:
No. No, it doesn’t.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. Okay, great. I’m glad we’re having this conversation.
Steven Butala:
Well, here’s the result of using tool like WebHarvy, specifically with Zillow. When you open Zillow and you look, just like we do on the Thursday calls as part of your due diligence whether or not you should buy a piece of property or sell it, what you should sell it for, the price, you pull it up and there’s a bunch of dots. There’s all these properties on a map that the red dots are a for sale property, the yellow dots are sold properties. And so that’s great. You’re staring at a bunch of data that you can’t use because it’s not in a spreadsheet form where you can average it all out and say, for example, properties from one to five acres have sold in the last 12 months for $50 to $100 dollars an acre. Great. I’m buying my this property. It’s right in the middle of it. It’s a like kind property for $400 an acre. I’m probably going to do okay.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala:
That’s that’s what WebHarvy will allow you to do. When you’re staring at the data, unless you’re the Rain Man, you can’t figure that stuff out. You need to put it in a spreadsheet. So WebHarvy is a tool where it allows you to scrape all that data, puts it into a spreadsheet for you, you manipulate the spreadsheet to make value decisions.
Jill DeWit:
Perfect.
Steven Butala:
There’s a ton of other scraping tools out there. This one, for whatever reason, I don’t know why I chose this one. Probably, honestly, I chose this one because the owner of the company, the developer, did a lot of videos on YouTube specifically for real estate people. So yeah, I can go do it on realtor.com. I can do it on LoopNet. There’s a lot of sites, but there are specific sites that are very anti-scraping for a lot of reasons, they want to control that data. A realtor is one of them.
Jill DeWit:
How do they do that?
Steven Butala:
How?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, how do they do it?
Steven Butala:
They have tech tools or their developers can block it. You can scrape it. You can scrape realtor, but what it’ll do is, if you’re logged in, it’ll block you and block your URL.
Jill DeWit:
Oh. They couldn’t find you.
Steven Butala:
How do I know this? I still can’t get on LoopNet from this computer.
Jill DeWit:
That’s hilarious. I have LoopNet Online. We’re all good. That’s really funny. Okay. “Why do you have six computers?” Don’t ask.
Steven Butala:
Why are you flying to Los Angeles this weekend. Yeah, because I can’t use my computer anymore.
Jill DeWit:
That’s so funny. Oh, that’s hilarious. There’s a workarounds for that too, by the way.
Steven Butala:
Oh yeah. Jill, listen to you.
Jill DeWit:
I know.
Steven Butala:
This whole tool, WebHarvy, is one big, huge workaround.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
That’s Jill’s middle name.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true. That’s true. Yep.
Steven Butala:
Does that explain it? I hope that explains it. It’s hard to talk about this without doing a demonstration.
Jill DeWit:
Showing? Yeah.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, but if you dream it up, I mean, it’s an amazing tool. I don’t make a decision now, an acquisition decision, without using it.
Jill DeWit:
The point for me is, look where we are today in 2021, what we can do, versus what we had 10 years ago, even five years ago. Luke’s question, when we’re talking about Neighbor Scoop, I can just click around and find out everything I want on the neighbors and on the properties and pull deeds. It’s amazing what I can do right now. In the old days, you’d have to go somewhere or, like the way we would work, we’re buying three states away. So I’m calling and I’m waiting for stuff to get mailed to me and I hope they do it right.
Steven Butala:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jill DeWit:
And sometimes I have to mail them a check and then wait for them to cash the check, and then they’ll do the work for me. And it could be weeks before I have any answers.
Steven Butala:
What’s next? That’s my big question.
Jill DeWit:
I know.
Steven Butala:
I watched an interview with George Lucas, the guy who did Star Wars, and he said, “The movie industry is about 100 years old right now. It’s a little more than 100 old.” And he said, “Think about the original movies and think about the movies now.” And then he said, very intelligently, “Think about the next 100 years of what movies are going to look like.”
Jill DeWit:
It’s going to be like those you’re in it movies.
Steven Butala:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Like a hologram or something.
Jill DeWit:
I bet you can step into it and you can have your own ending. Could you imagine?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
I think that’s so cool. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Jill wanted to end this.
Jill DeWit:
I did.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Using Data 101 In Your Land Investing Career. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Do you write the titles for us now, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
I think that’s great.
Steven Butala:
They’re going to be brainy.
Jill DeWit:
It’s perfect. It’s good. I’m glad.
Steven Butala:
Actually, we have Jill Friday coming up again, because everybody loved it. Our numbers were so good last week.
Jill DeWit:
Ah, that’s cool. I like that.
Steven Butala:
I also created Steve Thursday.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, this’ll be great.
Steven Butala:
Stuff I want to talk about it.
Jill DeWit:
I like this.
Steven Butala:
So bear with us. They’re all technical topics, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Then there’s Jack Thursday and Jill Friday.
Jill DeWit:
That’s cool. Hey, if you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers and FEMA flood map overlays, check out neighborscoop.com. Created 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.
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