Using Data 101 in Your Land Investing Career (LA 1465)
| Using Data 101 in Your Land Investing Career (LA 1465) |
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hi.
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 special Scottsdale, Arizona.
Steven Butala:
Today jill and I talk about using data 101 in her land investing career. Special Scottsdale?
Jill DeWit:
I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of a different S word. I had sizzling. Sunny I say for California. I said sweet. Today it’s special. I’ll come up with some other words. Someday it might be sucky. I don’t know it. It won’t be sucky. It’s awesome.
Steven Butala:
Are you guys really going to talk about data again?
Jill DeWit:
I know.
Steven Butala:
Don’t you think you talk about data enough? I thought this show was supposed to be about real estate. Where’s the … I want to choose paint colors. I want to choose window treatments. I want you to talk about issue TV and buying a rickety, broken down house and making it beautiful. Isn’t that what real estate is? No, it’s not for us.
Jill DeWit:
Stop it. Just stop it.
Steven Butala:
It’s not just it’s about assessor’s tax rules, and it might as well not be about real estate. In fact, what we should probably call this as a Data … Data Academy is what we should call this.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true. You are right.
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 already a Land Academy member, make sure, put it on your list today. Join us on Discord.
Jill DeWit:
I’m making a note to talk about here, but on the topic, because it’s important, but with this data. Okay, Doug wrote, “I’ve got eight siblings with 10 acre parcel each. All want to sell to me. They’re all clustered together. Problem is, no access. Is this worth contacting a neighboring land owner to try and work out a deal for on an easement? Providing I can make that happen. I’d have to get a dirt road built to access the other seven parcels, and then build that easement into each of the deeds. Headache or goldmine waiting to happen?” This ties into the Luke thing yesterday. Go.
Steven Butala:
Run. Run the other way. Open the next signed offer and do that deal. That’s my advice here.
Jill DeWit:
It’s doable. Doug’s not nuts, but are you saying because of the time and the energy and the costs and all of that?
Steven Butala:
Yeah. Yeah. Before … I’ll tell you, here’s my serious answer. How much money are you actually going to make? If you’re going to make a couple million bucks, okay, I get it. Then you can start down the year long path of how long this is going to take, and make sure that it doesn’t stop you from doing other deals too.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven Butala:
This is a long, long path, and I’ve never … I’ll phrase this in a question. Have you ever had the sibling thing work out to your favor? Everybody signing at Thanksgiving kind of thing.
Jill DeWit:
A few times, but when there’s that many it’s hard.
Steven Butala:
It’s the exception for sure. It’s not the rule.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly. It is hard. Often one of them gets a stick up there or whatever, and they decide they don’t want to sell at that price or something. It’s really hard to get eight on the same page. It’s very true.
Steven Butala:
Siblings are famous for fighting with each other at the time of parent’s death.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, I thought you just meant in general.
Steven Butala:
Oh, they’re famous for finding each other anyway, but specifically when everyone breaks the will out and says … The worst thing you can do is Jill and I are going through this estate planning right now. The absolute worst thing you can do as a parent to your heirs is say, “The daughter gets 50% and the son gets 50%, and you guys work it out, knock yourselves out.”
Jill DeWit:
Right. Whatever it is. I don’t know. Yeah, exactly.
Steven Butala:
Instead of just, how about you just create two bank accounts, put one in … Or whatever. However, it works out. Here’s two pieces of real estate. You get this one, you get this one.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I understand.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic … Should we say anything else about this? Doug, I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t do this deal at all.
Jill DeWit:
No I think it’s fine. No, we talked about this. I think we talked about this on the Thursday call too.
Steven Butala:
We did.
Jill DeWit:
So he got real-time feedback from us then too. So that’s good.
Steven Butala:
This is a good time to say this. We aren’t here to be uncomfortable, have a terrible time and struggle. We are …
Jill DeWit:
Or pick on anybody.
Steven Butala:
Yeah. We are here to make our lives easier, and better and create wealth for ourselves so we can have more free time and whatever your hobby is, do it more. And deals like this are just going to create huge problems in your life, versus just buying a piece of property and reselling it without ever going there and seeing it, and collecting the money and laughing.
Jill DeWit:
You’re right.
Steven Butala:
That’s what this is supposed to be about, and this deal is not traveling down that path.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, using data 101 in your land investment career. This is the meat of the shell.
Steven Butala:
Go back to 1998. Here’s what happened to me in 1998. I walked into the assessor’s office in Maricopa County. I plopped down $35, and the assessor, the woman behind the counter at the assessor’s office slid across the counter a CD. And it said tax roll on it.
Jill DeWit:
I thought you said she slid across the counter. Where are you going? And the assessor, Betty, slid right across that counter.
Steven Butala:
Wow, Jill, where’s your mind?
Jill DeWit:
I don’t know. It’s just the way it came out. Like what the heck? Okay. Sorry.
Steven Butala:
Do you want to talk about sex today?
Jill DeWit:
No. Well maybe, but not now. Yes, but not now. Sorry.
Steven Butala:
She slid across the counter, a DVD. And if you saw the woman that slid the DVD across the counter, you would not be think-
Jill DeWit:
Could she get up on the counter?
Steven Butala:
That’s just not what you’d be thinking about.
Jill DeWit:
Now I have a whole different image in my head. Understood. She put down the Cheetos. You forgot to say that. And the Coke.
Steven Butala:
Yep, for that moment.
Jill DeWit:
And the cake.
Steven Butala:
Why Cheetos man?
Jill DeWit:
I don’t know. Okay.
Steven Butala:
So with a smile on my face, I went back and jammed the thing in my computer at home. And there was the biggest gobbly gook mess of data on my screen that I’ve ever seen. And ask you to the limited form. Don’t ask me to explain. Two weeks later, I had it all into a spreadsheet. The assessor role. I had the data in usable form. It took me two weeks. And so thus began my data career path down the road about using the relationship with data and real estate.
Steven Butala:
What was on there? This is 101 stuff. All the owners to every single piece of property in Maricopa County. And there’s hundreds of thousands of rows of data, and all the information that the assessor from the county collects in order to value any given property so that the treasurer can send out tax bills twice a year, in Arizona’s case. And so I sent a mailer out. This is my first mailer in 1998. Because I was tired of going to back tax auctions. And it was a smash hit, it was an amazing success. I don’t know if anyone ever did that in the county where I was sending that data in Maricopa County. I’m going to say probably not. Not in the way that I did it.
Jill DeWit:
Brilliant.
Steven Butala:
And so that became my usability test, or I guess my feasibility test to see if this would work, and it did. And it was expensive and it cut into my … I had a full-time job at the time. And it seriously cut into my bank account. That’s been thousands of dollars to see if something can work, and it really did work. I bought tons and tons of properties. So there’s this relationship between data and real estate that is undeniable. And I really think that the vast majority, even people that have been very successful people in real estate their entire lives don’t understand the power of sending direct mail and sending out offers. They think it’s about the real estate.
Steven Butala:
And I’m here to tell you if there’s one thing that you can take away from the show, or this episode, this is not about the real estate. That’s part of it. Nobody to buy terrible property, although that’s appropriate sometimes if it’s cheap enough. It’s not about that. It’s about data, and manipulating that assessor role to get yourself a mailer. Get yourself a direct mail campaign out in the mail. Since then, fast forward to now, there’s companies like Data Tree, Real Quest, Black Knight, but those are the big three. Jill and I are licensed providers, and what they do is they collect, they do exactly the same thing with the Cheetos lady. They get the data … There’s what? 3400-
Jill DeWit:
3144.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, 3144 counties in the country. They collect every month, and sometimes more often than that, assessor data, put it into a format, a data format that’s usable and consistent. So that a county in Arkansas and a county in Maine are going to look the same from a data perspective. I can’t tell you what a luxury it is to have data in just a few clicks of a keyboard. You can have it all downloaded. What took me two weeks back then now it takes about five minutes. So it’s that assessor data, and the source of the data is exactly the same. There’s that CD. They just make it a lot easier.
Steven Butala:
And so again, since then, Jill and I … First me on my own, and then Jill and I since 2015 have been one by one, creating these tools that we used ourselves to make this incredibly simple. We’re licensed providers on this data. That’s great. We own a company called Offers 2 Owners, the number two, which is a bulk mail company specifically designed for real estate investors to get these offers in the mail. So you don’t have to learn all this stuff that I had to … There’s no real learning curve. There’s just a talk in Discord. It was yesterday, it was last night. It was a brand new member complaining about the 75 dollars a month that it cost for Neighbor Scoop.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
And they don’t understand why Neighbor Scoop’s necessary at all, because they can look it up on Google Earth, and there’s all these other tools. And I didn’t have to say anything.
Jill DeWit:
No, go right ahead.
Steven Butala:
There were 10 people that went in there and said, “Okay, listen idiot.”
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. How much are you saving? Two hours is $75 of your time. Hello.
Steven Butala:
One person specifically said, “Yeah, these little tiny expenses when you’re brand new can add up, I get it. All of us are trying to save money in the beginning. Once you do that first deal,” this is what this person said, “Now it just becomes about time. Because you know it works, you know that there’s hoards of money to be made, and it’s not just as a race against the clock.” So the Neighbor Scoop, I watched Jill take a phone call from a potential seller. She keeps them on the phone, because they’re responding to the mailer, log on to Neighbor Scoop, and within 30 seconds say, “Yeah, we do want to actually do this deal. We’re going to check it out, and I think the price is probably okay.”
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Totally. That’s the value. It’s amazing. I couldn’t do that before. 10 years ago didn’t have that.
Steven Butala:
So I think that’s a pretty good data 101.
Jill DeWit:
10 years ago I’d hang up the phone and go, “Okay, now I’ve got to find this thing. I got that. This is going to be good.” In some places it was hard to find them. So then I’d have to come … I used to have to cut myself off. I’ve give myself an hour. If I couldn’t find it, I’d come to you. But I would really try on my own.
Steven Butala:
So that’s is a pretty good summary of data 101, without getting into the real details.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. That’s kind of what I have. Using data 101, I wrote down … Well, there’s the acquisition. You need the data, all the seller information that you just talked about. And then you’re into the, “Do I want to buy this property now?” That’s your due diligence period. Or engineering. And you have to have all that property data and mapping data and everything that we have that’s the neighbor scoop. And then the third thing is now I’m selling it. So I need data to help me determine sales prices and things like that. So that’s what I wrote down.
Jill DeWit:
I had a funny note too. This is so interesting to me. We are just data … Well, you’re a data person. You have turned me into a data person.
Steven Butala:
Oh no.
Jill DeWit:
So no, yeah, I guess I’m not really. I still feel my way through everything. Let’s be honest. You are a data person. And it’s so funny to me, because I was just thinking about everything that we’ve done is data. You won’t buy a vehicle without running the data on it.
Steven Butala:
Oh man.
Jill DeWit:
See, where we live there’s data. Probably the number of children we have has data involved in it.
Steven Butala:
It absolutely has. Absolutely there’s data involved in that.
Jill DeWit:
Where kids go to college, I’m sure there’s data.
Steven Butala:
Absolutely. All of that.
Jill DeWit:
I know that. High school there’s data. This is truth, everyone. He picks schools and things based on their numbers, on where these kids are going to college, how their testing scores are. It’s all about the data.
Steven Butala:
The last three places we’ve lived is because of the school systems.
Jill DeWit:
Yep. So it’s no shocker that this is what we do for a living. Why? Because if you look at the numbers, please give me one other possible business avenue where you could make these numbers.
Steven Butala:
This is a great discussion. I’m glad it became this. Because I don’t know what other business you can possibly get into with very little money and be successful in two weeks.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Butala:
You can’t buy a company. That’s very expensive. You can’t. You can buy all kinds of companies, but there’s going to be-
Jill DeWit:
Not like this.
Steven Butala:
Unless you’re in the business, there’s a learning curve. You’re right. And a lot of risk. I don’t see any risk in sending a mailer out, spending 1500 bucks on a 3000 unit mailer.
Jill DeWit:
I don’t need a lease. I don’t need an office.
Steven Butala:
Buying three or four properties for half of what they’re worth, reselling them immediately, and then counting the money. That’s our whole business model. So I don’t know what’s better than that.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Butala:
And specifically in real estate, I don’t know what … None of this is on accident.
Jill DeWit:
That’s what I’m saying.
Steven Butala:
We didn’t choose land as a real estate type because it was just convenient. We chose it because it’s ridiculously simple, in my opinion, to buy a piece of land, never go look at it, dress it up on the internet, and sell it for more. It’s very hard to do that with houses.
Jill DeWit:
We talk about this a lot. I talk on clubhouse about this. One of the beautiful things about land is you can double your money, period. You can’t do that with a house.
Steven Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
Don’t expect to do that with a house. You can do it right and make money, sure. But not like this. It’s very different.
Steven Butala:
You can do it if you improve it, improve the asset, but now you’re in the real estate business. I don’t want that. I want to be in the data business.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, exactly.
Steven Butala:
I don’t want to improve it. I want to just make money.
Jill DeWit:
I don’t want to buy something, tear it down.
Steven Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
That would be the only way you could maybe double your money. I buy something where I’m buying it for the dirt, I tear it down, I get plans, I make something amazing. But now I’m two years in.
Steven Butala:
But even then, whatever asset you buy, commercial real estate, the trailer parks. I don’t care what you buy, you’re still sending out mail. You’re using data to make a choice. If there’s 1500 trailer parks in a state, everyone should be getting a letter once a month. If that’s what you’re buying, everyone should be getting a letter once a month saying, “Hey, are you ready to sell yet? Are you ready to sell yet? I’ve got it valued at this. How about now?” You’ll buy what you want if you continue to do that. So yeah. You’re still using data there.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true. That’s awesome. Thank you. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the Land Academy Show is called The Pros and Cons of Leveraging Time Versus Money. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Inadvertently just talked about that. That’s what Neighbor Scoop is.
Jill DeWit:
This is true.
Steven Butala:
Here’s a hint. Whatever you have the most of, that’s what you need to leverage. If you have tons of money, leverage it. If you have tons of time, leverage it.
Jill DeWit:
Yep. If you’re interested in learning more about us or what we do, check out landacademy.com or houseacademy.com. We provide the education tools and support you need to be flipping property like the pros. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information …
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration …
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