Web Scraping for Accurate Mailer Pricing (LA 1481)
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 Dewit, broadcasting from sunny Scottsdale, Arizona.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about … really, I talk about web scraping for accurate mailer pricing. Jill adds some flair to it.
Jill Dewit:
Truth time. This was my topic. I love this.
Steven Butala:
You like web scraping?
Jill Dewit:
Yes. I just said, “Can we please talk about this? I just can’t talk about it enough.” I think this is the greatest thing. Ever since I’ve learned this trick, I do it for everything. I web scrape to make sure I’m buying the right mascara, hair products.
Steven Butala:
You know what? Friday, tomorrow’s Jack Thursday.
Jill Dewit:
Okay, got it. Do I get a Friday? Oh, I get my … okay.
Steven Butala:
On Friday, it’s Jill Friday. So much fun looking at our properties, so you can talk about-
Jill Dewit:
Okay. I can talk about that. Oh darn. Okay.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, so taking the [crosstalk 00:01:03]
Jill Dewit:
Fine. I’ll let you have web scraping this time. I might roll that into mine on Friday.
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. Oh, and if you’re already a member, you should join us on Discord. Seriously, I’m not joking. It cracks me up that a lot of people in our group aren’t on Discord. That is 50% of the education value of being in Land Academy is Discord.
Jill Dewit:
It gets distracting though, because I mean, we have that, and then we have the land investors online community. Both are great. Both are great. Okay.
Steven Butala:
What I’m noticing since we started the Discord thing is that the people on land investors are all not in our group. Even though there are a lot of people that answer questions on land investors that are in our group, but the questions are from new people that are not yet members, but all the real questions and education goes on in Discord.
Jill Dewit:
Understood. Hello, Bobbie. Bobbie wrote, “Still new here and getting my bearings. First off blessings to you all, Steven and Jill and the entire Land Academy team.” Thank you, Bobbie.
Steven Butala:
That’s nice. I never get tired of hearing that.
Jill Dewit:
Aww. She says, “Thank you for creating such an amazingly helpful community and offering so much of yourselves to all of us. After a lot of research I have yet to stumble across this info. I just wanted to find out what’s typical with regard to the purchase agreement when selling land. Is it as simple as using the same purchase agreement to buy it? If so, do you all have suggestions on any necessary modifications when converting the agreement? Thanks in advance.” I use the same one.
Steven Butala:
Same one.
Jill Dewit:
It doesn’t really matter.
Steven Butala:
If you go to offers, the number 2, owners.com, and you go to forums-
Jill Dewit:
Forums.
Steven Butala:
… This is all free and it’s all open to the public. Click on purchase agreement, and whether you’re in the group or not, you can use it to buy and sell real estate, and here’s why. Jill and I just bought a house. We’re going to flip it, but it’s an extremely expensive high-end house that Jill got for an amazing price. I have never … And we got a mortgage on it, because it was less than 3%, because I couldn’t make the math work otherwise.
Steven Butala:
I have never signed so many documents in my life. I bet we signed our names-
Jill Dewit:
Tell me. I know. A hundred times.
Steven Butala:
… probably a hundred times. You know how many times we sign that purchase agreement when we buy and sell land? Once, and the seller or buyer signs it once.
Jill Dewit:
Right. I sign that, I sign off on one-
Steven Butala:
So it’s just my way of sticking my middle finger up to real estate agents and the lawyers behind them. It is ridiculous. How many times? This is not for a mortgage, even. This is just to buy the damn asset.
Jill Dewit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
And it gets worse and worse and worse.
Jill Dewit:
My favorite is not … since we’re ranting here, I had to sign a COVID thing for a piece of dirt that I never even stepped on and got near anybody. I’m two states over.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, we never … yeah.
Jill Dewit:
I’m two states over, and I had to sign the COVID release form. I’m like, “What the heck is this? It’s a piece of dirt. We’re not going in anybody’s house. I’m not even there.” It’s so funny.
Steven Butala:
The real estate agent that dealt with this house … We dealt with the listing agent. We don’t carry a real estate agent of our own in our back pocket. We deal with the listing agent.
Jill Dewit:
Correct. Right.
Steven Butala:
And she had no idea that there is another way to do this.
Jill Dewit:
Correct.
Steven Butala:
None.
Jill Dewit:
She did not understand.
Steven Butala:
She’s an idiot, just truly on knowledge about real estate.
Jill Dewit:
She didn’t know. “You mean, I could submit the offer? We could just do it?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t have to have someone on my side.” It’s weird. Anyway, that’s not what this is about.
Steven Butala:
I’m not going to even tell you what she made on this house, the amount of money.
Jill Dewit:
I don’t even want to know. I know. So anyway, let’s get back to this.
Steven Butala:
Sorry.
Jill Dewit:
And back to the purchase agreement, it is this easy. Don’t ever think it. Use the same one. And by the way, you can even cross stuff off and write it in and then they’ll still take it. For example, I sent an offer out to someone. Say it’s $4,392 and 55 cents, and they say, “Make it five grand, you’ve got a deal,” or 5,500, whatever it is, it’s close enough. “You know what, Mr. Smith? I’m totally cool with that.” But just cross that off, write in 5,500, initial it, send it in, and that’s going to be just fine. And sign the thing at the bottom. It’s going to be fine. Okay. And that’s what I take to open escrow. And they say, “Okay.” There you go.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, web scraping for accurate mailer pricing. Good night, Jill.
Jill Dewit:
Is that written in there? Because it should be. It should be written in there, like “Jill’s day off.” This is what happens.
Steven Butala:
Web scraping, philosophically now, forget about the tech piece-
Jill Dewit:
Yeah. Please describe this for us.
Steven Butala:
… is going on to a website and telling a tool, a web scraping tool, what you want to extract. So, like a crawler, it creeps and crawls throughout this website to extract the data that you want, in our case, so that we can get it into a spreadsheet so we can price a mailer accurately. If you go on to Zillow and let’s say you say, “I’m going to-”
Jill Dewit:
Back up, prices and size and any details.
Steven Butala:
And dates, days on market.
Jill Dewit:
I can say, “Okay,” say I’m doing it on Amazon.
Steven Butala:
Acreage, prices.
Jill Dewit:
Say I want to do it on Amazon. Let’s just say I may want to price all the … I want to compare all the mascaras. You think I’m kidding. I can have it extract all the mascaras, all the manufacturers’ names, all the prices, whether they’re Amazon prime or not. I could do that, in theory.
Steven Butala:
And which one, like let’s say which seller has-
Jill Dewit:
The highest ratings.
Steven Butala:
What you’re mining for is which seller has the cheapest brand-new Chanel mascara.
Jill Dewit:
Right. So you extract them all to line them up and pick one. Thank you [crosstalk 00:07:12]
Steven Butala:
So for real estate, there’s an infinite number of applications here, but what I use it for and what we now teach is going out into Zillow, looking at Mojave County, let’s say. I always pick on Mojave County. Please don’t send mail there.
Jill Dewit:
That’s why we use Mojave?
Steven Butala:
Just to use it as an example, Mojave County, Arizona. Then I scrape all the postings, whether they’re active or sold. And let’s say I only want five to six-acre properties, or five to 10-acre properties. I want to know what they’re listed for, the price, how big they are, so I can calculate a price per acre, how long they stayed on the market, and what areas they’re in, very specifically what areas they’re in. Maybe let’s say what zip code they’re in.
Steven Butala:
So now, when this is all done, I’m staring at a spreadsheet that tells me in 85, fill in the blank, zip code, 42 properties sold in the last year. There’s 12, let’s say, active in between the two. The price per acre is $822 in that zip code. You know, that’s incredible information. So when I go to send mail to the other property owners that are in that zip code, who own properties between five and six acres, I know pretty darn with confidence that I can sell properties, not because … if the price per acre I found out it was 82? I know I can sell property there, if it’s good property, for 500 an acre.
Steven Butala:
So what am I going to offer? 250, 200, some number like that that’s a lot less than wholesale price, which in this case, is 500. So am I dramatically oversimplifying this? Yeah, I am. There’s a lot to this. It’s complicated, but there’s a ton of education out on YouTube. There’s a lot of web scraping tools. If you’re a member, we have a universal key code which we purchased from the developer for WebHarvy. You get it for free with the Land Academy subscription, but there’s a lot of them out there.
Jill Dewit:
Okay. Let’s just say I’m brand new. I understand this concept. I want to do this. What do I do first? Go sit on YouTube and watch a bunch of videos?
Steven Butala:
Yes. Yeah.
Jill Dewit:
And see which WebHarvy, whoever it is, sings to me and makes the most sense to me and looks the easiest to use, within reason? Because I’m guessing that’s number one. And I’m guessing number two is now spend a weekend on it.
Steven Butala:
You’re right. Yes. There’s always-
Jill Dewit:
That’s the thing that I see people getting hung up on. They’re like, “Well, I got the key. Why is it not working for me?” Because you need to learn it.
Steven Butala:
Well, that’s a personality flaw. That’s with all software.
Jill Dewit:
Well, people do that. I want to let everyone know you are not nuts. You do need to plan on spending a weekend on this stuff. Please, please, let’s just sit back and accept it.
Steven Butala:
No one’s going to do this for you. I don’t care how you slice it. I don’t care what group you sign up for, you need to look at yourself straight in the mirror. What she’s getting at is that this takes a lot of time. It’s hard, but it’s very, very rewarding financially if you learn how to do this correctly.
Jill Dewit:
Give it a weekend and you’ll get it.
Steven Butala:
And it’s going to always change. We just started using web scraping since the COVID.
Jill Dewit:
The [crosstalk 00:10:31] yeah.
Steven Butala:
It’s not related at all. It’s just the timeframe. It was probably the middle of last year when I really started to use it for mailer pricing, and I used it enough to that … now we instruct it. There’s lots, and it’ll be something else next year.
Jill Dewit:
It’s very true. Think they got it?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill Dewit:
Okay. Happy to join us today.
Steven Butala:
If you got it. Did I explain it?
Jill Dewit:
Yes.
Steven Butala:
Did I bring it down to the eighth grade level?
Jill Dewit:
Yes. I now know where to best buy my Chanel mascara.
Steven Butala:
It doesn’t work on every website. There are certain websites, like LoopNet, for example, have the anti-scraping software in them. LoopNet gave me a timeout last year. They said, “You don’t need to be logging onto our website for a while.” They slapped me on the hand.
Jill Dewit:
So, excuse me, back up. It is possible to do it, but they don’t condone it and they will come find you and say, “Nope.”
Steven Butala:
Yup. That’s exactly right.
Jill Dewit:
Ah. What’s the workaround?
Steven Butala:
For some reason, Zillow, there isn’t one. Oh, listen to you, “What’s the workaround?” That’s Jill’s first question. Not, “Are they right? Is it okay? Let’s talk about it.” It’s their data, by the way. It’s not my data. What’s the workaround? You are so the right girl for me.
Jill Dewit:
I have one in my head. I don’t know if I should share it.
Steven Butala:
Go ahead.
Jill Dewit:
What if I just hired my VAs overnight to do it?
Steven Butala:
VPN is the answer, absolutely. VPN is the answer.
Jill Dewit:
Okay. All right.
Steven Butala:
I’m going to kiss you.
Jill Dewit:
Thanks. Happy to join us today. We got to go. Monday through Friday, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called, It’s Jack Thursday, just for engineers and business owners. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill Dewit:
Yeah, I’ll miss that one too.
Steven Butala:
I don’t know why so many members in the Land Academy are engineers.
Jill Dewit:
I know why, and I’ll share it tomorrow. You know why. If you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers or FEMA flood map overlays, check out neighborscoop.com, created by investors, that’s us, for investors, that’s you.
Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill.
Jill Dewit:
We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
Information-
Jill Dewit:
And inspiration.
Steven Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.
Jill Dewit:
You got me all flustered.
Steven Butala:
You teased me.
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