Jack Thursday – Mailers are Never Finished (LA 1487)
Jack Thursday – Mailers are Never Finished (LA 1487)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit broadcasting from sweet Scottsdale, Arizona.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how it’s Jack Thursday, how mailers are really, truly never finished like art.
Jill K DeWit:
Yes.
Steven Jack Butala:
At this point in my career, there’s more art in doing a really good well-priced mailer, one’s that’s really effective than there is a science or technical talent.
Jill K DeWit:
You think so, really?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. I think when a painter learns to paint, it’s all about technical stuff. Or when you learn to play the guitar in the beginning, it’s all about getting the techniques down. And further along in their career, it just becomes an art effort.
Jill K DeWit:
I understand.
Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know. Is it that way with your end of the business, you think?
Jill K DeWit:
Mine’s all art. It’s a little bit of both.
Steven Jack 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 K DeWit:
And if you’re a Land Academy member, please join us on Discord. All right. Doug wrote, “Hi, I’m in the middle of purchasing a parcel in North Carolina. To get an idea of what price I should sell it at, I’d like to talk to a local realtor to get their thoughts on what the parcel might be worth. Especially, is it a zone for agricultural use? How are you approaching realtors with this question, especially if you don’t actually plan to work with them to sell the property?”
Jill K DeWit:
Well, first of all, I never let them think that. I let them think that I’m… which I really am. Because what if they really are awesome. I do let them think that I am interviewing them if they want to maybe sell my property and you get to know each other. They might be fantastic. Because I’ve had some guys that just blew my socks off. I’ve had some that didn’t, but that’s the whole point.
Jill K DeWit:
So number one, what you want to do is make sure you have it locked in. I want you to have it a signed purchase agreement. You shouldn’t even doing anything without a signed purchase agreement anyway, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a real deal. Anybody could change their mind at that point. You could speak vaguely enough that it’s almost done, preferably you have it in escrow. That’s my second thing.
Jill K DeWit:
If I’m that serious about it, I’m talking to brokers and agents trying to get an idea of what to sell it at. I feel pretty good about it and like, “Hey, I’m just closing on this,” and then that’s all I’ll say. “I think I know what I’m going to do with it, but I’m just reaching out. You look like the expert in the area. I’m reaching out to find out what your thoughts are, what you think we could sell this for, and in what timeframe.”
Jill K DeWit:
The other thing I also tell agents and brokers is, “Hey, I’m not that guy. I’m not holding out for retail, by the way. So I hope to be your favorite person. I really want this to go within 30 days. So be aggressive. Tell me what you really think.”
Steven Jack Butala:
I also think you should explain to the person that you’re happily, we’ll pay them 10%. But you want to feel like you got all of it. You got the service that you needed, that the buyer’s a correct buyer. And that the person really did put a lot of work into it, unlike most residential real estate agents who don’t understand what work is.
Jill K DeWit:
You’re bashing on them a lot this week. Are you okay? Did you have some run in? Did a real estate agent rear end you, and I don’t know about it?
Steven Jack Butala:
You know what happened, why I’m real down on real estate agents? Somebody in a Land Academy Discord group asked, they said, “Look, I got all the HUD-1 back, the closing statement back, on this property I’m buying. And it’s got this thing in there called a capital improvement fund for a thousand dollars. What the heck is this?”
Steven Jack Butala:
And so, I was a bearer of the bad news and said, “This property is in an HOA, and they have a transfer fee. And to make things worse, you’re going to have to pay that on the other side too when you go to sell it.”
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Oh, so the agent didn’t disclose that?
Steven Jack Butala:
No. So then it became a thing where then we started talking about, I said, “Please take a picture of it.” I don’t know if he’s done that yet. Take a screenshot of this and put it in here so we can all talk about it because everyone in Land Academy hates closing fees. We all do. The worst closing fee of all is for a real estate agent.
Jill K DeWit:
Hold on a moment.
Steven Jack Butala:
Along these lines, Jill and I just bought this extremely expensive house, but we know we can sell it for $2 million more. So we elected because the way interest rates are, so you’d get a loan. That closing statement, I fell out of my chair. The real estate agent made $186,000 on this deal. Who the hell can ever justify that kind of fee?
Steven Jack Butala:
The mortgage industry adjusted itself after the last downturn. Mortgage brokers were making so much money per deal that Congress had to step in. It was causing with predatory lending. And so, the rules changed. When are they going to change for real estate agents?
Jill K DeWit:
I wonder. There should almost be a cap.
Steven Jack Butala:
There should be a cap.
Jill K DeWit:
I agree with that. Totally agree with that. It’s kind of not cool.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s an outrage how much money they make and what they don’t do.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Don’t go there, but I did close that deal. That’s totally true. Totally true. I’m going to show my phone here. As we’re recording the show right now, you’re seeing this on YouTube. I’m also doing it on Clubhouse. If you’re here on YouTube or wherever, iTunes, Spotify, whatever, come find me on YouTube.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, Clubhouse people, this is a-
Jill K DeWit:
I’m going to come and do this sometimes on Clubhouse and let you hear our shows before they air next week, so this is kind of cool.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, we’re prerecording. Today’s topic, it’s Jack Thursday, and how mailers are never finished. This is why you’re listening. This came up on our Thursday call, our Thursday webinar, and there’s just this art component. If you ask an artist, an artist will tell you that whatever type of artists they are, whether it’s their composer or painter or anything, they’ll tell you that whatever they’re working on is never finished.
Steven Jack Butala:
Animators, I learned about this through watching an interview with a couple of what was used to be Pixar animators. And they said the way that those cartoons are… They’re not cartoons, but the way that-
Jill K DeWit:
Animated stories and movies.
Steven Jack Butala:
… animated movies are done is that they’re huge teams. It takes two years, a year to two years to do it. And each team is responsible for about three seconds of footage, three to six seconds of a scene. And so, they work on that for a year. And then the director puts it all together at the end or as they go.
Steven Jack Butala:
What they said really stuck with me obviously, because it’s the title of our show. They just said, “The only reason that we ever finished the scene, it’s never finished. We run out of time.” That’s how I feel about a mailer. This topic came up on the last Thursday call and people were saying, “I just can’t ever get my mailer out.” I brought this up. I said, “Because it’s never finished for me either.”
Jill K DeWit:
You have to cut yourself off.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, you have to cut yourself off.
Jill K DeWit:
You have to cut yourself off. We talked about this a lot.
Steven Jack Butala:
And you have to have a calendar. You have to keep on schedule.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s why I told you, we’re doing a lot of this in smaller groups. We have different accountability groups. We have our normal Thursday call and now we have a smaller accountability group. And then we haven’t even smaller group called Career Path. That’s one of the big discussions, that you have to cut yourself off because otherwise you’re never going to get any mail out.
Jill K DeWit:
I totally get that. What if it’s all day Sunday? That’s your thing. All right. You’re going to sit down and spend all day Sunday, but at eight o’clock, you’re going to have to turn off your computer. And you’re going to know that you did the best that you could. You priced it as well as you could. You scraped as much data as you could do in that time.
Jill K DeWit:
I would say, some people need to do this, you need to really write down the steps. If it’s really hard for you, break it down in 10 steps. There’s all the steps involved in picking a county. And then there’s all the steps involved in how granular am I going to get. I need to get the data to make sure I’m picking the county. I have to do a red, yellow, green test.
Jill K DeWit:
I would write down the steps, give yourself a healthy time, maybe an hour per task or two hours per task, whatever it really is and space that out over… If you only have Sundays, maybe it’s two Sundays. Maybe you have all day Saturday, all day Sunday, you do a weekend to do that. Fine, but you have to cut yourself off and you almost need to use your timer on your phone as silly as it sounds. Otherwise, you’ll never get it done. You’ll never move forward. That’s with everything.
Jill K DeWit:
But I was thinking about this is the biggest hurdle. I think this is one of the biggest hurdles that people in our community have. They understand the process. They understand the data. They understand how the phone calls go. They can wrap their head around I’m buying for this, I’m selling for that. All of that big picture stuff’s figured out, but it’s just the sitting down, because this is the first part of it.
Jill K DeWit:
They think if I don’t nail my offer prices that I’m sending to these sellers, everything else is going to fail. That is not true. So I want to tell you right now, erase that from your head because you can recover. Sorry, just to hijack your whole show, your whole thing, I’m just ranting.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s okay.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. This is important to me, because I talk to people so much about this.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s called Jack Thursday, but it’s really-
Jill K DeWit:
It’s Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
… Jill. My whole life is like this. It’s really not about me at all. It’s all about Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
No, it’s not. I’m really trying to help. We’ll get back to your data part [inaudible 00:10:12]. You have to sit yourself down and get it done and get it out. That’s my last two points and I’ll hand that back to you, because of you overprice, so what? Everybody loves you. You got a lot of calls, a lot of offers coming back. You have a lot of deals to review.
Jill K DeWit:
But we talk about this often. There’s ways that you can recover and you can lower the price and let them know why. Shucks, I know I offered you X. It’s really worth Y, and here’s why. Here’s the reasoning behind it. Let’s get this done. The other flip side is true. You come in too low, too hot, and then everybody’s going to love you because you will up the offer. And you will offer more money and it’s okay.
Steven Jack Butala:
We were just talking yesterday on the show. There’s a very large community of engineers in our group, for whatever reason. This business model and accountants attracts technical data, engineering, whether it’s software engineers or aerospace or whatever. That type of personality tends to be a perfectionist. You cannot be a perfectionist in a mailer.
Steven Jack Butala:
If you have to say it in front of the mirror, go ahead and do it. You have to truly accept the fact that there’s going to be a bunch of errors in every single one of these mailers, because if you try to individually price a 10,000 unit mailer, you’ll never get it out.
Jill K DeWit:
Could you imagine? Some people have thought that. They’re like, “How do you send out 10,000?” I’m like, “Trust. We don’t go line by line.” You can’t possibly go line by line and preview every property too, by the way. You just got to blast it out. See what the response is. Let the people come back to you.
Jill K DeWit:
You’ve warmed them up. You gave them an offer. You did the best you could with the data that you had. And picking the exact area that you wanted, the exact zoning, the exact size, no mortgage, dream it up, whatever you want. We all can whittle down our data very easily. And then you pick from those.
Steven Jack Butala:
Jill and I own offers2owners, the number two, dot com. It’s a bulk mail company that takes the mystery out of doing these mailers and pricing and all that stuff. A product that we’re looking into developing is to preemptively notify the owners of real estate through social media channels before the actual mail goes out.
Steven Jack Butala:
In layman’s terms, it’s like you go onto Facebook, you say, “Hey, John Smith in North Carolina, I know you own this property over here. Just please take a look. Please watch your mail, because you’re going to want to buy a property. Please let us know what you think.”
Steven Jack Butala:
And so, it’s very possible to do this, how much tech time and all that is really the variable, like everything. That just is going to add another component to, wow, this is never finished. Or I wonder if that was the right Jack Smith or whatever, but I anticipate that it’s going to be wildly successful.
Jill K DeWit:
We’re just putting ads. The first phase, I think, is putting your ad in front of those people. It’s not hard to track them and figure that out. It’s a little scary. We were watching something on the news the other day and it was just like… I’m not going to say what it is, because it doesn’t matter what it is.
Steven Jack Butala:
That was for me, not for you this year.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, that was for you.
Steven Jack Butala:
No, that was for Jack.
Jill K DeWit:
My point is, we were watching some footage on something on the news, and Steven correctly says, “Wow, we have that camera angle. There really are cameras everywhere.” Yep, there are. Got to get past that, everyone. It’s okay.
Steven Jack Butala:
The mailers are never going to be finished. You just have to cut yourself off.
Jill K DeWit:
Totally. Happy you could join us today. Monday through Friday, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow the episode in the Land Academy Show is called it’s Jill Friday, the three P’s and what makes a great land investor. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
I’m glad that you put this topic in here. And I’m glad that you shared your 2 cents, because this is a hangup for a lot of people. They are freaked out, freaked out by hitting that send button on 5,000 units. Maybe it’s even 1000. Maybe it’s 1000 pieces of mail, but they’re freaked out by that because what’s going to happen? These letters are going out. Your name is on it. Your phone number’s on it. Your email address is on it and your website’s on it.
Jill K DeWit:
These people are going to get your offers and they’re going to call you back, and you need to be ready. It’s not bad. That’s why we’re here. We will show you and help you and guide you in every last little thing. I always say this. It’s the same thing I say to the kids. I’ve adopted the saying to everybody in Land Academy. I’m like, “We won’t let you fall that far. Don’t worry. We will help you recover.”
Steven Jack Butala:
No, exactly right. We have a guy in our group, Dave, and every chance I get, I throw him under the bus. I already cleared it with him. He’s like, “Oh yeah. Use me as an example.”
Jill K DeWit:
Like mistakes.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Well, he sent out two mailers and he emailed me and said, “I don’t think this works.” And then the calls hit from the third mailers and he’s buying all kinds of property all over New England right.
Jill K DeWit:
We have a couple people like that.
Steven Jack Butala:
My point in this is, what’s the worst thing that can happen if you really, really misprice it or make a mistake? You send out another mailer.
Jill K DeWit:
Do it again. You don’t have a warehouse full of inventory, isn’t that nice?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yes.
Jill K DeWit:
Think of all the things you could have screwed up.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not [crosstalk 00:15:46]. That’s right.
Jill K DeWit:
You didn’t buy anything. So what? You didn’t waste any money. You recover, you learn. It’s okay. You can even reuse that data, I would argue. Need to send out a few thousand offers to property owners like us? Checkout offers2owners.com. Offers, the number two, and owners dot com. No setup fees, free mail merge, and exceptional service. We should know it, it’s our company. Give Offers 2 Owners a call today.
Steven Jack Butala:
We’re Steve and Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
We’re Steve and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Information-
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration-
Steven Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.
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