Our Last Mailer Deconstructed-We Created a Quarter of a Million Dollars (LA 1496)
Our Last Mailer Deconstructed-We Created a Quarter of a Million Dollars (LA 1496)
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here. 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-
Jill DeWit:
I was going to say sweaty Scottsdale, Arizona. Not to make you and the rest of the country mad at us, but it’s 22% humidity right now which is pretty darn high for us.
Steven Butala:
High for us. At 95 degrees, it starts to get-
Jill DeWit:
A little bit… Yeah.
Steven Butala:
Start to have thoughts of Christmas. And these things happen when it’s may. Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
I’m like, “I need to be in the pool right now.” Okay.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how our last… well, we’re going to deconstruct our last mailer and show you exactly how we made about a quarter of a million bucks on that.
Jill DeWit:
Cool.
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’re already a Land Academ member, please join us on Discord.
Jill DeWit:
Mike D wrote, “Hello everyone. I’ve actually been a member since August 2020, and I’ve done 10 deals since then, mostly buy for two to 5,000 and sell for double. I’m starting to gain some momentum. And I’m looking to get some help from members on how to move forward with confidence. I would like to discuss a rather large deal for me, buy for $150,000 and sell for $300,000. And I need the assurance from people that have been doing this a while that it’s a good deal. Where can I post the details so it can be discussed? Thanks.” Aww.
Steven Butala:
Mike D., you’ve done every single thing right, every single thing. It’s been about six months, less than six months, you’ve done 10 deals just like Jill always talks about, get 10 deals under your belt. Who cares what they look like? Who cares how much money you make? Just to see if this is for you. And now you’re ready to make $150,000 on a deal. And this is a great question. It’s actually my favorite question of the week. I would reach out. There’s two or three places that we have set up for this to really get some traction for you and people like you. I would start with Discord. I know you’re a member because I can tell on Land Investors. We also have something called Deal Board, which we’re kind of phasing out, but our members-
Jill DeWit:
Because of Land Tank now.
Steven Butala:
Our members won’t let us phase it out because they like it. It’s like a bulletin board in a hospital for guitar lessons.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, exactly.
Steven Butala:
And then there’s Land Tank. I’m not so sure if you don’t have a deal, that Land Tank is the best place if it were me and I can speak confidently. If it were Jill, I would post it on all three places just to see what would happen.
Jill DeWit:
But I do want to sign purchase agreement though moving forward just to make sure because no one really has a deal until we have that, then we can really talk about it.
Steven Butala:
If you have a signed purchase agreement and you think the numbers are 150 to 300 and you put it on Land Tank, it won’t last three minutes. There’s vultures and I say that in a good way, money people in our group that are dying to fund property.
Jill DeWit:
I would like to add a point here too. We don’t always have to double our money. So think about the numbers you’ve been doing to this point. What if you do it all wrong and you buy it for 150 and you sell it for 250 or 225, those are still great numbers.
Steven Butala:
We do deals like that all the time.
Jill DeWit:
So don’t worry. Don’t stress. If you know going into it, “I’m buying it for 150 no matter what. I really made a mistake. I sell it for 200,” you’re still going to be just fine.
Steven Butala:
Yep. That’s a big topic for last week that came up a lot. I bought this property for $80,000. I didn’t get 160 out of it. I got 120 out of it. Jack and Jill, what am I doing wrong? Nothing. You should celebrate.
Jill DeWit:
How much did you make again? You’re just fine.
Steven Butala:
We have people in our career path group, which is kind of the advanced advanced group, how to scale. This topic comes up a lot because a lot of those people in that group are just like you. They’ve done a bunch of deals. They understand. They’ve proven the concept to themselves that this is a good business. They want to make it their “career”. It’s called career path. And now I need to get to 150 to sell for 300. So I personally have now made it my mission to make people realize that the rest of the world isn’t made of 100% profit margins. It’s made of like three to 5% margin. So if you can get 20% out of your money, you’re doing great at that level.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I would even say, we talked about this. I was in a group recently where we talked about just what’s your bottom number. Actually, I think it was career path, but like what’s your number? What if you say, “I just need to make at least 50,000 a deal”? Great. Just go at it like that. And this is what you’re looking at right here, Mike. No matter what, if you just say, “I’m going to make 50,000, no matter what,” perfect. Those are great numbers.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic is called our last mailer deconstructed, how we created a quarter of a million dollars net on one mailer. This is the meat of the show. So I’m not saying that you should go out and do this, but at this point in our career, this is what works for us and none of it is honestly Jill’s idea. It’s a result of me.
Jill DeWit:
[inaudible 00:05:27] is not my idea. Oh, I don’t like making money. That’s not why I’m here. I just like to be here to be on the camera. That’s it. That’s all I’m here for. It turns out that if you make money, people will listen. That’s dumb.
Steven Butala:
There’s an interesting twist to this mailer.
Jill DeWit:
I had nothing else to do today.
Steven Butala:
Interesting twist to this mailer that I did and it worked out great and largely worked out great because Jill took the calls and turned these transactions into profitable real estate deals. Yeah, exactly. So it was a result of months and months and months of me informally horsing around on Zillow and Redfin and looking at values of properties in areas that I already know about and looking at for sale property and tagging it, that I like it and then micromanaging it after it goes under contract and gets sold. And so there were never spreadsheets involved in the first phase of this. So I took a county, I isolated all the properties that were for sale and sold that were above a certain dollar amount, in this case $30,000, then really microscopically looked at the zip codes that they’re in, in some cases, the APNs, but mostly the zip codes, isolated a size that fit that.
Steven Butala:
So I applied tons and tons of logic and not a ton of math yet. And so I came up with a few zip codes in an area that I’m very familiar with, that I’ve known for a long time and came up with this concept and very confident I can send mail out, buy these properties for between 10 and $12,000 and sell them between 30 and 50. And they have to be prezoned for certain types of residential structures or agricultural and this is all this county specific information. Like the next county over, I can tell you from and where we’re about to do that is very different. So it’s prezoned property that I know sells really well right now for a certain amount that’s close to between 30 and $50,000 per property at a certain size range. And the size range came from two places, what’s selling, what’s sold, and what the county will allow to be built on in that area because it’s in a very rural area, but it’s also very hot area because of this whole stay at home, the whole real estate… If you don’t know, the real estate market’s on fire right now in a great way. Now you know.
Jill DeWit:
If this is the first time you’ve heard that right now, we’ve got to talk.
Steven Butala:
We’re in the middle of one of the greatest, legitimate, real estate booms that certainly been in our lifetime and arguably since World War II. It’s probably going to surpass that. So what happened? We sent out about 7,000 letters. I think we turned five, some number below 20. Trent, Jill sifted through the stuff. She does what she does. What do you do that… What’s so special here?
Jill DeWit:
Oh, it’s magic. I can’t show that.
Steven Butala:
She Jillified it. She made a lot of friends with a lot of people in cowboy hats and their wives. That’s the truth of it.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven Butala:
Come on. They’re dying to know. Tell us.
Jill DeWit:
No. Well, you just said it. You did.
Steven Butala:
Over the phone is what I mean. And so while we were sending out offers between eight and 12 or $18,000 per property, Jill’s pulling them up on Neighbor Script as they come in and saying, “You know what? That property actually does work or it doesn’t work or we love it at this number. We can accept this number and potentially go to this high, but I doubt it.”
Jill DeWit:
One of the things that I think about too with this particular area and this particular property type, you got creative, and this is one of the things we tell everybody, “Get creative. Go places where no one else is going. You know what to do. Do what Steven’s doing. Spend some time. Follow the market. See what’s happening. Then send some offers and see what happens,” because we still had a healthy response from signed purchase agreements that hadn’t seen in a while, which makes me think that people weren’t getting these and it made me feel really, really good because there’s some people like there’s a gal that just came through the other day. I didn’t even talk to her. Signed it. Sent it in. I did. I sent it to my transaction coroner said, “Hey, please throw us an air table, tag us both. And we’ll look at it.” Before I could even get to it, you said, “Yep. Done. Buy it,” so I wrote her a note and my transaction coroner said, “Hey, go ahead and open escrow. You don’t even need me on this one.”
Steven Butala:
They signed a $15,000 purchase agreement. It has a full-blown house on it without buildings on an acre and a half I think, on a river, on a seasonal river for 15 grand. I think it’s 15 change, so it’ll be 18 by the time we’re done and we’ll immediately relist it for about 45 to 50. Actually, that’s the most recent result in the mailer, so let’s do the math on this mailer. Let’s really deconstruct it.
Jill DeWit:
That’s a good one. Yes. They’re still coming in. It’s hard to really gauge it right now. You can’t know because you know what? I’ll tell you real quick, your expiration date, the 90 days that you put on these mailers hasn’t hit yet.
Steven Butala:
Right. I know.
Jill DeWit:
So that’s what I’m waiting for too. What’s still coming?
Steven Butala:
So here’s the math. I mean, we’ll average. This is my, I think average, average. This is really conservative. I think it’s going to be a lot more, $20,000 per transaction, net, net, net. This is after fees and everything. And we’ll do-
Jill DeWit:
That’s low.
Steven Butala:
That’s way low.
Jill DeWit:
That’s very conservative.
Steven Butala:
Way, way low. And we’ll do at least 20 deals. At the end of it, it’ll be at least 20 APNs that will be sold. I think that’s really light too. It’s going to be probably closer to 40, but let’s just use 20. Yeah, me too. So net $20,000 a deal.
Jill DeWit:
Times 20.
Steven Butala:
Times 20 is 400,000. So yeah. Oh my God, but in the title you say quarter of a million. You know what happens? People don’t believe us.
Jill DeWit:
I know. You think so?
Steven Butala:
I think people that listen to the show probably believe us and our Land Academy members would believe us, but after a while, it gets hard and no fun to address people and this is usually in a social environment for Jill and I that when we start talking about numbers like this, they don’t understand it and don’t believe it, and then they think we’re bragging and stuff.
Jill DeWit:
They don’t understand it.
Steven Butala:
I’m always trying to just chill the whole thing out, kind of cool the jets on all of it and just say, “Yeah, we made a quarter of a million bucks on that,” and it didn’t take that long. When in reality, it was probably closer to 1,000,005. This will be a million dollar mailer for us by the time we’re done and what I’ll do, what the real consequence of that is that I’ll start moving around the state now. And actually in other states, I have a-
Jill DeWit:
It’s a good thing.
Steven Butala:
Research assistant that’s researching the viability of this concept that I’m describing in multiple other states.
Jill DeWit:
There you go. It’s awesome. Happy you could join us today. Monday through Friday, you can find us right here on the Land Academy show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode of the Land Academy show is called well, it’s Jack Thursday and I’m going to talk about unique ways to improve your land. For example, putting a Breaking Bad RV on your property that you found on Craigslist for $500. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Steven Butala:
And that’s just the beginning.
Jill DeWit:
I know. I love it. It’s a little scary. It’s a little scary, but yeah. Hey, you never know what’s in there. It’s like those shows Storage Wars. People buy this stuff. They don’t know what’s in there and they’re all excited about it. It’s kind of like that. Hey, if you need 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.
Steven Butala:
Information-
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration-
Steven Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.
The BuWit Family of Companies include:
I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.
And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.
