Part-Time Real Estate Investing | Land Investing (LA 1525)
Part-Time Real Estate Investing | Land Investing (LA 1525)
Transcript:
Speaker 1:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
Speaker 1:
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 Southern California.
Speaker 1:
Today Jill and I talk about part time real estate or land investing. Let me tell you, we all started part-time.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Speaker 1:
With very, very, very few exceptions that I know of. We all started part-time until we made enough money and convinced ourselves that there’s some longevity in it and we quit our jobs.
Jill DeWit:
Beautiful.
Speaker 1:
But I’m going to say this, if you start this right off the bat, because you hate your job so much and are consumed with trying to get to that starting line so you can quit your job, you’re just causing problems for yourself. 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 member, join us on Discord.
Jill DeWit:
Corey asks, did I send to escrow too early? I received a signed PA the other day. The signature had a small note under it saying that the owner was deceased, minor detail, right? PS-
Speaker 1:
Gets good though, this is a good start.
Jill DeWit:
Wait, this is going to be funny. It sounds funny. I haven’t read this before. I’m just envisioning, sure we want to sell, we love it. PS, mom’s dead. Here you go. Like we’re not going to notice.
Speaker 1:
Figure it out.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Speaker 1:
At least they told you.
Jill DeWit:
Well, there is that. And then just sign mom’s name and pretend. Small note under it saying that the owner was deceased and that the person responding is a daughter of the deceased. The daughter didn’t leave any contact info to reach her. I did due diligence on the property and realized that this is a very good deal. I signed the purchase agreement and also included a letter asking the daughter to contact me with my contact info on the letter and overnighted it to her on… This is all real time. This is a new. June 3rd.
Jill DeWit:
In the meantime, I went ahead and sent the signed purchase agreement to an attorney and started escrow. The letter was delivered on 6/4/2021. I still haven’t heard anything from the daughter as of June 8th. The attorney got back to me today and told me that mother conveyed the property to her in a revocable living trust and left the daughter who signed the purchase agreement as a successor trustee. This is good.
Speaker 1:
Good start.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. So in parentheses, it says we’re good to go there. All of that to ask this, do you guys think I sent it to escrow/attorney too quick? Should I have waited until the daughter contacted me? Or would you guys have done the same thing I did? I got with a realtor that was recommended and he told me that he thought the property would sell quickly and it would gross a profit over $130,000. I love it. Here’s my only thing, I probably would’ve done the same stuff.
Speaker 1:
I would skip trace this daughter and I would blow her phone up.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Just make sure.
Speaker 1:
Did you do it too early? No. You did everything right.
Jill DeWit:
So, and I imagine too right now, because you’re having an attorney close the deal obviously. I think you’re having an attorney close a deal. Is that what he said?
Speaker 1:
Attorneys are great at finding people by the way.
Jill DeWit:
That doesn’t say it’s nice. And let’s see, in the meantime, I went ahead and saw the attorney and started escrow. Okay. So that’s why I’m assuming they’re doing the deal. So you’re trying to reach the daughter and the attorneys try and reach the daughter. Pretty sure one of you is going to reach the daughter because what’s needed from the daughter is, hey, by the way, we need to get your signature and where do you want your money to go? So she wants to hear from you. Maybe she’s just forgot. It’s probably different. You got on the third. It’s less than a week later by the time… It’s five days you haven’t heard from her. So she is hopefully going to still surface.
Speaker 1:
I almost never say this, but I would assume the best here, not the worst. I would just assume that she got tied up.
Jill DeWit:
I’m rubbing off on him. I am so proud of you. Wow. This is a big day everyone.
Speaker 1:
She just got tied up doing something. Maybe relatives are in town, like ours are right now.
Jill DeWit:
Maybe. Exactly. Maybe they can barely get the chance to sit down and record some shows. I don’t know. Stuff happens. I’m going to assume the best.
Speaker 1:
Hey, let us know Corey, because we all want to know.
Jill DeWit:
This is great.
Speaker 1:
Today’s topic, part time real estate and land investing. This is why you’re listening. Jack, why are you cutting me off when I’m mid laughing and mid talking? Because our relatives are in town and we’re trying to get through these shows this week. That’s the truth.
Jill DeWit:
Not through these shows. We love this.
Speaker 1:
We enjoy doing these shows a lot, as always.
Jill DeWit:
You do.
Speaker 1:
Let’s just drag them out.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, thanks.
Speaker 1:
Even though they’re all starving.
Jill DeWit:
Who’s starving? Oh, our family?
Speaker 1:
Just joking, just joking.
Jill DeWit:
We’re not feeding them yet. Lunch will come in a minute. Just kidding. So part-time real estate investing/part-time land investing. Okay. Whatever the term is-
Speaker 1:
We don’t write the titles anymore.
Jill DeWit:
No, no.
Speaker 1:
We just [inaudible 00:05:18].
Jill DeWit:
That’s right.
Speaker 1:
If you can call it that.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly. So what does that mean to you?
Speaker 1:
Everybody started part-time and so then you find out we all started everything part-time except maybe, well even school.
Jill DeWit:
Parenting.
Speaker 1:
Kindergarten’s part time.
Jill DeWit:
I would’ve loved to start parenting part-time.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that’s true. Try it off for a month.
Jill DeWit:
That would’ve been great. Trade off with somebody else. Okay, next week you don’t get any sleep.
Speaker 1:
Let’s share this kid.
Jill DeWit:
Within two families.
Speaker 1:
Share one child with three families.
Jill DeWit:
There we go. That’s fair. I like that.
Speaker 1:
Part-time land investing, if you care about something, it’s hard to do it part-time. And how many times of all the subjects you’ve had in school, you like one or two? Or you’ve got the side project going that you’re dying to do and it’s research or something and something else gives and you start not putting your all into math because you like chemistry.
Speaker 1:
And so that’s what ends up happening with land investing. You really just have to make time for it and pay the bills some other way. So is it manageable? Yeah, it’s totally manageable. I do really, really well waking up really early in the morning when nobody else is awake. I do it about two or three days a week to really try to get content done and a bunch of stuff done for other things like career path and some of the other companies that we have or that we’re starting. And that’s my happy time. The phone’s not ringing. Everybody else is asleep and I can really knock some stuff out.
Jill DeWit:
I know that’s why your happy time. That’s your happy time. No one else is around. That’s my happy time. Just kidding. I would love to share, because I think this is funny and I know people get a kick out of this and they can then relate to this. My part time investing with you and this was my setup, then I don’t want you to share yours because it’s fun. I had two desks. I was lucky enough, not in the beginning, but when I really started to pick up traction and doing deals, I was lucky enough that I got to work remote. And so I had a set up in part of our bedroom at the time, where I had a desk. And so I had a desk and a chair and a full computer setup.
Jill DeWit:
And then behind me, total truth time, I took over half the bed and made that a workstation too. So I would do deals here, the phone would ring, I’d be doing my day job, right? Phone would ring, whip my chair around, jump into that. And for some people that’s hard to do and I get that. You have to take a second and go, okay, whoa, and then your brain engages like when you’re changing speeds on your bike, it engages. You’re like, okay, now I’m caught up on that property. And I would do that all day long. It was the funniest thing.
Jill DeWit:
And then I would end my day job and then at night, then I would do all the catch up stuff, all the emails, maybe I’d make deeds, maybe I’d get all that stuff ready for the next day, do postings, whatever it took. That was my part-time land investing. And then to take it a step further, that stopped happening when we really saw, and I know your story is the same and you’ll share, and this could happen to you too, that now I’m losing money. Shoot. I can’t answer the phones fast enough. There’s deals I’m not doing. I can’t keep up with the traction. I’m really losing money because my W2 job on when I whip my chair around, that’s costing me money and then we had to make it a full-time thing.
Speaker 1:
I look at my entire land investing career in milestones, separate sections and milestones and they’re all deal driven. So the first deal I did was I still had a job at the hospital as the VP of acquisitions for long-term care facilities. And I bought a piece of property on, I talk about this in our ebook, actually on Land Academy. So I bought a piece of property on eBay for I think, $8,000. And then immediately just cleaned it up on the internet. I never went and saw it. This was back east and I bought the property in Arizona. I won an auction, cleaned it up, put different maps, got some pictures taken and resold it for twice as much. This is all all completely part-time. I had a job to go to unlike Jill, it wasn’t work from home. And I was immediately said, that’s it.
Speaker 1:
And I scheduled a meeting with the guy that I bought it from and flew out there and then drove to where he was. The whole thing took a week, took all my vacation time and found out from him how and where he’s buying these things. I don’t know why he told me all this, but he did. And so-
Jill DeWit:
Same reason we do.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I guess we’re talking about it too. And so I moved back, eventually moved back to Arizona shortly after that, got a W2 job with an investment bank. And I worked there and went to land auctions and ultimately did a very large deal in Northern Michigan and Northern Arizona, which generated six or $700,000 in cash.
Jill DeWit:
Wait, were you full-time at that time or part-time still?
Speaker 1:
No, I was totally part-time.
Jill DeWit:
Still part-time. Okay.
Speaker 1:
Totally part-time for this investment bank.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
And that still wasn’t enough. So now I’ve got five or $600,000 cash more than I started with in the bank. And I still wasn’t comfortable leaving my job. So I went to an auction and I bought all the properties at this auction live on a weekend. They were smart enough to hold them on Saturday so I didn’t have to take time off. And now when you go to these auctions or with these land acquisitions, at least I calculate what they’re all worth. So I think I spent about $87,000 and I realized there’s probably two, maybe $300,000 of value of equity in the whole thing when I’m done, which pushed me over to a million dollars. And my rent was $310 at the time. I had no relationships or children or anything like that. And my car was paid for. And so here I am with a million dollars of equity that I created in less than a year. That’s so-
Jill DeWit:
Did you feel comfortable then?
Speaker 1:
I left then.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. There we go.
Speaker 1:
And I left it an extremely lucrative W2/bonus investment banking job. And so-
Jill DeWit:
You had to prove it to yourself.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And then I went on to do a ton of deals and do really well, build a team in an office and all that. Then I met Jill and it was during the downturn and this is about the time now where she’s doing her little desk dance. And then we went to an auction.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, my desk dance. That’s kind of cute.
Speaker 1:
And then we went to an auction and we bought thousands of properties for nothing. We’ve told the story in the past, it’s a tiny little town in Bisbee, Arizona. Then I had a money belt on with tens of thousands of dollars.
Jill DeWit:
That was hilarious. My purse was packed.
Speaker 1:
That was it.
Jill DeWit:
Cash.
Speaker 1:
This was now spanning more than 10 years. What I just described all happened in 10 years. And on the drive back from that, she quit her job, her W2 job. So it’s all milestones for me. But every single time I did it, I’m like, wow, I should’ve done this a lot earlier.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly. So for you starting out, part-time investing, you’re not nuts. Yeah. Like you said, pretty much everybody is, everybody does. Most people don’t have the luxury to say… Actually, it’s funny because we talked to somebody though, this does happen, most people don’t have this, talked to guy on Clubhouse. It was today that we did it. He’s 63 years old. He’s retired from a jewelry business. And then-
Speaker 1:
That’s great. That’s a great time to do this.
Jill DeWit:
He did actually a couple of years ago because he said in the process I paid off my house. When I sold my jewelry store, I went from a 300 square foot shop knowing nothing, to a 2000 square foot thing. I owned everything in there-
Speaker 1:
Knowing less.
Jill DeWit:
Right. When I sold it, I owned all the inventory. I still do, my safe is full. So he’s like, I sleep really well at night. I can just parse these out if I need to. He’s like I bought a boat, took a year off. He’s like, I wish I hadn’t done that. But here he is doing land investing. But most people don’t have that luxury. He’s like, I can afford to do this. I have the time, I have the energy, I know how to do a business. Most of you do not.
Speaker 1:
Here’s how you fail at this.
Jill DeWit:
And you can still do it and be okay.
Speaker 1:
The people who fail at this don’t have a calendar or if they do, they don’t stick to it. And that’s it.
Jill DeWit:
That was our chat today.
Speaker 1:
That’s the whole secret to part-time land investing is to have a calendar. And so if you’re pressed for time, like all of us always are, Jill and I are totally pressed for time this week. It’s just always seems to be that way. I would be dead in the water from an efficiency standpoint if I didn’t have a calendar.
Jill DeWit:
You’re two parts though. Not only having a calendar, but you follow through. That was all today that we talked about, getting that first deal done and you just have to do it. You’ve got to go for it.
Speaker 1:
You’re never going to close a deal if you don’t send any mail out, and you’re never going to send any mail out if you don’t run through these programs and learn how to do it the correct way.
Jill DeWit:
Well, I would argue part-time investing is great too, by the way, because you have a safety net. You have a built in safety net which is your W2 job or whatever it else is putting food on the table. May not be a W2, whatever it is. Maybe you have another business. We have lots of people here that have other businesses that are like, I just want a different business.
Speaker 1:
We have other businesses and we still get it all done.
Jill DeWit:
But you know what I’m saying, you’re new to this. You can do it. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Speaker 1:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called real estate courses versus free online content. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Ties right into what we’re talking about. Do I really need Land Academy? Do I really need to go pay for all this stuff? Maybe not. We’ll talk about it.
Jill DeWit:
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.
Speaker 1:
We are Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Speaker 1:
To buy undervalued property.
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