Jack Thursday – Counties You Shouldn’t Mail in 2021 (LA 1532)
Jack Thursday – Counties You Shouldn’t Mail in 2021 (LA 1532)
Transcript:
S Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
S Jack 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 sunny Southern California.
S Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about, well, it’s Jack Thursday, and I’m going to talk about counties you shouldn’t send mail to in 2021.
Jill DeWit:
Oh I’m excited. Should I get out a pen and be ready to write them down?
S Jack Butala:
Actually you should, I am going to give a couple of counties that you just shouldn’t send mail to, but I’m going to give you the secret weapon.
Jill DeWit:
But that’s not what this is about.
S Jack Butala:
I’ll give you the absolute secret weapon on how to analyze any county or parish in this entire country and it will tell you whether or not you should send out mail there.
Jill DeWit:
We’re going to go through all 3144 today, right?
S Jack Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
Could you imagine?
S Jack Butala:
No, I’m going to tell you how to set up a spreadsheet.
Jill DeWit:
Yes, no, no, yes, yes, no, yes. That’s so funny.
S Jack Butala:
I’ll show you how to set it up in a spreadsheet and it’ll tell you right away.
Jill DeWit:
Cool.
S Jack Butala:
Before we get into it though, let’s take a question posted on landinvestors.com, our online free community, or some of the questions come from Discord and if you’re already a member, you know all about the Land Academy Discord.
Jill DeWit:
Cool.
S Jack Butala:
This is like one of my favorite, I laughed out loud at this question. You have to read this all the way through.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, this is long.
S Jack Butala:
It’s funny too.
Jill DeWit:
All right. Bear with me. This is going to be long. Okay.
Jill DeWit:
“I don’t subscribe to Land Academy since I come from real estate oriented family and I’ve been involved in real estate investing for years.” This is Dallas, okay. “My opinion is real estate is often hyper-local, get out on the ground and visit neighborhoods you’d like to invest in. Don’t give away your investment strategy, but meet the neighbors, invest in foot leather, et cetera. Word of mouth is so powerful. Talk to cities and get to know council members, show that you care about your investment neighborhoods and want to make them even better places. You will learn so much and open up an avenue to better leads.
Jill DeWit:
Don’t always enter it with expectation of flipping quickly, sometimes it makes sense to buy and hold, perhaps even develop certain vacant parcels or find temporary income producing uses. Sometimes you can work out deals with investor neighbors to acquire better parcels. PS, word to the wise, some great investment neighborhoods can be a bit rough and tumble. I’m a fairly big guy, but when I was getting started, I nearly got into a fist fight. I had an AK 47 pointed at me at point blank on one other occasion, and I’ve had to evict a drug addict, but I’ve also had disgruntled people yell at me dozens of times. Be safe and good luck.”
Jill DeWit:
Boy, that sure makes me want to run out there and do the same thing. Not. What? What?
S Jack Butala:
This person is not a member and this person is engaging and engaging in what I would call a non data driven real estate career, like a real estate agent and like a person who drives for dollars or like somebody who flips houses for show on HGTV. I’m going to spend some time on this for a second.
Jill DeWit:
Can I tell you how many times I’ve had anything pointed in my face? Zero.
S Jack Butala:
When’s the last time you saw a piece of property you even bought?
Jill DeWit:
Well, I’m trying to think of now.
S Jack Butala:
Five or eight years ago? On accident because we were on vacation.
Jill DeWit:
We were on vacation. We drove by it, actually and the conversation was we sold a bunch of stuff over there. Oh, that’s kind of nice. It’s pretty.
S Jack Butala:
My opinion is real estate is often hyper-local no, it’s not. It’s where the data is that tells you to go. Get out on the ground, visit neighborhoods that you’d like to invest in. Worst idea ever.
Jill DeWit:
Talk about a waste of time. How many places can I?
S Jack Butala:
Don’t give away your investment strategy, that’s what Land Academy is, giving away our investment strategy.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
S Jack Butala:
And meet the neighbors. That’s how you get a shotgun in your face. Invest in foot leather, et cetera.
Jill DeWit:
I invest in flip flops.
S Jack Butala:
Word of mouth is so powerful. Talk to cities and get to know council members? When’s the last time you went to a council member meeting?
Jill DeWit:
Never. Ever.
S Jack Butala:
Show that you care about your investment neighborhoods and you want to make them even better places, you’ll learn so much and open up an avenue to better leads.
Jill DeWit:
How about mail them all?
S Jack Butala:
This is walking for dollars.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
S Jack Butala:
That’s worse than driving for dollars, it takes more time. Don’t always enter with the expectation of flipping quickly. Hey everybody, enter with the expectation of flipping quickly. That’s our business model.
Jill DeWit:
You want to own it for five minutes. That’s what you want to do.
S Jack Butala:
Sometimes it makes sense to buy and hold. It never makes sense to buy and hold. Perhaps even develop a certain parcel. Do we develop property here at Land Academy?
Jill DeWit:
Nope. Nope.
S Jack Butala:
Or find a temporary income producing uses. Sometimes you can work out deals with investor neighbors to inquire even better parcels. How about you just sell it to the neighbors with a neighbor letter?
Jill DeWit:
And move on, put it in the bank and move on.
S Jack Butala:
Some great investment neighborhoods can be a bit rough and tumble.
Jill DeWit:
I’m not going there.
S Jack Butala:
Land Academy is packed full of people that have made massive mistakes buying land in places like Detroit and I’m from Detroit so I can pick on Detroit all I want. Trust me, these are not places you want to buy and sell real estate. It’s riddled with massive problems. And then he goes on about his AK 47 and how he’s got to fight people. There’s a reason this person’s not in the group.
Jill DeWit:
That’s not the kind of company I want or the kind of way I want to do business or the business I want to be in. I’m not going to be, if I have to put on a bulletproof vest, there’s a problem.
S Jack Butala:
All joking aside. Listen, I set this up a lot of years ago, so it’s scalable. So you can sit from your desk, the second you move from your desk, you’re losing money.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
S Jack Butala:
Sit from your desk and buy and sell property and scale it up through all kinds of ways to scale your property.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true. It’s a business.
S Jack Butala:
Starting with virtual assistants and getting a partner like Jill and new phone lines and sending more mail out. You can’t scale a business like this. You can’t scale a business where you’re walking around shaking people’s hands.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
S Jack Butala:
I’m sure this person is going to contact me directly with threats.
S Jack Butala:
Today’s topic Jack Thursday. I put it on Jack Thursday so I could rant about it.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
S Jack Butala:
Counties you shouldn’t mail in 2021. This is the meat of the show.
S Jack Butala:
How did this come about? In the pre-show, Jill explained why our customer service is getting a lot of questions about this.
Jill DeWit:
Because they get calls now and then from people interested in joining Land Academy and they had tested this, send out mailers to areas that did not produce good results. IE, a lot of already investors already in those areas, or just flooded with available property for sale, things like that. And they said, “Look, the point of this is,” you’re going to give us one thing, “it’s like every county’s good, but you got to know how to pick it.” And you know what I was going to say, they change by the way, my hot county today is not going to be my hot county six months from now or maybe a year from now.
S Jack Butala:
That’s for sure. Or state.
Jill DeWit:
Or state.
S Jack Butala:
Boy Jill, you know what, that’s a great perception. Stuff changes all the time and where you buy property changes for a bunch of reasons.
Jill DeWit:
Totally. So will you please expand on how this happened? People are hung up on secret county lists. So we talk, we’re calling it the counties you shouldn’t mail today. We’re not going to list different counties.
S Jack Butala:
I’m going to list a few.
Jill DeWit:
But, and I want to take this with a grain of salt, there are a few that are today and you know what, six years from now, or five years from now, this list is going to change. So this is not forever, this is today.
S Jack Butala:
This whole thing started because Mark Podolsky’s Land Geek program had had some success with what he, this is a lot of years ago, what he called the secret county list and he had a list of like eight counties where it’s great to send mail to.
Jill DeWit:
And they were all terms, that were good terms things too. Was that kind of a thing.
S Jack Butala:
Jill’s right, maybe back then they were good. Maybe there was some secret reason to it. I mean, you don’t say secret county list for long, without it being-
Jill DeWit:
Not a secret.
S Jack Butala:
It’s like the first rule about Fight Club kind of thing. You just don’t, you know what’s going to happen, how that ends.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
S Jack Butala:
To which I responded of several years ago, by designing what we call the red, green, yellow test. And you take data from accounting or from a specifically from zip code, either one’s fine, and you put it into a spreadsheet, if you’re a member it’s in the spreadsheet that we provide, the equity planner, you can copy and paste it from realtor.com or redfin.com who provide spreadsheet, free data. And you pit the counties or zip codes, either case, against each other to find in there, it’ll tell you this is red, or this is yellow, maybe you should consider it, or it’s green and it might be a good place to send mail.
S Jack Butala:
And I came up with three statistics since then, we’ve had incredibly brilliant members expand on that, but let’s just use the original red, green, yellow test for this perspective. It looks at days on market first for all real estate, that tells me, days on market we haven’t talked about it recently, for me is the end all, if I’m in a hurry and I want to send out some mail, which I never am but if I was, I would look at days on market only for all properties in that zip code or that county and it would tell me pretty quickly whether or not people are buying property there.
Jill DeWit:
So think about this, you put five zip codes together, and one has 10 days on market, the other have 20 days on market and then you have 300 days on market, 75 days on market, 62 days of market. What do you think you’re going to do with that information?
S Jack Butala:
Right. So you always want to send mail to the lowest days on market,
Jill DeWit:
Right.
S Jack Butala:
Oh Jack, but if it’s got a real low days on market, my mail response is going to be worse. Trust me, it’s going to be just fine. People respond to these mailers because they’re in a life situation not because they know anything about price and don’t care. The same way, your reason you have a garage sale, for whatever reason, you don’t care about what you sell it for you’re just cleaning the garage out. That’s number one, days on market.
S Jack Butala:
Number two, number of properties sold to number of properties for sale. And that number should be below one-to-one for the last 12 months. So if you have a hundred properties for sale and you have a hundred properties sold in the last 12 months, you can even take it to the last month in some real urban cases, we do that with houses. You want a one to one ratio. If you’ve got 650,000 properties for sale in certain counties like San Bernardino, and you see 22 sold in the last 30 days-
Jill DeWit:
Not a good sign.
S Jack Butala:
That might not be a good place to send mail at any price. At $50 an acre do you really want to stick-
Jill DeWit:
Compete?
S Jack Butala:
Drop your for-sale property down into a sea of available property where it just immediately gets lost like a drop in a bucket? And then I forgot what the number, the third statistic is.
Jill DeWit:
So we’ve got days on market, list of sold-
S Jack Butala:
Oh, universe of properties.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
S Jack Butala:
Number of properties for sale against the universe of properties in that county or zip code. You want small numbers of properties that are for sale in the universe of properties, which means there’s a much higher demand, in my mind, a much higher demand than there is supply. Now you can take this out, there’s unbelievable statistics on real estate, specifically houses and so I look at all real estate to run these numbers. In some cases you can get just land numbers and that’s great, but those are usually real urban counties, which we don’t specialize in. This will vet out 99.9% of the time where you should send mail. If you run this in San Bernardino county, if you run this in the two counties that are out west in Culverson county and Hudspeth county in Texas, you’re going to immediately find you won’t get past days on market. You’re going to immediately find that is not a place to send mail. So everybody dies for me to do this for them. They want the eight or 12 counties that we know, but all you have to do is run the tests and it’s free and easy.
Jill DeWit:
That’s the whole point here. Don’t get hung up on the secret county list. Don’t get hung up on what you hear. Don’t get hung up on you think people are doing and just know, learn for yourself to do it the right way. That’s what Land Academy is all about by the way, Land Academy is not me telling you A to B to C and we haven’t talked about that in a while.
S Jack Butala:
Let’s talk about it because that’s how I was going to end this.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, good. Well, just Land Academy is about us teaching you what we do, what we do and what triggers a good area because at the end of the day, you’re going to find deals and counties and areas we’ve never heard of. And that’s my favorite thing. And you’ll be over here killing it in those places.
S Jack Butala:
Land academy has evolved into teaching people, the types of people who want to do this for a living, it’s the professional version of land investing. This is not the Hello Kitty version of land investing like the several other, I don’t even want to call them competitors. There’s a lot of places where you can learn how to do this. And I would encourage you to look at them all or be members of lots of them.
Jill DeWit:
It’s like a checklist. Yeah.
S Jack Butala:
But if you’re come from a technical background or a mega sales background, and you’re not afraid of spreadsheets or you’re not afraid of talking on the phone, or you’re generally not afraid of taking three or four months and learning the right way to do something so that it will feed you for years or generations, however you want it to, we have multiple people in our group that are doing this with their children, us included, then this is for you. If you want a cute little list of where not to send mail, and you’re going to trust that, you shouldn’t trust me anyway, you shouldn’t.
Jill DeWit:
Do your own numbers.
S Jack Butala:
You shouldn’t trust that I’m saying don’t send mail at San Bernardino county. You should run your own tests in a spreadsheet.
Jill DeWit:
And go, oh, now I see it.
S Jack Butala:
If spreadsheets scare you, if you want an easy button or spreadsheets scare you, this is not for you. That’s what this is, this topic, it miffs me a little bit.
Jill DeWit:
We’re here to make sure you succeed, period.
S Jack Butala:
There’s not a simple little five step process where you can start cranking a crank and cranking money out on this.
Jill DeWit:
There are moving parts. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
S Jack Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the Land Academy Show, finally, it’s Jill Friday. I have money to burn. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
S Jack Butala:
They give you cute little titles.
Jill DeWit:
You got one too.
S Jack Butala:
I mean, it’s like a, I’m writing a book was last week.
Jill DeWit:
Oh yeah.
S Jack Butala:
Exclamation point.
Jill DeWit:
Well, we are different people.
S Jack Butala:
I have money to burn on your deals.
Jill DeWit:
On your deals.
S Jack Butala:
Exclamation point.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly. Do you need to send out a few thousand offers to property owners like us? Give offers to owners or call, check them out. No setup fees, free Mail Merge, and exceptional service. We should know as it’s our company. And I want to remind you too, we now have a new product in there called Concierge Data and Pricing. Check that out. It’s awesome. So give offers to owners a call today.
Jill DeWit:
We’re Steve and Jill.
S Jack Butala:
We’re Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
S Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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