Jack Thursday – The Drama of Scrapping the Internet for Accurate Pricing (LA 1552)
Jack Thursday – The Drama of Scrapping the Internet for Accurate Pricing (LA 1552)
Transcript:
Steven J Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
Steven J Butala:
welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
Is it entertaining?
Steven J Butala:
Maybe.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven J Butala:
For certain people it might be.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven J Butala:
I’m entertained.
Jill DeWit:
Oh good. I’m glad. That’s what matters. And I’m Jill DeWit. We are broadcasting from awesome Phoenix, Arizona. I’ll come up with a good name.
Steven J Butala:
Today is Jack Thursday and the topic is the drama of scraping the internet for accurate pricing.
Jill DeWit:
There’s so much drama. Why is there so much drama?
Steven J Butala:
I’ll explain it all. Because you know why? Because it’s probably not ethical. In some cases, it might not be legal. Now, there’s all kinds of potential lawsuits. There’s a huge multi-billion dollar, not just a lawsuit, but it’s almost now a criminal thing. So I’m not sure if it’s a civil lawsuit or a criminal. Nobody knows the rules. That’s why. It’s brand new.
Jill DeWit:
It’s not real clear.
Steven J Butala:
Nobody knows who exactly owns what data. So we’ll talk all about that.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, because it’s MLS data. I can look at it freely on Zillow. Why can’t I look at it this way and not that way?
Steven J Butala:
That’s one of the seriously compelling arguments, in my opinion. I have access to all the data anyway.
Jill DeWit:
I could be writing it all down.
Steven J Butala:
Right. That’s right. I could be screenshotting it. Is that okay? There’s a lot of questions and not a lot of answers yet. 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 a Land Academy member, please join us on the discord.
Jill DeWit:
Kyler wrote, “Data tree question. I just pulled some data and set my parameters on all the improvement fields to zero and zero, to weed out the properties with structures. I even tried setting the living area and other fields to zero and zero, but those took my search results down to zero. Once I’d pull the data, I had almost 900 lines with some type of Homer structure on them. Is there something I’m missing to weed out the properties with structures? I tried everything I thought would work, but either they don’t weed them out or it takes my search results down to zero. Or do you think it varies by county? Thanks for any help.”
Steven J Butala:
This is a very common question. And it’s a very good question. And I have trouble with this. Everyone does. The fact is this will never go away. And here’s why, here’s a short answer. And then I’ll give a longer one. The fields that matter to you in DataTree, don’t matter to that assessor.
Jill DeWit:
Good point.
Steven J Butala:
But some fields do matter to that assessor. So, here’s the long answer and it’s very workable. I’ll get you there. DataTree is a data aggregator. They have an agreement with 3,144 counties to access their assessor data. And as you can imagine, some are very urban counties. Let’s use San Francisco as an example, because that’s where Silicon Valley is, extremely sophisticated computerized assessor in tax role. What your accessing is this tax roll. So if you did this in San Francisco, it would probably be a breeze, but we don’t buy property in San Francisco. And probably nobody in our group does because we’re rural vacant land people.
Steven J Butala:
So let’s just pick an Arkansas. Arkansas probably doesn’t use half the fields that are in DataTree. They just don’t care. They might check a box. Does it have a house on it? Check. They don’t care about how many bedrooms it is or whatever their methodology is. And I’m not judging anybody, whatever makes sense to them, it’s their county. And so you have to manipulate the heck out of getting those structures off out of your dataset, if that’s super important to you. Maybe Arkansas only cares about the square footage of the property. And so now you have to start messing with the square living area. Maybe in Phoenix, having a pool matters. And so I know that that’s a box that everybody is concerned about.
Steven J Butala:
And I use that when we’re mailing houses to try to not get houses with pools in them for investor areas or reasons. So you have to really spend hours. And then the next time you choose another county, you’re going to have to spend hours again. So I wish I had a better answer. This is one of those things that makes us data people first, before we’re real estate people. And it keeps a ton of people out of the business quite honestly. My final point is this. So you have some houses in there, send them a letter.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you for asking, Kyler. Glad you’re here. Woo. That was long.
Steven J Butala:
It really is Jack Thursday today.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, it is.
Steven J Butala:
Today’s topic is the drama of scraping the internet for accurate pricing. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit:
The drama of being Jack Butala’s cohost. Another day.
Steven J Butala:
That’s a total topic.
Jill DeWit:
That’s a Jill Friday. What’s that drama like?
Steven J Butala:
A day in the life of Jill.
Jill DeWit:
Oh gosh.
Steven J Butala:
I am sitting in the left seat, aren’t I?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. You kind of are.
Steven J Butala:
For your pilots out there.
Jill DeWit:
Ooh. Okay.
Steven J Butala:
What the heck is scraping anyway?
Jill DeWit:
Who’s scraping and what are they scraping? Is this a house renovation thing?
Steven J Butala:
Dream with me for a second.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven J Butala:
There’s a lot of different ways to see data. I see data for better, for worse in a spreadsheet or in a database. So when I look at Zillow, I don’t necessarily see one house here, one piece of land here, that’s spatial. I see right through the front end of Zillow. And I see a line by line by line by line or field by field data set. And I want to get my hands on that. That’s what scraping allows me to do. From an application standpoint, it extracts the data.
Steven J Butala:
Let’s say I choose a county and I choose five to 10 acre properties. And I extract all that data and I dump it into a spreadsheet. And it’s very helpful for me to price mailers because now I know what’s going on in that county.
Jill DeWit:
And your talking for sale property? Or sold?
Steven J Butala:
For sale or sold. Either one.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven J Butala:
Scraping is very effective for that. Is it okay to scrape? I don’t know. Is it ethical? I don’t know. Is it legal? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s legal. Not a hundred percent sure. There’s a lot of court cases right now.
Jill DeWit:
I’m sure we’ll find out in the next couple of years, it’s like when email first came out and people were just blatantly emailing people. And so that was okay for a while, until it wasn’t okay that you had to have consent and things like that.
Steven J Butala:
And then, that was the birth of spam.
Jill DeWit:
Right. That may change, we’ll see.
Steven J Butala:
So think bigger for a second. There’s tons and tons of backend data, unimaginable backend data on Facebook. So somebody got it all, four or five years ago. And there’s huge precedent setting case going on. I don’t know if it’s criminal or civil or both, and that’s probably going to tell us if this is okay or not. In the meantime, companies like Zillow and certainly companies like Facebook have office buildings full of people, writing software to make sure that this doesn’t happen. So for people like us and Land Academy members, don’t get that back end data. Why? I’m not sure, I guess it’s valuable.
Jill DeWit:
The point is you can get it, it’s there, it’s open for you to go, but just like you have to click and write them all down kind of thing. We all know we can pull up a property, see what day was posted, see when it went pending, see what the price, as long as the county discloses that kind of stuff. Let’s just say California, for example, you can pull up a property, see all the property details. You can find out the agent who did it, when it went under contract. If they updated that stuff, what it sold for, price per square, foot price per acre, whatever you’re looking at, it’s all there.
Jill DeWit:
What we’re talking about is just mass doing it at one time, which that’s a gray area. If I can write it all down, why can’t I do it all at one time? What’s the difference? I could hire a team. I could hire a team in a room of people to write them all down and then I’d have it. So what’s the difference? That’s the gray area, but we want to have it just to make quick decisions. We’re not bad people.
Steven J Butala:
Well, the way we use it, I believe it’s very ethical. We’re not contacting people or spamming them. All we’re doing is, that leads me to my important point. Why do we care? How does this affect us in land business? So if you take a county or better yet a zip code and you magically in a spreadsheet, know how much per acre, all the properties for sale and how much per acre all the property has sold for. And you start to run averages and run the math on that. And you determine that in the last 24 months, let’s say, properties are either listed or have been sold for about $1,200 an acre. Now I’m making really intelligent decisions. Like, “You know what? I’m going to send an offer to this zip code for all the other people who own land, that haven’t been involved in this for sale or sold scenario. And I’m going to offer them 800 bucks an acre instead of 12.”
Steven J Butala:
Because I know I can sell it for 1200 pretty quickly, or maybe I’m going to send it out for 400. I’ll get maybe less deals, but more profit. So you can see how it takes the mystery out of pricing by scraping data. But that’s great Jack, but they’re going to stop us from doing it. Yes they are. And I’ve been saying forever, that scraping is temporary. It’s all going to stop one way or the other. And when? We don’t know, but it’s going to stop. The answer is getting the data like the rest of us get data through an API. And we are diligently working with DataTree to get access to their API, so we can price our mailers in a very intelligent manner. In the meantime, we have worked around this because we have our own team of people too.
Steven J Butala:
So it’s just a tennis game of back and forth. Yeah. Now we’re going to use this product to scrape. Yeah, now they’re going to put up a bigger fence. And so, it’s drama. It’s right in title, but it’s important. You don’t want to just go into a county blind and not know what property is selling for. Could you do it manually? Sure. And that’s I think for non data people that see the value in sending out blind offers like we do, it’s going to take longer, but it’s not that many lines of data. If you go into a zip code and you look at just manually look at all the properties that have been sold or all the properties that are active, it’s probably 20 lines of data, 30 lines of data.
Jill DeWit:
Let’s pretend I’m not a real data person. I’m not good at this stuff. I don’t know how to do it. Is it the end of the world? Is it going to be the end of my career?
Steven J Butala:
No. Oh my gosh, no.
Jill DeWit:
Because I’m not on the front end of this.
Steven J Butala:
Absolutely not.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you. What would I do then?
Steven J Butala:
I would just go in manually and I would go into a zip code, maybe five or six zip codes. You could probably pull data, just like price, acreage size. Just write it down, put it in a spreadsheet. Take the averages like we do in pricer mailer. No, it’s not the end of the world at all.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you. That’s why people, if you’re listening and you’re like, “Hold on, I can’t do this.” No, don’t worry about it. By the way, this is a good point. Please explain what it was like back in the nineties when you started and what you had.
Steven J Butala:
Well, we didn’t have any data.
Jill DeWit:
There you go.
Steven J Butala:
Anything to scrape. So yeah, we had a dart board in the office and we didn’t have a dart board.
Jill DeWit:
There was a lot of guessing.
Steven J Butala:
There’s a lot more guessing and there’s a lot less guessing now.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven J Butala:
If we have to go back to doing this manually.
Jill DeWit:
Like driving an automatic or driving a manual, excuse me.
Steven J Butala:
And let’s say there’s tens of codes I want to send, just one county, and there’s four or five, 600 properties that we have to manually collect. Then we’re going to call the Philippines. We’re going to make a little video. We’re going to tell them how to do it. They’re going to create the spreadsheet for you. And in the end, you never had to learn anything and you got the data set anyway.
Jill DeWit:
Perfect.
Steven J Butala:
That’s the worst case thing that can happen here. By the way, none of the supplies the houses, the way we buy and sell houses in House Academy, there’s no scraping and there’s no need for that. We implicate. We implement something called smart pricing. Implicate.
Jill DeWit:
Uh-oh.
Steven J Butala:
What?
Jill DeWit:
No, that was funny. Implement.
Steven J Butala:
The highlight of Jill’s day is when I misuse a verb or adjective or an adverb.
Jill DeWit:
Some of them are cute. It’s very sweet. I think it’s funny. I love that about you. We’ve had a few of those this week. Look, it’s usually, you know why it’s funny because it’s usually me.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
I’m the one that’s jumbling up things and making up words. So when it’s not me, you better believe I find it comical.
Steven J Butala:
Here’s the difference. I go, “Oh sweetheart. Hold on a second. I think you meant to say that.” And in Jill’s case, when I do it, she just laughs at me. Just like that.
Jill DeWit:
I’m laughing with you.
Steven J Butala:
Just exactly like that laugh right there.
Jill DeWit:
I’m laughing with you, not at you.
Steven J Butala:
No, you’re laughing right at me.
Jill DeWit:
Hey, don’t laugh at us or laugh with us and we’re happy you could join us today. Five days a week, we want you to laugh with us here on the Land Academy show.
Steven J Butala:
Tomorrow is Jill Friday and she’s going to talk about sellers need to like you and your dynamic personality. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
I’m not laughing at you.
Steven J Butala:
I know.
Jill DeWit:
I’m just laughing because again, I really am like, “Yeah, it’s not just me.” That’s all.
Steven J Butala:
A year ago, I would have disagreed with this whole topic.
Jill DeWit:
About scraping?
Steven J Butala:
No, about sellers needing to really like you. I had no idea. I’ll talk about it tomorrow. How important it is to really meet people from where they come.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you. I appreciate that. Need to send out a few thousand offers to property owners like us? Checkout offerstoowners.com. No set up fees, free mail merge, and exceptional service. We should know, as it’s our company. Give Offers to Owners a call today.
Steven J Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven J Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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