Occupations that are Going Away (LA 1601)
Occupations that are Going Away (LA 1601)
Transcript:
Steven J Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hi.
Steven J Butala:
Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit. And we are broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.
Steven J Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about occupations that we think are going away.
Jill K DeWit:
I want to even add just, not just, the big picture concerns about what’s coming. It’s so interesting. So I’ve read some interesting articles this morning. I’m going to, I have some notes to share.
Steven J 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 don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel, comment on the shows you liked.
Jill K DeWit:
Anthony wrote, a couple of topic suggestions, using the 80/20 rule, which is the Pareto principle in the land business. “I read this book a few years ago, and I applied the advice in it to a business I was running at the time. The results were shocking improvements in profitability. I moved on and forgot about this until last week when I heard it mentioned in a video, and I remembered how it helped. Identifying those 20% of things that produce 80% of the results. And then…” Is this for me?
Steven J Butala:
No.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, okay.
Steven J Butala:
No. It’s for our listeners. If you get something out of it, then that’s up to you.
Jill K DeWit:
All right, thank you. “And then putting your focus on those things can result in big improvements. It’s hard sometimes though, to be ruthless about applying the rule, an example, what characteristics do the people who accept your most profitable offers, like the 20% that make the 80% of the profit have in common?” Oh, this is a little out there, but yeah. “Are they out of state owners? Are they behind on taxes? Are they married age? How many homes do they have? Income? The idea would be to build a profile and find ways to target those people in that data.” I took this as something else. I just took this as 80/20, like what am I doing every day that takes up 80% of my time.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah, this is, I mean, we can talk about that in a minute too, but really if you’re just buying and selling land full time, every one of us has one or two deals every year, where we say, “Oh my gosh, this is the greatest deal ever. If I could do just 10 of these, instead of all these other 50 deals, where I only made five, $10,000 or $15,000. But this one I made $150,000 on. All I need to do is 10 of these, where I make a million bucks a year.” And so that’s the 80/20, there’re all kinds of, it’s a tremendous number of examples. So the idea is to sit yourself down, and think about it. In my case, I’ll take a piece of paper or, a tablet, or whatever with a pen. And I’m just brainstorming about why that deal was so good.
Steven J Butala:
And the flip side is, why some deals just didn’t work out. And so it’s not so much, like he says here in the question, the profile of the person that you’re buying from, because I don’t believe in that. I believe in sending everybody an offer and just, well, they’ll find you.
Jill K DeWit:
I agree.
Steven J Butala:
You send out 25,000 offers, that five people or 10 people in there that are just dying to sell that day are going to find you. They’re going to respond to your offer and say, “Yes, I want to do the deal.” The question is, if I send out 25,000 offers, and I do it for only the property profile, and the pricing profile, where I made that $150,000 net, I’m going to do, it’s not going to be 80/20 anymore.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s the key.
Steven J Butala:
It’s going to be, it’s going to be 50/50, or 60/40 in your favor.
Jill K DeWit:
Right, I’m going to find more properties, priced this way, in this area, and with this attribute, because those fly off the shelves.
Steven J Butala:
Yep.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s the goal.
Steven J Butala:
Cast a wider net, but cast a wider net in the type of fish that you want to catch, not in all fish.
Jill K DeWit:
Right. Because I agree, and my main thing is, if you’re going for bigger properties, if you’re mailing to buy for 20, 30, 40,000, because you know, it’s worth double, that triple that almost, then that’s for me the best. That way, versus I don’t care about where they are in their taxes, if they’re married or not.
Steven J Butala:
No. I wouldn’t pay attention to any of that.
Jill K DeWit:
If they’re 20, or 50, or 80, I don’t care.
Steven J Butala:
You’re not going to see, I can tell you in my years of doing this, decades of doing this, you’re not going to see any consistency in that anyway.
Jill K DeWit:
There’s so many young kids that just inherited the property from dad who was 80, and you missed them.
Steven J Butala:
Plus, you don’t have that in your dataset. I love this question, I obviously put it in here. You don’t have age of ownership in a dataset, you don’t. The only things you have in a dataset, if you’re newer is stuff that the assessor cares about, so that they can make a logical assessment on the property, send them taxes.
Jill K DeWit:
If they have a mortgage on it, or taxes.
Steven J Butala:
If it’s got, if you have a one acre property that’s got a 7,000 square foot mansion on it, with 10 outbuildings, and you have a one acre property that’s vacant right next to it. Those are going to be taxed very differently, as they should, property taxed, as they should. And so, but they don’t, if one of the owners is 18 and one of them is 80, nobody cares about that. That has nothing to do with the assessed data.
Jill K DeWit:
You are correct.
Steven J Butala:
What Jill was alluding to earlier was time management. And so, I’m going to address it because she brought it up.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, great. This is awesome. I love this.
Steven J Butala:
This is a problem.
Jill K DeWit:
This is a throw Jill under the bus.
Steven J Butala:
No, I’m going to throw myself.
Jill K DeWit:
No, we’re going to talk about it on Friday a little bit.
Steven J Butala:
Oh what’s Friday’s show?
Jill K DeWit:
Friday’s show is about what Jill does in our office all day.
Steven J Butala:
I recently, I’ll leave it at this and we’ll talk about it on Friday, put a spreadsheet together about things that you can spend your time on during a Workday.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven J Butala:
And the vast majority of everything that we, I put myself at the top of the list, what we work on makes no money.
Jill K DeWit:
I understand.
Steven J Butala:
Today’s topic, occupations that we think are going away. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
And it’s not just us, by the way. I’m sure you know this there’s article, after article, after article, right? That’s saying this, am I right?
Steven J Butala:
Absolutely. One article came out. I think it was Forbes or Fortune.
Jill K DeWit:
You go first, because you started this with your list, and then I’m going to add a couple follow-up comments.
Steven J Butala:
There’s been a two week trail of articles based on what about occupations, that the whole world, no financial analysts and economists think that are going away, they’re all an offshoot of the one original article. I don’t know what the original is, because it’s been regurgitated so many times. People have been saying that real estate agents are obsolete for years, for years, and years, and years, there’s never been more real estate agents, and successful real state agents than there are right now. Why is that? Because a lobbyist groups propping them up. Is it ever going to go away? Yeah, it’s going to start to go away. Think people, things like Redfin, which is a creative way to employ real estate agents, but for less. Things like that pop-up, all these fad type offer apps, that are geared toward 30 something females, that you see on, because females make a decisions in a household usually.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah I see them on commercials on TV
Steven J Butala:
That stuffs gone.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. “Do you want this package or that package? This is the renovation package. This is the, we clean it for you, and organize it for you package. And this is the, you don’t do anything package.”
Steven J Butala:
This failed, by and large failed. And the ones that actually survived, aren’t really cashflow positive, but they’re not set up to be. They’re only set up to be an acquisition candidate, for a bigger company. So, do I think that real estate agents are going to go away anytime soon? Hell no. I think they’re here to stay for quite some time. Unfortunately.
Jill K DeWit:
I think there’re too many.
Steven J Butala:
Unfortunately.
Jill K DeWit:
Don’t you think?
Steven J Butala:
I think the fact that there’s too many real estate agents is great. I think they all can feed on each other like cannibals.
Jill K DeWit:
Because everybody’s going to get one good deal a year, or one good deal, hopefully, a month.
Steven J Butala:
How about escrow title agents? Never going to go away.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven J Butala:
I don’t think.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Shucks. I was hoping we could do it on our own, but they’re making it harder. So I want to talk, can I, tell me when you’re done?
Steven J Butala:
It’s all you.
Jill K DeWit:
You want to go some more? You want to talk about more occupations?
Steven J Butala:
No, I mean, I have a few, but I want…
Jill K DeWit:
Bring it.
Steven J Butala:
Well, I really, and rightfully so, I think some of the rest of the occupations that I have, and I have a personal issue with this, with minimum wage type. I think that the minimum wage personally should go up. The national minimum wage is too low, it doesn’t go up with inflation, not even close. And so what’s happening, and it’s been happening in factories for years and years and years… I grew up in Detroit. So every, at the dinner table, all I would hear is, my jobs being outsourced or automated, usually automated, not outsourced. So, and now you walk through any Walmart or grocery store. The line, the self checkout line is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Used to be, there as one little lane, and it was empty. This is not long ago. Now there’s like eight lanes and they’re packed, and there’s only two or three people that are actually checking people out, like old school cashiers, is what I’m saying. I think that’s going to be gone.
Jill K DeWit:
I used one the other day. I was surprised myself, because you know what, there were, because I didn’t want to wait for the… They had one cashier, you know what they do? They almost force you into it. There was only one cashier, and you want to stand in that line? Or you want to do it yourself?
Steven J Butala:
So I think the world’s a better place because of this. I don’t think it’s taking people’s jobs away. There shouldn’t be all these minimum wage jobs anyway.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay.
Steven J Butala:
It’s too easy to get some type of skillset, and make better than that.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, can we talk about that occupation? Because this is where, this is what was my readings this morning? What I read this morning was all about a lot of the minimum wage jobs, and even those are going to be… They’re getting cut, cut, slash, people don’t want them. And let me tell you what, hospitality and travel is coming back, right? But what’s happening, if you’ve not stayed in a hotel in the last six months, let me tell you what goes on, daily room service, you don’t get that anymore.
Steven J Butala:
It’s gone.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s gone. So these hotels, by the way, are loving it. They don’t want to bring it back. I was reading article after article this morning about all these hotel chains, that are killing it. Their numbers are higher than pre-COVID. They’re beating their 2019 numbers. Why? Because people are kind of getting out and traveling again.
Jill K DeWit:
And they’re like, oh, we don’t have to offer the daily room service, the room cleaning thing. We’re saving a fortune on that, and they don’t want to bring it back. I’m like, “Wow, that is so amazing.” Then the flip side though is too, for the, the services they do want, they can’t get the people. Here’s why they told a story about, and this is I’m sure many, 2019 you’d have a bartender in a hotel that would work 18 hour days in a very expensive, popular city, make $18 an hour, plus whatever tips. And it was so expensive. He would share a room with other people that they worked at, right?
Steven J Butala:
This is fascinating, Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
No, this is true. All right, so here’s what happened, COVID hit. Guess what he did? He went to live with mom and dad because the hotel was shut down.
Jill K DeWit:
There’s nowhere to live, no work, no money. Guy’s paycheck to paycheck anyway, he’s now living at home. Well, here’s what happened. He’s now living at home in his parents’ basement for free, and mom is cooking him meals. So this guy sitting there going, do I really want to, why do I want to give this up? So some of the hotels, and some of the occupations can’t get the people, because he doesn’t want to get off the couch in mom’s basement, and mom’s home cooking. And it’s all like, he’s having that mental conversation. So, that’s what I thought was going on, it’s so interesting. The other thing that I read that was really cool, which was a positive, is because of a supply chain, especially I was reading a whole article about England supply chain, and all the things that they’re behind on, that the things that they can’t get and things being held up all over the world.
Jill K DeWit:
So what is it doing in a positive way for our country? It’s making us produce more industrial, more jobs here at home. I know. Texas went from being like number two to number eight, I think it was.
Steven J Butala:
Jobs that matter, not Starbucks jobs. It’s producing jobs that matter.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. There used to be a lot of automotive and things, right? In Texas. That was a thing.
Steven J Butala:
And oil.
Jill K DeWit:
And so now other states are doing more, they’re surpassing Texas, as far as producing and creating these industrial jobs. And that makes me happy too.
Steven J Butala:
Me too.
Jill K DeWit:
And it was just, it was very nice. I’m not being political here, at all. I’m trying to be stat neutral, but they said, that’s what Trump was trying to do all along. Trying to bring more jobs here in our country.
Steven J Butala:
What news feeds are you reading Jill?
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, why? That was a California article. Well, it was produced by a California company but…
Steven J Butala:
What does this mean to us as real estate investors? What it means is people are going to make more money.
Jill K DeWit:
I hope so.
Steven J Butala:
And people are making more money. So they have more money to spend on real estate, or second homes, or rural vacant land as an investment. And so I hope, because our businesses dramatically reflect this. That’s what we’re seeing happen. We’re seeing a lot less sales time, and properties even two years ago, it’s a lot easier to sell property. Obviously you’ve got, obviously nothing’s changed about how we buy it, we buy it an inexpensively. So, there’s a lot of jobs that are going to go away. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily bad jobs. I really think that there’s, the prevalence of a coffee shop on every corner, or…
Jill K DeWit:
Not necessary.
Steven J Butala:
It’s just unnecessary. There’s too much minimum wage retail. And it’s too easy for people who aren’t that motivated, unlike most land academy members, to go get those jobs and just accept it as a way of life.
Jill K DeWit:
This is so interesting. I could go on, and on, and on. I read so many good articles, by the way.
Steven J Butala:
Go ahead Jill, give me some more, because I’m fascinated by this.
Jill K DeWit:
Google’s buying up New York. They just bought a huge building in Manhattan. I’m like, I thought people weren’t going to go back to New York, and I’m like, “Is this a real estate play on Google?” That’s what I’m kind of wondering, because they’ve been buying New York property, the last three to five years. I’m like, “Huh.” I was reading all about that.
Steven J Butala:
Well if you look at Google’s track record on real estate, it’s overwhelmingly positive. They turn properties that are invaluable, and warehouses type properties, they’re doing this in San Francisco too, by the way, and make them good. They make them great places to work, so we’ll see. Do I think it’s a real estate play on Google’s part? No, I think the culture in that company is to improve people’s lives. Google’s not what I’m talking about. Google pays great. If you’re lucky enough to get in there, Microsoft pays really well. These companies, but the problem is these retail based companies, these big box stores, grocery stores, not necessarily grocery stores because you get paid there, to work there pretty well, or better than… It’s just these endless sea of coffee shops and minimum wage type driven.
Jill K DeWit:
Fast food. That’s working itself out. Anyway, I think.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
It really is. That was, I’ll end it on this. How much of us were eating out? We were eating out, pre-COVID. We did so much out. And now post COVID, COVID taught us we can cook, we can stay in, we can enjoy our families. It’s so interesting. I know this all ties together, and this is actually probably a week’s worth of shows. So, that was fun. Thanks for listening. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven J Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show, well it’s Jack Thursday already. I’m going to talk about work life, money, balance. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. I have not successfully been able to achieve those things myself at this age.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, we’ll talk about that. I would also like to talk about, since it’s the after show, and I mentioned cooking at home, the alarm you hear in the background is Steven doing some home cooking and he forgot to had the alarm on. So that’s what you’re hearing. If you can hear, I don’t know if our guys can scrub it all out. Is it still going?
Steven J Butala:
Yeah, I don’t think that you can hear it.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, it stops after five minutes, apparently. It just finally stopped.
Steven J Butala:
Thanks Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, you’re welcome.
Steven J Butala:
Thanks for throwing me under the bus there.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, you’re welcome. That’s what love is for. Thank you for tuning in. We would love to connect with you tomorrow on clubhouse. Join us every Thursday at one o’clock Pacific time in the Land Investing Club. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven J Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information…
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration…
Steven J Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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