Blast From The Past: What’s Possible Land Side Hustle Math (LA 1668)
Blast From The Past: What’s Possible Land Side Hustle Math (LA 1668)
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Butala:
And 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.
Steven Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about what’s possible in your land side hustle, specifically the math.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
Like these shows.
Jill DeWit:
You didn’t tell him it was going to be math class today. I did not prepare for that.
Steven Butala:
There’s going to be some math in this. Not going to be math, it’s just going to be … You don’t have to do any math, you just have to listen to the-
Jill DeWit:
All right. Good thing I have a notepad and a pen.
Steven Butala:
Listen to the good and the bed and the ugly about what’s possible and what’s not possible. I’ll tell you, here’s a hint though, it all starts with getting a mailer out.
Jill DeWit:
You want to know something realistically? I loved math in school.
Steven Butala:
I know you did.
Jill DeWit:
Did you like math?
Steven Butala:
Did I like math?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Did you know that about me?
Steven Butala:
Yes, I did.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. How did you know that?
Steven Butala:
I’ll tell you Jill, you’re a pilot and you have that natural … I don’t think we ever sat down and said, “Hey, how’d you feel about math in high school?” How boring would that be if we did that?
Jill DeWit:
I did like math. My favorite teachers were my math teachers. Math and physics, I loved those. What was your favorite subject?
Steven Butala:
Math, physics. I liked home economics a lot, because-
Jill DeWit:
Is that where the girls were?
Steven Butala:
Yes
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
You know what? I liked all. There’s not a class that I didn’t like.
Jill DeWit:
I’m trying to think. You know what was one of my least favorite classes? That I did it, and I went through the whole thing and I was even president of the club at the end, it’s a French club.
Steven Butala:
Oh, you know what? I don’t like languages either.
Jill DeWit:
There we go. That was hard.
Steven Butala:
I can get through Spanish, because it was a requirement. I like it now. I like speaking it or trying to speak it.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, you’re good at it.
Steven Butala:
I think I’m great at it after two beers, but …
Jill DeWit:
You are.
Steven Butala:
But I think I’m great at a lot of things after two beers.
Jill DeWit:
Don’t ask me to speak French.
Steven Butala:
No, I don’t even … I can’t count to 10 in French.
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.
Jill DeWit:
Herbert S, “Hello all, I’m seeking information/guidance on what I should do with the first deal that I have here. I bought this lot with a very old dilapidated double-wide fixed mobile home on the property that has been there for more than 30 years. According to Steve and Jill, this is normally a good thing, but I’ve been having troubles trying to sell it because I purchased it without having title to the mobile home and many of the buyers calling in would like to have that, which is understandable. We purchased this lot in an attorney state and did not have any problem buying it without the title. Has anyone dealt with this kind of situation in the past? What would you say are my options?”
Steven Butala:
Yes, so let’s take two steps back. Herbert, you’re in a great situation. There are two components to buying a mobile home on a piece of land. The land real estate deal, like we’re all very used to, and then the personal property aspect of buying a mobile home, which is in most of the states, maybe all states, the exact same as buying a car. It has a … You go to the DMV, it’s all … I think Texas might be different. There’s one state, in fact, it might be California. But the vast majority of states, again, if not all of them, have that DMV component. And if you’re like me, you’ve lost a title to your car before. Or you’ve incorrectly purchased a salvage title or an abandoned title. There’s all kinds of stuff that goes down with the DMV. So hopefully you’re a member of AAA or there’s some type of consultant that allows you to not actually walk into or call the actual DMV to get the answers to your questions. And they’ll help you, they’ll get it in your name. That’s number one.
Steven Butala:
Number two, I want everyone to listen to this. I’ve never been in a situation where having an old, terrible looking mobile home on a piece of property is worse than if there’s just nothing there at all. There’s a septic system in place, there’s probably a well in place or it’s attached to some water source. So all kinds of hidden things. And people know this. And so Herbert said flat out in between the lines here, “Hey, if I had title to this mobile home, it would have been sold already.” I’m paraphrasing. This is a one hour fix for you. And so you need to make sure we need to tell the story or describe it in the posting. You can say something like, “Hey, whoever lived here, whatever they did, they figured out the water situation, they figured out the sewer situation and whatever else utilities are probably there. There’s got to be utility somewhere. I mean, do you agree? Is there anything bad abour this?
Jill DeWit:
Nope. No seriously, nothing bad. I’m excited for him.
Steven Butala:
Me too. There are people that seek these situations out that are really, really handy. And they’ll get in there and take the whole system out themselves and reconnect it and clean that thing up and either live in it or have their daughter-in-law live in it or whatever. So this is way different than selling a piece of vacant land.
Jill DeWit:
It’s an improved property now. It’s great. I love it.
Steven Butala:
Also tell you this, these old mobile homes, when you have the real property, the real estate under the property, the percentages or the chances of selling it to somebody that’s very near the property. Let’s say … This has happened to Jill and I 50 times, I could probably … Well, collectively and individually, everybody’s lived in a neighborhood where you drive down the street and it’s like, “What’s going on with that house? Ever since I can remember it’s been fallen down. And I know somebody lives there, because I heard my aunt say this or whatever, fill in the blank.” So everybody’s got that eye on the house. When it goes up for sale, they want to do something. It’s a driving for dollars situation.
Steven Butala:
Although I would never recommend driving for dollars, but we’ve all been drived down the street 50 times a day. And look, that’s happening with this mobile home like this too. I can guarantee there’s people all wondering what’s going on. So first of all, I’d put a sign in front of it. They’re the people, if they live in a mobile home nearby, they know what’s going on with the water and the sewer or the septic or electric or all of that stuff. So they’re very, very, very logical buyers for this.
Steven Butala:
So Herbert, you’re in a great spot, just push your foot down on the sales gas pedal. Just take that … I’ve seen Jill … We have a set of properties they are going to be very, very profitable for us for sale. And we asked somebody to help them sell us, and they just didn’t do it correctly. So I watched Jill last week get involved. And how many houses did you get on that property last week?
Jill DeWit:
Oh my gosh, 10.
Steven Butala:
With people out there … And addressing problems. Apparently we own a gate with a cattle guard on it.
Jill DeWit:
Well, here’s the whole thing, it’s never a problem. When someone calls me, it’s not a problem. Like, “Isn’t this great? All you got to do is find this and get this and you’re good to go.” You just need to turn the situation around.
Steven Butala:
There’s a well on it, we’re finding all kinds of … Yeah exactly, Jill, exactly.
Jill DeWit:
Turn it around that it’s a positive thing, it’s never a problem. “Great, somebody did that. We know there’s a road, awesome.” “Do you have bolt cutters? I’ll buy you some.” Just that easy.
Steven Butala:
Oh no, this is what one person said. “Oh no, no, we have those in our trunk. We keep those in our trunk”.
Jill DeWit:
[inaudible 00:07:18], “No, thank you, we have the bolt cutters.” So I’m like, “Good for you. So you’re used to this too.”
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, what’s possible in your land side hustle, let’s do some math. This is the meat of the show.
Steven Butala:
Here’s the same old story you’ve heard a million times. I have a job, I don’t like my job, I’m out on the internet trying to find some kind of side hustle to do, make some extra money, and it turns out I really like the idea of buying and selling land. I have a baby at home. I have a two year old and a non-compliant wife, but I really want to do something well with my life.
Jill DeWit:
What’s a non-compliant wife?
Steven Butala:
Oh really?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Why does that come into this?
Steven Butala:
Well, do you remember-
Jill DeWit:
You have a very compliant wife.
Steven Butala:
I know.
Jill DeWit:
I hope you have a… Well, is it harder if you have a non-compliant wife if you have a non-compliant wife? You should hopefully have a compliant wife, or semi-compliant wife.
Steven Butala:
Do you remember having a baby and a four year old at home?
Jill DeWit:
I do.
Steven Butala:
Did you love life at that point?
Jill DeWit:
I had fun, but it was a whole lot of work, that’s true.
Steven Butala:
And then your man walks through the door and says, “My job sucks, I’m going to do some stuff over here and I’m going to get us out of this mess.”
Jill DeWit:
That’s good.
Steven Butala:
Jill, you are so in the minority on this.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, I’m sorry. That’s a good thing, “I’m going to get us out of this mess.” Thank you.
Steven Butala:
Every man who’s listening to this stopped what they’re doing, and they’re like, “Okay, that should be the show, not this side hustle.” How can Jill teach other women that moving forward is good, it’s not backwards.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Butala:
Maybe this should be … I’ll do the math real fast in this, so we can talk about your thing. You know what? We’ll talk about it in a minute, because I’m fascinated. Took me a lot of years, decades, to actually be in a relationship with somebody who wants to have financial independence and is pretty much willing to do whatever the hell it takes within reason to get there.
Jill DeWit:
You need to have a [inaudible 00:09:13]. Then it’s part of having a discussion when you meet. Now it’s therapy, by the way, hope you didn’t show up for this math thing.
Steven Butala:
We will do the math.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, do the math.
Steven Butala:
No, I want to hear your thing first.
Jill DeWit:
Because we had discussions about what the end goal was, and we haven’t wavered. And we’ve wavered maybe how we get there, how fast we get there, and by way of which states.
Steven Butala:
Yes we have, wavered pretty hard [inaudible 00:09:37].
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. And we’re undoing some things. We made some great decisions, then we made some crappy decisions. And so they’re all personal, not business, but we’re fixing them.
Steven Butala:
We’re moving just about as far mainland west as you can move in this country and we are going back east a little bit.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. So anyway, I really think that … And I would think a man would be like, “Hey baby, what if I said to you …” What if you came home and said, “Sweetheart, I’ve been selling X on the side and I have $25, 000 saved up in a little account here. What should we do?” Wouldn’t you be like, “Yippee-ki-yay.”
Steven Butala:
Well, first thing I would do is grab you in my arms and kiss you hard. That would be my absolute reaction to that.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you.
Steven Butala:
I just don’t think a lot of people … Let’s just leave women out of it. I don’t think a lot of people are open to change like that. Talking to myself more than you.
Jill DeWit:
I would think that they’re afraid of the other person like, “Great. I’m already one that’s doing all the meals and all the shopping and all the school runs and all the ballet, now I got to do even more because you’re going to be locked in your office doing X.” That would be the only thing that I can see that someone … And also, I would say this, worried about how much money is this going to cost?
Steven Butala:
Yeah. Those are all reasonable things. But if you trust and believe in the other person.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. And trust that they do their homework and they can follow through.
Steven Butala:
You know what I’ve found too? When people have spouses that are in medical school, they’re happy. They could have three kids running around.
Jill DeWit:
Which one?
Steven Butala:
It doesn’t matter.
Jill DeWit:
The person in medical school? No, wait.
Steven Butala:
No, the other person.
Jill DeWit:
The person going to school, the person staying at home?
Steven Butala:
The other person, the spouse.
Jill DeWit:
Why do you think that is?
Steven Butala:
There’s something about marrying a doctor, male or female, I don’t care how it goes.
Jill DeWit:
I’ve never heard of this.
Steven Butala:
Just everybody’s like, “Okay.” Because they make so much money.
Jill DeWit:
And then they’re never around?
Steven Butala:
And they’re never happy.
Jill DeWit:
Wait, wait, wait. So the person who’s in medical school, not gender specific, all they’re doing is upping their income and they’re never around and the person gets just to do what they want?
Steven Butala:
That might be your take on it. There’s some security for some reason, some financial security or something for people about medical school and I’ve never met a happy doctor in my entire life.
Jill DeWit:
I have security, but anyway, we’ll get back to that.
Steven Butala:
I think I do too.
Jill DeWit:
Well, let’s talk about the math. Let’s back to the math.
Steven Butala:
All right, good segue. Here’s some security. So now you’ve got this picture of a spouse. The other spouse has got taking care of the kids. One’s a baby, whatever. Maybe they’re in an apartment. We’ve all been through some version of this. If you had never gone through this you’re the smartest person ever, or you inherited a lot of money. And so it’s like, “I’m never going to dig myself out of this hole.” Well, here’s what’s possible if you start on the side doing this.
Steven Butala:
First of all, I would recommend that you don’t spend any money on education, including ours or any of that. I want you to spend a ton of time and energy utilizing all the free resources you possibly can, including this podcast or other people’s podcasts. To get this sorted out to the point where you can get your head wrapped around the fact that you got to buy some data or mine some data, you have to price it correctly, get a mail out, choose a good county to mail it in and get some mail out, that’s the whole goal here.
Steven Butala:
There’s no side hustle there, there’s no income, possibility of digging yourself out of that hole if you don’t get a mailer out. It’s not going to happen with tax deeds, it’s not going to happen with tax liens. You can make some money doing those things, but unless you have a team behind you and a decade of knowledge, that’s not going to work. You need to send a mailer out, get some deal flow coming back in, and then surround yourself with a support group, like on landinvestors.com or whatever, or Land Academy, or Jill’s Ladies … What is it called?
Jill DeWit:
Land Academy Ladies.
Steven Butala:
The Land Academy Ladies now. She’s got a whole crew of women that get together once a week and talk about getting to the next step or whatever’s important to them.
Jill DeWit:
My live show.
Steven Butala:
So you need a peer group that’s ahead of it further than … It used to be, when I was growing up or a young professional, the only way you could get that professionally is to be the new guy in an office, and you would learn from the older guys. And most of them are not nice, especially in Detroit. Different topic. So what’s possible? You send this mailer out, you’ve got this peer group around you, you’re starting to get some deal flow. You’re sitting there saying, “I don’t know if this is a good deal or not.” Well, if you look at 10 of them, I can almost guarantee if it’s priced relatively correctly, one of them is going to be good. And if you’re surrounding yourself with a good peer group, somebody like me or Jill, or one of these people in Land Investors or a Discord now we have, is going to say, “Are you kidding me? This is a great deal, and I’d love to fund it. So you don’t need any money, let’s do this together.”
Steven Butala:
That is how you dig yourself out of a hole, financially or whatever situation that you’re in. Create a real side hustle for yourself, get yourself associated with some people who know what they’re doing. And here’s the math, it’s going to cost you about five to $700 to send out mail. That first mailer you’re going to get about five potential opportunities. Hopefully one of them, one or two of them are very viable, maybe more. Sometimes people buy 50. I don’t know, it’s just how it is.
Jill DeWit:
You never know what’s going to come back.
Steven Butala:
Sometimes you go out fishing and you catch a ton, sometimes you only catch one or two. And so your whole goal is to get that one deal done. If you’re doing everything correctly and you’re not worrying about money because you don’t have any, you’re worried about my money. And not even that, I’m worried about my money so your job is to find some great deals. We should each clear $10,000 each if it’s a good deal. So now you’re making, let’s say you do this once a month, you’re making an extra 10,000 a month. That’s the math.
Steven Butala:
Now you’re making an extra 100, 120, $150,000 a month sending out 1500 to 2000 units of mail at a time every month. Doing all the hard work, all the hard work that people like me, not so much, Jill, but people like me don’t want to do. We just want to fund your deal, and we want to. That’s why we created Land Academy. We want you to succeed so we can succeed to, maybe funding your deals. So that’s the math. I can go deeply into the math piece of this. It’s not too hard to go from one deal a month to two deals a month. Now you’re talking about not 100 grand a year, 200 grand a year, and then one a week. Now you’re talking about half a million to 600,000 a year. Now it’s not a side hustle situation anymore. And now your spouse-
Jill DeWit:
She’s on board there. She’s on board, by the way.
Steven Butala:
Because she’s a bank account, or he. And the kids are a little older. Now you have more time to play the kids. So I’m not trying to paint a rosy picture here, it’s a heck of a lot of work. There’s a lot of crying and anger, but every house has got that.
Jill DeWit:
I never know the crap that Jack says, you never know what’s going to come out of his mouth.
Steven Butala:
It takes raw gumption to get the stone. And if you’re motivated to do it, you’ll get it done. That’s what the word hustle is.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you. Happy you could join us.
Steven Butala:
That’s it?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
You don’t have anything to say, Jill?
Jill DeWit:
Oh, I do. We have a lot … This show, we have a lot. What do you want to ask me? I couldn’t talk better what you just said, seriously.
Steven Butala:
Oh no, you have to have something to say about this.
Jill DeWit:
What? You just covered it perfectly.
Steven Butala:
All right. We’re going to talk tomorrow then.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. Happy you could join us. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the Land Academy Show is called The Three Levels of Employees, Build Your Dream Team by Jill. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
I couldn’t top at all what you just said. You explained it perfectly.
Steven Butala:
We have a show coming up this next week here, because it’s the last week in 2021 about the whole gist of the show is. Jill doesn’t know what these show are by the way.
Jill DeWit:
No, I’m there for the inception. I’m there for the whatever, but I’m not there for the delivery.
Steven Butala:
A whole point to this show is it’s not about … Learning about real estate, it’s like playing an instrument or playing guitar. If you can run through some scales on a piano or guitar, great, you’re a musician, but what does it really take to get into that and make it so people are going to listen to you or whatever you’re trying to get out of it. There’s something else, it takes this inner soul drive to want to practice, or you just into it. That’s what this, this is no different. This is no different at all.
Jill DeWit:
The same as any business, like you just said, there’s a lot of that. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please get on over to our YouTube channel, hit the Subscribe button and give my new live show some love.
Steven Butala:
And your comments and suggestions help us to create the type of content you’re here for hitting the light button helps us support our channel’s algorithm, engage your interest for future shows.
Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill.
Jill DeWit:
We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
Information …
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration …
Steven Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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