Building a Land Work Flow Process like Machine Events (LA 1698)
Building a Land Work Flow Process like Machine Events (LA 1698)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Happy Monday.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy show “Entertaining Land,” investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun
Steven Jack Butala:
Today Jill and I, aside from Jill looking like a hippie, are going to talk a little bit about building a land flow.
Jill K DeWit:
What are you talking about?
Steven Jack Butala:
Building a land workflow process, like machining events.
Jill K DeWit:
Why do you think I look like a hippy? Because of my necklace?
Steven Jack Butala:
You got a little hippy thing going on. And it’s good.
Jill K DeWit:
Well yeah. By the way, this is Laguna Beach sand in here. And by the way, did you know that there’s a fire? Did you see the news today?
Steven Jack Butala:
No.
Jill K DeWit:
As we’re recording this it’s Thursday, it’s four days before this is going to air and there’s a big fire in Laguna Beach right now.
Steven Jack Butala:
In Laguna Beach itself?
Jill K DeWit:
Yes. And it’s real close to the homes, so the firefighters, a wall of them standing between homes, it’s in the little canyon and it’s sitting in the winds and that’s what’s happening, it’s blowing at the wrong, you know…
Steven Jack Butala:
Every single year.
Jill K DeWit:
I know, that’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
Every year this happens.
Jill K DeWit:
This is true. I know.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s still terrible.
Jill K DeWit:
I know, it’s scary, but I’ll take my hippy…
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s an outstanding way to change the conversation almost immediately.
Jill K DeWit:
Wearing my Laguna Beach sand.
Steven Jack Butala:
It took an eighth of a second for us to not talk about real estate.
Jill K DeWit:
Yes, thank you. Now you know. Welcome to my world.
Steven Jack 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 please don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel, comment on the shows you like
Jill K DeWit:
Kim wrote… “Does anyone know if there’s an easy way to search days on market for agents? I’m one by one-ing my way through Zillow and LandWatch at the moment, researching listing and brokers to engage. But I keep thinking there’s an API or Excel download that I could be accessing. I’m attempting to weigh sales price versus days on market for these agents.” Interesting. “This approach seems to make sense when choosing who I contact, let me know if you look for other characteristics as well in a listing agent.” Oh, I have a few! “I don’t want this to take forever, but right now I’m new to this piece of the process and wanting to make a little sense out of who I should engage.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Kim, this is an extremely intelligent question. And Jill’s got a lot to say, but before she says it, I want you to stop this notion of tying a real estate agent, the best real estate agent out there, maximizes your price. So I think that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get a download to see who’s getting the most price per acre, and then you’re going to contact that agent and they might be your agent. Jill’s going to dispel that for you right now.
Jill K DeWit:
Totally. So Kim you’re clearly like Jack, and it’s all data driven. And I do understand that, but here’s my first tip to finding an agent. Do they answer the phone?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yep, call them.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s number one.
Steven Jack Butala:
Jill calls him at like six in the morning sometimes to trick him.
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t do that!
Steven Jack Butala:
Two or three days ago, you did that.
Jill K DeWit:
It was 8:00 and it wasn’t a trick! Okay, wait a minute. It was between 7:00 and 8:00. It wasn’t 6:00, but it was like 7:30 in the morning. Yes, it was early, but we were getting ready to go on the road and look at a property.
Steven Jack Butala:
And he answered!
Jill K DeWit:
And he answered and I’m like, “You know what? This might be a good guy to use.” So that’s my… It’s more about the responsiveness, how hard they work for you, and are you on the same page? Honestly, I never look at, I never look at how fast their listing closed. So I do two things. One is, do they make a good listing? Are there more than three pictures? Is there a video? Do they write a paragraph? Pulling the buyer in that stuff that you go, “Wow, I want to buy this property!”
Steven Jack Butala:
Do they care?
Jill K DeWit:
Right. That’s one.
Steven Jack Butala:
You can tell if they care.
Jill K DeWit:
Right, and then two is, are they responsive? Do they answer the phone? Do they get back to you in a timely manner? And are you guys on the same page? If you’re arguing about sales price, it’s not the right guy. Or girl, you know what I mean.
Steven Jack Butala:
This is one of the hottest markets, if not the hottest market I’ve ever seen since I’ve been in real estate. Well, it is the hottest, and so there’s also, in a one to one ratio with that, never been more lazy real estate agents right now. Because they can get away with anything because properties sell. Your job in this is to buy really good property, very, very inexpensively, and to dictate to the real estate agent how much you’re going to sell it for. They might have an opinion, but in the end you’re going to decide. They don’t have a lot of control over days on market or pricing with us. The beehive hairdo woman who specializes in midrange SFRs might sit down at your coffee table and give us all this data and say, I really think you should list your house for $358,000.
Jill K DeWit:
And then she gets in her Cadillac,
Steven Jack Butala:
Her 40 year old Cadillac. And nine times out of 10 on that type of client, which is not us in this group at all right, is going to say, “Oh great. That sounds good. Thanks. What do I sign?” So we’re telling real estate agents what to do, their job is to implement what you tell them to do from pricing and all that. And if all that happens the way it should, your days on market are going to be less than 30.
Jill K DeWit:
You had a lot to say
Steven Jack Butala:
No, I think we did well just now. There’s not any arguing. There wasn’t really any, “No, that’s not how it works.”
Jill K DeWit:
Right, it’s coming!
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic. Yeah, it’s coming. Today’s topic, building a land workflow process like machining events. This is the meat of the show. Guess who wrote this title?
Jill K DeWit:
Gee, I wonder
Steven Jack Butala:
Jill and I are neck deep in teaching Career Path right now, Career Path is a product that we have for people who just don’t want to be regular Land Academy members, this is their career. And so we’re getting a lot of questions that are in depth questions about, “Well this piece of real estate let’s turn it this way. Let’s turn it sideways and look at it. Let’s touch it. Let’s feel it let’s make it our own.” To which I say, who cares? It’s just a piece of dirt and you really need to train yourself or retrain yourself to, if you really want to scale in this business and do really financially well move a lot of dirt through your life. You need to think about machining events. So if you talk to any mechanical engineer or anybody who’s ever been involved in manufacturing, you’ll hear the word “machining events” forever because what they try to do when they make a part, when a manufacturing company makes a part, it goes through machining events.
Steven Jack Butala:
One machining event might snip it or cut off some part of the metal. Another machining event might insert grooves, so it can be screwed into something, and on and on and on. So very complex parts have lots of machining events, very simple parts, like let’s say nuts and bolts, have two or three or four machining events. The least amount of machining events, the least expense and the faster you can kick them out. And that’s what we need to be modeling these real estate deals after, not loving on them you need. You need to send out a ton of mail, tons and tons of mail. That’s an event. The mail’s going to come back. Somebody’s going to answer the phone and get them into a CRM. That’s an event. And so on and so on. As an owner, you’re going to decide: “Yeah, I want to do it,” or “No I don’t,” or “The price isn’t right, go back and tell them the price is different.” That’s an event, and on and on and on, and then shove it to the real estate agent and onto the next deal. There’s too much love.
Jill K DeWit:
Like, “Maybe we should rezone it, look what’s going on over here…”
Steven Jack Butala:
Yes Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
“Maybe this…”
Steven Jack Butala:
“Maybe we can deforest it.”
Jill K DeWit:
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.”
Steven Jack Butala:
“Maybe we can subdivide it.”
Jill K DeWit:
“Yeah, I can clean it up. Heck, I’ll go out there myself.”
Steven Jack Butala:
“Maybe we can put some roads in.” None of that. That’s all stopping you from being successful.
Jill K DeWit:
“Maybe I should call a Forester and see what they would do if they wanted to take the trees off,” and all of that. All these things are going to slow you down. Let me back up. Here’s here’s my opinion on this
Steven Jack Butala:
You have a lot more to say on this than I thought.
Jill K DeWit:
I do.
Steven Jack Butala:
I’m glad.
Jill K DeWit:
I think that a lot of the things are going to slow you down, and you should not even consider them until – there’s a caveat – you have that machine going and after a while, maybe a year or two, you’ve got machine, you’re making good money, You have a team, it’s like clockwork. You got some free time. Now you might stop…
Jill K DeWit:
What’s so funny?
Steven Jack Butala:
Free time. Who has free time?
Jill K DeWit:
You do.
Steven Jack Butala:
Okay.
Jill K DeWit:
We do. And this is what happens. This is exactly why I’m saying this, cause this is what happened to us. You get the machine going and then you can go, “Now I can take a step back, and maybe there’s some special use properties in here that I could even make more money. I’ve got the time to wait, and then I can do this to them.” And it might be minor split. It might be stuff like that. It’s going to take a year, but you don’t care because then it’s kind of a different product type. So the key is don’t do it on every property. Don’t change your process. But after a while, maybe test some other things and see how that goes.
Steven Jack Butala:
A lot of years ago, many, many years, to drive this point home, I had a company that would buy and sell 40 acre properties only. In the state that we were operating in at the time. Here’s the business model. We would buy any 40 acre property anywhere in the state. No questions asked, forget about access. Cause all they had to do was be alive to sign. None of the five A’s are the six A’s or the four A’s, none of it. And we would auction it off, on the internet, on various places on the internet at the time. And we would sell it for anywhere between 6,500… We would buy it for 4,000, sell it for anywhere between 6,500 and $40,000 or $50,000, or anywhere in between. And we moved some dirt, and we never looked at the deals. We never cared. We just made sure that we got title insurance and collected the money on the sale.
Steven Jack Butala:
That kind of model is what you should be after. I’m not saying go try to buy 40 acre properties for that number. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying what you’re looking for is that type of consistency, right? If if you have to look at a property on NeighbourScoop or anywhere else and really think about it for too long, you shouldn’t be buying it.
Jill K DeWit:
Correct. Oh, that makes me feel good. You know right away, don’t try to see something that’s not there. That’s another show. Happy could join us today, five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the Land Academy show is called “The Role of your Telephone in the Land Business.” You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
That sounds like a Jill topic.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s totally a Jill topic. Today was mine. Tomorrow’s yours.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh has this come because the other day when I was holding up my phone and… Is that where that came from?
Steven Jack Butala:
No, again, this is all coming from Career Path.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s where I think I was doing it. Here’s my phone, here’s my headset. Or my earbuds. They’re with me everywhere I go.
Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re a one person operation, you should be on the phone all day. If you’re doing this right. I don’t think I convey that. I convey, “Data, data, data, do it this way. This is how you do an Excel,” all that.
Jill K DeWit:
Sit back and find a Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s about it. Hey, thanks for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really do appreciate your support. Don’t forget if you haven’t already please check out our YouTube channel and hit that subscribe button. There’s a lot of good videos there too, by the way.
Jill K DeWit:
We’re Steve and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Information…
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration…
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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