Jill Friday – Running Out of Land to Sell (LA 1722)
Jill Friday – Running Out of Land to Sell (LA 1722)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steven, Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hi.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the valley of the sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I… Well, it’s still Friday and she’s going to talk about running out of land to sell, what a beautiful thing.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s great. We’re both going to talk about it because it’s happening to you too.
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 back in the day, it was nearly impossible to find land without a mailing address, which is almost all of the property that we buy, we’re in the land business. To solve this, we now access a live database by assessor’s parcel number to find any property in seconds. And like all of our products, all the products we developed, we used it for ourself first to solve these problems and then made it public on a website. In this case, we call it neighborscoop.com, call us, or check us out at neighborscoop.com or landacademy.com.
Jill K DeWit:
Perfect. Sandy wrote, “I’ve heard some investors complain about certain states like New York because of the additional work in order to close the deals. What other states have a lot of hoops to jump through in order to get deals done efficiently? I read in a group, Ohio has extra issues to deal with.” So one of our moderators, Lori wrote back. I’m going to read her response and then we’ll weigh in here too.
Jill K DeWit:
Lori said, “I used to think that about this too, but I found that if you’re doing closing with title escrow or an attorney, there’s not much difference in the effort and the headaches between states. Some are slower, more expensive and more antiquated during deal process, where you need to do your homework is before you start mailing that state. Learn whether the state allows a post-sale disclosure of the sale price, if not, you won’t have any sold comps to use. Not always a problem, it’s fine, but find out if there’s legal to send offers there. Are assignment’s legal if you’re planning to do that. Make sure your target county has data online before you mail and make sure it’s up to date.” Those are just some extra things that matter. I love that.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s no real difference between states at all-
Jill K DeWit:
Not any more.
Steven Jack Butala:
At any state, you can use a lawyer to close just about any state with very, very few exceptions. They don’t embrace the concept of escrow agents as a replacement for every… Used to be lawyer’s [inaudible 00:02:26] to close the real estate deal. And then in California, they devised this process to make it faster, and it’s since then worked its way east from California’s from back in the… I don’t know exactly when it all started.
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t know.
Steven Jack Butala:
So, she’s right, just do your home work.
Jill K DeWit:
[crosstalk 00:02:45] and things like that. Yeah, so that’s the thing. It really isn’t, especially the deals that we’re doing. So I think what she’s talking about is once upon a time, doing smaller deals and closing yourself, there were states that you couldn’t do that. That’s true. But now all the deals that we’re doing is… Even newbies right out of the gate. We’re teaching you how to add a zero and do bigger deals right away. And for those deals, you’re using an attorney or escrow or something, and so, it’s not hard at all. I would argue it’s even easier by the way.
Steven Jack Butala:
So would I.
Jill K DeWit:
Back in the day, I used to fight. I used to say, “Closing my own deal’s easier.” No, I thought, let somebody else do it, and they do all the work. It’s nice.
Steven Jack Butala:
Absolutely. Today’s deal Friday. She’s going to talk about running out of land of sell. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
Is this not the greatest problem to have?
Steven Jack Butala:
Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good. When we have no land, we have tons and tons of cash. When we have no cash, we have tons and tons of land, but it all seems to move in the right direction.
Jill K DeWit:
Right. It’s the greatest thing right now, who knew post COVID how it would all shake out so many things that I’m sure you’re scratching your head too going, “If you told me a year ago this would happen or that would happen or fill in the blank, I wouldn’t have believed it.” But crazy stuff’s happened. And for us, I’m just… We’ve never, ever had a lull where we couldn’t sell property, first of all. We may have had times in our career that we didn’t sell it for the prices that we were hoping to, but we always made a profit because we bought it so well, maybe I didn’t double my money or triple my money. Maybe I did 80% or 75% or something like that. I’m fine with that. Those are still incredible numbers to move property through and keep food in the table.
Jill K DeWit:
But what’s been happening now is, I don’t know if it’s everybody has so much more money right now, or they’re just sick of everything. People are just wanting land and wanting to get out of these cities and ourselves, and so many of our members, it’s like I run the risk of running out of property and it’s such a great problem to have. What’s funny too is sometimes, we’ve talked about this before on the show, Jack will say to me, “Please don’t let that one go below X, because I really know it’s worth that. I know what’s going on over there.” How well you guys are doing. I’m like, “You know what? Done.” You think that you’re retail pricing it, like you’re it up here. Well shucks, even those are selling in a couple of weeks, I’m here looking at me like, “What did you do?”
Jill K DeWit:
I’m like, “I didn’t do that, it’s just happened. Yeah, it’s a great property.” And it was still a solid, good price, and it went. So how do you combat this? You don’t stop. When you start seeing this happening, last… Let me back up. Last thing you want to do is buy something, like buy 10 properties, sell them all, send up mail, rent, repeat. That’s not the way to do things. It’s going to slow you down. It’s not a good system. While you’re in the middle of it right now and you’re like, “Uh-oh.” You can start to see what’s happening like, “I had 50 properties, now I have 30. I can see 20 coming. I need to get… And my bank account’s growing.” Yay. You need to keep the wheels going and keep moving faster. So what you have to do is just keep sending mail.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s right.
Jill K DeWit:
Keep pushing property through the system. If anything, this is the best way to get your company bigger, is by pushing yourself to do more property and, or larger dollar amount properties, maybe bigger size or just something that they’re just more valuable, because then you’re going to build your bank account even faster.
Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know what else to say. I mean, if you’re doing everything right… I’ve always said this since the beginning, in a perfect world, if there is such a thing, which there isn’t, you would never actually own a piece of real estate. You would be moving it through the cycle so fast that you own it for a day, and then it’s sold for the… And so, you always have… You’re cycling through money. You’re cycling through real estate, that’s not how the world is. But in times like these, you run out of land. And so if this were an economics class, running out of inventory is horrific for most people, but we’re not a manufacturing company.
Steven Jack Butala:
We don’t build cars. And supply chain is imperative to building a car and running out of inventory, car inventory, the finished product or the parts that make the car is detrimental. But for us, it’s not so bad. That’s just another glaring example, I’m not selling anything here, I’m just saying why this business is so great, you have so much control.
Jill K DeWit:
You do.
Steven Jack Butala:
If I need more inventory, then I’ll send out 5,000, 10,000 more letters. If I need more cash, I’ll sell some property that I don’t necessarily, not really happy with the sell price, but I can generate cash pretty fast.
Jill K DeWit:
Perfect.
Steven Jack Butala:
Lot of control.
Jill K DeWit:
Perfect. Show’s short today, but I think we got our point across. I hope you had a great Friday and happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode, because you are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Trying to think, I have examples of members, but I think you get it. I love it when I see these people talk and in discord all our members. So in case you weren’t sure, we have our landinvestors.com online community, but behind the scenes, there’s a lot more chatter going on. Not only in Land Investors, there’s a closed area there, but there’s also a discord that we use for really up to date notes and comments and it’s awesome seeing what’s happening and these numbers of what people are doing in the volume.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you. I mean, I review what goes on with offers to owners. Once a month we have a kind of a… Just look at the numbers and the whole thing and it used to be that we would send out a 100,000 to 200,000 letters. Then it was 300,000 and last month it was 800,000 letters. So there’s a lot of mail cycling through the system and a lot of property being purchased and sold. We’ve never bought so much property probably as we have right now.
Jill K DeWit:
No, you know what’s so great about it too, I’m being pickier. I’m getting good stuff and I hope you are too. Thank you for tuning in. Hey, by the way, coming soon… It says now, is this coming soon? Is there more than…
Steven Jack Butala:
[crosstalk 00:09:29] by the time this airs.
Jill K DeWit:
You think it’s going to be about time this airs?
Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, well, okay. I’m going to let you go with that.
Steven Jack Butala:
[inaudible 00:09:36].
Jill K DeWit:
Soon, maybe today. I am not sure. Give it a minute, because I don’t know if I could handle this today. So let’s back up. Let [inaudible 00:09:49] give you a little bit, welcome to my world. This is how Jack announces to me that he’s launching a company under my direction. I just got the notice. This is my way of getting the memo. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be ready for it today, so give me a couple days, but very soon, we’re going to be able to notarize your closing documents worldwide from our office. Recently, the legislature has changed the notarization rules in our favor. Closing documents notarized has never been easier, so this… We haven’t even named it yet. Thank you very much. So check it out, go to support@landacademy.com if you have some questions about it or just watch Land Academy, watch our site and watch your email because there’s going to be a huge, huge blast when this does get turned on, I’m excited. We are Jack and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Information.
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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