Jill Friday – Why AirTable is Imperative when Buying and Selling Land (LA 1742)
Jill Friday – Why AirTable is Imperative when Buying and Selling Land (LA 1742)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
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, well, it’s Jill Friday. Today she’s going to talk about why Air Table is imperative when buying and selling land. Before you get into it, though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. 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. To solve this, we now access a live database by assessor’s parcel number, APN, to find property instead of its actual address, like 123 Main Street. Like all of our products, we’ve developed it for our own use and then released it to the public on a website. In this case, we call it neighborscoop.com. It’s incredibly easy to use, almost all of our members use it to find property very, very quickly. In fact, fast enough while you’re on the phone with the seller to see if you want to buy it. Contact support@landacademy.com to see if it’s for you.
Jill K DeWit:
David wrote, can anyone give me any advice on setting up my website as it pertains to land acquisitions for a new land company with no land. I’m a beginning Land Academy member. Anyone know of a web developer with you have used that I could work with. I’m sure that that was all over Discord with a bunch of people sharing tips, right?
Steven Jack Butala:
It was slammed. By setting up a website, the real reason you want to set up a website very quickly is because, when you send a mailer out, you’re going to have your website on there. The first thing that people are going to do, just check you out on the internet to see if you’re for real. You want a great website all set up, maybe one or two pages at most. Nothing complicated that says, I’m Jack. This is my girl, Jill, here’s our dog, here’s a new car we just bought. We’re real people, just like you. Call us. We’ll buy your property.
Jill K DeWit:
Cool.
Steven Jack Butala:
Real, simple stuff and really inexpensive.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you for not bringing up the color palette. I thought since it’s Jill Friday, you want to talk about the color palette.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jill Friday. She’s going to talk about why Air Table’s imperative when buying and selling land. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
Here’s the scoop. We are aggressively hiring right now because, yep, we’re growing again. It just happens and not just Land Academy, but land business growing our numbers are… I just can’t keep up. We’re building it and, this is a little side note. If you are in the Scottsdale Arizona area and you want to work for us, send a note to support@landacademy.
Steven Jack Butala:
Seriously.
Jill K DeWit:
I’m not kidding. All right, got that out of the way. But the point is, we’ve been meeting with our team, our hiring team right now and talking about what we want and the right kind of people and who is successful working with us. One of the common themes is how much… We have realized a direct correlation to our successful staff members, if they are organized and they have a great system. So it’s not just everything that we do every day, but also our land business.
Jill K DeWit:
Let me bring this down to what this show is right here. So much of my, and our success in just our day to day buying and selling in land, is in a direct relationship to how organized we are. The only way we could do that is having a system. We use Air Table, but there’s Jura. There’s all kinds of great things out there. But having that system, where six people can log in at the same time and only focus on what specific task is needed of them, and they know what’s needed over them, and they know exactly where the property is as it’s going through the process, is a game changer. I can see incoming acquisitions. I see them working through the system. I see them going out to a broker. I can see postings for them all in this one thing I can just… It’s seamless how they move through and it’s not redundant. Once you get it set up, sure, Let me back up. I’m all about hiring a pro too, because that’s what we’re doing right now.
Jill K DeWit:
We’re actually revamping our systems in Air Table. We hired a pro from Toronto who makes educational videos on this. We just said, finally, we want him, and he works for us now. He is creating our own custom system to make it even better. Because I know it can be. It’s staggering what you can do in there. What do you think about it?
Steven Jack Butala:
All throughout my career, there’s internet tools that I would call revolutionary, that absolutely in completely changed how and why… I’ve always been buying and selling land. Always. But how and why I bought it and sold it. The first revolutionary tool in my world, way back in the middle of the 90s was eBay. We still, to this day buy property relatively the same way that I’ve always bought it, but how we sell it is so different, it’s silly. eBay changed all that for us. Everything became an auction and allowed us to buy 10 times the amount of property because we could just auction it off in a system. Now it’s about going and purchasing at tax auctions all over the country. Then came RealQuest Pro, which allowed us to now implement this. Now we still use this mailing system where we reach sellers by direct mail and at that times [inaudible 00:05:38] our business. All along the way, these products became available.
Steven Jack Butala:
NeighborScoop is one that Jill and I developed about two, three years ago, where that allows us to look up property based on an assessor’s parcel number. Now we know exactly what we’re buying. We know what it is within seconds and can make a decision.
Jill K DeWit:
Due diligence got cut from hours to minutes.
Steven Jack Butala:
Recently, it’s been Air Table.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
Air Table’s a situation where… Jill has been fully implementing it in our land business for about 12 to 18 months. With all the through time, she’s been successfully accomplishing this with people who are a little bit older and not as comfortable with technology and they got it, and they get it. Now we’ve company wide and all of our companies are using Air Table to close real estate deals, to hire VAs, to get in there so we know what they’re working on and control tasks. We probably are five to 10 times more efficient, literally, than we were before. We’re also finding out that certain people are not set up to just use a CRM at all. I love what you said, this is just the future now. We just need to be more efficient. You can work 40 hours a week with a couple of employees or you can work literally two hours a week with a bunch of VAs using Air Table, for next to nothing, from a labor standpoint, if they get it.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. If you’re brand new, okay, you’re brand, brand new. You don’t want to get started on… You’re you’re going to get your first 10 to 20 deals done by yourself. Can you manage that yourself in Excel? Absolutely. No reason to run out and get an LLC. You can buy and sell property in your name as you’re getting started. And you could use Excel for a little bit. I just want you to, don’t spend too much time there. I want you to, as soon as you realize, soon as you decide, this is it, I’m doing it, this is what I’m going to be doing, Wow. That was easy. Look, I just made a $100,000 in the last six months. I guess I know what I’m doing with the rest of my life. As many of us have had those revelations, then you need to go, all right, and do it sooner and not later. Get yourself going. There’s going to be a little of a learning curve. That’s okay. But it’s going to save you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.
Jill K DeWit:
Big time down the road.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s lots of formal education out there that’s cheap. Less than a $100 for eight or 10, and free, eight or 10 hour class that’s going to answer every question you’ve ever you’ve ever had. What’s great about CRMs too, which is what Air Table is, is that they’re all basically the same. They have the basic stuff. So you can learn all this stuff about Air Table. And then, eventually, there’s going to be something that’s newer and better and shinier and cheaper and all that. You can take all those concepts and just apply it. I’ve been using a CRM since 1993.
Jill K DeWit:
Me too.
Steven Jack Butala:
And I’m sure you have too,
Jill K DeWit:
Since 90.
Steven Jack Butala:
What’s great about Air Table, in my opinion, very specifically is, it’s so easy to use. You can credential everybody. If you’ve got in the Philippines, they just want to see a little section, no problem.
Jill K DeWit:
Different views and allow different permissions and all kinds of things. It’s much easier to lock it down and just give people what they need to know and just keep them on their tasks. Once you get into it, I promise, and you get going in it, it’s going to be fun and you’re going to like it.
Steven Jack Butala:
What’s bad about it? Specifically, Air Table. Is there anything bad?
Jill K DeWit:
No. The only thing is honestly, is the initial learning curve if you’ve never worked in something like that, but you’ll get over it, it’s no big deal.
Steven Jack Butala:
Not the learning curve for Air Table, the learning curve for CRMs.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
If you’ve never worked in a CRM, there’s going to be a learning curve for the concepts. The same way if you’ve never worked in a spreadsheet in your life and you turn on Excel-
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s going to be a learning curve for that.
Jill K DeWit:
Going from zero to CRM, zero to Excel. What’s a formula?What is that?
Steven Jack Butala:
I honestly would take a week. I wouldn’t rush through it. I would take a week and learn Air Table through YouTube videos and Udemy and all that stuff. Nobody likes to learn new software.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
Nobody. Me least of all. It’s just where, where we are in this world and we’re all better for it.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s great. Thank you. Happy to 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, you are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. It has changed everything. I almost wish I would’ve started our kids in it. Like, here’s what we’re doing this week. You could use it like that. You could make Air Table your family calendar. Not kidding.
Steven Jack Butala:
Microsoft 365 revolution-
Jill K DeWit:
Chores.
Steven Jack Butala:
Revolutionized our company in 2015.
Jill K DeWit:
Wow. I would’ve done that. I would’ve put all the kids on there listen, there’s chores in Air Table. Wow. So if you have an extra two or three kids around, because you can afford it. Get your kids and their chores in Air Table. Your life will be better, too. Hey, thanks for tuning in. And by the way, we are still working on this in case you didn’t know, we are aggressively working on being able to, as a company, Land Academy, notarize documents worldwide from our office, with you on your cell phone or in any video that you have available. Rules have been changing, especially in our state. We are allowed to do this. We’re working out the details now. So hang on. And if you want some more information about the service, just hit up our team support@landacademy.com. We are
Steven Jack Butala:
We’re Jack and Jill. Information
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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