3 Biggest Roadblocks to Success in Land Investment (LA 1804)
3 Biggest Roadblocks to Success in Land Investment (LA 1804)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and 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:
And I’m Jill K DeWit. Broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Haven’t said that in a while.
Steven Jack Butala:
It just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?
Jill K DeWit:
It does. Actually, I still have to think about it. I’m used to the valley of the sun now, but we’ll get it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about the three biggest roadblocks to success in land investment as I think the members see it, not necessarily how I see it.
Jill K DeWit:
I would like to pause and note, if you’re watching this, you see a different background, we’re not our usual thing and we’re certainly not at the beach where you’re used to see the bikes going by behind us. So we are in a sweet Airbnb for the whole month of July, so that’s what’s going on.
Steven Jack Butala:
The audio video production will suffer because of that, but I think our attitudes are a lot better.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. Good point.
Steven Jack Butala:
Before I get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. And I hope you know that we have a full blown operational commercial printing company called Offers, the number two, owners.com. Jill and I set it up a bunch of years ago out of our own frustration of trying to get our own mailers out with a regular non-specialized commercial printing company. If you’d like more information, it’s the cheapest to best places to send a mailer. Trust me, check out support@offers, the number two, owners.com or just go to the website.
Jill K DeWit:
Jaylen wrote, “I hope everyone had a great 4th of July. Is there anyone in here that’s working with commercial vacant land. I’m getting ready to send in a mailer and I have a couple questions about it.
Steven Jack Butala:
I’m just going to basically talk about it. I know, Jaylen, a lot of people piped in. Here’s how I handle commercial vacant land. We keep it in our mailers. If I decide to send a zip code, a mailer out to a zip code, I certainly keep in every land type that’s in there at all, commercial, industrial, there’s all, most of the places we send mailers, different types of commercial property. So there’s two schools of thought here. You have to figure out which one’s best for you. If you just look up commercial real estate or segregated out, segregate commercial property from everything else, let’s say, we just talked about this in the advanced call a couple days ago, what you’re going to find is very small numbers. So you might have a really populated county or zip code, and you’re going to I just want to look at commercial property and you’re going to see that it’s the numbers are 5% of the actual number of properties in the entire data set.
So number one, that can be an advantage or a disadvantage. The advantage is this, small numbers like that, you can price it individually, you can apply a lot of methodology to pricing, but it’s generally doable by hand. So I can look at every single property and price it and say, “Oh yeah, it’s worth $250,000, I’m going to offer 25% of that.” Go to the next one. “It’s worth $350,000, I’m going to offer 25% of that.” And on and on and on. There’s a lot more data on commercial vacant land than there is on just regular, rural vacant land. The bad news is you’re now about to send out a 500 unit mailer, what do you think about that?
Jill K DeWit:
Well, this sucks. I need more phone calls than that. So do it times 10, please.
Steven Jack Butala:
The best of both worlds is find about 10 places, 10 zip codes, or 20 zip codes to send a commercial real estate mailer, spend some time pricing it, and whoever’s going to answer your phone, well, in your case it’s probably going to be you because I know you’re new, and you’re all set up for it. Now you have 5,000 unit mailer for commercial real estate, you’re set up to make a ton of money.
Jill K DeWit:
Sorry. I’m just getting comfortable here still.
Steven Jack Butala:
The next topic, the three biggest roadblocks to success in land investment. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
We were talking with our pals from Chicago and that was one of the questions, what are the things that hold people back? I’m like, “Ooh, I like this.” And we haven’t talked about it for a while. And I was really spending some time thinking about this yesterday and today, and what’s interesting is even though we haven’t talked about in a while, it’s pretty much the same things, the same things that stopped people five years ago are stopping them today. And I’ll tell you my three and then I’d love to hear your three.
So my first one is, and it’s just getting going basically, first thing is people don’t take action. There should be a healthy amount of research. Really, I want a good amount of research. Don’t want three years of research, but I think three months research is good. I think that’s great. Three weeks, maybe that’s enough for you. I don’t know. I think three months is good, honestly. I don’t want you to jump into something flippantly, but I don’t want you to stop. Like I said, you don’t need a PhD in it because then you didn’t do anything, so taking action. Then second roadblock that I see people want to get into this is… And by the way, taking action is getting an education and joining a program, that’s the fastest, best way to do it.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s not on my list, but man, that’s number one.
Jill K DeWit:
Is not taking action by your research, you know what you want to do, now you found the right place, now you’re going to jump in. Whatever it is that you’re doing in life, whether it’s land investing or something else, you got to just get the education, learn from somebody who’s doing it right, and then follow them. So my number two thing is money related and I think that money’s a roadblock because of poor planning. We all know how much money comes in. We should know. Well, you know and you know how much money goes out and if more money’s going out then is coming in, then you’ve got to make some changes. And so that’s why it’s all part of planning. And if it takes you six months to save up to do it right, that’s just what it takes.
There’s nothing wrong with that. So that’s my number two. And then my third biggest roadblock to success, let’s say you got past number one, I did my research. I know what I’m doing. I joined Land Academy. I’m moving forward. I planned money. I’ve got some money in the bank. I know I can pay for data. I know I can send out mail. I can pay for a phone service. Maybe I’m working a day job, so I have them matching the phone. I planned all that out. So what’s the third roadblock that this person might encounter, they have to overcome? And it is second guessing decisions instead… Because I watch this a lot. Even people are so afraid to just push the button and send out the mail, second guessing decisions instead of trusting the process and moving forward and knowing you’re going to fail and then adjust as you go. I know that’s a lot rolled into one, but that’s my number three. What are your three?
Steven Jack Butala:
So there’s a bunch of components to doing this from start to finish. We talk about this in the formal education portion all the time. There’s between eight and 10 components to it and here they are. And this is a loose podcast version of skipping along the top of the steps to do a mailer. Number one, you troll around the internet with the parameters that you’ve set, based on how much money you want to make, we call it trolling, to find places to send mail that work for you. Let’s say you want to make $10,000 or whatever the trolling numbers are. You do that. Great. Check. Then you check those places using the red, green, yellow test to see if they’re days on marketer that fit your criteria, if people are buying and selling property at a pretty high speed there, it’s red, green, yellow tests, the trolling aspect might be perfect, but the days on market are 150 days.
We just don’t want to do that. That’s an indication that if we buy some property really inexpensively, it’s going to take too long to sell it. So that’s number two, red green, yellow test. Number three is do the mailer. Do it and price it. That’s the third component. Number four, set up all your stuff, like Jill said. Number five, answer the phone and convert some of these really white hot leads into actual deals that make sense for you from a number standpoint. Number six is send it to the escrow agent, buy the property. Number seven is post it. Number eight is sell it. That’s loosely the anatomy of a deal. Well, most in people that join Land Academy or are interested in buying certain land or generally interested in real estate are very, very intelligent and so they’ll look at this and they’ll say, “Here’s these components to a mailer, I love all of this, but I can’t stand answering the phone.”
So my number one what stops people is there’s one of these things, and there’s a lot of different flavors in these eight to 10 stops, it concerns you a lot, for a lot of people it’s doing a mailer. That’s not one of my concerns, but I’m not real interested in answering the phone for a lot of reasons. Certainly not at this point in my career. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do this because one of two of those things you’re really concerned by it, what I’m saying is you should find a partner or do it yourself for a while, knowing that you’re going to have to outsource it or make it a partnership situation at some point.
So for me, my number one thing is the reason I think people don’t completely follow through on this and hit their financial goals is because there’s one thing that’s freaking them out. And Jill and I have made it now I guess our life’s work to solve these, to create tools to make this a lot easier. For instance, Data Tree’s way easier, Offers 2 Owners is easier, concierge data does the mailer for you, PATLive answers the phone for you. It’s not an easy button by any stretch, but man it’s nothing like it was when we started. We had to do all this stuff.
Jill K DeWit:
What’s number two?
Steven Jack Butala:
Lack of organization. Okay. There’s 10 steps and then I’m going to put all these steps in Outlook. And there is a day that I’m going to send this, my mailer, to Offers 2 Owners. And it’s, let’s say, two weeks in the future, and so that’s the day I have to send it. That’s the due date for myself. We’ve all had due dates. That’s what school is. That’s what our primary education is, is deadlines, and in college, hopefully. So you work your way backwards and just like you did on every exam or every paper that you had to write for school and then put it in Outlook and stick to it.
Number three, you’re either a Jack or a Jill, I think. I can do both, and I did both for a lot of years and I did it with mediocre success. When we joined forces and I didn’t have to do the stuff I didn’t want to do anymore and I could really focus on the stuff that I like and I’m pretty good at, what a force. And that’s what Land Academy is for is to provide you the resources to find a Jack or a Jill, depending on what you need or want. And we see that in there all the time, partnership wanted is what it’s called in Discord. And daily people are saying, “I love doing the mail. Don’t want to answer the phone.” I love answering the phone. Don’t want to do the mail.”
Jill K DeWit:
I suck at Excel.
Steven Jack Butala:
I need a partner.
Jill K DeWit:
Or I suck at data, whatever.
Steven Jack Butala:
Again, we provided, I think, these solutions on this.
Jill K DeWit:
Good lists, I like this. Yours is better than mine. And I’m just thinking about the Excel thing, the other day I was thinking in the car, I’m like, “I think some people get held up just I’m afraid of it.” You can overcome it. Yo can overcome that. And that’s a whole different show.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a lot of moving parts to this. For some people it’s crazy successful. This last career path that Jill and I taught, I’ve never seen…
Jill K DeWit:
It was fun.
Steven Jack Butala:
So many diverse types of people in different parts of the country with different types of land being so successful. The first thing we do in career path is we go around the room and ask everybody, “Why are you here and how many deals are you doing? And what’s going on?” And I almost fell out of my chair. Way more successful financially at buying, selling land than Jill and I are.
Jill K DeWit:
I think in this last career path too that partnerships were formed faster than any other career path. They really did a good job of getting to know each other quickly, and that’s huge. Happy to join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
So now the episode on the Land Academy Show, while we interview a member, Austin [inaudible 00:12:45], and he tells us he’s career path, graduate or alumni. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
I’m looking forward to it. In case you’re wondering when the next career path is, I will tell you. And actually you can find it on the website. There’s dates and there’s times and there’s stuff already out there. And actually you can sign up now by the way.
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, really?
Jill K DeWit:
Yes, you can.
Steven Jack Butala:
Geez, what’s that all about.
Jill K DeWit:
I’ll tell you right now. This is going to be my little extra here.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s impressive.
Jill K DeWit:
If you go to landacademy.com/career path, you will find it. And it is October 13th, that Wednesday is the first day, and it’s the 10 Wednesdays. So we go October 13th through I think it’s December 14th, but the times are there, the days are there, it’s all there. The description of what goes on is in there. And again, there’s a button that you can join. So if you’re writing, you want to jump in, it’s there ready to go.
Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information.
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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