Why the Right Land Partner is Essential (LA 1813)
Why the Right Land Partner is Essential (LA 1813)
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:
And I’m Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about why the right partner, the right land partner is essential.
Jill K DeWit:
Not like this.
Steven Jack Butala:
This is a topic we’ve covered in the past, but this is a little bit different because Jill’s experiencing both sides of this. I think with deal funding…
Jill K DeWit:
Why you think I’m not the right partner?
Steven Jack Butala:
No, it’s not with this.
Jill K DeWit:
Both sides of this. Sometimes you don’t get the right partner, Jill and sometimes you’re not the right partner, Jill, because that could happen too. We could talk about that, and I got to make a note about that.
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 I hope you know that Jill and I personally instruct. I advanced type, instructional session …
Jill K DeWit:
… Intimate Group.
Steven Jack Butala:
Called career path. It’s for people who have made this their career, buying and selling land or people that want to make it their career. Check it out at support@landacademy.com it’s called career path and I think the next one starts in October.
Jill K DeWit:
It does. And actually you can sign up now just so you know, if you go to yeah, Did you say? Oh, you said the support one. I’ll give you one little hint too. Go to landacademy/careerpath and you’ll find out more there. Oh thank you. Tammy wrote, I found a county that I like that has a site zip code for 99% of the 2000 properties. Wow. All those 2000 properties, half of a side street address with a street number and the other half just has a street name. Should I be concerned that this is not rural enough? Because there are situs zips attached to most of the whole data set. I did spot check and it does look like there’s no buildings.
Steven Jack Butala:
No Tammy, this is a very intelligent question. I know you’re brand new. I see in Discord a lot and I appreciate your participation and you really are asking the right questions. There’s a pretty, pretty stiff learning curve to some of this, if you don’t follow the program. And so to answer your question directly, the situs address or non situs address, you know, in a mailer, in a data, any given data set a property has a mailing address where the …
Jill K DeWit:
… Tax.
Steven Jack Butala:
tax bill goes to or a situs address, which is where the property’s actually located. Well, a vast majority of many, many, many properties, vast majority of properties that we deal in, don’t have a 123 main street post office address. They just have a situs address, which might be main way. It might be just blank. The assessor doesn’t really care as long as they know which property it is and how to assess it so that they can apply the right tax amount. They don’t care exactly where it is. So the fact that what this tells is you chose a relatively urban county, but it doesn’t matter. As long as it passes the red, green, yellow test and you follow step by step, everything that we teach in chapter four and chapter five of Land Academy 3.0, you’re going to do great. And that’s …
Jill K DeWit:
… Funny, like I’m concerned, this is going too easy. You know, I can, I can totally relate to that.
Steven Jack Butala:
Well, even your result here is that you have really good data.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
Because mostly time the question’s, the other way. It’s like, I can’t find these properties at all. What do I do? And there’s a huge solution for that called geocode.io that we explain all of that and the actual education.
Jill K DeWit:
Here’s the other takeaway Tammy needs to needs to know, don’t get used to this. It’s not going to always go this easy.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. No, I’d say mail it and I think anybody else would say mail it.
Jill K DeWit:
Of course.
Steven Jack Butala:
I think you chose the right, good place.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic: Why the right land partner is essential. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
I was thinking about this, and we were talking about, this came from a discussion that we had this week. I’m like, it’s so important to have a partner when you’re doing a deal. This is really me doing deals with other people, not just ourselves. And it’s so important to, I’m sorry, there we go. Have someone that you connect with, and they get you, and they know where you’re coming from, and they know what you do, and they know how you got there. So let me back up. Here’s an example of what just happened this week. I had someone reach out to fund three land deals for me, from me. And one of them has a house on it. So I’m reading the notes. I’m starting to look it up. Doing my due diligence? And I realize, I don’t think this person’s a Land Academy member and I go digging and I look and I check and I’m like, yep, sure enough. They’re not a Land Academy Member, which is fine.
I’m very upfront and honest about, and we mean it, no good deal should go to waste. So if you’re, even if you’re not a Land Academy member, you need deal funding. You can happily submit a deal to me. But if I don’t know where you came from, how you’re educated, how you source the deal, what’s going on behind it, I have to do extra work and makes me take a step back and kind of go, all right, let’s see. What’s really going on here? And then like this particular deal, the person was very nice and upfront and honest and said, this has a house on it. I have no idea what to do. I’ve never done anything like this. I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m like shucks and it’s like six states over.
So I’m like, all right, I hate to say this, but I’m not your guy because it’s very hard to do a deal with a house on it or any structure on it, when you don’t have boots on the ground, a. Or B, you don’t know what you’re doing. You haven’t done anything like this. This is really not the place and the time for me and the resources to really help get you there and do the deal. So I had to very nicely say, Hey, I wish you all the best, but this isn’t going to be for me. You know? And I really, and I was honest and I said, for two reasons, number one, you don’t have the experience that I can work with at this point. And two, it sounds like you don’t have the boots on the ground. You don’t have the infrastructure that we need to really do this right. It goes both ways. So this person, wasn’t a good fit for me, and I’m not a good fit for them.
So let me go back too. There’s people out there that would love to probably hold this persons hand and maybe even learn together, maybe like, Hey, let’s do this together and get through it. Now we have two heads are better than one. Totally understand that. I’m at the point now with everything that I have going on and the deals that I’m doing, I can’t one on one, coach someone from zero and really effectively get them there. What I can do though, is I go watch Land Academy and then talk to me or come in career path or something like that. That’s the thing too. Who am I really doing deals with right now? It’s people like me, you know, they’re coming to me that, we’ve done six of these and I’ve got, you know, $400,000 allocated. I don’t have another 80 for this one. You want to jump in on this? I’ll be, sure I don’t even have to talk about it kind of thing.
Steven Jack Butala:
So this applies, I really think it’s an important part of life too, Joe. I just got done redecorating our primary residence and it took almost a year. One of the reasons that it took a little bit longer, other than environmental reasons, like COVID just happened and contractors are different. We would take, we would have two or three vendors come in and give us a bid. But in that, in that time I watched, I was involved in a bunch of it, certainly on the front end of the, some of these subcontractors. A flooring person would come in and that they would say, here’s what we’ve done. Here’s the bid. Thanks very much.
Well, for every two, or three, or four contractors like that, this is true with everything in life, you connect with one of them. In one case, the cabinet refinisher came in and he had full videos on a tablet. And he’s like, look, I’m the owner of the company. We only do, we only complete five orders a week. We come in on Monday and we’re done on Friday. Then we have new all new customers the next Monday. He had very proudly showed me pictures of his machinery and this process and all the money they well, and of course he was by leaps and bounds, the most expensive.
Jill K DeWit:
Expensive.
Steven Jack Butala:
And we chose him.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
We largely chose him because of what Joe’s talking about. Look, if there’s a problem, I’m going to go to the guy. He’s going to be reasonable about it. There’s always problems. I’m telling you, there’s not problems, there’s always issues that have to be dealt with in any project, including a real estate deal.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
Exact same is true with employees. We want to run a fairly large crew, and I can tell you right now, there’s a personality type for employees that Jill and I both get along with very, very well. They’re complete and total start self starters. They don’t need a lot, or any, direction from us. The majority of the people now who we have are probably smarter than us, or better at what we hired them for than we are. Certainly on my side, we cut everything in half and all the things that I’m responsible for without exception, everyone is better at their jobs than I would be if I had that job. I just had the benefit of gray hair and kind of keeping everybody together and motivated. Providing tools to let them succeed, computers and content direction and things like that.
It’s no different with the land deal. There’s people that submit deals to us seeking us out as a partner, a funding partner who don’t necessarily want to get the deal done. They want us to do the deal. They’ll throw a lot of stuff at the wall just to see what sticks. And then, so that’s not the right partner for us. There are other people in our group who will happily do that. They’re not sending out their own mailers. They have a bunch of money and they’ll work with the, you know, they don’t want to locate the deal they want you to. And then they’ll do the deal for you. That’s just, our way’s not the right way. It’s just the one that works for us.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Jack Butala:
I guess that’s the whole point of this discussion is you have to really decide what works for you. And then only hang out with the people that, you know, really …
Jill K DeWit:
… You get it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Where everybody understands each other. it’s a total birds of a feather situation.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s Land academy for a lot of it. I mean, really.
Steven Jack Butala:
The older they get, the easier this is to digest. I think that when you’re really young, you tend to just say, you tend to celebrate all the different types of approaches to whatever you’re trying to accomplish. And I think that’s really, really healthy, I think it’s great. It’s really, really healthy until you find out who you really are and how to actually get stuff done really effectively. Then it’s like, all right, I want to surround myself with some people that are going in the same direction I am.
Jill K DeWit:
I have a question for you. What did you do? I’ll go first if you want me to. What did you realize along these lines? And you were really, really young and you, and then you’ve changed it now. For example, I’ll give you mine. When I was really, really young, because that was a good point you brought up. I used to want everyone to like me and I was crushed when people didn’t like me. If I had been in this role right now, I would be trying to do every single deal and make everybody happy.
Steven Jack Butala:
I gotcha. So would I, Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
All of that, I’m not doing that anymore. If you don’t like me and I moved too fast and it’s too hard, I’m like, sorry, I’ll be over here.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Looking at my bank balance and you can stand over there still trying to figure it out.
Steven Jack Butala:
So professionally, I really learned, I’ll answer it socially in minute. Yeah. Professionally I learned about, I learned this about myself when I was at the very early stages of investment banking where I would find a healthcare facility. A seller wanted to sell the healthcare facility and I would go to certain buyers and you know, it, wasn’t hard to sell healthcare facilities back then. I still don’t think it is. You find one, let’s say it’s in the middle of the state. You look at who owns all the other healthcare facilities around there. You just kind of drag out a circle and you’ll see that there’s one or two, or five, or eight other owners or operators of these facilities. You invariably just like here, really get along with one or two of them. The other ones it’s are you just keep bringing them deal, after deal, after deal? No, I don’t like the paint color on that one. It’s like, okay. You know what? After like the seventh deal, paint color, doesn’t really matter to me.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
As a broker of the deal, as a buyer, or the seller, it’s just, it’s not what not anywhere. So in the end, I think that those types of people just want to be in the action. They’re really just on the sidelines. They have no intention of ever really making a decision. Then in that group of potential buyers, you’ve got somebody who’s probably associated with a company that’s got a real high, real hardcore taste for acquisitions. They’re going to overlook some of the flaws and bring something to the table when they buy the facility and say, yeah, the staffing’s all off. We’re going to restaff this the way that it should be. The delivery of care is not what we want to focus on. We’re going to deliver on something on this. Now we’re all working together. All the cylinders are firing and we’re getting some stuff done. And that’s how Jill and I are to this day. Back then, I was like, there’s something wrong?
Jill K DeWit:
What was your point when you were young, that you do differently now?
Steven Jack Butala:
The age?
Jill K DeWit:
No, no, no, no. What did you look at differently then? Or think the differently then like now? Mine, then I wanted to please everybody now, I don’t care. What’s your one sentence and two cents?
Steven Jack Butala:
Back then, I just wanted to, I thought I should get every single deal done that there was something wrong. I was taking it personally.
Jill K DeWit:
Now you’re just now you’re being selective,
Steven Jack Butala:
And the fact is there’s …
Jill K DeWit:
… which is good.
Steven Jack Butala:
Some deals are just innately flawed for, regardless of whatever happens. You can’t take any of this personally.
Jill K DeWit:
No.
Steven Jack Butala:
You can get a partner in a deal and look at some stuff and really laugh about it and say, yeah, maybe we’ll do the next one.
Jill K DeWit:
There you go.
Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, the older we get, here’s the truth of it.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
The older we get and I hear other Land Academy members say this too, the more picky we are.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. You know, the better it is. I love it. Happy you could join us today. Five days, 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 … Well, I’m going to talk about the reality of pricing, a land blind offer campaign. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. I just priced a massive mailer and I’m going to talk all about it. It’s how long it took me, what I focused on. It’s actually all very, very good news. It’s a little time consuming, but man, it came out. I love the end of the project.
Jill K DeWit:
Constantly tweaking. Speaking of constantly tweaking, this year in 2022 we tweaked another program and it’s Land Academy 3.0. We are doing things differently now than when we did when we launched years ago. And then what you did decades ago. Sorry, I didn’t mean to age you there, but …
Steven Jack Butala:
The camera’s on. They can see.
Jill K DeWit:
I know. That’s true. You know exactly how old we are. Anyway, check it out, go to landacademy.com. You can do some recon onto Land Academy, 3.0, which is catching up with Land Academy for 2022. Then if all else fails, just send a note to support@landacademy.com. 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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