Jack Thursday – There’s Always a Solution (LA 1816)
Jack Thursday – There’s Always a Solution (LA 1816)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining with land investment talk, I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday and I’m going to talk about how there’s always a solution.
Jill K DeWit:
Is there?
Steven Jack Butala:
Always. I’m a huge proponent for this.
Jill K DeWit:
I know. Does it mean I’m going to like the solution?
Steven Jack Butala:
Nope.
Jill K DeWit:
Got it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Could be incredibly painful.
Jill K DeWit:
Got it. Think I heard that-
Steven Jack Butala:
You might have to check your pride at the door and all kinds of other stuff at the door. You might be defeated, you might have to turn your entire life around, but there’s always a solution.
Jill K DeWit:
Thanks.
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 and comment on the shows you like.
Jill K DeWit:
Charlie wrote, “What is everybody doing to create recurring income from their land other than just buying and selling? Leasing and owner financing are the first few that come to my mind, but I’m sure there are others. And who do you lease to?”
Steven Jack Butala:
Owner financing is a very, very popular option here. We have tons of people in our group who buy property for five grand, sell it for $200 down, $200 a month, and the sale price is $20,000. This has been going on forever. That’s very popular. Jill and I used to do it, we don’t do it any longer. We feel like we’re better at selling it for cash, or we’re just better acquisitions people versus babysitters.
That’s one way. That’s by leaps and bounds the most popular way. If you have commercial property in an urban area, leasing property if it’s zoned correctly to construction crews or for RV storage, that’s very popular and extremely profitable. In fact, mobile home parks are based on this model where you just lease the land. The owner would put their own mobile home on that park, pay two or three or $400 a month for a pad lease and everybody’s happy.
It’s incredibly affordable for the owner and incredibly profitable for the park owner. That’s a great option. There’s two, the reason I put this in here, two new ones that popped up recently. One is buying a piece of rural land, making sure that it’s very usable, and then VRBO-ing it out as campground land for $30 or $40 a night. It’s very popular as long as the use, again, the zoning’s correct.
To my knowledge in most places, especially if it’s county land, there’s no reason that would be restricted in any way. And so if you have an RV, you go park it out there for a certain number of nights as long as it’s compliant, or if you just take a truck out there with a tent, make a fire, as long as it’s all compliant.
That’s very, very, very profitable. You can buy in certain places, even in Los Angeles County, you can buy property for $4,000 or $5,000 and start renting it out for $30 or $40 a night.
Jill K DeWit:
What’s the second one?
Steven Jack Butala:
And the second one is… Why? Am I going too slow?
Jill K DeWit:
No, just curious. I was impatient.
Steven Jack Butala:
The second one is putting up some type of structure like a yurt, this is all over Discord right now, where you take that VRBO land rental model and make it just a little bit more attractive. A couple years ago, it was Airstreams. Make a little Airstream community again as long as it’s compliant, and then rent those out.
Jill K DeWit:
Cool.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday, there’s always a solution, this is why you’re listening. I was watching a reality show that many of you maybe have seen, or not seen. I find it fascinating, especially when Jill’s not around.
Jill K DeWit:
Now I know where this-
Steven Jack Butala:
… called Big Timber. It’s about these two married people in Canada. They go get timber claims. And there’s very profitable types of wood and not profitable types of wood. And so they get these claims, they rent them for a season from the Canadian government, they go and… It’s a very healthy… My first reaction was just like, “Oh my God, you’re cutting all this wood down.” What they do is they cut dead trees down. They thin out the forest, it’s good for fire prevention and all of that.
Anyway, they literally create a road in some cases to get up to this claim, they take out the dead wood and they mill it out and sell it. And it’s very, very profitable. Well, in the very first show of season two, whether or not this is real, I don’t know, they get a bill from the government for a million bucks. “Hey, you didn’t clean this up the way you… You have to clean up when you’re done.”
To which her reaction was… His wife, she runs the entire business. She runs the sales part of it, she runs the mill, he’s out just getting raw materials. And so he fell apart and she’s like, “There’s always a solution.” And so they spend an entire season, both of them, working like crazy people, defying the weather, scavenging for logs all over the sounds and bays that there are off of Vancouver Island, and they did it. They raised like $1.4 million.
Did they have to actually end up paying the bill? I don’t think so, we’ll find out next season. But it got me thinking. These people work like dogs, both of them, and their crew, dedicated crew of people, both on the administrative side and the sales side, and then on his side, which was procurement acquisitions of these logs, are tirelessly… Machinery is breaking down.
So I’m sitting there watching this with a cold drink in my hand, sitting on the couch, thinking, “I’m the biggest oath there ever was, and what Jill and I do is very crazy profitable, but it wasn’t always like that.” And so I know that we started Land Academy to help people do this for themselves also. And the first few years that I did this, it was terrible. I just didn’t know what I was doing, and so it was constant trial and error. By the time Jill arrived, which is several years later-
Jill K DeWit:
You mean back doing deals, not Land Academy.
Steven Jack Butala:
No, Land Academy. Yeah, I’m sorry, this is not Land Academy. We’re talking about buying some land.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, we failed. Like, “Well, wait a minute, I was here football years ago.” That’s not what he meant, he meant just buying-
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, I think the nineties, buying and selling land.
Jill K DeWit:
Learning how to do this before we’d share this with you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. And so there was a pretty steep learning curve, and then there’s constantly stuff that gets thrown at you. My point to this episode is there’s just constantly stuff that’s going to happen. Like Jill yesterday spent 20 minutes talking about a deal that probably should have gone sideways.
The vast majority of people that would do that real estate deal, even really professionals, would not have worked that hard and done what they needed to do. Everybody got on the same team, did what they needed to do to liquidate the property for a profit a year later. So there’s always a solution. Always. There’s always a solution for any issue that you have in your personal life, every single time. You just can’t give up.
Jill K DeWit:
I think people get hung up here because the solution is “I got to dig in and work hard”, and they’re afraid of that, because that’s often the answer.
Steven Jack Butala:
I’ll tell you, if you’re not interested in working hard, this business is not for you. In fact, probably no businesses are.
Jill K DeWit:
Stuff you got to do.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what this is.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Somebody was telling us a story recently.
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, I heard that too. Wait, I know what you’re talking about. Same thing. We have a very dear friend who works at a bank and one of her jobs is, “I’ve got this team, I got to motivate them to do better. And because by doing better, A, we get more efficient, and B, people get raises, all these good things happen.”
So she had this employee that said, “Look, here’s where I’m at in my life. I’m at this point, this level, I am not interested in learning any new skills, I’m not interested in working any harder and I’m not interested in even making more money. I’m happy right where I am.” And I’m like, “Sheesh, what do you do with that?”
And I’m like, “Can you help them find their way out the door?” But it’s a very large bank, you can’t necessarily do that, they just settle in. That’s not us. But for some people, it is. I guess that’s your point.
In the simplest form.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s work and reward, and the harder you work, the harder and smarter, I should say… I’m not talking about breaking rocks. You can work as hard as possible breaking rocks eight hours a day and you’re not going to really get ahead. I’m talking about working really smart as an entrepreneur, this will absolutely pay out.
I have example after example. Jill and I, our career path is packed full of people who make between two and $8 million a year doing this. And they join career path to maybe pick up some pointers, largely a lot of them join because they want to share their story with people who are newer and let them know that it’s possible in a really helpful, fantastic way. In my opinion, that’s what Jill and I are sitting here doing right now.
So there’s just a solution. There’s always a solution. And I didn’t know this about Jill when I met her, but it turned out that she and I were really, really similar about this, neither one of us will stop.
Jill K DeWit:
No.
Steven Jack Butala:
And I don’t want you to stop. I don’t want you to get sidetracked because, I don’t care what it is, you fill in the blank. “Well, but I don’t like data,” then find somebody who does.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, figure it out.
Steven Jack Butala:
“I don’t like sales,” find a job. “I don’t have any money,” well, then use deal funding. We have an answer for all of this. That’s what Land Academy, step by step, product by product, has addressed all these concerns that people have and we’re here to try to make it a lot easier. But that doesn’t mean there’s an easy button. There is no easy button to this and there never will be.
There are many people who join this group because they innately want to make it all automated, and they’re usually software engineers. And I understand that, I want to make things more efficient also, but that’s just not going to happen. This is not the stock market.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, there’s things that you can, we do that, but then you can’t totally walk away.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a variance in this market, a pretty substantial variance. In any market where you can buy a piece of real estate that’s worth $100,000 for 25 grand, just because that person wants to sell it that day, that’s amazing to me. I’ll never ever get over that.
I’ve said this a few times before, if you could buy a share of stock that’s worth $100 today for $25, you can’t. You just don’t. It’s such an efficient market that it commands what it’s worth. And so real estate’s not like that, and that to me is a massive amount of opportunity.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Happy you could join us today, five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow’s Jill Friday, and she’s going to talk about the concept of mailer excitement. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack Butala:
We had a mailer, just a large one that I talked about earlier this week, and we got notice from offers to owners that it was in the mail, they notify you as they’re working on it, and Jill got all giddy. She’s like-
Jill K DeWit:
Like, “Yay, I love it.”
Steven Jack Butala:
She loves when the mail hits.
Jill K DeWit:
We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Hey, thanks for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really do appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please zip on over to our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button.
Steven Jack Butala:
We Jack and Jill. Information-
Jill K DeWit:
… and inspiration
Steven Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.
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