You Already Know Flipping Land Works So Let’s Talk about the Right Way to Do It (LA 1828)
You Already Know Flipping Land Works So Let’s Talk about the Right Way to Do It (LA 1828)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steven 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 Dewit, broadcasting from the valley of the sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how you already know flipping land works. So, let’s actually really talk about the right way to do it.
Jill K DeWit:
I have something to say. I’m going to share more about this in a minute. I was on a clubhouse chat today, I was just a fly on the wall listening. There were like 130 people in there, and it’s people talking about wholesaling houses. And I’ve never heard people work so hard. I’m going to share more about the conversation. But I was just like, here’s the deal I would’ve busted in and said and dropped a little nugget like there’s an easier way to do this, and there’s a lot less work. Because what we do with land works for houses, but I didn’t have half hour because every time I’ve done this, it results in who are you and what are you talking about? And how do we do this? And it needs a half hour and I didn’t have enough hour. So, that’s why I didn’t go there. But I will share more in a minute.
Steven Jack Butala:
Similarly, there has never been more bad advice on the internet about buying and selling land than there is now.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s really funny.
Steven Jack Butala:
But we’re going to dispel all the bad stuff here in the next half hour. Before we get into it let’s take a question put by one of our land investors on our online community called landinvestors.com it’s free and Jill has some stuff to say ParcelFact.
Jill K DeWit:
So, I wanted to tell you today’s the day in case you didn’t notice when you log into NeighborScoop, it’s going to look like a different logo. And it’s going to say ParcelFact. Yes. Why? Because they are merging. So, it’s happening right now today. If it hasn’t already popped up, you’ll see it next time you log in. It’s awesome. We started with, or excuse me, we started with ParcelFact, which was our beta test of finding property for us with a state and accounting and APN and all kinds of other awesome information and maps and overlays and FEMA, flood zone overlays, all kinds of wonderful things. And now, then we came out with a second product, made it better called it NeighborScoop. We’ve decided that two is not always better than one. We really only need one. So, when you log in, don’t worry it’s just one big product NeighborScoop and ParcelFact are now combined. And it’s just ParcelFact.
Steven Jack Butala:
Big, long takeaway here. We took two great sites that did some stuff differently, made them one, combined the two members of each and now it’s called ParcelFact and it’s the best and easiest way to do what we do for a living, check to see if the property stage one due diligence. See if we should get it done.
Jill K DeWit:
Cool. Look at this. Barb from career path wrote first big success story. Just got our bank wire of 75,347 acquisition was $25,000. Is there more to it or is that it?
Steven Jack Butala:
No, that’s it.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I couldn’t tell, I’m just…
Steven Jack Butala:
She was and a lot of people Barbara’s, very vocal in our group and we all love her. She’s funny as heck. And I’m glad to see that she’s doing really well.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, that pays for all of career path, about five years of Land Academy, all kinds of things who knows.
Steven Jack Butala:
All the mail.
Jill K DeWit:
What she’s doing with that.
Steven Jack Butala:
One deal.
Jill K DeWit:
But yay. Hopefully she’s going to pour that into our property, knowing Barb she is. That’s awesome. Yay. That’s awesome.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic. You already know flipping land works, so let’s talk about the right way to do it. This is the meat of the show. I know you have notes.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I have a lot to say about this. I’m going to try to calm myself down. So, today like I was saying I was listening, I was in a clubhouse chat. It was a big wholesaling group and everybody’s wholesaling houses. And here’s what they do. They somehow go into an area. They pick an area. Usually I think for a lot of them, it’s an area that they live in, it’s nearby them. And what they’re doing is they go skip trace all these people and pick up the phone and cold call them. And the whole show was around. When I tuned in at least, it was just role playing and how to get a good response from sellers, potential sellers that is. So, they would even do ring ring and the person would say hello, and the guy would say, “Hi, I’m Joe Smith with ABC investing. And here’s how we totally started out. So, it looks to me like you developed quite a bit of equity in your home.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Man.
Jill K DeWit:
“And I also noticed you owe a couple thousand dollars in back taxes. So, how about we turn this into a win for you? And if you’re thinking of selling, I’m going to make it easy for you and we’ll get that done.” It’s just, “Well, wait a minute. How do you know I owe back taxes?” He’s like, “Well, it’s my job. This is what I do. I am a wholesaler.” He didn’t say investor. He said, “I’m a wholesaler. And I work with a lot of investors and I will work for you and I’ll negotiate this great deal and da, da.” And that’s how the conversation was going. And I’m like, “That’s a lot of work.” And then, which was nice, the panel helped him out and said, “Well, first of all, maybe don’t say you work with these people, make sure you clarify who you are and you’re not just working for them. You’re an investor. Maybe you say you partner with these people.”
Whatever it was. They went down this long path. My whole thing was wow, I mean, it’s a little scary if I got that call, I even knowing what I know I would be put off right away. It just sends the wrong message to me and it really too. I appreciate he was being honest and saying, “I’m not going to buy it, but I work with people that do.” So, I mean that, like I said, great for the honesty, but what we do is just so different. And if I had a half hour, I would’ve said, “Hey, everybody do you know there’s a better way.” And this is what we do with land. What we do with land is we send out offers, we spend a lot of time, a lot of energy picking an area.
It’s not just where we live. It’s where we, when I say we, I lovingly mean Jack, has identified as a good area, that it’s going to give us the numbers. And we see the movement, things are happening in the area, people are selling, people are buying, it’s not nuts, not crazy. There’s a lot of property there that this would really work. There’s a lot of things that go into it, I’m paraphrasing here but, and we send them offers with a dollar amount. And the key here is let them get our professional offer, let it marinate in their heads and then let them call us and reach back out to us when they’re ready. So, much better. Just this morning, just now I just sent something over to my transaction coordinator. I got a very nice email from a person that said, “Hi, Jill, we received your letter. The partners that I work with want to sell, but we’d rather use this kind of a purchase agreement. So, we filled this out. We like the standard state one.” Or whatever it is, totally fine. And sent this over to this other document.
I didn’t even open it. I just sent it right on over to my transaction coordinator, because she’ll put it in your table and get all the details filled in there for me. But it obviously was professional, reached them. It’s been on somebody’s desk for a couple days, they talked about it, they respond and said, we just want it to be done on this form because we like this form better. Fine. I don’t care. And let’s roll. So, there you go.
Steven Jack Butala:
I have two big points to make in response to what Jill’s saying. Number one, the sheer inefficiency of what she described as to a data person like me makes me want to cry. You can make what 40, if you’re amazing, you can have maybe 40 conversations a day like that.
Jill K DeWit:
Probably, you could probably dial 80 to a 100 people and hope to get 40 on the phone. I bet you’re lucky if you get 20.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so-
Jill K DeWit:
Maybe 10, even 10s lucky.
Steven Jack Butala:
In that same amount of time, in an eight hour period, I can send out 10,000 offers and it’s not because I’m great at this. It’s just because that’s how we do it. Most people can. If you use a product that we have called Concierge Data, you can get stuff out in the mail the next day, 10,000 offers let’s say, 50,000 if you want, it takes us the same amount of time to deliver 500 offers, as it does 5,000, as it does 50,000 through the magic of mail merge. So, inefficiency is that’s crazy, it won’t yield the results that you want. Certainly, not enough to retire on. Number two, none of which Jill described is data driven. They’re dialing numbers or based the only data they really are using is geography. So, we have this whole methodology at Land Academy about choosing an area based on data what’s selling faster.
What days on market are they higher or lower? What price per acre are property’s selling for. And does that fit with my criteria and on and on and on. That’s really too much to describe actually in this podcast environment. So, from a data standpoint, everything we do is data driven. Every single decision, there’s no dart boards in our off… We don’t, what Jill’s describing is this old school, 1960s way of who will listen to me? Instead of what we do is we’ll send out 10,000 letters and what Land Academy members do. If you’re a Land Academy member and you’ve got a few mailers under your belt, you know exactly what I mean, you send out 10,000 offers instead of calling somebody. The 10 or 15 or 20 people decide. The mail does all that work for you. The 10 or 20 people that decide it’s actually probably time for us to sell this property.
Now we don’t… To do 10,000 calls. It’s just not possible.
Jill K DeWit:
Could you imagine?
Steven Jack Butala:
I mean it would take years.
Jill K DeWit:
The staff and the people.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so in a two week period, 10,000 people are going to get an offer from you. By the way, we’re sending an offer. We’re not sending a, “Hey, do you want to sell your house or your land?”
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, they haven’t even got to that point.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s an offer. “I want to buy your property for 40,000 bucks and I want to do it in a week. And here’s your timeframe to decide.” There’s a lot of key points to the template that we’ve developed over a lot of years. So, there’s a lot of ways to do this wrong. Here’s a few key points or here’s a few great examples, offers of interest. So, let’s say you understand now that sending out 10,000 offers tomorrow is a better idea than making 40 phone calls.
You have to send out the right letter, and the content in that letter needs to be really professional, like a business letter that says, “My wife and I want to buy her your piece of land and we want to buy it for this amount of money and here’s the timeframe and here’s how it goes. And when we’re done with this, you’re going to get a $40,000 check for something that you’re probably never intended to use at all.” So, that’s the right way to do this. That’s half of this, that’s half. The other half is Jill’s half where there’s a dynamic personality that comes into play when the seller gets on the phone and after maybe 10 or 15 minutes of talking to Jill or people like Jill, they now want to do the transaction.
She establishes trust and not through lies and deceit and being cute. It’s actually saying, “Yeah, we’ve done this thousands and thousands of times, I understand you know that we’re going to buy your property for $40,000 and it might be worth more, but it’s a convenience situation.” So, yeah, this is how you do this correctly. How do I know that this is the correct way to do it because I’ve done it all the wrong ways. So, has Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
Since the ’90s. Isn’t that great. That’s so funny. It’s interesting too, there are people in our space that have gone down that path. There are lots of people in our space, in the land investing space. Let’s just say who also educate people. And it’s funny how they’ve gone on different tangents and then they come, eventually they circle around and they learn that. Yeah, I guess Jack and Jill’s way is the best way. Yeah. Kind of is put a dollar amount on it. It’s really fun
Steven Jack Butala:
With very few exceptions. All the people that are out there attempting to teach what Jill and I teach are former Land Academy members.
Jill K DeWit:
This is true.
Steven Jack Butala:
They’re just repeating it. I’m doing a whole presentation today on what it takes to be successful, on a Thursday call.
Jill K DeWit:
Good. I’m excited for that. That’s great. Happy could join us today. Every day, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow. The episode on the Land Academy Show is called turning a hateful mailer response into a seven digit deal. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Jill and I are doing a deal right now where somebody responded to a mailer like we’re talking about. And they said, “You have to be off your rocker, I’m never going to sell this property to you for this amount of money.” She in five or 10 minutes befriended the person finally found out what they actually do want to sell the property for, and now we’re buying it. It’ll end up being a million dollar profit margin for us or close to it.
Jill K DeWit:
Thanks for tuning in. And don’t forget today’s the day that we are combining ParcelFact and NeighborScoop. So, check it out, go to, I’m going to stop even saying NeighborScoop, we don’t need to say that anymore. So, here’s what I want you to do. What are we talking about? Go check it out. Go to parcelfact.com. If you are not using this to check out your property and see the maps and get the ownership information. There’s so much there, tax information, all of it, legal description. It’s awesome. Parcelfact.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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