Jack Thursday – Land Deal Flow Machine Consistency (ReAir LA 1686)
Jack Thursday – Land Deal Flow Machine Consistency (ReAir LA 1686)
Transcript:
Steven Jack :
Steven Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hi.
Steven Jack :
Welcome to the land academy show entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven, Jack [inaudible 00:00:08]
Jill K DeWit:
And I am Jill DeWitt and we are broadcasting from the valley of the sun.
Steven Jack :
Today’s Jack Thursday. And I’m going to talk about land deal flow, machine consistency. This whole episode is about one basic concept and I’ll phrase it as a question. Is it better to buy [crosstalk 00:00:28].
Jill K DeWit:
Sorry.
Steven Jack :
Better to buy a piece of real estate and decide what to do with it every single time, or is it better to buy the same type of real estate over and over and over again and do exact same thing? The same process, the same people are involved over and over and over again. I bet you can guess which one I think is better. 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 don’t forget to subscribe on the land academy YouTube and comment on the shows you like.
Jill K DeWit:
Steven wrote. “Hey guys, I am currently scraping data from Zillow for my next mailer, and I noticed that in Zillow, many of the listings don’t show the acreage anymore. You have to click in the listing to find out. So because of that, when I scrape the acreage is not spit out, I need manually go into each listing to find out. Does anybody know of a workaround when scraping?”
Steven Jack :
There’s two. And inconsistent data in Zillow is fairly common. And here’s why. Some of the places in the country Zillow collects data from the MLS. Some of the places they have to be manually input by whoever’s listing the property. There’s two types of people that list the property, real estate agents, who don’t usually don’t know their ass from their elbow, or people like us, but it’s mostly the ass from the elbow kind. And scraping data from Zillow can go great sometimes because sometimes they implement anti scraping software. Sometimes they don’t. So it very much varies from area to area. Don’t get discouraged, the sure fire away to fix this is to get a virtual assistant overseas, to manually input some of that data. It is not expensive at all. Usually wait if you order it, you’ll get it back overnight because they’re working, their day is our night. I’ve done it both ways for years, years and years, we manually order data mining from the Philippines in our case. And now we scrape. But the truth is if I can’t get good data, when I scraped to price and mailer, I moved to a different area to send mail.
Jill K DeWit:
Peaches and cream. What’s, peaches and rainbows [crosstalk 00:02:57].
Steven Jack :
This show it’s been on since 2015, every day.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep. Yeah. You’d think I would not be shocked.
Steven Jack :
Even real estate agents have reached out to me. And said I don’t like your attitude. I don’t think your description of the average real estate agent is accurate. Zero, zero.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. [crosstalk 00:03:20]. Because they’re not listening to this. Because they know.
Steven Jack :
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
All right.
Steven Jack :
Today’s Jack Thursday, by the way. So I get to say what I want.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack :
I’m going to talk about land deal, flow machine consistency. This is why you’re listening. Jill and I have struggled with this. So for years and years and years, I bought and sold real estate through one venue, eBay for years, 10,000 plus deals. And then around 2011, Jill and I joined forces and we did it a little bit differently and I have to say, we make a lot more money together than we did separately, but it was a totally a different type of company. We would buy property the conventional way, the way we buy property now. Sending out mailers a lot of times back then I went to tax sales, but we would buy it the same way every single time, process it, get it up on the internet and auction it off the same way.
Steven Jack :
And so we had at one time, 20 or 30 auctions closing a day, Jill and I joined forces and eBay was no longer an option because it changed. The website changed and the money that we were generating, that wasn’t possible. So my dream consistency machine was gone. So for several years we did it in a hybrid way where I bought the property the same way I’ve always been buying it. But Jill sold it and Jill sells it. And so Jill’s the kind of person who has to, and I’m not complaining. It’s just how it is. And she’s very successful at it. Touch every deal, look at it, love it, feel it. And then list it with a real estate agent or close it herself or depending on when and why and the property. So, we’ve actually recently really tried to take in what’s great about how she does it.
Steven Jack :
And what’s great about how I do it and meld it into this machine. And I’m starting now to share it with the entire community, because we’re doing a lot less deals and making a lot more money.
Jill K DeWit:
And a lot less work by us.
Steven Jack :
Yeah. We maybe have if combined, maybe have a whole hour of work into an entire real estate transaction and it’s not like we ever don’t you think?
Jill K DeWit:
No. Yeah. I agree.
Steven Jack :
Don’t you think? What was that face?
Jill K DeWit:
No, no, I’m sorry. I’m just listening. That’s just my face.
Steven Jack :
That’s just your face?
Jill K DeWit:
What face that I made?
Steven Jack :
I don’t know, like a Muppet face.
Jill K DeWit:
I’m just hanging out, listening, letting you run.
Steven Jack :
Check Thursday.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s why I just got here.
Steven Jack :
And it’s not like she and I sat down and planned this out. I think that we both just got tired of each other’s stuff, honestly. And so these deals come in and what’s really changed is we’re building businesses around a sell side, real estate agent that Jill likes.
Jill K DeWit:
I have several and that’s-
Steven Jack :
She has multiple agents that she deals with. So buying them is easy. Buying really cheap real estate is easy.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack :
Selling it consistently can be like hurting cats. And so recently we’ve really figured this out. So you want to strive for this. You want to strive for that machine consistency. You don’t want to touch and love on every deal and make it some type of-
Jill K DeWit:
Personal-
Steven Jack :
[crosstalk 00:06:42] Making a birthing event.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, here’s the same picture-
Steven Jack :
That should have been the title.
Jill K DeWit:
Here’s my truck and my chair in every property that I buy. It’s not going to always work out that way.
Steven Jack :
In fact, if you can have absolutely no emotion about it at all.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s the best. That’s the downside. That’s another good thing to talk about being a machine here you don’t want to get too hung up on something. You might not sell it maybe and you might make a bad decision if you are just really routine, it does better.
Steven Jack :
Yep.
Jill K DeWit:
It may sound monotonous, but it’s better.
Steven Jack :
Well, wait a minute Jill, you just said real estate agents suck. And now you’re building a line of business around a real estate agent. Yeah. Here’s the difference. Residential real estate agents who have beehive hairdos and an old Cadillac, you don’t want to list your land with them. You want to list it with somebody who’s got a cowboy hat on, who is very, very intelligent about the local market that you’re buying and selling real estate in and has a whole long constituency of buyers and home homeowners and people who live there. So he can, he or she can and reach them with the property that you own and sell it to them.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack :
You want a guy in a cowboy hat to tell you, well, if you go into this zip code north of this street and south of this road, and it’s more than 5,005 acres and less than $5,000 per acre, I could sell that on all day long.
Steven Jack :
But if you go east of that road-
Jill K DeWit:
Don’t go there, don’t bother.
Steven Jack :
So now you’re building a whole business around a really intelligent, knowledgeable real estate agent in the local market. That’s changed our business and we keep adding lines of business to it. So one line might be in one county. Then we move three counties over that agent may or may not be good for that county. You just keep building lines. And that’s how you really, really get that machine going. Not if you’re spending an hour on every deal and you’ve got land [inaudible 00:08:52], all the funding that goes on in discord for land academy. So now you don’t have to come up with any real money and you’re using concierge data to do all your mailers. This is millions and millions of dollars that we are, and many people in our group are generating.
Jill K DeWit:
And not doing a lot of work.
Steven Jack :
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s my best part.
Steven Jack :
Yeah. I mean, I would argue, correct me here. I bet we spend 10% of the time in our land business that we do in land academy.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh wait, wait.
Steven Jack :
It’s 90% land academy and 10% land business.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. That’s correct. Yeah. I agree. Happy you could join us today.
Steven Jack :
That’s it? You don’t have anything to say.
Jill K DeWit:
No, you covered it beautiful.
Steven Jack :
She’s done.
Jill K DeWit:
Rainbows and cupcakes.
Steven Jack :
Good thing tomorrow’s Jill’s Friday.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the land academy show.
Steven Jack :
Tomorrow is Jill’s Friday, your goals are your goals alone. You are not own in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
This came up on week one of career path, number three, which we are into right now. And it was so great. Everybody went around the room, introduced each other, shared where they are, what they’ve done, not just in land investing, but in prior businesses and careers. And then they laid out their goals and it’s such a variety, huge variance in goals of what everybody wants to do. And so we’re going to talk more about that tomorrow. I thought that was. I love week one. That’s really fun. We really get to know each other. I love career path too. It’s really kind of fun. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you’ve found the content valuable and we appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel, hit the subscribe button.
Steven Jack :
We are Steven and Jill
Jill K DeWit:
We are Steven and Jill.
Steven Jack :
Information.
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack :
To buy undervalued property.
Jill K DeWit:
Actually. It’s not kind of fun. It’s very fun.
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