Jill Friday – Pricing Like a Seven-Year-Old (LA 1856)

Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:
And I am Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the valley of the loyal sports fans. We have the Brewers, we have the Packers, and we have the Bucks. You think I’m kidding?

Steven Jack Butala:
No, we’re not kidding.

Jill DeWit:
We have, in the days that we have been here, seen some amazing, awesome, loyal, crazy fans, in a good way crazy.

Steven Jack Butala:
And some real estate too.

Jill DeWit:
Oh yeah, that too.

Steven Jack Butala:
Some great real estate.

Jill DeWit:
Do you think they picked the green because everything else is so green?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
I do.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill’s from Southern California where everything’s brown.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
So she’s getting a good taste of Fall green and some colors changing.

Jill DeWit:
These are what trees are supposed to look like.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. This is what nature looks like Jill.

Jill DeWit:
I didn’t know that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Not in a desert.

Jill DeWit:
Sorry. That painted wall with the cow on it, isn’t that the same thing?

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s still Friday. She’s going to talk about pricing like a seven year old.
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 want to tell you about a time back in the day when it was impossible to find land that didn’t have a post office address, like 123 Main Street. People don’t assign properties an address until they want to do something with them. So all you have is an assessor’s parcel number and a state and the county that it’s in. Well, it was very hard to find property. We solved it. We wrote, we commissioned parcelfact.com. So where you can just type in the state, the county, the APN, right when you’re on the phone with the seller and find out a lot about the property. Enough to know anyway, really quickly whether or not you want the deal to continue or stop right there.

Jill DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
Check it out. parcelfact.com. We’re proud of it.

Jill DeWit:
Cool. All right, back to the question.
Mark wrote, “My partner and I are looking at mailer pricing. We are using concierge data to scrub and send the mailer. We’re using many counties next to each other to get enough properties to do the mailer. The prices per acre very considerably on the different counties. Any thoughts on how to price?”

Steven Jack Butala:
Absolutely. At the end of concierge data, you’ll get the entire mailer file back in Excel. Just like we teach, it’s nothing out of the ordinary at all. Just like we teach in chapters three and four of the of Land Academy 3.0. And you have to assign a pricing scenario, usually a percentage of resale, 25%, 30% or whatever number you choose. And it can vary widely from county to county, state to state and certainly zip code to zip code.
So, what we do is we enable a concept called testing for reason, which is not my concept at all, it’s actually an accounting concept where you test for reasons. So what we do, just like on the Thursday call, you have to ask yourself this question, “If this mailer came back priced just like this, would I buy it?” That’s testing for reason. And if so, at 25%, if you’re saying, “Heck yes, I would absolutely buy it.” At 30%, “Yeah I still would buy it.” At 40%, “I’m not so sure.” Then maybe 30%, so I should price the mailer. And I go over this in great detail all the time on a Thursday, we have a weekly Thursday webinar call where everybody in the whole group gets together, throws a bunch of deals at Jill and I and we say, “Yeah, you should absolutely do this deal,” or “Well wait a minute.”

Jill DeWit:
And here’s why, both ways, here’s why I love it and here’s why I don’t love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
So that concept or that train of thought, “Oh my gosh, yes, you should do this deal.” That’s what I want you to do before you send the mailer out. I want you to take 20 or so per zip code tests and get it to that pricing to the point where you’re saying, “Heck yes, I would do this deal.”

Jill DeWit:
That’s an easy way to look at it. Kind of like a seven year old would.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yes. Yes. Today’s topic, well it’s still Friday, she’s going to talk about pricing like a seven year old.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is the meat of the show.

Jill DeWit:
The wording I’m going to explain today is more like why pricing a seven year old can work. Because that’s really it. So what the heck are we talking about? So you’re new to Land Academy, like Matt was saying here, you’re trying to figure out pricing. I did the concierge, it came back and you gave me all the answers I need like how much right now active and sold, what the price per acre is for all these properties that I’ve had you scrub for, download and scrub.
Now the last piece for me is to put the dollar amount on the offer. What percentage of those numbers am I going to use to send them out in the mail? How much time do I need to spend on it? So the joke came from the advanced call of the day, “Pricing like a seven year old and why it can work,” is because when you’re new, you don’t have to spend the time to have a PhD in it, to get the mail out. If you wait and don’t send any mail until you feel comfortable enough that your like, “If I’m as close as I can be at Jack’s level, I’ve spent a year and a half on it, I’m now going to get the mail out because I need to really dig in and understand this and have a PhD in Excel and this and pricing and whatever. Now I can push the button and confidently send the mail out.” You’re never going to get there. Sometimes you have to take a step back and do the best you can and just get the mail out.
And the point is today, wait a minute. Well how can I make that work? So here’s the deal. This is why you have both of us. You have Jack to ramp you up as fast as possible. You have the screen share. If you’re [inaudible 00:06:18], you know what I’m talking about. You are going through it next to him side by side. You have one screen on Jack and one screen on George and you’re doing this and you’re doing that and you’re like, “Okay, that looks like okay I got it,” and then I’m sending the mail out and then you may feel like I just priced it like a seven year old. How the heck is this going to work?
Well you know what? That’s why you have me. Because I’m here and I’m showing you and telling you and helping you and talking to you, like on these Thursday calls, exactly what to say to make it work. You can find a deal. I can find a deal out of darn near everything or darn near anything I should say. So what I mean by that is once a mail goes out and now the calls come back, maybe you priced way too low. Okay, we can work with that. I can add money. I can talk to these people and find out why and I can explain, I did my best. It might have been off, I’m now understanding why and what is your number and let’s talk.
And then maybe I came in way too high. Great. Now everybody loves me. I get to reel them back in. But the advantage there is I had so many deals come back at me. Everybody freaks out about everybody loves me. I price these offers way too high. Everybody wants to sell. Oh my gosh, I totally missed something. So what? You’ve got now even more to sift through.
See these are good too because now instead of getting 20 back, you got 200 back. So what? Go through them. You know how to do this. Put them in your spreadsheet, put them in air table like I do, assign them all a number, however you want to organize them all, the best ones down to the worst ones. What I mean, what’s the best and the worst? You know what to do. You know the six A’s. You should have those columns in your spreadsheet. Does it have access? You could even make little columns. This is what I would do. Access, yes, and is it paved or dirt or gravel? Whatever it is. Make 20 columns if you have to. For your six A’s make it be 16 A’s. And then you’re going to go, “Oh, these properties have all my little check marks. Well those go to the top and all the ones go to the bottom.” Now, and again this is because you over mailed, but I would do this on every property anyway.
But now just take those top ones, go back, look them up, go back to those people and just say, “I know I sent you 30,000, I meant 12 and I’m really sorry, I didn’t realize it was not as close to X. I thought whatever…” You can come up with something and say, “I know you’re all excited but this is my new number, if it works for you, great, I’m ready to go. And if it doesn’t, I totally understand and please hang onto this and sleep on it and if a week from now 12 makes sense and you can wrap your head around that, I’ll be right here and I will get this deal done so fast it’s not even funny.” And just move on. Go down the list. And you’d be surprised how many people would say, “I kind of thought 30 was high.”

Steven Jack Butala:
You’d be surprised.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. I kind of wondered where you were all going with that one, because you’re not my next door neighbor and you’re not trying to expand your farm. That would be the only thing I could think of why you would over offer because we all know it’s not worth that. So pricing like a seven year old can work.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think if you ask a seven year old basic questions like, “Do you want the pretty one or the ugly one?” “I want the pretty one.” “Do you want it to be cheaper or more expensive?” “Oh, cheaper.”
And so that’s where this topic came up, because a person in the career path alumni group literally is involving his children in the pricing and that’s where the whole title came from. We were all laughing about, it’s like I asked my seven year old to review my pricing, literally.

Jill DeWit:
That’s funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
And so I think that young children, you can learn a lot about simplifying all the crap that we put ourselves through, through asking young children.

Jill DeWit:
Isn’t that great? Daddy’s going to teach you Zillow tonight after dinner. Wouldn’t that be cool? And we’re going to talk about Zillow. See this? You’re going to put in the zip code and you’re going to look up… Yeah. Yeah. That’s called acres. Yep. See the five, the four. There you go. Once you put in two to 10, there we go. And you’re going to get it and then sort price low to high. And I want you to, in this little box here, write down the number that pops up for the very first property.
Wouldn’t that be great?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
We could all do this.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill DeWit:
By the way, I’m not condoning this, I don’t need to have your whole family sitting around. That would be funny. The fastest way to have everybody turn against you is every night at dinner they all have to do this. “No TV for you.” But if you pay them, that could work. Pay them in ice cream. That Steven, you could pay your seven year old in ice cream and teach him Zillow.

Steven Jack Butala:
Simply is almost always better than harder.

Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
Happy to join us today. Five days a week. You can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode because you are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill DeWit:
Why didn’t we do that? Maybe we did it wrong. We took the kids when they were older and tried to teach them.

Steven Jack Butala:
They were older.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, I know. If we started them younger like this and taught Zillow at the age of seven, we might be a lot further.

Steven Jack Butala:
Some kids love it, some kids don’t. I think that earlier you get them involved the better. Jill and I have three kids and none of them are really interested in doing this, but they’re all interested, very interested in other stuff. So that’s all that matters.

Jill DeWit:
You know what’s funny? Is number one’s coming back around though and asking about some stuff.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s good.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. And this is a good thing to talk about. We should make a whole show on this. I’m going to end on this, because there’s a lot of people that come to Land Academy with the intention of making it a family business. And we should have some open discussions about this and Discord. I’d love to know what other people have done to get their college age or maybe they have young children age. A lot of people have said, “Hey, I’m here Jill, learning Land Academy and I want to teach my kids because I want to know that they’re always going to be able to put food on the table.” I’m like, “Brilliant.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.

Jill DeWit:
So it’d be fun to talk more about. Thank you for tuning in.

Steven Jack Butala:
Career Path is coming up in October.

Jill DeWit:
Oh yeah. And we’re probably three and a half weeks away. It starts October 12th, FYI. So if you’re interested, go to landacademy.com/careerpath and if you have any questions, send a note to support@landacademy.com.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are jack and Jill. Information…

Jill DeWit:
…and inspiration…

Steven Jack Butala:
…to buy undervalued property.
Out.

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