Land Academy as a Legacy Business (LA 1859)
Land Academy as a Legacy Business (LA 1859)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Howdy.
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 Apple Centric, awesome Michigan. How’s that? How many apples are in a bushel? You know it’s funny, your sister-in-law, your sister, my sister-in-law brought up picking up a bushel of apples the other day and I’m like, that sounds cool. I want that too, but I don’t know if I can fit it here. How many apples are in a bushel? Is that like one big basket?
Steven Jack Butala:
I’m just as much now from the west as you are.
Jill K DeWit:
Have you ever had a bushel of apples?
Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t think you should buy a bushel of apples unless you’re going to make moonshine.
Jill K DeWit:
Or pie.
Steven Jack Butala:
Or what else?
Jill K DeWit:
Pie. Hello.
Steven Jack Butala:
Moonshine because it… Yes.
Jill K DeWit:
Apple sauce?
Steven Jack Butala:
The answer’s yes.
Jill K DeWit:
Maybe, oh, I’m going to get some apple cherry fill in the blank. Wouldn’t that be delicious?
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s big! Bushel of apples is big.
Jill K DeWit:
I think it’s like a big bucket of apples. I know you guys are all laughing at us right now.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s special. It’s a bushel, like a wooden woven…
Jill K DeWit:
That’s what I thought. Okay.
Steven Jack Butala:
Bigger than a bucket.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s going to be cool. I love it here. Thank you Michigan. You guys know how to…
Steven Jack Butala:
Thank you Northern Michigan.
Jill K DeWit:
Yes. Northern Michigan, I love your Fall weather. The leaves are starting to turn. We couldn’t have picked a better time to be here. We’re having a ball.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about Land Academy as a legacy business.
Jill K DeWit:
Yes.
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’d like to let you know, and hopefully you already know, that Jill and I have a full-blown commercial printing company that goes along with Land Academy, called offers2owners. Offers and number two owners. It was born out of our frustration from using other people’s printing companies to send out offers. They just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand mail merges and a bunch of other stuff. Go to offers2owners.com. I know for sure we have a promo going when this airs, until the end of the month. So you get 10% off.
Jill K DeWit:
Sweet. I think it’s like MAIL10. It’s on the website. You’ll find it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. The promo code I think is MAIL10. Just ask them. They’ll tell you.
Jill K DeWit:
Mike wrote: “Hey, regarding easements, I have a 35 acre track and a contract in East Texas, with a quarter mile easement to it. The easement has never been used and is directly across three neighboring wooded properties. The pricing is great, but the easement would take serious money to turn it into real physical access. Has anyone gone through with deals like this? [inaudible 00:02:40] with access around turning $80,000, whereas I’m thinking I could sell now for around $180,000.”
Steven Jack Butala:
So Mike you’re in a great situation and I’ll directly answer your question and then I’ll take a couple steps back. Hell yes, we’ve done deals like this, and we do deals like this. An easement is a right to cross somebody else’s property to get to yours. Easements are all over the place. They’re super prevalent. Chances are you cross over all kinds of properties to get to your own and don’t even know it all the time. So now this is very common where luckily you’re in a great situation. That’s why we say access, which is one of the six A’s in Land Academy. Access is when you go through your phase one due diligence, you want to check the six A’s and I’m not going to go through them now, but one of them is access, arguably the most important. And then we break it down into physical and legal access.
Well, you had legal access here. So in the eyes of the law you could… I’m oversimplifying, mow down whatever’s there, foliage or trees or whatever. Put a road in, and now you’ve got physical access to all these properties that you’re crossing along the way. So you’re in a great situation. And please don’t mistake that there’s no access to this property, because there is. It’s just there’s stuff in the way, that could legally be removed, and is very often removed.
So I would go through this… There were many… This is in discord… Many people responded to this original question, and all of them are saying a version of what I’m saying, especially in Texas, there’s situations where people have stories where their grandfather shook hands to cross over somebody’s property. So that makes things very complicated. This is very clear.
Jill K DeWit:
There’s legal access, physical access. Preferably we want both. Legal is what Jack’s talking about. There it’s written in. There’s a contract. You may see it in a legal description. There’s something recorded with the county that we can all look at it and see on the map and how it’s spelled out basically, where the access is. It’ll tell you from this point to this point, along this whatever border, kind of thing, and then there’s physical access, which is somebody just rolling around out there with their truck. They’ve just been driving this way. They always just cut off the main road and this is where their truck goes. And they’ve been doing it for 20 years now, and it’s just the ground is worn down kind of thing. That’s the physical access. Ideally you want both, but if I had to pick between the two, I want legal access.
Steven Jack Butala:
All day.
Jill K DeWit:
Because then I can go in and make a road if I want. If I only have the physical access, it doesn’t mean I can just call up a company and have it paved tomorrow. I have to get the legal to go with it.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s worth mentioning too, that many transactions Jill and I have done, it’s talking to the people where you’re interested in executing an easement, but crossing their properties. Just call them. Jill’s done this many times where we’ve got a deal come in. We don’t have any access to it. She calls them and says, Hey, do you mind if we get legal up? We’re going to do all the work. You don’t have to do anything. Just sign some stuff to get legal access on the west side of your property. They’re like, heck yeah, we never use it anyway.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s easy. Yeah. If you want to know, here’s what I did in the past. I just drew a circle around the property and I sent out a handful, it wasn’t even 10 neighbor letters. And I put a map in there because I was doing less than 10. It took me just minutes to print out a copy, right. I pulled up ParcelFact. I did a screenshot and printed out a little map and I highlighted my property and I highlighted the other person’s property. So they could get this in the mail and know exactly who I am, what I’m talking about. This is me. This is you. And it was just a nice letter saying, Hey, can we work out some kind of access? And that has always gone great. They call back and say, yeah, well how can I help you?
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic. Land Academy is a legacy business. This is why you’re listening.
Jill K DeWit:
Forgot to mention by the way, that’s how you say too, Hey, I know we’re talking about access, but do you want to buy this property because it’s next to yours?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yes.
Jill K DeWit:
Ding, ding, I’m always selling or buying. There you go. Okay. So today Land Academy’s a legacy business. This came up because there’s a healthy amount of people in Land Academy that are here to do this as a family business. Remember the sweet father daughter in Career Path. I don’t know if it was two or three, and it was so cute because she was 16 and she found Land Academy for her and her dad. He was leaving his, like retiring if you will, from his very successful insurance business, looking for something to do now and do with his kids. And the daughter came up with dad, let’s buy and sell land, and hey, look at this Land Academy thing. And the next thing you know, they’re in Career Path and doing fantastic. So there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of great reasons to do something like this for your family.
Number one, as a family business, what’s better than having a sweet company that everybody can get together around the dining room table, not kidding, on Sundays, and build and create your own family, land buying and selling business. It’s wonderful.
And then the second thing is, I think too, as a parent, we need to know and we want to know our kids are going to be okay. So not only would I get to do this with my kid, and we have done this with all three of our kids, by the way, at different times. All three of the kids have been involved in our companies in some way or another and it’s so nice.
They’re not always involved. They’re not currently involved in the level that we are, but they know how it works and they know what to do. And I as a parent, feel really good knowing that if anything goes sideways, they all know how to do this. They could all go by land and sell land and take care of themselves and feed their families. That’s the main thing.
And then the third thing is, they need their own money. Come on. Kids need to make their own money. You know not just for any reason, other than I’m not going to always be here. My kids need to know how to maybe… Like I said, so many things change in this world. Things come and go. People get down. I don’t have to get into a Career Path talk, or just like careers. And think about, even you, look at your degree that you use your degree, but not in a way that you went to school for. You know what I mean?
Steven Jack Butala:
To save money.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s the thing. That’s my point. So you think what you want to do, but doesn’t always pan out that way. And gosh, having… And even just knowing how to start and build and run a company will help them in life in so many ways.
Steven Jack Butala:
So when I hear land and I hear legacy, I think of something else. Jill’s point is totally, is spot on. Teach the kids how to buy and sell land. If they’re into it, they’re into it. If they’re not, they’re not. But the fact is, if you’re buying and selling land for yourself, you’re going to accumulate some wealth. You’re going to accumulate real estate, and you’re going to accumulate liquidity, money, cash.
Did you ever drive down a subdivision or maybe where you live there’s this vacant piece of property at the end, and you’ve never seen this for sale sign on it. It’s total prime real estate. It could handle a couple of houses, maybe a subdivision. And you just wonder what the heck’s going on with that piece of dirt. Here’s what’s going on in a lot of cases, especially in relatively higher priced areas. We all are going to leave our kids something, a Weall estate plan let’s say. Nobody knows when they’re going to pass away, but you want to make sure that whatever you have, you’ve accumulated in your life goes on to the right people and paying as little taxes as you can.
It’s very easy to buy a piece of property that’s undervalue, which is what we do all the time, and then own it. And then co-deed it with joint tenants to one of your beneficiaries. Could be a sister, could be a… In most cases, it’s your kids, without them knowing. Conveying real estate’s not a contract. I can convey all kinds of real estate to Jill, without her ever really knowing. I just sign it over to her and that’s it. It’s not a closing. They’re not looking for compensation. So when I own, or Jill owns a piece of property with one of our kids as a joint tenant, and she passes, at that instant, that beneficiary or in this case, Jill’s child or one of the kids owns the property.
It’s not a taxable event. It doesn’t go into the estate. It’s a very positive, easy way to ensure that your kids are going to get some money. It’s a legacy and they don’t know about it, so they can’t mess it up. Because young children tend to mess stuff up, especially if they’re teenagers. And it keeps going up in value, in some cases dramatically. It’s a perfect legacy vehicle, land is. So I know Jill… this topic was something different, because Jill talks to people who want to help their kids succeed at something all the time.
Jill K DeWit:
Like day to day. Day to day have income, money coming in. So that was my take on it. But I like your take is a long term, big picture.
Steven Jack Butala:
Land is such a great… I mean wars are fought over land. Land is such a great investment vehicle. So…
Jill K DeWit:
Our most…
Steven Jack Butala:
A great legacy.
Jill K DeWit:
-I would think most wars are fought over land.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. If not…
Steven Jack Butala:
Or oil.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh okay. There you go.
Steven Jack Butala:
Or food.
Jill K DeWit:
Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us or women can find us here.
Steven Jack Butala:
I wasn’t going to say. I’m like, oh I shouldn’t say it out loud. I don’t want to make them mad.
Jill K DeWit:
On the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Throughout the episode on the Land Academy Show, it’s called the difference between county incorporated or unincorporated land and township land. We’re learning that to the point of nausea. You’re in Michigan right now.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s very different.
Steven Jack Butala:
You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s funny. Yeah. I had to think about that. Now there’s been wars over all kinds of screwy things like when you go way back wars, but it seems like nowadays most of the wars are over land. Oh Hey, thanks for tuning in. By the way, Jack and I are very aware that not everyone has a few hundred grand lying around to buy property like we do.
Not to worry because we do and do many other people in Land Academy. We are happy to fund your deals. Nowadays it’s so great coming into this community with us. You just have to be a deal finding machine, and we’ll help fund them. So to find out more, go to landfunding.com or always just send a note to support@landacademy.com and my team will fill you in and point you in the right direction. We are Jack and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Information.
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.
The BuWit Family of Companies include:
https://BuWit.com
https://offers2owners.com
https://landinvestors.com
https://landacademy.com
https://landpin.com
https://parcelfact.com
https://countywise.com
https://deedperfect.com
https://ownersdata.com
https://houseacademy.com
I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.
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