Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill K DeWit:
Hello.

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 are going to discuss how blockchain, or blockchains I guess, will change real estate forever. So like it or not, this is one of those technology things that I think is here to stay. Hasn’t really even gotten started. I’m not sure who created the concept of blockchain, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant. 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. Before we get into that, I’m hoping by now you know that Jill and I have created a very specific commercial printing company to help you get offers to owners out in the mail expediently and inexpensively. We did this several years ago for ourselves, and it was worked so well, we decided to share it with everybody. Fast forward to today, we do almost a million offers on behalf of members and non-members every single month. Oh, the name of the company is Offers, the number 2, owners.com.

Jill K DeWit:
Aaron L. wrote, “The usual advice here is to mail every owner of the properties in a target zip code or county. After all, who knows why someone might want to or need to sell. I’ve acquired 48 properties in five different states since I joined Land Academy in 2021. Not hundreds or thousands like some of you. Working on that. I’m pretty sure I have never bought a property from someone that lives in the same county as the property.”

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a staggering statistic.

Jill K DeWit:
“Is this unusual? I also find that people that live in the same county call a lot more often and tend to be more angry than those that live far from their property.”

Steven Jack Butala:
I love this question or comment. And it goes along the lines, right now Jill and I are in the middle of instructing a Career Path session. I think it’s Career Path number five. We just got done talking about specialized mailers and when they’re appropriate and when they’re not. So yeah, he’s absolutely right. The conventional wisdom is to mail everybody and see what comes back, but I’ve never really looked at adjacent property owners because every time we, in the Thursday calls are so often identifying or reviewing properties for people in our group where the adjacent owners are relatives or the same person. So I’m glad that you can quantify that, that that’s your experience. That hasn’t been mine, but I still find it fascinating. Don’t you?

Jill K DeWit:
That’s actually been more my experience like Aaron’s here. I have more, like I haven’t seen it in 20 years. That comes up a lot.

Steven Jack Butala:
But you think you can quantify where they live? If you can say, “80% of the property, I”-

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
What I’m saying is how can you do it-

Jill K DeWit:
Think about where the notary has to go. So I know that too from what we’re doing. Think about where the title company … The title company’s in the place of the, at least in the state usually, as the property, not the seller, or not you, the buyer. It’s for the property. So when I think about that and I think about most of my sellers are not driving in. Some are.

Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, I read this question and specialty mailer just pops up like a light bulb over my head. I would like to do a split test specialty mailer for one county and send it to non-residents and residents and see.

Jill K DeWit:
That’d be cool. See what traffic, how it comes back.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly. Great comment, Aaron. Thank you. Appreciate it. Today’s topic, how blockchains will change real estate forever. This is why you’re listening.
Geez. Unless you live under a rock as a professional person, you’ve heard the word blockchain, you’ve heard the word crypto, you’ve heard people criticize it, you’ve heard people praise it. You’ve heard people make multi-billion dollar fortunes and then lose it all. This is all in the last 30 days news of these things. So when anything’s new like this, it gets a lot of criticism. You see a lot of success, a lot of tragedy.

Jill K DeWit:
Hype.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, exactly. That to me means there’s a lot of volatility, which equals a lot of money to be made. But is it real? Let’s start with a few definitions. Blockchain. This is my attempt at describing these things down to the eighth grade level. Blockchain is a very sophisticated way to record things immediately, in most cases for free and forever. The blockchain physically, or at least in Ethereum’s case, is banks and banks and banks of computers all over the world recording events or now documents all over the place, simultaneously creating an absolute permanent record of what’s happening.
So when you think about how this may apply to real estate, like the chain of title, if you can picture a chain of title from 1850 when the property got deeded from the federal government to whomever, and then all the times that it’s changed hands along the way up ’till today, there’s maybe 10, 20, 30 times that it’s changed hands. And maybe each time there was some addition or subtraction to the land or a change in the legal description. But those things changed and the only real record of that that we have is going to the county and doing … This is what a title plant does. The title people check back to see did this person in effect deed it to the next person and then the next person, and ultimately to you.
So when you think about recording that in a cloud on server banks all over the world and there’s no chance of it, no record of it, there’s no loss of record for any reason because it’s recorded in so many different places simultaneously, that gets you thinking. That gets you thinking that, wow, do we need title insurance anymore then? Or could we or someone write software about, yeah, you can’t record this because it doesn’t tie with the vesting deed that’s on the blockchain.

Jill K DeWit:
And because it’s decentralized and public and everybody ties into the same documents, if you will, it’s impossible to change or hack or cheat the system. It’s not one system.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. So I mean, Jill’s saying words like impossible and I’m saying words like it can never, ever go away. That’s certainly not the case. There’s always a possibility of something going wrong. It’s in its infancy stages. So the concept of this is feasible and plausible and affordable. Maybe not in its current state, maybe it’s not, but this is the beginning of it and there’s a massive worldwide use for transparent record keeping for all kinds of stuff.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, here’s my point.

Steven Jack Butala:
Huge applications.

Jill K DeWit:
I think of blockchain and I’m excited because I think this could replace title insurance.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill K DeWit:
Because you no longer have to go to somebody else that goes to who knows how many record sources to put together what they think, and they do their best, title insurance. They only guarantee what they can find. They can’t guarantee what they can’t find if you really read the policy. So they do their best to guarantee ownership was transferred the right way and recorded and the right people, the right documents, all that stuff, until it gets to you right now as you’re buying this property or selling the property, however it is. And that takes time. I think if you’re lucky, you can get a title report in a couple days. Now the nice thing about the blockchain is it’s almost immediate. It depends on, you have how many sources, depending on the blockchain environment. It relies on unrelated third parties to all verify the transaction before it goes through. And that can still happen in minutes, which is really cool. So that’s the part that excites me.
I can say I’m going to buy this property if it’s on the blockchain and I could probably own it in an hour with the equivalent of title insurance because that’s what happened for this transaction to get approved. I don’t know if recorded is the right … Documented.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, documented. That’s great. That’s the good news. So that’s a beautiful theory and it’s happening for a lot of things right now, and I’m aware none of them are real estate related. And why is that? So it’s that way because we had this exact same conversation around 1998-ish, the world did, about hey, all these properties are listed on the internet on the MLS, we don’t need any real estate agents anymore. Well here we are, it’s 2022, and we have more real estate agents than we’ve ever had ever. In the history of this country, there’s more real estate agents now. And that’s because the National Association of Realtors is making sure, because it’s so profitable, making sure that the federal government doesn’t do away with real estate agents, even though they’re ridiculously unnecessary in most cases. So it’s not so much, wow, this is a great idea, it’s totally efficient and it doesn’t cost anything. There’s way more to it than let’s just do it then.

Jill K DeWit:
Do you have an opinion on what’s going to … Okay, having brought that up, do you have an opinion? And I’m asking you sincerely because I really don’t know your opinion, on do you think there’s going to be people opposing this or trying to-

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh my gosh, yes.

Jill K DeWit:
I mean, because when you really think about it, this could A, remove title companies.

Steven Jack Butala:
Completely remove title companies.

Jill K DeWit:
And the cost of that and the time, like I shared. And then I mean potentially even … Now the good agents though, I do see a need for good agents because they can market and get property out there and talk to people and walk them and show them. You can’t do that on the blockchain. That’s not going to happen. This would be behind the scenes. But what are your thoughts on that?

Steven Jack Butala:
No. Well, very specifically in the agent situation, if the only way you could buy a piece of property was to click through a list of property that’s for sale, much like now, let’s just look at realtor.com or even Zillow, but more so realtor.com. I’m not saying do away with the MLS yet. I’m just saying do away with the 6% representation that’s involved. When you choose a property online, this is what we do, you choose four properties online, you go drive around, you take a look at them. You like two of them, and then you put an … Maybe you have to walk through, maybe you don’t. In the future, maybe you just hire a minimum wage person to walk somebody through the property and you like it or you don’t. Then you buy it through clicking through a form online and getting immediate financing if that’s what you need.

Jill K DeWit:
We don’t do it in the Land Academy stuff with what we’re doing with land.

Steven Jack Butala:
Of course not.

Jill K DeWit:
How do we do it? Okay, yeah. I’m clarifying that little piece.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s just inefficient. And again, it’s really, truly personally surprised with real estate agents, it’s gone this far-

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
… where it’s still so prevalent. And along the same lines, and then we’ll get back to blockchain in a second, is car dealerships. I just don’t get it. I really truly in my soul believe it’s the financing component to everything that’s driving all this. If you could click through a form and say, “Yeah, I want a Chevy Tahoe. I know the colors I want and I can see that there’s one in a yard somewhere six miles away from my house, and I’ll click this dot, these two, and I need financing, and have some finance person call me.” And again, get escorted out there or have the car driven into my driveway. That should have happened a long time ago.

Jill K DeWit:
Well we kind of have that, don’t we?

Steven Jack Butala:
With certain car manufacturers, they offer that. Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Well I even thought like Carvana and those places.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, it’s starting.

Jill K DeWit:
There’s places that you go right online say and arrange delivery.

Steven Jack Butala:
You’re exactly right. It’s starting to happen, go toward that. And honestly I think the world would be a better place with most of it.

Jill K DeWit:
Well you know, you and I have kind of done that when you think about it. I have bought, not sold, but you have bought and sold site unseen. You know what I mean? To your seller and stuff like that. Just talking pictures and shipping it, here it comes.

Steven Jack Butala:
So the blockchain is a way to record all of those events. I mean, that’s a great point. Think about the DMV in your state. All of that would go away.

Jill K DeWit:
Yes.

Steven Jack Butala:
All of it, because it’s all recorded and it’s transparent and you can see who owns a car and who doesn’t own the car. It’s in its infancy stages. This is just a theoretical episode, but I tell you, the world would be a much more efficient, better place.

Jill K DeWit:
There’s one word to me that this all goes around and what makes me happy. One word, decentralized. That’s it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep. That’s what keeps it honest.

Jill K DeWit:
Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Do You Make Land Decisions Based on Data or Based on Feelings? You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
I bet people think that they know what I’m going to say and it may not be what you think I’m going to say.

Steven Jack Butala:
My gosh, I was going to say the exact same thing. More and more, the older I get, the more I get into this profession, the more I’m on Team Jill versus Team Jack.

Jill K DeWit:
Well then you might not be ready for my answer too, so this is good. Hey, by the way, thank you for tuning in. Jack and I are very aware that not everyone has 100 grand or more lying around to buy land like we do. Don’t worry. I mean it. We fund many Land Academy and non-members’ deals every single week. So check out landfunding.com. In addition to us, Jack mentioned yesterday on our show, so many members in our community are doing it every day in our closed small Land Academy, private discord community. I don’t even know how many millions of dollars are changing hands right now, but it’s a lot. There’s very rarely a deal does not, or probably never, does not get funded in that environment, which is awesome. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to support@landacademy.com.
We are Jack and Jill.

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

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.