Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Jack 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’s Jill Friday and she’s going to talk about embracing the hate and then sending out more mail.

Jill K DeWit:
This comes up because I think every, well, every day there’s somebody getting a mailer. I’m sure of it. I’m sure in our community there’s somebody getting their first mailer out, probably darn near every day or every week at least. And then these questions pop up and I think now there’s a lot, there’s enough of juice in our environments. We have the free environment in land investors. We have the closed environment for members in Discord where you can kind of see how people handle it and work through some stuff. But it’s still worth mentioning and bringing up because it is part of this process. It is going to happen. And we’ll talk more about it here on the show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into the topic, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. Back in the day, it was nearly impossible to find land without a USPS mailing address, like 123 Main Street. So over time I developed a solution. Fast forward to today, it’s called parcelfact.com. You type in the state, the county and the assessor’s parcel number and up pulls a parcel with the basic stuff that you need to make a phase one due diligence decision about whether or not you want to buy the property. It’s a pretty cool tool. It was again, something that Jill and I used for years and then ultimately cleaned it all up and made it available to the public.

Jill K DeWit:
I have to be honest and say too, I don’t between, I can make a decision with a property. With parcelfact, looking at it on Google Earth to check slope and things like that. Which parcel fact will take me right to. And then the last thing I use is like Zillow or Realtor. Something to get a handle on days on market, numbers and what’s for sale, what’s been sold last six months, last 12 months, whatever that is. That’s it. Those three. So I pay for parcelfact, but Google Earth Pro is free and Zillow’s free. So I make decisions and that’s on those properties 90% of the time with just that. Shannon wrote, “anyone sending holiday cards to sellers you’ve bought from this year? What’d you say in the card? I’m having a hard time coming up with the right words.”
Well how sweet is that, Shannon? I actually haven’t done that. Or I would even say maybe, I would take it a step further that. So if you’re reaching out to sellers and sending holiday cards, I would be hoping they have more property to give me. That would be the reason I would be doing that. Now what I would be more likely to do is send thank you cards to people who have bought from me because those are my buyers and those are probably other investors and they might be looking for more property and I would love to keep them. I like to keep my name on the forefront on whatever I’m trying to say with them. What are your thoughts?

Steven Jack Butala:
No, I completely agree. I think all that kind of stuff goes a really long way. I think you’re going to be doing it by yourself, because not very many people do it anymore and I think it’s a great idea.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, that’s really good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jill Friday, she’s going to talk about embracing the hate and then sending out more mail. This is the meat of the show.

Jill K DeWit:
So I’m going to cover this and then I’m going to have you ask me questions. So what am I talking about? We get our data, we get it in the mail. We have these real offers that go out to owners of property. They aren’t expecting this, they weren’t looking for this. They don’t know it’s coming. They didn’t click on anything. And here comes a real offer in the mail to buy the property. And some of them are going to be unhappy. You, I’m sure you’ve got some for your house. That happens a lot. Or fill in the blank, pizza. I love those coupons though.
But there’s people that get it and they either throw it away. There’s people that are either like, “this is a bunch of junk, I don’t want to sell my house,” or, “I don’t want to sell my property, I’m building on it right now, or I have plans to,” fill in the blank. They throw it away. There’s some that are really happy to see your mail. They’re like, “oh thank God I didn’t know what I was going to do with this. I didn’t even know dad had this or my husband had this or fill in the blank. I’m so happy.” And then there’s some that are like, then they’re mad. And that’s what Jack coined the term HAIGHT. And why? It’s spelled H A I G H T. That’s Jack’s special spelling that he came up with a couple years, well, 20 or so years ago. To lovingly refer to the hate.

Steven Jack Butala:
Lovingly refers to the hate.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
I love that sentence.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. And it’s just part of it. I personally get excited because that means, “oh, what could be coming?” If you get no hate and everybody calls you back and they love all your offers, you’re like, “uh oh, that means I probably offer too much money.” But healthy amount of hate is normal for this. And yeah. Should that stop you from keeping the wheels on and keeping the mail going? No.

Steven Jack Butala:
Got to embrace it.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. And if you don’t like it, if you really get into this and you really can’t handle it, you find that you’re not good at turning these people around. You can’t get numbers out of them, don’t worry about it. Shoot those phone calls over to PatLive or something like that. It’s too easy to have somebody else answer the call and uncover for you. Do they really want to sell? Do they like your offer? And enough information that you can move forward from there. That’s it.

Steven Jack Butala:
In most Westerns, like movies or action movies, there’s one moment where a couple or few people are huddled under a rock taking all kinds of enemy fire and they are probably about to die. And one character says, “I can’t believe we got ourselves into this. This is, we’re about to die and it’s been great knowing you.” And the other character says, “are you done yet? Because we need to, I’m not dying today. So we got to get out of this.”
When you get the hate, don’t be the first guy. Be the second guy. All the hate’s coming in, in a few more minutes there’s going to be an amazing real estate deal out of all this. And that’s what I say about it. Embrace the hate. Just send out more mail and you just got to laugh about it. That’s what I meant really by this topic. Jill, for whatever reason, is a natural at this and has been since day one. And I think that I personally have laughed a lot harder since watching how she deals with it and turns it around in our favor. And very often we end up buying a piece of real estate because you embrace the hate. It doesn’t get to you.

Jill K DeWit:
Nope, never has. I, you know what? I’ve never taken it personally. Maybe that’s part of it. So maybe that could be a question. Why do I take it like that? Because I don’t care. I don’t know these people. I don’t really care. If they want to sell, great. If they don’t want to sell, fine. No skin off my nose.
I’m just going to answer that phone because you know why? Because I got enough mail out there, I got more coming at me. Every time that phone rings, there’s an opportunity. It could be a seller, it could be a buyer, I don’t know. It could be my title company saying, “yay, I got the commitment back a week early. When do you want to close?” It could be that kind of a call. So I always answer the phone eagerly wondering who’s reaching out to me. And that’s my whole thing too, by the way. I can handle this. What I can’t handle is cold calling. This is so funny. As good as I am on the phones, for two weeks when I was somewhere between somewhere around 19 years old, I had a job. I didn’t, actually shouldn’t say that, two days. I didn’t even last two weeks.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ve had a lot of two day jobs.

Jill K DeWit:
The two weeks was another job.

Steven Jack Butala:
[inaudible 00:08:29]

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t even think I lasted one day. I’m pretty sure it was like one day. It might have been two, but I’m dead serious. This is a hundred percent true. I had to go into an office and sit down, put on a headset and cold call.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s awful.

Jill K DeWit:
Doctor’s offices.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh geez.

Jill K DeWit:
To sell rubber gloves. So first I’m like, “okay, I can handle this.” And so the first trick is getting through to the office manager. The receptionist is pretty, all good receptionists are pretty much trained to get you off the phone and not even entertain it. So you got to kind of sneak your way in there to get to talk to the office manager or who’s in charge of buying the rubber gloves. It’s not, it’s the funniest thing.

Steven Jack Butala:
Good story, I don’t think I’ve ever heard this.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. So I really think it was two days. So it’s day one, I’m giving it a shot and every phone call I get a little bit closer. I’m like, “all right,” I learn to use this verbiage. I learn not to come out of the gate with that, I get a little get better at these phone calls. And then I think it was somewhere on during day two, I realized I just can’t do this. This is just not who I am. You have to almost be sneaky too to say, “I need to speak with whatever.” So I did not last, obviously. I did not go back and I honestly didn’t even collect a paycheck. I didn’t feel like I deserved any pay for that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Isn’t that great?

Jill K DeWit:
Because I just couldn’t, couldn’t hack that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Boy. That’s the greatest decision ever. I think that jobs that can parlay into careers, which is just, it’s tragic.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I think about the number of people that are still doing it in our world. There’s a lot of people I talk to that are going calling and they, not only do they have this list of people that they call, it’s mostly in the house flipping environment that they’re doing a lot of outbound calls and talking to a lot of people. And trying to, I feel like they’re almost trying to talk them into selling their house. And I’m like, “why would you ever do that?” And how hard is that? And how many phone calls do you have to make to get a deal? I’m just not going to work that hard. So send out, so much… The money that they spend and waste and the weeks of sitting there-

Steven Jack Butala:
Decades.

Jill K DeWit:
-would be so much better spent sending out a ton of mail and seeing who comes back when they have your offer like we do.

Steven Jack Butala:
So you put a frame of reference around it like that. There’s a few options for you to create a pipeline or a funnel of potential transactions. Cold calling is one way. Sending out a mailer is another way. Sending out an offer campaign is another way. And when you look at all of them, this is the way to do it. Right? Sending out an actual offer campaign, with it intelligently priced, with a way to answer the phones and some intelligence about the market is way different than calling somebody to see if they wanted any gloves. Buy some rubber gloves.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
So when you really look at that, the how to create that funnel, taking the hate, embracing the hate is easy. It’s a silly little offshoot, hilarious thing that you just do. And then you buy some dirt.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, you shake it off, you kind of giggle. Well, I get I hit them on a bad day. Whatever it is.

Steven Jack Butala:
So I guess the second part of this is then send out more mail, embrace the hate, then send some more mail out. So I think that hope that doesn’t negatively, there’s got to be people that say, I can’t deal with this hate, so I’m not going to send any more mail out. And that’s kind of where it all could end. That’s what I don’t want to happen.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s why , if you can’t do it, or you maybe you know it going into it, great. Put someone else in place from day one. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s right.

Jill K DeWit:
At all. Don’t make it your mom.

Steven Jack Butala:
Or your daughter.

Jill K DeWit:
Definitely not your wife.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yes.

Jill K DeWit:
If they can’t handle it. Could you imagine somebody’s like, “I’m going to have my wife answer the phone. She has no idea what’s coming.”

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s awful.

Jill K DeWit:
No, that’s do that. Going to say, don’t do that.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s terrible.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. So yeah, there’s companies that can help you with that and they’re ready for it. And we can help you with that in LAN Academy and we’ll show you. Happy you could join us today, five days a week. You can find us here on the LAN Academy show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode. You Are Not alone in your Real Estate Ambition. You know what we forgot to say is, Happy Thanksgiving.

Jill K DeWit:
That was last week.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is Friday. Oh right, yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, we miss a week.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh sure. Okay.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, we got a little ahead of ourselves.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, we did.

Jill K DeWit:
They know it. That’s okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what happens when you get ahead of yourself recording.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, it’s now eight days after Thanksgiving and Jack just thinks about it. That’s nice. Yep. That’s same with my birthday. Same with Christmas. Don’t even give me started on our anniversary.

Steven Jack Butala:
You know what the truth is. I remember all those things and you know it.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.