Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
Jack 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’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about how to use the Land Academy online community in real time.

Jill DeWit:
This is so good. This is one of those things that we always tell our community. You ask, we listen. And day one almost of launching Land Academy way back in 2015. Wow, it’s been that long.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
We have how many years of this?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, it’s going to be eight.

Jill DeWit:
Eight. Eight years of making millionaires. How’s that? I’m just going to say it. Eight years of making millionaires. That’s easy. But 20 to 30 years.

Steven Jack Butala:
30 years.

Jill DeWit:
… of us doing it on our own.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.

Jill DeWit:
Talk about valuable experience. I haven’t said this in a while, but man, I wish I had us when I was starting out. So anyway, but one of the first things that came out of our folks was, “How can we communicate with you?” I’m like, yeah, you’re right. We do need to do that. And so we started an online community. It had a different name than it is now. It was fun. That was Success Plant back then. It was really cool. And then it morphed into Land Investors, and now we still have that, but now it’s gone into this Discord environment, which is blowing me away.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too. I mean, I’ll tell you, we offer value added products in Land Academy all the time. Jill’s got all kinds of prop products lined up for 2023. And a online community, especially in this Discord format, was a really good idea. In fact, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So 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 though, I hope you’d know by now, and this is another example I guess of a product that we created that everybody loves. Yep. Jill and I created a commercial blown commercial printing company created solely to help you get an expensive direct mail offers in the hands of sellers quickly. It’s called Offers to Owners. We set this company up several years ago to share it with members and non-members. It’s nothing more than how we used to do our own mailers. We just made it pretty and offered it to-

Jill DeWit:
And still do.

Steven Jack Butala:
… our leadership community. Fast forward to today, we do between 700, and 900,000 offers per month on behalf of members and non-members. Everything from pulling and scrubbing and collecting comps to just actually, literally doing the mailer for you. Check it out. Offers2owners.com.

Jill DeWit:
Titus wrote, “Good morning, Discord family. Hope your Thanksgiving was fun and relaxing. Quick question. Is anyone else having issues with sorting data from Redfin’s housing market data website by ZIP code? I don’t see ZIP codes in the region type or region fields. Any thoughts? Anybody else having this issue?”

Steven Jack Butala:
So I put this in here. This is a fantastic use of our online community, specifically Discord. So he’s in there pulling data and pulling comps as we ask everyone to do in the Land Academy education. And there’s something’s going wrong with Redfin. So Redfin, their data center specifically is amazing. I cannot believe how much realtime data they provide for people like us to make good decisions about where to send mail and whether or not, and just if you know the program. You know how we use Redfin’s data center. Here’s the thing. It’s awesome. It’s web enabled, and it breaks often. And so I often, very often go into Redfin when I’m doing my own mailers. It’s not working right. I have to wait a couple hours maybe. Do it the next day. I included this in this format. I can’t include all the responses, but there were several people in there said, “Yeah, I’m having the same problem today with it. I talked to customer service. They’re aware of the situation, and it’s going to be back up fill in the blank.”

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is a great use of-

Jill DeWit:
This happens.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s s great use of Discord.

Jill DeWit:
You’re not nuts. It’s not perfect, and that’s okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s my point.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. I love it because it makes me think, yay, we’re not alone. Think about their tech team, what goes on with them. I’ve said this before. Every time I go on American Express, I get a 404 err. I’m like, yes, somebody else has problems sometimes. That’s okay. Just be patient.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, I mean the real point here is that now the Titus is not alone. He’s like, oh yeah, everybody else is saying they’re having problems with it today too.

Jill DeWit:
Now you know, and you got a quick answer.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic, how do you use the Land Academy online community in real time? This is why you’re listening.

Jill DeWit:
Just like Titus.

Steven Jack Butala:
We just used it. Boy, what else goes on in Discord? I’ll tell you what, there’s subsections. Here’s some of the subsections in their success stories. I love those. People celebrate their wins. There’s a rant section where you can just really blow off some steam about anything really. I love the rant section.

Jill DeWit:
I can’t believe the county told me X and they were wrong. That happens.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s a note that the seller sent back about how they feel about my offer.

Jill DeWit:
You know what I loved? I loved the other day that a couple shared with us on these offers that go out, they call the first wave that you call the hate. They call that the qualifying day. We know we did it right ’cause we’re getting the hate and so that qualifies how we’ve sent out our offers. I’m like, brilliant. That was brilliant.

Steven Jack Butala:
No, that’s jillifying it.

Jill DeWit:
Well, that that’s true. Thank you. So depends on how you look at it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Not everything can be soft and cute.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. The last thing you want is everybody calling you back and they love you and everybody wants to sign it and they can’t wait to sell. You’re like, oh-oh. I clearly overpriced all these.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly.

Jill DeWit:
Something’s wrong. That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Another few sections in there are deal funding and what’d you do this deal?

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, that’s huge.

Steven Jack Butala:
The way you do this deal is a place where people can go and put their deal, their transactions that they’ve received back from the mail. And one, ask people if they think it’s a good deal the way it’s priced. And two, request funding. And anytime anybody ever requests funding-

Jill DeWit:
If it’s a good deal.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a ton of, ton of people are saying, “Happy to do this deal.”

Jill DeWit:
Will get snatched up fast.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s worth the price of admission.

Jill DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s one subsection in Discord. I’m telling you, just very straightforward. Land Academy Discord is a place where you put your deals in and get funded.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, I know people that-

Steven Jack Butala:
Immediately.

Jill DeWit:
I had people tell me when they came to Land Academy, “I can’t believe this one cheap.” I’m like, “Thanks.” They’re like, “I know a guy who pays 500 bucks a month just for the opportunity to look at some deals.” I’m like, “What? We do that every day, all day long. That’s crazy.”

Steven Jack Butala:
There are a few other categories in there. It’s a whole section in there for career path alumni. So Discord is a product that I’m proud of and it’s really, really worked out. And we have a content suggestions section in there where a lot of these topics that we talk about come from.

Jill DeWit:
What’s nice too, our staff uses it to post workarounds every now and then. If you’re pulling your own data and you’re not using Concierge, now and then you have some like this Redfin hiccup or a scraping tool hiccup. And my team will post workarounds for you in there to help everybody. And I love that. That’s a great use of that space.

Steven Jack Butala:
So finally, my final point here is you want to check it out and you’re not a member, just go to landinvestors.com. I embedded view only of real time Discord and how we’re all talking to each other in there for some of the sections, not all of them. It’s really-

Jill DeWit:
It’s cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
And just you can play with it and look at it and go back in time and all of that pretty. It’s-

Jill DeWit:
It’s cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
It is cool.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s informative as hell is what it is.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. To see whatever’s really doing and really talking about.

Steven Jack Butala:
What it does too is it validates all of this. People are in there talking about the deals that they’re doing and some of the hiccups that they’re finding, and it’s an amazing way for me to get feedback so that when I sit down and do Land Academy 4.0 next year, I’m going to incorporate some of the things that people are repetitively asking so that it’s super clear in the education.

Jill DeWit:
The bottom line is nowhere can you get the experience that we have, the number of transactions we have and the community support. That’s the biggest thing. I know a lot of people are like, “I can figure all this out, but I need the support, I need help. I need realtime help.” Like you just said.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re not here to sell anything. That’s not what this podcast is for.

Jill DeWit:
But it’s just if you’re thinking about it.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re here to provide tools for everybody.

Jill DeWit:
If you’re thinking about this and you need to know that, I need to know where I’m going to get my questions answered because I know it’s going to come up then yeah, we got you. We got you covered. So thank you. Happy to 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 Why Land Ownership is Ideal To Fight Against Inflation in 2023. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Boy, I have a lot to say about this because land is … If you read any economist’s opinion or any billionaire’s opinion, what do they say right now? Buy land.

Jill DeWit:
I was going to say there’s one downside to Discord. You ready for it? You can get lost in there. You can go out … You could just be like come up for air two hours later. So that’s my only warning. Budget your time.

Steven Jack Butala:
Discord is-

Jill DeWit:
There’s so much in there.

Steven Jack Butala:
For us to use a closed Discord community, was that overnight success. We set it up all up. We connected it to our site and all the other stuff that we do. And then I woke up the next day and there are like 28 entries in there, and people were immediately asking questions and other people … We didn’t even set up formal moderators or people to answer questions on our staff at all. We have that now, but everybody was like, “Yeah. What do you think about Arkansas? What do you think about this?” It’s just a natural extension of what we do every day.

Jill DeWit:
It’s just easier to use too. We had a closed environment. We still do on our landinvestors.com website, but it’s not an app like this where you can just really rip through it. It’s awesome. Hey, thanks for tuning in. By the way, Jack and I are very aware them that not everyone has 100 grand lying around to buy a land, like we talked about here where you can get funding. So we fund many Land Academy members and non-members deals every week. So if you’re a Land Academy member, probably pop it in Discord, or you could send it directly to me whether or not you’re a member via landfunding.com. Not only myself, but our membership community as a whole has somewhere between 15 and 100 million bucks set aside to help fund other people’s deals. If you want to find out more, just send a note to my team via support@landacademy.com. We are Jack and Jill.

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

Jill DeWit:
And inspiration

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.