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, Jill and I talk about how 90% of millionaires own real estate. What a sentence.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
The real question is great, 90% of millionaires own real estate, and I think we all are familiar with this type of concept one way or another. The question is, how did they start? I can answer that and we’re going to talk about it. The answer is one deal at a time.

Jill K DeWit:
I wonder how many of those people, this is the majority of what got them there. You know what I’m saying? Did they have another business and then they branched? Because some people have other businesses and then they realize what’s possible in real estate and then they get into real estate. And some people, fortunately enough, started just in real estate, like you, and took that to the moon.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ve always wondered that too. I don’t know if it’s a result of creating wealth somewhere else. I bet-

Jill K DeWit:
There you go.

Steven Jack Butala:
… it’s probably 50/50. But in the end, what we do, real estate was just a vehicle. We started a company. It’s starting companies and creating something and then plowing money into other things.

Jill K DeWit:
Making it great.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly. 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.

Jill K DeWit:
I would like to note, make a quick little announcement here, that if you are thinking about Land Academy, you’re going to want to check out this Thursday coming up. Thursday, December 15th, join me live on YouTube and Facebook. Go to our Facebook page and you can sign up there and get all the details. The title is going to be, what I’m going to talk about is How to Buy and Sell Land for Zero Down and Recession Proof Your Business. How cool is that? One of the things about us is this is not our first recession, not just based on age, but that’s part of it.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s based on age for me.

Jill K DeWit:
Part of it. But let me go back and just say this too. Not only is this not our first recession, this is going on your third recession being in this industry.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, that’s true.

Jill K DeWit:
That is what’s unique.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, that’s true.

Jill K DeWit:
This is going to be Jack’s third time doing this as an investor. And I know, because I came in with Jack towards the tail end of the last one, and I saw and I knew and I watched some of the people that were other land investors in our space not make it. I was able to be there with you and watch it rise back up again. And now we’re just in such a better place. So anyway, we’re going to talk about things like that on Thursday, so join in. It’s going to be awesome.
Back to the question. Jeff wrote, “Hey, I’m just putting some feelers out there to see if anyone would have any interest in some help on their Jack type duties.” There’s Jack duties and there’s JILL duties. “If you get anxiety at sitting at your computer and looking at your screen, I may be able to help. I can help with data pulling, scrubbing, data scraping, pricing, online research or similar tasks. If I can bring any value to your business, please do not hesitate to contact me. I’d love to see if we could put something together and help each other.”

Steven Jack Butala:
So this is in the section of the Land Academy Discord that we’ve set up for just this type of thing, so everybody can-

Jill K DeWit:
Partnership.

Steven Jack Butala:
… partnership, get together and help each other. This is specifically in the subcategory partnership wanted.

Jill K DeWit:
This is not help wanted. We don’t have a help wanted section.

Steven Jack Butala:
So Jill and I put together Concierge Data, which is a full-blown company to help you get the mail out, scrub the data, get the mail out.

Jill K DeWit:
It will do a lot of this.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’ll do all of it. But if you’re interested in having a full-time partner and splitting the money up and the equity that you create up, this might work. But my point in putting this in here is that we’re all helping each other.

Jill K DeWit:
Perfect.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic, 90% of millionaires own real estate. This is a funny sentence? I think Dale Carnegie said it in the beginning and since then everybody’s been doing research to back that statement up, and turns out it’s true. So where do you start? Do you start in real estate? Do you open a convenience store and buy the building that you’re in? And on and on and on.
So you have to get your head around the fact that this all happens one transaction at a time. So if you own a convenience store, let’s say, or you own a small manufacturing company or whatever you can dream up, if you own a bunch of stock in companies because you’ve been buying and selling stock for a while and have created some equity there, real estate is a very logical place to put money into to create and hold onto equity, especially in a recessionary time. So that’s what this is all about. We’re all on the same boat on this. It’s one deal at a time.

Jill K DeWit:
This does not include REITs and things like that, I’m assuming, right? This is individuals owning their own individual portfolio.

Steven Jack Butala:
The article that I read went on to say, “Of this 90%, about 30% of the people that are in this statistic and work certainly in the statistics go on to buy stock in REITs and play in that market space,” which we choose not to do.

Jill K DeWit:
Right. So, I’m sorry. I missed that. So that means they go on to do that, but that doesn’t make up this 90 … Let me back up. Here’s how I see it. I think that, A, I totally believe this, number one.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill K DeWit:
Number two, I even think, because this could be taken loosely. This could be taken that I happen to live in Tustin, California and I bought my house for $300,000 and now it’s worth a million dollars, and now I’m in this group.

Steven Jack Butala:
I absolutely agree.

Jill K DeWit:
So I accidentally fell into this group in that scenario, which is good. But I think what’s interesting is, like we were talking about earlier, everybody knows. If you don’t know that there’s money to be me in real estate, we’ve got to talk, which we are, number one. And I wonder, my argument is if I was going to start any company, like you’re talking about, I’m out here, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m going to start something. I’m going to sit down and figure out what makes the most money.
Do I want to be selling something for a dollar a pop? Maybe I make only a couple dollars a pop, like a pizza. Hey, won’t go there again. Or fill in the blank. Have your own YouTube business. Remember that woman that we met. We used to have an employee a long time ago that her job, which I thought was very smart, this is way before COVID, way before working from home, her way of having her own little online business and just having a nice sweet life was going to garage sales and buying a whole lot of books. That was a lot of our things, were books and magazines from garage sales, taking them home, taking beautiful pictures, putting them on eBay, selling them for more. And that was her gig. And that’s a lot of work, I’m going to argue, for probably-

Steven Jack Butala:
For not a lot of money.

Jill K DeWit:
… if you’re lucky, $10 of profit-

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, lucky.

Jill K DeWit:
… a sale. So, that’s great. And then if I was to this person, I’d be like, “Well, I’ve got that figured out. Now I need to make $10,000 a sale,” hence the real estate.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know what the point of that is.

Jill K DeWit:
My point was I was going-

Steven Jack Butala:
How do we get onto books in $10?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, well, learning to round it … I think of smart people starting real estate. I imagine a lot of them are here or get here because they were smart enough to do and figure out something else, and then they were smart enough to transition it into something that yields much more profits.

Steven Jack Butala:
Creating money for yourself or equity or wealth for yourself happens one of two ways. You buy something and you sell it for more, or you buy something and you do a bunch of stuff to it, maybe in a manufacturing setting, you add components to it, so the sum of all the parts equals more than the actual parts. Or in the case of real estate, you buy a rundown house, you clean it all up and you sell it for more, and then the price of the house and the price of the improvements and all the stuff that you put into it is more. So in both situations, you’ve created equity. Our real estate way is to buy a piece of land that’s valued at $200,000 or less, you buy it for 100,000, you sell it for 180 or 200,000 and you’ve created $100,000 of equity for yourself relatively quickly, in my opinion, without a ton of work. So when you start to add those numbers up, it doesn’t take long to get to a million dollars.

Jill K DeWit:
A million bucks, no, geez, 10 deals.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re buying a book at a garage sale and marking it up $10, that’s going to take a while.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s going to take a long time.

Steven Jack Butala:
But Jill’s point-

Jill K DeWit:
She’s probably still doing that and very happy.

Steven Jack Butala:
… a substantial number of people that are in the statistic, 90% of millionaires, which is getting antiquated by the way. During Dale Carnegie’s time, a millionaire was a lot of money.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s just not the case anymore. I do think that you can create wealth by being an electrician, let’s say, buying a house for two or $300,000, 30 years of being an electrician, the house is worth a million dollars. Can you do that in downtown Detroit? No, probably not. And that’s not your fault, that’s the market condition. But you can do it in-

Jill K DeWit:
California.

Steven Jack Butala:
… Hermosa Beach, California. In fact, they plan on that.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
So my point is, maybe you just do one deal. Maybe you do your primary residence and it increases over time and now you’re a millionaire, or maybe you do some version of what Jill and I do, which is one deal at a time. Maybe you are hardwired to finance strip centers, strip malls, and you do it that way, or you buy in on a partnership where somebody buys and sells or buys and manages trailer parks and you’re a 10% finance person in the whole thing.
But my whole point is this. It’s so easy to say this sentence, 90% of millionaires, but then the vast majority of the people who are listening or watching this, and you’re not wrong, “Okay, great. Well, how does that happen? How does that start?” It starts with one deal, one single deal. My first deal was an 80 acre property in northern Arizona that I bought for about $8,000 and sold it for 16 pretty quickly on the internet, site unseen. And I created whatever that ends up being, in the bitter end after marketing and all that, probably $10,000. And that was it for me. That was it. I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And fast forward, whatever, 20 years, 25 years, and here we are. So you’ve got to get your toe in the water.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s my point. And I don’t know a better way to do that than with a small piece of land.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. That’s really good. Yeah, join on Thursday, and you’ll hear me talk about how you can do it with other people’s money and really feel great about it, like my money.

Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, what Jill’s talking about without stealing your thunder, is that there’s an entire community within Land Academy where people are just there to fund other people’s deals.

Jill K DeWit:
Correct.

Steven Jack Butala:
Including us.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
We fund other people, Land Academy members’ transactions all the time. So it’s not so much, geez, how do I start? How do I get that first piece of property? Once you go through the education process of finding undervalued property, let’s just say, not just land, not houses, but office buildings and all of it, there are all kinds of people lined up to be your partner to see the deal through. So if you establish the talent of locating amazing real estate deals, the money’s going to fall on your head.

Jill K DeWit:
You know how I describe it? I said, “Let me just explain this to you this way. What do you love? Cars. Great. Okay. What’s your favorite car? ’65 Mustang. Awesome. So maybe that’s worth a really good, pretty cleaned up right now, $45,000. Okay, good. What if you found a sweet little old lady that had one in her garage and didn’t even know what to do with it, and her husband passed on and she would sell you this car for 15 grand and you know it’s worth 45 right now in its current condition. What would you do? Well, I’d be scrambling to get the money to” … That’s what I’m saying.
So when you put something like that in front of somebody, it’s the same thing with real estate, same thing with a property. You come up and say, “We’ve got to buy this. Either I’m going to get the money from you, or I’m about to start selling my kids so I can afford to do this.” Yes. You know what I mean? The money’s there. So not to steal that, but more coming soon. 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 The Riskiest Thing You Can Possibly Do is Not Take Any Risk At All. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. It’s kind of a-

Jill K DeWit:
That’s going to tie into tomorrow actually.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s theory week this week.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, is tomorrow the risky thing, kind of what we just described?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Then I won’t say anything more about that.

Steven Jack Butala:
You can’t do nothing. You have to do something. That’s what it is tomorrow.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Hey, by the way, if you think land investing and everything that we’re talking about might be a good fit for you, get our free ebook. By the way, that’ll get you on the email series too, so you’ll get notified when I go live on Thursday. So go to landacademy.com. At the top, look for the button that says sign up to get a free ebook and it’ll happen immediately. Check it out, read it, see if it’s for you. If you have any questions, you can always send a note to my team via support@landacademy.com. We are Jack Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jack and Jill. Information.

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.