Transcript:

Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Hello.

Steven Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California .

Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about the types of blind offers to send and the types not to send.

Jill DeWit:
Oh, I have a list. Believe you me.

Steven Butala:
This is one of those topics that just gets a little passionate about, and I love it.

Jill DeWit:
Well, only because we’ve done it all. I mean, I can honestly say, we haven’t been doing this… Well, you, because you’re much older than me, since the ’90s, and tested every possible thing. There’s a reason why we got to this point. The reason why we’re successful, is the reason why our community is successful, and we all have the secret, and I’m happy to share it.

Steven Butala:
Awesome.

Jill DeWit:
For $10,000. Just kidding, I want to share it right now today.

Steven 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 if you’re a Land Academy member, please join us on Discord.

Jill DeWit:
James wrote, “I’m in one of the states with a lot of rural lands and with thousands of lakes.” Well, how lucky are you, James? You’re bragging a little bit, and I think that’s awesome.

Steven Butala:
You can brag, but those lakes are frozen, right now.

Jill DeWit:
Oh, well, there is that.

Steven Butala:
I’m from a place like that.

Jill DeWit:
Okay. “I ran the red, yellow, green test, and many of the counties look like good spots to mail. My problem is, it’s hard to find any good average for the pricing, because of all the lakes. On a coastal lake are often higher priced, where a half mile to mile away are much cheaper. I was thinking I need to use in-fill lot pricing, but even on the zip code level, there’s a lot of price variability. Do I have to price APN by APN? Or is there a way to price to get me in the ball park of a decent sized area?” This such a good question, because this is stuff that we talked about in the show yesterday. That’s a common thing here, if you’re doing an area like where we’re sitting in Southern California. Ocean front and on the west side of PCH is a whole different pricing point versus one mile or even half mile or even yards away.

Steven Butala:
James, this is a question I asked myself, even today. I’m working a certain, very specific area in a specific state right now, and I looked at and studied and studied and studied pricing variances based on attribute, that’s really what the issue is. And the red, green, yellow test, was designed to solve that for you. So, even in a rural area, if you take each zip code, if you’re lucky enough to get the data and drop it into the red, green, yellow test, you’re going to see where property is selling, and where it’s not. So the theory is, property that’s close to the lakes and cheap or cheaper, will sell faster. And then, so you can price that that way, so that’s one way to look at it. And then if that’s the case, and it almost always is, it’s pure supply and demand, pricing and supply and demand go together.

Steven Butala:
Then you can extrapolate that and run the data sets that way, based on what you find from a zip code standpoint. But zip codes don’t often comply with, let’s say, shoreline, so what do you do? You have to pretty much run an APN scenario, and I just did it. All of this is more theory than reality. The fact is, if you stick 42 fishing lines in the water versus three, you’re going to catch more fish and some of the fish that you catch are going to be small, and you’re going to throw them back, because you don’t want them. Some of the fish are going to be awesome, you’re going to keep it. And some of the fish are going to be, you’re going to shake your head and say, “This might be a record for this lake, for the biggest catch of all time, ever.” So, you have to really get a lot of lines in the water and see what happens.

Jill DeWit:
Here’s what I think you’re saying in Jill terms. Let me, Jillify this. Number one, we do not want you to go line by line by line, that’s ridiculous.

Steven Butala:
No.

Jill DeWit:
You cannot do it, because you’re sending out thousands of offers, it doesn’t… That’s not possible, and we know that, but you can get an APN scheme going. We’ve done that, when I say we, I mean, Steven has done that in certain areas, where you can kind of get a feel for all the properties, starting with 103, are kind of priced this way, all the 104s are priced like this, and all the 205s are like, there are way over here, and we price them this way.

Steven Butala:
Or 205 isn’t something we want.

Jill DeWit:
Right. And you could kind of sit and figure that out. And that’s kind of advanced level stuff.

Steven Butala:
Way advanced.

Jill DeWit:
And-

Steven Butala:
This is master’s degree, PhD stuff.

Jill DeWit:
… it takes a little time. So, what do you do if you’re new? Okay, Jill, that’s great. You know what? This is what I would do. And I mean, you can tell me if I’m right or wrong, I would go with kind of a median in between there. I’d still try to get a feel for, what offer is not going to piss off the lakefront property people too much and not make the people way over here jump up and down too much? So I’m kind of in the middle, so when they call me back, I can adjust.

Steven Butala:
And when she says adjust, she means turn their opinion around and buy their stuff for the price that she wants.

Jill DeWit:
Or-

Steven Butala:
… that’s the whole point here.

Jill DeWit:
… add money or takeaway money.

Steven Butala:
That’s the whole point here. If you throw a bunch of lines in the water, some are going to get bitten on, some aren’t, some are going to steal your bait. Jill wants lots of lines in the water, so that when they do bite, she can, with her talent, reel them in.

Jill DeWit:
I can adjust. So what happens… What’s the worst that’s going to happen, James? You don’t want to sit and learn this yet. You’re going to send them out like, “All right. I know that waterfront property is really 3000 an acre is what I should be buying. Away from the water, should be buying at 1000 an acre. I’m going to go 2000 an acre and see what happens.’.

Steven Butala:
Or 1000-

Jill DeWit:
So then you’re going to go with, or something like that-

Steven Butala:
1000 for all of it.

Jill DeWit:
… 1500 or something. I don’t know. When they call back, you can adjust, and say, “All right, now I know what’s going on. And thank you for telling me, I was waiting for some of these ocean for properties or this lake for properties to come back. You’ve got one, I love it. And you’re right, that was too low. Let’s talk.” And have that dialogue.

Steven Butala:
Jill’s absolutely right. That’s not going to happen. You cut yourself off from the chance of that happening, when you… This happens so often with the new people, they try to… I don’t know if you’re one of these people, James, or not. I’m saying this happens. The mailer efficiency and mailer yield and pricing efficiency and pricing yield, the importance of it, is so blown out of proportion that it makes me want to make everybody stop, and say, “Look, the county’s only got 4,200 properties in it anyway, why not just mail them all?”

Jill DeWit:
It’s true.

Steven Butala:
Jill’s example is 3000 shorefront, 1500, a little above, and then inland is a 1000. Why not just send everybody an $800 an acre offer and see what happens, and you’re off to the races? Your lines are in the water. You don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know of anyone who’s completely and entirely struck out this way.

Jill DeWit:
I would like to add, it’s not like we’re one-upping each other, but we’re not. No, but-

Steven Butala:
Yeah, we are. It always happens.

Jill DeWit:
No, no. But I’m just thinking of one, as an example though, there have been times… James, this is going to help you feel good. I don’t want to the planet off. What’s the worst that can happen. You know what’s the worst that can happen, James, you could send somebody a crazy low offer and they don’t even care, and they say, yes, to it. Because that has happened, and that could happen.

Steven Butala:
And there was… It does happen to.

Jill DeWit:
So, let it rip. And again, don’t go APN by APN. I don’t want you to do that. Pick a number that feels good, and you got this.

Steven Butala:
The reason I just spent all this time on an APN scenario is because these are very specific lots that we’re going to do certain stuff with, and I know that there’s a crazy different demand for this certain APN, to these three APNs versus all the other APNs in the County. And believe me, the other property owners, throughout that whole county, are going to get an offer, just not in this run at that price. But I’ve been doing this tens of millions of offers I’ve sent out and data sets I’ve analyzed, so, you shouldn’t have want to do that. You can’t play the guitar like Eddie Van Halen the first time you pick it up.

Jill DeWit:
It makes me happy.

Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, types of blind offers to send and not to send. This is the meat of the show. You’re spreading down a lot of notes, I can’t wait to hear this because-

Jill DeWit:
Oh, I did.

Steven Butala:
… this is a one of your peeves.

Jill DeWit:
Do you want me to start with what kind you should send? How about I’ll do the opposite. I’m going to pick it. I’m going to do here’s what not to send. And then, I’ll tell you what to send. Okay? When you are trying to buy property like we do from owners rather… And I want you to send them to, by the way… Number one is, don’t send them to only people that are out of state. I want you to send them to instate out of state. And then what do I send? You do not send letters of interest. Like, “Hey, I want to buy your property. Call me.” That’s a waste of time. Every single person’s going to call you back and are going to want retail, or they’re going to name their number, or you’re going to… No matter what, you’re going to have everybody calling you, and you won’t know who’s real or who’s not real. And when I say real, I mean, in the price range that you wish to purchase.

Jill DeWit:
Number two, don’t send dumb, pretty, glossy postcards with you and your dog or whatever it is, or any… it looks like a pizza, how about that? A postcard is going to look like a pizza ad, don’t do that. Don’t do cute stuff on yellow pads. We all see right through that. We know it’s not really a yellow pad.

Jill DeWit:
Don’t spend any money or do your own wet signatures, not necessary. It’s okay. They don’t need that. Don’t send anything cute. Don’t put a dollar in it. And the last one, this really made me mad when I got this, please don’t walk around and put a sticky note on somebody’s front door. So, somebody was walking around in our neighborhood, like a year or two ago, looking at houses, and they were writing sticky notes and putting on every front note door with their phone number. That kind of spooked me a little bit. You better believe I didn’t call them or take them seriously? It’s just like, “Hey, I want to buy your house. Here’s my number.” Well, yeah, join the club. Yeah, no kidding kind of thing. At the time we were renting, I want to buy it too, take a number. They didn’t do any of their homework. So they left a note for me, the tenant. I’m not going to do anything again.

Jill DeWit:
So here’s what you should be sending professional, personalized, well thought out, real dollar amount offers for a specific property, and Steve is going to tell you more about how you do that. But on your offer, I want you to have your real name, first and last name. I want you to have a way to look you up online and verify that you’re legit. I’d like a website. I’d like your LinkedIn. I’d like your Facebook page, I’d like it to match, and I’d like a way to contact you.

Jill DeWit:
This is way better too, than even all those things… There’s a lot of… This is going on a lot in Arizona I see, it’s like a thing, because there’s just so much property changing hands right now, in the house world. Every person and their brother is doing these commercials and they have an 800 number, and it’s like John Buys Houses or something. I’m not into that, and I don’t know how it makes other people feel, but it doesn’t… I just know that our yield and the way we do it is fantastic, and that’s the reason I’m still doing it. And by way, we’ve tested a lot of these things over the years, or people in our community have, and said, “Yep, didn’t work. You’re right.”

Steven Butala:
So, the question you should be asking yourself is, “Yeah, that’s great Jill, what… Why… Congratulations your yield’s awesome. I want my yield to be great too. What do I do?” And this is what you do.

Jill DeWit:
Copy us.

Steven Butala:
Number one, you have to create an offer. I don’t care if you’re sending out 800 or 80,000 offers. Every single one of those offers, absolutely, has to look like it was just addressed to that person. And all this stuff Jill said was… I completely agree with. But here’s where I… And here’s how you do that. I’ll just just say this.

Steven Butala:
Every owner, every single… In our data sets, we know who owns the property. We know it’s johnandjacksllc.com or it could be a Great American Cattle Company, or it could be Jill Dewitt or it could be Steve and Jill. So that presents a data challenge in how it’s presented on that actual offer, because what… If you have an 80,000 lines of data, you can press a button via the miracle of mail merge, if you’ve got these 80,000 scrubbed data set and a mail merge in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word, press the button., And it comes out perfectly in a 160,000 unit PDF. They all get printed off, stuffed in envelopes, and it looks like all those 80,000 people, you just wrote them a letter. It doesn’t look like a form letter. It doesn’t look like it’s an advertisement. It looks exactly how you had intended it. So that’s where I see… I just proofed my own mailer 20 minutes before we turn this camera on, and found like six errors, because it just wasn’t meeting my standards of spacing and those… All those things really matter.

Steven Butala:
Number one, so that persons needs to say, “This is a real letter from a real person. I just checked jilldewitt.com, they are real. It’s for a very specific price, $7,342 and 42 cents. If you say… Imagine you get a letter, it’s addressed to John or current occupant, “We want to buy your house. Or we want to buy a piece of land located in Elko County, Nevada. Here’s my number. Give me a call.” You’re going to throw that away. But if it says, “John Smith, we would love to buy your 30 acre property for $2,342 and 38 cents. We’ve done tens of thousands of properties in Nevada. And we understand that there’s a few back… there may be back taxes or whatever. We’re very used to dealing with all this. And we’re very used to taking all the stuff that can go on in a real estate transaction out of it. And by the way, there’s not any negotiation and there’s not any fees or any of that stuff. We don’t play those games. Give us a call. We can get this deal done pretty quickly. If you’re interested in selling it. Thanks.”

Jill DeWit:
What is special too that I think you’re perfect in, that was awesome, and one thing that we add in there is a call to action, which is, “Here’s the purchase agreement. All you got to do is sign it and send it back.” So the first page is everything that Steven just laid out, and the second page is, “Here it is, sign it, send it back, and we’ll open escrow.” Next. That’s kind of it.

Steven Butala:
You’re going to get a great response, if you do that. You’re going to get terrible response, if any, with postcards. If you send a letter that says, “Give me a call and let’s talk about… I really want to buy your property, give me a call.” You know what, you’re going to get a million phone calls and no one’s interested in selling their property, because everybody thinks their property is worth a million dollars. What my way does is it makes the mail work for you. So if I send out 10,000 offers, there’s going to be 50, 60 or 70 people in there that are… you just caught them on the right day. And they’re not real interested in price, they’re just interested in selling it for the price… Because they just want to be done with it, or they’re getting a divorce, or their wife doesn’t want it, or their husband does want it, but she doesn’t want it, or their kid’s going to college or whatever.

Steven Butala:
So it just doesn’t become a price thing, it becomes a life circumstance thing. And that’s what this offer is designed to do. They don’t want to… Who wants to call and talk about it for days? No, nobody. They just want their money.

Jill DeWit:
Exactly. It’s so powerful. Like you just said, I have whatever life event and your thing shows up. And I might’ve thrown three away in the last two years that that could happen, but today is the day.

Steven Butala:
And so James questions here about the lakes, and we get this… My whole entire Land Academy career, I can speak for both of us, and I can say exactly where James is in his career, because here’s really what’s going to happen to James with his lakes. He’s going to take my advice, he’s going to send everybody in that county an $800 an acre offer or whatever Jill’s example was. A certain predictable number, two or three people, are going to call him back maybe four or five, and they’re going to say, “Your timing’s perfect. We do need to sell this property. $800 an acre is not going to work, but 900 will or $72,000 or however, the numbers work out well.” And if he’s priced it right, and he would… as I’m suggesting, they’re going to come to an agreement, where it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than what it’s worth.

Steven Butala:
And then, he’ll never write a question like this again. I’m not picking on you, James. He’ll never add a question like this again. What he will do is, is say this, “Well, I just undercut the hell out of this entire county. I bought two properties and resold them for three times what I paid, very quickly. And now I don’t care, because I’m going to do the math. I sent out 5,000 offers, bought three properties. I would like to send out 10,000 offers and buy six properties. And on and on and on these kinds of conversations, don’t go on in the advanced group.

Steven Butala:
They don’t talk about… We never… Once you do a two or three successful mailers, you never worry about mailer yield or attributes or doing it correctly. You know what my biggest problem is with mailers? This is truth time, staying on a schedule that satisfies her and her staff, so that I can jam her pipeline absolutely and completely full, all the time. In fact, I just hired somebody to make sure this is their whole job in life. I wish somebody would have given me this job.

Jill DeWit:
Keep you on a schedule.

Steven Butala:
Their whole job in life, on Wednesday morning, is to say, “Tell me what County, I… And they’re very proficient, this person is extremely proficient in Excel. They’re better than I am actually. Just to stay on track, to make sure that we get enough mail out.

Jill DeWit:
It’s awesome. I love it, that makes me so happy. And I’m happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here, on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called, what to do when you can’t find a dataset for a mailable county. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill DeWit:
This will be really good, I’m excited. I’m looking forward to that.

Steven Butala:
Surprise, surprise.

Jill DeWit:
There’s new people… We have some new… Ad experience people are like, “Okay, wait a minute. I got this great area. I’m a little hung up here. Steven, how I solve this?”

Steven Butala:
Some data sets are great-

Jill DeWit:
And I was like-

Steven Butala:
… some data sets are non-existent, and then there’s everything in between.

Jill DeWit:
Exactly. If you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers or FEMA flood overlays, checkout neighborscoop.com created by investors, that’s us, for investors like you. We are Steve and Jill-

Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill, information-

Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Butala:
To buy undervalued property.