What’s Holding You Back from Accomplishing Your Goals? (LA 1939)

LA 1939 wp New

Never Miss an Episode!

Subscribe to the Land Academy podcast

Description​

 

Welcome to episode 1939 of the Land Academy Show with Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit. In this episode, learn how to negotiate a purchase price and discover what’s holding you back from accomplishing all of your goals. Tune in for a mix of Jill’s insights on land deals and Steven’s tips for making serious dough. The show has now transitioned into a weekly format where they answer questions from their Land Academy Discord forum and review land acquisitions from the weekly member webinar. Members and non-members alike can benefit from the valuable information shared in each episode. Check out landinvestors.com or landacademy.com to access the Land Academy Discord community in a free, read-only format.

Transcript: 

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, and this is the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is episode number 1,939, if you can believe it. And today we are talking in depth about how to negotiate a purchase price down from $30,000 to $13,000. Jill’s going to handle that. And then, a little later on the show, I’m going to talk about what’s holding you back from actually accomplishing all your goals, personally and professionally.

Jill K DeWit:
Cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sounds like we got a good mix of Jill telling us how to do deals and me hoping maybe I can get you prepped to make some serious dough.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, the point here, too, is this podcast is not just for people who find us, but for members and anybody in our world. I know there’s a lot of people that listen and watch that are not in Land Academy. You have told me. And you get little nuggets out of this, and I appreciate that. Remember the time, it was so funny, I was looking for a broker in a certain area, and I picked up the phone, and I just was cold calling. I’m like, “I need a broker to sell this property.” And I called this guy, and he answered the phone, and he was like, “Jill DeWit.” And I’m like, “Have we spoken before?” He’s like, “You don’t know me, but I listen to your podcast.” It was so funny. It was really cool. So I appreciate that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Good. Hope you’re also enjoying our 2023 weekly show. This format’s changed. I think this is probably number four. Each week, we answer questions from our Land Academy Discord forum, review land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar, and take a deep dive into two land related topics that we just mentioned. And these are usually by request.

Jill K DeWit:
They are definitely by request.

Steven Jack Butala:
Now let’s take a question posted by one of our members in the Land Academy Discord online community. If you want to sneak peek about what that’s all about, you’re not a Land Academy member yet, check out landinvestors.com. It’s also posted out now on landacademy.com, I’m told.

Jill K DeWit:
It is.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s free in a read-only format. It’s pretty interesting. If you’re into this, it’s worth checking out.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay, Probacorn, I think I got that right, wrote, “Should most HOA properties be avoided entirely? Just received two accepted offers in North Carolina, but both have a $3,397 yearly HOA in a golf community. Both are infill lots.” That’s hefty. That’s really good. So here’s a couple comments that some members wrote. First of all, Will wrote… I like this. This is the power of Discord, and I was just helping someone about that this morning. Everybody right there is here and happy to help too.
So one of our members, Will, wrote, “Not necessarily, but a few things to look at for infill lots and HOAs in my experience in North Carolina. Number one, see if they’ve already paid the HOA dues for the year and if they will agree to transfer that amount in the sale. Number two, get details from the HOA on what the ownership transfer fees are.” We’ve been hit with that. “I had one under contract that has $7,500 owner transfer fee. Nope.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. We’ve seen that too.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep. “The lot wasn’t worth it and I couldn’t get it assigned to a builder to try to minimize the impact of two transfers.” That’s a lot. See, that’s the thing. You can’t get hit with that. “And if you do go forward, number three, make sure the doc prep fee for the HOA ordinances. They can add $500 at closing.” So yeah, there can be a lot of hidden fees. We always think about what are the annual fees, what are the monthly fees, and what are the restrictions? We don’t think about the transfer fees all the time and that’s important. And thank you Will. You are 100% correct. You need to check all that.

Steven Jack Butala:
What’s an HOA anyway? It stands for Home Owners Association.

Jill K DeWit:
Or POA. There’s POA’s, Property Owners Association, too. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly. So you have to decide if this type of property is something that you want to invest in. People make a lot of money buying and selling HOA property all the time. First, you need to decide who your customer is. HOA properties in general, or HOA communities, why do they even exist? Why are some properties in an HOA community? Why are some properties not in an HOA community? HOAs are relatively new in the world of real estate development and subdivisions. In the fifties and sixties, no one ever heard of what an… They were nonexistent.
In the seventies and eighties, it became a new business model. So not only do you build a condo community, or in our case, when we go and buy and sell land, a large swath of real estate subdivided into properties, and then sell those properties off and charge an association fee, which is usually responsible for road maintenance and some other stuff. Unfortunately, what comes with that is rules, a lot of rules. And if you’re in an urban area, the rules can get pretty ridiculous pretty quickly, like how long your grass can be.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, yeah. How long you can keep your garage door open and pulling in your trash things.

Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly. In my opinion, the spirit of rural living is you can do whatever the hell you want out there. And if it’s got an HOA associated with it, where you can’t have chickens, or anything you can imagine, that really narrows… The thick of it is it narrows your buyer base. When do we ever want to narrow our buyer base? Never. So now you’re selling real estate to a very specific buyer, and you better get it cheap. That said, Jill and I have made tons of money, literally tens of millions of dollars, in HOA communities in the southwest. So you just have to decide. We don’t buy HOA property almost ever anymore.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s rare, but it’s okay. But I know that it’s a $100 transfer fee, and it’s like $100… I’ll tell you what really comes up. The ones that I deal with now are like $100 transfer fee, and it’s $100 a year. Because all they do is there’s a sign, it pays for the sign, and maybe running over the roads, keeping the dirt roads relatively passable kind of thing.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you call the HOA, and if the HOA is large enough, there are people that are working there. And so, now all the people that are living in the community are paying in every month or every year, and now they’re paying these people’s salaries. And so, if you’re the kind of person who likes government, and you like paying people’s salaries to just create some type of fictitious work, then HOAs might be for you.

Jill K DeWit:
No sarcasm there.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you call the HOA and ask them for a copy of the CCNRs, their covenants, something, and restrictions. So right in the title, you are restricted. Covenants and restrictions. I don’t want to be restricted in the use of my land.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, you know what? And sometimes, even with this one, this $7,500 one, okay, if it’s a million dollar home HOA, it might make sense. So let me just back up and say that. Wherever this is, if these are lots that are sold between $100,000 and $200,000, and then the homes when they’re done are a million bucks, then $7,500, I can totally swallow.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a golf course there, and a club, and that’s what you’re paying for.

Jill K DeWit:
And a bar and a restaurant.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s different. That’s not an… We don’t run into those at Land Academy.

Jill K DeWit:
Not very often.

Steven Jack Butala:
Those types of places are, it’s a country club type of environment. And some people could argue that you actually get value and you’re creating value in the house that you buy or the condo that you buy, and you’re having fun on the weekends too. So that’s different.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
In general, restrictions on real estate, not good. Today’s first topic is how to negotiate a purchase price from $30,000 down to $13,000 by Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
So let me paint this picture. Jack did everything right. The mail went out, Jack picked the right area, he downloaded the right information, the right comp, scraped it, all of the stuff that he does that goes into pricing to get these offers out to property owners. They get direct mail offers with a number on it. And let’s just imagine my number was $31,336.45. That would be what our offers look like. Because it’s a beautiful, I don’t know, 80 acre ranch-type property. Maybe it’s ag. It’s 80 acres of ag. That might make sense. I could-

Steven Jack Butala:
80 acres for 30 grand, huh?

Jill K DeWit:
Right? Let’s just go with that. I don’t know. Just follow me here. That’s good. So the offer comes back, and I look at it, and at first, I’m like, “This is great. Let’s see what we can do.” And the guy signed it and he sent it back, and we’re all ready to go. So now I dig in, I go, “Oh shucks, this one slipped in. This one isn’t zoned the right way. This one doesn’t have the access that we thought. This one’s not being used, farmed right now.” Some of them we get are being used kind of thing. I’m like, “Shoot.”
And it’s way on the outskirts. It’s on the other side of the train tracks kind of thing, where it doesn’t command that price. If it would’ve been over on this side of the train tracks, it would. But on this side of the train tracks, it doesn’t. That can happen. Can you account for that when you send out the mail? No. So this is a normal situation and this does come up, and you just need to know how to handle it.
So now I’m looking at this and running numbers again and it’s still a good property, so I’m liking it, but I’m not going to do $30,000, because I’m going to sell it for like $50,000. I can’t buy it for $30,000 and sell it for $50,000. That’s not going to work here. That does not meet my numbers, especially when I factor in escrow fees, and the way I do it nowadays, I’m not going to work that hard. I’m bringing in a broker to do it, and I have a great guy in the area.
By the time I took all that out, I might net $10,000, and if something goes sideways, then I’m really worried. So I’m like, “All right.” So I look at the property. I’m like, “I could do $13,000.” Buying for $13,000 with a commission, with escrow fees, and all of that to sell for $50,000, now it makes sense, now I’m going to do it. So great. That’s great, Jill. But you’re saying, “What now? How do you get the seller on board with you?” That’s a tough conversation, and that’s what we’re going to have right now. And even though we put negotiate in here, I’m really not negotiating.

Steven Jack Butala:
What are you doing? This is interesting.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. No, I’m explaining, it doesn’t work, and here is why.

Steven Jack Butala:
You’re explaining it. You’re explaining the actual-

Jill K DeWit:
Not explaining.

Steven Jack Butala:
No, I think that’s right. That’s great. You’re actually explaining to the seller why his property or her property is not-

Jill K DeWit:
It doesn’t command that.

Steven Jack Butala:
… not worth the original purchase price, to us, anyway.

Jill K DeWit:
And you know what? That person, just so you know, that’s the reason they signed it at $30,000. They know it’s like, “Whoa, that’s a good number.” Remember, I want to sell it for $50,000. So they know, “Woo. I’ll take $30,000 all day long.” So this is what you have to do. First thing I want you to do is everything I just said. Do your homework, do your due diligence, and get all your ducks in a row, and be sure that you still want the property. I love it. Access isn’t great, but it’s… It’s not paved, it’s dirt. Fine. And we have legal access. Fine. So that all checks out. We’re good with that. It’s not as close to town as I like, but at $13,000, I can make this work.
And I would write this stuff down. I want you to have a couple points, not 20, and try not… I don’t want you to make up stuff. It’s okay to say, “I wish it was closer to,” or, “It’s not as close to this.” I want you to have real reasons why it doesn’t work for you at that price. And you’re going to call the person back and talk to them. You probably had a conversation. I hope you had a conversation with them before. You may or may not have had a conversation. It may have just been they signed it and sent it back.
Either way, it’s going to start out with, “Hi, I’m Jill. I got your signed purchase agreement. I’m so glad that you’re excited and you want to sell this property. We got to talk.” Something like that, like, okay, you’re kind of prepping them. First thing I want to know is what do they know? Have you seen the property? When was the last time you’ve seen the property? A lot of people have never seen it. They don’t even know it’s out there. They may think that Amazon is next door and that’s why you’re sending this offer. They may have inherited it, owned it for 20 years. Who knows?
A lot of the time, they haven’t seen it, they haven’t been out there. It’s not their property next door kind of thing. So we got to find that out or just gauge what they know. And then you know how to come at it too, and go, “All right, well…” You’re either going to say, “As you may have noticed, nothing’s happening in that area,” if they have seen it, if they are not far from it. Or you’re going to say, “Let me tell you what’s going on with that area, because you haven’t been there in a while.” And this is where you start filling them in.
“All right, so I see that that was going to be hopefully the path of growth when you bought this back 20 years ago, but it’s not what’s happening now. So I looked around, I did all my numbers, and…” Well, actually, let me get to that. First, I’m going to start giving them two, maybe three things that are concrete of why it doesn’t command $30,000. “I wish it was closer to…” Fill in the blank. “Anybody that’s going to be out there, they’re kind of out there. They’re going to have to drive this far to get their mail and milk, number one.”
“Number two, I thought it was paved. Turns out it’s not. It looks like you do have legal access, so that’s…” I try to make them feel good, that it’s a good property, because I want it. “So that’s good, but I can’t really get every vehicle out there, so that’s going to be a little bit of an issue. And then the third thing is, I just looked at properties in the area, and they’re just not commanding that much. I looked back and…” Something like that.
I want you to have a couple good things that… So you’re kind of setting the thing for them, like, “All right. I kind of thought…” And let them talk while you’re doing this too. Don’t give them a speech. Let them talk. I want a dialogue. I want them to go, “I kind of suspected that,” or, “Yeah, I remember that. We all thought that was going to be a big airport, but it’s still just a little private thing, and I think there’s five planes a day that land there.” And you could say, “Yep, that’s exactly what it looks like to me too,” kind of thing.
So then you’re going to go, “So now here’s where we’re at. I do…” Now we’ve got them all knowing where you’re coming from and you’ve explained why it’s not as great as you thought it was when you sent out that offer for $30,000. So now what you’re going to do is say, “But I do like the property. I do. I do see some value there. And I ran some numbers, I did some work on it, and I really came up with the best that I can do, and that is $13,000. If that works for you, great. I will get escrow started right now, and I will get this… My gal in town can do these things in two weeks, if that. I’ll try to push it through so you can get paid out quickly.” And let them talk, let them breathe, let them think, and let them come back to you kind of thing. Do you want to ask me questions yet?

Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, what percentage of the time does it work?

Jill K DeWit:
More than 50. More than 50%.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s really important to retain from what Jill is saying here. She’s got a pretty patented, experienced way of legitimately reducing a purchase price so that it works for her acquisition criteria. See, in Land Academy you’re supposed to establish an acquisition criteria before you even start sending the mail out, before you even start to look for places to send mail. And so, if these properties come back and they’re not fitting your acquisition criteria, it’s extremely important to not just go ahead with the deal and see what happens. That’s what most people do in life, and it doesn’t work out. If you’re at all questioning the purchase price that you offered… This doesn’t mean that you sent the mail out wrong.

Jill K DeWit:
No, not at all.

Steven Jack Butala:
What it means is it came back and there’s some legitimate issues with the real estate that you could never see in the assessor data that we use to value property, and you’re adjusting the price legitimately. What you don’t want to do is make this your business model, where every single property… Because we all know people in our personal lives, they may be living in your own house that have to negotiate everything. That’s just who they are. And that’s not what we do and that’s not what Land Academy is for. We are not here to squeeze every single nickel out of a seller, so that we can make more money on the sell side. That is not this model. But if the property’s not fitting the criteria, it just doesn’t.

Jill K DeWit:
It just doesn’t command that price.

Steven Jack Butala:
What’s the cure-all to this? What’s the real cure-all to this? Send a ton of mail out. So now you’re looking at not just this one deal that needs to be reduced from $30,000 to $13,000, you’ve got 22 of them. And if she’s at a 50% strike rate, and you’re brand new and you’re at a 20% strike rate, you’re still going to do a bunch of deals.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, let me finish with this. And you’re right, because it’s like dating. I hate to say this. It’s just like dating. When you up your numbers, and you know that you’re going to have a date on Saturday night because you’re dating four people, you’re not hung up on one person because you had one halfway decent date, you’re dating four people, you’re going like, “Yeah, if this guy doesn’t want to go, I’ll go with another guy. I got three other guys in mind that I would love to go to dinner with or who would love to come with me to this concert.”

Steven Jack Butala:
This works both ways.

Jill K DeWit:
I know it does.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not gender specific.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Trust me, I learned it from a guy. We women didn’t come up with this. You men came up with this. I’m learning, and I’m trying to help every other woman.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re in the beginning of a relationship with a woman, and she’s not compliant, like a seller’s not compliant-

Jill K DeWit:
Compliant?

Steven Jack Butala:
… send out some more mail.

Jill K DeWit:
Is your girl compliant? Dude, that’s going to be next week’s show. How to have a compliant partner.

Steven Jack Butala:
How to make your seller compliant.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. It’s awful. No. No. Back to this. Okay, so let me tell you how this is really going to play out now. You’re like, “50%? What are you talking about, Jill?” Yeah. So remember, we had a conversation. This person and I are talking about this, and I’m explaining the situation. Sure, they’re going to be really disappointed right now. But you told them all the reasons why.
Now, if they’re not… There’s a couple things that are going to happen. One is they’re going to go, “Okay, fine. I get it. Let’s do this.” That’s the dream that’s going to happen right there, number one scenario. And then you do it, and you follow through, man. That’s what I’m saying. When you call him back and you have that number, you better be ready to go. It needs to be a number that you feel great about. If something else pops up, I don’t care, because I got it for 13 grand. I know this is going to work.
All right. Scenario number two is they’re going to go, “Oh, sheesh. That is not what I was thinking. Oh my gosh. Okay, I need to sleep on this. I need to talk to my wife. My brother expressed interest.” That’s going to happen. “I need to make some calls.” “Totally cool. That’s totally fine. I get it. You want me to call you tomorrow? When do you want to talk?” And set up a time that you’re going to call, have the right number, and be ready to go, so they can make their calls and be ready for you. That’s number two.
And then, number three is, “What the heck? Hell no. That is not going to work for me. I only wanted $30,000. I really wanted $50,000,” because they want retail or above retail. Let’s even go there, because they do. They don’t even know what it’s worth. “And $13,000? Nope, not going to work. Sorry. Have a…” Whatever. “Okay, totally get it. Would you just hang on to my offer. Tell you what. I totally understand and I get it and I know that would be hard to hear for me too. So please just hang on to my letter, leave it on your desk, think about it. I’m going to be available. I’m usually available in the afternoons. And if you change your mind, please give me a call back, and I can get this going really fast. I’m ready to go.” And let it go.
And watch how many times… You got to leave the door open. You got to be understanding to them, and you got to leave that door open. And they will come back. They will call you. It might be a day from now. Like the guy that we had, the first situation, he wanted $20,000, and I was at $5,000, and he called me the next day. He was like, “What?” And he’s like, “I’ll take your $5,000.” He’s like, “How fast can we do this?” And I ran to the bank and we got this thing done real quick.
But the other ones, they’ll probably make those calls, and it might be 30 days. It might even be a little bit longer. Usually it’s within 30 days, my experience is, that this comes back. And they do go, “All right, I’m ready to go.” But the ones that wait even longer, those are even the best ones. Because when they call you back six months from now, and they’re staring at their offer, and they know that you promised $13,000, and they need $13,000 right now, they’re calling you back in six months saying, “Hey, do you still want this? And would you still pay $13,000?” They’re even warmed up to say, “I’ll take what you’ll give me,” kind of thing.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you are thinking about doing this as a real career, or if you are already doing it, many, many, many of you are already doing this, the situation that Jill’s describing is something that you’re going to come across on a weekly basis, if not more. It’s something that you really need to think about and embrace and certainly not take advantage of. I think that goes without saying.
But prices need to be adjusted. It happens in all kinds of real estate all the time. Think about buying a house. You go to buy a house, everybody agrees on a price, the inspection comes back, and it needs a new water heater. Well, we need to take that off the price. If I’m the buyer, we’re taking that off the price. If I’m the seller, I’m going to say, “Well, it’s already so… The price is so reduced.” And so, there’s some discussion that has to go on, within reason. And so, it either works for the seller and the buyer or it doesn’t. It’s not anything to be really worried about.
The way to… Unfortunately, with a house you’re buying one house. You like that house for whatever reason, and it’s a little bit more emotional. For land, you’re just looking at the money piece here. You could have 50 of these things going on at the same time, and really negotiate the ones that need to be negotiated. They need to be valued correctly for you to make money. You have complete control over the situation. You might not have complete control over this one deal, reduced from $30,000 to $13,000, but if you’re looking at six of them because you sent the mail out correctly, you have entire control over what you’re going to buy that month and sell.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s the best part, like Jack just said. And usually you have more than six. If you’re doing it right, hopefully you got 20, and you’re like… So when you have that thing, and like I said, you leave the door open, and you say, “Hey, I’m here. Let me know if anything changes, and I’ll get it done real fast for you. Usually I can do it within two weeks. My escrow agent is amazing. I wish you all the best. Thank you. Bye.” Click. Next envelope. You don’t even care. You don’t even care.
Because you know what? Next one you open up, that’s… Next one you open up that you sent out for $30,000, you’re like, “Wow, I would’ve paid $50,000. This thing’s worth a lot more even than that. This one’s worth $100,000. Holy cow, I think I can get $120,000 for this thing. Let me check with the broker.” Now you’ve already forgotten. You are on your way, working on this next deal, and then someday, this sweet person’s probably going to come back, and like I said, say, “I called all my family, my wife’s going to divorce me if I don’t sell it.” That happens. I’ve had those… They say that. “She was mad at me from buying it in the first place,” kind of thing, “And I’ll take your $13,000.”

Steven Jack Butala:
What can really complicate this is if a seller is staring at three offers. Let’s say the State of North Carolina, because everybody seems to love to mail North Carolina. I’m not sure why.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s kind of funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
But that just happens. I’m not advocating… Just by the fact that I think I just said North Carolina, people think that I’m advocating sending mail there. And it’s quite the opposite. I’m saying, please don’t send any more mail to North Carolina.

Jill K DeWit:
If we list a county or a state, that means don’t do it.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s right. What ends up happening is-

Jill K DeWit:
Not because of us.

Steven Jack Butala:
If a seller is staring at three offers, I can tell you this from experience, and one of the offers is from us, and Jill’s talking like she just talked, and she’s… What she’s really doing is establishing trust and establishing a relationship with the seller. There’s a very good chance that one of the offers that they received, even if it’s for more money, they just went dark. They never followed up. They’re great at sending-

Jill K DeWit:
Happens a lot.

Steven Jack Butala:
They were great at sending mail out which is-

Jill K DeWit:
Happens to me.

Steven Jack Butala:
They were great at sending mail out, which is what I’m really, really good at, but I’m not really good at what Jill does. And so, all right, that offer’s off the table. Offer number two, they may have gotten a call back, and they may have gotten a call back with somebody that’s got a dry personality, like me, where I’m really… I’m on the phone with you. “Yeah, it’s $13,000. Here’s why. And please let me know what you think.” Click.
And then there’s Jill, and she’s befriended this person, talked to them for let’s say 10, 15, 20 minutes, probably knows their kids’ names by then. And so, who do you think they’re going to call back? Who do you think is going to actually get the deal done? And this is not an option. The piece of this business that Jill fulfills for us is not an option. It’s like sending out a well-priced mailer. It’s just not a… You have to do it. You have to do some version of this to be really, really successful at a real high level, if you want to make it work. And what surprises me about this is the amount of times that it works. 50%? I’m way removed from it, but I think 50% is low.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, thank you. It could be higher. It’s funny you brought up that situation, because I can remember one in particular where I had that exact situation. He’s like, “Wait a minute.” It was my $5,000 guy too, by the way. He’s like, “I had another offer for $20,000.” I’m like, “Great, take it.” I said, “Do you think it’s still going to be $20,000 by the time the person does all the recon and stuff like I just did? And I’m in it. I’m ready to go.” He’s like, “Yeah, you’re right.”
And that was the let me sleep on it guy, and he took my $5,000 over the one for $20,000, because I said, “You and I both know that that $20,000 is too much. My $30,000 was way too much,” kind of thing. “So by the time that person looks at it and figures it out and all that stuff… And you have me right now, Bob. I’m ready to go. My checkbook is open.”
I say this stuff. “I’m ready to go. My checkbook is open. I will do this for you. You can count on me. But it’s $13,000.” And they’re like, “I’ll take your $13,000.” I said, “Okay.” And they have… That’s it. And you had brought it up. It’s because they trust me and they believe in me. And why? Because I’m talking to them like a real person, and we’re having a conversation, and I’m not making fluff, and I’m not slimy, and all of that. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I go, “Okay. I wish you all the best.” That’s the key there.

Steven Jack Butala:
What we don’t track really is how many people then call you back six months later and say, “I tried to get it done with this other person.” They don’t really tell you that. They just call back and say, “You know what? We decided to take your offer.” And they probably went up and down the path with somebody else that sent them a mailer that couldn’t get it done. Who knows why. Maybe they’re part of the LandGate group and they don’t know how to do deals correctly. Not sure.

Jill K DeWit:
I was going to say that a different way, but I was thinking the same thing. Because in Land Academy, that’s one nice thing about Land Academy and our group, is that you guys are smart. You know how to get a deal all the way, done the right way, and to talk to these people, and that’s why you’re here.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill and I go way back with Mark. We’re just horsing around. Mark’s got a pretty good program, from what I hear. I don’t know.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t know.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar.

Jill K DeWit:
Thinking of what to say. Do you want to learn more about us and what we do and learn more about Land Academy? Get our free ebook. It is awesome. It tells our whole backstory and gives you all kinds of insight to what we’re talking about, about sending offers, and getting this data, and pricing these offers, and how this all works. So go to landacademy.com, and download the free ebook, and then horse around there. There’s all kinds of great stuff there. You can see the back end of our Discord group. You can see testimonials from some of our members. There’s just tons of information there.

Steven Jack Butala:
Hey, don’t forget about Offers 2 Owners. Jill and I have a full-blown commercial printing company to fulfill your order for sending offers out to owners like we talk about on the show all the time. It’s the nucleus of our business. So check out offers2owners.com. They have specials and promos going on there all the time. Let’s take another question posted by one of our members on the Land Academy Discord online community. Again, if you want to sneak peek at the Discord channel, which I really highly recommend, please go to landacademy.com and check it all out in, let’s call it, read-only format. It’s free.

Jill K DeWit:
All right, so here’s another question. Clay wrote, “I received a signed purchase agreement via email yesterday and responded with thank you and a simple question about the property. I also called them since they had provided their phone number in the email as well. They responded saying they didn’t want to sell anymore because I was fishing and I should already know about the property already.” That’s hilarious. Has anyone ever-

Steven Jack Butala:
To which I say great work, because you did your job sending the offer out. Because if you send these offers out correctly… I don’t mean to interrupt you, but if you send these offers out correctly, they think that you only sent one offer.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, that’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
Not 70,000.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. “Has anyone ever had something similar happen to them? Any advice when it comes to receiving signed purchase agreements via email? Also, I’m curious if there is possibly a better way to approach a situation like this through email in the future. Thanks.” I’m kind of curious what the question was. Because if the question was zoning or something, it should be something like… If it’s something that you could have reconned on by calling the county or looking up yourself in ParcelFact or something, then that’s true.
But if it’s something like, “It looks like there was a mobile on there. Does the mobile still exist,” then that guy has an attitude problem and you just need to maybe come at it another way. I would call him and just say, “You know what? I’m not right there, and I’m not able to do a drive by this week, so that’s why I’m asking you. Is the mobile still there, and is anybody in it?” And that’s fair.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s different cultures. There are very different cultures around this country. And when somebody receives an offer for a value for their property that they think is less than what is in their head, it could be fiction, they’re going to respond certain ways. A lot of it’s based on the cultural area that they live in. People in… I’m from the Midwest, so I can say this very directly. Everybody has to argue and scream in the Midwest about everything, and then 10 minutes later, if it goes okay, and everybody plays the little chicken game, then everyone’s friends, and you might get a deal done. But there’s arguing first. In the West coast. Everybody hugs first, then they talk it through, and the deal may or may not get done.

Jill K DeWit:
This explains… Welcome to my life, by the way.

Steven Jack Butala:
In the Northeast, nothing gets done, because everyone’s angry for no reason at all. I think it’s the weather. And in the South, that’s mostly compiled of people that were sick of the northeast, and so they have a little bit of that going on, but you might get a deal done, in let’s say Florida, or God forbid, North Carolina. So you have to gauge this. I’m half joking here.
You have to gauge what this response is. Why did somebody sign an offer, seemingly take a picture or scan it in, and send it to you via email saying they want to do the deal, but you said, “Yeah, okay, cool. Let’s do the deal, but I need to know if you have physical and legal access,” and that sends them into the situation where they don’t want to do the deal?
Then you have to have what Jill has, the talent that Jill was seemingly born with, which amazes me on a daily basis. That sense of, “All right, I want to buy this property for the right price,” has to kick in. My innate response to that situation is, “Cool. We’re not doing the deal. I’m going to open the next one.” Her innate response to that situation is, “What’s it going to take to get this deal done? If I offended you with this question, I do have a few more questions. Where would you like me to get these answered so we can actually get you a check in the mail?”

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Yeah. You signed it for a reason kind of thing. I love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sometimes no doesn’t mean no.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, I loved your thing. Sometimes people are just cranky, maybe had a bad day, who knows. It could be something. Or you know what my other gut instinct on that was? What if there’s something glaringly wrong that he’s trying to push this through and intimidate you to do the deal, “Watch me. This thing’s not worth anything.”

Steven Jack Butala:
She’s going to get the upper hand, Jill is. That’s just how it is.

Jill K DeWit:
I just need to know the truth, and then I’m going to make a decision. That’s it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Look, they’re not engaging you unless they want to sell it, no matter how mad they are. They want to sell the property.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally. He wouldn’t have done that.

Steven Jack Butala:
They’re just disappointed.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. It’s kind of funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s second topic is, what’s holding you back from accomplishing your goals? This is a really, really important topic, because I feel like I have a lot of personal experience in this. I didn’t walk out of college, and then got a light bulb over my head, and said, “Hey, I should buy and sell land, and we should do it out West, because it’s cheaper and easier, and I don’t think it’s as prevalent as it is in the Midwest.” No. You have to put yourself out of your own way and really look at what you want to accomplish, and why, and how, and map it all out. I would love to do this topic with you.

Jill K DeWit:
Do it. Ask me some questions.

Steven Jack Butala:
So have you ever been… What’s held you back, if anything?

Jill K DeWit:
That’s a good question. You know what’s funny? I do not suffer from this. And I think it’s because I, for whatever reason, have a lot of confidence.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, did you accomplish-

Jill K DeWit:
I’m not afraid of anything.

Steven Jack Butala:
You worked for American Airlines for what, 18 years? And I worked in a public accounting and did all kinds of stuff that I did not want to do at the time, nor would I ever go back to.

Jill K DeWit:
That helped me accomplish my goal. You know what my goal was back then? Goof off and travel.

Steven Jack Butala:
So it wasn’t money driven?

Jill K DeWit:
No, it wasn’t money driven.

Steven Jack Butala:
Wow. I’ve never known a single minute in my entire life where it hasn’t been money driven.

Jill K DeWit:
No. Are you kidding? I just wanted a job that I could afford to travel and I had all the benefits. So come on. My first trip by myself, I went to Greece. I mean, with my girlfriend. I’m like, “This is the greatest thing on the planet.” So that’s what we would do every weekend. My friends, we would go to London for Saturday night and come right back because you could.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ve done that too, several times, actually.

Jill K DeWit:
And especially back then too. We would get first class tickets and you would get… It was like confirmed seating kind of thing, because they wanted you to know the experience so you could sell the product. And the flight to London was sometimes more fun in first class than the London part of it. So this was great. I haven’t eaten so well like this in a while. So no, that was my goal. I think the difference is, for me though, I don’t set crazy, crazy, crazy, $5 million in my bank account in one year goal. I wouldn’t do that.
My goals are like, I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to get in this size. And it’s attainable. Not, I’m going to be a supermodel, or I’m going to be a jockey. Not attainable. So I always pick attainable goals, but stuff that I got to work at it. And by the end of this year, I want to be able to take this trip, I want to afford to do this, and I want to pay off my car. Something like that. Those are my goals. I want to not worry about my mortgage. I want to have kid college funds started all that stuff.
And then, getting to those goals, to me, I set it out, I have it in my head, and it’s always on my mind, and I don’t beat myself up when I fall down. I think that’s a lot of it. Because I know a lot of people that are like, “Well, okay, here’s day seven, it’s January 7th, and I’ve eaten like crap all seven days, because I had the flu, and then this, and I was traveling, fill in the blank. Not going to happen. I’m just stuck, and it’s not for me.” No. So what? Pick it up the very next day. Pick it up the very next hour.
You’ve may or may not have heard me talk about, do you want to be a land investor? Well, great. Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you are a land investor. That’s how I want you to think. You’re going to get up in the morning, you’re going to have it in your head. You’re going to start making decisions just as if you are a land investor. And why are you not? I mean, this is my crazy confidence. Who’s going to tell me I’m not? I mean, I’m making my website. I decided today I’m a land investor. I’m going to get a hat made. And I’m going to start getting my website done, and this, and this, and this. This is all the stuff that we do in Land Academy. And there’s no reason you can’t just go like that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s some things that I’ve heard people say in the past about why they can’t accomplish what they want. I don’t have enough money. That was a big one for me. I’m not smart enough. I don’t have enough time.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay, I’m listening.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m too busy with… I’m too busy with… I have two little kids. I can’t do that. I don’t have time. I’m a mom. I’m a single mom. These are things I’ve heard directly from people for years and years and years. All that means to me is that up to that point in your life, somebody’s been telling you, you’re not smart enough. Maybe you weren’t the best student. That doesn’t mean you’re not smart enough to do this at all. I wasn’t the best student. And so, you have to either overcome these things with a will to succeed, which is roots from some type of confidence, and believing that whatever was told to you up to that point, you just don’t believe it. Yeah, I am smart enough. I might not be smart enough to be a surgeon. In the end, I probably am. I’m just not really willing to put in what it takes to be that.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s it. I’m convinced that all these things… Okay, I love it. Smart, money, and time. I’m convinced they are all accomplishable, you’re just not motivated to do it. There’s some reason you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t want to work that hard.” Okay, let’s just be honest then. You don’t want to work that hard. That I can understand. Whatever it is. And money. I don’t have the money. I can’t start this. So what? So wait six months, save it up, get another job, do something else.
I used to coach in a past life, another job I would talk to kids about that want to go back to college, and they didn’t have a lot of money. And I’m like, “Okay, what…” And actually, back then, my favorite was like UTI and MMI. I worked for that school. Anyway, and these guys are all car guys. I’m like, “What’s stopping you from starting your own detail company? By the way, I know car detailers, they make good money. We pay well kind of thing. What’s stopping you from on your weekends and evenings or early mornings, having your own little car detailing company. It’s your own little business by the way. You’re going to learn a lot from that, and you’re going to get some great income coming in, and you get to set your own hours.”
So this is just one example. So whatever you come up with or whatever it takes, picking up hours, getting a second job, selling something, changing something in your life so you have more money. That’s an easy one, by the way. Maybe I don’t need to have a two-bedroom apartment all to myself in downtown San Diego. Yeah. That might be a way that you could get money in your bank account right now.

Steven Jack Butala:
So that’s a result… That whole thing is very popular with younger people, and that is a direct result of consuming popular culture to a point where… I just read something, just this guy got roasted really bad for saying if you don’t have a Lamborghini in your twenties, then… Yeah. And so, it went viral, and then they pulled it down.

Jill K DeWit:
That sends the wrong message.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s the kind of message that you will end up defeated, because it’s not realistic, and who cares anyway. If you want a Lamborghini, which I understand, then do it in your fifties when everybody’s college is paid for and your house is paid for.

Jill K DeWit:
You saved up, you worked hard, that was your goal

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. And you put it in your mind that you’re going to get a Lamborghini by the time you’re 48 or some obvious number, after your other responsibilities in life are all… And I mean responsibilities to yourself, a paid for house, or whatever they end up being.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
You’re going to set your own goals here. And setting… Jill is exactly right. Setting blank goals about being a supermodel is silly. Setting a goal to make $180,000 this year buying and selling land part-time is crazy, crazy accomplishable. And then increasing that to $300,000 in next year. And then maybe after 36 months of doing this, quitting your W-2 job so that you can make a consistent $300,000 to $500,000 a year because what you’re doing is very, very realistic, and it’s honest, and it doesn’t take a ton of time to do it.
Setting a goal like, within the next eight months, getting a novel completed part-time, getting up before your kids do or doing it after they go to school or something like that, very, very accomplishable, and potentially very profitable. Maybe writing software, in the same exact way, and selling a portion of it or all of it as an exit strategy. Those are all accomplishable goals. I know this for sure.
What holds me back at this point in my life, in my fifties, from accomplishing goals that I have, is that I hate what I’m doing. I have the confidence to do it. I know what I’m capable of and what I’m not capable of, but things change over time. And if I’m not interested in doing it, I’ll make reasons. Jill and I are famous for this. There’s a bunch of stuff that Jill loves about buying and selling land and running Land Academy, and there’s some stuff that she doesn’t, and it’s real obvious what she doesn’t like.
And I could be describing myself. It’s the same thing. And so, what we do together is to work on either hiring people to do that part of the business for us, or eliminating it. So that’s honestly what our goals are right now. Our goals are not so much financial any longer, because we’ve long accomplished those, both with land and everything else that we’re involved in. What I’m interested in more now is applying myself where I’m most effective and removing the stuff that I don’t want to do.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. That’s really, really good. I want to add to this about these goals that we’re talking about. You brought up that 180, we’re going to work with 180 a year. Maybe that’s your goal. I’m going to join Land Academy, learn how to do this. I hear all these guys making a lot more than that. Let’s just even just say $100,000. I want to make $100,000 doing it this year. That’s going to show me this is possible. It’s going to catch… I can breathe. And then after next year, maybe I’ll start looking at replacing my day job, if that’s what you want kind of thing.
So walking around going, “$100,000. I got to get $100,000.” Now you can’t look at it like that. Now you got to break it up and make it into attainable. And this is in our equity planner, which you’re going to do coming up in a couple weeks, a thing for our new members that just joined too, but in Land Academy, we have an equity planner sheet that we share with everybody, and we talk about often, especially at the beginning of the year.
What are your goals? You want $100,000? Let’s divide that up. How much is that a month? Great. Now how hard do you want to work? Do you want to do one deal a month, two deals a month, four deals a month? What’s your threshold? Because the more deals you do, the less you need to make on each deal. When you back into that, you could look at, “I don’t have to work that hard. If I do one deal a month, and they each net $10,000, well, heck, there’s my $100,000.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Netting $10,000 a deal in this world that we’re in is really, really easy.

Jill K DeWit:
So that’s a real… And that will show you what’s possible. Then now you know, “All right, now next year, do I want to double that? Do I want to quadruple that? If I do four deals a month now, now I’m at $400,000 a year. Huh? Look at that.” And you notice I have some wiggle room in there too. Maybe two months, you’re busy. I don’t know. You have some wiggle room there. So this is really good.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think the place to start about accomplishing your goals is to really sit down and have an honest conversation with yourself about what you want, what you’re actually interested in, and what you know you’re capable of. And if the answer is, “Well, I don’t really want anything, and I’m capable of being a stay-at-home mom, and that’s exactly what I want to do until the kids go to school,” then you’re good.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
But if there’s something else that you feel like you need to accomplish, whoever you are, whatever… Maybe you don’t like your job. That’s easily the most popular… That happened. That’s why we’re here. That’s why Jill and I are here, because we didn’t like our jobs. That is very changeable.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally. And I’ll never forget when I left my job to do this full-time with you, and I got into it, and I transitioned from… There’s a lot of moving parts. Let’s be honest. And again, that’s what Land Academy is for. We teach you and walk you all the way through this stuff. But when I transitioned, I just knew that this was my goal, being my own boss. That’s probably it. Because that’s part of my own boss. If I don’t want to work today, I don’t have to work today. Big deal. So I had a conversation with myself, and I didn’t even realize I did it till later, but my conversation was, “I will never go back.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too, Jill It’s funny.

Jill K DeWit:
If it comes down, and there were times years ago, you guys know this, have been with us for a while, boy, there were rough times during last downturn where it was you and me, baby, and we didn’t have a staff. We didn’t have an office. You’re buying it, you’re selling them. I’m buying them, I’m selling them. We’re keeping food on the table. I’m like, “I don’t care. I do not care.” If it comes down to you and me, I know we could have a nice life.

Steven Jack Butala:
I made partner at the accounting firm where I was, and I told them to go pound sand. And that was the best decision I ever made. And I went and took some money that I made from buying and selling long-term care facilities and applied it to this. If you read the ebook, it’s all in there, the Land Academy ebook. And that was it too. So my goal, I didn’t know it when I was younger, but my actual goal was to not work. And I don’t mean go to the beach every day at all. That’s not what I mean. I just mean to be in control of my own time. Jill was, I learned today, that she just worked at American Airlines for 18 years, eight hours a day, and all the crap that goes on with that type of position back then, just so she could travel.

Jill K DeWit:
I was having fun.

Steven Jack Butala:
So she didn’t want to work there. She just wanted the fringe benefit.

Jill K DeWit:
Ding ding.

Steven Jack Butala:
So I never wanted to work anywhere either. I just wanted the money. And it worked, and I got it, and I learned a lot. So yeah, in the end, we made a lot less money. I did extremely well through the 2000s, like on the back of a yacht, literally, well. And that downturn brought me to my knees financially. And Jill and I worked back our way back from there, and it worked. So, it just takes a sense of confidence and an actual interest. I’m actually interested in land. I think you are too.

Jill K DeWit:
I love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
I am not interested in renovating houses. I’m not interested in… Which I’ll talk about… Today’s Wednesday. Well, I talked about it on the Thursday call last week, the webinar, about why buying a trailer park or a multi-tenant building right now just pales, financially, in a comparison for buying and selling land. Buying a house and renting it out, I went through the numbers, extensively went through the numbers to show you why there’s no better real estate business that I can think of than buying and selling land. And I’m not trying to sell anything here. But whatever’s holding you back, just get ahold of it, and deal with it. Otherwise, five years from now, you’re going to be saying the same thing.

Jill K DeWit:
Perfect.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take a look at another one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar. Jill, I think you have something inspirational to share with us today.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep. I just wanted to talk a few minutes about the value of this community and the value of a successful land community. It’s kind of funny, when we first… I was talking to someone about this the other day. When we first started Land Academy, it was because people asked for it. We had people going, “Can you tell me what you’re doing? Can you teach me what you’re doing? Can you teach me what you’re doing?” It was our buyers. They bugged us enough to teach them what we’re doing. And I’m like, “Okay, I can’t keep repeating the same thing over and over again.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Our land buyers.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, our land buyers. Other investors kept going, “I need you to tell me your secrets.” You got to go get the data, you got to do this, you got to do that. They’re like, “Oh.” So we did Land Academy. So here we are. The month we launched, here comes some questions. And they’re like, “We want to connect with you. We want to connect with other people doing this.” So I’m like, “Brilliant. You’re right.” This one, very nicely, sent me to California, made a website, had a different name. Now it’s evolved into, now it’s a Discord. But the point of it is there’s so much experience combined now. This online community now is eight years running with so much combined experience. Not just us too, but everybody else.
Am I in every single county, in every single state right now, today, doing a deal? Heck no. I wouldn’t lie and say I was. So if you need something in that part of the whatever, there’s good chance there’s somebody in Discord right now that can help you and someone in our Land Academy community can help you. And I love and appreciate how generous, and helpful, and welcoming our community is.
When we did our first live event in Southern California a couple years ago, I remember people going, “Yay. I talk to these people. It’s so nice to see them and meet them. I’m not on an island.” No, you’re not on an island. We’re all doing this together and we all have our own individual companies, which is great. So we’re not competing with each other. We’re all helping each other.
Because in the end, too, someone probably helped them. Someone was always a step ahead of them, which was probably us. We help them, they help you, and you’re going to help somebody else. And whether it’s knowledge or deal funding, there’s a lot of that going on too, this community is packed full of like-minded people with goals just like you. Did you want to add to that? How do you add to that? Aw. All right, Jack. Do you have something informational you would like to share?

Steven Jack Butala:
My topic today is business 101. And I think that a lot of this gets overlooked. I think people come to us maybe brand new, from not really experiencing any type of business. So I’m going to go over a few terms and concepts that really helped me back in the day. And then, if you’re more established and you’ve had a business, or you’ve been like, let’s say… For whatever reason, we have a lot of career, retired, or maybe at the tail end of their career, corporate salespeople. There’s some good information in here to think about maybe how you could potentially change your already existing land business. Your business needs to make money.

Jill K DeWit:
This is good stuff.

Steven Jack Butala:
If it doesn’t make money, it’s a hobby, and hobbies are expensive. But you’re here to make money, and that’s the first thing they teach you in accounting. You are here as an accountant to create shareholder wealth. So let me translate that for you. If you’re a public accountant, you’re brand new, you’re working 80 hours a week, and your client is Tesla, because it’s a publicly traded company, your job as a junior accountant for a big accounting firm is to create shareholder wealth.
That gets completely overlooked and undiscussed, especially in this environment that we’re in now, where share shareholder wealth is celebrated, but despised for some reason, in many, many, many circles. So you’re here to make money, and as an accountant for Tesla, it’s a lot harder to do that than it is to buy a property for $30,000 and sell for $60,000. You’re in a community like that. You have a decision in business to either make something or buy it. It’s called a classic make-buy decision.
A person who owns a manufacturing company buys raw materials, they machine it somehow, they injection mold it, they cast it, and then they do hopefully a ton of them because they’re filling an order. And that raw material, the cost of the equity that they generated from themselves, they’re making money because they made something. Or in a case of, let’s say, a television, all the components that went into it, the value of them altogether working as a television is worth more than the components on their own, just sitting on a desk, let’s say. That’s the make decision.
Or you can buy something and improve it, which is what we do. You can buy real estate for a very inexpensive price and resell it, create some equity for yourself, which is our business model. Or you can buy a piece of real estate and improve it, creating equity and selling it. It’s a make-buy decision. Think of McDonald’s. You’re taking in all this raw material in the back, you’re creating hamburgers, you’re utilizing all the years and decades of marketing and selling hamburgers. You made something.
You have fixed and variable costs. This is one of my favorites. Think of McDonald’s. McDonald’s has to build a building, put all kinds of equipment in place. They have to staff. They’ve got to train people. They’ve got to put in play lands or whatever else they’re going to do long before that first person walks to the door to buy a hamburger for $1.50. Those are all fixed costs, all of them. The only variable costs in McDonald’s are the food itself, so they’re very heavily fixed costs.
Think of a manufacturing facility. They’ve got to go lease space, buy huge, multimillion dollar machinery, and then they have to go, once they’re ready to make parts, go take in bids or whatever. There’s a lot of fixed costs and upfront costs. Everybody loves variable costs. The variable cost for us by and large is buying that actual piece of land. Buying a land for $30,000. We know it’s worth $60,000. So all we’re doing, the vast majority of the money we’re spending, a fixed cost could arguably could be your phone or your computer in our business, and potentially the mail.
There’s a chance that you’re sending out 5,000… I don’t know how this would happen, but you’re sending out 5,000 letters a month and you’re just not generating any revenue. So from a fixed variable cost analysis, buying and selling land is crazy favorable compared to a convenience store at McDonald’s or a manufacturing facility. Convenience store is another one. You got to put all this stuff in place. You got to get signs made. You have to hire staff. And then you’re buying Ho Hos and you get all that money back at about $1.50 at a time. It’s a tough business.
You are in control of your assets. And the more control that you have over assets… And this is including capital, capital meaning stuff that makes you money. One of those things is actual money. But the other things that would arguably… What’s capital in our business? Jill’s capital. Jill can take a deal that… This is a very valuable asset for us. Jill can take a transaction that otherwise most people wouldn’t get done and make it a deal. How do you place value on that? That’s extraordinary, when you truly think about it.
And so, you might have extraordinary access to capital. And the more assets in capital that you control… This is capitalism 101. And this is what governments try to do. They try to control assets. And nonprofits do. And nonprofits are not in the business of making money, which is a government. They’re in the business increasing their assets, and they only can do that by… That’s what hospitals do. They don’t make money. They just increase their asset value. To one end, I’m not sure. That’s why I don’t work for a non-profit hospital anymore.
You need to think about controlling the assets and how much capital you have access to and utilizing it correctly. If you have $80,000 in the bank, you join Land Academy, you spend some money on education, great choice. You spend a lot of time in Discord channels and learn everything. You get a mailer out. Now you spend a few thousand dollars on a mailer, great choice. You’re utilizing your capital and your assets. You’re controlling them. You reel a couple of deals in.
Darn, you don’t have the actual money because it’s costing more than $50,000 or $60,000 or $70,000 that you have left. You control going on a Discord to gain somebody else’s capital to get the deal done. And so, now you’ve taken on a partner. You have a little less control because you’re taking on somebody else’s capital. But in the end, if it goes okay… I constantly… I was in Discord earlier this morning. Constantly, the number of success stories in Discord is pretty amazing.
Customer concentration. You never want to have one customer. This crushes manufacturing. For some reason, that business, once the manufacturing businesses get rolling, they find one or two parts that are very profitable, and one customer wants a ton of them, and so it becomes 80% of their business. So they’re making parts for one, let’s say, assembly client or customer, and they stop ordering it one month.

Jill K DeWit:
Like Toyota.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Or a company that supplies Toyota, and you make one of the components that go in the alternator, let’s say. And so, they have a bad year, and not in Toyota’s case, but a lot of companies in Detroit go out of business because they’re mismanaged. And 80% of your revenue one month is gone. You do not want customer concentration. Do we have customer concentration? Hell no. Every time we send out 7,000 offers, let’s say, we have 7,000 potential customers. Our customer concentration in this business couldn’t be any better.
Basic accounting, including budgeting and eventually income tax management needs to be something that’s addressed. If you’re brand new, it doesn’t need to be addressed at all. If you’re at a level in your career where we are, income tax is our largest expense. Income tax is larger than… Well, cost of good sold is our largest expense, which is land. But our second largest expense, way more than payroll, is tax.
And it’s something that you need to be aware of, and it needs to be in the back of your head right from minute one, before you start this. If it’s something that makes you want to vomit… And honestly, taxes make me want to vomit. Getting to taxes, not so much. But you need to be aware of it and it needs to be managed, and I’ve said this on the air many times, otherwise it’s going to manage you.
It’s very hard for people to digest this accounting and budgeting and tax thing. Because we have all been trained, and this is not any accident… I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, whoever dreamt up paying taxes out of your paycheck, your W2 paycheck, and then filing a tax return, and then getting money back… And if you watch people that are just career W2 people, they just love that time of the year, because they get a 3, 4, 5, $8,000 check on money that they already paid in. And they say, “Thank you. Thank you, federal government, for giving money back.”

Jill K DeWit:
Giving me my money back.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s my money.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
And so, if you own your own business, you have to turn that switch off in your head that all of us have been so trained to do, unfortunately. Because you’re going to be writing big checks if you don’t do that. We’ve done this.
Sales is not optional. The biggest reason restaurants fail is because they do exactly everything wrong. They go into it saying, “I have my mom’s recipe and my grandmother’s recipe for meatballs, and there’s no way this restaurant could fail.” Well, guess what? It failed because you didn’t have anybody selling. You didn’t have any marketing program.
Sales are… I learned this the hard way. I used to laugh at people when I was in college, laugh at people who were getting marketing degrees, in my head, saying, “Well, if I make the perfect part,” because I grew up in a manufacturing environment, “if I make the perfect part, it’s going to sell itself.” That’s ridiculous. In fact, you know what?

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. I’m just going to sit on the corner and wait for them to find me.

Steven Jack Butala:
Mary Kay Cosmetics is classic for saying this sentence, which I think there should never be another sales module in anything that’s taught without this concept. Sales drives everything. First you sell it, and then you place the order. We’ll go make the order. We’ll go make it after you sell it. I think that’s the simplest, most genius thing I’ve ever heard. It all starts with sales. Everything. It’s not an option. If you’re not as good at sales, find somebody who is.
Everything needs to work on paper first. This is a huge mistake that people make. That’s what the equity planner is. I’m going to… I want to make $100,000 a year, and I want to do eight or 10 deals. Okay, good. I’ve got to make about $12,000 net for each deal, and I only want to buy for $30,000 and sell for $60,000. That’s good. It’s $20,000. Very accomplishable. Let’s take all that. We just did it all on paper. That was your whole budget right there, and it seems to work.
Now let’s go do what Jack and says, and we’re going to start trolling for property. We’re going to find areas. We’re going to send some mail out. Now you have a plan. You have a whole business plan right there. How many people do you know have never opened a spreadsheet who own businesses? Never. “Oh, I’m going to get my accountant to look at that.” It’s shocking that it works for even a week. It all has to be spreadsheeted out and work first. If you hate spreadsheets, a lot of people do, find somebody like me that doesn’t hate them.
Before you start anything or before you continue to operate your business, for better or for worse, you need to really take a real solid look at what your risk threshold is. I can’t talk about risk without, Jill doesn’t even know this, without thinking about my own mother. I’ve never met anyone in my life, to this day, who has a lower threshold for risk than my mother. She drove 55 miles an hour on the right lane. She never broke a rule in her life. She only ever wanted us to go to college, and get a job at General Motors, and hopefully rise up through the ranks, and live it a quiet little life. She never… Starting a business to her meant a nervous breakdown.
So if you’re one of those people, that’s cool. We are the exact opposite. Jill, our threshold for risk is cuckoo, and it gets us in trouble. I don’t think buying and selling land is risky at all. I think starting a manufacturing facility is very risky. I think buying a manufacturing facility that fits all the criteria that we’re talking about here, customer concentration and all of that, for a rational price, stepping into the shoes of the old owner and making improvements is very low risk. Startups are very risky. That’s why the reward’s so great.
I have a handful of friends who, for whatever reason, were original investors, not original, but early investors in Apple, and they don’t do anything anymore at all. For me, there’s a risk reward in that. There’s a huge risk. How much stock did they actually buy in different companies, too, where they lost their ass? Startups are risky. This is not a startup. Land Academy is not a startup. We’ve already done it all. You’re just buying into it. You’re stepping into our shoes and doing it for yourself.
Staffing and recruiting. This is the bane. Staffing and recruiting is the bane of everyone. Every business owner is managing employees. It’s been that way since the beginning. I cannot imagine what the industrialists of the early 20th century dealt with when unions became a thing. Did unions change the world for the better? Yeah, they did. That’s just my personal opinion. Are they appropriate everywhere? Absolutely not. What they are is expensive. But are you making a better product? The answer to that, we’ll never know. There’s pros and cons to unions.
But it’s dealing with labor. And dealing with that, as a business owner, you’re eventually going to have to do that. And if it gets out of control and manifests itself into too many sick days, that stuff can really bog you down, so you need to be aware of it. The good news is this, this entire world has never experienced the outsourcing of labor to this degree of success ever, like Fiverr, and temporary help, and all kinds of stuff. So there’s really way more options because of the internet than there ever was to effectively staff and manage that.
I can’t think of staffing without thinking of Steve Jobs. He said, “If you do everything in your career correctly, eventually, you just become a recruiter.” And I agree with that. Your business will live or die based on who works there. In the beginning, it’s yourself, and your business is going to do great in the beginning or it’s not, and that’s because of you. Between the two of us, Jill loves to do things herself. I can’t stand it. My first reaction to do anything, almost anything, is to find somebody else to do it, and then I’ll manage it, and go on, and start the next thing. Jill’s locked into doing stuff herself and that’s just what happens sometimes. She gets it done correctly.
And finally this, if you don’t have a sincere interest in what you’re doing in business, it’s going to eventually end not good. Nobody wants to do stuff they don’t want to do. I mean, maybe somebody does somewhere, if they have some self-punishment thing, but nobody should do, this day and age, do stuff they don’t want to do.

Jill K DeWit:
I agree. You won’t stay with it. You’ll give up.

Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, it’s amazing to me that you worked for American Airlines that long.

Jill K DeWit:
Had a good time.

Steven Jack Butala:
Then you didn’t do something you didn’t want to do.

Jill K DeWit:
No, I did everything I wanted to do.

Steven Jack Butala:
Every day I was at accounting, I didn’t want to do it.

Jill K DeWit:
I had a good time. I had good friends. We had a good time. It was great. And again, I had good vacation benefits and then I would split and be gone. You know what was nice about it at the time? Those were my goals, and it was also a job that, if I wasn’t there, the planes would still be in the air. It wasn’t dependent on me. So when I clocked out, I clocked out. That was different back then. That’s all I wanted. So now I clock out in a different way, and it’s still just as effective.

Steven Jack Butala:
You know what I hated about work?

Jill K DeWit:
It’s in our RV, or something like that.

Steven Jack Butala:
What I really disliked about working is whoever was above me was forever unpleased. They’re unpleasable. So whatever I was producing… And we had computers, but it was nothing like it is now. Whatever reports we were doing, “Yeah, go back and change this.” Everything got redlined. And it wasn’t because what I was producing was, I learned later, bad. It was just, that’s how they just justify their existence. It’s so inefficient to work for somebody else, especially in a big company. The inefficiencies crushed my soul. It sounds like you didn’t care. You just wanted to go to Paris.

Jill K DeWit:
Yes. That’s exactly right. You nailed it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next Wednesday for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
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.

 

Thanks for listening, and finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

LA 1998 WP

How To Be Successful At Flipping Land (LA 1998)

In this podcast episode, learn how Jack and Jill successfully flip land. They emphasize the importance of experience and knowledge in the land flipping business, and highlight the value of learning from those who have been in the industry for a long time. They outline

Read More »
LA1997WP

Respond To Change in Real Estate 2024 (LA 1997)

Jack Butala and Jill DeWit explore the real estate market, discussing the anticipated stagnation in 2024 and offering valuable insights for investors. Jack shares three crucial strategies to thrive in this shifting market: increasing offer volume, recognizing the rise in rental demand, and predicting demographic

Read More »

No need to hire staff - we did it for you.

Land Academy PRO is the brainchild of founders Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit. Designed at the request of Land Academy members who are ready for a higher level, we’re excited to continue to provide the tools and support needed by professional investors.

Each level comes with a preset amount of included data, Concierge Mail service, and postage. For example, the Green level includes 6,000 units of completed-for-you mail completely out the door at no extra cost to you.

All levels include a PatLive introduction and preset script (we will set up your phone answering for you), use of Land Academy’s personal Transaction Team to manage your deal flow, an AirTable (CRM) base setup managed by our (and your!) Transaction Coordinator, personal consulting, regular office hours, and includes your Land Academy subscription cost.

If you’re making this a business, Land Academy PRO takes the work off of your plate so you can focus on the things that matter – like running your business.

Green

$10,060

per Month

Silver

$14,590

per Month

Gold

$19,120

per Month

Platinum

$23,650

per Month

Black

$28,180

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
6,000 mailers 9,000 mailers 12,000 mailers 15,000 mailers 18,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value $500 value $500 value $500 value $500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value $7,500 value $7,500 value $7,500 value $7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value $100 value $100 value $100 value $100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
- - $1,000 value $1,000 value $1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value $2,500 value $2,500 value $2,500 value $2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value $150 value $150 value $150 value $150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value $23,000 value $23,000 value $23,000 value $23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value $300 value $300 value $300 value $300 value
Subtotal: $8,550 value $8,550 value $9,550 value $12,050 value $12,050 value
Mail Value: $7,500 value $11,250 value $15,000 value $18,750 value $22,500 value
Total Value: $39,050 $42,800 $47,550 $53,800 $57,550
Apply Now Apply Now Apply Now Apply Now Apply Now

Green

$10,060

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
6,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
-
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $8,550 value
Mail Value: $7,500 value
Total Value: $39,050
Apply Now

Silver

$14,590

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
9,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
-
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $8,550 value
Mail Value: $11,250 value
Total Value: $42,800
Apply Now

Gold

$19,120

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
12,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
$1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $9,550 value
Mail Value: $15,000 value
Total Value: $47,550
Apply Now

Platinum

$23,650

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
15,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
$1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $12,050 value
Mail Value: $18,750 value
Total Value: $53,800
Apply Now

Black

$28,180

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
18,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
$1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $12,050 value
Mail Value: $22,500 value
Total Value: $57,550
Apply Now

Disclaimer: *We have a monthly “use it or lose it” policy with mail and data – Land Academy PRO is designed to keep you on-track and consistent.

To cancel, all packages require a 30 day notice to move you back down to regular Land Academy membership.

Office Hours Schedule

Scheduling a Career Path interview call is currently on hold and will resume closer to Fall 2024 as we approach Career Path 10.

FREE eBook

You Are Not Alone in Your Real Estate Ambition.

eBook redesign 2023 1 webp

Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved.

 

*eBook will automatically be delivered to your inbox. If you do not see it, please check your Spam/Junk Folder.