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:
Today, we are talking about … Well, we’re going to hear about Jill’s personal story, and a little later, we’re going to talk about my personal story.

Jill K DeWit:
Can I pick … Does it have to be the story of me, or can I just pick a story-

Steven Jack Butala:
You can tell us the story of what happened to you last week if you’d like.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
This all came about, because a guy that produces the show, we asked him, “You post the stuff, you handle the whole thing.” He’s like, “Well, it really turns out, everybody wants to hear some version of your personal story.”
This is completely out of my comfort zone. I don’t want to sit around here and talk about myself, but that’s what they want. I think it’s going to be pretty interesting.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s what you want.

Steven Jack Butala:
I want to hear Jill’s story. I want to hear what your version of this is, because-

Jill K DeWit:
My version of the story, and then you’re going to give me the real story. It’s going to be no, no, no, sweetheart, that won’t really happen at all, but, okay.
Hey, I want to pause and say Happy Almost New Year.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
This is it, we have days, as this airs, just a couple days before it’s 2024. I was thinking about it today, I’m already starting to write … There’s some years, you’re like, “I’m halfway to February and I’m getting the year wrong.” I have no idea why, but I’m so excited about this next year.
I’m actually already finding myself putting 2024 on things ahead of time. I’m doing the opposite, and I don’t know why it’s happening but it is. It’s really funny. Are you doing that at all?

Steven Jack Butala:
No. Not at all. That never crossed my mind. What crosses my mind at this time of year is what am I going to do about next year? What worked last year? What worked next year? Honestly, I love this time of year, because you just get a restart button.
More and more and more, it’s not about money. It’s just more about other stuff, which is a really nice place to be in, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
True. I completely agree.

Steven Jack Butala:
Each week on the show, we answer questions from The Land Academy Member Discord forum. We review land acquisitions from our weekly member webinars, and we take a deep dive into two land-related topics by popular request.

Jill K DeWit:
All right. Josiah wrote, “I’d like a consensus on this. We’re under contract for a 10 acre parcel adjacent to a major interstate accessible via dirt, two track road, in a rural area. We’re struggling to find comparable properties that border the highway. In your view, does proximity to the highway negatively impact the value of a property like this?
The property’s physical address access matches up with the legal access,” so that’s good. We have physical and legal, so it’s a two track-

Steven Jack Butala:
First of all, Josiah is a Career Path alumni.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Incredibly successful member, and so for him to ask this question, first of all, it’s super cool of you to do this. Thank you. We all learn from things like this. I do, for sure. I think everybody else does. He’s not a new person who came up with his first deal here.

Jill K DeWit:
I have a question, though, I’m curious. A two track road, I’m assuming that it’s adjacent to the interstate and I’m assuming from the back way-

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill K DeWit:
… is where the two track coming in … By the way, it’s on the highway. Does that bother anybody? Can I answer first?

Steven Jack Butala:
For sure.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I’m not worried about it, because it’s 10 acres. If it was one acre, and we’re on the highway, and all that stuff, then I might be a little more concerned, but 10 acres with access back on the other way, does not necessarily worry me, number one, and, number two …
Because access, acreage, and affordability are such big things on our due diligence and our checklist that I’m going to argue Josiah’s got all three.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. That’s actually my answer to the question. My answer is how did the eight As come out?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, access, you’ve addressed it, and I really believe because you have a lot of experience, physical and legal that work. My big concern is adjacent. If there’s nothing around there, that really …
You got to find out what this property is going to be used for adjacent to the freeway. If it’s a more urban area, and there’s three retail strip centers or three gas stations on each of the other corners of this thing, then that’s good. Now you know from an adjacent standpoint what’s possible, and what will eventually go there.
If it’s just absolutely nowhere, and it’s uncleared and everything else around it for miles is farmland, that’s eventually what it’s going to be used for. What it’s probably not going to be used for is any type of residential anything for the most part.
It’s a standard old question, run through the eight As, see where it comes out, and then your stage two due diligence is all about how’s it going to be used, and does it make sense financially?

Jill K DeWit:
I understand where Josiah is coming from. It’s all about that major interstate. That’s it. There’s a time and a place to be on the interstate.

Steven Jack Butala:
What’s the time and place? Because I can’t stand interstate property.

Jill K DeWit:
See, that’s where I was going with this. That’s what I assumed. I know. Yeah. What’s a time and a place for interstate? I have a rock company. I want that traffic driving by there every day.

Steven Jack Butala:
Gravel.

Jill K DeWit:
Seeing my gravel company. I don’t care. The gravel doesn’t complain about the noise.

Steven Jack Butala:
In fact, having a gravel company on an interstate is a huge bonus, because it’s free advertising.

Jill K DeWit:
There you go. That’s why.

Steven Jack Butala:
If it’s conducive for that type of use-

Jill K DeWit:
On the back wall is going to be painted the name of my gravel company, and you’re going to see my gravel piled up there. You’re going to go, “Oh, that’s where I’m calling when we redo our yard and redo our driveway” kind of thing.

Steven Jack Butala:
A great example.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s the thing, the … It sounds like we agree, the answer to the question is who is the end user? Is it zoned appropriately?

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s it. The moral of the story-

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t want to change the zoning.

Steven Jack Butala:
Follow the eight As, if it passes all of those in general, ask yourself this, now you’re in a phase of due diligence, it’s probably under contract, because it’s cheap enough, how is it actually going to be used? And then confirm that it can be used that way. If it’s a commercial gravel company, can it be used that way? If it’s agriculture, can it be used-

Jill K DeWit:
There’s going to be all kinds of things like that from anything construction-related to housing supplies, to a nursery. If it’s zoned appropriately like that for a commercial-

Steven Jack Butala:
Or a trailer park.

Jill K DeWit:
… use, then I think this is going to be a phenomenal property. Then I would just find a really good guy on LoopNet, that sells things in the area like this.

Steven Jack Butala:
Every property works. It’s just a matter of price. That’s true.

Jill K DeWit:
There’s some I don’t buy anymore, though.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, but that’s because-

Jill K DeWit:
Let’s be honest. Aren’t there properties that if I called you, and you’d say, “I don’t care. You can’t give it to me.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, but that’s because we’ve been doing this for decades. If you’re new, every property works. It’s just a matter of price.

Jill K DeWit:
I’ll give you $500 for it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Or a dollar.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I’ve given a couple hundred … I’ve gone as low as $200. Well, we bought some in bulk below that but when I’m really talking one-on-one with a seller, I want to, at least, make sure they can take their wife out to dinner.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s you, though.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. That’s me.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s first topic is Jill’s personal story. I want to hear this more than the listeners I think.

Jill K DeWit:
Really?

Steven Jack Butala:
Mm-hmm. I’m serious.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I started thinking about this 10 minutes ago.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what I thought. I blindsided Jill on this.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. “Here’s what we’re talking about today.” I really have just a couple of points to make in my story. This is all 30,000 foot level stuff. My personal story was growing up in southern California, it’s all about what we do.
I was already intrigued at a very young age, at these wealthy real estate investors. It was impossible in the ’80s to not know who Don Cole was or fill-in-the-blank. You’d see their signs on the freeway, all over Irvine, of these investors and these brokers and these amazing deals.
Watching a strawberry field become a hospital and just like, “Wow.” I was so intrigued by all of that. Watching Disneyland take over more and more orange groves and turn them into parking lots and other things around Disney. I lived there and watched the whole thing, and I’m like, “Somebody’s making a whole lot of money off of this.” That was at a young age. You’re just in it.
Then I’m sure it’s the same for someone growing up in the Midwest and watching farms pop up, and farms getting bigger and more agriculture or more cattle or something like that, so I’m sure it’s the same thing. For me, it was buildings. I am watching buildings, I am watching subdivisions. I didn’t really understand it, but I watched it all happen.
I watched new towns being formed. I watched new zip codes being added. I remember I was intrigued too, like, “Why do we have a new area code? Where did that come from?” It was more and more people, so I was like, “Huh, what is this?” It’s like I always paid attention to all of that.
Then my very, very first full-time job, the job that got me out of the house, and living on my own, I had plenty of part-time jobs, Little Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, and, goodness, Disneyland Hotel. Boy, I had some fun there. That was just as a kid.
My first real full-time job was working for real estate developers, and then I was like, “Oh.” I watched these guys show up. I helped house-sit their homes, babysit their kids, and see the cars they drove, and I’m like, “All right. There’s something here.”
I got to really learn ground up what they would do, and buy the land … They would buy it, maybe rezone it, if they had to, and build on it. I watched them build office buildings and I would help with all of that. I’d help read blueprints sometimes, and answer calls from the bank, and help write checks out of the construction loan account. I learned about all of that.
They would either build office buildings or strip malls, and then what’s interesting is, this group that I worked for, it was two brothers and one other guy were the main people, three of them but they would hold onto them, they wouldn’t build them to sell them, they would build them to hold them, lease them up, and hold them.
Then later on, I would get the rent checks and deposit the rent checks, and I would keep track of bookkeeping, so I really learned a lot, and I loved it.
Then I decided I wanted to travel a little bit more, because, “I got this job, I understand it.” The thing too, I remember having a discussion with myself like, “I got it, I went as far as I could,” and then there were the owners, and I couldn’t afford to buy in. That wasn’t an opportunity. I wanted to be an owner, I wanted to do what they were doing, but I didn’t know how to do that yet. I was 20 something.
I went off and got a job at American Airlines, followed in my family’s footsteps, my dad and my grandfather. I traveled, and so I got that W2 job for 17 years.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jeez.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. Boy, talk about drinking the Kool Aid and the golden handcuffs and all that. I thought, “Oh, I have seniority. Now I get the days off I want. Now I got the schedule I want. I get first choice vacation. I thought that was all great.” No. It’s not.
I know. There’s a life … It’s funny. I still have some friends there, and I have to remind them, there’s a life outside of American Airlines, and they’re like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yeah,” but now they’re retiring and I’m like, “You guys are nuts,” but whatever.
Anyway, the whole time I was there, and I did some other W2 jobs after American … I got out of the American thing and realized, “Whoa, there’s a whole big world out here,” and I did some other things, because they yielded more money, I was able to use my talents to make more money. That was the whole point, I always knew I could do more, and it wasn’t-

Steven Jack Butala:
You still … Should I save my questions until the end?

Jill K DeWit:
Yes, please.

Steven Jack Butala:
Okay.

Jill K DeWit:
Then it wasn’t until I met you, and then you really showed me the way to knock it out of the park, to be my own boss, work as little or as hard as I want, call the shots, buy the properties I want, make the returns that I wanted, and just really make it count.
I quickly with you learned that my time is my time. It’s the same amount of time to make $1000 as it is to make $100,000, and I’m going to argue, sometimes it’s less on the bigger deals, it takes less of my time.
Now I never look back. I would never go back. I don’t even consider it. Now I have the secret sauce. I don’t have to worry about it.

Steven Jack Butala:
What we’re really talking about-

Jill K DeWit:
That’s my story.

Steven Jack Butala:
What I realized while Jill was talking about, in this environment, what influenced her to get to where she is now, and so you did a good job on that. I’ve always been really intrigued by people who say, “I want to travel.”

Jill K DeWit:
You know what that was?

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not because I disagree with it. I just want a real good definition.

Jill K DeWit:
I’ll tell you, that was code for do you want to start a career now? For me, that’s really all it was. It was like do you really want to jump into your career now or do you want to goof off a little bit? I wanted to goof off a little bit.

Steven Jack Butala:
Okay. Good.

Jill K DeWit:
I wasn’t married, I didn’t have any kids. That was the least expensive-

Steven Jack Butala:
Did it work?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
You traveled everywhere?

Jill K DeWit:
I did. I did.

Steven Jack Butala:
Where? Where did you go?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh my gosh. All over Europe. I didn’t go to Asia. All over the country, all over Europe, I went to Canada, Mexico. I had a really good time. Mostly Europe-

Steven Jack Butala:
Was it out of your system?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
All right.

Jill K DeWit:
Yes and no.

Steven Jack Butala:
Was it mission accomplished?

Jill K DeWit:
It was mission accomplished.

Steven Jack Butala:
Okay. Awesome.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s really what I’m asking.

Jill K DeWit:
I knew I was young. I was not married. I didn’t have any kids. If I’m going to goof off a little bit, and want to see the world, now’s the time to do it, and I couldn’t afford it or get the time off, so I’m like, “Ding ding”, my benefits had changed, then as an adult child of an employee, so I’m like, “I better go get my own job there, so I can afford to travel and get the perks and get to the places I wanted to go.” That was the reason I did that.
Did I ever want to be CEO of a major airline? Heck no.

Steven Jack Butala:
Then you said later you always wanted more.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Did you get it?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Do you still want more?

Jill K DeWit:
No.

Steven Jack Butala:
Really?

Jill K DeWit:
Well, define-

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a good just right-

Jill K DeWit:
Honestly-

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a good knee-jerk answer, Jill. I don’t mean knee-jerk-

Jill K DeWit:
Yes and no.

Steven Jack Butala:
… good immediate, non-thought out answer.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Do I want more? No, because you know what actually? You asked me this a while back. You asked me some question. I can’t remember how it was worded, and my answer was I already succeeded my goals, what my goals were, for many years. Seriously. Already hit and succeeded that.
It actually happened when we were back in Southern California living on the beach. The first time, the first house, not where we we ended up on the beach, I was like, “Shoot, I was happier over there.” I thought I won. Then it kept getting better and better and better. Like, “Whoa.”
I don’t have a … The only push I have to do more is because now it’s fun. It’s rewarding.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. I agree.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m not dying to prove anything to anybody, I’m not dying to prove anything to myself. Did that answer that?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Would you change anything?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I would have got out of that W2. I would have got out of the W2 cog after five years, not 20. I wasted 20 flipping years. Yeah. It was about 20 years of that whole cycle until I met you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Wow.

Jill K DeWit:
I could have done without that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jeez. That’s a long time. On that note, let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday webinar.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s funny.
Hey, it is the end of the year. I think there’s some time left on our offers to owners, direct mail opportunity to get some stuff going-

Steven Jack Butala:
I know there is.

Jill K DeWit:
… for the end of this year, and early into January. Check out offers, the number two Owners.com, and start budgeting and planning and maybe even pre-pay for some mailers, so you can hit the ground running in 2024. That’s what we’re doing. Check it out.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take another question posted by one of our members on The Land Academy Discord online community.

Jill K DeWit:
Ed wrote, “Has anyone had any success with properties with no physical access? Have you been successful getting access? Was it worth the hassle? How about success selling it to a neighbor? I’m getting quite a few, and I hate to see them go to waste, but I don’t want to waste my time either.”
You’re perfect at this.

Steven Jack Butala:
Last week, I said this sentence, which will eventually come back and bite me, but it’s really good now, all properties has some value. All of them.
I built my career, which we’re going to talk about here in a second on buying access-less property. I didn’t seek it out. It just happened to be within my budget at the time.
I made it work. I changed how we marketed it, and made sure that we paid so little amount of money, all access-less property has some serious value, all of it, but it’s not worth the same amount, not even close to the same amount of an adjacent property that has physical and legal access.
Yeah. You can seek these out, if you want it. There’s always a way to eventually get access to a property. The question is are you going to go through eight years of your life, in some cases, or a very long time usually, and a lot of arguing and all kinds of stuff that’s associated, where it’s probably in the end not worth it? It’s better to just send out more mail, pick some properties that fall within the amount of money that you’re offering, and you’ve already pre-determined that it works, and so that’s what we choose to do in our career.
I did more than [inaudible 00:20:15] sold more than 10,000 properties without access, fully disclosing that. We were never trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. It was so blasted cheap, that it just worked for the people we sold it to.
Yes. I have had a lot of success with no physical access.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I believe most, probably all, states by now have passed laws that no one can be withheld access to their property. I don’t think any state will say, “Well, too bad, so sad. You’re going to buy a helicopter, if you’re going to go visit your property” kind of thing. I don’t think that exists anymore.
Like with what Jack was saying is sometimes you have compliant neighbors and you can work it out, and that’s the best case scenario. If you had a property, and you found a nice neighbor that like, “Oh, sure, I don’t mind giving up 30 feet over on this side, you can do that.” There’s a process, getting a survey, getting it recorded, legal descriptions have to be rewritten, and then it’s all physical, legal, and you’re good to go.
It can take time, so that’s best case scenario, and it’s probably going to be 90 days to six months, a couple grand, and everybody is on the same page.
Worst case scenario is nobody wants to do it, and now there’s a court battle, and that’s where you would have to basically go to you’re working with the county, and almost suing people, and the county is going to pick, ultimately, between one more person or maybe a couple, how it’s going to happen, like, “We have to give up the access, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to give up this part of your …” Nobody wants that. That’s where it could take years. You need to know both.
The question is have I done it? Yeah. Actually, but I haven’t done it all the way to the end. I’ve made sure it was possible, and what the steps were, so my buyer could get it, but big picture now is I don’t really mess with it, like Jack is saying. If you’re new, I wouldn’t mess with it, especially if you’re really, really new. Make sure you have physical and legal access, and then don’t think about it.
Ed, some day, you figure it out, you get a great attorney and neighbors are compliant, I don’t know. Circle back around to those properties. We keep track of that. In our inventory, when we pass on deals, that people have signed and sent back, we notate in our air table base why, and one of them is access.
You know what? Some day, you want to go back and look at those, you sure can. You’ll have an easy little list to go, “Here are all the ones I didn’t buy,” and that’s why.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s what’s really important to understand about lack of access with all properties, they’re not equal and they’re not the same. There’s 100,000, almost infinite number of reasons why a property doesn’t have access, and so the question lies whether or not you can create some value out of it, lies in whose property do you have to cross to get to yours?
Here’s some examples. Jill and I bought an island one time in a river in the Pacific Northwest, and it worked out great.

Jill K DeWit:
It did.

Steven Jack Butala:
Because it was water access, but did that property have access? No. Did we seek it out? No. I don’t remember what happened with it.

Jill K DeWit:
It was hilarious.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s another example of access-less property that worked out great. You got to cross the Bureau of Land Management, BLM Land, to get to it. Well, that’s easy. Believe it or not, it’s really easier, it was in our case, to just call the BLM, apply, two page application, I’m floored, still, over that, because the federal government is tough to deal with, to get 100 year access for $1. I think it costs $1 or $1.15 or something crazy. And we got it. And we sold the property successfully, and everybody was satisfied with that.
I bought properties on the flip side that were the internal side of the Grand Canyon on accident with no access. Almost no value. Who bought it? A rock climber, literally. He wanted to say I was climbing on his own property. I’m not sure about rock climbing in the Grand Canyon but that’s not my problem, it’s his.
Whose property you have to cross is imperative here. There’s been many, many cases where Jill called a neighbor and said, “We’re going to buy the property behind you, would you like to buy it from us? If not, can you see it in your heart to grant us access on the eastern part of your property? Happy to pay you or not,” and many times, they say, “I was always wondering about that property, and, sure, we’ll grant you access. Send us the stuff. You don’t need to pay us.”
It comes in all different shapes and sizes. Then the opposite, of course, is the Hatfields & McCoys and, “I will meet you here with my shotgun, if you attempt to even try to get access to that property.”

Jill K DeWit:
It’s funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
What do they all have in common? It’s a bunch of freaking work.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s it.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re not in the business of-

Jill K DeWit:
[inaudible 00:25:34].

Steven Jack Butala:
… working. We’re in the business of buying a piece of property really cheap, and reselling it without doing anything except finding a real estate agent for a lot more.

Jill K DeWit:
There we go.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s second topic, my personal story. As I’m going through this, I do not want this to be about me. I would like it to be about you, the listener or watcher. I want you to think about the things that have influenced you to get to your point, wherever you are, positively and negatively, because that’s really what my story is about.
I was born in the late ’60s in a lower middle class suburb of Detroit on 13 Mile. We’ve all heard of 8 Mile, well, it’s five miles north of that. Not too far out of the muck.
My dad had, as far back as I can remember, a small tax accounting firm, and he was never happy. He was never happy about working, I found out later. It wasn’t that he wasn’t unhappy.
He had clients, and he could see in their tax returns how much money they were making or not making. Well, it turns out, no surprise, the clients that you had that were making a bunch of money, and paying taxes, or avoiding taxes, let’s say, legitimately avoiding taxes, hopefully, he became friends with, and so they would ask him if he liked the deal or didn’t like the deal, and sometimes, he was a partner.
He started buying properties with these partners that he had. Some of it was farmland. We were on 13 Mile, and now way up into 28 Mile, and 36 Mile Road. All the way up where it was all farms. It was becoming subdivisions.
At the same time, my entire extended family, all the men, worked for some version of the car companies. Detroit is the absolute Ground Zero for unions. Love them or hate them, that’s the way it is. My dad was not in a union. He owned his own business. Everybody, on both sides of my family, was involved in that somehow, and none of those people were ever satisfied.
All they talked about was the day they retired. They had calendars in their basements, 365,000 days until I retire, and so it just became a race to retirement thing. When they retired, because I was around for that too, many, many, many years later, they were twice as upset, because that was it.
I never wanted to be like that. I never wanted to let some predetermined concept … This is all under the guise of influence, so I had some positive influence with these real estate deals my dad was doing, and then 50 stories of my immediate family where it was the exact opposite. They were on somebody else’s time, somebody else’s schedule, they’re collecting a pay check, like Jill just said, not happy.

Jill K DeWit:
Jill just did.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill’s story has a happy ending. I’ll tell you with confidence, all of my extended family, there was not a happy ending.
My dad gets involved in this real estate deal where he bought … There were three distribution centers for back then when you had a telephone on the wall, all those network lines had to be maintained. It was three distribution centers around southeastern Michigan, that were huge, massive triple net facilities where the trucks were stored and the supplies were stored. It was back then called Michigan Bell. Bell, as in Alexander Graham Bell, and my dad bought those three properties from a retiring accountant coming off of 30 year leases, at any amazing rate, and he lost money for three years, and so they renegotiated a higher end lease to adjust for inflation and new costs and all that, and immediately resold them for a ridiculous amount of money.
I’m paraphrasing, because we don’t have a ton of time. He did a bunch of real estate deals up to that, and I have long lists of stories of me and my sister sitting back in his car, driving out to 28 Mile Road, and looking at farmland.
This deal triggered us to move. We moved from this lower middle class area to one of the nicest suburbs in southeastern Michigan called Grosse Pointe. I remember this like it was yesterday, because I was just starting to be old enough to understand some of this stuff, or, at least, be intrigued by it. Let’s call this influenced by.
We packed our stuff up, and we were in the car, and I asked my parents what … They bought a house and sold it, so they took the money from the old sale and plotted into the new one. I asked him about what these prices are, like how much … They bought that house for $13,000 and sold it for $87,000, to which I said, immediately, this is like this with these guys in the desert building strip malls, “Well, why don’t we buy all these houses then if that’s the case?” My dad stopped the car, and he looked at me, I thought I was in trouble … We were always in trouble back then. Were you?

Jill K DeWit:
No. Well, no.

Steven Jack Butala:
He said, “That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard,” and so that always stuck with me. It really influenced me. We moved to one of the nicest neighborhoods, and I was fortunate enough to go to high school there and have a great high school experience, and then go on to college.
In the back of my head, I always knew that the way … It was so simple about buying land, and buying houses or whatever else, and just reselling them.
That set the stage. I went into accounting, got out of college, got a job, a really good … I was a commercial real estate broker for full commission, and I made nothing and I ate ramen noodles for probably two years. The third year, I did incredibly well, because I decided to specialize in buying and selling long-term care facilities, assisted living and nursing homes.
My best client was in Scottsdale, Arizona. They were taking their company public. I did a bunch of deals for them, got paid, finally, a lot, way too much for my age. It was all pent-up, and I blew a lot of money real fast.
Luckily, these guys called me and said, “We need an acquisition person. You seem to know what we want. We’re going to go public. We’ve got to do a road show, and raise capital,” and the whole thing. I couldn’t fly out here, which ends up being here, fast enough.
Got the job. During the interview, I told the CEO, “I’m either going to fly here next week with this job or without it,” and so they hired me. We did a lot of deals. I negotiated a …
I’ll never forget. I had a one bedroom apartment, I think it was $515. It had nothing in it except a mattress on the floor. I made a $50,000 base salary. This is 1993. $50,000 base salary-

Jill K DeWit:
That’s a lot of money back then.

Steven Jack Butala:
… and 2% of everything I bought. These are $5 million and $10 million properties. That’s when it all launched.
I did fantastically well with those guys. We took the company public. I had equity, so I was even making more on that. Ultimately, got a call from KPMG, which wasn’t that back then, and they swooned me away to become a partner there to do it for them, buy and sell for their clients, buy and sell long-term care facilities. They had a lot of really huge healthcare systems, hospital systems that had nursing homes that they didn’t want. Negotiated a deal, got a percentage of the sale on that.
All during while all of this is happening, I bought a piece of property on eBay, an 80 acre property, for $8000 in Arizona. 30 days later, I bought it, got the deed, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know about how deeds worked. We were doing huge healthcare facility deals with lawyers on both sides, and I really didn’t have to do any real work. I was the guy in a board meeting saying, “We should buy this property because the numbers really work,” and making everybody laugh. That’s all you had to do back then. I’m sure that’s what you had to do is just make everybody laugh.

Jill K DeWit:
Sometimes.

Steven Jack Butala:
I bought this property-

Jill K DeWit:
I actually had to work too.

Steven Jack Butala:
I bought this 80 acre property, which I know now had no access whatsoever, in the worst part of Arizona, for $8000. Got the deed. It was recorded. I copied the deed, I had no idea what I was doing, and then resold it on the same thing, on eBay, for $16,000. That was it. That was it.
I was done. I forgot about accounting, I forgot about healthcare systems. All I did from that point forward was plan the rest of my life to get to where we are now. Huge influence early on, on both ways.
The takeaway from this is I watched some people very close to me make a lot of money in real estate quickly. What seemed like it was quickly to me probably was pain for them, pure pain.
I also watched at the same time the demise of every single male on both sides of my family just implode on themselves working for the auto industry their entire lives, both of my grandfathers died of respiratory diseases working in the factories before the EPA and before there were OSHA or any of that stuff. It literally killed them.
That was it, I left my … I closed a huge deal for KPMG, got the fee, put in my two weeks notice, and moved back to Arizona. I made it my life’s mission, my mission in life to buy inexpensive land and resell it. That was like 1999.

Jill K DeWit:
How’s it working out?

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s working out great.

Jill K DeWit:
Good. You mentioned some of the people along the way that you’re like, clearly, influenced you. Do you have one person in particular that you can say that was the biggest-

Steven Jack Butala:
My buddy in high school, his father was incredibly successful, and my buddy now inherited all that, and he made it three times, four times as successful. He’s just as smart as his father, if not more.
I got a chance to spend … Because my parents moved to Grosse Pointe, got a chance to spend summers with that family, and really got exposed to just, at that time, multi-million dollar balance sheets, and they all were involved in accounting.
Yeah. That was a huge positive influence, but if you talk to anybody who owns manufacturing facilities, they all hate real estate, because the profit margins in real estate are not what they are from an ordinary income standpoint. It didn’t phase me, I knew that that was what was going to happen.

Jill K DeWit:
Would you change anything?

Steven Jack Butala:
Probably not. Jeez.

Jill K DeWit:
Do you think anywhere along the way you spent not enough time or too much time?

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s interesting. I’ll answer it this way. I see all this crap on the internet about side hustles, and passive income, and all of that. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what I was doing. I had built-in percentages for all the deals that I was doing anyway, and I was always after that, one deal, in the mid-’90s, after that, I was always buying and selling land on the side anyway.
It wasn’t a thing called a side hustle. It was an automatic. Every place I worked, I was planning my exit. I was either going to take over the company, completely take over the company or I was going to leave with my land business developed.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I see. Got it.

Steven Jack Butala:
I was not going to work there for 20 years. It was never going to happen. When I left public accounting, and I said this to the guy that I worked for, and I said this sentence, “I would rather flip burgers for the rest of my life than do this for two more weeks.” You know what he said to me? “I completely understand.”

Jill K DeWit:
That’s hilarious.

Steven Jack Butala:
Just worn down to a nub, at that point, he was. I really would encourage you to look at the negative influences in your life, male or female, as much as you’re looking around at the positive influences, and if all you’ve ever had is negative influences, great, stand right in front of the mirror, and say, “Now I’ve got a great example of what I don’t want to do and be.”

Jill K DeWit:
Yup. Excellent.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think that’s just as important as having a positive influence.

Jill K DeWit:
Excellent.

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

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I have a question for you, and not just you, Jack, but for you, here with us today, are you excited about or afraid of 2024?

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m excited as hell.

Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that funny? I was talking earlier today about I’m already writing 2024 on everything. I had a little scare the other day, duh, I almost got duped by a stupid spam email, which prompted me to spend the next two hours changing a bunch of passwords. Lovely.
Nothing bad happened. Caught it all just in time. I’m like doggone it. I’ll tell you what it was, I was expecting a DocuSign from my staff, and here comes a DocuSign, and I didn’t notice it wasn’t the right DocuSign, until I’m in it, like, “Shoot. This is not the right one.”
Anyway, locked it all down. We’re all good. Got new passwords. I’m like, “Well, it’s coming into 2024. It’s been some time on some of these passwords. I need to change them.”
For some reason, I personally feel pulled into 2024, not dragged, and I’m not afraid of it, and I’m not sitting watching the clock. I’m like, “Let’s start this, man.” I feel really good about everything we did in 2023. You know what it is? And then I’m going to ask you.
I, personally, have some bigger projects for 2024 that I’m excited about.

Steven Jack Butala:
Me too.

Jill K DeWit:
I want to get them going. I’m like, “Let’s hurry up and just …” I don’t care. We’ll just start January today. I’m happy with that.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s how I feel.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m thinking of you, listening or watching, how are you feeling? And why? What is your why? If you’re hesitant about 2024, maybe you didn’t have the best 2020, or maybe … You know what? If you’re hesitant about 2024, you probably had a pretty good 2023, and you’re not sure you can top it. That would be a reason I could think of, but I know I’m going to top it. I know, in my gut, we’re going to top 2023 next year, so I’m like, “Bring it.” What about you?

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m an accountant, so I look at we have 12 new, fresh, blank canvas accounting periods to go through. Around the middle of October-

Jill K DeWit:
We call those a month on my side, for me.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you can imagine, just a whiteboard, just erasing 2023, and putting 2024 at the top, which I do, obviously, in software, and you just stare at it. Anything’s possible. Around October, mid-October to late-October, you know how the year is going to end, so now I’ve been going through just pain, because, like you, we can’t start the next year yet. I already knew it was going to happen here.
I love finishing stuff. It’s a personality flaw when you drop that cherry on top of the-

Jill K DeWit:
Hot fudge sundae?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. It’s [inaudible 00:42:17]. It’s not the highlight. Just looking at it, it’s perfect right now. That’s how I look at January 1st. Everything is just perfect. We’re either going to mess it all up, because time is going to go on anyway, and we’re going to make it amazing, better than the year before, and it’s like now I’m challenged. We know it’s going to finish, it’s going to end. It’s all positive. I’m not blowing smoke here.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m going to argue you don’t know how to mess it all up. I’m going to say whatever it is. You and I will pivot, whatever it is, we will sell that pizza joint and pivot.

Steven Jack Butala:
January is always-

Jill K DeWit:
We’ve done that.

Steven Jack Butala:
… really good month for us, because everybody just comes out of their stupid holiday shell and they’ve got pent-up deals to do.

Jill K DeWit:
Bring it.

Steven Jack Butala:
On the buy side and the sell side.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
February is usually as good, and then summer starts rolling in, and there’s issues. She’s right. I don’t know. If April or May suck, which sometimes that happens, then we just make changes.

Jill K DeWit:
Because you stop going to the gym.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what accounting periods are for. They’re so you can measure them against each other, and say, “This one sucks, so we’ve got to make some changes here.”

Jill K DeWit:
Totally. Jack, what do you have for us? Do you have something that you want to share?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, it’s an offshoot again of my story. I really think there’s three days left in this month. Define what you want. Really define it. What side of that do you want to be on? If you’ve got negative influences all over you, why would you repeat that? Why would you copy the people that are a negative influence on you or have been in the past? If you don’t have a positive role model or you need an example of what to do, jeez, the internet is there. We didn’t have that. We were stuck with the 15 people in our immediate circle to learn from.

Jill K DeWit:
And our teachers.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, and our teachers. Right. Define your interest. You have to be interested. I don’t know why. Real estate, you heard the story, real estate chose me. I could have been easily, with all the influences I had, gone straight into manufacturing, which maybe would have been better.
I’m just not interested in it. I’m not a mechanical engineer. Great. Parts get stamped out, and you sell them to GM. That sounds like the most boring thing I’ve ever heard. Buying 160 acres on 28 Mile Road, out of town, and selling it for a lot more-

Jill K DeWit:
That’s interesting.

Steven Jack Butala:
… it’s got my name on it.

Jill K DeWit:
Yup.

Steven Jack Butala:
It always has.

Jill K DeWit:
I like that. I completely agree. Don’t forget, if you want to learn more about us, go on LandAcademy.com. From there, you can get our free e-book, read about us, you can schedule a call with my team, lots of great stuff.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode. Buy land cheap, sell it for more on the internet. Usually a lot more.
We’re Jack and Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
We’re Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information-

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.