Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
I am Steven Jack Butala.

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

Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I are talking about, well, it’s episode 1,994, and we’re talking about the truth about mailer yield, this year in 2024, and a little later we’ll talk about the three types of land to buy, and the two types I think you should probably avoid, especially this year.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, this is going to be good. We talked about topic number one ahead of time a little bit, but we did not talk about topic number two, so I’m going to be just as surprised.

Steven Jack Butala:
Good.

Jill K DeWit:
But I have a feeling I know what it is, you know what? I’m not new to this. Isn’t that funny? It’s a little bit funny when you talk to someone that’s just learning about us and learning about land flipping and they’re trying to wrap their heads around this.
It’s like part of me is I feel very proud to say how long I’ve been doing this and how long you’ve been doing this, but then I go, oh my God, how old are we? Then there’s a part of me that goes, you’re not 20 anymore and you’re not 30 anymore. You’re not even 40 anymore.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t have a problem with that. I like it.

Jill K DeWit:
I know it’s a guy thing. You men.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s talk about this for a second.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
What’s the problem with getting older?

Jill K DeWit:
Because men look better. Men get distinguished and women get old. Not kidding.

Steven Jack Butala:
I disagree with that. You look, and I’m not blowing smoke or trying to get anything out of this. You actually look better with the age, and I’m really serious about this.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, if I could grow a beard and hide some of my wrinkles, I would, you know what I’m going to do?

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh my God. We should have one of our guys put a beard on you and just keep it there for this camera.

Jill K DeWit:
Great. Now that you said that Alex is going to do it. There’s going to be a beard here in a minute. I know it.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think this age thing is ridiculously perceived.

Jill K DeWit:
All right.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think that there’s a certain population or a certain part of the population that sees real value in very young women and you don’t want to hang out with this people.

Jill K DeWit:
Anyway, I couldn’t, if I was getting into this right now and I saw some kid, especially a kid standing next to a Ferrari, I’d be like, nope, not my people.

Steven Jack Butala:
Any version of that.

Jill K DeWit:
But if I just saw anybody that looked less than 30, “I’ve got this. I can teach you.” I’d be like, “Son, first of all, call me when you’re old enough to shave and then,” you know what I mean?

Steven Jack Butala:
If I was really young and we were in Land Academy and I had a few deals under my belt, this is what I would say, “I’m really young, but I have a lot of credibility and I have an incredible knowledge in how do you use the most current tools that are available to buy and sell land? Is it a replacement for experience? No, but it’s a slight edge.”
Because I had that when I was really young, a really serious edge with computers and all of that. I was surrounded by people that were baffled by, let’s say, Excel. Back then it was Lotus and so it was a huge edge and I used it to my advantage and here we are.

Jill K DeWit:
I understand.

Steven Jack Butala:
So instead of just what ends up happening, and I don’t want to make this a rant, what ends up happening is a lot of lies, and it’s very unfortunate for the person who’s doing it. And then obviously the constituency gets caught up in believing all that stuff, and then let down, which by the way is probably 50 to 60% of the people that ultimately find Land Academy and become a part of it have these…
This is why we know this, jill and I, because we get these stories, “I joined this person’s group and it just wasn’t what I thought.” I didn’t think this is where this was going, but that’s the truth.

Jill K DeWit:
No, it was really about age and us. But anyway, that’s good. It’s funny. Here’s what I heard from it, like the other day that we did on the Thursday call or the in career path, 41-year-old casual dating. We’ll get to that later but…

Steven Jack Butala:
When do you think casual dating should end, Jill?

Jill K DeWit:
I’m like Lotus 1, 2, 3. That’s how I remember that. When should casual dating end?

Steven Jack Butala:
When should you be kind of done with casual dating?

Jill K DeWit:
All right.

Steven Jack Butala:
And sort of starting to say, “I’ve got to implement my life plan here.”

Jill K DeWit:
Let’s give the backstory real quick here. So in the beginning, we’re in career path nine right now, so we’ll get to this topic in a minute. We have too much, we have-

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s talk about your mail [inaudible 00:04:24] in a minute.

Jill K DeWit:
In a little bit. This is more important. So, we’re in career path nine right now. Career Path is our highest level coaching product like mastermind group that we offer. And the beginning of week two, Jack was very sweet and shared with us some of his behind-the-scenes content coming someday for Manplan.com, and there’s a whole life timeline. It’s a Gantt chart, there’s a financial Gantt chart and there’s a personal Gantt chart.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a life Gantt chart for men.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, this was the first time I had seen it. This evolved, let’s just say, or maybe even seen it at all. I don’t know. You may have shown it to me and I blanked it out.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, I’m sure.

Jill K DeWit:
Because that happens. So you’re showing the financial piece to it and my eyes, all they do is go down to the personal part of it and it talks about the developmental years and the things that you’re doing and then there’s education.

Steven Jack Butala:
Education, formal education.

Jill K DeWit:
Focus here and they’re like, it’s like when you need to be thinking about getting married, if you want to do that and thinking about that part of your life, and all I saw was a casual dating period, which started somewhere in the teen. You’re in your teen years and it ended at 41. I’m like, “Are you kidding me, casual dating still til 41?” and then you get serious about somebody.

Steven Jack Butala:
What are the two things in life that will destroy any hope for a man of being independently wealthy?

Jill K DeWit:
Well, probably getting married and having kids.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s it. So, why not not do it until it’s time?

Jill K DeWit:
I’m not disagreeing with you.

Steven Jack Butala:
I knew you wouldn’t.

Jill K DeWit:
I just don’t know what to do. Well, you know what? I got to tell you, we have three children and the last thing we do is pressure them to get married or have kids.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s the opposite.

Jill K DeWit:
We pay them.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have a handshake, dollar amount.

Jill K DeWit:
If you make it 30, here’s what you get.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s 30 and then 40 without children or marriage and it’s equal by gender.

Jill K DeWit:
I understand.

Steven Jack Butala:
I believe they’re going to hold us to it.

Jill K DeWit:
It doesn’t mean that if you’re in that situation now, you can’t overcome that and doesn’t mean undo it. It means you may have to work a little harder and [inaudible 00:06:43].

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what it means.

Jill K DeWit:
You just have to, that’s…

Steven Jack Butala:
You have a different Gantt chart now.

Jill K DeWit:
You do. Where is that?

Steven Jack Butala:
And that’s okay.

Jill K DeWit:
I want to see that one.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what we do. We adapt and overcome in our lives. And the Gantt chart that Jill was exposed to and the people I was presenting this all to-

Jill K DeWit:
What if none of them were 18 years old so it didn’t apply to them, but you have to start with a template. And so if you find yourself listener and you’re 42 years old, you have three children who span in age, maybe some are in college, maybe some are still in grade school or all of the above, and you’re on your third wife, you’re going to have a different Gantt chart than that 18-year-old who’s thinking about it.
So, that’s the point to Man Plan. This is not a commercial by any stretch. You just need to be aware of these things. Everybody always says, “Well, there’s no life manual.” That’s what Man Plan is and that’s what that Gantt chart is. It is a manual. That doesn’t mean that you can’t solve any social or financial problem that you have at just about any age, man or woman. It’s just a different Gantt chart.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m just thinking of people that we know in their Gantt charts. Casual dating to 25, casual dating, again, starting at 40 and ending at 51.

Steven Jack Butala:
How about not getting married when you’re 19?

Jill K DeWit:
And then casual dating at 60. Seriously, so we have three [inaudible 00:08:17]… You know who you are, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but there’s people that I’m sure they have 10 years of casual dating in their early years, 10 years of casual dating in their middle years, and then 10 years of casual dating again, and maybe they’re 95 and they’re casual dating again.

Steven Jack Butala:
My dad is 85. He lives in-

Jill K DeWit:
He’s been casual dating forever.

Steven Jack Butala:
He’s casually dating at 85, whatever that means for him. He explained to me with a very high degree of seriousness, because I think this topic is a crack up, that he did everything the opposite in life. He got married too early, had kids too early, meaning me, because I’m the oldest, which is fine.

Jill K DeWit:
Yep, you’re the problem.

Steven Jack Butala:
Then he got unmarried and then two wives later, passed away, and now he’s reversed. So all the stuff he’s supposed to do in high school, he’s doing now.

Jill K DeWit:
Behaving like a teenager.

Steven Jack Butala:
And he was mansplaining it to me like I’ve never thought about these things before and I’m sitting there saying, “Oh wow, thank you for this advice. I didn’t really didn’t think that. I never thought about that.”

Jill K DeWit:
Don’t worry, Dad, I watched you do it all wrong.

Steven Jack Butala:
I got to be careful. I know he listens to this.

Jill K DeWit:
Oops, sorry, sorry. Sorry, LB.

Steven Jack Butala:
Each week on the show we answer questions from our 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:
Perfect. And don’t forget, if you have a question or you just want some more information, reach out to my team, support@landacademy.com.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take a question, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
All right, person X wrote, because we don’t have their name.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is their name. This is their real name.

Jill K DeWit:
Is it you?

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not me. They have the same name as I do.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I saw Stephen B, and I’m like, you’re Stephen B. So a different Stephen. B, Stephen B two. Stephen B dos says, “Has anyone acquired land through tax deed sales? I’m researching them a little bit as a way to try to increase deal flow. Would be curious to know if folks have had success or not. Thanks.” Well, you can speak about this a lot, so let her rip.

Steven Jack Butala:
I feel qualified to answer this.

Jill K DeWit:
Yes, you do. I’ll just sit back here and drink my tea.

Steven Jack Butala:
I cut my teeth in the land business by buying a back tax property and reselling it online, specifically on eBay, and thousands and thousands and thousands of deals later and millions of dollars of profit margin later, I can tell you that it is not the right way to buy property cheap. And I would never have known that had I not gone through it.
So my answer to you is give it a shot and see if you like it, and maybe it’s going to spark a light bulb for you that it never did for me. I was always chasing these land sales and there’s a lot of work. Here’s the pros and cons. The pros are you can buy some cheap dirt and as evidenced by me and resell it for more very successfully.
When you buy properties for three, four, $500, it’s hard to not make money, no matter how you slice it. The downside, the very severe downside, which is how I came about and devised this system of sending out blind offers. The problem is, best case scenario, you’re staring at a list of, let’s say, in LA County’s case, LA County has a tax deed auction that’s a week long. It’s a week long. That’s how many properties they have that they have to get back on their tax rolls.
So that’s, in some cases, thousands of properties. It’s run the analysis on thousands of properties and then bid on them, raise the capital beforehand, go to the auction or do it online, bid on them on the ones that you want. It’s a massive undertaking. It sounds fun. It sounds profitable when you talk about it at a 35,000-foot level like I’m talking about it now. But the fact is it’s going to take you weeks if not a month, to analyze all those properties and figure out what the values are and what you’re willing to bid.

Jill K DeWit:
And then what if you don’t get them?

Steven Jack Butala:
And then there’s a real good chance you end up with nothing.

Jill K DeWit:
You’re like, well, there, I’m not willing to work that hard.

Steven Jack Butala:
So what we do, and he’s in our group so he knows this, is rather than do that, we spend a couple hours, maybe five hours on a mailer, a 10,000 unit mailer, let’s say, with real specific pricing in it, and we send it all out and the mailer does the work for you. Then so 20, 30, 40, 80 properties come back, a hundred properties come back with people saying, “I am interested in selling.”
Then you analyze those a hundred properties, 80 properties instead of 10,000 and decide which ones you want to buy, and you have the luxury of saying, “Nope, nope, nope, nope. Don’t care. Don’t care. Priced that wrong. Seller doesn’t want to sell. Seller’s not alive,” and on and on and on until you whittle that thing down pretty quickly and efficiently, if you’re somebody like Jill, into two or three deals that you’re going to make 30 to 80 or a hundred thousand bucks each on, and that’s how the real funnel works. So tax deed sales, I’m all for them. It’s just a lot of work.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic, the truth about mailer yield in 2024.

Jill K DeWit:
This is cool. I was thinking about-

Steven Jack Butala:
This is Jill’s topic.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, it came up in career path again this week as we are filming. We just wrapped up week two of eight for our career path session. We have an awesome group, heavy smart women involved, which I love.

Steven Jack Butala:
Have you noticed that there’s more and more women in our group?

Jill K DeWit:
Yep. Oh, I’ve noticed.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think it’s the greatest thing ever.

Jill K DeWit:
I do too.

Steven Jack Butala:
It tells me that you’re providing, not me. You’re providing an environment that’s…

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
… more toward that type of mental… Women just invest differently than men and I think that’s great.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill’s got a book on our desk that says Invest like a Girl, and it’s written about Warren Buffett.

Jill K DeWit:
So we were talking in career path, mailers to get mailed again, and we were talking about, and it was just interesting to me to think about how long we’ve been doing this. And I mean, back in the day, I bet when you first started this, you could send out, we’re talking in the 90s now, everyone, you could probably send out a thousand offers and buy 10 properties. Good ones.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m embarrassed to say that’s really high.

Jill K DeWit:
Was it high?

Steven Jack Butala:
Mm-hmm.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, you didn’t have me then.

Steven Jack Butala:
No. We could send out 200 letters and get a deal.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, and buy 10 properties, because nobody was doing it back then. No one knew it. People would get a letter and go, what the heck is this? Well, back then too, they couldn’t even find their own property. Even when I got involved 15 years ago, it was not what it is today, finding these properties. There’s no state county APN and it pops up, did not exist.

Steven Jack Butala:
I have to say, when Jill and I talk about these years ago, what we were doing, it’s not under the guise of our good old days.

Jill K DeWit:
This is better.

Steven Jack Butala:
I am more happy now and we are more financially successful and I think rewarded all the way around now than I ever have been in my land career ever. The tools out there are easier to use. We got a group of people in Land Academy that have open checkbooks, and so there’s really-

Jill K DeWit:
Us included.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s an unlimited supply of capital when we bring in good deals. The truth is, Jill and I, we don’t do a ton of deals, but the ones we do, hell yes.

Jill K DeWit:
So I’m going to go back. So you could send out a thousand offers and buy a lot of property, 20? Let’s just say 20 that you picked out that you loved.

Steven Jack Butala:
Not a thousand, that’s like a thousand to one.

Jill K DeWit:
Let’s just say… Give me the best time.

Steven Jack Butala:
Like years?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Where was the aha moment before me when you’re like, “Holy cow, I can’t believe I just canvassed this area and this is what came back.”?

Steven Jack Butala:
So as I mentioned earlier, I cut my teeth on tax sales, so I knew where there were big, huge pockets of property that were always in tax sales, and so in like 99 or 2000, I think it was like 99, I sent out a little test mailers, which I don’t recommend you do now, but little mailers like that for those properties, for those types of properties in that area. And we just didn’t have the tool. We didn’t know where the properties were physically. We didn’t have the tools.

Jill K DeWit:
But how much could you buy? I just want to know how much came back.

Steven Jack Butala:
I would send out let’s say 500 offers and probably get 20 signed purchase agreements and prices would all be like $500, and they just never… At that price, they couldn’t get a real estate agent to sell the property. They usually inherited it. They never saw it and don’t care, and they were tired of paying the taxes.

Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that great? I’m only asking for the evolution here. You don’t have, so thank you. I want to interview you here. So, that was in the late 90s.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, let’s say early 2000, start there.

Jill K DeWit:
Early 2000s, so then when was there a shift where, and if there was a shift, what do you think happened?

Steven Jack Butala:
Without making this show two hours long?

Jill K DeWit:
Correct.

Steven Jack Butala:
What happened is there would be a wow and flutter, so there would be-

Jill K DeWit:
A wow and flutter?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. So there’s a heyday of success because that was a very specific product type, and so with the way we were selling property, we would buy 50 or 80 of those and you can’t just put 50 or 80 properties at the same time, or even the same formats-

Jill K DeWit:
True, next to each other [inaudible 00:18:43].

Steven Jack Butala:
So we were really always struggled in that environment with diversity.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
So what happened was I found out that there is an oil gas data company called RealQuest that I convinced them to provide data to us. Even though we were real estate investors, we weren’t in this highfalutin huge money backed industry, and they did. They allowed us to do it in a crude way.
Between that and using the CDs that the assessor would provide, pieced together mailers, the data set was nothing like it is now.

Jill K DeWit:
I can’t even imagine how much time this took to spend.

Steven Jack Butala:
And I’ll tell you, it was all self-taught. There was no YouTube, so you figured it out. Anyway, that solved the diversification problem, and that was the real light bulb moment.

Jill K DeWit:
So then you guys-

Steven Jack Butala:
Our mailer yield and the stuff that we bought and how we sold it was truly spectacular.

Jill K DeWit:
You were mailing places that you hadn’t driven to and been at the auction then after that.

Steven Jack Butala:
It took all the real work out of it too. We didn’t have to analyze auctions anymore. It was just an evolution of success.

Jill K DeWit:
And then, so that was in the 2000s. So 2010 through 15, let’s just say before Land Academy, I felt like we were doing fine.

Steven Jack Butala:
Really quickly, between 2004 and 2009, when 2009, the market really cooled off. We sold tens of thousands of properties and generated millions and millions of dollars on top of, and we were still doing tax sales at that time.

Jill K DeWit:
People don’t realize too, when these things happen, it’s a buyer’s time. You could grab some things. I mean, back then you were pivoting. There were house things to nab up and you did.

Steven Jack Butala:
So what Jill’s really getting at, or if I can paraphrase, is each little step of the way based on the market, we changed, we had access to data for the first time in the early 2000s and we utilized it and changed. And then as time went on, we would add, we just made changes based on the environment and the markets. That’s what mailer yield.
That’s where people get tripped up with mailer yield now. They say sentences like this, this is what Jill’s getting at, “I used to send out 6,000 letters in the Dallas market area and I would buy 14 properties. Now, I have to send out 15,000 to buy 30 properties. What the hell, man, is it over? Why is my mailer yield so bad? What am I doing wrong?”
Well, I’ll answer that fictitious person. You’re not adjusting to the market, whatever that means to you. You can’t continually do the exact same thing over and over in the same market or same environment and expect the same results forever. It’s just not how it is.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I want to go with, let’s fast-forward to today, and this is, do you have more? Can I?

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s it.

Jill K DeWit:
So the point that I wanted to make today on this topic is I wanted you to understand the progression and what Jack just shared, but the thing about today is it’s going to take more mail for obvious reasons to get the offers back. So my argument is make the mail count, make the deal count.
What if it’s going to take you 5,000 units? Let’s just say this, to get one that you love, that you’re running to the bank for property. Just using that number randomly. And that mailer costs you, 5,000 units, I don’t know, 3000 bucks, 3000, $3,500 by the time you’re all in, data and postage and using O-to-O, because it’s like 65 cents roughly a unit to get that mail out.
So I’m not going to spend $3,500 on mail to buy a property for 2000 to sell it for eight. That’s my point. But I will spend that much money on mail to buy something for 20,000 to sell it for 80,000. Now, it’s worth it, and that’s where I think I see people still doing these little things. I’m like, what are you doing?
Then there’s all kinds of other things that we talk about around Land Academy and career path, such as I’m going to tell you, the bigger deals are easy to close anyway. That’s a whole nother topic.

Steven Jack Butala:
The fact is everyone stops talking about mailer yield, us included, after their second or third deal because they realize how much money is involved and how small in comparison. The return on investment for a well-thought-out mailer is staggering, staggeringly positive, and here’s the root of that.
Think of two sets of people, four people total. Set number one is a person who used to own a chain of restaurants. They sold them all and they’re looking for something new. They have a pile full of money and some time, so they get involved in land investing or house flipping or whatever, whatever we do in our little world. Their reaction every single time, because we see these people in career path, and get a chance to get to know them really in their history.
Their response to that is, “This is it? I have to spend $80,000 on mail this year. I’m going to generate about a million bucks. Well, with my restaurants, it took a year to open one. I had to spend a million dollars on a build out turn improvements and on and on and on. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jack and Jill. Holy heck, why doesn’t everybody do this? This is the greatest thing in the world.” That’s set number one.
Set number two is somebody who’s just getting into the land business. They have a W-II job at Costco, and they have $1482 to spend on mail, and their question in 62 different ways is what’s going to my mailer yield going to be the first. The former restaurant owner never asks about mailer yield. They don’t care. They’re prepared to make mistakes learning. Send out 3000 here, 8,000 here, 4,000 here. Buy three or four deals, resell them and enjoy the money and the success.
The second set is prepping for disappointment, in my opinion. That’s why Land Academy is packed full of formerly successful people who are now adding this to their already successful life, instead of brand spanking new people who just are setting themselves up, in my opinion, for disappointment.

Jill K DeWit:
So it’s not that you can’t, if you have $1482, I would just say wait until you have $14,082, what would you say?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, I would say we have a product-

Jill K DeWit:
Put your head down.

Steven Jack Butala:
… a little known product called Land Up Academy community.

Jill K DeWit:
That.

Steven Jack Butala:
And I would say join that.

Jill K DeWit:
We haven’t announced that yet, but thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, sorry. You know what?

Jill K DeWit:
This is good, actually.

Steven Jack Butala:
Usually, I don’t even know about this stuff, but this thing crossed my desk and I love this product. If you want to be in a room full of people every week that are making this incredibly successful, but you don’t have the money or the comfort level yet to get super involved in actually sending mail out or whatever, you just want to listen.

Jill K DeWit:
And learn and prep.

Steven Jack Butala:
You want to audit the class in college. That’s the product for you.

Jill K DeWit:
Prep for it. It’s coming.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m sorry, was I not?

Jill K DeWit:
No, that’s actually funny. I like it, coming in April. We’ll talk more. This is good.

Steven Jack Butala:
I thought it was already launched-

Jill K DeWit:
I love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
… and everything, Jill. I’m sorry.

Jill K DeWit:
You’re hilarious.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar. Hey, if you don’t know it about it already, Jill and I own a commercial printing company called Offersthenumbertwoowners.com, they will do your mailer for you. That’s it. I have nothing else to say about that.

Jill K DeWit:
You hate Excel, you hate data, you hate downloading, you hate scrubbing it. You don’t know what you’re doing in scraping. What the heck is scraping? I got to do that to get comps. I’m so confused. They do that too.

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

Jill K DeWit:
All right, Jim wrote, “I’ve heard that people are shying away from targeting infill lots. What are the pros and cons of targeting these areas? I’ve done some rural land and some infill lots and made money on both. Obviously, the area would need to pass the red yellow green test. I’m looking for anything else I should be considering. Thanks in advance.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Great question, Jim, and it leads directly into our next topic, so you know what?

Jill K DeWit:
We’ll just cover it here?

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m going to go right into the topic.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay, good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic, there are three types of land to buy and two types to avoid.

Jill K DeWit:
Is this in 2024?

Steven Jack Butala:
In general, this is in 2024 and when times are hot, and they were a couple of years ago, these almost can be at times flipped, but not necessarily. Look, in the end, it comes down to your personality and what you like.

Jill K DeWit:
I like that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here are three types of land that I think always work, now that you’re mentioning from a timeframe standpoint. The number one favorite is rural vacant land.

Jill K DeWit:
Timeless, like that Chanel jacket. You think I’m kidding.

Steven Jack Butala:
You know what’s in my calendar today?

Jill K DeWit:
You describe it in man talk and I’ll translate to girl talk.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s this really high-end secondhand store that made its way into my stuff to do today, made its way into my calendar.

Jill K DeWit:
It was optional.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, really?

Jill K DeWit:
I put optional. You don’t have to go.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re supposed to go to My Sister’s Closet later, Jill and I, and shop old Chanel jackets.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m going to go look. That was just a, “This is where I’ll be today.”

Steven Jack Butala:
You can’t go wrong with rural vacant land and here’s why. If it has all the seven As or whatever, we’re up to, eight As-

Jill K DeWit:
Eight, yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
… of access and all of that, the number of users, the end users who you’re going to sell the property to is really large. It could be hunting people. They could be, jeez, people who want a rural homestead. There’s all kinds of uses. It could be turned into agriculture depending on the zoning, and so your bio [inaudible 00:29:34]-

Jill K DeWit:
Turned into a subdivision.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, it could be redeveloped so that always works. The second type of land that really works that almost in every case, and this is probably my personal favorite, is what I call specific use property. So in a city like Phoenix or really in any urban area, there is some type of master plan, and that’s what civil engineers do.
They get together with the city, there’s a budget and they essentially say, “Over here’s the cemetery, over here’s the hospital, over here’s where the subdivisions should go. Here’s the heavy industrial park,” and so what you don’t get is all mixed up… You don’t get houses next to chicken farms in general. In rural communities, it’s still like that. It is just open zoning.
So specific use property in a really urban area like this, you can pick out-

Jill K DeWit:
Commercial.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s 20 or 30 or 40, let’s say, pre-zoned properties for mobile home parks that are undeveloped. And so it’s really easy to identify those. The way that we do this and send everybody a letter and say, “I’ve got a buyer.” Or, “I am a buyer and I want to buy a mobile home. Your taxes are $82,000 a year on this, and I don’t know where you’re coming up with the money, but we’d like to take it off your hands for X amount.” And those kinds of mailers, those specific use property mailers are very successful. I started my entire career on specific use property in healthcare.

Jill K DeWit:
So that was two, rural vacant land. The specific use, these are the three types of land that you love. What’s your number three?

Steven Jack Butala:
And number three is as a wider category, but it falls into adjacent. So your property comes back and whatever’s happening on four sides of it or three sides of it is probably what’s going to happen with your property. So it’s very similar to specific use, but you don’t send out a mailer based on pre-zoning.

Jill K DeWit:
Got it.

Steven Jack Butala:
You just figure it out how it involves the use. I don’t want to complicate this.

Jill K DeWit:
Maybe it all comes back. Remember that time we had one, well, there was a marijuana. Two properties that were, I had no idea that it fell into this area in northern California that was already approved and not near… There’s all kinds of restrictions, and I had just landed in it that were two marijuana conducive properties and they were big. They were like 20 acres each.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It’s not specific use property because it’s all zoned agricultural, but it’s all being used for blueberries, let’s say. So when you buy it or when you review it as an acquisition candidate, that’s going to be used as blueberries. And you probably know, by the way, that people-

Jill K DeWit:
Who’s going to buy it.

Steven Jack Butala:
… the adjacent people who are blueberrying are very logical person to sell it to. You can’t go wrong with those three pipes and they’re timeless.

Jill K DeWit:
Perfect. What’s the two that you don’t like?

Steven Jack Butala:
Under the two to avoid, which gets up to Jim’s. Question number one, infill lot by definition, an infill lot is a property that is in a subdivision, a non-master plan subdivision. They’re all over the place in the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties, all over this country.
You know that they’re not master plan because when you go look at it, there’s a subdivision of 20 properties and 18 of them are already done. 18 of them have houses on it, and the guy that has a two left responded to your letter. And so now your buyer pool is tiny and the use for that property is going to be a house.
And very, very, very often there’s an amazing raw supply and demand reason why they don’t have houses on them yet. It’s just because the market won’t support it. In general, if the market supported it, they would’ve been built on in 1974 or some version of that.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
So unless you can get them super cheap, look, we buy infill lots every year-

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill and I.

Jill K DeWit:
There are random things, like maybe Willie was holding onto it for the kids kind of thing. That could be but often it’s your way, what you just said.

Steven Jack Butala:
And markets change too sometimes. It’s very cool right now to be in a rural market because of the work from home internet phenomenon, which is here to stay. So there’s some opportunities there, but in rural markets, it’s hard to justify the price of the land because the houses are so cheap.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s it. You shouldn’t be buying infill lots where homes are selling for a $100,000. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like you go, wait a minute, I can’t sell this property for 20,000 like I’d like to because they can’t build a house for 80. It’s not going to make sense.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s below replacement costs is what she’s saying. And I don’t need to tell you that everything’s more expensive now that it was a year ago.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re in a strange inflationary period and materials and labor, labor’s harder to get. Materials are more expensive. And so the replacement costs of building a house, a new house on a lot, there’s some extraordinary stuff that has to happen to make an infill lot model work. I’ll tell you, it’s rooted in very expensive houses that you see on the coast of Oregon or something, or California where there’s 2 million houses and you can buy a buildable infill lot for 30 grand. That’s a deal I would do. And so would you That’s the kind of deals we actually do.

Jill K DeWit:
But in general, the first one on the infill lot when it’s two, you can’t build a house for that kind of thing. Don’t do those. And what was your second type to avoid?

Steven Jack Butala:
Currently, farmed agricultural property. And here’s why. If you’re in this business at all or you read the news, there’s so much criticism. The center states, if you talk to a farmer, we have the opportunity to talk to a lot of active farmers in Scottsdale here because where Jill and I live, because they’re snowbirds and they come here and it’s their off season.

Jill K DeWit:
From other states.

Steven Jack Butala:
They’re not farming, they’re from Iowa or Illinois or whatever. And so they farm thousands and thousands of acres. Most of it is leased. They lease it from the landowner, people like us. And so because there’s leases, it defines the price of the property, of the acreage. So if you talk to anybody, they will tell you, “Oh, agricultural property right now where I farm is between $4200 and $5100,” depending on the crop that yields there.

Jill K DeWit:
An acre.

Steven Jack Butala:
And everybody knows that. The landowners know that. The farmers know that. And so for you to go in and do a mailer, we’re very used to doing every single month and try to buy that type of property that’s already pre-valued like a commodity for 20% of its value-

Jill K DeWit:
Good luck.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not good. Plus what you’re doing is making a lot of enemies and it’s not the regular hate where people call and say, “Look, this is kind of silly.” They call, they’re all together banned together to not sell land there for anything less than they think it’s worth.

Jill K DeWit:
Just a waste of your time. That’s the real thing. So you’ve told me many times they all get together Sunday morning at the same coffee shop and hang out and talk. They’re not going to move, nor should they. That makes sense.

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:
Yes. Today I want to talk for a few minutes about, I thought I had a topic. You know what? I’m going to talk a few minutes about not casual dating.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what I thought it was going to be.

Jill K DeWit:
At 41. I’m not going to talk about casual dating at 41.

Steven Jack Butala:
What’s the problem with that?

Jill K DeWit:
Well, you can use that for your topic during this minute. I’m not going to spend any more time on that. You know what? How about this, I’m going to talk a few minutes about and I haven’t because we haven’t recorded in a couple of days, but I was just finishing filling up career path, and I can’t tell you, have I talked about this recently? Tell me if I did.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t don’t know the topic yet. Neither does anybody else that’s watching.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. My topic is the frustration and sadness I feel when people should be in the room and they’re not putting themselves in the room. What is that? It goes back to you. I was just thinking about, I was talking to kid number two on the phone the other day, and his girlfriend has this same problem that a lot of women have, which is-

Steven Jack Butala:
I want to hear this.

Jill K DeWit:
… Women won’t apply for a position, this is totally true and documented. We look at a position in a company that we want to work and we won’t even throw our hat in the ring until we think we have mastered 80% of that, which is stupid. Men throw their hat in the ring when they have 20%.

Steven Jack Butala:
Get the job and learn how to do it.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s how men see it. Women don’t see it like that. And it was funny, we were talking about another subject and I brought that up and he goes, “She does that.” I’m like, “Do you want me to talk to her?” Kind of thing.

Steven Jack Butala:
Wow. He’s actually listening to you, which is amazing.

Jill K DeWit:
Yes. Well, that’s another thing. But anyway, so I was thinking about that with career path and I’m thinking, I wonder how many people… I bet that was part of it. There’s probably a lot of people that didn’t throw themselves fully into career path, and they’re not fully throwing themselves into this land thing that we’re here queuing up for them because they don’t think they have all these steps mastered.
Don’t worry about it. Get in there, do it, try it, know you’re going to fail, know you’re going to break something, so what? We know how to solve it, we can help you get out of this stuff. That’s what it’s all about. Because if you don’t do that, you’re going to be on the sidelines forever. That’s the part that I get frustrated with is people that are, and you and I, aren’t those people.

Steven Jack Butala:
Is this nature or nurture, do you think?

Jill K DeWit:
For myself, I’m going to probably say nature. What do you think?

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know. I don’t know because I never fully realized this topic until I met you because you made me aware of it.

Jill K DeWit:
What else did I make you aware of?

Steven Jack Butala:
I also don’t think it’s that seriously gender-specific. I just think there’s go-getters and there’s not, which is what my topic’s about after you.

Jill K DeWit:
But people get so far, but they won’t go the last 10%.

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture. But it’s certainly personality type. It’s not gender.

Jill K DeWit:
So how is this inspirational then, I guess my point to anyone that is relating to this, stop it. Push yourself. It’s going to be uncomfortable and know that. Be ready for it. Everything was uncomfortable at one time. You have to take a step back sometimes ago, even when you started the job you have today, maybe it was even 30 years ago.
Maybe you’ve been in your same career for 30 years, but you know what? 30 years ago you were uncomfortable and look where you are today. You can do that again. We’ve all had to do that. I tell people all the time when they join Land Academy, “There’s always someone six months ahead of you and six months behind you.” Your questions are not stupid and people want to help. You just have to go for it and ask.

Steven Jack Butala:
You have to get in the right environment, because I think that we’ve all had experiences probably starting with school, where you’ve got people who are really encouraging, teachers who want to be teachers for the right reasons are encouraging you and encouraging your questions. Then there’s teachers who are usually just about ready to retire, who think everything you say is dumb. So I think that the message that sends to certain personality type is, I better have my stuff together before I walk in.

Jill K DeWit:
Which is not the case. It shouldn’t be.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s people like me who’ve never had their stuff together and you’re just going to walk in anyway, and it’s always Worked for me.

Jill K DeWit:
Is that nature or did you-

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m going to argue you were born at eight.

Steven Jack Butala:
It always comes back. In our house, it always comes back to an Enneagram result. If you have never taken a Enneagram test, please look it up and take the test. I think it’s free, especially if you’re in a personal relationship and you live together with someone, both take it together and you’re going to find out what’s wrong with the other person.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m going to argue-

Steven Jack Butala:
With definitions and everything.

Jill K DeWit:
You came out of the chute challenging the doctor.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s probably true.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. All right. What about you? What do you have to share with us today?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, mine’s labeled here, people who succeed, and so rather than spend 10 minutes talking about and breaking down or deconstructing why the anatomy of what makes somebody succeed or what doesn’t. The real simple short version is you know if you’re going to succeed or not, you already know.
Whatever you put your mind to, and I hate, it sounds like a cliche, but if you work on it, you’re going to succeed at it. I’ll tell you, here’s an anecdotal personal note. I’ve been doing this buying and selling land, some version of it since the early 90s. What is it? It’s 2024. That’s-

Jill K DeWit:
Long time.

Steven Jack Butala:
30 years, I’m a lot less interested in hitting my financial goals, a heck of a lot less interested at this point in my life than I was in the beginning. In the beginning, I was unstoppable. I would stop for nothing because I took it personally and placed personal responsibility on myself. I wasn’t, not even in a relationship by any stretch. I was casually dating, if that.
So, it wasn’t like I was trying to set my kids up or I was motivated or scared or there’s no fear motivation factor. It was just like, I’m going to succeed at this. I had just a little taste of success buying and selling a piece of property and I made like five grand or something. I don’t remember the numbers. It’s in the Land Academy and that was it.
I knew I was going to do that for the rest of my life. I thought I was going to be a medical doctor and went down that path. We had luckily programs in high school and I was involved in that and hated it, but a different personality type, that would’ve been it. The light bulb that they needed and it was over. So if you’re going to succeed or not, and if you try to force it, you’re going to end up being disappointed.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
So just take a look at yourself.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s good. Thank you. This is a good show. I’m proud of this, this was awesome. Hey, join us next Wednesday for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
We are Jack and Jill.

Steven Jack Butala:
Information.

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.